Baker's Dozen with Patrice Sarath

For my 13th Baker's Dozen interview, Gordath Wood novelist Patrice Sarath and I discussed first novels, horses, day jobs, and why it's okay to suck.

As an active member of the Slug Tribe, an Austin writers group, and a workshop teacher, what advice do you offer for newer writers attempting their first novel? Do you find that teaching and working with other writers helps you with your own writing?

Just write. Writing is hard, but it gets easier.

Be consistent. Write every night or on a schedule you can live with. You don't need eight hours of empty time to write. You'll just end up wasting about seven hours of that.

Know the difference between rituals that get you in the right frame of reference to write, and mere procrastination.

Dare to suck. Everyone does, and everyone gets better.

Something I have seen novices do over the years (and have done myself) is they write below their ability. If you think that a particular market will be "easy" to break into, you'll waste your time writing down to that market. You won't sell anything that you think is dreck, so why write it and submit to a market you hold in contempt? Write up instead. Stretch yourself and your abilities.

I love teaching because it's a way to pay it forward. I know that people say, "you can't teach writing," and I think that's true, that writing can't be taught. However, writing can be learned, and workshops are a great way to learn. I like the camaraderie of workshops too, the sense that you're all in it together. And everyone learns how to critique their own work by critiquing others, so I highly recommend getting into a writer's group or workshop to learn that skill.

Rick Klaw Talks about Irving Klaw

An interview with me about my famous grandfather appears on the BettiePage.com blog.

How has your own life, work and passions been shaped by experiencing the "cult" audience of Bettie Page?

The cult of Bettie enabled me to learn more about a part of my family history that I thought lost. I didn't learn about my grandfather's famous history until I was 21 and at the 1992 San Diego ComicCon. I remember the event clearly.

"Are you related to Irving Klaw?"

I stood dumbfounded. I knew the name but never expected to hear it at 21 while attending a comic book convention. Irving Klaw was my grandfather.

Irving died about 16 months before I was born. His death is the stuff of family legend.

The grey-haired man in front of me was Ray Zone. As a comic book and magazine publisher, Zone was single-handedly responsible for the 3-d boom of the late 80's.1

"He was my grandfather. Why?"

Zone proceeded to show me examples of my grandfather's work: Images of Bettie in black leather and leopard print bathing suits bound in a variety of positions. Some of the pics had Bettie with a whip. In some she was spread in doorways or suspended from a ceiling, bound and gagged. A few even had other women, but none had any nudity at all.

So you could say the "cult of Bettie" changed my life but not in the way most expect. I became curious and over the years and learned as much as I could abut his life and work. It's enabled me to re-establish a relationship with my Uncle Arth. Turns out we have a lot more in common than Irving.

Interview with The Damned

Creators, that is. My latest Baker's Dozen for RevolutionSF is with The Damned writer Cullen Bunn and artist Brian Hurtt.

It's been said the in order to get anything published, you must sell your soul. How much of Eddie comes from your personal and professional life experiences?

BH: The process of doing this comic has been entirely painless. We have a great relationship with Oni (I’d done several projects with them prior to this) and when they said yes to the pitch they more or less cut us loose on the book. Their input has been minimal and always put forth as questions rather than edicts. The Oni philosophy has always been to hire the creators they like and trust and then let them do what they do. It’s a great way to work.

Eddie is a bitter, tired, and pessimistic soul. He’s entirely based on Cullen.

CB: I tried to sell Brian’s soul on eBay, but the highest bidder failed to pay. I didn’t get a single bite on it when posted to Craigslist, either. I finally gave his soul away on Freecycle so it wouldn’t clutter my garage.

Working on The Damned seems a bit surreal, because it has been so easy, and I’m grateful every day for the experience. Brian and Oni Press are great to work with. My only fear is that I’ve been spoiled by how well this has gone. I can only hope that all the other projects I work on will be as rewarding.

Continued...

A Dark Forces Double Team

Peggy Hailey and I double teamed for the RevolutionSF coverage of Terry Moore's latest series Echo.

I interviewed Terry about life after the very popular Strangers in Paradise (which ended last year), his new series Echo, and science fiction.

What new themes has the science fiction setting allowed you to explore that you were unable to tackle in your previous works? Do you approach the writing of an sf concept different than a super hero or slice of life story?

The imagination is liberated, yet spawned from the practical laws of physics and life. I think it's advanced stuff to try and pull off, because you have to be good at the other genres to incorporate them into your sci fi story in order to establish setting and sense of place.

You could specialize in slice-of-life and be lousy at everything else, but you can't write good sci fi without being good at other genres as well.

Continued...

Peggy had the task of reviewing the first two issues of the new series.

A lot of this comic is vintage Moore: a female protagonist with some personal issues gets caught up in a much larger story and has to deal with the fallout. But it’s new, too.

Julie Martin isn’t Francine or Katchoo; she comes from a different background and has different issues to deal with. And while SiP could occasionally bust out into full on spy thriller mode, it was essentially the story of Francine and Katchoo: their day-to-day story was the heart of the piece, not the theatrics around them.

Echo is a science fiction comic, and while I’m sure we’ll spend a lot of time with Julie and her daily life, I suspect that the bigger outside story will have more prominence.

Continued...

Norman Partridge interview and book review

Since Norman Partridge's Dark Harvest is our next book, my interview with the author and Peggy's review of the book should be of interest to y'all.

From the interview:

What made you decide to use a second person narrative in Dark Harvest? Is this a style you will continue using?

I'm sure I'll use it again someday, but it's not the kind of style that would fit every project. With DH, I really wanted readers to hear me talking from the other side of the page, the way you do when you listen to a campfire tale.

I wanted to yank them into the book and make them part of it, too. I had that intention from the first paragraph: "A Midwestern town. You know its name. You were born there." That was kind of the wham bam welcome to my world moment.

From Peggy's review:

I came to Norm Partridge's Dark Harvest with high hopes: I'm a big fan of his collection The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists, so I already knew he could write. But even having read him before, I wasn't prepared for how quickly this book sucked me in.