From Twitter To Storify

My first ever Twitter chat was a wash, as Twitter happened to choose that day—almost that exact time frame, in fact—for one of its warp core meldowns. Which was a shame, since it happened to be on September 12, one day after the anniversary of the event my little book is about. Everything about that book seems serendipitous. So, we rescheduled for Thursday the 26th instead and it went off without a technical hitch. It was an interesting process, one's responses to questions severely limited by the 140-characters rule, but having to answer so succinctly is an oddly satisfying challenge... a far cry from the interview I did with Richard Godwin a year ago. The contrast is almost funny. Yet both enjoyable in completely different ways.

Anyway, Kathy Meis of Bublish turned the whole thing into something chronologically followable on Storify, which you can read here if you're so inclined. Screenshot below.

Heads Up for the Slaughterhouse

So, I've mentioned it in passing, but I might as well make it a more *formal* announcement. For anyone (and I can't for the life of me think why they would) who wants to know what type of pale, awful critters make those scuttling noises down in the dim cellar of my subconscious, Richard Godwin will be interviewing me tomorrow (Saturday, September 8, 2012). Except "interview" is a wholly inadequate word for this monstrosity. Conducted on and off between March and July of this year, and running over 7,000 words, this thing felt more like an interrogation from someone who was trying to torment me by forcing me to think beyond my comfort zone than any other interview ever. Oddly enough, I don't mean that negatively. The strange mix of relentlessness and openendedness seemed to combine almost alchemically in order to extract a series of interesting (comic, bewildered, bitter, awestruck, sad, pissy, loving) responses that might well occasion some anxious concern over my mental health from some quarters, but I feel better for having stayed on this particular bucking bronco, so yeah. Okay, I'll say it: some of this felt damn near cathartic, and although my reticent side remains a little uncomfortable with its candid nature, I still think it's the best insight out there into why I write and why I write what I write and why I write about the things I write about. Uh. Anyway, look for it tomorrow.

Incidentally, his interview series with crime/horror writers he terms Chin Wag at the Slaughterhouse is well worth checking out in its entirety, with everyone from Jack Ketchum to R.J. Ellory, as well as my good friend Dan Mader, all given the "sharp, bright light in the eyes in the stark, dim room" treatment.

Pod People

I am now officially a pod person. I've been interviewed before, which is an interesting experience the first few times, but when you notice yourself repeating many of the same answers in slightly different ways, it can be a case of diminishing returns. Which illustrates the importance of fresh questions on the part of the interviewer, but also behooves the interviewee to remember to dig deep and not resort to phoning it in... which is an apt figure of speech for the most recent experience I had of this strange concept in which one person asks questions of another person and they share the result of the conversation in the assumption others will find it interesting. But anyway, what I'm getting at is, on this occasion I did actually phone it in. Almost literally. Well, okay, Skyped it in. And the interviewer, Carolyn Steele, who runs the website Trucking In English, shaped this audio into something very listenable—a podcast, in fact, and the only known recording of my voice on the internet.

Ostensibly a conversation about Dissolute Kinship, it moves surprisingly seamlessly (given my propensity for inexplicable tangents and, um, awkward, ah, speech fillers) between the topics of New York City itself, both then and now, and the wider implications and fallout of the attacks of September 11, 2001. I even talk a little about growing up Catholic in a Protestant country. So, uh, religion and politics. Great. I eagerly await the hate mail.

But somewhere in there, she somehow manages to get me to make a connection between the unifying nature of the world's initial reaction to the horrors that day and the subsequent democratization that's largely been wrought by the internet, offsetting the more rigid and authoritarian reaction in the political sphere. It's an interesting counterpoint to the almost dystopian pessimism into which it's far too easy to lapse. And it takes no small amount of skill to elicit thoughts I probably wouldn't have come up with on my own. I guess that kind of synergy is the point, really, is why interviews can be so illuminating. Greater than the sum, kind of thing.

Anyway, have a listen here and if nothing else, see how mockable my outlandish Anglo-Canadian accent is.

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David Antrobus also writes for Indies Unlimited and BlergPop. Be sure to check out his work there if you like what you read here.