"My father Daniel, on the other hand, didn't remember anything but the nuclear weapons," writes Nick Mamatas in his new book coming out from Soft Skull Press. "Dirty bombs, WMDs, suitcases filled with high-tech stuff; that was all he could think about. He took a job mopping floors at SUNY Riverhead so he could take classes for free. Physics. Mechanical engineering. His head was like an MTV video: all equations, blueprints, mushroom clouds, people running through the streets, and naked ladies, in and out, flipping from image to image."
Besides his novel Move Under Ground, Mamatas has built quite a bookshelf: Kwangju Diary (co-author), Before and After (contributor), Everything You Know is Wrong (contributor), and You Are Being Lied To (contributor).
Today, we have the rare opportunity to climb inside a writer's brain just weeks after finishing a novel. This is my deceptively simple feature: Five Easy Questions. In the spirit of Jack Nicholson’s mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality interviews with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web publishing.
Jason Boog:
You have a new novel coming out soon. Could you walk us quickly through your novel publishing process?
Nick Mamatas:
Well, the idea for Under My Roof had been brewing for a long time, probably since the first Gulf War when I read The Acharnians. It's a play by Aristophanes in which a man, tired of the wars with Sparta and other enemies of Athens, sues for a private peace for himself and his household...
For a while I kicked around the idea of a modern dress version of the play as the sort of thing you might produce in a house, where the audience walks through the events of the play. I abandoned the idea and moved on to other things, like writing essays and living in crappy apartments in Jersey City and watching people have nervous
breakdowns.
Then in 2003, after having sold Move Under Ground I decided to dust off the old idea. I wrote a partial, which languished for a bit, as I had been going about it all wrong -- it was too didactic and cynical.
So I decided to change the voice: make it naive yet omniscient, thus our "tween" telepath protagonist whose father builds a nuclear bomb, plants it in his yard, and declares his independence from the US.
So we wrote a partial and sent it out as a young adult type thing, but it didn't really get anywhere — comments we received were along the lines of "Well, can't everyone just learn to be friends at the end. Maybe the kid can get a girlfriend and talk his father into disarming the bomb?"
Soft Skull, which I had worked with years before under their previous management, had started two imprints: "Short Lit" for long novellas and short novels, and "Red Rattle" for young and young adult readers.
So we sent them the partial and they asked for the rest, but I refused to finish it without a deal. I'd already published with them and have completed other books since, they should trust that I could finish a 40,000 word piece.
So we compromised, and I wrote another 5000 words for them to see the next plot point in action. They bought it, and I just finished it a couple of days ago. It'll be a Short Lit book, with some of the Red Rattle marketing.
There's no cursing in it, which was a bit difficult to write.
Then in 2003, after having sold Move Under Ground I decided to dust off the old idea. I wrote a partial, which languished for a bit, as I had been going about it all wrong -- it was too didactic and cynical.
So I decided to change the voice: make it naive yet omniscient, thus our "tween" telepath protagonist whose father builds a nuclear bomb, plants it in his yard, and declares his independence from the US.
So we wrote a partial and sent it out as a young adult type thing, but it didn't really get anywhere — comments we received were along the lines of "Well, can't everyone just learn to be friends at the end. Maybe the kid can get a girlfriend and talk his father into disarming the bomb?"
Soft Skull, which I had worked with years before under their previous management, had started two imprints: "Short Lit" for long novellas and short novels, and "Red Rattle" for young and young adult readers.
So we sent them the partial and they asked for the rest, but I refused to finish it without a deal. I'd already published with them and have completed other books since, they should trust that I could finish a 40,000 word piece.
So we compromised, and I wrote another 5000 words for them to see the next plot point in action. They bought it, and I just finished it a couple of days ago. It'll be a Short Lit book, with some of the Red Rattle marketing.
There's no cursing in it, which was a bit difficult to write.
» Blog This Book! from ThePublishingSpot
We've spent most of the week exploring Nick Mamatas' community on LiveJournal, but I've been meaning to show you some writers that plug web communities into their books.The Insititute for the Future of the Book coined the term networked... [Read More]
Tracked on: May 12, 2006 9:50 AM | Permalink to Trackback