China Mieville called Move Under Ground "an intense crossbred bastard homage-cum-critique-cum-vision." Reviewers at The Believer and The Village Voice all dug Nick Mamatas' literary horror novel. Seeing how the trade paperback edition comes out soon, we caught up with Mamatas for an interview. Every week, he captures the crazy writing lifestyle in his LiveJournal page--from struggling without health insurance to triumphantly filing a freelance piece.
For both these reasons, I picked him for 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 one novel published and another on the way, how did that affect your career? How do you support yourself? How do you find time to balance work and Art?
Nick Mamatas:
I'm a full-time writer. I'm going back to school so I can get an MFA at a low-residency program where I can write the stories and articles I would anyway, and get credit for them...
Potentially, this can lead to a university job in two or three years.
I do a lot of feature articles, which pay much better than fiction, and write educational copy as well, for standardized tests and that sort of thing. I certainly don't support myself all that well, and I have no health insurance.
Now if I did go balls-to-the-wall with getting corporate writing gigs, I could probably do a lot better, but what little fiction and interesting non-fiction I do manage to write would suffer. For now, I'd rather just live humbly.
I also used to mess around in the real estate market, and my first two deals made me quite a bit of money, but I got spanked on my third deal, hard, so I'm waiting for the bubble to burst before getting back into that game.
I do a lot of feature articles, which pay much better than fiction, and write educational copy as well, for standardized tests and that sort of thing. I certainly don't support myself all that well, and I have no health insurance.
Now if I did go balls-to-the-wall with getting corporate writing gigs, I could probably do a lot better, but what little fiction and interesting non-fiction I do manage to write would suffer. For now, I'd rather just live humbly.
I also used to mess around in the real estate market, and my first two deals made me quite a bit of money, but I got spanked on my third deal, hard, so I'm waiting for the bubble to burst before getting back into that game.
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