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House Of Leaves with Ed Wilson
281 Plays2 years ago
This episode we finally open that door of the Chronscast household we'd not dared to open before and plunge into the abyssal labyrinth that is Mark Danielewski's maddeningly epic debut novel, House Of Leaves. A book that defies conventional categorisation, it's been described as a horror, a literary piece, a puzzle, and even a love story. We're joined on this subterranean literary odyssey by renowned literary agent Ed Wilson. Ed is the director of the Johnson & Alcock literary agency, representing a vibrant and developing list of fiction and non-fiction, from new and debut writers to established, bestselling and award-winning authors.
With Ed we gleefully dip down the House Of Leaves rabbithole, discussing ergodic literature, innovation in writing, the perils of overanalysing texts, and the Manic Street Preachers. We also chat about the submissions process and navigating the slush pile, and the options open to authors and agents.
Elsewhere, The Judge gives a sumptuous talk on the use of clothing in worldbuilding, and the effects that clothing can have on society, and our writing. We'll hear the winning entries to May's 75-word challenge, and April's 300-word challenge, written by Oliver Helm and Victoria Silverwolf respectively, and we get an unexpected phone call from an ex-President of the United States, whose home extension has gotten out of hand and seems to lead to the belt of Orion.
Join us next month when we'll be joined by literary agent John Jarrold to talk about Rob Holdstock's winner of the 1984 World Fantasy Award, Mythago Wood.
Index
[00:00 - 52:54] Ed Wilson Interview Part 1
[52:54 - 54:07] Voicemail 1
[54:08 - 1:08:28] The Judge's Corner
[1:08:28 - 1:09:10] Voicemail 2
[1:09:11 - 1:12:31] Writing Challenge Winners
[1:12:32 - 1:13:43] Voicemail 3
[1:13:44 - 2:07:31] Ed Wilson Interview Part 2
[2:07:32 - 2:09:36] - Credits
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Kronscast and House of Leaves
00:00:15
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Kronscast, the official podcast of SFF Chronicles, the world's largest science fiction and fantasy community. I'm Dan Jones. And I'm Chris Bean. Today we're talking about House of Leaves. It's the outstanding debut novel from American author Mark Z. Danielewski, published by Pantheon Books in 2000.
00:00:36
Speaker
It's a very unconventional piece of speculative fiction in terms of structure and follows a family in a fictional documentary detailing the impossible dimensional physics of their home. Hint, hint, it's bigger on the inside than the outside. The story is told from multiple points of view and contains hundreds of footnotes and appendices. It's been classed as a horror, weird fiction, cosmic horror, even a love story by its author, and is strongly influenced by academic writing.
00:01:03
Speaker
However you categorize it, it's a chilling existential read that somehow drifts from the everyday to the uncanny to the downright terrifying and stays with you for years.
Guest Introduction: Ed Wilson
00:01:14
Speaker
Joining us as we wend our way through the labyrinth is the literary agent Ed Wilson. Ed's the director of Johnson and Alcock representing a vibrant and developing list of fiction and nonfiction from new and debut writers to established best-selling and award-winning authors. He has an active science fiction and fantasy list with multiple award-winning and nominated authors and is always on the lookout for new writers. His clients include RJ Barker, Ben Aitken, CJ Driver, Anna Thomason.
00:01:41
Speaker
and Claire Francis. Ed also looks after the majority of the agency's estates in conjunction with Andrew Houston, including Beryl Bainbridge's Dick Francis, William Trevor and Elizabeth Taylor. Ed can be found giving talks up and down the country and also online, and he runs a regular Guardian Masterclass entitled How to Get Published and, to date, many of the attendees have indeed got published. He also is an aficionado of cats, gin and, pleasingly for me,
00:02:11
Speaker
cricket. So welcome, Ed. Welcome. I thought I was coming on a cricket podcast telling me this is about this is about speculative fiction. We'll do the cricket next week. What we really need is we need a novel that is speculative, speculative cricket. That's what we need.
00:02:27
Speaker
Well, Douglas Adams had it. In the latter stages of the Hitchhiker's Guide, there's a lot of cricket. That is true. The planet, cricket, K-R-I-K-E-T, I think it is. I assume this is Sean Ray's horror.
00:02:42
Speaker
long drawn out horror. The beauty of cricket is it can burble away in the background, you see, while you're while you're creating your magnum opus. And I think maybe if Mark Z. Danielewski had been more into cricket, we would have got a much calmer book than the one that he that he eventually wrote. Indeed.
00:03:00
Speaker
I just finished reading The Taliban Cricket Club, which is a strange novel. It's about 10 years old now, and it's set in the late 90s when the Taliban state that had just taken over Afghanistan decided to apply for a cricketing license from the ICC.
00:03:21
Speaker
an Afghan journalist, a female Afghan journalist cobbles together a cricket team on the pretense that if they win the tournament, then they get to escape Afghanistan. I love that. It's fantastic. Yes, it's great.
Ed Wilson's Perspective on House of Leaves
00:03:34
Speaker
It's fantastic. You would love it, Ed. Anyway, House of Leads. We've already gone down the labyrinth. It's just not the one we thought it would be.
00:03:43
Speaker
OK, OK. House of Leaves. So why did you pick House of Leaves, this very strange book? Why did I? I think it was all it was all a terrible mistake. So I the list of books available had a lot of kind of interesting titles, and I think it was quite an interestingly curated list. And at the point at which we were having these conversations, I was really quite sleep deprived. And I thought to myself, what have I already read?
00:04:13
Speaker
so that I can then refresh my memory rather than having to start from scratch. And House of Leaves kind of appeared before my eyes and I thought, hey, what could possibly go wrong? I then kind of went and dug it up and discovered it was still at my parents' house. I had to go and locate it. So the seeking out of the book itself was quite an escapade.
00:04:38
Speaker
And once I'd found it, I really disappeared down the rabbit hole. In fact, if you can see, my desk is covered in paper and piles of books just from this evening of me trying to get myself in the headset. And I think this is what's so extraordinary about the book is it encourages you to become the person that you were when you first read it. So I was an undergraduate.
00:05:04
Speaker
I had time to tug on every thread and to go down every single rabbit hole. It's been rather joyful.
00:05:16
Speaker
revisiting and rediscovering and remembering all of the mad theories I came up with before and finding all the new ones that have come out. So the answer, why did I pick it? It was a moment of weakness and I regret it and don't regret it in equal measure. I think we're going to have a very interesting conversation about this book because it is
00:05:36
Speaker
Well, it's a great book. It really is a great book. It's a real tour de force of imagination, innovation. We can talk about innovation a little bit later on. There aren't that many books, as far as I can see, that are truly innovative. There are plenty of imaginative worlds, secondary worlds, great characters, interesting plots. But this is really a piece of innovation that changed the way in which we
00:06:02
Speaker
conceive of a novel itself, the very structure of what it is. It's, we should probably, before we go on, just give a little bit of a description about why this is. So we're going to wax lyrical because, and if you haven't read Rehouse of Leaves, you're going to be listening and thinking, well, I don't think anyone who's not read it is going to be listening to a podcast on it. I mean, that would be self-flagellation of the worst type. And also we need to, that brings to mind, normally we just do false spoilers. Are we going to do spoilers in this?
00:06:32
Speaker
Well, I think we have to go for false spoilers. It's 20 years old. I don't think there are spoilers. That would imply a kind of a conventional linear narrative where things happen in a perceived order. There are only interpretations. What about Daisy's Echolalia? If people might not know Daisy develops Echolalia...
00:06:53
Speaker
Oh, no. This is terrible. It's terrible. People will be switching off the poker. Right. I mean, well, let's let's if we if you actually get hold of a physical copy of House of Leaves, I mean, this is one book you cannot read on your Kindle. That's the first thing to say. It's not a book to download your Kindle. You need to buy the physical thing. The version I've got is something called I've got the the remastered color edition. No, I've got the same.
00:07:20
Speaker
Exactly the same i got the i think we got the i think we've got for the cheap i think we've got the best the original one is new yeah i signed what's not really you i think mine's a second edition i second no i got the remastered color one and that's got the the
00:07:39
Speaker
the appendix stuff at the back, so the whale stow letters, the correspondence between his mum and his mum. That's the only one I don't own, so I've got only revolutions, and I've got the 50 year sword, but the whale stow letters struck me, because that's his mum's letters, right? Yeah, completely deranged.
00:08:01
Speaker
Yeah, which, you know, suits the tone of the rest of the book. But they're in this one. They're in this copy. They're in this copy as well. But there's 30 pages more, I think, in the novella version. Okay. So I think in your version, Dan, you've probably got the full whale stow letters and we've got Yeah, and it's only towards the the back end of the whale stow letters that you figure out what's going on. Yes.
00:08:21
Speaker
we'll probably come to that later on okay so let's go back to the book it's not really a book that you read so much as interact with so you you know you read it upside down you read it back to front at certain points you read it non-linearly because there might be a reference to something that happened 40 pages ago that you have to go back 40 pages to figure out.
00:08:41
Speaker
where to go next. There are hundreds and hundreds of footnotes scattered throughout the book. And the structure of it, well, ostensibly, as Chris said in the introduction, ostensibly, it's a kind of haunted house story about this photographer called Will Navidson.
00:08:58
Speaker
who decides to make a documentary film investigating his house, which he figures out is the internal dimensions are larger than the external dimensions.
Analyzing the Narrative Structure of House of Leaves
00:09:12
Speaker
Then, after a while, he discovers a door at the back of the closet. He decides to investigate it with his camera and he finds an
00:09:22
Speaker
a vast, unimaginably vast labyrinth behind this closet door. And he just starts to venture into it a little bit more each day, a little bit more each day. And he finds that it keeps getting bigger until he launch, he recruits some friends to undertake a whole expedition inside this. And all of this is captured on his video camera to create a film called the Navidson Report. And House of Leaves is
00:09:51
Speaker
a an academic dissertation written by an old blind man called Zampano who has taken it upon. Well, this is the great joke of the book. It's a blind man who's writing an academic dissertation about a found footage documentary. So that's the great joke of it. And Zampano is found dead at the beginning of the novel, having spent
00:10:15
Speaker
the entirety of his adult life, seemingly, piecing together this dissertation about this film. He's found in his apartment in California with pages scattered everywhere, and one of the people who discovers him is a guy called Johnny B. Truant.
00:10:34
Speaker
who's like this California bum dropout who sort of coasts from meaningless job to meaningless job and meaningless woman to meaningless woman. And he tries to put together the pieces of this manuscript which are found in Zampano's apartment. And in doing so, he gets lost and obsessed with trying to put it together and he ends up lost down the rabbit hole as well. So there are multiple layers
00:10:59
Speaker
to the book. Zampano's manuscript is riddled with footnotes, some of them academic, some of them are put there by Johnny B. Truant, keep up, and through the footnotes, Johnny B. Truant is telling his own story as well as commenting on Zampano's story, which is telling Will Navidson's story. And then there are also the editors. Then there are the editors. Some undefined editors who have also edited what we assume to be Johnny's
00:11:29
Speaker
Johnny's kind of commentary, but they are undefined. And so we are reading the edited editings of the incomplete work of a documentary that doesn't exist. Yes. It's just multiple layers of interpretation. And for that reason, it was hailed as a great postmodern text.
00:11:52
Speaker
Because it seemingly and you know, in some instances in some ways you can look at it and say, yeah, that's correct. We can go. I don't personally believe that it is an example of a postmodern text. I think it masquerades as one or I think it warns against.
00:12:08
Speaker
That's the thing about postmodernism is everything both is and isn't. It's satire proof. So if you try and deconstruct something to prove it's not postmodern, the very act is postmodern. I mean, you can get totally poststructuralist on it, but it all amounts to the same thing. It's subverting the conception of what are books, what are words, what is meaning, how does it all fit together.
00:12:32
Speaker
And I have to I have to say, I'm going to disagree with you right from the start, because podcasts need controversy. None of it's none of it's none of it's new. Like, let's be honest, it all goes, but Tristan Shandy did it first. Most of the stuff that's in this book was done by Tristan Shandy. You know, you can you can you're reading upside down.
00:12:49
Speaker
the blank pages, the following the narrative, the threads, the twists, the turns, all of those things were done. In terms of the really kind of chopped up stuff, I mean B.S. Johnson was doing that work 80, 70, 80 years ago. After him, most of the beats played around with that. Burrows did all the cut-ups and I feel that a lot of the structural tricks that he employs
00:13:12
Speaker
combined together in a single volume and Turned up to 11 which this book most certainly is that certainly the experience of it is something completely new the individual Techniques that he's employing And those are those have all been done by other writers, you know, nothing is new in literature I think what what he did is brought them all together and basically just kept on going and kept on going and kept on going and there is a
00:13:39
Speaker
impressive relentlessness to the book, that revisiting it as more of an adult. When I first read it, I was an undergraduate, I was sort of, you know, forming myself, revisiting it now, the sheer weight.
Cultural Impact of House of Leaves
00:13:52
Speaker
You know, I've worked with authors for 15 years, and he talks about spending 10 years writing 10 hours a day to create it. I mean, it's an extraordinary achievement.
00:14:01
Speaker
The book, surely, whether you love it or hate it, the book as a piece of work, as a thing that must be assembled from disparate pieces, is quite extraordinary.
00:14:16
Speaker
Well, I like the idea of relentlessness of the text and it is relentless because it keeps plunging you down rabbit hole after rabbit hole after rabbit hole until the reader seems to have to go through this path of obsession or this path of absolution. I think for Navidson it's a path of absolution and we can come to the monster.
00:14:38
Speaker
at the hands of the labyrinth. But I think what Navidson is really doing with his house is pursuing this, well, looking for repentance and absolution for his own sins. But yeah, it's relentless and it forces the reader
00:14:54
Speaker
to undertake a path that he or she doesn't necessarily want to do or undertake. You may want to read the text in a linear way. It's not possible. You have to fragment your own understanding of what a book is in order to follow it around. I think you're absolutely right. In terms of
00:15:14
Speaker
achievement, it's staggering. I have to ask, as we've got an agent on, this is a particular question that I think we should ask an agent rather than perhaps an author. If you wanted to be wildly innovative and inventive, or at least subversive, let's put it that way, and you wanted to put together a book like this, how on earth do you pitch it?
00:15:43
Speaker
You don't, you don't. I mean, this is a moment in time, okay, so this book was published, originally published just after the millennium, right? So that is functionally a different world from where we are now. Like, in a way, if you think about the way the world consumed and the media are available for the world to consume at that point, a text like this came at the right time.
00:16:09
Speaker
just followed the biggest conspiracy theory of all time, the millennium bug, the Y2K hoax, that we were all going to go crashing back. Then four months later, this comes out. And I think the millennial anxiety that fed into it, combined with a lot of Danielewski's, he's spoken very openly about the personal problems that went through the process of writing the book. So it very much
00:16:32
Speaker
exemplifies a moment in time. And I don't think you're ever going to get that again. And the plenty of them have tried. I mean, he tried himself. The subsequent books did not have the commercial success of this. I mean, quite the opposite. They were, they were bad. I mean, so
00:16:49
Speaker
I'm holding up books, which if you're listening, this means nothing. But Only Revolutions was published by the same publisher, was published by Doubleday, so part of Transworld. So that's the thing to remember that House of Leaves is published by part of, well, then Random House. So like a big publishing group is not some esoteric press, but Only Revolutions was a commercial failure. I mean, that's not even a controversial thing. And so the 50 Year Sword, the one that came after, which is
00:17:17
Speaker
stitched and I mean stitched so within it there's a lot of text that's stitched in.
00:17:22
Speaker
That was published by a small independent called Cargo in Scotland that went bust, not long afterwards. So it's not a viable route to commercial success, trying to capture a cult book. I mean, there'll be other people who've tried to do it. I mean, the JJ Abrams, Doug Dorst book, S is probably the closest, which kind of goes beyond that even. I don't know if you, do you know that book? No, actually.
00:17:48
Speaker
Oh, there's so many parallels. This is a separate podcast. So the Minotaur at the heart of House of Leaves. So it's exactly the same. I've got it here. So exactly the same. So JJ Abrams hasn't lost, so he produced it. And the book that he has found within it is called Ship of Theseus.
00:18:09
Speaker
Oh, so cool. But this is incredible. It has, again, podcast. I'm going to riffle pages for the experiment. This is for the ASMR community. It has incredible postcards and photographs and things. I mean, go get a copy of this book. It's the follow up. But, you know, that was
00:18:30
Speaker
published in 2013. Was that written with House of Leaves explicitly in mind? It can't not have been. It replicates
00:18:44
Speaker
The format is not the same. It is House of Leaves without the Johnny Truant narrative. And I think anybody who has any love for this book knows that the Johnny Truant narrative is the one that you need to get rid of. It's the bit that serves no purpose. It's the point at which Danielavsky kind of went to... He was trying to
Critique and Influence of House of Leaves
00:19:04
Speaker
add a commercial contemporary voice into what was an intellectual experiment. The voice he went for was a very millennial, like Bret Easton Ellis, Chuck Pananook, like drugs and booze and shagging. My personal feeling is it doesn't add anything. Well, there's a reading of the text that says, Jonny B. Truin is, well, I really liked
00:19:29
Speaker
his name. I think that his name is a clue. And I think if you say in the style of this sort of millennial, California, Joggy Dropout, like Johnny B. Truin, you know what I'm saying? So Johnny is literally Truin. He's absent from the text. Yeah. So he's there. He's literally, he's literally a footnote. That's what he is.
00:19:47
Speaker
But then again, but what are you trying to do? Is he trying to like Tyler Durden us? I mean, what is the, like, you have to, you can't have somebody who occupies such a significant place within the town. You can read it and totally ignore him. And I think the fact the reading of the book becomes much more interesting in that way. But I mean, to an extent, Jonny B. Truin is us. He is the reader.
00:20:09
Speaker
in the level of analysis and the mania that the other elements of the book brings, but it's also the author and a lot of the more emotional side and the things that come in later about his upbringing, I think are things that reflect elements of Danielewski's life, and that was part of it. Have you listened to the album, the Poe album? His sister produced an album. It's called House of Leaves, isn't it? Yeah.
00:20:35
Speaker
uh it's called haunted oh no house of leaves is one of the songs isn't it yeah it's called haunted and it's a sort of concept album that goes alongside and a lot of the lyrics on that kind of unpack elements that that the author then kind of himself referred to in some of the interviews but i think you can lose the
00:20:51
Speaker
The Johnny B. Truant narrative is an interesting addition, but I think that very much dates the book in a way the rest of it isn't. So yeah, so S by JJ Abrams is without the Johnny B. Truant. It's the same thing. It's a discovered text. And how's that? And you get all of these things. I mean, there was this published by Harville Sacker. Again, I'm holding a book, The Selected Works of T.S. Spiffert by Rief Larson. And again, it's got footnotes and it's got illustrations. It's doing something very, very similar.
00:21:22
Speaker
None of them have achieved the cult status of House of Leaves. None of these books arguably have delivered
00:21:30
Speaker
the thing that you want if you're trying to publish something for a cult readership. It's never the ones that are published in that way that find the audience. To a certain extent, the Rorschach text. Yeah, that's what I was going to say. We're going to cover the Rorschach text hopefully later in the year. Which is a book that has more of a coherent narrative to it than any of these other ones. I mean, it's a simpler book, whether that's better or worse. I'm trying to work out what else I've looked at. I mean, a lot of it all goes back to Fred Exley. Do you know, have you read Fred Exley, a fan's notes?
00:22:00
Speaker
No, no, go and tell us. And then I'm going to have to come back to Johnny Truant. Tell us about Exley. Well, Fred Exley, again, so the Johnny Truant character is a kind of Bukovsky archetype. And there's the story that when Danielewski told his dad that he was about the book he was writing, his dad told him to go and get a job at the post office. And so in a fit of emotional peak, he took the manuscript round the back and chucked it in the bin. Everything goes, anything that involves
00:22:29
Speaker
that involves our angry white men, and our angry white American men eventually comes back to Charles Bukowski, because that's just the nature of it. But what he was doing is, Fred Exley's A Fan's Notes is a kind of, it's about an obsessive sport fan, and it established the kind of flip side, it was a kind of post-beat generation, this sort of flip side to the American dream, and that is the character. If you want to read that book, then you read A Fan's Notes, because it is unbelievable.
00:23:00
Speaker
particularly like American football, which I do. If you don't, it kind of still makes sense.
00:23:06
Speaker
So you end up with a character who I feel doesn't necessarily fit in with what else is going on in the book. I'm going to just pick you up on Johnny B. Truin, because I can go along with that to a certain extent. But at some point, I think there's an episode which is written by Johnny B. Truin in the footnotes, which I think nails the point of the whole book. Well, along with the denial,
00:23:33
Speaker
photograph. We'll come to that. But there's a section where Zamperno is trying to analyse Will Navinson's dreams. And he talks about Will Navinson dreaming about being on the back of a giant snail. And it's kind of a weird fiction vibe. Wouldn't you say, Chris? There's a sort of a folk horror thing because he imagines Will Navinson imagines himself being a part of this strange, rural community. I can't quite
00:23:58
Speaker
can't remember the details, but he imagined himself as part of this strange rural community. He's on the back of a giant snail going round in a big spiral, which is the pattern on the snail. And then Johnny B. Truant
00:24:12
Speaker
relates his own dream after that. And his own dream is being cut up by an axe-wielding frat boy. And the frat boy cuts him into a million pieces, is very extremely violent, cuts his nose off, pops his eyes out, prizes his thighs off of his knees, splinters his sternum and rips out the inside.
00:24:33
Speaker
Really this this dream frat boy really goes to town on him But and he tries to pulverize his teeth and that part is unsuccessful and I think that He and the the phrase that he uses is absolutes and zeros and heights. So utter dismemberment That's what the frat boy is doing to Johnny be truant's body in the dream. I think that's what is happening to
00:24:58
Speaker
to everybody and everything in the book. There, as Anthony is subjecting this film by Navidson to an obsessive level of dismemberment, he's trying to dissect every single frame of this found footage documentary to try and find meaning in it. And so is Johnny Retruin. Navidson is trying to dissect the labyrinth at the heart of his house and try and find the heart of darkness at the heart,
00:25:28
Speaker
at the center of the labyrinth of the Minotaur, and he ends up completely lost as well. So I think that the utter dismemberment episode or event in the Johnny B. Truett narrative is the thing which is the point and it kind of binds everything together.
00:25:45
Speaker
I can see that to a degree, but it's a shame. The problem with it is not some of the things that are put in the mouth of Johnny, or in the words of Johnny Betruin. The issue is the manner of their delivery and to use what is basically a kind of, again, a Bret Easton Ellis kind of archetype there, the kind of ultra-capitalism, the frat boy, this kind of poster child, but turned nasty.
00:26:11
Speaker
American Psycho was 1991. By this stage, even the film had come out. So it had gone out into the kind of wider echelons of kind of public consciousness. And I think that's really, that's what it, and I can see there's a dismemberment to an extent, but it's Navitus is not pulling the house apart. He's trying, he's searching for something. He's looking for something. And that in a way is a kind of a constructive
00:26:32
Speaker
Yeah, I agree. I think that yeah, Navidson's journey is unsuccessful. It's ultimately one that ends in failure because he ends up lost and sort of floating in this soup of nothingness. But yeah, I think that Navidson's journey is an attempt at resolution and an attempt to face the Minotaur at the heart of the labyrinth. Zamper, though, is
00:26:56
Speaker
definitely trying to do the utter dismemberment. He's trying to, he dissects everything to do with the film and he ends up with nothing. So he ends up with something that's kind of less than the sum of its parts. It's like explaining a joke.
00:27:10
Speaker
It is, yeah. If you explain the joke, then all of a sudden it loses that sort of spark of divinity that transcends the mere words on the page. And he's doing the same thing. And the question is, is the subject, I mean, this goes back to the Finnegan's Wake argument. Is everything there so laden with meaning that the more that you deconstruct it, the more you understand about the world?
00:27:35
Speaker
Or do you reduce it to nothingness? Do you reduce it to its constituent parts, to its atoms, and then go, great, I've just got a bunch of atoms? And I think, to a certain extent, I think that ergodic literature, which is what this is, which is a term I must confess, I didn't actually know when I was obsessed with this, because it was only coined about two years before I read it. But the idea that you have works that defy
00:28:05
Speaker
comprehension or defy a traditional reading that requires an effort on the part of the reader. It's a sort of challenge and I think in a world where a lot of the culture, a lot of the reading material, the television, a lot of it is very, very simple and straightforward and people are looking for that kind of reassurance. I think the fact that there are writers who are still prepared to write books that are
00:28:28
Speaker
Certainly not inconsiderable amount of effort that goes into reading a book like this and for all of the innovation and the strange ways in which you interact with the book and the sort of thrownness of the experience of reading it I do think that if you peel all that away there is actually
Themes and Symbolism in House of Leaves
00:28:48
Speaker
a fairly conventional narrative, sort of a kernel of truth sitting at the heart of it. And I mentioned the phrase earlier, heart of darkness. I do think that's the essential narrative of the book. But I don't agree. I think with something this experimental,
00:29:03
Speaker
to prescribe a meaning to it without seeing it. Because everything you're saying I can see as an academic argument. But my experience of the book was purely emotional. And it was purely claustrophobic and agrophobic. It wasn't thinking about all these different things. Although one thing we're all agreed on is the Johnny B. Truant story is
00:29:26
Speaker
It's a bit of a drag, not just because of the unsympathetic character, but also because the inconsistencies of him as well, the use of, instead of have, so often, although they have these turns of wonderfully literary phrases that he has. But when I think about House of Lees, and we're talking about things also,
00:29:48
Speaker
Rorschach texts and all the works that you've mentioned. It has influenced so many different types of media and story in one way. So some it might be structure, some it might be just the concept of a space that's larger on the inside or the outside. You have films like Yellow Brick Road, which is the nearest I think you'll get to a House of Leaves kind of being filmed.
00:30:13
Speaker
And it's open for interpretation. I think it's very easy to take the literal minotaur thing to an academic intellectual end, which is a bit sort of missing the experience of the book.
00:30:33
Speaker
I don't want to sit down and have an A-level text or go through it and pick it apart like that. I want to experience the book. So when I'm reading about the thing about the angles and the dimensions and the noise and this Minotaur, the first thing that came to my mind, even knowing about Theseus and the Minotaur was the hands of Tyndallos, the sort of H.B. Lovecraft,
00:30:59
Speaker
things that come through the non-dimensional. The liquid smoke creatures. Yes, exactly. And so I think it's really, it's a bit risky to take something that's so inscrutable and intangible. I think you're right, there might have been influences, but to say that this book is about that, I think that's personal to us.
00:31:18
Speaker
So you're reading it as a straight horror story because I mean that's the most, that's the usual, the usual response to it. It's a haunted house story. I wouldn't call it a horror story, I would call it weird fiction and I would call it, I certainly would call it a horror story, I would call it an existential dread, you know, I would, cosmic, much more cosmic than
00:31:38
Speaker
I understand what you're saying about haunted house, but I just mean in the traditional sort of gothic haunted house, it's certainly not like that. It's a Dutch colonial, you know, sort of a New England burial ground or something like that. You're right. I mean, a lot of that is the kind of post-millennials that you think about the Blair Witch Project, you think about paranormal activity, even something like the Cabin in the Woods. You know, a lot of those influences can be seen as being kind of post-Danielewski. Now, do we think
00:32:05
Speaker
that those explicitly came from? Blair Witch was a few years before. Was that before? Yeah, I think it was a few years before. 1999. I would have thought that, yeah, it's the other way round, that this is, that the Navidson report draws very heavily on Blair Witch and the success of that. I don't know. I mean, he probably started writing it a long time before Blair Witch was released. Yeah, he wrote it 10 years before. Yeah. So it's, yeah, like you say, it's an interesting,
00:32:35
Speaker
sort of snapshot or time capsule for that period just after the millennium, the turn of the millennium. But I think it is worth saying that I imagine this is a book that has been bought many times and has sat on a lot of shelves and been unread. I think, you know, certainly a kind of a
00:32:54
Speaker
It took a substantial amount of time the first time I read it, and the experience of reading it the second time was much more of a kind of skimming through and refreshing and picking out different things. The idea of actually sitting down to read it, it would take an extraordinary amount of time. I used to study a lot of this kind of
00:33:14
Speaker
the more complicated things, right from kind of Robert Musil all the way through William Gaddis. I became completely obsessed with William Gaddis. I mean, Pynchon to an extent, and I mean, Don DeLillo, his latter books have probably slightly
00:33:28
Speaker
everyone forget what a good author he used to be. But there is something about books that you do have to invest that time in. And I think that sometimes the initial response, which I kind of take to be your response, is more the kind of the darker, the oppression of it, of this world. And I think that gradually the mind will intellectualise
00:33:53
Speaker
And that's when you begin to go deeper. And that's when you start to kind of peel it. And that's when you essentially lose your mind. And that's the power of literature. That's one of the great jokes of the book, isn't it? It's set out in such a way that you can't help start thinking about why is it laid out in this way? Why is it structured in this way? Why is this this way? There are several questions that you could ask. And these are the same questions that Zampano
00:34:22
Speaker
asks in trying to do his dissection, his academic analysis of the Naviton report and he ends up lost. He dies and the work is incomplete and it's essentially in looking for meaning, in spending all of his waking hours searching for minute, I'll use your phrase, atoms of meaning in every single frame of this found footage documentary,
00:34:48
Speaker
he's wasted his life and he ends up dying alone and well, there's no greater, no lesser meaning, what am I trying to say? There's no greater meaninglessness than that. I can't agree with that either.
00:35:05
Speaker
You see, controversy. This is good. No, this is good. No, no, I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm saying the way I read it is this is his bobby dick. Yes. But when you say his, do you mean? He's he's having his
00:35:23
Speaker
you know, he's, well, he lost his, his loss to sight in the 1950s. So God knows how he even managed to watch the Naviton Records. Yeah, well, that's, that's the gag, isn't it? So regardless of however he gets to see it, the fact is, it's absolutely compelling. And I can imagine being monomaniac about something like this myself.
00:35:42
Speaker
If you discover this little dimensions and stuff, then how could you not destroy your life by finding it? He's a much more relatable character, even though he's got the blank spaces we don't know as a reader. He's a lot more relatable.
00:36:00
Speaker
to me because because I'm a monomaniac probably on certain things because if I discovered something like this it would be my complete and utter focus because it's so out there so
00:36:16
Speaker
has I know what the word is, you know, it's so completely unrelatable that you would just want to pick and pick and pick and pick. And then you just said you your experience of the book was your experience of the book. So they said emotional response to the book rather than wanting to pick it apart.
00:36:33
Speaker
But I'm not saying I want to pick apart the meaning of this book. I'm saying I want to pick apart the physics of it. If I'm San Paolo, I'd experience, because he's got all those tape measures nailed in his floor and all these things which are other force fields against the dark. Is it happening to him? He doesn't wake up. He's found with the scratches in the floor. That doesn't suggest
00:36:56
Speaker
There's so much where you have to decide for yourself, is this happening? Is it the madness of this? Because he's a graphomaniac as well, isn't he, Zampano, which is somebody who compulsively writes and often it's nonsense. And then Johnny B. Truin is a drunk and a, you know, substance abuse. And so there's
00:37:21
Speaker
can we trust what he says? You can sort of take what side of it you want. But that's their approach to the house itself, or the approach to the conundrum is what I'm talking about, not the approach to the literature that Danielewski has written. Okay, well, okay, so the Zampano gets
00:37:45
Speaker
completely thrown, or he gets obsessed, he becomes obsessed with this. And Navidson becomes, okay, I could live with that. Actually, I'm going to pick you up on the Moby Dick point, because in Moby Dick... It all goes back to Moby Dick. That means we have to move sideways onto David Foster Wallace, and then that's when the wheels properly come off. Yeah, we really have to call time at that point. Our families find us in a week's time.
00:38:10
Speaker
Yeah, with writing scribbled all of the walls of the bedroom. I get in a lot of trouble even if I was dead. This is brilliant. Your spin-off podcast can be like podcasts about the unreadable works of literature people have on their bookshelves and never read. Yeah, they can be paid premium content. We can do infinite jest. We can do a bit of William Gaddis, probably the recognitions. I'm checking my bookshelves now to see what I've got on there.
00:38:36
Speaker
just like the really impenetrable stuff. And we can just talk endlessly about them. But I do, I, look, Moby Dick, it all comes back to Moby Dick because... Well, Ishmael survives. That's the thing in Moby Dick. That's all I was going to say. Ishmael survives at the end of Moby Dick. So I don't think you can say... But the point of Moby Dick is about Moby Dick, the white whale is what it is. Yeah, it is. It is. And like everybody has a white whale. And the majority of these, and particularly it's an obsession with, it's an obsession with, you know, the great American novel, which I think anything, any book that is physically
00:39:03
Speaker
substantial and written by an American. And they all come down to, they'll come back to maybe Dick because there's always going to be a white whale. There's going to be something at the heart into which a protagonist or the reader themselves.
00:39:21
Speaker
Well, even the labyrinth in Naverton's house. I mean, that's the same thing, isn't it? It's a heart of darkness or the white whale, if you want to. And he wants to investigate it because he's projecting his own neuroses and his own difficulties and his own guilt onto it. And a bit like Zampano, whatever we do, like you said, Chris, we don't know anything about Zampano's life outside of his attempted reconstruction of this very strange manuscript.
00:39:47
Speaker
But whatever his outside life was, he's kind of rejected it and jettisoned it so he could do this work. Naviton kind of does the same thing because he has a wife, Karen, and he has two children, Chad and Daisy, we haven't mentioned. They've moved into this house. Poor Daisy. Poor Daisy. Spoiler alert. Oh yeah, that's awful. And his brother.
00:40:09
Speaker
What happens to his brother, Tom? Tom is kind of a hero, isn't he? He is. He ends up being a hero. But yeah, sticky end. But again, he turns his back increasingly on the thing that has the greatest
00:40:23
Speaker
amount of meaning in his life, which is his family, and he turns to the darkness. He's come back from the darkness. He does come back from the darkness. Originally, he was there in the kind of water photography at the cutting edge of this horror and has come back to re-engage with his family to then discover another type of horror in his own basement. The horror in his own basement is, I mean, the Minotaur is a great
00:40:52
Speaker
It's a great symbolic monster. I was having a real think about the Minotaur. It's a bit of a guffin, isn't it, the Minotaur? I'm not sure. Minotaur's American. I'm Minotaur, then. Well, it's an American book, isn't it? OK, we'll go with Minotaur. I was thinking about it, and I had a look online for interpretations of the Minotaur, and I couldn't find any that were satisfactory. Well, it's half, it's a beast, and it's got the head of a ball, but it's also got the body of the man. So he's half man.
00:41:22
Speaker
So it seems to me it's like the part of yourself that's monstrous and Theseus goes into the labyrinth to kill the Minotaur and I took that as an interpretation of going deep down into yourself to kill the part of yourself that is most monstrous so that you can emerge as a better human or at least as a functional human and you can lead the best possible life that you can lead because there is a monstrous part. Well that's all the way stored, isn't it?
00:41:48
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Oh, the Heart of Darkness again by Conrad, same thing. Can we just have some props for Joseph Conrad? Joseph Conrad, English was not his second language, not his first language, or his second language. It was his third language. And he had never, he never spoke or wrote a word of English until he was 21. And then he wrote Heart of Darkness. Wow. I mean, like, I mean, that's taking the piss.
00:42:12
Speaker
I really hate him. I hate for that. But no, I can see that. I don't know. The thing is about the nature of the labyrinth and the concept of a labyrinth is not really about what's at the center of it. It is that you become lost in the process. And I think that that's what's happened. Everybody in this book is lost in that process. That depends on your definition of the labyrinth because a labyrinth isn't necessarily a maze, a puzzle.
00:42:40
Speaker
a spiritual labyrinth like the one at the Cathedral de Notre Dame at Chartres. For example, there's a massive labyrinth laid out as a mosaic on the floor and it is circular and you journey to the centre but there's only one path. There are no options to go left or right. There's a difference between a maze.
00:42:58
Speaker
Yes, exactly. So the labyrinth, you only can ever take one path. And the idea is that if you walk the path of this labyrinth in the Cathedral to Notre Dame, then you can see every aspect of the cathedral.
00:43:10
Speaker
And then you arrive at the centre, and you have a sort of a holistic understanding of every aspect of the cathedral. And I think that's what Navardson is doing. Although there is a sort of maze element to it superficially, but essentially that's what he's doing. He's sort of trying to drive to the centre of the labyrinth, and that's where you encounter the Minotaur, which is the monstrous version of yourself. And you have to take in every aspect
00:43:36
Speaker
of your life in order to identify or find the monstrous aspect of yourself and realize that's what's wrong with me. That's the thing that I need to burn away. That's the thing that I need to kill to move on with my life or to emerge as a better person. And the Minotaur for me
00:43:54
Speaker
was the little, you said he was a war photographer, and the minotaur for me is the little Sudanese girl, Delial, or Delial, I don't know how you would pronounce it, Delial I always read it as, which is an analogue, and the book is so
00:44:11
Speaker
Yeah, it is such a time capsule, this book, it really is. The Sudanese girl, okay, so Will Navidson takes a photograph in Sudan of a book, a girl that he labels Delisle, who is starving to death. And in the background, there is a vulture.
00:44:30
Speaker
stalking the little girl and this little girl is skin and bone and she's she's clutching a bone in her right hand in her own bony grasp desperate for food and there's a vulture a symbol of death stalking her in the background and he
00:44:47
Speaker
feels immense guilt about not intervening and helping the child. He simply takes the snap and then walks away and he wins a Pulitzer Prize for it. And so Navidson is a very obvious avatar for Kevin Carter. I mean, it's not even attempting to sort of disguise it or
00:45:08
Speaker
I wasn't aware of Kevin Carter. I mean, apart from the manic song, I wasn't aware. It's very strange, isn't it? Kevin Carter was a South African photographer. He did the same thing. He went to war-torn countries. South Africa was a war-torn country, but he followed the gangs in South Africa as they went around necklacing people. Then he went to Sudan to cover the famine. He took a photograph of this little girl who was crawling to a United Nations food camp.
00:45:36
Speaker
on her hands and knees, literally, and there's a vulture in the background of the photograph. And he took the photograph, and then he walked away. And he said, the UN people said, don't interact with the locals, because they may be carrying disease. And so he did that. He walked away. And he was consumed by such guilt that even after getting the Pulitzer Prize, only months later, a few weeks after that, he killed himself. And then to add insult to injury, the Manic Street Preachers wrote a song about him.
00:46:06
Speaker
But I have to say that that aspect is something that I wasn't aware of until I read the... I'm sure within the narratives around in this podcast, you'll include a link to your excellent article about the book that has many more in-depth points about it that I hadn't realised. But it's... It's a very strange thing to alight on, I think, the Kevin Carter thing. Yeah.
00:46:34
Speaker
What would you say? As a source of guilt, you know, the photograph. And a lot of House of Leaves is actually about photography. It's about footage. That's an avid sense thing, is it? It's inexorable, you know, that the stuff with Delisle and the stuff with his wife, he is observing the house completely coldly. He's meant to be the scientific one if we're believing what Zampano has said about him, because Zampano is not particularly believable in terms of the way he reports Karen and the way he reports Will.
00:47:04
Speaker
There's a slight misogyny there. But when you find out at the end about Delilah and what had happened in this photo, and you compare it to the way Will Navidson treats his wife and his relationship and the conundrum of what's in his house, compared to, say, Karen, who is using the Yi Jing and the Feng Shui and tarot cards, and she's all to do with emotions and feeling, and he's to do with completely not feeling. And even though they've moved there to this house,
00:47:33
Speaker
to save their marriage, he is still putting their marriage on the line by investigating and going into the dark space when she has made him promise he wouldn't. So I think that's just a nice thematic link about his character, the whole thing with Delal. And it gives a real sucker punch, a real
00:47:56
Speaker
You know, when you read that section, it's a horrible, horrible story because you realize this man, you've kind of been behind. Well, if you're me, you're like, yeah, that's interesting. I'd like to find out what's in my house. But then you think about what he's done in the past and you realize he's a cold shark. Yeah, well, and he comes to that realization as well, which I think that that's the clever part. It doesn't just present him as the cold shark.
00:48:20
Speaker
When Zampano eventually gets to revealing the truth about the photograph of the Sudanese girl, Delisle, that's like the whole...
00:48:32
Speaker
That's the hook on which the whole book hangs, I think. And that's like, again, that sort of hard kernel of truth. It's inescapable. It's real. It's literally real for Naviton. That's more real than anything. And for the reader experiencing it, then researchers and discovers that, in fact, there is a basis of reality. Then I think the kind of the layer, it adds another layer.
00:48:53
Speaker
to the understanding. And I think that's why the emotional heft of the book, which is something that I feel that at times gets lost amidst some of the silliness. I mean, structurally, it's a technical term. But I think that there isn't an emotional heft, and there is clearly a lot of darkness within the book. And I think it comes from a very dark place. And I think that
00:49:15
Speaker
the stylistically and a lot of the pageantry and a lot of the kind of mythologization around the book, particularly the fanboy thing. It's been commented in various articles because it was 20 years from its first publication and there were lots of kind of
00:49:33
Speaker
He came back onto the scene, he came clean about the script that he'd written for the TV show, but it was observed that it's the kind of book that does occupy the minds of a certain type of young man. The obsessiveness of that is something that's... Creepypasta, the kind of creepypasta generation.
00:49:54
Speaker
And I think that's it. If you bump into somebody at a party and they tell you their favourite books, House of Leaves, you're probably not going to stick around. And there are a certain type of authors that have that same effect. I mean, Chuck Palanuk and Brett Easton and Alice are very similar. And they're very much of their time as well, aren't they?
00:50:18
Speaker
There's a whiff of misogyny there, and I think certainly this book has that whiff. I think he counterbalances it. There's so much smoke and mirrors it's hard to pin down any viewpoint, but there's definitely a whiff, and that's something that came through rereading it that I wasn't aware of. And I think part of that is about the difference between the time it was written.
00:50:37
Speaker
and now. I'd be fascinated to know how this book is viewed in another 20 years' time, in 100 years' time, whether this book is actually Tristram Shandy and is something that will be poured over in 100s of years' time.
00:50:53
Speaker
or whether it will date even more and even more quickly. This is before Twitter, this is before Facebook, this is before memes, it's before any of these things that it's hard to imagine.
00:51:13
Speaker
like, does this book? It sort of occupies a very particular time, doesn't it? Just after special effects made it possible for the camera to lie, which is a point, you know, that comes up explicitly in the book, from Navidson's perspective as a photographer, and before social media could circulate the lies that the camera tells.
00:51:34
Speaker
That's exactly it. That's exactly it. And I think that that in itself is interesting, is the kind of the very specific point. And I think the book has to be read within the context of that time. And it's a time that's very, it's
00:51:46
Speaker
written by somebody who is on the cusp between a kind of analog world and a digital world. And the people who read it as late teenagers, early 20s at the time, so roughly contemporaneous with the author, would have been exactly the same. I speak for myself. I turned 40 last year. So I'm kind of in exactly that space where I have one foot in a different world and then desperately trying to cling on to the modern one. And I think that the book
00:52:15
Speaker
grasps that in a way that, as you say, books of that generation do. And that's why it's interesting to see what the author goes on to write next. And to be honest, this is his achievement. Everything else looks back and refers back to it. It's almost like the most subversive thing that Danielewski could do, be to write a conventional linear narrative novel.
00:52:41
Speaker
Yeah.
Challenges for Writers Post-Success
00:52:42
Speaker
Okay, well, I think that's probably a good time to take a break. That was a really cool conversation about House of Leaves. I really enjoyed that. We will, yeah, take a break now and join Ed a little bit later on in the show. Hello, SFF Chronicles. My name is Barack Obama. I think I found a magic portal to another dimension. I rang the New York Times to explain and they said to give your office a call.
00:53:10
Speaker
It was Tuesday morning, when I first spotted it. A door, at the bottom of the stairs. And when I opened it, there was a hallway, followed by a... Oh, are you chatting to now, Barret? Ah, don't tell me you're pontificating again. Don't you get that up? Oh, no. No, no, no. Not at all. I'm letting the people know about my new interdimensional corridor, next to the downstairs toilet. Oh, yeah, I've been meaning to ask you about that. Just one moment, please. Where was I? Oh, yes. Traveling along an interdimensional passageway. It is the journey I continue today.
00:53:40
Speaker
For walking down an alleyway between space and time is a thing we must all do some day. It is a duty that we have to ourselves, to our nations, and to the world. A duty that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly. Firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit than wandering along between dimensions that coexist separately to our own.
00:54:09
Speaker
Hello, welcome to The Judge's Corner with me, Damaris Brown. This month, as part of my series on aspects of the law which we can use in our stories, I'll be looking at laws relating to clothing. From our earliest times, clothes have attracted a host of customary rules and conventions, as well as religious mandates and prohibitions, all acting to create a sense of belonging and community within a group, and as a consequence, a sense of separateness and difference.
00:54:40
Speaker
But for millennia, governments have also intervened, setting out rules about what can and can't be worn by different sections of society, such as the Roman laws, whereby the number of stripes allowed on men's tunics was fixed according to rank, where only augers could wear saffron-coloured togas, and only the emperor himself could wear a purple toga, died at tremendous expense. Some tree legislation of this kind swept across Europe in the 13th century,
00:55:08
Speaker
ostensibly designed to control expenditure and extravagance, frequently buttressed by religious or moral arguments as well as financial justifications, since importing expensive foreign goods was seen as harming the economy. And how could a ruler negotiate the loans he continually needed if his moneylenders had spent all their gold on fine clothing?
00:55:32
Speaker
Whatever the stated reasons, and consumerism, particularly by women, was blamed for all types of societal ills, even declining birth rates, the laws served to bolster prevailing social hierarchies. Growth in trade had increased the wealth of the merchant classes, who now not only aspired to luxury, but were able to afford it.
00:55:53
Speaker
By thus encroaching on the privileges of the nobility and thereby undermining their position, such expenditure threatened social unrest, so measures had to be taken to control it. So, for instance, laws in Montpellier from 1227 sought to prevent extravagance in courtship rituals, with restrictions on clothing styles and materials.
00:56:15
Speaker
notably silk, pearls, shiny fur and shirts sewn with gold thread. While in 1377 Florence tried to limit the length of men's pointed shoes, the shortness of their tunics and the amount of silver in their belts. And in 1582 in Augsburg male servants were forbidden to wear silk, velvet headgear, pearls, gold thread and costly weapons.
00:56:41
Speaker
The first of the Statutes of Apparel in England was enacted in 1363, and amendments, additions, and restatements appeared over the next 200 years, culminating in 1574 under Elizabeth I, that never knowingly underdressed monarch, in a statute which fulminated against excess, superfluity, unnecessary foreign wares, vain devices, waste, and the decay of the wealth of the realm.
00:57:13
Speaker
Under the Tudors, lower classes were limited to wool, linen and sheepskin, in colours such as brown, russet and green, and blues had to be dyed from woad, not expensive indigo. For the other classes, there were precise lists of exactly who could wear what cloth, in what colour and on what garment. So, for instance,
00:57:34
Speaker
None shall wear in his apparel any silk of the colour of purple, cloth of gold-tissued, nor fur of sables, but only the king, queen, king's mother, children, brethren and sisters, uncles and aunts, and except dukes, marquises and earls, who may wear the same in doublets, jerkins, linings of cloaks, gowns and hoes, and those of the garter, purple in mantles only.
00:58:05
Speaker
And so it goes on in meticulous detail, regarding tinseled satin, cloth mixed or embroidered with gold or silver, furs of various animals, damask, camelot, taffeta, sarsenet, and woolen cloth made out of the realm, and for all kinds of clothes from caps to nether stocks, and for dukes to apprentices of law, mares, and other head officers of any town's corporate.
00:58:32
Speaker
This desire by the ruling elite to maintain and define rigid hierarchies through clothing wasn't only apparent in Europe. In the Yido period in Japan, laws forbade the merchant class from wearing bright colours to prevent the not as wealthy samurai class from losing face. While in China, only the emperor could wear yellow, and his ministers and officials were governed by strict rules as to how many embroidered cranes could decorate their clothes. Silk was reserved for the upper classes,
00:59:01
Speaker
with penalties attached to the common folk who dare to wear it, instead of the hempen clothing allotted to them. The Aztecs of Mesoamerica were regulated not only as to the cloth unornamentation used, so the king had fine mantles of expensive cotton embroidered with designs of different colours and featherworks.
00:59:21
Speaker
while for the common people wearing cotton was a capital offence, and they had to be content with cheaper home-produced cloth than magway fibre. There were also restrictions as to how clothes were worn. A common man's mantle couldn't extend below the knee, and if it reached the ankle the penalty was death. And while commoners had to tie their clothes over their right shoulder, some nobles and priests were permitted to tie them under the chin.
00:59:47
Speaker
The state could also reward or punish its citizens with laws relating to clothing. A Roman general could have a gold border to his toga at his triumph. But a banished citizen wasn't permitted to wear a toga at all, making him indistinguishable from a barbarian. While for the Aztecs, the more prisoners a warrior captured, the more ornate and opulent the mantles he was entitled to wear. But the nobleman of a conquered city late in paying tribute were
01:00:15
Speaker
No longer to wear splendid mantles. From now on they must use cloaks of magway fibre, like people of low rank.
01:00:24
Speaker
Laws were also designed to differentiate outcasts from polite society, so under Roman law prostitutes couldn't wear the stola, the sign of a respectable matron. Over a thousand years later, this approach was repeated when in the late 12th century the Pope ruled that harlots should dress differently from honest women, engendering a plethora of regulations against them.
01:00:46
Speaker
In London it was expressly stated that they weren't to dress like good or noble dames or damsels, and by 1351 their hoods had to be striped, setting them apart. While in Pisa they had to wear a yellow filet or headband, and in Florence bells had to be affixed to their hoods or shawls. Outsiders
01:01:07
Speaker
particularly people of different faiths, could also be set apart by laws relating to clothing. At the Lateran Council in 1215, Canon 68 required both Jews and Saracens to wear something distinctive, so that no Christian shall come to marry them, ignorant of who they are, again leading to a wealth of laws over the next couple of centuries.
01:01:29
Speaker
In England, Jews had to wear a yellow badge, while the Holy Roman Empire required them to wear a red hat with the brim twisted into a pair of horns. In Portugal, Muslims wore a crescent moon of coloured cloth, while Jews had a six-pointed yellow star, a symbol which, of course, sickeningly returned to Europe 600 years later under Nazi legislation.
01:01:55
Speaker
But laws could also be used to try to unite a nation, such as the reforms in 1829 of Sultan Mahmud II, which sought to remove the hierarchical complexities of headgear within the Ottoman Empire. So instead, all men would wear the fez, with no distinction between officials, soldiers and ordinary subjects, and especially not between Muslims and non-Muslims.
01:02:17
Speaker
Some tree laws may have disappeared, but legislation about clothes is still being made and enforced around the world. The requirement in many Muslim countries for more distress, and particularly the hijab, the Taliban requiring the burqa to be worn in Afghanistan, and the state forbidding its wearing in France.
01:02:36
Speaker
But it is not always necessary for the law regarding clothing to be formally enacted in statutes or municipal regulations. There was no specific law in Stuart, England that prevented a woman dressing as a man in public.
01:02:49
Speaker
Though James I and VI may have contemplated making it one, when in 1620 he ordered the clergy to invade vehemently and bitterly in their sermons against the insolency of all women, and they were wearing broad-brimmed hats, pointed doublets, their hair cut short or shorn,
01:03:07
Speaker
as shortly thereafter it was reported regarding these impudent women that, our king threatens to fall upon their husbands, parents or friends that have or should have power over them and make them pay for it.
01:03:22
Speaker
But while it wasn't a criminal offence, cross-dressing in Tudor and Stuart England was seen as not only outlandish but literally unnatural and against God's law as set down in Deuteronomy. Consequently, women who wore male accoutrements might find themselves in the church courts, accused of immorality or indecent behaviour, and having to do public penance as a result.
01:03:45
Speaker
And that use of alternative avenues for prosecution still exists, as Stephen Gough, the so-called naked rambler, knows to his cost. There is no law in England and Wales forbidding nudity in public, but you can still spend years in prison as a result, thanks to such legal concepts as disorderly conduct, outraging public decency, antisocial behaviour orders, and contempt of court.
01:04:10
Speaker
So how to bring this law about clothing into our writing? Well, we all know that clothes can tell our readers who our characters are, their wealth, class, aspirations, attitudes to conformity, and so on. But never forget that those clothes also indicate something of their society and its wealth and aspirations. And control by this state through clothing legislation isn't only the province of fundamentalist religions in dystopian novels, such as The Handmaid's Tale with its strict dress code.
01:04:40
Speaker
If your society has a religious class, it will undoubtedly enforce rules as to clerical dress, in the same way that a 1269 Icelandic rule forbade priests to wear party-coloured clothing which had dubious and frivolous associations. Perhaps it might also seek to differentiate itself from other competing faiths, as with the plain clothes of Lutheran and Calvinist ministers at the Reformation, in contrast to the perceived excesses of Catholic costume.
01:05:11
Speaker
But in your well-building, what is religion's view of dress for its lay adherence? Does it impose its will, particularly over women, requiring them to wear sombre colours and to cover their hair? What happens to those who defy its rules? And is it powerful enough to get the state to enforce its will directly through legislation or indirectly through morality laws?
01:05:33
Speaker
If a religious sect or small foreign group in your world is seen as unwelcome by the larger society, does the state require its members to wear distinguishing marks so they cannot hide? Or to ensure conformity, are they forbidden to wear their national or religious dress? Or perhaps the group itself, mindful of its vulnerability,
01:05:53
Speaker
issues its own sumptuary laws to its people to avoid dangerous ostentation and to limit their visibility, as the Jews of Forley in Italy once did, so that none of them could wear silk or velvet, except in a way that it is completely hidden. If your society is hierarchical, are there stresses as a merchant middle class acquires wealth and seeks to emulate its betters?
01:06:22
Speaker
Does the state enact sumptuary laws to retain the distinctions of its ruling class, whether priests or nobles or bureaucrats? Or does the state prefer to encourage trade and the immigration of wealthy foreign artisans, so pre-existing laws are being removed humiliating the nobility? Or does the state wish to unify the many different peoples of its lands into one whole, so sets about legislating for a form of dress which all must wear?
01:06:49
Speaker
Perhaps the state needs to protect its cloth producers, sheep farmers, spinners and weavers of wool or silk, or in a future world, the recyclers of wearable plastic. So it brings in legislation that its citizens must wear such cloth rather than foreign imports, as with the Elizabethan order that everyone had to wear caps of English wool on Sundays. Or to protect the balance of payments, perhaps the state embargoes the import of expensive cloth or clothing, or puts sky-high duties upon it,
01:07:18
Speaker
Inevitably, that's going to lead to deception, thievery, smuggling, perhaps even murder. And who couldn't get a story out of that?
01:07:28
Speaker
Also, don't forget the possibilities if there is inequality between the sexes in your world. If, as was often the case in medieval Europe, your society allows married women to retain ownership of their clothes, even if their lands and other valuables can be plundered by their husbands. Will those husbands be happy at seeing wealth in the form of silks and velvets removed from their grasp? Or will they press for laws restricting their women folk to only a couple of cheap gowns?
01:07:56
Speaker
power. Who has it? Who wants it? Who suffers because of it? That is what so many stories come down to. And laws about clothing are just one more tool for those in power to assert their authority and control. I'm indebted to a great many articles and publications which have helped me in researching this talk, and it would be invidious to single out any particular one here, but I will give links to them all on Crohn's for those who wish to further their own reading.
01:08:35
Speaker
Hello, SSF Chronicles. I'm just ringing about a call you might have got earlier from Barack Obama. Just telling you not to mind what he says if he was whinging about the extension. See, ever since he retired from the presidency, he's been going a bit daft. He's the sort of man who constantly needs to analyze and just has to find something. Anyway, there is nothing wrong with the house. He just said to me, make that 40 units in length. Oh, I thought he meant kilometers. But now he's saying he meant it in inches. Anyway, look.
01:09:04
Speaker
I'll try to get him to call back and explain. The May 75 Word Writing Challenge was on the subject of Infinity and was won by Oliver Helm, aka Therapist, with his piece The Infinite Room Hotel, and I'm delighted to say he's recorded himself reading his winning entry for us.
01:09:28
Speaker
We also confirmed the winner of April's 300 word challenge, which was Victoria Silverwolf, whose entry museum piece is being read by Chris. The Infinite Room Hotel by Oliver Helm Sir, the prince wants a room, but we're fully booked. Impossible. We have infinite rooms.
01:09:56
Speaker
But sir, we had exactly infinite bookings today. Okay, tell the prince room one is available in 15 minutes. Sir, the Hilberts are in there. Move them to room two. Dr. Yang, move Dr. Yang to room three. Shift everyone down one room with infinite rooms to relocate every guest. Will this work?
01:10:27
Speaker
Theoretically, now hurry. You have 15 minutes.
01:10:40
Speaker
Because Eggfather and Eggmother had appointments at the Cellular Reconditioning Centre, Seedmother and Seedfather accompanied First Child to the Hall of Alien Artifacts. Eager to taste and smell the many strange objects from other worlds, First Child extruded an extra pair of locomotive tendrils, even though this would mean more time spent in hibernation next cycle. The Seedparents let the youngster rush ahead, slithering through warm tunnels to the cavern that held the exhibit.
01:11:11
Speaker
So many strange scents and flavors, First Child uses many sensory tendrils as could be produced safely, always aware that excessive somatic rearrangement carried the risk of complete exhaustion. Seed mother signaled caution, an aroma that blended the sweetness of affection with a sharp scent of warning. Seed father, more indulgent, used a manipulating tendril to direct the child's attention to the prize of the collection.
01:11:36
Speaker
First Child's tendrils revealed it to be very tall and slender, with a shape that suggested someone turned sideways. A squat, rounded tendril sat above a thin body which possessed only four tendrils, long and thin. It tasted like metal and had no detectable scent. With a mixture of curiosity and a little fear, First Child placed a sensory tendril into the vat of thick liquid that explained the weird thing.
01:12:00
Speaker
A complex combination of flavours and aromas. Far more interesting than anything offered at school entered First Child's nervous centre. Alien object used to shield its body from environment. Sample taken from only known visitor of species failed to regenerate after transport landed. First Child was amazed. The being had actually been inside the object. First Child vowed to discover the homeworld of the mysterious creature that had died so long ago when it was time to become a gendered adult.
01:12:34
Speaker
Hello, SFF Chronicles, this is Brock again. I'm just calling to clear up a bit of a misunderstanding. I left a message earlier about an interdimensional portal built onto the rear of my house. I may have been mistaken, sorry about that. I keep getting confused, you see, between imperial and metric measurements. That's my fault. Oh, just one more thing. I had another look through the portal and stood on the back deck of a blinker bound for the Crab Nebula.
01:13:02
Speaker
with sweat in my eyes, watching stars fight on the shoulder of Orion. I felt wind in my hair, riding test boats off the Black Galaxies, and even saw attack ships on fire off the shoulders of Orion. Bright as magnesium, I rode on the back decks of a blinker and watched sea beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. And then I thought, all those moments, they'll just be taking up space in the spare room when I die.
01:13:29
Speaker
So I'd like to place an order for eight interdimensional tidy bins. If there's nobody in the house, when you call, could you just leave them out back next to the Galactic Tesseract? Thank you.
01:13:43
Speaker
Welcome back. We're now in part two of the Crohn's cast discussing House of Leaves with Ed Wilson. We talked briefly at the beginning of the episode of how difficult it would be to sub a work like House of Leaves these days. Well, not these days, but at all to an agent or a publisher. Ed, you had some comments about that being an impossible task. Is there any way you could
01:14:11
Speaker
In terms of going experimental, how far do you think an author can push the envelope? Well, there's nothing wrong with experimental writing. I think it's very important that not all books that are published become samey. I think that the modern era, there are so many different ways to get your material out there in a way that
01:14:36
Speaker
in the year 2000, or I'm guessing the book deal for the House of Leaves would have been done in the very late 90s. Even then, it had already existed, but in a kind of handwritten sheaves of it were passed around in underground book groups. Nowadays, I mean, the internet, there are so many communities and forums where you can do that digitally, that you build a buzz and build hype around a book before it comes out. To an extent, that's what
01:15:05
Speaker
led to the resurgence in poetry sales, things like the Instagram poets, who were selling books in numbers that poetry publishers would dream of five, 10 years ago. So I think nowadays, if you're trying to do something truly original, the first thing to remember is, it's not truly original. Somebody's already done it at some point. And I think you have to
01:15:30
Speaker
understand where you fit into the lineage of experimental literature. And that that is a very specific part of the industry. It is the kind of the haute couture. In a way, there's no expectation of extraordinary sales to create a genuinely kind of phenomenal cult book in the last in the last 510 years, things like Max Porter,
01:15:56
Speaker
You know, a really interesting experimental writer who's done it. Rachel Cusk, to a certain extent. I'm just naming favour books now. There are plenty of writers who experiment. Something as far out as House of Leaves, I think, will be almost impossible to sell nowadays, just because it's already been done. And you're not going to do it. There's an element of commercial risk, isn't there, on the part of the publisher? And so I think I'm, you know, I tend to be quite practical about these things. And I talk about
01:16:24
Speaker
trying to be practical or balancing the artistic with the practical when you're being a writer. Publishing is a very strange industry, it seems to me, because it has to balance
01:16:38
Speaker
originality and artistic creation and let's call it liberal openness, openness to ideas and creation, and yet it's governed stringently by commercial restraints. As authors, I get a bit twitchy sometimes in thinking about commercial risk and think, well, like Chris said, how far do you push the envelope? How far do you toe the line? You want to do something
01:17:03
Speaker
that is true to your own vision and that might mean stepping off of the well-worn path or the commercial path, but how far off the path can you permit yourself to go? Considering the commercial considerations of publishing.
01:17:29
Speaker
publishing books themselves used to have the market order themselves and used to be the only show in town. I think as time has gone on, as commercial pressures have changed and as different things have come into existence, different forms of the media, it's become much more uncompetitive. That classic Netflix maxim where they're looking for eyeballs, you define the amount of time
01:17:59
Speaker
that any kind of functioning, financially competent adult has in the day. Once you strip out sleeping, eating, going to work, there is a finite number of hours. And now there are so many different ways you can spend that time. So I think that a book that requires the investment of time, that something like House of Leaves does, is a reach in the kind of the attention poor
01:18:24
Speaker
modern era. That doesn't mean that people shouldn't try. And there's probably going to be different forms of experimental literature that we haven't thought of yet. That's the good thing about experimentation. There'll be something that nobody's ever thought of yet, and it will come along. And when it works, it breaks out and it becomes a publishing success. The
01:18:46
Speaker
The real challenge is for a book that seeps out into the wider world and becomes something that people who don't regularly read books hear about and know about. That's the thing that's almost impossible to do because the nature of anything kind of experimental, it has to engage with what has come before. Then it becomes a slightly inward-looking aspect of the industry. I think the industry needs to be broadening its horizons at the moment.
01:19:11
Speaker
So I think if you're working on books that are doing different things, then there are a limited number of agents and publishers who you could approach with that.
01:19:25
Speaker
be realistic and manage those expectations because it's probably not going to be a pot of gold, but what you will be doing is contributing to a lineage of writing and of experimentation that I think is culturally important.
01:19:46
Speaker
more likely that an established author could get away with writing a House of Leaves style book these days, rather than a debut. Because to me, that's the most fascinating aspect of House of Leaves, it's a debut. Yeah, that's insane. No one got away with that. Someone like JJ Abrams is a classic example. Nobody else could have gone away with that book. It has about 50 different inserts, cost a huge amount to produce.
01:20:12
Speaker
In terms of the royalty that they would receive on that, it's going to be tiny because it's an illustrated book. It's full-colour printed, different textures, different fonts, different everything. Basically, it's the production department's nightmare. I think that that's going to be part of the... When you look at top-end art books, we're doing interesting... I remember
01:20:34
Speaker
there were some of the some of the really, really kind of wild days in the kind of late 90s, where where Tashin would produce. Yeah, which is amazing. I remember there was a book because I went to Waterstones for a bit. And I remember there was a there was a book that was basically the same size as me that came in. It was another one which was in like a pillow. It was an inflated pillow and you couldn't get at the book. So it was kind of like I feel I think those days are gone.
01:21:00
Speaker
for anybody who's starting out in the industry. Once someone's established, you can get away with murder and produce in ever higher spec editions because you know that people will go to them.
01:21:14
Speaker
he said you can get away with more once you're established. One of our previous guests, Stephen Cox, and he used the Chatham House rule. He didn't disclose who said it, but he said one of his acquaintances, who is a very well-known British writer, said that they've got to the stage where
01:21:34
Speaker
they could probably withstand one bad selling book or one flop or one weird book that didn't quite hit the mark, but it's taken them a long time to get to that stage. Yeah. And that's through treading that well-worn path of
01:21:53
Speaker
of commercial success, essentially. It's brand building. Most of modern authorship now is brand building. You establish yourself and it becomes a numbers game, particularly in the genre world, where the readership tends to be extremely loyal, but there is snobbery from other parts of the publishing community. Looking at that, I think you have to consolidate your market and you have to just write and establish your brand and then you get to a point where you can
01:22:21
Speaker
play around. Well, that's the one thread that we've had through all of our guests saying, you've got to write, you've got to write, you've got to just do it, you've got to act, you've got to do it. The important thing to remember is that that doesn't mean the quality has to diminish. There are some writers who write. The more you write, I mean, in theory, the more you write, the better it gets. Everybody, I mean, Chris, wouldn't you agree? That's certainly how I found it. Well, I don't know because I've only had short stories published.
01:22:51
Speaker
Yeah, but the quality of your craft improves. It does improve. But again, it's that lightning in a bottle for your first novel, something, because experiment as House of Leaves.
01:23:08
Speaker
That's kind of an example of Brand building going a bit wrong, isn't it? House of Loops, because he felt like, I suppose, he felt like he had to stick with this weird esoteric, agodic writing. And he didn't quite nail it after that. He boxed himself into a corner and then it's going to be diminishing returns. But that is, I mean, then again, if you've written one work that is definitive,
01:23:34
Speaker
then it's always very difficult to do anything else. You're never going to repeat that feat. Difficult second album. Yeah. Well, but that's it. But that's it. I feel that the most writer's trajectory is to build. And certainly the way that I work with my authors, the expectation is not that you come out of the blocks with your smash hit. I mean, what a terrifying idea that you have published is your great suggestion. It's all downhill after that.
01:24:02
Speaker
That's something that I think in no other creative forum is there an expectation that you come out ready to go. I will always counsel my authors that whoever you're published by first, that is just the start of your journey. Some people find the right level and stay there. It's funny you say that. My brother, he's a musician.
01:24:23
Speaker
he's well i'm not sure how much i should say but he's yeah it's fine he won't mind he's just signed to um a record label which is very cool and his his description of the the process was that they do expect you to come out of the block all guns blazing because the quality we had a chat with uh john gerald um a little while ago for a future episode and
01:24:47
Speaker
He said the quality of submissions that comes in now has rocketed up in the last few years. And it's the same with the record labels. That if you haven't got a record that is absolutely ready to go in terms of not just the musicianship and the songs, but the production, the mastering, the engineering, everything's got to be top, top quality because that's what people are doing. And if you don't come up with that, you've got no chance. So you've got to be ready to go.
01:25:13
Speaker
No, and I'm not saying that you should be submitting shoddy work. I'm simply saying that the expectation that the first thing you write is the best thing you write, I think. Anybody creative, that is an absolute death now. Well, I've done it. Why give up? I mean, who is it? I mean, Salinger, gone with the wind. I mean, yeah, there's a couple of writers who just, you know, do it once, get it right. I think I'm done now.
01:25:43
Speaker
I mean, why would you? Why would you? Maybe some people just have that one book in them that they've got to get out and that's it. Maybe that is the case for some people. Yeah. And then if you try again, then you end up rehashing what's come before. But I personally think it's a bit like that.
01:26:02
Speaker
I mean, I think there's other stuff that obviously Melville produced, like Bartleby the Scrivener and Billy Budds and stuff like that. But, you know, it's Mopey Dick all the way down, isn't it? Wales all the way down. Well, it's all about the Wales.
01:26:18
Speaker
But I think that it's a shame that there isn't more space within publishing for experimental. But the reality is that if you publish a book like that, it can sell a handful of copies. It comes back to commercial risk, and it's not the author that's taking the commercial risk.
01:26:37
Speaker
It's not on the author's shoulders. I want to talk a little bit about brand building, which is a really interesting thing. Now, we generally talk about genre fiction on this podcast, but we touch on other stuff. I mean, I think House of Leaves, you could quite easily categorise that as literary fiction, for example, if you wanted to.
01:26:56
Speaker
Within the confines of genre building and i include horror in that it seems to lend itself to universe building or series where it's very easy to build that brand however it's not a universal case and some authors.
01:27:13
Speaker
We'll actually want to write standalone novels and the novels may be different in terms of setting in terms of style. How viable is that a route to building a brand? I'm thinking I'm thinking of somebody like Ian Banks.
01:27:28
Speaker
So harking back to somebody like that who had wildly different output, you know, something like the Crow Road, you could compare that to fearsome engine and you can't think of any two books that are more different than that. And yet it's still sort of fit under his, his oeuvre quite, quite easily because it was all inimitably banks.
01:27:49
Speaker
So I have, you know, no, it impacts is very much the exception, the idea that you can get away with doing. And I mean, the the the science fiction was published with very little expectation. I mean, I think this has all been sort of talked about that. I mean, that he wrote, I think the first three novels he'd written.
01:28:06
Speaker
before any of them got published and send by that stage he had enough sort of visibility to get away with it and the fact there were three books already backed up ready to go and went out in fact and do you know coming out the blocks with considerably versus the you know that's something that establishes your mark getting published at all is bloody difficult.
01:28:25
Speaker
getting published in one genre is very tricky. If you try simultaneously to get published in more than one genre, you're almost certainly going to fail in both. I think what's important to do is to work out what kind of writer you are, what books you want to write, to focus on those. And then once you've established yourself in a certain area, and I mean, you know, a couple of books further down the line, once you've got a readership, then if you want to do something different, then you can do something different.
01:28:53
Speaker
but I think allowing yourself to be pulled in two different directions simultaneously, trying to court two different audiences and cultivate two different audiences and also deal with the logistics of publishing with two different publishers and all of the rigmarole that that entails simultaneously is really, really difficult and you're setting out to fail, I would say.
01:29:13
Speaker
I have a number of authors who have published different types of books, different genres of books, and I fully support that because I think creative individuals should scratch whichever itch happens to be the most prominent. But I would never try and launch an author in more than one genre.
01:29:32
Speaker
One of our previous guests, Jo Zebedee, who's a regular down at Crohn's, she describes herself as a hybrid author because she's had the traditionally published books, but she also self-publishes.
01:29:45
Speaker
And that's the way that she traverses the different genres. So it could be that, yeah, that's the way that an author has to set themselves up these days. Hybrid is a generally accepted term and is no longer, I think, is no longer stigmatized at all. I've got a number of authors who do exactly that. Where I sit down with, there's somebody, so there's a brilliant, a brilliant Irish writer called Quieve McDonald. He writes Irish comedy crime, self-publishes them extraordinarily successfully.
01:30:15
Speaker
Those books are what started the conversation between us. We handled the foreign rights and the TV option for those books. And then he and I sat down and thrashed out the idea for a series that I would sell to a mainstream publisher. He publishes that under C.K. McDonald's, so a variation on his name, but very, very much not a kind of secret.
01:30:35
Speaker
The first one's called The Stranger Times, and it's sort of Pratchett-esque, published by Terry Pratchett's publisher, edited by Terry Pratchett's editor, and have been extremely successful. So you can navigate those. I think the key is to find an agent who basically is able to adapt their model to fit it all in.
Navigating the Publishing Industry
01:30:57
Speaker
Some agents want a piece of everything, whereas I take the view that
01:31:02
Speaker
before I sign an author, they're allowed to have a creative life. And if they do some stuff that's not with me, then that's okay, as long as they and I have a creative relationship that functions as well. What was the Irish writer's name? It's called Queen McDonald. I got the CK, but yeah. It's interesting.
01:31:26
Speaker
I'm trying to see. He's hilarious. He's hilarious and incredibly talented. And he writes ludicrously quickly. And the books are always of top quality. And I think some writers have that kind of gift. There are some writers who will take two years, five years, ten years to write a book.
01:31:48
Speaker
you know, this is, you have to, you have to, you have to just deal, well, play with the hands of your doubt, I think. Yeah. It was interesting, you mentioned that the, that you had a, well, you established a relationship on the basis of his self published work. I wanted to ask the question about authors establishing a relationship with an agent before they even get to the submission stage, and whether that's useful. Now you, you are like inviting them on a podcast.
01:32:15
Speaker
Well, you never know. You could say that. I couldn't possibly comment, I suppose. But that might be one thing, but it might be events. It might be your master classes that you run with the Guardian. But there's more than one way to skin a cat. And obviously, there are great success stories that come out of the slush pile. But it seems to me that if you can
01:32:42
Speaker
If you can circumnavigate the slash pile and establish a relationship beforehand, is there any advantage to doing that? Obviously, this is assuming that the work is of sufficient quality. Yes, I was going to say, it is an advantage. There are ways to skip the queue. That's definitely true. In days of yore, the way to skip the queue was usually a family connection. I'm delighted to say that that doesn't really happen.
01:33:08
Speaker
That doesn't really happen anymore. It still does. And I've got a story which I probably shouldn't share because it's public, but it still does actually. Well, there is a bit of that. I mean, nepotism is, it's very interesting in the English language remake of Call My Agent with 10%, which is now on Prime, that one of the key changes they made between the French version and the English is to add a bit of nepotism in.
01:33:36
Speaker
because the English are obsessed with nepotism. No, you can skip the queue. That's definitely true. And I'll go to lots of events you've taught. And if I meet somebody, or there's somebody who's short fiction I've read, and I think they're talented, then you will already begin a relationship so that when the book turns up, that's going to get read quicker than if it just came out the blue. And I've had a number of times where I've taken years,
01:34:06
Speaker
of getting to know an author and helping them and helping to kind of build their confidence to get to the point where they deliver a novel. And then the novels come in and then they've signed with another agent. So, you know, sometimes you invent something, but this is the nature of the business. You invest time where you see talent and I'm more interested in people. I suppose I'm asking the question because
01:34:36
Speaker
A lot of authors, especially authors who are trying to establish themselves and maybe are still learning about the industrial side of the business and the corporate side of the business and the commercial side of the business, see agents as a type of gatekeeper, which to an extent is correct for the traditional publishing model and kind of see them as this sort of
01:34:56
Speaker
aloof sentinels, I suppose. And I certainly thought that years ago. And then I bothered to actually interact with a few agents and found that it's not actually the case. And you open up all of these new relationships and
01:35:13
Speaker
even if it doesn't lead to a publishing deal it's actually quite enriching because it teaches you a lot of stuff that you didn't know about the business it teaches you a lot of stuff about the process of writing about the processes of submission which vary from agent to agent and it just,
01:35:29
Speaker
it just broadens your horizons a little bit and makes you realise that the agents are not that sort of cold-hearted gatekeeper who are saying, well, some of us are, some are awful. You're dreadful, but apart from dreadful people. And I think that a loose sentinel is a kind of, it's a thing. The reality is that the agents need authors and need new authors because there is a degree of wastage within the industry that there's always new stuff coming in. I think most of it and most of the talks I do are not for the
01:35:58
Speaker
It's not for the money, it's not for the fame, which is lucky because there's very little money and there's no fame at all. But what it is, is about demystifying... Why is the Guardian charging £90 plus VAT then?
01:36:09
Speaker
Well, I didn't need the money because they can't sell any newspapers. No, you'll have to cut that bit out, I'm afraid. That's the end of your masterclass career. No, the point of it is about demystifying the industry. I always take the view that if somebody who is talented doesn't send me a book because they think in some way that I'm not approachable, then I've failed.
01:36:38
Speaker
And publishing has a real problem with representation. It is seen as being a very kind of white middle-class industry, and that's something that people in publishing are desperately trying to change.
01:36:48
Speaker
Part of it is about showing that it's an industry that anybody from any background has just as much chance of getting into. Talent doesn't care where you are born, or what your age, what your race, ethnicity, religion, any of those things are.
01:37:08
Speaker
If you've got it, then if you're writing, you may not realise that you're going to be a writer. And if the industry in some way is seen as being unapproachable, and puts off somebody who has talent and they go off and they do something else, they go into film, they go into games writing or whatever, then that is a failing of the industry.
01:37:33
Speaker
I don't think it's a failing so much. Like I said, it's a misconception. Certainly it was a misconception for me because I think it's a victim of its own success in some ways because you can probably give us the amount of submissions that you or your colleagues at Johnson and Alcock receive in the average week. I imagine it's
01:37:54
Speaker
Quite large and so what can you do other than? Occasionally send out the form rejection which is which is the the interaction that I would say is probably the most common interaction that The majority of wannabe writers and aspiring writers get nice. I still get the you know form rejections as well and But it's a numbers game, right?
01:38:20
Speaker
Yeah, it is an obvious game. The majority of people who write a book won't get that book published, just as the majority of people who paint a picture won't get it exhibited in a national gallery.
01:38:32
Speaker
I think that publishing has this weird idea that the only validation of being a writer is to get your book published. If you play the piano, you don't expect to give a concert at the Royal Festival Hall. You do it for your own enjoyment. I think plenty of people write books and write poetry and write short stories because they enjoy the craft and they enjoy sharing it with their family, with their peers.
01:38:53
Speaker
To be honest, not sharing it with anybody is perfectly okay. They do it for themselves. Writing is therapy. Writing is like a pure enjoyment. It's just as valid as getting a big book deal and having it splashed over the front pages of the bookseller. The industry needs publication and conventional publication through a publisher with an agent
01:39:15
Speaker
to be the end point in order to keep the wheel turning. But I think the thing I've learned from talking to people is that some books are not meant to be published. Some books fulfill the need that they've come into existence for just by being written, and I think authors should learn to be happy with that.
01:39:37
Speaker
Personally, I think that's a really important thing to say. Stephen Palmer said it on a previous episode. He said, you've got to have something to say if you're going to write a book. And if you've got something to say, then you'll probably write it anyway, regardless of what happens to it, and extract the joy just out of the process. And you talk about it, Chris, a lot, don't you, when you have that sense of the lightning rod, the downloading when it's just pure flow. Yeah, I call it download flow. The aerial goes up and you just,
01:40:06
Speaker
But I think the risk is really for us, we hear this a lot on the website, well not a lot, but it comes across in various forums and discussions on the forum, is somebody who has an idea, you know it's their baby, their dragon egg that they've been sitting on for years, they finish it, it's 250,000 words, they edit it down to 200,000, get it down to 100,000.
01:40:28
Speaker
or a passable amount, and it doesn't get picked up. But they can't let it go. And so they fixate on that instead of producing more work. And the fact is, I thought my first book was going to be probably the only thing I ever wrote. And my opus and all that kind of stuff. But it wasn't until I wrote the second one that I realized I didn't really care about the first one anymore. And now I'm writing the third one. I'm like, well, actually, I prefer this to the second one. And I think you have to put that side of yourself
01:40:56
Speaker
outside when you're working creatively, take the logic out of it, take the business, get it down on paper or whatever, write it, polish it, and then start thinking about the business side of it. And I think because of the democratization of publishing these days, so many people go into writing thinking about publishing the story before writing the story. Totally true. That's totally true. I always think of it in like, I hate to bring kind of sporting analogies, but it's
01:41:21
Speaker
if you're trying to catch a ball, if you already think about what you're going to do after you've caught it, then you're probably going to drop it. And I think that happens so often. I spend a lot of time talking to people and just saying, right, what are you writing next? And they've been pitching their book to me. And it's like, well, I know what your book is. You've told me you're going to send it to me and I'm going to read it. What are you writing next? And this idea that I'm interested in what comes next is
01:41:45
Speaker
I mean, it's just baffling to them. The reality, the nature of my job. I mean, I was working it out. I mean, a contract that an author of mine signed, the last book on that contract is going to be published in 2027.
01:41:58
Speaker
When a book turns up in our office, it's a wonderful thing, but we're usually a couple of books further down the track with that author. It's the nature of the business, the time lag between signing a contract and the part where I work intensively with a writer, getting it ready, getting it submitted to when the book actually appears. So we're always on to the next thing. And I think most writers should see that.
01:42:24
Speaker
It is not about what you're writing now. Make that the best it can be. Send it off, but then forget about it. Move on to the next thing. If you're a writer, then you keep writing. You don't fixate. You don't, you know... Or back at House of Leaves, aren't we? Don't be my... Or do, if you're going to do... I'd be fascinated. I mean, I don't know any of the financials. I tried to get his editor to tell me how much they paid for the book. I suspect it was a significant sum of money.
01:42:49
Speaker
because when a book has a certain level of hype, the money starts to flow. I mean, he can clearly live off a single work. I think the expectation for any writer is that they cannot live off a single work. You need to keep on writing. Keep on writing, and that's it.
01:43:10
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah. R.J. Barker is probably the best example of that. I mean, a brilliant writer. He won the whole stock award for best fantasy novel for The Boneships. His new series is going to be out in the next spring. I mean, one of the most extraordinary writers who takes different fantasy genres and smashes each one out the park. He writes quickly, he writes books in between the books he's contracted to write. He just keeps on writing and grafting.
01:43:35
Speaker
And if you ever get a chance to see him talking, he speaks very, very passionately. He's from a working class background. He's been sick a lot of his life. He's not somebody who comes from any kind of privilege, but just grafts.
Resilience and Community in Writing
01:43:48
Speaker
And I think that you have to have the talent, you've got to have the good ideas, but combine that with that kind of work ethic, and that's how you make it.
01:44:00
Speaker
That is very good advice. That's not even advice, isn't it? It's way beyond advice. That is a mantra, isn't it, for what the writing life should be. And that is. It is a life, isn't it? It's kind of a cross you bear.
01:44:17
Speaker
and something that you strap to your back as you make your way through the world and you want to articulate yourself in this in this strange way this strange structured or unstructured way if we go back to daniellevsky and then you maybe have this compulsion to send it out into the world and and see what the world thinks it's um yeah it's very strange process but you have to become acquainted with failure and that's when you start to
01:44:47
Speaker
You start if you i think it's just go back to what chris said about you know there are certain writers who will sit on their dragon egg they will sit on it for years and years and years and years and i think there's a sense that if they don't let it go.
01:45:01
Speaker
they can never fail. And there's like sort of an inverse parameter for success and failure. So well, if I never, if I never quite complete it, then I can never quite fail either. But also it's that it's that, oh, you just don't get it. You just don't get me. I mean, how many times have we heard that? So I know your story shit.
01:45:21
Speaker
or your idea is hackneyed or you go back and learn how to create a nice phrase or a nice sentence. And I'm not trying to be snooty about it. I'm just saying there's a realism that a lot of writers, not a lot, but we come across writers who seem impossible to accept.
01:45:43
Speaker
But what you were saying about that failure, I think as a breed, humans need to get more used to it, and particularly as a writer. Somebody being mean about your book in your writers group, then getting rejections from agents, your book's going to get rejected by... You sound an agent, your book's going to get rejected by editors. And even if you have this wonderful sunny process where nobody says anything nasty about it, the first one-star review on Amazon will come in.
01:46:10
Speaker
each stage of the process, your skin thickens a little. And by the time your book is published, you're going to be so deep into writing the next one that you don't care what some faceless person on Amazon thinks. First of all, you shouldn't be checking your Amazon reviews, because if you're one of my authors, then you get a one star review.
01:46:29
Speaker
I will screen-cap that and send it to you. I'll be like, hey, that's some good news for you. This is genuinely true. I've got some good news. I've got your first one-star review. And it's not even that mean. It's usually packaging slightly damaged. Oh, yeah, yeah.
01:46:42
Speaker
come on. But I think that's it. I think toughening up. And the creative sphere is, you know, there's a robustness to the debate. And usually it's an experienced author, like you can be people can be mean about Stephen King, because he's sold gazillions of books. And I think that and he's earned the right to take the occasional take the occasional kind of bad, you know, bit of brick bats.
01:47:05
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. A bit of criticism. The thing I hate seeing, and it's happened to one author of mine, is debut author, and on the first day his book is published, got probably the most scathing review I've ever seen from somebody very prominent within the industry. And I think that that's pointless. That's punching down. And I think there's an industry where you have to be very careful not to be doing that, because that's the sort of thing that gives a bad look and discourages people from participating. And
01:47:33
Speaker
Writing is something that everybody can do. Everybody can do. Whether you're going Ridley Walker and writing phonetically, or you're crafting the most complicated poetry.
01:47:46
Speaker
writing something everyone could do and participating within the industry and embracing the kind of community around it. That's what's so brilliant about what you're doing. The website, the community there, the community aspect is hugely important. It's massive.
01:48:07
Speaker
This is part of the community. This is why it's the thing because we're hoping that we can download some information from the guests that we managed to attract onto the show. Even without that, just having that resource of other people,
01:48:24
Speaker
And there's a really famous Will self quote, which is writing as an isolationist pursuit. If you can't bear time spent alone, then you need not apply. And yeah, I think that's correct up to a certain extent. I think if you if you just box yourself in completely, absolutely, and you deny yourself engagement with other people, with agents, with other writers, with publishers, with editors, with
01:48:49
Speaker
you know, just people with readers, then you're denying yourself a whole raft of knowledge and expertise and opinions and different perspectives. And yeah, well, why wouldn't you do that? I mean, that's it. No brainer to me. I think that's what, for me, the impetus of starting this podcast with you was that you have this massive website, 20,000 members over the years,
01:49:15
Speaker
however many are current, all of a certain age or tend to be of a certain age and it's free, it's heavily moderated so there's no flame wars, there's no trolling and the amount of expertise on there is phenomenal and you're getting free advice, you get to polish your craft every month with the micro-fiction challenges and every quarter with the other micro-fiction challenges, you get to make connections globally
01:49:42
Speaker
And so it's nice, I think, well, you know, taking that to the next level with a podcast for people who want to listen to it, getting advice from people like you, Ed, and other authors and other agents. It's just keeping everything fresh. And, you know, it's like the bulletin, news bulletin, you know, just taking information, getting
01:50:04
Speaker
get people on top of things and and also keeping away from the prescriptive or proscriptive advice that sometimes we hear on the forums somebody who's saying oh but that worked for so and so and they say yeah but that was 30 years ago things are different now well yeah they are different now but it might work
01:50:21
Speaker
Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell is not written like a modern day, you know, easy to read piece. I mean, talk about footnotes, that thing is little. But I'm not talking about the footnotes. I'm just talking about the sort of faux style, you know, of historical style of writing, even though it's in this magical realism setting, it's still you can imagine it. It's a sort of semi Dickensian kind of. Yeah.
01:50:48
Speaker
which I can hear people saying on the forum sometimes. No, no, that wouldn't work now. It's like, well, everything works. You've got to chuck it at the wall and see what sticks. There's always outliers. And I think that's exactly it. And part of it is, you know, the shape of the industry has changed. There's always been the idea of the kind of the
01:51:11
Speaker
people who don't get published, what do we do with them? And I think the growth of the creative writing community, for good or bad, is about taking people who haven't made it at that first attempt to kind of get into publishing and without being too crass about it, to monetize it. And some of it's done very cynically. I mean, there are certain
01:51:31
Speaker
literary agencies who have their own creative writing setups that I personally feel is not a good look. There are equally plenty of universities who provide a kind of academic accreditation, and it becomes an incredibly useful source of talented authors going and raising their craft and getting better. But equally, there's plenty of stuff you don't have to pay for. And I think that any community that is offering advance and helping people without demanding
01:52:01
Speaker
money from them is a good thing. And that's something that literary agents never charge reading fees. We never charge retainers for our clients. I make money when I do some work for my authors. Until that point is reached, until I've actually sold something, then my clients cost me however much they cost me, be it stamps, coffees, a train ticket to wherever they live.
01:52:25
Speaker
And I think that's the thing to remember about agents is that there has to be a commercial edge to everything we do, to every decision we make. That doesn't mean that everything has to be the most commercial. And there are plenty of writers who I've worked with for years just to find the right project, whether it's their first, second, third, fourth, fifth book.
01:52:45
Speaker
find the right project and when it works, then everything sets in motion. That's really interesting. I don't think we've had that perspective. I've not heard that perspective before. That's sort of investing, paying it forward almost.
01:52:57
Speaker
Yeah. Well, and that's the beauty of, you know, I'm in a very privileged position that I, you know, I'm one of the owners of the agency, so I don't have to, I'm not accountable in the way that somebody who is a younger agent or a more junior agent at a larger agency would be. And they have to have hit after hit because they have targets. Well, we have to have enough.
01:53:18
Speaker
books selling well to keep everything going. But at the same time, there are writers who need that time and need that confidence and need somebody in their corner who they can email and just go.
01:53:29
Speaker
I don't think this is working. Can we just go for a coffee? You know, I do hand holding and dog walking. That's part of the service. Equally, there are some authors of mine who I never speak to because they don't need me. They have an active relationship with their publisher and they just keep on going. And for them, I'm accounting software and I check their contracts every three years.
01:53:51
Speaker
Well, that's, that's part of, I guess, is that part of doing your research? So every author is, is told, do your research, find out the list of agents that you think will be a good fit to you. I mean, it is personality, a part of it as well. And do you find to work, you know, working relationships are very much dependent on chemistry as much as the quality of the work and the business setup. There's a certain, yeah, alchemy going on between the, between the people to, because it's art, isn't it? We're not talking about just mathematics. There's, there's something.
01:54:21
Speaker
creative at the heart of everything. I think you should always do your research and I think you'll find that there are some basic definitions. Small agencies and large agencies. The kind of big corporate idea that works for you, then that's great. That's the kind of sausage factory model where a lot of writers go in, book doesn't sell, then you get churned out. I think you're looking for somebody with whom you're going to have a long-lasting relationship and a lot of the clients that we worked with
01:54:48
Speaker
over the, like Dick Francis, you know, the horse racing thriller writer, whatever, 60, 70 million copies sold globally, only ever had one agent. And that was, that was my boss, Andrew Houston. Beryl Bainbridge was with us her whole career. William Trevor left us to go to another agency and then came back again.
01:55:08
Speaker
because he made a mistake. That's kind of part of it. And there are some agencies where it is a family, where you are committed. And it's not about, how well did your book do? I'm afraid we're going to have to let you go. Because that conversation would simply never happen. If you're talented, and if the book that you've published most recently didn't do what we thought it was going to do, then we sit down, we learn from that, and we work out what you're going to do next.
01:55:35
Speaker
And I think that's part of the basic research. The culture of a literary agency is as important as the personality of the individual agents and also just the respect that they give to their writers. There's no point being a sausage factory.
01:55:53
Speaker
There's plenty of places to do that. It reminds me of something Hugh Howie wrote, the author of the Wall series, the self-published author. He managed to get his traditional published contract on the back of wild success self-publishing. But he said something very similar, even if he did decide not to go down the traditional route. He said, I realized that it was about the next thing, exactly what you said, the next thing, and planning your workout. It was many years
01:56:22
Speaker
that he had planned for from year dot up to, it was either five or ten year plan where he said I know which books I'm going to write for the next five to ten years and I'm going to stick to that plan and I'm just going to publish them and come what may. And it became wildly successful because he was working to this plan, he figured out exactly what he was going to do and he always knew what the next step was going to be.
01:56:46
Speaker
So even if you're not going to go down the traditional model, if you're if you know the direction in which you're headed, then I always think it's very it's very good to have.
01:56:58
Speaker
a concretized definition of success to you. So what's your definition of success? And I don't think necessarily... We're using writers as a verb, I notice now. Yeah, well, we can be French. We can be French, actually. We can do that. But I think writers are very good at writing, obviously, is what writers do, but not necessarily writing down
01:57:23
Speaker
the specific definition of success to them and what it is and what it looks like and how they're going to get there. And I, again, it's only something I realized relatively recently that if you write this stuff down, it can it can crystallize it in your mind and make you think, oh, okay, there are some steps that I can take to get there. And that might involve writing other stuff, not just sitting on my dragon's egg.
01:57:48
Speaker
Yeah, that's it. Have a plan. Constant motion. And I think that's kind of something that every writer will have that realization that they just keep writing. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if some of it is not going to be used now, because when you write the thing that is going to be your launchpad,
01:58:07
Speaker
then you go back. You've got this portfolio to back it up. That's it. Your debut book is the first one published. It's not the first thing you wrote. Very rarely is it the first thing you wrote. And I think that every single book you start and it doesn't feel right, put it to one side because there'll be a point further on in your career where you go, I know,
01:58:30
Speaker
I had that idea 10 years ago, and I wrote 20,000 words, and hey, Presto, you've got a head start on your next idea.
Current Trends in Genre Literature
01:58:38
Speaker
I think that's very important. I mean, and you, Harry, really bears it out because he's got a big series with Will as being adapted by Apple. I think that one's worked out okay for him.
01:58:56
Speaker
I think it's a really encouraging point. It's probably a good point on which to draw to a close. We've got a couple of regular questions that Chris likes to ask at the end of each episode. I think I've been waffling on too much. This is perfect. This is so personal for me.
01:59:16
Speaker
What is your recommended genre reading? In genre, what is your recommended required reading? What book would you force people to read? Science fiction, fantasy, horror. What will tell you the most about me and my list or just generally? Just a book that people should read.
01:59:44
Speaker
Sorry, I have bookshelves here. He's looking at his bookshelf. This is great radio. That's impossible. That is an impossible question. It's like asking me what my favorite book is. Bloody hell.
02:00:00
Speaker
No, I genuinely have no idea. Very rarely do I encounter somebody who isn't versed to some degree in kind of genre reading. I mean, I started with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and that was the kind of, that was my definition, and I was listening to it. I had the cassettes in the car. My parents used to put it on.
02:00:18
Speaker
And for me, that gave me a sense that the writing didn't have to be perfect. It wasn't all school. It was fun and it could be a bit naughty and it could be subversive. And I think that was always my entry point. I would never, ever say, there's one book I have to give to every writer and this is what you need to read to know what goes on. I think I would usually adapt it to what that person is and finding out what the gap in their knowledge is. And often I will sit down and go, right, you're writing X.
02:00:46
Speaker
That means you've got to know y, z, but also a, b, f. Don't forget about h and j and k. And they go, I've never heard of those writers like, OK, well, that's what's missing. Take some time away. Step away from the book and read all those. And I have literally taken authors to Waterstones and walked around and picked books off and bought them for them and said, there's your pile of books. And when you come back to me, you're going to know what it is that isn't clicking.
02:01:16
Speaker
And it usually works. So I'm being a politician. I'm not answering. I don't accept the premise of your question. Well, I think it's an excellent answer. I mean, I wouldn't be able to choose. It's a bit of a disingenuous answer, but it's a way it's a way a disingenuous question. It's a way of me to find out good books I've not read. So I get them off the off the guests. But it's funny you say that about taking the round waterstones, just sort of picking up on that point briefly is one of the things I think is crucial regardless of genre genre is
02:01:47
Speaker
I write horror, for example, with fiction slash horror. And I am really enjoying recently having really a reading outside of horror. And particularly at the moment, there's a foreign member, she's a moderator on the Forum of Dusty Zebra, bought me Pat Conroy's Beach Music and Prince of Tides. And I'm absolutely in love with them, those books and just just reading something that's completely
02:02:16
Speaker
almost like a drama. And it's got humor, elements of literary fiction, the human condition. And it just informs your writing so much than just sticking into your own genre the whole time, reading your genre, reading your genre. So yeah, that's something I would really recommend.
02:02:33
Speaker
I don't know, Pat Conroy. The problem with working in publishing is that your ability to read very, very widely stops the moment you start in the industry. So essentially, my bulk reading was all done beforehand, because after that point, you have to read submissions, your existing authors, new books, and then occasionally, like on holiday, you might get to read like an actual book.
02:02:57
Speaker
exciting. And then you have children and you never get to read anything apart from Tabby McDowell for the rest of time. So I'm always fascinated by Pat Conroy. I'm going to check that out. Okay, so I'm not sure if I can, I don't know how relevant or how much you'll be able to say with this last question, because it might be a bit private, but is there anything you're involved in now that you want to sort of, or that you can talk about?
02:03:23
Speaker
Any projects or work? I'm not aware that I can't talk about anything. Most of the stuff I'm excited about, it's too early, and so I can talk about books that are getting published, so I don't just represent genre writers. My passion has always been science fiction, fantasy, a bit of horror,
02:03:46
Speaker
Although I'm quite squeamish, so like The Nasty Horror, you have to leave that alone. But I mean, the writers that I get excited about, and once you've got books coming out at the moment, people are, I mean, R.J. Barker, the like, the Tide Child trilogy is just, for anything, for anybody, anybody who wants to
02:04:04
Speaker
anyone who's bored of the same kind of the stale fantasy tropes of, you know, dusty landscape, a bit of magic, a bit of this, and just want something different. R.J. Barker is just unbelievable. You know, he's a writer, he's a writer who you strip away all of the fantasy tropes and just purely on a like a sentence level. It's just extraordinary. C.K. Macdonald, who I mentioned before, if you want to laugh, and let's be honest, we all need a laugh at the moment,
02:04:30
Speaker
Then his Stranger Times trilogy, there's two books out, third one is coming. Stark Hoban, Stark Hoban Tenlow, feminist space westerns that are absolutely brilliant, signed up for another one. No, Stark Hoban. She will come around to your house and break your kneecaps for spelling her name wrong.
02:04:54
Speaker
I have another, a totally different type of thing, an author called Andrew Caldercott, who's rather weird, was a kind of Gorman Gasty kind of British folk fantasy. Oh, that sounds very cool. Yeah, his new book Mementicon is coming out.
02:05:09
Speaker
this week? Next week? What's the date? Next week? Two weeks? I don't know. One of those things. This is bad. I'm going to forget people now. Well, you've set a precedent now. You've mentioned some of your clients. I've mentioned some of them. These are people who've got books that are out at the moment. I'm going to look on the side there and make sure.
02:05:28
Speaker
And Jackson Ford, if you haven't read, if you want ass-kicking, wisecracking, hip-hop and food-obsessed LA urban fantasy, then Jackson Ford's, the series, the Tegan Frost series, the books have naughty words in the titles.
02:05:47
Speaker
which means Waterstones love them because they love swearing because it's wonderful. So the first book is called The Girl Who Can Move Shit With Her Mind and it is about a telekinetic, wise-cracking, chef, hip-hop, and obsessive. And in the acknowledgments, he manages to, yeah, Jackson Ford's the author, so in the acknowledgments he manages to compare each of the people in the publishing team to a member of the Wu-Tang Clan
02:06:14
Speaker
which is, which is, which is including, including the, um, the MD of orbit was, uh, was, was all dirty bastard, which I think was a bold call.
02:06:24
Speaker
get to a certain point and then you can give it a go. No E, no E, no E. So those are the genre books that I think one's most relative to kind of your community that's coming out at the moment and loads of stuff that is years off that is going to be coming through that I'm equally excited about and lots of writers that I love and if I've forgotten you then I'm sorry but on the spot those are the ones that are buzzing around my orbit at the moment.
02:06:51
Speaker
brilliant. Some of those sound, to me, the one that stuck out was the Andrew Caldercott one. That sounds, that sounds fantastic. I'm gonna have to get hold of that. Listen, Ed, it's been absolutely incredible having you on the podcast. It's been informative. It's been fun. It's been, yeah, it's just been everything. It's been brilliant.
02:07:09
Speaker
Pleasure. Thank you for having me. And like I say, if I'm around doing talks and whatever, if anyone wants to come and meet me or just drop me a line, I'll be at FantasyCon this year. Like if you see a small bald man looking slightly awkward, then that's probably me. Wonderful. Or me. See you soon. Bye bye. Thank you. Thank you very much.
02:07:38
Speaker
This episode of Crohn's Cast was brought to you by Dan Jones and Christopher Bean, and our special guest, Ed Wilson. Additional content was provided by Damaris Brown, Brian Sexton, Jay Stalepa and Oliver Helm. Special thanks to Brian Turner and the staff at Crohn's, and don't forget to join the world's largest science fiction and fantasy community for free at sffchronicles.com.
02:08:04
Speaker
Join us next month when we'll be joined by another literary agent, John Gerald of the John Gerald Literary Agency to talk about Rob Holdstock's winner of the 1984 World Fantasy Award, Mythago Wood.
02:09:21
Speaker
You know that.