Sumiko Saulson's Blog, page 59
December 3, 2012
Interview with Sumiko Saulson, by George L. Cooks III
Today I was casually perusing through the interview links on my page, which include interviews I’ve done with other people, and interviews others have done with me. I noticed that one of the links had expired. You can find my interviews here, by the way:
http://sumikosaulson.com/interviews/
I still have the text of the interview in a word file, though… because we did the interview via email. So I decided to repost it here. Hope you enjoy it!
About the Interviewer:
George L. Cook III
I was interviewed by George L. Cook III, author of “The Dead War Series” earlier this year, back in summer. Every month he featured an interview with an author of a zombie-themed book called “Zombie Author Of The Month”. Here is a little about Mr. Cook’s book:
“The US Army doesn’t run from any enemy, living……or dead!
In the year 2053 the dead walked. Mankind was caught off guard at first but within six years mounted a massive military assault on the dead.
These are the stories of some of those men and women that fought back. These are the stories of some trying to find a “cure”. These are the stories of those that are just trying to survive the nightmare of the walking dead. These are the stories of those that caused The Dead War.”
His website can be found here:
http://www.thedeadwarseries.com/
About the Author:
Sumiko Saulson
Sumiko Saulson is a horror novelist, published poet and writer of short stories and editorials. Her novels include “Solitude,” “Warmth”, and “The Moon Cried Blood”. A native Californian, she was born and spent her early childhood in Los Angeles, moving to Hawaii, where she spent her teen years, at the age of 12. She has spent most of her adult life living in the San Francisco Bay Area. An early interest in writing and advanced reading skills eventually lead to her becoming a staff writer for her high school paper, the Daily Bugle (McKinley High, Honolulu, HI) one of the nation’s only four such daily High School papers at the time. By the time she moved to San Francisco at age 19, she had two self-published books of poetry and was a frequently published poet in local community newspapers and reading poetry around town. She was even profiled in a San Francisco Chronicle article about up-and-coming poets in the beatnik tradition. Over the years she’s written numerous articles for local and community papers, non-profit and corporate newsletters, poetry and lyrics and novels.
About the Book:
Warmth
Warmth: “I hate the dead. They have no self-control” – Sera. She is ghula – one of the extremely long-lived though not immortal flesh eaters whose lives can end in only one way – in resurrection as a hungry, ambulatory corpse who will spend the short days of its unlife rotting, eating, and infecting as many as possible. Sera compares her life to a dark comedy – trapped with an unwanted pregnancy for the past 600 years, constantly afraid that the fetus will die and go zombie in-utero, always cold and constantly running a fever like every other ghoul on the planet. Luckily, two things in life sustain her: her joy in hunting and destroying the Dead, and the constant seeking of comfort in warmth.
The Interview
Interview of Sumiko Saulson by Interviewer George L. Cook III
http://www.thedeadwarseries.com
Q. Tell us a little about you. Hobbies, schooling, favorite teams, etc.
A. I was born in Los Angeles, California and raised there until I was eleven. Both of my parents were also raised in Los Angeles, although neither was born there. A lot of people wonder if I’m Japanese because of my first name: I am not. My mother is African American, and my father is an American of Russian-Jewish heritage. I am named after one of my mom’s two best friends from Dorsey High (in Los Angeles, where she grew up). Her friend happened to be Japanese. We moved to Hawaii just before I turned twelve. I lived there until I turned nineteen, at which time I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where I currently reside. I graduated from McKinley High School in Honolulu, HI, where I spent two years working on the daily paper: one of only four daily high school papers in the USA at the time. I think I was lucky to go to a high school with such a strong journalism program. My higher education includes technical certifications including ACMT, A+ and Network+, among others. I am currently working on an AA in English Writing and Composition at Berkeley Community College as a re-entry student. I’ve all of my adult life working in computers: either as a computer repair technician or as a computer graphic designer. My design experience really comes in handy when it comes to making book covers.
Q. What inspired you to become a writer?
A. I’ve always wanted to write. When I was five years old, my parents asked me what I wanted to be when I grow up, and I said, “an artist, a writer, or a veterinarian.” When I was a teenager I was writing for the school paper, self-publishing a local fanzine and a couple of booklets of poetry back in the days when self-publishing meant running off copies at Krishna Copy, and hanging out at the local poetry readings. When I came to San Francisco at 19, I would up in the local newspaper in a piece profiling up and coming beatnik poets, but I truthfully never came up. I was paid to write, certainly, but for the most part I was writing technical articles for newsletters at large companies, or record review columns for the neighborhood paper. I wanted to write creatively: not journalistically.
Sumiko and her mother Carolyn Saulson, 2010
Further, while I was able to make a living as a commercial artist, and/or in IT, I never could make enough writing to support myself. Add to that the fact that one’s creativity must necessarily be limited to what a client desires when you are being hired to work for someone else. All of my life, I have been fortunate enough as to receive strong praise from teachers and employers with regards to my creative talents: but I am not someone who takes rejection very well. I craved the validation of being paid or being praised too much to face the rejection letters.
If it were not for the advent of self-publishing at the current level with eBooks and your Lulu and CreateSpace type online-self publishing companies, I might have never had the courage to attempt to develop a readership for purely creative writing. I have a great deal of respect for those with the courage to take things to the next level and submit repeatedly to publishers. Creative is one area where I am free to come at things from a completely personal approach. Speaking of personal: on a more personal level, I decided to begin writing novels specifically when both of my parents were diagnosed with different cancers in 2009 and 2011. I felt that if I didn’t finish the novel while my parents were still alive to read it, I would never be able to forgive myself.
Q. Why write a zombie book?
A. I’d already written one fairly serious sci-fi/horror book called “Solitude”, and was in the middle of writing a second one, “The Moon Cried Blood,” when I started writing “Warmth”, my zombie and ghoul book, almost as a method of depressurization or stress relief. I took a local approach to marketing, so the book “Solitude” is actually in half a dozen San Francisco Bay Area bookstores now, as well as being available online through Amazon.
As an African American woman, I felt a lot of pressure to write this very
Sumiko and her father Robert Saulson, 2012
serious literary fiction: to have a voice like Toni Morrison, or at the very least to be the next Octavia Butler, but as I went through the editing process for “Solitude”, I was getting all of this feedback that I sounded more like James Patterson, Stephen King or Dean Koontz. I write this very accessible mainstream horror, my writing has been described as highly entertaining, and I’m a good writer: I am not a “great” writer. I might even be formulaic. Yet, I was feeling I needed to represent by being as serious as possible. “Warmth” became my blowing-off-steam project, one where I was allowing myself to be funny, vulgar, and gory: everything “Solitude” and “The Moon Cried Blood” are not.
As a result, “Warmth” exudes a tremendous sense of dark humor that is not present with the dry-witted “Solitude”. Writing about ghouls and zombies was really a lot of fun. I learned that I have a real talent for grossing people out – but in a good way.
I’ve also written a zombie short story called “Frankenzombie”, which is for my next book, a compilation of short stories. I am sending that to you via email and people can purchase it as an eBook for iPod, Nook or Kindle in a three story promotional pack called “Frankenzombie and Other Stories”… it’s a little promo for the short story book “Things That Go Bump In My Head” which can be expected in November, just in time for Christmas shopping.
Q. What is the title of your most current book and what is it about?
A. “Warmth” takes place in a world where there are no immortals, but there are extremely long-lived formerly human creatures called ghouls, some of whom like to go around pretending they are vampires because it just seems more glamorous. The ghouls have a serious problem: when they die, they are guaranteed to become ambling, flesh eating reanimated corpses, better known to you and I as zombies. Further, the only way that a ghoul can be created is through zombie bite, as the ghouls and the zombies are created through the lifecycle of a prehistoric gut flora: a sort of pre-bacterial symbiotic or parasitic life form combined with specific other viruses and fungi. When the ghoul die, the creatures living in their intestines reanimate their flesh and proceed to try to infect as many as possible during their zombie phase. Unlike the ghoul phase, the zombie phase is quite short: the lack of embalming causes the zombies to eventually rot their way into non-existence. There aren’t that many ghouls because smallpox killed off most of them. The other reason for a limited ghoul population is the systematic elimination of all zombies by a small number of very effective zombie hunters.
In fact, the chief protagonist, Sera, is a legendary zombie hunter. Because
Sumiko dressed as Sera, ghoul, for Halloween
ghouls age very slowly, she’s coming to the end of her 600 year old pregnancy. She is also sick all the time: like every other ghoul on the planet, she is continually feverish, and always seeking warmth. She pops a lot of aspirin. She finds pretentious ghouls who refuse to acknowledge that they can survive off of dead human flesh irritating: those kind tend to dress up like vampires and suck groupie blood. Vampire wannabes are only insufferable – zombies are much worse. She hates the dead – they have no self-control.
Like the rest of her kind, she slays zombies to prevent an out-of-control epidemic of zombie bite, resulting in an unmanageable number of flesh-hungry ghouls and zombies that would simultaneously out the ghoulish condition to all of humanity, and threaten to cause the extinction of mankind and ghoulkind alike by infecting the totality of the food supply. When a psychotic ghoul named Lizbet, who has suffered an unfortunate miscarriage/zombie child birth, causing her descent into madness, goes on a killing spree, Sera and all ghoulkind are placed at risk. What if the FBI puts a bullet in Lizbet and she turns into a zombie? And starts infecting everybody? On national television?
Q. Would you put your book more in the action, comedy, or horror category? Is there another category you would add?
A. “Warmth” is horror/dark comedy. I would not call it action, although there is some action in it. It actually started out as a straight-up parody, because when I had the idea for it, I was reading a bunch of fans on one vampire book writer’s page slagging off on another vampire book writer, and I thought: “Wouldn’t it be funny if there were no vampires, just some zombie-like creatures who thought they were vampires?” – and also, “What if instead of a vampire impregnating a human with damphyr, a vampire was stuck being pregnant with a fetus that would not come out and she couldn’t abort? Would she hate it? Would she have hundreds of years of morning sickness?” – every thought I had about creating it was of a dark comedy nature, because I was poking fun at the serious, petulantly beautiful vampires by turning them into something ugly and repulsive: walking future zombies.
Q. What sets your book apart from the thousands of zombie books out there?
A. I think my book spends a lot of time poking fun of the great vampire vs. zombie pop cultural debate. In “Warmth”, vampires are zombies and zombies are vampires: well, of course, they are not, they are all ghouls, in either their living form or their dead form, but my book is essentially poking fun at the genre rift. I read an article in Cracked Magazine about how scientists did studies showing that in the United States, during Democratic presidencies there was an increase in popularity for vampire stories, whereas during Republican presidencies there was an increase in popularity for zombie stories. Maybe that puts a political spin on my insinuation that the zombies and vampires are more alike than different: I’m not really sure.
Q. What, if anything, do you want the reader to take from your book?
A. One of the great things about “Warmth” is it is the first book I’ve written where the reader doesn’t actually have to take anything away: it can be read as pure, unadulterated entertainment. The main take-away of “Warmth” is about the ecology, but you have to really pay close attention to pick up on what it says about mankind’s elevated sense of self importance in relationship to the rest of the world we live in.
Q. Where is your book available?
A. It is available online at Amazon.com, and through Lulu.com. It is available locally in Oakland at Laurel Bookstore on MacArthur and Lokal Boy on Fairfax. Visit my website at http://www.sumikosaulson.com and look under http://www.sumikosaulson.com/books for a complete list of my books and where they are available for purchase.
You can buy it on Amazon HERE.
Q. Where can you be contacted?
A. http://www.sumikosaulson.com
https://www.facebook.com/authorsumikosaulson
The Video
“Warmth” Book Commercial Spot
“Warmth” Book Reading at Blow Salon
December 1, 2012
Announcing the Evil that Cats Do Contest!
It came to me last night as my cat, Marla was busy trying to park her fuzzy butt on my laptop keyboard. Marla is an adorable ball of fur and fury – not her fault, really. We have two cats, Marla and Bootsy. Bootsy was adopted from the ASPCA and Marla was adopted from our own front yard – she was a semi-feral teenage feline when we got her, and she’d so reverted back to the wild that it took a year for her to begin to act like a domesticated housecat – mostly. She’s still a little wild. If you pet her in a way she dislikes, for too long, she may try to bite you.
> Marla< 
By the way… I do encourage pet adoption. I also encourage spaying and neutering – Marla wasn’t fixed when we got her, and she’d had a litter when she was only six months old. Do you know how young that is? Stop teen cat pregnancy! Spay your cat today!
The Contest
Perhaps your cat is not naturally evil like Marla. Perhaps your cat is like Bootsy – an easygoing fellow who seems not to know that the toilet isn’t a feline water faucet, what with the fresh running water and things… sort of like a man-made stream. Whatever the case, to enter to win, you simply take pictures of your cat acting evil – or, use pre-existing ones… and post them on my author page on Facebook, along with some kind of text on the photo or describing the photo, to let us know why the cat in this photo is being evil.
Bootsy – Party Animal
What if you don’t have a cat? Then you will have a lot of extra work cut out for you, I suppose – chasing down neighbors’ cats trying to photograph them, or possibly going out to adopt a cat of your own just for this contest. But if you don’t want to do all that, we will accept any image of a cat that is your original work, so if you want to scrawl a doodle of an evil cat we can also work with that. Just NO reposts of other people’s stuff.
And where do you submit this artwork? Right here!
https://www.facebook.com/authorsumikosaulson
Don’t forget to “like” my page while you’re there… we are trying to get 300 likes… for SPARTA!
DEADLINES:
All images to be submitted between December 1 and December 31, 2012.
Final voting on January 1, 2013.
The Prize
The winner gets an autographed copy of “Things That Go Bump In Your Head”.
“Things That Go Bump In My Head”, a short story collection.
A bit of old fashioned horror… a ghost story… a couple of works on the dark humor side of horror (and they are unabashedly funny), a science-fiction dystopic tale, a few works of psychological horror… even a bit of poetry. Reading “Things That Go Bump In My Head” is like entering a haunted house ride… you never know what you will find around around the corner.
Things That Go Bump In My Head
November 30, 2012
Pumpkin…head
As November comes to a close, I find myself completely overwhelmed by finals and leftover pumpkin. Did you have pumpkin pie this Thanksgiving? I had one, carefully meted out slice because I am on a diet – but that didn’t prevent me from having pumpkin-flavored everything. We’ve had two months of pumpkin, and now that they are coming to an end.. I’m going to cook this pumpkin and discuss pumpkin recipes and scary pumpkin legends with you.
At the Thai Restaurant, having pumpkin curry and being inspired to come home and make more pumpkin curry. Holding a $4.26 check from a class action suit. Really.
Jack-O-Turnip…
Jack-O-Lanterns originally started out as turnips, not pumpkins. Aren’t you glad you weren’t forced to carve a face into a tiny turnip last month in October? I didn’t carve mine.. I wanted to be able to cook it later, so I drew on a face with a black permanent marker. When you cook your pumpkin, remember to wash the pumpkin and to throw away the part with the Sharpie ink on it.
Here is a link to the whole story on Supernatural.tv – did you know I watch Supernatural? Of course you did… right?
http://www.supernatural.tv/reviews/le...
The pumpkin curry soup I made tonight, slaving over a hot wok.
And here is a recipe for Pumpkin Curry Coconut Milk Soup…
Actually… here are a bunch.
http://www.yummly.com/recipes/pumpkin-curry-soup-coconut-milk
I don’t use recipes, because I’m weird, but this is roughly what went into mine:
1/2 a Medium Pumpkin, Cubed and Steamed (before making it soup)
2 Baked Boneless Chicken Breast
1 can Coconut Milk
2 cans Water
2 sliced Red Bellpeppers
1/2 chopped Garlic Clove
2 tablespoons Curry Powder
1 tablespooon Cumin
a dash of Red Chili Powder
1 cup shredded Carrot
I also baked the pumpkin seeds… I assume you don’t need a recipe for that? Well, most of the time was involved in cleaning them.
Washing Pumpkin Seeds
Still washing pumpkin seeds…
And STILL washing pumpkin seeds!
Here is a recipe for pumpkin seeds if you want one. Personally, I threw them on a pizza pan, tossed some salt on them and cooked them for about 7 minutes.
http://www.simplyrecipes.com/recipes/toasted_pumpkin_seeds/
The Headless Horseman
The ultimate scary pumpkin story is the Headless Horseman, who decides to replace his severed head with a delicious gourd. Although many of you have seen a movie or a cartoon about him, the original story was written by Washington Irving, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” He is the same guy who wrote “The Legend of Rip Van Winkle” so he was really into writing these spooky little short stories…. and it was short! It is in the public domain now, because it was published back in 1820. And you can read the whole thing right there…
If you have read the story, then you surely know that the horseman was supposed to be carrying his own severed head – much scarier than a pumpkin – but in the morning, only a smashed pumpkin was found. A spook or just a trick? You be the judge.
Speaking of smashed pumpkin… here are some pumpkin pie recipes, just in time for the December holidays!
http://allrecipes.com/recipes/desserts/pies/custard-and-cream-pies/pumpkin-pies/
Pumpkinhead
Pumpkinhead
And that was just an action figure… nuf said. Here is a nice link to a Mega Scale Pumpkin Head action figure review.
http://www.mwctoys.com/REVIEW_111006a.htm
Here is the IMDB link for Pumpkinhead…
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095925/?ref_=fn_al_tt_4
And here is your final recipe for the day… actually, let’s give you a link to 100. At least I hope it is 100, as advertised, because if Pumpkinhead arrives you will definitely need to know 100 ways to cook a pumpkin…
http://www.endlesssimmer.com/2010/10/14/100-ways-to-cook-a-pumpkin/
November 29, 2012
It’s The Time For The Season of Finals…
You may have noticed that I’m not updating this blog that much right now. Yes… it is true. The holidays are upon us, and so are finals. I spent today working on a creative writing assignment for my English History class, which is a mash-up between Chaucer and Milton called “The Scrivener’s Tale”… I had to turn it in on Turnitin.com so I’m not going to put it up here now, because you never want to get into trouble for plagiarizing yourself. But I probably will later, after it’s graded. Meanwhile – I have finals for that class on Monday. And the final paper is going to be due the week after that.
It’s hard to blog when I have so much on my mind. I get scatterbrained and I ramble. Did that blog remind you of a song called “Time of the Season”? It’s by the Zombies, you know. Zombies. Arrrrgghhh… I want to eat your brains. Did you know the Zombies in Warmth aren’t actually zombies? They are the reanimated corpses of ghouls, which means they aren’t undead humans, they are undead like… infected.. uhm… what was I saying?
(brainfart… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqnuI9K5ct4)
Here is a picture of my cat. He vants to drink your milk…
November 26, 2012
CyberMonday… support independent artists and authors
I just figured out they have something called cyber Monday now that has nothing to do with sex. Weird. It’s for shopping. Like the Black Friday of the Internet. Well, I need money to buy gifts for family members in the great cycle of buying and giving that is the holiday season’s boost to the economy: and I will be buying and giving things from other independent writers, artists, and artisans. So when you buy my book for your giving, you actually help me buy stuff from other artists – such as a local jewelry crafter, Requiem Rose Designs. They have a 50% off sale today.
Original set by Requiem Rose Designs
I’m afraid my advertising budget is a lot lower than the big companies who are putting on a CyberMonday sale – but today only get a signed copy of Warmth for 25% off! That’s $13.13 cents. I’m not just trying to be spooky here – it happens to come to that price. Or a signed copy of the latest, Things That Go Bump In My Head, for only $9.56 (which is also 25% off, but sounds less snazzy). These are SIGNED COPIES, straight from ME, the Author, today only, while supplies last!
Author, desperately shilling books for the holidays.
Lulu is ALSO having a CyberMonday sale, which is actually 30% off – which is more – and you can get any of the books, but, you know, they won’t be signed. Whereas if you get them from me directly, they will be signed. And if you don’t live close buy where you can pick them up, of course you have to pay shipping and handling to me – but if you can pick them up, no S&H. Lulu totally has S&H. But you can buy the books there: http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/sumikoska
I just decided that I should turn the photo into an actual advertisement. What do you think? Has it benefited through conspicuous Befunky-fication?
What do you think?
November 24, 2012
My Father’s Nightmare
Dad at UCSF Emergency
There is nothing so incredibly frightening and horrible in fiction that it cannot be surpassed by the terrible things we deal with in non-fictional day to day living. I have to see what my parents go through facing cancer and trying to receive adequate care and support and it truly is a nightmare. What my father is going through now is painful for him – it is painful for all of us. He was not able to tolerate chemotherapy, and his cancer care team is offering him only two options: chemo, or death. His body was not able to tolerate the chemotherapy, which caused him to experience terrible side effects including strong hallucinations, ending him up in the emergency room. I’m researching other treatment options and I know there are some: such as radiation, being used to treat cancer.
We will be looking into getting a second opinion.
The Interview
This is an interview with my father, Robert Saulson. He came in to UCSF with complaints of liver pain in 2011 and in the course of testing to investigating the cause, it was discovered that he had lung cancer. While the lung cancer was successfully treated, the liver caner was not detected until his six month wellness check after the end of the lung cancer treatment. He is upset and frustrated with the bureaucratic separation of everything into specialists and failure to communicate with a general practitioner (failure to have a central hub of communication) which seems to have lead to the end of the investigation of liver pain complaints one he was referred to a lung cancer specialist.
He is frustrated with the continued issues with failure to communicate about pain management. My father has had Hepatitis C since I was a kid back at the end of the 1970s, and he acquired it as a result of intravenous drug use – the doctors should have known that 35 years of living with Hep C could end in liver cancer, but they missed it. Now, because of his history of drug use doctors are reluctant to give my now 70 year old father adequate pain relief, and the general physician he sees for pain management seems unaware of his currently grim prognosis.
I am having a hard time writing in a detached and unemotional journalistic manner about any of this – this is my father, and I am understandably upset. He has been told that without treatment he has less than a year left to live. He is understandably upset – upset about the failure of treatment, about his inability to take the treatment offered, about the failure to have had it diagnosed earlier, and about the pain he is in: pain that is not being treated because doctors are expressing that they are afraid he will become addicted, while at the same time expressing doubt that he will even be alive long enough to need to worry about being an addict. It’s all very confusing, and overwhelming.
We invite you to share your own stories about troubles with pain management or cancer in the comments, thank you for listening.
November 21, 2012
Make Black Friday Book Friday
For Black Friday – You should totally check out the fabulous book sales. Let’s start out LOCAL – Laurel Bookstore, which carries my titles as well as titles by local author Serena Toxicat has this AWESOME offer (btw that is Luann Stauss between Serena and I in the photo)
LUAN SAYS:
Buy a new book, get a used book free! Seriously. Limit three free used books, but hey
they’re free and we have a great selection right now!
We’ll even have snacks and things so come on in where it won’t be insane!
Happy Thanksgiving to all.
And yes, we’ll be closed on Thursday.
Laurel Book Store
4100 MacArthur Blvd.
Oakland, CA 94619
510-531-2073
M 10-6 T-F 10-7 Sat 10-6
Sunday 11-5
Open since 2001!
www.laurelbookstore.com
Let’s Go Lulu:
If you are not local, www.Lulu..com also has my books (and Serena’s) on sale:
November 19, 2012
November 15, 2012
Interview with Howard Brad Halverson, author of The End and The Echo
The Author
Howard Brad Halverson
Author of “The End and the Echo” (on The Passion of Abolition press) a novella that bridges the genres of Modern, Fiction, Literary, Experimental, Cultural Criticism, and Romanticism. A recent graduate from San Francisco State University with a BA in English Literature, Howard Brad Halverson is now turning to authorship. Originally from Northern Utah, Howard has also traveled extensively in many different underground music groups or solo and even a semester abroad in Växjö Sweden. Howard is influenced largely by modernism and seeks to maintain a deconstructive approach to all projects. With his fledgling novella, The End and the Echo, expect a varied stumbling through human thought and experience, often complimented with cultural criticism. Howard aspires to continue writing as well as being involved with many other creative or expressive endeavors.
The Book:
The End and the Echo
Brandon Anderson is caught in the grips of despair when he begins to chronicle his itinerant affair with Gillian, the youth whose beauty enamored him years ago. Drifting aimlessly, their chance meetings mesh into a panoramic of desire, saw-toothed edges hacking at the boundaries of relationships, dark corners of attraction exploding in slow motion.
In the recollections of Gillian that Brandon conjures destiny is questioned; whether true love is the thread coursing through their intimate engagements or if feelings are only the byproducts of cultural patterns. A sense of estrangement sears between the lines, Brandon’s experiences oscillating around idealizations of love and the flagrant betrayal his desire entails.
The Interview
Q. “The End and the Echo” is your first novella. Had you written in other formats such as short fiction and poetry previously, and what made you decide to write a novella?
A. At Berkeley City College I took a creative writing course with Tom Moniz and he had the class write poetry for assignments. At the time I thought it was stupid but wanted to get a good grade so I did it and afterward started to think that I liked it. So I would sit in class and daydream and scribble down little tangents, more like free verse and try to make some kind of poetic structure with them. There is one series called History Class Girls, written about all these hot girls in the class. I think I really creeped them out, staring at them, but the class was so boring and I couldn’t get the thoughts to come into words unless I look at them for a long time. Later when I had the English core courses at SFSU and was exposed to the whole cannon of poetry and had to do analytical studies on poetry, that’s when I began to really understand what poetry is. I did get into screenplays and wrote a couple shorts. I was working at Berkeley Community Media doing graphic design then and they said since I work there I could train on video production for free and I could have a show on the cable channel. I produced one of the screenplays with a portfolio class at Laney called Part of the Organization. It was very Kafka inspired. I’ll have to get that up on Youtube sometime. I thought I would write the novella wanting to do something that had some length. It was the summer break and I didn’t have a job, so I sat in my closet and stared at the screen all day plucking at the keyboard. When classes started in the fall, I thought it’s finished, I have to focus on school work now. And I just wrote the ending. The file was almost a hundred pages.
A. What does the title “The End and the Echo” mean and where does it come from?
Q. It’s pretty direct. I thought it was authentic but then I heard a Death In June song with lyrics that were similar. Later too, I thought about the Greek myth, but I don’t know if the book really speaks to that same type of narcissistic complex. I used to have a Roland Space Echo, a big box that had a loop of ¼” tape running over five tape heads, a delay machine. That is the sort of concept behind the book, that repeat of memory and memory is the underlining concept. Because how do you know what reality is? Most of what we project into the world is a form of memory. Reality happens. It ends and then it is something else that may be beyond what we try to say it is. But we carry through all the endings with that residual of the happening being over. Only like the delay machine, that residual is somewhat distorted from the actual resonance. The thing is for the character to deal with his emotions in reality, as he keeps thinking about his lost love, but he is somewhat separated from reality because he only has the memories, the echoes.
Q. You intermingle many genres in telling your story. Did that pose any particular challenges for you?
A. I don’t think it is of any genre. It’s only a short book, fiction. I wanted to do something literary and what is literary to me can not have anything like a genre attached to it. I think what you are getting at is how the book can be related to different literary modes or periods. Of course the Romantics are a big influence and I did try to put a lot of what distinguished the Romantics into the book. But still it is very modern as it is very internal and self-conscious and that will sort of separate it from the Romanticism in that Romanticism only begins to separate the idea from reality and modernism is more of a conscious attempt to portray reality. I did fancy myself as being experimental. Later I thought only the non-linear format was unconventional. That too was done to reflect the operation of memory, inspired by Henry Bregson, trying to really portray how memories work. And this sort of purposefully representing the representation lends itself to the whole post-modern conception, that idea of nothing being original; the character is only dealing with his memories, there is no actuality in the text, it is only his charismatic repetition of what was actual. Then I thought more about it and it really seems to be first person narrative. Actually, no. It goes all over the place.
Q. Was “The End and the Echo” particularly influenced by stream-of-consciousness writing styles and what inspired you to approach it as a piece of experimental writing?
A. Yes. I have just been reading Joyce’s Ulysses and I think Faulkner, in some parts of his books, really get at that type of writing and it is simply amazing what they were able to do, although it is supposed to be absolutely unintelligible. But still I think I only get at in spots and haven’t been able to really harness that style as well as others have. The character is intensively thoughtful and that sort of automatic sense, the sense of your thoughts flowing without any structure, was no what I intended for him. The intention was for him to be so self-conscious, even to the extent of becoming delusional. Still, who really knows what they are thinking? And I guess that would be the same for the character, there are some parts where he obviously gets caught up or carried away and is trying to understand why that happens to him. But, is that more tangential than that type of erratic display of things occurring inside the mind? Words are so formal anyway. It is really hard to get beyond their ordinary use, how they are expected to be presented. I think I’ll have to put more effort in future works to uphold such a notion as experimental writing.
A. Central to your story is a romance, although much of it is viewed through the lens of your protagonist’s emotional despair. In what ways is “The End and the Echo” both like and unlike traditional romances?
Q. Obviously, and this a more Romanticist feature of the book, the character ends up alone. I want to really question what love is in general and what better way then show how superficial and untenable some relationships are. Otherwise it’s not so much about romance and love as much as it is about attraction or desire. I don’t want to so much say that love does not exist. I will say that, for a large part, what a lot of people believe in is bullshit. You can see this through the stories. But when the character finds his love, not only a love for himself, but he wants to extend his love to another, he also finds this knowledge upset. To have him in despair is to reveal how he wants himself to be happy and to make someone else happy but that relationship is not there for him. Then, too, something like intimacy is what I wanted to show, to show how a relationship can be or how intimacy can be betrayed. And also a fear of intimacy, of really experiencing someone else and letting someone else experience you. I think these are some issues in general and want to vitally address them more than trying to uphold some idealistic take on love or put forth some formulaic expectation of what people believe love is. Romance has been so clichèd and that’s all it will be. Don’t’ think that I want any of that in there, although, maybe there is some. Hopefully it will be equalized out by everything else in the book.
Q. The advice you gave prior to our joint reading at “Book Zoo” was very helpful to me, as was your sharing of anecdotes which relaxed the audience. What advice would you give to any readers about how to approach public readings, and overall, how important do you think they are for authors?
A. What did I tell you? I can’t remember! I was pretty nervous then. It is nerve wracking doing that sort of thing. If you are writer and going to do that sort of thing, just drink a couple of beers first. Like I said that night, a reading can go pretty bad and I didn’t want that to happen then. The Book Zoo is such a great store and Erik and his people are awesome. I really wanted to give something to those who were going to be there, so I just thought it out. I thought about how I could tell other people about my writing and what examples I could use to show them what I was talking about. It’s such a difficult thing to arrange in this high tech world where you can video blog and what not. Who would want to go see some unknown authors rant about their writing in a dusty book store on a Friday night? I would. But that’s beside the point. It’s that type of event which is naturally awkward unless you’re a librarian. So, like you said, you have to try and deemphasize the awkwardness and you can do that by trying to establish direct relations with the situation. Say something about how you got to this point or how others may have got to this point so that the people there have a firm understanding about that type of situation. And because writing is so intimate for me, let your audience know your are going to be intimate with them and things may be smoother that way. As far as importance goes, they aren’t any more important than anything else in the world. It’s such a different format from visualizing and producing a text. How readings work is to give an audience a writer’s perspective on what they are going to take away for themselves.
Q. What advice, generally, would you give other writers and prospective writers?
A. Read a lot. Make sure you have a good dictionary on hand. Maybe study linguistics in some light because that is what you are going to be doing. Writing is one of the best things in the world and when you go into it, at the point where you say, without any of the romantic trappings, that I am a writer, that realization is difficult because then you understand that you have to be honest as you possibly can. Otherwise you are just using writing technique to exploit other people. It’s a grueling reality, but to be truly creative you must take that perspective if you are going to transform anything for the better, which is what true authors are supposed to do.
Q. Is there anything you’d like to share that we haven’t already covered?
A. Just to let everyone know that they can order The End and the Echo online. Or if you live in the Bay Area, Needles and Pens in SF or Issues in Oakland carry the title. And I’m looking forward to producing more writings for everyone.
Where To Get The Book:
Needles & Pens
3253 16th Street, San Francisco, CA
Issues
20 Glen Avenue, Oakland, CA
CreateSpace
https://www.createspace.com/3762141
Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/The-Echo-Howard-Brad-Halverson/dp/1468164570
Smashwords
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/67038
Where To Find the Author Online:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-End-and-the-Echo/165662166863932
November 14, 2012
NaNoWriMo and Wordcounts and Bears, Oh My!
Yes I did…
Today I donated $10 to NaNoWriMo’s Office of Letters and Light… bringing my total donations to $20. Aside from that my activities chiefly consisted of sleeping all day and trying to allow my body to generate enough energy to beat off the flu I seem to have been infected with. I woke up, saw that it was the last day for registering for Night of Writing Dangerously, and went to check out my fundraising page on StayClassy. Still $10 – which I personally donated to show my commitment to these things. I reflected then, suddenly, upon how extremely unlikely it is that I will raise $240 in the next couple of hours.
Okay… not suddenly. I just wrote that to convey more excitement to the blog reader – but in all reality, I knew that there would probably be no more than $10 because I haven’t been promoting this very well, and these things do not promote themselves.
What have I been doing instead? Well, yesterday I spastically completed an eight page textual analysis regarding Milton and his physical infirmity – that is, blindness. By the end of the semester, it will need to become a term paper. For now, though… I managed to add about 1500 words to my pitiful NaNoWriMo word count, and as I approach the 10k word mark and think “wow, in half the month I can probably reach 1/5th of the writing assignment for NaNoWriMo”, I exhaustedly squeeze $10 out of my personal finance and I decide, rather than immediately passing out, I will try to blog and swallow more coffee.
Tomorrow, there will be an interview posted.. I have the interview. It is with Howard Brad Halverson. It only needs to be posted. I, tired, write funny. I babble write. My writing, it doesn’t make sense. I iz tired. I have no choice but to resort to lolcats.
Courtesy of (http://www.relaxedpolitics.com/2009/1...)
Depo Provera. Yes. I need it for medical reasons.
Screaming Me… me.
Just so you know.. I don’t work a Catholic employer. I currently work for the county, so my employer is a government body… I’m working as a care worker these days. So I was surprised when I got a weird call regarding birth control coverage yesterday.
I posted this on my personal Facebook page… and I usually don’t like to post political stuff here, but I think I will make an exception, because, you know, it terrified me. It was like something I’d been having nightmares about while reading all of the pissed off comments on political pages about birth control and sluts and stuff. So, this is me quoting myself…
Yesterday I received this nightmarish call from my doctor’s medical billing office about my Depo Provera shot. Like a Twilight Zone episode based upon the Election year debates regarding birth control, there I was, being interrogated about my shot. Do these people not have access to their own charts? “I do not use Depo Provera for medical reasons,” I explained calmly but irritably. “It is a treatment for my endometrios. It is a replacement treatment for the Lupron Depo I used to be on. It is has fewer side effects than Lupron. Part of my ovaries and all of my fallopian tubes have been surgically removed due to endometriosis and I couldn’t get pregnant if I wanted to.” Finally the woman said “okay, so it’s a medical treatment and should be billed as such.” “Yes,” I said grumpily, “it is a medical treatment and should be billed as such.”
Now, some of you may not know what endometriosis is, but I have it. I’ve been diagnosed with Stage 4 
Endometriosis since the age of 21, when they were able to medically confirm it by sticking a microscope into my bellybutton and looking around – this is called a laparoscopy. Endometriosis is the number one cause of female infertility. Rather than describe it, I will provide a nice, concise definition via link:
http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/endometriosis/DS00289
So, yes.. it hurts like hell. I always compared the pain to being dissected like a frog – you know, it felt like someone was slicing into my abdomen with a sharp object. The endometriosis also caused me to get ovarian growths called chocolate cysts, which is why I had surgery. Twice. A normal ovary is the size of a Greek olive, but with the cyst inside my ovary grew the size of a softball. The birth control helps prevent this kind of issue also. As you can imagine, I am happy to be out of pain and free from random internal cyst grown. Yes, they have found an effective treatment for me. The thing is – my effective treatment is most commonly used as a form of birth control, and now birth control has become politicized so apparently, I actually have to make sure that my medical health care provider (known as a “midwife” because – well, probably because my medical clinic is in Berkeley, CA – but an ob-gyn to the rest of us) accurately lists it as a medical treatment not birth control. Although the last time I met with my doctor she explained that it is actually serving a secondary purpose as birth control, because, well, the fact that my fallopian tubes are tiny little nubs now doesn’t 100% rule out the possibility that I could become pregnant with one of those tubal pregnancies or other pregnancies where there is a fetus growing somewhere outside of the uterus who can’t be carried to term but can kill you and stuff.
But no… not the main purpose. The main purpose is to keep me from being bent over in excruciating pain and throwing up ten out of every thirty days, the way I used to be before they put me on Lupron. Lupron, my prior injection solution to the condition, puts your body into temporary menopause by shutting down estrogen production. I was on it for two years, which might have something to do with me starting to show symptoms of joint issues like arthritis lately. My bones have been prematurely aged by treatment for a condition so painful that – well, it was worth it, let’s put it that way.
I will have to receive treatment until I naturally or unnaturally reach menopause.
Without the shots, the next solution would be surgery to remove both of my ovaries, which would send me into menopause immediately because – well, no ovaries, no estrogen production.
This is my personal nightmare, and if you’re read my books, you probably understand the repeated appearances by angsty infertile chicks now. You know.
But enough of that for now. /rant, off
