Nicolas Wilson's Blog: News about the novels and writing of Nicolas Wilson - Posts Tagged "interview"

Check it out at the review hutch.

Look for more info on Whores here on goodreads!

Whores: not intended to be a factual account of the gender war

Or follow along on facebook.

Check it out at The Review Hutch.

The link also has some great text from last weeks interview, discussing my inspiration with Whores, and an introduction to my work.

Enjoy!

And a long one at that! Take a look, here.Justin interviews a lot of interesting indie authors, and definitely gave me some food for thought.

Here's an excerpt.

"The book [Whores] is certainly controversial. But so, I would say, are the events that led me to write it. Socially conservative people may see red when they realize large portions of the story do involve female birth control, up to and including abortion, but I think that's just their biases showing. I'm absolutely pro-choice, but the novel isn't about my political beliefs, or evangelizing. If anything, I wanted it to reflect the fact that as much passion as people stoke over the issue, it comes down to human beings making important decisions over their lives.

It's also about a political undercurrent that's somewhat rooted in a movement known as Men's Rights, but also more broadly articulated this last year by conservative officials. Right now, these views are marginalized, but if they gained clout, if they were allowed to fester, they could very easily roll back even what should be noncontroversial aspects of women's health, like cheap access to birth control. And the more we normalize those types of behavior, the more we offer the appearance of validity to fringe groups that would encourage discrimination, misogyny, or violence in other areas of society. Women's reproductive issues took center stage because access to birth control is what allows women economic freedom, which is necessary for anyone to be truly free.
...
All choices when it comes to women's reproduction are difficult, and all of them have ramifications for them socially, psychologically and economically (and if they're so inclined, spiritually, as well). I wanted to show those difficulties, and show some examples, against the backdrop of the story, of why I think the freedom for a woman to make these kinds of choices is important.

It would have been so so easy to invent a straw woman, someone with health conditions that made a pregnancy dangerous, whose pregnancy was the result of incestuous rape, who 95% of people would say should be allowed an abortion. But I wanted the novel to be about choices, and why people might reasonably make the choices they do. I think the repetition of different women choosing how to live their lives independent of their role in reproduction to some felt like a drum beat, me trying repeatedly to make a point, when to me each woman in the story, and her choices and the reasoning behind them, are distinct."

I owe you an update a bit later this week. I'm excited to share synopses for a number of new novels I should be releasing very soon.

Available at his blog. Lots of fun stuff on my favorite parts of writing (including my embarrassing revision habits)

Though anything can inspire the concept, the story and the drive to finish it comes from my characters. Although I write a lot of absurd stuff (I pitched a novel to my wife as "werewolves in space"), it has to be focused on the people living through that concept. It's not just about the big scary werewolf attacking people; it's about the man trapped in a can with a big scary werewolf attacking his friends, with only a ding dong wrapper between him and the vacuum of space, and it's about his friends' claustrophobia as they flee through the confines of the shuttle, their confusion over whether it's right to kill the beast, knowing their friend is still inside it... That monster has to be as real to me as it is to them, or it's just the literary equivalent of a Roger Corman flick- which doesn't sound too bad, actually, but I think without cheesy special effects, Corman just wouldn't be Corman. But I really enjoy getting in their heads. When I'm writing the crisis out, I don't want to stop.

For my second time interviewing with VWI, we focused on Dag, my second novel. Here's a taste.

I tend not to be an author who thinks about themes, which is weird to admit. But I think the themes are never self-evident to me in a story until I’m a draft or two into it....

It’s basically a story at its core about how people need each other, because people who don’t allow themselves to need each other and to help each other become terrible, selfish, basically mutated imitations of human beings.

Read the full interview here.