THE NEXT NEXT BIG THING TYPE THING
My man in Glasgow (and fiction editor over there at A-Minor), Kenny Mooney, invited me to take part in a thing called The Next Big Thing, which is kind of a chain letter in the form of a blog post, except it’s more of a self-interview/self-promo/opportunity to promote the work of others sort of thing. So, win/win/win, right? Probably, yes, at least in theory
What is your working title of your book (or story)? PIXEL REVOLT | remixed {+ekphrastic poems based on the John Vanderslice companion album}. This title may very well change.
Where did the idea come from for the book? I am always interested in the way art forms can inspire and/or cannibalize one another; how they can live independent of one another, and still remain intrinsically connected. Being familiar with Vanderslice’s original PIXEL REVOLT album, I was taken with how the instrumental deconstructive remixes had effectively shed their own voices. I felt inspired to imagine new, equally fragmented voices for the music.
NOTE (a):
JV’s Pixel Revolt remix album can be downloaded for free here.
NOTE (b):
An outtake version of one of the poems, PLYMOUTH ROCK (alt. remix), has been recently published by Truck. See it here.
What genre does your book fall under? Poetry. Ekphrastic. Alternative Black Robot Metal [slash] Sentient Data Rock [slash] Down-Core Noise-Wave meets Bruise-Wave in an alley where the former bodies of analog synthesizers once planned the eventual rise of New Conspiracy Theory Post-Content-Core.
Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition? I would like for there to be a robot character called Caramel, who would ideally be played by an actual robot named Caramel. Caramel would be portrayed as a wall of ancient sci-fi military computers projecting audio-video montages, soundtracked by the album & played by a revolving cast of known and unknown actors and actresses. Spoiler alert: You will wonder how you are seeing these images. Four years after the premier of the film, another will be released as a prequel, revealing that Caramel is God and that the concept is God is an illusion created in a 1950s laboratory and placed into the machine-fed collective conscience stream. In short, it will be revealed that we are all of us nothing more than an accumulation of data; we are our stories made of digital fog, and every food we have ever known is nothing more than oyster crackers reconstituted into some other imagined form.
What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book? This is not light; these are not vast breathing oceans.
Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency? I hope to count on the independent small press world to offer a tiny place for it when the time comes, whether in print or online. Failing that, who knows? That the work is read is what matters most.
How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript? It’s a short manuscript—14 short poems based on 14 songs, each with a separate footnote poem (so, 28 poems). Most of the original draft of 14 poems was done in a single album sitting, which was part of the point of the project. A second listen patched up some holes that I’d missed. The footnote poems took another couple of weeks. Some are still in progress. It doesn’t sound like much, I know, but sometimes the real effort is spent finding the right avenue, particularly with ekphrastic work.
What other books would you compare this story to within your genre? As the work contained within the work is of an ekphrastic nature, I think it could hang out casually at parties with WE BURY THE LANDSCAPE by Kristine Ong Muslim and THE MOON & OTHER INVENTIONS: POEMS AFTER JOSEPH CORNELL by Kristina Marie Darling, though both are full-length books, and in no way am I making direct comparisons to those fine authors or their work.
Who or what inspired you to write this book? Mastodons, mostly. That and the disembodied voices of the doomed crewmen on the spaceship in the 1979 videogame, Asteroids. So, the same stuff as everyone, probably.
What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest? I’m sorry if this wasn’t made clear; this is a poetry chapbook—I know not of these “interested readers” of whom you speak.
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Next week, look for The Next Big Thing blog posts from CODE FOR FAILURE author Ryan W. Bradley, the ubiquitous Howie Good, and publishing mogul/textual gangster, Chad Redden.
