tiredHere's a quick Q&A with the Golden boy, the first part of what we've deemed a serial interview. (I nearly wrote, "It's a killer." Then I thought against it. Then I wrote it anyway. Get it? Serial interview? I know it's Monday morning, but...)
How's life?
Life is craaazy. Good stuff, mostly. But I desperately need a vacation. I'm directing a play at my kids' school for the second year in a row and I love it, but I should NOT be doing it. My eldest is going to be in high school in the fall, which seems impossible. My brother and his fiancee had a baby in August, and that makes me very happy. And I'm totally stoked to go to England this fall for British Fantasycon, where I'll be a guest of honor (oh, all right, "honour," since it's in the UK). I haven't been over there for several years and I've missed it horribly.
Read any good books lately?
Yes! I spent three or four months reading very little for pleasure, just research on (alternately) Japan and New Orleans, and re-reading a ton of Neil Gaiman for PRINCE OF STORIES: THE MANY WORLDS OF NEIL GAIMAN, which I wrote with Hank Wagner and Steve Bissette. But yep, I've read Neil's upcoming THE GRAVEYARD BOOK, which is sheer genius and may be my favorite novel he's written.. I also recently read CROOKED LITTLE VEIN by Warren Ellis, which is sick, mad genius, PROMISES TO KEEP by Charles de Lint, who is one of my favorite writers, and DUMA KEY, which is the best thing Stephen King has written in a very, very long time. Absolutely loved it.
How does your reading affect your writing, and vice-versa?
You'd have to monitor me and decide for yourself. I'd like to think that when I'm reading someone good, my writing improves, and when I'm reading crap for fun...my writing doesn't suffer. Heh. But that doesn't seem very logical, does it? So hopefully reading doesn't affect my writing one way or the other. Writing only affects my reading in the sense that I'll usually try to avoid anything that's at all similar to whatever it is I'm working on at any given time. For instance, I'm starting a new book for Bantam that concerns supernatural events on an ocean setting, and I've got a novella by Lee Thomas that I've been wanting to read, but I've purposely NOT read it and won't until I've finished this novel.
What's your writing routine?
If you're a Wallace and Gromit fan, you'll understand what I mean when I say it's a bit like being dumped into the "wrong trousers" every morning. For those unfamiliar with that bit of genius, I'll just refer you to the runaway mine car scene in INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM. I get up, I answer e-mail, I try to take care of things people have been waiting too long for, and then I work for as long as I can on whatever I'm writing at the moment until my wife sends our daughter up to drag me downstairs for dinner. All too often this includes weekends, and all too often I come back upstairs after dinner. The past six months have been the busiest of my life, and I'm now working toward the time, a few months hence, I suspect, when I'll be able to have my nights and weekends back. I only hope my children will recognize me, and my wife will remember my name.
Happy Mother's Day to Christopher's awesome wife!
Read the next part of the serial interview.
Read other Christopher Golden-tagged posts at Bildungsroman.
Visit Christopher Golden's website.