On his old, now defunct site, Victor Gischler conducted a series of interviews from the end of 2004 to mid-2005. With his permission BSC will be reprinting his World’s Worst Interview series over the next few days. Sometimes the internet feels temporary, and good content gets lost or forgotten in the rush forward. When possible, we want to blow the dust off of something and bring it back to the front. If you know of something that should be reprinted let me know.
Victor Gischler conducted the following interview with Sarah Weinman in early January of 2005.
Yet again THE WORLD’S WORST INTERVIEW: Sarah Weinman Edition. To me it seems that Sarah knows everything about crime fiction and knows everyone involved in crime fiction. After checking my own e-mail, her blog site Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind is my first stop on the web every morning. I know I’m going to get the latest industry news and/or interesting opinions. She’s also getting into fiction writing, reviews for the Baltimore Sun… well, lots of stuff. Let’s flail her with some dumb questions, shall we?
Victor Gischler: You’ve probably answered this question like a million times, but just once more for old Uncle Vic. How did you get into all this super-blogger, know-all-about-crime-fiction stuff?
Sarah Weinman: A combination of boredom, laziness and serendipity. Basically, I had too much time on my hands, I needed a way to procrastinate finishing my thesis for a master’s degree that it looks like I’ll never use, and I’d become addicted to reading literary and NYC-related blogs. So I wanted in, and since I had crime fiction coming out of my ears–from reading, reviewing, working in a mystery bookstore, hanging out at conventions, drinking to excess–that’s what I wanted to focus on. Over a year later, that’s what I’m still doing, although I’m always amazed time and time again that so many people read what I have to say. I still labor under the stubborn belief that there’s only about 10, 20 people and I know them all…
You’ve published some short fiction. Whassup with that? If I sneak into your house while you’re away, will I find (after drinking all the beer in your fridge) a novel manuscript?
Did you know that Maritta Wolff (who wrote a phenomenal first novel in the early 40s called Whistle Stop when she was 22. 22!) got so pissed off at her publisher that she refused to give them her last book and kept the manuscript in the fridge? Now she’s dead and her family’s letting Scribner publish it in April. I always wondered: why the fridge? To keep the manuscript nice and cold? Easier storage space? Guess we’ll never know.
But I digress. I love writing short stories and always will, because it’s a great way to explore strange ideas and try out different plots and structures and put odd people together in crazy situations. But I do kind of hope the “first draft all in a mad rush” method that’s prevailed in most of my published fiction (and a few unpublished) will eventually give way to something a little more methodical, because writing 5000 words in one evening (which is what I did for the story I wrote for the upcoming Baltimore Noir anthology) gets bloody exhausting.
As for novel-writing…a few months ago I realized that if I didn’t start the novel idea that had been blitzing my brain for the past two
years, it might well explode. At the moment, I’m about halfway through the first draft. Some days I despise it, but right now I think it’s
mostly OK…kinda.
So, what kind of beer did you find in my fridge?
Hamm’s. Do you ever restrain yourself from saying something on your blog (because it might hurt somebody’s feelings or whatever) or do you just let fly?
Mostly I say whatever I want to because I can pretty much ignore the fact that I have an audience and just kid around with my friends, most of whom appear in the “Harem of Cabana Boys” listing. But there have been more than a few occasions where I’ve had to be really careful about what I’ve said. Just the other day I got an email from a writer I went on at length about some time ago, explaining why I thought his book was flawed. He was really nice about it and had a lot of cool things to say but it was a bit unnerving like, “shit, I keep forgetting people read me.” I don’t think I want to get over that, because it does keep some of my impulses in check.
You write a lot of reviews and you’re obviously well-read. What’s the one book you think everyone should be reading … even though they aren’t for some reason?
Damn you, because that’s a tough question. One book? For everybody? Is that even possible?
I’ll go with a dead person because it’s easier: Dorothy B. Hughes’ In a Lonely Place, which absolutely blew me away when I read it soon after it was reissued. Great writing, an incredible sense of decay, excellent insight into the post-war mentality, and it totally inverted almost every single noir novel convention even before some were invented. And it holds up really, really well.
Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter?
Potter, although it’s pretty unlikely J.K. Rowling’s going to write an additional volume called “The Secret Life of Slytherin House”
which is rated something way beyond PG. Even so I’ll probably be one of the dorks who gets in line early for my copy of book VI, mostly because I want to see which other freaks will show up and silently mock them.
Would you rather eat a monkey brain or drink liquified slugs?
Monkeys aren’t so far removed from humanity, so better that. Bring it on, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease! I’ll show you who’s boss.
If some really dorky guys at Bouchercon invited you to play video golf, would you do it?
Sure I would, but nobody asked me last time. Maybe because I was too busy hanging out with other really dorky guys named Bryon and John and spending far too much time talking about goatsucking and weasels. (We’d have discussed lemurs but none of us knew about them till later.)
Mmmmmbzbbzzzzbb. Did you hear that? Listen. Bzzzzbubububzzzzzz. What’s that sound like?
Oh no, CSIS is tapping my phone again!
When I was in college, my best friend Yasmin and I had this running joke because every time we’d talk to each other by phone, there’d be
clicking noises. Every time. So we got into the habit of calling out CSIS (Canadian equivalent of the CIA, and yes, it exists, and it is
suitably lame) and telling them what our Evil Plans were. Sadly, most of them involved pretending to kill Preston Manning, then the leader of the opposition party and kind of a pedant. I have no idea why I just told that story.
From somebody who has the BEST blog to somebody who has the worst blog (me) what advice would you give for total blog success?
Suck up. A lot. Interview more people. Ask for more free books that you are not obliged to then blurb. Kill more lemurs.
I certainly WILL suck up, and may I say you look LOVELY today, Sarah.
Lets all give Sarah Weinman a big round of applause and thank her for playing along. Find out what’s new in the world of crime fiction at
her website.
And BSC Review would like to give Victor Gischler a round of applause for the generous use of this interview series!
Victor Gischler is the author of 4 hard-boiled crime novels. His debut novel Gun Monkeys was nominated for the Edgar Award, and his novel Shotgun Opera was an Anthony Award finalist. His work has been translated into Italian, French, Spanish and Japanese. He earned a Ph.D. in English at the University of Southern Mississippi where they beat him with rolled up newspapers and fed him raw liver. His fifth and sixth novels Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse and Vampire a Go-Go were published by the Touchstone/Fireside imprint of Simon & Schuster.
