I kinda hate these things, not least because I was such an egregious and hungry-for-attention propagator of them when I started writing on these here internets (as a trawl thru the archives here at VCTB will all too quickly reveal). But hey, why pass up an opportunity to subvert the format, right? Right.

I was tagged by Nick Wood, one of my fellow students from my Masters course — and, more particularly, one of my fellow students who always made me feel profoundly amateur. He’s a fine writer. Go check out his stuff. He has a story in the AfroSF anthology, so that’d be a great place to start.

Anyway, to the meme…

The Next Big Thing

1) What is the title of your next book work?

“Beyond the Sound”.

2) Where did the idea come from for the book work?

It came, in part, from finally escaping a town in which I’d spent half my life, and from realising that the only thing that had trapped me there was myself.

3) What genre does your book work fall under?

Haha, fuck knows. Borgesian psychogeographical post-modern post-apocalypse? (Shelve that, you bastards.)

4) What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

Complete unknowns, ideally ordinary people from Portsmouth, where the story is actually set.

5) What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book work?

One sunny summer afternoon, the city of Portsmouth becomes even more of a cultural island than it always was.

6) When will the book work be published?

Hell knows. I’d be very surprised if I can convince a dead-tree publisher to take it; it’s an odd length, it has a very odd structure, and it doesn’t really fit in any currently-valid subgeneric box. I’m thinking of following through on my theory that it’s actually better suited to a hypertextual medium, and making it into a website wherein all the scenes are geotagged onto a map of the city.

7) How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

Three months, near enough. Technically there are still bits waiting to be finished, but there were also a great many offcuts and deleted scenes, so I figure that balances out.

8) What other book works would you compare this story to within your genre?

[gallic_shrug.gif] I got nothing.

9) Who or what inspired you to write this book work?

Pretty sure this is question 2, phrased differently. Well, I had a dissertation piece to do. And being a sort of masochist, I decided that doing some sort of obvious boxticking exercise in generic skiffy would bore me shitless, and I can’t do good work on a project that bores me. So I kinda scraped together all the things that were interesting me at the time, in literary terms — Borges, Burroughs, Mieville, psychogeography and cities, metafiction, and the collapse of an identity I once thought I’d possess in perpetuity — and made of them a monster.

10) What else about the book work might pique the reader’s interest?

It doesn’t have any fucking zombies in it.

***

In letter if not in spirit, eh? I can’t think of anyone for whom this meme would be appropriate who I hasn’t already done it — so rather than tag anyone deliberately, I’ll just suggest that if you’ve got a thing to talk about and you fancy doing a meme, maybe you should do this one? Yeah, that works. Knock yerselves out, innit.