readersvoice.com

Hugh Howey p1

simon — Sat, 01 Jun 2013 06:24:29 +0000

The author of post-apocalyptic novel Wool and its subsequently published prequel Shift, Hugh Howey, said he captained boats for the filthy rich for eight years. He travelled the world, seeing places like Cuba and Central America. Then, as a lot of sailors do he said, he fell in love and settled down. He now lives in South Florida. He started watching tv regularly, and saw the world through a single screen. The world seemed dangerous, he said, whereas when he had traveled to countries like Egypt, these places had seemed ok. This insight fed into his novel Wool, which features people living in silos after the outside world has been destroyed. They view the tattered landscape through a computer screen. Occasionally someone is sent outside, like Sheriff Holston of Silo-18, presumably to their deaths. They are expected to clean the screen sensors while they are out there. Usually they comply with this duty, like good sports, before being killed by toxins. Hugh Howey wondered: “And what if the world outside is better than it appears?”

Hugh Howey listed a lot of his favorite books and comics. The list demonstrates how much homework reading went into writing his novel Wool. Although, it was probably fun homework. He liked Ender’s Game (1985) by Orson Scott Card.
He said Neal Stephenson’s novels Diamond Age (1995) and Cryptonomicon (1999) were “must- reads”.
He said one had to read everything by Matthew Mather, author of CyberStorm and the six-part Atopia Chronicles.
He liked Peter F. Hamilton’s 1999 novel The Naked God, which was the third book in The Night’s Dawn Trilogy.
Another favorite was Lucifer’s Hammer, a post-apocalyptic 1977 novel by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.
“Comics have influenced me greatly,” he said. He liked The Watchmen. Also he liked Y: The Last Man, a Vertigo comic which had a run of 60 issues beginning in 2002.
Walking Dead comics were another favorite. This was a monthly comic beginning in 2003, chronicling the travels of survivors of a zombie apocalypse.
He liked science fiction classics like Asimov’s Foundation Saga, and most of the short stories of Phillip K. Dick (collected into books like We Can Remember It For You Wholesale).
He liked the Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse anthology, edited by John Joseph Adams, which included a Stephen King story “The End of the Whole Mess”.
Also he liked the After The End anthology, edited by Shane R. Collins.
He liked Neil Gaiman because he could write in any genre, children’s or adult.
In non-fiction he liked The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002) by Steven Pinker. One reviewer said Pinker skewers irrational targets with swift and classical neatness. Some of the book’s themes on human behavior and organisation emerge in Wool.
Also he liked The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do (1998) by Judith Rich Harris (with an introduction by Steven Pinker).
He liked Cosmos by Carl Sagan.
Also he liked Shakespeare’s sonnets and plays, and Rudyard Kipling.
Also he mentioned that he liked the 2009 sci fi film Moon.

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- copyright Simon Sandall.

Hugh Howey p2

simon — Sat, 01 Jun 2013 06:05:35 +0000

Hugh Howey said his favorite authors were the ones who’d just written a book and were trying to get it published. Even if nothing happened and they only sold one copy to Mom “you’re a successful novelist in my eyes,” he said. “No one can take that away from you.”
Hugh Howey had had seven or eight novels written and was working in a book store when he started writing Wool. He wrote a short story and put it online. He didn’t promote it. He said he didn’t bother because, he said: Who would read a depressing story about the end of the world? He said people liked it and wanted more, so he kept developing the story. Hugh Howey thought the Wool e-novella would sell maybe 500 copies, but it’s sold 500,000, he said. Amazon reviewers wanted him to continue the story, so he wrote four more novellas. The five stories were collected into the 550-page Wool Omnibus, released in January, 2012. It made the Amazon top-100. His agent courted publishers. The paperback novel Wool is based on the Wool Omnibus.
Hugh Howey said he learned two things from the experience: Firstly, it’s good to write in a number of genres and he was glad he had; and secondly, that he knew nothing about what people wanted to read.
20th Century Fox bought the film rights, and he’s met with executives from 20th Century Fox about the script. Ridley Scott might be directing it. Hugh Howey said he has a one-week on-set vacation written into the contract. He didn’t want any creative control of any movie.
Wool is set in the Silo, where thousands of people live in a 200-tiered building. The old world has been destroyed by a disaster 60 years previously. There are many rules of the Silo, and one of the punishments for criminals and other breachers of Silo etiquette is to be sent outside to do a cleaning. They don protective suits and clean the sensors for the Silo’s video view of the outside world.
The story starts with the sheriff of Silo-18, Holston, being sent outside, just as his wife Allison had been. The sheriff had watched as his wife cleaned the sensors for the Silo’s video screens, waved at him and walked off only to be killed by toxins.
Later in the book Juliette becomes a main character, questioning the rules of the Silo.
Mr Howey said people had always thought the end of the world was nigh. He said post-apocalyptic settings were good for stories. “These stories have always been popular.” The stories had a lot of in-built tension from page one. There was conflict and drama and things for characters to overcome.
He said the danger in post-apocalyptic stories or disaster tales didn’t come from things like zombies staggering around chasing people. You could easily out-run zombies. The danger arose from the other people the character is walled in with. He gave the example of Lord of the Flies, where the ship-wrecked kids all turned on each other, and things devolved into a blood-bath. He cited Stephen King’s The Stand from the 1980s, and Lucifer’s Hammer. He said the philosophical and political ideas of Hobbes and Rousseau on human nature and society came into play in Wool. “In Wool I kind of explore that.” Perhaps this came from his reading of The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature.
He said he had been writing a young adult series and horror, but when he wrote Wool things really took off.
His young adult fiction was “more edgy” than his fiction for adults: older readers didn’t want some of the horrors teenagers regarded as normal.

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Hugh Howey p3

simon — Sat, 01 Jun 2013 05:51:13 +0000

Tension was something Hugh Howey looked for in his writing. He goes back and deletes any boring stuff.
Readers would write to him saying how much they liked Juliet, a main character in Wool, and hoped she wouldn’t get hurt. He said he would then make Juliet get hurt because readers needed tension and to have their expectations defied; to have horrible things happen to good people, because readers would want it resolved. So he liked to get input from readers.
He said he was in favour of fan fiction, where fans would write stories based on his. At first he would tell fans: Why don’t you want to write for the Star Wars universe instead of mine? He said it was flattering enough for a writer to get hundreds of thousands of readers, but fan fiction took the flattery to a new level. He said he’d tell fan writers not to make the fiction available for free; that readers would pay a dollar for it. Also, he said he liked fan fiction because it was writing with the training wheels on. He said he wasn’t closed off and protective of his work against fan fiction, because writers were not in competition with other writers; they were in competition with Facebook and tv and the beach. Many in the audience had written books when I saw Mr Howey speak at Supanova at the Gold Coast.
As far as plot construction for longer stories went, Mr Howey said one good method was where characters had a “larger concern”, and along the way they faced obstacles. He gave the example of the tv series Battlestar Galactica where people on space ships were trying to reach Earth. Along the way they faced obstacles which made up individual episodes. He liked the way Walking Dead comics were written. Other series he’d watched sometimes became lost on the way. He sometimes wrote the climactic scene first, he said. That way he knew where he was heading and worked towards that.
Although he started out as a self-publisher, he said it was great to have a publisher, as he was flown out to Australia and places like Berlin now, which he wouldn’t get to do as a self-publisher. But in an innovation in writer-publisher deals, he kept the e-book rights, which he said were very lucrative. He said he knocked back some big advances from publishers and signed with Simon and Schuster (one of the Big Six publishers) because they agreed to letting him keep the e-book rights. They agreed because the paperbacks were still selling well. He was able to knock back the other offers because his e-books were selling well and he didn’t need these advances: he was making the equivalent of those advances in e-book sales.
So he and Simon and Schuster made “the deal they said would never be made”.
Now Hugh Howey travels the world again, promoting his novels from Berlin to Brisbane.

- copyright Simon Sandall.

Makoto Shinkai p1

simon — Wed, 01 May 2013 03:47:03 +0000

Makoto Shinkai said his latest animated movie The Garden of Words was “a simple love story between a boy and a girl.” But rain was a main character, too, he said. The director and writer of The Garden of Words spoke about his 43-minute movie after its world premiere at the Gold Coast Film Festival on April 28. The movie is produced by CoMix Wave which also produced his previous movie Children Who Chase Lost Voices.
Takao is a 15-year-old boy in Shinjuku. He skips school on mornings when it rains and goes to a lush green public garden. There he sits in a shelter near a pagoda and a beautiful big pond. He sketches shoe designs, hoping to be a shoemaker one day. “The reason I chose shoemaking to be the boy’s ambition was because it’s a really personal thing,” Makoto Shinkai said. “.. And I wanted to portray Takao as someone who was, through shoemaking, wanting to make personal links with people and connect with other people.”
It is the rainy season, and it is raining when Takao meets 27-year-old Yukino at the shelter. He sketches while she drinks beer and eats chocolate.
Makoto Shinkai said there were many symbols in The Garden of Words. “For example, rain is something you can’t stop from falling on anyone’s heads,” Makoto Shinkai said. “It just comes naturally…That symbolizes love as well. It just happens. You can’t stop it from happening. And that’s the symbolism that I used.”
Each day Takao prays for rain.
Their relationship grows. He sketches her feet, measuring them for his shoe designs, tracing around them.
She is a bit lost in life. He wants to make her shoes for her to walk a new path.
Feet and shoes are also symbols in Garden of Words. “In terms of the feet and the shoes, when I was interviewing women for this film, I might ask a question: Would you show someone your feet? Most people answered, No, no way… So for a 15 year old boy, having to touch or see a woman’s feet was what Takao said: the mystery of life itself.”
Thunder is another symbol used in the movie. As Yukino departs from Takao on the first day they meet, she quotes from a tanka (a traditional Japanese poetry style). The tanka uses imagery like rain and “a faint clap of thunder”. Traditionally in Japanese culture, Mr Shinkai said, thunder represents a good harvest and God’s life. When it claps in the background at the park, it gave Yukino a goddess imagery, he said.

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-copyright Simon Sandall.

Makoto Shinkai p2

simon — Wed, 01 May 2013 03:40:09 +0000

The Garden of Words has some beautiful imagery. The backgrounds, movement and visual details are stunning. “As animators, obviously, we feel motivated by wanting to draw more beautiful and picturesque scenery,” Mr Shinkai said. They wanted to show what they could do.
Rain drops spatter beautifully on tiles. A green branch arches over a large pond in a city park. People walk down crowded traffic-filled streets. Commuters board trains, which rush past buildings and electric wires. And the director uses a variety of camera angles or views : We follow a bird as it soars around a high rise building. There are close-ups of train wheels roaring along tracks. We watch from a cloud as raindrops fall to a lush green park far below. Some of these shots can be viewed online in the preview of The Garden of Words.
But the movie doesn’t rely on the beautiful imagery to keep the audience interested. The story is good, with nothing unnecessary. Also, it’s a shorter movie than his previous movie Children Who Chase Lost Voices. Mr Shinkai said 43 minutes was enough time to portray human emotions and have a strong theme.
Mr Shinkai gave a lot of interesting details about The Garden of Words. He said they had finished production on the CoMix Wave movie only three weeks before the premiere.
Also he said he came up with certain lines of dialogue before there was a script. “For this particular movie there were lines I wanted the characters to say, so the script came from those lines.” eg. the line where Takao says Yukino is the mystery or secret of life itself. And when Yukino says that as a 27-year-old she is no smarter than she was when she was 15: and that she was still in the same place.
Also he changed some artistic techniques.
“I used a different approach in coloring for this particular animation,” he said.
He simplified skin coloring: He said he used one color for where the sun hits the skin, and another shade for the rest of the skin: sometimes a greenish color for reflected light on the skin.
As far as favorite books went, Mr Shinkai liked Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami. A rain-related quote from the novel appears in one shot of the movie, he said. The two main characters are drenched from the rain in the park, and the boy says they looked like they’d swum across a river to get there.
The Garden of Words would be a great movie to watch on a rainy afternoon.

- copyright Simon Sandall

Screenwriters

simon — Wed, 01 May 2013 03:27:57 +0000

“I think Evil Dead will take the horror genre back into darker places,” Todd Farmer said at the Gold Coast International Film Festival in April. The professional screenwriter wrote My Bloody Valentine 3D and Drive Angry. He also wrote Jason X, the tenth in the Friday the Thirteenth horror film series, where the demonic, undead Jason goes into space. Mr Farmer made a lot of interesting points about horror. He liked the way the new movie Evil Dead had practical effects rather than CGI. CGI often left people underwhelmed: He said they could see it was CGI. He said with practical effects, like makeup and artificial wounds, you could “see it all” and it had more effect.
Todd Farmer mentioned some of his favorite horror movies, although he said they weren’t all strictly horror movies. He liked Jaws, Alien and Aliens, Halloween and The Empire Strikes Back.
“When stuck when I’m making movies my brain goes back to these to fill in the gaps,” he said.
As far as favorite books went, he liked Salem’s Lot. He also liked Stephen King’s Danse Macabre, which is a 1981 non-fiction book on the horror genre in film, novels and comics. In fact he liked all of Stephen King’s books. He also liked the Harry Potter books. The professional screenwriter also liked Syd Field’s books on screenwriting, which include Screenplay, The Foundations of Screenwriting. And he liked a biography of Clint Eastwood he’d read because Clint Eastwood talked about how important his screenwriter Dean Riesner had been for the success of those great Dirty Harry films. On his website Mr Farmer said Dean Reisner was a mentor of his.
I also caught up with the creators of Sushi Girl. A man called Fish is released from prison where he has spent six years for his part in a robbery. He is given a celebratory dinner by some crooked colleagues he’d protected with his silence. They are keen to ask him about some missing diamonds. Sushi is presented on the body of a young woman. She watches as the situation around her degenerates. The movie features Mark Hamill as Crow, a psychopath who delights in torture. Director Kern Saxton said he liked The Final Programme by Michael Moorcock, which he said was a post-apocalyptic political satire from the 1960s that had been made into a movie.
Co-writer of Sushi Girl with Kern Saxton, Destin Pfaff , liked A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jnr, which is a post-apocalyptic science-fiction novel from 1960. After a nuclear war, an order of Catholic monks sets out to preserve the remnants of mankind’s scientific knowledge until the world is ready for it.

-copyright Simon Sandall.

M. L. Stedman p1

simon — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 02:20:21 +0000

“I sat down and closed my eyes and could see there was a lighthouse,” said M. L. Stedman, author of The Light Between Oceans . “Then I saw an island and I knew it was long ago.” Then she saw a man who, she knew, was the lighthouse keeper. And she knew it was going to be his story. Then she saw a boat wash up, and in the boat was a dead man and a baby. “I had to keep writing to see who they were… Gradually the story emerged and gradually the novel emerged.”

The first time novelist said she didn’t plan her novel. She said different ways of working suited different writers and you had to work out what was best for you. “I sit down, close my eyes and see what comes up.”
She used the same approach to keep the story going. She just saw what was in her mind: a scorpion, for example, or a storm. Then she wondered, Who’s that walking in the storm?
She said writing was akin to sticking her head in a cinema: the story was there, she just had to look and see it.
Writing was something where you could go off and frolic on your own, unlike her career as a lawyer, in the UK, where she had to plan.
The Light Between Oceans is the story of lighthousekeeper and WW1 veteran Tom Sherbourne and his wife Isabel, who are childless and living on Janus Island off the Western Australian coast in 1926. When a boat with a dead man and a baby washes up on the island, the dutiful Tom wants to report the incident. But Isabel wants to keep the baby. Tom makes a concession to her: he will wait till the morning to report the boat. Eventually he goes along with her idea.
“That’s where the trouble starts.”
Then themes came into play, she said. “How do we prioritise our values?” She said Tom and Isabel have conflicting obligations: marriage (obligations to each other); Tom’s obligations to the Commonwealth Lighthouse Service to report the boat; and their duties to other people, such as any family of the baby.
She said the book was about “how you find your North Star”: how you find the right thing to do, “how we negotiate a morally complex world”. Isabel has a belief in Christianity (there is a scene where she prays over the grave of her miscarried child).
And M. L. Stedman said all the characters were “basically good”. But “All the characters are operating out of a woundedness of some kind,” she said. “They were doing what they thought was best for the baby, with disastrous consequences.”

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M. L. Stedman

simon — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 02:02:48 +0000

M. L. Stedman wrote a lot of The Light Between Oceans in the British Library, as well as in the Margaret River and Gracetown areas of Western Australia. In the British Library you weren’t allowed to use ink, only lead pencils, and no post-it notes or water were allowed. While writing, she would imagine the wind and the waves and the water around Janus Island.
“I can thoroughly recommend the process of making up your own world,” she said. “It’s a cheap holiday and thoroughly fascinating.”
She said whatever you do in life should be worth the heartbeats you have in life. While writing in the British Library she realized there was nothing she would rather be doing, “and to get published then was astonishing.”

Once she had started writing the story she researched lighthouses. “You can’t help but become enthralled by them.”
At the Australian National Archives she read logbooks of lighthouse keepers that hadn’t been opened for a hundred years. She was interested in the meticulous nature of the way lighthouse keepers recording things like wind speed, and she loved putting in these details in her novel.
She mentioned how lighthouse keepers were not in the Maritime Union and received “the short end of the stick” as far as working conditions went. Her book was “a bit of a homage to a past way of life”.
To research the WW1 veteran lighthousekeeper Tom, she read battalion journals, and field diaries which were the personal diaries of soldier’s days in action in WW1.
The diaries had no self-pity, she said, as they described lives of young men who’d come from sunshine and wheat fields to the frozen mud of the Somme.
She contacted the Tasmanian archives by phone and was told how soldiers returned from WW1 often went far away from civilization.

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M. L. Stedman p3

simon — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 01:47:47 +0000

She said the novel took about two years to write, starting in March 2008. The first draft was finished in a bit of a rush in June 2009. She said she had an agent by then and the first draft was finished in time for the agent’s maternity leave.
But things didn’t pan out, and the book had no agent for a while and went into abeyance. She was philosophical about this: the world wasn’t obligated to run after her book. When writing the second draft, the pressure was off and she asked herself “What would the characters really do?”
She said she wasn’t writing toward a place to end the book. She was just letting the characters be who they were and acting consistently with their nature. She said this requires the writer to hold their nerve. She said she wanted the ending to be uplifting in some way, and affirming the human spirit. She said it would depend on individual readers whether they thought the ending was uplifting.
She said she wanted Tom and Isabel to stay together at the end of the book, too: to have a strong love that survived their decisions and the consequences. That they would have a deeper connection by the end of the book.

Then the book ended up with its current agent, and they started submitting it to publishers in 2011.
As soon as an agent gets more than one publisher interested in the book, they set up an auction. These auctions go through rounds. In the first round there were 11 publishers interested in the book, she said. The auctions went through a couple of rounds until she chose the publisher. It was first published in Great Britain by Doubleday, an imprint of Transworld Publishers in 2012, and in Australia by Vintage, an imprint of Random House Australia.
She said the agents were very good and knew how to present the book to publishers.
Noah Taylor reads the audio book version. “He has a very meditative way of reading, which is very nice.”

She said she had recently signed a contract whereby Steven Spielberg’s company Miramax optioned the novel for a film, to be produced by Harry Potter producer David Heyman of Heyday Productions.
Some of her favorite books included Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, and Love in a Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford. She had recently read and enjoyed A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. The Idiot by Dostoyevsky was another favorite, as was The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger. Other favorite authors included Ian McEwan, Cormac McCarthy, Emile Zola, PG Wodehouse and Andre Gide.

- copyright Simon Sandall.

Michael Dowers p1

simon — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 02:41:21 +0000

READERSVOICE.COM: You’ve said in one interview that you had handmade 45000 comics yourself. When did you get started in the world of comics, and progress into publishing and anthologising comics?

MICHAEL DOWERS: Well that number has grown to almost 47,000 now…When I was a kid I was lucky enough to get all the hand me down comics from the older neighborhood boys. Large boxes filled with Harvey and DC comics. When I was 17 I remember a friend coming over to my house with a copy of Crumb’s ZAP #1. But it wasn’t until my mid twenties when I was living on an isolated island in Washington State’s San Juan Islands (mid 70’s) that somebody had come to visit and left two large stacks of Marvel comics behind. I must have read those two stacks of comics five different times (there wasn’t much to do in the winter time. No electricity or running water for more than 4 years). I was hooked on comics and read as many Marvels as I could get my hands on for the next two or three years. By 1982 I had read an article in Jay Kennedy’s Underground Price Guide about how you too can make your own comics. The rest is history…

RV: Do you think that mini comics are gaining in popularity with artists and writers, or is its appeal tidal?

MD: I would say that mini comics are more popular than ever right now. Definitely more creators involved than ever before. I expect the medium will only continue to grow.

RV: In the Treasury of Mini Comics Volume One, you included minicomics stars like John Porcellino and, in Volume Two, Jeffrey Brown. Which artists did you come across that were excellent yet unknown to you?

MD: You know I have been searching for that one amazing mini comic that no was has ever heard of with the greatest art by a very obscure artist. You would think that book does exist, but I have yet to find it. Roger May’s Alien Cumshot #2 comes to mind. Fukitor by Jason Karns is very good…but neither of these are included in the anthologies.