The Next Big Thing
What is the working title of the book?
Where did the idea come from for the book?
In 2006 I entered a raffle and won an iPod programmed by Thurston Moore filled with black metal songs. He called the mixtape "Old Hate." The songs were great but what was even more interesting was the spreadsheet that accompanied it with all the band names and song titles. I started keeping my own spreadsheet of song titles and began collaging select phrases with my own (and others') adolescent poetry, language culled from World of Warcraft and occult forums and chatrooms, sentences from H.P. Lovecraft and Arthur Machen, and bits of art theory. I had been interested in slang and specialized vocabularies for some time...the language in my first book, Galvanized Iron on the Citizens' Band, was drawn from the somewhat eroticized slang of truckers and miltary personnel. I view Fright Catalog as a sequel of sorts to that book.
What genre does your book fall under?
Poetry
What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?
There are no characters in Fright Catalog. But if there were a books on tape version (and it would have to be tape, not digital, so that the sound would wear out and get a bit warbly) I could imagine Sean Connery as narrator. He would be dressed in his Zardoz costume and sip single malt Scotch and interrupt every now and then to ask, "Is this thing on?" By the end of the book he would be so irritated that he would curse with words only Scots know and throw his headphones on the ground and stalk out of the recording session.
What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?
Wouldn't you love a monsterman to repair the dimensional cluster?
How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?
2 years, 6 months and 3 days. Then it sat around on my hard drive for many years. Finally the design of the book took more than a year.
Who or what inspired you to write this book?
Aram Saroyan, Robert Grenier, Barbara Kruger, Sister Corita Kent, Will Alexander, Colby Poster art, Euronymous, Mark E. Smith, Jenny Holzer, Allen Ruppersberg, H.P. Lovecraft, Lautréamont, Varg Vikernes, Hannah Weiner, Jack Parsons, Marjorie Cameron, Halloween costume catalogs, Friz Quadrata, Graham Harman, children's literature, Azeroth & Draenor (& its shattered remnants, known as Outland...)
What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
I nearly always think about the physical form the book will take while I'm writing it (and sometimes even before I've written anything). In the case of Fright Catalog, the text and the form are inseparable. It's published in full color and every page has a different color combination of text and background. It's also published in the form of a semi-glossy magazine.
Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
Fright Catalog was published by Insert Blanc Press.
Writers I am tagging.
Harold Abramowitz, Amanda Ackerman, Sophie Sills
