An Interview with Author Steven R. Boyett

Interview by Faith Bicknell-Brown

Wild Child Publishing.com © 2005

Everyone has a list of his or her all-time favorite books. If one really thinks about it, at least half of the literature on that list is books read during childhood or teenage years. For me, The Architect of Sleep, by Steven R. Boyett, is one such novel. I read this book when I was in high school. The plot inspired the desire to be as imaginative in my own writing. Recently, I sat writing notes for a new novel and my mind began to wander over the little pieces and disconnected ideas that I mentally store away for such things. For some reason, I began remembering books that inspired me when I was young and The Architect of Sleep came to mind. I looked up the book at Amazon.com and ordered a copy so I could re-read it. This led me to looking for more books by Steven R. Boyett. When I discovered his website, I contacted him. To my delight, the author of one of my most favorite tales allowed me to interview him for WCP.

WCP: You attended the University of Tampa on a writing scholarship, and then quit college to write. If writing is what you wanted to do with your life, and you had a writing scholarship, what prompted this decision?

Steve: I already knew how to write when I went to college. I didn't realize that they don't really teach you much about being a writer - by which I mean having a writing career, the everyday necessities and investments. Mostly what they do is natter. I can get plenty of that at Starbuck's, thanks. At the same time, when I was 17 and starting college, mostly what I wanted to do was meet girls and write. School was hugely in the way of both.

I began Ariel the summer after my first year of college. By the time the second year rolled round, school seemed irrelevant to my writerly ambition. I was failing everything in sight except writing classes. I told my advisor--Prof. Andy Solomon, also my writing teacher and a terrific guy to this day--that I was thinking of quitting. To my astonishment, he replied, "Well, I think you should. There's nothing here for you." So I took his advice, quit, and finished my first novel.

Three relevant postscripts to that story: Four years after I quit, Ariel was published and the university invited me to speak and give a reading. Andy Solomon introduced me by telling the audience, "I want Steve to talk about how he got from where you're sitting to where he is in now in four years." I stood up and looked at everyone and said, "Well, um--I quit."

Second coda: When I was researching my second novel, The Architect of Sleep, I had to confront the considerable sea of my own ignorance about How Things Work. You know--things I would have learned had I stayed in school. Oopsy. I have since become a fiend for research.

Third: It wasn't until literally a decade or so after that, that someone pointed out to me that 90% of the writers in the acclaimed Best American Short Story collections were writing teachers, and that the vast majority of published writers earn their daily bread not by writing but by teaching. I had never wanted to do anything for a living but write, and quit school without earning a degree. Oopsy redux. (I have taught at several schools now and find, somewhat to my surprise, that I like it).

WCP: After you quit college, it was four years until you sold Ariel. What did you do to pay the bills until that first novel sale?

Steve: It actually wasn't four years. It took about 1-1/2 years to write Ariel after I quit school, and then about that long to sell it. From sale to publication was an unusually short time--about ten months, as I recall. So it was four years from quitting school to publication, but notfrom finishing the novel to sale.

Putting it together that way makes me realize how fortunate I really was. People spend decades trying to make a sale. I'd only been trying since about junior high school.

Regarding how I supported myself, I worked at a U-Haul for a while after I quit school. I and my girlfriend at the time had just moved in together, and after I quit the U-Haul job, she supported me for about eight months while I finished the book. I'm eternally grateful for that, though it was tough on my self esteem, to be honest. Let's see, I washed dishes for a little while, and then we moved to Gainesville, Florida, where I worked at a Majik Market (think B-movie 7-Eleven), then as a word-processor operator for the Departments of English and History at the University of Florida. Some of the academics thought it was ironic and funny when Ariel was published, because I'd been entering their weighty tomes into the Lanier No Problem Word Processor (each 5.5" disc of which could hold a whopping 27 pages--1980, golly), and here I had this book come out whose first print run was greater than the cumulative amount of copies most of them would publish in their entire careers. Not that that's any indication of worth, but they (and admittedly I) thought it was a hoot.

WCP: You mention that you took four years off from writing and that's it's a long story. Would you care to elaborate on this?

Steve: I didn't take four years off; I quit, with absolutely no intention of writing again. I'd love to elaborate on it, but it would take a lot of space. Best I can do here is to say that a whole lot of bad stuff, career-wise, happened at around the same time. The one I'll mention was getting supremely fucked by Disney on the Toy Story 2 writing credit, which (besides the inestimable value of having a writing credit on a movie that made $600 million, also kept several hundred thousand dollars from coming my way). I don't have to even pretend to be nice to Disney here, or anywhere, in hope of getting future work from them, because I wouldn't write a movie for Disney now if it were The Steve Boyett Story. They're terrible people, and if their slavishly adoring fans saw the Frazetta-like mound of bodies that vapid mouse dances on--well, you know, they'd probably shrug and pay their ten bucks anyhow. But the Happiest Place on Earth is built on a foundation of anonymous marrow. Aren't you sorry you asked this question now?

WCP: Actually, I've heard similar views and comments about working for Disney before. My grandfather Nutter wrote a historical novel about The Nutter Family and Disney wanted the manuscript and $5,000.00 paid to them up front to publish it. Although this happened some 35-40 years ago, it made warning bells clang in my head when the family told me about it. So, your comments about Disney don't really surprise me.

Steve: So, with that and some other significant things raining on my literary parade, I figured the universe was trying to tell me something about my writing career, and who was I to argue with the universe? I quit writing, and boy, was it odd. People at parties would ask the typical L.A. Question ("...And what do you do?"), and I'd shrug and say I wasn't sure. They figured I must be a drug dealer.

I taught myself to play the didgeridoo--the second-most useless thing imaginable (didgeridoo players themselves being the first). I mean, it's basically a dead tree that produces a single musical note. Not like I'm gonna make a living at it, right? So in a strange way it was very pure because I learned it not from any expectation of gigging, or making a living at it, or wanting other people to like what I was doing with it, but entirely because I liked it and it was fun. Eventually, I wanted to record some didge stuff I was doing, and I learned about digital recording, mostly because it was a far cheaper way to go than acquiring tons of analog equipment. I had a girlfriend into hip-hop, and I got into that, and then I found progressive house music and DJ culture, and buddy, I was home. I started composing, learned about DJing, all kinds of stuff. And it was a blast entirely because I didn't give a shit about sending it out, selling it, being some famous whatever. I didn't even think I was all that great; it was just so much damned fun. To this day, I still haven't recorded any didge because I've been doing all this digital stuff.

One day in the middle of all this, I realized that I was happy. I was enjoying my life. It was enormously sobering to realize that I could be happy doing something other than writing. Really, I'd always believed I'd rather be unhappy as a writer than happy not writing. I guess you need to believe that to have the monomaniacal drive to sit on your ass and fill a six-inch-thick pile of paper with words. But I'm older now and I hear the ticking of the clock, and as an atheist I have to operate by the conviction that, when it comes to your life, you only get one. That being the case, I'd rather be happy. It really was a decision I made: I decided to be happy. But it was so hard to let go. Joseph Campbell famously said that "In surrender lies bliss," and I believed that even before it happened. But I didn't understand it. At first I thought, you know, "Okay, I've quit; where's my lollipop?" Time went by: no lollipop. Eventually, I stopped waiting for a lollipop and set about pursuing interests I'd never even considered because I hadn't thought of myself as being good at anything but writing. Turned out I could do other things. And maybe I was good at them and maybe I wasn't. But they were fun things. Which was the point. The other thing I learned was that I still had some kind of creative engine that operated even if I wasn't writing. I needed to Make Stuff.

One day I got an idea for a novel and I wrote it with absolutely no expectation of publication. I wrote it fast and had a blast. It wasn't until I sent it out that I started feeling the things that had sent me away from writing in the first place--hopes, expectations, all that baggage. That was where I learned the difference between writing and having a writing career. Learned it viscerally, I mean; I already knew it intellectually. Now I have enough distance on that novel to realize that it probably isn't very good, but it was no less fun to write. And in order to write now, I have to approach it with the same sense I did learning the didgeridoo: I got no expectation of outcome here. It's just fun to blow into the damn thing and mess with what comes out. Is that satisfying from a professional career standpoint? Hell, no. Is it satisfying personally? Absolutely. So in the long run, maybe I'm some kind of long-winded amateur; I dunno. But that's how the Didgeridoo Saved My Life.

WCP: While working in the history and English departments at the University of Florida, you began working on Architect. How did the bet come about--the one where the English professors bet that if you ever misspelled a word you would buy them lunch?

Steve: I have this weird idiot savant talent--I rarely misspell words, and somehow the English language seems quite intuitive to me, even though it's an inconsistent mess. But for some reason it's the water I swim in (in which I swim, for all you pinky-extended purists), and I just know how it works. I balance this by being far less mathematically inclined than the average parrot. Anyway, I used to word-process for the English and History Depts. at UF, and it drove me insane that people who taught, published, dissected, and worried about English were often so poor at wielding it. I would proof their books as I typed them, and occasionally this meant being seen as uppity. It annoyed me, and I took to offering to buy lunch if I were ever wrong in a correction. I never did.

WCP: Why do you think that The Architect of Sleep has such a large audience of fans?

Steve: I'm not entirely convinced it does. Certainly not the number Ariel has. I used to say that it was the most infamous unfinished novel ever published in the genre (I leave it to others to decide which genre), but by now that probably isn't true, either. I still get mail on both, though.

Can I take this opportunity to announce that, contrary to literally decades of insisting it would never happen, I am working on a sequel to Ariel? Never say never, and all that. My reluctance to do so is spelled out in detail on my website; all I can say is, I had been carrying around this notion for a few years, and one day I realized it fit perfectly into the world I had created with Ariel, and whiz bang--all the internal planets aligned, and dammit, there I was writing a sequel (well, sort of a sequel) to Ariel. It's called Eloi; I hope to have it finished by the end of this year. It takes place in California 30 years after Ariel.

WCP: You say that Architect isn't finished and you mention on your Web site that parts and pieces are in your head and the rest is in a box on a shelf. Why is the sequel developing so slowly?

Steve: That's not really the case. Architect has a storied publication history, and there's no good and trenchant way to answer that question. As briefly as I can, I had a dispute with the publisher of Architect over the second volume, and I bought it back. No one was going to buy the middle volume of a projected three, especially while the first was in print at another publisher and the third wasn't written. I took what I saw as an opportunity to try to write other kinds of fiction, and as time passed, not only was Architect less relevant to my aims as a writer, I wasn't even the same kind of writer. Talking about these novels is visiting someone half a life ago. I don't remotely write like that now.

That said, I also don't like to start things and not finish them. So, for a fuller account of what happened with Architect and its current status, the best thing I can do is direct readers to http://www.steveboy.com/archetyp.html.

WCP: That is a very informative page regarding the matter, so all Boyett fans should visit the link and read about Architect's history leading to the sequel The Geography of Dreams.

Now, for my next question: You've probably been asked this countless times, but from whence did the initial idea for The Architect of Sleep originate?

Steve: Ariel had begun with the image of a young man walking along an abandoned interstate with a unicorn. That's pretty much a condensation of the feel of the book, really. Architect began with a similar image: a young man walking along a canal bank having some sort of conversation with an upright and intelligent raccoon-like creature. Sometimes you think, "Well, that's kind of dumb", and you move on. But sometimes you're intrigued enough to ask yourself questions about that mental image, and you get answers that lead you further in, and next thing you know, you're sucked into that horrible creative vortex. Stay away, I tellya. Here be dragonz.

I tend, especially in my earlier work, to be a very visual writer. The last ten years or so I've been more obsessed with rhythm, with lyric prose. By some odd coincidence, I've also been somewhat less, um, published.

WCP: You moved from Florida, where you spent a large portion of your life, to Los Angeles, CA, in 1984. Was this decision based on your writing career? It wasn't until 1997 that Pixar/Disney asked you to write the second draft of Toy Story 2. Did you feel that being close to Hollywood would present more opportunities?

Steve: Well, first question first. Gainesville, Florida, was too small for Steven R. Boyett, Boy Genius Writer. I wanted to write and I wanted to be in an environment where I couldn't slack off. At the time, I was much more interested in writing movies than I am now (probably because I now have written them), so L.A. was the logical place to be. I knew writers there I wanted to hang with. Did that, too. Don't like to hang with writers much now. Apart from stand-up comedians, writers are the most approval-seeking and disaffected bunch you will ever meet. Be a nurse. Everybody likes nurses.

Second question: Between 1984, when I moved to L.A., and 1997, when I wrote TS2, I wrote five novels, a book of parodies, many short stories and novellas, four feature-length scripts, god knows how many TV-length scripts, some low-budget animation projects, comic books, news articles, pitched to Star Trek: The Next Generation, The New Twilight Zone, and Freddy's Nightmares when they were in preproduction, and also pitched to I don't know how many other shows. So I may not have been easily visible or easily identifiable, but I definitely wasn't unproductive.

It was during one TV pitch (to Star Trek, (my third pitch there) I realized that I didn't even own a damned television, for christ's sake, and wondered--out loud--why I was wasting these people's time and my own. The scales fell from my eyes. Now (especially after my experiences with Disney, From Whom All Ichor Flows) I find I am indifferent about the whole mess. If someone knocks on my door, that's swell. But I myself ain't knocking.

Mark Twain once wrote, "Fans of sausages and laws should never see either being made." If the film industry had existed at the time, I think he'd have included movies, too.

WCP: Your bibliography has several sales listed for Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Most of today's speculative writers covet a spot within the pages of those two publications. Do you have any tips for writers on how to break into these two markets besides writing a well-crafted tale?

Steve: I'm a bit of an unusual case: I sold my first novel unagented out of the slush pile at age 21. Because I was young and felt it was My Destiny to be A Writer, I didn't realize how amazingly fortunate I was. On the strength of those first few novels and being on panels at conventions, I was at least taken seriously by editors, so that helped me a lot. It does help to know that editors in the genres really do read submissions, and that a good story does have a decent chance of being published. Until I sold my first novel, I was sending things out all the time and getting rejections. Often nice ones. I literally papered a wall of my house with them.

WCP: How did you get involved with the Ren and Stimpy comic?

Steve: In perfectly unspectacular fashion. My amazing genius super talented friend Ken Mitchroney was drawing a comic for Marvel and dropped my name when an editor mentioned needing someone to write an R&S in a hurry. I turned something in, they liked it, and they used me for four comics.

I think the comics I wrote just plain sucked, for two reasons: One, because the editor at Marvel didn't get what I was doing at all and edited the scripts until they made no sense (which I guess isn't necessarily a bad thing when it comes to Ren and Stimpy). Second, because I can't write comics worth a damn. Once upon a time, I was used to considering myself pretty facile as a writer and thought that I could approach just about any medium that dealt with the written form at some point in its process from brain to world. Then Ken asked me if I'd write an issue of his comic Space Ark, the first comic-book script I ever wrote--and man, it was lousy! I was so bad that I ended up sketching out thumbnails and sending those instead of script pages. So, comic-book writers of the world, your jobs are perfectly safe from me.

WCP: What do you think of the publishing industry of today in comparison to how it was ten or even twenty years ago?

Steve: Jesus, how long did you say this interview was allowed to go? Okay, I'll draw in crayon: Multinational corporate conglomerates have created an enormous amount of consolidation on the publishing and retail sides of the industry. This means fewer options, fewer outlets, and an industry driven almost purely by profit margin. I don't see the latter as the great horror some people do; it costs a lot to publish a book, and publishers aren't charities. If a publisher can buy 50 promising new novels for $100,000 each, or one John Grisham novel for $5,000,000, which do you think they'll buy? I'm not sure I blame them, either.

But the time when a publisher would groom a writer over a long term is largely over (there are amazing and heartwarming exceptions). The role of editor has increasingly become that of go-between and decreasingly that of person who edits. Editors are in a tough spot. They generally are people who love books and want to present quality stuff. But they have to justify their expenditures to managers who must in turn justify their expenditures to stockholders. Editors must also deal with writers who don't understand why seven bajillion dollars aren't being spent to promote their latest act of deathless prose. Jesus, I wouldn't want to deal with writers, and I are one.

On the retail side, I've noticed a gradual crowding-out of original fiction in bookstores. The section gets smaller and located farther back every week, it seems. Compounding this is the number of books ostensibly written by celebrities or about celebrities, which have a more assured return on investment but take up a slot in a bookstore some new writer is never gonna see. Media tie-ins seem more prevalent, but mostly in genre. I find it curious that novelizations of movies and TV shows exist almost entirely in science fiction, fantasy, and horror. No one's novelizing Designing Women, or whatever. I have some theories on this. They ain't pretty.

WCP: Selling a first novel without an agent is truly a rare occurrence. Nowadays, trying to land an agent is like trying to reel in Moby Dick on a spider's thread. I know a few authors who feel that agents are a waste of time. I'm beginning to wonder that myself. I had a high-profile agent in NYC who requested one of my manuscripts. She kept in touch with me for two and a half years, giving me the option to peddle my novel to other agents because she was so busy, then after all that time, she decided that she just didn't have time to read it, nor had she even looked at the first page.

Probably 99% of the big publishing houses won't look at a submission unless it comes via an agent, but if a writer can't get an agent's attention, what advice would you offer him or her?

Steve: It depends on what you write. The big publishing houses might not be right for you, you know. If you're a genre writer, you can generally get by without an agent while you're trying to build up sales and, you hope, a reputation. Happily, most genre short-story markets are open to unagented submissions, and the genre publishers look for people making a reputation in the short field. And genre is a place where you can get that kind of attention. Genre readership tends to be both loyal and voracious, and that's a good combination for publishers looking for new writers without crowding out an established stable. It's happened more than a few times that some writer made a splash with short work and a publisher asked, Hey--got anything longer?

Mainstream fiction is a different story--no pun intended. Publishers won't look at you without an agent, agents won't look at you without a publication history. In many ways, the market seems to have become more and more gimmicky. It sure can't hurt to have a good writer friend who has an agent who likes him and will do him a favor. If you don't have such a friend, it can't hurt to go to the right parties and make one. Universities are good for that. Or you can spend money on workshops that may not necessarily do your writing a lot of good, but can do your career some good if you can get a teaching/speaking agent or editor to say, "Gee, sounds interesting--you should send it to me." Just remember that every other writer there is trying to do the same thing. But I've had such an odd and bass-ackwards career that I'm almost certainly the wrong person to give any advice on this topic.

A good agent is definitely worth the commission, not only because the agent will likely earn enough additional advance money or royalty rates to justify his percentage, but also because agents act as shit magnets for you and your publisher's venting about one another, leaving you and the publisher free to work on the written words and not worry overly about the spoken ones. I wish I'd had a better understanding of how to effectively utilize an agent early on in my career. That said--well, I've sold more of my novels than any agent has, so I'm kind of on both sides of the issue here. It's worth keeping in mind, though, that the first person your prospective agent sells something to is you.

WCP: Publishers only want the authors who make big bucks for them, but eventually those writers will become past tense. Many writers believe that electronic books will replace print. Do you foresee a big change for the publishing industry when you look at how much this business has changed concerning media and who the big houses will publish?

Steve: It's not as if moneybags writers are a dying breed. There'll probably always be some kind of grocery-line novel that sells unreasonably well. And plenty of publishers also like writers who are feathers in their cap--award-winners who don't necessarily sell a lot. Plus, I know of several occasions where publishers printed writers simply because they liked their work, and that's heartening, honestly.

The bigger issue is whether publishers themselves will become past tense. But that's capitalistic evolution, isn't it? Adapt or die. And some will and some won't.

Insofar as writers and electronic media are concerned, I think writers tend to be Luddites who fear change. I was initially resistant to the notion, but felt that it wouldn't hurt to have some of my work published in digital form. Scorpius Digital Books reprinted Ariel with a restored chapter, some very slight revision, and a foreword and afterword by yours truly, not to mention an amazing cover by Rob Alexander. They also printed a short-story collection, Orphans, that would have been hard to get a hard-print publisher to touch. So, I'm a happy camper about that.

I think that eventually some digital form of publishing will take precedence, but what's preventing that now are the issues you see with digital music--common format, outmoded business models, reliable methods for profiting from an easily disseminated and duplicated product, how to make consumers aware of your books when the field has become crowded due to technological accessibility.

When electronic publishing comes up with its version of the iPod, things will definitely get interesting. If I were a print publisher, I would be keeping a very sharp eye on the digital music industry right now. I've been wondering when and if issues of intellectual property will begin to affect publishing in the way they have music. Sooner or later someone's going to produce the first sampled novel--a novel of lines from other novels. It's gonna be an interesting time, possibly in the ancient Chinese curse context.

WCP: But what about audio books? I often wonder if those will eventually win over e-books because--let's face it--there are a lot of people who are either too busy or too lazy to pick up a book and read it from cover to cover. My oldest son is a classic example. He will listen to a story before he'll pick up a book and read it. (However, he's one of those teens that will remember everything he hears versus anything he might read.) In addition, so many of today's kids can barely read by the time they graduate. My son can read, but he still has trouble reading well, and no matter how much the teachers or I work with him, he continues to stumble over words. He loves to have someone read to him; one of his current teachers does this for her class every morning, and then he can recite the entire story to you. I see him as an adult borrowing audio books at the local library or joining one of those audio book clubs.

Steve: Well, you know, The Odyssey is one of the first audio books, when you think about it, and I don't see that it's done much harm. In fact, I own the Ian McKellan reading of it. (I think these were basically rap songs, by the way, which is why I think it's funny when I hear attempts to illegitimize rap. There's no such thing as a inherently bad medium, only bad practitioners of it.)

Some writing is meant to be read with the ear as well as the eye. I'd kill to get hold of a good reading of the John Ciardi translation of The Inferno. I've got the full version of Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses. It's got some of the most beautiful stretches of language I've ever heard. Christ, I stayed up for 36 hours to tape the Irish Public Radio broadcast of Joyce's Ulysses.

I don't think that the printed word is threatened by the recorded one. Maybe by a bunch of other stuff, like an increasing cultural attention-deficit syndrome and attendant stimulation addiction, but not by audio books. I think it's a national embarrassment that so many kids can't read, but I'm more inclined to blame a baby boom generation with a sense of selfish entitlement and an oddly oxymoronic fascist agenda of political correctness that conspires to make everyone except themselves responsible for their own behavior and the behavior of their children. There are a lot of engines of distraction operating that compete with the comparatively less stimulating medium of the printed word. And schools in dense populations have been reduced to little more than babysitters being dogma-compliant to get government funding. But now I'm geezing, to use my friend Mary Kern's word.

WCP: Do you feel that there are truly talented writers out there whom publishers and agents overlook, or do you think that the industry is inundated by countless wannabes who kill the chances of the gifted few?

Steve: I think there are truly talented writers whom publishers and agents overlook, and I think the industry is inundated by countless wannabes. There's an implicit assumption in the question that I find I used to agree with but don't anymore: That writing talent helps ensure publication. There are amazingly talented writers that no one will buy if they are published. There are lousy writers people gladly plunk down money for. Commercial viability has nothing to do with talent, and vice versa. Like the frustrations that accompany behavioral psychology (which is a science attempting to quantify an abstraction), this is frustrating to amazingly talented but wholly unmarketable writers because the major quantifiable measure of success as a writer is number of copies sold and/or amount of money made. But that's business, and it's got little to do with a publisher feeling it's his civic duty to present a beautiful piece of art to the world no matter how much it ruins the family publishing fortune.

Publishing is a business. Publishers want great books among their offerings, but they want to make money whatever they offer. And while writing for a living is a business (okay, a profession), writing itself is not. I've read books--hell, I've written books--where I've thought, you know, I absolutely love this, but who the hell else would pay for it? I used to sort of assume that the universe owed me a living because I was a gifted writer. Or that a good book will find a home. Guess what? Nobody owes you something just because your book is good. If you can't accept that, you're gonna have one frustrating career. At least, I've heard that you will. I mean, it happened to a friend of mine once.

WCP: What do you think of some of the latest literature crazes such as the Harry Potter series?

Steve: I think even having something we can call a "literature craze" is a blessing. In a sense, I guess that's a cynical viewpoint, huh? My curmudgeonly aphoristic self wants to say that I think reading the worst novel is better than playing the best video game. Maybe I even believe that, too. But I think the Harry Potter books are fun. I've read 'em. Not stupendously plotted, but very inventive. But she's just lucky, you know? Diane Duane wrote So You Want to Be A Wizard? at least a full decade before these. When (and if) Eloi, the Ariel sequel, comes out, I'll probably be accused of being influenced by Rowling, too, even though I was dealing with fantasy in urban settings in 1979. Some people tell me I invented it. I dunno. It's probably safe to say that J.K. Rowling never read me, wasn't influenced by me.

Things like this are usually a double-edged sword. On the one hand, I think anything that gets kids reading is terrific. On the other hand, it tends to take attention away from (a) similar (and often prior) things that deserve as much attention, and (b) different things that won't get attention because (1) they aren't like that Harry Potter stuff, and (2) the Harry Potter stuff has consumed the resources that might be available to more and varied works. In a weird kind of way, Harry Potter is to publishing what Wal-Mart is to the U.S. economy. But Harry Potter seems to have made other works accessible that might not otherwise have been so promoted--Lemony Snicket comes to mind, and Diane Duane's Wizard books have been reprinted. So my cynicism may be a little hyperbolic.

WCP: In all my interviews, I'm curious about what authors the interviewee enjoys reading and why. Who is your favorite author(s)?

Steve: Cormac McCarthy, Cormac McCarthy, and Cormac McCarthy. He's pretty much ruined reading fiction for me, because after reading him, other writers are like drinking tap water after fine wine. I'm in love with the English language, with writers who will write something just because it sounds good, not because it even makes rational sense. Soliloquies. Pure narrative, I call it. McCarthy is absolutely fearless about it.

I'm actually just coming out of a period during which I didn't read much fiction at all. I'm talking years here. I used to read a book a day. Now I go to Barnes and Noble and think, holy shit, there are 150,000 books here, and I don't want to read any of them. Grumpy middle age approacheth, I suppose.

Robert A. Heinlein, H.G. Wells, Harlan Ellison, Edgar Allen Poe, Ray Bradbury were childhood favorites. I just went through a bunch of Heinlein again and found I still enjoyed reading him, and still appreciated his phenomenal oblique way of building an entire society, but had to filter him a bit.

At the moment, I'm rediscovering Raymond Chandler and loving every letter of it. I love James Joyce; that kid has a future, I tell ya. Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren literally changed my life when it came out. After I send this off to you I'll probably remember 35 other writers I'm nuts about.

WCP: Of all your published work, what is the most precious to you, the story that you feel the most connection to? Any special reason?

Steve: Writers are supposed to say that their stories are like children and you don't play favorites and you like different ones for different reasons and the best one is the one you're working on right now. Okay, I said that. And it's true. But it's also true that my favorite story is probably "Emerald City Blues." In my collection <Orphans, I wrote nearly five pages about that story in the Afterword. I just think it's an audacious idea executed in about the right tone, a tour de force that took some chops to pull off--especially at nineteen, which was how old I was when I wrote the first draft. I've done more mature stories, and more lyrical stories, and certainly stories with better characters. But "Emerald City Blues" is a distillation of a theme that permeates my work: The collision of reality and fantasy, and its effect upon society in general and the human heart in particular. It uses the trappings of fantasy to question why and how you use fantasy, why people would rather flee the world than dust off their hands and try fixing it. As I've mentioned elsewhere, people have been upset with me for nuking Oz, but not for nuking Omaha. But Omaha exists. The nukes exist. Which is the point of the story.

In that way, "Emerald City Blues" represents my flavor--or at least the flavor I try to impart--better than any of my other stories. It's really funny and horrifying and heartbreaking, all at the same time. It took a lot of research, but more important, my ability--I think even my soul, to put on airs (oh, quelle surprise)--had to grow enough to do justice to the story between first and final drafts. Which, by the way, was probably six years.

I recently did a very nice spoken-word recording of it, with wonderful music by Maureen Halderson. Send me ten bucks and I'll mail you a copy. Heh.

Funny--in preparing for that recording, I was a bit startled to realize that even though I'm proud of the story, my style has definitely moved on. It's pyrotechnic and show-offy, but some of that is a young turk waving his sword around and yelling, Look at me! Look how good I am! In my ripe middle age I've learned--I hope I've learned--that Musashi wisdom that the deadliest sword is the one not drawn.

If "Emerald City Blues" is my favorite story, "Drifting Off the Coast of New Mexico" is probably my best story. (There is a difference, ya know.) It's about Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn as old men making a last stand during the Mexican Revolution after being talked into joining up by Ambrose Bierce. It's narrated by Huck, and his voice as an old man just took me over during the story's writing. It's about the price of growing up, and the fact that (to quote Tom in the story), "It ain't a world for boys no more." Yet another Boyett Bittersweet Special.

WCP: What is your current goal as a writer?

Steve: I think this answer might vary enormously depending on when you asked it. Tomorrow I might say something completely different, you know? Which means I'm gonna have to answer it and just live with being unsatisfied with that answer. That's one of the pitfalls of writing--often it only represents a moment, but that moment's accessible for a while.

My goals right now are fairly pragmatic: Publish, stay published, make a living from publication. Currently this translates as: Finish Eloi (the sequel to Ariel), finish The Architect of Sleep just to have done with the poor sad thing, and keep going. Sounds simple, but that doesn't mean it's easy. Like yoga. Or Go. Or playing didgeridoo.

Oddly, I find my goals aren't esthetic ones. I know who I am, as a writer, as a human being. I know I'm better than I was and trust that I'll get better as I go, and I try not to be too hard on myself for not being there now (no offense to Baba Ram Dass). I don't feel as much need to impress anyone, or even myself, as I used to. I can live with people not liking something I've done. Even more important--to me, anyhow--I can live with me not liking something I've done. I have a lot of paints on my palette. Some I was born with, some I acquired. Talent is being able to use them ably, experience is knowing which ones to use, wisdom is knowing which ones not to. Of course, I may be full of crap.

WCP: What would be your most important advice for the serious aspiring author?

Steve: Quit. Run. Otherwise, know your strengths and weaknesses. Work on the weaknesses; I'd rather fall off a high wire than walk a sidewalk with amazing grace. Know what you want to write, learn about the publishing industry, and understand that there may be a difference. Exercise. Use your life in your work. Acquire a Zen-master ability to embrace paradox, e.g., always be professional but don't write only for money unless you aren't emotionally attached to your work. Try to remember that even when it's tearing your heart out, it's really a lot of fun to make stuff up. Listen to the angels and devils on your shoulders, but remember that you're driving. Revise mercilessly. Love the language. Know that you're responsible for every word. Read a lot. Think beyond first publication. Write everything through the lens of Why am I telling you this? Don't drink decaf.

WCP: Oh, how I have often wished I could just quit writing! Alas, I can't, it's part of my genetic makeup; therefore, I continue to subject myself to constant punishment from the publishing industry! LOL! Still, I concur wholeheartedly with your advice on this issue.

And as for decaf, I think it's a heinous sin for the dedicated writer to drink it. Typing with caffeine jitters is part of the fun! (grin)

Anyway, you have some unusual interests such as Tuvan throat singing, anything related to the Titanic, paper marbling (the site I visited has exquisite examples), and martial arts, which, although not unusual, takes a lot of concentration and dedication. How did your interest in these topics arise?

Steve: Jeez, how does anyone's interest in something arise? I mean, with most people it's a combination of exposure and the striking of a responsive chord. Tuvan throat singing was weird and interesting; I loved it from the second I first heard it (like a lot of people, my first exposure to it was on a Nova episode about Richard Feynman entitled "Tuva or Bust"). So I taught myself how to do it and met musicians from Tuva and have had some terrific adventures as a result. The Titanic is too large a subject to explain here, except to say that the ocean scares the living crap out of me (it's another planet on our planet, for chrissake), and that I am also completely obsessed with commercial airline crashes.

Paper marbling I could write a book about and one day shall. It came about when a friend and I wanted to open a booth at the Southern California Renaissance Faire entirely to meet chicks, and so we pretty much scammed our way in and taught ourselves how to marble. We succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. Didn't sell much paper, though. Oh, well.

Martial arts was something that just got into my blood. I don't really talk about it much; you'd hardly know I practiced it for decades (well--except for its presence in some of my fiction). I started Tae Kwon Do when I was 13, and it was the only athletic activity I practiced for at least 20 years, that and Aikido. Since then I've lifted weights and played racquetball and practiced yoga, but martial arts was always my first love. Someone like me ought to take martial arts. I have a big mouth, and I don't like to be pushed.

During the four years that I quit writing, I learned to play the didgeridoo, began composing electronic music (sorta danceable pretentious early Mike Oldfield, if that helps), and learned to DJ. I'm still learning all of this. I probably always will be.

I think the most valuable advice I ever got was from my friend Ken Mitchroney, whose life is certainly an example of the benefits of living by this advice: Never be a fan of anything. Learn how to do it, and get to know the people who are great at it, and then do it with them. With didge, DJing, writing, Tuvan throat singing, I got to know some of the best people in the world at it. They became friends. When you're a practitioner and not a fan, suddenly you aren't a consumer, you're someone who shares their passion. We trade jokes and emails and booze and ideas, and my life and my art are richer for it.

WCP: Okay, here's an odd question. I have read that you are an avid coffee drinker. I've noticed that writers have their routine writing accompaniments. Some writers are smokers and must have that cigarette lit as they write. Others need a drink, soda, or even a cat sprawled across the desktop. I even have a friend who can't write unless he is at the local bar with chaos going on around him. He takes his laptop, some pens, paper, and a dictionary, plus has that ever-present cup of coffee at his side, too. My writing addiction/companion is coffee as well. There's almost always a cup of java sitting on my desk. Is your coffee-drinking derived from the fact that you're a writer? Any special flavors?

Steve: I didn't drink coffee at all until I started an office job in my twenties. I was never a morning person, and I just couldn't function in the morning. I went from one cup with cream and sugar in the morning to two pots a day to espresso. I'm already pretty hyper, so people thought I was coked up all the time. Since I think anything worth doing is worth overdoing, I educated myself about coffee and got all snobby about it. This is way before Starbuck's showed up and metastasized across the globe. A few years ago, I cut way back on my coffee consumption because I'd like to have a bladder and kidney function in my old age. I still have to have my two cups and newspaper in the morning. I've always been eighty years old that way. And besides, Change is Bad.

For what it's worth, my favorite coffee is pure Kona. Not blend; they're allowed to call a coffee Kona blend if it only has something like 20% Kona beans. Pure Kona tastes great and is the lowest-acid coffee out there. I like it better than Jamaican Blue Mountain, which has actually been degraded over the years. Told you I was a snob.

WCP: I have to say, Steve, this gave me a good chuckle. As for my personal favorite coffee, I adore a good hazelnut-flavored coffee, but a CA friend of mine sends me a pine-nut variety that has me spoiled.

Steve: Ahh, why sugar-coat your vices? I used to have a cup beside me constantly when I wrote. Not so much anymore. Crunchy stuff. Gotta have the crunchy stuff.

WCP: Any special announcements, appearances, etc. that you would like to tell our readers about?

Steve: I mentioned that I'm working on a sequel to Ariel called Eloi. I'm shooting for end of the year to have it finished. When I've put some putty in the cracks and sanded it a bit, and it's learned not to drool on itself in public, I'll probably be going to more conventions to give readings and be on panels and exercise my atrophied social skills. My Website, steveboy.com, has an "Appearances" section. It's the only page on the Internet with dust on it.

Lately I've gotten this jones to DJ dances at science fiction conventions. I've gigged decent-sized venues before. I spin progressive house and tribal music, and I'll be spinning my Sci Fi Hi Fi show at the EnigmaCon May 28. Maybe I should post my gigs on my site, too. For some reason, I've tended to keep my interests fairly separate. I wonder why that is.

I'd like to thank people who've read me and enjoyed me over the years. Heck, I'd like to thank people who read me and didn't enjoy me.

WCP: You've invested a lot of time and patience into this interview, Steve. Thank you so much for talking with me and giving us a glimpse into your portion of the writing/art world. I wish you the highest success with your newly released Ariel, <Orphans, and the upcoming sequel to Ariel. Maybe we'll get to chat again sometime when the latter is released.

Steve: Thanks very much! When--and if--Eloi is published, I'd be delighted.