Bloggasm

You can find Ben Peek’s blog over here.

Ben Peek is a Sydney based author who writes strange and odd things. His fiction has appeared most recently in the anthology Leviathan Four: Cities, edited by Forrest Aguirre, issue seven of the ‘zine Full Unit Hookup, issue four of the online zine Shadowed Realms, and in the first volume of The Year’s Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy. Next year his dystopian novel, Black Sheep, will be published by Prime Books.

He keeps a blog called The Urban Sprawl Project, named after a zine he created. It’s a free flowing thing where he tosses ideas about literature around, discusses film and tv, and occasionally talks to an Imaginary Jesus. Just because. His blog has been called honest and mean. The two go together, by all accounts.

Simon Owens: Many American short fiction writers complain about the constant decline of short fiction markets every year. How does this compare to the Australian short fiction market?

Ben Peek: It’s sort of like comparing an aging, healthy individual with a corpse, really.

The American short fiction markets are actually markets that Australians look at, simply because everything is so skint round here, so their decline also has an impact on us. However, the comparison can’t really be made between the two markets, since the bulk of Australian short fiction is published in backyard independent presses that manage print runs of three to five hundred. There are larger markets out there, but they’re usually part of something else–a short story in Woman’s Weekly, for example. Rarely dedicated, and there’s basically no large, professional paying short fiction market out here to sustain anyone. Instead, everything is done for love. So when the fiction markets decline in Australia, you can actually feel the physical loss of the publication, the loss of people, and the loss in content that is produced that year. In the States I’m sure it’s much the same, but over here the line between having a short fiction market and not having one is something you can see a bit more readily.

So, basically: Australia: a twitching corpse. America: healthy old person.

SO: Does it frustrate you that there aren’t many places that review short fiction?

BP: Not really.

I think people tend to view short fiction all wrong. Reviewing it more isn’t a problem, and the people you get to review it at the moment generally don’t know much about reviewing, so you get a bunch of people cutting their teeth on that. Which is fine, really, but I don’t it needs to be reviewed more. It needs, instead, new readers. That’s what it needs. Once you get people to read it, they’ll talk about it more. How do you get people to read it? That’s a trick, but I figure you might as use the mentality for sitting in front of the telly. So instead of watching some poorly designed and written show, you say, ‘Here’s something to escape into for thirty minutes. Skip the President’s speech. Fucker’s just lying to you anyway. Read this. Wrestling is in an hour.’

Fiction for your disposable time. Disposable fiction. People hate it when I call it that

SO: Do you ever fear that American editors won’t understand any Australian references in your fiction?

BP: Nah, not at all. We’re all one big happy world out there, and America and Australia are both Western countries. So I just don’t worry about it and, really, there’s plenty of reasons not to buy a story, even one of mine, before my nationality or the setting of the story comes into it.

SO: What are the five blogs everyone should be reading (besides your own)?

BP: Five?

I’m giving you one, because one is a rational, sane recommendation. Yes. That blog is PostSecret .

It’s quite a popular blog, so a lot of people have heard about it, no doubt. But what I like about it, is that here exists a global community art project. It’s primarily western, sure, but you can see non english cards appearing, and I can only hope that’ll grow as it goes along. The cards people make for it are funny, touching, sad, and odd, among other things. It’s the full range of human emotion, especially when related to the secrets you carry inside yourself.

So go check it out.

My secret is that I’m cooler than Jesus. It’s not hard. You just don’t do Easter.