Bloggasm

You can find Nick Mamatas’ journal over here.

Nick Mamatas is the author of the Lovecraftian Beat road novel MOVE UNDER GROUND (Night Shade Books, 2004), which was nominated for and lost both the Bram Stoker and International Horror Guild awards for First Novel in 2005. In 2006, his short novel UNDER MY ROOF will be published by Soft Skull Press, and the anthology SPICY SLIPSTREAM STORIES, which he co-edited with Jay Lake, will be published by Wheatland Press. He lives in Vermont.

Simon Owens: Your story “Withdraw Withdraw!” is arguably one of your best pieces of short fiction. But one of its major plot points is based on current events (Abu Ghraib torture) that a person ten years from now might not know about. Do you ever worry about your fiction being dated? Do you think this story will be just as enjoyable if people don’t get the reference years from now?

Nick Mamatas: I think Abu Gharib will be one of those cultural touchstones for a generation or so. People still say of someone with a fanatic loyalty for something “He drank the Kool-Aid”, nearly thirty years after the Jonestown mass suicide, for example. And supposedly they didn’t even drink Kool-Aid but FlaVor-Aid(r). The culture concept has overwhelmed the facts of the event. Obsolescence is something writers who hope to read should be concerned about, that much is true. I recently read Dennis Etchison’s DARKSIDE and it fairly reeks of 1983; I liked it, but there was something cloying about being so steeped in what was once so current, but that could only be navigated via nostalgia in 2005.

On the other hand, stuff falls out of print so quickly that such concerns are a bit presumptuous. Magazines and paperbacks are stripped and pulped after a month or three, websites fail and their URLs are harvested by low-rent portals or porn companies after a few years, and even hardcovers end up in the bargain bin and finally a street vendor/crack addict’s blanket on 6th Avenue along with a broken tape recorder and some Peaches & Herbs LPs. Life is long, art is short. One can’t worry too much. At best, one can capture a moment in time so completely that educators find it useful to instruct children with.

SO: You write for a number of high-profile nonfiction magazines. How high do you think the cross-over rate is for your readership?

NM: Fairly low, though there are some exceptions. I’ve sold short fiction to some of the same markets that I’ve written features for, so I’ve had the four-digit short story pay-days and the six-digit readerships thanks to magazines like Razor and Spex (a German music mag, sort of a Spin analog). But for the most part, people who read features in the Village Voice, or even in book magazines like The Writer, Pages, and Poets and Writers don’t rush out and buy books based on an author’s bio at the end of some article.

SO: How successful do you think your blog has been at promoting your work?

NM: Pretty successful. I like publishing short fiction online as a URL on my blog can guarantee a few extra dozen readers. Even links to other articles and blogs I’ve put up have enough effect that I occasionally get thank-you-for-linking emails from the owner or author of the site I linked to. Somewhat less frequently I get aggrieved emails or comments on my blog from the author — these comments tend to boil down “Hey, you’re saying stuff about me; I didn’t put this on the Internet in front of 500 million people so YOU could look at it!”

The blog has certainly sold some books, and I suspect that it works as well as it does because the blog ISN’T one of those “writer’s life” blogs. I write about writing, of course, but also about politics, the media, pro wrestling, my dog, the rare occasions when I leave the house, etc. I was online for years before I decided to become a writer, so I didn’t see any reason to change my behavior or craft some sort of writerly persona once I started writing.

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

NM: I don’t think everyone should be reading my blog, or any other blog,
really. Buy a damn book once in a while. Having said that, I regularly read the following:

1. Leninology

2. Lee Goldberg’s “A Writer’s Life”

3. Hal Duncan’s Notes From the Geek Show, which I especially recommend for the unemployed since the entries take a while to read.

4. Matt Cheney’s Mumpsimus, which has improved greatly since Cheney has recently been contractually obligated to mention me once a month, and

5. “Gutbloom”