Bloggasm

Simon Owens: As a writer who focuses a lot on unconventional fiction, do you have any fears that it will be harder for you to make a large profit from your writing?

Doug Lain: I’m not in the game in order to make a large profit, I’m in the game in order to be loved and respected after I die. I worry that won’t happen, but not because I write unconventional fiction.

Nobody likes conventional fiction anyway, and nobody strives to write such stuff. The biggest hack in the world usually thinks of his work as groundbreaking or unconventional if not in style then in content.

SO: In your story “A Coffee Cup/Alien Invasion,” you try your hand at meta-fiction. Do you tend to read this style of writing and do you plan on using meta-fiction in the future?

DL: I’ve read many metafictional stories that I really liked, for instance Kurt Vonnegut’s “Breakfast of Champions” or “Slaughterhouse Five” along with John Barth’s “Lost in the Funhouse” are for me foundational examples of what metafiction is for and how it works.

“A Coffe Cup/Alien Invasion Story” is not my first foray into the realm of metafiction. My story “The Suburbs of the Citadel of Thought” is also metafictional and is included in my upcoming collection “Last Week’s Apocalypse.” There are risks when you play around with this form. Eileen Gunn, who wrote the introduction for the collection said she worried about my sanity when she read “Suburbs.”

Here’s an excerpt from Eileen’s Intro: “Reading it, I worried sometimes for Doug’s sanity, and other times I feared the imminent demise of his narrative skills. It is a tour de force that manages to be compellingly readable as plotted fiction, while at the same time it meditates on the relationship of the dead to the living and undercuts its own fictive credibility by analyzing the creative process from the viewpoint of a writer who thinks too much.”

SO: As someone who isn’t very prolific, do you find it hard to dive into novel writing?

DL: I don’t find diving into a novel difficult, it’s finishing a novel, not sinking to the bottom, that I have trouble with.

However, I am currently writing a novel and I’m determined to swim to the other side of it. It’s tentatively entitled “The Brainwash Brand.”

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

DL: I can’t think of anything that everyone should read, let alone a blog. Still, Nick Mamatas is always entertaining. I like Counterpunch which is a daily newsletter and not a blog. Tom Tomorrow is a squishy liberal but his blog is often informative. And I read Matt Cheney’s blog often for his take on what’s being written in the genre.

You can find Doug Lain’s blog over here.