Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Saturday, June 18, 2011
Sunday, June 5, 2011
Good morning! Today we have an interview with the talented and prolific William Meikle.
Again, thanks to Eric S. Brown for bringing NSP another excellent interview.
Q: How did you get interested in writing?
A: I didn't chose writing, it chose me. The urge to write is more of a need, a similar addiction to the one I used to have for cigarettes and still have for beer.
I -nearly- became a scientist. I have a degree in Botany, specialising in the archaeological history that can be gleaned from studying peat bogs. But I couldn't get a grant for a PhD, then I followed a woman to London and ended up by accident more than design in a career in IT. I actually took it seriously for a while, but the need to write slowly welled up and subsumed it a few years back.
When I was at school my books and my guitar were all that kept me sane in a town that was going downhill fast. The steelworks shut and employment got worse. I -could- have started writing about that, but why bother? All I had to do was walk outside and I'd get it slapped in my face. That horror was all too real.
So I took up my pen and wrote. At first it was song lyrics, designed (mostly unsuccessfully) to get me closer to girls.
I tried my hand at a few short stories but had no confidence in them and hid them away. And that was that for many years.
I didn't get the urge again until I was past thirty and trapped in a very boring job. My home town had continued to stagnate and, unless I wanted to spend my whole life drinking (something I was actively considering at the time), returning there wasn't an option.
Back in the very early '90s I had an idea for a story... I hadn't written much of anything since the mid-70s at school, but this idea wouldn't leave me alone. I had an image in my mind of an old man watching a young woman's ghost.
That image grew into a story, that story grew into other stories, and before I knew it I had an obsession in charge of my life.
People write for different reasons: some want to make a lot of money, some want to exorcise some personal demon, others because they are driven and can't imagine doing anything else. So "accomplishment" is relative. The most important thing is to be able to clearly convey what you want to say to your readers (and if that means using a split infinitive, then so be it.). How you do that, your style, is what you have to work at.
For me, I want to entertain, and if people like my work, I've succeeded.
Q: You've written a lot of genres, do you have a favorite?
A: It's all about the struggle of the dark against the light. The time and place, and the way it plays out is in some ways secondary to that. And when you're dealing with archetypes, there's only so many to go around, and it's not surprising that the same concepts of death and betrayal, love and loss, turn up wherever, and whenever, the story is placed.
My favorite genre is the occult detective - they may seem to use the trappings of crime solvers, but get involved in the supernatural. William Hjortsberg's Falling Angel (the book that led to the movie Angel Heart) is a fine example, an expert blending of gumshoe and deviltry that is one of my favorite books. Likewise, in the movies, we have cops facing a demon in Denzel Washington's Fallen that plays like a police procedural taken to a very dark place.
And even further back, in the "gentleman detective" era, we have seekers of truth in occult cases in John Silence and Carnacki. Even Holmes himself came close to supernatural conclusions at times.
I love exploring this sub-genre this for myself, in the Midnight Eye Files stories, in a series of Carnacki stories, and I even got a chance to have Holmes fight a Necromancer in Edinburgh in an anthology appearance in Gaslight Grotesque. It seems there is quite a market for this kind of merging of crime and supernatural, and I intend to write a lot more of it.
Q: What do you credit your success to?
A: Persistence, a lot of writing and a will to entertain. That, and a thick skin to deal with rejection.
Q: Do you have any favorite writers who inspired you and if so, who are they?
A: Tarzan is the second novel I remember reading. (The first was Treasure Island, so I was already well on the way to the land of adventure even then.) I quickly read everything of Burroughs I could find. Then I devoured Wells, Dumas, Verne and Haggard. I moved on to Conan Doyle before I was twelve, and Professor Challenger’s adventures in spiritualism led me, almost directly, to Dennis Wheatley, Algernon Blackwood, and then on to Lovecraft. Then Stephen King came along.
There’s a separate but related thread of a deep love of detective novels running parallel to this, as Conan Doyle also gave me Holmes, then I moved on to Christie, Chandler, Hammett, Ross MacDonald and Ed McBain, reading everything by them I could find.
Mix all that lot together, add a dash of ZULU, a hefty slug of heroic fantasy from Howard, Leiber and Moorcock, a sprinkle of fast moving Scottish thrillers from John Buchan and Alistair MacLean, and a final pinch of piratical swashbuckling. Leave to marinate for fifty years and what do you get?
A psyche with a deep love of the weird in its most basic forms, and the urge to beat the shit out of monsters.
Q: You have out a Yeti book. Please tell us about it.
A: Vikings vs Yeti. What more do you need to know? :-) Actually, they're ALMA. Same beasts, different name.
For Tor and Skald this is their first Viking raid, their minds are full of thoughts of honor and glory. What awaits them are beasts - huge, hairy and fanged, the Alma will not suffer intruders in their domain. When the Vikings slaughter a female Alma they soon find themselves in the middle of a bloody revenge. Now they must stand and be counted, for their destinies await in the mountains, where the hairy ones dance.
Big beasties fascinate me.
Some of that fascination stems from early film viewing. I remember being taken to the cinema to see The Blob. I couldn't have been more than seven or eight, and it scared the crap out of me. The original incarnation of Kong has been with me since around the same time. Similarly, I remember the BBC showing re-runs of classic creature features late on Friday nights, and THEM! in particular left a mark on my psyche. I've also got a Biological Sciences degree, and even while watching said movies, I'm usually trying to figure out how the creature would actually work in nature -- what would it eat? How would it procreate? What effect would it have on the environment around it?
On top of that, I have an interest in cryptozoology, of creatures that live just out of sight of humankind, and of the myriad possibilities that nature, and man's dabbling with it, can throw up.
Back at the movies again, another early influence was the Kirk Douglas / Tony Curtis movie THE VIKINGS. There's that, and when I was very young I would be taken ten miles over the hill to the shore at Largs on the Ayrshire coast. There's a memorial there to "The Battle of Largs" where Scots fought off Vikings. The story was told to me so often it sunk into my soul, and as kids we spent many a day in pretend swordfights as Vikings (when it wasn't Zorro -- but that's another story :-)
All those things were going round in my head when I first sat down to write BERSERKER. And there might be some of THE THIRTEENTH WARRIOR in there too.
Q: Will it ever be out in paperback for those like me who don't own a Kindle, Nook, etc.?
A: Short answer,yes. Generation Next Publications are doing a series of FLIPIT paperbacks, with two short novels in each, one upside down in relation to the other. My novels THE INVASION and THE VALLEY are the first in the series. BERSERKER is coming soon, once we decide what the other book to accompany it will be.
Q: What's your take on the whole zombie trend?
A: There's something cathartic about seeing everything being torn down. It also makes for amusing daydreams when the boss is being a tool or when the commute seems to take forever. So there's that, and there's also the sheer spectacle of the thing... the same reason people like to slow down to look at car crashes. There's a "there but the for grace of God" vibe you get when watching or reading of the world being torn down.
Plus, zombies aren't as far -out there- as other more supernatural monsters. People find it easier to imagine it could actually happen. Indeed the lack of -soul- in today's society makes it seem almost an inevitability.
The success of the Zombie phenomenon is testament to the power of the images that Romero tapped into all those years ago now... and I can't see it going away any time soon.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I'm about halfway through CARNACKI: THE DARK ISLAND, a short Edwardian ghostbusting novel that's turning into a homage to H G Wells, William Hope Hodgson and H P Lovecraft.
I'm also about halfway through a sci-fi novel that's also Lovecraftian and a throwback to the Space Operas I loved as a kid.
Q: Where can folks find out more about you and your work on the web?
A: I get around. I hang about
On Facebook here: http://www.facebook.com/williammeikle
On my blog here: http://williammeikle.blogspot.com/
And I have a site with all the book details here: http://www.williammeikle.com/
Q: And I ask everyone this, Marvel or DC?
A: D.C. I started reading them in about 1964, and BATMAN is the man for me. I also loved Green Lantern. Marvel's flawed heroes were all well and good, but there's just something iconic about the bat that kept me going back for more.
William Meikle is a Scottish writer with ten novels published in the genre press
and over 200 short story credits in thirteen countries. He is the author of the
ongoing Midnight Eye series among others, and his work appears in a number of
professional anthologies.
His current bestseller is the sci-fi novel THE INVASION which reached #2 in the
Kindle Sci-fi charts on Amazon.com and #4 in Kindle horror.
He lives in a remote corner of Newfoundland with icebergs, whales and bald
eagles for company. In the winters he gets warm vicariously through the lives of
others in cyberspace, so please check him out at williammeikle.com.
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