We are very excited to announce our newest interview with Eriberto Oriol. . Eriberto was kind enough to let us be the very first to release the pictures he took of Blink-182’s set of their music video “Down” were Eriberto shot his son Estevan Oriol directing the video. Please take some time to read the interview here to learn more about Eriberto, his career, history, and lifestyle. Get educated!
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
INTERVIEW: ERIBERTO ORIOL
Sunday, March 14, 2010
CANTERBURY interview 05/03/2010
Canterbury are a band on the up. They have recently been getting positive press across the board with their poppy brand of post hardcore modern day emo style rock (a description I‘m sure they won‘t thank me for but it does ring true). I met up with the two front men an hour or so before they took the stage at their recent show at the Westcoast Bar in Margate.
PW: So can you introduce yourselves
L: I’m Luke and I sing and play the keyboards in Canterbury
M: And I am Mike and I sing and I play the guitars in Canterbury, well, just one of the guitars. The other is played by James.
PW: Fist off and a most obvious question really. Why name yourselves Canterbury? Have you links to the City?
L: We knew we would be asked this question here of all places being so close to Canterbury. We haven’t ever played in Canterbury and this is the closest we’ve come.
M: We are saving playing in Canterbury for a better time I think.
L: We’re going to say for now that the reason is that we checked an online census and the City in England with the most Luke’s, Mike’s, James’, Scott’s and Bens is Canterbury. That’s the one we are going to give to Margate today.
PW: That’s the thing before I heard your music with a name such as yours I imagines either a progggy 70’s influenced sound or a straight up hardcore din? I didn’t expect at all what came out of the speakers. Canterbury is an odd choice of moniker don’t you think?
M: It’s largely to do with being just a pleasing word, when it’s written down, when it’s spoken.
PW: What about on a Google search, that’s got to be a tricky one?
M: We’ve only just got on there, if you type Canterbury now I think our YouTube video for Set You Right or our MySpace is the fourth entry that comes up now. We’ve beaten the City… almost (Laughs).
L: It’s working towards a sponsorship deal with Cathedral City Cheese
M: And the rugby team deal.
L: They can make us a nice kit. An away kit sponsored by Canterbury.
PW: You’ve been together since school and being so young in age have you found it difficult being taken seriously and because you are still a tight unit a few years down the line do you see peoples perceived opinions about you have changed?
L: I think that depends on the way you act. We’ve now had four years experience and we do get taken a bit more seriously than we used to and of course it depends on how the music comes across as well for instance when you show up to a gig and people are like ‘Who are these little kids?’ but whoever your playing in front of are the important ones. I think now that we have been around for a while and people know of us now I’d hate to think that we are not taken seriously. You can always trump a sound guy by beating them to questions before they ask you and you have a little fun with it that way. We have accepted that sometimes we do get treated like morons but then there are as many times when we get treated seriously as well.
PW: Some of this may stem from the press that you have received in the past. A lot of articles pick up on the fact that when you started out you were not allowed to play live because of school. What is the truth behind that?
L: Well, four of us were in boarding school in Hampshire. It wasn’t that we weren’t allowed to play live but it got in the way, a lot.
M: We had school on Saturday afternoons.
L: Playing gig’s were not the easiest things to do. When you’re boarding you can’t say like, ‘Can I Go and play a show tonight?’ Playing a gig on a Wednesday night and having school at 8.30 in the morning…
PW: Could you still pull it together at all for weekend shows?
M: Every now and then we would play a weekend show and in the holidays we would try and play as much as possible but we never played that much.
L: Instead we just wrote an album, we felt we had one year left of school so we took it semi-seriously and got ourselves a bit of education. We sat back and wrote an album so at least when it was time to play loads of shows we didn’t have just the three songs.
M: We really did just focus on the writing because it wasn’t really an option to be on the live scene at that stage.
PW: So you wrote this album during down time at school and after all the work you guys had put into the process you decided to record it in someone’s living room. It seems an odd and risky choice, how did that come about?
M: Yeah, Scott’s living room. We had the album planned out and we practiced the album and only that, rather than have 20 songs and picking 11 or whatever we had what we knew would work. There were a couple that did get taken out and replaced but we always had that (core). We had to record on a budget and we found this Pete Miles guy who at the time who was freelance. He was mobile and had a van full of gear and can literally make you sound so good.
L: Wherever you are.
PW: That is a good point. From the first listen the album sounds like money as if a huge budget has been blown on the thing.
L: It took 3 weeks and £3,000. There are some records that I wont in any way mention but you here how much money they spend and how shit it sounds as compared not in such to our record but the quality of the production of our record. Cheekily we did it. Why would anyone want to fly to America to record an album? I just don’t know. It’s not a scrappy album and I don’t think we expected it to come out as it did If I am being honest because all we had were these songs that we had been practicing in a village hall before we ever played live and then all of a sudden when we come to record them they sound way more in time than we do, not that we synthesized any of it artificially but because Pete Miles was so on the ball and he knew exactly how to capture everything we wanted to do. It just came out sounding better than we were. So for the next 6 months we basically had to learn our own record. And live we are sort of developing the songs our selves. Now we are 2 ½ years down the line and that’s where we are at now.
PW: So it’s been an age since you completed the recording then? Do you get bored of playing these songs now?
L: I wouldn’t say bored of the songs. We started writing the record between the ages of 16 to 18 and we waited until we were 20 and 21 to release it. Opinions do change but we didn’t grow out of it but we almost forgot it was our record and did other things.
M: we’ve only been playing maybe 5 of these tracks since we’ve been playing around and it does get a little degrading. On the flip side as soon as it was released and you see people knowing the songs that only you used to know.
L: It completely re sparked our love for it.
M: It gives the whole thing a new lease of life and there is not a song on that album now that I don’t enjoy playing live.
PW: I imagine you are tired of talking about it by now but the whole free download thing in hindsight for a new band is such a masterstroke.
M: For the first 2 years after we finished it we did knuckle down and try and get it released and then we thought about paying for a 1000 copies and just giving it out to people in our local scene because that’s how new bands do it. Then our manager found us and luckily we got a booking agent as well and it was they who convinced us to keep it under wraps to see what our options were.
L: A lot of people were thinking where has this band come from? They have this album that sonically sounds like a second or a third album but we basically could not play live.
M: We couldn’t play the record as people knew it; we scared quite a lot of people off.
L: Because we hadn’t been on the live circuit we had no one to release it to. I mean locally we were known and people from our school knew us but we had to wait for a platform in order for us to release it. We didn’t want 20 fans around the country and the record drips on for a few years and you get a miniscule fanbase so we toured for 2 years, built a fanbase of thousands rather than tens and then we released something to them that they could all get at the same time. Our manager was quite reluctant at first about the free download.
M: We didn’t have enough fans to physically release an album to.
L: For me it should be the done thing with a new band, how else can you get as many fans as possible? We can’t charge £10 for a CD when nobody knows who the band is. You can’t expect them to buy it. Saying that we now have released that album for free and we don’t know whether we are expected to release free records for the rest of our lives. There are so many people out there that want an actual CD though, to be able to read the lyrics. I would not want to ever do a release without having a physical copy as well.
M: Films, fair enough. People can pay £500,000,000 for a film to be made. We paid £3,000 to make our record. We paid for it and I would like that money back but we are alright without it. We have an amazing album that we are so proud of out of it.
PW: (As the doors open and a huge throng of people pile into the venue). Well I can tell you that in Margate you would not have a crowd of this size unless you had done the free download.
M: If we had have charged we would have sold maybe 1000 copies by now. That’s great, we would have grossed a bit of income to put towards a new van or fixing the van or fucking petrol. Doing it this way we had 10,000 downloads in two months, released it in the end of October and by Christmas had 10,000 copies out there. Of course if we had sold 10,000 units labels would be snapping us up. I’m not sure of the final figure but it is somewhere between 15 and 20,000 thousand now (05/03/10). We have had this donation scheme as well and people have been coming back and giving a bit of money, £3 here and £4 there. Some have just given a tenner and said fuck it it’s a good album or whatever.
L: The day we put it up we were in Birmingham on the Billy Talent tour and my phone was going crazy with all the people commenting on twitter and facebook. It was so exciting after waiting 2 years for people to have it.
PW: And why the title Thank You?
L: It was always the title; it was the title before we had the songs. I’m not really sure why. I think it was a case of ‘that would be a cool name for an album’.
PW: So what’s with the medical theme, Diver, Accident, Ambulance, Hospital all appear to follow a narrative path?
M: We don’t like to go too far into it because we don’t want to come across and this profound or annoyingly arrogant band but we did write a little story.
L: It was meant to be more fun than say an album that is just a collection of songs. We had those three songs Accident, Ambulance and Hospital which followed the narrative of a person in these situations. So we had these words as titles and when it came to writing the songs we fit the words to each song which is why it flows like it does. It’s there as a clue but fit’s as to what they are about. We came out with this because you asked about it. We haven’t gone around saying ‘We have this debut concept album’
PW: But it is always mentioned in reviews.
L: A lot of people have picked it up. And we wanted to create that (buzz) as well. I can’t ever imagine releasing music that is simply a collection of songs. It means a lot more this way for us playing it and a lot more for listeners working it out. The best albums always have some journey through them.
PW: So now you have reached the next level from local band to getting write ups in the national press and playing on big tours, how has playing with the likes of Cancer Bats, Hundred Reasons and Billy Talent in the larger venues affected your attitudes.
M: We had a period during the summer before the Billy talent tour where we did absolutely nothing and we were feeling like we may never play to anyone new ever again. Then in quick succession we had the Billy talent tour, then the Hundred Reasons tour and then we went out on our own. Our first ever headline tour and I was blown away everyday by the turnouts. Even in a place like Stoke, 100 people showed up and there were people singing along to every song. It was what we had been waiting for all that time.
L: It was an amazing step down though; we had just come from being first on a proper big tour, these little boys in these huge rooms. It was a steep learning curve. Those huge shows were really pressurised. If you fucked up, you fucked up in front of thousands rather than dozens. It was an interesting time last year getting a sneak peek of every aspect of success for a touring band.
PW: Stepping out in front of a huge audience for the first time must have been nerve wracking?
L: We’d played with Enter Shikari and You Me At Six a couple of times so we sort of had been there before.
M: Yet at Brixton Academy when we walked into the backstage area we turned into tourists. Everybody had their phones out. The balconies that never have anyone in them, I’d never seen them from that side of the venue.
L: And there is an evil security woman that’s always there and you could just flash her a pass and you were inside a room where only rock stars go. It sounds really corny but it was an absolute dream come true.
M: It was weird to go to the merch stand and see your t-shirts for sale, 100% dream come true. A massive live box was ticked. At the same time though it kinda feels like we earned it. It felt like we had been working towards that and we weren’t thrown in at the deep end. And of course playing venues that size you can grab yourself an instant fan base. And it was the middle of that tour that the record went active online.
PW: So what about the future, has a label picked you up or do you want to continue down the online route?
M: It’s only our friend really who put out the physical copy. He does work on an A&R desk at Atlantic records but he runs the Friends Vs Records label. It does have Universals distribution so we kind of have a foot in the door but it was nothing like ’Here is a load of money guys, I’ll put this out”. He is a really cool and hard working guy but it’s not like it’s label backing really.
PW: So you really are in the same sort of boat as you were previously in the fact that you don’t know how the next record is going to come out?
L: Definitely, yeah. We have this single, Gloria coming out on April 5th which is going to be a free download as well. We have been plugging this away to get on music TV and it’s on a couple of channels already. This should take us up to the summer time. I would like to be able to do a DVD of our story, it’s a fun tale.
M: As for being picked up, there are certain things a label can do for you. One of which is to be played everywhere which is the side of a record label that we really want. But they will pay for billboards and advertising in return for people paying full price for your album but what we could really do with is money to keep us afloat.
L: If I didn’t have to work a job I would be able to focus 100% on the band. After every tour I have to walk back into Tesco’s and it is the most depressing 9 hours of anyone’s life. So for that reason and I will completely unashamedly say it. I would love to get signed.
After the interview the band proceeded to rock the house. Mark in particular was completely chuffed with the turnout and reaction of the Margate crowd proclaiming the gig as his favourite ever show to the young sweaty throngs piled in front of him. I personally was on the fence with them, they are great at what they do but what they do isn’t really what I like. Saying that though, the guys managed to win me over. The song Eleven Twelve in particular is still stuck in my head today. What was most surprising was to find after an absence of Margate gigs for 4 years now there is still a crowd out there, hungry for live music. The future looks very, very bright indeed.
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Local H's Scott Lucas In '02: 'Sometimes It’s Almost Better To Be Poor'
Scott Lucas seems pretty hungry these days. Not too long ago, he cranked out his solo debut, George Lassos the Moon, under the somewhat deceptive moniker Scott Lucas & the Married Men. And soon he’ll be turning his attention back to his true spouse, Local H, with a bevy of tour dates from mid-April through early June.
For posterity’s sake, here’s a Local H piece I scribbled in early 2002, around the release of Here Comes the Zoo. Here, the article finally sees the light of day online. As sarcastic and sardonic as you’d expect, Lucas also meditated on poverty and class struggles, the loss of hope – and “Big Momma’s House.”
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Scott Lucas, the brainchild behind rawk duo Local H, is in your fucking face. Sardonic, bitter and downright hilarious, the Zion, Illinois, native is at one moment ready to tickle your armpit, then rip the rug from under your feet in the next. A sampling of song titles from his four-albums-deep catalog proves it in a nutshell: “She Hates My Job,” “ ‘Cha!’ Said the Kitty,” “All the Kids Are Right” and “Mayonnaise and Malaise” just skim the surface. In concert, the point is driven home even harder; at a recent pit stop at Los Angeles’s renowned club Whiskey, Lucas entered the stifling, sold-out venue in a massive gorilla suit. And he had it in mind to do the entire late-2001 tour in the thing, no less.
“A couple shows into it I realized it was a pretty stupid idea,” Lucas says in a recent phone conversation from his on-off Chicago base while taking a break from watching “Big Momma’s House.” “I was wondering how long I could do it until it didn’t become funny anymore, and keep doing it until it got funny again. That’s what I occupy myself with these days, those kind of thoughts.”
That and churning out some killer rock ’n’ roll music. Coupled with his indispensable sense of humor, Lucas is the creative genius behind a bass-guitar combo instrument which has allowed him to keep his Local H unit confined to himself and a single drummer – once the towering Joe Daniels, now former Cheap Trick drum tech Brian St. Clair.
But that’s not all, folks. With their indie cred permanently intact, Local H has accomplished a feat that, while seemingly brushed off by many, is indeed the ultimate-yet-unattainable aim for most. Read: airplay. “Bound to the Floor,” from 1996’s As Good as Dead (Island), became the sleeper radio hit of the year. The irresistible “Eddie Vedder” followed, granting airwaves one of the best lyrics to come out of the ’90s: “If I was Eddie Vedder, would you like me any better?”
The long-overdue Here Comes the Zoo also contains a swatch of tunes solid enough to nab the well-versed listener’s ear, but catchy enough for radio-philes: “Half-Life,” the first single, “Creature Comforted” and “Keep Your Girlfriend Away From Me.” Local H’s first release through former Island chief Chris Blackwell’s new Palm Pictures imprint, the 10-track effort might not reach the mainstream listener, but is a winner all the same. As for Lucas, he’s just happy to see the record – Local H’s first since 1998’s Pack Up the Cats – hit the stores … and without any corporate sponsorship to boot.
When Island was bought out by Universal, Blackwell quickly launched Palm and invited Local H to come on board. “I was ready to go there from the minute that that idea was brought up,” asserts Lucas. “He [Blackwell] has that kind of maverick spirit where he wants to beat the other guys at their own game, but wants to do it his way. And I really respond to that.
“I don’t feel like going to Palm was a step down in any way,” he adds. “We’ve got the resources that we’ve always needed. I don’t have to worry about someone swooping in and buying the thing. It’d be stupid for me to sign to another major-label corporation.”
Despite their new indie-label status, Local H managed to rope in another top-name producer for their fourth album – Jack Douglas of John Lennon, Cheap Trick and Aerosmith fame. Though he recruited Roy Thomas Baker (Queen, The Cars) for Pack Up the Cats, Lucas says he wasn’t expecting to land another legend. In an odd twist of circumstance, drummer St. Clair ran into Douglas at a wedding for Cheap Trick’s manager, who quickly agreed to produce Here Comes the Zoo.
What unique slant did Douglas offer to the album? “We wanted to make a record that was a little more rough around the edges and representative of what we’re like live,” says Lucas. “And some of Jack’s greatest records do that – the records he’s done for Aerosmith and Cheap Trick are very rough-and-ready. I don’t know what it is, it seems like people come to our shows and seem surprised at how we sound live. We were just trying to figure out how to get that onto record.”
Aside from the roaring riffage – furthered by visits by Queens of the Stone Age shredder Josh Homme and the Misfits’ rambunctious Jerry Only – Here Comes the Zoo is, lyrically, Local H’s bleakest outing. Says Lucas, “There’s some grim stuff in there. Not a lot hope. On all of our records, the last song always seems to give off a glimmer of hope. On the first record there was a song called ‘Grrrlfriend,’ it was a little cherry on top. The last record was talking about ‘It’s a lucky time with everything improving.’ And this record ends with a mass suicide.”
“What Would You Have Me Do?” is a 25-minute foray into a dark netherworld – the first half a creeping death, the second an atmospheric afterlife clogged with fuzzy, distant noise that furthers the macabre feel. Says Lucas. “I wrote this like it was New Year’s Eve 2000 and what was going to happen. I thought of all these people getting together in a house and drinking cyanide and killing themselves. That’d be quite the New Year’s Eve party.”
For the faint-sounding part two, Lucas and St. Clair held a microphone outside their studio window near Times Square, where they caught a variety of incidental noise: people buying Broadway tickets, a man clanging on a steel drum, cars and motorcycles chugging.
“If you listen real close you can hear me scream and shout,” Lucas says, “We wanted to do it for the vocals and see what we could get. We got sirens and a bunch of stuff by accident. We were listening to it and realized that it’d be really nice to have on the record. [You can] pretend you live in downtown New York.”
On a more socially conscious note, the last cut resonates with what Lucas signals as the album’s mission statement of sorts: “The whole record’s about selling out, getting old and losing your edge. What do you do, just give into that, or cut your losses while you’re still ahead?” “Rock and Roll Professionals,” for example, is a direct assault on bands more than ready to cash in their dignity for a Gap commercial appearance. The album title itself is a reference to Iggy Pop’s sarcastic jab “Success” from Lust for Life.
Though invariably linked with Local H’s transition from major to indie, the anti-establishment concept reaches far beyond just the music industry. “Half-Life” is about class struggle: “The upper class has a vested interest in the working class staying the working class,” Lucas declares. “The way beer commercials and everything is sold to poor people is to keep them there. Those people aren’t really given any handouts. A college education is so expensive, it’s not so easily obtainable. If you’ve got a station, your kids are going to be at that station, too. It just goes on and on and on. The only way to really get out of it is on your own.”
“Creature Comforted,” however, is a sharp critique on the self-made man. “If you climb that ladder and acquire all these possessions, in the end they possess you,” he continues. “You get fatter, older, you lose your edge. You don’t want to leave your apartment or house, you don’t want to stop watching TV. You stay inside the little cage you’ve built for yourself rather than keep yourself interested in what’s going on. And in that respect, I think sometimes it’s almost better to be poor, to keep yourself hungry. That’s better than getting fat and dying.”
Local H are slated to hit the road the day their new record is released – March 5. An eight-week tour will commence, followed by another potential headlining leg or opening slot. Per usual, guests will hop on stage to fill in with guitar solos, tambourines and toy pianos – instruments four arms can’t manage alone. Lucas sounds eager to hit the circuit again and perform in front of Local H’s typically mixed bunch.
“It’s really hard for people to get a handle on what our crowd is,” he opines. “I’m not really even sure what it is either, but I think the people who know the records inside and out are a diverse group. It’s nice when you see 15-year-old chicks up front toughin’ it out. I’ve never seen us as a macho-idiot band. It’s nice to have that reinforced.”
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Somewhat-but-not-really-related:
• “Iggy Pop: ‘I Didn’t Want To Sell Out’ The Stooges
• “Iggy Pop Transcript, 7.18.03: ‘I Was Shooting Dope At The RIAA Awards When It Wasn’t Chic’
• Anti-Death-Penalty Hangman
5 Of The Best - Personal fitness tips
Published in Matchbox magazine
Matchbox brings you a very special Five of the Best this month, courtesy of fitness guru Matt Roberts.
In the depths of the last recession, Matt Roberts moved to London with an idea: he’d identified a niche in the market for personalised training, where athletes or regular clients could get tailored help in reaching their fitness goals.
With no banks willing to lend, he had to put in some hard graft to raise the necessary funds. But raise them he did and in 1995 Roberts managed to set up his first one-to-one training centre within a former art gallery. Today he owns four plush personal training gyms across the capital with a client list that boasts the likes of John Galliano and Naomi Campbell. The following are Roberts’s top tips on keeping healthy in 2010.
Interview with Laura Holt.
1. Staying Motivated
Set a distinct goal and a date by which you want to achieve it. Be crystal clear and devise a reward for yourself for when you reach that target – and a forfeit if you fail to make it. Your goal could be that you want to get into a certain size dress for a special occasion, for example. So buy the dress in a smaller size that realistically matches your target. You’ll have an incentive for getting your weight down – or you’ll have wasted your money.
2. The Fun Factor
The best way to avoid monotony in your routine is to mix up the intensities – with things like interval training – and by varying the activities. Part of the reason why triathlon has become so popular is because advocates can vary training up by going for a run one day, then a bike ride or session in the pool the next. It’s important to allow yourself a mental and physical break. Make sure you have different patterns you follow. Sit down on a Sunday night and plan your activities for the week ahead to help stimulate your workout.
3. Eating Better
The average female consumes between 85-105 grams of fat each day, when it should be no more than 60 grams. With men, the ratio’s roughly the same: we’re consuming 80 per cent more fat than we should be. Where possible, remove saturated fats from your diet (commonly found in fried foods and dishes with rich creamy sauces and cheese). Stay away from ‘bad’ fats (many mass-produced biscuits and the like still contain unhealthy trans fats), and focus instead on the ‘good’ ones, in sources including fish, nuts and seeds.
4. Working Out
One of the most effective ways to work out is through interval training. At least twice a week, throw a hill session into your running or cycling routine or change your speed when swimming for a minute or two. Push yourself really hard, to the point where you couldn’t carry on any further, then recover for same time. Keep this up for 45-minutes and it will raise your metabolism phenomenally. Working out at a constant pace raises your metabolic rate for about 8 hours – with interval training, the afterburn effect lasts for up to 48 hours.
5. Warming Down
When you’ve finished an exercise session, you really need to stretch. Cool yourself down by bringing your heart rate down slowly. For example, if you’ve finished a run, spend five minutes gradually reducing your pace to a slow walk before finishing by stretching all muscles.
VIEW THE ORIGINAL PRINT VERSION
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Interview with Nick James
Nick James is the Seattle-area author of a forthcoming sci-fi series tentatively titled SKYSHIP ACADEMY. Hi, Nick, and thanks for talking to The Spectacle! Let’s dive in:
The first book in the series will be released by Flux in Fall 2011.
Q: Can you tell us a little about the story?
It takes place in a post-war America transformed into one big desert after a string of chemical bombings. Some folks have retreated into the sky, living on city-size crafts called skyships. Others have sought refuge in the Government’s Chosen Cities, protected from the elements by enormous domes. Both sides fight over mysterious green orbs that began falling from the heavens shortly after the bombings. They call them Pearls — and just one can power a skyship or Chosen City for months.
The story follows two teens on opposing sides of the struggle. Hapless slacker Jesse Fisher trains at Skyship Academy, preparing to steal Pearls away from the corrupt Surface government. Meanwhile, Cassius Stevenson works for an elite team of government operatives charged with powering the Chosen Cities. When the two clash — developing mysterious, frightening abilities — they’re pulled into a battle that threatens to unlock the true mystery of Pearls and trigger a new war.
Q: What drew you to this genre?
I was drawn to sci-fi and fantasy at a very young age. I grew up on comic books and went especially nuts over the big, multi-issue story arcs in my favorite series. Epics, I’d call them. I like reading about worlds that require some imagination, people that are relatable on a human level but get swept up in amazing, crazy adventures. I think children’s and YA writing is often the best example of this kind of storytelling. Kids aren’t afraid to express their imaginations and demand books that cater to that.
Q: What inspired this particular story?
I wanted to write a book that combined elements of some of my favorite contemporary adventure series (ARTEMIS FOWL, ALEX RIDER, MAXIMUM RIDE) with the kind of voice and characters from my favorite coming-of-age novels (THE ABSOLUTELY TRUE DIARY OF A PART-TIME INDIAN, THE PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER). So the initial spark was more of a mood and tone than a specific story. As the plotting fell into place, I drew on influences from my childhood, like the dialogue-rich storytelling found in comics and graphic novels. I ended up writing the series I would have picked up and loved as a kid, while making sure it was smart enough to appeal to my (slightly) more grown-up tastes now.
Q: What has been the biggest challenge so far in the writing or your path to publication?
I think any story that requires a lot of world-building is inherently challenging. You want to make the characters’ world feel plausible and real without overstuffing it and making it burdensome for the reader. A lot of my revision dealt with this. It was fun exploring this futuristic world and bringing it to life.
I feel that my path to publication has been relatively pothole-free. As with any author, it’s a lot of work, but I’ve enjoyed every step so far.
Q: What’s the craziest thing you believe in? Or how else is your imagination expressed in your life?
I really believe that life would be so much more interesting if it were a musical. I’m patiently waiting for the day when everyone suddenly bursts into song while going about their daily routines.
A few years ago, my fellow camp counselors and I decided to put this theory to the test and declared an all-singing day. The kids just sort of glazed over like we’d suddenly gone insane. The all-singing day lasted for about an hour. I guess that kind of shoots the whole thing down.
Q: Or maybe you’ll have to write that musical world! What did you read most as a kid?
I started out with comics, for sure. I was a really good student but always a little bit of a reluctant reader, as many boys are. It wasn’t until I was in high school that I started reading novels outside of school.
But I was always a writer. From my own fledgling comic book series, to an entire shelf’s worth of chapter books, I was my own little publishing empire.
Q: If you could live in a sci-fi or fantasy world not of your own making, which would it be? Why?
As clichéd as it sounds, I’d have to say Harry Potter’s wizard world. I’m not sure there’s a single person who’d turn down the opportunity to enroll at Hogwarts. It’s such a well-realized world. In fact, I even took a teaching internship at a school in England, half-hoping that they’d present me with a wand or something. Alas, no magic, but it was an amazing experience all the same.
Or maybe Philip Pullman’s England in the HIS DARK MATERIALS trilogy. It would be fun to have my own daemon!
Q: What are you working on now?
The second book in the SKYSHIP ACADEMY series, which will be out in 2012. On top of that I’ve always got other projects in the works, some finished, some just beginning.
Thanks for dropping by, Nick! Readers interested in connecting with him can find him on Twitter and Facebook, and we’ll look forward to catching up again between now and next fall!
Tests & Treatments : Virtually Amazing
Download Tests & Treatments : Virtually Amazing
Allison and Bryan are talking about Solitary 4.0 Episode 6! Going over all the spins, putts, punches, lies, mazes & air guitaring like the champs they are. All that and an interview with Bea Henington AKA #7!
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Website : www.NotMakeFriends.com
E-Mail : podcast@notmakefriends.com
Phone : (206) 202-3261
Twitter : @NotMakeFriends
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