That question meme I've been ducking...
Nov. 21st, 2009 09:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desperanceDamn. a_d_medievalist caught me at a weak moment, and dropped five questions in my lap. So:
1. Who's the bloke in the pic?
Ah. *sighs* I don't know his name. *sighs again* He is the fallen angel Luke, on the cover of my novel Dispossession. What happened was that I told my editor I wanted to write a novel about amnesia, and a guy having to investigate his own life. She said "Does it have anything supernatural in it?" I said no, it's about amnesia. She said "Oh." I said, would you like something supernatural? She said "Yes please." I asked how she felt about angels. She said "Love 'em." Fallen angels? "Sexy."
Which I agreed with. So I wrote her a novel about amnesia and a fallen angel. And then she spent an afternoon interviewing young male models, making them take their clothes off right there in her office - and she didn't invite me to the session! Can you believe it?
2. What inspired you to set your tales in a non-Europeanish fantasy world?
Heh. It was sort of the other way around, to start with: what inspired me was meeting Tolkien, when I was twelve. So then I spent my teenage writing bad imitation Tolkien, and it wasn't until I acquired some critical judgement that I swore a great oath to write no more fantasy till I had something original to write about. Twenty years later, I read a brochure advertising a reprint of Stephen Runciman's history of the Crusades, and it was like a bolt from the blue, it was perfect. So I wrote the Outremer books, set in a fantasy Palestine where all the pre-Islamic myths are true, there really are djinn and 'ifrit and ghuls and so forth. And camels, and desert. Lots of desert.
Then I wanted to write a wet book, so it made perfect sense to move up to Istanbul and my take on the Ottoman Empire; I like to say that Selling Water by the River is an alternate-world story told in Outremer.
Aaaand then I went to Taiwan for the first time. And, yup. Not so much inspired as obsessed. Mandarin classes and all. But I had to let Daniel Fox write the books.
3. How old are the moggies?
Um. Everything's approximate (when Barry was found in the street in a Terrible State and taken to the vets, they thought he was elderly, on his last legs if not his last life; then they looked at his teeth and decided he could only be a year old at most), but Baz is about four now and Mac's about three. Unless I've missed a year. Time kinda passes me by sometimes. (I am myself L, you know.) I think they'll be five and four come the spring. Which means it's high time they settled down, he said, beetling his brows ferociously at 'em.
4. What is your favourite fish (and why?)
To cook and eat, or just generally? Assuming the former, the question is impossible. The range is vast, and so is my interest. I'm very fond of whitebait and sprats and such, fish that you cook whole and eat whole; I'm very fond of halibut, a fish so vast I've never seen a whole one. Possibly my favourite fish-cookery moment was when I walked into the fishmonger and stood there blinking for a bit, before I found my voice and asked for a pound of that and a pound of that. One was a whole swordfish, freshly flown in from the Med; the other was a basket of samphire, freshly gathered from the salt marshes of Norfolk. I went home and invented the swordfish-and-samphire stirfry (with cashews and walnut oil).
But my favourite way to eat fish is currently sushi & sashimi, so I guess my favourite fish at the moment is whatever is freshestest...
5. Desert Island Discs?
Eek. More favourites. I am so bad at this...
Individual tracks will always vary, but I need Tom Waits and I need Tom Robinson and I need Janis Ian and I need Elvis Costello. And I must have Jessye Norman singing "There's a man goin' round takin' names" (also at my funeral, please note). And I must have Bach and I must have Faure's Requiem (with a boy soprano, please) and I must have Sondheim and... Wait, how many am I allowed, again...?
And for my luxury I'd like Gore Vidal, please (yes yes, I know the rules say "nothing animate" but I don't think he'd move much, he'd just sit quietly and talk a lot - but if I can't have Gore, I'll have Radio 4, thanks), and my book has actually changed recently. It used to be The Lord of the Rings, as being inarguably my favourite book over the years if "favourite" is the one you read most often; but now I want Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle. Which is longer, and just as engaging, and more gobsmacking. How can one man know so much...?
a_d_medievalist caught me at a weak moment, and dropped five questions in my lap. So:1. Who's the bloke in the pic?
Ah. *sighs* I don't know his name. *sighs again* He is the fallen angel Luke, on the cover of my novel Dispossession. What happened was that I told my editor I wanted to write a novel about amnesia, and a guy having to investigate his own life. She said "Does it have anything supernatural in it?" I said no, it's about amnesia. She said "Oh." I said, would you like something supernatural? She said "Yes please." I asked how she felt about angels. She said "Love 'em." Fallen angels? "Sexy."
Which I agreed with. So I wrote her a novel about amnesia and a fallen angel. And then she spent an afternoon interviewing young male models, making them take their clothes off right there in her office - and she didn't invite me to the session! Can you believe it?
2. What inspired you to set your tales in a non-Europeanish fantasy world?
Heh. It was sort of the other way around, to start with: what inspired me was meeting Tolkien, when I was twelve. So then I spent my teenage writing bad imitation Tolkien, and it wasn't until I acquired some critical judgement that I swore a great oath to write no more fantasy till I had something original to write about. Twenty years later, I read a brochure advertising a reprint of Stephen Runciman's history of the Crusades, and it was like a bolt from the blue, it was perfect. So I wrote the Outremer books, set in a fantasy Palestine where all the pre-Islamic myths are true, there really are djinn and 'ifrit and ghuls and so forth. And camels, and desert. Lots of desert.
Then I wanted to write a wet book, so it made perfect sense to move up to Istanbul and my take on the Ottoman Empire; I like to say that Selling Water by the River is an alternate-world story told in Outremer.
Aaaand then I went to Taiwan for the first time. And, yup. Not so much inspired as obsessed. Mandarin classes and all. But I had to let Daniel Fox write the books.
3. How old are the moggies?
Um. Everything's approximate (when Barry was found in the street in a Terrible State and taken to the vets, they thought he was elderly, on his last legs if not his last life; then they looked at his teeth and decided he could only be a year old at most), but Baz is about four now and Mac's about three. Unless I've missed a year. Time kinda passes me by sometimes. (I am myself L, you know.) I think they'll be five and four come the spring. Which means it's high time they settled down, he said, beetling his brows ferociously at 'em.
4. What is your favourite fish (and why?)
To cook and eat, or just generally? Assuming the former, the question is impossible. The range is vast, and so is my interest. I'm very fond of whitebait and sprats and such, fish that you cook whole and eat whole; I'm very fond of halibut, a fish so vast I've never seen a whole one. Possibly my favourite fish-cookery moment was when I walked into the fishmonger and stood there blinking for a bit, before I found my voice and asked for a pound of that and a pound of that. One was a whole swordfish, freshly flown in from the Med; the other was a basket of samphire, freshly gathered from the salt marshes of Norfolk. I went home and invented the swordfish-and-samphire stirfry (with cashews and walnut oil).
But my favourite way to eat fish is currently sushi & sashimi, so I guess my favourite fish at the moment is whatever is freshestest...
5. Desert Island Discs?
Eek. More favourites. I am so bad at this...
Individual tracks will always vary, but I need Tom Waits and I need Tom Robinson and I need Janis Ian and I need Elvis Costello. And I must have Jessye Norman singing "There's a man goin' round takin' names" (also at my funeral, please note). And I must have Bach and I must have Faure's Requiem (with a boy soprano, please) and I must have Sondheim and... Wait, how many am I allowed, again...?
And for my luxury I'd like Gore Vidal, please (yes yes, I know the rules say "nothing animate" but I don't think he'd move much, he'd just sit quietly and talk a lot - but if I can't have Gore, I'll have Radio 4, thanks), and my book has actually changed recently. It used to be The Lord of the Rings, as being inarguably my favourite book over the years if "favourite" is the one you read most often; but now I want Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle. Which is longer, and just as engaging, and more gobsmacking. How can one man know so much...?