NewPages Interviews

I was one of those annoying child writers. I wrote weird animal stories when I was 7, I wrote the class play in 5th grade, satirical stories and skits about my school all through high school. I was (who knows why?) much praised for this stuff, so I suppose that encouraged me to keep going. I started to take writing seriously in college (Wesleyan University, in Connecticut); my senior thesis was a slender and absurd rock musical called Two Dwarves in a Closet. It was a huge (and some might argue inexplicable) success; people danced in the theater at the finale. This fostered the delusional belief that I might be able to make a living as a playwright.

I guess I would call the novel schizo-fiction. Since bookstores don’t seem to have a schizo book section, I guess I would put it on a shelf called science fiction or, more to my taste, general fiction, subcategory post-modern, addled fiction. You ask about the cyberspace/gaming/virtual reality motif. Just stand in the middle of Times Square, NYC, and you’ll get a pretty good feel for the pace of the modern media world. We’re hit with overt/covert messages all the time. And sometimes it seems hard to tell the difference between reality and advertising. The “game” (if you want to call it that) might be in deciphering all these strange and conflicting signals.