The Interview Meme!

[jack_ryder]

(from benpeek)
1. Leave me a comment saying, "Interview me."

2. I will respond by asking you five questions. I get to pick the questions.

3.
You will update your livejournal/website with the answers to the
questions and leave the answers as comments here (or at least provide a
pointer to your site).

4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.

5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.



Ben's questions and my answers

1) You're a new writer on the scene. What would you say you
goal is with your fiction and plays and why does that mean people
should bother hunting out Iain Triffit's work?

My
goal is primarily to amuse myself and shock and/or surprise the
audience (in no particular order.) The two plays I co-wrote with Brett
Danalake accomplished both these goals, and I'm still chuffed that Rob
Hood thought my story was too dangerous for Daikaiju. The brave man
decided to publish it anyway.

I'm trying to move out of this
distinctly adolescent phase, and I guess my overall objective with my
writing is to shift people's perspectives, to make people think
something they've never thought before. I want to challenge people's
preconceptions, especially my own.

I haven't thought about why
people would bother seeking out my writing, maybe if you want to laugh
and think at the same time and develop a case of conceptual hiccups.

2) What's your long term plan? Do you even have one?

The
overall plan is to find a nice cushy writing job in radio and
television, and use that to finance my short story writing. While I'm
not trying to emulate his style (I can't drink that much) I very much
want to emulate Warren Ellis' freedom of movement between mediums as
well as genres. To be able to more than survive as a writer I want to
be able to work in as many mediums as possible - prose, radio, theatre,
I've even done a tiny bit of television (and Brett and I are working on
tv scripts at the moment.) I'm working on a film script (aren't we
all?) and maybe, just maybe one day, I'll fulfill every genre writer's
dream and get my own miniseries with DC Comics where I get to kill off
one of their second string characters.

I can dream.

3) Your honest opinion of the quality of the local scene, it's positives and negatives.

The
first thought that entered my head when I read this question was the
phrase "circle jerk". Which is unfair, but does sum up the ambivalence
I have about the "local scene".

The positives as I see it are:

- there are some great writers out there, some of whom I'm lucky to know personally.
- there's a thriving small press scene supporting current writers and actively promoting new writers.
- Australian writers are making a greater impact overseas than our overall population would warrant.
- there's good eating at the various BBQs and writing groups.

The negatives:

- everyone's too cosy.
-
Too many people have said they don't watch the news any more because
it's so negative, and it's getting in the way of their writing.
-
most Australian SF/Fantasy that I've read (and I really don't read that
much now)seems to be recycling tropes that the US and UK have
discarded, thus preserving our second string status.
- everyone's working on a fucking teenage (sorry - "young adult") fantasy novel - how many more do we need?
-
the fan community seem to be bent on building the literary equivalent
of the Israeli Security fence to keep the "mainstream literary
community" out
- which isn't required because the "mainstream literary community" hate SF/Fantasy anyway.
- and the food at Magic Casements sucks. Honestly.

When
I think about the local scene, I think of a story a Russian friend told
me about the Tolkien fans in Moscow during the '70s. They were able to
play rock music, smoke drugs and basically live as they liked without
the threat of the gulags because the KGB judged them to be harmless.
They had absolutely no interaction with the outside world, and
therefore it was easier to leave them as they were. They were no threat
to the state, lost within their own community of self-gratification.

I think the worst thing a writer can be is harmless.

4)
You're dead. The tax department poisoned your mail in an attempt to not
pay money to people. You go to Heaven (assuming there is, blah blah,
you know the drill) and God is there, waiting. What do you say?

"You're pretty small for a consensual hallucination."

5) Favourite swear word?

It's more a phrase - MF Christ - short for Motherfucking Christ! - it kind of describes a spiritual feedback loop.