Colin Wilson: From the Outside Looking In

In remembrance of Colin Wilson's life and works, we have resurrected our exclusive interview from the print archive and proudly present it here for internet posterity with a few minor up-dates.

 Colin Wilson, one of Britain's greatest Modern thinkers, talks with Remy Dean about the death of the author, creative immortality, the magic of our minds, morbid curiosity and romantic criminality...

Colin Wilson transcended the material world a year ago... On this first anniversary of his death, I recall my meeting with him back in 2002. I had been to a London venue to see him address the Society for Psychical Research and had arranged to meet him after the event to ask a few questions. This was going well when he called a halt to the interview. I was flattered when he explained that my questions deserved more time to consider and invited me to join him over breakfast the following morning. 

So, early the next day, I was sat across the kitchen table of the his London lodgings, being generously plied with tea, toast and marmalade by Joy, his wife. In this relaxed situation, Colin was extremely generous with both time and intellect - we chatted for a good part of the morning. I was talking with the man who wrote The Occult - one of the books that had the greatest influence on my mind as a youth!

The interview I ended up with was far too long for the intended publication, and it was all too interesting to cut any out... An extract saw print in Outlook Magazine, but I held the bulk back for The Scrawl pilot issue. Now, here it is again, preserved on the internet for posterity, too entertaining and important to be left in the paper archive...

ANGRY YOUNG MAN

Colin Wilson was first recognised as one of this century’s most notable thinkers and literary figures back in 1956, when his first book, The Outsider, was published to, initially, unanimous acclaim. Since then, he has repeatedly fallen in and out of favour with the literary community but always remains the agent provocateur - outspoken about his ideas and opinions, however controversial they may be.

He has written fact, fiction and theory. His story, SpaceVampires, was adapted into the SF movie, Lifeforce, which he has called, “The worst film ever made,” and many of his novels and short stories have been optioned for cinematic development.

Colin Wilson was born 26 June 1931, in Leicester, and grew up against a working class backdrop. He has been a voracious reader and absorber of ideas ever since he was an eight-year-old. He spent his time either reading, exploring the local countryside on his bicycle, or experimenting with his chemistry set. Depressed by his environment, he had built a refuge for himself with the words of the Romantic poets and overcame suicidal urges with the pursuit of meditation.

He left school at 16 and at the age of 18, after a short stint as a civil servant, he had to enroll for his National Service. Military authoritarianism was an anathema to the young Wilson, and after being assigned to various departments he was eventually discharged.

He put all his free time back into reading, thinking and writing. He devoured all kinds of books with a voracious appetite, later writing a book of his own - The Books In My Life - as a homage to those texts that have influenced and shaped both his interior and exterior lives. When he had enough money, he travelled in Europe. He married and divorced in the space of two years. He moved from job to job, barely covering the rent.

In 1953 with an act of will, he set out to escape this repeating cycle, stopped paying the rent, bought a weatherproof sleeping bag and took up al fresco residence on Hampstead Heath, spending his days in the Reading Room of the British Museum to further research and write two books simultaneously.

With the encouragement of novelist Angus Wilson, the Reading Room superintendent at the time, he submitted the first part of a manuscript titled The Outsider to a publisher. The book was accepted on the strength of the unfinished manuscript and an advance paid to facilitate its completion.

The Outsider, was published in 1956, by Victor Gollancz. Never has a debut by an unknown met with such a fervent reception. Wilson was 24 when he found himself the darling of the London literati and hailed as a major writer. The book was a best seller in America and Europe, translated into a dozen languages within a year.

The instant success enabled Colin to afford a comfortable place to live with his second wife, Joy, and they moved into a house formerly occupied by Dylan Thomas, but Wilson was soon reacting against this fame and stardom. He became irritated by vacuous interviewers were only interested in telling the sensational success story of ‘young working class lad makes good’.

The press coined the phrase, ‘Angry Young Man’ and used it to label a perceived trend embodied by the likes of Wilson and John Osbourne. With such a high profile and an increasingly indignant attitude, it was not long before opinion began to turn against him. Serious critics began denouncing him, many changed their views through 180 degrees. Deification turned quickly to vilification.

By 1957, his image had been assassinated to such a degree that his wife’s parents forced entry to a friend’s home, where they were dining, and threatened Colin, accusing him of being a bisexual who had been unfaithful with a string of lovers. They had seen some notes for his novel, Ritual In The Dark, and mistaken them to be his diary!  It is probably apocryphal, but I have heard told that the father-in-law busted down the door, bull-whip in hand, cornered Colin and proclaimed, “The games up, Wilson, we’ve found your diaries!”

The police were called, by the owner of the house, and the newspapers were hot on their heels. Fed up with the media attention, Colin and Joy left London and let the rumour and gossip feed off itself. More than one critic predicted that Wilson would never have another book published and that he had been a charlatan all along

Colin Wilson is the author of more than 100 published books including science fiction novels, psychology, biography, commentary and critiques, countless essays and articles, plus many short stories. He appeared regularly on television as an authority on serial killers, the paranormal, Atlantis and the occult. He is one of David Bowie’s favourite writers.

Scrawl is honoured to present an extended interview with Colin Wilson conducted by Remy Dean:

COLIN REACHES HIS PEAK

You hail the Romantic poets as a major formative influence on your life - what was it about them that affected you so deeply?

“The Romantics had these moods of intense ecstasy, but the question was how to duplicate them. Pushkin compares the poet’s heart to a coal, which is blown into a glow by the wind of inspiration, and then the wind goes away and suddenly it’s just a black lump. What he’s saying is that you have to wait for the wind of inspiration. There’s nothing you can do.

“Well, I disbelieve that, I wanted to learn the mechanics, so to speak. It seems to me that when you get into certain moods, peak experiences, it’s exactly like having arrived in a particularly beautiful place in a city, but a city for which you have no map. And if you want to get back there again, the first thing you’ve got to do is get a map. If there are no maps on sale, you have to make your own. All my life’s been about making maps...”

Like shamans charting the otherworld of the subconscious?

“Not really… a lot more practical than that. What interested me so much about the Romantic poets, was they felt that they had discovered a way of living that was far more purposeful and real than ordinary, everyday life. It struck me that they were making an artificial distinction. What we’re talking about is not ordinary, everyday life, but the state of mind that ordinary, everyday people share If for example, you went into a room of stupid people, concerned only with gossip about the royalty or something, after you’d been in there a few hours, your state of mind would be pretty low. It would be extremely difficult to get yourself into any higher state, or to think about anything more serious. The same goes for human beings in general - we’re stuck among them.

“Apparently, there are ‘feral’ children, found among animals in forests, who have actually been brought up among animals. The problem is with these ‘feral’ children, is that there’s no way of ‘humanising’ them. Even if they had been among wolves or apes for only six or eight months, they behave like apes or wolves - they remain basically ‘animal’ for the rest of their lives, even if you can teach them to speak.

“Since human beings, for the most part are pretty stupid - regarding the love affairs of the royalty as the most interesting thing in the world, for example - you can see why, being brought up among all these ‘apes’ and ‘wolves’, that most human beings are unable to rise to anything better than apes or wolves.

“I had the same problem when I was a child. I was working class, my father was a boot and shoe worker in Leicester. I was always bright, but I had this feeling that I was stuck among some extremely thick, average working class people and that I was never going to escape that. The result was, that I did what a lot of kids do - I went to extremes. I found a copy of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture Of Dorian Gray, when I was about twelve, I remember devouring this from beginning to end, becoming a disciple of Oscar Wilde immediately. Simply as a way of escape.

“That’s the big question - ‘How do you get out from amongst the apes and the wolves?’ In the same way, when my mother bought me a chemistry set, when I was about ten, I just became fascinated by science, chemistry, astronomy. By the age of twelve, Einstein was my great intellectual hero and I was reading his book on the theory of relativity. Not just because I was interested in science. Because it was an escape! Like poetry, like music, like going up to a mountain top.

“This is what is interesting about human beings. The intelligent ones have this extremely powerful desire to get to the mountain tops, up from the valleys where the apes and the wolves live.”

So have you found an effective method to achieve this?

“It’s not an easy thing to do! People like myself are trying to create an artificial environment that people can escape to. The Romantics also did that, but the trouble was, if you escaped to their mountain tops, you couldn’t live there, because the air was too thin, and when people came down from those mountain tops, they found the real world so appalling that they shuddered and committed suicide! Now, there’s obviously something wrong with that! It ought to be possible to create this environment, in the mind, for people to escape to from the valleys, which is just as good and healthy an environment. This could be said to be my aim and my purpose.

“This is one of the reasons why I’m interested in crime and psychology… I never felt that you have to escape into some rarefied environment where there is nothing but beauty. What we need is any kind of intellectual interest. As soon as you get intellectually excited, it can be about the theory of relativity, or about murder, it’s equally valid because the excitement carries you straight out of the valley, like a balloon taking you straight into the air.

“The result is that people like me spend all their time, particularly when young, looking for the more interesting people. Very often they’re dead, but fortunately they have left their ideas behind in books, music and paintings.

“In a sense, my books are themselves a complete intellectual environment. If you’re interested in philosophy and mysticism, then you can read certain books of mine, if your interested in crime and so on - the darker depths of human psychology - then you read others.”

What is your motivation for writing if not fame?

“Everybody’s motive is the same: to alter one’s self. In the process of pulling yourself up, you also happen to be pulling other people up, with a bit of luck. The whole question of fame is a very interesting one, nobody honestly says ‘No, I don’t want fame’...

“...Yet, what I was saying in The Outsider, is that it’s extremely important to be able to subsist without fame. All the great outsiders from, Shiele and Hoffman, down to VanGogh and Mogdigliani, have subsisted without fame, died more or less unknown, or even jeered at. The main problem with these outsiders was that they didn’t realise that it was possible to stand alone. If you drove yourself up to a far higher level of intensity, then you could in fact subsist as an outsider.

Colin Wilson - when being outside was the in thing...

“One of the main problems is, of course, if you publish a book like The Outsider, which makes you famous, suddenly you are potentially an in-sider. I was saved from that by a terrific backlash of all the critics. Within three months of The Outsider coming out, everybody was saying the book was a fake, a fraud, it’s just an anthology of quotations from other people... The result was that I was suddenly right back where I started, except that I now had the possibility of making a living as a writer. In a country like England, that made me a total outsider!”

Do you think you have to be on the outside to write?

“In a sense, yes. I wrote The Outsider because I was so fascinated by the people who don’t fit in, who have this strong evolutionary urge to rise to a higher level, because they are totally dissatisfied with the people around them. Then having achieved this, having got The Outsider published, to suddenly be denounced as a fake when I’m probably the most serious writer that Britain has ever produced! The feeling was ‘Oh, well - F**k it! I said that it should be possible - to exist as an outsider!”

“In Shaw’s Back to Methuselah, a sculptor produces sculptures of the ancients instead of the usual beautiful young people. So all these young people go to see them and are revolted, ‘ancients, how awful!’ Then, a much older sculptor tells him that when he was younger, he also had this desire to stop sculpting just beautiful young bodies which bored him and also did busts of ancients. So the first sculptor says, ‘well bring them out, I’d love to see them, I’ve done it and these f**king c**ts haven’t done me any harm!’

“And the other chap says, ‘well, I destroyed them’.

“I feel very much the same – I did it and these f**king c**ts haven’t done me any harm! I’ve succeeded in remaining an outsider and the f**king c**ts haven’t done me any harm! I hope I’m a kind of symbolic figure in that way…”

PLAYING CHESS WITH MR. DEATH

Talking of age, you have said that the peak experience can make people feel indestructible and able to go on for ever… are you a proponent of longevity, and immortality, being good and desirable things?

“Well… Shaw believed that human beings should be capable of living to be 300, but in Back To Methuselah, when the question is raised of what do you have to do to achieve this, his answer is you don’t need to do anything – it will just happen, Now, he had not really understood the basic problem, which is that you need such a high level of intellectual drive and self-renewal in order to keep going indefinitely. Shaw did not have that. You only have to read those later books about him like, Days With Bernard Shaw and Shaw’s Corner, by people who wrote down Shaw’s conversations in later years, to see that Shaw’s mind had reached a full stop. It was just dreadfully repetitive… What he should have been doing at that age is studying the up-and-coming people like Heidegger and Jean Paul Sartre, he should have been learning new things instead of living in the past.

“I spent a couple of years trying to understand Heidegger and Fucault, and when I finally got the hang of them, I realised that all the effort had not really been worth it – they said nothing new at all. Then again, in a sense, there never is anything new! There are only two positions in philosophy. A negative, materialist position, or a positive, idealist position. No matter how much you try to disguise it, your philosophy ends up as one of the two. Like a billiard table with only two pockets, eventually, you drop into one pocket or the other.”

Eternal life has had a lot of bad press over the ages, from the Wandering Jew to Dorian Grey. By far the best-known ambassador for immortality must be Count Dracula, cursed to live forever, the Prince of Darkness. All our legends and folklore seem to be designed to make us certain of death. The possibility of physical immortality has been portrayed as evil, something no-body should want...

Why do you think there is such an in-grained resistance to longevity in our culture? Why are those thinkers and scientists who are outspoken proponents of longevity, such as Timothy Leary, so vilified by the UK press?

“Remember, Aldous Huxley wrote a book called After Many A Summer as a deliberate counterblast to Shaw’s Back To Methuselah, and in it the old count – or whatever he is – has discovered how to extend his life by eating the raw liver of fish… something like that. When they find him at the end, he has turned into a kind of ape. This, of course, was Huxley’s typically pessimistic comment on all this. He was a terribly negative man in many ways.

“You see, most people don’t want to be faced with the immense effort that would be entailed in actually teaching themselves how to live for a long time. Or, in deed, having to evolve in any way!

“This is a reason for my unpopularity among the English intellectuals – they’re a lazy lot of f**kers! Every single one of the bastards is f**king lazy! The English are the laziest people in the world, intellectually speaking. They’re living in a kind of cultural desert. They always admire anybody who has no talent and is modest about it! We don’t have a really intellectual tradition, no Satres, Heideggers or Goethes.

“We have Shakespeare, and Jane Austin – who describe everyday life and are very good at it, but nothing much outside that. Aldus Huxley is really a male Jane Austin, still stuck in that little ambiance of tea on the vicarage lawn and all the rest of it! This tends to summarise the English temperament.

“England has many very good things about it. One of them is that there is a great deal of freedom and you can, more or less, say what you like. We’ve never had a dictatorship. It’s quite a good environment for someone like me – I’m allowed to get on and do what I want to do, provided that I can make a living. There are no real barriers, as there would be if I had lived in Russia or Nazi Germany!

“The fact remains that I do get pretty bored, now and then, by the sheer stupidity of the English. There seems no way of making the English think. The buggers just will not think! That’s why they love John Osbourne who says in The Entertainer, ‘I don’t want to make people think, I want to make them feel.’ Well f**k it, we feel too much! Osbourne certainly does. I want to make them think. Unfortunately that’s almost impossible to do!”

ROMANTIC SERIAL

Moving from the sublime to the reviled… Your interest is not solely absorbed by those members of the human species that attain exceptional levels of intellectual and creative powers, you are also an ‘expert’ on criminals and murders – serial killers in particular…

“Ted Bundy was a highly intelligent man, one of my outsider types, who had this rather harsh background with a grandfather he greatly admired, but who was a total bully. Bundy’s mother moved away to Seattle, Tacoma, in order to get away from this family background, and what Bundy as a child wanted, was what I wanted… and what Bernard Shaw confessed to wanting: dreams about being a prince in disguise, about someone turning up and saying, ‘I’m your real father and I’m the Raja of so-and-so…’ Of course, he wanted to be adopted by an uncle who was a music professor, so all these daydreams...

“But! What you need is what I called The Strength To Dream – taking the title of my book from Bernard Shaw, who thought that every dream could be willed into reality by those who were sufficiently serious about it and whose will is strong enough. This is what I wanted to do.

“Ted Bundy did not have the strength to do that. Or rather, he was so completely shunted onto another track, by his sexual desire, that took him the wrong way. The judge who said, ‘You took the wrong road pardner,’ had absolutely got straight to the point.

“In the beginning of Ritual in the Dark, where the character goes down into the London underground and the advertising pictures of girls in their underwear he feels like a match thrown against a petrol soaked rag. The trouble with our civilization is that the level of sexual stimulation is far too high.”

It seems often that our society is very repressive, sexually, evident from the degree of censorship in films, books and comics. Yet, as you say, our advertising seems to rely heavily upon images of overt sexuality. Perhaps this is something (semi)conscious: if sexuality is routinely suppressed, then these quite blatant images in advertising become so much more potent…

“No – you see what you are suggesting by that argument is that perhaps we aught to have a far more open and sexually liberated society. Like the old jokes about Sweden, ‘Oh, that was wonderful… what’s your name?’ And that also leads to too much emphasis on sex and we’re back to Ted Bundy. The simple fact is that when you are really deeply interested in ideas, you become absorbed and transcend sex. It becomes an enjoyable diversion, but you’re not so deeply obsessed by it.

“I realise more and more, that this is a problem with our society. Robert Ardrey said in African Genesis, ‘in the jungle, sex is just a side show.’ As soon as you put animals in a zoo, they do nothing but screw, but in the wild, this just isn’t so. They are interested in more serious things, like eating and surviving… Reproducing is a part of it all, but not the dominant, all-important part.

“The problem with this civilization is that we’re all living in a zoo and as a result, sex has been raised to this intense level where we get serial killers who are obsessed by it. Who, like Ted Bundy or Ian Brady, wreck themselves and destroy their lives, and the lives of others, just because at a certain point they decide that it is worth exploring this sexual thing as far as they can possible go.”

Serial killers seem to have become the entertainment archaetype. Hannibal, and before that Freddie Kruger, are almost heroes. Do you think this indicative of a culture that is teetering on this sexual frustration? Or is it morbid fascination, or just that the serial killer has become the new ogre, the new mythic foe… It seems to be serial killers or alien abductors… or terrorists.

“I was surprised when I went into a shop, in Melbourne, that sold nothing but crime books, and they told me that most of their customers were teenage girls! To me, the reason for this seems clear. Teenage girls are in the most danger of being the next victim, and you always want to know about things that frighten you. When I was young I read books on sharks, octopus and snakes, because they struck me as creepy creatures. Like serial killers, you are not very likely to actually ever become a victim of these things, but they worry you. But what you learn almost immediately is that, in general, the usual stories you hear about them are rubbish! Conan Doyle wrote a story about some mysterious thing that kills people – their bodies are found horribly crushed. It turns out in the end to be a python. It is completely inaccurate about the behaviour of pythons!

“What we want to do is to learn about the things that frighten us by knowing about the real thing. In a sense, serial killers are less frightening than they appear to be. Someone like Henry Lee Lucas turns out to be a very mixed-up man with a strong desire for ‘salvation’, and an extremely bad habit formed when he was young, of fucking dead things. And as soon as you know that clearly, Henry Lee Lucas ceases to be this powerful, sinister serial killer.

“Dennis Neilson said of serial killers, when he was talking about The Silence Of The Lambs, that Harris had turned Hannibal Lector into a tremendously potent sinister figure and this was rubbish. He said, ‘I never felt potent in my life and that’s the reason I killed’. That’s a real insight – you see that Harris has completely distorted the serial killer.

“I think that Silence Of The Lambs is quite a good book, on the level of a fairy tale. It’s rather like Jack and the bean stalk, ‘Fee Fi Fo Fum…’ – totally unrealistic.”

Do think that these criminals, murders and serial killers might be trying to get away from their circumstances, some form of escape from the apes and the wolves – setting themselves aside from the rest of human society by committing ‘inhuman’ acts?

“You’re talking about the criminal romantic…

“To me someone like Nielson is totally uninteresting. Just as he says himself. Not a Criminal Romantic at all, just an inadequate victim of his necrophilia.”

I wonder if any of them can be seen as ‘Romantic’?

“Ian Brady, I think, was a Criminal Romantic. Ted Bundy was a Criminal Romantic. But the others, for example Richard Speck – who killed the eight nurses in Chicago – though he had the makings, so to speak, of a Criminal Romantic, he was basically just another inadequate personality like so many of these mass killers. Just a few have the idea, at the beginning, that if you do whatever you wanted to do – this is the De Sade fallacy – that, somehow, you would evolve beyond it. You would put it behind you… and stand triumphantly above these desires that no longer hold power over you.

“This doesn’t happen. What happens – and this is a very interesting and weird thing – is they get tangled, it’s like they can’t get their feet free of the net and they keep repeating the killing. The Yorkshire Ripper is a very good example of this. Now, I think there is a very good case for arguing that these people are literally possessed. Again and again these people say they are possessed by the devil. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised!”

INSIDE, OUTSIDE and THE OTHERSIDE

How firmly do you believe in spirits? You have given talks at the Society for Psychical Research...

“The answer is that I do, and it doesn’t strike me as the least bit important. The evidence seems strongly in favour of life after death. But, it’s as if you handed me some interesting piece of machinery and I asked you, ‘What’s this?’ and you tell me that it’s part of a car or a radio… I’d say, ‘Well that’s of no use to me whatever’. If I had a car that needed that part, I’d be delighted, but I haven’t. In the same way, handing me a piece of information like there is life after death, I’d think, ‘Well what can I do with this? Of what practical use is it to me?’ The answer is that it’s not.

“Although Dostoevsky said that the problem of whether we live after death is the most important question of all, to me this seems a fallacy. It would be nice to be absolutely certain that we live after death, but the real question is this confusion of the world we live in. The basic point is to try and understand it. That’s why I was so excited by chemistry when I was ten years old, it offered me a key with which to begin to understand it. I like to know things, it gives me pleasure. I feel that in a sense, I’m merely an instrument of a force that wants everyone to know things. One of my jobs, as a writer, is to digest information and process it in such a way that it becomes available to a larger number of people.”

THE CHURCH OF BOB

I think a friend of yours, Robert Anton Wilson is also very good at doing that…

“Oh, Bob is an old friend of mine, and Bob has said some very interesting things! There’s one piece that comes to mind, in his book TheIlluminati Papers, in which he describes when he began to smoke pot, while his wife was out at a feminist meeting once, and how he suddenly realised that with pot you could do the most amazing things. You could make yourself shrink, or expand until you filled the whole room. He goes on to say that later he realised that you can do this without pot. This made him terribly aware that we don’t understand anything about the powers of the mind. He talks about Freudian repressions and says that you suddenly realise that our minds are so full of these repressions, but you never notice because when you look at the external world, we edit it so quickly that we are not aware of the editing process. We are not aware that we are processing all the information. What’s more, processing it through things that we take absolutely for granted, we just accept these things as real. He says that when you do become aware of this editing process and the terrific speed at which it occurs, then you also realise that you can start re-editing things, and learn how to this more and more. It seems to me that when Bob wrote that three-page piece, he said one of most important things that any human being in the twentieth century has ever said. He put his finger right on it!

“He’s great fun, one of these rebel characters, very funny – a kind of Mark Twain. A lot of American rebels, like Vonnegut, for example, are very good at being anarchic and jibing about things, but they’re not terribly good when it comes to being creative and analytical. That’s where, I think, Robert Anton Wilson goes one phase better. He’s a very good example of what I mean by an outsider. He doesn’t make a tremendous fortune, he has to work as a journalist all the time… His books sell to a cult audience and make him a living, and he lectures around, but he is still working hard and he’s two or three years older than I am! The result, I hope, is that him and me both will make 90!” [ Editor's note: Sadly, Robert Anton Wilson has also passed away since this interview was conducted, he died on 11 January 2007, aged 75. He was outlived by Colin, who died on 5 December 2013, aged 82. ]

SERIOUSLY LIGHTWEIGHT

How do you compare your fiction and non-fiction?

“In a sense, my fiction is the ‘serious stuff’. To begin with, I thought of myself as a novelist. Ritual In The Dark took years and years to write and was the basis for The Outsider. I was writing Ritual longer before Outsider. In Ritual, I was writing about the three types of person: the hero, who is the typical intellectual outsider, feeling bewildered but pretending to be very analytical. There is the painter called Oliver Glass, who was based on Van Gogh, who is what you might call the emotional outsider. Then there is the murderer, Austin Munn, who is really based on somebody like Nijinski, who is the physical outsider. Each of them has a different way of disciplining themselves: the mind, the emotions, the body. It was when I was talking to my friend, Bill Hopkins, about this, that I began to express this idea about the three types of outsider, that I suddenly saw that I could write a book about this. So, the central chapter in The Outsider is the chapter in which I deal with T E Lawrence as the typical intellectual outsider, Van Gogh and Nijinski. These three types of outsider became the basis of the book and having taken this stuff out of Ritual and put it into another book, I lightened the load of Ritual and it became much easier to write! I had been trying to digest too much information into it.

“Ever since then, all my novels have been lightweight. I mean they’re not ‘just stories’, they are an attempt to digest extremely important information. For example, I wrote a book called Introduction To The New Existentialism, in which I talked about an idea that human beings are the victims of a kind of mind parasite that is deliberately sucking away our energies. At the same time I wrote The Mind Parasites. There’s always tended to be a novel running parallel with the ideas that interest me at a moment.

“I’m fascinated by virtual reality. I went to a conference in Japan about virtual reality – Timothy Leary was there talking about it. I think the interesting thing about the notion of virtual reality – being able to create a whole world inside your own head – really, the first creators of virtual reality were the Romantics. When Samuel Richardson invented the modern novel, in 1840, with Pamela – what he had done is invent virtual reality more than two centuries ago!”

SHAKESPEARE NEVER DID THIS!

Shamans and many ritual practices, such as visiting the other world, or astral travelling… are an ancient version of virtual reality. It seems that it is a fundamental human need to enter into, or create, these separate and virtual realities…

“The problem with ordinary reality that surrounds us is that it is filled with things that interest us and things that don’t, but mostly with things that don’t. The result is that very rarely do we perceive external reality as something that really interests us. This is why we want to visit strange places. If you are walking down a street in Hong Kong then ordinary everyday reality has taken on a higher level of interest for a short time while you are absorbing new things. The thing about a book is that writer has deliberately taken a lot of things of interest and put them between two covers. Compressed the interest, so to speak. And this was what the Romantics were doing, pushing all the interesting bits between two covers – all the bits that interested them, of course. Which involved beautiful girls, mountain landscapes, ruined castles and so on.

“This is the reason when as a child, the mere sight of a book was enough o send me into a kind of ecstasy. If I went into a room, in the house of some relatives, and I saw a book laying on a table, I headed straight for it. I wanted to know what was in it, what it was. More often than not it was some boring thing that I then didn’t want to look at. Nevertheless, this idea that you can compress meaning into books, so you create a far higher and concentrated level of meaning between the two covers has always struck me as tremendously significant – this is one of the greatest advances the human race has ever made! And when you start compressing your daydreams into books, you’ve gone higher still.

“Shakespeare never really did what H P Lovecraft did. There are horrors in Shakespeare, but he didn’t feel that there were certain things that he wanted to get out of his system and therefore he put them into Macbeth. Whereas Lovecraft, who was stuck in an extremely boring environment in Providence, quite deliberately created a hothouse environment in the mind and put it into stories. In a certain sense, Lovecraft did progress. He started off writing these weird, horrible stories… the early ones really are quite morbid. Then he got more and more imaginative as he progressed and developed. Towards the end of his life, the horror all but disappears and you get very good science fiction stories like The Shadow Out Of Time. They are not horrible any more, they’re fascinating. Lovecraft then stopped writing! He had written himself out of the horror and thought, ‘Oh, my god. I’ve nothing more to write about!’ At which point he died.

“Kierkegaard fell dead on the pavement the day after he went to the bank and withdrew the last of his money. Almost as if the unconscious mind told them to die. As if Lovecraft’s unconscious mind said, ‘Oh dear, I’ve got rid of all my morbidity that turned me into writer, so it’s time to die’. Now if he had the courage he would have said, ‘Right, I’ve put all that behind me, now let’s get on with the next stage!”

- Colin Wilson was talking with Remy Dean

A printable PDF file of the original interview, as it appeared in the first newsstand issue of The Scrawl, can be downloaded here...

Colin Wilson's autobiogtraphy, Dreaming to Some Purpose. is available at amazon.co.uk

You can read The Guardian's obituary for Colin Wilson here,

and an obituary for Robert Anton Wilson here.

Lots more info and interviews can be found at the Colin Wilson World website.

Dave Graney - Brought to Book

What was the first book you can remember reading that really grabbed you and carried you along?

I grew up in a house with three bedrooms and eight people living in it, so there was very little in the way of privacy or a little place to be by yourself. Mostly, we ran in and out of the house, madly playing football and cricket.

I read books at school but they made you read things that perhaps weren't right for a teen. I must mention here the Australian author Patrick White whose novel, about two strange brothers, The Solid Mandala, was given to us to read when I was about 15 or 16. It was too weird and slow and interior for us. I read it a  couple of years ago and - like all his work- it's pretty much a  total masterpiece.

I think, growing up, I read little bits of things here and there, and took them in quite hungrily. Things like J D Salinger’s For Esme With Love and Squalor. When a young adult, I read a lot of crime fiction. It was hard to find, mostly out of print. That made it good too. So I would say, The Postman Always Rings Twice, by James M Cain, had a big effect on me - made me think of ways to express things and illuminated my mind with thoughts of a wide open California. A definite adult world of drifters and working people. It was good to put my head in it when I was just moving into the rock music world which was becoming institutionalised youth culture.

Dave Graney, book-lover...

Do you have a favourite book, one that changed you or that you have re-read a few times?

I don't think I've ever read many books twice. I used to collect all the Richard Stark books involving the character, Parker. Lee Marvin played him in a film called Point Blank. The books were all very formulaic, written by Donald E Westlake under the ‘Stark’ pseudonym. I loved all the masks involved. Each book had the same format, so it was almost like the same one! We did an album called The Devil Drives with an image of Lee on the cover and I did a live show called Point Blank as well. There is an amazing hard-boiled novel by Paul Cain called Fast One that I have actually read two or three times.

What was the most recent book you read and thoroughly enjoyed?

It was either a book about Captain Bligh’s trip in an open boat after the mutiny on his ship, The Bounty, and then the subsequent mutiny in New South Wales, when he came here to be governor... or a book about an explorer called McDowell Stuart, who walked from Adelaide to the top end for the first time. I probably most enjoyed Somebody Else, a book about the poet Arthur Rimbaud in Africa, after he'd given up writing.

Actually, I just remembered - I loved, A Narrow Road to the Deep North, by Richard Flanagan. It’s just been listed – deservedly, too! - for the Booker prize. (Since announced as the 2014 winner - ed.) An absolutely monumental, epic novel set in Adelaide during the Second World War and the Burma Railway. I highly recommend it - a masterpiece!

Who have been your favourite authors, and what have you learnt from them?

I bought four Patrick White books in hardback a few years ago and absolutely roared through them. He won a Nobel Prize for literature - the only Australian, and deservedly so. His books are unpopular - Too Good! An amazing writer. Everything I've read: The Vivisector, The Tree of Man, The Cockatoos, Voss - about a German explorer - Riders in the Chariot... Amazing.

I love a lot of Australian writers. David Foster is quite experimental and wrote a recent book called Sons of the Rumour, where he tried to tell the thousand and one nights in contemporary colloquial language. Two women, under the name 'M Barnard Eldershaw' wrote a great modernist- futuristic novel in 1945 called Tomorrow And Tomorrow And Tomorrow - amazing work. A contemporary writer called Delia Falconer wrote about Custer’s last battle in a great novel called The Company of Soldiers. I have read two great novels set in convict era Hobart which seemed to be a reconstruction of Georgian London of thirty years before - one by Christopher Koch called Out of Ireland. The other was by a writer with a very shady reputation called Hal Porter. It is magnificently ragged and raw but electrifying. It’s called The Tilted Cross. It’s about British class, seen through the Tasmanian reproduction.

Do you have a writing ritual, regimen or a tried and tested process?

I wish I did! Something like George Simenon or Zane Grey who seemed to be machines! I just avoid it like everybody and then panic and sit down for hours. Feel great and then feel shit. The usual!

So, what motivates you to write?

Its quite enjoyable! I don't know whether it’s as enjoyable for me as playing music or singing. That’s quite an unconscious thing that I really love, also the camaraderie of fellow players. Writing to order for stories is enjoyable. Trying to write an extended piece is a great challenge. I'm suffering that challenge at the moment.

What are the major differences between your approach to writing prose for a book and writing songs for an album?

Well, musical things are just dumb luck or mistakes for the most part. Also very intuitive and you make your own rules. Australian artists all make themselves up, we have very few archetypes to model ourselves after. I don't know what the business side of it is like or how its going to hold together in either pursuit. There's no retiring in music.

Do you think a writer has any social or moral responsibilities?

Well writers are mostly just scratching out a life yeah? Like everybody. These are pretty brutal times and the days of self destruction are pretty much over. Nobody cares much for that sort of thing, do they? It’s also a world of cheap sensation and buzz. It’s easy to stir up a lot of people but it’s hard to get a lot of sustained momentum from that sort of thing. I'm talking about outraging the mob. The mob just drifts away don't they? I live in Australia which at the moment is run by Rupert Murdoch and several mining magnates and companies. It is being destroyed. Ravaged. I guess artists have a responsibility to at least express their cognisance of the great scams that are going on.

Who do you admire, who would be your heroes / heroines?

I admire some people from a distance who would have probably been pretty hard work up close. The explorer Richard Burton, the dandy Beau Brummel. Those two mainly for their notoriety and the fact that people know so little about them. Jerry Lee Lewis, Jim Morrison, Hank Williams, Charlie Rich, Charlie Chaplin, Mick Jagger, the guitar players Grant green, Davy Graham, Kenny Burrell. I love some early TV shows like the Prisoner with Patrick McGoohan and the Avengers series. I love Dave Chappelle and a lot of British comedians. I think they're amazing actually. Those long shows by Stewart Lee and those Fast Show guys, Higson and White, Mitchell and Webb. I love the drama of Apollinaire and Rimbaud and the great, compact writing of the mysterious A E Coppard.

Now you have a long and successful writing career, do you have any advice or ‘words of wisdom’ for aspiring young writers of songs or prose?

My advice is to BE LUCKY. And also happy. Why ever not!

Why ever not, indeed! Thank you, Dave Graney! 

Dave Graney - King of Pop

UPDATE: we have since added a more recent Scrawl interview with Dave Graney here 
...and you can also read an archive Scrawl interview with Dave Graney here 
(PDF from newsstand edition)

STOP PRESS: Dave Graney is currently playing select venues in the UK with his band 'The MistLY':

October 2014 dates include:

Tuesday 14th at the Brixton Windmill, London. 

Thursday 16th  at the 12bar Club, London. 

Saturday 18th  at the Mucky Pup Islington.

Tuesday 21st  at the Voodoo Rooms, Edinburgh

For more info on the music and books of Dave Graney, go to his official website.

Click here to read reviews, hear samples or to purchase Dave's latest album, Fearful Wiggings.

Check out Dave Graney's Facebook for more info and any additional live dates...

- Dave Graney was talking to Remy Dean.

The Horror... The Humour... of Graham Masterton

One of Britain’s most prolific and hard-working horror writers talks to Remy Dean about sex, murder, crossing the line and not wearing hats indoors…

If you check out an on-line bibliography of Graham Masterton, you will be glad of your scroll wheel! The lists go on and on… and most are incomplete, mainly because no one can keep up with his output, which seems to average about four novels a year. 

If you talk to a Masterton fan (I count myself as a member of this cult) they will sing his praises and convince you that he is indeed, ‘the living inheritor of the realm of Edgar Allen Poe’ - as claimed on the back of numerous book jackets - a writer of dark imagination that rivals, perhaps surpasses, the big names such as Stephen King and Clive Barker. Talk to one of his detractors (as with most horror writers he has many) and they will fail to convince you that his stories come from a sick and warped imagination and are only suitable reading for those who have sicker minds. Or perhaps you will talk to a reader of his sweeping historical sagas, who will recount how they could not put his doorstop of novel down, how they were transported into a well-researched and convincing re-telling of some historical setting and mind-set. Or maybe a reader that loves to be immersed in his perceptive and often prophetic political thrillers… 

Generally, Masterton divides readers, into three categories: those who love his books, those who hate them, and those who have never heard of him… He has managed to maintain the status of a ‘cult’ writer, although his first novel, The Manitou, was published nearly forty years ago, he has won literary awards, collaborated with William S Boroughs, featured on best-seller lists, been adapted for television and cinema… and shows no signs of slowing down!

Depending on what day you ask me, I may well cite Graham Masterton as my favourite author – not for clarity and elegance of prose, for that I go to Bukowski, not for his profound yet entertaining philosophical inventiveness, for that I go to Richard Miller, not for his potent and disconcerting honesty, for that I go to Lydia Lunch… but for a good rollicking read, I’ll go for Graham!

In a recent twitter conversation with @GrahamMasterton, he stated that Descendant was one of his personal favourites from his own back-catalogue. I thoroughly enjoyed it too and on hearing the news that another of his books has just been optioned for film, was suggesting it as an ideal candidate for cinematic treatment… His writing is usually so cinematic, it is surprising that more of his books have not been made into big screen movies.

“Ten of my books have been optioned over the years for feature films, including Trauma, which was optioned by Jonathan Mostow, and Family Portrait, which was optioned by Gold Circle. Every time some last-minute problem led to the projects falling by the wayside – usually financial. Almost all writers will tell you that they have had the same experience. The late Tony Scott bought three of my short stories for his Hunger TV series, the best adaptation of which was The Secret Shih-Tan, a Chinese cannibal story featuring Jason Scott Lee. The other two were Anais, about the sketch of a sexy woman coming to life, and Bridal Suite, about a honeymoon couple who get more than they bargained for in a New England guest house.

"Walkers has been optioned by Jules Stewart, the mother of Kristen Stewart from the Twilight series. It is currently in development with her Libertine Films in Los Angeles, under the new title of The Oaks. All I can do is cross my fingers and hope that it gets a green light.”

Also ideally filmic was one of the first Mastertons that I read, The Devils of D-Day, a fast-moving and fantastical war story that I have since pushed on several friends… With such a huge back-catalogue, does Graham have any recommendations for anyone who has not read anything Mastertonian? Where could they start?

“I think The Manitou is probably a good place to start,” he responds with little hesitation, “because that was the novel which kicked off my career as a horror writer.  After that I would probably recommend some of the novels I wrote in the 1980s like Family Portrait and Mirror and The Pariah. By the time new readers have digested those, I think they will be pretty well acquainted with the way I write and the directions I like to go wandering off."

The Manitou was a hugely original and influential novel for the horror genre, with very few precedents at the time of publication, it has been followed by four sequels to date. In the Manitou series of stories, the protagonist, Harry Erskine - who was played by Tony Curtis in the 1978 movie version - is  described in the books as a bit like Elliot Gould... so who would be cast in that role now?

John Singing Rock (Michael Ansara) talks 'medicine'
with Harry Erskine (Tony Curtis) in The Manitou

“I think Tony Curtis was perfect for the role, because he played it absolutely straight - as did the rest of the cast. I don’t know enough of today’s young male actors to be able to make a suggestion for a remake.”

How much of the real Masterton is in Erskine?

“Oh, quite a bit, the real Masterton finds it hard to take things too seriously and also reads fortune-telling cards, although I do it for pretty young women for free, rather than rich old ladies for money.”

He seems happy enough to be labelled as a horror writer, and is respected as one, having been awarded some prestigious genre prizes, such as a Special Edgar for Charnel House, a Bram Stoker award for short stories, the Prix Julia Verlanger for Family Portrait. He recently had a park bench dedicated to him in Krakow, where you can sit and listen to an extract from Bassilisk on your mobile device... but having written such a variety of genres, including non-fiction and sex-guides, is there a label he feels is more suitable?

A French edition of Family Portrait / Picture of Evil
which was awarded the Prix Julia Verlanger 

“If I labelled myself as anything, it would probably be ‘journalist’. I was trained as a newspaper reporter and a magazine editor - I have always written to entertain and involve my readers rather than trying to make any personal points or explore my own psyche. To me, writing is my job.”

Does he wear different hats for different genres? (I mean this metaphorically, of course, but privately hope he really does wear a variety of a hats when writing!)

“Obviously there is a difference between the way I write a sex guide and the way I write a horror novel, but when I am writing fiction the genre is unimportant. What is important is making the characters and the settings believable and giving readers the sense that they are participating in the story rather than just reading it. Even with a sex guide I try to be involving and make readers empathise with the experiences of the people I am writing about, and imagine themselves in some of the sexual scenarios which I recommend.”

Is there, I wonder, a personal favourite piece of work that means a lot to him on some level, or that he is particularly proud of?

“I was very pleased by the way Trauma (aka Bonnie Winter) came out. I was originally going to write it under a woman’s nom-de-plume but when I showed it to my agent he persuaded me to publish it under my own name. It tells the story of a woman crime-scene cleaner who is gradually brought to the point of a nervous breakdown by the horrors of her job and her dead-end marriage, and I feel that in this novel I managed to get closer to understanding female thinking than any other novel I had written before.”

Fellow Brit Horror writer, Ramsey Campbell, recounts how people often come up to him and, knowing him to be a horror writer, will say, “I don’t like the kind of books your write,” to which he responds with the questions, “Oh, which ones did you read and not like?” To which they reply, “I haven’t read any of them…” Clive Barker is accused of being in league with Satan… Graham must also be used to dealing with negative responses because of people’s preconceptions?

“My crime novels White Bones and Broken Angels, which have been very successful as Kindle books, did elicit some hostile reactions, mainly because I wrote about murders in a very graphic way. But, after all, murders are horrible and I don’t see any point in pretending otherwise. Real murder is not like an Agatha Christie novel, in which the bishop gets bashed on the head in the bathroom with a badger. It amused me that most of the readers who complained spelled 'graphic' with a double 'f' - ‘graffic’.

"I never read reviews these days, because I know from my experience on magazines that only a tiny percentage of readers ever complain, and so they are not in any way representative of the readership at large. All that counts is how many books are sold... if it’s a lot, then you obviously have some happy and satisfied customers."

His books do often have a level of cruelty and ‘nastiness’, but the characters and stories are also very entertaining and I often find myself chuckling along to dialogue and the ridiculous situations they may find themselves in – to me the horror seems balanced with humour. Is this a deliberate decision?

“It’s deliberate in that I know that people often react to desperate or even grisly situations with humour. It’s our defence mechanism against the unspeakable. Think of the 'Tommies' in World War One who produced humorous magazines like The Wipers Times and made jokes about death and hideous conditions in the trenches.”

…the cat and razor-wire enema from The Sleepless, or the family murdered cruelly in the opening of Black Angel – both books I really enjoyed, by the way, particularly the latter – but does Graham ever think he has ‘crossed the line’?

“I have occasionally ‘crossed the line’, as you call it, on purpose. I have written several short stories which were intended from the beginning to test the very limits of acceptability, such as the notorious Eric The Pie, which led to the banning, by W H Smith, of the horror magazine Frighteners, which I still regret, as it was a very good horror magazine. Then there was Sepsis, which was a Cemetery Dance chapbook, and most recently Beholder, about a little girl who believes that her mother is keeping her imprisoned in the house because she is too beautiful to go out. That will appear in my new collection of short stories Figures of Fear, in October.”

What does he think his readers enjoy in the books, what attracts them to come back?

“I hope when they read my books they feel involved in the characters and identify with their lives and their problems. All of my characters are pretty ordinary people, not super-heroes or knights of the realm, and they often have difficulties quite apart from the evils they have to confront, like business difficulties or a failed marriage or grief. I try very hard to make myself invisible to the reader to create that ‘cinematic’ effect you talked about. This is not nearly as easy as it might seem, because it requires very precise choice of words and an ability to communicate plot essentials without appearing to be lecturing. The late William Burroughs and I spent many hours discussing how to become what he called ‘El Hombre Invisible’. I try to evoke sounds and smells and sensations in my novels to make them feel real, and the greatest compliment that was ever paid to me was by a woman who was reading my Irish crime novel White Bones and said she had to keep looking up from the book to reassure herself that she wasn’t actually in Ireland.”

Graham has been writing professionally for fifty years or so, what is it that still motivates him to write?

“It gives me a chance to tell everybody else what to do. And sometimes that’s a good thing. A retired country doctor in Warsaw said that for years he had prescribed my sex guide Magia Seksu (How to Drive Your Man Wild in Bed) to his patients if they had sex problems.”

Short video: Graham Masterton at a Polish convention  
talking about where his ideas come from

He was instrumental in publishing Scare Care – a collection of horror stories sold to raise money for children’s charities - what wider issues are important to him? What gets Graham angry or ‘fired up’?

“Very few things fire me up except stupidity and ignorance and cruelty and elderly people who dress badly and people who wear hats or caps indoors,” (okay, so he doesn't actually wear different hats for writing each genre…) “Oh, and Banksy and his rubbishy clichéd graffiti. Apart from that, I find it almost impossible to believe that in the 21st century we are still fighting and killing each other, especially small children who have never had a chance to live out their lives. I have seen a great deal of child abuse, and also children who have terrible debilitating illnesses and brain damage, and that is why I put together the Scare Care anthology, which was a collection of short stories by mostly well-known horror authors all of which were donated for free. It raised tens of thousands of dollars for children’s charities in the UK, United States, and several European countries.”

So who are his heroes and heroines?

“People who believe in themselves and stick at what they believe in and take risks. I am helping a young woman to write her first novel and her determination makes me proud of her.”

In many Masterton books, you will find some quite specific art references, to particular works and painters. I gather then that art must be an interest of his – how does creativity from other formats feed into the creative writing?

“I have always enjoyed art and in fact was going to be a commercial artist before I decided to become a newspaper reporter instead. Art can teach you a lot about how to describe a room or a scene or a building or a person. Take a look at paintings by Velasquez, easily my favourite painter. From a distance, they appear immensely detailed, but when you look closer you can see that elaborate lace ruff is just a few splodges of white, and that cherubic face is made out nothing more than some smears of red and yellow ochre. Picasso could do that, too, before he started painting all that Cubist rubbish. Whistler comes a close second...”

To what extent does Graham think that location influences creativity?

“Location is very important as the setting for a story. It has to be utterly believable and feel real. But I can write anywhere. I have written horror stories on the beach in Greece, and sex guides in a cupboard in Stockholm,. When I first joined a newspaper, the reporters’ room with all its manual typewriters sounded like a riveting shop in a Glasgow shipyard, but you soon get used to writing with all that background noise.”

He moved around from Scotland to Ireland to the USA and back – can he still be considered a British writer?

“When I write, I am not aware of having any particular nationality. I set many of my books in the United States for commercial reasons – the whole world is familiar with American culture from films and TV, so it make sense. I am writing a series of books about Katie Maguire the Irish detective at the moment so the inside of my head is completely Irish and I even find myself saying things like: (in blarney accent) ‘if my dog had a face as ugly as yours he’d shave his arse and walk backwards’!”

So when we drink to Graham’s health this solstice weekend, what should we toast him with… a shot of poteen or Irish whiskey? ...perhaps raise a Guinness?

“I have been known to enjoy a Sauvignon Blanc or two, although in Bialystok in Poland recently I spent the whole night until 2:30 in the morning on wild strawberry vodka. It was absolutely delicious and so pure I had no hangover the following day. Many thanks to Adam ‘Tequila’ the barman!”

- and thank you Graham Masterton, Cheers! 

Graham Masterton was talking with Remy Dean

if you enjoyed this interview, you can...

Just out are a new disaster novel Drought - in the style of Plague and Famine - and a new Katie Maguire novel, Red Light. 

A new short story collection Figures of Fear will be published in October and he is currently working on a fourth Katie Maguire novel and when that is finished he promises, “to write a novel so scary that nobody will be able to sleep at night after reading it.”

up-coming release...

More info and news on the official Graham Masterton website...

Graham Masterton is 'Brought to Book' in our Yuletide issue...

You may also like:

The Joy of Horror with Ramsey Campbell… +  The Heart & Soul of Clive Barker

Liesel Schwarz - Brought to Book

What was the first book that really grabbed you and took you on a journey when you started reading?

That's a very difficult question to answer because there are so many! I think stories and the books they came in have always held me in their thrall. I grew up reading a lot of fantasy. For me, historical fiction was also a form of fantasy because writers were bringing the past to life. I think as a child, books written by authors such as Rosemary Sutcliffe and Diana Wynne-Jones had a profound impact on my young mind.

Do you have an all-time favourite book? 

I have many, so it's very hard to pick just one. I know I am supposed to cite some wondrous work of literature at this juncture, but I think I also have a number of ‘guilty pleasure’ favourite books - the ones you own in paperback and have read till they became dog-eared and the pages started falling out? I am a big fan of Michael Moorcock's work. I also love writers like Margaret Atwood, Ursula LeGuinn and Anne MaCaffrey.

What is the most recent book you have read and really enjoyed? 

I recently read debut author Debbie Johnson's novel, Dark Vision which I thought was excellent.

What are you reading right now? 

I am currently in the process of researching my next project so I am reading a lot of non-fiction at the moment. I have however recently purchased G W Dahlquist's next book titled, The Dark Volume which is sitting on my shelf waiting for me.

Is there any other media you really enjoy and what inspires you most such as comics, music, art?

I tend to absorb a lot of media across the board. That includes film, TV, comics and short films. I am currently very interested in what Amazon Prime and Netflix are doing in terms of television shows.

Who is your all-time favourite writer?

There are many and it changes from time to time. I am a big fan of Charles Dickens. I also love writers like Jules Verne.

Is there a writer who changed your outlook profoundly? 

I think every time you read a good book, it changes your outlook profoundly. That's what books do. I think I read Stephen King's On Writing many years ago and it made the idea of being a writer accessible. I also absolutely loved Sometimes the Magic Works - Lessons From a Writing Life by Terry Brooks. I was incredibly honoured to meet him in person last year and he was ever so nice to me which made it extra special.

 When did you ‘wake up’ to being a writer?

I don't think I had a moment where I ‘woke up’ to being a writer. I've always had an aptitude for languages. I've always been a voracious reader and I wrote stories from a very young age. Then common sense prevailed and I went on to become a lawyer with a ‘real job’. I took the decision to go back to writing when I was in my twenties - once I had ticked all the boxes one has to tick in life.

What is your writing regimen right now?

Sadly, the image of the ubiquitous writer spread out on a chaise lounge, wrapped in a feather boa while nibbling bonbons is a myth. Writing is very hard work and so I think that having a professional approach to one's writing is important. I think it's also quite important to have structure and routine, so I aim to be at my desk, working by 8.30 am as one would a day job.

Do you have any advice for writers getting started? 

The best advice I can give writers who are getting started is this: Learn as much as you can about your craft and the business. Work hard and finish what you start. Also, never give up on your dream.

Did you wonder about being gender neutral for your launch in the Science Fiction and Fantasy genre? Do you think this a valid issue? 

Oddly enough, there is a percentage of people who think that Liesel is a man's name - I joke not. I think every writer, around the time of publication of their first book wonders what name to put on the cover. Unfortunately, sales and reader statistics seem to indicate that even in this day and age in the SFF genre, female readers will generally read books written by men and by women. Male readers won't and tend to stick to books written by men. This is why female writers and their publishers are faced with the dilemma of whether or not to publish under a gender neutral name in order to reach a greater readership.

It's a sad state of affairs, but one that I hope is slowly changing, one reader at a time. I am happy to say though, that I have never been asked to androgenise my name. In fact, I am extremely lucky to be with my publishers, DelRey UK, who actively promote and celebrate women writers in SFF.

What is your favourite recipe book? 

My favourite recipe book is a work entitled Domestic Cookery written by ‘A Lady’ It was published in 1846. Recipe books published pre-Mrs Beaton are quite rare, mostly because few survived the ravages of the kitchen. I love it because the recipes are so interesting.

Liesel Schwarz is hailed as ‘the new high priestess of steam-punk’ and writes with an infectious joy in the genre. Dark arcane arts, gadgets and fin de siècle details merge into a compelling story arc which follows the adventures of heroine Elle Chance.

Novels to date are Conspiracy of Alchemists, A Clockwork Heart and Sky Pirates - which has just been published by DelRey.

Chronicles of Light and Shadow - the story so far...

She also teaches SFF creative writing master classes and is just finishing off her MA in creative writing at Brunel University.  

Liesel was born in South Africa, worked in London and now has a cottage in the country. She is a romantic and loves (amongst other things) cats, the British Library, and the proper way to drink Absinthe.

For updates see Liesel's official website 

Thank you, Liesel!

- Liesel Schwarz was talking with Kim Vertue