Snapshots: Robert Freeman Wexler interviewed

What kind of writer are you?
Geologic. Words, thoughts, ideas materialize slowly and find their way to the page.

What are you working on now?
A novel, tentatively called Recollections of a Malleable Future, but I also call it New Springdale Novel, because it’s set in Springdale.  I’m around a third of the way through it, but I’ve put it on hold to work on a novella.  The novella is a historical/Western-ish thing set around the Gulf Coast of Texas in 1888.  It’s a crime/detective story with strangeness.  I’m about halfway through and still trying to think of a title.

What’s recently or soon out?
This is the longest period I’ve had without new things out.  I’m looking for a publisher for a short story collection.  The Western novella is supposed to come out from PS at World Fantasy in Brighton…assuming I finish in time.

In Springdale Town is one of those stories that plays with the boundaries between the weird and the very real. Tell us about the story’s origins and why it became something you had to write.
It really started when I went to a movie theater and no one was there (I describe that situation in the Afterword; that doesn’t mean it really happened—I fabricate many things—but in this case it’s true). I had been thinking about writing a Jonathan Carroll-type of story in which the people from a television drama are actually real. After writing a bit about a man who can’t find other people, I realized that I had found the television program story. And had hooked myself, so I had to finish it.

Describe your typical writing day.
I write for twenty to thirty minutes Monday through Thursday during lunch breaks at work, then longer on Fridays. Rarely on the weekends. I wish I had more time, but I’ve learned to be efficient with the time I have.

What would you draw attention to from your back-list?
Besides In Springdale Town, newly released in ebook from Infinity Plus…? I’m still (after all these years) looking for a U.S. publisher for The Painting and the City. It came out in 2009 from PS, in French translation from now-defunct Zanzibar Editions, audiobook from iambik audiobooks…but no U.S. publisher.

Which other authors or books do you think deserve a plug?
I recently posted on my blog about a fine contemporary noir novel called Robbers, by Christopher Cook. Older writers, Robert Aickman and Arthur Machen, newer writers, Michael Cisco, Brendan Connell, Kaaron Warren, Sébastien Doubinsky, other writers available from Infinity Plus, Iain Rowan, Neil Williamson, Anna Tambour.

Who are the people who’ve made a real difference to your writing career?
Teachers from Clarion West: Lucius Shepard, Michael Bishop, Nicola Griffith, people who’ve published me, mainly Peter Crowther of PS—without him the world would be a sadder place of fewer books.

If you were to offer one snippet of writing advice what would it be?
Don’t write what you think will sell. Write what comes from yourself, in a way that only you can write it. Otherwise you’ll sound like everyone else. There’s a market for people who sound like everyone else, so you’ll sell a lot more books than me, but that’s my advice.

So… the easy one: what’s the future of publishing? How will writers be making a living and publishing in five or ten years? What will readers be reading?
I can’t tell you. I figured it out, but it’s a secret. No one else has figured it out. Just me. All will be revealed at the proper moment. No sooner.

Any other questions you’d like to have been asked? Feel free to add and answer them, and I’ll pretend to have asked them.

I’d like to say thanks for putting this new Springdale ebook together. It’s great to give new life to the story, send it out to find new readers.

More…

Robert Freeman Wexler’s latest novel is The Painting And The City, PS Publishing 2009. His new infinity plus novella, In Springdale Town, originally came out in 2003 from PS Publishing and was reprinted in Best Short Novels 2004, SFBC, and in Modern Greats of Science Fiction, iBooks; his other work includes a novel, Circus Of The Grand Design (Prime Books 2004 and infinity plus ebooks, 2011), and a chapbook of short fiction, Psychological Methods To Sell Should Be Destroyed (Spilt Milk Press/Electric Velocipede 2008). His stories have appeared in various magazines and anthologies, including Polyphony, The Third Alternative, Electric Velocipede, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. He lives at Sanity Creek, Ohio with his wife, the writer Rebecca Kuder, and daughter Merida Kuder-Wexler.

Buy stuff:

• In Springdale Town
  amazon.com | amazon.co.uk
• Circus Of The Grand Design
  amazon.com | amazon.co.uk