Twinings Earl Grey tea. Soon, very soon, I'll grab a bottle of Heineken from the fridge.
Introduce yourself - as writers, we often get asked for boring factual author bios. If you could write an author bio unconstrained by the boundaries of reality and truth, what would it say?
Hmmm. I tend a bit toward self-deprecation, so... How's this:
Tony Rabig knew from an early age that he wanted to write, and resolved to learn from the best. He traveled back and forth across the United States, England, Europe, and South America in a decades-long quest to learn his craft from some of the world's finest writers. As a result of his efforts, numerous writers' organizations were formed and the organizations pooled their resources to hire the sharpest legal minds so that restraining orders might be filed against Rabig on behalf of their clients. Undaunted by the threat of lawsuits and prison, Rabig changed his tactics; no longer did he lie in wait for the writers, or sneak into their studios to go over their drafts -- now he followed the trash trucks to the landfills in hope of finding cast-off drafts or discarded file copies of manuscripts. When his few remaining friends complained about the stench, he gave up this practice, and simply began to write. The writers' organizations he had been instrumental in creating found other things to do. Rabig has recently been allowed to go off his medications, and begin using pens rather than crayons. He claims to no longer have any impulse to hold seances so that he might speak with Ernest Hemingway; his long-suffering wife, however, reports that he must occasionally be escorted out of libraries and bookstores because he tries to substitute his own name for Hemingway's on the contents pages of anthologies that include "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber." Recently, he finished the very first draft of his very first declarative sentence, and he hopes to write another sentence soon.
If you had a Mister Hyde style alter-ego what would he/she be called and why?
Godzilla. There are a number of places and people that really need the kind of attention Godzilla devotes to downtown Tokyo; the ability to morph into the big green guy would come in awfully handy there. If something more unobtrusive and not copyrighted or trademarked by Toho is needed for the alter-ego, though, let's go with Vinnie the Hammer. Same functions, basically, but on a much smaller and more personal scale.
'Literary horror' - oxymoron or your bread & butter as a writer?
Certainly not an oxymoron. As for my bread & butter -- I can't say how "literary" my stuff is; I try to make sure it reads fairly smoothly and that it's not dull.
The Penny Dreadnought art features people-with-telescopes-for-eyes. What low-tech body adornment or extension would you like?
Not really into that sort of thing myself, but a good pen for the right index finger might be of some use.
If you could make any one person - alive or dead, male or female, real or fictional - an honorary Abominable Gentleman, who would it be and why?
I think I'd go with John Collier; for the reason, look no farther than his short story collection Fancies and Goodnights. Wonderful, wonderful stuff, and the book's worth the price of admission just for the closing paragraph of "Over Insurance." Trust me.
Let's bitch - we partially came up with the idea of Penny Dreadnought in reaction to a lot of the 'sparkly vampire' school of supernatural writing. What about writing or publishing today makes you want to scream?
What's happened to mass market paperbacks over the last forty or fifty years. I groused about some of this in my blog a little while ago. When I started buying paperbacks, I could walk into a pharmacy in my neighborhood and find, in mass market editions, writers like Anthony Burgess, Vladimir Nabokov, John D. MacDonald, Anthony Powell, Theodore Sturgeon, Shirley Jackson, B. Traven, Cornell Woolrich, Henry James, Richard Matheson, John O'Hara, Isaac Bashevis Singer, W. Somerset Maugham, Nevil Shute, William Goldman, Evan Hunter, Roald Dahl, and more. A lot of the writers whose work once appeared in editions aimed at mass audiences simply aren't available that way any more, and the casual reader browsing the supermarket or WalMart racks won't see anything like that range of material. There's apparently an assumption that only the newest sparkly vampire stuff will sell enough copies to warrant that kind of distribution. Sad.
Be honest - despite being a seasoned horror pro, are you actually confident you can pronounce 'Cthulhu' correctly in public?
Seasoned horror pro? Moi??? Anyway... Can I pronounce Cthulhu correctly in public? You bet. Ka-THOO-loo. Right? RIGHT?????
What's the most abominable thing you've done that you want to reveal to the internet at large?
Well, in every national election from 1984 to date (and 2012 won't be any exception) I've voted a straight Republican ticket. Does that count?
The third issue of Penny Dreadnought is about the world ending. What's your favourite literary apocalypse?
Novel-length would be a three-way tie between Stephen King's The Stand, Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, and John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids. Shorter -- a tie between Alfred Bester's "Adam and No Eve" and Arthur C. Clarke's "The Nine Billion Names of God," and I might toss "Vintage Season" by Henry Kuttner & C. L. Moore in there too.
Aliens are threatening to destroy the human race unless we can prove we are civilised enough to live. However they are short of time, and out of the entire cultural repository of the world to date, they want a single short story of yours to prove we are worth not vaporising. Which story do you pick and why?
One of my stories? Kiss the planet goodbye... While I don't necessarily think it's my best story, I'd probably go with "Acts of Faith" (included in "The Other Iron River, and Other Stories." End of commercial.) The protagonist tries to preserve something of value for the future even though there's little hope he can do that, and even less hope for his own survival; but he tries anyway, putting his personal safety aside for larger concerns. Of course, aliens of a devious nature might regard people with that capacity as a potential threat and wipe us out just the same.
If you had a Mister Hyde style alter-ego what would he/she be called and why?
Godzilla. There are a number of places and people that really need the kind of attention Godzilla devotes to downtown Tokyo; the ability to morph into the big green guy would come in awfully handy there. If something more unobtrusive and not copyrighted or trademarked by Toho is needed for the alter-ego, though, let's go with Vinnie the Hammer. Same functions, basically, but on a much smaller and more personal scale.
'Literary horror' - oxymoron or your bread & butter as a writer?
Certainly not an oxymoron. As for my bread & butter -- I can't say how "literary" my stuff is; I try to make sure it reads fairly smoothly and that it's not dull.
The Penny Dreadnought art features people-with-telescopes-for-eyes. What low-tech body adornment or extension would you like?
Not really into that sort of thing myself, but a good pen for the right index finger might be of some use.
If you could make any one person - alive or dead, male or female, real or fictional - an honorary Abominable Gentleman, who would it be and why?
I think I'd go with John Collier; for the reason, look no farther than his short story collection Fancies and Goodnights. Wonderful, wonderful stuff, and the book's worth the price of admission just for the closing paragraph of "Over Insurance." Trust me.
Let's bitch - we partially came up with the idea of Penny Dreadnought in reaction to a lot of the 'sparkly vampire' school of supernatural writing. What about writing or publishing today makes you want to scream?
What's happened to mass market paperbacks over the last forty or fifty years. I groused about some of this in my blog a little while ago. When I started buying paperbacks, I could walk into a pharmacy in my neighborhood and find, in mass market editions, writers like Anthony Burgess, Vladimir Nabokov, John D. MacDonald, Anthony Powell, Theodore Sturgeon, Shirley Jackson, B. Traven, Cornell Woolrich, Henry James, Richard Matheson, John O'Hara, Isaac Bashevis Singer, W. Somerset Maugham, Nevil Shute, William Goldman, Evan Hunter, Roald Dahl, and more. A lot of the writers whose work once appeared in editions aimed at mass audiences simply aren't available that way any more, and the casual reader browsing the supermarket or WalMart racks won't see anything like that range of material. There's apparently an assumption that only the newest sparkly vampire stuff will sell enough copies to warrant that kind of distribution. Sad.
Be honest - despite being a seasoned horror pro, are you actually confident you can pronounce 'Cthulhu' correctly in public?
Seasoned horror pro? Moi??? Anyway... Can I pronounce Cthulhu correctly in public? You bet. Ka-THOO-loo. Right? RIGHT?????
What's the most abominable thing you've done that you want to reveal to the internet at large?
Well, in every national election from 1984 to date (and 2012 won't be any exception) I've voted a straight Republican ticket. Does that count?
The third issue of Penny Dreadnought is about the world ending. What's your favourite literary apocalypse?
Novel-length would be a three-way tie between Stephen King's The Stand, Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, and John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids. Shorter -- a tie between Alfred Bester's "Adam and No Eve" and Arthur C. Clarke's "The Nine Billion Names of God," and I might toss "Vintage Season" by Henry Kuttner & C. L. Moore in there too.
Aliens are threatening to destroy the human race unless we can prove we are civilised enough to live. However they are short of time, and out of the entire cultural repository of the world to date, they want a single short story of yours to prove we are worth not vaporising. Which story do you pick and why?
One of my stories? Kiss the planet goodbye... While I don't necessarily think it's my best story, I'd probably go with "Acts of Faith" (included in "The Other Iron River, and Other Stories." End of commercial.) The protagonist tries to preserve something of value for the future even though there's little hope he can do that, and even less hope for his own survival; but he tries anyway, putting his personal safety aside for larger concerns. Of course, aliens of a devious nature might regard people with that capacity as a potential threat and wipe us out just the same.
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