DH: Brad Watson can write with anti-matter. In his stories, like the ones in Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives which I have been reviewing on TG1B, he can spin alternative worlds where his characters are supported and loved, alternative dimensions where they find the self-esteem they have been looking for.
But those worlds aren’t this one. In this world his characters can seem alien, like they are sea creatures that have been plunked down in the middle of Death Valley, their fins and gills useless.
I have been corresponding with BW for a couple of weeks about the possibility of this kamikaze-brilliant writer doing a WWFIN for the Three Guys…a guest post in our When We Fell In Love series. That’s not going to happen right now. But Brad’s explanation of why that’s not going to happen is giving us a left out-of-left field post about being a successful writer in the early 21st “in these impossible promotional times”.
So we are breaking through our genre constraints here on Three Guys. Brad’s guest post is an anti-WWFIN. It’s an un-WWFIN about the impossibility of doing one. It is posted below with the author’s blessing. Thanks, Brad. Always thanks.
BW: I just wrote a paragraph and it was sounding terrible and rambly and probably bullshit. Is it also, besides being sick of me, dinking around on four novels at the same time? Three of them in first person? I’m like some dandy deciding which gal I really like, or something, dithering. I’m doing the pages, and nothing’s really bad, but I can’t find the magnetic center yet. Like one of my favorite sayings, Lars Gustafsson telling his UT Austin students, “You must find the black hole to which everything is attracted.”
I guess that paragraph above is a near marvel of kooked metaphors lined up. At least they’re in separate sentences.
Anyway, thanks for understanding. I’m doing a long interview with friend now that she’ll try to place somewhere, print I think, and we’re having fun with that. And I’m going to do one online for a prize competition the book’s up for (among many, many other collections nominated for that prize). But I seem to not mind that. I did just give in and write a NYT Mag “Lives” piece for my agent (I’m sure they’ll reject this one as too negative/dark/etc. as they did the last one — I don’t know why my agent thinks they’ll like my brain or history); and I wrote an essay on my attempt at a first job, age nine, for a friend’s anthology on writers’ day jobs. So maybe I’ve just burned myself out on writing about myself for the moment.
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