Need To Stop Reading

What writing are you most proud of?

Night’s Favour (http://amzn.com/B00EBNA0MU) is my first “real book” and I’m still very proud of it. I like re-reading it — sure, I find things I’d have done differently if I wrote it again, but I also like the dialogue I wrote, the action, and I like the people in there.

When I finished that book, I actually got pretty depressed for a while, because I was so enjoying my time with Val, and John, and Danny, and Carlisle, that I didn’t want to let them go. There’s another story with them kicking around in my head, and I’ve started planning it — tentatively called Night’s Fall — but that’ll be a while away yet.

I’m hoping that Upgrade, my current work-in-progress, will be better than Night’s Favour. I’ve been wanting to write it for years, but haven’t quite known how. There’s a lot of moving parts. It’s a story about Mason and Sadie, Laia and Zacharies, Harry and Carter, and they need to be able to tell you their story first.

What books did you love growing up?

I gobbled up anything by Eddings and Feist. Man, those guys. I read Lindholm before she was cool and became Robin Hobb. Really, lots of epic fantasy, truckloads of the stuff before I acquired some semblance of taste.

Science Fiction nabbed me when I found some authors who could do it and tell great stories rather than shitty science. I was a bit fan of Niven, especially when he hit the power combo with Barnes and wrote Dreampark — and his solo Ringworld books were amazing. Julian May.

This is where I admit I also read McAffrey. For the dragons, not the romance, okay?

Steven Barnes.

A little Poul Anderson — it’s hard to keep up with that guy.

My tastes are (only a little) more diverse these days — I’m in it for the story and the telling of it. I’ll read supernatural, or crime thriller, or whatever, as long as it’s good stuff — but I still find that my real interest lies in more speculative stuff.

Who is your favorite author?

You want me to pick one?

Just one?

There are so many good ones out there. If you put my back up against a wall, I might say Richard K Morgan. But it’d be hard to choose — I keep a bookshelf or two at home, full of real books, treasured works. I consume most of my stuff intravenously via Kindle these days, but if it’s good, I will get the paper copy. In a non-creepy, totally benign way I like to touch the physical copies, to smell the paper, and to feel the story in my hands.

So, next to everything that Morgan’s written you’ll also find the works of Neal Asher, Glenn Cook, Hugh Cook, Alastair Reynolds, Neal Stephenson (even though I always feel like I’ve ridden the short bus to work after reading one of his), Neil Gaiman, and Peter Clines.

There are more, but that’s a start. I’d like to think that when I grow up and become a real writer, I’ll be half as good as half of them.

What book should everybody read at least once?

The Cloth Merchant’s Apprentice, by Nigel Suckling (http://www.unicorngarden.com/clothmerchant.htm).

It’s a bit of a rare book today — it’s one of my treasured paper artefacts. There are still some copies kicking around used online, and I’ve just checked Amazon — it’s out there (http://www.amazon.com/Cloth-Merchants-Apprentice-Nigel-Suckling/dp/0905664086/). It reminds me of Gaiman at his best, a story that’s gentle and startling, much like Stardust.

This book taught me that you can have adventures and romance together, and that the way a story is told is a tremendous amount of the beauty in it. The book is honest and respectful, fun and soulful in equal measure.

I will never part with it.

Is there any books you really don’t enjoy?

Anything that’s “YA.”

Wait, don’t go. It’s not like that.

“YA” is not a genre, not really — it’s a descriptor for a group of people who are trying to find their way in the world like the rest of us. They’re people, clever and intelligent, and want to know more about which way is up. They have the best parts of enthusiasm and the worst parts of inexperience. Saying you’ve got a genre for “YA” is like saying you’ve got a genre for Czechoslovakia.

Is “YA” the best we can do when we’re trying to sell a vapid vampire romance? I get that a vampire romance can be awesome, so let’s — as storytellers — respect our audience and encourage the brain over the beast. Let’s not tell stories that feed on our insecurities and baser nature.

One of my favourite quotes here comes from a Master™, Stephen King. Love or hate the man, but he’s written a lot of stuff about a lot of things. It’s hard to cite the original source, and maybe it’s urban legend, but it feels right: “Harry Potter is about confronting fears, finding inner strength and doing what is right in the face of adversity. Twilight is about how important it is to have a boyfriend.”

Contrast with King’s example of Rowling, or Le Guinn’s Earthsea series, and you can see the gap. It’s totally possible to write for a younger audience and respect them. I’d like to see more of that respect when we’re telling stories to our next generation. After all, these are the people who will be our leaders and change the world after our footprints are gone.

What do you hope your obituary will say about you?

That I lived well, that I did things that were right despite that they were hard, and that I was a good friend, husband, and human.

And that I had one foot in Heaven before the devil knew I was dead.

It’s kind of hard, though. There’s a way you’d like your life to be like, and then there’s how the world around you impacts on the edges of that. You’ve got people at work, or people in your social club.

Everyone knows that special person in HR. You know what I mean.

I’d like all those people, and my friends and family too, to think that I made the world just a little bit better while I was on it. If that was said at my obituary, that’d be enough.

Location and life experiences can really influence writing, tell us where you grew up and where you now live?

I was born in the Philippines.

Yeah, I love whipping that one out. Truth be told I didn’t spend much time there — my parents yanked me back Stateside when I was about two years old, give or take, so my memories of the place are just a couple of scattered images. A garden. A few people, one of whom I was sure was my nanny. Nothing bad — it’s a place I’d like to go visit again, with full expectation that I know nothing about it.

Speaking of Stateside, I spent some of my formative years in the US, largely at the edges — Los Angeles and New York City. I remember sunny places where there’d be a jalopy with the roof cut off, and winters so cold that your face hurt.

I really don’t want to live somewhere where the air makes your face hurt. What the hell is this, Pluto?

After my folks split up, we drifted across the US for just a little while, touching down in Connecticut before heading to New Zealand. I’ve spent most of the rest of my life here in little Aotearoa.

When I got here, there were only two TV channels. There were only cartoons on a Saturday morning. That’s bullshit, plain and simple.

Despite my initial poor reaction to the backwater third world country that I thought I’d arrived in as a kid, I view New Zealand as my home. I’ve travelled to a few places, Australia of course, Japan, Italy, America a few times, and the odd resort location to drink cocktails out of a coconut.

I don’t like Fiji.

People around me still think I have a little bit of an accent, and wonder where I come from. I sometimes wonder that as well, and I like that I can lend a few different voices to my writing.

How did you develop your writing?

By abuse, mainly.

When I wanted to get serious about it, my little brother stepped up and threw me into a writer’s group — run by a pro, and it was more of a critique group than anything else.

Here’s the thing: when you write something, and you put your thoughts on paper, you think it’s awesome. I mean, it probably doesn’t need any editing, and can go straight from your brain to the printing press at a mega publisher. The people who aren’t getting published?

Hacks. All of them.

Then you join a writer’s group, people who really just want to write good stuff, and wow — you will begin to understand just how much you suck. It’s not like these people sit there and tell you that you suck, but the variety of feedback will show you gaps you never even knew you had.

So yeah. I wrote a lot, about a lot of different things. Sure, I was working on Night’s Favour, but I also wrote a few short stories, and some radio plays, and the odd poem or two. All under the watchful gaze of my writer’s group, who were hard and soft, gentle and stern, but above all else, faithful to making me a better writer.

Other than that, I wrote. I wrote around the edges of my life, and thought about writing when I wasn’t writing. Mostly dialogue, but also about scenes, and the way things would play out.

And then I wrote some more.

Where do you get your inspiration from?

It’s possible our house was built on an old industrial spill, with some toxic chemicals that leached up through the loam and into our very bones. If that’s the case, I’ve been super unlucky with living in houses built on old spill sites, because I’ve had weird ideas since as long as I can remember.

It could have easily have been something baked into the old Crayola crayon set I had when I was a kid. It’s hard to be sure — was there ever a recall? How do they make those colours?

I read a lot. I watch a lot of movies. I talk to people who read a lot and watch a lot of movies. I like taking something that’s a little familiar to people — say, a nice werewolf legend — and then sprucing it up with a bit of industrial magic, a virus or two, see where it goes.

Ideas are not something I’m short on. How many of them are good ideas is probably a bit subjective, but I feel like I could sit down and write books until the end of my days, until the tips of my fingers were worn away, and not hit the bottom of the barrel.

I just want to do those ideas justice. I want the stories to be fun and insightful — I don’t want to start writing without a good idea about the story that wants to be told. I try and ask myself, what makes this story different?

Valentine’s an ordinary guy with ordinary problems. His boss is an asshole. He’s an alcoholic. And he’s getting that middle age spread just a bit too early. One night — the one night he can’t remember — changes everything. What happened at the popular downtown bar, The Elephant Blues? Why is Biomne, the largest pharmaceutical company in the world, so interested in him — and the virus he carries? How is he getting stronger, faster, and more fit? And what’s the connection between Valentine and the criminally insane Russian, Volk?

Buy Now @ Amazon

Genre – Action, Thriller, Urban Fantasy

Rating – R16

More details about the author

Connect with Richard Parry on Facebook & Twitter

Website http://www.rage.net.nz

Breakfast was a mash of overly bright post-dawn light and harsh jarring sounds. He’d choked back some dry white toast, using black coffee syrupy with sugar as a chaser. After he kept that down, he brushed his teeth twice before leaving the house, jacket slung over his shoulder. He was already sweating through his shirt by the time he almost made his bus, watching it pull away from the stop as he rounded the corner.

The driver of the next bus was a man sitting proud behind the wheel, stamping with binary control at the gas and brake pedals, lurching and cursing his way through the crowded morning streets with nausea inducing irregularity. The only blessing was that no one wanted to sit next to him — even Val could smell the Bacardi sweating through his skin.

He spent his time before his meeting surfing the Internet and drinking bad coffee and stale water. He avoided his co-workers, taking refuge in his cubicle. The office hummed with the gentle background of cloistered productivity, phones and conversations overlaying each other into white noise. All except Werner in the cube next to him; that man shouted into his phone like he was trying to raise the dead. Maybe he was — he worked the marketing angle of the project they were on.

By the time he had his meeting with Davies, the shaking in his hands had stopped, the world returning to normal levels of brightness and colour. He was still sweating through his shirt.

“Sit, Val.” Davies’ tailored suits were a thing of office legend, fitting a frame that spent a lot of time eating healthy food and doing whatever it was they did down at Gold’s Gym. He stood behind a baroque desk, a screen, keyboard, mouse, and cellphone laid out just so.

Val’s personnel file was open on the desk too, a couple pages marked with cheerfully coloured Post-its. A gold pen, Cross brand embossed on the clip, sat ready on a legal pad.

No notes, yet.

Val shut the office door behind him and settled into a chair designed for thinner men. “Hey, Pete. Look —”

“Hear me out, Val. It’s not what you think.” Davies shuffled a few of the pages of the file, as if he hadn’t already read each page twice. “You’ve been with the company a while.”

That was a bit unexpected. “Uh, sure. Since —”

Davies held up a hand. “Almost five years. Done some good work for us. Really saved our asses in that coding war with Unisys.” He chuckled to himself, as if it was some beachhead victory they were remembering together. “Top performer three years in a row.”

Val shifted a bit. The padding on the chair was worn thin, and he felt like was sitting on raw plywood with sackcloth nailed over the top. “…Right.”

“There’s not really a delicate way of talking about this.” A smile that was more a grimace sat on Davies’ face. “Since Rebekah passed, well, we’ve noticed some changes.” Davies looked at Val’s gut, then picked up the Cross, tapping it on a paragraph in the file. “Fact is, we still need you.” The clock on the wall ticked by a few more seconds, the sounds of the city outside the open windows gentle. “But we need the old you. You’re a wreck —”

“Hey Pete, c’mon. I crank out the code like you need. I’m the first guy to punch in every morning…”

“And the first guy to hit the Blues at lunch. After lunch, you’re back at your desk, but you’re thinking about your next drink. When was the last night you didn’t knock back even just a few?”

“Everyone has a pint after work, Pete. Be serious. We work in computers. And our clients are assholes.” Val tried for some easy camaraderie. “Who wouldn’t drink on a government contract?”

“It’s not like we work in the ER, Val. And if it was the work that was the problem, we could fix that. You work in a team of what, ten guys?”

“Yeah, and they come down for a beer at lunch too!”

“They don’t all go down. With you.” Davies examined a perfectly manicured nail. “At the same time. Fact is, they’re going down to make sure you’re ok. A few of the guys — and I’m not naming names, it’s confidential — are worried about you. They said they want to keep an eye on you. They’ve come to see me, to ask me to … intercede.”

He grabbed a sheet from the file — this one suspiciously laid out in corporate style — and spun it on the old wooden surface towards Val. “It’s a leave form, Val. It’s on the house. But it’s got conditions.”

Val didn’t lean forward to look at the form. “You’re getting rid of me. Gardening leave. I don’t know if I should be flattered or pissed off.”

Davies tapped the paper again. “Maybe you should just be… Well. I think we both know ‘happy’ is a bit of a stretch, considering. Get your house in order. Drive up the coast. See some friends.” He paused, as if the idea had just occurred to him. “Get some help, Val. See someone.”

Val reached forward to get the sheet, seeing his hand shaking with either anger or the memory of the hangover. Maybe a heavy salting of both. The form was straightforward — a month of leave, but with a small catch.

“The company wants some return, of course.” Davies looked down in carefully constructed abashment. “We want the old Valentine Everard back. We want you a productive member of the family again. We’re going to … invest, shall we say … a few weeks. What’s a few weeks? That’s on us.” Nodding, Davies replaced his expression, looking Valentine right in the eye with an affable smile. It was like watching a super marionette, as if all those management courses had taught him which emotions to try and fake, and when. “But you’ve got to do your share. A part of the bargain.”

It was there in black and white. They’d even helpfully supplied a phone number and a website — probably one of the narcissists in HR. Those fuckers thought of everything with their saccharine sincerity. They wanted him in an alcoholics group of some kind.

“If I don’t sign?”

Davies swapped the grandfatherly smile for a look of grandfatherly reproach. “Well Val, then things might have to get formalised. You know how it is.” As if it was out of his hands. Just one of the boys, Val and him in this thing together. “But we — well. I don’t want it to get formalised.” He handed the Cross to Val.

After he’d signed — like there’d been a choice — he walked out to collect his jacket. He felt as if the entire office watched his walk from Davies’ office to his cube, the air heavy with the silence of funerals. The hessian partitions were covered with the same old crap, charts jostling for supremacy next to Dilbert cartoons. The odd slice of fake humanity was shown with photos printed in cheap colour on the office laser — corporate functions, team building. Outside his own cube, he saw a photo of himself peeking out from under layers of project charts and productivity estimates. It was like growth rings on a tree, those layers — the closer to the heartwood of the hessian backing, the older they were.