Caldon Mull Interview: 15-05-2021 Interview Questions:
SBB: Is there a theme or a set of themes that you like to work with?
CM: I suppose so. Some are conscious choices and others are background style preferences. I try hard to not be boring with my selection of characters and work at every polished piece to never really be about, what it appears to be about. So I’ll start a selection with a stable ‘buddy-cop’ set of relationships and spin the weirdness from there. My assembly of cast has drawn some shade in the past, with regards as to who my hero and who my lancer actually are in any one instance. I’ve just ignored this mostly it’s not useful to me to delve into other people’s projections and waste time affirming their projection while trying to deny it. [pauses]
I’ll assemble a relationship and move forward with this relationship and bounce things off the pair/ensemble. I like a theme to be kinetic, so external events or internal friction need to move somewhere and a resulting transformation or resolution needs to be evaluated at that point. I prefer any theme to be Uncanny in the sense it heightens or broadens the perception of the characters or readers in some sense.
I like discovery and exploration themes, and I like procedural themes. I like positive and hopeful themes in some sense, too. I’m sick of these mean-girls-in-high-school-being-mean type of tropes and themes everywhere I look. Their time is long past and that specific style of story doesn’t interest me anymore. I like transformation themes right from early on in my writing, I guess Ovid and the Metamorphoses really sank home with me. I also like themes where characters can find some measure of peace. I suppose some form of catharsis is always somewhere in my work.
SBB: Are you concerned about your GLTB tag-cloud obscuring your other Novels?
CM: No, not really. In the past, Genre classification has been a primary off-sort of books and Fiction generally in the past. I imagine this has worked for the last hundred years. Libraries, Bookshops and stalls have all needed a way to allow Readers to find a book with material that interests them quickly and without having Google to help them. I have a different opinion that in the ‘Internet of Everything’, people are now more inclined to follow an author than they are by subject material alone. I’m sure it won’t matter to my fans if every third or fourth book is considered Erotica, if I’m putting the same amount of effort into every character to make them as real and as sensual as I possibly can, into any or all of my works. As I do consider my characterization as a strong point, I don’t have to go into the detail I would for an Erotica novel if that is not the focus of the work, or it would detract from the story. I like to leave things to the readers imagination for the most part, a nagging suspicion that any of my characters can creep off into the boudoir to get their freak on, while the reader is making tea for themselves in the next room.
SBB: Who are your favorite authors?
CM: Oh, this is going to run on for awhile. I must draw a line in the sand with my first two choices, being Gene Wolf and JRR Tolkien. After that is out of the way, my selections become much more muddied with Philip K. Dick, George R.R. Martin, Isaac Asimov and Anna Kavan in a group around the middle, and have to end my list in no particular order with Andre Norton, Ursula Le Guin, C.J. Cherryh and John Brunner.
They come and go, obviously, but those are the most persistent ones.
SBB: Where did you grow up, and how did this influence your writing?
CM: I grew up in rural South Africa, in and around Zululand and then moved into the city when I was in my teens. The oral culture of the surrounding areas meant that literacy was a very rare thing, and for entertainment when I was still a boy we would sit around and tell stories around a fire. As our family moved around a lot, I found that this practice became less and less common as I reached my teens, and thus I determined to start writing down some of the stories and remember them that way, in case I ever forgot. After awhile, I found myself writing stories I had not heard before because I had stories to tell and no one to tell them to. The primary influence this would have in my later writing, would be in the dialogue of my characters where I have tried to keep the conversation as real and as close to what someone would actually say. Whether the characters are right or wrong in their assumptions, their ‘voice’ is more important to me in getting the characterisation as accurate as possible.
SBB: What do you read for pleasure?
CM: This past year I have been reading African Speculative Fiction quite a bit. There is a movement happening on this continent that is quite exciting. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of hard SF happening here, from what I can see but the Speculative Fiction is novel and interesting. If the authors of this movement can order their themes a little more carefully, there is a wave of very different viewpoints headed into the publishing world, and I’ll be excited to see that happen. In the mean time I have been catching up with “Best of…” Science Fiction and Fantasy Anthologies, I’m really hooked on N.K. Jemisin at the moment and love the stuff she’s doing. I also feel the need to revisit Moorcock’s ‘Corum’ series but I don’t know why at present, I think there’s a deep planning session happening in my sub-conscious that I’ll know when it’s done.
SBB: What is your writing process?
CM: I’m a slogger. I’ll think on a concept, or an abstract until I’m confident I want to tackle it. I’ll write that down in broad strokes, a storyboard. Then I’ll assemble my cast and crew, protagonist and antagonist and decide what sort of relationship I want them to have and how any others bounce off of them. I take two or three days off not thinking about any of this, and then I return to the study and start punishing the keyboard. A week after I finish the draft, I return to tweak it so that there are no sharp edges. That’s when I usually submit to a copy editor, and move towards publishing. Once I start writing, I cannot stop until I finish the first draft. So I generally get that out as soon as I can, and do the tweaks in sections and in layers, sometimes over months.