Simon
I want to thank you, for taking the time to talk with me today.
Oh, I'm
happy to speak with you, Evelyn. I love talking and listening about writing,
and secondly, I enjoy talking with you, because we have such fun doing it!
Can
you tell us a little bit about yourself?
I'm
actually a Swamp Thing. No, really, I was born in a little town in the middle
of the Atchafalaya Swamp, and we moved to New Orleans when I was a year old. I
consider New Orleans my home. My mother was a movie fan, and Daddy's work made
him have to travel, so after supper every night, Mother and I would go a block and
a half to the movie theater—it was called "The Grenada" and watch
the double feature, sometimes the same shows two or three nights in a row. So I
absorbed film structure from a very young age. As far as poetry and prose, my
parents read to me from infancy, and the conversation in our home, even when the
family grew to six of us, was always lively, intelligent, funny and
electric, in the sense that we most often anticipated each
others' line of thought and addressed it at a great rate, and then
someone else picked it the line and ran with it. No one ever actually had
to finish a sentence. It was exhilarating, wonderful and tremendously contributive
to the creative process, no matter by which expression we chose to express
it. Initially, my brothers chose music and writing; my sister was a journalist;
I write and paint.
What
is your favorite quality about yourself?
Courage.
What
made you want to be a writer?
I've
always been an omnivorous reader, and have also always been a storyteller.
For me it was not only a joy, it was a necessity. Let me explain: In a
traditional Italian/Sicilian family, such as the one I come from,
they value a certain kind of beauty: blonde hair (even if it's an inch long
and all over the body) and blue eyes (it doesn't matter how many there are,
so long as they're blue) but as it happened, I was very
small for my age, dark, skinny, handicapped, and intelligent. All
no-no's for girls in the traditional S/I family. So I told stories to
make people like me (and because I absolutely LOVED telling stories! When
I married and no longer had the built-in "audience," it was natural
to start writing the stories down, and it grew from there.
How
long have you been writing?
I told my
first cohesive story when I was three years old (I told a really terrific story
before that, but my parents didn't understand it), and I've been telling them in
prose, poetry and screenplays ever since, nonstop.
How
did you come up with your book titles?
Okay,
I'll just talk about the science-fiction books right now: "All the Gods of
Eisernon" is part of the protagonist's medical oath; "The Elluvon
Gift" was a logical extension of the name of the extra-galactic alien
mother, an 'Elluvon;' "The Trumpets of Tagan" refers to the sea
creatures, called 'Trumpets,' who inhabit the Single Sea; "Timeslide"
is, as stated, a slide backward down Time; "Hopeship" is (again, not
surprisingly!)-about the concept of the decommissioned hospital ship, the good
ship Hope, as superimposed on the idea of interplanetary travel. My "good
ship Hope" goes from backwater world to backwater world and back again,
serving the poor and needy of all species. At one time, Gene Roddenberry
and I had agreed to make it into a series spinoff of Star Trek, but once Desi
and Lucy divorced, all bets were off.
What
do you do when you are not writing?
I'm
always writing. But when I'm not at the computer, I love cooking and
entertaining friends and family; doing heirloom embroidery; drawing and
painting; and I love prayer. I pray a lot, just because I enjoy it.
Can
you share a little of your current work with us?
My current work is the next novel in "the Einai
Series," called "Recovery.” My
protagonist, Dao Marik, has been through some pretty tough times (including
having a prejudiced Earthling politico destroy what he thinks is the last copy
of Marik's medical certification and military record), and has had to be
patched up so he could go back out and have more adventures. In
"Recovery," he hears that the scuttled hulk of the hospital ship
"USS Pacific is going to be nudged into a nearby sun, and that's where the
real last copies of his records are. So he decides to go recover them. Hence
the title, "Recovery." However, he forgets what lives in
shipwrecks, which makes for a fun book.
My books
are available from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, White Bird Publications and from
my website, at http://www.authorsimonlang.com/
or you can order them from any bookstore. Buy millions, they make great Christmas/C'hannukah/Diwali/Kwanzaa
presents, and just think: you'll be helping a nice little Sicilian/Italian
grandmother get to be a best-seller! A note here: I use the dreaded
"N word" in my work, because I'm frankly trying to de-mythologize it.
As Al and I have a huge (20 children) multi-racial family (everything but
green), I may be crazy, stupid, or whatever, but prejudiced I'm not.
Thanks
for having me on your blog, Evelyn. As with every time we get together, it's
been fun! God bless you!
No comments:
Post a Comment