the pro files : between two chandeliers
Pondering a Title for this Post
Writer Q & A with ann james & staff hosted by Sir Patrick Eades
Disclaimer: All decapita(lisa)tions and other rebel Punktuations at the behest of HM the Author.
You are something of an enigma on Medium. Your writing style has been described as brilliant, bizarre, mind-boggling, and ‘fully whacked out.’ How did you develop your unique voice?
So, you’re not buying it that there are 12 women and two dogs (one bent on world domination) who share one account?
No. Out of interest, what does world domination look like?
Like Lucy Furr, our ‘Lab with attitude’. Here she is in downtown Calzoncillos, listening to what the doorknob said.
Do you ever feel pressure to be as zany and clever as you write in real life? Or does it come naturally?
No. Yes. In real life, I am a good listener. Me mum and da taught me not to interrupt adults. So to get a word in edge-wise with me family and friends, I am required to raise me hand and wait for permission from an elder to speak. “Tangent” is what I have been told to say first, cuz by the time I’ve been chosen to blather on, the conversation has turned to somethin’ else entirely.
Por ejemplo, I was once talking to the Caterpillar about madam mayor and mr. moo — as you can imagine, dragon, a politically-charged topic. Someone had the audacity to interrupt, asking me about Mound House and Madam Georgia. Turns out, she was a member of me clan. Five minutes later, we were on the phone, asking Madam Georgia to run for mayor of Calzoncillos. There are also several homeless people I’ve talked to recently who would be fine mayors.
I’ve been on Medium for about 9 months now, and that feels like a lifetime. I’ve already seen a lot of good writers come and go in that time. You’ve been here since 2018. Are they holding you hostage?
Yes. Nine months, enit? And you’ve not yet given birth to your first novel?
I am literarily pregnant, but I might need pharmaceutical inducement to deliver it. I guess what I’m asking is, what makes you hang around when so many others burn out in flames, or Subaru Impreza’s?
One burnout I was thinking of this morning was a new writer who, unaware of the yearly purge of bots and fake accounts, lost a lot of followers overnight and quit. Annie Trevaskis and others were not aware of it either. It would be nice to have a heads up from Tony Stubblebine’s staff next time. Bicho is doing his own purging as his new account grows. (i.e., I am number 150 from his current 117. Perdóname, por favor. [una mensaje privado, ¡Bicho, gurgle, gurgle, blub glub!]
A few others I’ve seen think Medium will make them the big bucks without putting a ton of work into it. They need to remember that a lot of writers are not even eligible for the Medium Partner Program because of where they live.
For me, Medium is a hobby. It’s the only social media platform I use. I can see what my loyal subjects are up to as well as those in Queen Raine Lore’s southern hemisphere. Raine, reina del hemisferio sur : reina lluvia : reina raine. So pretty. Can we do the rest of the interview en Espa —
— No. I mean, maybe next time, Your Majesty. [shuffling papers] You were the first person to comment on one of my stories, and your encouragement and support of new writers doesn’t go unnoticed. Would you say you are a mentor? And who have been your mentors?
[while Sir Patrick is checking his notes, queen ann exits stage right and carrie ann and ziggy take her place. carrie ann is the author of the award winning “snow boots and stilettos” and numerous maxi-golf rants. ziggy is a lab/ciao who thinks the golf course would make a perfectly nice dog park.]
i cannae believe no one else responded to your first story. since it’s about flog, and it’s flog season here now the snow’s melted at 4800 feet, we’ll not likely have more snow-shoveling to do in the high desert valley, only shit. i’ll trade in me snow shovel for a garden shovel. the ground’s thawed so you know what time it is! have you any politicians who should be buried? ccontact Kristen Stark for dead politicians. keep in mind, she is busy with a new real world job at the moment. i’ll take the live ones. mrs. jackson is always ready with a lecture for them. and, por supuesto, lucy and ziggy will help them back out the holes for the wee price of dog biscuits from rex of sir Robert Gowty’s s.s. corrington.
robert-the-guillotine gowty has 5 ⭐ snacks. — ziggy
hmmm. . . Tejaswini Katreddy is the only writer who has openly admitted i’m her mentor. she’s mine.
“Carrie, you have work to do, sweetie.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Madam Georgia of Georgia’s Elite, Mound House, Nevada, takes Carrie Ann’s place. Ziggy stays. There might be more tasty snacks.
Sorry, Sir Patrick. It’s a bit hectic here. Please help yourself to the delicious lamington from New Zealand and coffee from Cafetal Gloria, Oaxaca, the best in the world. Where did we leave off? Oh, yes, mentors.
Mentors are my heroes. I’ll not go into detail here as to who my mentors are. Andy Garcia’s character, John Buber, says it best in the 1992 movie:
If you had to choose between writing only about dogs, politics, or mound houses for the rest of your career, which would you choose?
Since Lucy Furr refuses to write any more posts, and Ziggy’s a lazy boy laying on the lazy boy love seat, I’d have to choose Mound House which would eventually lead back to politics because of Dennis.
[patrick drops his tablet on the marble floor. takes his vegemite from his suit pocket and wolfs it down. his ten-month-old boy is with him and has just woken up from his jet-lag nap, bellowing. his cries echo down the hallowed halls of the palace of versailles. katie, (carrie ann’s sister, a waitress and nail tech) rushes in and quiets the boy, taking him to the gardens to play. in the hub-bub, ann james takes the hot seat of inquisition.]
You’ve published a novel that took you eight years to write, yet don’t seem keen on spruiking it or selling it online. It’s not even listed on Amazon. Why?
I’ve never spruiked before, except for a few dozen networking meetings and a wine walk at an old bookstore in Calzoncillos. I announced five years ago that my book would soon be a Hollywood movie. I published both my novel, “Rain Forest Jim” and my book of short stories, “Dust Devil: Tales from the High Desert” on Amazon. I took them down on January 1, last year because of my B$ario boycott. I ordered a dozen print copies and posted my “DD” on Medium. It’s had a few views. Not as many as May More 💜 Tales, por supuesto, but, hey, competition’s stiff.
I have to ask, where did you find Smillew Rachuef? And is it possible you can put him back?
In my crawl space. Michaël Wertenberg and Steve Day are there, too. Sometimes, Flavio Musa de Freitas Guimarães visits. We share a tub of popcorn and watch Michaël’s stand-up on ‘you tube’ en mi casa, por supuesto. There is no TV in the crawl space. It’s good that Smillew has his unicorn floatie. It helps him to keep dry with the 99 floods, 700 inches of snow and 10 gazillion atmospheric rivers we’ve had this winter/spring. H. Mikel Feilen knows this. He’s a bit downstream from Calzoncillos. And, no, we will not let any of them leave. They nearly escaped when Carrie Ann lost all our dinero gambling, and the city condemned our house.
What’s the deal with writing in all lowercase? Was that really the result of a pickleball incident like you claim?
abuelita: no pickleball. creo que you have me confudido con Victor Cardenas who hates pickles or mi terapist de massage who blue out his knee jumping a netta de pickleball. i broke my little finger jungando volley tennis en escuela secondaria.
“little lower case ann”: this nickname came from Steve Day, my mentor on scribophile. i type in a hurry and word 2010 automatically capitalizes initial caps and corrects misspellings. so my typing, which was never good, despite being a sekertary for seven years, became lazier and lazier. i rarely used word 2010 on scribophile, hence the nickname.
You also write in numerous different languages. Do you think that hurts your views on a primarily English-speaking platform? Does that matter to you?
Yadi and I wrote a lot of stories together from October 2021 until almost a year ago when she got a full-time job. 😭Cleaning houses with me a few days a week and writing for Medium was filling our coffers with laughs, but not much dinner roll (dinero, money). By the time we split it with the other girls on our Medium account y los peros, it was $1 a month each. This is what happens when you work for a B$ario, enit? That was definitely the best of times. We met Pablo Pereyra, Natalie, Carlos Garbiras who is also from Colombia, 🌬️Mitch, and Giedre P.
There is a large Spanish-speaking community on Medium. Also, an author from El Salvador has a group on Scribophile, “La Gente” (The People) that I follow. If you are a fan of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, you will love in the time of corona Charlie Vasquez’ writing. He is one of the many people I wish could quit his day jobs and write full time.
Thanks, Patrick. This was fun, but it’s already twice as long as my readers’ (all ten of them) attention span, and Lucy is whining.
Hasta la vista.
I’ve work to catch up on. One of my subjects has slandered Sir Smillew Rahcuef, the Great.
by Philip Ogley
