Jamie Kort interview

AUTHOR INTERVIEW

When did your love of books begin?

It was probably a book called The Great Gulper. It’s about a wee monster that likes to drink oil, and one day he sooks up all the oil from a spill when a tanker crashes. I still think about that book from time to time and I’m in my forties now.

When did you start to have the wish to become an author?

I started trying to write things about twenty five years ago, but I rarely finished anything. I always set out with a goal to write about something specific and made it very difficult for myself. Eventually I gave up and just enjoyed reading other people’s work.

How have you found the process for becoming an author?

It’s been easier than I thought it would be. I think reading a lot for twenty years or so has helped immensely, you learn a lot by reading the work of science fiction and fantasy greats, as well as the best new writers while deliberately avoiding all of The Classics (but not the Greek stuff like the Iliad). 

An old pal got me back into writing when he sent me a silly story I wrote years ago, one that I’d forgotten about, and he said he really liked the madness of the story (I wrote it for a joke when I was very drunk) and he suggested that I should do more. So I started writing that character again, aiming it squarely at my pal, making him my audience… but I began to run into the same problems as before… Then he sorta coached me through the problems. So now I write specifically to make this one person laugh (or horrify him) and I’m not concerned at all about pleasing any other audience. That makes writing a lot easier - knowing you only have to please one person.

The whole ‘getting your work read’ bit was frustrating to begin with but now I just try to have fun interacting with people online. I’m just writing for laughs with my pal, and for my own happiness. It makes me happy to write and I can sleep at night now because I’ve got the ideas out of my head and it’s silent in there when I close my eyes, which has been a problem for most of my life.

What would you say to those wanting to become an author?

Go for it! Write that story you’ve thought about for ages. It’s all in your head and you just have to let it come out, it will come out if you encourage it! Don’t put pressure on yourself to write the next Dracula, or On The Road or whatever… don’t think, just write… have a good time writing!

Tell us about your book/books:

Well, I wrote a sock-puppet erotic horror, which is the next Dracula and On The Road combined, called “A Puppet Scorned”. Me and my pal were tossing ideas back and forth, trying to come up with a creature feature, a scary monster story that hadn’t been done, so we have a few of those in progress, but we went for the least intimidating creatures or monsters we could think of… and then the challenge became ‘how do we make these not-scary things scary’ and that led to a horror story about sock puppets for me. Then we started thinking about horror tropes and how they would work with not-scary ‘monsters’. What would life be like for a sock puppet? I didn’t want to do the Chucky- style murderous puppet, that’s been done plenty times already (but I do like that kinda thing, it’s a lot of fun!), so I went in a different direction which was very much influenced by Dracula, or at least the first forty pages (that’s all I’ve read so far). After I got started I found a dead bat at my work and that led to an entirely new story forming. I started seeing dead animals everywhere I went, so many dead foxes, you wouldn’t believe how many, some had been dead a long time and the smell was horrendous and some were brand new and the crows were just getting stuck in… My ‘friends’ started sending me pictures of dead animals that they found - THANKS, PALS! (not really, please stop sending me that stuff) and that got me thinking about dead animals and sock puppets and how that could go together. The erotica aspect came from researching knitting. There’s loads of amazing knitters on twitter, and a lot of it is really fun and hilarious stuff, so you should check some knitting sites out… but anyways, my wife likes knitting, and she always looks sexy, but ‘sexy’ isn’t the first thing that pops into my head when I think about knitwear, so I thought it would be fun to have the sock puppets have sexy-time and that’s when my friends and everyone at my work stopped asking me about my story.

I also wrote a story called ‘Scarecrow Vodka Jesus’ about a character called Tiberius Baltimore (and his autobiographer) who is an awful human being that believes he’s some kind of Victorian, scientific explorer that happens to live in contemporary Glasgow, Scotland. I wasn’t trying to achieve anything when writing that, it was purely a ‘don’t think, just write’ exercise, but some people really seem to be into it. It’s very much based on actual events from when I lived in Glasgow. I think maybe I was trying to ride the zeitgeist on fart jokes with that one…. anyways, Glasgow is my favourite city in the whole world, I love it, despite the filth and grime you have to wade through when you live there!

There’s a second Baltimore tale called ‘The Man With The Electric Cock’ which is another ‘don’t think, just write’ exercise about the north east of Scotland. I don’t even know what to think about that story. Sometimes I take it off the internet because it’ll surely drive people away from reading “Puppet…”, which I’m quite proud of, but then I put it back on sale because it makes me laugh. A nice lady that claimed she would read it because she was insane tried reading it and said she didn’t get past page 1, and that made me so happy because I was really pleased with the lunacy in the first page when I read it back. I guess there are levels to insanity. She’s cool though, she likes pirates and I’m all in on pirates. Yar! I’ve got many more Baltimore tales that I’m going to collect together as a “memoirs of a madman” type novel.

What do you love about the writing/reading community?

Everyone seems to be very nice. When someone is in the “OMG-how-wil-I-ever-get-my-novel-finished despair pit” everyone is very supportive. Different kinds of people from all over the world being nice to each other is a great thing.

If you could say anything to your readers what would it be?

Thanks for reading! You‘re the best! Come and talk to me anytime! Don’t send me pictures of dead animals!

Where can people connect with you?

Twitter @JamieKortScrawl

Goodreads https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/22093280.Jamie_Kort