"The Eye has now seen. And this is its verdict."

And suddenly the video and audio smash back in. There is a jumble of flashes and cries just slow enough to follow, each scene shown from infinite angles, the echo of each voice overlapping the next. There is no coherent narrative, no story, no time sequence. There is only an illusion of time. There is a city on fire. There is a boat in the storm. There are protesters lying prone, and cops stomping their heads. There are airborne gas canisters and a masked girl with a baseball bat. There are families on the dinghy and a man at the tiller. She whacks the tear gas back over the lines and it falls through a tank’s hatch. She whacks a cop’s skull and the bloodied teeth hail on a riot shield. He steers the dinghy over a twelve-feet wave, and they don’t capsize. There’s a hobo in a public library. There are children in a stage play. The hobo’s reading Aristotle. The kids are not in school. They’re dressed as princesses and knights and laughing their asses off along with the audience. There is an old lady planting flowers in a pot; her house stands on stilts in the river. There is a girl masturbating in her bed, to nothing in particular. There is a flannel blanket; a golden toad on the window sill. There is a Chinese man in a raincoat letting go of the bicycle his son is riding. There are two blonde girls in shorts shooting photos of each other. There are daisies brushing their waists. There is a lighthouse in the background. There is a girl in hijab sitting in lotus, chatting on her phone, her smile lighting up the room. There’s a parrot saying hola in an empty lobby with celeste wallpaper. There’s a two-hundred-fifty-pound man in a locker room, astraddle a bench. There’s blood on his boxing gloves and his eyebrow. He’s sobbing. There are three corpses sitting in barber chairs. The interrogator is washing his hands. He turns from the basin to fold up his knife roll; there is a blade missing. He turns again, and now there’s a corpse missing (but not for long). There’s somebody in goggles and scarf, not an inch of skin exposed, walking through brutalist ruins to the cheers of citizens in the windows. There is a white-haired Black man slamming a domino on the table, and the onlookers go insane. There is a maid in a golden palace. There is a slob writing code in a hazy basement. There is a battle in a desert village. There is a toddler reaching for the stars above their crib. There is a Taliban firing an RPG from a minaret. There is a tear on the eye of a mannequin. There is a white woman catching the missile in midair. There is a short-haired girl in dungarees drinking beer. The white woman hurls the missile back at the assailants; bodies torn apart, bone shrapnel flies into Foxtrot’s face.

[Excerpt from Foxtrot/November — a sequel to The Supernatural Enhancements (unpublished).]

Quidnuncs and Aardvarks

Y'all ask, I answer, this blog looks active despite the dearth of new published material.

 

I want to know if you’re working on any new books?

I swear I haven't stopped writing, despite what my Wikipedia page seems to imply! Sadly my upcoming novel Heaven Park has gotten stuck somewhere along the publisher's manuscript-to-book assembly line, and it's still far in the horizon. This is extra frustrating because the logjam is also preventing me from shopping around my new manuscripts, of which I have completed two since Heaven Park (one and two).  

How old were you when you started learning English? And then writing in it?

I was 7-8 when I took my first lesson, and 17 when I took my last. The real learning came later, when I started reading books and watching movies and shows in the original English (in Spain all foreign media is dubbed, a practice I strongly oppose now). I started writing in English around 2004 (23 yo), but never for publication till The Supernatural Enhancements in 2011.

 

How do you come up with the expressions in your books? I swear I'd never heard 'borborygmic' until Meddling Kids. Is it just a process of reading more? Are there secret thesaurus tricks you know?

Thesauruses are awesome, but mostly I come across new words in books and movies. The crux of the matter is that many of those words wouldn't be exotic at all to you, but I make an effort to use them all, regardless of whether they're only new to me or merely obscure. If I only used words with which I am 100% familiar, my English vocabulary would be very limited.

 

Will we see the characters from Meddling Kids again?

In book form, no.

 

Do you see yourself writing a saga? About what? What main character / villain do you imagine for it?

I have considered (even written) loose sequels set in old universes, and I wish I could give A.Z. Kimrean a new case, but I've never envisioned a saga or a multi-part novel. My brain just can't operate at that scale. I am certain that Heaven Park is the longest story I had in me, and right now it's about 570 pages.

Bear with me, I promise it's coming.

Foxtrot/November

I'm a happy little author.

Departure

"I hope my editor likes the new manuscript; it's such a big departure from my previous work."

(Old tweet, but feels fresh anew.)

Quicksand & Apricots

I was due to write a post but I couldn't think of a subject, so I asked for help, and this is what we got.

So about A.Z., what's it like for Adrian when Zooey's knocked out, and vice versa? Static? Cognitive impairment? Does he gain full control over her hemisphere, and why doesn't his personality change? Researching for, you know, reasons.

It is said somewhere that both Adrian and Zooey have control of the whole brain the whole time: their only problem is agreeing on what to do. Two pilots, one plane. You can see Adrian without Zooey in chapter 7 and Zooey without Adrian in chapter 10: they're just less frustrated when the other's sleeping. However, both personalities alone are too radical for their own good, so it's best to compromise and help each other. Adrian needs Zooey to show empathy and not to antagonize everyone. Zooey needs Adrian to grab the steering wheel while she plays air drums.

Do you ever get bored of a story during the writing process? I can't tell if when it happens to me if it's because the story is boring, or because I've just been sitting on it for too long and it's just not fun to me anymore.

Bored as in, I'm not interested by this subject anymore, not that I can remember, no. Bored as in, I would rather be playing Terraria right now, yeah, quite often. Take breaks!

Oh, also, about how old is AZ?

I'm gonna say 31. It's how old I was when I met them.

How smoothly does the editing process usually go? Are you ever told to change things you don't want to change/write things you don't want to write?

From my experience, the editing process is sort of a negotiation. I doubt any editor expects an author to take 100% of their suggestions. On the other hand, taking 0% is arrogant and self-righteous. So sure, you can refuse some changes. But you also have to wonder whether you're doing it out of pride: if you and your editor truly see eye to eye, you must listen to their input. Since Meddling Kids, everything I've published has gone through the same editor at Doubleday, and he has improved all of it. We've argued, but I'm glad he stood up to me every time, cause he was right. Also, keep in mind that editorial suggestions seldom come in the form of, "This doesn't work--write this instead"; they're more often like, "this doesn't work--find an alternative," so there is ample room for solutions that please everyone.

The biggest and most specific change that was suggested to me was in The Supernatural Enhancements. I refused it, but I explained why and proposed a different solution, and the book turned better than the manuscript.

Hey Edgar, any advice to someone trying to break into the publishing industry?

I don't like giving writing advice because universally good tips are painfully obvious. Plus, my own beginnings were in Catalan, which is a completely different scene, so my experience doesn't help. Therefore, I only have the usual platitudes for you: write stuff, finish it, and then write more stuff. Don't skip steps 2 and 3.

Thanks all for your questions! Keep them coming!

& Blanc

So, as I was telling you the other day, by early 2013 I had finished a manuscript in Spanish, with Noir as the setting and, in my opinion, an interesting enough private eye. Eyes. It's complicated.

While I was writing it though, my English debut The Supernatural Enhancements was sold to Doubleday. The size of that deal, added to the fact that I was being thoroughly ignored by publishers in Barcelona, forced me to focus on my work in English. However, I didn't give up on the other languages. This picture, taken in March 2014, shows the galley edition of TSE between two finished manuscripts: Catalan on the left, Spanish on the right. The Spanish one is the Noir novel.  

Because my Catalan- and Spanish-speaking characters longed for the spotlight, they poked their way into the English books. The leads in the manuscript on the left are glimpsed by the Eye in The Supernatural Enhancements. And the P.I. from the Noir novel sneaked into one chapter of Meddling Kids.

Despite my editor's suspicions, this doesn't mean I'm building a sort of "Canteroverse". That would require an architect's mind, and I'm a 36-year-old man who can't use a day planner. If anything, these crossovers mean that I can't focus in a single work. But they also mean that my new novel stars at least one (1) background character from Meddling Kids. And I've been dropping clues.

Oh, and Doubleday just showed the title on Tumblr yesterday, so enough with the hush-hush.

Source: tumblr/doubledaybooks

This Body's Not Big Enough For Both Of Us: my new novel, coming Fall 2018. *Blows party horn.*