Honk!

NBT Project

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 08:25:00 -0700

May-Lan Tan was kind enough to include me in the Next Big Thing Project, an interconnecting breadcrumb trail of young writers’ profiles.

What is the working title of the book?
It started as 388, which was the bus I was taking a lot when I returned to London after a long absence. Upon reflection, however, it’s a pretty boring bus route (I would get it from Bethnal Green Road to Blackfriars in an attempt to get to the Southbank Centre). Now I’m leaning towards Foley, for thematic reasons. The problem with this title is that when I hear it I think of Felicity actor Scott Foley, on whom I think I had a crush circa 1998. I should probably remember whether or not this was actually the case.

Where did the idea come from for the book?
My friend once needed to get a bus up to Edinburgh. When some other friends and I realised we hadn’t heard from him in a couple of days, we remembered that he’d also taken a sleeping pill notorious for making people black out and act goofy before they actually fall asleep. We had this sort of fantasy about him wandering off the bus and going on a sleepwalk walkabout along the M6. I thought it would make a great premise for a story: one friend trying to track down another who’d been kidnapped by pharmacology. I’d been reading a lot of Waugh and Murdoch when this idea started to come together. I’d love to capture some of the meandering rhythm of Under The Net or Vile Bodies — people just moving through a city, searching for loved ones for reasons that aren’t totally clear to them.

Through that narrative vehicle, I found I could address other themes that had been on my mind: Being indigenous to nowhere, adulthood’s insistence on youth, the tendency aural sensitivity has to fall on people like viruses.

What genre does your book fall under?
As it stands, moody literary fiction.

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?
For the protagonist — I can’t think of any other way to put this — like, a Jewier Rooney Mara. Or Olivia Thirlby, as is.

What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?
Young prescription drug dealer physically retraces the last two years of her professional and personal life in order to find her missing friend AND there’s a sound stage AND there are a lot of buses AND there are a bunch of fantastic self-contained single sentences like this one.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?
Expected: seven months.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

Everyone involved in my Masters programme at Goldsmiths.

Next up:

Ryan Mazer

Caroline Woods

iwdrm: “Los Angeles, November 2019, Part III (I, II)” Blade...

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 16:45:52 -0700

iwdrm:

“Los Angeles, November 2019, Part III (I, II)”

Blade Runner (1982)

Today I miss Scotland.

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 16:32:00 -0700

All those NYFW backstage pics are now up on Jezebel

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 16:05:00 -0700

All those NYFW backstage pics are now up on Jezebel:

Here

A few things about Paris

Thu, 16 Jun 2011 18:34:00 -0700

I will be in Paris in close to a week. I’ll be there for a minimum of a month and a half, and I will technically be studying French. This is most likely the spot where I’ll post pictures of streets, post pictures of antiques, post pictures of streets with antiques on them, and write about things that are interesting to precisely no one but myself.

In a way I feel like I’m eating my own criticism of New York and New Yorkers:joining a city’s cult with absolutely no personal experience to go on, simply because I’ve absorbed its charm through film and music and rhetoric. I am clearly only projecting my own needs and mythology onto a place in exactly the same way self-obsessed twenty-somethings have been doing since Roman Gaul. Expect a lot of that from my instagrams. Ha ha just kidding. I don’t know what instagram is.

Just trust that I will never say anything along the lines of: “Everyone is out in the park today — ONLY IN PAR-EE!”

Pick a tooth.

Tue, 31 May 2011 23:16:32 -0700

Pick a tooth.

Photo

Tue, 10 May 2011 20:29:30 -0700

The Great Frustration

Thu, 05 May 2011 12:48:00 -0700

(Image via Seth Fried’s blog)

While interning at McSweeney’s a few summers ago, I came across a short story in one of the quarterlies that I found particularly striking. This was the same summer I graduated from Edinburgh, got my second-hand crash course in the structure and characters within Gawker Media, and read Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, so (doing with that information what you will) for whatever reason ‘Lie Down and Die’ by Seth Fried hit some kind of poignant-macabre nerve.

I got in touch just to tell him how much I liked the story. For the first time (of many to come) I experienced that acute whiplash of feeling giddy to be actually communicating with someone you admire, and also finding out they’re like, basically your age. AMAZING-slash-SELF-PITY-PARTY, but mostly just amazing. While I was at Vice Magazine in London, Seth managed to get into the 2008 Fiction Issue, at which point I began practicing all the ways one can say “I knew his work before he was big” at a cocktail party without sounding like an a-hole.

And I’m sure glad I did, because The Great Frustration was published this month. Once I finish reading about North Korean refugees with the giddiness of a 7th grader reading Breaking Dawn past her bedtime, I’m gonna gobble it up. (Also I think I might be in the acknowledgements? SWEET.)

Seth is wonderful, can’t wait to read, you shouldn’t either.

I have a theory

Mon, 28 Mar 2011 14:46:14 -0700

That no one has ever actually been to Macedonia. Think about it.

To Be (Anonymous) or Not To Be (Anonymous) - Hollaback, 3/15/11

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 16:37:00 -0700

To Be (Anonymous) or Not To Be (Anonymous) - Hollaback, 3/15/11

Oh, Britain. I missed you.

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 14:48:43 -0700

Oh, Britain. I missed you.

Because 90s nostalgia never got cute, or stopped making me feel old

Thu, 10 Mar 2011 16:22:00 -0800

I know there have been sporadic dialogues about this since the days of Y2K, but there really needs to be a word for the expanse of years that was 2000, 2001, 2002 and 2003. We, as a nation — nay, a world — had just collectively gotten Steal My Sunshine out of our heads. Online media was still a sexy unknown. The Phantom Menace had released a deluge of insufferable movie-snark unto society from which we would not recover until Jim Jarmusch and Kill Bill 2 got us feeling really smug re: our own taste. Also halter tops were acceptable to wear to prom (if I am to go off Delia*s catalogues).

As I said, something happened in 2004 that let everyone get real slick again (due, I think, to some strange combination of Julian Casablancas and the first issue of The Believer), so you can’t really ascribe a term to this period as you would a decade. The Noughties doesn’t cut it.

Any ideas?

I have hereby joined the honored ranks of Edinburgh graduates...

Mon, 07 Mar 2011 17:56:00 -0800

I have hereby joined the honored ranks of Edinburgh graduates who have gone to the Edinburgh Castle bar and club in San Francisco*.

*I am 95% sure that this place is tiki-themed.

Hobo-wine with Activision Studio-Head and Star Control Creator Paul Reiche III

Tue, 01 Mar 2011 17:30:00 -0800

Dad ordered Spike Your Juice, an invention which promises to boozify any juice with a sugar content of over 20g. We chose pomegranate.

Delicious. By today the alcohol content will increase and it will be noticeably less carbonated. Now I just wonder what would happen if we attached this nifty invention to our jugs of bathtub moonshine!

Watch for cameos by CBS SmartPlanet’s/Gizmodo’s John...

Mon, 28 Feb 2011 21:46:22 -0800

Watch for cameos by CBS SmartPlanet’s/Gizmodo’s John Herrman and Kyle Van Hemert in Lil B’s Pitchfork freestyle video. Everything you could possibly take note of in this is hilarious and adorable in equal measure.

Excerpt from an upcoming piece for the Hollaback! re-launch

Fri, 25 Feb 2011 11:36:00 -0800

…

A 2006 statistic from the Consumer Electronics Association revealed that women in the 25-34 age bracket were out-playing men in “casual” (non-console) games by 30%. Three years later, a Nielsen report would find that women over age 25 make up the largest constituency of gamers in the United States. And in the UK, women have been projected as made up 48% of World of Warcraft players. “It’s a little relieving to not be singled out as that odd girl doing something she shouldn’t be,” Pittman explains. “Video-games still have that kind of stigma - that they’re for children, or that they’re a waste of time. Over the years, as I’ve met more and more people, I’ve begun outing myself as an actual female. And more often than not speak with people you thought were male — and they’re not. Suddenly they’re like ‘Oh thank God, another woman!” and suddenly you build these friendships where you’re just clinging to each other like a drowning guy to their life-jacket.”

This tendency toward voluntary anonymity is, perhaps, rooted in the avoidance of Pittman’s “creepies”, of whom it is rare to find a woman without a story of her own. But is it also self-perpetuating?

—

Read the full story at Hollaback’s re-launch in March

(NSFW)

Coming soon

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 08:56:12 -0800