Sunday Whoever

Well now – would you look at this. Our Whoever Author has now accumulated a full house. He has been featured in all four Sunday Specials. Who is this wonder you may ask – well I’ll tell you. It is none other than Mick Bloor. Wow Mick – Go you. If you haven’t read his stories – what the heck have you been doing. Go immediately and correct this error. Although, read the interview first!

***

What topic(s) would you not take on?

I was going to say that I wouldn’t take on any topic that I knew nothing about: I couldn’t be bothered to do the research. But I realise it’s not quite true. I’ve written a couple of SF stories and a satanism story, each of them with no research at all, but they were just written for the jokes, comic stories not requiring realism or research.

How many friends and family ask how your writing is going?

My partner, Doreen (bless her), not only asks how it’s going, but requires printed and signed copies. Doreen apart, I have half a dozen old friends, all of them of about fifty years standing, who take a strong interest. That’s about it. But I’m sure my old dad would’ve read the stories if he was still alive – he was loyal to a fault.

What in your opinion is the best line you’ve written?

Without a doubt, it’s ‘Conceived in Sin, Born in Pain, a Life of Toil, and Inevitable Death.’ The line isn’t mine, it’s the title of a seventeenth century painting in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. I pinched it as the title of a piece, accepted by an editor (not LS, of course), who asked me very courteously if I’d could see my way to adopting a shorter title. I did.

Would you write what you would consider shite for money?

Only if my pension pot goes belly-up. To be serious, some of our very best authors have churned out shite to keep the wolf from the door, while they mined for the motherlode. I don’t think any the less of Treasure Island, Kidnapped, The Master of Ballantrae, and Weir of Hermiston because poor old Stevenson also churned out Catriona and St Ives. And I read somewhere that Scott Fitzgerald’s book royalties in the last year of his life were a total of $11. He spent his last years as an unsuccessful Hollywood scriptwriter, using most of his salary to pay his wife’s hospital bills, and in his spare time repeatedly re-writing the wonderful, already published but ignored, ‘Tender is the Night.’

Will you ever go Woke with your writing and use pronoun/non-descript characters and explore sensitive issues in an understanding and sensitive way?

Are you calling me insensitive, damn it?
I think pronoun/non-descript characters look a bit clunky on the page, though that may be due to my relative unfamiliarity. I can’t see myself submitting such a woke piece. But I do think a good rule for authors is that the editor is always right. So if an editor gave me a considered argument for making pronoun changes to a piece, I’d seriously consider it.
I write to amuse myself and, if it’s submitted, to entertain others. Can’t see myself exploring sensitivity.

Do you see something different in a mirror that others don’t see when they look at you?

Definitely, I’m now the spitting image of my grandad, who died sixty years ago. It’s a source of secret satisfaction: I was very fond of him.

The future – Bleak or hopeful?

Hopeful, but it looks to me like it’ll get worse before it gets better.

What would you like to like as you hate that you hate it?

Tricky. Please forgive a short digression. I’m not a big fan of Freud, but I reckon that what he wrote about ‘Projection’ was right on the money. In my late teens, I developed a near-murderous hatred for my university tutor. At some point, I realised that my hatred for that poisonous, mean-spirited, hypocritical poseur was so all-consuming that I’d become blithely tolerant of all the other sinners. As Neil Young put it: ‘Even Richard Nixon has got soul.’ The tutor died a couple of years ago, but I find that I can still successfully project my ill-wishes onto his snivelling, sneaking shade.
So, to return to the question, I’m afraid I really like all my hates.

Records? Tapes? Or CDs? And…

I transitioned from records, to tapes, to CDs. And stopped.

Would dogs be horrified to learn that people consider dogs to be their best friends?

Almost certainly they’d be horrified, also puzzled by our inconsistency in not going around sniffing their backsides. But of course we’re not talking about all people here: what about Roy Rogers and his faithful horse, Trigger? And I recall that, as a very small child, I was briefly enamoured of ants.

Thanks a million, LS editors! I was honoured to be asked and tickled pink to respond.