Jayme Beddingfield posted the following interview to her blog in February of 2013. It has since been taken down, so I’ve posted a copy of the interview here.
Jayme: Could you start by telling us a little about yourself?
Mark: I’m the fourth and youngest son of two very loving, very Catholic parents. As a child, I was an altar boy, a Boy Scout, a straight-A student, and utterly devout — the kind of son you know is just setting his mother up for a fall. By the time I went off to college, my faith was already faltering. When I graduated, four-and-a-half years later, my faith was a memory and my worldview had been reshaped. So much so that my parents disowned me, and we didn’t speak for a year. Declaring my rejection of religion and my plan to move in with my girlfriend was just too much for them. I moved to Milwaukee — a city where I didn’t know a soul — to start my first post-college job, writing accounting software for a mutual fund company. Shortly after the move, my girlfriend left me, and I found myself profoundly alone.
Eighteen years later, I’m married to the girlfriend who left me (Nancy and I got back together five years later), my parents and I are on good terms (we avoid talking about religion and politics), and I have deep roots in the city where I now live (Chicago). But my experience with isolation left its mark, and clearly influenced my creation of Raymond, the troubled protagonist of “Upload”.
J: How long have you been writing?
M: When I was a kid, my family went on a lot of very long road trips. My dad always had a travel bug, but we never flew. We pulled a little pop-up camping trailer behind whatever car we had at the time, and we camped along the way. I loved it. We played a lot of car games, and my mom would often read to my dad — and anyone else who was awake. When I was nine, my brothers and I started writing what we thought were terribly funny stories about dysfunctional families, one-upping each other with gross details and ridiculous violence. I was hooked, and kept at it. When we weren’t on long car trips, I would pretend we were. Seriously. I would set myself up on the couch, with all my favorite car-trip activities, and the rule was that I could only get off the couch to go to the bathroom or get more iced tea. I would stay there writing and drawing for hours.
J: Did anything in particular motivate you to start your writing career?
M: It feels a little early to call my writing a career. My software career is fairly demanding, which has forced my writing to live at the margins, but the call to write has been getting harder and harder to ignore. I started “Upload” when I was between jobs, back in 1999, and chipped away at it for thirteen years. As I was nearing 40, I realized it was time to nudge the book out into the world where it would have to socialize. It’s been an immensely satisfying experience. I feel like I’ve finally found my voice in the world, and I’m taking steps now to make writing much more central in my life.
J: Tell us about your novel Upload.
M: It’s the story of a brilliant but deeply troubled young man, Raymond Quan, and his scheme to escape the crimes of his youth. It’s technically science fiction, but the world feels like an extension of current technologies. It’s set in the 2060s, at a time when scientists are closing in on the ability to transfer a person’s mind and body into a computer — to upload them. Raymond managed to score a position on the University of Michigan’s Human Mind Upload Project — a name I came up with long before the announcement of the Human Brain Project that is now underway in Europe. His crimes are catching up with him, and he plans to escape by uploading himself, living out his life in Nurania, a virtual utopia he’s been building for years.
Raymond’s childhood was lacking in love and human contact, amplifying his naturally introverted tendencies. He has a sense of independence that borders on pathological. When he works up the courage to reach out to Anya, an attractive and outgoing scientist on the upload research team, he’s shocked to discover the attraction is mutual. He finds himself in the first meaningful relationship of his life. It turns his world upside down. With newfound attachments to “reality prime”, he starts to have second thoughts about uploading.
That’s the setup. It’s ultimately a story of love and self-discovery, from the perspective of a extreme loner. It also explores our basic need to respect our peers, and some of the philosophical pitfalls of virtual society.
J: Can you share some of what you learned during the process of writing your novel, Upload?
M: I have a weakness for video games and a magnetic attraction to hobbies. With a demanding full-time job, there’s only so much time left for creative pursuits, and I squandered an awful lot of it. I kept coming back to “Upload”, getting excited about it again, and then wandering off after some other interest. My wife told me countless times to keep at it, even when I hated the story and never wanted to see it again. So I guess that’s one thing I learned: if your wife says you have a good story on your hands, dig deep and find the discipline to stick with it. I recently read Stephen King’s “On Writing”, and I texted my wife when I read the part about his wife fishing an abandoned draft of “Carrie” out of the trash: “See, it’s not just me.”
I also learned to be grateful for gifts of free time. Even when they were given to me by my cat, Brother Man, at 5:30 in the morning. There’s a great quote, attributed to Thomas Edison: “Everything comes to those who hustle while they wait.” So true. Words to live by.
By the way, I say “my cat”, instead of “our cat”, because I was the one foolish enough to lure him into our home. He was a feral kitten, and my wife made it very clear he was mine. There’s an age after which you can never really socialize a feral cat — somewhere around twelve weeks. Brother Man must have been right on the cusp. He was a real pain-in-the-ass cat for the first few years, and he wouldn’t let you get close to him. It was all work and frustration, and none of the reward of having an affectionate animal in your home. But I stuck with him, trying always to give him the benefit of the doubt, and gradually he grew to trust me. Now, we’re tight. He follows me around, lies behind my head on the sofa when I write, and waits patiently outside the bathroom while I shower. He loves my wife, too, to be sure, but he’s still mine. It’ll be utterly heartbreaking when he’s gone.
J: Are you working on any projects right now?
M: I’m toying with ideas for a sequel of sorts for “Upload”, but I’m more focused at the moment on a children’s story. It’s an inversion of “Walden”, in which the animals get ahold of a shrink-ray, start bringing man-made objects into their lives, and get swept up in an obsession with gadgets and material possessions. It’s up to our hero, Cyril Frohlix, to point out the madness of abandoning the blissful simplicity of their old ways. Or something like that. I’m very early in the process, trying to sort out how all the pieces fit together.
I’m also loving writing short pieces for burrst.com — with two R’s. Great place to put up prose sketches, see what others are writing, and share feedback. Folks can get a glimpse of things I’m working on there, if they’re interested.
Oh, this isn’t a project exactly, but I’m experimenting with an idea that I’m calling functional poetry. Tiny poems that help you remember something, stick to your priorities, or otherwise influence your state of mind. I have one to stave off my desire to play video games, for example — not that I think video games are bad. They’re just addictive, and I don’t really want to spend what little free time I have on them. So I have this very old-fashioned little rhyme I made up, as a poetic periapt against the addiction: “I will not play this video game; I can’t abide the hideous shame”. It’s quaint and overstated, but I think reciting it fires up my prefrontal cortex, and gives me just enough willpower to turn my attention to something that’s either more productive or more relaxing.
J: Do you take on more than one project at a time or do you prefer to zero in on a single one?
M: Writing “Upload” displaced pretty much everything else, which in hindsight I regret. When I wasn’t working on it, I had a guilt complex about writing anything else. So I ended up writing nothing. I probably would have been better off writing something unrelated — maybe it would have refreshed my interest in writing in general, and ultimately helped me make progress on “Upload”. I didn’t want something else to get in the way, because I was afraid I’d lose the feel of “Upload”, but I suspect that was wrong thinking.
Right now, I’m jumping all over the place, working on whatever seems exciting.
J: As an independent author, marketing can be a big undertaking and a huge learning curve. Do you have tips or tricks that you’ve learned so far?
M: First, don’t get obsessed with checking for new reviews, new sales, how many people have added your book on Goodreads, etc. It’s great to have all that information, especially when you want to gauge the success of your marketing techniques, but it can quickly become a distraction. Better to have only one or two days a week where you allow yourself to check in on that stuff. In early days, it’s especially tempting to keep checking to see how much activity there is around your book, and it’s a hard habit to break.
My second piece of advice is much bigger, for me. I recently started having a little status meeting with myself every Sunday, complete with a status report. I even created a template for the status report. I note achievements from the prior week, decide what I want to focus on for the week to come, and jot down the “big ideas” from my marketing plan that should be guiding choices of how I spend my time. It’s a simple project-management technique that I picked up at work, and I’m finding it really helps with the promotion side of being an author. I would never do that with my actual writing, personally, because I don’t want that part of my life to feel so structured. But marketing should be structured, and these little status meetings help me focus on the stuff that I think matters most.
J: Is there a character of yours that you’re especially fond of?
M: Brody. She’s an astute police detective with a rare gift for compassionate insight into the minds of the people she questions. She also sees the big picture in terms of right and wrong — she thinks hard about her cases, and never just goes through the motions. She doesn’t have much “time on the ice” in “Upload”, but she plays a key role. No, I’m not a hockey fan; that metaphor just felt natural.
J: Do you set time aside for writing or do you just write when inspired?
M: A little of both. If I have good momentum and I want to keep it going, I try to set aside time for writing. Otherwise, I tend to jot notes in my journal from time to time, and keep an eye out for an idea that really gets me going.
J: What about writing science fiction do you find the most rewarding?
M: I’m hoping my science fiction raises some concerns in the minds of readers about where we as a species might be headed. But I also hope to inspire, to get people excited about the potential for greater understanding of ourselves and our surroundings. Science fiction gives me the chance to let my imagination run wild; sticking to near-future science fiction helps me keep my stories grounded and relevant. I’m tempted to write more fantasy, but I find with fantasy that I tend to drift into pure escapism. It’s absolutely delightful to dream it up and write it, but I don’t feel I have much to add to the genre.
J: What about writing do you find most challenging?
M: I tend to think in terms of themes first, then story. Stephen King recommends writers do it the other way around, but I can’t help it — it’s how I think. Sticking with the story when I’m having a hard time connecting it with the themes can be very frustrating. I end up throwing out major chunks of prose, because they just don’t seem to resonate with the core ideas I had when I started writing. Yet, forcing the story to adhere to the themes can yield unnatural dialog and preachy clumps of exposition — not what I want to be known for. I guess the most challenging thing is powering through the blockages, forcing yourself to write things you know you won’t like with the hope it will give rise to something that really sings.
J: What are some of your favorites aspects of writing?
M: I’m a quiet person, especially in groups, and it sometimes leaves me feeling like I have no voice. Sharing something I’ve written gives me a voice in the world.
Writing also helps me think clearly. It’s amazing how often I feel muddleheaded, aimless, and prone to depression. It’s like the world and everything I knew about it just blurs out, and I’m in a haze of nothingness. Writing helps bring life back in focus. So does exercise, actually, but in a different way. Combine the two — the energy from exercise and the clarity from writing — and I’m a happy man.
J: What are some of your favorite genres to consume?
M: My reading is fairly broad. I’m into everything and nothing — I have breadth but not depth. And, unfortunately, I’m a slow reader. Fantasy stands out as a favorite. I loved “The Magicians”, by Lev Grossman, and enjoyed his follow-up, “The Magician King”. Harry Potter, the “His Dark Materials” series, “Neverwhere”. “Watership Down” was one of my favorite books, as a kid, and I loved “The Chronicles of Narnia”. Of science fiction, “The Martian Chronicles” stands out as a favorite. And my dad had an old sci-fi book that was two-in-one, where you would finish one story and then flip the book over and start from the other end. One of the stories was Eric Frank Russell’s “Next of Kin”, which I thought was brilliant. To be honest, my science fiction reading is comparatively limited, and most of what has stuck with me is shorter stuff. Now that I’ve published a science-fiction novel, people expect me to be well read in the genre, and I have a lot of catching up to do. I also love Henry James, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Checkhov, Turgenev, Saul Bellow. I thought “Catch 21” was genius. Oh, and Barry Yourgrau — his dream-like stories are some of my all-time favorites. Especially “Wearing Dad’s Head”. That was a huge influence. I also read a lot of non-fiction, and occasionally find a poet I really respond well to — although I tend to prefer writing it to reading it.
J: If you could create any universe and live there what would it be like?
M: A communal-living arrangement with all my friends, in a Romanesque compound along the lines of Sant’ Antimo. With jobs for everyone but never too much work to do. An abundance of good food and drink, a fully equipped hackerspace, a high tower room to which I could escape to be alone, cats and dogs, beehives, lots of wildlife, farm animals, and beautiful countryside for long walks. And benign magic. And a fully functional TARDIS.
J: Are you more of a planner or by the seat of your pants type of writer?
M: Definitely more of a planner. I enjoy doing stream-of-consciousness writing as an exercise, and my poetry comes in flashes, but for the bulk of my writing there’s a great deal of stewing, note-taking, collecting ideas, discarding ideas, fitting bits together, prose sketches, and something approaching outlining. I’ve never had much luck with detailed outlines, but I do like to have a basic roadmap.
J: What do you think the future holds for self-published authors and traditional publishers?
M: I think traditional publishers will serve niches where books demand high production value, such as illustrated children’s stories, guides to wildlife, coffee table books. But for most books, I think the value of traditional publishers is vanishing, and their role as the gatekeepers of quality will act against them. Increasingly, authors will side-step the hassle of finding a publisher, and will cut out the middleman. Paper books will become a novelty, valued only by enthusiasts, and eBooks will dominate the market. With the rise of eBooks, the problem of producing and distributing books becomes a software problem, and the new “publishers”, like Lulu, will provide software-as-a-service, as well as a clearinghouse approach to finding related services — editors, illustrators, and publicists. Authors will release a sea of self-published books into the world, even more than they do today, and readers will rely increasingly on social media to guide them to the good stuff. As for literary agents, I suspect their numbers will diminish dramatically. Those who remain will serve the specialty niches of high-production-value books, or will help bestselling authors navigate the tricky waters of success: movie rights, trademarks, etc. Some of today’s more savvy agents will probably reposition themselves as the new gatekeepers of quality, applying their talent-scout expertise to fill the void left by the traditional publishers, in ways I’m frankly too industry-ignorant to even imagine.
J: What is your favorite thing about being an independent author?
M: Control. I created my book, and I control it. I don’t have to place it the hands of others and hope they’re acting in my best interest.
J: What is your day job? Does it help to inspire your writing?
M: I’m a software developer. I’ve been coding for money for twenty years, and my familiarity with computers definitely helped me write “Upload”. I wouldn’t say that it inspired the overall story in any meaningful way, but I think it allowed me to achieve a higher degree of believability in the details of Raymond’s hacking and world-building.
J: Where can we buy your books and find out more about you?
M: To find out more about Upload, go to uploadthenovel.com. There’s also my Goodreads author page, and my Upload book-page on Facebook.
As for where to buy Upload, I have a list on the Where to Buy page at uploadthenovel.com. Also, you should be able to call or walk into any bookstore and special-order the book, since it’s available on Ingram.