We’re thrilled to welcome Stark Holborn, author of Nunslinger, Triggernometry and the forthcoming Ten Low, to WAYR today.
Stark is the author of Nunslinger – the first ever digital serial published by Hodder & Stoughton – as well as the Triggernometry series and the upcoming Ten Low. As well as writing about westerns for Pornokitschand Screen Queens, Stark is also a games writer and is currently working on the SF-noir detective game Shadows of Doubt.
And if you’d like your own Western-inspired name, try out Stark’s name generator, here.
What are you reading?
I’ve been reading a lot of novellas lately; I just finished Nghi Vo’s The Empress of Salt and Fortune. It’s been described as an epic in miniature, which is spot on. I always enjoy deft world-building, conveyed with a word or two, tucked into the sentences and the same goes for Daniel Polansky’s The Seventh Perfection. It’s written in second person, which can be hard to pull off, but it works brilliantly and again, reads like a snapshot of a much wider fantasy world. I also just started Tlotlo Tsamaase’s The Silence of the Wilting Skin, which came highly recommended, and Premee Mohamed’s These Lifeless Things is waiting in my downloads. I have a bit of a scattergun approach to reading, so alongside those I’m also re-reading Philip K. Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and dipping in to Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life. Mushrooms are so weird.
What’s the last great book you read?
Great as in epic, or great as in brilliant? I just finished re-reading Moby-Dick – cliché, I know – but I got so much out it this time, most of all Melville’s sheer literary audacity to meander about seas and subjects before zooming in for feverish, diabolic, Shakespearean soliloquies. Over Christmas I read The Ballad of Halo Jones, which I loved. Those slim volumes contain whole worlds, and are a perfect blend of free-wheeling imagination and big themes that feel still contemporary.
What’s your best advice for writers?
If you get stuck, go and stand in the shower. Always works for me. And never be afraid to make things weirder.
What’s the most interesting thing you’ve learned recently?
I read an article about the legendary DJ David Mancuso, founder of The Loft dance parties in New York and an early dance music pioneer. He grew up in a children’s home, and related how his love of shared musical experience came partly from one of the nuns there. She could bring out a stack of records, a player, juice, balloons and find any excuse for the children to have a party. That struck me – how one woman’s act of kindness shaped the evolution of popular music culture as we know it.
What would you love to be asked in an interview?
Probably something about western films, so I could rant about the best and worst and why the genre is always ready for a merciless shaking up.
Thanks so much, Stark! Ten Low publishes on 1 June.
In agency news, we’re delighted to welcome a new client: Jesse Stuart! Jesse’s brilliant work combines humour, heart and just a smidge of darkness with a bit more humour. You’re going to fall in love with her heartwarming books just as quickly as we did!
You can find her full bio here and follow her on Twitter @SisterQuill.
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