Ask the Author: Mike Watt
Answered Questions (4)
Mike Watt
Panic and deadlines.
Mike Watt
Never high-five the thing under your bed. It really wants you to.
Mike Watt
The most recent book I published was HOT SPLICES and there's no simple answer to that question. HOT SPLICES is what happens when you start your film career watching your peers fail dramatically while you work underground, in the dark, in a film lab, breathing chemical air, for two full years, while still trying to make a movie of your own.
HOT SPLICES is about obsession - in this case, obsession with film, watching and making them. It's a collection of stories that also grew out of a film I'd written for the first son of director George A. Romero. This was to be George C.'s first film. Amy Lynn Best and I were the producers. It fell apart, as most movies do, but we took the base story - and first draft - and let it breathe from there.
HOT SPLICES offers its own cosmic mythology, with the creative minds controlled by otherworldly "Elders", gods like Cinemagog, Ifirs, Illuminatia, both comic and terrifying. They exist in the spaces between the frames.
HOT SPLICES offers a metastasized version of obsession with "flixing" - film addicts sucking on frames of film, immersing themselves into the film they're watching, or summoning forth those images as terrifying visions.
HOT SPLICES introduces the lost "Borgia Films," "The Divine Heresy," seemingly amateurish bits of NY ephemera that, if viewed in the correct way, tear away the veil between film and reality, exposing the Elders beneath, and bringing the murderous filmmaker, Luther Borgia, back to life as a god himself.
There are murder mysteries included, sentient machines that live on celluloid, sexual obsession captured and replayed.
TLDR: Mostly, from the back of a matchbook cover.
HOT SPLICES is about obsession - in this case, obsession with film, watching and making them. It's a collection of stories that also grew out of a film I'd written for the first son of director George A. Romero. This was to be George C.'s first film. Amy Lynn Best and I were the producers. It fell apart, as most movies do, but we took the base story - and first draft - and let it breathe from there.
HOT SPLICES offers its own cosmic mythology, with the creative minds controlled by otherworldly "Elders", gods like Cinemagog, Ifirs, Illuminatia, both comic and terrifying. They exist in the spaces between the frames.
HOT SPLICES offers a metastasized version of obsession with "flixing" - film addicts sucking on frames of film, immersing themselves into the film they're watching, or summoning forth those images as terrifying visions.
HOT SPLICES introduces the lost "Borgia Films," "The Divine Heresy," seemingly amateurish bits of NY ephemera that, if viewed in the correct way, tear away the veil between film and reality, exposing the Elders beneath, and bringing the murderous filmmaker, Luther Borgia, back to life as a god himself.
There are murder mysteries included, sentient machines that live on celluloid, sexual obsession captured and replayed.
TLDR: Mostly, from the back of a matchbook cover.
Mike Watt
I'm in that weird cycle of pitching and reprinting - my older stuff is getting a new life at Happy Cloud Publishing, and in the meantime, I'm shopping around a "soft science-fiction / time travel but not really" novel titled "Something Changed," (which sounds like a Joseph Heller novel, but was intended to be "Douglas Adams reads Vonnegut"), as well as what is turning out to be a pretty nifty historical novel based on the friendship between notorious outlaw Dave Rudabaugh and lawman John Joshua Webb, which led to the two men being imprisoned together for life before an incredible escape! It could be my "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid."
This last thing grew out of a Weird West novel I'm in the midst of (cowboys, vampires, and Old West Wizards), also starring Rudabaugh, and the more research I did into his life, the more that story begged to be told. The man rode with Billy the Kid and Mysterious Dave Mather, he was hunted by Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp, and Pat Garrett, the entire town of Las Vegas tried to overturn the train he and the Kid were on to lynch him, and his entire legacy has been boiled down to a ridiculous performance (that I love) by Christian Slater in Young Guns II.
So that's how I spent my Pandemic Vacation.
This last thing grew out of a Weird West novel I'm in the midst of (cowboys, vampires, and Old West Wizards), also starring Rudabaugh, and the more research I did into his life, the more that story begged to be told. The man rode with Billy the Kid and Mysterious Dave Mather, he was hunted by Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp, and Pat Garrett, the entire town of Las Vegas tried to overturn the train he and the Kid were on to lynch him, and his entire legacy has been boiled down to a ridiculous performance (that I love) by Christian Slater in Young Guns II.
So that's how I spent my Pandemic Vacation.
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