Ask the Author: John Winkelman
Answered Questions (10)
John Winkelman
We don't really know who my paternal grandfather's father was, other than that grandpa was born in The Netherlands, probably in Amsterdam. This would have been before World War 1. Tracing things back through the events of two world wars could be the seed for a story in several different genres.
John Winkelman
I will keep unworn baby shoes after all. A dear friend just gave me this monkey's paw.
John Winkelman
I think I would travel to Roger Zelazny's Amber, since from there I could travel to all possible other worlds, fictional or otherwise. Assuming I survived walking the Pattern, of course.
John Winkelman
Almost anything can inspire me to write - the events of the day; a particularly good line in a poem I am reading; the smell of a cigarette wafting out of a passing car; a late night conversation with my partner. Inspiration comes from the space between "is" and "might be".
Or to put it another way, I am always inspired to write, but I don't always have the time, space, mental, and/or emotional energy to make a good go of it.
Or to put it another way, I am always inspired to write, but I don't always have the time, space, mental, and/or emotional energy to make a good go of it.
John Winkelman
For me, the best thing about being a writer is taking the seed of an idea and running with it to see where we end up. Many times it is a dead end, but sometimes (with respect to Paul Blackburn) we go to the wall because that's where the door is. Maybe.
John Winkelman
A couple of years ago I bought subscriptions to a few publishers of books in translation - Open Letter Books (https://www.openletterbooks.org/), Deep Vellum (https://deepvellum.org/), And Other Stories (http://www.andotherstories.org/), and Restless Books (http://www.restlessbooks.com/). Two years and about 60 books later, I have actually read maybe half a dozen of them. My plan for the summer is to reduce the size of that pile.
John Winkelman
Write randomly. Set aside the blocked project, and write something else for a while. I like to hit the "random article" button on Wikipedia and write 500 words on whatever comes up.
Or go for a long walk.
Or go for a long walk.
John Winkelman
Read a lot. Read good books. Set aside a dedicated chunk of time every day for writing, and stick to it. Get in the habit of writing. Integrate it into your life. If it is something you "also do", then it becomes something you can easily set aside.
John Winkelman
Cleaning up several short stories I wrote in 2014.
John Winkelman
From Neal Stephenson's talk on Solve for X, discussing "moonshot thinking" in general, and specifically, the construction of a 20 kilometer tall tower.
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