The Goat in the Sky

There's now an in-depth interview of my editor Kristopher Young and me - by the cool Martin Garrity - online @ Solarcide, regarding Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat.

Martin writes:

"TSMG is an odd sci-fi tale of corruption in a dystopian future, set in Melbourne, Australia. (Bergen is himself Australian, though he now lives in Japan) It features an immediately likeabe protagonist, Floyd Maquina, who is a government endorsed ‘seeker.’ Floyd’s job is to hunt the deviant menace that threatens the future of the last inhabited city on the planet. This could almost be a special edition, Vegemite-flavoured version of a certain Philip K. Dick story.

"But that ain’t even the half of it.

"TSMG is also homage to the golden age of film noir. It’s a cigar puffing, whiskey sipping, piano playing, bar lout, and the book may very well stir up memories of a black and white nature. Andrez makes a million and one references to movies (The Third Man and The Maltese Falcon, in particular, are heavily drawn on) and the settings are stuffed to the margins with inspiration from this classic era of cinema."

I actually really dug doing this interview; Martin was great to yack with and he asked some canny questions - and I really loved the head-to-head between he and Kristopher.

Anyway, you can read it if at all interested HERE.

Cheers, Martin! ;)

Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat - the novel

Big news for myself this week relates not to hack muzak but hack writing - my novel is finally starting to emerge from its 18-month sub-editing purgatory!

The first 2 chapters are now online as a bit of a freebie teaser HERE; there're
some typos I noticed the other day, but otherwise pretty much tweaked into (final) submission, with huge thanks to Kristopher and Bob - the two best people I could ever imagine helping me to reign in the beast - and gratitude going out to Scott Campbell on cover art chores (the version here is the initial rough sketch Scott ran by me way back at the beginning of the editing process).

So, Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat is finally going to be published in 2010... thank god! The people generously running with it are this way cool, semi-punk, ideologically wunderbar publisher in the U.S. called Another Sky Press and I love 'em to death.

Along with Scott, they've become mates and a virtual family over the course of the past 540-odd days of fine-tuning.

So what's the novel all about, anyway? I think my editor, awesome scribe Kristopher Young, put it way better than I ever could in a recent interview with Verbicide:

"We’ve spent... wow, at least a year at this point hammering his novel into shape. It’s a huge undertaking; he’s got this brilliant voice that only he could have, but it needs fine tuning, so that’s what we’re doing. The book itself is sort of... well, indescribable, really — noir-ish, subtly sci-fi, hard boiled, futuristic. Think Blade Runner with a touch of Sam Spade, a smattering of Orson Welles circa Touch of Evil, or better yet, The Third Man. And a shot of some good bourbon."

Anyway, enough blabbering.

If anyone here ever gets time, have a peek, download the PDF, and I hope to hell you dig... No correspondence, however, will probably be entered into as I'm just too goddamned busy finishing this baby and the off-beat travel tome!

Andrezzz