Guns & Romances: Five Minutes with Marc Nash

Some of our Guns & Romances authors have agreed to sit in the hot seat here on my blog, and today I introduce y'all to Marc Nash. Don't forget that you can pick up your copy of Guns & Romances for your Kindle or download a copy from Smashwords. 

So, Marc, who are you? 
Marc Nash, literary Molotov cocktailist, bringing narrative conflagration to a book near you. I like to push the boundaries of narrative form and language to try and reflect our contemporary world and get away from dusty old Aristotle's "Poetics" of beginnings, middles and ends. Human life doesn't follow character arcs, nor is our brain linear in function.

Tell us more about your story and what you enjoyed about writing it.
I worked in the music industry for 19 years and so this project gave me the chance to bring together two of my passions, texts and tunes. I suppose it was inspired by Charles Whitman's Texas clocktower shootings, but I wanted to plot my sniper's emotional tenor through the mixtape he'd put together for ordering his mind for the shooting spree ahead. It seemed like a curious juxtaposition worth exploring. I had to keep the songs fairly mainstream in case readers hadn't heard of the more obscure titles I have taken to my heart.

Why do you think short fiction is important? 
Because it's much easier to mess with expectations of story, narrative, language over a short form than trying to sustain any of these across a novel. I write flash fiction (stories of 1 000 words or less) and it allows me to be way way more radical than anything in my novels. Stories without characters, stories composed entirely of endings, stories made up of 100 single word sentences, etc.

What is your favourite short story? 
Kafka's "Metamorphosis". so rich in imagery and expertly plots the family dynamics. Ben Marcus' "First Love" is pretty neat, what he does with language is extraordinary, like stripping down a car and rebuilding it to be an entirely different vehicle.

Have you got upcoming projects you'd like to talk about?
My 5th collection of flash fiction "Extra-Curricular" - tales told out of school is published September 18. I'm also really excited to be working with a video designer to turn one of my flash stories into a kinetic typography video. I've had one done, but this one is going to a whole new level.

Follow Marc on Twitter.