Bloody Parchment's Liam Kruger

If you're yet to pick up a copy of the current Bloody Parchment anthology, it's available on Amazon and Kobo, among other vendors. In the meanwhile, I have one of the contributors, none other than Liam Kruger, stopping by.

Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Well, I mean, I write, that's the main thing. Also variously read, run, and drink. I'm a recent graduate of the University of Cape Town's Masters in Creative Writing programme, with a handful of stories published in genre and literary publications around the country.

What gives in your story?

Not much, really? My stories are not, historically, overwhelmingly giving. It's a couple of ghost kids walking around, shooting the shit, coming to terms with their relatively new ghostly station. Sort of like if you saw the trailer for Ghost World and assumed because of the title that the protagonists were actual ghosts.

What do you love about reading and writing speculative fiction?

I mean - look, this notion of speculative fiction being qualitatively different to realist or literary fiction started off as a a marketing tool, and then got a bit out of hand. Good fiction, irrespective of genre identity, should be doing the same stuff in terms of being entertaining and instructive and unsettling. Maybe speculative fiction has a little more carte blanche about the tools that it uses in achieving that effect than the standard realist stuff does.

Is there a novel or movie that you feel has been the most influential on you, that you keep coming back to? 

Y'know, if there is, then my subconscious is probably doing me a favour by keeping me in the dark about it? A couple of years ago I published a story which, in hindsight, had a scene lifted almost whole cloth out of Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita - which is not an obscure book - and when a friend asked me about it, I had no idea what they were talking about. Probably there's another, even dumber source for all of my other work that I'm ignoring. Something like The Mighty Ducks 2.

How do you approach the writing process? 

Obliquely. I try and trick myself into writing longer things by writing a series of smaller things - vignettes, chains of dialogue, whatever - and then looking at them for a while to see how they fit together, if they fit together. The alternative - the one where you outline, try and storm the thing all at once - terrifies me.

liamkruger.com
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