(Interviewer’s Note: I interviewed Rupert in his US locale. As is usual, he was surrounded by pussies..er, I meant to say cats. A tabby cat was asleep next to him, and a skittish cat kept running all over the house. Outside, the early Spring sun was shining on the backyard pool. We were both masked, more about that momentarily.)
I: So Rupert, what have you been working on this Winter?
R: Nothing.
I: How so?
R: Well, I contracted Covid at the end of December, and since then it has been a bit of a roller-coaster ride. When you are in a mental fog, getting back into The Zone to write fiction prose is rather difficult. So I have been laying out, and recovering. Then there was all of the political and societal upheaval around the November elections.
I: Any words of wisdom about Covid?
R: Yes. Don’t contract it. Even if you are only minorly impacted initially, there are potential long-term side-effects that I am still recovering from.
I: So what is the status of your book projects?
R: Let me see…Books of Loukas…I have started on a revision of the draft of Book 1, which will be significant, both structurally and stylistically. The original draft had some issues which I tried to address, but they still existed in what I now realize was an insufficiently revised draft. The pacing was too slow, there was too much extraneous crap in the prose about this that and the other, and there were the usual nitty-gritty details that were not quite right. Plus, there was a potential integration problem to Book 0, which I realized would be required.
I have been going back and forth on whether I should write Book 0 now, or finish Book 1 and add Book 0 later as a prequel. I realized that I cannot simply ignore Book 0, because I might do something in Book 1 plot-wise that does not match the plot and flow of Book 0. That’s the downside of writing a book series. You have to understand that events in one book can impact other books. The obvious one (which is unlikely to happen, since I am not into murdering characters…yet) is that if you dispose of a character in one book, it is kind of difficult to put them in a later book. Well, unless you want to retrospectively “do a Dallas” and start passing off prior events as dreams or some such. I found that to be laughable at the time, but, hey, they needed to reinstate one of the key characters in the franchise.
I: So what is the timeframe for Book 1?
R: Summer.
I: Which Summer?
R: Hmm, you are way too smart. It will be this Summer. Some time. I have 60+ work items, ranging from nits to major revisions of one or two sections.
I: What about Belem? Has he been laid up also?
R: Afraid so. Alter egos get Covid too. Belem is only just getting back to thinking in smut terms. However, I have reason to believe that he has been thinking about how to connect a lot of his filthy stories into a fantasy novel.
I: When?
R: Hmm, I can see you drive a hard chariot, with much use of the whip. I doubt anything lengthy will appear until the end of the year. One complication is that I am trying to work out how and when to give up my day job. Ideally I would drop it, like, now. However, financially that is not possible. So my better half and I are working on a cunning plan. Well, more cunning than a Baldrick plan. His plans always suck. But I want to be writing full-time by August 2022. Life is too short etc. etc.
I: What about the other novel series? Weren’t you writing another series?
R: You clearly have far too good a memory. Yes, I am sketching another novel series. It was, entirely co-incidentally, set in the Western USA in the 2030s, after a major pandemic. No connection to Covid, I started sketching it in my scratchpad as long ago as 2015, when nobody had even heard of the Covid virus, or seen a patient impacted by Covid. So you could say I was prescient, or maybe I just guessed something by blind luck.
The series is more like a futuristic novel series, and I had to invent a new set of terminology along the way. So it is, in some respects, like a mutant cross between futurism, erotica and sci-fi. But I would not dream of passing it off as a sci-fi series. I know sci-fi readers, they have a frightening eye for detail and consistency, and they will tear it to pieces like lions falling on red meat.
Right now, the series is still in sketch mode. If I keep it relatively non-filthy, I will have enough material for at least 4 books.
I may actually make it a hybrid series. Books by Rupert Ramsgate, with offshoot filthy novelettes by Belem Knight. It is an idea that I thought of a while ago, when I was wrestling with the thought that I might be limiting my audience by having too much filth in the mainline of the books. I am still musing on that one. It may or may not have been done before.
I: Don’t you have another alter ego who is writing non-fiction?
R: I do, but he is heads-down on other stuff so he has no public comment at present.
I: So, in summary, you hope to have Book 1 of Books Of Loukas out this Summer?
R: Yes. Remember that there is an extract of Book 2 out there for your delectation and delight. And there is also a vignette from the book series set in the Western USA. And then Belem did produce some filth.
I: So when should I email you for the next interview?
R: July I think. By that time i will either have completed Book 1 of Books of Loukas, or I will have given up on the whole damn thing.