The Bodhisattva

Okay people, a debut of a new little feature at BookSpot Central. I’m going to cut/paste the intro to explain it a bit and then add more here that I didn’t want to say in the feature to clutter the feature itself:

This introduces a new type of feature at BookSpot Central today! We have always conducted interviews (our ‘On the Spot’ interviews) that tend to be - or have become - lengthy and comprehensive features. Now we love doing these and will continue to do them, but I felt like they had become something that limited my ability to communicate with various creators and personalities on specific subjects only. For instance, if I just interviewed somebody at length and something new pops up that interests me a few months later in their career, I can hardly justify conducting another long feature. We also wanted to have a feature that while still informative was a bit more lighthearted and looser - a feature I could work on while waiting on/conducting my much more time consuming ‘On the Spot’ features. Simply put, The BookSpot Beat will be me (or anybody else who wishes to do one) asking ten topic-specific questions to our guests.

When we first started doing interviews at BookSpot Central (when we were FBS) I actually kicked that off as well with an interview with the lovely K.J. Bishop. At the time it to was a short a feature and limited to 5 questions. I guess the reasons are obvious; we were a new site, even newer to interviews, and we wanted to make requests that weren’t overly burdensome for a site of our stature at the time to request. Little did we know that writers (I guess obviously) like to write - especially about themselves! I can’t speak for how others at our site who have done interviews but I know that mine have expanded quite a bit as I kind of like asking all the questions I’ve ever wanted to ask when give the chance now (see my Steven Erikson interview)! Now, we/I will still be “On the Spot’ interviews (I have questions out on one now and working on questions for three others) but I wanted to have room maneuver and be able to hit somebody up Beat style, get the 411 on a specific topic of interest. The reason for this is that I don’t do full blown interviews with writers I haven’t read (you’d think this is standard, but as you can tell from some questions you will see - it’s really not) but sometimes something pops up that interests me and I want to reach out and chat about it and that’s what this feature is about. Also, I don’t want to do a full blown interview every time a creator I’ve already interviewed announces something that interests me (which is everything)!

With Jeff VanderMeer, a lack of reading his work is not an issue - I’ve read all the work I could get my hands on and he’s one of my favorite writers period. That said, I was really interested in Jeff - a writer who I guess would be called a ‘literary writer’ (to those that matters to) - writing a Predator novel and I had to make him answerable to the Bodhisattva! It’s all cool to me I have City of Saints and Madmen and not too far from that I have a stack of Platinum Edition copies of Predator vs. Magnus Robot Fighter. You don’t know anybody realer than that!

It should also be noted that BookSpot Beat is a bit of a throwback to our site’s mantra PTE (pre-Tomio era) - Damon and Dave’s slogan was a Tongue-in-Cheek look at Fantasy and Book Reviewing and I wanted to get back to something real loose, some real kick-back and shoot the breeze type shit. I know some people just roll their eyes at the very idea, but - and this isn’t new - my policy of F them is an eternal one. I can go any style you want and crush; Excellence is my presence, never tense, Never hesitant, leave a reviewer bent real quick Real sick, brawl nights, I perform like Mike, Anyone, Tyson, Jordan, Jackson ,* - or so if you will!

At any rate I hope people enjoy it! As a bonus in this feature we also announced a bonus prize to the contest I announced earlier this week for signed copies of Predator: South China Sea.

Get the scoop on that and check out the debut of BookSpot Beat

My next guest on BookSpot Beat is going to be Paul S. Kemp so be on the lookout for that - we are starting this off with O.G. friends of the site!

_{*versatile like Chris Wallace - don’t make me change the name of this bog to The Speculative Biggie!}