Conducted by Glen Cox This interview was originally published in NOVA Express, Vol. 2 No. 2, Fall 1988. [Blaylock and I sat in the lobby of the Austin Wyndham, taking a break from the antics of ArmadilloCon X, where I quickly plied him with some Bass Ale, his favorite brew. My intention: to make him feel at ease. I wasn't blind to the fact that he was wary of this interview, almost wary of people in general. This was the same man who inscribed my copy of Homunculus at ArmadilloCon last year with, "For Glen, who has just listened to my first-ever reading. I'm shaken by it, and can't think." This same timidity comes across in his writing, which makes it that much more honest. Rummaging in my backpack, I pull out back issues of Nova Express and hand them to him, then reach over to the middle of the table and turn the recorder on.] James P. Blaylock: Hmm. I'm sort of partial -- in magazines of this sort--I'm a little partial to non-fiction anyway. I don't know why this is. I really like SF Eye, for example, it's a very readable magazine. My least favorite was the fiction issue, just because their non-fiction has been so good and their interviews have been so good, that I wanted more and more and more of that. Glen Cox: Let's jump right into it. William Ashbless is not real? JB: No. GC: Totally made up? JB: Entirely and utterly made up. GC: I suspected, but wasn't sure. You really gave it away with The Last Coin, cause there's that one section--Book III--that starts out.... JB: The One Pig. GC: Right. [The full quotation that starts Book III is, "...One pig to rule them all,/One pig to bind them,/One pig to bring them all/and on the pier end find them/In Seal Beach, on the Coast." --William Ashbless, Myths of the Pacific Coast--Ed.] JB: Yeah, that kind of put paid to that. Obviously it couldn't be an authentic book. We [Blaylock and Tim Powers] just decided it was too tiresome to try to keep pretending he was authentic. Also, two or three people had come up to us and said, "Geez, I spent all day long at the university library trying to find a reference to him!" and we said, "That's kind of a drag, isn't it?" So we decided to come clean on that. Also we had worked him pretty hard in a few novels. He may well reappear, I don't know. After you work a character over and play the prank for a while, it seems that there ought to be new things to do. GC: There's a scene in The Last Coin where Andrew discovers that Aunt Naomi (whom he has been having a feud with from the beginning of the book) likes cereal just like he does. I feel it's a breaking point in that book. Up until then, it's from Andrew's point of view, he's really eccentric and at that point it seems there's a whole shift where you realize that you are seeing Aunt Naomi through Andrew's eyes and when this happens you realize that, "Wait a minute...she's not as bad as he's portraying her," and you see something different and the book kind of changes from there. Was that deliberate? JB: Yeah, to a degree. I think that was one of the first times when Andrew finally stopped getting carried away by his passions and his eccentricities and sat down for a moment and actually listened to her and thought about her and talked to her and found out she was a human being too. Up until then he had been reacting furiously to her cats or something else like that. Actually, Andrew Vanbergen...a lot of his eccentricities and his passions are simply my own. It's always funny to me when people say that they find him an eccentric character; he seems like the sort of guy I can understand. But obviously he jumps to conclusions about all kinds of people in the book without enough justification and then later on either suffers for it or figures out he's been a fool. So, yeah, I wanted that scene to be a turning point for him, one in which he becomes instantly more sympathetic. Also, I've always hoped that I could take a really sort of mundane and pedestrian thing, whatever it happened to be--in this book it was breakfast cereals and in The Digging Leviathan I tried to do it with the bottle caps that they wore on their shirts--take that sort of mundane thing that I really have no business carrying on about at such length, and turn it into a something fairly crucial and even climatic and emotional, where people say, "Yeah, I really like the scene with the breakfast cereals," instead of them having to say, "I really like the scene where the guy's head exploded or he got shot." Try to pull it off with breakfast cereals instead of a .45. GC: That's when I finally realized what I really liked about your writing. I got to that point and thought, "Wait a minute, these people are real." You don't see peoples' heads explode, and you don't see people getting shot everyday. You see people eating breakfast cereal, and it was just the reality of, "Here are people meeting at midnight to eat breakfast cereal." I've done that. JB: Sure. My kids love it. They're eight years old, but if they got out of bed at midnight because they couldn't sleep and I said, "Let's have a bowl of breakfast cereal," it'd be like heaven for them. It'd be better than a trip to Disneyland. Maybe. I've always felt that way about the little elements of our lives and one of my great goals was to take those sorts of elements and do something with them artistically. Try to make the reader perceive them in the same light that I perceive them. GC: You use a lot of real things in Southern California that appear in your books, like Acres of Books. And you've just said that Andrew is a kind of reflection of your own eccentricities. How much of it is real and where does the fantasy come from? Where is the branching point? JB: That's kind of hard to answer because reality and fantasy really blend together there and I won’t try to suggest that I'm Andrew Vanbergen because I'm not. He's me, in certain ways, carried to an extreme. He probably has sympathetic characteristics that I don't have. And I would never have any kind of war with an invalid aunt. I would say, though, that both this book and The Digging Leviathan are highly autobiographical. In fact, almost all of my protagonists are me or some section of me inflated. But those two books are the most autobiographical, I'm sure. Most of the day to day incidents of that nature--the little breakfast cereal scenes or the characters getting mad at toothpaste tubes or whatever -- those are autobiographical. In The Digging Leviathan there's a scene in which William Hastings, who's a real forerunner of Andrew Vanbergen, goes crazy because of a kink in the garden hose, and he hacks it up with hedge clippers. That nearly happened. I had the hedge clippers in my hands in the back yard and I was advancing on the garden hose, determined just to hack it to oblivion. But I stopped short of actually hacking it up because it occurred to me that probably my wife was watching out of the window and the neighbors would be looking over the fence at that moment and I would simply seem to be certifiable. So I got to have William Hastings do what I wanted to do with that garden hose. The toothpaste scene, too, where he tears the toothpaste tube up: again, autobiographical. I stopped short of nailing it to the wall as an example to other nasty toothpaste tubes. A high percentage of those sorts of scenes are autobiographical. That's especially true of The Last Coin, I think. I've always sort of wanted to open a "Bed and Breakfast" because I love to cook and as far as home cooks go I'm probably all right. And I saw the opportunity here to have this B&B setting from the point of view of a person just like me, who'd really like to do it, might even have certain skills along those lines, but know absolutely nothing about it. But I could have Andrew cook up a big pot of gumbo (because I can cook up a big pot of gumbo) and seem to know what he's doing, while at the same time seem completely cockeyed: spending money on liquor and all the kitchen and bar paraphernalia. It's the trick of sliding in a naive protagonist or view-point character in order to cover your own lack of knowledge. I don't have to pretend to be adept at opening a Bed and Breakfast, because my character's not. So that was pretty much just me fumbling through. GC: This whole inept hero concept is something that goes through The Digging Leviathan, Land of Dreams, Homunculus.