Christopher Moore's Blog

The Author Guy, your all-knowing oracle, departs some mama-jammin’ wisdom:

Lauren Asks

Hey, Author Guy, what’s with all the snow we’re getting here on the East Coast? I, for one, am not amused. Will it ever be spring? (Like, real spring, with nice weather, and birds and grass growing and stuff, not just “yeah, March 20th.”)

ANS:

Easy answer. Like the torrential rains, flooding, and mudslides on the West Coast, your snow problems are purely political. By living in a Blue State you have pissed off God, and he is chastising you. This is not to say that he actually plays political favorites. The way he punishes people who live in red states like Nebraska is – well—Nebraska.

It will, however, be spring soon, when you will be visited by some ironic weather condition like a flood in the midst of a drought, a snow storm in the middle of heat wave, or squirrels with flaming flatulence, thus proving that we are put on this planet simply so God can fuck with us.

Ferrit Leggings Asks:

What is it that makes the likes of you, Kurt Vonnegut, Douglas Adams, and Hunter S Thompson so cool?

ANS:

We make you laugh.

I suppose my real question is what and who inspires you?

ANS:

Mostly I’m inspired by things I don’t understand. That is, I start a book because I hope that by the time I’m finished I’ll have some understanding of the stuff I’m writing about. I’m simply using the book to try to get my head around ideas like, how we construct faces to meet the world and how people react to those, and in that way we become tricksters (Coyote Blue), or what’s up with evolutionary biology? (Fluke) or, hey, death, what’s the deal? (The new book). I basically react to the world like a stone doofus, and therefore I put it in order in my own way. (The stories).

In the process of putting the story together I’m inspired by people I meet and see.

Jenny O Asks:

What’s your favorite pie?

ANS:

Gotta go with pumpkin. I like that someone has punished a squash the size of a Volkswagon until it submits to lying in a spicy puddle on a nest of crust. You can’t miss with a dessert that endures that kind of discipline.

Ted J Asks:

Hey AG, paper or plastic?

ANS:

I often envision Hamlet at the check-out counter, pondering that very question. And like that dark Dane, I am unable to decide. For while plastic is light and can be used again and again to suffocate oneself, paper can be pressed into action for cooling freshly baked bread, ripening avocados, and cutting into durable book covers. Paper, or plastic, that is the question! Both, I tell you. Both.

Consider carrying the severed human head to your car, if you will. While plastic will minimize the mess, it’s transparency ruins the surprise of your grisly trophy. The quiet loner who uses plastic alone will never have neighbors testifying to how helpful and shy he was if he parades his decaps through the parking garage. You gotta go with both. Plastic liner, paper cover.

Sgt. Steve Asks:

What comes first, the jokes or the plot?

ANS:

Both. Sometimes you have a great joke, so you write to that, other times you’re making the story adhere to the structure of the plot, and in the process you find funny situations. It also depends on how you set the defaults on your Comic Novel Writer 3.0 software.

Creepy asks: why do my kitties come in the house after being outside for awhile and go use the litterbox?

ANS: Kitties do not like to leave their “spoor” all over the place where CSI guys can shine flashlights on it and put it in evidence bags. At any given time, it is a safe bet that any cat is engaged in some kind of criminal activity. If they leave the evidence in the cat box they can conceal it quickly and not open themselves to prosecution.

why do they have to use it the second that i clean it? why why oh why?

ANS: The natural condition of a litter box is “nasty”. As soon as de-nastify it, your kitties feel the need to put it back in harmony with it’s nature.

Unc asks: Why do hot dogs come in packages of 10 and hot dog buns come in packages of 8?

What happens to all of those leftover hot dogs?

ANS: At any given time, 20% of the people in the US are on the Atkins or South Beach Diet. It seems strange that although this is a relatively recent social phenomenon, the hot dog – bun paradox has existed for over forty years. Yeah, well, how do explain all that oil under ground when the internal combustion engine has been used for barely more than a hundred years? Huh? What about that?

THAT’S IT FOR TODAY, KIDS. MORE ANSWERS TOMORROW

Okay, kids, here’s your chance to find out all the mysteries of live. In the Blog comments, post any question you have and the Author Guy will answer them in the next blog. Whether it’s quantum physics or stain removal, I am your full service Author Guy and will provide you with answers you can take to the bank.

Richard Brautigan, Douglas Adams, and now Hunter Thompson. My heroes have always been writers. And even though I never met these guys, never shared a meal, never wrote a letter to them, when they pass, it rattles my soul.

As a writer, you’re always looking for a map, some sort of guide to tell you that you’re on the right track. There’s no one to ask, so you pick up a novel and you read the miniscule bio on the dust jacket and you try to see if maybe there’s something there that resonates with you’re own experience. (For years it was looking for how old the author was when he published his first book.)

I remember reading Brautigan in high school, Trout Fishing in America. I read it in one night, and the next morning I ran into the home room of my favorite English teacher waving the book basically screaming, “What the fuck is this? Can you do this?”

“It’s social satire,” said a patient Mr. Hatfield. He smiled then, didn’t say anything — after all, he was the guy who busted me for reading The Man With the Golden Gun behind the cover of The Sun Also Rises and gave the same smile.

A couple of years later, I loaned a big book of bizarre paintings to a guy named Rusty who I worked with at the grocery store. Hieronymous Bosch, Peter Bruegal, Dali, Magritte,Goya: guys like that. Rusty gave me a little book called Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Who knew how appropriate a trade:Hieronymous Bosch for Hunter S. Thompson?

“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.”

And so it began. Grown-ups not only behaved this way, but they could write about it in really, really funny ways. A door opened for me.

I’d cut my teeth on Mad Magazine and The Catcher in the Rye. My first album wasn’t The Beatles, or The Stones, or the Jackson Five, like most of my friends, it was Class Clown by George Carlin. At age twelve or so I started tumbling down a staircase of comic virtuosity, hitting every step on the way down. Cheech and Chong, National Lampoon, Richard Pryor, Saturday Night Live – I wish I could say that all of my influences were writers, but in fact, they were just the people who made me laugh, and up to that point, I had never laughed like I did at Hunter S. Thompson’s book.

Later I would go back to Brautigan, find a Connecticut General from Big Sur, and the amazing, bizarre, hilarious plague of frogs, and find the true humor in that psychopath’s voice. Then I’d stumble across a strange book by a Baroque Brit called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (which I picked up based on title alone, and which influenced me later to title my own first book as a pseudo how-to), but it was Thompson’s Fear and Loathing that first gave me permission, if you will, to be a nut-case on the page.

Did you know that Thompson and Brautigan were contemporaries in Big Sur in the early sixties? Thompson the caretaker of what eventually would become The Esalen Institute, Brautigan a indigent hippie picking up cigarette butts on Highway One to make roll-your owns and living in a rattle-trap cabin up in the woods. I don’t know if they knew each other, but they were, in many ways, on parallel paths. They both had affinities for alcohol, tobacco and firearms, (I like to think that somewhere, in an especially ironic circle of Hell, Brautigan and Thompson run the entire bureau of alcohol, tobacco, and firearms). They were both on the edge and at the top of their fields, at a given time. Brautigan in poetry, Thompson in journalism. And they both blew their brains out in their remote homes.

I’m sure that it wouldn’t have made any difference to either of them that they inspired and enabled a mid-list comic novelist, and Brautigan sprayed his cerebral Rustoleum all over the walls long before I published my first book, but somehow I feel like they should have known. Like I should have sent a thank-you note. There’s a profound and palpable sense of loss.

I once asked Tim Cahill, who in 1974 went to Washington with Hunter Thompson to interview Howard Baker for Rolling Stone, what it was like to hang out with Thompson. He answered:

“Well, the first four hours of absolute craziness is a lot of fun. Then the second four hours of absolute craziness begins to get tiring. Then, by the third four hours of absolute craziness, you never want to see him again as long as you live.”

Imagine sixty-seven years of it…

Maybe it even got to be too much for Hunter.

So I watched Alien vs. Predator last night, and I give it four big claws up. As with the last movie from video game I watched, Resident Evil Apocalypse, it totally rocked. Massive violence, cool alien stuff, cool Predator gadgets, plucky and resourceful girl hero. And as Joe Bob used to say, “No plot to get in the way of the story.”

But there’s got to be a political metaphor there somewhere. Are the aliens the Democrats, the Predators the Republicans, and the humans the hapless voters? Hmmm.

(Spoilers abound below.)

After all, I think the Aliens just want to kill people to eat them and use them for incubators for their young. They will kill and eat and cocoon anyone. Everyone is equal. They will slime you and punch a hole in your scull with that little mini-mouth, but presumably they will come back and eat you later, so you’re not wasted. I can’t remember if they ever say in any of the movies that they eat us, but I believe that at some point in one of the movies Sigourney says, “They’re coming where the meat is,” so I’m assuming. So basically, they are just about taking care of their people.

(I’m really surprised, however, that someone hasn’t tried to use an antihistimine on them. I mean, there is snot dripping off those guys twenty-four seven. You’d have to eat like a kid and half a day just to keep up your mucus production. I’m just saying, next time a mad doctor or secret android guy captures one of the aliens, they should slip him a Benedryl and see if he just dries up. Or, who knows, cheers up.)

So, you have the aliens who are not concerned in the least with the cost of things, they are just interested in the well-being of the hive.

Then you have the Predators. To them, you’re really irrelevant unless you’re violent, or appear to be violent, or you can help them out. They might save your spinal cord and your scull for a trophy, but they really don’t care what happens to you as long as they can justify killing you with a cool and expensive gadget. Pretty much the Republican platform, right there.

The Predators are so rich, and so bored, that they exercise dominance over whole populations, just so they can entertain themselves with their favorite sport, which is killing stuff. Now, here the metaphor breaks down a little, because the priorities are switched. Republicans only kill populations so they can participate in their favorite sport, which is making huge amounts of money, so they can buy cool gadgets to kill stuff with. Predators don’t seem to care about money.

So, here’s the really hopeful message of Alien vs. Predator. At some point, the humans have to choose a side, and the way they do this is ….wait for it…. by giving a weapon to the Predator! And who gives it to them, but an African American woman, who then joins ranks with the Predator to battle the evil Alien queen. Oh my god, that’s not mucus the aliens are dripping, that’s irony.

(And here’s the big spoiler, but the real truth to it all…)

After the human chick helps them defeat the aliens, the Predators hand her a spear, get into five — count ’em –five ginormous spaceships, and leave her stranded in the middle of Antartica without a coat.

As they fly off, with a tear in her eye, she says, “But you said you would leave no child behind.”

She didn’t really say that, I’m just fuckin’ with you.

I have to go take a Benedryl. I’m feeling mucussy.

Hug My Face

Author Christopher Moore gets ‘Alien’ for Valentine’s

By David Templeton

Christopher Moore has some very hot plans for Valentine’s Day.

I’ve just contacted the bestselling author to extract his views on what constitutes the perfect movie for a romantic evening. According to Moore–who this year will be marking the 10th consecutive Valentine’s spent with the woman he refers to as his “wifelike girlfriend”–such movies must be chosen very carefully. For example, to celebrate their upcoming 10th anniversary, Moore and his mate plan to watch a double feature of Alien vs. Predator and Resident Evil: Apocalypse.

“We’ll eat Thai green curry, and then I will present her with some tastefully nasty lingerie,” Moore reveals. “She will, in turn, present me with something dark and disgustingly chocolate, with no regard to my zealous, albeit recent, dedication to the South Beach diet. We’ll finish the evening discussing the parallels between the aforementioned films and the Teutonic epics, with an eye toward also including the themes of Beowulf and Oedipus Rex–since both of those seem to reverberate through the Alien series.”

Moore is aware that to some people, his atypical Valentine’s Day plans seem a bit unromantic. Screw ’em. Such people, Moore believes, clearly don’t have access to really good green curry paste and 5.1 surround sound.

“My wifelike girlfriend likes splashy sci-fi horror films, and I love her for that,” he brags. “In our relationship, those kinds of movies were established as a specialty date early on, when we decided to spend our first New Year’s Eve together at home watching Species. It works for us.'”

Moore–who lives on the island of Kauai–has authored a whole slew of atypical novels, beginning with Practical Demonkeeping and including the bestsellers Fluke, The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove, Bloodsucking Fiends (a steamy romance about young vampires), Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal and his most recent, The Stupidest Angel, about an invasion of zombies on Christmas Eve. While no one would accuse Moore of being a writer of romances, it’s true that for all the demons, monsters, yetis, spirits, angels and sea mutants in his stories, his books are frequently quite sexy and remarkably optimistic regarding the transformational power of love. That said, Moore believes that, for the average American male, Valentine’s Day sucks.

“Sure, if a guy is in the courting stage, Valentine’s Day can be a chance to look good for the girl he’s wooing, to show his creativity and perception,” Moore counsels, “but for the guy in the long, committed relationship, Valentine’s Day is simply a pitfall, like anniversaries or other holidays that he’ll get in trouble for if he forgets.”

When compared to women, Moore says, guys rarely grow quarrelsome when their partner forgets to give them goodies on Valentine’s Day, and when it comes to the goodies most guys really want, they are ridiculously easy to please.

“I remember shopping for jewelry for my girlfriend with the help of a woman friend,” he explains. “When I asked her, ‘So what are you going to get Tom for Valentine’s?’ she said, ‘I’m going to take off my top.’

“Ironic, isn’t it,” Moore says, “that women–who love to shop–really never need to.”

But back to the subject of movies. Moore has observed that when a guy is choosing a movie around which to build a romantic evening, the most important thing to remember is this: avoid all movies featuring Angelina Jolie.

“Angelina is especially threatening because she’s actually crazy enough to have hooked up with a homely old guy who is clearly not in her league, and therefore perpetuates ridiculous hope in the minds of men,” he explains. “It’s tough to generalize here, but in my experience, Gwyneth Paltrow, Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman generally get a pass from most women. Those actresses don’t, for some reason, present much of a threat. But for reasons that are almost equally obscure to me, Michelle Pfeiffer, Heather Graham, Carmen Electra and the anti-Christ of female competition, Pamela Anderson, will do nothing but put a woman in a foul mood.”

Are you listening, gentlemen? No Angelina. No Michelle. No Pamela. This is serious.

“I’m convinced,” Moore says, “that Pam Anderson’s breasts are the most ominous and threatening orbs since the wicked witch’s crystal ball. The guy who brings Barb Wire or Scarface home for Valentine’s may as well have mothballs for testicles, because his equipment is officially in storage for the duration.”

A pretty extensive interview with the people at Powell’s. It’s transcribed from an audio interview, so if I seem incoherrent at times, it’s because I am…

http://www.powells.com/authors/moore.html

Just wanted to wish you guys a merry Christmas.

Thanks for getting behind The Stupidest Angel.

Hey kids, I’m going to be on Talk of the Nation on NPR this Thursday. I guess they’ll be asking me about Stupidest Angel. Details for broadcast in your area at www.npr.org They also have a full audio archive, here’s the link:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4242718

I’m thinking that you guys may have better things to do than listen to my dumb ass on the radio two days before Christmas.

You guys, while I’ll be on tour for the next couple of weeks, I’ve left a bunch of the signed bookplates in Hawaii for those of you who don’t live in tour cities, but want to give signed copies for Christmas.

So, as before, just send a self-addressed, stamped envelope and a brief note saying how many you need to:

Christopher Moore P.O. Box 111 Kilauea, HI 96754

Joe Kurmaski (The Metal Cowboy, fun bicycle touring books, like Charles Kuralt on a bike) will be putting these questions in the Oregonian in a very different form some time next week, but in the mean time, thought I’d share them with you guys.

1. Q: Do you always start with an idea for a story or do you work the story line out of a specific character? How did it work this time – with Stupidest Angel?

I usually start with a concept, something like: “What would happen if an angel came to earth to grant a Christmas wish, but really screwed it up?” Then I fill in with characters, creating each one so that I have someone to carry the story. Often I’ll create characters who have specific problems to overcome, because generally I think that we all do and readers relate to people who aren’t perfect. With this book, I’d already created the characters for other books, so I just sort of put them in a new play in the same setting I’d used in two of my previous books, Pine Cove, California.

2. Why a Christmas theme? beyond your agent suggesting it.

Actually it was suggested by a sales rep from my publisher, but when I started thinking about it, I thought it would be a lot of fun, and if I used a familiar setting that didn’t require research, it would be something that I could write pretty quickly and so get a new book into the hands of my readers who are always dogging me to write faster.

How’d you decide what part of the Christmas story to take on – the miracle angle works, did you start with it or get inspired along the way?

I started with the miracle and the angel, but along the way I wanted to brush with other classic Christmas themes: wish fulfillment, the coming together of a small town, the Gift of the Magi, the misunderstood Scrooge — basically I had everything but a freezing little match girl, and I would have done that if I’d remembered it. Then, once I had all the themes, I decided to twist them in a funny way.

3. How did you decide which characters to encore from previous books?

The angel from Lamb was in immediately because he gave me the whole “It’s a Wonderful Life” aspect, and most of the other characters were from my other Pine Cove books and had their own built-in idiosyncrasies, but the decision to include the pilot Tucker Case and his pet fruit bat Roberto came exclusively from readers, who continually asked me to bring Roberto back in another book. Over all, though, I wanted the book to work for you if you’d never read anything else I’d ever written, and from what people tell me, it does. It’s sort of a Whitman sampler of what I do.

4. Is there a warrior babe of the outland outside of your imagination?

Actually, The Warrior Babe is based on the notion of what happens to a cult-B-movie babe when her career is over. I met a couple of actresses who were selling autographed photographs at a science fiction convention a few years ago, and I thought exploring someone who played such an assertive character, but whose career ended right about the time that most personality disorders start to manifest themselves (late twenties, early thirties) would be interesting and possibly very funny. It was sort of my way of exploring the “Where are they Now” of the low budget scream queen. I actually like the idea of a world with warrior babes running around in it.

5. What’s next?

Death. I’m writing a book about death. You know, a comedy. Over the last few years I’ve cared for a couple of dying people and I think I have some stuff to say about it.

6. The pacing in The Stupidest Angel really gives the comedy even more punch and bite than the usually laugh out loud quality of your work – less is moore? Did you take a page out of elmore l’s brevity play book for this project?

I knew from the concept of the project that it would have to be short, and it actually was about fifty pages longer than I would have liked. Strangely enough, one of the reasons was that I wanted it to be affordable for people to give as a gift, and so it was going to be in small format to keep the price down. I don’t think this hurt the story, and I didn’t feel constrained at all, because I knew as I planned the book that it was going to be short — more like a three-act play than a five-act play. It’s actually about the same length as my first book, Practical Demonkeeping, which was also set in Pine Cove.

7. What’s the true meaning of Christmas?

Well, having done a whole bunch of research for a Jesus book that I wrote a few years ago, and therefore knowing that Christmas has nothing whatever to do with the historical birth of Christ, I’d have to say that the best way to honor the “meaning” of Christmas is with a spirit of peace, generosity, and forgiveness, because these are things the man for whom the holiday is named stood for. Of course that was before he became a Republican. Evidently now he just wants to bomb the bejeezus out of Iraq and keep Gay people from getting married.

8. After readers have purchased all of your previous books for the holidays, what other authors would you suggest under the tree?

I think you’re always safe with a book by David Sedaris, Carl Hiaasen, or Dave Barry. No one is going to be unhappy with a book that makes them laugh. If they haven’t read Douglas Adams, Kurt Vonnegutt, or the comic work of John Steinbeck, then what a fantastic gift you can give them. I envy a person who has never read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe, or Breakfast of Champions, or Cannery Row, who gets to discover how much fun a book can be over Christmas break. You turn someone on to those books and they’ll never forget you.

9. Are there any smart angels or worldly cherubs roaming around out there – or do they all see us and the world we’ve created in very literal terms?

I just don’t know. Above all, I write stuff that I hope is funny, and a stupid creature who is powerful, beautiful, and divine is just funnier to me than a smart one. I like the angels in Gregory Widen’s Prophecy movies a lot too, and they are far smarter and scarier than any angel I’ve every written about.