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By now you are surely following the Fifth Annual Tournament of Books. Let’s look at this week’s action: Finishing up the first round, The Lazarus Project trounced The Northern Clemency; A Mercy stuck one in The Dart League King; and My Revolution defeated Home. Kicking off the second round of judgments, 2666 swept past A Partisan’s Daughter; and City of Refuge redacted Harry, Revised.

Is our ToB not enough? Do you demand more content? Heeding your call is our own Nozlee Samazadeh, who this week interviews our own Kevin Fanning. Read on…

Nozlee Samadzadeh: HELLO MR. KEVIN FANNING.

Kevin Fanning: Oh hello.

NS: Ah, there you are, caps lock.

KF: Except I’m chatting to other poeple as well. Is that OK? Or do you need undivided attention?

NS: Absolutely. I require only fractional attention.

KF: Ok she’s off to get lunch anyways. PLUS we were talking about the Tournament of Books.

NS: Ooh!

KF: I’m so excited about all the drama in the YA community since Frankie Landau got wrongly ousted.

NS: Have you read many of the books?

KF: I’ve only read Frankie (I told Crans to put it in the Tournament) and I’m so glad it’s in there.

NS: There’s always the Zombie round, right?

KF: There freaking better be.

NS: Have you put money on any of the books?

KF: No. Times are tight. Plus I think the whole thing is bullshit.

NS: Gambling? ToB? Giving to charity?

KF: The ToB is bullshit. They pick boring safe things every year. Everyone knows this. But it’s still fun to read along.

NS: Interesting! I embarrassingly don’t know enough about modern fiction to be able to tell. Do you think it’s safe enough that, like, 2666 is just going to win?

KF: Uh…looking at my brackets…yeah, probably. Anyways it’s never what I THINK SHOULD WIN.

NS: THEREFORE NOT FAIR.

KF: Amen.

NS: Ha. Okay, interview-y question: what do you do, and what’s your TMN genesis story?

KF: I’m a recruiter in the video games industry. My genesis story was that way back in the original relaunch of the site? I forget how long ago it was.

NS: 2002 B.C.?

KF: Crans and Andrew emailed friends of mine like Josh Allen and Michael Oblivio and Dennis Mahoney and invited them to be part of the site. So I was like, uh, if they’re asking those guys, I should probably be involved. So I emailed them and was like “Hey I can help out.”

NS: Did you know Crans and Andrew at the time?

KF: Back then there was like a contract, and you had to agree to do x posts per week. And I decided I didn’t want to do that, but they let me chip in from time to time anyway.

NS: Oh wow, didn’t know that.

KF: YES you are getting the real history, friend. I didn’t know Crans and Andrew though, really.

NS: They were just these crazy dudes demanding precisely timed content from you.

KF: They’ve always had a very high opinion of themselves.

NS: Haha. Perhaps a necessary trait in starting a website? Belief that it should exist?

KF: Definitely. To their credit. You have to have a certain stubborness to get this site out the door every day for however many days like they’ve done.

NS: What websites do you have? There are at least a couple, yes?

KF: Yes: kevinfanning.com, whygodwhy.com, kfan.tumblr.com. Delicious, Flickr, Facebook, Goodreads. LiveJournal. I have one or two sites where I write under a different name.

NS: LiveJournal!

KF: Yes! LiveJournal is where you go to have a cigarette out behind the rest of the internet.

NS: Make out behind the bleachers, skip a class or two.

KF: Ah, you have one, I see.

NS: I only use it to read my friends’ posts, I swear!

KF: That’s what we all say.

NS: I don’t consider myself above occasionally posting my favorite song lyrics in all lowercase along with self-taken faceshots. Maybe not. So! The Location Scout!

KF: Yes.

NS: You wrote this book and self-published it. Why? Have you done this before? (Self-publishing.)

KF: Yes. This is the (hold on, need to check) fourth book I’ve put out myself. As far as why I did it, why I published it myself… I didn’t see any reason not to, I guess? I’m not a huge fan of the barricades put up by the publishing industry, even with small presses. Having to submit, get judged, wait around, maybe hear back, etc. I like the story, I want people to read it, why not just do it myself?

NS: I guess specifically, why not just publish on the internet? The book is almost like a longer blog post, but its physical presentation—type setting, paper, size—makes it what it is. When do you decide which goes in print and which doesn’t?

KF: Couple of reasons. I’ve been giving stories away on the internet for a long time. Part of it is that I don’t like how creativity is valued (or not valued) on the internet. There’s no longevity. People buzz by and enjoy or leave nasty comments, and then they’re off to something else. The idea of producing something that you hold on to and keep around, even if it’s just on a shelf, is appealing. Also, the story is 3,000 words, and no one reads a 3K-word story on the internet. Which is interesting given the feedback I’ve been getting from the story. People seem to really like it, but wish it was longer!

NS: Yes! I wanted to read more. Why did you choose to use the second person in the book? It was at times disconcerting, and at times added to the choose-your-own-adventure feel of the story.

KF: Second person is my default, I use it for most things I do. I do it because really, what I’m talking about when I say “You” is “Me.” But I don’t enjoy writing in the first person. It feels too diary-ish. First person works best when you’re trying to capture a very specific kind of voice. When voice isn’t as important, I like second person. At the end of the day, my writing is a pep talk for myself. I get better results from my pep talks if they’re in the second person.

NS: Ha. It still feels almost alienating even as it’s comforting/pep talk-ish, though, but maybe that’s just because no one is talking TO us from the internet (or any piece of writing) anymore.

KF: Right. Well, there is something about the second person that keeps the reader at a distance. I’m sure there are wonderful psychological reasons having to do with the internet and my self-image that explain why it’s my favorite voice.

NS: “And how do you FEEL about that?” This relates, though, to how so many people in your stories are lost, or at a distance to what they want/where they want to be. Are we lost because of the internet? What are we looking for? When did we get lost? Did people always get lost like this? (That’s a lot of questions; pick and choose)

KF: I’m not sure how it relates to the internet, although it’s interesting that you say that. The original idea for the story came to me last August, when I was on vacation at the beach, a solid week away from the internet. Being away from the internet is a great way to come up with story ideas.

NS: It’s true—so many ideas wasted on Twitter messages could have been much larger things instead.

KF: Absolutely. There’s been some neat things happening on Twitter, but the majority of it either needs more unpacking, or more ignoring.

NS: Reminds me of this that I saw today (the text is better than the image).

KF: Yes. Which, hello, “Baby’s First Internet.“

NS: Forgot about that!

KF: And look how we can speak in links instead of words!

NS: Ha, I ruined it (FAIL), should have responded with a link. Where’d that idea come from? Were you feeling particularly vitriolic about some forum flame thread you’d just read?

KF: It wasn’t any one thing. It just came out of my being frustrated about how the internet works, what it values. I just opened up tumblr one morning and typed “do not think to stop or edit, you must be the first who said.” Without even thinking about it. And a bunch of people liked it, and I thought “HEY LET’S EXPAND ON THIS.”

NS: The internet as a community! Which leads to a question, actually: do you like this community better (the same one that brought you to TMN, that helped you produce “Baby’s First Internet”, that led to you, like, producing lists of what people should read from Fireland’s blog) or the world of away-from-the-Internet publsihing and distribution? Do you think it’s possible not to be part of this bigger thing? To internet alone?

KF: Are you asking if I prefer the internet or the real world? I would hate to have to choose.

NS: Some days I would choose the internet, I think.

KF: I like that people’s moms are on the internet now. The worlds are merging. This make it much easier to explain certain jokes.

NS: Despite people’s moms sending us all emails about ankle-slashers hiding under our cars at gas stations?

KF: When our moms first got email, we had to delete a constant stream of email forwards. Now that they’re on Facebook, we have to scroll past their results on the “What kind of pizza are you?” quiz. But it’s just a stage, a way of getting one’s feet wet on the internet. It won’t always be that bad.

NS: Maybe you can repackage “Baby’s First Internet” for women of a certain age. Get it on Oprah?

KF: I would welcome the opportunity.

NS: Another Location Scout question, just because I was curious: why did you choose to credit borrowing phrases from your former blog posts and one of Joshua Allen’s?

KF: It’s a kind of map, really. Pointing the direction to other places that unpack some of the ideas and scenes happening in the story. These are things that influenced me in the writing. I just wanted to asterisk them out in case other people would be interested. I try to include endnotes like that in every book I put out. There’s other stuff to chew over once the story is done.

NS: Cool. My last question: what are you working on next? Wait, is that in the 2nd person?

KF: Oh goodness now I’m confused. But yes. Next I’m working on more print stuff. Plans change, but the plan is for the next thing to be about celebrities. I have a whole schedule this year, a different print thing every three months. We’ll see what happens.

NS: Oh awesome! Will they be seasonal at all, or just come what may?

KF: No, that’s just a reasonable time frame for me to balance Life Stuff with Writing Stuff.

NS: Fair enough. it’s the Iranian New Year so I have to go roll grape leaves and make baklava, but Andrew will edit this and it’ll be in this week or next week’s Friday Newsletter!

KF: Ooo yummy. Thanks! And let me know if you need my recipe for vegetarian dolmes.

NS: Although I’d still like to hear you talk more about why your characters are always lost (12x lost, “night-blooming” from TMN, the location scout, etc)

KF: Yeah it’s like my thing.

NS: My sister’s a vegetarian, we usually just take out the meat and balance it out with more rice/green things/barberries.

KF: OK, that’ll work.

NS: Just out of curiosity, what’s the longest thing you’ve ever published? That’s not phrased very well, I fear.

KF: The longest thing ever, I’m not sure. Maybe the redwoods story that TMN published in three parts, and which I cannot look on now without cringing. It’s awful. I wish they’d never published it.

NS: Really? I like it!

KF: I haaaaate it.

NS: I remember reading it originally and not being sure how the author had felt when he’d written it.

KF: Maybe because it’s not about being lost.

NS: It’s aged well in the last three years, at least—it’s pretty technology-heavy but didn’t feel outdated when I re-read it.

KF: It feels like it will be outdated soon, if it’s not already.

Last Week’s TMN Map Quiz Answer

What does this map represent? William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County.

This Month on TMN

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