To read part 1, click here. To read part 2, click here.
Cendrine Marrouat: How has your book been received so far?
Ryan Frawley: Better than I expected; some people have been very kind. I knew as I wrote "Scar" that it was going to be divisive. A lot of people are turned off by some of the formatting tricks I used – palimpsests, blacked-out pages, cryptograms, things like that. It’s not for everyone. But those who get it, really get it, and they’ve been very supportive.
CM: What is your daily routine?
RF: I wish I knew! Publicising "Scar" has been an entirely new experience for me; my background is in manual labour jobs, and you don’t typically learn a lot of PR skills slinging pallets around a warehouse.
The learning curve has been more like a wall, but I’ve come a long way. Something new seems to pop up every day. I’m enjoying the challenge, but I’m looking forward to getting back to my writing routine. I have a room in my apartment, a closet really, about 5 feet by 4. Just room enough for an IKEA desk and a chair I found in the parking lot of Home Depot. The walls are covered in pictures, pages torn from books, concert tickets, artefacts of my mythologised past. I sit there at night and I play my music loud and I drink whiskey and I write. Those are the most precious moments I know, hunched over the keyboard in that tiny space. I’m looking forward to getting back to that.
CM: Why did you choose the self-publishing path? Any advice for writers who want to follow in your footsteps?
RF: Lots, but if I had to distil it, I would say this: Be absolutely sure that this is what you want. Doing everything yourself will be so taxing, so emotionally draining, so time consuming that if you don’t truly love what you’ve produced, you won’t have the will to see it through.
I went the traditional route for a while, querying agents. A few expressed interest; some read the book and really liked it, but they couldn’t see it selling well. Too experimental, too difficult. If I was a well-known writer with an established fan base, it would be ok, but breaking a new writer with an experimental novel is a scary proposition for an agent. Plus, they wanted to make changes. Some wanted to take everything that made "Scar" unique, everything that made me write the book in the first place, and get rid of it. They wanted it to be more like everything else, as though the feeble-minded public would run screaming from anything with a hint of originality about it. I’d rather not publish at all than put out something I’m not proud of.
Meanwhile, I was looking at some of the musicians I admire. Radiohead released an album online, letting fans pay what they liked for it. Einsturzende Neubauten do without a record label, collecting subscriptions from fans to finance their albums. I truly believe it’s a golden age for music; the great democratisation the internet brought has enabled me to discover artists I love who I would never have heard on the radio or read about in a music magazine. The old gatekeepers of culture are dying on their feet. HMV is closing its flagship store in downtown Vancouver; it’s just not a business model that works anymore. I don’t go to the record store to see what’s new in music, I go online. And there I find people with real passion, for whom making music is a true labour of love, not a commercial enterprise.
Publishing’s going the same way; it just might take a little longer because the book-buying public is a bit older than the music-buying one. But it’s coming. For all the difficulty and hassle, I would recommend self-publishing to anyone. If you can’t join 'em, beat 'em.
CM: What is next for you?
RF: Some sleep would be nice. After that, after the work on promoting "Scar" is done – though in reality, it’s never really done, is it? – I’ll get back to my desk, in my tiny little room, and I’ll start writing something new. I have a few ideas of what it might look like, but novels have a higher infant mortality rate than sea turtles, so for now, it’s just a few ideas and a couple of scraps of paper covered in handwriting.
CM: Where can people find more information on you and your book?
RF: www.ryanfrawley.com is the central hub for all things Scar-related. I’m on Facebook as well.
CM: Any last words?
RF: I had a job for a while, years ago, delivering appliances. Sometimes we’d have to take a stainless steel fridge up a flight of stairs. I’m talking about real double-door monsters here, 3 or 4 or 5 hundred pound beasts. And there was just two of us, with no special equipment.
Lifting that kind of weight, especially for a guy like me who’s not particularly big, is physically painful. You can feel your muscles tearing as you do it, your joints screaming, your legs shaking with the strain. Sometimes you get dizzy from the sheer physical exertion, and halfway through lifting it, the only thing in your mind is the urge to drop it and walk away.
But you know that if you let go, if you stop lifting it, it’s gonna fall back onto you, and then the pain will be far worse. All you can do is keep going.
End of the interview.
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Cendrine Marrouat may be contacted for potential interviews, reviews and general enquiries at info@cendrinemarrouat.com. Website: www.cendrinemarrouat.com.
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