Author Mark Miller visits The Storytelling Blog today. Mark published his absurdist comedy adventure, The Librarian at the End of the World, in 2019. You can read more about the book at his website, here, as well as get the scoop on his upcoming novel, The Two-Headed Lady at the End of the World.

Mark shared a few thoughts via email on what inspires his fiction as well as his own writing process. The Librarian at the End of the World is available on Amazon.com. Follow Mark on social media: Twitter, here, and Facebook, here.

Disclosure: I have a business relationship with Mark Miller’s publisher, Montag Press, which will publish my Sean Joye Investigations novel, The Big Cinch, in December.

Kathy: What attracted you to writing fiction? What are the challenges and rewards?

Mark: I wouldn’t say I am attracted to writing fiction; I would say it is attracted to me. Like most beautiful people, I wake after only three hours of sleep, fully regenerated by the force of my own inertia. I am, as usual, already glistening with the sheen of pheromones and musk my body naturally secretes. I would say that I write as a means of making myself more appealing to the opposite sex, thus luring mates and projecting my genetic makeup toward the future, where who knows what my offspring will become, being both blessed with my own natural advantages and hopefully living in a time when cybernetic enhancements will make them even more powerful, even more beautiful, if you could even dare imagine such a thing.

But it would be untrue.  I do not write because it makes me more attractive to women; I date women because they make me more attractive to writing.  Imagine being a blank page staring back at a pasty, balding, corpulent, sweating lump of a man trying to hammer out a realistic sex scene based only on his lonely, fevered imaginings. This is the experience of so many women, and I refuse to do that to a blank page. It just seems wrong.

Kathy: Your books’ genre seems fluid—reviews have used the terms “bizarro” and “absurdist comedy.” If I were to shelve your books in a shop, where would you like to see them? 

Mark: On the back of the breakroom toilet because that would mean people were reading them. Reviews of my first book were flattering and, frankly, overwhelming. I got compared to most of the writers who’ve really influenced me. Which I guess means either that I’m a hack or I’m doing something right. I think I just want Mark Leyner to follow me on Twitter. I’m not bizarro, but I would probably be a good jumping off place. 

I like to think of myself as a bridge between a sleepy suburban neighborhood and some sort of dystopian wonderland where ad execs churn out slogans like, “You certainly won’t regret going to Walgreens,” or “Eat beef, it is actual food.” I think everything I write is plausible. Like, there really is cheese made from celebrity bacteria. You can eat it, if the price is right. One day we will have a President named Captain Pepperoni. Law of averages. Or eight billion monkeys with laptops.  It’ll happen. Trust the plan.

Kathy: Tell us about your new book, The Two-Headed Lady at The End of The World—Is it a sequel to The Librarian at The End of The World? What inspired this story? How long have you been working on it?

Mark: The Two Headed Lady at the End of the World is an epic love story between conjoined twins and the men who love them, two soldiers stranded in a long-forgotten underground bunker, and the sentient CPU of a missile defense system that falls for a Pentagon fax machine. It is not a sequel, but it exists in the same universe as Librarian, and some characters overlap. I wrote the first draft of Lady many years ago as a straight-up romance novel about the twins Amanda and Miranda Morgan, but then I realized that it would be better, for obvious reasons, if they were conjoined.  Everything fell into place after that.

Kathy: Was writing a second novel easier or more difficult than the first? In what ways?

Mark: If you’ve ever watched Animal Planet, you probably saw the now infamous episode where they faced budget cuts and had to train a walrus to answer phones, send faxes, and file documents. Obviously, the walrus was better at some tasks than others. Writing the second novel was a lot like that. As a side note, did you ever read the comic Yummy Fur back in 1986? (ED NOTE: I did not. Sounds frightening.) I am haunted by walruses*.

Kathy: What is your writing process?

Mark: I think about real life until I vomit a make-believe carnival.

Kathy: What does storytelling mean to you?

Mark: By way of illustration, I’ll expound on hallucinogenic toads and nostalgia here:

The problem with frogs is that sometimes they are covered in chocolate and sold as premium confections and other times they are simply bad, bad news. This was the truth as revealed to me by Wuckfit Juberock, who, in another time, was a good friend, his redneck tendencies notwithstanding. Of course, his memory becomes less and more with every year. We’ll have to see what he has left.

Sometimes we start anew, which is depressing, and sometimes we pick up where we left off, which is depressing. The point is it’s depressing.

The frog

Yeah, so. It was either Steve Ham or Zero who recommended that we eat the frog. They were always both so strange, and so we agreed because, if nothing else, they seemed to have the second-best lock on primo psychedelics (after Pete Paisley, of course). We no longer speak, and when we did it was never the same–Zero and Ham, that is. Paisley and I talk, but only about how much we hate our jobs. Back then I think we were all afraid of time. Which is like death but slower. Now I think we yearn for the inexorable march toward the void.

Don’t worry. There is nothing in death that can hurt you. I’ve done it before.

But the frog.

It was cursed, or so pronounced Surf Nazi, who was always kind of our leader. We thought it would be funny if we could find two more of him and have a trilogy. I understand that there will never be another friend who dons the nickname Nazi, even in jest, because we have learned that history repeats, and people are usually combinations of ignorant and evil. Or at least lazy and preoccupied. He just thought it was a funny movie, and we just thought the real horrible stuff of the world was consigned to history. If you don’t believe me, you will have to keep waiting and see for yourself. You wonder what atrocities were like? Don’t worry you’ll find out.

But Surf Nazi suggested we eat the frog. Somebody suggested it. I am so damn senile I can’t keep everything separate anymore. Someone suggested we eat the frog, and someone suggested afterward that it was a bad idea, and someone further proclaimed that it was likely a curse. I remember Tony Square just sort of gulped his portion down, shrugged, and said, “So it goes.” He was brave. Is brave. It is confusing. I am told he is a grandfather now. You can find them still in east Texas, three generations of screwups in one Ford truck.

The Princess

I am getting ahead of myself, which is easy to do. It was only after we had divvied it up–the frog–and eaten it that we noticed what had always been evident: Princess Bethany had been lurking around as usual, stroking her pet gerbil, as usual. It was Thursday night again and the whole crap carnival was drunk. It was getting out of hand again, it was making too much noise again, it was revealing too much about all of us (and our guests!). Again. I suppose it was fun, but that kind of thing that has a shelf life, you know?

And then the frog.

We ate the frog. Princess Bethany laughed and laughed. She said, “Welcome to an eternity of here, now, this!” We will always be friends. We will never leave; we will be in this moment forever. Our dreams will never be compromised.

Ha. I for one will never get to open a very clever coffee house with shelves of poetry and philosophy and reasonably priced espresso beverages such as “The Nutless Wonder,” “The Chocolate Bastard,” or “The Crunchy Frog Supreme.”

We are all kind of soured on frogs, thanks.

To Eat a Frog

If you ever wondered if you could go back, rest assured that you can. Would you do anything differently? Doubtful. You would still suck. Forever and ever.

Amen.

Your friends are trapped on the same earth you are, that’s all. This party doesn’t have to stop. It just isn’t a very good party. It’s so…. loud and bright and sickly. And no one you want to know is there.

And then, in her hand?

The frog.

Of course.

The frog was never a frog, or the frog was always a frog. This far removed, I can’t even tell what was symbol and what was literal. Either way I’m stuck with it, bound in the narrative of the life I try to tell. We all try to convince ourselves that it was real and held intrinsic meaning.

Or was at least interesting.

Then we die, find religion, get jobs we hate, marry someone who sucks the soul right out of us, and what is left is pretty close to nothing.

You can’t salvage it, can you? Not entirely. You look at yourself through different lenses at different times. But there you are, always the same, always alive, always dying. You tell yourself, “No, don’t do that! Don’t say that! Don’t feel that thing you felt or don’t stop feeling it. Hold on or let go.”

You’re always the wrong time embodied in the wrong person, and someone you didn’t know just dropped you off on the corner and said, “Do the best you can.” But you can’t change any of it from there or from here.

So go ahead and look back but know this going in: Memory is just another devil to sell your soul to. All this flash and noise? Get used to it. You’ll be back, but it will never be the same.

Frogs and Stories

Mark: That, to me, is the aim of all stories. Someone has to figure out what the frog is and what we are going to do about the future pressing down on us and ushering us toward the exit, because the movie is over, the credits are rolling, and we should all get in our cars and go home, except the parking lot is made out of lava and all you have is a speedo and a unicorn floatie.

Be sure to follow Mark’s website and social media: Twitter, here, and Facebook, here for the latest news on his upcoming book and activities.  If you enjoyed meeting him in this interview, you might enjoy meeting author Paul d. Miller. (No relation that I know of.) You can purchase The Librarian at the End of the World at Amazon.com  and Amazon.uk.

*My overediting corrected, 10/21/2021. “Walruses haunt me,” changed back to author’s original text, “I am haunted by walruses.”

And Now a Word from Our Sponsor

Like the blog? Subscribe (form at the bottom of my website) to never miss an issue. Want more? Subscribe to the occasional newsletter for exclusive content. And, of course, I’m selling books. St. Louis Writers Guild recently published Love Letters to St. Louis. This adorable letter-shaped volume of short stories, poems, essays, and illustrations includes my first science fiction story, “Welcome to Earthport Prime: A Self-Guided Tour.” Profits benefit the guild’s young writers’ program. 

Check out all my stories at Amazon.com. Order my new novella, Wolfhearted, or from Barnes and Noble if you prefer, here. It is also available as an audiobook, here. If you’ve enjoyed one of my books, tell the world! Consider leaving a short review at Audible, Amazon, or Goodreads. The direct link to review Wolfhearted on Amazon is here, The Resurrectionist, here , and Water of Life, here, or visit my Shop off the landing page menu to review at Barnes and Noble. Thanks in advance. Even five reviews will put the book in a more prominent position on Amazon.