I wanted to start a new feature here. So I came up with the AHA MOMENT. In which I invite an author to write about writing. It can be anything, really. Just writers writing about writing. Not writing advice or anything cliched like that. I just want to know what other writers think about when they are writing. I want to know what makes them tick. I want to see inside their beautiful fucking heads.

(Also: I totally stole the idea from John Scalzi’s THE BIG IDEA feature he runs on his site).

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First up, we have the author of the totally badass THE MONDO VIXEN MASSACRE, Jamie Grefe with his AHA MOMENT:

It’s not the violence of the act that matters to me. I’m terrified of violence like when those two high school girls fought fingernails and torn hair in the hallway. Heads rammed into concrete. We watched. There was blood streaked down their tops, hasn’t washed off. But it doesn’t have to be blood. It could be frenzy, excess, or the execution of extremity. It’s seeing The Incapacitants perform in Koenji, eyeballing a crazy Canadian noisehead thrash his body through the crowd like a windmill shark. He wouldn’t stop screaming, lit the place up and it was beautiful. Once, I had a show in Nishi-Ogikubo and felt guttural. I kept watching my girlfriend nod off. It made me angry, made me want to perform harder until the bar was a sheet of deep screeches, distortions, and mutilated vocalizations. Make complacency disappear. If your audience is asleep, wake them. Find a way to slip into their night-dreams, so you never leave. Or disappear. Too often I read books with the author’s physicality in my mind, an imagination of their face or the false memory of them writing the sentence I’m reading. I can’t help think what they might have had for lunch when they wrote that Epilogue. What they were wearing. Only certain great books wrap papery legs around my face so hard I lose myself for awhile. I still don’t know why. I can’t control it. A few months after that gig in Nishi-Ogikubo, I played at Milk in Ebisu. The place smelled like Red Bull, sweat, and cigarette smoke. I glitched country loops with chunky synth and sine wave explorations for an hour. I was self-conscious, shouldn’t have worn a Hawaiian shirt. I was horrible, more anti-comedy than noise. During Magical Power Mako some goon lit flyers on fire and threw those flyers at people in the crowd. He tipped over a projector and nobody stopped those little flames. He wanted to burn the place down, smell skin turn crispy. People scattered. Maybe he wanted to feel something real. I think he was wrong. I want to feel creation pray itself across the page like mass, feel the communal bloom on purpose. I used to tweak audio pieces for practice. Like noise manipulation, there’s a joy in revising a piece to blessed reanimation. Sometimes our messy Nothings mold into the journey of being Other. I’ve always been drawn to volume, to wet meat, to weight, to the suffocating depths of joy. I saw the Osaka doom band Corrupted perform in Shinjuku and my intestines were quivering for years. Still are. Could be this coffee. I want to create resonance in my fiction. I want to linger in the psycho-acoustics of a piece, but also create an entrance for meaning-making to happen in the mind of the reader. I believe in the quivering of guts, in the act of living breathlessly. Let’s work toward an “eventing” of the reading experience, of the voluminous expansion of story and the disappearance of the author’s face. I want to be faceless, not streaking down concrete walls or burnt alive in Tokyo. Let’s get lost in the Fall. I want you to be my face, dear.

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Jamie’s book is part of this year’s Eraserhead Press New Bizarro Author Series. It’s a fantastic, violent, beautiful little book that reads like a thousand tiny knives stabbing you in the gut over and over and over again.

Check it out. Support Jamie by purchasing the kindle or paperback version of THE MONDO VIXEN MASSACRE.

You can also check him out over at his website: jamiegrefe.com 

And on twitter – @ShreddedMaps.