CR20

For a long time, I only posted reviews on Civilian Reader. For some reason, I resisted branching out into other types of content. Partly, it was an issue of how much time I had (postgraduate degrees take up a lot of time), and how much I wanted to commit to the website. As I started to become more interesting in publishing and writing in general, though, the website took up more of my attention and energy, and I started to think about other types of content I could publish.

In December 2010, while taking a train back to university in the UK, my partner convinced me to try some interviews. I’ve always loved the long, feature-length interviews in magazines like Rolling Stone, but I didn’t feel like I had the journalistic chops to pull off anything remotely as in-depth or interesting. (I’m also not entirely sure that there are many authors who offer the chance for this type of interview; rock and movie stars just live the kind of lives that do.)

I’d just read, and very much enjoyed, Ari Marmell’s The Conqueror’s Shadow, so decided to reach out to him, and he agreed to answer some questions. I published that Q&A on December 31st, and it began a long run of interviews on CR — at the time of writing, there are 390 published interviews on the site. (I only did the math today.) The interview is recreated, below, entirely as it was published on the original, Blogspot version of CR, except for some typos. (I’ve also added the now-normal “Follow the Author” stuff, and updated some links to mentioned titles.)

After the interview, I’ve included a few general thoughts on interviewing, and why they became less-common on Civilian Reader.

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Twenty years ago today, I posted my first fiction review on Civilian Reader. That is… pretty wild.

Before creating CR, I’d been reviewing music for my own fanzine that I’d been running for about four years. I first put that together using Microsoft Publisher, and printed, stapled, and mailed it out to the handful of subscribers I had. After I discovered this thing called “blogging”, while studying journalism, I shifted everything online. (It’s just so much easier, quicker, and cheaper — no more multipacks of printer ink!)

I wanted to do something to mark the occasion, and more than just the one post marking the milestone, and have been mulling this ever since I noticed we were coming up to the 20th anniversary. I’m still not entirely sure what I want to do, so I’ll have to keep thinking about (hopefully) interesting and related things to do. I am currently toying with revisiting early books I read and reviewed for the website, and taking a look at “Before Civilian Reader” books that I love and think deserve a little more attention. (Basically, it’ll be an excuse to re-read some older favourites.) I’m hesitant to make any concrete plans, though, as I invariably don’t follow through on “reading plans” or “reading goals” for a variety of reasons.

The first book review I ever wrote was for Richard Morgan’s Market Forces, for my university paper. It was a good book, and I thought I wrote a pretty good (albeit too-long-for-print) review, which was then butchered for publication. What went to press stripped out the discussion of what actually made the novel interesting and worth reading. So, I decided to create my own space to review books. Continue reading →