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Dean M. Drinkel originally met actor / musician / writer Tim Dry through their mutual friend Barbie Wilde. Tim subsequently sent Dean a couple of stories and well, the friendship and working relationship grew from there with Tim’s work appearing in many of Dean’s anthologies over the coming years. It was obvious that Tim would be very much at the forefront of Dean’s plans when it came to the Short Sharp Shocks! Series and as such, Tim’s brilliant The Stranger & The Ribbon is Book 2 and is published on the 1st March 2019. They sat down recently to chat. DEMAIN PUBLISHING: Hello Tim. Welcome to the Demain family. Can you tell your readers a little about The Stranger & The Ribbon and how you came to write it? TIM DRY: Hi! And yes - this was the first time that I’d been asked to contribute a story to a collection without being given a theme so I had to think of one all by myself! I didn’t sit down with an idea and a through line at all and for a while I was treading water mentally. Then out of the blue came a memory of an argument that I’d had many years ago with my ex-wife in a pub out in the country. No idea why that arrived in my head but I just took it from there and I knew that I had to write those bitter first lines of dialogue at the head of what I hoped would lead me somewhere. From the moment totally drunk Brian gets into his car and drives off in a fury I knew that something bad was inevitably going to happen to him. Love Is A Stranger by Eurythmics came up as an ear-worm and I remembered what a strange and haunting piece of Electro Pop that was lyrically and musically back in the 1980s and introducing that started off a completely unexpected turn of events. That’s what I love about writing fiction, it’s as if you’re adrift in a boat on an open sea with no idea where the wind will blow you. It’s a kind of magical process as connections are made that you hadn’t even thought about. It’s almost like you become an observer of the result of your imagination channelling itself down through your fingers. DP: I appreciate with your background that music / musicians always feature heavily in your work and I love how certain songs really inspire you – me too – I’m writing something right now whilst listening to a lot of Peter Gabriel and Duran Duran with a bit of Bowie thrown into the mix…sometimes I dream I’m a frustrated musician but sadly the best I can do in real life is strum a few chords on my uke…oh and of course I used to belt out Bieber’s Baby on karaoke…I haven’t done that in a year or so so I tell people I’m in semi-musical-retirement ha ha. With your story, what were the challenges you faced when writing it? TD: For a large amount of the stories that I write I don’t normally have an end result in mind and this was no exception. I literally made it up as I went along! The challenge is finding a satisfactory way of rounding off the story if you haven’t got an ending before you start writing. DP: Good for you – I’m not really one for over-plotting etc and feel that a story needs to find its own heart / pace / breath…I’m with you all the way on that one. With your earlier answer about the argument with your ex-wife in mind, while you were writing The Stranger & The Ribbon do you use anything else from your real life? TD: From my own life? Hopefully not! Only a severely dramatised version of the pub argument that I mentioned. Also, one of the stoned art students is definitely based on myself back in the early 70s! DP: I think it would have been fun to know you back then ha ha. Let’s think about your writing, do you have a specific style? TD: I don’t believe I have a specific writing style as such. Although having said that I do have fun introducing elements of bizarre, possibly twisted, humour into a story. I also enjoy juggling with words and images. I’m a very observational person and because I have worked as a visual artist for most of my adult life elements of that definitely make their presence felt in my writing as well. I do tend to write in a kind of cinematic way because of that. DP: Which other writers (or books) influenced you? If you had a pick of any ‘famous’ writer to mentor you, who would it be? TD: That’s a tricky one! I don’t class myself as a writer in one specific genre and so my influences come from all over the place. I can’t name any one author as a mentor but off the top of my head I can certainly cite Stephen King, Michael Moorcock, Colin Wilson, Rupert Thomson, Jorge Luis Borges, William Burroughs, Kurt Vonnegut, Clive Barker, Stephen Volk, Christopher Fowler, Phillip Jose Farmer, Charles Higson as writers whose work I find inspirational in many differing ways. DP: Oh there’s some cracking writers there and I’m really with you on William Burroughs – I’m a great admirer of his work for sure and I’ve been lucky to work with Chris Fowler in the past…but let’s talk about the future – what have you got planned for 2019. TD: I’ve been asked to write stories for two more anthologies this year and I’m slowly laying down guidelines for those. I’m also about a third of the way into my second novella. This will be called Reconciliation and it’s the dream diary of an eccentric bon viveur who lived life to the max and died as a result! Yes, writer’s block is always the Black Dog threatening to start barking whenever a new writing project is called for. I find that the only ways to deal with it are either to just start writing whatever comes to mind, be it sublime or ludicrous or, if that’s not an option, then just forget about it and do something else to distract oneself. Of course the danger is that the distractions can sometimes supersede the desire to actually sit down and write! DP: Ha ha – I’m certainly aware of that pain – distractions – it is amazing the things you end up looking at following serious research isn’t it? And time flies that before you know it, the hours have passed…from what we’ve talked about before then – you write an outline before you start or just go for it? TD: It depends…sometimes one and sometimes the other! DP: Fair enough – (in your work) what’s your favourite theme / genre? TD: Because I’m English and I was born in 1952 I do find that elements from my life and times will quite often find their way into a story, whether it’ll be a nostalgic memory of childhood or music from my teens or old English myths and legends. There’s such a wealth of information to draw on when you reach my age that the well can never really run dry. However, I did write one story for an anthology called The Bestiarum Vocabulum that was set in Africa and Los Angeles. That was fun to do! DP: That was a great story – loved it very much. Okay, so, I’m looking for a project to produce – can you pitch me The Stranger & The Ribbon if it was going to be a movie. TD: A perverse alien father dispatches his twin daughters to come to Earth and collect two human heads that will complete the display in his zoological gallery. The race is on! DP: Oh I like that. And if you were writing a synopsis for a magazine / newspaper? TD: Abusive, out of control drunkenness, a dreadful accident, sexual desire, hallucinations, cigarettes, two daughters whose father is a shape-shifting alien, a house that constantly remodels itself, heads will roll and more. DP: I won’t say too much but I love the “heads will roll” part of that pitch – very apt. Okay, final one my friend – tell your readers something which might surprise them about you. TD: I’m old enough to know better but young enough not to care! DP: And long may that continue! Thank you for taking the time to chat – best of luck with The Stranger & The Ribbon. For more information about Tim, please visit: www.timdry.co.uk Twitter: timdry1 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tim.dry Amazon Author Page: https://authorcentral.amazon.co.uk/gp/profile Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/timdry Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/timdry1/ (Photo of Tim taken By Nicole Klein)
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November 2023
AuthorDean M. Drinkel |