Do you ever notice trends in the people you know, like that they all knit, or have hair on their knuckles, or secretly make stupid noises at cats? I know what is, I’m sure, a statistically unlikely number of home brewers. In disparate places. Who don’t know each other. Micah Joel is just one of them. And since he shares my fondness for Mesopotamia and telling absurd lies, he’s here to answer some interview questions.
A lot of your work involves crossing genre lines or squishing genres together. What prompts you to do that?
My earliest memories go back to my parents forcing me to keep my
genres separate. Maybe that traumatized me or something, because the
first day I was out of the nest, living in my own apartment, lo, great
was the squishing and mashing of the genres. Hmm, come to think of it,
I never got the deposit back on that place.
What is the one thing to have been the biggest boon to your writing career so far?
Being secretly born to aliens from the planet Borges before being
raised by my (genre-separating) parents was a big help, but the
biggest you say? I’d have to give that crown to the development of
written language. (Factoid: my biological parents knew the woman
responsible for that. She was fun at parties they tell me.)
If you could only read one more book for all of eternity, which book would it be?
I’m partial to that one book done by the infinite number of monkeys.
It never gets old. I’d swear that parts of it read like Shakespeare,
though.
Where do you get your ideas?
Coming up with ideas is hard! That’s why I’ve completely outsourced
the chore to the AI (sorry, “cultured intelligence” it insists on
being called) that I discovered in my landing pod. I try not to use it
too often though, because it slows down time and messes up all the
clocks in my house. So instead I often just write the truth.
What the one thing you want everyone to know about you?
Under no circumstances should you follow me on Twitter as @micahpedia.
I’ve long since lost control of that account to my cultured
intelligence…
Anaea Lay 