| A Conversation With Patricia Anthony | |||||||||
| An interview with Jayme Lynn Blaschke | |||||||||
| 1999 | |||||||||
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Your 1993 novel Brother Termite is being made into a movie by James Cameron. It's not exactly the type of book you would normally expect Hollywood to jump on. 
I think they're going to do a really good job on it. I'll admit when I heard they were going to make it, I,
of course, immediately thought "Oh, well they're not going to make my book, you know, because you can't
make my book. It's too hard.
It wouldn't make sense to anybody." The first thing I said when I heard James Cameron wanted to make the film
was "Who's James Cameron?" I don't go to movies a lot, okay? My agent said "Well, he did
True Lies." I saw True Lies, so that was pretty cool, but I couldn't see how the same person who
did that would be interested in Brother Termite. And then I called a friend of mine who knows more about
movies, and she started saying he did Terminator and he did Aliens. So now it's starting to make a
little bit more sense to me, although really, looking at those movies -- this was before I
saw Strange Days -- I was so puzzled.
I enjoyed those movies, don't get me wrong, and there was a lot of good characterization in those movies, but
when I look at those movies and I look at Brother Termite, I'm thinking those movies
are basically commercial. They're linear. Those movies make sense. They go from point A to point B, and he
bought this thing which is basically a political thriller, but it's also satire, plus it's got aliens in it
and science fiction, and it's also a romance. What in the world is he going to do with this? So I figured no,
no, no, he's not going to make this movie.
After the contracts were signed and everything and I got the press release from Lightstorm, I finally saw
what Jim Cameron had to say about it. What interested him were the characters, and the fact that Reen and the
other Cousins are very empathetic characters, and you really like them at the same time they're doing something
really godawful. There's that sense of tension in the whole book. When I read the screenplay, just the first
draft of the screenplay, Reen is definitely Reen.
Right. And make 'em nice! I don't know why I do that, but it's like in God's Fires,
where the protagonist is an inquisitor.
He's a nice guy, you like Pessoa. He really doesn't want to burn anybody, he doesn't want to hurt
anybody, but in the end he kinda, in a lot of ways, has to toe the line. You get a dichotomy going if you
have basically a good person, who is given a horrific duty. I mean, I really get into that. That's fun.
That's good drama.
It was real scary. Months went by and months went by and I did not hear a single word, and then to get
this huge contract in the mail... I mean it just went on and on and on. Of course, I only got to page two,
and you're signing your life away. I didn't sign the contract immediately. I waited a week, and I
freaked. Remember, I only read the first two pages. When I took that contract out of the envelope, my eyes
riveted on the option amount, and I'd been expecting maybe we'll get five, ten thousand tops. And it was
quite a bit more. When I saw that I realized they were indeed serious. The first two pages scared me to
death. They could change the title, they could change anything, and all for this X amount they offered in
the option clause. I didn't talk to anyone but my very closest friends, and I told them, "I'm
not going to sign. I'm going to tear it up. I don't need this." Finally, I was telling my decision to
this one friend of mine who was a screenwriter. I had to go to her because nobody knew anything about
screenwriting but this one friend. And I said "I've made the decision, I'm going to call my agent." But
it was a holiday, and she was not in her office -- luckily. I said "I'm going to call her and tell her
I'm not going to sign the contract. I cannot sign my future writing life away, and the perception of my
books as a whole for X amount of dollars," and I quoted the option amount. And she said "Well, yes, I
understand where you're coming from, but what's the actual purchase price?" Huh? "If they're going to
make the movie, they've got to purchase the movie, so what's that price?" I said, "Oh... page three." So
I get page three and I'm reading and there's this long silence, and then I say "Never mind."
I've never looked at it like these books are my children.
When I signed the contract, I made the decision that it's their movie. Whatever they want to do, it is
their movie. My novel rights are protected, and that's what I was worried about. And so I was just fine
with it after the decision. When all the paperwork was in, working with Lightstorm was terrific. They were
so nice. James Cameron said in order to do this screenplay, there was only one person who could do it, and
that was John Sayles. And I've been a John Sayles fan all my life.
He does really wonderful screenplays. He said he was going to do Brother Termite because, in
essence, he refuses to do a screenplay that he doesn't think is going to be a terrific movie.
And he apparently really liked the story. He's done a great job.
I've had a lot of people asked me, "Didn't you want to do the screenplay?" No. It's not my concept. My concept
is for the printed word, and that's what I paint with. I don't have the least notion of how to take something
and put it into a screenplay. What was really weird, he did a new scene. He added a scene which I'm
particularly fond of, which did not occur in the book, but probably should have occurred in the book. It
works so well. Who knows if this is going to show up in the finished screenplay, but I hope it does. It's
a wonderful little scene. I mean really, it worked really well. So, I'm really happy with it. I had
determined early on that no matter what, I was going to be their biggest supporter. Now, I find that it's
really easy. I look at what he's doing and I really admire what he's doing, and it's really quite neat.
Yes, that thrilled me to no end.
In essence, I feel there's a problem in Great Britain with the perception of science fiction, and I think
it's possibly the same problem encountered in Japan. Which is science fiction, by and large, is viewed
as an adolescent type of literature. They do have some really good writers over there, but all in all,
from what little I've seen, is that if you're doing something which is a little more literary in nature,
it's going to be lost to a lot of -- not the British audience, but the British publishers. You
understand? It's the marketing, and I don't think they know how to market the books. So when
Happy Policeman and Brother Termite came out, they were marketed with Magic Eye covers. I'm not sure
what the reception is in Great Britain, but basically if you market a Magic Eye cover here in the States, what
you're appealing to is like, seventh graders. You're targeting a very young audience. I have some
teenagers who read my work, but I don't appeal to the great mass of teenagers. Cold Allies
did okay, but then when the other two came out, man, they sank big time. I've been selling well in the
other countries overseas, but that was unfortunate with Great Britain.
The one that's coming after God's Fires, Flanders, is a World War I book about a young
Texas boy who joins the British army in 1916. The British sub agents really love this book, to my
surprise. I thought for sure I'd screw it up. I knew I couldn't go at it from a British
viewpoint. I've never lived in England. I cannot do a book from a British viewpoint. So I opted to do
this Texas boy who goes over there, and so you're looking at this society, and looking at the way this
society works from the outside. And that I can do, because I've been there. I've known Brits and I
know the differences, and they always say write what you know, and that's what I knew: Looking at the
society of Great Britain from the outside. It's my first book that is not science fiction at all. The
fantasy element -- and you can read this book as a history, because you really don't know if these
spirits are real. But Travis Lee Stanhope -- who is the protagonist -- he's writing his brother, and
at one point, he begins to dream about his dead comrades. He comes to believe that he's dreaming about their ghosts.
The book is about a whole lot of things, but basically it's about death. And what better way to talk
about... that's why I chose World War I. If you're going to talk about death, and shove the reader's
face in it, this was the most horrible, oppressive death possible, because you couldn't get out of it
in World War I. It was all around you. It was in your food. When they dug the trenches they dug
through the bones of the French and the British and the Germans who had died there. It was the most
godawful thing in the world. And of course he starts in 1916, and they've already been through a lot
of bad war. I wanted to do that, and then I wanted to show the other side of death.
Yeah, I parodied the Karma sellers. That was a send-up, but I made fun of everybody in that book. Today
I'm very Zen, very, very Zen, and have been for many years. But I also picked up some tenants of
spiritism, and you'll see that a lot, even though it was a send-up in Brother Termite. I had
a lot of fun making fun of it, and making fun of reincarnation. But these are my basic beliefs. Nothing was
sacred in Brother Termite. When you do a parody or satire, you've got to make fun of everything.
I make fun of everything and hell, I make fun of President Kennedy, and he was one of my idols. So today, yes I am getting into more
questions of religion and particularly death and the subject of death. It's something I've really always been
interested in, and you see that too all through the novels. And when you talk about morality and I say
I'm a Zen Buddhist, you have to go back. I really don't do heroes and villains, because I don't believe
there are heroes and villains. Yes, there are people who do horrible things. Sometimes there's really
good people who do horrible things. That's another problem the average reader has.
People look for heroes and villains, and I have a very nebulous sense of what right and wrong is. Which
is kind of dangerous and threatening.
Well, not really involved. It was very innocent. It was the very tag end of the 60s and we really believed
that we, as Americans, could remake the world and make it better. And the Portuguese students were really
caught up in that. I was lucky in that none of my students were arrested. I mean, we'd get invited to
their meetings and we'd go in -- bless their hearts -- and they'd sing
We Shall Overcome. That's what it was. They did not ever talk about violent revolution or overthrowing the government
violently. Another thing that was really interesting about that revolution, which was bloodless -- all of
them are -- there was an incident that occurred when the soldiers had been sent out to guard a weapons
depot. And so these soldiers were in the front with their automatic rifles, fully armed, and a crowd
of civilians was coming up -- a mob, really -- and they were armed with sticks. The old French Revolution
type thing, picture that, coming up along the street, and they're heading for that weapons depot. The
commanding officer of this small group of soldiers knew he had two choices. He could either open fire and
kill a bunch of them, which was his duty, or they could turn around and walk off and let the crowd have the
weapons depot. Well, what do you think an American would've done? But the Portuguese officer turned
around and walked off, and ordered his men to stand down.
And they left. That's the difference between the two cultures.
So even though Caitano was doing stuff like pulling people off the streets and beating them up, throwing them
in jail --it was horrible. He was a fascist, and I'm really glad he's gone.
Portugal's a whole lot better off.
This wasn't a nuclear test -- it was a screwup. I was a senior in 1964 at Robert E. Lee High School in
San Antonio, and in the afternoon they had these study hall periods. Anyway, all of the sudden, something
changed. I don't know what it was, maybe I felt the vibrations. There were these big glass and steel
doors to the outside, and all of the sudden these big door were coming open. I'm assuming the ground was
vibrating, that's what was happening. It was just like a movie. There was this really, really tall
mushroom cloud off in the distance. Now, you know any kind of explosion will make a mushroom cloud,
but this was huge. I was on the north side of San Antonio and this was happening at Kelly Field way on
the south side. The first reports over the radio was that it was a nuclear strike, Russian or whatever,
and then it was a rumour going around that one of the nuclear warheads on a B-52 had accidentally been
dropped. But I knew that wasn't the case, because I had not seen a flash. There was no light to it. The
cloud was very dirty, and there was no light to it. It was an explosion very deep underground. It
was a nuclear storage facility -- they had several of them out there -- and fission occurred. I don't
know why, but fission occurred and there it went. And if the wind had been different, if the wind hadn't
been just right, all of that could've come down over the city. It was interesting to me that those of
us who were there remember it. It was in our local papers and on the local television news, but it never
made the national news and has not since. And it's not widely known. I've lived through that, and I've
gone through an emergency landing on a plane, I've been struck by lightning. I've seen ball lightning.
That was cool.
I know, and it was great. I was in Brazil and it was a terrible, terrible storm, just the worst
godawful storm I've ever seen. In fact, it was so bad that in the interior, to the south of us, that
was the location of the hydroelectric plant, and it knocked out the hydroelectric plant. I mean, took
it down. It drowned a whole lot of people along that river valley. But all of the sudden, my ex-husband
calls out "There's a UFO!" and so naturally I run down the stairs. We had huge, two-story windows.
It was a magnificent house on an old coffee plantation on the side of the mountain. I'm looking through
the thick trees in front, and here's this ball. It was the size of a beach ball, and it was fire. It
was so cool. It was orange, and it was floating. The wind was blowing very strong, but it could
float against the wind, and it just meandered around the trees. And I said "That's not a UFO. My god,
that's ball lighting!" Our neighbour, the next day, he told us that he'd been in his house and this
orange ball rolled through the wall as we were watching TV -- oh, bad, bad news. It rolled toward that,
it went right over and hit the TV and pfft! electricity went out in the house.
I've got a thing about lighting. I don't know why, but it's struck me, it's struck my car. That was the
same night, the lightning was so horrific. The windows we had were wrought iron.
We're living in a lightning attracting place. I'm sitting downstairs, and at this point we still have
electricity in the house. All of the sudden I hear the clap, and I know what it is, and this blue
streak has struck the house. And it was following the electrical lines. We had stone walls, we had
granite walls inside and out, and you could see it following just in a grid pattern down where the
electrical lines were running, up to the light switch. It hit the light switch and pfft! flames went
this high up. Luckily it was all stone, but the lights were definitely out in the house. It wasn't just
us that lost electricity. The whole electrical company went out. So we were out of electricity for a
week, and when the electricity finally came back up, we turned on the electricity in the house, and the
electricity was polarized. It's direct current in Brazil, so for some reason this lightning strike
polarized the whole electrical system. You couldn't touch the refrigerator or the refrigerator would
shock you. Any kind of electric appliance would shock you, so we had to take and tie copper wire around
every electrical appliance we had and lead the copper wire out and bury it in the ground. It was
a hoot. It was a real hoot.
Roxanne Longstreet-Conrad -- who is also a wonderful writer and a brilliant designer -- got me a
website, and it's at www.patricia-anthony.com. And she's always tinkering on it.
It's pretty interactive, because writers can post their good news. I give writing tips. A lot of what I'm
interested in is mentoring, which is why I teach at SMU. That's why I teach creative writing. It
took me from 1980 to 1987 to sell my first short story, and I was still trying to sell novels, and I
didn't sell my first novel until 1992. That's a long damn time, and you get real discouraged and it
gets real tough. I've always wanted to be able to teach prospective writers so that they did not
make the stupid mistakes that I made. I made a lot of dumb mistakes about writing. Really not
understanding the craft, going at it without having any feedback, and doing it particularly because
I come at it as what I call an organic writer. Which is I don't outline. I go in with kind of a
vague story idea. I don't know what's coming out.
There was a kid who had bought Cold Allies, and he had gotten into the first three chapters and
was really excited. He lived locally, and he called me on the phone. He looked up my telephone number
and called me, and we had this great conversation. He was really excited about the book, and I said
I hoped he enjoys it, and to let me know what he thought about it when he finished. Well, he called
me again, like at 11 o'clock one night. I was already in bed and he calls me, and I'm like, "Who the
hell is this?" and he's going, "They left! They left!
The aliens left!" I say, "Yeah?" and he said, "Well, you never told me what they were doing." I went back
and I went over the book with him, and showed him the reasons. I said, "They left because that's the
way they were." In essence, those aliens, it was like being run over with a steamroller. They didn't
have to tell you what they were here for. We can't know, because they're so damn alien. There's no
way to make any sense of what they did. I said there's only an Epiphany sort of sense and a question
they leave in the mind. That's the essence of the aliens.
And see, I'd never understood that until I had to explain it to the kid. He thought about it, then
said "Okay... Okay!" So I think that when the stuff comes up in yourself, you should let it go.
(This interview first appeared in the June 1999 issue of Interzone.)
Jayme Lynn Blaschke graduated from Texas A&M University with a degree in journalism. He writes science fiction and fantasy short fiction and has several in-progress novels lying around in various stages of decay. His non-fiction articles and interviews have seen publication in the U.S., Britain and Australia. His website can be found at http://www.exoticdeer.org/jayme.html |
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