Rags And Muffin Interview

Rags and Muffin By D.G.D Davidson

1.  What inspired the idea for your book?

Although I have two other books already out, this particular novel is in a sense my first because it’s creation has been a lengthy process. They say you take ten years to write your first book and less than a year to write each subsequent one, and that’s been true for me. It’s difficult to remember what originally inspired the gun-toting Miss Rags and her pseudo-religious hypnotic ability, but as I fleshed out her world, I eventually drew a lot of inspiration from the worship of kumaris in Nepalese Buddhism.

In this Nepalese practice, young girls are selected to serve as living goddesses and are worshiped as such until puberty. I independently created something similar for Rags and Muffin, but after I learned there was a real practice that closely matched what I was trying to describe, I borrowed heavily from it.

I also draw a lot of inspiration from adventure stories aimed at kids. I’m fascinated by the way authors deal with the basic problem of sending children on a death-defying adventure: Kids are smaller and weaker and less intelligent or experienced than grownups, but they often have to face grown-up enemies in their adventure stories. I know of two ways to deal with this problem.

The first is to team up the kid with an adult adventurer. You can see this in the classic Terry and the Pirates strips. This is the kind of story that Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was imitating, and I suspect that’s partly why it was the least popular of the original Indiana Jones movies, because this is a type of story nobody does anymore, so the audience didn’t understand it.

Another solution, common in children’s stories today, is to make the adult villains into comical buffoons who are not really threatening. The cartoon show Kim Possible is one of my influences and is a good example of this, but there are innumerable others.

Although I don’t like the word “deconstruction,” which has been abused terribly since Derrida coined it, Rags and Muffin is, for lack of a better word, a deconstruction of this latter idea. The kids in the book lack adult supervision, and they have a lot of resources to draw on, but the adult enemies they face are not comical villains but genuinely bad people willing to do awful things. The story for that reason is quite brutal at times. I think of Rags and Muffin as a children’s adventure story written for adults.

2. What books do you enjoy reading?

Formerly, I read a lot of science fiction and fantasy, but in recent days, I have shifted almost entirely to nonfiction or classic works. Because of the action-oriented stories I like to write, I’m currently giving a lot of attention to adventure writers: Talbot Mundy is one of my favorites, and I’ve been exploring H. Rider Haggard.

I also continue to consume a lot of Japanese manga. I particularly like magical girls, and magical-girl manga and anime have a lot of influence on my work. When I first came up with Rags, she was more of a magical girl-type character, but that changed considerably as I developed her and her world.

3. Are there any books or authors that inspired you to become a writer?

Primarily Ray Bradbury, though I read a lot of other science fiction writers in my childhood. I was enamored of Bradbury’s work in my early teens, and I started writing partly because I wanted to imitate his style. Those early efforts were quite awful, of course, but with time I developed my own voice.

4. What books did you grow up reading?

I always wanted to read as long as I remember, but for much of my childhood, I found reading frustrating because I couldn’t find the kinds of stories I wanted. “Realistic” children’s stories, such as the works of Beverly Cleary, were in vogue when I was a kid, and I didn’t care for those because I wanted fantastical adventures set in fairyland or space. Sometime in grade school, I complained that all the books are set in either America or England, which I thought were dull. I was entirely wrong about that, of course, both about the uniformity of setting and the dullness, but I didn’t know any better.

The book I remember most fondly from my childhood is City Beyond the Clouds, one of the volumes in “Great Marvel,” a boys’ adventure serial from the first half of the twentieth century. I stumbled upon it and fell in love with it because it was similar to the Hardy Boys, except all the fantastical stuff was really happening and was not just a mystery to be explained away. The protagonists of the story were a couple of he-men who built a flying machine in order to travel to a second moon hidden in Earth’s shadow and battle a vicious race of red dwarves.

The Great Marvel series is loaded with adventure and weird locations and exotic monsters. It’s also unapologetically violent and full of things that a lot of people would probably be afraid to give to kids nowadays. I own a set, found through used booksellers, which I will be sure to read to my children.

5. Name an underappreciated novel that you love.

Very tough question! As I mentioned, I’m currently spending a lot of time with books that are so appreciated, they make up a sort of canon.

But I did recently read a little-known novel that I love despite its glaring flaws: It’s called They’ll Get You, and it’s a horror novel by Mark Pellegrini. Pellegrini has since gone on to fame and fortune; he’s the writer of the comic book Kamen America, which became a huge sleeper hit. But They’ll Get You was a self-published first effort, which he produced before he could afford professional editing.

Despite its rough edges and excessive length, it is a remarkably unsettling novel. It follows a ten-year-old boy who has not just one or two monsters but the entire universe out to get him. He faces countless traps and abominations, and It is a test of endurance for both him and the reader. It rattled me when I read it. I hope, now that he’s made it big, that Pellegrini might revisit it and give it the rewrite it needs.

6. Has any hugely popular novel left you thinking you could write it better?

Also a tough question, and a risky one to answer because a reader might very well pick up my work, dislike it, and conclude that I could not, in fact, write it better.

I’m going to give a safe answer: Twilight. I struggled my way through that book just to find out what the fuss was about. Improving it would be easy: Simply cut out all the descriptions of the vampire boy’s chisled chest and remove the stupid basball scene, and it’s better.

I will say, though, that Twilight indirectly inspired my work. Because its heroine is frustratingly passive, it convinced me that every character needs to have something important to do during an action sequence. When I wrote my first published work, Jake and the Dynamo, which is about an ordinary boy surrounded by superpowered girls, I always kept this in mind: Jake must do something in every scene, even when there are all these girls around who are tougher than he is.

7. If you could be mentored by a famous author, who would it be?

Probably the aforementioned Ray Bradbury. He did, in fact, mentor other authors who went on to success, so he’s apparently good at it.

8. What author in your genre do you most admire, and why?

To answer that, I have to figure out my genre. I so far have written magical girl-influenced fantasy works, one a satirical comedy and one a brooding actioner.

I think I should say Talbot Mundy, who is the writer I most had in mind while writing Rags and Muffin. His Princess Yasmini, who appears in several of his works, especially King of the Khyber Rifles and Guns of the Gods, is a remarkable character, one of those figures who seem to step off the page and introduce themselves. If I can write a heroine half as memorable as Mundy’s princess, I shall be happy.

9. Has writing and publishing a book changed the way you see yourself?

Only in one sense: It has shown me that I can do it. Self-doubt is common in aspiring writers, which is why there are so many more aspiring writers than actual writers. Finishing a book is often grueling. It takes mettle to accomplish it, and that’s probably why the first book takes so much longer to produce than the subsequent ones do. You have to prove to yourself that you can actually finish the job.

10. What is your writing process like? Are you more of a plotter or a pantser?

I am definitely a pantser, though that is a tendency I have to work against sometimes. When I wrote Jake and the Dynamo, I pantsed it, and that was fine because it’s a kitchen sink fantasy where I can always throw a new monster at the protagonists if I get stuck.

With Rags and Muffin, however, I needed an outline. Fortunately, the story for that one came easily to me. My current work in progress, which is a planetary romance, also demands an outline. I don’t like outlining, but writing often means doing unpleasant tasks.

11. If you could spend a day with another popular author, whom would you choose?

Like many authors, I’m introverted, so the question catches me off guard. I might name the aforementioned Pellegrini, who seems like someone it would be good to grab a beer with.

12. How do you celebrate when you finish your book?

The question should be, when is a book finished? Once I have a complete draft, I stagger away from my computer and rub my eyes. Then I let it sit for a week and begin the editing and rewriting. Then I cough up cash for the professional editor. Then comes formatting, ordering art, publicity . . .

13. What is the most valuable piece of advice you’ve been given about writing?

There is no such thing as writer’s block. I think that’s become a truism now, but the first time I heard it, it was still a revelation. Writing is a job, so as with other jobs, you do it even when you don’t feel like it. “Writer’s block” is either something you just have to mow through, or it’s a sign that you need to delete material and start over at an earlier point. Either way, it’s not something to deal with by either taking a break or engaging in funny exercises. You just work through it.