>AD: His publisher being Heartworm, of course, right?
JS: Right. But I had no idea what that was at the time. I just said‘why not?’and then the next thing ya know I get this email from this guy Wes who’s the owner of Heartworm Press and he tells me he wants to publish all this rough, unstructured shit right away and suddenly he’s all stoked about it…. I was totally blown away! This is like just a coupla days after Inger told me how powerful the last chapters of Scabvender were, and a couple of days more after my writer friend in Rio sent me the email telling me I had to publish this shit immediately… It was just all snapping into place effortlessly, like boom, bang, bam… You gotta remember that the whole thing still just consisted a couple of rough chapters in Scabvender and a bunch of random notes, maybe like 5 or 10 pages of very sloppy, disjointed prose, like some really crude old writing from those old junkie journals I used to keep…
So I asked Wes, the publisher to give me a coupla weeks to at least finish transcribing the rest of the old journals and try and polish it and clean ‘em up a bit and then he could publish it maybe as a short little novella. What the fuck, right? He said he was ready to go and publish the shit just the way it was, that he really liked it all crude and fucked up like that. But I told him I just wanted to edit it a little more and then I’d give it to him in a few days, and he said ok…
That’s when I sat down and started working on Narcisa full time. I still had no fucking idea what I was getting into. I really thought I was just polishing up some random and shit to make some little punk-prose thing out of to give to this guy to put in some ‘zine kinda thing. I had no idea how well respected Heartworm Press was, didn’t know any of their background or whatever, other than Howie Pyro, who I trusted, telling me they were pretty cool and stuff…But then as I sat down with all this shit and started working on it on a computer, it suddenly just started to take on a life of its own. Fuck me!(Laughs)…
Well one thing led to another and suddenly the coupla weeks I’d asked for to finish transcribing all these little stories and notes turned into like four months of obsessive fulltime writing and editing, and before I knew it I was working on it like 15 hours a day, 7 days a week, writing this huge ass 400 plus page novel and putting it out in a big hurry on Heartworm, just like my writer friend in Rio had told me to do, to publish it immediately… It’s like Narcisa just totally took over and from then on I became it’s slave. I guess I still am pretty much. Two years later and I’m still working on the final edit of the original book and I’m half way through a fucking sequel. When does this shit end, dear Lord?(Laughs)
Awesome!…the book is possessed and literally has a “life of it’s own!”…if you ask me…
it’s extremely POTENT with voodoo, heeby jeeby, demonic, spiritual, crackhead ghost energy…
thank you. very well put. sometimes it feels more like a magic spell than a work of art. but maybe that’s what art is supposed to be.