Ben Godby

Goldfish Grimm: If we could peek into your office (coffee shop, kitchen table, wherever you write), what would your writing process look like?

Ben Godby: Since I’ve given up notebooks and coffee, my writing process looks like a gaming laptop injected with a heavy metal enthusiast’s music library. The scraps, fragments, and half-finished stories that adorn my hard drive all pay secret tribute to favourite lyrics, soundscapes, and imaginary battles I’ve fought with giant laser-shooting robots or Second World War-era unterseebooten.
Actually, that’s the secret truth behind every story I’ve completed and sold, too.

GFG: What is it actually like?

BG: Currently, large periods of quiescence, laziness, and ennui characterized by sudden bursts of frenetic energy and productivity. There was a time when I made writing into an industrial thing, an assembly line kind of artwork, but that was untenable in the long term for the way my heart works. This means that when I’m writing, it’s usually because I’m totally grooving to whatever I’m writing. Sometimes, there is no groove, but it always comes back.

GFG: Was there anything in particular that inspired “Fathers & Sons”?

BG: “Fathers & Sons” is, essentially, the byproduct of reading too much Michael Cisco. His writing a contagious series of insane, impossible images, so when I spent a few months going through his books, my writing naturally became surreal and absurd.

GFG: If you dug a hole in your back yard, what do you think you would find?

BG: I think there may have been a miscommunication; “Fathers & Sons” is nonfiction.

GFG: Do you have anything you’d like to plug or promote?

BG: I was recently published in Tesseracts Seventeen: Speculating Canada from Coast to Coast to Coast. Go and buy a copy if you love right true Canadian spec fic!