A caveat, this is going to be great: The Deeds of Pounce is the most-recent book by my friend Benjamin Wachs, who you may remember as February 2016’s Artist-in-Residence.
I asked him why he wrote the book and he explained that it started as an exercise for a writing workshop he attended.
He continues, “The first half of the first chapter was basically just written for funzies, and I never intended it to go anywhere.
Then people started asking me ‘what are the goblins doing next?’
And I thought, ‘really? You want more goblins? And talking animals?’ And I figured it would go away.
But they kept bugging me about it. And, hey, it was kind of left on a cliffhanger, so, I finished the cliff hanger, and thought that would be the end of it.
But people pestered me, and wanted more.
So eventually I asked myself if there was a novel here, and started writing it out to see where it went.
That’s why I started it. The reason I finished it was because the goblins turned out to be so much goddamn fun. They were just delightful to write, even as their world began to hold more resonance and more depth of feeling. I just couldn’t let these little guys go – and once their story was finished, I felt an aesthetic obligation (the most powerful kind) to bring them into the world. They’re too much fun to not go the distance.
The book is filled with insider references to San Francisco politics and what might be termed deep thoughts on the nature of culture and sacrifice, but honest-to-God that’s all stuff I threw in just to see how they’d react, and what they’d do next. This book is a romp across San Francisco with two goblins. And it turns out I really wanted to do that.”
Fun fact: Benjamin writes for Burning Man under the name Caveat Magister.
The Deeds of Pounce is available now as a paperback (and for Kindle). |