The greydogtales interview – A cutting-edge tool with which to dissect a writer’s tragic ignorance of lurchers, or ask a leading artist about his or her favourite colour of pencil. The place where editors can share their tax returns, and independent publishing houses can admit they turned down Clive Cussler’s Top Ten Hip Replacements.

We started doing these things last October, with the first outline being despatched almost exactly one year ago. We were following a keenly researched five year strategic plan, and we can now reveal that the plan had three key elements:

• To save us having to write so many original features
• To make it look as if we vaguely knew cool people
• To promote people we sort of liked anyway on a random basis
• To latch on to current trends in an utterly shameless manner

Or maybe four key elements. We can’t write and do maths at the same time. Anyway, it worked. Quite a lot of people read these interviews. An astonishing number of people read some of them. And not long after we started, a slightly confused old man in Dorset clicked on a link by accident and bought someone’s book. After a couple of months, Amazon begged us to stop promoting people, as their warehouse robots were running out of oil trying to fulfil so many orders.*

In fact, such is the growing influence of greydogtales that most of our interviewees are still working in their chosen field, albeit on a reduced salary.

This October we start up again, with seventeen or eighteen overdue interviews to pack in to the next few months. We will delve again into the world of editors and magazine publishers, delight at discovering thrusting authors of weird fiction, young and old, and find artists who do neat stuff (a technical term amongst us creatives).

The reason we’re overdue is that we seriously try to read a writer’s work, investigate an artist’s portfolio or get to know a publisher before we go ahead. Which is a slow, stupid alternative to just making everything up. We don’t learn. And we often seek out people who haven’t been interviewed that much, because we like sign-posting new talent.  To make it harder. With well-known people you merely copy what they said somewhere else and change the order round. Or something like that.

*This was shortly before we were sue for constantly exaggerating our importance.

But before we roll our sleeves up, we want to pay tribute to those who have gone before, those generous souls who had no particular reason to put up with our questions. Given our skills at tagging and categorisation, we can be confident that at least some of the following were real people, and that some of the links next to their names work.

Read their wise words, buy their magnificent creations, and be glad that you didn’t have to go through the process…

THE ROLL OF HONOUR

(Probably forgetting someone jolly important)

Matthew M Bartlett – TAG TEAM HORROR

Tom Breen – TAG TEAM HORROR

Jeffrey Shanks – SECRETS OF SKELOS UNVEILED

Milton Davis – BLACK IS THE NEW BLACK

Luke Spooner – HOW TO ILLUSTRATE CLIVE BARKER

Scott R Jones – CTHULHU ON MARS

Rich Hawkins – THE LAST WRITER

Alan M Clark – DARK WORLDS, DARK LIVES

Joanne Hall – FIGHT LIKE A FANTASY AUTHOR

Scott Handcock – COME FREELY, GO SAFELY: DRACULA

CARNACKI LIVES!

Lynne Jamneck – VOICES FROM THE WITCH-HOUSE

Brian J Showers – SWAN RIVER SECRETS

Darin Coelho – THE EMPEROR OF DREAMS

John Guy Collick – A COLOSSUS OF MARS

Jim McLeod – A GINGER HORROR

Cobweb Mehers – EOLITHS AND NEPHILIM

Joshua M Reynolds – ROYAL OCCULTIST WITH A WARHAMMER

Michael Hutter – CARCOSA AND BEYOND

Dan Starkey – DR WHO & THE DETECTIVE

Matt Willis – SEA-SERPENTS & SHIP’S BISCUITS

Cameron Trost – THE BRISBANE FACTOR

Laura Mauro – SCARY WOMEN AGAIN

V H Leslie – SCARY WOMEN AGAIN

David Senior – AN ANTIQUARY IN DUNWICH

Ray Cluley – SURFACES FOR AIR

Neil Baker – ONCE IN AN APRIL MOON

Andy Paciorek – WEIRDFINDER GENERAL Pt 2

INTERVIEW WITH THE WEIRDFINDER GENERAL

Paul Watson – DARK (FOLK) ARTS

Clarissa Johal – SCARY WOMEN

Anita Stewart – SCARY WOMEN

Jorgen Bech Pedersen – ART OF NORDIC FOLKLORE

John Coulthart – AXIOMS & OTHER BEASTS

Ted E Grau – VOICE FROM THE NAMELESS DARK

Raphael Ordonez – FRACTALS & FANTASIES

Sebastian Cabrol – SECRETS OF SOUTH AMERICA

M Wayne Miller – AN ARTIST SPEAKS

Richard Mansfield – SHADOW OUT OF DENMARK

Sam Gafford – CRITICAL VOICES

John C Wright – THE INHERITORS 3

Julia Morgan – THE VOICE OF HORROR

Willie Meikle – THE INHERITORS

We may do a piece about what goes wrong at some point, and how interviews fall flat or collapse, but at the moment we’re feeling dynamic, so we won’t worry about that today, dear listener.

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Now we have hundreds of odd questions to write, far too much to read, and we must do some lurcher posts soon. Probably quite a lot of dogs and William Hope Hodgson in October…