MC:Your first novel "The Raw Shark Texts" have been widely acclaimed. As a first time writer what has this ride been like for you?

SH:It’s been so far beyond anything I hoped for or expected. The response has been phenomenal, it really has. A year after UK and US publication I’m in quite a strange place, I’m still thinking ‘did this really happen?’

MC:What kind of work had you done before dedicating yourself to getting a book out there?

SH:The book took about five years to write, more like six if you add the editing process into that. Before The Raw Shark texts I was trying to write a different book, so for ten or eleven years I’ve been trying to become a published author and everything else has really been secondary to that. I worked as a photographer’s assistant, data entry clerk and even a private detective (briefly!) to fund the writing

MC:The Raw Shark Texts is kind of difficult to describe in bullet points. I've seen it compared to films like The Matrix and the writings of Murakami and Neil Gaiman. For people not familiar with the book how would you describe it?

SH:You’re right, it’s very hard to describe. The idea was that the book would seem to evolve itself to reflect each reader’s interests and expectations (hence the ink blot word play of the title). I’ve joked that The Raw Shark Texts as a postmodern slipstream romantic psychological sci-fi metaphysical action puzzle thriller horror mash-up before now, maybe that’s as close as I can get!

MC:For me the book is a wild mix of a heartbreaking romance, a metaphysical adventure and flat out horror. Were you worried about trying to fit so many different genres into your first novel?

SH:No, not worried really, the challenge was a big part of what drove me on with the book. How many things can the same book be without collapsing in on itself? Was it possible to write a single book that a horror fan would see as horror, a romance fan see as romance, a puzzle fan see as something to be solved? Was it possible to also look at what a book is and what the jobs or the reader and writer are and how can they be stretched and challenged? You’re right, looking back I should have been terrified, but I was mainly excited to be treading what I thought was such interesting ground, I think.

MC:The story's hero is Eric Sanderson, a young man with no memory of who he is. Eric begins receiving notes and packages from himself that get progressively odder until they start to prove to be invaluable. Why did you decide to make the second Eric Sanderson a blank slate?

SH:I’ve been asked so many times – ‘why on earth start with a guy who doesn’t know who he is? Hasn’t amnesia been done to death?’ And I’d generally reply with something wonderfully articulate like ‘Oh. Has it?’ because it genuinely didn’t occur to me!

I wanted to put the reader in Eric’s shoes from the very first line and it seemed like an interesting way to do it. When we pick up a book and start reading we have no idea who the characters are, who we can trust and who we can’t, it seemed interesting to put the narrator himself in the same position.

MC:Talk a bit if you can about the conceptual world that Eric Sanderson can tap into...

SH:I’d like to quote you a little bit instead, if I can. This is a document written by the First Eric Sanderson, it’s the first time the Second Eric (our narrator) comes into contact with the idea of the conceptual world:

Imagine you’re in a rowing boat on a lake.
It’s summer, early morning. That time when the sun hasn’t quite broken free of the landscape and long, projected shadows tiger-stripe the light. The raystripes are warm on your skin as you drift through them, but in the shadowstripes the air is still cold, greyness holding onto undersides and edges wherever it can.
A low clinging breeze comes and goes, raising ripple patches across the water and gently rocking you and your boat as you float in yin-yang slices of morning. Birds are singing. It’s a sharp, clear sound, clean without the humming backing track of a day well underway. There’s the occasional sound of wind in leaves and the occasional slap-splash of a larger wavelet breaking on the side of your boat, but nothing else.
You reach over the side and feel the shock of the water, the steady bob of the lake’s movement playing up and down your knuckles in a rhythm of cold. You pull your arm back; you enjoy the after-ache in your fingers. Holding out your hand, you close your eyes and feel the tiny mathematics of gravity and resistance as the liquid finds routes across your skin, builds itself into droplets of the required weight, then falls, each drop ending with an audible tap.
Now, right on that tap - stop. Stop imagining. Here’s the real game. Here’s what’s obvious and wonderful and terrible all at the same time: the lake in my head, the lake I was imagining, has just become the lake in your head. It doesn’t matter if you never know me, or never know anything about me. I could be dead, I could have been dead a hundred years before you were even born and still - think about this carefully, think past the obvious sense of it to the huge and amazing miracle hiding inside – the lake in my head has become the lake in your head.
Behind or inside or through the two hundred and twenty-one words that made up my description, behind or inside or through those one thousand and twelve letters, there is some kind of flow. A purely conceptual stream with no mass or weight or matter and no ties to gravity or time, a stream that can only be seen if you choose to look at it from the precise angle we are looking from now, but there nevertheless, a stream flowing directly from my imaginary lake into yours.
Next, try to visualize all the streams of human interaction, of communication. All those linking streams flowing in and between people, through text, pictures, spoken words and TV commentaries, streams through shared memories, casual relations, witnessed events, touching pasts and futures, cause and effect. Try to see this immense latticework of lakes and flowing streams, see the size and awesome complexity of it. This huge rich environment. This waterway paradise of all information and identities and societies and selves.
Now, go back to your lake, back to your gently bobbing boat. But this time, know the lake; know the place for what it is and when you’re ready, take a look over the boat’s side. The water is clear and deep. Broken sunlight cuts blue wedges down, down into the clean cold depths. Sit quietly, wait and watch. Don’t move. Be very, very still. They say life is tenacious. They say given half a chance, or less, life will grow and exist and evolve anywhere, even in the most inhospitable and unlikely of places. Life will always find a way, they say. Be very quiet. Keep looking into the water. Keep looking and keep watching.

MC:You've created one of the more memorable menaces in recent memory in the Ludovician, a conceptual shark. How did you come up with the Ludovician and the other conceptual fish?

SH:I got interested in the way we seem to incorporate water terminology when we talk about language, thought and the mind – stream of consciousness, flow of conversation, the depths of the unconscious. When a person is making some concept more complex than it needs to be we can say they’re muddying the issue, or muddying the water. The water references are always there. I started to wonder – what kind of animals would live in these non-physical streams and flows? What would they be like, how would they interact with each other and with us? The Ludovician shark evolved from there.

MC:Once Eric first encounters the conceptual shark he begins a quest for answers. Along the way he meets Scout who may or may not be someone else. Can you talk a bit about her character?

SH:Scout seems to mirror Clio (Eric’s girlfriend, who apparently died some five years earlier) in ways that the Second Eric mirrors the first. In fact, and I hope I’m not giving too much away here, you’ll find a lot of mirroring in the novel - everything from the blindingly obvious to the very obscure. One reader has written a wonderful essay about the nature of the mirroring in The Raw Shark Texts over on the book’s forums (www.rawsharktexts.com/unspace) although lots of spoilers are lurking on those pages too, so do be careful if you’re not a spoiler fan.

There’s not too much else I can say about Scout without unbalancing the book and taking some of the control I hoped to give to readers away again. In an nutshell she’s a pale, pretty smart-ass who spends most of her time underneath buildings.

MC:As is having your hero being chased by a conceptual shark intent on devouring him isn't enough the plot continues to evolve to include other inventive concepts like Unspace and Mycroft Ward. Can you talk a bit more about them?

SH:More mirroring! Mycroft Ward was a Victorian gentleman who perfected a way of replicating his personality in others, but something went very wrong and his personally corrupted with each transfer and now he’s a sort of living identity virus. He never appears personally in the story, Eric never meets him. A couple of reviews thought it was on oversight, that I’d forgotten to include him (!) but it was always very important that we didn’t ever see him personally, some enemies are like that after all.

Unspace is all the nameless places, those areas that are never really used or seen and somehow are not quite one thing or another – the service corridors in shopping complexes or the basements of abandoned factories, for example. You could look at unspace as the unconscious too if you choose too, if you approach it from that direction then there are a few Easter Eggs waiting for you in the story…

MC:Despite all of the wild conceptual ideas in the book I found it to be a powerful love story. How important was it to you to make Eric's love for Clio the central part of the story?

SH:Eric's love for Clio and the loss he feels and suffers when she’s gone is the very heart of the story. We talked above about all the different genres the book shifts in and out of, but at the core The Raw Shark Texts is about love and loss. It’s about a boy who loses a girl and (depending on how you choose to read) never recovers from that or shifts Heaven, Earth and the nature of reality to get her back. Or maybe both.

MC:From the beginning the story unfolds in such a way that I think you could argue that it may only be happening in Eric's mind or that it might actually be real. As the author do you want people to come in on one side or the other?

SH:I want the reader to make those decisions. I tried to set up Raw Shark is such a way as to give the reader as much power and control as possible. I wrote the book with three different readings in mind, all of which function well within the story. The idea was that each reader would find themselves reflected in the story they found themselves reading. Whether you see the ending as happy or sad, for example, hopefully says as much about you as a reader as it does about me as the writer.

The most exiting thing is that it didn’t stop there. In the last year I’ve heard maybe another ten wonderful new readings of the story which have come from readers, some of them amazingly inventive and they all stand up to scrutiny. I’m very happy for each reader to read the book in their own way.

MC:You use text in inventive ways in The Raw Shark Texts. How did you decide what you wanted to try? And how hard of a process was it to figure out what might work in that kind of format?

SH:Something that the book plays with on several levels is the difference between imagining and seeing and I always wanted the Ludovician to be something of a hybrid between the two. Getting the images right was tricky, or rather getting the tone of the images right was. The early sharks I created looked far too graphic-y, too much like illustrations. I wanted the arranged text pictures to feel more closely related to the standard text, almost as if the format were morphing to let the shark though. After some experimentation, I decided that all the images should be made in Word rather than with a drawing or graphics package. I’m happy with the results but the whole thing took a long time, especially the flip-book!

MC:There has been some fairly inventive marketing for the book, from things like your myspace page to the clips found on Youtube featuring Tilda Swinton reading a passage from the book to handycam footage of the Orpheus. How did that come about?

SH:Well, my MySpace page is just my MySpace page! People keep calling it innovative marketing and I think my publishers may have even won a marketing award for it (!) but it’s just my own MySpace page where people can find info on the book, my work and my thoughts. I’m certainly not the first writer to have one! I felt it might be interesting and useful for other upcoming writers to see the process of a book coming through to publication, me dealing with reviews of various kinds and all the other madness that happened, so I blogged about all that stuff. Hopefully it has been useful or interesting to someone!

I wrote a proposal to my publishers suggesting an alternate reality game to promote the book because I thought it was different and interesting and it also kinda suited the nature of the novel. I was surprised and delighted when my publishers went for the idea. We had a few meetings with a very cool ad company who built the game itself (it starts at www.lostenvelope.com). Then my publishers won a marketing award for it (!!). Heh, I don’t mind really, the most important thing was that it created a sort of snowball effect with other international publishers putting up their own ARGs and other interesting Raw Shark content (including the Orpheus myself and the good folks at HarperCollins Canada built for the Canadian launch). I love all that stuff, the incompleteness, the digging, the active readership – it’s all a big part of what Raw Shark is meant to be. I’ve even put sections of the novel online which don’t appear in the printed book and different international editions have different content (the narrator of my next book even cameos in the Greek translation of Raw Shark). It’s a conceptual rabbit hole!

MC:You have also continued telling the story through hiding various missing letters from the first Eric Sanderson and expanding upon fragments, particularly The Aquarium Fragment, across different editions of the book. What's the response been to this? And how much more is still out there for people to find?

SH:The additional fragments are still in production, the idea was for them to keep appearing over time, maybe even over the next ten years or so. Of course, Raw Shark may be very obscure by then but there’s something interesting and exciting (and something very Raw Shark!) about writing additional content for an obscure book! Hopefully though, the fragments will help keep the book fresh and stop even the most serious diggers from ever hitting the bottom. There’s a lot still for people to find, and there’s more to come.

MC:The Raw Shark Texts is currently in preproduction to become a movie. What if anything can you say about that?

SH:Not too much at the moment, I’m afraid. I’m hoping to see the script very soon and I’m very pleased it’s in the hands of FilmFour and Blueprint, but other than that I’ll have to go for the mysterious/slightly annoying ‘no comment’. Sorry!

MC:Rumor has it that you are currently hard at work on your second novel. What can you say about that? When can fans expect to see your next work?

SH:The next novel is due to land in 2010, although there might be something else before that if I can get it up to speed in time. From the beginning I’ve had the idea of an over-arching five book project of which Raw Shark Texts is book one. That’s not to say they’re a series or anything, there isn’t going to be a Raw Shark II or Raw Shark The Revenge but there’s a theme of sorts. It’s pretty exciting to be moving forward with the Bigger Picture…