Interview with an Author - Gregory L. Norris
Gregory L. Norris is first up in our new series - Interview with an Author. Enjoy!
What’s your background, what compelled you to start writing?
Gregory: I grew up on a healthy diet of creature double features and classic SF TV. When I was ten, sitting in the living room of the enchanted cottage where I lived the first thirteen years of my life, I was captivated by Gerry Anderson’s Space:1999 and picked up my pen the very next day. I wrote off and on in my early teens—every one of those stories, to this day, are archived in my filing cabinets. But the summer I turned fifteen, a series of wonderful events showed me the much bigger universe to be explored through a literary life. I was, out of boredom, writing what would be my first novel involving friends as the main characters. One of my friends held onto every word, eager to know what his character had done. He went away for three weeks to summer camp and came back on the night I was wrapping that first longhand draft. He invited me to sleep over at his house and harassed me—in a great way—to reach the end. I did and experienced a rush of emotion unlike anything I’d ever felt before. It was like my entire body had transformed into spindles of light. After reading him the end of the novel, I uncapped my pen and started writing another story. One month later, I saw the movie Xanadu with Olivia Newton-John as a muse who grants a man his deepest creative dream. I walked out of the theater on that balmy August night beneath the largest, most beautiful full moon I have ever seen and declared to my friends, “I’m going to be a writer!” More than forty years later, I have lived a very happy literary life, the only life I ever wanted. I have a very generous and demanding muse and have written some 1,657 completed short stories, novellas, novels, tele- and screenplays as of this moment.
What’s are your top three books? Bizarro, or otherwise.
Gregory: My favorite novel of all time is The Janus Demon by Roxanne Dent, a fantastic supernatural mystery/adventure by the writer I want to be when I grow up. I also love the collected work of Poe. My third favorite would have to be Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg, a writing manual I read at least twice a year. And to toss a fourth into the mix, The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. Such a great novel!
If you could tell your younger writing self anything, what would it be?
Gregory: I would love to travel back to the beginning and share some of the incredible adventures I’ve had with him—that I would meet and interview all of our childhood TV icons writing for magazines, that I would stand on the set of Star Trek: Voyager, that I would write the novelizations of Gerry Anderson’s classic made-for-TV NBC movie, Into Infinity: The Day After Tomorrow, for Anderson Entertainment—which I watched when I was eleven in that enchanted cottage and loved. But if I did, he’d die of a heart attack and then…paradox.
What sparked the idea for your latest book?
Gregory: I was reading Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and the previous owner of the book had dog-eared the pages, something that drives me batty. So every fourth or fifth page, I was un=creasing them. KABOOM! Lightning bolt from Mount Helicon. So in May I’m writing a novel called The Ghostly Reader about someone cracking open a used book and finding messages left by the previous reader that lead the current into a supernatural mystery—and mortal danger.
Do you hide any secrets in your books that only a few people will find?
Gregory: Not so much hiding as layering. I’ve written a series of SF novellas set on a giant space station called Heliopolis, the City of the Sun, in orbit around Mercury, and some of the readers have found clues about past or future revelations. Heliopolis has a destiny that is only now being revealed in the sixth and final novella, “Sunset,” my present work-in-progress.
What’s brewing? What projects are you working on?
Gregory: I wrote a hilarious, soapy paranormal called Desperate Housewolves that is being released by the fine folks at Van Velzer Press in September 2023 and was asked to pen a long short story or short novella sequel to run as a bonus at the back of the novel, so I’m about to begin Desperate Housewolves: “The Coming of Going” about a mysterious character that shows up on the last page of the novel. I’m presently penning that last Heliopolis adventure. I’ve got sixteen projects, most of which are howling at me in the night and nipping at my ankles for attention like rabid Yorkshire terriers.
As a writer, what would you choose as your mascot?
Gregory: I’m a cat person. I think the Egyptians had it right when they worshipped them as divine. So most definitely a cat. A big calico cat like the one passed out on the rug beside my chair as we speak. She’s the most loyal cat, my Daisy—and she has no problem whatsoever with having every one of her needs attended to and being treated like the Egyptian deity that she is.
And, lastly;
What advice would you give for any aspiring bizarro authors?
Gregory: Trust in your own vision. Just when you think it’s gotten too bizarre, it’s time to ramp it up just one notch more. Don’t think outside the box…don’t believe in the box to begin with. Love every stage of the process and live a fulfilled literary life.
Gregory L. Norris' book, A Quaint New England Town, was published through Planet Bizarro Press in 2022.
