The View From the Shoe 1: D J Young

Today sees the first of a new weekly column I’m going to run in honour of all the wonderful creative people out there in cyberspace.
The View From the Shoe is an interview feature designed to get under the skin – and over the socks – of some of the most talented people on the Web and, I have no doubt, in the flesh. I hope it gives an insight not just into the creative mind as a whole, but into the creative juices of these very special individuals. Read all about them, and please, whatever it is they do, go and check it out for yourselves. As the slogan for Free-e-day will encourage you – discover something amazing today.

Just a quick note before we begin. The format for this week is slightly different. The Year Zero column will be on Wednesday. For the very good reason that on Wednesday Year Zero Writers will be launching Brief Objects of Beauty and Despair, the free anthology of some of the very best independent writing in the world. So from now, I will run The View From the Shoe on Mondays, and the Year Zero columns on Wednesday and Friday.

Without further ado, this is the View From the Shoe on DJ Young

DJ is a writer, blogger, essayist, logophile and long-time short story addict at work on first novel. I discovered DJ on twitter:@dijeratic from where I migrated to her fantastic blog: http://www.dijeratic.wordpress.com

Thank you so much, DJ, for agreeing to be the first lab rat for the new column.

Thank you so much for your time. So, Louboutin or Converse?
I have only worn Converse, and that was in school, but I must admit to being a bit of a Strange Person who enjoys going around in bare feet. I understand it comes from the hobbit side of the family. I do, however, keep any unsightly bits well groomed.

Why is there no one in the world who does it quite like you?
I doubt there are many for whom the wasting of an entire day re-writing the same sentence over and over holds much interest. Or maybe there are. Somehow, I do not feel alone. In fact, I am certain there are many who do it far, far better than I. Not as slowly, of course, but still.

What do you really, really love about it?
When I write I completely obsess over the inner life of the work itself – the characters, their ideas, their world and there is something so tortuous yet satisfying about it. It is the same with reading someone else’s work, or listening to certain pieces of music – Bach, for example – and there is this mazelike quality to it that I love being lost in.

A bit more time in the day, or a bit more money in the bank?
Oh both please – but time (if such a thing really exists – we know money doesn’t) would be very welcome.

Imagine you “make it”. You wake up, and imagine the day ahead. Tell us about breakfast.
If I even have an appetite for food at that point – I’m sure I’d be enjoying my usual poached eggs and toast – in Australia, perhaps.

What’s your Jimmy Choo? And what’s just cobblers?
I have no Jimmy Choo fantasies – my footwear is hopelessly casual and out-dated. Where I come from though, a cobbler is either a type of pie or someone who fixes your shoes. If we’re speaking of the former, I enjoy a blueberry cobber in the summer, very refreshing - and if I need someone to mend my shoes, well, let’s just say it is very sad.

Tell us about the last time a fan made you feel 100 feet tall.
This isn’t really from a ‘fan’ as such, but I did have someone tell me once that if I ever did become ‘really famous’ she would save all my emails and letters and transcripts of our chats so she could auction them off one day. Now that I think about it, I’m sure I was more scared than anything else.

Independent and poor, or under contract and rich?
Rich is a state of mind and experience and contracts are for Faustian types. That said, being poor has its drawbacks, so if I could possibly remain independent while under contract, I would feel very rich indeed.

Do you remember that bit on Play Away where Brian Cant stood behind people and did the actions whilst they spoke? If you could choose anyone to stand behind you and do the actions to your sales pitch, who would it be and why?
Neil Gaiman would be lovely – but only if he could do the actual speaking since he is impossible not to listen to.

Frocks or socks?
Socks, but only in winter. Can’t stand the chafing.

Once again, thank you

Year Zero has a Website!!

Warning: this post was composed at midnight after a heavy Beethoven session. May contain banality!!

www.yearzerowriters.wordpress.com It’s 2 days in and we’ve had 176 hits so far. Now there’s a Bridget Jones type thing to keep you updated on! And we’ve had some lovely comments for which a huge thank you!

Some of our writers have started posting their profiles there already, including Oli Johns, whose Benny Platonov is one of the first books to be released, on September 1st. It’s still right at the nascent stages so be patient. But you’ll start to get a feel for who each of us is and how we write.

Every writer needs a website. So does every writers’ collective. We knew that. We also knew it had to be a free one. But that was about it.

So why Wordpress? Well, I won’t say we’re done with thinking this through, but let me give you a little insight into where we are so far.

We’ve been hatching our plots for quite some time now. Since January, in fact, when we first decided 2009 was the year we should give it a shot, and do the very best job we cold of the collective lark. We’ve been doing it on a [secret] Facebook group, with Sarah’s bra as our rallying logo. Secret Facebook groups are great for hatching plots. It’s a social networking site so it suits cabalistic connivances. We’ve been able to do things like hold a 24 hour marketing brainstorm session across gazillions of timezones, which generated 118 posts.

But Facebook’s not really ideal as a website with all the copyright stuff. We have a Ning site (www.yearzero.ning.com), with some amazing graphics thanks to our techie genius Garalt, which is super. Ning’s a fantabulous whizzy do it yourself social networking site. So you can have your own groups without any of the copyright problems. Do come and join ours and see how you like the site! The problem with it is there’s no central area where we can say this is who we are and this is what we do. No real structure at all. Social networks are great for interacting, and we all want to do lots of interacting with our readers. But we also want somewhere that’s nicely structured where our readers can have a look and see who we are, what we do, and who writes what.

Wordpress seems to tick all the boxes. Or it did when I set it up, but as soon as I’d done that Sarah messaged me to say I should’ve used blogger because she’s a whiz at doing themy things with html on it! What Wordpress does let you do is structure the site. The first thing we needed was an orderly way to display the profiles and work of the 13 of us who’ve put work into our sampler, which we’ll be launching on July 1st. Wordpress lets us create a profiles section with 13 sub-sections, all of which can be further subdivided (it’s administrator’s heaven!!)

So that’s how we arrived where we are. We have a central site, with which we are very happy, and which we can stuff with cool content until it’s positively bursting with goodies. From there people can find each of our footprints, that roam far and wide across the web, sucking people unwittingly into that one central honeypot.

At some point I’ll go over how we all use our other virtual bits and bobs. I’m a huge fan of twitter, for example, and have found it a wonderful place to meet other people who love books and the whole indie scene. Sarah, on the other hand, because she’s dead good with images, uses deviantart. We all have blogger accounts, and I can’t be the only one who’s got a YouTube channel (agnieszkasshoes), whilst Octavia is ahead of the game and puts her books up on textnovel. All of this is well worth a who does what and why blog at some point. But right now the alarm’s due to go off in 5 hours and I haven’t had my bath yet.


Tomorrow: all about Free-e-day, the biggest FREE celebration of independent creativity ever seen.