Author Interview with Rhys Hughes

If you could have a fantasy pet, what would you have and why?

I would choose a squonk. It’s a creature that is generally described as being small and roundish, indigenous to the hemlock forests of Pennsylvania, but I’m not even sure what a hemlock forest is, unless it just means it’s a forest where lots of hemlock grows. I imagined it as a forest where the hemlock plants are so tall they are like trees, but I guess that’s wrong. Squonks weep all the time. They are the saddest lifeforms in the world, and if you capture one in a sack it will dissolve completely into tears. But my wife loves animals of all kinds, and she is very sweet, so I reckon she would cheer it up. Maybe we would end up with the first jolly squonk in history, a squonk that likes to laugh. It’s a nice thought.

What type of music best describes your writing?

Jazz. Because the way I write often involves improvising between certain markers. I don’t plan stories carefully, but I know roughly the direction I want them to go, and there are certain points along the way I try to reach. Sometimes I don’t reach them but go around them, or even go off on tangents, but that doesn’t matter. My method is to attempt to link up all those points, but I am a pantser between those points. Absolutely like certain types of jazz. Not sure exactly what types. Could be trad, could be cool, bebop or fusion, maybe a mix of all the kinds. I played ragtime piano when I was younger and I began to get into looser forms too, but I was never an especially good musician. I do my jazz in my writing instead.

Tell us about your writing office/space and why it’s special to you.

I don’t have any office space at the moment. I am sofa surfing. In fact, I am homeless, but if I say that it sounds more desperate than it is. We lived in a nice apartment in India, but my visa expired so I had to leave the country. The UK is absurdly expensive, and until I get a proper job, I can’t afford an apartment here, so no office space. I write wherever I can and whenever I can, but that isn’t anything new. I can write almost anywhere. I once wrote a novella while hiking in the Sierra Nevada mountains and bivouacking under the stars. I used boulders as a desk and wrote the story longhand. The dream is to have office space again one day, of course. It will be a place where I can leave my notes lying around without worrying about interference. It’s special in that sense. Privacy and non-interference from outside forces.

What is your favorite piece of visual art that has inspired a story or two?

Escher has been a big influence on my work, a formative influence. I first saw one of his pictures when I was about eight years old, in some book or other, and it was ‘Waterfall’, one of his most famous lithographs. The caption under the picture said something like, “Can you tell what isn’t possible here?” and I studied the image for ages, but I couldn’t see anything impossible about it. Eventually I concluded that the plants in the lower left corner were undersea plants and shouldn’t be on land, exposed to the air. It was several days before I suddenly grasped that the waterfall design was the impossibility in question. I was astounded. Writers mostly talk about their literary influences, and I do that too, but Escher has been almost as important to me as any author. I decided that my ambition was to do with my writing something similar to what Escher did with visual art, to play with paradoxes and impossibilities in a pleasingly aesthetic manner.

If you didn’t write full-time what would your day job be? Is writing a hobby for you?

Writing is a full-time job for me at the moment, but it doesn’t earn enough for me to sincerely call it a career. I was an engineer many years ago. I had an interesting life as a consequence because I worked in unusual situations in places that weren’t exactly on anyone’s bucket list in tourism terms. I haven’t been an engineer for a long time. My last proper job was teaching mathematics to undergraduates. Occasionally I will be paid enough money for a story or a novel to keep me going for a few months. But I have a frugal lifestyle. Living in India and Sri Lanka was a lot cheaper than living anywhere in Europe. My writing income almost paid for my daily expenses. Maybe one of my books will break through one day and my writing income will go up as a result but I’m literally not banking on it. On the other hand, I wouldn’t describe my writing as a hobby. It’s more of a compulsion really.

What is your writing schedule and how many words do you write in a sitting?

My target has always been to write 1000 words every day, but it’s very rare that I hit exactly that number. It’s often more than that, often less. I sometimes double that output, even treble it. But there are days when I write nothing. Last year, 2023, was my most productive writing year ever. I wrote 350,000 words of fiction, and that doesn’t include the articles, plays and poems I wrote. I doubt I will ever again have a year as productive as that one. Productivity for its own sake is pointless, of course, but in my case, I really believe in my projects, and I have a lot of projects on the go at the same time. In fact, I am looking forward to slowing down and working on only one thing at any given time. It must be pleasant just to be working on one novel, one story, one play, one essay, instead of being in a whirl of ideas and rushing from one project to another and then back again…

How do you celebrate publishing a new story?

By starting to write a new one. I don’t celebrate my publications. I have a fear of living on past glories. Not that my achievements are glories in an objective sense. I can’t say that. We should be modest. But all the same, I really don’t like thinking about what I have done. The only way I feel happy is by thinking about what I am doing and what I plan to do. I can’t bear even to keep my own books. Not that I am able to keep many books of any kind anyway, as I am constantly moving around and can’t carry too much weight, and I’m unable to read eBooks. I tried hard, I put a kindle app on my phone, but it drove me nuts. I am too wedded to paper books. And yes, a kindle app isn’t the same as a Kindle, but I don’t care. It’s paper books for me or nothing. I have made that resolution. I celebrate my wife’s new publications but not my own. I think that’s fair.

How do you balance your outside life with your writing life?

I don’t. I’m not organized in that sense at all. I write when I can, and I also spend as much time as I can outdoors. I love hiking, mountaineering, and daily exercise is essential to me. I would more happily skip a writing day than an exercise day. I guess some sort of balance happens anyway, but it’s not through conscious choice. It’s just a case of me responding to what urgency compels me at the time, whether to bash out words for a story or stretch my legs on a trek. I am waiting to be reunited with my wife. Bureaucratic rules have kept us apart for four months. In another few months we should be together, fingers crossed. That’s what I’m living for. And in the meantime, I write and hike. I don’t climb dangerous mountains like I did in my youth. I only go up relatively safe ones. The view from the top is often just as good.

Write your eulogy in three sentences.

“He was never really sure what the word ‘eulogy’ meant, and he tended to get it confused with the word ‘epitaph’. He kept looking them up in dictionaries. But he would quickly forget the definitions because they aren’t words he used much…”

What project are you most proud of completing?

The next one. Always the next one. This is the true answer, but I know it’s not an answer that will be looked on with favour by anyone reading this. It seems evasive, perhaps. I used to say that my best novel was The Percolated Stars, and my best short story collection was Tallest Stories, but I don’t know whether I still agree. Maybe I do. I know that I am certainly very pleased with one of my novellas, My Rabbit’s Shadow Looks Like a Hand, simply because it features so many of the things that I really like about writing, I mean concept-play, wordplay, and tricky layouts, also the mix of a speculative fiction backstory with lots of vignettes that are done OuLiPo style, in other words with a mathematical structure, such as stories written following the Fibonacci Sequence, by which I mean that each sentence of the text has a specific number of letters in it determined by the sequence itself. I love games like that.

Do you have any projects you would like to tell your readers about?

All of them. But once again, I’m aware that’s not a very useful answer. So, I am going to say my novel The Wistful Wanderings of Perceval Pitthelm, which is an adventure story set in the early part of the 20th Century, a bit steampunkish but not quite of that genre, magic realist as far as it goes, quirky, whimsical, inventive. But leaning on readers like this feels uncouth. I have a new novel coming out from the same publisher, Growl at the Moon, which is a weird Western. And from the magnificent Elsewhen Press I have a novel called The Devil’s Halo due out, maybe at the end of 2024. That one I’m really looking forward to seeing in print.

Who is your favorite character from any of your stories and why? If you had to choose a popular author to continue writing this character in another book, who would you choose and why?

Now I am going to say something that is probably going to mark me out as a bit eccentric. In any fiction there are only two characters, the author and the reader. The other ‘characters’ aren’t characters, they are just words on a page bundled together and we call them characters as if they are real people, and this convention is so ingrained in our approach as readers that we simply won’t question it. But they aren’t real people. They are facets of the writer’s personality and intentions, and they are interpreted by facets of the reader’s personality and intentions. Thus, my favourite character in all my fiction has to be the reader. I can’t choose the writer as my favourite character because that would be impolite. So, if you happen to be reading any of my stories or my novels, you are my favourite character in them. As for who I would like to take over writing this character, there’s only one answer. Yourself.

Where can your readers find you on social media?

I am on Facebook, and I can be found at https://www.facebook.com/rhysaurus. I am on Bluesky too, but I don’t use it very often. I have very little interest in Instagram or any other social media. I use Goodreads. That’s about it.

Bio:

Rhys Hughes was born in Wales but has lived in many different countries. He began writing at an early age and his first book, Worming the Harpy, was published in 1995. Since that time, he has published more than fifty other books, and his work has been translated into ten languages. He recently completed an ambitious project that involved writing exactly 1000 linked short stories. He is currently working on a novel and several new collections of prose and verse.

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhys_Hughes SFE: https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/hughes_rhys