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Interview with Best Selling humor author Christopher Moore.  Yeah, really ... THE Christopher Moore!  Author of the hilarious books Fool, Lamb, Practical Demon Keeping and other books guaranteed to make you snort with laughter.

I’m here today with best selling author Christopher Moore, who has taken the baton from famous humorists like Kurt Vonnegut and Douglas Adams, and is running with it like there’s a hive of angry bees on his butt.

Moore is being held responsible for busting peoples’ guts with such humor-drenched books as Lamb (The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal),  Bloodsucking Fiends,  A Dirty Job, The Stupidest Angel  and his most recent masterpiece Fool, which is best described as thus on Moore’s website:

“This is a bawdy tale. Herein you will find gratuitous shagging, murder, spanking, maiming, treason, and heretofore unexplored heights of vulgarity and profanity, as well as nontraditional grammar, split infinitives, and the odd wank.”

So here goes …

Me: Hi, Mr. Moore . wait, can I call you Christopher . no, even better, Chris?

Chris: Sure. I usually go by Chris.

Me: Cool.  I don’t want to waste your time asking questions already covered on your website, so if readers want to know about your writing habits, MySpace and all that, they should go to www.chrismoore.com .  And I don’t want to bore you, so I’ve done my best to come up with questions you hopefully haven’t addressed already.  So here goes:

Me: You’ve written about such varied characters . vampires, demons, American Indians, pilots, Christ, marine biologists, fruit bats and even King Lear’s fool.  Why such a variety?

Chris:  I never wanted to write the same book twice. I realize that seems a tad disingenuous now, considering I’ve written three vampire books, but I like to learn new stuff, and by picking new subjects, not only do I challenge myself, but I also get to add variety to my non-writing life. Thing is, you realize pretty early on as a writer that you could spend your entire life in a room making clicky noises on a keyboard. By writing about new subjects, I’m able to get out in the world and see things, learn things.

Me:  Without giving too much away, what would you like to write about that you haven’t written yet?

Chris:  I’m writing about 18th century French painters right now. I’m not sure what I’ll do next. I’m always open to new stuff.

Me:  As far as the location of where your stories take place, how much does writing off expenses to visit exotic locations come into play?

Chris:  It doesn’t really come into play at all in what I decide to write. Usually time is the bigger consideration. By that, I mean, if I were going to write a book about killer whales, for instance, and I wanted to include some of the guys who work in Antarctica, I’d have to wait until our winter to go down there, which means I’d have to plan at least six months in advance. Similarly, if I want to set a book in Venice, researching in the winter would be a nightmare. It’s nice to know I can write off research expenses, but it’s not a motivator. I’m pretty frugal when I travel.

Me:  What’s all this about sumi-e ink painting and where can we see samples of your stuff?

Chris:  I’m out of practice. I’ve been painting with oils and watercolors lately as background for this new book. I really suck at it, which is fine. I don’t need to be good, I just need to have some idea of what it is to push color around. I suppose at some point, if I feel like my stuff is good enough to share, I’ll post it on line. Right now, there’s no need to do that to people.

Me:  Does your writing come out funny right away, or do you have to work at it, re-write it, and add the funniness later?

Chris:  I usually get the ideas for the funny parts well in advance of actually writing the scene. The more character-driven stuff, in dialogue, often comes when I’m writing the scene. Very, very little comedy comes in after the first draft. Almost none.

Me: What’s the best thing about writing humor and what advice can you give?

Chris: The best thing is that when it works, you’re pretty sure you know it works. The best advice I can give it don’t do it. If it doesn’t come naturally to you, if you don’t react to the world in a funny way by default, you can’t craft it. You can’t make it happen in 11 drafts. You can polish comic timing, moving a word here or there to make the line funnier on the page, but you can’t pound something into shape to make it funny, which is not true of non-comedic writing. In workshops I’ve heard just miserable first drafts that turned out to be pretty good dramatic fiction after some working, but the humorous stuff worked right for the get go or it didn’t.

Me: I heard that one of your fans had one of your book covers tattooed onto her leg and you autographed under the tattoo at an author event.  Afterwards, she had the signature tattooed on permanently. Is this the most fanatic thing you’ve run across?

Chris: I’ve actually had that happen a couple of times. There are quite a few people with Lamb tatoos, that I know of. That may be the first where someone had my signature tatooed. I’ve been asked to sign breasts and whatnot and I always decline. My handwriting goes to hell when I’m staring unfettered cleavage in eye.

Me: If not humor, what other genre would you like to write?

Chris: I don’t really have a choice. I mean, I didn’t decide to write humor, I decided to write horror stories, but when I read my stories in workshops people laughed at them, so I went with that. I suppose I’d write horror or magic realism if I my stuff wasn’t funny.

Me:  Do you ever hang with other humorists like Carl Hiaasen or Dave Barry?  And if so, which of you is the most likely to bring a Whoopie-Cushion?

Chris:  I’ve met those guys, but I don’t hang out with them. I like both of them, but they’re in South Florida and I’m in San Francisco.  I don’t really hang out with other writers much at all. I see Lemony Snicket a couple of times a year.  He’s very funny in a dark and snarky kind of way. Lately I’ve been meeting a number of stand-up comedians through a friend who lives up the block from me. She’s sort of dialed into that community. So far they’ve been great people, very warm and not at all like the bitchy, frat-boy bullshit you see in the “behind the scenes” videos. I’ve met Lewis Black, Taylor Negron, Don Novello (Father Guido Sarduci) and Paula Poundstone, and all of them couldn’t have been nicer.

Me: Do you ever crack yourself up while writing?

Chris:  Yes. Sometimes the character-based stuff will seem to come out of the blue and really crack me up. It’s a bit like method acting, I’d guess. You’re writing a character and coming from their point of view and suddenly they say something that you’d never say, but is completely in character for them. Abby Normal and Jared Whitewolf from my books You Suck and Bite Me do that a lot, since they’re both Gothy teenagers, which is not a world I inhabit, and they’re much, much more jaded than I am now, let alone when I was 16.

Me:  When you Google the name ‘Christopher Moore’, there is one site that says “Christopher Moore studies touch perception, with an emphasis on brain dynamics and how they shape what we feel.”  Can we assume they are talking about another Christopher Moore or are you moonlighting as a behavioral scientist?

Chris: Christopher Moore is like the fourth most common name in the Anglo world. There are no fewer than six Christopher Moores that I know of who are published authors.

Me: Your Tweets are hilarious.  Are you in fear of turning into a bird?

Chris: Twittering is an interesting way to throw funny stuff out there that doesn’t fit into the context of a book. I haven’t been blogging as much since I started twittering, and I’m wondering if the tradeoff is worth it. We’ll see. It’s fun to be sort of a wise-ass just throwing stuff out there from the back of the class, so I’ll keep doing it until it interferes with my work.

Me:  When you get a funny idea, how do you keep from forgetting it before you can put it on paper?

Chris: Well, I write it down somewhere if I can. Otherwise I do forget stuff.  I’ve become pretty merciless about stopping in the middle of a conversation and saying, “Wait, I have to write something down.” People either get used to it or they don’t. It’s what I do. When I was swimming laps for fitness, which I used to do an hour a day, I used to keep waterproof paper and a pen at the end of my lane with a towel, so if I had and idea while swimming I could writing it down before I forgot it. (I found out about the waterproof paper and ink when I was working on Fluke, my whale book. Marine biologists use it in the field all the time.)

Me: What’s next for Christopher Moore?

Chris:  Well, as I type this, I’m in Paris, living for two months while I research the next book. I think I’ll have some bread and cheese in a minute, then maybe another cup of coffee. I’m a rebel that way.

Me:  Thank you for taking the time to show more of the amazing Christopher Moore world to your fans.

More Me:  Chris Moore’s stuff is legend!  If you haven’t read it, get yourself to the book store and buy one of his books!  Or go to his website http://chrismoore.com
On visit him on Myspace at:  http://www.myspace.com/theauthorguy
Or on Facebook at:  http://en-gb.facebook.com/pages/Christopher-Moore/14930560066
On Twitter at:  twitter.com/TheAuthorGuy

Seriously, go right now.
(Are you gone yet?  No?  Scadaddle!)

Norm Cowie
(oh, and my own new vampire humor book, Fang Face is out.  Yeah!  Check it out at http://fangface.homestead.com )