camwyn | Interview from alemya

1. What about your work fulfills you the most?

The parts where I get to do stuff directly related to the Red Cross mission. Going out on disaster calls, even if all I'm doing is filling out forms so that someone who's been burned out of their home can get assistance, is working with people who desperately need help that very few people can give. I know that the computer work I do is also stuff that very few people can give, but it just doesn't have the same kick.

2. If you had to choose an author to write the story of your life, who would it be?

Josepha Sherman, most likely; I very much admired her style on the Prince of the Sidhe novels. I haven't read much else of her work, but she's covered a number of genres and the other samples I've read have been really good regardless of the series or form she's working in. Besides, Terry Pratchett's too busy - and I mean Pratchett as he is when he writes things like Night Watch.

3. Where is the place you go to when you close your eyes and dream?

Too many different places to mention, but there is one place that now and again seems to crop up in my dreams. It has something of the look of a corporate campus, a great sprawling building in the middle of a greater green field, all glass and brick cut into the hillside. Inside it looks as if one might find a pharmaceutical company, or a maker of veterinary medicines - it has borrowed much of its imagery from my time temping at American Home Products. But that is all it has borrowed from them, because once I am inside it is larger by a thousand times than any corporate campus has ever been, and infinitely more strange. There are high-speed monorails within the building, running every few hours for the sole purpose of taking people from one end of the building to the other - there are that many rooms, dug into the hill and extending far away into the underground places. There are rooms where one may be issued a magic wand capable of everything in Harry Potter and more, where one might find flying brooms and artifact swords even in the hands of men with ties and briefcases and appointments to keep. There are libraries of strange media, containing as many answers as one might ever wish to find, if one can only get off the train at the right stop. There is even a part of the building that extends somehow under water, where for ten dollars one may ride a crystal submarine through the just-barely-sunlit depths.

The building is not easily visible to outsiders, because one must turn down a road and drive past other properties to get to the edge of their green lot. I believe I have seen its far side before, in a dream I had in college after giving up on normal and peaceful. The other end of the building extends out of hills so big as to be the beginnings of the Catskill Mountains, hanging out over a vast valley in terraces and balconies so fantastic as to make Howard Roarke the Ayn Rand architect cry. I do not know what exactly the building is, how long it has been there, any of it; but it is there, and I have been there once or twice, and expect to be there again.

I realize that is probably not what you meant by 'close your eyes and dream', but given the nature of psychoanalysis I expect that one could reasonably equate the Omega Building (the only name I have ever seen on any of this building's surfaces or properties, and even then only once) with the hidden places and expectations of my own mind, and so I imagine it is close enough to the shape of my waking imagination as makes no never mind.

4. For one year, you have the chance to go live the life of one of your characters. Who would it be and why?

You haven't met the one I'd choose, because he's to be the lead character in the hard SF series I'm working on with an offline friend. His name is Ira Dayan, and he's an engineer from a future version of Nanaimo, British Columbia. He founded the Guild of Asteroid Miners, Astro-Engineers, and Allied Trades in the early-to-mid twenty-first century, then joined one of the early Terran colony expeditions in the hopes of making a significant contribution to the future of humanity and protecting the rights of the skilled, educated worker. When it became clear that the colony was going to be co-opted by a sizable contingent of people with significantly different ideas about who ought to be in charge, he led the Miners' Guild in their resistance to the would-be world rulers. Aside from all the stuff he did socially, I'd like to see the world involved, since so far I've only described it and populated it with some thoroughly bizarre lifeforms. Having his life for a year would allow that, and would be really cool in terms of doing Things Worth Doing.

5. Would you rather live without any access at all to a computer or lose one of your senses?

Oh, hell, that's easy. Send the computer away. I'll be cranky about it, but the first time I missed the presence of cow manure underfoot, failed to notice the taste of really good ice cream, or couldn't tell the difference between acrylic and cotton yarn by touch, I'd be wondering why the hell a computer was supposed to compensate for that. Don't even joke about vision or hearing.