JAL Q&A stream transcript (2021-01-13)

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Siggdalos
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JAL Q&A stream transcript (2021-01-13)

Post by Siggdalos » Tue Jan 19, 2021 11:47 pm

On January 13, John hosted a live stream on the Instagram page his publisher keeps for him, to talk about The Kindness and answer fan questions (both ones sent in in advance and ones asked during the stream) from inside the little shed where he's written almost all of his works. Though he admitted that he was completely unused to the format (and the video was flipped on its side), it ended up being a pretty fun and informative stream. Below I've translated and summarized all the bits I thought would be of interest to international fans. I left out the parts that would only make sense or be relevant to Swedes.

Time stamps and questions are in bold, John's answers in italics. Note that there are parts where he talked about a subject without reading a specific question out loud, so those will just be in italics. I've included Wikipedia links or explanatory footnotes at the end of the post for things that I think might need extra clarification.

0:08:20 Despite being John's biggest writing project yet in terms of page count, The Kindness was relatively easy to write, since he wrote large parts of it on Cuba where he can reach a tempo of 10-14 pages a day when he's really in the flow. John thinks the fact that I Always Find You was nominated for the August Prize might have caused him to get overly "literary" ambitions, so with The Kindness he wanted to write a book in the same way he wrote LTROI: by just putting the story on paper and letting it flow out of him (though he still plans out the story a few pages ahead and has quality control in the form of his wife listening to and commenting on what he's written every evening). When he started getting a feeling for what kind of story it was, he jokingly told his publisher that the book was going to become a best seller and receive the August Prize, so those were the premises under which he worked on it. The first scene of the prologue was written around a year before the rest of the book.

0:15:50 Which one of your books is your personal favorite?
Up until now I've said Little Star, because I'm happy that I dared and managed to make that story as consistently dark as it is, but my current favorite is The Kindness. It's the first time in a long while that I can say that. I'm extremely fond of this tale. The themes, the characterization, the story. It's my favorite.

0:17:18
There was someone who asked earlier, a pretty fun question, about the color yellow, which is so prominent in H.P. Lovecraft's universe, The King in Yellow among others, where it symbolizes madness and contact with things the human mind can't comprehend... I don't know. Early on I got the image of this bright yellow container standing in the harbor. I've read my Lovecraft, so it's entirely possible that it was on some level influenced by Lovecraft, but it wasn't intentional.

0:18:30 Which one of your characters would you most like to have a drink with?
Not Bröderna Djup at least, I can tell you that much.

0:18:55
Someone would like to see Little Star as a film. So would I, and that might happen because... maybe I'm getting careless, but this isn't particularly public. Thea Hvistendahl, the Norwegian director who's going to be making Handling the Undead, originally wanted to do Little Star. That's the one she's most attached to, but at the time it was being made into a TV series for HBO. We worked on it for a year, it was a ton of work, and in the end, after revision number 17 on some episodes—it was 4 x 1 hour—they pulled out. So if Handling the Undead turns out good and Thea wants to, she may end up doing Little Star. Super talented young female director, who I'm sure is going to do something awesome with Handling the Undead. She has a completely unique visual style.

0:19:50 When do we get a new film or theater adaptation of one of your works?
If everything goes as planned—fingers crossed, knock on wood—it'll be Handling the Undead, which was supposed to start being filmed in August this year. Then we'll have to see how that turns out, with the Batman illness[1] and everything.

0:20:18 Someone likes that I reference Håkan Hellström in The Kindness. That was not one of the earliest things I came up with, but when I understood what kind of story it was... I'm a big Håkan Hellström fan. It was a fun challenge. I listened through everything that Håkan has done and just wrote down all the lines that could make for good chapter titles. I had decided that Siw, one of the book's main characters, was going to be a Håkan Hellström fan. And then it was just fun to see which chapters could fit with a Håkan Hellström title. He and I communicated a bit, and he's read the book and really likes it, so, so far so good when it comes to that.

0:21:55 Who is your favorite character in your books?
I think... Theres in Little Star, and Johan in The Kindness. For those who have read it, Johan was supposed to just be a side character, a sidekick to Max, then he just grew and grew and grew and it became more and more important to me to make a believable, truthful, emotional depiction of this very bitter, angry guy who sympathizes with the Sweden Democrats, among other things. I also like Alva in The Kindness, she's so darn funny.

0:23:00
The Kindness was unusual among my books in that it began with the characters. I've already told this story in a couple forums, but I'll tell it again. I got the very first impulse for this book around 10-12 years ago when I was driving around not Norrtälje but Thorildsplan, where there used to be a minigolf course. During a very warm summer day, me and my wife passed the area and I saw three guys around the age of 25 who were playing minigolf by themselves under this scorching hot sun. They looked a bit... they weren't super rich, they hadn't had much luck with their dreams in life, I don't know, their clothes were a little shabby, but they stood there chatting, joking, commenting on each other's shots, and were close to each other. And I looked to them and said to myself: "They don't have it so bad. It works. They have each other." And then another time when I was at the gym, back when you could still go to the gym, I saw two very overweight young women with black hair who used each of the machines in pairs and helped and encouraged each other: "Come on! You'll manage it! Wow, you've gotten so strong!" And that also gave me a feeling of: "They have it good. They'll manage." So I had those three guys and those two girls and thought that at some point I was going to bring them together and see what kind of story that'd make. Then I also had a separate idea—I have so many ideas—of a person who can know that something dramatic and probably violent is going to happen in a specific location, but she doesn't know if it's going to happen in 5 minutes, in two days, or if it happened yesterday. She only knows that the location has this aura. And then on the other hand, a person who gets mentally connected to an event, only 10-30 seconds before it happens. "Something horrible is going to happen in a few moments." If you brought those two abilities together, what would those two become together? And so that's Siw and Max, this book's romantic couple.

0:26:15
Now I'm going to do something as horrible as smoking a cig. Maybe that's not allowed... There might be children watching. Actually, I hope not! [laughs] I think it's so strange... A few times at book signings there have been parents who have come up to me with an 11-year-old who's a little shy and wants a book signed, and I go:
"But should you really read this?"
"I've read all of your books!"
"... oh." [laughs] What am I supposed to tell the parent? I think my books should have an age limit of at least 12. Maybe not
The Kindness... no, actually, there are nasty things in this one too.

0:27:15 Why Norrtälje of all places?
I mean, I live here. Or rather, a small village a bit outside Norrtälje, not in central Norrtälje. Norrtälje is simply one of the towns I know best, where me and my wife go on our pokénades and where I know what things look like. I mean, why would I write about Säffle when I don't know what Säffle looks like? Norrtälje is a good town in the sense that it's such a small area. People don't need to take the bike or the bus, they just walk through the entire town. You could do a tour of central Norrtälje in... 45 minutes, and then you've seen most of what there is to see.

0:28:15
Someone asked about the importance of music in my writing and if there's any single song that's important to the book. Well, I have two songs by Håkan Hellström, Jag vet inte vem jag är men jag vet att jag är din and Du är snart där which... I'm sure I've listened to them either way since I tend to listen to them every now and then. But there's no specific song for this book, the way that Harbour had Lifelines by A-ha. There's no specific song in that sense. It's a very reasonable question since I often have some specific song I use as a theme in my stories and which I have running in the background since I know that the story should feel like that song.

0:29:30 What's the most difficult part of writing for you?
I suppose it's getting started and getting over this impossible threshold: the blinking cursor, the white surface. I'm supposed to fill this surface with some kind of content that can be meaningful for other people to read. Who the hell do I think I am? I'll just write a sentence and then we'll see. And when I've written maybe three quarters of a page and have gotten into it, it starts to get rolling and I can write maybe 3-4 pages in an hour when it's at its best. It's like stage fright. You're terrified before going on stage, but once you're standing there and talking in front of the audience it just works. "Write fright."

0:30:25 What's the worst part about writing?
There's actually nothing bad about writing. I can really recommend it. I can't say there's anything bad about it. It's a fantastic job and a privilege to get to make up stories for a living.

0:32:15 Is The Kindness a kind of spiritual successor to Little Star, with the lack of kind deeds etc.?
No, I can't say that. The connection is Norrtälje and Bröderna Djup, whom I made up for Little Star. These criminal old guys, Ewert and Albert, who take people for a little ride if they don't do as they say. So no, The Kindness is not a sequel to Little Star. It's also a much friendlier book than Little Star. For those who haven't read it, Little Star is one heck of a depressing story, but I'm very fond of it.

0:32:55 How does recording an audiobook work?
The way it works is that Ordfront sends me equipment and then I get some help with putting it together in our bedroom wardrobe, where we of course have a lot of clothes. I squeeze a couple pillows into the window and put one of these inflatable sleeping pads in front of the door to make it soundproof. And then I sit there, cooped up in the tiny space, read the book, and gradually send audio files to the person who'll be doing the editing. In this case it was Love Antell, and the book is also dedicated to him and his beloved Jenny, for good reasons.

0:33:55 Do you have any plans to write more about Sulky and Bebbe[2] or other children's books?
No, not currently, but I've finished writing a completely different type of book called Alternativa fakta om fåglar ("Alternate facts about birds"). My wife is currently making the watercolor illustrations for it. It's just my loose humorous fantasies about Swedish birds that I present as if they're new scientific discoveries.

0:40:30 Which authors inspire you?
Stephen King. I've read an immense amount of what he's written, but not all of it. I think he's gotten a bit worse the last few years, but I think the Bill Hodges trilogy is an excellent return to form. I've read an immense amount of his stuff since the time I was 11, 12, 13 years old and onward, the time when the brain is still flexible, so I'm sure he's imprinted some kind of patterns in me regarding what books should look like, what horror is, and how a story is structured. It's not something I do consciously, other than that I insert quick thoughts written in italics. That's something I've taken straight from him. I think I'm more inspired by Clive Barker, who has a slightly more literary prose and more existential ambitions. His characters don't just have to fight monsters, they also have their own demons to fight which are often of an existential nature. Plus that he has such rad ideas about how people's anguish, ennui, emptiness is expressed through monsters or that they're offered an opportunity from the other side, like in The Hellbound Heart. That specific idea, that people in an existentially challenging stage of their life are offered an opportunity to get out of it through supernatural means that might have a very high price... that's very Clive Barker and I think that sits in my head as well. I'm also very fond of Samuel Beckett, for example, and Thomas Ligotti, whom I've discovered in the past few years after True Detective. I can really recommend The Conspiracy Against the Human Race.

0:43:00 Do you get frightened by what you write?
Oh yes, it happens. Primarily I can get very worked up. Especially on Cuba where it's very warm, when I write these very intense scenes, I start sweating a terrible amount. I often have to sit there and write without a shirt and frequently wipe my armpits. Pretty, isn't it? But yes, I can get very worked up. Especially when I wrote a new short story titled She which I finished a few weeks ago and which is a very classic and pretty brutal ghost story. It's pretty windy where we live around this time of year, and there was a rustling noise on our yard that made me jump, just because I had gotten so into the story's atmosphere. So I can really put myself in an atmosphere that can make me frightened while writing.

0:44:05 Do you play Pokémon Go and Zelda yourself?[3]
Of course! Me and my wife play Pokémon Go together on her phone. We take turns. She's the one who does most of the walking between us, so she does most of the egg-hatching and collects some Pokémon, but we also go on walks together. We've especially played it a lot the past few evenings. And Zelda, yes, absolutely. I'm ashamed to admit that I haven't played Ocarina of Time nor Majora's Mask, but I've played all the ones after that. I really liked Breath of the Wild, but my favorite is probably Skyward Sword, which might be a controversial opinion, I don't know.

0:45:10
There's someone here who watched my play De obehöriga and really liked it. Yes, it was fun, wasn't it? It really came about in collaboration with the director Anna Takanen and the ensemble. We pitched ideas back and forth, I tested, rewrote, and primarily talked with Anna but also with the ensemble to create that play, so it was super fun, among the most fun things I've done in my writing career. That, and the time when me and Tomas Alfredson worked on the screenplay for The Brothers Lionheart. Sadly, it didn't result in a film, but we worked on it for a long time and had a lot of fun.

0:46:25 Is there any one of your stories you would NOT want to see adapted into a film?
I suppose some of them would be very hard to film, but I mean, if a director shows up with a good idea or vision for what's possible to do with a story, I suppose anything's doable. So no, I can't say there are any cases where I'd go "Ugh, not that one". I know what my son would say, but I've never published that one after it was printed in a newspaper one time. It was called Ett fall i vila, and it wasn't any good. Wasn't any good.[4]

0:47:13 Will Handling the Undead take place in Stockholm or Oslo?
Probably Oslo, it looks like.

0:48:10 How do you start building characters?
Well... like I said, in the case of The Kindness, the characters were there from the start. But Siw's daughter Alva, for example, came as a surprise. I didn't even know she had a daughter until I wrote the scene where Siw comes home and I had the idea of a little girl struggling with the key when opening the door. That made me decide that Siw had a daughter, which led to a VERY long subplot revolving around who Alva's father is, and then Alva herself became a really funny character. Marko's sister Maria wasn't planned from the start either. It's very different from case to case. Some characters come into being as a necessity of the story. "I want the story to be like this, so I need this kind of character." For example, in my latest novel I Am the Tiger, you have on one hand Tommy T, who popped up complete and good to go in my head with his dog and everything, while his nephew Linus was a case of me deciding I wanted to have a young guy who would get involved in the criminal business and planned out his character based on that. So it's very varied. I don't have a simple answer to how my characters come into being.

0:50:10 Have you ever gotten criticism for the disgusting?
No, not really. Maybe the odd time in some review where someone objects "He might have gone a bit far this time". But I've now written my cozy novel, but I've also written an 80-page novella called The Pigs, which is completely disgusting and is about how the dansband Tropicos' tour bus gets hijacked by two inbred pig farmers who have very eccentric plans for what's going to happen with Tropicos. Plus The Value, the book I'm currently working on, which is just extremely violent and brutal in its graphic descriptions of everything. I don't know why. I get the ideas and then I have to take them to their end to see if I manage to do it. I'm hoping we can release them together as a book called The Pigs and the Value. That's a good title. I want it to look like something published by the Swedish Academy, very classic and formal, and then a big colored sticker: "Sensitive readers beware!" But I have no idea when that'll happen.

0:51:40 Which is your unfavorite character?
Which character I like the least? I mean... That's tricky. I can't say there's any character I dislike in that sense, since I always try to depict my characters with some sense of empathy so you can feel for them even when they're at their most disturbing, like Håkan in Let the Right One In, for example. But I suppose there's one character I didn't give much empathy and who I think is really creepy, and that's Max Hansen in Little Star, but even he has his weaknesses and vulnerabilities. But... nah, he's not a great person. An old guy in the music industry who pursues and manipulates young girls. Of course, it doesn't end well for him. I think it's one of the more brutal deaths I've written.

0:52:50 I need more Live! We have a lot of questions!
Yes, that's pretty apparent. [laughs] I'm doing my best. We'll do another one of these in a year or the next time I release a book or something.

0:53:15 Do you dislike being called "Sweden's Stephen King"?
No, it's totally fine. I think Stephen King has written so much good stuff. I think it's a bit of a tired comparison, but so what? I dig Stephen King. Like I've said somewhere... On the topic of boasting... Anyone who's interested in me knows this, but I'm bringing it up anyway just to show what a shabby person I am on one level. Stephen King said something about me, and I enlarged it, printed it out, and put it in a little frame I keep next to my desk. It's the time Stephen King was asked if he reads translated fiction and he mentioned "... and of course the wonderful John Ajvide Lindqvist". That's rad.

0:54:20 What are you currently reading?
Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy, Elena Ferrante's The Lying Life of Adults, and Niccolò Ammaniti's Io non ho paura because I'm learning Italian. The latter is a pretty easy-to-read book, but very good.

0:57:50
Someone says that the music in I Always Find You was wonderful. I listen almost... It's a very long story, but I'm currently writing yet another novel—a crime novel, actually—where one of the main characters looks like one of these grim heavy metal guys. Long, black hair and extreme self-harm behavior from his youth so his body is covered in scars, and the only thing he listens to is Svensktoppen music since it's the only thing he can stand. He's so brittle that he can't even stand heavy guitars or people screaming about horrible things, so he only listens to nice peaceful music because it heals him. Because of this, the only thing I'm listening to currently is playlists of old Svensktoppen songs.

0:58:55 Do you use synopses?
No, I'm very bad at writing synopses. Sometimes I have to when I'm working with TV or film or things like that, but I'm very bad at knowing what a story is going to be like before I actually write it. It happens while I'm working on it. If I'm forced to write a synopsis, I can do it, but I prefer not to since, in the worst cases, I write a synopsis and then the story turns out very different. It's only when I write something that it starts to live. Strangely... For those who have gotten that far into The Kindness, there's something I call "the Monkey and the Wrench" in the book. The term itself comes from my publisher Pelle Andersson. I'm good at coming up with stories. We have a pretty big family with children of all ages as well as friends with children around the age of 6-10, and when they go to bed, these children often want me to tuck them in and talk nonsense. The child in question says two words, any at all, and then I make up a story about that. It can be anything. A penguin and a slide, or the soccer world cup and a Smurf. So I'm good at quickly making connections between things, and a novel is essentially the same thing, just with 40 things that have to be connected instead of 2, and that takes a little longer.

1:00:55 Have you knowingly become more political?
No, not exactly, but The Kindness was a story that couldn't be written without taking that aspect into consideration, since in a way it's about how the misery and anxiety and fear that exists in the world among many people who have it difficult, gets concentrated into a yellow container that arrives in Norrtälje and starts affecting people. So it's not that I've become more political in that sense. I was much more politically engaged in my texts during the time I was a standup comedian. But it's good if that aspect is present and the story demanded that a societal aspect be present.

1:02:32 Which song inspired Tindalos?
Hm. Don't remember. But the Hounds of Tindalos are another one of these Lovecraft... but maybe it wasn't Lovecraft who came up with those. Maybe it was Robert Bloch. Not sure.[5] But me and my family play The Call of Cthulhu, with me as gamemaster. It only happens around once a year, but we have a group going through a campaign and sometimes I spend a few days preparing a few gaming evenings, so Lovecraft is present in that way as well.

1:03:12 How often do you feel that you want to return to your books and short stories and write more? I'm thinking of the fantastic The Final Handling, for example.
You think that one's fantastic? That's nice to hear. I mean, Handling the Undead was special in the sense that it just ended. At some point while writing that book I just felt "Nah, that's enough". I really didn't have any neat way of rounding it off or "This is what you just read meant" or a Sixth Sense twist. And then it took a while and I thought "I could've included that other thing as well" and so I wrote that. And then Let the Old Dreams Die, the continuation of Let the Right One In, was a consequence of the fact that people interpreted the film in a way that did not at all align with my intentions, that is to say that Eli is just grooming Oskar into a future helper. That thought hadn't even crossed my mind. At the same time, it's a completely reasonable interpretation of the movie's story, but I wanted to write a story which gave my interpretation.

1:04:40 Will The Final Handling be included in the film adaptation?
No. At least not in the screenplay I've written. There are some elements of The Final Handling towards the end in how the dead are treated and experimented upon, but not The Final Handling as a complete story.

1:05:05 Do you have any plans to write more short stories like Speciella omständigheter?
Yes, I just finished writing the aforementioned She, but that one's for a British anthology with Nordic authors. I still have the recording equipment here from when I recorded The Kindness, so I'll probably record She and release it via Ordfront only as an audiobook, just to test how that works. So that'll come out sooner or later. I've also written a short story for Creepypodden[6] with Jack Werner that I'll also record, and that'll probably come out in February.

1:05:40 Has the corona pandemic affected your writing? Have you taken any inspiration from it?
Not at all. Life is pretty much the same for me and my wife. Normally we meet the rest of our family more often, but nowadays we just do that outdoors instead, so it's not a big difference.

1:07:55 Have you ever noticed a typo while recording one of your own audiobooks?
Yes, that's happened a few times.

1:08:38 Are you going to write any more sketch shows like Reuter & Skoog?[7]
I was actually given an offer a few years ago to write a script for Melodifestivalen, the funny bits in-between the songs, along with two others. I tried it for a few days, but it didn't turn out any good. Maybe I'm not that funny anymore. With The Kindness, I asked my editor Jan-Erik Petterson to say during a meeting at Ordfront that "We have to emphasize that this is actually John's funniest book so far". I get funny ideas, but I seem to have lost the ability to write things that are only meant to be funny.

1:11:10 How the hell could you write the insanely uncomfortable scene in I Always Find You? I've tried to repress it without managing. That was mean of you. Love the rest of the trilogy!
Are you referring to the Dead Couple? If you are... I hesitated with that one. I considered whether I should just pass over it and say what they found, or if I should go all-in and really describe it in detail. When faced with those two options, I usually pick the latter. I cringe a little bit when I write those parts too, but it actually wasn't too difficult to write. I wanted to show the most extreme negative consequence of the slime, or the opportunity to transcend and become what you really are, and the kind of misery that can be created when those opportunities are offered. A bit Clive Barker.

1:13:15 What happened to The Brothers Lionheart?
It's a long and sad story I unfortunately can't get into, but from what I understand it's at least not completely dead in Tomas' mind. There were complications and maybe we were overambitious, because our plan was that it was going to be by far the biggest film ever made in Sweden.

1:13:38 American TV show? Tell us more if you're allowed to.[8]
No, I'm not allowed to. But the idea is... I've been in contact with certain people and I wrote a pilot in English which was so well-liked that... They had previously talked about having multiple writers, but now they want me to write the whole thing. We'll see. Film and TV... you never know. But it looks very promising, and it's a really cool concept.

1:14:25 When do we get to find out more about Sigge from the Places trilogy?
I'll finish on this one since I have a funny anecdote about this. When the last part, I Am the Tiger, had just been released, I was on a radio show with Johar Bendjelloul, who's really nice and knowledgeable, and we had a pleasant conversation and everything was fine and dandy. When the recording lamp and the microphones were turned off, he came up to me and said "WHO THE HELL—" and I jumped back, thinking "What did I do? Did I say something wrong on the air?" and then he lowered his voice and said "—is Sigge?" I told him that there's a short story that I'm going to call Sigge. Those who remember the very explosive ending of I Am the Tiger... Something happens after that, how the police act after that, which makes it so that Sigge's plan, this entity that exists in the Brunkeberg Tunnel, is even more far-reaching than these explosions. And that's going to be in the short story Sigge at some point. I've written short stories for all kinds of things and have around 200 pages' worth at this point, but there needs to be a bit over 300 for a short story collection. But when one such comes out, I'll make sure to write Sigge as well.

Footnotes
[1] Batmansjukan ("The Batman illness") is the joke name John uses for COVID-19 in "Underbara härliga fina Sverige (5 stars)", a satire text series on his website.
[2] Refers to Sulky och Bebbe regerar okej, a children's book John wrote in 2012 with illustrations by his wife.
[3] Both of these are prominently featured in The Kindness, hence the question.
[4] In a 2014 interview with Expressen (a tabloid newspaper) and the afterword to his 2016 Swedish short story anthology Våran hud, vårat blod, våra ben, JAL has mentioned that Ett fall i vila was a crime story he wrote for Expressen but which he will never allow reprinting of since he considers it to be the worst thing he's ever written.
[5] It was actually Frank Belknap Long.
[6] Creepypodden is a Swedish podcast consisting of readings of creepypastas and ghost stories.
[7] Reuter & Skoog was a 1999-2001 Swedish sketch comedy series starring the actresses Ulla Skoog and Suzanne Reuter. John wrote a significant portion of the material.
[8] Refers to a potential upcoming TV series that John mentioned in an earlier part which I've excluded from this summary.
De höll om varandra i tystnad. Oskar blundade och visste: detta var det största. Ljuset från lyktan i portvalvet trängde svagt in genom hans slutna ögonlock, la en hinna av rött för hans ögon. Det största.

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Re: JAL Q&A stream transcript (2021-01-13)

Post by Wolfchild » Wed Jan 20, 2021 12:40 am

Siggdalos wrote:
Tue Jan 19, 2021 11:47 pm
1:13:38 American TV show? Tell us more if you're allowed to.[8]
No, I'm not allowed to. But the idea is... I've been in contact with certain people and I wrote a pilot in English which was so well-liked that... They had previously talked about having multiple writers, but now they want me to write the whole thing. We'll see. Film and TV... you never know. But it looks very promising, and it's a really cool concept.
:!:

That is to say,
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...the story derives a lot of its appeal from its sense of despair and a darkness in which the love of Eli and Oskar seems to shine with a strange and disturbing light.
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Re: JAL Q&A stream transcript (2021-01-13)

Post by JToede » Wed Jan 20, 2021 1:37 am

Siggdalos wrote:
Tue Jan 19, 2021 11:47 pm
1:13:38 American TV show? Tell us more if you're allowed to.[8]
No, I'm not allowed to. But the idea is... I've been in contact with certain people and I wrote a pilot in English which was so well-liked that... They had previously talked about having multiple writers, but now they want me to write the whole thing. We'll see. Film and TV... you never know. But it looks very promising, and it's a really cool concept.
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Veni, Vidi, volo in domum redire.

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Re: JAL Q&A stream transcript (2021-01-13)

Post by Siggdalos » Mon Feb 08, 2021 1:32 am

The Creepypodden episode containing JAL's new short story, which was mentioned in the stream, was released yesterday evening and can be listened to here or here (in Swedish, of course). It's titled “Du måste läsa det här!” (“You have to read this!”) and is about a depressed young woman who finds a website called The Monkey's Paw which grants internet-related wishes. As the name "Monkey's Paw" would suggest, things end badly. It's a pretty simple story but I found it to be very effective and disturbing.
De höll om varandra i tystnad. Oskar blundade och visste: detta var det största. Ljuset från lyktan i portvalvet trängde svagt in genom hans slutna ögonlock, la en hinna av rött för hans ögon. Det största.

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