2024 Week 19: Question and (ridiculous) Answer session.

Posted on May 14, 2024 by mgbauer

Over the 20 years (Yikes!) since my first book The Running Man was published I’ve answered quite a lot of interview questions about my stories and writing and about myself. So I thought I’d look back and just pick out some of the more interesting or unusual questions along with some of the my more tongue-in-cheek answers.

Are you a morning person or night-owl? Morning? Is that when they reckon that big, shiny yellow ball comes up? No, I’m pretty sure I’d be a night-owl. I’ll just need to stay awake long enough one time in order to find out.

What was your first job? My cousin and I ran a lawn mowing service. Our motto was ‘We turn grass into shorter grass!’. One of the first jobs I had where someone else actually employed me was as a target changer at a big rifle range. It was a great learning experience. If you messed up, they shot you.

On a quiz show, what would be your special subject? Either ‘The Life and Times of Bob Dylan’ or ‘Questions That Any Simpleton Could Answer’.

What book character would you least like to meet? Probably Shelob from The Lord of the Rings. Something about being wrapped in a web and then eaten alive by a monster spider-type creature just fails to appeal to me.

What did you want to be growing up? Taller mainly. But after that, either the Phantom or Shintaro from the TV show The Samurai. Unfortunately our careers advisor at school informed me that I’d taken the wrong subjects for either of those things and suggested I should be an Accountant instead. I guess he thought that was close enough.

Do you procrastinate? Me procrastinate!? Not sure. Although somehow two weeks has passed since I wrote the answer to the last question.

If you could go back in time and give your teenage self one piece of advice, what would it be?  ‘Buy Apple shares!’ Or possibly, ‘OMG, what are you thinking! Don’t pick those thick, black-rimmed frames for your glasses!’

Ok seriously? I’d say, ‘Teenage-Self, you’re ok. And you know that corny thing adults always say about how ‘personality’ and ‘character’ being more important than ‘looks’? Well, as difficult as it is for you to believe, it’s actually true. So hear this Teenage-Self. You’re a nice person and you’re smart and funny, and people will like you for just that. You really should believe in yourself a hell of lot more. And take more chances! Oh and follow your dreams.’ (I know that was more than one piece of advice, but my Teenage-Self really could have done with a good pep talk!)

What do you like to do in your spare time?  Read. Play guitar and pretend I can sing. Try to write songs. Daydream about being a rock star, Samurai or Ninja. Support the Brisbane Broncos and the mighty Queensland Maroons in the Rugby League. Have fun on social media with my friends and fellow writers. Desperately try to keep my true werewolf nature secret and under control. Visit bookshops and move all my books to more prominent positions on the shelves.  Write in my blog. Go for walks. Spend time with my wife and family. Go to the movies. Travel. Watch TV (including, according to my family, an unhealthy number of Reality Shows and Football matches). The list just goes on and on. As you can clearly see, I am a true action man!

You have a terrific sense of humour and I love your blogs where does this come from? Well my father was a circus clown and a professional audience warm-up guy and my mother had a Doctorate and a thriving business in New Wave Laughter Therapy so I guess it was only natural that I … … Truthful answer? I’m not sure.

What’s your secret to making your characters come to life? I can’t tell you that – it’s a SECRET! Ok, first I threaten them and if that doesn’t work, I attached electrodes to their brains, tie the other end of the cable to my TV aerial and wait for a passing electrical storm. And if THAT doesn’t work, well I just try to think of them as real people and not characters. I try to imagine what motivates them to do what they do. I also try to imagine what their lives are like, or have been like or will be like, outside of the narrow confines of my story. I think if you try to understand your characters then they will come to life for you.

What does your workplace look like? Well you know those beautiful, stylish, well-organised office spaces they create in IKEA showrooms? Nothing like that.

Do you transform your writing space in any way for each book? Transform my writing space? Absolutely! I push all the rubbish and food scraps into the bin so I can see the keyboard. Sometimes I go the whole hog and don’t stop till I can see the rest of the desktop as well!

Do you think ‘School days are the best days of your life’ (as the saying goes!)? I hope not!

What are the most unusual and most difficult questions that you have ever been asked by fans? Besides this one? Well once after I’d given a talk about my first novel which is a serious young adult book, a girl came up and stood in front of me looking very grim. I asked her if she had a question and she named a character in my novel and said accusingly, “Why did you kill him!” I felt like a murderer! In Germany I got some unusual questions. One student asked me if it was true that in some parts of Australia, beer is used as currency. I said, ‘It’s possible.’  

What does a typical day look like for you? A much lighter and warmer period of time that starts just after the sun comes up and ends when it goes back down. (Boom! Tish!)

Do you have a favourite book or character (your own or someone else’s)? Someone else’s? You mean other people write books?!? You’re kidding? WHY DO THEY BOTHER?

If you were not a creator of books for young people what would you be? Probably a burnt-out teacher who spent his time dreaming of being a writer. See below.

What is the question you always wished to be asked? “Why on earth did you abandon your highly-paid and successful career as a male model to become a writer?”

What is the naughtiest thing you ever did as a school boy? Can’t think of a single thing! I was pretty much a perfect student. In fact you may not believe this, but there’s a statue of me erected at my old school and the inscription underneath simply says, ‘Why can’t you all be more like this kid!’

Is there anything else you would like to tell us about yourself? There is, but unfortunately the Government Spy Agency I work for said I had to keep all that stuff TOP SECRET. Even my wife doesn’t know about my exciting and dangerous under-cover work – or my Super-Powers!

Got any other left-field or otherwise questions for me? Just fire away in the Comments below.

Cheers
Michael

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2024 Week 18: Would a ‘me’ by any other name smell just as sweet?

Posted on May 7, 2024 by mgbauer

In the last blog I looked back 20 years to when my writing career began with the publication of The Running Man and talked about the creation of my first book cover.

This week I thought I’d look back 20 years to the creation of my author name.

The story goes that when my mother was pregnant with me, the old lady next door said something to her like, ‘Not long now till Michael is born.’ For some reason she just assumed that Michael would be my name even though my mother had never suggested it. In the end, she was right.

I like to think our neighbour was possessed with psychic powers that allowed her to foresee some great destiny for me. (On the other hand, it’s possible that she might have just been possessed – which would probably explain a lot about her. And me.) 

Anyway, an interesting thing about having Michael as your name, is the many different forms and variations it can take. Personally if I sign off an email for example I usually refer to myself as Michael. (Sometimes I use Mike but it feels a bit strange and a little too intimate. I just don’t think I know me that well.) 

However many close family and friends never call me Michael, preferring Mike or even Mick. But that’s not the end of it.

Over the years I have also been called Mikey, Micky, Mikail, Mitch, Michael Gerard, Michelle, and when I was very little, Micky Drippin’! (No, I don’t know why. I only hope it didn’t refer to a leaky part of my anatomy.)

Once during a school visit a boy (a fellow Michael) told me that when he was little he got branded Mickety Pickety! What is wrong with you non-Michael people out there?! Haven’t you got anything better to do? 

Which brings me to the important moment in my life when I had to settle on an author name.

The only thing I knew for sure back then was that I certainly wasn’t going to use a pseudonym. I mean, a miracle was about to happen wasn’t it? I was having a book published for goodness sakes. There was no way I was going to give the glory to some wanky pseudo-me! 

But like every first time author, I was still faced with a big decision. What variation of my real name should I go with? Michael Bauer or Mike Bauer or Mick Bauer or Michael G. Bauer or M. G. Bauer or M. Gerard Bauer or Mike G. Bauer etc etc etc?

In the end I went the whole hog and decided on Michael Gerard Bauer. 

Here are some reasons why: 

The main one was that as a name (and some people might unkindly claim, as a person) Michael Bauer is just too common.

Bauer (meaning Farmer or Peasant in German) is like the name Smith in Germany. There are heaps of us Bauers! And loads of “Michael Bauer”s around the world.

But if you were to put “Michael Gerard Bauer” in inverted commas and Google it (not that I’d ever do such a crass thing!!) you’ll basically just get me and not, for example, the famous food critic from the San Francisco Chronicle, or the unconventional German artist, or a million other assorted people.

Also, when I was in secondary school, once you reached the senior levels, it was trendy to have a briefcase with your initials embossed in gold on the side. (Yes we were born to rule! Although I should point out my briefcase was cheap vinyl not leather.) My initials, including my middle name, were M.G.B. just like the sports car. I loved it. For one brief shining moment, there was actually something almost cool about being me! So for me having my full name was a plus.

Finally, in grade 12 we studied the English Poet Gerard Manly Hopkins.

I developed a bit of a thing for Gerard. I loved the way he combined words and sounds and even created new words. He was ahead of his time – a bit of a 17th Century rapper. I could recite his poem The Windhover by heart (probably still can) and I always loved Spring and Fall which describes a young girl confronting her mortality.

So the Gerard in my name was also a little nod to the famous poet. (Also by a strange coincidence his initials have a strong car connection as well. GMH. Spooky! I thought it might be an omen for success.)

But as I’ve discovered, there are DRAWBACKS to choosing the name Michael Gerard Bauer as your author’s name.

First up, a three part name makes you sound like a bit of poser. Especially when people pronounce your middle name ‘Geraaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrd’ rather than the shorter ‘Gerrid’ like it’s meant to be. Probably not great when you end up writing mainly for children and young adults.

Then I found that the longer your author name is the more opportunities there are for confusion. Is his last name Bauer or Gerard-Bauer? Do we call him Michael or Michael Gerard? And what order did they go in again? Gerard Michael Bauer wasn’t it?

Once on a pamphlet advertising a talk I was to give I was referred to as Michael Gerard Butler. An easy mistake to make I’m sure you’ll agree.

Finally, the longer your name is the harder it is to fit on the cover of your books and so the smaller the font will need to be. And as we all know, the size of the author’s name is usually in direct proportion to the author’s success and popularity. I can’t complain though.

So there are pros and cons, but I’m happy I went with Michael Gerard Bauer even though you could argue that maybe the shorter, punchier, gender-neutral M. G. Bauer would have been a better choice.

I have only one nagging thought.

Could Micky Drippin’ Bauer have been even bigger than Andy Griffiths? 

Cheers
Michael/Mike/Mick etc

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2024 Week 17: A cover story.

Posted on April 29, 2024 by mgbauer

My first novel The Running Man was published in 2004. My wonderful publisher at the time Dyan Blacklock assured me that the book would be around for 20 years. Ha! Sure.

But she was right. This year marks the novel’s 20th Anniversary and it is still in print, still selling and still being used in schools here and in Germany. Pretty amazing to me.

Anyway because it’s been 20 years since my first publication, over the next couple of blogs I thought I’d look back at some Running Man related things.

Starting with the COVER.

It wasn’t long after I got the exciting news that I was going to have my first book published that I began imagining what the cover might look like. One day I sat down with my son Joe and he roughly sketched some of the ideas we came up with together involving various running figures, mulberry trees and silkworms.

Below is one of my contributions. It’s man being attacked by a giant killer silkworm caterpillar. (I may have been losing focus at that point!)

I also had fun trying to design some covers using a set image and playing around with various fonts. I think I sent some of these to the publisher but they weren’t keen.

I actually really liked the background image. It came from the chair below that my daughter Meg had created for a school art project. We still have it in our garage. It could have been famous!

I had another attempt at creating a cover on my computer which I also thought was quite good but Meg reckoned the little white figure up the top looked like a half-man half-crocodile.

That’s when I decided I’d better leave cover-designing up to the experts!

The original cover design for the book was the one below. I really liked it as did Dyan my publisher. I thought it captured the moody, mysterious atmosphere of the novel. And I loved David Kennett’s depiction of the Running Man character.

However the pre-publication feedback from booksellers on that original cover was that they thought it was too dark and looked a bit like an adult murder mystery cover. They believed the cover needed to reflect some of the positive and uplifting things in the story.

So at the last minute before official publication the cover was changed to this (the stickers came later):

The new version was obviously brighter, with silkworm moths featuring along with words from Douglas Stewart’s beautiful poem The Silkworms which is central to the story. I was happy with it and glad David’s illustration still featured prominently.

So that remained the cover until the 10th Anniversary edition in 2014 which reverted back to the original concept with the addition of a lovely quote from Markus Zusak (The Book Thief).

And finally these are the overseas covers. (And isn’t it great to see the Dutch version using my original idea of giant killer caterpillars!)

So that’s my cover story on The Running Man.

Next time as I look back 20 years to the start of my writing career, I’ll blog about the process of deciding on an Author name.

Did I make the right choice? I’m really not sure.

Cheers
Michael

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2024 Week 16: Where do I begin …

Posted on April 25, 2024 by mgbauer

One of the most common questions writers get asked is ‘Where do you get your story ideas from?’ The truth is, they can come from anywhere. And for me at least, they’re often quite small things that grow and evolve into a story. Sometimes they are lost in the process.

In my experience, the beginning of a story is like finding one piece of a jigsaw puzzle. Something about it grabs your attention. So much so that you begin to wonder what might connect to it and you start searching in your imagination for those other pieces.

Sometimes the first piece you discover is at the heart of the final picture. Sometimes it ends up a minor detail almost lost among the other pieces.

I used to love doing jigsaw puzzles when I was young but the difference between those puzzles and putting together a novel is that for a novel you don’t get all the pieces at the start. You have to find them.

Also at the start you don’t get a picture to guide you of what the completed puzzle is supposed to look like. You have to figure all that out as you go along.

Here’s a brief guide to the ‘jigsaw puzzle pieces’ that started my stories.

Beginning: A childhood memory.The first line of the book mentions silkworms. That was the first jigsaw puzzle piece of the story – a childhood memory of looking for silkworms on the mulberry in our backyard. I didn’t find any and I was frustrated and disappointed. That same afternoon my older brother came home from a friend’s house with a shoebox filled with silkworms. It was an Ashgrovian miracle! Somehow that memory grew into a story about a lonely teenage boy, a damaged Vietnam vet and a man bent out of shape by an unbearable tragedy.

Beginning: A picture and a line from a book. I had a still image from the movie version of MOBY DICK on my noticeboard. The famous first line of the novel is ‘Call me Ishmael.” I looked at it one day and imagined a boy complaining, ‘Don’t call me Ishmael! A three book series came from that thought.

Beginning: A movie. I was watching an old film on TV that was set in the Middle Ages and featured a dragon. The dragon looked a bit like a dinosaur. I began to wonder if the fables about dinosaurs could have come from people actually seeing a dinosaur. Question: How would a dinosaur get to the Middle Ages? Answer: Time travel of course!

Beginning: A name. Out on a walk the name Mr Mosely came into my head as a good name for a dog. I don’t know why. But it made me wonder what a dog with that name would look like. It also made me think of the dogs I had grown up with and their stories. Some of them were funny, some were sad and some were weird. There would end up being a particular reason why the dog in the story was called Mr Mosely, but I had no idea what that was at the start.

Beginning: An ending. A scene came to me involving a man and teenage girl. They had a fractured relationship. His was either the step-father or the mother’s new partner. They are confronted in a fish and chip shop by a violent, drunken, aggressive bikie. It’s a dangerous situation and they have to work together and trust each other in order to escape. It heals their fracture. I then wrote a whole story where that would be the final scene. It didn’t work. The ending no longer suited the story and characters I’d created. The final scene of the published novel still involves a confrontation with a bikie but it’s a very different one.

Beginning: A teenage memory. I was out walking (again!) and for some reason I was thinking of a time when I was in my late teens at the University of Qld and I was in the foyer of the Schonell Theatre waiting for a movie to start. I was watching the other students as they drifted through the door to buy their tickets. There was a girl I liked from one of my tutorials and I was kind of hoping she might walk through. Spoiler Alert: She didn’t! I began imagining someone else in that position desperately hoping for a ‘special’ person to enter who ends up with someone entirely different – the ‘wrong’ girl.

Beginning: A typing mistake and a title. Instead of writing ‘epic fail’ in a social media post I wrote ‘eric fail’. My daughter Meg noticed it and said is sounded like a character from one of my books. That led me to thinking of a book title – Eric Vale Epic Fail. Six books resulted from this and I got to work with my son Joe as illustrator.

Beginning: A previous piece of writing. I was asked to write a story for this series, so unlike all the other examples this didn’t start with me just stumbling across a jigsaw puzzle piece that developed into a story. On this occasion I went looking for an idea for a story. I ended up adapting a humorous article I’d written years before for an online writing school. It was about the battles my wife and I had with a very determined scrub turkey. I made it more child centered.

Beginning: A previous story. The very first thing I tried to write was a picture book about a little boy who loved drawing and dinosaurs and who unsuccessfully tries to draw a T-Rex and gets upset. It was based on my son Joe who loved (loves) both those things. The only difference was that in real life Joe could actually draw an excellent T-Rex! That picture book never got published but years later when I was thinking about it I imagined Joe getting upset (losing it) not because of a bad drawing but because he lost his favourite pencil. The double meaning really appealed to me. Then of course, I turned Joe into a rabbit!

Which just leaves the two pictures books due out sometime next year.

The first story was inspired by an illustration on a web page. The owner of that webpage I’m happy to say is now in the process of illustrating the book.

And the second story was inspired by a phrase spoken by a character from a novel. In fact from one of those books shown above.

So yeah, story ideas really can come from anywhere. What about you? Where have yours come from?

Cheers
Michael

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