I am interviewed by a fellow blogger

Brook Syers has published his interview with me on his blog, available here:

http://brooksyers.blogspot.com/p/author-interviews.html

Here's a sneak preview of the interview:

Tell us a little about yourself? Perhaps something not many people know?

I am an author and wildly successful nudist living in San Diego, California. My romantic novels have been described by literary critics as “‘The Notebook’ meets ‘Cannibal Holocaust’”.

In 2004, I was granted knighthood by the Basque Republic, becoming Sir David J. Schmidt for the following three years. (The title was stripped from me by the United Nations Council on Fallacious Royal Families in 2007.) After I was elected to the San Diego City Council in 2008, I spent my single term in office lobbying extensively for punctuation reform, pushing to have the period officially replaced with the obsolete, whimsical punctuation mark of the “fleur-de-lis”. In addition to these accomplishments, I also founded the yearly charitable event, “Race for a Cure to Spontaneous Human Combustion”.

I have been devoting an increasing amount of time to writing and research, ever since my physician informed me that I suffer from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.

What made you want to become a writer?

In all seriousness, our increasingly illiterate society inspired me to do so.

More precisely, the recent explosion of bad writing is what inspired my two recently published parody novels. I’ve been freelancing for more than ten years, but my most recent satirical projects—Pirates of the Danube and The Baron Rides Again—were written as a direct reaction to the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon.

A friend of mine was reading the Fifty Shades trilogy last summer, and she brought one of the books out at a party. I took a look at it, and just found it to be spectacularly bad. Not just artless storytelling or dimensionless characters, but criminally bad writing. I felt like it was assaulting all of my senses, like every page of this book was carpet-bombing my brain with grammatical errors. And then my friend told me these books had become extremely popular.  

I am not offended by the fact that an erotica novel is popular. I am not shocked by the content matter of Fifty Shades, or the fact that the books deal with sadomasochism and bondage. Heck, I wasn’t even shocked when my parish priest told me he was into sadomasochism. (Although I was perplexed that he chose to tell me while I was in the middle of my confession.) I’m an open-minded fellow. What offends me, though, is the fact that such a poorly written book can become popular. The book doesn’t read like an erotic tale of any sort—it feels like a third grader took a break from reading Hop on Pop and sat down to write a story about “people making boom boom”.

This was the birth of Pirates of the Danube. I endeavored to jump on the bandwagon, and write the most ridiculous and anachronistic romance-erotica tale imaginable....

TO READ THE FULL INTERVIEW, CLICK HERE.