Roughly seven months ago, I found myself reading a PM from a guy with a ridiculously long screen name, and a funny little picture here on Wattpad. He wanted to write for TK. We, of course, told him, Go Ahead. This guy was @MadMikeMarsbergen, and seven months later, he's been one of our go-to authors for original shorts that are sassy and crass, inventive, and will leave you gripping your side and scratching your head. We thought it only appropriate that he be this month's Author Spotlight. It is with much excitement and anticipatroy delight that I give you this original gem: A sit down with TK's own, @MadMikeMarsbergen. 

Mike, if you had to describe yourself in one word, what words wouldn't you use?

Hmmm, I'd like to think 'douchebag' wouldn't be used to describe me, but I suppose that's a matter of perspective. How about 'honest', 'caring'—no, no, those are two words I would use. 'Muscular', 'drug-addict', 'devil-worshipper', 'blind' (though I do wear glasses). I'm not a 'harpoon' or a 'mountain', nor am I 'evil'. 

I'd say that I'm not a lot of things. So, basically, if you can think of a word, chances are that it does not describe me. There. That about sums things up.  

What was your nickname at school?

Jack Scallywag. The Human Trombone. Shapeshifter. Damian Firefeet. Chameleon. Crazyhorse. Ironlungs.

Okay, those are all phony. I didn't really have a nickname, in the classic sense—like calling the skinny guy 'Skeletor', or the tech-freak 'Gizmo'. I was just called 'Mike', which, if you didn't know, is short for Michael. That's my name. I suppose it's possible I did have a nickname, but perhaps I just wasn't privy to it. Jeeze, I'd hate to know what it was...

Oh, not really a nickname, but a friend did say that I was 'the effing funniest guy in the world'—substitute 'effing' with a vulgar F-word of your choice.

When you were a young Padawan, what did you want to be when you grew up?

Numerous things. A scientist, a doctor, a veterinarian, a war-veteran, an astronaut, the Leader of the World... That last one is a lie. Speaking of lying, a lawyer. You know, the whole gamut of careers that get hammered into our heads by our parents when we're young. I sort of came back down from my hot-air-balloon ride of big dreams and wanted to be a writer—oops!

What is your favourite quote?

There are a couple by Terry Pratchett that immediately come to mind: 

"Susan hated Literature. She'd much prefer to read a good book."; and "Writing is the most fun you can have by yourself."

I also quite enjoy this quote by Hunter S. Thompson:

"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."

Other than writing, what hobbies do you have?

I love to read, obviously, and listen to music. I don't really mix music and reading or music and writing, like I know some people do. I find it hard to focus on both activities at one time. My brain wants to just do one or the other: analyze the words or analyze the music. I used to play guitar but I haven't really felt the urge to pick it back up. Most of my strings broke and I never took it in to get the strings put back on, so I sort of lost interest. I do a little painting, every once in a blue moon. Haven't done that in a while, though, because all my brushes are covered in dried paint.

I'm sensing a pattern here...

Tell us something we don't know about you.

I still watch Survivor. Fifteen years, baby!!!

Also, I prefer not to wear pants when I write. They're too restricting to me. I've got a theory going that my creative-muscles are located in my legs, and that I need to give them air so they can breathe properly.

What was the first piece of writing you were ever truly proud to have written?

Back in grade 7, there was a class-assignment to write the ending to an Inuit folk-story. Naturally, I decided to make it a gut-busting weird-comedy, fully-equipped with talking animals, kung-fu-fighting polar-bears and totally random sudden deaths for various characters. It made me laugh so hard while writing it and reading it. My teacher gave me an in-class award for 'The Craziest Stories', or something like that. I was damn proud of that one.

Who is your all-time favourite Sci-Fi author? How much—if at all—have they influenced your writing style?

I... have a confession to make. I don't read too much sci-fi. I'm sure some of you have gathered that by now, after having read my stories. Let's be honest: they're so soft that they're flaccid.

I really like dystopians, though. The old-school ones. 'The Chrysalids' by John Wyndham was the first I've read that really comes to mind, and that sort of triggered something in me and I wanted to read more.

Other than that, I've enjoyed Stephen King's forays in sci-fi territory: 'The Tommyknockers' was an underrated horror-sci-fi gem, and '11/22/63' is a fantastic time-travel tale. King has been a huge influence on my writing—analyzing his style has taught me a lot about the craft.

I'm getting some flashbacks to when I was very young, waiting for the next Harry Potter book to come out... I read some HG Wells and Jules Verne books. The most well-known ones, like 'The Time Machine' and 'Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea'.

Anyway, I may not have too much experience with sci-fi, but I don't think it's needed for the stuff I like to write. There often tends to be a horror/splatterpunk vibe to my stories, along with the weird comedy. And because I'm writing for TK, I'll of course try to create some type of sci-fi world that all this nonsense takes place in. I suppose what I'm trying to say is: I can use what I know to write what I don't, if that makes sense.

Do you have a muse?

You bet I do. I throw on some raw black metal that only me and the guy who made it have listened to, stand in the middle of a pentagram drawn on the floor in someone else's feces and sacrifice a caterpillar to the Great Old Ones, draining all the blood and guts into a cup, pour in some milk and orange juice and down it in one.

Nah, sadly I don't. Or maybe I do, but unconsciously. Sometimes—and I think a lot of writers will agree—the story seems to write itself and the words just pour out like a waterfall. It kinda feels like you're opening a cosmic-vault of creativity, selecting a tale at random, and giving it back to the world.

Walk us through your writing process. How do you begin and how do you decide when a story is done? What do you use to write, and whereabouts do you use it?

The first thing I do is come up with a basic skeleton for the story, often one that is missing vital bones when I first begin. It could be a first line or even the ending, maybe just a title or a scene. I think on it, gather ideas, read something, gather ideas while I read, have a bath and think on it some more, and then I finally start writing.

I like to use microchapters to divide the story into scenes, and it makes it easier for me to edit. I'll write a scene—often the first one, but sometimes I'll do some maneuvering of the scenes, or even add in new ones—give it a read and an edit, making corrections, subtractions or additions along the way. I typically reread the first scene a bunch of times, as it puts my mind into the proper place for the story. When I feel the scene is as good as I can make it—without spending years on it, and going crazy in the process—then I move on to the next one.

I decide the story is done when I have an ending I like. If I've gone over the word-limit, then I'll go back and look for stuff I can reword without making too many sacrifices.

I write on a computer, as it's faster for me and I like to be able to make edits on the fly. Also, my handwriting is messy as hell and takes up too much room.

Of everything you have written, what is your favourite?

A lot of things end up becoming my favourite immediately after I've written it. But there's one story that, despite the errors (it was written a while back, and I'm a much better writer now), I still think is one of my best. It's a comedic horror-fantasy called 'Me & My Receding Hairline', and deals with a young boy named Marvin who has a magikal receding hairline named Ignatius. After being set on fire by one of his abusive brain-cell-deficient brothers, Ignatius saves Marvin's life using his magik, but each time Ignatius uses his magik, he gets a little bit weaker. Eventually (and without me giving too much away), the two end up heading off to Mars to attend a magikal school there. Of course, people aren't very kind to a kid with the hair of a middle-aged man. It was the first story I've written that has ever reduced me to tears of sadness, due to the story's emotional climax.

...and what is your fans' favourite?

Not too sure. My 'fans' aren't too vocal, but the numbers would indicate that my first novel on WP, 'Cyber-Terrorizer', is their favourite. If we're going by actual reader-response, then 'Me & My Receding Hairline' had the most vocal people reading and commenting.

My number-one fan, my soulmate and also the love of my life, Olive Goodwin, says her favourite is 'Mars Mountain', which is actually an unfinished comic-fantasy (with a little bit of horror) series. I've written the comically large prologue and epilogue to the series (which are actually a novella and a novelette, respectively), and a good number of tie-in novellas, novelettes and short-stories. I'm going to get back to writing the first actual book, 'Mars Mountain and the Lost Souls of Negrebsram', soon enough. Think 'Harry Potter' having a good screw with 'Discworld', while Hunter S. Thompson's ghost watches (under the influence of LSD), and Clive Barker and Stephen King come in periodically to dump dead bodies.

We know some of the big authors, Orson Scott Card and Tolkien, for example, incorporate their religious beliefs into their work. Are you religious? If so, do you incorporate those beliefs into your work?

I was raised a Roman Catholic, but quickly left that flock when I was younger. I wouldn't call myself 'religious', but I would say 'spiritual'. I believe in the oneness of the universe, the bad and the good and the grey space in between. Maybe it's 'God', but maybe that's just a human-centric way of identifying that kind of force or entity. Regardless, I feel like it's all connected, and that our lives are all leading somewhere—and maybe we can shape our own destinies through past experiences and present choices, but we can never avoid our fates. That's both reassuring and kind of scary for me to think about.

I sometimes have religious or spiritual characters in my stories—after all, they do exist in the real world—but the concept of destiny and fate definitely factors into my creative world.

Was there one idea that you had that didn't turn out quite the way you envisioned it?

A lot of my stuff doesn't really turn out the way I first see it. But one in particular—I've mentioned it already—really took me for a wild ride into uncharted territory. 'Me & My Receding Hairline'. I originally started it because I was feeling a sort of creative block, or—maybe more accurately—a loss of self-confidence. So I started writing that story with the idea that I didn't really care where it went. It was just something I'd write for the sake of writing it. The premise seemed wacky enough for that, so I just went ahead and wrote. What ended up happening was, I created a story that I became emotionally invested in. And I think it worked very well.

Do you use real life experiences to influence your Sci-Fi writing?

Not really. A lot of them are a little too 'out there' to contain real experiences, unless I live in a madhouse or am permanently tripping on unmentionables.

Found in TK: Dystopian, 'Joy To Deprever' does contain a disturbing future, with a focus on the reverence for all things depraved (where the city-state's portmanteau name comes from), which is sort of my exaggerated/distorted view of the present. Just take a look at the numerous brother-on-sister, mother-on-son, father-on-daughter stories here on WattPad, and you'll find the seeds of my dystopian world. It unnerves me that the girls writing this crap will more than likely become mothers someday. That's true horror, right there.

Other than that, the beginning scene (up to the part where the alien spaceship crash-lands) of 'Atom Is An Alien', found in TKX, is based on an actual event. Smashing a case of beer-bottles is actually very fun. But, I was thirteen or so, so I'm not too sure how much has changed in ten years.

If all SF writers weren't from Earth but were from another planet, what would that world be called?

Maybe a parallel world called 'Earth', but one where each continent is a different sub-genre of sci-fi. The fruits would grant the people scientific revelations upon consumption, every thought that passed through their heads would somehow relate to science, and science would be the new deity. I'm sure they'd also all wear some kind of vision-correcting lenses or whatever the continental-/sub-genre-equivalent might be. And they'd probably wear lab-coats instead of pajamas, but only if it made logical sense to do so, and only after writing a few pages on the technical specifications of said lab-coat and their scientifically-sound reasons for wearing one. Soft sci-fi and its writers would be as dead as the dinosaurs are in our world—but in their world, obviously the dinosaurs would still be alive on one continent.

If you were to gain control of some form of time travel device, where—or when—would you go, and why?

Tough question.

Depending on how often I was allowed to use this device, I might start out with simple observations. Go back to experience different eras in history, just to see how correct our text-books are. Go back even further to quickly check out the dinosaurs, hopefully not landing in the lair of a T-Rex and getting devoured in one gulp. Go back to the beginning and hope that there's even anything there to go back to.

Following that, and assuming I survived it, I would definitely start tampering with things. Little things first, like eliminating the Coca-Cola Company so Pepsi could rule over the Earth, assassinating the teachers who denied Hitler into art school, and even handing Jesus a machine-gun while he was dragging that giant-ass cross to Golgotha. Then I'd start making some big changes. I won't even tell you what those changes might be. You may have nightmares tonight.

Which fictional Sci-Fi Universe is your favourite, and why?

Gotta be Star Wars. I would say The Matrix, but that place is just scary and I'm not sure if I'd be one of the types to stay in the dream-world or not.

So, Star Wars it is. I like the richness of the world, all the different races and planets. Robots, spaceships with wicked designs, lightsabers! I'd have a blue one, even if I was going dark-side—if my fellow baddies didn't like that, I'd start removing limbs. Star Wars might dip into fantasy at times, but I like that, too. I may have wanted to put Jar Jar into a chokehold and launch him into the Sun, but he's just one character and I do have sort of a love-hate relationship with him.

I remember when I was very young and I bought a game called 'Star Wars: Jedi Knight - Dark Forces II'. I was blown away because it had full-motion videos with real actors. It made it feel authentic, and truly a part of the Star Wars universe. But I think Disney decided that that game isn't canon, since it's part of the Expanded Universe... Bastards.

If you could have any superpower, what would it be?

The power to defecate bars of gold would come in handy. Though, I suppose with that skill, I wouldn't be joining any superhero squads... That's okay. I could take a dump, wash the gold clean and then sell it. I'd be making money with every meal. Not a bad way to make a living, either...

And in honor of this month’s subgenre, Tesla Punk…

Mike, we here at FP realize that teslapunk is not the most widely known subgenre of science fiction. Prior to this issue, had you ever read or written any teslapunk? What do you think the possible appeal of this slightly obscure subgenre is?

Prior to this issue, I didn't even know what teslapunk was, aside from part of the name coming from Nikola Tesla, of course. To some degree, I'm still not sure what it is. I think the appeal of it might be the fact that it's so obscure, so there's still plenty of 'leg-room' for people to weave something truly original. The idea of building a world that is permanently fixated on electricity as a source of energy, while using misfits and counter-culture types as the main characters—that seems pretty cool to me.

Now, we know you’ve written up a little divvy for this issue (and the last seven or so, I think!). Where did you get the inspiration for your most recent short? How do you tackle the challenge of writing something you’re not super familiar with?

I was making a food run, pondering what kind of story I could write. Then I got on the idea of a teslapunk-style boy-band—which led to the fictitious 'shock' musical genre—making the housewives swoon with their corny lyrics, and how they'd be replaced by robots in the middle of their concert. I was still missing the crux of the story, which revealed itself to me one night in the tub, while soaking in my own filth.

To familiarize myself with what kind of world I wanted, I had to do some reading on Wikipedia. Nikola Tesla's inventions, and the style of clothing the ladies liked to wear. Now, I've decided to set my story in sort of an alt-1950s world, so it takes place after Tesla has been deified by what is now known as the Society of Teslandia.

In general, I'll do some light research and brainstorm while in the bath. The relaxed and meditative state I get into while in the tub lets the ideas come to me a little easier.

What would be your advice to the other writers out there—new and old?

Don't give up—unless you're clawing at the lid of a coffin, six feet underground. I'd say it's probably too late by that point, and you may have made one too many mistakes to land yourself in that position... like appearing so dead that you got buried alive. Read lots of published stuff, to learn from and to see what mark you should be aiming for. Try to write every day, to keep those writing muscles strong. And, most importantly, tell the story you were made and meant to tell. One word at a time. That's how everyone else does it, so you can do it that way, too!