Featured Interview With Mike Battaglia
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
Sigh, where to begin?
My name is Mike Battaglia, and like everyone else here, I’m a writer. I’ve held a lot of jobs in 48 years, in a lot of different places doing a lot of different things, but despite my capricious career, it was all just a paycheck. I’ve done everything from gas up 747’s for a major airline to being a chef, but in the end, writing has been the only thing that has stayed with me and never waned for pretty much my entire life.
I was raised just north of San Francisco. I moved out of mother’s house on the morning of my eighteenth birthday, and I’ve been a nomad ever since. I’ve been married and amicably divorced twice, I’ve been all over the world, and I’ve lived in four different countries. My current home base is in Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil. I moved here after living in New Zealand for 17 years to be with the love of my life, whom I met on a writing website seven years ago. I may not have the most stable or responsible life ever lived, and where my next paycheck is going to come from is more often than not a mystery, but damn if the life of a nomad isn’t ideal for someone who lives to write.
As for pets, I’m a cat guy. Cats are the only animals, that I am aware of, who choose their companions. I don’t like to call myself a pet ‘owner.’ I can relate to a cat’s lone wolf independence, and I would never dream of cramping a cat’s style. If a cat and I get along and like each other, then we mutually decide to flat together. Most of my pets have been strays that I won over. I never restricted their freedom in any way, and my cats have always been free to come and go as they please, but every night, when the cats come back from their day to spend the night with me, it’s a feeling unlike any other. These cats chose to spend their time with me. I don’t currently have any cats, and I don’t know if I’ll ever get into another relationship with one because I get too attached, making it hard to say goodbye when the time comes. But man… if cat’s could write!
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I really couldn’t pinpoint a specific age. I was always fascinated with books, and the books I loved as a kid are still just as vivid in my mind as they were back then: Richard Scary’s What Do People Do All Day, The Five Chinese Brothers, There’s a Nightmare in My Closet, and my all time favorite, Harold and The Purple Crayon. But maybe it wasn’t so much books that turned me into a writer as much as it was the art of the story.
My dad was a master of embellishment. No matter how many times he told me a story, every time he told it there would be some new angle, some new detail, something to make it seem like I had never heard the story before. I could have heard the story a thousand times, but it was the way my dad told the story that kept me rapt every time; the passion with which he told it. This, more than anything, lit my writing fire. I wanted to recreate the thrill I got listening to my dad tell stories.
I started writing very young, beginning with hand-drawn, stapled together comic books (this is when all I could draw were stick figures and word balloons). I did about 25 issues, and I still have them. In middle school I discovered Alfred Hitchcock’s Three Investigator series, and that pretty much sealed the deal for me. It took me a matter of months to read the entire series (I think there were 34 books in the series), and when I got through them all I was so upset that there weren’t any more that I created my own young investigators and started writing my own adventures. I wrote five of my investigator books – all of them hand written in pencil on binder paper. The shortest was about 80 pages, the longest over 200. I was about twelve or thirteen at the time. Ever since then, I’ve been writing.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
This is a standard question all authors answer at one point or another, and I always find it difficult to answer because I love so many authors and books. My tastes in reading are myriad. I love the art of storytelling, I love words and the art of stringing them together to create an image. I love being transported to other worlds, I love discovering things, exploring, learning, roller coasters, laughing, crying, getting pissed off, getting riled up. It never ceases to humble or amaze me that something as simple as words has the power to completely change your life and way of thinking.
I’ve been inspired by almost every author I’ve ever read. If you saw my library, you’d be hard pressed to find any sort of common denominator. I might read a book on deep sea biology one week, and a pulp horror the next. All books are worlds, and I’m all for exploring any and every one of them if it tickles my fancy.
If I was forced to pick one book, though, it would be Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. That book has been my sidekick for as long as I can remember, and has seen me though so many dark days it’s like a brother to me. I still have the original paperback copy I bought as a kid. It’s faded, yellowed, falling apart, and held together with Scotch tape. It always goes in my carry on bag whenever I travel.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
I’ve got six books published, and seven more complete manuscripts waiting for their turn – all of them different. I just published a collection of short horror stories called Haunted House – 21 Twisted Tales (available on Amazon.com). I have a very deep sense of sarcastic humor, which I love to let out in my writing, and these stories are a good example of my style and voice on the page. Not all of them are scary. Some are funny, some are contemplative, and some are nightmares, but they all contain the one thing I love most in writing – the twist at the end. I am also about to publish a book on the chef life called ‘Sharp Knives and Skewers.’ I was a chef in New Zealand for 17 years, and I wanted to write a behind-the-scenes tour of commercial kitchens and the chefs that infest them. It’s filled with everything you have come to know about chefs and the chef life, as well as all the things you didn’t know, or didn’t want to know. It’s not whistle-blowing, it’s reality. If you want to know what being a chef is really like, this book covers every single facet.
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