I’d like to welcome author Matthew Hughes to the blog for #ThisorThatThursday!

A few of your favorite summer traditions: swimming in the municipal pool in Kitchener, Ontario, in the dog days of the 1950s, even though the pool was too full of screaming, splashing kids to actually swim

Something summer-related that you’ll never do again: going to the be-ins in Vancouver’s Stanley Park in 1967. Those days are gone.

Favorite summer beverage: ice-cold Guinness

A drink that gives you a pickle face: weissbier. It always gives he heartburn

Best summer memory: 1968, when my wife and I first got together. There’s nothing like young love in the summer.

Something you’d rather forget: 1958. My father took us on our first ever camping vacation, so we could be away while his brother burned down our house to get us out of a mortgage dad couldn’t pay. I had to be dressed by the Red Cross relief people.

Your favorite thing to get from the ice cream truck: Creamsicles, 1950s vintage.

Some dessert that you wish you’d never bought: Sorry, I’ve never met a dessert I didn’t like.

Most favorite place to write/edit in the summer: House-sitting in Tea Gardens, NSW, Australia. I shared a back porch with a Sylvester-type cat, overlooking a tropical garden.

The worst place to try to write in the summer because of all the distractions: house-sitting an apartment overlooking the Anarchist’s Quarter in Athens: searing heat, machine-gun- toting “special” police, nightlife that went on until 3 a.m.

The thing you like most about being a writer: I have a fragmented psyche, but it mostly all comes together when I write.

The thing you like least about being a writer: I spent most of my career as a freelance speechwriter, and sometimes I had to write speeches I very much disagreed with. Encompassing the world view of the speaker left a bad taste in my mind.

The thing that you will most remember about your writing life: winning the Arthur Ellis Award from the Crime Writers of Canada. Total surprise. I had no idea I was even on the shortlist.

Something in your writing life that you wish you could do over: George R.R. Martin asked me if I wanted to be one of his Wild Cards co-authors. I didn’t have the confidence to say yes.

Most daring thing you’ve ever done: Northern Alberta, 1968. I was an eighteen-year-old kid running a rec center on a remote Metis colony. I’d got a guy to put in a juke box so we could have dances on Saturday night. But one of the dances turned into a brawl. I shoved my way through a dozen fist-swinging and boot-flying brawlers to shield the juke box from damage

Something you chickened out from doing: waiting for a midnight train in Foggia, Italy, I saw what looked like Mafiosi punching and slapping some frightened guy. Nothing I could do.

The nicest thing a reader said to you: [Your] books make me feel like a mouse whose pleasure centres are being deliberately tripped in a scientific experiment upon its brain.

The craziest thing a reader said to you: “It’s a privilege to meet you.” I replied, “Not a privilege, but I’m shooting for ‘It’s a pleasure.’”

The best summer job you ever had: working with my dad and uncle framing up for pouring concrete foundations.

The worst summer job you ever had: ten- and twelve-hour days in a factory that made school desks. I stood in the box car at the end of the production line, stacking boxes of desks – two to a box – that weighed 96 pounds each. I weighed 135.

About Matthew:

Matthew Hughes writes fantasy, space opera, and crime fiction. He has sold 24 novels to publishers large and small in the UK, US, and Canada, as well as nearly 100 works of short fiction to professional markets.

His latest novels are: Barbarians of the Beyond, an authorized companion novel to Jack Vance’s Demon Princes series, and Baldemar, a fix-up of a series of stories that originally ran in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and two anthologies.

He has won the Endeavour and Arthur Ellis Awards, and has been shortlisted for the Aurora, Nebula, Philip K. Dick, Endeavour, A.E. Van Vogt, Neffy, and Derringer Awards. He has been inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association’s Hall of Fame.

In order to live on the earnings of a modern midlist author, he has given up having a permanent address to become a full-time housesitter. In the past fifteen years, he has lived in twelve countries and passed through several more. He has no fixed address.