Hurly-burly of a copywriter, novelist and columnist extraordinaire
KARIN SCHIMKE
Badly
Pens
Behaving
Your blog is called A Million Miles From Normal. Please list three ways in which your life – now – is a million miles from “normal”. (why?), e-mailed me a picture of his (not erect) penis and asked me to sign it and e-mail it back to him. True story.
2. The three most recent search terms in my Google history are: “How many teeth does an adult have?”; “Notalgia paresthetica”; and an “image of businessman tied up with a telephone cable”.
3. No two days are the same, one day I’m writing about blow jobs and condoms, the next I’m doing a job for an ad agency which has me researching different kinds of retirement annuities, or the best pram to buy.
So apparently you divide your time between the US, the UK and SA now. You do know how glam that sounds, don’t you?
Ha, if only. I love a good rumour. My home is in Cape Town. Last year I was lucky enough to get in a three-month trip, which included a month and a half in the UK, writing, a few weeks in Amsterdam doing research for my new novel and a month in the states doing a big road trip.
No matter how popular a columnist, collections of columns are supposed to sell notoriously badly. What are your hopes for this book?
That it’s an actual book at all was one of my biggest hopes. It started out life as a Sunday Times e-book. The fact that it’s a book of columns and crazy letters will hopefully lend it more appeal than a book of just columns. I guess now my greatest hope is that it makes whoever reads it laugh.
Paige Nick in numbers: how old are you? How many columns have you written? How many books have you written? How many followers do you have? How often did people write to you about your column?
You know what they say: there are three kinds of people in the world – those who are good with numbers, and those who aren’t. I’m in the latter category, but let’s give this a whirl anyway: I’ve written 218 columns for the Sunday Times Lifestyle section. Pens Behaving Badly is my sixth published book. I have 31 of my own teeth (one in the back, on the left, is missing). On a massive week after a column about penis size or farting, I can receive up to 20 or 30 letters. On a slow week, just four or five. Pens Behaving Badly contains 152 real letters (78 percent of which are nuts), from 119 individual letter writers. I am 41 and still have all 10 fingers and 10 toes, which come in handy when I have to count stuff.
What are you working on right now?
Earlier this year I finished a new novel. It’s a biggie for me and I’m extremely excited about it. It’s set in a strip club in Amsterdam where all the strippers are celebrity impersonators. The reluctant heroine is a Rihanna lookalike from South Africa.
So are you proof that someone can make a living from writing?
It’s tough this writing gig. Not as tough as being a brain surgeon, but tough nonetheless. I supplement my fictionwriting income with freelance ad writing, the columns and some prostitution.