AD: I know where and when you started writing it, from an outside perspective anyway, because I was around when Scabvendor made the transition into what is now Narcisa, but personally, at what point did you start entertaining the idea of actually writing Narcisa as a completely separate project? You said something just before about the material from Scabvender making the “jump” into a whole other book… How did that jump actually happen?

JS: That’s an awesome question, Sailor, cuz it really takes me back to the time this all jumped off like it was yesterday…  But I’m still not really sure. I gotta think about this for a minute… Yeh, it was right before Carnaval, coming up on New Years 2006-2007, and you had come to Brazil with me to start learning the ropes as a literary editor. Talk about the blind leading the blind, hein? (laughs)... We were sitting at my office at that little shack by the ocean in Ipenema every day writing and reading each other’s shit all day long then for weeks on end. I was working on Scabvender — Confessions of a Tattoo Artist. That project had been sidelined for years at that point because of screenwriting jobs and other random writing projects and I was just getting back into it full time again. It was going along pretty good after a coupla months daily writing there. I’d just gotten up to chapter whatever, where I was writing about a character loosely inspired by this crazy insane psychopath girlfriend I’d had here in Brazil when I was in my twenties… and then suddenly, bam, it’s like she came bursting off the page into my life and it was on. Total obsession… I guess that was it.

While I was in that weird magical daily writing zone working on the other book, suddenly I’d started hanging out around with another girl who reminded me of some girls I’d known and been intimately involved with many years before. It only became clear to me though when I took the first step back into the past through the whole writing process, unraveling these old ghosts and then right in the middle of it all I started going through some old journals I’d found and dug out all those old notes and then all this stuff was suddenly revealed to me from a more objective point of perspective… and from that point on, I just kept going, kept digging into these character’s lives as they mysteriously emerged onto the pages…

Well, with my own long personal history as a drug addict, I just felt an immediate empathy for this character’s plight as I was writing it, ya know, and as one thing led to another, I fell right into the character’s orbit and, well, the rest is pretty much history…  there’s not much I can add to the whole story here. Some of it is derived from true stories and random incidents and other things are made up or taken from other people’s experiences and stories they told me about themselves and other people they knew. The character of Narcisa is definately not based on any one real person, but rather a composite character, a sort of literary Frankenstein monster pieced together out of many people I’ve known or imagined. That’s what makes it fiction in the truest sense of the word, the freedom to mix fact and fantasy and strain it through the artist’s imagination… but I guess what I’m trying to get to is how to answer your question, which was how did I suddenly end up switching channels from the book I’d been writing, Scabvender, and end up writing a totally different book, this whole seven-headed monster that ended up as a two book saga known as Narcisa. That’s a good question. I still wonder how that shit happened myself (laughs)… To answer your question though, I never once really ever consciously ‘entertained’ the idea of writing anything remotely like Narcisa… It’s one of those things that just sorta happens as if by its own accord.