Please introduce yourself and tell us about your background as a writer.
Hi! My name is J. Manfred Weichsel, and I write satires that combine science fiction, fantasy, horror, and adventure into some really wild books.

My short stories have appeared in Cirsova Magazine five times, in the Planetary Anthology series from Superversive Press and Tuscany Bay Press twice, and various other magazines, anthologies, and blogs.

Since 2020, my focus has been on self-publishing, with a goal to fulfill the promise of self-publishing by taking advantage of its freedoms to follow my own literary and artistic vision without compromise.

My self-published works include Ebu Gogo, Five Maidens on the Pentagram, She Was Asking for It, Kittycat Massacre, Jungle Jitters, Not Far from Eden, The Calydonian Boar Hunt, and Planet of the Wage Slaves.

What are the most prominent influences on your writing?
The biggest single influence on my writing is the world’s first satirist, the Greek author Menippus.

How do you incorporate his influence without being derivative?
Easy! As none of his writings have survived into modern times, there is no way for me to read it.

I have, however, read a lot of Menippus’ famous early follower, Lucian, and many later satirists who were influenced by Lucian, such as Francois Rabelais, Jonathan Swift, and Laurence Stern.

Perhaps here I should define satire, as I have learned, through the course of promoting myself as a satirist, that a lot of people don’t know what satire is, and confuse it with parody. The primary difference between the two is that parody makes fun of fiction, while satire makes fun of reality.

But beneath the surface-level definition of the two words, each carries with it its own connotation. Parody is usually in good fun. It’s often considered homage. You parody things you love, not things you hate. Classic Simpsons episodes reference Citizen Kane so often because the creators loved the movie, not because they hated it.

Satire, on the other hand, can be mean-spirited and even misanthropic. You don’t make fun of real-life things you love. You make fun of the things you hate. Satire employs ridicule, mockery, and derision to attack human stupidity, weakness, and vice, as well as social convention and the hypocrisy at the root of propriety and decorum.

Common targets of satire include individuals; groups of people such as, say, members of a political party; human institutions, such as governments or schools; concepts, such as science or religion; and forms of government, such as monarchy or democracy. Anything human can be the target of satire, and just about everything under the sun has been satirized at some point or another.

Within this framework, there are two branches of satire in Western culture, which are very different from one another. The one that most people recognize as satire, but which is not the branch that I follow, derives from the Athenian playwright Aristophanes.

These satires usually take place in the real world, or something approximating the real world. The characters often include real people, whether living or dead, and poke their fun at current events. For example, Aristophanes thought Socrates, who was then living, was an idiot, so he wrote a comedy in which Socrates is a character, and is portrayed as an idiot.

The purest (but hardly the best) contemporary example of this kind of satire is probably Saturday Night Live, in which a comedian, playing whoever the President of the United States happens to be at the time, is a regular cast member, and the skits deal with that week’s biggest news stories.

The other branch of satire, which is the one that I do follow, derives from Menippus, and was transmitted to the broader Western culture mostly through his follower Lucian. These satires usually have some sort of fantastical setting. For example, Lucian sent his characters to the moon and Venus while writing in the second century AD. If Menippean satires are set in the real world, it is an exaggerated and highly stylized representation of it. Menippean satires are experimental, and break the rules of conventional storytelling. For example, they often have nonlinear structures, and plots that go on wild digressions, taking them far from where you would expect them to go. Instead of targeting specific people and groups, Menippean satires tend to make fun of broad human characteristics. Finally, and this is the thing Menippean satire is most famous for, it contrasts the metaphysical with slum naturalism in the form of gross-out humor, sex jokes, and scatological ones.

Menippean satires are those weird, bizarre, off-the-wall books where, once you finish one, you can’t believe what you just read. If you are interested in learning more, Wikipedia has a much more exhaustive list of its characteristics than what I can provide here.

Many authors say marketing is one of their biggest challenges. What tactics have you found to be most effective for getting your name out there?
I put naked women on my book covers.

That’s it?
Well, I do the other stuff too, but that’s the only thing that works.

How much do your audience’s expectations factor in to what you write? Does this ever cause you to hold back from experimenting?
This is kind of a funny question, because I write in a genre where it is expected that you are going to experiment. In fact, I would defy my audience’s expectations by not experimenting.

Have you had any new stories published recently? Are you currently working on any?
My most recent book is my 99 cent short read Planet of the Wage Slaves, which came out September 8th. I also just had my fifth story published in Cirsova, “Tripping to Aldous”, which you can find in the Fall 2022 issue.

I’m not sure what my next book is going to be. There is just so much I want to write. I am very happy with Not Far from Eden, which is an adaptation of an ancient Hebrew myth from the Dead Sea scrolls about angels who rebel against God to have sex with human women, and The Calydonian Boar Hunt, which is a highly comedic adaptation of an ancient Greek myth. At some point I want to write an adaptation of the Arthurian legends. There are all of these smaller, lesser-known stories about the love affairs between the characters, such as the love triangle between Arthur, Guinevere, and Lancelot, and the one between Morgan le Fey, Arthur, and Guinevere, and it occurred to me that they could make an excellent relationship comedy and sex farce. I could write that one next because I am very excited about it, but on the other hand, my most popular books are Ebu Gogo and Jungle Jitters, and it has been a long time now since I’ve written a jungle adventure story, so I might do that. I also want to write a book called Planet of Snakes based on the setting of a novella of mine, but I keep on starting and then stopping it. I’ve been trying to write it since mid-2021 and haven’t made any progress at all. I also want to write another Gothic horror sex farce along the lines of my novel Five Maidens on the Pentagram, but involving hypnotism and astral projection. So in other words, it’s still up in the air right now.

Any final words?
Thank you for having me here to talk today. DMR Books is doing a fabulous job publishing some really exciting new and classic sword and sorcery and pulp fiction. To learn more about me and my books, please visit my website. And to keep up with announcements and new releases, please join my newsletter.