Jeff VanderMeer:
Number 1. Climate change.
Number 2. The old house. You know that there’s a grey fox that hangs out at night there. You know the opossum. You know the raccoon. You know the birds. I've been worrying about what will happen to the creatures in the yard if I have to sell, and can I have a contract with a buyer which basically says you can't change anything in the yard, which I don't think is something you can do.
Number 3. The new house. In buying a new house, we're essentially saying we believe in the future of Florida in a climate change scenario. I just was at the new place and using the broom that I found there, and the cap on the end of the stick of the broom, which happened to be hollow, was off, and inside was a whole family of tree frogs.
Number 4. My health. Currently, my uniform is I have a long sleeve sweatshirt and these dark gloves and then these dark pants and these dark shoes and so I don't know if the neighbor thinks maybe it's a German Nihilism exercise, but basically I go out there that way because any time I don't, you know, even things like wisteria sometimes, I can't be sure of how it's going to react with the stuff on my skin to begin with.
5. Fascism.
6. Cockroaches. When I was in Fiji, I grew up in Fiji because my parents were in the Peace Corps, there was a kind of cockroach that would burrow into your ear while you were sleeping and then you would wake up to these crunching sounds. I try very hard not to cause any harm to any living thing as I'm walking about in the world. But I find it very hard to be generous towards cockroaches.
7. Is it too ordinary to be afraid of your cat dying? He's been the subject of a lot of my novels, um the giant bear in Borne that flies is based in part on Neo because it has these massive shoulders, and one reason why we’re fairly sure we're not going to have another cat is I don't think we can go through it again, but also because Neo is pretty much the one.
Number 8. Eight is just this general kind of fear of should I be doing something else. You know, I'm a writer. I'm kind of cynical about whether writing can actually change the world. It's epitomized by, you know, you meet someone at a dinner party who turns out to be very conservative and turns out they listen to the Sex Pistols. So clearly that didn't make any impact on their belief system.
Number 9. Showing new fiction to my wife, Anne. She is the one person who if she hates it, it's going to just kind of destroy me. I guess related to that, there's this fear with
10. That you're just not good enough. You're just not good enough for what you're trying to do.
My name is Jeff VanderMeer and these are ten things that scare me.
