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SD: Will we ever see a U.S. edition of The Shaft. And do you have any other novels in the works?
DJS: If my Babbage Books backlist campaign holds out, The Shaft should be the sixth book in the chain, in an affordable trade paperback edition with special extras. The first three Babbage books, by the way, are Seeing Red, Lost Angels, and Wild Hairs. Wild Hairs is actually Babbage's first original title ever, but it's also "backlist" in the sense that it collects a lot of previously written nonfiction work. If you can't wait and can read German, the Verlag edition of Der Schact came out in September 2000.
 We could say that I've got two novels in the works, but they've been in that indeterminate limbo for years, and every time I mention them in an interview, I wind up putting them off for another year or two.
SD: Earlier, we were discussing your use of film themes in your fiction. Could you tell us about any film and television projects you've got in the works?
DJS: I learned the hard way the best bet for cursing any in-work TV or film project is to talk about it. Remember what I said about writing novels? Same deal, only a million times worse. It's almost as if one's comments fly out into some black, cosmic megaflow to countermand, point-by-point, whatever you blurt out or brag about. A very close friend of mine called me on the phone the other day to note that the green-lighted movie which he was to begin directing at 9:30 AM that very morning, had suddenly and without warning morphed into a no-go at the corporate/studio level, at exactly 9:00 AM. Sets were built. The crew was standing around. The actors showed up at their assigned call times for a movie that, in the blink of an eye, wasn't being made so abruptly that no one knew about it but the executives. As fast as straw can turn to gold in the movie industry, it can turn back into straw at lightspeed, which, I guess, is why so many superstitions have grabbed hold of writers, directors, actors. Ask them and you'll uncover an amazing array of bizarre rituals and fetishes and bugaboos, all of which relate to jinxing the latest project. Mostly it's a good idea not to talk about stuff until it's done, and out, and able to be experienced -- and even then, think twice before your lips start flapping. Apart from the bottomless pit of promotion, what's the point of talking about an in-work project? Imagine us, sitting here right now, doing an in-depth interview about what my next short story is about. If I went into enough detail, I'd ultimately never write the story as a result.
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