How long have you been writing?
I started telling stories with pictures before I ever began
writing. So it was a natural transition to writing them down as a child.
Luckily, my Uncle Danny encouraged me by paying me a quarter a page to write
stories. Didn’t matter what, just that I wrote a story. I kept writing to keep
those quarters rolling in; they could actually buy something back in the day.
My first story to be published was featured in my elementary school newspaper;
it was a horror tale about an archaeologist and a mummy, even then I knew two
things: I wanted to dig and I wanted to write.
Which writers have influenced you the most?
Stylistically, I prefer older, pulpier writers who actually
played with the language without padding their stories heavily. As a reader, I
like a lean style similar to Ambrose Bierce who once said that a novel is only
a short story…padded. However, I do not like the extreme of modern industrial
fiction that insists one remove every adjective, adverb, and dialogue tag other
than “said” and “asked.” I try to be flowing, florid but not excessive. I also
find that I break the fourth wall often, especially in first-person perspective
stories. I feel I can credit that to writers who feel comfortable reaching out
and speaking to their audience, such as modern writers like Douglas Adams, Neil
Gaiman, and others. Older writers such as Dickens, Poe, and Lovecraft use this
style but without the humor. I try to embrace that for horror. Thematically, I
can go back to those writers as well as people like Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker,
H.G. Wells, and Jules Verne. I like to deal with speculative fiction mostly, so
I like writers with imaginations who have something to say about the state or
fate of humanity. Attitude wise, I am probably too much like Harlan Ellison,
only without the talent, money, litany of works, and clout.
Where have you found inspiration for your stories/books?
Depends on the story to be honest. I have found inspiration
in so many places. Not all of them turned into stories that ended up being
written down, but I find myself spurred to daydream little scenes of
situational tales based on any number of things, from a real life incident, to
a song, a person, or even a photograph or scene in nature. My latest story, “Beta
Male, Alpha Wolf”, was actually inspired by a real life event that left me
broken and battered physically and emotionally; so this wild, unhinged tale of
a werewolf with a broken heart was how I dealt with it. It was therapeutic,
even cathartic to write.
How did you come up with your story titles?
That’s almost as varied a process as coming up with the
stories themselves. Inspiration comes from a number of places but titles can be
trickier. Sometimes it comes before the story and spurs and steers the tale
itself. Other times I find myself enjoying a particular phrase or piece of
dialogue and use it for the title. I’ll give you some examples. If a story is
inspired by a song, such as my short submission for Chaosium’s Summer of
Lovecraft anthology, “Some Kind of Way Out of Here”, it comes from the song
lyrics. In the case of my story about dwarves on a submarine in Capes &
Clockwork, “Deep Diving Death Defying Dwarves of the Deep” is a twist on what
Navy submariners call themselves. Only they use “denizens” instead of “dwarves.”
For the first Cycle of Ages Saga novel, its title, Finders Keepers, refers to
the mercenary company that Kaladimus Dor, the main character, partners with on
the island.
Is there anything you find particularly challenging in your
writing, and how do you deal with this?
So many things. And the longer I do it the more challenges I
encounter. Motivation is an issue with me. I deal with depression and
insecurity issues already, so writing, which is a self-motivated endeavor that
ends up with one exposing their creative endeavors to the world for criticism,
can be a bit daunting. People who say that it is only fun for them. Well, I
hate those people. I enjoy what I do. But I also know that there comes a moment
when the bird has to fly the coop and face being shot to pieces by every
asshole on the internet. Or worse yet, have it ignored for a bestselling,
ghostwritten book about Snookie’s new baby and people writing Bigfoot and
dinosaur porn. Despite all of that nonsense, writing is very freeing, even
liberating. It’s the part where I try to talk other people into reading the
results and then awaiting their feedback that I hate. Though I am told that I
pretend to deal with it quite well. I guess a steady regimen of bitching about
it keeps my ulcers from exploding like the super volcano under Yellowstone and
drowning me in my own blood.
What advice would you give to aspiring writers?
Get a stable job that pays you six-figures first and then
budget the time to write into your schedule. Trying to write for a living
nowadays is a fool’s errand for the most part. Less than ten percent of writers
can pay their bills and live off of what they make. So plan on telling your
story your way for you; with 15 million books flooding the market every year,
no one may be reading but you. And if you do plan on running the gauntlet and
trying to keep the lights on with your writing, you must be prepared to write
to your market, unashamedly and unabashedly, as the well-paid whore that you
will become, a euphemism that Harlan Ellison uses to describe himself as a
professional, successful writer. Build a platform online, branch out, and if
you can stand people on the internet, be social with them. Start this process a
few years in advance of actually releasing your magnum opus. If you don’t,
you’ll be playing catch up with people who have 100K followers but not a single
book on the shelf, much less on Kindle. Don’t worry about an agent or a manager
for now. If you have to share you profits with anyone, other than a publisher
worth their share of the profits, do yourself a favor and find a good, eager,
and energetic publicist. Find one, hire one, and then call me, so I can hire
them too.
Do you sit down and write “by the seat of your pants,” or do
you carefully outline all the plot points before you start creating? (Or in other words, are you a “pantster” or a
“plotter”?)
I am only a pantster when it comes to poetry and very short
fiction. I find that if I don’t work on careful notes, research, and outlines,
I do not finish longer projects. Hell, with my attention span, I have enough
trouble starting them. But mission planning is always necessary in my opinion,
especially for a genre that requires a lot of world-building, like most sci-fi
and fantasy. I started my endeavor to become a professional writer as a
screenwriter so there are plot formulas, scene lists, character bibles, and
more that I used for writing screenplays and I find that those are helpful to
regular fiction writing too, from mapping out worlds to complicated action
scenes.
If your book was made into a movie, who would you like to
see as the star(s)?
Funny you ask, the first two installments of the Cycle of
Ages Saga, Finders Keepers and Sands of Sorrow were written as screenplays
before they became novels. Producers told us we’d need a fan base to push for
enough funding to do them right though. They are pretty high concept, big
budget affairs. So we’ve contemplated this before and talked it over. My
preference for Kaladimus Dor, our calamitous mage of Myth, would be Robert
Sheehan, an actor from the British series Misfits. Though I think Freddie
Highmore, Norman from Bates Motel, could do the role justice as well. We’d
actually talked to Peter Mensah’s agent about our saga and sent them the
scripts for him to read, but we never heard back, which is pretty typical
without any sort of funding behind a project. He would make the perfect
Breuxias. As for our elven war-mage, Yax’ Kaqix (pronounced Yahsh-hah-keesh), I
think Jeffrey Donovan from Burn Notice would play the part perfectly; he even
has the martial arts background to make the fight choreography believable.
If you could talk to any writer, living or dead, who would
it be, and what would you discuss?
Honestly, I’d love to say Douglas Adams, as he writes some
of my favorite books, but I think Mark Twain would be a helluva lot more fun
and insightful in the long run. It’s a close call though. If we’re talking
ideals, I’d just have the Doctor swing by in the TARDIS; we’d pick up Adams and
then travel back in time to catch old Sam Clemens on a particularly ornery but
talkative day, preferably after he’s completed War Prayer but realized he
cannot published it while he’s alive. Then we can all sit back over some
whiskey and talk about the life, the universe, and everything.
What writing project are you currently working on?
For the moment, I am on a hiatus while I recover from a back
injury. It took me too long to get my last story out the door and then I had to
bow out on a hardboiled detective anthology. So I am taking it easy and trying
to decide what is next for me. I spend so much time and energy on short
submissions that I may discontinue most of those projects for the interim and
focus on mission-planning and world-building for another novel. The main
problem is that I have so many ideas outlined and in different states of
development that I am not sure what to work on next. It may come down to which
genre I want to try my hand at or which theme/tone I am more in tune with
emotionally at the time. On top of that, there are people in my circle of
friends, family, and fans that are pushing me to write something more commercially
appealing, like erotica or a children’s book. I thought fantasy was
commercially appealing. Judging by our sales, I guess not, at least not our
saga anyway. How about you? Got any suggestions? I have at least one idea or
premise for every genre. I just have little faith in what I am doing at the
moment, and chronic pain and depression are not the best companions for
crafting coherent, much less entertaining fiction.
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