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Ari Marmell: The Terribleminds Interview

Ari and I go way back. We once fought dinosaurs in the Caveman War of the Ninth Glacial Epoch. We once surfed the rings of Saturn. And once upon a time, we worked freelance in the roleplaying game industry. Since then, Ari’s star has gone supernova and now he’s a Big Time Fantasy Writer, but thankfully, I was able to dose his drink with questionable veterinary drugs and convince him to submit to an interview here. His newest is Thief’s Covenant. Seek out his website — mouseferatu.com — or stalk him on Twitter (@mouseferatu).

EDIT: I’m told that it’s Ari’s birthday. GO BUY HIS BOOKS. He rules. Do so now.

This is a blog about writing and storytelling. So, tell us a story. As short or long as you care to make it. As true or false as you see it.

Once upon a time, in a distant land, there lived a young prince named Bernard. Now, Bernard had no real renown of his own, but he did run in some fairly famous circles. For Bernard, as it happened, was one of several suitors to that most illustrious, tower-dwelling princess: Rapunzel, she of the lengthy locks.

One day, worried that Rapunzel might choose one of the other princes vying for her attention, Bernard set out to pay her a surprise visit. To prove his love and devotion, he brought with him a gold and ivory comb, an heirloom that had been in his family for seven generations. The prince dropped from his noble steed, approached the base of the stone, weather-worn tower, and called up.

“Rapunzel! It is I, Prince Bernard! Let down your hair!”

After several long and uncomfortable moments, the princess’s melodious voice came drifting back down. “You ought to let a girl know when you’re planning to show up! I’ve only just gotten out of the bath!”

“Oh.” Bernard scowled, kicking at a clump of soil. “If you’d rather I come back later…”

“No, no, come on up.”

As in his many previous visits, a long coil of hair rolled from the upper window to dangle before him, providing a means of climbing the wall. Unlike those past times, however, this particular braid was loose and haphazard, scarcely braided at all. Worse, it was barely half the width of her normal rope of hair.

“Ah, Rapunzel? This seems… a bit flimsy, doesn’t it?”

“Nothing for it!” she called down. “I’m still busy brushing my other braids. Could be hours before I’m done. Surely,” she added, her voice teasing, “a young man as athletic as you should be able to climb what’s available safely enough! Or have all your claims just been empty boasts?”

Well, Bernard certainly wasn’t about to appear weak or cowardly! Straightening his back, he stepped forward and took an experimental tug on the princess’s lone and lonely braid.

It really didn’t feel all that secure.

When Rapunzel shouted again, her pout was obvious in her voice. “Don’t you love me enough to even try?”

Bernard began climbing immediately, of course. His grip was a bit precarious at first, but he swiftly got the hang of climbing the smaller rope.

Thinks I don’t love her enough, does she? I’ll show her!

Even as he climbed, Bernard removed the comb he’d brought to offer his beloved, and began to work out the knots and tangles of the haphazard braid. Not only would he climb up to visit, but he’d save her a bit of effort and show her just how good his gift actually was!

All of which might have seemed like a great idea, until–mere feet from the top–Prince Bernard lost his grip.

Had the braid been thicker, he might never have slipped. Had he not been so careful to comb out Rapunzel’s hair on his way, he might have had a knot on which to grab. Alas, the slender and smooth locks flowed through his fingers, providing no purchase at all, and Bernard perished in a heap of broken bones at the base of Rapunzel’s tower.

And so, as we come to the end of our tragic story, we can take consolation only in the wisdom imparted by our tale’s twin morals:

“A braid in the hand is worth two in the brush,” and “A man’s comb is his hassle.”

Why do you tell stories?

In part, I don’t really have a choice. The story ideas and characters come to me, and I really want to do something with them. As a kid, I was able to get that out of my system by running D&D games, but it’s just not enough anymore.

And also, I pretty much suck at everything else.

Give the audience one piece of writing or storytelling advice:

Don’t let worries over what’s currently popular keep you from writing whatever sort of story you love (or are driven) to tell.

What’s great about being a writer, and conversely, what sucks about it?

Well, being able to set my own hours is pretty cool. But really, the best thing is talking to people who have gotten real enjoyment (or even found deeper meaning, on occasion) from something I’ve created. The creation itself is wonderful, but seeing how that creation affects others is amazing.

As for what sucks? The fact that income varies so dramatically and that the job has no benefits causes some problems, certainly. And since so much of my enjoyment is based on others’ reactions, it also means–much as I try not to let it bug me–that negative reactions to my work sometimes bum me out.

Also, when you work from home and have turned your hobby into your job? You never really get a lot of time off. Even when you take a day away from writing, your brain’s still noodling away at whatever project you’ve got going, or forthcoming, or developing. (And yes, writers have all of that going at once. If your average writer was twice as prolific as Stephen King, he still wouldn’t be able to actually use more than a fraction of his ideas.)

Oh, the fact that people sometimes assume that what I do isn’t real work, and that if I’m home during the day it must mean I have time to run errands for them, is an occasional pain.

Okay, so I have to ask: how do you deal with negative fan/reader reaction?

Hard liqueur and thugs with baseball bats.

Honestly, it depends on the kind of negative reaction. If it’s screaming vitriol, I briefly bitch about it (to myself, my wife, or a friend), and then ignore it. Nothing you can do with that. But if it’s a reasonably or politely written critique, I find that my best bet is to consider whether I feel like they may be on to something. I’ve made a few improvements by listening to concerns that came in from more than one source. Obviously, in many cases, I won’t agree, and won’t change accordingly, but it’s worth looking at.

And then there are the ones you just laugh at, such as when somebody claimed The Conqueror’s Shadow was so bad it “literally kills babies.” It’s always nice when people make it easy for you to figure out that they deserve to land soundly in the “ignore” pile.

What did gaming (tabletop in particular) teach you about storytelling?

Well, a lot of the very basics — how to build a plot, for instance — came, in part, from my early gaming days. It certainly taught me about telling stories in someone else’s setting, which has served me well in my tie-in work.

But I think my gaming experience has also helped me when it comes to having my characters solve problems creatively. When I’m outlining, I very often describe the peril the characters have gotten into, but not how they get out of it. I wait until I’m actually writing that scene, and then try to get them out with only the resources I’ve already described/given them, rather than planning in advance to give them Tool X to solve Situation Y. It doesn’t always work, and I don’t deal with every challenge that way, but it’s fun when it’s appropriate.

What’s the upside and the downside to writing tie-in fiction?

Well, in every case thus far, I’ve really enjoyed the setting in which I was working. The opportunity to add to the experience of a property that I really like is a fantastic one, and quite possibly one of the single greatest highlights of tie-in. On a more mercenary level, the fact that there’s usually a built-in audience don’t hurt none, neither.

(Every one of my editors just had a coronary.)

Downside… Well, the fact that it is someone else’s world means that your options are limited. I can’t necessarily kill of Character X, or make a change to Setting Detail Y, or even assume that Trope Z holds true. It narrows the scope of what’s possible. Also, there’s the fact that a lot more people have a lot more control over the final product. I’ve been lucky enough to work with more reasonable people than not, but even reasonable people disagree on ideas here and there. It’s frustrating to have not just an editor, but 2d6 other people have a say over every last detail of the book–especially when any one of them can overrule the author.

You write fantasy for the most part — what’s the trick to writing good fantasy? What do you think is missing from most fantasy these days?

Well, leaving aside all of that “interesting characters and plot” nonsense that goes into writing a good anything

Internal consistency. What, on gaming forums, is often called “verisimilitude.” The fact that a book is a fantasy is not license to throw common sense or rational cultural development out the window. “A wizard did it” is not a one-stop solution.

There’s a saying that “It’s easier to believe the impossible than the improbable.” (I’d attribute it, but I don’t actually know who said it first.) I can, for instance, accept a world where dragons and sorcerers are real. I cannot accept a plotline that’s driven too much by sheer coincidence or character stupidity. I cannot accept a culture that makes no sense. It doesn’t have to resemble a real historical culture, but it has to feel like it actually hangs together, not like it was slapped together for no purpose other than to be convenient to the plot.

As to what’s missing in most fantasy? Hmm… This is beginning to change, but secondary worlds based on cultures other than Europe. Where’s the fantasy world that resembles Southern Africa? India? (One of my favorite recent fantasy series is Aliette de Bodard’s Obsidian and Blood trilogy, which is set in the Aztec empire. So next, I’d like to see someone create a secondary world somewhat resembling the Aztecs, without actually being historical fantasy.)

Also? I’d really, really, really, really like to see an increase in standalone books (or at least series where each book can stand alone). Not every fantasy tale requires nine books of 800 pages each to tell, people.

Why’d you write Thief’s Covenant? How is it a novel only Ari Marmell could write?

It’s a novel only I could write because I got to it first and it’s copyrighted, damn it.

Okay, more seriously… Most of my fantasy protagonists to date have been antiheroes (or, in the case of The Goblin Corps, outright villains). Widdershins may be a thief, but she’s basically a good person; I wanted to write a hero who was, at least in some respects, actually a hero. I also wanted to play with certain cultural aspects–the combination of the very French Renaissance with a very un-Renaissance belief system, in particular.

But mostly? I wrote it for the same reason I write most of my non-tie-in books: Because the idea came to me, and I liked it enough to haul it out of the stream, rather than let it drift by to the Lake of Unused Concepts. No more real meaning to it than that.

What makes it a “me” book? Partly the combination of humor and horror. Not that I’m the only person to do that–and there’s less of the “near horror” level of violence here than in my other books, though it’s still present–but I like to think this precise style of combining them is mine.

I also feel that–so far as is possible, given that I am not and never have been a teenage girl–that Widdershins is a very Ari character. I’m not sure I can articulate why, to be honest. She just really seems to have sprung Athena-like from my head.

Favorite word? And then, the follow up: Favorite curse word?

“Diphthong.” It just looks like it shouldn’t be a word at all, it’s fun to say, and in a pinch you can use it to sound like you’re insulting someone.

Favorite curse word? Hmm… I’ve long felt that if you’re only using one word, you’re not doing it right. But if I have to pick one, I really think the sheer versatility of “fuck”–you can make entire sentences out of nothing but variations–is the reason it remains a beloved classic.

Favorite alcoholic beverage? (If cocktail: provide recipe. If you don’t drink alcohol, fine, fine, a non-alcoholic beverage will do.)

I don’t drink. Yeah, I know, one of those. It’s not any sort of moral objection; I just don’t like the taste of alcohol, and it aggravates certain health conditions I have.

So, favorite non-alcoholic? One of various sorts of mocha frappacino, preferably in either a mint or chocolate-and-cherry variation.

Recommend a book, comic book, film, or game: something with great story. Go!

I’m gonna go old-school on this. Back in, oh, the early 90s or so, Sierra released a PC game called “Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Father.” (There were two more games in the series that were both pretty good, but the first was best.) It’s obviously a remarkably primitive game by today’s standards, but if you can get hold of it (and your computer will run it), I still recommend it as one of the coolest games–yes, including story–I’ve ever played.

What skills do you bring to help the humans win the inevitable zombie war?

I encourage teamwork among the survivors.

Specifically, I’m so slow and out of shape that I won’t be too hard to catch. Meaning that nobody has to resort to tripping anyone else in order to survive, thus building a level of trust they would otherwise lack.

You’ve committed crimes against humanity. They caught you. You get one last meal.

Probably something fajita-related. With nachos beforehand, and ice cream after.

Not just because I like such things, but because I’m lactose intolerant. If they’re gonna execute me, they get to deal with the results.

What’s next for you as a storyteller? What does the future hold?

Well, multi-million dollar movie deals, one hopes.

More likely? I have a few things I’m looking forward to diving into, including a near-future YA novel with a premise I actually haven’t seen used before; some additional tie-in work; hopefully some additional installments in the “Widdershins Adventures” YA fantasy series, and (also hopefully) writing sequels to my first urban fantasy, which my agent is shopping around as we speak.

Well, except that we’re not speaking. And she’s not doing it “as I type,” because it’s late.

But you know what I mean.

Nathan Long: The Terribleminds Interview

When Stephen Blackmoore says, “Pay attention to this author,” I pay attention. In part because Blackmoore is wise. In part because I figure maybe Blackmoore’s warning me about some author who’s trying to stab me with a shattered absinthe bottle because said author is jacked up on two dozen five-hour-energy-drinks. In this instance, Blackmoore pointed me to Nathan Long because he’s a smart guy with a new delicious pulpy book out — Jane Carver of Waar. Further, Nathan’s a guy with a lot of game-related tie-in fiction under his belt which I think appeals to you crazy cats and kittens. So, here he is. Meanwhile, find him at his website — sabrepunk.com. Or on the Twitters — @Nathan_R_Long.

This is a blog about writing and storytelling. So, tell us a story. As short or long as you care to make it. As true or false as you see it.

A few years back, I was head writer on a Saturday morning adventure show called Kamen Rider Dragon Knight, which was of the same genre as Power Rangers and Beetle Borgs, etc, only slightly more adult and ambitious. It was funded by an independent Japanese production company, basically two guys who had made some movies, but who had never done TV before, nor done any business with TV people. This meant they ended up putting a lot of their own money into it up front and praying really hard that someone would buy it somewhere on down the line.

Now, at the beginning, these producers told us they wanted Kamen Rider Season One to be 40 episodes long, which struck us as an odd number, but whatever. If that’s what they wanted, that’s what we’d give ’em. I wrote out a big 40 episode arc, which took our hero Dragon Knight on an epic journey of self discovery and self sacrifice, while at the same time allowing him to kick serious ass on a lot of monsters – and of course save the world. It was a rich and complicated a plot, probably too rich and complicated for Saturday morning, thinking back on it, but like I said, we had ambitions.

Anyhow, on the Monday of the week when we were shooting episode 23, and I was busy cleaning up the scripts for the next three, I got a call from the producers saying they were short on money, and that, instead of 40 episodes, we were only going to do 36, and could I replot the story so it would end four episodes earlier than previously planned.

Well, that sucked, but whatever. These things happen in Hollywood. So I dropped everything and got to work replotting, and had the new plot all worked by Tuesday afternoon, just in time for the producers to call and tell me that, actually, they only had money to do 30 episodes, and could I shorten it again. This time it was a lot tougher. I had a whole shitload of interweaving story lines running, and now I only had seven episodes to tie them up, instead of thirteen. But I did my best and had a new outline sorted out by Wednesday afternoon, at which point the producers called again and said the money situation was really, really bleak, and we were only going to be able to shoot one more episode, so could I wrap the whole series up in one final twenty two page script.

By this time I was tearing my hair out, but I sat down once more, pulled an all nighter, and came up with an outline for a script that, while not great, would at least pay off the main plotline and give the lead character’s arc some kind of resolution. Then, just as I was printing it out on Thursday morning and getting ready to bring it into the office, I got a further call from the producers. They had resolved their money issues. We were back on for 40 episodes. Could I put it back the way it was before.

That I stand before you a free man, and am not currently doing time for first degree murder is entirely because I work from home, and my homicidal rage was spent upon an entirely innocent office chair and an Ultra Man action figure that just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. Had I been at the production office, things might have gone very differently.

So, what is the moral of this tale of woe? I think it is this. A professional writer must be able to adapt to whatever changes are asked of him. He must also be ready to change his mind, and to remember that there are a thousand ways to tell every story – and that sometimes he’ll be asked to use every one of them.

Why do you tell stories?

Because I can’t stop. Because stories are secular church. They tell people how to be and how to live. Because real life has no satisfying endings, so we gotta make ’em up. Because I always loved reading stories, but there were some that weren’t being told, so I had to tell them. Because nothing else has ever held my interest for more than five minutes.

Just because.

“Stories are secular church.” What’s a good writer’s prayer? Or storyteller’s mantra?

Dear God of the Beginning, the Middle and the End, may my tale feel natural and unforced. May my meanings be clear and my intentions understood. May my endings elicit the emotion I intended them to. May I reach the reader that needs to be reached, and inspire (or at least amuse) the downhearted. Forever and ever, Amen.

Give the audience one piece of writing or storytelling advice:

Know the ending before you begin. I’m not saying you have to know it in detail, but you should know where you want to go. A good story makes a point. It isn’t just some events and characters strung together on a timeline. It works toward a conclusion, and if all you’ve got when you start writing is a hero, a setting and a conflict, you don’t have a story, you have a box of ingredients. You may find a story along the way, but it’s a hell of an inefficient way to go.

I don’t start until I know that “She’s going to chose honor over family,” or “He’s going to realize he’s an spoiled jerk and finally do the right thing,” or “He’s going to save his people and ruin his personal life.” You notice that, even though those are the actual payoffs for some of my actual sword and sorcery stories, they don’t mention swords, sorcery or monsters. That is because, stripped of the frosting of genre, all good stories are about a guy, or a gal, and how they choose to deal with the shit life hands them. The rest is candy.

Endings. What, then, goes into a good ending?

A novel is an extended joke, and the ending is its punch line. You have spent many many pages setting up and complicating a central conflict, whether internal, external, or hopefully both. The ending must pay off those conflicts in emotionally satisfying ways. That doesn’t mean that all books have to have happy endings, or even that they all have to completely resolve. But you have to satisfy the reader’s expectations in some way. That is part of the contract you made with them at the beginning of the book. You cannot promise them chocolate cake for desert all through a long dinner, and then give them bean sprouts, or tell them that the cake is actually at the end of the next book. I am also not a fan of the oblique ending, where the reader is not sure what happened or why. When someone finishes one of my books I hope that the ending will trigger some kind of emotion, whether they laugh, cry, cheer, or curse my name.

A good ending with find strong and surprising ways to pay off both the book’s external conflict (the action story) and the internal conflict (the emotional story) as well as any side conflicts that have not been tied up, and it should do it without appearing mechanical or forced.

What’s great about being a writer, and conversely, what sucks about it?

The greatest thing about being a writer is hearing that somebody read your story and it affected them in the way you intended it to, whether they laughed, cried, cheered or cursed your name.

The thing that sucks about writing is that I have 11 novels out and I’m writing this on the sly at my day job.

Favorite word? And then, the follow up: Favorite curse word?

Favorite word: This changes on a daily basis. Today it’s “batshit.”

Favorite curse word: Cunt. Nothing else sums up a man in so satisfyingly angry a syllable.

Favorite alcoholic beverage? (If cocktail: provide recipe. If you don’t drink alcohol, fine, fine, a non-alcoholic beverage will do.)

I’m a teetotaler and a tea snob. I like high-end oolong, the richer the better. Whenever I get money I go down to Chinatown to score.

Recommend a book, comic book, film, or game: something with great story. Go!

Book: Fingersmith by Sarah Waters – Fantastic characters, delicious setting, perfect construction, heartbreak, romance, and an lovely, satisfying ending. I read it in a single night.

Comic book: The original Tin-Tin comics. Fuck that movie.

Film: Diggstown – hands down my pick for the best constructed screenplay ever.

Game: Planescape Torment – Creaky old-school graphics but the first game I ever played that made me feel like I was living a novel.

What skills do you bring to help the humans win the inevitable zombie war?

I always know where the exit is.

You’ve committed crimes against humanity. They caught you. You get one last meal.

That’s a tough choice. Sushi at Nozawa. No wait, barbeque pork at Hong Kong BBQ. No no, I changed my mind. Ramen from Jinya. Okay, no. I got it. I’d like a meal on the first commercial space station, and I’m willing to wait. That oughta give me 50 more years to live, right?

What’s next for you as a storyteller? What does the future hold?

This is a big year for me. Night Shade Books has just published my first original novel, Jane Carver of Waar, which is about a kick-ass biker chick who goes to another world that is not at all like Mars, and I am currently in the middle of a mini signing tour for it here in southern California.

It’s funny to feel like a first time novelist when I have published ten Warhammer novels in the last six years, but I do. I truly enjoy the fun and challenge of tie-in work, but I can’t tell you how exciting and gratifying to be able to put that word “original” in front of that other word “novel” for the first time. Of course it’s terrifying too. My personal writing is finally out there, unfiltered by having to stay true to the IP or write to the target age demographic of a game. I’m bare-ass naked now, and a little nervous about what people will think.

Still, despite Jane, I haven’t abandoned Warhammer, and I have two books coming out from that world as well. The first is the Gotrek and Felix Anthology, in which I have two short stories, also out in March. The second is my third Ulrika the Vampire novel, Bloodsworn, which is coming out in June.

Beyond that, Night Shade Books have already contracted me for a second Jane Carver novel, this one entitled Swords of Waar, which I am cleaning up as we speak, and I have a bunch of other cool side projects that I’ve been putting off in order to finish Jane that I’m itching to get back to.

And on top of all that, I’m looking for a job writing computer games. I hear it pays better than novels, and it’s a medium in which I have always wanted to try telling stories. Any takers?

You’ve worked predominantly with tie-in novels — what’s the trick to writing a satisfying tie-in? Feels like a tightrope walk to me.

There are many different kinds of tie-in writing – novelizations of movies, continued adventures of TV characters, children’s books about Saturday morning cartoon characters, but the only one I have any experience with is game tie-ins, and to me, that kind of tie in writing can give a writer more freedom than any other. It is much more like TV or comic book writing, where you are asked to write new stories for existing characters in an existing world. When I was asked to take over Warhammer’s Gotrek and Felix series, that was the equivalent of taking over Batman for a five year run, or writing a few episodes of 24. You know you’re not the first guy to do it, and you won’t be the last, but you try to bring some spark to the franchise and make it your own.

And if you’re really lucky – like I have been once or twice – they’ll let you come up with your own heroes and create your own series. That is even better than taking over an existing series, as you don’t have to worry about matching the style or storyline of previous authors, and can write pretty much what you want – as long as your editor approves, of course.

As to the trick of writing a good one? Easy. Treat it like a regular novel where someone else has done all the world building. That’s all there is to it.

Why Jane Carver? Why is it a book by Nathan Long and not by anybody else?

Good question. I think it stems from my love/hate relationship with adventure fiction. I have always loved high adventure stuff. I love the look of it, the dash of it, the swashbuckling action, but at the same time I am often frustrated by its limits. The writing can be pedestrian, the characters can be shallow, and the heroes often seem to all be cut from the same cloth – male, unflawed, impossibly noble or unrelentingly dark, and generally not actual humans. Changing that has always been my goal. From the beginning, I have wanted to make adventure fiction with more depth, character, emotion, and a more inclusive cast. I hope Jane Carver of Waar shows that it can be done.

Also, I fell in love with Vasquez from Aliens, and thought she should have her own movie.

Jane Carver is pulp-sodden. Recommend some other good pulp for us to read.

Hmmm. I don’t know if all of these will qualify as pulp, but a lot of them are the ancestors of Jane in one way or another, so here you go:

-Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series – for language and wit

-George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman series – for sex and skullduggery

-Harry Harrison’s Stainless Steel Rat series – for alien cultures and action

-Rafael Sabatini’s Captain Blood, The Sea Hawk, Scaramouche, etc – for swashbuckling and romance

-Michael Shea’s Nifft the Lean series – for horrific invention

-John D MacDonald’s Travis McGee series – for southern style

-Robert E. Howard’s Conan – for rough-hewn heroics

-Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter series… for starting it all.

Seanan McGuire: The Terribleminds Interview

Seanan McGuire is Mira Grant. Mira Grant is Seanan McGuire. Both write kick-ass novels like FEED, or the INCRYPTID series. I can only assure you that you want to be reading her brand of urban fantasy meets horror meets, well, urban fantasy all over again. You will find her at either the site of Seanan McGuire or Mira Grant, and you can– and should! — totally follow her on Twitter (@SeananMcGuire).

This is a blog about writing and storytelling. So, tell us a story. As short or long as you care to make it. As true or false as you see it.

I was that stereotypical little girl out of a Ray Bradbury story waiting to happen: my family didn’t have much money, my bedroom looked like a magpie’s nest crossed with a junk store, I had big blue eyes and curly blonde hair, and best of all, I lived right at the edge of a swampy marsh forest filled with crawdads, scrub grass, wild birds, and snakes of all varieties. I spent my summers running around in the sun until I was almost as brown as the dirt in our apartment building’s yard, and promptly turned the color of chalk when the autumn came. My hair would bleach in the summer, and stay bleached well into the winter; I was a ghost-girl by the time Halloween rolled around, with no color left to my name but that unrelenting white.

I very well may have grown up in the golden age of trick-or-treating. Halloween was a big enough deal in the 1980s that everybody did it, and every house and apartment in sight gave out candy, but it wasn’t yet the modern era of paranoia and refusal to let kids out after dark. Halloween was magic. Every October 31st my mother zipped me into a costume made by my grandmother, handed me my equally homemade (and equally awesome) trick-or-treat sack, blazoned with glow-in-the-dark pumpkins that would lose their glow before I was halfway through my rounds, and shoved me out the door. My mission? To collect as much candy as humanly possible in the short hours between dusk, when trick-or-treating became acceptable, and nine o’clock, when the porch lights started clicking off. (Running up against that unspoken curfew was an art and a science. You could double back to houses you’d visited earlier, and not only would they have forgotten you, there was a good chance you’d be able to score the remainder of the bowl from tired adults who just wanted to go to bed. Or you might get ignored, or yelled at, or placated with things that were distinctly not candy. I got silverware once. I think that guy was drunk.)

The year I was ten, I was dressed as one of the little dead girls from the Nightmare on Elm Street movie series. I had the right “look” for the part, and all I had to do was add some dark circles around my eyes and a white dress I didn’t care about. I haunted the streets of Concord and Clayton, filling my sack with all the sugary goodness it would hold. I knew the shortcuts and the back ways and the best neighborhoods to target, the ones where you could get full-sized candy bars from people whose own children could afford store-bought costumes (still a rarity in those days, and something to be envied). What’s more, I knew the fastest routes from neighborhood to neighborhood, which meant that I could skip the boring commercial blocks and get straight to the good stuff.

And that is why, from the perspective of the man driving too fast around the curve on Bel Air, I suddenly materialized–a dead-white girl in a tattered white dress, with white hair and eyes sunk deep into her skull–from beneath the old creek bridge. There were no other trick-or-treaters on that block, which may have added to the shock of my appearance; he had no other monsters to compare me to. He swerved hard, away from the bridge, and slammed into a tree.

I went back under the bridge and resumed trick-or-treating. I was, after all, not supposed to talk to strange men in cars.

According to the paper the next day, he lost control of his vehicle because he saw a ghost. My mother asked if I’d seen anything strange. I shook my head “no,” and ate another pack of candy corn.

Why do you tell stories?

Because I am incapable of not telling stories. According to my mother, I started roughly five minutes after I started talking (she still recites one of my earliest claims, that the aliens had stolen her real baby and left me, on a regular basis). I think that, were I to take a vow of silence that extended to the written word, I would actually explode. On the other hand, I speak some ASL, so maybe I’d just get more fluent in a hurry…

Give the audience one piece of writing or storytelling advice:

If you want to be a writer, you need to read, and you need to write. Everything else is varying shades of bullshit, and what works for me is not absolutely going to work for you. I know people who find my combination of tight structure and absolute chaos to be incomprehensible, while I find their particular setups to be equally bizarre. But you have to read, or you won’t know what works on a page, and you have to write, or you won’t know what works on your page.

Reading and writing as critical components to a writing life, agreed. What one novel would you recommend to serve as a master class on writing and storytelling for aspiring professional authors?

Yay, questions with no right answer!  But seriously…this is a hugely personal question, and it’s going to be different for every author in the world.  For me, that book was Watership Down.  You know.  With the rabbits.  It was the book where I realized you can have lots of characters and lots of situations and a major quest and not be talking down to your reader and that’s okay.  I was eight when I read it, so it was sort of a step up from the rest of what I had access to.  And it changed my world.  So for me, that was the book.  But you probably have a different book, and that’s cool.  I think this answer changes with cultural background, age of the reader, and what genre that person wants to work in.  And maybe gender, a little bit, especially in science fiction, since so much older science fiction is male-dominant.

I’d say that short stories, though…everyone, regardless of genre leanings, should read Tiptree’s “The Only Really Neat Thing to Do,” Matheson’s “I Am Legend,” King’s “The Mist,” and Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder.”  That will build a foundation that lets everything else find the place it needs to stand.

What’s great about being a writer, and conversely, what sucks about it?

I get email from people who feel that they have a close personal relationship with my imaginary friends. That’s pretty awesome. I love that people who actually exist can suddenly engage with the people who exist only in my head. It’s just incredible to know that these stories are getting out there, and that I can tell them to people, and that people will listen.

As for what sucks about it…a lot of people don’t understand that it’s work, it’s hard, and it doesn’t happen as fast as they read. So I start getting “when’s the next one?” the day after a book comes out, and it just makes me so bone-tired that I want to crawl under my bed and stay there for a year. And these are some of the same people asking why I don’t do a book tour, why I don’t come to their town for a signing, why I don’t spend more of my limited writing hours not writing. It makes me so tired. I need a nap.

You are Seanan McGuire. But you are also Mira Grant, author of the most-excellent Feed. I get a lot of authors asking about pseudonyms, so enlighten us: why write with a pseudonym? How did yours come about?

So my stock answer for this is basically “Disney created Touchstone when they wanted to show tits in the movies.”  And that’s basically true.  My Mira Grant stuff is a lot darker than my stuff under my own name. and actually dives into the huge pools of geeky, geeky science that occupy a large percentage of my brain.  Distinguishing the two seemed like a really good idea.  I continue to believe that it was a really good idea, since periodically, my fans discover Mira and go “OH HOLY FUCK WHAT IS THIS SHIT,” and sometimes Mira’s fans discover me and go “WHAT GIRLY FAIRIES TINKER BELL COOTIES WHAT THE FUCK.”  And I like to avoid that.  (Mind you, there’s a huge overlap between my fans, and a lot of people read both of me.  But the outliers can sometimes make my head hurt.)

I was originally going to be “Samantha Grant,” but there’s someone who owns the .com, and my publisher wanted me to have a pseudonym where we could get the .com.  So the shuffle of possible first and last names was run again, and I came up Mira.  It’s a complicated horror movie pun which requires knowledge of two languages to get.  I am very proud of that fact.

Favorite word? And then, the follow up: Favorite curse word?

My favorite word is probably “abattoir,” which yes, unpleasant meaning, blood on the carpet, I know, but it’s just so much fun to say. My favorite curse word is the uncreative “fuck,” but I’m very creative with my swearing, and just as likely to call you a meatsack or a cockwaffle if I’m mad at you.

Favorite alcoholic beverage? (If cocktail: provide recipe. If you don’t drink alcohol, fine, fine, a non-alcoholic beverage will do.)

Without question, Woodchuck Special Reserve Pumpkin Cider. They only make it in the fall, they only make it for one night, it tastes like Halloween in a bottle, and I think I wound up buying or receiving a full hours’-worth of the production from 2011. I wanted more. I have one beautiful bottle in my fridge, waiting for me to finish my current project and reward myself with the Great Pumpkin’s blessing.

My favorite non-alcoholic beverage is Diet Dr Pepper. I could fill a swimming pool with what I drink annually.

Recommend a book, comic book, film, or game: something with great story. Go!

Book: After the Golden Age, Carrie Vaughn. Comic book: Unwritten, Mike Carey. Film: Slither, directed by James Gunn. Game: Kingdom Hearts 2, STOP LOOKING AT ME LIKE THAT.

What skills do you bring to help the humans win the inevitable zombie war?

I know how to gut and butcher a deer; I can shoot a longbow, although it’s been years, so my aim may suck (on the other hand, a zombie war is a naturally target-rich environment); I know what plants and animals will kill you along the California coast; and I have a large collection of machetes and baseball bats.

You’ve committed crimes against humanity. They caught you. You get one last meal.

I like to think that, were I to commit crimes against humanity, there would be no one left to catch me, since the slatewiper pandemic would have taken them all out. Maybe the aliens have caught me? I don’t know. Anyway, if this is my last meal, it would consist of whatever I damn well wanted, so…

Appetizers: A plate of sliced heirloom tomatoes, a bowl of potato leek soup made with my recipe, and a cup of fresh candy corn.

Main course: Two roast beef sandwiches and two brisket sandwiches, both from Maverick’s in St. Paul.

Dessert: A pint of Riesling poached pear sorbet from Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams, and an assortment of cupcakes from Cups and Cakes.

Drinks: With the appetizers, Diet Dr Pepper. With the main course, Christian Brothers ruby port. And with dessert, Woodchuck Pumpkin Cider.

I have just discovered Jeni’s Ice Cream and it is phenomenal. I must know — what other flavors do you like?

My favorite is absolutely the Riesling Poached Pear (hence it being in my last meal), but I have honestly never had any ice cream from them that wasn’t amazing.  My favorites–beyond the pear–are probably Rockway and Apricot, Brambleberry Crisp, Dark Chocolate Peppermint, and their amazing seasonal Heirloom Pumpkin.  That shit is like religion in a waffle cone for a Halloween girl.

What’s next for you as a storyteller? What does the future hold?

Hopefully, a nap.

More seriously, a new series, InCryptid; lots of new books and stories and thoughts and characters and now we’re back to that whole “nap” idea. I’m hoping to move to Washington state within the next year, so I’m writing as fast as I can now to build myself a buffer for those days when I can’t find my desk and the cats have hidden my spare laptop battery. It’s an exciting life!

Discount Armageddon. First Incryptid book. Coming out next week. Get cocky. Get bad-ass. Tell us in no uncertain terms why everyone should go nab a copy ASAMFP. Kick us in the face with your sales pitch.

You know what I fucking hate in urban fantasy today?  I hate that all the women have to have these huge, improbable super powers, or we’re expected to dismiss them as Mary Sue self-insert author daydreams.  We used to have bad-ass chicks with big guns and great hair, and now we have super models in leather pants who can magic up everything but self-esteem and a fulfilling love life.  It’s the genre, it’s the standard, it’s the can-you-dig-it way things have gotta be.  And you know what?  Fuck.  That.

I want girls with guns whose only super power is spending a few thousand hours at the gym.  I want physics that work.  I want worlds that work, where the underlying science may not matter to the story, but still makes fuckingsense.  I want pixies that can fly because they have hollow skeletal structures coupled with a musculature developed for short-pulse lift, not because ZOMG PIXIES ARE COOL LET’S HAVE SOME PIXIES.  And I want as much ass kicked as humanly possible.

Discount Armageddon is my huge “fuck it, let’s do this.”  It is my I WANT AND I SHALL HAVE.  Because it is built on science and gonzo cryptozoology and biology that actually works if you cock your head and squint.  It has chicks with guns and no super powers but the ability to tango in high heels.  It has functional families and dysfunctional families and people who are people, not an excuse for leather pants.  And it’s a honey trap.  It’s light and fluffy and it has a pink cover, for fuck’s sake, and if you come in, it’s going to get dark, and grim, and bloody, because I am still me, and the second act of trick-or-treating is murder in the corn.  And it’s going to be fucking awesome.

Also you should buy my book because I want to move to a creepy old house in the woods and it’s going to cost a lot to surround the place with barbed wire, suspicious-looking scarecrows, and pit traps.  Plus I have cats the size of small dogs, and if I can’t feed them, they’re going to eat me.

Discount Armageddon.  It’s so fucking awesome it can end the world and save you money at the same time.

(Discount Armageddon at Amazon.)

What of your word-babies (aka “novels”) is most emblematic of you, and why?

Whatever I finished most recently, because I am not a stationary target.  I am constantly changing my approach to damn near everything except for chainsaws and corn mazes, and that means that if you’re looking for “me,” you need to look at the freshest tracks.  So right this second, it’s actually the second InCryptid book.  And in a few months, it’ll be the first of the new Mira Grant duology.

Life moves pretty damn fast.  Try not to blink.

Dan O’Shea: The Terribleminds Interview

Today, we’re publishing three — count ’em, three! — interviews here at Jolly Olde Terribleminds. On first pass, I don’t like to crowd up with interviews, and I thought, mmm, maybe I’ll spread these out. But here’s the thing: these interviews talk to three writers who each share a kind of intellectual space. All three are cracking short story writers, all three come out of crime writing, all three have killer novels (two of them published, one on submission), and to boot, all three know each other. So, my thought is, let’s let these interviews feed into one another. Right? Right.

First up? My alpha clone, Dan O’Shea. Dan’s a grizzled bad-ass of a writer, but incredibly thoughtful and smart about how and what he writes. His prose astonishes me. This week he’s got his first collection of short stories out — some of which originated here at terribleminds — and you need to check it the fuck out. It’s called OLD SCHOOL and, I’ll be honest, I wrote the foreword. You can find Dan’s website here — danielboshea.wordpress.com— and track him down on Twitter (@dboshea).

When you’re done here, check out the other two interviews:

Chris Holm

Hilary Davidson

This is a blog about writing and storytelling. So, tell us a story. As short or long as you care to make it. As true or false as you see it.

It’s July in the Summer of Fishing, or that’s how you remember it. The summer you bought that Diawa spinning reel over at Zayre, the summer you got over being afraid of the old black guys that would sit along the bank of Blackberry Creek by the old railroad trestle on the bike trail, drinking whatever it was they drank out of the bottle wrapped in the paper bag, the way they’d talk to each other, trading insults that would have been fighting words in your world, but they’d just laugh about them, at least the insults you understood. The guys that shook their heads at the rubber worms you’d tried to use. The guys that showed you how to catch carp and catfish with wadded up balls of Wonder Bread dipped in some foul smelling crap that they kept in a rusty Folger’s can.

It’s a month or so before you bought the fly fishing rod, before you and Brian tried practice casting with it in the gloaming after dinner and found out you could fly fish for bats. Almost a decade before Brian was the best man at your wedding. Of course, Brian’s dead now, and even that’s five years back.

The summer you found that lake.

You called it a lake, and I guess it was near enough to one in your experience, this part of Illinois not being much stocked with them. Fifteen acres maybe, all in. A pond really, and not a naturally occurring one. You know that now. An irregular pit bulldozed into some old wetlands, developers trying to contain the runoff, keep the water out of the subdivision up the small slope on the east end, back when Orchard Road wasn’t Orchard Road yet, just a nameless gravel track. Now, it’s four lanes. Now, the golf course would be across the street. Now, you’d be able to see Home Depot from here. Now, you’re 52. Then, you were 13.

Your mom made you bring your brother with you, Patrick. He would have been what? Four? Maybe five?  Ruined the spirit of the thing. Because that summer, in spirit you were one man alone on the edge of wilderness, pitted against nature, trying to coax beasts from the deep. But if your mom sent Patrick along, then this wasn’t any wilderness, no danger lurked near. If they let you bring Patrick, you were still just a kid fishing in some neighborhood pond. She dropped you off on the paved road at the edge of the subdivision, east of the pond.

You tried not to look east, because west it was still woods, still marsh, still wilderness. Wilderness to you, though it was really just saplings and scrub reclaiming an abandoned farm field, a field some developer had already bought, one they just hadn’t torn up yet. Wilderness if you ignored the hum of tires to your left, probably a couple hundred cars an hour driving up and down Galena.

But these tires weren’t on Galena. These tires were crunching along the gravel across the pond. An Impala, an old one, mid-sixties, the red paint faded to the color of diluted blood, the wheel wells and quarter panels lipsticked with rust. The car stopped where the pond pinched in, where it narrowed to a wasp’s waist of mud and shallow water, maybe ten yards across, where you could wade from one side to the other without getting your ankles wet. Two guys in front, you could see that. They just sat there a minute, didn’t seem to be looking at you, just sat there.

You knew you should leave. You knew you should take Patrick, walk up that embankment to the paved roads and the houses. You knew it and you cast your line back out into the pond anyway.

The passenger door opened and a guy got out. Twenty maybe, twenty five. Blue jeans, a ratty t-shirt, stringy blond hair to his shoulders, a Winston bobbing in his lips. He was carrying a crutch, but he wasn’t using it. He smiled at you.

“You boys catching anything?”

You shook your head. “Not today.”

He nodded. “Too hot probably.”

“Probably.”

Then he’s sloshing across that narrow gap. Then he’s standing next to you. Patrick’s on the other side of him. The guy just stands there.

“What you using for bait?”

You reel in, hold up the tip of the rod, show him the little plastic minnow with the small treble hook behind the flashing Mepps spinner.

He snorts. “Shit kid, I doubt there’s anything in this ditch big enough to get its lips around that.”  And you know he’s not going to help, not going to tell you about bread balls and stink bait. You know something bad is going to happen, but you keep trying to act like it isn’t. You cast out into the pond again.

He finishes the cigarette, flicks the butt out into the water. It hisses, a sunfish rises and pecks at it, spinning it a little.

“You got any money?” he says.

And you don’t. Not a cent.

“No.”

He touches your ass, running his hand across the back of your pants. Your insides freeze. But he’s just feeling your pockets for a wallet.

“Left you wallet home, huh?”

You just nod, knowing if you speak right now, your voice is going to crack. You don’t want your voice to crack.

The guy bends down, opens your tackle box, dumps it out in the dirt, paws through it, takes a quarter he finds glinting in a gray pile of spilled splitshot.

“Waste of fucking time,” he says and takes the first step back toward the car.

“I’ve got money,” Patrick says. Little kid’s voice, petulant, defiant. “But you can’t have it.” Turns out Patrick has a nickel in his pocket.

The guy stops, steps toward your brother, and all the embarrassment and rage and confusion short circuits you a minute and you whip the rod around, smacking it against the guy, the hook catching in his shirt, tearing it open as it rips away.

And the guy turns, the crutch he was carrying already in motion, him holding it down near the footpad, swinging it like an ax.

You shuffle just enough that it only glances of your head, slamming down onto your shoulder, the screw and the wing nut out sticking out in the middle where the handhold is bolted in bite into your flesh, gouge out a wound, and you backpedal into the water, trying to get some distance as the guy swings the crutch again, like a bat this time, in from the side.

You bunch your shoulder up, taking the first part of the blow on the meat, but the crutch skips up, hits you over the ear, and there’s that moment where time stops, where the force and the feel and the sound of the blow translate into this flash of light inside your head, where any outside sight or sound is cancelled out so that when your sight comes back, it’s skipped a frame, like a projector where the sprocket slipped, and you see that he’s already in mid-swing again, a three-quarter angle this time, from the top and side, and you turn your back, bending, and he blow lands across your scapula, that wing nut biting in again, and you hear a crack and you think for a moment that your bone is broken, but then you hear a splash and most of the crutch is bobbing in the middle of the pond in a riot of fresh ripples, and you turn and the guy is holding maybe six inches of busted wood now, and you’re screaming at Patrick to get into the water, to get behind you and Patrick is saying he’ll get his shoes wet and you scream “Get in the water, goddamn it,” you’re thinking maybe the guy won’t want to come in after you, won’t want to get wet, and even that idea feels stupid, but that light strobing inside your head and it’s the best you’ve got, and your brother gets it finally, the threat, the danger, gets it at the same time the guy does, the guy reaching for Patrick, Patrick running around him,  and he splashes into the water, crying now, and you put your left arm back, holding him behind you, and you remember the filleting knife on your hip, hanging from your belt in its leather sheath, and you remember how sharp that is and you pull that, backing into the pond, the water over your knees now, almost to Patrick’s shoulders, so you stop, holding the knife out in front of you, not sure how far this is going, but knowing that, if the guy comes in after you, you have to start slashing.

But he doesn’t. He kicks your tackle box into the pond, throws your pole in after it. Stands there looking at you a minute, pulls the pack of Winston’s out of the pocket of the t-shirt that hangs on him ripped open, digs a lighter out of his jeans, blows a long stream of smoke out into the air.

“Fucking kids.”

He splashes back across the wasp’s waist to the Impala, and the car spins off in a rooster tail of dust and gravel, heading south back to Galena.

Later, at home, your back and shoulder bandaged, your scapula striped with bruise, the police come and gone, you hear that this Chris kid, a guy that had been two years ahead of you in school, big guy, star of every team, the date of every cheerleader, that guy had gone down to Starved Rock State Park that same day. He was fucking around with some friends and had fallen off a cliff. He was dead.

And you realize this. It is all wilderness.

OK, Chuck, you said a story. You said as true or false as I see it. That story is mostly one, some of the other.  But, as I read back through it, I find myself absently rubbing the scar on my left shoulder.

Why do you tell stories?

Maybe the only useful thing I learned from religion classes through thirteen years of Catholic schools, if you count kindergarten, is the power of parables. People listen to stories. You can convey a message through stories with a power that a lecture will never equal.

That, and the truth is boring.

Give the audience one piece of writing or storytelling advice:

Always read your stuff out loud.

Writing is just a system humans dreamed up because the sound of speech was transitory.  I have to wonder, if we’d had recording equipment back 5,000 or so years ago when writing first developed, if we even would have invented it. Would there still be documents if we already had a way to make speech permanent, or would everything just be on tape?  Language was oral first, writing is just a way to make speech permanent.

When you read something out loud, you catch things with  your ears that you don’t with your eyes. All the awkward little constructions that your eyes rolled right over, the word you are repeating too often, the dialog that’s glaringly bad when read out loud – your ears will catch bullshit that your eyes never will.

Maybe it’s the frustrated actor in me, I don’t know, but I really love to read my stuff. Here, try some.  Here’s a reading of Shackleton’s Hootch from my collection, Old School. It’s appropriate that I run this one, because it was something I wrote in response to one of Chuck’s occasional flash fiction challenges.

I really do like the whole audio thing – in fact, anybody that buys OLD SCHOOL will find an offer in there to get a free audio book version. Just a little something I’m trying to differentiate my offering from the burgeoning pile of e-books out there.

What’s great about being a writer, and conversely, what sucks about it?

That moment when you are in perfect communion with a character, when you are channeling a person of your own creation as if you have tapped into an external psyche, when you completely understand a person you could never, yourself, be, and that person’s world, their words, their being, all of that is spilling out through your fingers as if that character had opened a vein and you were writing with their own blood, that’s  a hard feeling to top.

The business side of it, all of that sucks. This whole do I self-publish thing, all the Amazon crap, all the possible distribution channels and alternative ways to market – you could make a full-time job out of understanding that whole mess, and none of that appeals to me in the least.  It makes a little cloud of despair in my head when I think about it, so I try not to.

Favorite word? And then, the follow up: Favorite curse word?

Impossible question. You’ve only got one kid right now, so you don’t get it. Somebody asks you who your favorite kid is, that’s easy for you. I’ve got three.  But we’re writers. Words are our children, too.

Comes to words, there isn’t even an exact answer to how many there are in the English language – 200,000 or thereabouts. I’ve read that the average person knows between 12,000 and 20,000 of them. I’d like to think that most writers know more. But a favorite?  I can’t say I have one.

There are those moments though, as a reader and a writer, where you find the perfect word in the perfect place, usually one used a little off-center, one that jolts the reader into a new mindset. Hell, in the story I just sent you today, I said the rust on the old car was “lipsticked” around the wheel wells. I kinda like that. I think the reader will get that, but will get it in a more exact way than if I’d just said an old, rusty Impala. So maybe this morning lipsticked is my favorite word. And it isn’t even a real word.

As to curse words, when I was in high school, my sophomore football coach was a nutjob guy who was raised in Brazil. He was also the Spanish teacher. There was some foreign phrase he used to scream at us in practice when he got pissed, maybe it was in Portuguese, maybe it was in Spanish, maybe it was some Creole of both, I don’t know. But he wouldn’t tell us what it meant. Years later, I saw the guy and asked him. He smiled, and told me when he got mad at us he would scream “You have the prick of a fish.”  That’s pretty good. Curse words alone aren’t all that special. It’s the constructions they’re used in that make them pop.

Favorite alcoholic beverage? (If cocktail: provide recipe. If you don’t drink alcohol, fine, fine, a non-alcoholic beverage will do.)

I’m a Manhattan guy. I’ll drink a lot of stuff, although not gin, never have liked gin, and I’m kind of meh on vodka, too. In fact, when it comes to rum, I’ll take dark over light every time, so I guess I’m not big on clear liquors. Beer, sure, but something with body and taste – I think the Sam Adams people put out a fine line of products, and I especially like a lot of their seasonal offerings. Wine, yep. Red more than white. In the summer, there’s nothing like whipping up a nice batch of sangria – I’ve got a couple of favorite recipes for both red and white versions – and, if it’s a hot week, there’s probably a pitcher of one of them in my fridge. Sangria, by the way, isn’t just wine with fruit juice in it. There’s brandy, or maybe peach schnapps, maybe some triple sec – there’s something in it to give it a backbone.

But if I’m going with one drink, it’s the Manhattan. It was my father’s drink, I write at my father’s desk. At the moment, I’m sitting in my father’s chair. Filial loyalty.  Two measures of bourbon (rye if you have it), one of sweet vermouth, a splash of bitters (or a couple in my case), gotta have a cherry, and a little splash of the cherry juice from the bottle doesn’t hurt, either. On the rocks in a rocks glass. If I go to a bar and they bring my Manhattan in a martini glass without ice, then I know the place is just too precious for me. So a Manhattan.  It’s simple, it packs a punch and it makes me think of my dad.

Recommend a book, comic book, film, or game: something with great story. Go!

I’m going to go old school on you. The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene. He’s a guy too often overlooked in my book. Pick that up. Hell, anything by him. Saul Bellow’s another one, a guy who seemed to have a much larger public literary reputation when I was younger, but who now has drifted into that obscurity of only being read in lit classes.

Funny thing, I guess, because you said great story, and when I think back on the books by either of these two, story isn’t the first word that comes to mind. Character does. Atmosphere does. Mood does. Gestalt does. Of course, all of that has to be wrapped around a story of some kind, but story alone isn’t enough.

Story matters more in genre fiction, I think. If I had to pick someone in the crime genre that consistently cooks up a great story, but still bakes in the good stuff, I might go with John Sandford.

What skills do you bring to help the humans win the inevitable zombie war?

Well, if the walkers have already eaten John Hornor Jacobs, I’ll be the guy who still knows about his zombie herding idea. Not going to give it away here, spoil his This Dark Earth launch, but it is the key to final victory.

You’ve committed crimes against humanity. They caught you. You get one last meal.

I’ve always found the last meal thing kind of paradoxical. From the executioner perspective, you’re going to kill the guy because he’s so horrible, so what’s with stuffing him with his favorite eats first? From the executionee perspective, how much are you really going to enjoy this meal when the only thing you can taste is the idea of your own death?

Again, hard to say. Probably depend on my mood that day. Don’t have to worry about my heart at that point, I suppose. Maybe a big slab of St. Louis style ribs, maybe a thick porterhouse, medium rare, slathered in minced garlic and sautéed mushrooms. A side of lobster newburg maybe.

What’s next for you as a storyteller? What does the future hold?

How the hell should I know? My short fiction collection, OLD SCHOOL, comes today from Snubnose Press. I’ve got two novels out on submission, and a third one will be joining them real soon.  I’m writing a horror/crime thing now.

One of my novels, ROTTEN AT THE HEART, is my Elizabethan first-person Shakespeare as a private dick thing. I’ve got a couple more ideas for ol’ Will if that ever sells or, who knows, maybe even if it doesn’t. But I’ll work on what I’m working on now, and then I’ll worry about tomorrow. Sufficient unto each day is the evil thereof.

OK, maybe I learned two things in religion class.

What’s the art of telling a good short story as opposed to something longer form?

Funny thing is I’d never written a short story until after I wrote a novel. Before I finished the novel, I was just this guy who always wanted to be a writer, and who then was cursed by finding a way to make a living as one. But my living is writing marketing and educational material for professional services firms – primarily accounting firms as it has turned out. So I’ve spent thirty years writing about the tax code and such. If that won’t make you want to write about killing people, nothing will.

I’d mess around with writing a novel now and then, but that never had a deadline attached, and it sure as hell never had a payday promised to it, so that always got shoved to the back burner. I had a family, responsibilities – writing’s just a way to pay the bills, I’d tell myself, and I’d turned it into a pretty good career. This novel stuff? It started feeling like wanting to play third base for the Cubs. It started feeling like one of those childish things you put aside. And I pretty much did.

My best friend since fourth grade, best man in my wedding, he wanted to be a writer, too. Ended up being a cranberry farmer. We used to talk about the books we were going to write, and we’d both mess around with them. Coming up on five years ago, he crashed his car on Halloween night. I got the call the next day. He was dead. And when his family went up to northern Wisconsin to pack up his stuff, they found his manuscript, all typed up, all finished, in the desk drawer.

He was that friend you make once in your life if you are lucky, the one that is with you all the way from being a boy to being a man and beyond. He taught me a lot. Even in that final act, he taught me something. Taught me we only have so much sand in the glass, and none of us knows how much that is. If there’s something you want to do, you’d best commence to doing it. So I commenced to writing a novel.  Found out there’s just as much time for things as you make, and there was time enough for that.

But this whole online writing community? I knew nothing about it. Bouchercon, the other cons, the Facebooks, the blogs, the tweeting? Never heard of them. (Hard to believe, I know, given my profligate Twitter habit now.) But I wrote a novel, got an agent in about a month, figured I’d be Steven King by the end of the year. I mean hey, this shit seemed pretty easy. Of course, that was three years ago, and my agent is still shopping that novel today. Shows what I know.

But she told me I should think about a blog, maybe get on twitter, all that stuff. I did. And pretty soon I ran into my first flash fiction challenge.

Blame Patti Abbott, a fine writer in her own right who’s collection, Monkey Justice, is a must read. I’d never heard of flash fiction, but somebody sent me a link to a challenge she was running on her blog – write a story, 1,000 words or less, set in or around a Walmart.

A thousand words, I thought. Impossible. So I had to try it. And the resulting story, Black Friday, reinforced for me one of writing’s most valuable lessons – strip it to the bone.  Or, as the Bard once said, “When words are scarce, they are seldom spent in vain.”

I was hooked. Short fiction became a major food group in my writing diet. Not just for the stories themselves, but as a kind of training for when I’m in the middle of a novel. When I’m writing a novel, I have a tendency to meander, to get a little flabby.

Meander, you say? You? Surely not. I mean it only took you what, Five or six paragraphs to even start answering Chuck’s question?

Well, that’s another lesson, maybe. Good storytelling isn’t always a frontal assault. Sometimes one story starts out as another. Sometimes the real story kind of sneaks up on you. Sometimes a story is like a river, just a little trickle at first, flowing this was and that, picking up a tributary here and there until it builds its force. Then, it will carve a canyon through a mountain instead of going around it.

But yeah. I spend a fair amount of time on short fiction these days. A few hours back in the short fiction gym puts an end to the flabby shit. Maybe not to some of the meandering, because, like I said, meandering has its place. But there’s nothing like a short story to remind me that the flabby writing has to go.  It reminds me that you can lose a reader any time. With this sentence, or with the next one. Strip it to the bone.

OLD SCHOOL published by a small e-publisher, Snubnose Press: what’s the value of a small publisher over a larger one?

Because Snubnose is the only publisher I’ve had to this point, that’s hard for me to answer. For me, it came down to this. I had a growing collection of short fiction. People seemed to like it. I wanted to pull it together, get it out into the world, see if I could get a broader audience for it.

The big publishers, they don’t put out that much short fiction, especially not from new authors. Frank Bill is the one exception I can think of, and for damn good reason. If you haven’t read Crimes in Southern Indiana yet, stop right now and do so. It’s OK, Chuck and I can wait.

So my choices were pitch it to one of the smaller publishers or self-publish.

I just don’t want to mess with self publishing. I don’t want to design a cover, format a document, be the only set of eyes proofing or editing something.  A man’s got to know his limitations.

And I had another concern. Amazon has opened the floodgates on self-publishing, and the vast majority of that flood has been a stinking river of effluvium. Badly written stories, barely edited, rife with errors, often offered for free or near to it. I think readers are beginning to drown in that cesspool and are looking for some beacon that offers hope that a download might be something other than just another half-dissolved turd bobbing in the piss warm stream of sewage that the self-publishing revolution hath wrought.

A publisher’s name attached to a book offers that hope, even if it is a smaller publisher like Snubnose. It means somebody who cares enough about writing to set up a publishing company has vetted the book, given it their blessing, invested their time in it, attached their reputation to the author’s. Even for a small e-house like Snubnose, the titles that make it through are a tiny fraction of those submitted. For the reader, that means the publisher has strained through the distasteful river of crap to pluck out the occasional tasty bits.

You hear a lot of railing against gatekeepers from the self-publishing crowd – how agents and publishers are artificial arbiters standing between the reading public and this damned up reservoir of genius. And there are some heady drinks of genius to be had from that reservoir. But you have to gulp down a disproportionate amount of foul treacle to find them.

How are the stories in OLD SCHOOL emblematic of Dan O’Shea?

The collection is entitled Old School because the characters in these stories all have some miles on them. TV and movies are the predominate forms of storytelling in popular culture, and if you drew your view of the world from those sources, you’d think most everybody was some hard bodied twenty- or thirty-something posing through life’s dramas in a Hugo Boss wardrobe.

I don’t write about those people. The protagonists in my stories tend to be middle aged or older. They’ve suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and often have not prevailed against them. But they also aren’t the dispossessed loners that dominate a lot of noir fiction.

A popular meme in a lot of crime stories is that old saw that having nothing to lose makes a man dangerous, desperate, a better protagonist. I think that’s bullshit. Having nothing to lose means you’re playing with house money. It means the only ones with anything in the pot are everybody else. Might as well play out that hand, all it has is upside. Having nothing to lose means that all you have ever been is a loser.

No, having something that matters to you, bearing the scars that earning that something cost you, having known life’s successes and its failures, but having shown that you have grit enough, guile enough, to have had some of the former, for me, that makes an interesting character. Show me a man who has worked his whole life for what little he has and now finds that in danger and I’ll show you a desperate human being. A dangerous human being. And I’ll write you a story.

You don’t tend to write happy, fluffy stuff — where’s that darkness come from? How do you temper the grim stuff for readers — or, do you?

The story I started out with, that’s mostly memoir. Some embellishment around the details aside, that happened to me.

Now, as a kid, I lived as charmed a life as this nation offers. Dad was a doctor, and a good one, so we had money, creature comforts, good schools, loving parents, all of that. Dad was the kind of doctor that cared way more about his patients than he did about money. Dad was the doctor who, back in 1965, quit the local country club when the clinic he worked at hired a Jewish doctor and that club wouldn’t let him join – got a lot of the other docs to quit, too. The club changed its policy, but Dad never signed back on. Dad was the doctor that was still making house calls in the 1990s. He was the doctor who kept patients for life, who was treating the grandchildren of the patients he started with by the time he retired. He was the doctor I’d find staring blankly over a cup of coffee at the kitchen table some mornings, still wearing the clothes he’d left in the day before, having been at the hospital all night because one of his patients was dying and, even if there was nothing he could do to stop it, he’d be there for it. At his wake, person after person came up to me to introduce themselves as “one of your dad’s patients.” I tried to think of a doctor I’ve had whose wake I’d bother to go to. I couldn’t.

He was and remains the most decent human being I’ve ever known.

That caring extended to his family. I remember my freshman year in high school, we had a football game in Woodstock, maybe 30 miles from our house, way out in the sticks. Our freshman games were on Monday afternoons, started about 4:00. It was a shitty day, pouring rain, cold.  At some point in the fourth quarter, I’m running off the field after we scored, and I see my old man standing there on the sidelines, soaking wet, he’s pants cuffed with mud, clapping for me. He’d knocked off work early, driven out into the boonies, just so he could stand in the rain and catch the last quarter of my game. He was like that.

So I was raised in the best of circumstance, yet that story I started with? That still happened. I still got mugged, I still had to protect my kid brother at knife point, and the very same day this other kid I knew, a kid who was pretty much a god in my eyes, that kid fell off a cliff and died. A few years ago, my best friend died in a car crash. A week ago, in Naperville, next town east from here, a town that’s always making that list of Best Cities to Live In or Best Places to Raise Your Family, there was a fight in a bar. Not a biker bar, not some roadhouse. An upscale joint, the sort of place where one MBA who met another MBA on match.com might pick for a first drink. Some guys got drunk, got into it, and this twenty-two year old kid tried to play peacemaker, got in the middle of it, tried to break it up. Took a knife to the heart, bled out all over the nice oak floor.

One my favorite openings to a book is the beginning of Stephen King’s The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. Somewhere in the first couple paragraphs there is this line: The world has teeth, and it can bite you with them any time it wants.

We’ve all got some teeth marks on us somewhere, but fiction is usually about amplifying the everyday, so in my stories, life has bit down hard and locked its jaws.

I don’t always temper that. Some of the stories are just dark, period. But in many of them, there is a note of redemption. Thin Mints comes to mind. That’s probably the one story of mine that’s gotten the most traction – been published in Crimefactory, showed up in the Noir at the Bar anthology, got nominated for some award last year. In that story, you have an everyday guy who throws away everything – family, job, self-respect – in pursuit of his selfish appetites. But in the end, he’s confronted with a hard choice, finds a line he won’t cross, redeems himself.

ROTTEN AT THE HEART sees Shakespeare-as-shamus: what’s the trick to writing historical fiction? Do the facts ever get in the way of the fiction?

Chuck, you and I have famously disagreed on the role of planning (I say famously because it happened on your blog – what happens on my blog happens in obscurity). You like outlines and character bibles and such, I prefer a more organic process – placing characters I like in situations I find interesting, and then just following them around my head and seeing what they do.  Now, having written exactly one piece of historical fiction, I won’t hold myself out as an expert, but here’s what I found. I didn’t need an outline for this one, because history provided it.

The story is set in the summer of 1596. Henry Carey, the First Baron Hundson, the Lord Chamberlain and the sponsor of Shakespeare’s theater troupe, dies. That actually happened. A couple weeks later, Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, dies. That actually happened. I refer to the Rising of the North in 1569 and a Spanish raid on the southern English coast in 1595, those actually happened.  Marital tensions that I include between Shakespeare and his wife? They may not be true, but there is substantial speculation of the same nature offered by numerous Shakespearian scholars. A guy named Radcliffe, who was basically the Queen’s designated torturer, plays a key role, as do George Carey, the Second Baron Hundson, some of the Queen’s other ministers and Elizabeth I herself. And those are all real people performing their real offices.

Outside of historical events and people, there are realities of life in Elizabethan London that inform the story – the rise of Puritanism and its antipathy to the theater, the banishing of “entertainments” to districts outside the city proper, the growing power of the Bourse (the birth of what we would now call a stock exchange) and the beginnings of the competition between the power of the crown and the power of private capital.

Taken together, all of that formed a virtual outline for the story, provided a historical skeleton I had only to flesh out. So the facts drove the fiction, they didn’t get in the way of it.  In fact, the most improbable part of the book – maybe the most improbable thing I’ve included in any of my books so far – is an event from history.  The famed Globe Theater, the venue most associated with the Bard, really was built in a day. Due to a real estate dispute, Shakespeare’s troupe really did disassemble their theater in Shoreditch and, in a single night, transport the boards and timbers to the Globe’s location in Bankside, where it was raised the next day – and without power tools.  Had that not actually happened, I would never have dared write it, but it did, so I did – and it plays a central role in the story.  Although, historically, that happened a couple years after 1596. I’m no Elizabethan scholar, so I’m sure I’ve made other historical errors, but moving that up a couple of years was the biggest liberty I took knowingly.

I like to say this: Rotten at the Heart didn’t really happen. I don’t think Shakespeare was ever blackmailed into serving as a royal sponsor’s private dick. But it could have happened, because the facts presented in the story and the historical realities that provide the story’s tension and motivations are all, to my knowledge, true.

James R. Tuck: The Terribleminds Interview

Next up for the terribleminds interview — James R. Tuck, author of the recently released BLOOD & BULLETS, a Deacon Chalk story. James is the type to sell it straight and tell it like he sees it, so I’ll leave him to get right to it. Welcome him here at terribleminds, and you can find James at his website, JamesRTuck.com, or on the Twittertubes @jamestuckwriter.

This is a blog about writing and storytelling. So, tell us a story. As short or long as you care to make it. As true or false as you see it.

“Respect your elders boy.”

The young man looked at him, eyes bloodshot, a sallow cast to the whites of them. “My dad left before he even knew my whore of a momma was knocked up with me. Hell, he was gone before his drunk wore off.” Long brown fingers stubbed out the joint delicately; white smoke wisping out the side of his mouth he leaned forward. “My whore of a momma didn’t even have the courtesy to take me to my grandma before she split. Hell, she was gone before her drunk wore off too. My grandma had to take the crosstown bus for over three hours to come get me from the hospital. I love my grandma. I would kill for my grandma. I say ma’am to her, dress nice when I am over there, take her to church every Sunday and the Piccidilly afterwards. I do respect MY elders.” The Glock appeared, pointed at Leon’s chest. A smile with no humor touched the young buck’s narrow, pock-marked face.

“The rest of y’all are just old.”

Why do you tell stories?

Because I love it. Everybody says to write the story you want to read and that is exactly what I have done. I’ve been an urban fantasy fan for decades now, reading stuff that fit the genre even before I knew there was a genre. I’ve also always been an avid reader, always carrying a book and reading whenever the moment presents. I had just finished an urban fantasy book that was supposed to be dark, violent, and kick ass. It was the lamest, tamest, piece of crap I had ever read. Now I picked this book up because the reviews for it were off the hook. Many reviewers actually saying they were uncomfortable with the darkness of the book, the didn’t know how the author had gotten away with writing something so violent, etc., etc., blah, blah, blahditty blah.

The book sucked balls. Not just balls, but big monkey balls. The ashy gray, wrinkly, and covered-in-tiny-hairs-like-wires monkey balls.

I put the book down and said out loud to myself: “I can write better shit than that.” So I did. That made me sit down and write what would become BLOOD AND BULLETS, the first book in the Deacon Chalk series.

Give the audience one piece of writing or storytelling advice:

Quit using so many damn speechtags. Seriously, speechtags are of the Devil. They are lazy, worthless little filler words. I’m not saying never use them, but never use them.  If I see a whole page of he said, she said broken only by the occasional he exclaimed, then my eyes glaze over and I want to throw the book across the room. You can get so much more out of telling me what the character is doing instead of just telling me that they said something. Hell, that’s the job of the quotation marks. You throw those bad boys around some words and I just know they were said by someone. Double duty your writing and let me know something about the character who is speaking by having them do something or describing something. Ditching speechtags and making use of descriptors will not only boost your writing but you will discover a whole world of subtext that will give weight to what your characters are saying, punching a hole in the reality matrix and bringing them to life.

Get them out of the white room and make them do something. You can write a whole page on a character making a sandwich and if you do it right it will be gripping and compelling. Have your character make a banana and mayonnaise sandwich while they discuss killing someone, or divorcing their husband, or sleeping with their girlfriend for the first time. You can turn that sandwich into a load of character detail.

Not bad for two pieces of wheat bread, a smear of Hellman’s, and a banana.

(Don’t knock it, that shit is delicious.)

Oh, and free second piece of advice.

Pull your head from out your ass.

Quit thinking you are so awesome you don’t have to be polite to people. Seriously, a little consideration and manners will take you further than your talent will in some cases. Just take the two seconds to send a thank you email, or to repost the stuff put up by folks who help you out. Don’t be the dick author that goes to a blog, does your guest post, and then trots back off to your masturbatory abattoir (masturabbatoir?) until the next time you need something posted. Life is about the give and the take. You should give more than you take.

What’s great about being a writer, and conversely, what sucks about it?

I love being a writer. I love meeting fans and reader and people who think I suck. My favorite thing is being able to go up to writers whose work I admire and talking to them without seeming like a crazed fanboy. I can chit-chat on fairly equal footing with writers whose books I have enjoyed over the years. It’s awesome.

The suck factor comes in for me  in that I have no idea how I am doing at any given time. The bottom line is, well, the bottom line. How you sell. That is what matters in the publishing world. Not your talent, not your art, not even your story. Just did the book make money. If you made money then you get to write again, if not, then you and Geno have a meeting in the back with a Louisville Slugger.

The Illuminati keeps those figures locked up in the vaults just to drive people like me crazy.

(Curse you, Illuminati!)

What do you love about the urban fantasy sub-genre, and what do you hate about it?

Urban fantasy is my great love in reading. It is tied with crime fiction. I have always been fascinated with mythology and religion so pulling that into the “real” world really works for me. It just gets stuff moving in my bloodstream. Monsters and guns, hell to the yeah.

The biggest problem I have with urban fantasy right now is the way a lot of it follows in trends and the way it pulls back from the edge, trying to be more paranormal romance.

Now the first part of that is it seems like: “You know what’s hot right now? Fairies. Vampires are dead, don’t write about them, write about fairies. Fairies sell.” Well, kiss my ass very much. I’ll write about fairies when I damn well want to and because I have a new spin to throw at it. I wanted to write vampires as the bad guys in my first book because they kick ass when stripped of their humanity and made into monsters. It’s a classic because it damn well works. I did hear that no one was buying vampires after the publishing world has turned against the Twilight franchise. People said to me. “Oh, vampires are over. Stephanie Meyers ruined them.”  “I wouldn’t write that, vampires are so cliché.”

Don’t be an idiot. Write a good book. Shut the fuck up.

Vampires are over is just another excuse for you to not write a damn book. Hush now, the writers are talking.

And the proliferation of paranormal romance into urban fantasy is old news. Now I like a good paranormal romance and love is a huge motivating factor in characters. Love has a place in urban fantasy, hell yes it does. However, there is a thing with paranormal romance, one of it’s defining characteristics, in which the love story IS the story.  All the other factors play second and third fiddle to the romantic element. If that is what you are writing, then go for it. Do it well and I will read it and enjoy it, but if you are going to write urban fantasy then write it. Give me monsters without redemption. Inject some horror in there. Make some characters who are totally screwed up, because if you had to deal with this crazy shit in real life you would be nine kinds of fucked up.

What’s it take to write great urban fantasy?

Brass balls. (Picture Alec Baldwin with a pair of shiny balls in his hand.)

Seriously, it takes a careful attention to character and propensity to write those characters getting fucked up. You need to be able to go there. Take the bus full of your characters and drive them to the heart of Weird Shits-ville and kick them out. Naked.  You need to be able to see that if you were writing reality these people would be damaged. You also need to keep your sense of humor, because unrelenting horror is, well, horror and not urban fantasy. But if you are writing urban fantasy then do yourself a favor and don’t hold back. It’s your job to tell me about the piece of gristle stuck in the canines of a Were-wolf. It’s your job to imagine just how a vampire who drinks blood and never brushes his teeth smells when it is in your face talking to you. It is your job to crawl through the dark and bring me a damn story worth reading.

Favorite word? And then, the follow up: Favorite curse word?

I really like the word eldritch. I have since I first read it used by the late, great Robert E. Howard. It’s a terrific word that I don’t get to use nearly as often as I would like since I am not H.P. Lovecraft.

(Side note: How cool is it that Lovecraft is now a descriptive word in its own right? Lovecraftian. You call something Lovecraftian and you have just shortcut a ton of description to one word.)

Favorite curse word…..hmmm. If you read my first drafts it would seem like it would be fuck. I use that like it’s my last name when I am first drafting. But my favorite would probably be cocksucker, which I haven’t used in a story yet, but in book two my main character does tell someone to “keep your cock-holster buttoned.”

So, if Lovecraftian is a word that describes work that feels like it’s been written by Lovecraft, what would the future adjective “Jamestuckian” imply?

Dark, violent, bloody, and a propensity to use sentences where the action happens before the subject.  I want folks to know what they are getting into when they see my name on the cover. It will really throw them off when I do write a paranormal romance. (Muwah-ha-ha) But I do think that my books will always have a high action content, even if they aren’t dripping blood from the page. I mean I’m 42. I’m not finding myself here. This is what I like dammit, and this is what I write. Trends can suck it.

Favorite alcoholic beverage? (If cocktail: provide recipe. If you don’t drink alcohol, fine, fine, a non-alcoholic beverage will do.)

I love me some Red-headed Sluts. Takes about 15 to really do a number on me, but they are delicious and highly recommended.

1 oz Jagermeister

1 oz peach schnapps

2 oz cranberry juice

Preparation:

  1. Pour the ingredients into a cocktail shaker filled with ice.

Shake well.

  1. Strain into a shot or old-fashioned glass.

Of course if I am drinking straight then give me a nice bourbon, rum, or Southern Comfort. I hate beer, hate wine, and can’t drink straight vodka anymore. I will take a nice moonshine if you have it though, I mean I am Southern-born and Southern-bred, we don’t turn up our noses to the bathtub brewery.

Recommend a book, comic book, film, or game: something with great story. Go!

There is no better film than The Princess Bride. Seriously, everything works in that movie. The perfect blend of acting, directing, storytelling, and unicorn blood. Virgin unicorn blood. That damn movie is infectious like a rhesus monkey in the CDC.

Book- The Road by Cormac McCarthy. The language in that book makes me weep in shame. True, the story is really not worth telling, you don’t know shit that is going on, and the lack of character definition can be maddening, but the LANGUAGE is just breathtaking.

I also love the book and the film for High Fidelity.

I can’t recommend a best comic book ever. I love comic books. I am a fanboy from way back in the day. I love comics like I love my spleen. Hello, spleen, good day to you, I love you so much. Closest I can come to a best comic ever may be Preacher by Garth Ennis. That is  a comic book that is not for the faint of heart.

I can’t recommend a game because (gasp!) I am not much of a gamer. I play vidjah games to unwind about once every 2 months. I want a game that I can run and gun, no thinking, no figuring shit out. Just give me a lot of stuff to destroy and I can veg out for a few hours. To illustrate, the only game I have ever beaten was Devil May Cry.

What skills do you bring to help the humans win the inevitable zombie war?

I do carry a gun in real life and am a better than decent shot with it. My true skill though is a complete and utter lack of conscience. I could do the most jacked up stuff, the stuff you need to do to survive, and never once feel bad about it. I can be the go to guy for fucked up shit that has to be done to survive.

I am sure most folks here are watching the Walking Dead on AMC. Have you noticed how utterly badass Rick Grimes has become? It’s like that Dave Chappelle thing that gets stuck in everyone’s head: “I’m Rick James bitch!” has now, in my head switched to: “I’m Rick Grimes bitch!”. If this was zombie apocalypse I could make that switch in your head to: “I’m James Tuck bitch!”.

You like guns, huh? What’s your go-to gun in any situation?

My Colt .45 1911. I have one and it is, hands down, the finest handgun ever made. The pistol is absolutely intuitive. When you snatch it out of the holster your finger just slips over the safety in a gentle caress. If you carry it cocked, locked, and ready to rock (hammer back, safety on, one in the chamber for those of you who don’t know) then you can have your firearm ready in seconds.

Plus the gun is just gorgeous. I get it that some folks aren’t into guns but I am in a big way. To me, the 1911 is a work of art. You see it in movies a LOT because it is so damn cool looking. It’s a big, shiny handful of badass.

What do most writers get wrong about guns in their stories?

Same thing as Hollywood usually. They forget to count bullets. They have bullets flying and the characters not reloading.

Plus, it seems most writers have never fired a gun. You can tell when you read that most writers have never blown that black shit out of their nose after an afternoon at the gun range.  And I have read a lot of odd mistakes. Safeties being flicked off of semiautomatics that don’t have them, hell, safeties being flicked off revolvers, hammers being pulled back on Glocks, that kind of thing. It’s fine if you write your character as not knowing about guns so you can skim some stuff, but there are basic levels of research that can’t be gotten online. Hell, if you are a writer and have a question about a gun drop me a line. Unless the floodwaters of deadline are sweeping away my house, I’ll answer.

You’ve committed crimes against humanity. They caught you. You get one last meal.

The seared flesh of my enemies.

Or a really nice steak and a Dragon roll.

What’s next for you as a storyteller? What does the future hold?

Crime. I am writing the 3rd Deacon Chalk book now and after that I have the 3rd Deacon Chalk e-novella to knock out. After that I am writing a crime novel. Something really dark and violent like Tom Piccirilli’s stuff. I want to switch things up with one Deacon book a year, which is urban fantasy, and one other book a year of my choosing. The rest of my time I want to fill with short fiction, comic book writing, and maybe some screenwriting.

But next up is crime. I have a list of crime fiction ideas as long as my freakishly gorilla length arm.

Martha Wells: The Terribleminds Interview

Martha Wells is no slouch when it comes to writing — her first novel, The Element of Fire, landed with Tor in 1993 and her most recent novels, The Cloud Roads and The Serpent Sea are out now with Night Shade. That fails to mention the many short stories and non-fiction pieces, too. She submitted herself to the recent fusillade of questions here at terribleminds, so please give her a warm welcome. And someone get her a margarita. You can find her website here — MarthaWells.com — and she’s on Twitter (@marthawells1).

This is a blog about writing and storytelling. So, tell us a story. As short or long as you care to make it. As true or false as you see it.

Before I got married, I lived in a fourplex in the end unit next to a small grove of trees. It was part of a single row of fourplexes that backed onto a wide open field with some clumps of trees, then a highway, and then more fields and trees. (It was not a good place to live for a single woman, since if a murderer was looking to murder someone, this was pretty much the first apartment they would break into. It had everything but an “easy murdering here” sign.)

One Friday in the summer I had a terrible sinus headache so left work early and went home. It was late afternoon and I was sitting in the living room trying to write and noticing my headache was getting worse. I also noticed my elderly cat, who normally sat next to me on the couch, had gotten down under a heavy wooden endtable. Then I heard someone banging on the doors of the apartments. I didn’t think anything of it at first, because this area sort of specialized in randomly drunken college students, but the knocking was coming closer, like the person was banging on every door, then finally my door. I looked through the peephole and saw it was a woman who lived a few apartments down so I opened it. She said, “THERE IS A TORNADO IN THE FIELD BEHIND THE HOUSE. I THOUGHT YOU SHOULD KNOW.”

I said, “THANK YOU.” I knew it was true, even though the sun was still out and the wind wasn’t bad, and there had been nothing in the weather report, and the only real sign of it was the pressure in my sinuses and elderly cat’s survival instinct. (This became a big deal in town later, that there had literally been no warning of this thing.) She ran away and I shut the door, and ran through the living room and the little hall to the kitchen where, framed perfectly in the sliding glass doors, was the biggest freaking tornado in the world. This was the only time in my life (so far) where I said “Oh my God” and really really meant it.

I went and got elderly cat and we hid in the downstairs bathroom (an extremely inadequate equivalent to a basement but it was all I had) and waited. Except I couldn’t wait. I had to see where it was. So I went to the kitchen and looked out the glass door again, and the sucker was gone.

Or at least, I couldn’t see it. I crept outside like I was expecting it to jump me from the bushes, and looked around. No tornado. Then I looked up.

Seeing a tornado from the side is bad, but seeing it hovering over you is much worse. And I’ve heard people say that they’re afraid they wouldn’t recognize a tornado if they saw one, but believe me, in that moment there is no mistake. From directly below it is a horrible huge round wrong, very wrong, fundamentally wrong thing in the sky, and there is no iota of doubt in your body about what it is or that it wants to kill you.

The upshot is, the tornado did not murder me. I went back in the house to huddle in the bathroom. The tornado went away to bounce happily around town horrifying the crap out of people but did not actually kill anybody. It was looking for an audience, apparently, because it hovered over the university baseball stadium while a game was in progress. Then it wandered off back to Hell, where it probably lives in a happy threesome with Hurricanes Ike and Katrina.

Why do you tell stories?

There are a lot of reasons, but I think it all boils down to a need for communication. As a kid, I had a lot of issues with feeling isolated, feeling like an observer and not a participant in life, feeling like no one was listening to me. Making up imaginary worlds and people to entertain myself made me feel better, but what really helped was being able to tell a story and express what was going on inside me, even if I was expressing it through a completely different person who was blue and lived on another planet with three moons or whatever.

Give the audience one piece of writing or storytelling advice:

When I work with people who are first beginning to write, one of the most common mistakes I see is when they make a character too passive. Usually this comes from the writer trying to figure out how the character would react to different situations, and instead of asking what the character would do, they ask what they would do instead. If you’re a tiny person with asthma, for example, your reactions and survival instincts are going to be completely different from someone who is an experienced detective, or a big beardy guy with a sword, or someone who has tentacles and lives underwater. You have to learn to step outside yourself and think like a different person, and a lot of people who want to write have trouble making that step at first. It’s like running someone else’s software on your hardware. Even if you’re a more experienced writer, and you’re having trouble with a tricky characterization, it’s worth it to step back and think “am I really in this character’s head, or is she so different from me that I’m shying away from what she would really do in this situation?”

Who’s your favorite character you’ve ever written and why? Related: favorite character you didn’t write?

My favorite character that was also the most difficult to write was Nicholas Valiarde, from “The Death of the Necromancer.”  He was a little bit of a sociopath, so his reactions to every situation were so different from what a normal person’s would have been.  It took a lot of work to get him right, but I was proud of the way he turned out.  He also showed up again in “The Ships of Air” and “The Gate of Gods” about thirty years older, so writing the older version of him was interesting and difficult too.  His daughter Tremaine, who is the main character of the Fall of Ile-Rien trilogy, is probably my second favorite.

Favorite character I didn’t write: I’m going to go with a recent favorite and say Zaboo from The Guild.  He is so much like the very young fan boys that I’ve known, so funny and smart and clueless all at the same time, and Sandeep Parikh plays him perfectly.  It’s been a treat watching the character grow up a bit over the five seasons of the show.

What’s great about being a writer, and conversely, what sucks about it?

It’s great in that it’s fun in so many different ways. I love making up places and people, and getting stories out there to be read, and seeing how other people interpret what I’ve written.

It sucks because it can be a lonely job, sometimes. I think it’s less lonely now, with the internet where it’s very easy to connect with other writers every day and see you all have the same problems. But I have to spend a lot of time inside my own head, and that can be very isolating. Also, no matter how thick a skin you develop, when you put your work out there, it really does leave you vulnerable in a lot of ways. If you’ve been a writer for any length of time, you get used to rejection, but even knowing that it’s inevitable, and will continue to be inevitable throughout your career, it’s still sometimes hard. It makes you feel like crap and but you have to get up and stagger out and go get some more, and you know you have to do it over and over again.

What’s the trick to writing good fantasy?

I wish I knew!  Ha, ha, anyway, what I try to do is write worlds and characters that I’m really excited about.  I try to come up with worlds that feel like they have infinite possibilities, where you don’t know what might be around the next corner or in the next valley.  And I try to think of interesting ways for my characters to explore those worlds.

You see writing advice telling you to never try to chase trends, that you should write what resonates with you, and I think that’s really true.  I end up writing about things that publishers don’t think will sell, but I think I’d do a bad job writing about the things they do think will sell.  So I’m just happy to write about my own weird stuff.

You’ve got a hefty writing resume under your belt — what’ve been the trials and triumphs of trying to get published over the years?

The biggest triumph of all was probably selling my first novel, “The Element of Fire”, which was published in 1993 by Tor.  It took me a year to write and I got a lot of “oh isn’t it cute, she thinks she’s writing a novel!”  I was around 27 when I was writing it, and people tended to assume I should be writing romance, and not a created world fantasy based on 17th century France with swordfighting and wheellocks and explosions.  The other big triumph was my third novel, “The Death of the Necromancer,” getting on the Nebula ballot in 1998.  It was actually a very stressful time, as my mother had just been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, so the Nebula nomination was one of the few good things that happened that year.

The trials have mostly been in trying to stay published.  After “The Death of the Necromancer” came out, Avon was bought by HarperColins, and while I still had a contract for four subsequent novels, my original editor there was promoted and then left the company before most of the books were published.  There was also a problem with the cover of “Wheel of the Infinite,” my fourth novel.  The main character’s skin color was dark brown, and when the publisher did the original cover printing, they made her gray.  I didn’t find out about this until later, but fortunately the artist, Donato Giancola, put his foot down and made them change her back to brown.

I had a career crash in 2006, after my trilogy (“The Wizard Hunters,” “The Ships of Air,” “The Gate of Gods”) came out.  They were steampunkish with a giant ocean liner and airships, but that was before steampunk was popular.  The books got good reviews, but very little promotion, and didn’t do well.  After that I was still writing, but nobody was buying.  I did get to do two media tie-ins in 2006 and 2007 for my favorite TV show, which was a lot of fun and a creative change that I really needed.  Then I had to look for another agent, and queried one agency only to be told they were only interested in seeing work from established writers.  Being told that nine novels did not make me established enough was a big low point.

I think it did help to get my early backlist, “The Element of Fire,” “City of Bones,” and “Wheel of the Infinite,” back out as ebooks.  I didn’t sell another new fantasy novel until “The Cloud Roads” and “The Serpent Sea” sold to Night Shade Books in 2010.   That was a pretty big triumph, too.

Favorite word? And then, the follow up: Favorite curse word?

Favorite word: Rollicking. I didn’t get to see the cover copy before my first novel was published, and I guess fulsome would be the best way to describe it. It used the word “rollicking.” Probably it was just in there once but in my head it was in there maybe 400 times. It made the book sound like a comedy, which it really wasn’t. There was a lot of death and sarcasm, but I guess the editor thought saying that in so many words would put people off.

Favorite curse word: I wish I had something more original but the truth is it’s just “fuck.” It’s the word of my Id.

Favorite alcoholic beverage? (If cocktail: provide recipe. If you don’t drink alcohol, fine, fine, a non-alcoholic beverage will do.)

I like margaritas (tequila, triple sec, and lime, on the rocks or straight up, with salt) but get drunk on them very quickly, because I’m a total lightweight. I recently discovered hard cider, and that’s really more my speed.

You don’t get away with mentioning tequila here without a followup question — got a favorite brand of tequila?

I tend to stick with Jose Cuervo, because pretty much every place has it.  If my tummy cooperates, I’d love to try some of the ones that are aged more than a year.  I’m not sure how different they’ll taste, but it will be fun finding out.

Recommend a book, comic book, film, or game: something with great story. Go!

It’s tough to pick just one. I’m going to go with an older fantasy novel: The Birthgrave, by Tanith Lee, which was her first published novel and came out in 1975. It’s a created world novel, where a woman wakes up in a tomb in a strange city under a volcano, with no idea who she is, and goes on a journey through a strange landscape. It’s dark and rich and vivid and there’s a lot of sex, especially when you read it when you’re 11 years old and somewhat too young for it. It was a big influence on me.

What skills do you bring to help the humans win the inevitable zombie war?

I’m pretty ruthless. If a zombie was trying to eat me, or my family, or my friends, or my cats, or my neighbors, or random people or cats on the street, I would make that sucker regret it. I could think of a lot of terrible things to do to zombies. Zombies better stay the hell away.

You’ve committed crimes against humanity. They caught you. You get one last meal.

This is another tough one. I can think of a lot of choices, but there’s a Mexican restaurant near where I live which makes sopes topped with shredded beef brisket, lettuce, tomatillo salsa and sour cream that I crave randomly a lot. That would be a pretty good last meal.

What’s next for you as a storyteller? What does the future hold?

I just finished a new fantasy novel a few days ago. It’s the third book in a series that started with “The Cloud Roads” last year and “The Serpent Sea” which just came out from Night Shade Books. I know I’m about to start working on another fantasy novel, but have no idea which one of several semi-developed projects I want to move from back burner to front burner yet. I’m not under contract to anybody for anything at the moment, so the possibilities are wide open. I just know I want to write fantasy.

Tell us about The Cloud Roads and its subsequent sequels. Why are these books only you could’ve written?

“The Cloud Roads” is about a shapeshifter named Moon, who is an orphan with no real idea where he came from.  The species he most closely resembles are predators that feed on other intelligent species and destroy whole cities, so he can’t show anyone who he really is.  He lives in a world with a lot of wildly different races and cultures, but he’s never come across his own people.  When he does find them, he has to face the fact that he might be too different and never fit in.  Plus the colony of his people that he encounters is under attack and may be dying out, their social system is complicated and scary, and his role in it is not an easy one.  “The Cloud Roads” is about finally finding the place where you belong, and “The Serpent Sea” and the third book are more about the work it takes to actually stay there, when you’ve been alone for too long.

It took two years for “The Cloud Roads” to find a publisher, and it was rejected a lot.  I was surprised by this, because I thought, hey, it’s got dragon-like shapeshifters, and flying around, and adventure and fighting and gender role reversal and air battles and magic and sex and paranoia and cannibalism, publishers will love that!  Turns out not so much.  But Night Shade Books was willing to take a chance on it and “The Serpent Sea,” and I’m very grateful.  So far the books have gotten some great reviews, which is a big relief.

I don’t know that only I could have written them, but I think I could only have written them now, after all the different experiences I’ve had, if that makes sense.  I don’t think I could have written these books earlier in my career.  I’ve always been aware that I’m still learning how to write as I go along.  I think everybody who does new and different things is still learning.  I’m mainly still learning to push myself to make things bigger and stranger and further out of my comfort zone.