Ten Interview Questions for the Next Big Thing

Ten Interview Questions for the Next Big Thing:

What is your working title of your book?

The title for the next book being released is Blood Mother.

Where did the idea come from for the book?

This is always an impossible question to answer. A million different influences and images get distilled into what finally emerges as the 'idea' for a new story; even the initial spark is usually very difficult to pin down. The first volume of this series, Dead Roots, emerged from boredom at two in the morning and I fully did not expect to finish it. I had the idea to combine Splinter Cell with Silent Hill and see what came out, and what I wound up with was much closer to The X-Files. At least in my opinion.

 

What genre does your book fall under?

Horror/thriller. It's been called a cross between Raymond Chandler and H.P. Lovecraft.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?
Oh, this was fun. (An extended answer to this question can be found on my tumblr)

Thomas Bell - Michael Fassbender

Artie - Seth Rogen

Shinichiro Keda - Justin Chon

Margaret Redding - Gillian Anderson
Oscar Tippler - Zach Galafianakis
Evey - Mila Kunis

Harold Saldana - Woody Harrelson
Cristophe -Common
Rodham - Will Smith
Berenger  - Martin Sheen
Jethro - Ethan Suplee
Hatcher - Daniel Day Lewis
Madame Theroux - Tonye Patano
Cody - Michael Madsen
 

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
Thomas Bell, emotionally scarred paranormal government analyst, travels to New Orleans to clear his name, in the eyes of a coven of barbaric near-human monsters.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

I'll be self-publishing my book on Amazon.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?
The first draft took about six months. The bulk of the work occurred during the final two months, as during the first four I was also editing, publishing and promoting the first in the series.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
American Gods, Ring, 1408, The Call of Cthulhu

Who or what inspired you to write this book?
There's actually a fairly long post about this on my blog, but I've always dabbled around with fiction and this was just one of those ideas that I put a few pages into and didn't really think I'd finish; what inspired me to really dig my heels in and try to make a proper series out of it was the success of Fifty Shades of Grey. I felt that if people would pay in the millions for what I considered to be ill-conceived wish-fulfillment dross, then I had no excuse not to try and make a living writing.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
 The setting is an expansive and original world drawing much inspiration from Japanese horror and mythology, populated by flawed and neurotic characters.

Tag five other writers/bloggers and add their links so we can hop over and meet them.

Lee Laughead, a fiercely smart writer who blogs about video games and has a novel out called Anchored to the Flesh.  http://www.leelaughead.com/

Steve Flavin, a dear friend who blogs on any medium you can think of about film, fashion, celebrities, art and literature.  http://steveflavin.tv 

Josh Loomis, author of Cold Iron and professional coder/blogger. http://about.me/blueinkalchemist 

Tom Sims, another good friend who is currently working on his own graphic novel. http://defilerwyrm.tumblr.com/ 

Jesse Summerson. I wish this guy had a blog I could link to, but currently a short story of his can be found in the anthology Explorers: Beyond the Horizon. http://www.amazon.com/Explorers-Beyond-The-Horizon-ebook/dp/B008E97SHW 

Include the link of who tagged you and this explanation for the people you have tagged. 

I was tagged by Lisa Bouchard. http://LisaBouchard.com

Blood Mother - The Analyst vol. 2

The average American encounters eight supernatural beings in a given week. 98% of these occurrences go unnoticed. One in fifty paranormal happenings is aggressive in nature, and of these, only 5% are ever reported. As an Analyst for the Department of Paranormal Study and Defense, Tom Bell's job is to respond to that 5%.

When a botched encounter leads to aggression from the barbaric Dry Ones of Louisiana, Tom heads to New Orleans to plead his case. There he finds himself embroiled in a brutal power struggle between the colony’s two leaders: pragmatic Judge Berenger, and bloodthirsty Archbishop Hatcher. With Keda growing increasingly unstable, old threats from Tokyo rearing their heads, and the mounting tension between the Dry Ones, Agent Bell will have to pull out all the stops to get out of here in one recognizable piece.

The nightmares are back, and they're telling of a terrible power growing deep in the swamp…

Blood Mother will be available on Amazon within the next few months. Stay tuned for an official release date. 

I am giving away Dead Roots FREE OF CHARGE from 12:00am Friday, September 28th to 12:00am Tuesday, October 2nd. Click here to pick up a copy and check it out.

DPSD Employee Safety Primer

Special thank you to Kay of Stand Alone Media for an awesome job putting together this brochure, to be handed out to con-goers at Days of Terror this weekend.
Design is based on this free InDesign template.

Swamp River Blues

Tom wandered aimlessly between the trees for several minutes. This was all wrong. That guy could be back at the dock bashing Cristophe's brains in. They hadn't found any decent leads. It was the middle of the night, and he was lost on a fucking mud bar in the middle of the New Orleans swamp.

"Fuck my life, really."

Tom couldn't see a damn thing, and he was pretty sure he'd lost the hillbilly for good. Nothing but trees and crickets. He thought to ignore a piece of battlefield advice he'd heard awhile back, and light a new cigarette, but then changed his mind. He was already wheezing from the exertion of chasing the half-naked hick.

Instead, for one reason or another, it occurred to him to call Margaret.

Tom leaned against a tree and fished into his pocket for his phone. The LED was black.

"Bullshit," Tom muttered. "Plugged this thing in this morning..."

Tom smacked the side of the device with a flat palm and jammed his thumb on the power button. He growled at it in irritation. Finally the screen lit up, almost blinding him. To his chagrin, the phone did not actually boot up, but instead shone a deep, flat yellow, one that hurt his eyes to look at.

"I can't even... what the fuck."

The device started to emit a buzzing, like the speakers were broken. It grew in volume and pitch. Tom slapped the phone shut, but the glow still stuck out from the sides of the gadget and it was screeching at him horribly.

Tom’s stomach turned over as it dawned on him what was happening. He tossed his cigarette to the ground and let it smolder in the wet grass.

Tom checked to see if he still had his handgun, and then that it was still loaded. Once he'd confirmed both, he tilted his head hesitantly towards the sky, and his fears were realized. The sky was still dark, but had taken on an ethereal glow from the light of a full yellow moon. The same color washed over the forest, which was shrouded in an ochre fog.

He'd crossed over. There was something in this swamp, and now he was playing by its rules.

Tom took a deep breath and recalled his training. He couldn't see more than twenty feet in front of himself, but it was still better than some situations he'd seen. He had to start moving. Either he'd leave its sphere of control, or whatever was here would show itself. Then again, he could be wandering in these ethereal woods for what, to him, would seem like days-- or years. The thought made his heart race, and it was too late to take a Xanax pill and force the creature into the real world.

"Shit."

Taking the first fearful steps, Tom started to walk. For every few feet he walked, the mist would shroud the place he'd come from. There was no light source, no house in the distance... no point of reference.

Tom fought down the urge to call his opponent out into view. He didn't know the rules here, yet. For now, gravity held and everything seemed more or less the same as it had before the shift, so continuing on seemed the best course of action.

Every pop of his joints and snap of twigs under his feet put him on edge. This place was silent. The crickets had vanished; there was no flow of swamp water. He nervously pulled back the hammer on his handgun and could've thought it was a crash of thunder. Tom looked up to the sky anxiously, past the canopy of leaves, only managing to stare for a few seconds. He tried in vain to find a point of navigation-- the North Star, or similar, but the sky here was alien, and the stars followed no recognizable pattern. Even had he found something, dark clouds were rolling in on a high wind. They shrouded the yellow orb of the moon, but did nothing to obscure its sick glow.

Then he really did hear thunder.

It startled him to feel the first spatter of rain against his head. It was a light drizzle at first, but as he continued to walk, it grew into a shower. He took solace in the fact that it seemed to stop there and didn't become a downpour. The soft swamp earth became softer. Mud caked Tom's sneakers.

Another rolling pound of thunder swayed the trees. Tom saw something lying on the ground in the distance. It looked like a body-- a skinless body, contorted and mutilated. It had to be George, he thought. He'd found his killer. No, that wasn't right-- the killer had found him.
Tom heard an awful shuffling sound up ahead. He ducked down behind a tree and did his best to obscure himself in the grass. Sweat was running into his eyes and coating his palms. He made sure he still had a good grip on his gun. When he saw what lumbered out of the yellow fog, his training kept him from dropping the firearm and running for his life-- but he still wanted to.

Tom could only describe its initial appearance as a massive, featherless bird. The more details he saw, the less it resembled one. Its whole flesh-colored form was lined with black pockmarks and angry red scars as if it had been terribly burned. It had one too many sets of skin-flap wings. It took pendulous steps on muscular legs, having muddy human hands in place of feet. Atop its pot-bellied body, at the end of a swan-like neck, there was a person’s head. From his vantage point Tom could see that its eyes were shut, burned forever closed by whatever calamity had ravaged the rest of its form. The human mouth was wide open, for out of it stuck the creature's 'beak'. It was a long, cone-like protrusion, as if it had simply been shoved through from the back of the neck.

The monster shuffled towards the body and didn't seem to notice Tom. It kept making shrill chittering sounds, as if trying to squawk through a blocked throat. Despite its shut eyes, it loomed over the skinless corpse, and situated itself. Tom had slowed his breathing as best he could, taking long, low breaths. Under better circumstances, he could hide in the darkness this way without making a sound, but his heart was pounding and he kept breathing loudly out of his nose. The claps of thunder overhead and the rain smattering the ground seemed to mask any noise he made, to his great relief, but he resisted getting too comfortable.

The creature opened its fleshy beak. It split four ways, each limp flap lined with shark-like teeth. The bird lowered its head and a slithering tongue slapped the corpse tentatively. Satisfied, the beak slid shut around the corpse's arm, and sucked loudly. Tom winced at the slurping and smacking sounds the monster made over its meal. The beak curled open again; George's arm had been sucked free of all but bone. The bird wrapped its mouth around another part of its meal and started slurping again.

Tom wanted no more to do with this. The sound of him standing up was drowned out by the thunder and rain, and the creature's messy feeding. He stood shakily upright, still clutching his weapon, and started to take long sidesteps away, never taking his eyes off the monstrous bird.
He made it some thirty feet, and felt like he might soon be in the clear. Stepping backwards, he felt his foot sink into the ground and lost his balance. He'd stepped into a hole in the mud, and submerged himself to the shin in muddy rainwater.

"Shit!"

Tom immediately lambasted himself mentally for the slip in composure. He paid the price. The flesh-colored bird lifted its head up suddenly, probing its head around for the source of the sound. Tom aimed his pistol at it instinctively. After a few seconds it seemed to see him. It stared at him, if it could be said to do so, through its burnt-shut eyes, and lifted its body to protect its meal with its four wings. The rubbery beak spread open, and the creature screamed at him in a strangled, raspy screech, like a person choking on poison.

Tom resumed stepping back carefully, handgun pointed.

"I don't want your fucking food."

It screeched at him again and flared its wings out to the sides. The fat bird moved towards Tom on its hand-feet, crossing twice the distance he could in a single lumbering step. He felt his aim wavering in his shaky hand.

"I don't want it."

The thing kept walking towards him. He went for broke, and fired two warning shots into a tree. Wood splinters flew off the trunk to smack limply on the bird's pot belly. It stopped in its tracks and screamed at him. The monster spread its wings in a show of dominance.

Tom flipped the safety on his weapon and turned tail to run. He could hear the bird creature squawking at him angrily, and turned back to look after he'd cleared some distance. It had followed him half the way, but now seemed satisfied that he was not a threat to its food. The monster receded back into the fog, making thunderous thuds with each step. Eventually its cacophony of squawking, thumping and slurping faded away under the sounds of rain and thunder, and its pendulous form had disappeared into the mist.

Tom took the opportunity and bolted away. He didn't know where he was going, but it was away from that thing, and that was enough.

Thread Topic: Imaginary Friend?

Hi everybody. I feel like I'm having a relapse of a mental illness I suffered from when I was a kid. It never really interfered with my life, and I was never diagnosed with anything, but I do remember some really weird stuff I used to do; in addition to that, I just last week found myself suffering from some really nasty headaches and night terrors. I wouldn't think the two are related, but-- well, bear with me, I'll get to that.

This post will be a wee bit long but I'm hoping somebody here might have suffered from something similar and can tell me what the condition or syndrome is called. I'd really like to get some pills or therapy that could assist me with this.

I was staying with my parents last week, and I wasn't able to sleep. So out of boredom I went digging around in our garage through some boxes that had a bunch of my old shit in it-- toys, books, school assignments, that sort of stuff. I was really excited when I dug out this old sketchbook of mine that I thought I had thrown away. I was really into being an artist when I was younger. It was kind of painful looking at some of those terrible old drawings.

Then I came across some pictures in particular that sort of left me a little shaken; I think maybe I'd repressed the memory of them or something, but then it was like I wondered how I'd ever forgotten. It's really difficult to explain without showing the pictures themselves.



This is a picture I did when I was probably 5 or 6 of my house and my dog, Milly. Your first question is probably going to be what that stuff in pencil is; that's where I need help.

The figure standing behind Milly is almost definitely "Jambi". Jambi was my imaginary friend until I was about 10. It isn't shown here but I specifically remember telling people he always wore a purple shirt. I remember adding these details to the drawing later, and I'm talking days or weeks later, not a long time afterward. But until I dug this book up again it was like I'd blocked the memory of Jambi, and the pencil parts, out-- it was almost like a light bulb "oh, yeah!" moment when I remembered Jambi.

I have no idea what that weird thing around my head is supposed to be, that's another part I'm hoping someone can help me with.

This picture was drawn on May 12th, 1991; I remember the date because it was exactly one day before Milly died from a stroke. Her little grave is out in the backyard.



This is a bigger picture of Jambi from when I was probably 7 or 8. I remember Jambi "adding" the marker lines after I "showed" it to him. Looking back, it was always kind of a point of argument between Jambi and I that he never smiled.






This is a map of my parents' house that I drew for a class project (my blue crayon snapped in half partway through). The thing that sticks out to me here is "Jambi's" addition of a door in our basement that wasn't there, and that sideways person. I'm not sure if that's supposed to be him or not; why would he be in the basement when I'm up in my room?



This is a self portrait I drew when I was 12. I tried to make it super realistic but it just wound up looking strange and creepy, I think. Here I drew that weird halo thing around my head again, but I'm not sure when I did that. I remember my mom asking me what that was supposed to be every time she saw it, and I told her "I don't know, Jambi drew it". The thing is, by the time I drew this portrait I hadn't "spoken" to Jambi in over two years.



This one is a picture of Jambi and me, obviously. You can see that he's gone over the smile on his face with a pencil again, and drawn the halo behind me. This one was pretty unremarkable at first, until I was showing my mom the sketchbook for a laugh. she said she'd looked through my sketchbook dozens of times when I was younger, and she didn't remember this picture at all.

Putting all that together, it makes me feel really weird and I'm just hoping there somebody who's been through something similar, and can tell me if there's a name for it or anything I can read on the subject. Please don't hesitate to send me an email if your post would be too personal for this forum.

Regarding Creepypasta

Lot of words in this one.

I've recently been trying my hand at writing a "creepypasta". Before I go any further, I should probably define what exactly that is.

A "copypasta", from the word copy/paste, is a humorous story or block of text that usually originates on a message board like 4chan or Reddit and then makes its away around virally. My favorite versions of these are usually a story written out to sound like the speaker is an absolute trainwreck of a human being, then at the end twists it by being a veiled reference to Star Wars or Pokemon.

A "creepypasta" is like this but is intended to unsettle the reader, sometimes doing an undeservedly good job of it. Some circles refer to it as "horror microfiction", but given that the format has grown to include heavily edited YouTube videos and sprite artwork (more on that in a minute) it's difficult to really classify or name what exactly is going on. The gist of it is, it's scary storytelling in an unconventional, internet-based format that is heavily dependent on being told in its original medium, rather than something that would be served better as a book or short film.

With that terribly amateur definition out of the way, I want to talk about a few creepypasta stories that have influenced me, for better or worse, and hopefully deconstruct what sets the better ones apart from the dross.

1. The Bad
I feel like I should start with the poorest attempts at creepypasta in order to illustrate what exactly we're trying not to achieve. Go and have a look at It Wasn't Lavender Town and the notorious Jeff the Killer. These are the absolute bottom of the barrel, as far as I am concerned, when trying in earnest to tell a scary story.

It Wasn't Lavender Town is an attempt to latch onto the Lavender Town-related creepypasta craze. If you don't know, Lavender Town was a location in the first generation of Pokemon games where you fought a lot of ghosts and was notorious for its creepy 8-bit musical theme. There was a pretty decent story surrounding Lavender Town called Lavender Town Syndrome and I'll be talking about a really good one, Pokemon Black, in a minute.

The point is that Lavender Town took off as the subject of various copycat creepypastas (I hated typing that phrase, btw), and It Wasn't Lavender Town is an example of the kind of absolute dreck that can occur when teenagers are given access to a word processor, and a platform for having their bowel movements praised by other chan-board users. I can't even figure out what exactly is going on in the story, and while normally I'd be able to look past that as a stylistic choice, in this case I don't give a shit. The writer rattles off horror buzzwords-- screaming, pain, secret, innocent, beckoning-- to try and evoke some kind of response out of the reader, and instead just comes off like a high-schooler imitating Stephen King. Barf.

Jeff the Killer has gained notoriety, I think, purely for its use of a visual aid, a grinning bone-white face which has now been turned into a myriad of image macros and fanart. Without that youtube-screamer-worthy face as a hook, Jeff the Killer is little more than an overblown, overlong, Wes Craven-style snorefest. Had the writer used his head, he might have scrapped everything after the news article at the very beginning, edited that up so that it had a nice twist ending or some decent imagery, and then left it at that. As it is, the thing clocks in at over five thousand words. All in all, much like Lavender Town, it serves only to make it sound like a shitty campfire story for the Facebook era.

When it comes down to it, the best creepypastas tend to work well as a sort of "urban legend" that can be copy/pasted (!!!) or linked to out of context and get a good, scared reaction from the reader. The worst ones are the kind that decide they want to be a horror story without having a fucking clue what makes good horror, aping sub-par spooky cinema in the process.

1. Wasted Potential/Jumped the Shark

The next category are creepypasta stories that started out promising-- in some cases, extremely so-- and then at some point disappeared up their own ass. This is usually the result of the author having a good idea to start out, and putting out a pretty good first installment, often with high production values for their visual aids or videos. Then they decide they have a larger story they want to tell, but unfortunately that story pans out into an overblown mess that undermines the sinister quality of the original concept. My examples for these are Haunted Majora's Mask Cartridge (or "Ben Drowned") and NES Godzilla Creepypasta. 

In regards to Ben Drowned, you may notice that I posted a link to a KnowYourMeme article instead of the original story. This is because I lost interest trying to find a link to the original story through Google or any related articles, instead digging up a treasure trove of (useless) information regarding an alternate reality game based on the story, and its own fucking wiki. To paraphrase KYM, the story started out as a thread detailing a mysterious forumgoer's experiences with a copy of Majora's Mask he picked up from a creepy old man at a garage sale. He uses youtube videos as the primary means of telling the story at first, the majora-ty (har) of the text just describing what's occuring on the screen.

To his credit, the videos are very good. Unfortunately, with each entry, the story flies off the handle and becomes a story about a ghost that lives in your computer and omg you just downloaded the ghost and then, from there, turned into an overblown ARG involving a cult modeled after the game's villain (???) and the exploits of a series of protagonists as they fought against this killer AI. I guess if the author wanted to make an ARG, he succeeded, but the storyline is laughably bad and any sincerity the tale originally possessed is quickly drowned out under the old horror staples of cults and an omnipotent spooky intelligence. Swing and a miss.

NES Godzilla follows a similar trail, beginning as a pictorial recording the writer's encounter with a seemingly cursed or haunted NES game (haunted video games are a popular concept). Using admirable skill with sprite artwork, the author subtly alters the game as the playthrough progresses, eventually leading to an encounter with the work's villain; an unrecognizable, low-res demon, whose boss "fight" area is labeled by a single chilling directive. RUN.

At that point, I would've ended the thing, but the thing goes on for a groan-inducing eight more chapters, each of those divided into several sub-entries for a grand total of a couple dozen posts. The story culminates in some bullshit about a childhood friend who is trapped in the cartridge, now in the form of an alien-looking angel, and a Hollywood-worthy (that's not a compliment) final showdown with the demon where the player can't move or turn off the game and feels actual pain whenever his character is attacked.  Oh yeah, there's also a silly redemption arc with one of the characters, a defected minion of the villain.

This shit is still awesome though:


What this boils down to is they start out with a good, unsettling concept-- and then fall into the trap of thinking every story needs to escalate swiftly to stay interesting, and that every story needs an ending that either wraps up the story or kills off all the humans involved. When you're writing horror, many of these rules are extremely malleable, and you have to be exceedingly careful when choosing to follow traditional structure; particularly when your second and third acts are stupid as fuck.

The Good

With that out of the way, two of the best ones I can think of off the top of my head are Candle Cove and Super creepy Pokemon hack (or the now-defunct "Pokemon Black").

These are very good scary stories. Candle Cove, using the format of a small forum such as the kinds that these sorts of stories tend to originate on, starts out fairly innocuous, and then goes on to play with something almost all of us are familiar with; the insane, retrospectively traumatic imagery of kids' shows. We all remember Ren & Stimpy, the scary boat ride from Willy Wonka, the donkey island in Pinocchio. The discussion concerns a fucked-up sounding puppet show from a local TV station. The beauty here is that the show is set up as being obscure enough that googling it would realistically not turn up anything, and nothing in the show sounds particularly insane, as far as the insanity of old children's programming goes. Until you reach the Skin-Taker, arguably.

The stakes are raised when one poster's nightmare about the show is recalled by another as being an actual episode of the show; then whole thing is punctuated with a delicious twist ending that answers one question-- what?-- while opening up a whole host of others-- why? How? There are no further entries to elaborate on those new questions, and god damn it, that's how it should be.

Super Creepy Pokemon Hack doesn't even do that. The entire story is an account of the player's experience with the cartridge, a transcript of what exactly occurred on the Game Boy screen, and then a quick rumination on the origins of the cartridge without any concrete answers. It takes a fond memory, a subject very familiar to most people reading the story, and makes it wrong. After subtle twisting of the source material, the story leads to an oppressive conclusion that has the scares administered by an inhuman, unfeeling, nigh-faceless 'other' that never answers any questions or makes its motives known in the slightest.

In the end, we're left with the two basic blocks of a good horror ending-- leaving more questions than answers, and never bringing the monster down to the protagonist's level. Even if the Ghost had been vanquished at the end of Pokemon Hack/Black, it was never humanized and could have been part of a larger, unknowable force.

So?

I'm guilty of breaking a few of my own rules about scares in the name of a more marketable story in my novels, but given the freedom from market expectation I would definitely do something more along these lines, and that's what I hope to accomplish with my own little creepypasta story. This exercise has got me to identify a few of the elements that I think make a great scary tale, and hopefully some of you who are already creepypasta enthusiasts might go away thinking a bit more critically about what you read.

For the rest of you, I'm an opinionated blowhard, move along.

Addendum: I wanted to talk about The Princess as well, which is a long-form creepypasta concerning a video game ghost and which has taken off into a few fan-made videos and artwork. It's harder to comment on as a whole piece because it's not finished yet, but so far it's up to part 11 and I'm still on board, so take that for what it's worth. Give it a look!