[Updates from The Writer's Desk]

Formal Questions

What is your favorite line from one of your books? Dialog or otherwise.

I love writing dialogue for a pugnacious rabble rouser and journalist who calls himself Handsome Johnny Troubadour, a minor character in the novel I’m working on. Handsome Johnny got in a fight with my thirteen year old protagonist over who gets to be called “Laureate.” His argument was this:

“I am a poet of mayhem! I study the movements of monsters! If the established literary scene don’t want to recognize my work as art, that don’t matter to me. I know what I do and I’ll take whatever damn title I please. Mark me, Batgirl: If you don’t take a title you like somebody is going to give you one that you don’t.”

She argued that Laureate is a poet’s title, and it’s one that must be granted, and her name isn’t Batgirl.

Now that your book/story is published, do you avoid re-reading it out of fear that you’ll find more edits? If you have re-read it, did you make the edits or leave the book how you first published it?

I reread my stories when they come out. I used to be bothered by little things, like if I had dropped that one word out of that one sentence the rest of the story might have draped together so perfectly, but I know that’s only because I’m a fiddly person and had I done so the story would have desperately needed that one word right there in that one sentence… I have to tell myself that I will never write a perfect story because the next story begins with the failures of the last. A single story cannot encompass every single direction the brain plays with it. Putting words down narrows and narrows the focus, killing off the other decisions until the only thing left is the story’s end, but some of those other ways you killed had potential. So those pathways you killed are exhumed and given life with a new set of characters, inside different circumstance. I am only a little bit afraid of the things I killed while I wrote, so it doesn’t bother me too much to reread my stories. But I will edit previously published stories if they are going into a new thing because I can’t help it. I’ve got an editing sickness.

Has interacting with fans of your work ever influenced a story you were still writing? You don’t need to be specific. Just yes or no. 🙂

Yes!

Fun Questions

It’s the zombie apocalypse and it has been for at least a month. What do you smell?

A month… Sweat, decay, low tide and hot metal.

Tell me about your favorite, easy to prepare meal

Truck tacos! Either with chicken or steak. Put a little stack of corn tortillas in tin foil and throw that into an oven turned to warm while you dice up the meat in little cubes, really little because it’s going into little tortillas. Toss that biz into a fry pan with some garlic, salt, pepper, Tapatio (best hot sauce) and whatever else you like to use as taco seasoning and fry it until the chicken or steak has burned through its juices and starts to stick to the pan because that somehow makes it tastier. Take out the tortillas, put the meat on there, and maybe some shredded cabbage with lime and salt and pepper, or salsa, or guacamole… really whatever you want to put on top, and eat! Try not to think of that taco truck 20 blocks away that does it a little better, those tacos are so far away from the ones in my face and these are plenty delicious. That taco truck is magic anyway and I’m no taco wizard. Yet.

Pick a type of business establishment in your town/city that is in the best position to survive a zombie apocalypse. Why would anyone in that business/building have a higher chance of survival?

I like my chances in either Stadium or Lincoln High School. Both are massive castles with easily quartered off sections and extremely thick walls. Stadium especially, as it was first designed as a hotel and the builders ran out of money at about the fourth floor, but they had fortified its foundation for six or seven, and the brick walls reflected that. Both have big kitchens and stores of food, and fewer people would think of holing up in a high school, so you’d avoid all the people raiding the stores. Stadium has a big football field that’s already fenced off from the city, and the other side drops down to the Puget Sound, so it’s a defensible enough position to put a farm for lasting survival. It even has a great place for terraced gardening where a good portion of the stadium seating collapsed, so you can take full advantage of the sun for high yield veggie gardening. And I bet the library has some good material on food production, fishing, and defense tactics (to supplement what I already have.) Too bad the place is across town.

What is the most difficult part of surviving a zombie apocalypse? Who would die first?

I am far more concerned with the people who have built up a lone wolf, anything to survive mentality, and use it to justify acts of atrocity against the backdrop of an apocalypse. These people would be more destructive to survival than any unthinking horde of hungry corpses. I live in a place of plentiful islands and rich soil (thanks, volcanoes!) but geography can’t guard against the greed of other people. Humans can live through apocalypses. Hell, the Black Death killed 75% of Europe (which demanded a restructuring of the ruling class and brought about the renaissance… no I’m not eagerly awaiting the apocalypse, I promise) but society was not rebuilt by some asshole with twelve guns, a stack of bullets, and a plan to live out the rest of his days in a Costco. That’s small thinking. So I’d say the hardest part would be to bring about a renaissance with the people who could survive a zombie apocalypse, and to fortify it against the sorts of people who plan to survive on nothing more than brute force.

All this is a moot point for me, though, as I’d likely die first.

Do you own running/tennis shoes? And how fast can you run a mile?

I wear my skate shoes almost every day. They’re not the best for running, but certainly not the least practical. I think… oh jeeze. I don’t want to even know how long it takes me to run a mile. It’s been a while since I’ve last tried. I can make it in a minute on a snowboard, though. Let’s stick to wintery apocalypses, please.

A single can of food remains in your supplies and the dead are too many to risk a supply run. The expiration date printed on the can came and went last month. Your belly is aching from hunger. Do you risk it and feast, take your chances outside to find something safer for consumption, or starve a while longer and hope for some sort of miracle?

Only a month? I bet that’s alright… what sort of food is it? For some reason I have this inkling that the expiration dates on canned fruits and veggies have a little more leeway than anything containing meat, oh but there was that tin of sardines that was still edible when they found Shackleton’s lost voyage to Antarctica 100 years after his disappearance… then again that was in Antarctica so perhaps the cold had something to do with it… the sardines might have been frozen inside their tin that whole time. But cans are different now from the way they were first manufactured back in the Napoleonic campaigns, was it Napoleon? I’m sure it was someone who had to feed his troops… I do know they used thicker metal, didn’t even have can openers, had to shoot their food open, none of this easy open shit that we have now; easy open is a weak point in the metal, a place for contaminants along hairline fractures that I can’t even see with the room this dark… Does the can feel like it’s bulging at all? Is the label wet? Is that blood? What’s it smell like? What’s that sound at the door?

Oh. It’s the zombies.

Probably shouldn’t have overthought this. Now my arm’s come off.

And that’s why I’d be among the first to die.

(previous answer is not guaranteed to contain any truth, as it was written under the assumption my ramble-brain would not have access to Google during this zombie uprising.)

Do you have a favorite brand of pen?

I try not to write by hand because I have really terrible handwriting, but I took notes in a red Bic ball point pen for a few stories over an electronic free vacation a year ago and half of the notes are in sketches. Something about a Bic lends itself to sketches, which is nice when I can’t decipher what I wrote. That squiggle could be an a or a u, but I do know that the boy has a bouquet of flying fish tied to string and he looks like a strong swimmer. I can work with that. Bic pens are best. Oh, and I really dislike Papermate because they’re always out of ink.

Final Questions

What did you learn from writing your first book? Are there things you do differently as you work on new pieces?

I want to say that I would outline the next book, but I know I can’t outline anything. I write without knowing what will happen. Sometimes the key to the ending is in some minor detail that came out of an object held by the character, one that would not have been noticed in a major outline because I was just enjoying the scenery for a moment. But I have learned that I need to finish the story fully before I can begin to edit. I got tired of my first draft and thought I’d polish the early chapters, get them all pretty so I’d not have to fix anything, but after I finished the first draft the full shape of the story changed some things in those early chapters and I had just as much work on my hands for the next round of edits as I would have had I left the editing alone.

I turned my screensaver to come on if I let the screen sit still for more than thirty seconds so I won’t sit there and stare at the sentence I just wrote, wondering if there was a better way to put the words. It helps to remind me to keep moving forward until the end.

If there is only one lesson or nugget of wisdom that a reader could take away from your book(s), what would you hope that it be?

Love is terrifying, but worth it.

Plug something. Anything.

I love the comics of Emily Carroll and she just released a collection of stories with four brand new stories! It’s called Through the Woods. I recommend it to anyone who loves fairy tales and the old Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books. Her work has that deceptive simplicity of folk tale illustrations, and all the punch of the water and ink Scary Story illustrations; the skulls and maggots and thready hair that turned your stomach even though you couldn’t look away. Remember all the best nightmares you had as a kid? I’m fairly sure Emily Carroll invents them.