A Word Please: Conversations With 24 Authors
A Word Please
Conversations With
24 Authors
January –June 2012
Quiet Fury Books
Copyright © Darcia Helle 2012
All rights reserved
This ebook is for your personal enjoyment only. No part of this book may be copied, reproduced, or posted anywhere on the Internet without written permission.
Note to Readers:
This collection of interviews was initially published on A Word Please, the blog belonging to author Darcia Helle. All questions were written by Darcia specifically for each author, for each book discussed. Along with the interviews, you will also find information on the books and authors.
Table of Contents:
Black Light of Day, Nights Gone By, and Walkout by Jason McIntyre
Bloodstone: The Guardian’s Apprentice by J. Michael Radcliffe
Appliances Included and Cupid’s Maze: Short Stories by Mark Souza
The Lion, The Lamb, the Hunted by Andrew Kaufman
A Murderer’s Heart by Julie Elizabeth Powell
The Nightmare Within and Where Darkness Dwells by Glen Krisch
B-Sides and Broken Hearts by Caryn Rose
Finally Home by Elysabeth Eldering
Metallic Dreams by Mark Rice
Lair of the White Wyrm by Lea Ryan
Facing The Son by M L Rudolph
Changes by Charles Colyott
Playing With The Bad Boys by Sylvia Massara
The Bastard Year by Richard Lee Zuras
Slings & Arrows and Gone by Julie Elizabeth Powell
The Art Lovers Handbook by Les and Sue Fox
Web of Lies by Sarah Tate
King Trevor by Susan Helene Gottfried
Crashing Eden by Michael Sussman
Eerie by Blake and Jordan Crouch
Hide and Seek by Jenny Hilborne
Recall! Return of the IRR by Doug DePew
Corpse Days by Jonathon Kane
When America Slew Her King by Joel Blaine Kirkpatrick
Black Light of Day, Nights Gone By, and Walkout by Jason McIntyre
Dangerous Intersection // At the same intersection over the course of the next year and a half, Janey Dietrich goes through the motions of her ever-changing life and might finally discover what’s truly important to her.
Remembering Train Car Six // 58-year old Mort can’t shake the feeling that he’s been doing things in the past to help himself in the present. He just can’t remember doing them.
Two in the Park // The man in the fedora is good with his video camera but recently-divorced Albert is too busy watching his own daughter boss her way through the playground to give him the notice he deserves.
One Hour’s Reprieve // Allie gets one hour for lunch with her mom, to laugh, to catch up, and to deliver some heart-breaking news.
Dark That Day, After All // As they peer into the heavens together, elderly Jarvis Schloss unburdens his soul to another park dweller as they sit on his favorite park bench. The two each reflect on the primes of their lives and uncover something even darker than the sky overhead.
Act of Contrition // Mark Foley has climbed his way to a prime V-P position with Gabriel-Garvin and Subsidiaries but today he’s getting more than a simple hand-slap over a deal that went south.
DDA // Ada Verhoeven has just graduated from a Berlin university. Now she’s following her father’s words of advice, getting things in order and making plans for her new life.
House Lights // Thinking he needs to get out of the house Abe is now face-to-face with the girl he pined for through high school…and he’s taking an acting class with her.
Man With an Addiction // The man in the pickup truck tells Katie that he’s just out to buy dog food for his newborn pups but surely there’s more to his offer of a ride home.
Down The Line // Otis Derry’s lead line inspector finds something on the early morning train bound for the mountain pass through Willis.
East Meets West // Duncan loves to work in the dirt and now that spring is here he can finally get that new flower bed planted before darkfall but the next-door neighbour has other plans.
Through the Transom Light // Henry can’t sleep and hasn’t for some years now–not since that night seven years ago when his and Anna’s lives were shattered with the scream of the baby monitor.
Gavin is a wealthy and demanding investment banker, the sort of power-hungry, driven man those in the professional world don’t question. When a beautiful young woman finds herself entangled with Gavin following his divorce of a year ago, things aren’t exactly as they first seemed. Now, nearing the end of an icy winter, she’s living in his luxurious home in a rich neighborhood just north of the sprawling city. She’s washing his sheets and tending to his every whim…but a mysterious boat house on the property calls to her and, in time, she may not be able to stop herself from answering.
Our conversation:
Black Light of Day
The first story – Dangerous Intersection – takes place entirely with Janey in her car. What prompted you to set an entire story inside a car?
I read a foreword (or maybe it was an afterword) by Stephen King some years ago when he tried to pre-empt questions about why he set his novel, From a Buick 8, in Pennsylvania rather than his more traditional location of Maine. He said something similar to, “I was driving in my car in Pennsylvania when the story occurred to me so, to be honest to the story, I kept it in Pennsylvania when I wrote it.”
To me, this answer seems almost too perfectly rational. In a similar way, the idea for Dangerous Intersection came to me in the car as I was driving home from work. Each day, week after week, I would inevitably be stopped in a particular left-hand turning lane with only the soft, rhythmic click of my signal flasher as witness. It struck me how this echoed the opening scene of my novel from last year called On The Gathering Storm and that made me tune into the idea of echoes in our lives. Do we even listen to such echoes? No matter how often they repeat? Pretty soon, I had the nuts and bolts of the narrative and the characters figured out. I decided to keep the narrative not just inside the car but at the exact same intersection for much the same reason as King did. I felt I could be more true to the story if it felt more true to me.
Act of Contrition has a futuristic, sci-fi feel. This one brought to mind the ‘group think’ mentality, and also had shades of the Stanford prison experiment conducted in 1971. Did either of these things factor into your writing on this one? What was the inspiration?
The idea of ‘group think’ is absolutely a valid notion for readers to take from this story. Here, an employee of a large conglomeration has moved even beyond the point of frustration with the constructs of his work-a-day world and is now forced into a trial by fire.
I vaguely remember learning about the Stanford prison experiment from 1971 when I was in high school but didn’t have it at the forefront of my thoughts while writing this. Like most things, it was probably in the ingredient list of the stew which eventually became the final story. It is certainly applicable and an off-shoot and I love when readers bring such things back to me from their reading.
I was inspired by stories like Lord of The Flies and The Lottery (two other things originally gleaned from high school which I learned to love long after those awkward teenage years). They embody the idea that we as a species can be hunky-dory and even as cordial to one another as saccharine until the chips are down. Then, whamo!, we are throwing stones at each other or spearing pig
s’ heads and lighting forest fires. This thin piano wire between rationality and chaos has always intrigued me.
Your writing is always visual, but Act of Contrition in particular stood out for me. I could see the action playing out as if on a movie screen. Are you a visual writer? Do you see the scene in your mind, then write it? Or does it become visual for you as you create it?
Striking question and I need to pause and really understand how it occurs myself before answering.
Okay. I’m back. Hope no one left to go to the bathroom or get a cup of coffee. If you need to, go ahead. I’ll wait.
Wonderful. Feeling refreshed? Me too. Where were we?
Usually the premise or centerpiece scene of a story or book comes to me in a visual way, as if seeing it on a film reel in my mind’s eye. The nuts and bolts scenes needed to either lead up to that centerpiece or trail away from it and explain it, occur in a similar visual way – but these parts unfurl in the moments as I write them. I go back religiously to ensure that the reader will take what I want them to from each of the filmstrips. I guess you could say I strive to be a master manipulator. If only I had political aspirations.
Nights Gone By
Through the Transom Light was the standout for me in this collection. The subject matter struck me deep. With Henry, the main character, you tackle the depth of a father’s love. For this story, did you draw on your own feelings of being the father of two young children?
This one was absolutely inspired by being a father. Despite this being Henry and Anna’s first child, the inspiration for this story came not from being a pop the first time but instead the weariness of going through it all a second time. Ugh. The thinking and re-thinking about whether I would even want to bring a child into this mixed up, violent, harsh reality. And, oh, hey, lookie-here, didn’t I just have this mental tug-of-war last week when we had the first baby? Sheesh. Now I’m mixing that with all the things I experienced that first time, logistical realities like not knowing how to handle baby’s new teeth and her indigestive wailing, never sleeping myself, losing out on such things as career advancements simply because my priorities had changed from seeking prestige to simple nocturnal survival. Simple things too, like not knowing where the remote is even though I JUST. HAD. IT. IN MY HANDS.
Another facet of this story – which, to be fair, has been one of the hardest for me to write, EVER – was the idea that we have no real understanding of why things happen to us. We can call it faith, religion, fate, destiny, karma, but no one rightfully knows why certain things happen to certain people. Being responsible for human beings outside of my own physical body is a sobering notion. Something will happen. It’s inevitable. And I will not be able to control it. Nor will I necessarily be able to explain it. There are irrational realities. And as a father, that’s scary as hell.
The paranormal twist gave the story an eerie edge, and Henry’s ability to hold onto his belief despite everything had a poetic feel. This was a fascinating blend. What was the inspiration behind this?
Simply, the idea that upon the birth of my second child, I had this unshakeable feeling of, “We did this once. It’s killing us. But we got through it before. It will be okay again. Some day.”
I don’t know how I would react in a similar situation to Henry’s and I hope I never have to be tested in such a way. But I have certain truisms about humanity that I hold dear. One is that we are a hopeful lot. We hang onto beliefs that are engrained in us, even if they are completely irrational and unfounded in the reality we see every single day. It’s our main survival instinct.
The dichotomy of an almost religious-level of faith mixed thrown against the supernatural felt like an interesting two-step to explore. I believe that not knowing the answer to a big life question is almost always the main driver of effective suspense fiction. As a writer, if I can formulate a question in the mind of the reader without actually phrasing it, and then explore the character’s path through to some kind of answer, I stand an excellent chance of scaring the bejeezus out of that reader.
In Man With an Addiction, you step into the mind of the story’s antagonist. What is it like for you to write from the perspective of a ‘bad guy’? Do you need to be in a certain mood or prepare in any specific way?
For a rather short story, Man With an Addiction took a considerable amount of thought and research before I set pen to paper, so to speak. Even before the newspaper clippings were consumed and shivered over, I was inspired by a shoddily-written warning note that was tacked to a community bulletin board at a local library. It warned of a known offender who had recently bought a house in the neighbourhood. Some citizen felt the need to spread the word.
The story’s challenge was an interesting one. I was inspired – believe it or not – by the movieJaws. You see only the shark’s fin until about 80% of the way through that incredibly effective movie. If you read Man With an Addiction closely, you’ll note that nothing offensive, suggestive or off-colour is ever mentioned outright. As readers we’re unsettled by only the implications being made by the narration. And those implications are of the most unsettling kind I can imagine.
It was a dark few days as I wrote the first draft of that story.
Walkout
This novella was full of your signature darkness and vivid imagery. What inspired this story?
In a nutshell, I’d moved in with my girlfriend (who would one day become my wife). We lived in a rather shambled, poorly-built house and I had trouble sleeping that first winter as I became accustomed to living with another person, sharing that space, the lifestyle and so on. I feared on one particular dark and snowy night that my identity might be swallowed whole by this new world I now inhabited, even despite the infatuation and love I had for the person I lived with. But in that night, as I lay staring at the ceiling I worried, I wouldn’t ever go to sleep again. I’d grow so weary, reality would blur with imagination, bringing me to a state where I could legally claim temporary insanity. Would I go into a fugue and find myself standing barefoot outside one of our drafty windows pounding to be let in and having no real understanding of how I got there?
The confusion you feel in the story is an earnest attempt on my part to recreate that feeling of moving from a solo figure on the landscape to suddenly being half of a couple. Does an individual’s identity survive? Can it? It does, I think, but depending on specific dynamics it can get a rather extreme face lift. Peach gets one of those, doesn’t she?
Peach, the main character, goes through a period of intense confusion. Because she is the viewpoint character, her confusion becomes the readers’ confusion. I felt like I’d fallen down the rabbit hole and could relate to Peach’s disorientation. The sense of imbalance in the story could easily have left readers stumbling and irritated, but you managed to walk that fine line with ease. Are you aware of this tightrope act as you write? Or do you immerse yourself in the character’s mindset and write what you see and feel?
How much ego is involved if I say that the tightrope walking is intentional? I will admit that I rarely start writing a story unless I’m reasonably confident I can succeed in whatever kind of medicine the story needs to heal – if that even makes a lick of sense. Writing is a bit like doctoring. You get a patient (in the form of a nagging idea) and then you set about administering drugs and therapy to the nag with the purpose of curing it (and yourself, vicariously). If you get some kind of response – the wiggle of a toe when you were certain that paralysis was imminent – you’re encouraged to keep at it. Maybe you’ll get an x-ray of clear lungs after a month of imbalanced, violent pneumonia-like hacking. That black sheet of film puts you a little at ease. You feel like you’re on the right track with this course of treatment. The patient may not on live, but walk again, and breathe without the help of an air tank. As I wrote Walkout I had that feeling of pending fatality avoided and kept at it. In the end, beta readers said I nailed it so I packaged it up and sent it out into the world.
In the end, after all the bandages,
casts, pills and prescription slips, that’s all I can do.
General Questions
Some readers are under the impression that a male writer cannot properly write from a female POV and a female writer can’t properly write from a male POV. What is your opinion on this?
My opinion? It’s laughable that anyone can tell another person they’ve failed in a creative pursuit, particularly one so subjective as gender-specific points of view.
I’ve had some success with stories like Walkout, On The Gathering Storm and Bled – all told from a woman’s perspective — and certainly wasn’t inspired to try writing this perspective until I saw other male writers achieve it in their work. It’s a broad stroke to say that any writer, man or woman, can truly inhabit another’s point of view. You can’t. But you can write it in a believable way. I’ve seen it done. I’ve also seen it faked. My hope is that when I write any character – man, woman, black, white, old, young – that I do it in a way which is nearly invisible to the reader. It should be a heartbeat from the reality they know for it to be effective.
If I’ve come that close for a reader, I consider the story partway to success. The next thing is to tell the story so it unfolds for them in a reasonable way – even if the dinosaurs in it are drinking cognac and talking about the Martian’s chances in November’s presidential race.
Your writing is generally in the dark and twisted zone, and you occasionally tap into people’s fears. What scares you the most and why?
The news. I don’t often sit down to write directly topical or issue books (at least, I haven’t yet) but I work in a field that is directly related to the media and so I’m touched on a daily basis by the kinds of news stories tugging on the heartstrings and fear factors of average people. These ideas sort of saturate me, my psyche, my behaviours, and they tend to stew in me until they coagulate in a way that makes a bit of sense and I set about writing them down, either to get over them or cure them out of the wheelchair and make them walk again.