Shock Totem 9: Curious Tales of the Macabre and Twisted

by Shock Totem

  She had five book contracts at that time—the three fairytale books and mystery/thriller/horror type of things. We Skyped a little, we sat down, we basically really got things going with the World Fantasy convention in San Diego, where we sat down on a balcony with yellow pads and tossing ideas back and forth, and that’s where it really started to take shape, and then we started writing, you know, back and forth. It was hard for her because she had [to do] a lot of conventions, and I think she had really over-extended herself. But we got it done, and it came up to about 52,000 words, which is a little too short for most trade publishers, so we went the small press route, and now it’s a finalist for the Stoker.

  As for Tom and me, Nocturnia has a long history of going back to the early days of the Horror Channel, which was supposed to be a cable channel. Nick Psaltos is still working with it; he owns the title, which everybody wants. We were gonna do something like what Matt Costello and I did for the Sci-Fi Channel; Tom and I came up with this world called Nocturnia, where all the classic monsters have their own nation-states, and there’s politics going on between them, and then we would do newscasts from Nocturnia; it was sort of interspatial programming for the Horror Channel. But the Horror Channel never got off the ground, so we had this whole scenario worked out, so why let it go to waste? Why not write some books there? It sort of had to be YA; I couldn’t imagine doing it any other way. So we got a trilogy going from that. I was just working on it yesterday, and I’ll probably get to work some more on that this afternoon. I have a morning book and an afternoon book; that’s sort of the way I work.

  And Tracy Carbone and I, we probably go back to 2007 for The Proteus Cure, and working on that off-and-on. And I know these things sort of seemed to come out, bam-bam-bam, but it was probably over a period of about six years that they had been in various states of development.

  BLD: When you were nearing the end of writing the Repairman Jack novels, were you eyeballing prospective work like this?

  FPW: Um...it looks like I’ve suddenly decided to collaborate with everybody in sight, but it’s been coming for a while. I’ll probably do another Repairman Jack novel somewhere along the line; I just don’t know when it’ll be. I stopped doing the idea of getting contracts, of multi-book contracts, and delivering one every fall—I’m stopping that, because basically, I don’t have a new Repairman Jack novel every fall. I don’t want to write them just to write them, because the whole series will suffer then, so if I come up with something I’ll deliver it, but I’m not going to commit myself to one every year. I mean, I have other things; I’m working on an international thriller that I’m having a lot of fun with. I was feeling sort of claustrophobic after a while, you know, [keeping] the venue in New York City all of the time, so I’m going to be country-hopping in this one. Something a little different, but, you know...fun.

  BLD: Besides this international thriller, do you have other ideas for works that might be a bit “different?” (Much like how The Fifth Harmonic was something you’d never written the likes of before?)

  FPW: I think I’ll be switching back and forth between the familiar and the unfamiliar. Like, people keep asking me for a sequel to Midnight Mass, and so I have come up with some sketchy ideas that might work; you know, things like that. Basically, it’s a matter of keeping things different enough that I’m happy, but familiar enough, too, so the readers don’t feel I’m leaving them in a lurch. It’s a balancing act, you know?

  BLD: Do you think you might return to other genres you haven’t written in a while, such as the period fiction in Black Wind or hard SF again?

  FPW: I don’t really have any intention, but there’s always—if I get the nerve—to write about the First Age (when the two key players of the Adversary Cycle first met, aeons ago), but that’s a huge undertaking. I’d have to really commit to that, but I’m just not sure if I’m ready to, and I’m not sure if there’d be that much of an audience, a wider audience. You never know; it could tap into the Game of Thrones audience, but it takes a different mindset, and I don’t know if I’m really the right type of guy to deal with that. Again, it’s in the back of the mind; but that, I think, is a long shot, to say that I’ll be doing something like that. I still have people that want me to do it, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I’d do a good job at it; I can’t do a good job if it’s not something I’m interested in.

  Chris Golden had an anthology of collaborations, Dark Duets, and the premise was that you would collaborate with somebody you’d never collaborated with before. I was already collaborating with Sarah at that time, and since Rhodi Hawk was an old friend, I tapped her, and we came up with this crazy kind of steampunk-y zombie story, and we really had a lot of fun with it, and we left it kind of open so we could expand on it, or continue it, to a novel. But again, I’m working on two books now, and she’s been working on a novel she’s got under contract, so that’s one of those things where we’ll get to it when we get to it, but there’s no hurry. The novella was a huge amount of fun, so the novel—just continuing those characters—I think would be a good book, and it would be fun for us to write.

  BLD: Going back to Repairman Jack for a moment: you said you don’t have anything planned at the moment. Because his storyline comes to a conclusion (along with the rest of the characters and plotlines of the Adversary Cycle) in Nightworld, would a potential book be something of a “one last normal fix-it” for Jack, for instance?

  FPW: Oh yeah; that would be the way to go. If I did any more Repairman Jack books, they would be plug-ins along the timeline, but they wouldn’t change it, you know; it would be [something like] a story that happened between The Haunted Air and something else; that type of thing.

  And actually, I was just going through some notes, and I ran across something that was like, “this could work out as a Jack story.” But again, I’m definitely prioritizing this new thriller, and I’m not going to even think about that until I get that done.

  BLD: Is writing two books at a time your usual method?

  FPW: Yeah, I mean, like I said, I have my morning book, which is the thriller, and right now, the afternoon book is the second Nocturnia book, with Tom.

  BLD: What other things do you do to help bring yourself into the writing mood? Do you listen to music, do you eat certain foods, do you look out the window...?

  FPW: No, I have a rolltop desk in a corner; when I look out the window, I see the sky, but that’s pretty much it. I don’t listen to music, because I always end up trying to figure out how they play that, which doesn’t work; I find music distracting. I pretty much become a hermit up here; I’m on the top floor, on a loft, with my computer and my library; that’s where I do my work. I can’t see how people write to music; it baffles me, but a lot of people do. Maybe something ambient would work for me; something that doesn’t have much structure, but if it’s got structure, and if you can tap your foot to it, or something, it probably isn’t going to work for me. I’m too much into figuring out how they do that; what that chord is, that type of thing. It’s totally distracting.

  I actually have a little program, Freedom.exe, that turns off my ability to go on the Internet, and I can set it for certain times. I usually set it for 45 minutes; it keeps me focused. When you’re writing along and you hear the ding of an e-mail or something, then you’re curious to see what it is, and you go look at it, and twenty minutes later you realize you’ve wasted twenty minutes. You just set the time, but once you do... (laughs) There may be a way to undo it, but I don’t know how to do it. It can be frustrating, because all of a sudden you want to look something up, and you can’t, because it’s blocked, and you have to wait, but I’ve learned to appreciate that; that’s actually a good thing that the apps stay off like that. I’m much more productive because of it.

  BLD: Someone always wants to know what’s going on with the Repairman Jack movie, or TV show, or whatever it’s going to be. You’ve said for a long time now in your monthly newsletter that you don’t know much more of what’s goi
ng on; is that still the case?

  FPW: Yeah, that’s still the case. There’s not much happening. I don’t see much happening, unfortunately. I just don’t understand that with all the crappy TV shows that keep getting [made and] canceled, they can’t just get Jack on, to give that a shot. I really can’t talk about it too much, because I start getting a little angry and [might] say things about certain people I shouldn’t say, and should just shut up.

  I’d love to get [the rights] back, but Beacon has invested at least a million dollars in scripts and stuff like that; they’d want to get that back, and who’s going to pay that?

  BLD: Who might you have cast as Jack, once upon a more active time?

  FPW: Back in the 90s, when it looked like it was actually going to happen, I always liked John Cusack, but studios are always looking for someone who can open a movie; he wasn’t considered. For a while, Touchstone was heavily involved, and when they were going to distribute everything, they were talking about using The Rock, which showed a total misunderstanding of the character and how he worked whatever he did.

  It’s one of these comedy-of-errors that goes on; Touchstone wanted one of “their” people to do a rewrite, and the way rewrites are done, you don’t get a screen credit unless you’ve written a certain percentage of it. So [the writer] started making changes just for the sake of making changes, and totally ruined the script, and Touchstone wasn’t interested anymore. We were back to square one, and getting another script done. This was [novelist] Craig Spector’s script; he did a good job, but...you know, the way it goes out there, it’s amazing that anything ever gets done. Just amazing.

  BLD: Besides Jack, are there any other of your works that you’d want to see on big or small screens?

  FPW: I’d like to see The Keep done right. A lot of people are interested in doing it, but the rights are so tangled that somebody could come in with very deep pockets and say, “I’ll pay you off, and I’ll pay you off, all of you just shut up and go away, here’s money,” but that would start the movie off behind a certain 8-ball. There are certain egos attached to it that probably wouldn’t want a better movie made than they did, and that type of stuff. You have to do some heavy buying-off.

  There’s a documentary [Chronicles of a WWII Fairytale] coming out—I was interviewed for it—from foreign fans of the [original] film who are really into it. They were sort of telling me some things, sort of off-the-record, that are going to be in the documentary, about the financing and things like that. I had no idea that some of this stuff was going on, but apparently Michael Mann blew through the whole budget on location in Wales and had to get the money from somewhere else to keep it going. Some strange stories, there. I don’t want to say anything, because I don’t even know if they’re true, but these guys seem to think they are. Hollywood magic! (laughs)

  BLD: What’s next on your plate, besides collaborative work and the international thriller?

  FPW: I have enough things, between doing the Nocturnia books with Tom, and the thriller, maybe a Midnight Mass sequel, maybe another Repairman Jack book, and maybe finishing that novel with Rhodi; that’s going to keep me busy for quite a while. I’m not so much at a loss of things to write; it’s more a matter of worrying over, will I live long enough to write them all? I’ve never been someone who’s had to worry about writer’s block.

  BLD: Plus you deliver new works pretty regularly.

  FPW: I usually deliver on time. I don’t have any contract on the thriller. I’m writing that on spec, and I’ll just sell that as a completed novel; sometimes that works out for the better, sometimes it doesn’t. I think it’s going to work a lot better; sometimes people actually read it if I have to pitch it, so I’d rather be able to just sit down with the book and say, “This is it, we know what we got, this is what he was talking about, so this is what we’ll do.”

  That’s pretty much how I wrote most of my books until I started Jack, but then the publisher wanted a commitment in advance, so they could plan a publishing schedule for the series, so I would get two or three book contracts at a time, and just delivered every fall, as promised.

  BLD: You’ve come a long way since writing The Keep.

  FPW: The writing life is good. I’ve been very lucky, up through the years. When I wrote The Keep, everyone at the time was doing the Stephen King, small-town horror thing, so I thought to myself, well, I’m going to do something a little different, and it worked. Probably, if I’d done another small-town horror type of thing, it would have passed by unnoticed like so many other books that were out at the time.

  BLD: Did you ever want to write a small-town horror novel?

  FPW: Not really. There were so many of them around. It’s always been my way to take what’s going on and turn it upside-down, to see what it looks like from the other side. That’s sort of the way I’ve run my career; don’t go with the flow, just sort of, fuck the trend a little. It’s easier to get noticed that way. After reading ‘Salem’s Lot, I felt like, okay, small-town horror’s been done, so it’d be hard to get any better than that, so I thought I’d try something different. And I was a fan of Robert Ludlum at the time; I was definitely influenced by his sensibilities and the paranoia going on in his stories, so I thought I could do that well. I didn’t know if I could do small-town horror well, because I’m not a small-town guy; I grew up in the Manhattan suburbs, and [went to] high school in Manhattan, so I have much more of an urban sensibility, so I probably would’ve blown it. I probably would’ve sucked.

  BLD: Would you write one?

  FPW: I’m really not interested. I think it’s been done to death. I mean, King’s still doing them, but I look at how many of these movies are like this. You know, the small town, the writer or somebody and their family move to the small town, and something horrible has happened in that house in the past, I mean God, I’m so sick of that scenario that [when] I see that on a synopsis, I don’t even want to tune in. Been there, done that. It’s really hard to make your mark in something when the ground has been plowed so many times. I’m better off striking something that makes me comfortable, rather than writing something like that just for the sake of writing it.

  BLD: What books have you read lately that you’ve enjoyed?

  FPW: I enjoyed Doctor Sleep. I don’t read much King anymore, because the size of the books, but I think he’s really at the top of his form in Doctor Sleep. I read a book called Runner, by Patrick Lee, which was super; that’s actually got some odd, weird elements—it’s a thriller a little like Firestarter, in a good way. Right now, I’m reading The Last Detective, which is pretty slow; it’s got an interesting premise...but it could be much better-paced. I’ve got a couple of other books in the hopper that other people have sent me to read; publishers and stuff. Probably books you haven’t heard of, because they haven’t been released yet. But yeah, Runner was really good; it’s really worth looking into.

  BLD: F. Paul, this was an honor and a treat. Thank you for your time!

  FPW: My pleasure.

  THIRTEEN VIEWS OF THE SUICIDE WOODS

  by Bracken MacLeod

  1

  Skip sat on the tree branch letting his feet dangle as he looked up through the leaves toward the peak of Mt. Schoenborn, hidden in the ever-present clouds. He smiled thinking about the time work paid for him to take a tiny single-propeller plane home from Port Atwood and he got to see the summit of the mountain pushing through the white blanket permanently pulled over the city. Looking at the mountain from the co-pilot's seat, he'd vowed to one day climb it and stand on the summit to watch the misty sea below roil and drift. But like all dreams, it was ethereal. The highest he'd ever climb was twelve feet up into this tree.

  A half a billion years, he thought. In half a billion years there'll be no mountain. Wind and rain are beating away at the peak, eroding it—wearing it down to nothing. Little by little, he knew the mountain would succumb to entropy. But by then who'll be left to care? No one will be around to even know there once was anything but
a plain.

  He pushed forward with his hips and slipped off the branch, bracing himself for the shock of the rope that would snap his neck.

  2

  Mandy held the note in her hand. She couldn't read it through the blur of tears welling in her eyes, but after a dozen or more times through already, the words were seared in her brain like a brand. My dearest Amanda, I've gone to Schoenborn. Please don't come to find me. Let's just have last night. I love you. Your Skipper, always.

  She looked at the phone in her hand to be sure the call was still connected. The police had put her on hold. Hold! There wasn't any music or even an occasional beep to let you know your call hadn't been dropped. She sat listening to silence on the line as the minutes ticked away, waiting for her chance to tell the dispatcher, “You’ve got to stop him! You’ve got to go find him.”

  Outside, the sounds of her neighborhood carried on. People passed by on the sidewalk shouting into cell phones as their dogs barked at passing cars and each other. In the distance, an ambulance siren wound up and wailed off into the city, the crew rushing to save someone. Not Skip. Of course it wasn't Skip. She hadn't gotten through to a dispatcher yet. For all anyone else knew, he'd gone out for muffins and coffee.