Congratulations on the release of Bird Box. How does it feel to be published?
Part relief, part cosmic gratitude, part unearthly, and part very real. I’d always imagined this moment coming, to the point of some big self-delusion, but when it came, when Bird Box got picked up, I sunk into a pool of astonishment and haven’t got my whole self out of it yet. Which is probably good in some ways… but I think it’s time to move on from the initial holy-shitness and really start to see it all as a career. Getting a book deal isn’t the finish line, of course, it’s the day the “career” begins.
What started your interest in the horror genre?
My uncle introduced me to Twilight Zone the Movie when I was twelve or so and my love has been ballooning since then. My friend and I, we used to ask his grandmother if she’d rent A Nightmare on Elm Street for us and then after we watched it we’d ask her if she could go rent part 2. You know, in the same day. Then part 3. I’d sneak downstairs to watch the Saturday Shockers on television. I remember distinctly watching Firestarter that way, half scared of the movie but equally scared of Mom or Dad coming downstairs and hollering at me to turn it off. But the real affair began with the books. And 1985 was a helluva time to be a ten year old falling in love with scary books. The 80’s were very good to me in that way. And whatever relationship I have with the genre, it’s always been a slow, shadowy affair. As if I met a friend (or maybe just an entity) at a very young age, one nobody else knows about, and it’s been around, hanging around, toying with me ever since.
Who are your favorite authors? Of the horror and non-horror variety?
I’ve been reading the new crop lately. John F.D. Taff. Stephen Graham Jones. J.D. Barker. These guys are wonderful, all in very different ways. Richard Thomas is doing things he might not even be aware of, as goes propelling the genre as an editor, putting out incredible compilations. Doug Murano and D Alexander Ward also, they’re doing that, too. Ross E. Lockhart. Nikki Guerlain. Rena Mason. Lisa Morton. This new group is so colorful, so varied, that I can imagine a reader embarking upon their work and never even make it back to the 80’s where, of course, the crazy boom went off. I love it all, I love em all, and maybe I’m “too open” to it, but the way I see it, even an Okay horror novel is better than most scary movies. Just open one up, any one, and you’ll see what I mean. (I’m sure your readers already know this)
You mention that inspiration can be a devil in and of itself. If that’s true, what gets you motivated to follow a story line?
When people talk about writing a book like it’s running a marathon, I suspect they’re referring to the holy-shit effort it takes to maintain the enthusiasm for the original idea. What I mean to say is; of course you love the idea or you wouldn’t be feverishly writing a novel in the first place, and yet… your mind plays tricks… doubts… you know… just like anything else. At some point you start questioning shit, worrying that you’ve taken a great idea and accidentally dropped it in the toilet when you reached for something on the shelf. These are the moments that kill an author. That turn a potential author into someone who only wants to be an author. Because, if you want to be an artist, you’ve gotta finish works of art. With every book… there’s a moment when you’re in the deep end… it happens somewhere in the middle… maybe 37,000 words in… and you can’t see shore on either side and you’re worried you ate too many donuts and maybe you’re not in good enough shape to swim all the way to the other side so you might as well quit and sink and drown and die that way. It’s an awful idea; here you were fantasizing about strutting about town with your new book finished and instead they’re gonna’ find your bloated body washed up at Cedar Point. But there’s a way through this; for me, it’s not caring whether or not the book I’m working on is good or not. I’m not afraid to write a bad book and I think it’s that Ed Woodian philosophy that carries me through most of what I do. Then, once you’ve landed, once you’re on shore again, you can fix as much or as little as you want to. But it’s a helluva lot better to say “I can fix this, I can work with this draft” rather than “I don’t know if I can write the book at all.” So… to answer you directly… what motivates me is a pinch of guilt, and a lot of blind rolling downhill, not caring how good it is, but knowing that doing it is what has to be done.
It looks like creativity runs thick in your veins, as both an accomplished writer and singer/songwriter. Tell us about having your song become the theme for Shameless and how that’s affected your career.
My band mates and I, we’ve been best friends since we were kids. They got into music before I did, I was writing, trying to write, and one day they invited me into the music world and asked if I could write songs. This lead to a magnificent four years of living in New York City, touring the country for six more, and really it was a decade of self-discovery, cartoonish elation, some madness, and reinvention. All that said, don’t go imagining rock stars or anything like that. If we played 2,000 shows, we played for 3,000 people… total. I’d like you to imagine delusional, broke boys who just didn’t give a shit about “success” and truly experienced “the road.” So, you can imagine our astonishment when Derek (drums) got a phone call that Showtime wanted to use one our songs as a theme song for a new show. It was magnificent news. And it still is. I wouldn’t say it’s “changed our career” in the way I suspect someone would ask that question (i.e. notoriety), but it gave us some much needed money and, at the absolute very least it’s given us something awesome to hold our head a bit higher about.
Is your band, the High Strung, touring? How do you balance both a career as a writer and a musician?
We’re not touring right now because I more or less told the boys I wanna’ write a new album, reinvent ourselves before we emerge from the swamp again. The problem with that is that I haven’t written that new album yet, and I’m falling behind. Not that we have a hard deadline for anybody, but I can feel that I’m behind… in a spiritual sense. At the same time, what can I say? I’m working wonderfully hard on the next book, novellas, blurbs, and beyond. So, while I’m happy my life is comprised of 24/7 lunatic artistic endeavors… I do need to make room for the next album. I’m working on it.
Which is harder: writing music or writing fiction?
Ah, different animals, different appetites. I’d say neither are “hard” in that I’m in love with both. But, then again, love is hard I suppose. The good news about writing a song is that once my band mates get a hold of it, they can change an alright thing to a great thing by electrocuting it to life. With the book, you’re out there on your own. And yet, that sounds like an advantage, too, in that there’s nobody to be shy in front of, nobody to perform for until you’re done and hand it to your publishing house, which of course is a kind of performance, too.
It seems like your book got sent over to Nelson almost by accident. Were you hoping to get the manuscript out there? How long had you been working at getting it published?
Well, I know what you mean when you say “by accident” but it wasn’t exactly like that. What happened was, I’d been writing novels for years (and failing at writing novels for years before then) and the number of books was getting pretty high and I would post online about finishing this or that draft. Wrapped up a rough draft today; anybody wanna’ skydive later? And a friend of mine from high school saw the posts and called me up, told me he’d been working with an entertainment lawyer… a literary lawyer no less… and would I mind if he sent the lawyer one of my books? I was all for it, though I wasn’t sure where it would lead, you know… how could I be? The lawyer liked the book, called me, told me he had a great manager in mind. The managers called me (there were two of them then), said they’d like to represent me, and from there we shopped it to agencies. Kristin Nelson seemed like an odd choice only because her website stated she didn’t work in horror, and yet Wayne (lawyer) and Ryan and Candace (managers) were right in sending it to her. So… “accident” only in that I didn’t set out to meet the team myself… but no accident in that I’m a firm believer in the Theory of Momentum: if a man stays in motion, he may not end up where he envisioned himself landing, but he’s gonna’ end up somewhere new all the same. So, some may call it call it lucky even, the way this story panned out, but remember that before all this, I’d been writing alone for decades. That kinda’ makes it a darker story, and that’s the truth. As goes “working on getting it published,” I’m not sure if it was because the band was touring and we were making just enough to scrape by, or if it was because I felt a sense of progress with the boys, traveling from city to city for so many years, but I never really tried to shop the rough drafts. That’s not to say it was a hobby (gross word), I just never looked at the book with dollar signs in my eyes. I had brief run ins with people who might or might not help, that kind of thing, but it wasn’t until the lawyer entered my life that it all began rolling.
Do you branch out into other modes or genres of writing? Do any others interest you that you have yet to explore?
Some of my friends and first readers tell me that I don’t write horror at all. That these books are strange literary tales, Bird Box included. But I know better. Because I don’t see the genre as only being vampires, wolves, and the undead. I love that trio, but I don’t write about them, not yet. And so… rather than saying I don’t write “horror,” I argue that most people could benefit from expanding their definition of horror. It’s a magnificent, infinite, life-changing genre… and I have no plan on turning my back on it. Feels like I was born here, live here. Horror is home.
Where did you grow up? How much did that influence your professional life?
I grew up in suburban Detroit and I think that the American suburbs in the 1980’s were ripe as hell for stories, horror stories, real world tales. In fact, come to think of it, I’m not sure I’ve ever really considered just how much that upbringing has influenced my writing until right now, with your question, because it’s bringing me to realize that the ideas that excite me the most are the ones that have something to do with the way I was brought up. I wonder; do all artists feel this way? They must, yeah? And at the same time, I’ve met artists who write of places they’ve never been, as if by writing about them they can travel there after all. But, yeah, yes, turns out the suburban upbringing has played a big part in all of this. Man, it was joyful, magical, dark at times, bizarre, and maybe it even acted as a palette of sorts… a canvas a city maybe couldn’t be, not in the same way, ready to be written about, written upon.
What absolutely scares the living daylights out of you?
I’m at the psychic, right?, and she’s reading my cards, my fortune, and while she’s talking she slips me a piece of paper, keeps talking, as if nothing’s happened. And as she goes on I discreetly read the paper and it says, There’s been someone crouched beside you, staring at you this whole time. Possibly your whole life.
You’ve been racking up award after award with Bird Box. Did you expect this sort of success with your first novel?
Ah, shit. Hmm. Well, I’ll say this: I used to interview myself all the time. Walking around town, interviewing myself. I’d imagine a whole shelf at the bookstore of books I’d written. And I got so good at this thing that I became happy in there, that world I’d invented. And in that world there were awards, sure, and speeches, and discussions with imaginary editors and the works. So… I’m not sure how to answer this one because rather than “expect” this sort of thing to happen, I think I wrote a novel in my head in which it did happen. Asking me if I expected these awesome things to happen for Bird Box is almost like asking if I expect the events in Bird Box to happen, too. At some point, my reality and my fiction melded and I’m sure there’s a doctor out there who has the right jaws of death to pry the two apart again, but I don’t wanna’ see him.
What’s coming down the pike with you for writing? When can we expect a new release?
I’m a week or two away from submitting book 2 to HarperCollins. Already wrote her, now I’m rewriting her and then I gotta’ read that rewrite one more time. Haha. Sounds like a wheel, eh? It’s not a sequel to Bird Box. That would feel insane. And I don’t exactly have a title for it yet or I’d tell you what it is.
What do you do outside of writing and singing? What’s a hobby that you don’t get to do very often, but is one of your favorites?
I run. I love going to the symphony. I love fishing with Mom. I’m not sure I have any hobbies, honestly. I understand that makes me sound severe, but the truth is, I spend almost all my time reading, writing, running these days and I’m so fucking glad I do. Because I spent years thinking I was getting more done than I was. You know what I mean? At some point, some when, the numbers of all of this became very clear to me and I fully understood that if I wanted to get all of these ideas on paper, I was going to have to fixate, almost maniacally. So I did. And so I am. And thank God.
What advice do you have for aspiring writers who think there’s not enough time in the day to sit down and write? How did you find the time and what are some of your writing habits?
Well, the first thing, the very first thing, is that a man will do what he loves doing. He just will. We’re all creatures of lust and desire and doing what we want to do when we can however we can. So… now the question becomes… “I know I’m a writer but I can’t seem to finish this book! Why?” And the best answer I can give is, “Don’t be afraid of tangents. Don’t be afraid of writing a bad book. Don’t get snagged on silly things like character names. Use your own as a place-holder. Don’t be afraid to say no to plans… for weeks… months… until it’s done. Get used to saying, ‘Sorry, I cant hang tonight guys. I’m working on that book.’ Say it until it’s done. Then go out. And when you do you’re gonna’ be the most charismatic version of yourself your friends have ever seen.”