by ed. Pela Via
STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES: I came on in I'm guessing in ‘05 or so. The way it's changed, that I've noticed is I think it’s the way all boards change. It's different minds, different people who are running it for this year or that year. Lots of people who were the big players when I signed on The Velvet, they're not around anymore. They've gone onto other things. It's strange not seeing them anymore, it's neat when they pop back in. I think it's the natural evolution of boards. They cycle through people.
LIVIUS: Stephen, can you tell us a little about your story in warmed and bound, “The Road Lester took?”
STEPHEN: Yeah, “The Road Lester took.” I guess Logan hit me for a story for this Warmed and Bound. Somehow I got the sense from posts on The Velvet or from somewhere that it was going to be not necessarily a noir anthology but it was going to have those leanings. Kind of dark noir kind of stuff. So I went to my directories and cycled through my story directories and cycled through what I might have that wasn't published or on the way to being published. I was nervous because I thought oh man I got nothing. The trick is, not necessarily a good trick, I give them the stupidest possible titles and I can never find them when I put them in directories I don't really use. It's like shooting myself in the foot. The good thing is two or three years later I'll be cleaning stuff up and I’ll find a story and will be like "I can't believe I wrote that, it’s actually half decent." And that's what happened with this Road Lester Took I wrote it and this other story about Jesus standing on the side of the road, holding a sign or something I wrote them in the same week. The Jesus one blew up, never did work and I forgot that I wrote Lester and he was just sitting on my hard drive and when Logan said we need something I started looking through the directories for something that would maybe fit a little bit with crime and sure enough, there's Lester down in the basement playing poker for drugs, inviting strippers to his house, having all kinds of fun.
As for the story itself, it's my favorite type of story to write. It’s where I just have the first line or paragraph and no clue at all how it's going to play out. I had no idea with Lester, I don't want to spoil it, the final scene, I didn't know what was going to happen, it really surprised me. It's like in stories you always want the worst possible thing to happen to see how your characters deal with it and I think that's what happened in this story. I wanted to totally stick something under his life and pitch him to a different place. As for where that story comes from, I think I said this somewhere, maybe on The Velvet, where it comes from is doing those lamas classes with my wife when she was pregnant with our first kid. I remember one time we showed up for class, we had so many people registered for that class, but only half of them showed up, there were only like 20 of there, 20 couples anyways, big old room, and so the people who were running it ordered all these sandwiches and I was broke as can be. So after class was over after we learned how to breathe and all that stuff, I didn't learn nothing, I know how to breath and stuff, I went up and asked the teacher, “Hey what about all those sandwiches all those people who didn’t come?” You can tell she was heartbroken cause she had just signs of those sandwiches I was more poorer than her. I think I took 18 turkey sandwiches. Man I ate for a week, I was so happy. I had this fascination with places where I get free food, they become really real for me. Find my place for Lester and his wife in lamas class felt really real to me.
ROBB: That's funny you mention that because when I was reading that I mean I a bunch of impressions about different parts of the story, but when I was reading that lamas class scene, this feels pretty authentic. This has to be coming from a place that he knows.
STEPHEN: Definitely the poker is not from a place I know. I don't play cards. I don't understand poker really. I do understand having criminal friend and I was going through some workman’s' comp stuff too. So that's where the detective comes in.
LIVIUS: Lester and again, not to give away too much of the story, as terrible as Lester's life becomes, I thought it was one of the more fun stories, just kind of the path it took was a little more fun than the other ones we've read.
STEPHEN: Thanks man, he's like the cartoon of me. His whole story is just these people are caricatures around him.
ROBB: Like a continuing of just things happening to him.
STEPHEN: Yeah yeah!
ROBB: When you were talking about looking for a story for warmed and bound you mentioned directories and stuff like that. my question I want to go into is something about many of the guests we've talked about with warmed and bound who know you and know of you talk about the amount of input, the pace of how much you write and you saying directories made me think of that. So, what's your process for writing and how can you be so prolific with how much output you have?
STEPHEN: You know I think it's like I don't have to get inspired to write, I'm just compelled to write. If imp not writing imp like why I am even here, might as well put a gun in my mouth I'm useless you know, like writing is how I make sense of the world. I think also, I don't write on a schedule, I'm always so jealous of those interviews where the writer says, “I wake up at 6, have some coffee,” which I hate coffee so I don't understand that part, “and I write from 7 to 11 everyday and then I go mow the lawn and go to the bank and do all this other stuff.” To me that sounds like a job. I have to check in, clock in and clock out. I can't imagine doing that. So I go three or four days without doing any writing at all and watch the Rockford Files and be completely happy with life. Then sure enough Jim Rockford will look at somebody in a way and this story opens up for me and I'm down in the computer and lost there for 3 days, forgetting to eat, forgetting to sleep and everything. So I just write in binges I guess, but yeah, I guess I do kick out a lot of this stuff, a lot books, and the reason just in may I guess it was I wrote the sequel to It Came from Del Rio. Part of it was I told my publisher I'd write it in may but also I first found this out when I first wrote this novel, The Dogmother, I don't want to be in these novels too long because I'll lose my grasp on what's real and what's fiction. I think Dogmother is a novel where terrible terrible things happen and will never get published. it’s such bad stuff that was happening it was making me sick the whole time I was writing, it was making my physically ill I couldn't eat, and so I would just make myself sick and be here 10 hours a day, it wasn't like a job, it was like I had to get this out of my brain, onto the page so I wouldn't have to think about it anymore six weeks later bam it's gone, out of my life, write a happy Lester story or something. Yeah, for me, 4 to 6 is about the cap for writing a novel, a novel these days anyways, which isn't to say I won't go back into it. Sometime maybe in the fall. Sometime I took a little bit of time and wrote a zombie novel, The Gospel of Z, and I loved it and I was being stupid because it was a terrible novel, but then I went back and read it, had some people read it and they said yeah, it's a stupid novel, but I thought it still has a good skeleton, a good dramatic arc, a lot of these zombies and so I tore it all well first what I did I put that story into a screenplay so I could draw a dramatic line better, then I went back and put a new voice on it. So that novel I guess you could say, really took me longer than 4 -6 weeks to write, but it's good that I wrote it twice. I don't mind rewriting stuff, but I do hate abandoning novels. I only have right now three novels that I've abandoned as too broken. Well I don't know about too broken, one was too broken, the other two are salvageable if I put some effort into it. I kick out a lot of stuff, I think I want to be, I want to take over the world with fiction and you don't take over the world with fiction by writing one book every six years, you take over the world of fiction by pulling back on your bow and shoot as many arrows as you can one of them is going to find it's mark. Like I think by 2014 I'll have 5 or 6 more books out. They’re arrows lobbing at the world. Stick it right through the heart.
ROBB: Wow. That’s a really great way to say it. I really like that. As far as inspiration goes, it sounds like you take inspiration from practically any experience that kind of just catches your mind and makes you think. Is t
hat accurate? Do you just take impressions from daily life and expand on them until they become something bigger?
STEPHEN: I do yeah, well, I guess it's part of how my imagination works. I guess people call imagination, I call it suspicions or certainty truly like whenever I'm at somebody's house and it's 8:45 and the people who are supposed to show for dinner were supposed to be there at 8 and they're not there and everybody is saying oh they forgot, they had some people come over or they had something happen, I'm always nodding and smiling and saying yeah but really what I know what happened is they got abducted by aliens. They gonna show up and to them it's nothing it's still 8 o’clock. I'm always edging the possible into the real world and the possible is what I believe in. I think one of the best places to get ideas is standing in line at the food court cause you hear the 13 year old girls in front of you talking about what happened at school in gym class on wed and you never hear the whole conversation but the pieces that you miss here are 9 times out of 10 are magic. You just write 'em down and it automatically blooms into a story whether you want it to or not. I do steal from the world of course but often end up off world as well.
LIVIUS: You mentioned you have the sequel to It Came from Del Rio written and we know you have some other books that are waiting to be published. How does that affect you that you have work that is backlogged before it hits books? Like you said you have to get it out of your system to write it. Once it's written and it's done are you ok with waiting for it to go public or does that bother you in some way?
STEPHEN: It completely bothers me. It drives me crazy. Makes me feel like a loser. I hate having stuff in the drawer. I think the reason I hate, a big part of it is Stephen King's novel Bag of Bones. Do you remember that? It’s where the novelist is living on the island and he's involved in this ghost story and he's able to keep on, because he has four novels in the drawer he's able to keep feeding his publisher novel and everyone thinks things are fine for four years, but those 4 years are hell for him, dealing with ghosts and all this terrible stuff. So I keep thinking the way to not have ghosts is to not have stuff in the drawer. I think if you write what you think is the perfect short story and mail it off to 50 journals who all reject you, then number 1 you hate all those journals, you hate the world and everything, you feel like a failure. So no matter how many novels I have, if I have a novel in the drawer I can't sell I feel like a failure. Actually I've got one like that now where I'm finally getting that out into the market, it's called The Least of My Scars, it's tremendously violent and disturbing, so I think the content is going to scare a lot people away. Or at least that's the lie I tell myself, it could be the quality of my writing or the crappy story or something, but I really believe in the story as much as I'm scared to. You can't write novels that you don't publish either, you gotta keep your audience in mind of course and you gotta stick fast to your vision. You have to insist on your vision. That’s what I'm thinking.
ROBB: My question would be a lot of people go the self-publishing route. Does that not seem legit to you? Would you rather have it go through the traditional shopping it around, having it picked up by someone process?
STEPHEN: Yeah, we're kind of still stuck with this old model where the editorial bottle neck is making the assurance of quality. The idea is one novel makes it through the bottleneck were as 50 were rejected because they weren't good enough when really it's just the editors taste. We put this implicit trust in editors, they've been around the block a few times, they know what's good and what's bad. You know 5 years ago Bandit Publishing would have been really frowned upon, these days it's changing people don't call it Bandit Publishing anymore, it's just self-publishing it's so easy and I don’t' know if it will ever be the new model just because individuals don't have the marketing power of the big corporations. It’s definitely a model to contend with and it doesn't have the stigma it used to have and it's a way to make money. You’ve got the retailer taking a cut, and you get the rest of it pretty much. It’s attractive, but I haven't done it yet anyways.
LIVIUS: Can you tell us a little bit about your relationship with Dzanc and the reprint label?
STEPHEN: What it is they'd already accepted my not for nothing novel and Flushboy novel for publication in 2013 and 2014 as both eBooks and print, but then they started this rEprint with a capital E for electronic.
LIVIUS: It’s edgier that way.
STEPHEN: It sure is! When they started the rEprint line and they hit me up and said, “Hey, what about your back catalog? What do you have that's both out of print and that you have the rights to?” I'm like, “I don't know; I've never read one of my contracts. My agent sends them to me, I sign them, then I lose them.” That’s the way it all happens. So my agent and I figured out what I have the rights to and it turned out I had the rights to The Long Trial of Nolan Dugatti from Chiasmus Press and All the Beautiful Sinners from Rugged Land and I've been itching for years to rewrite All the Beautiful Sinners. Even when it was published I thought it was too bulky, I thought it didn't move fast enough. It was like a lot of me indulging myself and the author should never be allowed to do that. A fiction writer anyways. I said, “Do you want to run with them?” And the editor said, “Yeah, that's great.” Then I said, “What about this other novel that's not reprint or not strictly a debut either, Seven Spanish Angels” which was supposed to come out in ‘05, but I got into a big fight with the publisher and it died, it was on Amazon which was real, but it wasn't really real. He said, “Sure.” Seven Spanish Angels came out today actually. It’s the debut novel in their rEprint series, but it's not actually a reprint. I love that novel, Seven Spanish Angels and I’m so happy to be getting it and Dugatti and Sinners out in e-format because when e readers first popped up, instantly, I knew that's where everything was going to go. It's so convenient and so intuitive. I didn't think it was going to happen as fast as its happening. I thought it was going to be a 10 year cycle I think we're more on a 3 to 4 year cycle. I think really soon the p-book is going to be a collector's limited edition thing. Brick and mortar stores are by and large gonna go bye-bye and it will be all e, which I'm cool with. I mean I love book stores, don't get me wrong, but I like instantaneousness of being able to click on something and have it on my eReader immediately. I like that my readers can do that as well.
ROBB: You just gave us like 4 follow up questions. So we're going to run through them in order and if we skip over some, that's fine too. Let's talk Seven Spanish Angels first. Like you said, in our time machine fashion, this will have come out yesterday. Do you want to talk a little more about what it's about at all?
STEPHEN: Yeah, it's about, well, we all know about the Juarez Murders, if from nowhere else from Robert Bolano. It was big news back in ‘05 when I was writing this or ‘04 also. It's about the girls being found out in the desert, dead. Seven Spanish Angels, what it is, is 7 days and 7 girls somebody's trying to kill 7 girls in 7 days. Our lead investigator, the protagonist, is a young girl, Marta Villareal. She's what, 22, I guess, she's not even officially out of crime-tech school yet and her boyfriend, who is AWOL at the moment for the novel, is the main suspect because he used to work the Bravo Murders which are the Juarez women. And she has to figure out who's doing it and stop it from happening. And of course, she's one of these 7 women who are supposed to be killed. This is a novel I wrote; I think it's 300 to 350 pages. I wrote about 2000 pages to get it down though. It was supposed to be a sequel to All the Beautiful Sinners, took it to my publishers, I'd written 300 or so pages and he put his finger down on page 2 or page 6 and he said, you know, “Let's chop it all off and start right here.” He did that about 6 or 7 times and he'd get deeper in the book, 50 pages, 70 pages and I'd have to start all over. I didn't like this, doing a whole lot of writing. It did improve the book tremendously. It's a really tight novel I think. In going back through it, I was going to fix everything. Cause I thought surely it's a five year old book, there's gonna be all kinds of stuff broken. I burned back through it looking for all kinds o
f typos, but there weren't even many of those. It went through the ringer and I think it's very clean. I'm very proud of it.
LIVIUS: You mentioned having an e book reader, and I know on your blog, I read a really interesting thing, it was the pros and cons of paper books and e books and it was really great stuff. My question after all that is, whose reader do you use?
STEPHEN: Right now I've got a Kindle 2, and I keep trying to stage falls. For it to break because I want a Kindle 3 or I want that new Nook. But now my Kindle won't break. This one just won't break. Although, I knocked my Mac Book Pro over the other day, knocked it on the ground and it's not acting happy anymore. I need more gadgets. I was all happy about that Google Reader. I thought that was going to be that's where the reader needs to go. We need a retailer free platform. We need to have something that we can just go to Amazon, or go to B&N or go to Google or go to the library and get whatever format they have and read it on my reader. I think as long as the readers are specific to different companies; I think it's going to be too fragmented. We need one reader to unite them all.
ROBB: When you said that you accidentally dropped your Mac Book Pro, I cringed a little bit. I'm a big, big Apple person and Livius is definitely on the Windows side of things. He always makes fun of me. I think I felt a little pain when you told that.