Christopher Rice's Blog, page 2
June 30, 2014
Official Announcement: THE VINES, October 21st from 47North
47North Acquires Four Books fromNew York TimesBest-selling Author and Bram Stoker Award Nominee Christopher Rice
Original supernatural thriller,The Vines,and three additional novels to publish in October 2014
SEATTLE—June 30, 2014—Today, Amazon Publishing and 47North announced the acquisition ofThe Vines, an original supernatural thriller, and three additional novels fromNew York Timesbest-selling and award-winning novelist Christopher Rice. Set outside New Orleans,The Vinesis a dark, elegant,...
April 12, 2014
Every Paradise Has Its Amazing Paperback Cover From The 80′s*
This week, the arrival of this small, slightly tattered paperback was heralded with great fanfare around these parts, if by fanfare, you mean yelling at the cats to get out from underfoot as I tore the package open in a frenzy while walking into the kitchen. Here are the reasons why:
1. How freaking amazing is this cover? Remember? Remember when covers like this? When the characters inside your favorite steamy novel were brought to life with the wild sense of color and coy literalism typically...
April 9, 2014
(UPDATED) What We’re Really Asking For When We Ask For Writing Advice (*includes picture of hot guy(s))
My previous (and first) blog post was about how I was eleven years late in starting a blog. So I thought it was only fitting that my second blog post be a contribution to a trend I’m equally late for. A List Of Self Serving Pieces Of Writing Advice That Makes Me Look Super Published And Important And Like A Real Author This Jerk Might Represent.
OK. I’m not just equally late for this task. This is a storied, venerated tradition, dating back to an era when women were forced to write their M/M e...
April 7, 2014
11 Years Late* (*includes a picture of a hot guy)
Four score and seven versions of Windows ago, just about everyone I knew was starting a blog and I was the guy on the sidelines, not taking them very seriously, choosing instead to focus on rageful anonymous Amazon reviews of my first few novels because I was in a period of my life when bathing myself in criticism from people I hadn’t met – people who, in their anonymity, could be transmogrified into every bully or ex-boyfriend who haunted my obsessive late night thoughts – made me feel like...
April 12, 2010
AM I TEACHING PEOPLE HOW TO KILL?
So here I am, a week into my tour for THE MOONLIT EARTH, and enjoying the heck out of Little Rock - the latter of which surprised me, to be frank - when a reader at my discussion asks me a very simple question, but one fraught with...er...implications, shall we say? "In Blind Fall you include a lot of information on how to kill a person. Are you concerned that maybe you're, uh, teaching people how to kill?" To be honest, the question was asked with the utmost respect but the chill that went through me was palpable.
Stephen King, upon learning that one of his novellas about a school shooting has been found in the locker of a real-life school shooter, yanked the title off the shelves. My mother, Anne Rice, has bent over backwards to distance herself from any real life practices of vampirism. No, I don't seek to compare myself to either King or Mi Madre. These are just two well known examples of writers taking some responsibility for the real-life ripple effects their fiction might make in the world outside their minds. Fact is most writers take the opposite approach. I'm told A.M. Homes when asked whether or not her writings about a pedophile might inspire some real ones said something along the lines of... Are knife makers held responsible for stabbings?
My response falls somewhere in between. For the record, the killing techniques described in Blind Fall are actually taken from Marine Corps defensive training techniques, and John Houck, the Marine in question, is only pretending to teach Alex Martin how to kill. (For those of you who haven't read the book, John has just learned that the comrade who saved his life in Iraq was secretly gay. What's more? The guy had a boyfriend, Alex. What's MORE?? His comrade has just been murdered and he and Alex have learned the identity of the killer.) John is convinced Alex is going to set about getting his revenge in a stupid and reckless manner if he doesn't take the guy under his wing. So his promise to "teach Alex how to kill" is actually just a ploy, an attempt to bring Alex around to his way of thinking while immersing him in a simulated training environment in the Arizona wilderness.
But back to the question at hand. Here's a basic breakdown of how I answered during my talk. 1. The information I used is out there and readily available to anyone with homicidal tendencies. No national secrets were spilled. No wildly complex instructions on how to build an explosive were made suddenly accessible to the masses by my sterling prose. 2. I write dark material specifically so I can address my fears and anxieties about certain issues. Like how easy it is to kill someone, and the frightening number of people who are willing to try. And lastly - or 3, if you're a stickler for consistency - I'm actually kind of a wuss when it comes to extremely violent material in films and books which I feel should give me sort of a pass on this question over all.
Email my good friend, writer Gregg Hurwitz, and ask him how I responded a few years back when he called to see if I wanted to go with him to see Saw II. It wasn't pretty. The torture porn phenomenon - which actually seems to be on the wane following the dismal box office of Eli Roth's second Hostel film - pretty much scared me away from horror films all together. But let's be honest here. This doesn't have anything to do with moral high ground, perceived or otherwise. In my second novel, I killed a character by suffocating him in hot wax. I just didn't make you suffer through each excruciating moment of his death. But there are plenty of things in my novels that make certain people drop the book and grip the arms of their chair as they gasp for breath. (It continues to amaze me, however, that most of these things have to do with sexuality and not violence. I continue to be stunned that I live in a country where films depicting intense, consensual sexuality are saddled with NC-17 ratings while skinning people alive gets you an R.)
What am I getting at here? I like dark stuff. I write dark stuff. I support the right of all consenting adults to watch and read dark stuff, even the stuff I can't make myself sit through. But am I teaching people how to kill? I don't know. Ask all those people who have murdered people based on the directions they received from Blind Fall. Oh. That's right. There aren't any.
(This post was written with the utmost respect for the gentleman from Little Rock who asked this question in the first place. Thanks for coming, thanks for reading my book, and thanks for not killing anyone : )
Get more on Christopher Rice at SimonandSchuster.com
Stephen King, upon learning that one of his novellas about a school shooting has been found in the locker of a real-life school shooter, yanked the title off the shelves. My mother, Anne Rice, has bent over backwards to distance herself from any real life practices of vampirism. No, I don't seek to compare myself to either King or Mi Madre. These are just two well known examples of writers taking some responsibility for the real-life ripple effects their fiction might make in the world outside their minds. Fact is most writers take the opposite approach. I'm told A.M. Homes when asked whether or not her writings about a pedophile might inspire some real ones said something along the lines of... Are knife makers held responsible for stabbings?
My response falls somewhere in between. For the record, the killing techniques described in Blind Fall are actually taken from Marine Corps defensive training techniques, and John Houck, the Marine in question, is only pretending to teach Alex Martin how to kill. (For those of you who haven't read the book, John has just learned that the comrade who saved his life in Iraq was secretly gay. What's more? The guy had a boyfriend, Alex. What's MORE?? His comrade has just been murdered and he and Alex have learned the identity of the killer.) John is convinced Alex is going to set about getting his revenge in a stupid and reckless manner if he doesn't take the guy under his wing. So his promise to "teach Alex how to kill" is actually just a ploy, an attempt to bring Alex around to his way of thinking while immersing him in a simulated training environment in the Arizona wilderness.
But back to the question at hand. Here's a basic breakdown of how I answered during my talk. 1. The information I used is out there and readily available to anyone with homicidal tendencies. No national secrets were spilled. No wildly complex instructions on how to build an explosive were made suddenly accessible to the masses by my sterling prose. 2. I write dark material specifically so I can address my fears and anxieties about certain issues. Like how easy it is to kill someone, and the frightening number of people who are willing to try. And lastly - or 3, if you're a stickler for consistency - I'm actually kind of a wuss when it comes to extremely violent material in films and books which I feel should give me sort of a pass on this question over all.
Email my good friend, writer Gregg Hurwitz, and ask him how I responded a few years back when he called to see if I wanted to go with him to see Saw II. It wasn't pretty. The torture porn phenomenon - which actually seems to be on the wane following the dismal box office of Eli Roth's second Hostel film - pretty much scared me away from horror films all together. But let's be honest here. This doesn't have anything to do with moral high ground, perceived or otherwise. In my second novel, I killed a character by suffocating him in hot wax. I just didn't make you suffer through each excruciating moment of his death. But there are plenty of things in my novels that make certain people drop the book and grip the arms of their chair as they gasp for breath. (It continues to amaze me, however, that most of these things have to do with sexuality and not violence. I continue to be stunned that I live in a country where films depicting intense, consensual sexuality are saddled with NC-17 ratings while skinning people alive gets you an R.)
What am I getting at here? I like dark stuff. I write dark stuff. I support the right of all consenting adults to watch and read dark stuff, even the stuff I can't make myself sit through. But am I teaching people how to kill? I don't know. Ask all those people who have murdered people based on the directions they received from Blind Fall. Oh. That's right. There aren't any.
(This post was written with the utmost respect for the gentleman from Little Rock who asked this question in the first place. Thanks for coming, thanks for reading my book, and thanks for not killing anyone : )
Get more on Christopher Rice at SimonandSchuster.com
THINGS I LEARN ON BOOK TOUR
Here's a brief rundown of things I've learned so far on my tour for The Moonlit Earth.
1. Little Rock is a great town.
2. The Capitol Hotel in Little Rock has the best chicken friend steak in this solar system.
3. If you're going to be stuck on a small commuter jet that has no AC make sure you're sitting next to fierce performance artist (and memoirst) Stacey Ann Chin.
4. Morning shows sometimes ask serious, substantive questions. Don't go in prepared to field a bunch of light questions about your mother. They might actually ask you where your characters come from.
5. There is no looking perfectly pressed on a book tour. Leave anything that needs to be ironed at home. (But bring one snazzy jacket to hide the pit stains that will be your constant companions.)
6. Come up with some quick, witty dismissals to the scads of questions you will receive about the imminent collapse of publishing.
7. Do not, under any circumstances, walk into an independent bookstore and do your reading from the Kindle version of your novel.
More to come...
Get more on Christopher Rice at SimonandSchuster.com
1. Little Rock is a great town.
2. The Capitol Hotel in Little Rock has the best chicken friend steak in this solar system.
3. If you're going to be stuck on a small commuter jet that has no AC make sure you're sitting next to fierce performance artist (and memoirst) Stacey Ann Chin.
4. Morning shows sometimes ask serious, substantive questions. Don't go in prepared to field a bunch of light questions about your mother. They might actually ask you where your characters come from.
5. There is no looking perfectly pressed on a book tour. Leave anything that needs to be ironed at home. (But bring one snazzy jacket to hide the pit stains that will be your constant companions.)
6. Come up with some quick, witty dismissals to the scads of questions you will receive about the imminent collapse of publishing.
7. Do not, under any circumstances, walk into an independent bookstore and do your reading from the Kindle version of your novel.
More to come...
Get more on Christopher Rice at SimonandSchuster.com
YOU'RE FUNNY!
People who meet me in person after reading my work (or short synopses of my work) often tell me they think I'm funny. Why don't I try my hand at a comedy? Why not, I think? Last year, I took this idea to my good friend, writer Eric Shaw Quinn. "I think I'll try my hand at comedy," I announced proudly.
"Ah, yes," he responded with a wistful smile. "A comedy in which dark forces kill hundreds of people. I can't wait."
I am, however, perfectly capable of writing funny bits of dialogue which I sandwich in between terrorist bombings and the unearthing of decades-old, family-destroying secrets. That counts for something, right?
But let me clear about something I have learned over the past few years. The darker a writer's work, the more fun he or she is in person. And as everyone in Hollywood knows, if you ever want to have a depressing dinner party, invite a bunch of comedy writers. So for now, let's go with this. I will make no attempt to write a comedy because I fear doing so will turn me into a morose bore, at which point most people who meet me for the first time will begin peppering me with questions about my most recent tale of dark suspense.
Why is it that a fiction writer in person is so often the inverse of what they write? And I'm speaking of tone here, not behavior. When I meet a comedy writer for the first time, I don't expect him to start jumping up and down while he tries to tickle my stomach. But I'm always taken aback when all he wants to do is kvetch about political figures he despises. For several hours. While getting horribly drunk. And blending in vile remarks about all of his ex-wives.
And when Joan Hansen, the much revered figure who presides over the popular Men of Mystery Conference in Irvine, California, commented to a large audience that mystery writers always seemed so happy and cheerful, no one in the crowd rushed to disagree with her.
Do the worlds we write about pass out of us and onto the page, leaving us to see only those things around us we didn't seek to put on the page that day? Are everyone but the most "literary writers", most of whom chain themselves to pedestrian realism, inclined to write about worlds they don't see from day-to-day? (Perhaps world creation, a term most often applied to Sci-Fi writing, is appropriate to other genres as well.)
I have no easy answers to these questions. But I don't have comedy ideas kicking around upstairs either. So for now it's dark stories and stimulating dinner time conversation.
Get more on Christopher Rice at SimonandSchuster.com
"Ah, yes," he responded with a wistful smile. "A comedy in which dark forces kill hundreds of people. I can't wait."
I am, however, perfectly capable of writing funny bits of dialogue which I sandwich in between terrorist bombings and the unearthing of decades-old, family-destroying secrets. That counts for something, right?
But let me clear about something I have learned over the past few years. The darker a writer's work, the more fun he or she is in person. And as everyone in Hollywood knows, if you ever want to have a depressing dinner party, invite a bunch of comedy writers. So for now, let's go with this. I will make no attempt to write a comedy because I fear doing so will turn me into a morose bore, at which point most people who meet me for the first time will begin peppering me with questions about my most recent tale of dark suspense.
Why is it that a fiction writer in person is so often the inverse of what they write? And I'm speaking of tone here, not behavior. When I meet a comedy writer for the first time, I don't expect him to start jumping up and down while he tries to tickle my stomach. But I'm always taken aback when all he wants to do is kvetch about political figures he despises. For several hours. While getting horribly drunk. And blending in vile remarks about all of his ex-wives.
And when Joan Hansen, the much revered figure who presides over the popular Men of Mystery Conference in Irvine, California, commented to a large audience that mystery writers always seemed so happy and cheerful, no one in the crowd rushed to disagree with her.
Do the worlds we write about pass out of us and onto the page, leaving us to see only those things around us we didn't seek to put on the page that day? Are everyone but the most "literary writers", most of whom chain themselves to pedestrian realism, inclined to write about worlds they don't see from day-to-day? (Perhaps world creation, a term most often applied to Sci-Fi writing, is appropriate to other genres as well.)
I have no easy answers to these questions. But I don't have comedy ideas kicking around upstairs either. So for now it's dark stories and stimulating dinner time conversation.
Get more on Christopher Rice at SimonandSchuster.com
