Lance Weller's Blog, page 2

Dogs as Characters

With the paperback version of Wilderness coming to bookstores next month, and, hopefully, new readers coming to the book, I’d like to take a moment to talk about a concern with the story that I’ve heard more than once now. And that is, the fate of the dog.

This is prompted by some very nice comments by a Goodreads reader who set the book aside after the prologue because they already knew what happens with the dog. I can certainly understand and empathize with these sorts of worries because all...

Let’s Get Lit!

There are things in the world that can be considered absolutely good. Dogs come to mind immediately. Books and libraries are two others. So, here on the cusp of March, I’m mightily pleased have been asked to attend a pair of events in support of books and the houses that hold them.

Firstly, Seattle’s getting back a bookstore that it was a tragedy to have lost in the first place. Luckily, it wasn’t gone for long. The Queen Anne Book Company is having its Grand Opening Weekend from March 1 to Ma...

The Great Wilderness Tour

I’ve been nervous for a year. Ever since my editor at BloomsburyUSA told me they were giving Wilderness the gift of making it their lead adult fiction offering for fall 2012 and that they hoped I’d help support the book with public appearances and readings. I managed to put aside my anxiety over public speaking while I worked on the manuscript, shaping it up into its final form but then, after a decade of fretting over the thing, it finally left my hands forever and I was left alone with the...

Why Comics? I’m glad you asked…

The time has come to confess to an enduring love of comic books. Superhero comic books. Capes and cowls, tights and Kirby-crackle. Four color, nine panel cave paintings of wonder. I’ve always loved these things and used to have quite a collection of individual issues in bags with boards and boxed carefully away. Still have a lot. All right: a LOT.

Why comics? Adolescent power fantasies of a short kid? Probably. Worlds of escape for a sometimes ill kid? That too. And, also, simply put: comic bo...

More American Marchlands

It didn’t feel right just posting first bit of the prologue for American Marchlands—like an incomplete thought—so here’s the balance of it along with a picture my wife thought was too creepy to go with it but that I really like. Because it’s creepy.

American Marchlands

Wrapping the reins around the brake bar, the driver stepped down and put his arms over his head for an expansive stretch. Then, bobbing his head and grinning a grin that was somehow strange but not at all offputting, he held out...

American Marchlands Excerpt

The third and final part of the Wilderness Roadshow is coming but, since I’ve had a little time between readings, I’ve been working hard on my next Thing. And, seeing as how I’m getting asked about it pretty regularly at my events, I thought I’d put up the very first little bit of the new novel I’m calling (for now) American Marchlands. It started as a story of a marriage but has become something more akin to a road novel set in frontier America circa 1846. It’s about two men who go west and...

Interviews For Your Review

With a week off between reading dates (the next one is Oct 4, 7:30 pm at Eagle Harbor Book Company on Bainbridge Island with Jonathan Evison), I’ve been hard at work on my new novel American Marchlands. I’ve been at it a little less than a year and I’m finally beginning to see the parts of it I couldn’t see before come into view. Had a few minor breakthroughs just this week, so that’s a real load off my mind and I’m feeling like, pretty soon, I can make a big push toward the end and finally h...

The Great, 4-Day, Mississippi Wilderness Roadshow, Continued

Part Two: A Deficiency of Klondike Bars

So I arrived at Oxford in the hot, eerie damp of the dark Mississippi night. The brightness of strip malls on the edge of town gave way to older houses in shadowy yards, older buildings of the sort of clean, pretty architecture that said, to me, “This is the south.” Trees of the sort to which I was not used to leaned over pale sidewalks and things felt suddenly slow and easy and safe. I made a wrong turn or two—with Serena patiently “recalculating” (and...

The Great, 4-Day, Mississippi Wilderness Roadshow

Part One: Looking for the Devil at every Crossroads

The day before my novel, Wilderness, hit the shelves I was traveling from Seattle, Washington to Jackson, Mississippi—nervous as hell because the next day would bring the first reading of my first book tour and I had no idea what to expect from any of it. Also, air travel is inherently unnatural and the flight down from my little corner of the Puget Sound had been long and turbulent. But even still, I kept the shade up on the last, short leg...

Fifty Shades of Scott

I haunt bookstores. Always have. Often, whatever errands I have will be arranged in such a way as to allow the maximum amount of loitering-time between the shelves of one store or another—or, if not a bookstore, then at the very least the local library. These are ordered worlds that I understand and am comfortable in. And if I don’t walk out with some sort of hardback, trade paperback, mass-market paperback, graphic novel (Marvel Comics, naturally), newspaper, magazine, Moleskine, textbook or...