3Q’s – John C. Foster is THE WOLF!
Super fun one today and our guest offers a great insight into how they construct their stories!
John C. Foster continues to churn out riveting and tension-filled tomes. Add that to the fantastic photos he shares of his pup and I’m always excited to see what he has on the go! I was actually considering messaging him back to see if he could send a photo of him and his dog, but alas, I didn’t want to bother him again!
Please, do welcome John!
Steve: What does your writing time look like? Do you try and write at the same time each day? Do you have a word count you attempt to hit?
John: My writing style includes getting up and down frequently, pacing and roaming the kitchen for snacks, taking a shower and walking the dog. During a first draft when I’m on a hot streak, I wander a lot, start doing other things while my subconscious is churning and then stop mid task to run back to my office and hammer the key board. I write like I exercise, in explosive bursts. It’s a ridiculous way to do things. Sometimes it takes me over an hour to finish a shower because as soon as I step into the spray an idea-bomb goes off. If it’s small, a firecracker, I can write it down on the waterproof pad I keep in the shower, but if it’s an entire dialogue exchange I jump out, grab a towel and dash to my desk.
Like I said, it’s a ridiculous process at times.
I never set a word count goal because it feels restrictive. I try to finish whatever scene I’m working on in a single day so as to maintain the kinetic flow. As for schedule, I loosely break up my day into three sessions. The first starts around nine or ten, although when I’m REALLY hot I’m at my desk before seven after walking my dog Coraline. The sessions last anywhere from 45 minutes to two hours, pulling the trigger until the hammer hits empty chambers. Then I take a break to let my brain catch up with the story. The first is typically the most intensely raw and creative. The second blends that with tightening and revision and fleshing out, making sure I’m telling the story through more than just the visual sense, etc. The third is often about going back and cleaning up the mess I’ve made. I work with great intensity but I’m a shite typist and routinely commit horrible crimes against the language.
An exception to the above is as I’m hitting the last chapter or so. If memory serves I finished one book with an all day single session of around 20,000 words. It was insane and my brain felt like it had been squeezed dry, but I felt as giddy as I did tired. (The clean up effort in following days was enormous – shite typist and all that)
During draft revisions the process is a bit less frenetic, more workmanlike, though I still follow the two or three session a day plan. If the creativity just isn’t happening, there’s still work to be done. Pitching. Querying. Researching story calls and reading books I feel I need to read as a writer…though this last bleeds straight over into fun.
Steve: You end up at an estate sale and discover an unpublished manuscript from an author you love. Do you keep it just for yourself or do you share it with the world?
John: I’d definitely bring it home, but I think the first thing I’d try to do is determine what the author wanted to happen with the work.
Did they think it was worthy of publishing or had they buried it in a trunk? I think back to Harper Lee’s unpublished follow-up to To Kill a Mockingbird and how it was published to benefit a seemingly duplicitous person after Lee’s death – I wanted no part of it, so I have not read it even though I think To Kill a Mockingbird may be the finest novel ever written by an American.
So there’s a good chance I would not share the manuscript widely in an abundance of caution to respect the wishes of an artist not present to represent themselves. That being said, I may be exposing some hypocrisy here, because I’d sure as hell read it myself.
Steve: Tell me about your newest release (novel/story/poem/novella) and why someone should read it!
John: My latest novel LEECH, published by Ghoulish Books, debuted at the first annual Ghoulish Book Festival in San Antonio and has generated more personal/direct messages to me from readers than anything I’ve written to date. A mosaic novel, it tells the story of psychologically unbalanced secret agent, a southern gent who is part 007, part Fox Mulder, who can “see through the veil.” Told in a series of stand alone stories that tell a larger narrative when read in order, LEECH takes readers on a tour of crumbling realities, dark scientific experiments, prehistoric super beings and demonic forces locked in arctic installations. The binding current running through each story is his reliance on his wife Karen, also psychologically unbalanced…but as unstable as these two may be, they are each other’s rock and take turns pulling each other back from the brink. At the end of the book, Leech is quite willing to destroy the world for her.
The book came about because I wrote a couple stories about Archibald Leech in his white linen suit and my crit group wished there were more. Who knows, there may even be more stories about Archibald Leech down the road? (Hint, there are more Leech stories in the works).
Steve: Bonus Question! You wake up in a comic book. What is your comic book character and what is your superpower?
John: The Wolf. Strong, endless endurance, inescapable. Hovering in between hero and criminal. Definitely a killer. I’d much rather be a sorcerer or be able to throw lighting and fire—no flying though because I’m a afraid of heights—but if my inner self affected the mutation, I’d come out as some kind of canine predator for sure. Also wolves like to eat a lot and so do I, so I’m halfway there.
Excellent choice! Thank you so much, John!
To find more of his work, check the links!
Twitter: https://twitter.com/johnfosterfic
Website: https://www.johnfosterfiction.com/
