10 Questions with JG Faherty
Where did you come up with the concept for The Burning Time?
cthulhu
**Actually, I got it from a song. For a long time, I'd wanted to do a story or novel that was a throwback to the old classics by Karl Edward Wagner and Manly Wade Wellman, a story about a simple country man who spends his days battling Evil. An homage to the stories I loved as a kid. But with a modern take. At the same time, though, I was kind of tired of supernatural detective stories. So I shelved the idea. And then one day I was listening to John Fogerty's "The Old Man Down the Road" and this story idea hit me – an old man coming down the road, bringing evil and mayhem to a town. The line "He makes the river call your lover," which I'd heard a million times over the years, suddenly sounded so creepy to me – what was in that river? And then I knew. In my story, there'd be a Cthulhulian demon, its tentacles waiting to grab innocent women. And from there the whole thing just took off.
2. Who has been your biggest influence as a writer?
**I guess a lot of classic writers. Wellman and Wagner, for sure. Bradbury. King. Allan Dean Foster, David Gerrold, Roger Zelazny, because of their humor. For modern writers, Brian Keene, Michael McBride, Jack Ketchum, Jeff Strand, and F. Paul Wilson. I think the one thing they all have in common is a more down home, friendly style that moves quickly but at the same time isn't simplistic. It's just not bogged down with pedantic content; they're not trying to impress anyone with their knowledge of the language or their vocabulary. It all flows smoothly.
3. Since your first novel, Carnival of Fear, how have you as a writer and your writing changed?
I've gotten slower and lost my attention span. That's no joke! Carnival of Fear was written in a frenzy, with the entire book, nearly word for word, sitting in my head. I wrote the whole thing long hand during lunch breaks from work and in the evenings I would type what I'd written that day. But I've never had a novel come complete to me like that again, so I've had to learn how to write slowly, map things out, outline, develop my plot twists and subplots. The nice thing about that is after the novel is done, I need only a couple of editing rewrites before it's ready to submit (Carnival of Fear was edited by me and others 6 times). The bad thing is it takes some of the jazz out of the writing, makes it more like work, and sometimes I get bored with a story or lose sight of where I'm going, and then I wander off to another project. That happened with The Burning Time. I was a little more than halfway through and I couldn't figure out how to get the main character to the final act. I struggled for days, and then finally went on to something else. It was a year later when I came back to it and sparked the idea by re-reading it from the beginning like it was new. Right now I have at least 5 novels in various states of completion for the same reason.
4.Who is your favorite writer?
**I don't know if I can answer that. I have so many writers I love reading, both old and new. How do I judge who's my favorite? How many times I've re-read their books? That would be King; he never gets old. Who I would still pay to read rather than wait for a freebie or a cheap e-book? Lots of people on that list. In some ways, the comparison isn't fair – King and Straub and McCammon and Koontz and Wilson have written dozens of books; newer writers haven't had the chance to catch up or perhaps even hit their stride yet. People like Benjamin Kane Ethridge or Shaun Jeffrey. Writers from the 80s and 90s who really aren't putting out a lot of new stuff today: PN Elrod, Scott Ciencin, Tracy Briery. Some writers who dabbled in horror, creating some good stuff, and then moved away from it, like Fred Saberhagen, or people who had a nice run of a series, such as Laurell Hamilton or Lee Killough.
5. What current writing projects are you working on?
**Woof! I've got a couple of novels I'm bouncing between, one is a dark adult horror and the other is a YA urban fantasy. I'm also doing my best to pitch three novels – two adult horror and one YA sci-fi – to publishers.
6. Is there an overall theme to your writing?
**No, I don't think so. I've done a lot of horror, some sci-fi and fantasy, some YA novels and short stories. I've bounced around between classic suspense-style and in-your-face graphic blood and guts. I've done traditional tropes and some stuff that's really out there. Supernatural and psychological. It's just whatever comes to me, I guess.
7. What made you start writing?
**I've always had a love of writing and desire to do it. In middle school, I wrote goofy short stories and risque, gross comics that I shared with classmates and family. In college, I tried my hand at writing a novel but it was the wrong time – I was 3 chapters into a story about a creature emerging from a lake and I realized I was doing a poor imitation of Stephen King. After that, I never did any fiction writing again for many years – until I was 39. Then I picked up a side job writing elementary school test preparation guides for The Princeton Review. Part of the assignment was creating fictional reading passages. I realized it was fun and not that hard, and then I tried my hand at writing a real horror short story. It came thisclose (last story rejected) for an anthology with a Van Helsing theme and the editor, Jeanne Cavelos, told me I should keep trying my hand at it because I had some talent. After that, I couldn't stop! It was two more years, though, before I made my first pro sale.
8. How do you use social media to promote your writing?
**In all the usual ways. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Goodreads, LibraryThing, AboutMe, guest blogging, etc. The only thing I don't have is my own blog. I simply don't have time to do 4-5 entries per week.
9. Is there any subject that is off limits for you as a writer?
**Thematically, no. Fiction is fiction – if something is germane to the story, it shouldn't be taboo, whether it's a maniac who rapes and eats small children or a character who is racist or homophobic. But it needs to be germane to the story; shocking people just for the sake of shocking them is a cop out. It's weak writing. It means you don't have a good story or the ability to tell a good story. Now, this doesn't mean that I think you should write a story praising gay-bashing or pedophilia or the KKK. But that stuff does exist in our world, and things even more terrible, so if you want your protagonist chasing a serial killer who gets off on eating peoples' genitals, well, then go for it. It might not be right for me, it might not be something I would write or read, but that shouldn't mean it can't be written. Just don't expect me to praise your book if all it contains is 300 pages of intestines getting pulled out or babies being raped. Free speech doesn't necessarily equal good writing.
10. If you could invite five people to a dinner party (alive or dead, real or fictional) who would you invite?
leonardo da vinci
**The ladies from the last Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue – not only would they not eat very much (cheap dinner party!!), but they'd be very easy on the eyes.
Seriously, let's think about that. Carl Kauffeld – he wrote a bunch of books about herpetology, which I studied in grad school, and he was the man who first got me interested in science, which is what I devoted my life to until I started my own business writing resumes in 1999. Stephen King – he's the only one of my writing heroes who is still alive that I haven't had a chance to meet yet. Leonardo DaVinci – I would love to pick his brain and find out how he came up with all those inventions, and finally get the answer to whether or not he was visited by aliens. Thor Heyerdahl – his tales of adventures would be fascinating. And Howard Stern – he's been entertaining me every morning since the 1980s, and we actually have a lot in common when it comes to interests in photography and movies. Plus, if the other guys get boring, we could make fun of them.
On second thought, those bikini babes are starting to seem like a better choice.
cthulhu
**Actually, I got it from a song. For a long time, I'd wanted to do a story or novel that was a throwback to the old classics by Karl Edward Wagner and Manly Wade Wellman, a story about a simple country man who spends his days battling Evil. An homage to the stories I loved as a kid. But with a modern take. At the same time, though, I was kind of tired of supernatural detective stories. So I shelved the idea. And then one day I was listening to John Fogerty's "The Old Man Down the Road" and this story idea hit me – an old man coming down the road, bringing evil and mayhem to a town. The line "He makes the river call your lover," which I'd heard a million times over the years, suddenly sounded so creepy to me – what was in that river? And then I knew. In my story, there'd be a Cthulhulian demon, its tentacles waiting to grab innocent women. And from there the whole thing just took off.
2. Who has been your biggest influence as a writer?
**I guess a lot of classic writers. Wellman and Wagner, for sure. Bradbury. King. Allan Dean Foster, David Gerrold, Roger Zelazny, because of their humor. For modern writers, Brian Keene, Michael McBride, Jack Ketchum, Jeff Strand, and F. Paul Wilson. I think the one thing they all have in common is a more down home, friendly style that moves quickly but at the same time isn't simplistic. It's just not bogged down with pedantic content; they're not trying to impress anyone with their knowledge of the language or their vocabulary. It all flows smoothly.
3. Since your first novel, Carnival of Fear, how have you as a writer and your writing changed?
I've gotten slower and lost my attention span. That's no joke! Carnival of Fear was written in a frenzy, with the entire book, nearly word for word, sitting in my head. I wrote the whole thing long hand during lunch breaks from work and in the evenings I would type what I'd written that day. But I've never had a novel come complete to me like that again, so I've had to learn how to write slowly, map things out, outline, develop my plot twists and subplots. The nice thing about that is after the novel is done, I need only a couple of editing rewrites before it's ready to submit (Carnival of Fear was edited by me and others 6 times). The bad thing is it takes some of the jazz out of the writing, makes it more like work, and sometimes I get bored with a story or lose sight of where I'm going, and then I wander off to another project. That happened with The Burning Time. I was a little more than halfway through and I couldn't figure out how to get the main character to the final act. I struggled for days, and then finally went on to something else. It was a year later when I came back to it and sparked the idea by re-reading it from the beginning like it was new. Right now I have at least 5 novels in various states of completion for the same reason.
4.Who is your favorite writer?
**I don't know if I can answer that. I have so many writers I love reading, both old and new. How do I judge who's my favorite? How many times I've re-read their books? That would be King; he never gets old. Who I would still pay to read rather than wait for a freebie or a cheap e-book? Lots of people on that list. In some ways, the comparison isn't fair – King and Straub and McCammon and Koontz and Wilson have written dozens of books; newer writers haven't had the chance to catch up or perhaps even hit their stride yet. People like Benjamin Kane Ethridge or Shaun Jeffrey. Writers from the 80s and 90s who really aren't putting out a lot of new stuff today: PN Elrod, Scott Ciencin, Tracy Briery. Some writers who dabbled in horror, creating some good stuff, and then moved away from it, like Fred Saberhagen, or people who had a nice run of a series, such as Laurell Hamilton or Lee Killough.
5. What current writing projects are you working on?
**Woof! I've got a couple of novels I'm bouncing between, one is a dark adult horror and the other is a YA urban fantasy. I'm also doing my best to pitch three novels – two adult horror and one YA sci-fi – to publishers.
6. Is there an overall theme to your writing?
**No, I don't think so. I've done a lot of horror, some sci-fi and fantasy, some YA novels and short stories. I've bounced around between classic suspense-style and in-your-face graphic blood and guts. I've done traditional tropes and some stuff that's really out there. Supernatural and psychological. It's just whatever comes to me, I guess.
7. What made you start writing?
**I've always had a love of writing and desire to do it. In middle school, I wrote goofy short stories and risque, gross comics that I shared with classmates and family. In college, I tried my hand at writing a novel but it was the wrong time – I was 3 chapters into a story about a creature emerging from a lake and I realized I was doing a poor imitation of Stephen King. After that, I never did any fiction writing again for many years – until I was 39. Then I picked up a side job writing elementary school test preparation guides for The Princeton Review. Part of the assignment was creating fictional reading passages. I realized it was fun and not that hard, and then I tried my hand at writing a real horror short story. It came thisclose (last story rejected) for an anthology with a Van Helsing theme and the editor, Jeanne Cavelos, told me I should keep trying my hand at it because I had some talent. After that, I couldn't stop! It was two more years, though, before I made my first pro sale.
8. How do you use social media to promote your writing?
**In all the usual ways. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Goodreads, LibraryThing, AboutMe, guest blogging, etc. The only thing I don't have is my own blog. I simply don't have time to do 4-5 entries per week.
9. Is there any subject that is off limits for you as a writer?
**Thematically, no. Fiction is fiction – if something is germane to the story, it shouldn't be taboo, whether it's a maniac who rapes and eats small children or a character who is racist or homophobic. But it needs to be germane to the story; shocking people just for the sake of shocking them is a cop out. It's weak writing. It means you don't have a good story or the ability to tell a good story. Now, this doesn't mean that I think you should write a story praising gay-bashing or pedophilia or the KKK. But that stuff does exist in our world, and things even more terrible, so if you want your protagonist chasing a serial killer who gets off on eating peoples' genitals, well, then go for it. It might not be right for me, it might not be something I would write or read, but that shouldn't mean it can't be written. Just don't expect me to praise your book if all it contains is 300 pages of intestines getting pulled out or babies being raped. Free speech doesn't necessarily equal good writing.
10. If you could invite five people to a dinner party (alive or dead, real or fictional) who would you invite?
leonardo da vinci
**The ladies from the last Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue – not only would they not eat very much (cheap dinner party!!), but they'd be very easy on the eyes.
Seriously, let's think about that. Carl Kauffeld – he wrote a bunch of books about herpetology, which I studied in grad school, and he was the man who first got me interested in science, which is what I devoted my life to until I started my own business writing resumes in 1999. Stephen King – he's the only one of my writing heroes who is still alive that I haven't had a chance to meet yet. Leonardo DaVinci – I would love to pick his brain and find out how he came up with all those inventions, and finally get the answer to whether or not he was visited by aliens. Thor Heyerdahl – his tales of adventures would be fascinating. And Howard Stern – he's been entertaining me every morning since the 1980s, and we actually have a lot in common when it comes to interests in photography and movies. Plus, if the other guys get boring, we could make fun of them.
On second thought, those bikini babes are starting to seem like a better choice.
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