My Writing Process
Yeah…so you remember how I said I wasn’t sticking my neck out when people were asking for who hadn’t done the “My Writing Process” blog chain thing? Remember how I said I probably was going to get sniped the moment the post came out when someone saw I hadn’t done it? Yeah, I got hit. Funny though, Jon Konrath (author of a number of of kick ass books including the recently released and extremely good Atmospheres) tapped me for this fifteen seconds or so before he saw the post.
I’m cursed.
Anyway, enough whining. Here are the questions:
What Am I Working On?
Right now I’m working on promoting the fresh release of my second book The Garden of Good and Evil Pancakes. I’m also shopping around a new book called Apocalypse All the Time, shopping around a collection of absurd stories called Not Quite So Stories, and doing some preliminary ‘sketches’ for a novel where a guy tries to fix a failed relationship with a kind of sympathetic magic by making up for things he did wrong to get the girl to reappear.
How Does My Work Differ From Others of its Genre?
I’m not really sure I have a genre. Some of my work is pretty straight realism (Bones Buried in the Dirt is a good example with a child narrator), some is absurd (like “Home Improvement” or “Monkey! Monkey! Monkey! Monkey! Monkey!“), some is just straight weird (like “There’s a rabbit living under my kitchen sink….“), and some like The Garden of Good and Evil Pancakes defies easy categorization by wandering between realism, magical realism, and whatnot else. I write a lot of different stuff, but I’ve always been a little off and I think that results in my own take on whatever I do.
Why Do I Write What I Do?
I obey the whims and orders of my brain. Something appears in my head and my brain screams: YEAH! At that point, I either do what it says or suffer the consequences. Stupid brain.
How Does My Writing Process Work?
I work a lot by intuition and feeling out what works. I’m working daily on something, whenever I can fit it in and whatever it is. Reading, blog posts, jamming myself into literary discussions on social media, ‘sketching out ideas,’ actually writing, revising, planning, writing book reviews, I don’t do a lot with my non-work time that isn’t really writing related. It’s just what I do, regardless what it is or what it looks like.
One thing to mention is that I write almost everything longhand first on a legal pad. Then I type it up, getting at least one pass of revision in just getting it into electronic form. There are times where I don’t even keep to that though, going straight into Word or into Word from a page of notes. I work best when not under a completely rigid process so I always leave room to wander from what I even normally do…much less set up any rigid rules that I’d chafe under anyway.
And now I’m supposed to tag other people to do this. I contacted them all telepathically and they all agreed, so I’ll just assume they don’t know their own minds if they don’t follow up on this:
- Edward J. Rathke, author of Ash Cinema, Twilight of the Wolves, Girl with Ears & Demon with Limp, and the forthcoming Noir: A Love Story
- AE Stueve, author of The ABCs of Dinkology
- BH James, author of Parnucklian for Chocolate
