Eric’s Comments (group member since Oct 23, 2011)

Eric’s comments from the Q&A with Eric Hendrixson group.

On this day last year, all of the books on this group's bookshelf became available on Amazon. It's also the day Amazon first received an order for Bucket of Face. Check the books out. You can meet the authors on Goodreads or you can chat with all of them here: http://www.goodreads.com/group/show/4...

If you have any questions about NBAS, you can ask there or just in this thread.

Actually, it was a separate inspiration. In this case, the idea was just to watch fruit eat fruit. It's the same kind of uneasiness people have when they see pigeons eating from chicken bones discarded in the street. For some reason, people are uneasy when they see birds eating birds, but mammals eat mammals. Primates eat primates. We are all made out of food. I'm made mostly out of meat. It was a joke about squeamishness, and since many of the characters in the book are usually considered food, I wanted to address the issue in the first chapter.

The setting in the carnival, which moves around. The time is fairly recent, but I have not decided when. Most of the action will be in Texas and Arkansas.

I back up my novels on a flash drive, but on this occasion, I had to send a computer in for repair. It just happened that that flash drive was corrupt when I got home, after giving up the computer to be wiped. I think the novel was better for it, but I'll probably use Google to back up my stuff in the future.

I'm thinking of a Southern Gothic that takes place with a traveling carnival.

I tend to write in layers anyway, so even an awful first draft is a good thing to have. Steve Martin wrote in "Writing is Easy" that "words can be changed, rethought, fiddled with, and, of course, ultimately denied."

I might. I have or had a book that takes place in DC about ten years after BoF. At least I had it before the crash that took my first draft of BoF. One prominant character is Merry, who is a doughnut shop worker. This was the girl hired at the end of the book. I'm still not sure if it will be in the same universe.

I also had thoughts of a prequel of sorts: Roma Rising, but that might just be a short story. Since I visualize Roma as first generation, this would get into the root of some of his anger issues and show why he knows so much about Michael Jackson.

It's a fun thing to do. I have done it for four years. This will be my fifth. Of course, the first time I got a novel published was the year I failed to finish on time and spent the rest of the year writing the book. Still, it gives you something to work with at the end of the month.

Dan wrote: "Eric wrote: "I started the first draft in November. I've been doing NaNoWrimo for years, so that has become when I start novels. "

Will you be doing NaNoWriMo this year?"

I'm going to try. Bizarrocon makes it difficult.

He's known for his work in the Splatterpunk, horror, and Bizarro genres. He also does screenplays. He wrote Nightmare on Elm Street 5. Nice guy. Good beard. I donated July's royalties to getting his zombie musical made.

Yeah, but I met Mark Cline. There was half a chapter about him that got cut down to the dream scene in which Charles meets the Fisher King and sees the shark.

You'd be amazed how much time it takes to get the word out about a book like this. This has cut into my writing time, but I expect to start up again in November.

However, it has definitely helped with the "why bother" question about writing. Getting to know the people who read the book, what has worked for them, and things like that will probably help me with my next book.

I definitely have a few ideas I'm working on using a plotting method John Skipp showed me.

I started the first draft in November. I've been doing NaNoWrimo for years, so that has become when I start novels. That's the first year I did not make my wordcount. I started off with a completely different story, but I realized halfway through the month that I was writing a very weird story that didn't make much sense. Instead, in the last couple weeks of November, I started on BoF.

I worked on BoF on and off through the winter, then lost it all in a computer failure that also messed up the flash drive my backup was on. In early spring, I locked myself in a cheap motel in Natural Bridge, VA and rewrote half the novella from memory and a couple scenes I had workshopped with Bradley Sands that were still in my Google Docs. My first draft was finished in late August, later August than Kevin would have liked.

There was a lot of back and forth about daily for about two months. Twice I went into bunker mode, locking myself into a motel without wifi for three or four days to do major rewrites.

The New Bizarro Author Series has a wordcount limit of about 15,000 to 30,000 words. I exceeded that. After cutting it down over the course of over a month or two of editing, I still exceeded it. Bizarro books by first-time authors are short. This is intentional. The story should move quickly, and the book should not take more than two hours to read. However, I am used to writing long stories between 50,000 and 75,000 words. In the final draft, I'd say BoF was between Old Man and the Sea and the Great Gadsby in length.

I did not have a first draft of over 9,000 pages. That was an inside joke based on an Internet meme. However, every time Kevin Donihe sent me a shorter version that he had edited down, I sent a longer version back to him. There was a lot of cutting, but I think it was for the best. You might notice that my book is the longest of the NBAS and is in the smallest font size. We barely fit it in.

(Gabriel now) I think it is better to over-write and then cut things down. What I cut out was mostly things that could be more effectively implied. In future books, I will probably follow this model, which is actually the way I tend to converse: think about everything; say what is necessary. That means to write the entire world and then cut out everything but what you need to tell this particular story.