David Wong
This first part will be old news to hard-core John Dies at the End fans, who call themselves John Dies at the End-heads, but the first book was written as a serial online, on my old blog, over the course of about five years. So it served as my novel writing school, really. BUT the version you can purchase has been rewritten and edited so much that every sentence has probably been reworked five times. The second book was the first time I sat down and said, "Okay, I have to write an entire book, all at once" but the transition wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. The difference was the first time I got reader feedback one chapter at a time, where with Spiders I spent two years writing it alone before anyone ever saw it, so I guess there was the possibility the editor could have just rejected it entirely but that didn't happen. And honesty by that point, I'd been doing it long enough that I felt pretty confident that I knew how to execute a horror novel. But that's only because I had so many years in getting JDATE into shape. It was like seven years from conception to final hardcover edition you can buy now, and many iterations. I don't know if that answer was helpful at all but it is true.
More Answered Questions
Jack Walters
asked
David Wong:
This question contains spoilers…
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I noticed in the answers to one of your other questions, you said, "...so we're talking fall of 2020, assuming we're all still alive then". Do you think we'll all still be alive then? What do you think is the likelihood of that not being the case? Do you think that it's more likely that you or the person who answered the question will die of a heart attack, or world powers will start exchanging nukes/bio-weapons/etc.?
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Chevy Rendell
asked
David Wong:
Your blog posts often caution against essentialism (for example, the idea that all of the people who voted for Trump are hate-mongers). In John Dies at the End (a deliciously ambiguous title) the reader's assumptions are untethered (how reliable, for instance, is the narrator?); resolution is subsumed by acceptance that things (people/events) defy essential categories. To what extent, if any, was this deliberate?
David Wong
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