Ask Benjamin Percy - Tuesday, July 23rd! discussion
Ask Benjamin!
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Cynthia
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Jul 03, 2013 04:19PM
Welcome to the group! Benjamin will be answering questions throughout the day on Tuesday, July 23rd in this thread only. In the meantime if you have a question for Benjamin or just want to introduce yourself feel free to do so in this thread.
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I quite liked the ending of Red Moon and got a bit of hassle for saying so in my review as some other readers and reviewers didn't . Would you change the end in anyway after hearing the reviews or were you happy with it as well.
Hi Ben!For those that loved RED MOON (myself included!), which of your other books should we read next?
Hey guys,I'm a big fan of Ben's, I've reviewed two of his books at The Nervous Breakdown, THE WILDING and RED MOON. Loved them both. Here's my question.
When it came time to develop your own unique werewolf story here, what did you use as a point of reference? What were your inspirations? I've never been a huge fan of werewolf stories, but two of my favorites films were An American Werewolf in London and The Howling. Did either of those films influence you? What other novels or movies? It's such an epic novel, Red Moon, that I'd have to expect titles like The Stand, Swan Song, and maybe even The Road to creep into your visions.
Thanks for willing to do some Q & A with your readers. Three questions- You use really great descriptive language without pulling out the storyline. Any recommendations to improve descriptive writing while keeping the pace of the story?
- While the world went downhill in a hurry for all, there doesn't seem anymore than some brief relief at the end. What was your motivation to not have an upbeat ending?
- You seem to develop most characters and discard them fairly early. Is it hard to create a character to let him go soon. What was you motivation to let them go?
Hi,This book contains so many movements and themes, it was rich in characters and storyline--was there any temptation to draw it out into a series or a trilogy?
Hi Ben,Haven't read Red Moon yet, but I've trumpeted The Wilding far and wide to my tiny circle of reader friends.
Many of the questions here thus far seem to be about your interest in the supernatural. I'll go the opposite path and ask, how much does where you grew up (Oregon, I believe) inform your material? Clearly, you have a deep appreciation for and, I'm guessing, love of wilderness... Were you an environmental activist in your younger days? I suppose I'm just interested in your take on how to make naturalistic material compelling when kids in developed nations drift further and further away from "the sensuous" (or rather, toward a tech-filtered lens to the natural world).
Hello, Benjamin!I want to start with saying how much I love RED MOON, and how it's the best lycan based book I've ever read.
What was your motivation behind making the lycans terrorists? Also, will their be a sequel? I'd really like to know what the world is like a few years after the ending.
Thank you! :)
Hey Ben,Long time reader, first time poster. Librarians are often examining the merits of evolving forms of resources and services, especially as user habits shift towards electronic information and are increasingly tied to the Web. Can you speak for a moment on modern authors and the process of engaging with users beyond the traditional/singular form of print (i.e. Twitter posts, Refresh Refresh in graphic novel form, podcast readings, the antidote naming contest, or even this Q&A, just to name a few).
Do authors find this seemingly added demand challenging, distracting, exciting, or maybe even vital to careers in this modern reading landscape? Do you personally search to find avenues to cross, or is this usually the result of collaboration via handlers and other artists and industry professionals? Do you feel like there is a trend forming among modern writers to engage with readers in varying formats, or that there has been an increase in the amount of freedom or tools to do so(please forgive the numerous, sweeping generalizations)? From a reader's stance, I know I appreciate the different ways creativity can manifest from great artists and I was wondering how this affects your process.
Hello Ben, I am a present fellow Portlander and always get a kick out of authors who base their novels here (Chelsea Cain, early Alafair Burke, just to name two).
Did you base Red Moon here in Portland (as opposed to Minnesota) because of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation? Game changer, that.
And, are you coming back to Portland soon? Perhaps the Powell's on Hawthorne, just down the street from my house?
Awesome story. Great setting. Pittock Mansion as the command center for the Lycan resistance? Fabulous.
Ben, hello! You were in Cleveland for a conference probably around the time you were finishing up writing Red Moon. We have a political activist here named Arnold Pinkney. You have a politician in your book named Pinckney Arnold. Please tell me this isn't a coincidence!!!
Mod
1] In your work, does your protagonist pretty much reflect your own view of the world and how it operates?
..."
Hi, Kenny.
Think of me more like a busy actor, trying out as many different voices and postures and costumes as possible. Red Moon has a vast cast of characters, supplying myriad perspectives on what is a complicated knotty issue. There are sprinkles of me throughout, but inhabiting all of these different minds is one of the challenges and thrills of writing.
And yes, I grew up nerdily and greedily obsessed with the supernatural. I still have an artifact from the 6th grade -- a "research" paper called "Werewolves!" -- in which I dug into the mythology and the psychological troubles of lycanthropy and then concluded the paper by trying to transform myself beneath a full moon in my backyard. No kidding. Despite my obvious dedication to the subject matter, I received a B -, which is one of many reasons it feels so good to hold the book in my hand now and say, "In your face, Mrs. Zeeganhagen!"
Mod
I am a present fellow Portlander and always get a kick out of authors who base their novels here (Chelsea Cain, early Alafair Burke, just to name two).
Did you base Red Moon here in ..."
Kathleen --
I grew up in Oregon (born in Eugene, raised in Bend), and it remains my muse even though I've moved to Minnesota. I continue, too, to visit Oregon several times a year and hopefully one year I can get a splintery cabin in its mountains. My next book is a post-apocalyptic reimagining of the Lewis and Clark saga and the book after a techno/supernatural thriller that takes place in Portland. It's such a dramatic, fragmented landscape geographically (with so many different environments -- desert, ocean, alpine, plains, rainforest -- crushed into its borders), politically, culturally, economically. I can't imagine (quite literally) my fiction taking place anywhere else.
I attended the Christmas tree lighting several times as a kid, so the bomb threat that happened a few years before haunted me -- and whenever I feel that electrical pulse I know I need to put it on the page.
Thanks for reading!
Ben
Mod
I'm afraid that's a coincidence. The only thing I took out of Cleveland was a guitar fridge magnet from the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame.
One more, Benjamin. I detect a bit of X-Men vibe in Red Moon. Seems like a trend in comics is to get established novelists to write some story arcs ... Brad Meltzer, China Mieville, Greg Rucka, Charlie Huston are a few who come to mind.So ... when is it Benjamin Percy's turn on the X-Men?
Hey Benjamin,Do you plan on writing any more books of short stories?
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Long time reader, first time poster. Librarians are often examining the merits of evolving forms of resources and services, especially as user habits shift towards electronic informatio..."
Hi, Evan --
The idea is, people don't read a book because of a review. They read a book because they read a review, they heard an NPR segment, they saw an ad, and they read an article or blog post. That's when a book sticks -- when it seems worth buying -- when you can't seem to escape it.
I try to be a muscular part of the campaign. I can't tell you how many Q&As and blog posts and articles I've hammered out in connection to Red Moon, but enough to make my head spin. I'm not complaining: I've worked so hard on the book, I want to make sure it gets in front of as many eyes as possible.
But it is distracting -- and it is difficult for authors in general when you consider that we're a bunch of misfits who (usually for good reason) chose a profession that isolates us from social contact.
My hope is, if I hustle now, I can lay off a little with each passing year. But right now I'm a punk nobody has heard of, so I need to open up my throat -- and howl.
Mod
I read you short story collection "Refresh, Refresh" before reading "Red Moon." The stories in "Refresh, Refresh," though "short" stories in terms of their length, felt novelistic in..."
Thanks, Christopher. I can't possibly nutshell the differences between writing novels and short stories. It took me many years, many thousands of hours at the keyboard, and four failed manuscripts to figure it out myself. But one of my early struggles was this: I write chapters as if they were short stories. I would introduce and conclude a problem in the course of fifteen pages, which created an episodic quality absent of momentum. Chapters instead should work toward a moment of heightened emotion and trouble and then cut away, so that you're juggling flaming chainsaws, tossing up on page 15 what might pass through your hands again on page 45 and again on page 75 and resolve itself on 125, surrounded by other swirling dangers.
Hi Ben! I had the pleasure of meeting you about a month ago in Minneapolis. One of the best readings I've been to! I had a question about your writing process and research. Do you do all your research beforehand, write till you have to research, write and fill in the research later on, or something else? I've been struggling with this issue lately and I'd like to know your approach.
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I want to start with saying how much I love RED MOON, and how it's the best lycan based book I've ever read.
What was your motivation behind making the lycans terrorists? Also, ..."
Thanks! I do hope to write a sequel. When I first set down to build the world, I imagined stories set before and alongside and after the novel. But the infection has to spread first, so make ten thousand of your closes friends buy it.
I wanted to channel cultural unease. We fear, more than anything, infection and terrorism. Like Frankenstein, like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, like Night of the Living Dead and The Dead Zone and The Road and Oryx and Crake, Red Moon is taking a knife to the nerve of the moment. But the lycans aren't terrorists. An extremist group within the larger population is. The villains and heroes are on both sides, similar to the X-Men. Ultimately, the book is about the culture of fear that we live in, our want to marginalize and punish anything, anyone that is "other."
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Haven't read Red Moon yet, but I've trumpeted The Wilding far and wide to my tiny circle of reader friends.
Many of the questions here thus far seem to be about your interest in the supe..."
Lynwood --
My parents, for a time, were back to the landers. All of our meat came from our henhouse or the venison, elk, bear my father harvested. Our vegetables and fruit came from our garden. And every single vacation (not exaggerating here) I took growing up was camping, hunting, fishing, hiking, rock-hounding. So I grew up in a way that attuned me more than most to the natural world.
Mod
This book contains so many movements and themes, it was rich in characters and storyline--was there any temptation to draw it out into a series or a trilogy?"
I would love to continue to build the series, but if you look at the novel (built into three parts), you won't be surprised to hear that I proposed it as a trilogy and they asked me to write it into a sweeping epic.
Mod
I'm a big fan of Ben's, I've reviewed two of his books at The Nervous Breakdown, THE WILDING and RED MOON. Loved them both. Here's my question.
When it came time to develop your own uni..."
Elaine wrote: "Hello. I'm looking forward to this."
Hi, Richard.
Sure, I've read and seen just about every werewolf story out there, but I hoped to reinvent the mythology, make it new, in the same way that Sergio Leone tipped his hat to John Ford while snapping so many of the western's conventions and archetypes over his knee like a brittle bone. That's one of the reasons my lycans are based on the slippery science of prions, the same misfolded proteins responsible for mad cow and chronic wasting disease.
If you look at the sweep and structure of the book, the inspiration is The Stand, Swan Song. While the allegory is rooted in Atwood and Orwell.
Mod
I'm a reader who has really enjoyed your last two books, and indeed Red Moon, immensely. Here in the UK, Red Moon has received excellent backing from your publisher-from you being rel..."
Hi, Allan.
I grew up on pop lit and never encountered literary writers like Carver and Woolf and O'Connor and Alexie until I took my first creative writing workshop in college. Genre was forbidden. I fell in love with literary fiction but never fell out of love with genre, and all of my published work falls into a gray area, neither fish nor fowl. You can look at Refresh, Refresh and see blurbs on the back that refer to its tropes and tenor as belonging to horror. Refresh, Refresh initially had a supernatural ending (in which the boys transformed into their fathers) and The Wilding did too (the creature was not a bear, but something else), but these were edited out. So Red Moon has been a long time coming -- it's the book I've bee wanting to write my whole life, and it's the kind of book people should be expecting from me from now on. Thanks for reading.
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That would be a blast. I did just write a graphic novel script and I have spoken to a few peeps at Vertigo about comic work, so maybe some day!
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Every time I write a short story or article or novel, I'm immediately dissatisfied. I'll even delete paragraphs, edit sentences when reading before an audience. I'm glad for this -- it means I'm always improving. But this dissatisfaction is based on my own aesthetic demands; I generally avoid reviews (they're too distracting). So I do the best I can with every book, then narrow my eyes and take a deep breath and try to jump higher, run faster in the next.
Mod
- You use really great descriptive language without pulling out the storyline. Any recommendations to improve descriptive writ..."
I'm always trying to make my stories as active as possible. So I'm strategically considering the arrangement of physical and emotional beats. I'm making certain setting is a stage, yes, but also a way to reveal mood and characterize. I'm debating the spikes and valleys of my narrative and considering the larger orchestration of suspense. Any description is in service of story, never luxuriant or distracting.
As for your second question, some of the villains are conquered and the boy gets the girl, so I hope that offsets some of the darker threads that conclude. I'm always looking for tonal variation. And the epilogue, of course, is a gateway to a possible sequel.
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I had a question about your writing process and research. Do you do all your res..."
Thanks, Martin. I usually spend a year thinking about a novel before I begin writing it. During this time, I'm sketching out characters and plot arcs. And researching. I filled up piles of yellow legal tablets when interviewing medical researchers, government agents, politicians, brewmasters, soldiers -- and when reading articles, watching documentaries, surfing the net. There are always opportunities for further research along the way, but I try to muscle my way through most of it up front.
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Do you plan on writing any more books of short stories?"
I do have another book of stories ready, but we're waiting for another few novels to come out first. There's no real rush -- the readership is so limited for collections. But thanks for asking!
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For those that loved RED MOON (myself included!), which of your other books should we read next?"
Maybe check out The Wilding, my first novel, a dark compact thriller that takes place over the course of a weekend and follows a doomed hunting expedition. I'd recommend my chapbook of erotic haiku, but I wrote that under a pseudonym.
Hey Ben, Whenever I read your novels or short stories, I'm always blown away by your similes/metaphors. As something of a writer myself - I'm still a grad student - those are what I always struggle with. How do you come up with lines like, "his belly rests in his lap like a garbage bag full of warm milk"??? Thanks!
Ariel Spengler
