Pod People

I just found out that FantasyBookSpot.com has put up the podcast interview they did with me last week. Damon Caporaso did an excellent job with the questions and I did an excellent job drinking two beers throughout the course of the interview without burping into the mic even once.

Bartender, another question -- make it a double.

Now That's Writin'

Her figure was wholly sinful. It may have been part of the reason, indeed, for the spirituality of her face, for its breathtaking voluptuousness could not be concealed under any sort of clothing, and condemned her, no matter where she went or how, to the role of nude descending perpetual public staircases; thus she moved as though withdrawn into herself, with an abstracted, Godivian saunter that was aware of nothing nearer than the sky.

-- Sinful Woman, James M. Cain, 1947

Otto's Shrunken Head

Nope, that's not me, but I wish it was. Maybe it's just because I've been reading Happy Hour of the Damned, but all of a sudden I have to go to this place. It was featured in an article in today's New York Times, and when I checked it out I realized it's like, two blocks from where we used to live on E. 14th Street. I'm actually kind of glad we didn't cross paths then, because besides all the delicious beverages, I would've been spending way too much money on stuff like this.

That said...road trip!

That's Bloody Disgusting!

The good folks at Bloody Disgusting.Com just ran a zippy interview with me that posted today. Mega-kudos to BD's awesome interviewer Elaine Lamkin for the great questions. This one was fun.

As for the other interview I mentioned yesterday, it's coming very soon. By that point you should know more about me than I do.

A Month Without Internet

Well, not exactly.

But Verizon did cut off my internet, like, a week before we moved. That was November 7th. Now they're promising I'll be back online by...wait for it...November 30th. Meanwhile I'm forced to blog like a transient, an anchorite slogging through the Cormac McCarthy wasteland, holding up my laptop and hoping to trip across a WiFi signal from some far off Starbacks.

Meanwhile...

I've been interviewed for a legendary horror magazine, one that I've loved for decades, and I can't wait to tell you about it.

The short story "It Sleeps Till Dark," which you'll find in last month's blog archives, now has a second chapter. I'll have to ask permission to run it here, though, since...I didn't write it.

I got the galley of Mark Henry's forthcoming zombie jewel Happy Hour of the Damned in the mail, signed with a cheerful death threat, and found out that Mark had dedicated the novel to me. How sweet! Except he misspelled my name C-A-R-O...oh wait, that's his wife. But I made the acknowledgment page though. Which is totally like finding yourself in the liner notes of a Metallica album. Cool! Oh, and P.S., you're going to love this book. It will leave you hungry, horny and scared. Not necessarily in that order.

I've started getting editorial notes back for what I hope will be the final draft of The Black Wing, and my editor really digs it so far.

I washed my dog on Thanksgiving. With pictures! Can't post 'em though. Yet.

Audiobook Winners!

Now here's something to be thankful for -- not one, but two winners of the Eat the Dark audiobooks. The idea here was to come up with the scariest bit of children's book prose, the weirder, the better.

The first is a seasonally appropriate bit of brilliance from Jeffrey Forbes:

Excerpted from "Satan Claus is coming to town" by B.L. Zebub

Packages wrapped with ribbons & bows

Under a tree with lights so bright

Robbie prayed he'd live 'til dawn

Every Christmas night



Everyone feared the darkness

Villagers fled the street

Inch by Inch he crept through town

Looking for someone to eat.



Our second winner, James Goodman, took a different approach, less funny, more flat out creepy.


“You’re hands are cold,” Johnny said, his tiny face drawn into a scowl.

He inched away from his twin brother, further up the bank.

“Why are you staring at me like that?” Johnny turned away from his brother’s unblinking gaze.

He could hear his mother’s footsteps coming down the trail. He turned to see her over his shoulder.

“Mom! Come help me,” he urged. “Bobby’s scaring me.”

She froze staring down at her two sons, their faces once mirror images, now share the same cut, but of a different hue. She drops to her knees, without a sound, hand reaching for tiny fingers extended, frozen in the air. She pitches forward, lands at the edge of the pond. Her palms slide across the ice. She grips the sleeve of his jacket.

“I can’t wake him up. Help me wake him up!” Johnny shouts, cold and frightened.

He drops beside his mother, tugs at the other sleeve. “I’m cold. I want to go home. Make him stop. Make him come home with us.”

“Why won’t he wake up?” Johnny stares at her with eyes so big, they seem out of place on something so small.

She stares back at him, heart torn, mind conflicted. How can she explain? Helpless, she pulls him close.

“He won’t ever wake up again Johnny,” she manages in a choked whisper.

Johnny’s body shudders under the weight of his burgeoning sobs. “Make him wake up. Make him wake up. Make him wake up.”

“Oh, Johnny… why did you have to take your brother out on the ice?”

Brrr. Congrats, Jeffrey and James -- drop me a line where I can send you these audiobooks. And have a great T-day, everybody.

I'll see you back here Friday for some really cool breaking news.

Office Space

We finally got most of the boxes unpacked. And guess what? There's actually a room where I'll be able to write!

And what's that on the desk? Next to the monkey lamp? Let's take a closer look, shall we?

That's right, the Eat the Dark audiobooks are here! And you know what that means -- if you entered to win one of these things...it's your lucky day. I'll be posting the winning answers later this week and getting the winners' addresses to send out these deliciously evil platters of pure terror.

By the way, I did my first podcast interview yesterday -- I can't say who interviewed me just yet, but when it goes live, I'll definitely post the link here. And it gave me another opportunity, among other things, to talk about what a great job Renee Raudman has done with these audiobooks, both Chasing the Dead and Eat the Dark.

Speaking of the Eat the Dark audiobook, Amazon's top 15 bestseller list for horror audio lists eight titles by Stephen King or his son, two by Koontz, one by Poe, one by Christopher Lamb, one by Elizabeth Kostova...and one by me.

And it snowed last night for the first time.

I love November.

Ira Levin

He wrote short books.

Unlike Norman Mailer, Levin never used a paragraph when a sentence would do, and never used a sentence when a single word would suffice. He used dialogue to advance the story, define character and build suspense. I remember being in my mid-20s, the delight I felt picking up a hardcover of The Stepford Wives at the Edgartown Library on the Vineyard, and realizing it was under 200 pages long. That seemed almost poetic.

He understood how our modern social manias and paranoia could easily slide into the supernatural and fantastic, and how these same elements of the supernatural and horrific can contain elements of black humor, all of which is so elegantly summed up by the four words The Boys from Brazil. I remember being a kid and hearing that title, probably the movie version, and dying to find out what it meant. To this day I think it's probably one of the most perfect titles ever.

He wrote about New York in a way that made it glamorous, scary and funny all at once. I remember one of my first trips to the city, when I came to meet my first agent and sign my first book deal. I stumbled across a film crew on the Upper West Side and saw Sharon Stone coming out of a brownstone. They were shooting the movie version Levin's novel Sliver. Later that day I found out my agent also represented him. I felt honored.

I own mass market paperbacks of most of his novels. When I got stuck on a chapter opening, I used to open them up and flip through just to see where and how he attacked the scene. It was like working one-on-one with a master craftsman.

Now he's gone.

And the world is that much emptier.

Lessons Learned (and Re-learned)

I read a half-dozen or so writing blogs on a regular basis, but few of them are as sane, honest, insightful and cogent as Tess Gerritsen's latest post on what she's learned over the last two decades of publishing novels. I haven't been around for that long -- my first novel came out back in 1994 -- and I haven't published nearly as many books, but much of what Tess talks about in this post resonates with me and how I've sometimes felt, both then and now.

Although I did a bit of celebrity ghostwriting in the late '90s, the only thing I published under my own name between '94 and 2006 was a travel guide to Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket. My fiction-writing career got something of a reboot with Chasing the Dead and Eat the Dark. Although I've only been "back" for a little over a year, I too often I find myself impatient with the sales aspect of my work, forgetting that most successful authors build careers over years and decades, rather than lucking into them the first or third time out.

And, as Tess points out, just because you hit the New York Times Bestseller list once doesn't guarantee you the career of a bestselling author. I still remember how I felt when Putnam bought Next of Kin back in the early '90s, and my first thought was, I'd never have to work a day job again. The optimism and excitement that I felt was understandable, but I wish I hadn't wasted so much potential writing time feeling frustrated and disappointed...in other words, I wish I would have been able to read Tess's thoughtful and revealing comments back then.

Meanwhile, I'm going to print them off and post them over my (new) desk, as I go to work on another round of revisions on my next book.

Last Year at This Time...

Look at this guy. This is a happy man. He is on vacation with his family, standing outside the cemetery in Concord, MA, one of his all time favorite places, and it's mid-autumn, 2006, a great time to be in New England.

Flash forward to 2007...

We weren't in New England this weekend.

We weren't on vacation.

We were moving.

Everything we own.

Back-breaking. Soul-shattering. Knuckle-busting. Wallet-draining. But it was so worth it. Our new house is bigger, newer and funner (yeah, it's a word, look it up) than the one we're leaving behind. There's an extra bedroom where I'll hopefully be getting The Black Wing ready to go out the door by year's end. Also, the other upside, we got the whole thing done--

In one day. That's right, sports fans, one single day. At the end of the day, around nine o'clock, I drink half a glass of Jim Beam in lieu of Ibuprofin and crawled onto the mattress which was all we had left behind in the old house -- we don't officially take residence until Wednesday -- and fell asleep next to my son. I felt like I'd been hit by a garbage truck full of brass doorknobs.

Also, as a bonus, I just found out that Eat the Dark got a pretty cool review in Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle. Check it out.

Writers Need Sugar!

My pal Martin "Big Labor" Sweeney, aka Kyle McStrikey, aka, Pickethammer Jones, is a working screenwriter, and right now he's doing what the rest of the working screenwriters of America are doing, standing out in front of studios, picketing and holding signs. I spent an hour or so on the phone with him last night talking about the strike, and came out of it feeling surprisingly optimistic about my own future, since all I really want to do is sell out and write for Hollywood like F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Right now conventional wisdom is dictating that the strike is going to last for a while, and while that might be the case, the most recent scuttlebutt isn't all that dark. For one thing, current rumor and speculation seems to hold that the producers and studios on the other side of the negotiating table are using the strike as an opportunity to cancel not-so-profitable contracts and reboot a less-than-thrilling TV season. After thirty days of work stoppage, these things become possible. So word on the street seems to be, after six weeks or so, the producers will reach some kind of an agreement and people can all get back to the business of buying screenplays, firing writers, putting new writers on the job, pumping out watered-down entertainment for the big and small screen, and most importantly, making a lot of money.

More important still is the fact that, for a lot of these writers, the act of picketing actually constitutes the first real exercise these guys of gotten since they first started actually selling screenplays. Martin suggested a "weigh-in" whereby the striking writers are all weighed pre- and post-strike, with the idea that they should lose an average of at least ten pounds. This goal may be slightly skewed by the fact that mega-agencies like UTA are dropping off four hundred pizzas and hundreds of boxes of cookies to show their support.

Go big labor!

On the List!

Just found out that Eat the Dark is on Dark Delicacies' Top Ten Bestseller List for the week ending 11/3/07. If you've never been over to the DD website -- or the Burbank location -- check it out. You're missing a treat.

I've been busy with a couple interviews which will hopefully be out in the next month or so. And I've been reading Norman Partridge's short stories, most recently The Man with the Barbed-Wire Fists. Norm's fiction will get your blood pumping by page one, especially if you read it while listening to Steve Earle's Copperhead Road. Man, it's good.

Soft Pretzels and Hard Truths

A guy walks into a bar, covered in blood, carrying a chainsaw in one hand and a human head in the other.

The bartender looks at him and says, "This isn't a joke, is it?"

This nickel's worth of absurdity occurred to me while I was sipping a Blue Moon with an orange slice in it at Ruby Tuesday's in the Berkshire Mall in Reading yesterday. I was in between book signings, having just finished one at Borders Express in Park City Mall, then driving 45 minutes to the Borders Express in Reading.

I felt like I deserved that beer.

If you're a relative unknown, doing book signing in a shopping mall can be many things -- encouraging, awkward, surprising, comical -- but a joke, it is not. If you're hanging out at a mall for any amount of time, particularly if you're sitting at a table in front of the store with copies of your books stacked on either side of you, watching the human traffic flow by, you soon realize you're seeing people in their most unprententious state. For a writer, even one who isn't hawking his or her wares to an unsuspecting public, it's a great exercise. If you've got the skin for it, that is.

Most people won't even notice you. Some will stare, often with genuine pity, as if you were an animal whose owner has leashed it to a rack of James Patterson mass markets while he goes to get an Auntie Anne's soft pretzel. Others will come up, stare at your book covers for a moment, and walk away without a word. Still others will stand there and make fun of your book titles, and then walk away.

But most people who are actually interested enough to stop and look at the books on the tables will be intrigued enough to talk to you. They're the ones who, when you ask if they like scary books, will probably say yes. Or at least, they'll tell you what kinds of books they do like. You'll chat about where you live, what you do for a day job, how you became a writer. At some point there will come a prom-date pause when you'll have the chance to tell them what your books are about, and depending on their reaction, they might pick one up and look at the back cover. And maybe, just maybe, they'll buy a copy and have you sign it.

Between my two mall appearances yesterday, I probably sold a dozen or so copies of Eat the Dark, and another dozen of Chasing the Dead mass markets. Not a banner day, but not too shabby either, considering they were all cold-call sales. Certainly more than I would have sold if I hadn't been sitting there, pen in hand, on the authorial equivalent of the county fair dunking stool. I'm grateful to every person who bought a copy, but even if I didn't sell a single one, I'd chalk the experience up as time well spent. Partly because I think it's inherently good for an author, particularly someone like me who isn't a natural self-promoter, to get lots of practice talking about his books and getting his pitch down a few sentences or less. Let's face it: Unless you're Joe Hill or Max Brooks or Laurel K. Hamilton, these cold-call type opportunities, as awkward as they might seem, are your one good chance to get your books out there, get them prime real estate, even better than what Warner Books pays in co-op for James Patterson. It's inherently a good opportunity.

But I think it's important for another reason -- I think, as a writer, you have to be realistic about the marketplace. And like I said, if you're selling yourself, there's no place more realistic than a suburban mall on a Saturday afternoon. For every person that went into Borders yesterday, or even glanced in its direction, twenty walked by without so much as noticing its existence. Most people don't read books. If you sit in front of bookstore for two hours, you start to wonder how they can even afford to pay their lease.

Yet they do. And people do come up, and listen while you talk about your books, their eyes widening as you sketch out the premise of the story, and that prom-date moment ends the best well possible with the retail equivalent of a long slow kiss as they pick up your book, and you know -- flat out know -- the only time they're going to let go of it again is when they let you sign it for them. Then it's straight back to the cash register. You know this from the look in their eye, just as you know that that they're going to sit down later that night after the kids are in bed, and start reading your book, and they're probably going to dig it. You just know. And that's the best. It's like mainlining pure satisfaction when that happens, the ultimate manifestation of the ideal writer/reader connection.

Fact: As writers, we spend most of our lives in a vacuum, and often it does indeed suck. The solution is to open the pressure valves, to put yourself out there and mix it up. You'll learn what kinds of people like the stuff you're writing, and how a potential buyer's mind works when she's only got ten extra dollars to spend on a week's worth of entertainment. You'll learn more about the rude truth of American's buying preferences in two hours of mall traffic than you will in a month of online publicity.

It might not always be pleasant or ego-soothing or even particularly encouraging, but like the bartender said when he looked at the guy with the chainsaw and the severed head, it's no joke.

My Halloween Pimp Hat