My friend Leigh Anne, over at her
Be Less Amazing blog, participated in the Writing Process Blog Tour.
She was invited to do this by local Pittsburgh Poet Angele Ellis (you
can read her responses HERE). Leigh Anne made a more general call for
anyone to participate. I'm doing the same. If you want to be a part
of this, answer the questions below and link back to me. I'm curious
to see what other people have to say.
What Am I Working On?
Way too many things, probably.
I'm currently working on a paid professional comics project involving
the Holocaust in conjunction with the Pittsburgh Holocaust Center and
the Pittsburgh Toonseum (this is my first public announcement of
this). I serve on the steering committee as a comics historian as
well. The overall project involves what will be a traveling
educational art/history museum installation called “Chutz-Pow!:
Real Life Superheroes of the Holocaust.” The idea is to focus on
real people who participated in genuinely heroic acts in the midst of
this tragedy. We're using the metaphor of the superhero to do this.
Many of the earliest comics creators were Jewish and had connections
with European Jews during this period. Many served in the military in
World War II.
My primary responsibility is
writing a 24 page comic book that will be given away as part of the
project. I'm telling the stories of five Pittsburgh residents who fit
the description of a “real life hero of the Holocaust.” This has
involved a tremendous amount of research. The biggest challenge of
this for me is trying to fit these tremendous stories into four to
eight page vignettes. I'm lucky to be working with four local
professional comics artists. This is shaping up to possibly be the
biggest, most important writing project of my life so far.
The installation will premiere at
the 2014 Pittsburgh Three Rivers Arts Festival. I will be making more specific announcements about this project as the details develop.
In addition to this project I
occasionally blog at two different sites, this one and another one
over at Word Press. That ones, called Masks, is the home of my very
specific ramblings and thoughts on comic book history and serves as a
first draft space for what may someday be a book on the topic. This
one is home to a wide variety of topics. I write the occasional book
review for the Pittsburgh Post Gazette.
Then there are my novels. I have
four complete novels available, and I'm currently about 50,000 words
into the next one (though it seems to be taking awhile).
How does my work differ from
others of its genre?
In the course of submitting my
novels to agents and publishers I was told many times that while they
loved my writing style (one agent called it “lyrical”), the
problem was that they didn't know how to market it because it didn't
fit comfortably in a specific genre. Three of my novels (I leave
Bedivere out because it is pretty specifically Arthurian fiction),
straddle the line between Horror and Urban Fantasy. The tropes of
each of these are certainly present, but it's difficult to pinpoint
either. When I was submitting I would craft my pitch either way
depending on what the publisher was looking for. I've had others
refer to my work as Dark Fantasy, Slipstream, Magical Realism, and
Speculative Fiction. Okay...
So what makes my work different?
While I deal with elements of Horror my work isn't as dark as a lot
of that genre. Even in my darkest moments I am still inspired by
heroic fiction, so I guess that's where the Fantasy comes in. There
is a message of hope in my work that that is absent from a lot of
Horror, without ever slipping into “the hero who will save the
world” cliches. I'm not very interested in the classic monsters of
Horror (at least in writng about them). It might be more commercial
but the world has enough vampire and werewolf and zombie fiction
right now, and don't get me started on the overdone Lovecraftian,
tentacled horror from beyond. There's way too much of that to dig
through. There are so many other mythologies and folk lore to mine
for ideas.
Why do I write what I do?
I've always been drawn to the
fantastic. I learned to read from comic books, so the idea of heroes
living in a world of monsters and aliens and super powers is my
default worldview. I like the metaphor that these genres provide.
When we write about monsters we're writing about the monstrous in
ourselves. When we write about heroes we're appealing to our own
better self. Genre fiction allows us to exaggerate these things and
explore the ideas in sometimes deeper ways.
And, simply because I enjoy these
genres myself, I find them more fun to write.
How does your writing process
work?
When things are going well on a
novel I sit down at the keyboard and write. I try for at least 1000
words before I will let myself walk away. There's no magic to it
other than showing up for work. I usually have spent a lot of time
thinking about the project and what comes next, and I will have a few
notes, but in general I'm not a big outliner or planner. Within
certain parameters I want to be open to let the story take me where
it will. Characters frequently say and do things I never planned
until the moment I wrote the lines. When that happens it is usually a
sign that the story has become a living thing and I need to listen to
what it's trying to tell me.
The process works better for me
when I have some kind of writing routine in place. Recently I have
not been showing up to work as often as I would like, at least not on
my novels. As I stated above I have been spending a lot of my
creative time on the Holocaust project. I'm also teaching a class
this semester and a lot of my energy has gone toward that. These are
not meant as excuses, simply the reality of time management at the
moment. I made a conscious decision to put a hold on the novel I'm
working on because I knew these other commitments would eat into my
time and energy. The fear is always that once I get off the
novel-writing horse it can be difficult to get back on.
But I write because I write. It's
a big part of what defines me.
