Warmed and Bound: A Velvet Anthology (43 page)

LIVIUS: Can you tell us a little bit about your relationship with Dzanc and the reprint label?

STEPHEN: What it is they'd already accepted my not for nothing novel and Flushboy novel for publication in 2013 and 2014 as both eBooks and print, but then they started this rEprint with a capital E for electronic.

LIVIUS: It’s edgier that way.

STEPHEN: It sure is! When they started the rEprint line and they hit me up and said, “Hey, what about your back catalog? What do you have that's both out of print and that you have the rights to?” I'm like, “I don't know; I've never read one of my contracts. My agent sends them to me, I sign them, then I lose them.” That’s the way it all happens. So my agent and I figured out what I have the rights to and it turned out I had the rights to
The Long Trial of Nolan Dugatti
from Chiasmus Press and
All the Beautiful Sinners
from Rugged Land and I've been itching for years to rewrite
All the Beautiful Sinners
. Even when it was published I thought it was too bulky, I thought it didn't move fast enough. It was like a lot of me indulging myself and the author should never be allowed to do that. A fiction writer anyways. I said, “Do you want to run with them?” And the editor said, “Yeah, that's great.” Then I said, “What about this other novel that's not reprint or not strictly a debut either,
Seven Spanish Angels
” which was supposed to come out in ‘05, but I got into a big fight with the publisher and it died, it was on Amazon which was real, but it wasn't really real. He said, “Sure.”
Seven Spanish Angels
came out today actually. It’s the debut novel in their rEprint series, but it's not actually a reprint. I love that novel,
Seven Spanish Angels
and I’m so happy to be getting it and
Dugatti
and
Sinners
out in e-format because when e readers first popped up, instantly, I knew that's where everything was going to go. It's so convenient and so intuitive. I didn't think it was going to happen as fast as its happening. I thought it was going to be a 10 year cycle I think we're more on a 3 to 4 year cycle. I think really soon the p-book is going to be a collector's limited edition thing. Brick and mortar stores are by and large gonna go bye-bye and it will be all e, which I'm cool with. I mean I love book stores, don't get me wrong, but I like instantaneousness of being able to click on something and have it on my eReader immediately. I like that my readers can do that as well.

ROBB: You just gave us like 4 follow up questions. So we're going to run through them in order and if we skip over some, that's fine too. Let's talk
Seven Spanish Angels
first. Like you said, in our time machine fashion, this will have come out yesterday. Do you want to talk a little more about what it's about at all?

STEPHEN: Yeah, it's about, well, we all know about the Juarez Murders, if from nowhere else from Robert Bolano. It was big news back in ‘05 when I was writing this or ‘04 also. It's about the girls being found out in the desert, dead.
Seven Spanish Angels
, what it is, is 7 days and 7 girls somebody's trying to kill 7 girls in 7 days. Our lead investigator, the protagonist, is a young girl, Marta Villareal. She's what, 22, I guess, she's not even officially out of crime-tech school yet and her boyfriend, who is AWOL at the moment for the novel, is the main suspect because he used to work the Bravo Murders which are the Juarez women. And she has to figure out who's doing it and stop it from happening. And of course, she's one of these 7 women who are supposed to be killed. This is a novel I wrote; I think it's 300 to 350 pages. I wrote about 2000 pages to get it down though. It was supposed to be a sequel to
All the Beautiful Sinners
, took it to my publishers, I'd written 300 or so pages and he put his finger down on page 2 or page 6 and he said, you know, “Let's chop it all off and start right here.” He did that about 6 or 7 times and he'd get deeper in the book, 50 pages, 70 pages and I'd have to start all over. I didn't like this, doing a whole lot of writing. It did improve the book tremendously. It's a really tight novel I think. In going back through it, I was going to fix everything. Cause I thought surely it's a five year old book, there's gonna be all kinds of stuff broken. I burned back through it looking for all kinds of typos, but there weren't even many of those. It went through the ringer and I think it's very clean. I'm very proud of it. 

LIVIUS: You mentioned having an e book reader, and I know on your blog, I read a really interesting thing, it was the pros and cons of paper books and e books and it was really great stuff. My question after all that is, whose reader do you use?

STEPHEN: Right now I've got a Kindle 2, and I keep trying to stage falls. For it to break because I want a Kindle 3 or I want that new Nook. But now my Kindle won't break. This one just won't break. Although, I knocked my Mac Book Pro over the other day, knocked it on the ground and it's not acting happy anymore. I need more gadgets. I was all happy about that Google Reader. I thought that was going to be that's where the reader needs to go. We need a retailer free platform. We need to have something that we can just go to Amazon, or go to B&N or go to Google or go to the library and get whatever format they have and read it on my reader. I think as long as the readers are specific to different companies; I think it's going to be too fragmented. We need one reader to unite them all.

ROBB: When you said that you accidentally dropped your Mac Book Pro, I cringed a little bit. I'm a big, big Apple person and Livius is definitely on the Windows side of things. He always makes fun of me. I think I felt a little pain when you told that.

STEPHEN: I had to trade in my iPhone because I couldn't get reception in my house with AT&T. Now I have a Droid, it's a fun thing, but I miss my iPhone.

ROBB: You mentioned gadgets before. When I was doing a little research before we did this, I think I saw somewhere that you're into gadgets. What kind of gadgets are you looking for or that are coming out? What do you geeked out the most on?

STEPHEN: I like the look of the Sony S2 tablet. I've never been big on Sony; I know they do quality stuff. The Sony stuff never plays well with my Macs. I like the way the S2 looks. It's a tablet that folds in the middle like a little DS or something. That would be so handy to have something like a clam shell I could stick in my pocket like an eye glass case and then fold it up on the bus and go to town. I love that. I like that split screen idea. I would like to play with it anyways. I don't have a tablet right now. I think it's because I got my nose in my phone all the time anyway, I'm like what am I going to do with a bigger phone? It takes up all my time. I'm still jealous of those people with iPads or different tablets. They cock it open wherever they are and they got that little Bluetooth keyboard. Man they're cooking. I'm thinking they're doing work and I'm just sitting here listening to songs.

ROBB: You mentioned in an email to us that you're teaching a class that has to do with zombies. That sounds exciting. We've talked to a lot of people about zombies. 

STEPHEN: Yes, it's zombie renaissance. It’s an online course for continuing ed. at CU Boulder. They invited me to teach it and I jumped on it. Because the wonderful thing about an online course is you can give your students six times too much to read, and they have to read it. In a chalk and seats classroom, you have to police yourself a little bit, but online you can go crazy. And I got so many cool zombie stories. I have the class split into 5 units, protozombie, then we go pre, Haitian, Romero, rage and post, maybe it's 6 units. We go all the way back to Tibet, those freaky zombies, we go through the hopping zombies of china, and through the dark ages, come up and try to read Poe, follow The House of Usher such that it's a zombie story. The Monkey's Paw of WW Jacobs, which I think is a zombie story. Then we look onto all the enthusiast stuff happening with people importing these stories up out of Haiti in the early 20th century, for a terrified or guilty America who was scared of an underclass rising against them. Then you have Lovecraft, 1922, he gives us these zombies, they're hungry, they'll rip you limb from limb, they walk around in hordes, he was the first dude to say hoard in association with zombies, anyway, I found some cool old stories. I found this one story; it cost $142 for me to take a picture of it at some Australian library. It's an old old zombie story that's so good. And then we jump to Romero, you know how he gave us flesh eating and infectiousness and the all important head shot. 

We stay with Romero for awhile and have fun with him. We get to
Return of the Living Dead
, and I love
Return of the Living Dead
, that's probably one of my favorite zombie movies. Although Max Brooks says it killed the zombie story, which it did, but then Boyle brought it back in ‘02 with
28 Days Later
and
Resident Evil
was the same year. The next year was
The Zombie Survival Guide
, which is actually a defense manual for Romero zombies, but we were already in the Rage Era. Then
World War Z
and now here we are with
Rammbock
. We got these rage zombies developing in really interesting ways. In that class, that’s what we're trying to figure out in class right now. Why this zombie craze right now and where is it going? Those are the two main questions. 

LIVIUS: Wow, that's all I can say about the brief history of zombies we just heard. Of all the zombie types, whose camp are you in?

STEPHEN: I prefer the rage zombies. I think they make for more exciting stories because any plans the characters make are always frustrated by these zombies that are so fast. The trick with a rage zombie is, like our trick, as humans, we grew up as persistent hunters, we could run an antelope down until it died, then we'd stab a spear through its side and have us some food. Our lungs and our long legs and our intelligence are the three things that separate us from animals, but now you have these rage zombies, they don't need to breathe, or maybe they breathe, but their hunger out balances their need to stop running because they're hurting themselves, so the rage zombie is never going to stop chasing you. And for that reason they're terrifying. Although on an individual level, I'd hate to encounter a rage zombie, but on a global level, I think the Romero zombie is more effective because I think Romero zombies infect the population better. Because they're so slow, they get one bite out of you, then you run away to the safe place and you infect everybody else. Whereas a rage zombie, they bite onto you, they're chewing for awhile and they got you. Haitian zombies, No one is scared of Haitian zombies. They developed because of a cultural fear of enslavement, you know, what's worse than being enslaved your life, well, being enslaved during death too. In America, we're not scared of that, we're scared of marketing campaigns turning us into mindless consumers.

ROBB: I have something, I risk outing myself as a far huger geek than I ever have admitted, at least not on an audio podcast that other people will listen to. I have a pretty okay knowledge of how role playing games like D&D work. Now traditionally, let's say in D&D, zombies add a seriously different element, like they can be defeated by religious people. The holy aspect of it, not something you see in traditional zombie movies. Does that ever come up in your class? Do you address that at all? 

STEPHEN: You know it doesn't come up. We talk a little about the priest in night of the living dead, but we didn't talk about it very much. But yeah, the clerics in D&D they always have powers over the undead. I think must be kind of like the port cross from the vampire. I think that was a sloppy move on D&D's part, or whoever created the world at the time. I completely understand those 18 sided dice. I nearly failed out of college playing D&D. I weaned myself off of D&D with Magic, which was pretty addictive too, then I weaned myself off Magic with Settlers, then I don't have anybody to play Settlers with anymore, so I just write fiction.

LIVIUS: Probably the more profitable venture of the two. One more follow up on zombies, only because we had to quiz a couple other authors on this. Assuming Romero type needing brain death zombies, if you were in the zombie apocalypse, and your choice was sword or sledgehammer, which would you go with?

STEPHEN: I think I would go for sword. Not because it's more effective, because I would feel cooler. I think the zombie apocalypse plague, it’s not about surviving, and it’s about having the best death. I think I would have a much better death with a sword. It would look a lot more dramatic if Frank Frezetta were to draw it or something than if I had sledgehammer. I'd go for the sword. Especially like a katana, not a long sword, I wouldn't know how to swing a long sword. I wouldn't be much use with a rapier or a cutlass or any of that. I've seen enough martial arts movies that I think I could pretend in my head I knew how to use a katana.

LIVIUS: That's where we all learned our katana abilities, Kung Fu Sunday.  

ROBB: For the record, Livius has chosen "sword" in a previous episode and I had chosen sledgehammer. Back to teaching a little bit. I'm assuming the zombie class isn't the only thing you teach. Are there any other authors that you think are important to teach in your classes that you want to mention? 

STEPHEN: You know, I don't. In the other classes that I teach, I've taught Slasher, I've taught Haunted House. I guess, in Haunted House King was kind of important and Shirley Jackson was pretty important, but in Fiction Workshop, which is really what I teach the most, that's what they hired me here for, I don't know if there is any author, I have two or three, maybe ten or twelve clutch stories that I try to walk people through just so they can understand a story works, somewhat, so they can see that I don't understand how a story works, either way. The way I keep those fiction workshops interesting to me, usually, is I don't have a textbook.

The first day of class, the assignment I give is everyone goes out to the library, go out into the world, go out to the magazine rack and find, you have to read at least ten stories, ideally fifteen, you have to prove to me that you read them you have to give me a annotated bibliography, and you have to bring the best of those stories to us, eighteen or twenty copies, so we can all read it and that's our textbook for the year, those eighteen or twenty stories they bring. So, I get to read a lot of stories that I would not have otherwise found, and it's all new, and I think that the things that I might to say about these stories are probably, or hopefully rings a little more true because they aren't canned, I haven't said this to fifteen other classes, you know. No, I don't think I have any writers I say you have to read ever, I just have ideas about story that I try to pass on.