Saturday, May 28, 2011

The F. Paul Wilson Interview: Final Installment

Well, it's hard to believe that May is almost over, and with the end of May comes the final installment of the F. Paul Wilson "Breakfast Interview" from World Horror Convention 2011.  I would like to express my gratitude to Paul for being so gracious as to allow me over an hour of his time to have this interview, and the subsequent time he spent going over my transcriptions to make sure that everything accurately reflected his responses to my questions.


So, without further delay, enjoy the final installment of my interview with F. Paul Wilson.






AA: So, since you still practice medicine on a part-time basis on Mondays and Tuesdays, do you have a concrete writing schedule for the rest of the week?

FPW: Yeah. Basically, I get up in the morning and I write, and I write until I run out of gas. Usually, by 3:00 in the afternoon, I'm ready to quit. Sometimes, I'll go to the gym and work out for about half an hour, and if the juices are flowing, I'll write some more. And, of course, there are times when I'm on a roll, and I'll skip the gym.

At the minimum, I try to do 1,000 words every day on a novel. Once I do that, I feel like I've done my duty. Then I can do other things. I used to work on a short story here and there. But now I'm scripting these graphic novel adaptations, or I'm proofing something. I've got the proofs for Reprisal sitting there, and they want them back by May 6. And they'll get the back on time, but I can never go through with the kind of care that I'd like. I mean, I go through it as carefully as I can, and try to make it as consistent as possible with everything else I've written. But then, reading it again is like “Ugh!” So that can be a chore, but it's something I have to do. And it can pay off. Sometimes I'll find a glaring error, and I'm really glad I caught it.

AA: Do you tend to wait till a chapter, a section or the entire book is complete before you go back and do revisions, or do you tend to “revise on the fly”?

FPW: No. In fact, I do my best not to go back until the entire book is finished. I start out not knowing my characters very well. They're much more a function of my story. But then, as I go along, they become more real. By the end of the book, I know them well. So then I go back and re-write what I know about them. I can include things earlier in the book about their characters that will be consistent with what they'll have to do later on. It's a matter of retro-fitting the characters with the rest of the story.

AA: It's interesting that I actually read The Haunted Air shortly before I read the book Superstition by David Ambrose, which also deals with the tricks of the psychic trade. I actually learned more about the underbelly of that industry reading these two works of fiction than I ever had anywhere else.

FPW: I learned from The Psychic Mafia [by M. Lamar Keene and Allen Spraggett]. It's an outdated book, because now they use computers and email now to share all this information.

AA: So, when you're setting out to write a novel, do you tend to be more compelled by your plot or your characters?

FPW: I like to think of it as “the story,” which is everything together. Plot doesn't move without characters. And characters running around without a plot? I guess it could be interesting for a while, but during 100,000 words or more, they have to do something.

But basically, as a rule, my characters serve my plot. I work hard on the characters to make them likable and accessible. Or reprehensible, if that makes the story work better. I like symmetry when I'm writing a story, so I work very hard to achieve that symmetry. And if [the symmetry] works, even if you fail a little bit with the characters, the reader still comes away feeling like they've had some sort of satisfying experience.

So, I'm a story guy rather than a pure character guy.

AA: So the story itself tends to have power over your characters, rather than the other way around?

FPW: Yeah, they serve the story. I mean, I may have to have someone jump in the river to accomplish something in the story, and I didn't know they were going to have to do that in the outlining stage. Then I have to go back [during revision] and include the fact that they were on a swim-team in high school to make the scenario plausible.

Sometimes I'll start off with a strong character, like Lyle in The Haunted Air. I wanted a very cynical—at the risk of sounding redundant—fake psychic. He wasn't kidding himself. He was in a very likable role, as opposed to the other psychics that Jack deals with.

AA: What book in your repertoire are you MOST proud of?

FPW: I would say Black Wind. The Keep is also up there. For some reason, it hit all the notes that I wanted to hit. And it's also frozen in a very crucial point in world history. So it doesn't get old and dated. I did a lot of research, and I got everything right as far as the period. So, I'm very pleased with that. Thirty years in print—I must have done something right.

I also really like The Haunted Air. That's one of the few novels I've written where I actually went in with a theme: knowledge versus belief. That was the theme that I clung to during the whole novel. It is very rare that I approach a novel with an idea as the engine. Save for my science fiction novels. Those books are very idea-driven, except maybe Dydeetown World. That was character-driven. I wanted to write Raymond Chandler-esque book, and that was it. I love that book.

AA: Do you get to do a lot of reading these days?

FPW: Nowhere near as much as I would like. That's why I like these trips. I can get on a plane and I can read. I can also write, because I don't have the internet or a phone to distract me. I can pound out my thousand words without much trouble on a plane. On the flight here I finished a .pdf of the last book of Sarah Pinborough's The Dog-Faced Gods trilogy. Which, by the way, you can't get here in the United States, so she was nice enough to send me a copy so I could load it onto my Kindle. I believe Tor will be publishing it here soon.

AA: Who is the most exciting writer in your estimation to come out recently?

FPW: Well, Sarah is awfully good, but she's been out for a while. She wrote for Leisure years ago. Even her books there were a cut above the rest. I think she has really hit her stride with the supernatural thriller like The Dog-Faced Gods. She's got the procedural down cold. She's got the underlying “Otherness-type” stuff. I really look forward to reading her books. Women seem to be writing the more innovative fantastica these days. Rhodi Hawk, Alex Sokolov, Mary Sangiovanni, Sarah Langan, Kelli Owen—they’re not recycling the same old tropes.

I get a lot of books from people who are looking for a blurb or whatever. Some are good; some are not. Nowadays, I spend a lot of my reading time doing research. Searching for New York in the 1990s has taken up a huge amount of my time. I thought it would be so easy. You know, Life in New York in 1990: The Book...Nope, doesn't exist. So, I have to go to all these different sources to do my research. I have to think about all the popular places in New York City. You're walking down Seventh Avenue near Times Square—is CATS playing yet? Is Les Miserables still playing? And all this just to add a little color to the narrative. It amounts to ten throw-away words, but it can take me hours to do the research to get it right. I'm anal about all that, so that's where I “waste” a lot of my time, rather than reading. Believe me, I'd rather be reading for fun.

AA: I'm going to ask you a question similar to one that I ask almost every other author that I interview for my blog, and that is--

FPW: Do you like Marvel or DC?

AA: [laughs] I was thinking more along the lines of “Do you prefer The Who or Led Zepplin?” Actually, the question is: if you were sitting across the table from a young F. Paul Wilson, and you were advising him about the directions that he should take to become a successful bestseller, what would you say to him?

FPW: Well, if we're talking about writing for profit, I would tell him to write that second Repairman Jack novel. Then again, maybe not. I mean, I earned a seven-figure advance for The Select, and if I had been writing Repairman Jack [instead] where would I have been? But, I went and wrote The Select because I had finished Nightworld and The Adversary Cycle as a whole, and I wanted to try something a little different. So, if I'd continued with Repairman Jack, I wouldn't have had that advance.

But who knows? It's a tough question to answer. A successful film could have made a huge difference. I look back and the movie technology of the 1980s was pony-cart compared to today. They could not have made a good version of The Tomb back then. Roger Corman optioned it, and re-set the story in Pasadena. And you just know [the Rakoshi] would have been guys in rubber suits. I always say the line between horror and hilarity is very thin. They would have made a very bad movie out of [The Tomb]. He came up with a terrible script, plus there were complications with rights to the title (a long story involving Fred Olen Ray that I won’t go into here). All in all, a mess.

But I digress. [If I'd stayed with Repairman Jack], I might be on Repairman Jack #27 right now, and I could have run him into the ground, and I would be so locked into Repairman Jack that I couldn't do anything else. I could have been like Lee Child. He's very happy writing [Jack] Reacher novels. And for him it works, because they are all very stand-alone in nature, so he can go on writing those forever. But if he wants to take off in another direction, he might have some trouble—not because of the quality of the writing, because he’s tops, but because readers would say “I want a Reacher novel.”

Robert Parker got out of that with Spenser by cloning Spenser. Jesse Stone is Spenser in a small town. He even talks the same. So, people who want another Spenser novel can just go out and pick up a Jesse Stone novel. They're exactly the same.

It's easy to get locked in, especially if the character is successful. Jack started off with a bang in The Tomb. It was on the New York Times bestseller list, and I certainly could have kept doing that. People kept saying, “I want another Repairman Jack book.” And I would just raise my hands and say “No, no, no. I want to do The Touch. I want to do this really cool book about World War II called Black Wind.”




F. PAUL WILSON is the author of forty-plus books and numerous short stories spanning science fiction, horror, adventure, medical thrillers, and virtually everything between. His novels regularly appear on the New York Times Bestsellers List. He was voted Grand Master by the World Horror Convention and received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Horror Writers of America. He has also received the Stoker Award, the Porgie Award, the Prometheus and Prometheus Hall of Fame Awards, the Pioneer Award from the RT Booklovers Convention, the Inkpot Award from San Diego ComiCon, and is listed in the 50th anniversary edition of Who's Who in America.


Over eight million copies of his books are in print in the US and his work has been translated into twenty-four languages. He also has written for the stage, screen, and interactive media. His latest thrillers, Ground Zero and Fatal Error, star his urban mercenary, Repairman Jack. Jack: Secret Vengeance recently concluded a young-adult trilogy starring a fourteen-year-old Jack. Paul resides at the Jersey Shore and can be found on the Web at www.repairmanjack.com.




JESSE S. GREEVER is "The Accidental Author" and CEO of eLectio Publishing, a digital publisher for Christian authors.  If you are a Christian author and have a manuscript that you think is worthy of publication, check out the submission guidelines and follow the directions for manuscript submissions.

Greever is also a co-author of the book, Learning to Give in a Getting World, and numerous fiction titles from Untreed Reads publishing.
You can become a fan of eLectio Publishing on FaceBook:  http://www.facebook.com/eLectioPublishing
You can follow eLectio Publishing on Twitter (@eLectioPubs):  https://twitter.com/#!/eLectioPubs

Friday, May 20, 2011

The F Paul Wilson Interview GIVEAWAY Rules

Okay, as promised, for the finale of my World Horror Convention Breakfast Interview with FPW, I am going to be running a giveaway of signed FPW books.

Here are the rules:

You can enter one of four ways:

1.  Become a follower of this blog (The Accidental Author). 
2.  Become a follower of me on Twitter (@tisafire)
3.  Become a fan of my author page on FaceBook (http://on.fb.me/l1gtNI)
4.  Post a MEANINGFUL comment to any one of the portions of the interview.  You can make ONE entry this way PER DAY (but you can only enter ONCE PER DAY this way...for example, if you post five comments in a day, it still only counts as ONE entry).  I will reserve the right to reject an entry if it is not MEANINGFUL...ie, if you just post your name or some random word that has NOTHING to do with the interview, that WILL NOT COUNT.

You CAN garner multiple entries.  If you do #1, 2, 3 AND 4, that will count as FOUR entries.  So, conceivably, any one person could have 15 entries maximum (one each from #1, #2 and #3 and 12 entries by posting one comment per day).

Any time you complete any one of the four, email me at entries@accidental-author.com.  Each entry will be assigned an integer.  The very first entry will be given the number 1, the second, number 2 and so on.  You will receive a reply with your entry number for that entry.

NOTE:  If you already ARE a follower of my blog, follower of mine on Twitter, fan of mine on FaceBook, email me at entries@accidental-author.com stating this and I will assign you entry numbers for each.

The deadline is May 31.  On June 1, using true random number generator at www.random.org, I will draw TWO winners, based on the number assigned to their entry (or entries).

The FIRST prize winner will receive a hardcover copy of FATAL ERROR, signed by F Paul Wilson.

The SECOND prize winner will receive a trade paperback copy of THE KEEP signed by F Paul Wilson.

If you win, you will be contacted via email to get your mailing address.  Prizes will be mailed out around June 15, 2011.

If you have any questions, post them here, or email me at jesse@accidental-author.com.

Good luck!

Thursday, May 19, 2011

The F. Paul Wilson Interview Part Three

It's time for yet another installment of the face-to-face interview I had with New York Times bestselling author F. Paul Wilson.  In this segment, he responds to a very complimentary comment from Stephen King about his work, the road to publication of his most ambitious novel, Black Wind, and the evolution of the publishing industry as it rapidly makes the conversion to more digital-based publishing.


Also, read the note following this installment...I'll be having a very exciting contest to commemorate the final part of the installment with F. Paul Wilson!


Welcome back...F. Paul Wilson...






The Accidental Author: I'm going to ask you to respond to something. When I was a sophomore in high school, I worked at the library in my hometown. We had a display case, and every month, a different library employee had to do some sort of themed display. When it was my month, I decided to do a Stephen King display, since I was a huge fan at the time. I wrote him a letter and asked him to send stuff for the display case, and to my surprise, he sent back a whole box of promotional materials. And included in that was a personal letter to me, where he detailed many of his influences and inspirations. In one of the final paragraphs, he specifically states that The Touch is a book that taught him the “literary value of horror”.

FPW: My book?

AA: Yup.

FPW: Well, he never told me.

AA: Are you surprised that it would be The Touch?

FPW: I’m just plain old surprised. I’ve never been accused of “literary value” before. Let’s not spread that around too much – don’t want to sully my pulp cred. But literary or not, The Touch became an example of an ongoing problem with my work: Publishers didn't know what to expect from me. The Tomb after The Keep was not what Wm. Morrow wanted. They turned it down. Then, I wrote The Touch, and it wasn't really horror, per se. I mean, it was horror in the sense of what was happening to [the main character]. But I had all that gothic stuff in The Keep. Then I had what Ginger Buchanan, one of the editors, called “the blue meanies” in The Tomb. Then I did The Touch, which is what I would call “quiet horror”.

AA: Your editors must have really had to pick their collective jaws up off the floor when you sent them Black Wind, right?

FPW: That's why Black Wind wound up at yet another publisher. Putnam/Berkley turned it down. They said they didn’t know how to publish it. As for The Touch, we had a bit of a falling out over how it should be published. They saw me as a paperback author. They published the paperback of The Keep, and they sold a ton. They published the paperback of The Tomb, and they sold a ton. I insisted that they publish a hardcover for The Touch, and they didn't want to do it. I don't know if it was by design, or whether they didn't have enough advanced warning, but the spring catalog for that year did not list The Touch as a hardcover. Didn't list it at all. I’d go to bookstores and they would say, “You’ve got a new hardcover? I've never even heard of it.” But I had my vindication when this “stealth” hardcover went through three printings.

But then I threw Black Wind at them, and that was all she wrote.

AA: I would say [Black Wind] is your most challenging work. I think it demands a lot of the reader.

FPW: I don't know if I would say that it requires a lot of the reader. It’s my longest novel and not paced like Repairman Jack, and that puts some readers off. I’ve been told it reads like it was written by someone else. But if they let the story happen, they usually love it.

AA: What I mean is that it's clear that you spent a lot of time researching it, so the reader has to come up to speed with all the history and cultural aspects, so they get an education as they're reading. But I would also say it's one of your most gratifying novels to read.

FPW: It definitely has the broadest sweep of any of my fiction. Truly my most ambitious novel. It's got so much going on in it – the conspiracy theories surrounding the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the love quadrangle, the clash of cultures, the black wind itself. It's a difficult book in the sense that a lot of people were turned off by the children as the focus of the winds. And the self-mutilating monks. Definitely a lot of horror in it. But, it's also a family saga as well as a historical novel. And it starts off with a lot of human drama. So publishers were saying “How do we market this?” Tom Doherty did his damnedest, but the book never caught fire. I call it my “lost novel.” But people keep finding it. I met Joe Hill for the first time at a BEA a couple of years ago and the first thing he said to me after hello was, “I loved Black Wind, man.” That was nice to hear the next generation of writers. With the help of the ebook revolution, it will never be out of print again.


AA: Switching gears a little, you've written a number of articles for the journalistic website True/Slant regarding digital publishing and the problem of piracy. It seems like the publishing world is going through the same growing pains that the music industry went through a little over a decade ago. Do you think that this issue of piracy is something that the publishing industry is just going to have to learn to live with, or do you think there is a way to avoid piracy altogether?

FPW: Unless there is some sort of new “zapping” technology that allows us to fry the offending websites, I think we're going to have to coexist. When I put up my own eBooks for the Amazon Kindle, I put them up DRM (Digital Rights Management) free. Number one, I don't think there is a DRM that can't be hacked. Number two, I think that if you buy an eBook, you deserve to be able to read it on any platform you wish. It's like saying if someone buys a book, they can't read it on the train, they can only read it at home. Even though I know [the lack of DRM] could lead to more piracy.

I mean, I have a Google alert set to look for pirated copies of my books, and new ones show up every single day. And the servers are in places like Vietnam, so you're never going to catch up with them. I always compare it to Whack-a-Mole: you knock one down, and another one pops up. Most of them are bottom-feeding pirates; some will dress themselves up and say that they're providing a service, or that they're just like libraries. But they're not. With a library, a patron has to return the book, and there's only a finite number of copies. But with these pirates, there's no finite amount.

These parasites essentially have set themselves up as publishers without the permission of the content providers. They're appropriating the work of living authors, publishing and selling it without permission, and without compensating the creator. It’s flat-out thievery. The lawyers call it “copyright infringement,” but you can’t let lawyers define reality: it’s thievery and they’re thieves.


AA: One of the things that I've noticed with the digital revolution in the music industry is that some artists are actually moving away from the full-length album, and they're releasing single songs or shorter collections of songs, and they're thriving on that. Do you think that we're going to see the same transition in publishing, where more authors will be selling stand-alone short stories and novellas?

FPW: We're starting to see that now. Barry Eisler has got a couple of short stories that he's put up from his Rain series. They're selling very well, and they're selling for the same price that many of us are selling our full-length eBooks. I don't know if I would personally pay $2.99 for a short story, but I guess a lot of people have more discretionary income.

Draculas is a good example. We wrote that over a period of about six weeks, and we were all writing at once. But [in the eBook version] we included all the emails we sent back and forth. It's an 85,000 word novel, but there's 80,000 words of extras. And a lot of readers enjoy reading all the emails we traded, because it gave them insight into the process of writing it. You know, one of us would say “Well, I always intended to kill this character.” And [one of the other authors] would say, “No, you can't kill that guy. My wife will kill me if you kill that character.”

So, to include all that in a paper book, you'd essentially have to double the price. It's twice as much paper, and twice the amount of shelf-space, and so on. But with an eBook, it's just a bigger file, and so you can do it for the same price. I see the inclusion of bonus material as a huge advantage for eBooks.

And when the technology evolves a little more, and it’s easier to include images, I think it will really take off. I’ve found the inclusion of images very useful as I'm scripting graphic novel adaptations of the Young Adult Repairman Jack books. If I'm not sure if the artist knows what I'm talking about, I'll just search out an image and insert it in the script. The artists we're using are Spanish. A lot of people are using European artists these days, because they work cheaper, and they're VERY good. But when I mention that we open up with a panoramic view of the New Jersey pine barrens, and the artist is in Barcelona, does he know what I'm talking about? It doesn't matter. I find an image, and insert it in the script.

But the technology is evolving where we will soon be able to enrich the text of eBooks. Right now, formatting and inserting JPEGs can be problematic, because of the different screen-sizes of the various eBook readers. I mean, when you're reading an eBook on your iPhone as opposed to some of the other platforms, what is it going to look like? But that will all evolve very quickly.

AA: That's one of the things I enjoyed about the eBook version of Draculas. There were a few images sprinkled in that gave the reader help in envisioning these creatures.

FPW: Yeah, we commissioned four illustrations for Draculas.




Note:  Stay tuned for the fourth and final installment from the F. Paul Wilson interview, which should be up around the end of next week (the week of May 23).  As a part of the conclusion of this interview series, there will be a giveaway of a SIGNED copy of an F. Paul Wilson book to one lucky reader.  You DO NOT want to miss it!






F. PAUL WILSON is the author of forty-plus books and numerous short stories spanning science fiction, horror, adventure, medical thrillers, and virtually everything between. His novels regularly appear on the New York Times Bestsellers List. He was voted Grand Master by the World Horror Convention and received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Horror Writers of America. He has also received the Stoker Award, the Porgie Award, the Prometheus and Prometheus Hall of Fame Awards, the Pioneer Award from the RT Booklovers Convention, the Inkpot Award from San Diego ComiCon, and is listed in the 50th anniversary edition of Who's Who in America.

Over eight million copies of his books are in print in the US and his work has been translated into twenty-four languages. He also has written for the stage, screen, and interactive media. His latest thrillers, Ground Zero and Fatal Error, star his urban mercenary, Repairman Jack. Jack: Secret Vengeance recently concluded a young-adult trilogy starring a fourteen-year-old Jack. Paul resides at the Jersey Shore and can be found on the Web at www.repairmanjack.com.



JESSE S. GREEVER is "The Accidental Author" and CEO of eLectio Publishing, a digital publisher for Christian authors.  If you are a Christian author and have a manuscript that you think is worthy of publication, check out the submission guidelines and follow the directions for manuscript submissions.

Greever is also a co-author of the book, Learning to Give in a Getting World, and numerous fiction titles from Untreed Reads publishing.
You can become a fan of eLectio Publishing on FaceBook:  http://www.facebook.com/eLectioPublishing
You can follow eLectio Publishing on Twitter (@eLectioPubs):  https://twitter.com/#!/eLectioPubs

Wednesday, May 11, 2011

The F. Paul Wilson Interview Part Two

This week's entry in the F. Paul Wilson interview sees a discussion of the current state of vampire fiction, the status of the Repairman Jack movie and what on earth went wrong with the film version of The Keep.






The Accidental Author: Not too long ago, I read your eBook Draculas, which you wrote with Crouch, Strand and Kilborn/Konrath. I found it in stark contrast to what seems to be very popular today, which is the “sexy vampire”. Based on what you wrote in Draculas, and also your previous vampire novel, Midnight Mass, your vision of the vampire is decidedly “unsexy”. Why do you think there is such a gravitation towards these glamorized creatures, whether they are vampires, werewolves or witches?

F. Paul Wilson: Well, it started with Anne Rice. Even before that, there was always something seductive about the vampire.

AA: Even with Bram Stoker.

FPW: Yeah, who I referred to as an English author in one of my books, and I've heard about it from Irish readers ever since. I think it was The Keep, come to think of it, where I referred to [Stoker] as “that English writer”.

But, there was always a good amount of eroticism in there. I think it makes it more dramatic, in that [the vampire] isn't just sucking your blood, he's sucking your soul. There's that other level of destruction. And basically, that's what I did in The Keep, where [Molasar] figuaratively sucked out Cuza's soul. It wasn't through sex, though. He seduced [Cuza] by unmooring him from all of his values, leaving him morally and spiritually adrift. It’s a recurring theme in my fiction: Being lured into becoming something less than you are. The seduction occurred, but it happened without romance and without sex. I think it is much more invidious that way.

But clearly, the easy way to achieve that seduction is with sex. And once romance writers grabbed onto the vampire mythology, they're now screwing everybody in sight.

AA: Are you okay with that? I mean, do you begrudge them that?

FPW: Not a bit. They actually kept horror alive through the last decade. So, good for them. But my reaction to that whole thing was Midnight Mass, and that's how I've always pictured vampires. I mean, if you're dead, and your interest is really in blood, then you're not going to shower a lot. And after you've sucked a lot of blood, you're pretty likely going to be a filthy mess. So, I don't see how that can be terribly attractive.

Everybody wants a series these days, so I'm getting emails that ask when I'm going to write the sequel to Midnight Mass. But I don't have one. If I had one, I'd write it, because I really liked working with that type of threat. I came up with the priest being the twilight man, and that was something I could work with. But, I've got so many other things on my plate right now, I just can't do that.

I probably should, to be honest. It would be a good move, career-wise. Since I'm moving away from Jack, it would be a great way to solidify another audience. When I finish writing [The Repairman Jack series], I'm going to lose a certain audience that doesn't necessarily read me, they read Jack. They won't read my medical thrillers. You know, they're just not interested in anything I do that isn't Jack, or that isn't related to The Otherness in some way.

AA: If memory serves me, you mentioned on your website that you recently had a meeting in the seemingly endless string of meetings regarding the Repairman Jack film. Did anything come of that? Is there any exciting news to share on that front?

FPW: It's not new, necessarily, in the sense that I'm always hearing the same thing. I don't like to talk “out of school” so much, because a lot of these things are told to me in confidence. But, they have an A-List director who is interested in doing it, and then, they don't move on it. Or, they're about to move on it, and someone else comes along who is a bigger name, and says “I'm a huge fan of Repairman Jack, and I want to do it.” So they dance with him for a while, and then a while later the music stops with him.

And at some point, you're just sitting there thinking, Come on, just make the movie already.

AA: It seems to me that any studio that could successfully pull it off would have a potential franchise on their hands. You look at the book series like The Harry Potter Series and The Twilight Saga that have been successfully made into really successful franchises...these things have brought in billions of dollars. If this film does well, a studio could have a pretty long and lucrative series on their hands.

FPW: Yeah, well, it would never be as big as Potter. Not even close. But the thing is, if it is a successful money-making movie, they'll do another one. It doesn't necessarily have to have a gross of $250 million, but it has got to make a decent profit. They need the right star; they need a guy who can carry [the role of Jack]. Ryan Reynolds has been interested in it for a long time. I think he would be great. I was at WonderCon and I saw him promoting The Green Lantern. And, it was like The Beatles. But he's a cool cat. He would do a really good job.

Obviously, you have to get a good action director. And we've already got a wonderful script. Chris Morgan did a great script. By the way, there's a video that I'll put in the next newsletter. Chris wrote the new Fast and Furious movie, Fast Five, and the Onion did this parody of a morning show interview with the screenwriter of Fast Five, and it's a five-year-old. And they ask him things like “How do you go about writing these scenes?” and he takes little toy cars and crashes them together and says, “Then they explode!” So, I sent the link to Chris, and he wrote back that he had seen it. But then he said “That's exactly how I pitch these things.” So he's a good sport about it.

The elements are all there [for the Repairman Jack movie]. But all the elements were there for The Keep. We had a hot new director in Michael Mann. We had Ian McKellen, Scott Glenn, Gabriel Byrne and Jurgen Prochnow. And Alberta Watson. We had a great special effects team. We had an award-winning set designer. But then, everybody goes over there and gets coked-up, and the special-effects guy dies. They shoot way over budget, and Paramount says “No. No more money!” Then, [Michael Mann] hands in a three-hour cut of the movie that needs even more funding for more effects. And again, they say “No. Cut that down to an hour and a half, and we're going to release it.” And it was on their “B-list” for publicity. There were a few trailers on TV, and that was about it. They knew it was a turkey.






F. PAUL WILSON is the author of forty-plus books and numerous short stories spanning science fiction, horror, adventure, medical thrillers, and virtually everything between. His novels regularly appear on the New York Times Bestsellers List. He was voted Grand Master by the World Horror Convention and received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Horror Writers of America. He has also received the Stoker Award, the Porgie Award, the Prometheus and Prometheus Hall of Fame Awards, the Pioneer Award from the RT Booklovers Convention, the Inkpot Award from San Diego ComiCon, and is listed in the 50th anniversary edition of Who's Who in America.

Over eight million copies of his books are in print in the US and his work has been translated into twenty-four languages. He also has written for the stage, screen, and interactive media. His latest thrillers, Ground Zero and Fatal Error, star his urban mercenary, Repairman Jack. Jack: Secret Vengeance recently concluded a young-adult trilogy starring a fourteen-year-old Jack. Paul resides at the Jersey Shore and can be found on the Web at www.repairmanjack.com.



JESSE S. GREEVER is "The Accidental Author" and CEO of eLectio Publishing, a digital publisher for Christian authors.  If you are a Christian author and have a manuscript that you think is worthy of publication, check out the submission guidelines and follow the directions for manuscript submissions.

Greever is also a co-author of the book, Learning to Give in a Getting World, and numerous fiction titles from Untreed Reads publishing.
You can become a fan of eLectio Publishing on FaceBook:  http://www.facebook.com/eLectioPublishing
You can follow eLectio Publishing on Twitter (@eLectioPubs):  https://twitter.com/#!/eLectioPubs

Sunday, May 8, 2011

A Random F. Paul Wilson Tidbit

Here's a question:  What do F. Paul Wilson, my family doctor growing up and my father have in common?  Any guesses?

Well, in the conversational period before we began our interview at World Horror Convention 2011, I found out that F. Paul Wilson had his medical training at Northeast Missouri State University in Kirksville, MO.  This incidentally happens to be where my family doctor growing up (Dr. Larry Dickinson) got his medical training.  In addition, my father got his Master's Degree in Kirskville as well.

Incidentally, the days of Northeast Missouri State have long since passed, as it was re-branded Truman University in 1996.

Friday, May 6, 2011

The F. Paul Wilson Interview Part One

Recently, I had the privilege of sitting down to breakfast with New York Times bestselling author (and personal favorite), F. Paul Wilson during the World Horror Convention in Austin, TX.  Wilson has been writing bestsellers for over thirty years, spanning many genres including straightforward horror, action/adventure, family drama, science fiction and medical thrillers.  In 2011, one of his most recognizable works of horror, The Keep, is celebrating its 30th year in print.  Wilson was gracious enough to allow me to hound him with over twenty questions, and spent the better part of two hours discussing his nearly every aspect of his career.


The interview will be posted in four (or more) parts during the month of May.  Check back early and often (or follow my blog) to see when new portions of the interview are posted.  At the end of the month, my own version of "outtakes" from the interview will be posted, which will include special content that may be considered "spoilers" from The Adversary Cycle and the Repairman Jack series will be posted.


In this portion of the interview, Wilson discusses The Adversary Cycle, the young adult Repairman Jack series, his upcoming Repairman Jack prequel trilogy, the process of killing off characters.





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The Accidental Author: You wrote The Keep thirty years ago this year. In that story, the main villain, Molasar (or Rasalom, as we come to know him), is a pretty despicable bad guy. But, as The Adversary Cycle and the Repairman Jack series progresses, his level of insidiousness reaches new heights. When you were originally writing The Keep, did you foresee Rasalom as capable of the level of atrocity that he perpetrates in the further volumes?

F. Paul Wilson: I never thought of taking him anywhere beyond The Keep. I had written a short story previously called “Demonsong,” where Glaeken and Rasalom first met. So, when I wrote The Keep, I looked at these two characters whose rivalry had been going on for millennia, and I thought, “This is perfect.” Very few people had picked up the anthology that contained “Demonsong,” so I renewed the rivalry more for me. I really had no idea it would go anywhere beyond The Keep.

AA: One of the really interesting things that you are doing right now is that you are taking The Adversary Cycle and The Repairman Jack series and tying them together in such a way that they logically converge in Nightworld. You've stated that you are heavily revising Nightworld to become more temporally congruent with the Repairman Jack series. How do you even begin to undertake something like that? That has to be a pretty daunting task.

FPW: Yeah. I moved the opening scene of Nightworld to Bloodline [Repairman Jack #11], where Jack and Glaeken meet. Furthermore, in Nightworld I had to rewrite all of Jack's encounters with Glaeken because Jack already knows all about The Otherness, so all those conversations had to be cut. Some other things had to be cut too, but the book wound up being 10,000 words longer, so there is a considerable amount of new material.

I realized as I was going through it that Gia and Vicky are completely absent from the body of Nightworld, and it didn't really matter when Nightworld was written, because they had been supporting characters in The Tomb. And Abe was a minor character as well. But I realized now, if I'm a reader, I'm going to be asking “What are Gia, Vicky and Abe doing?” So, I created a whole new sequence of events with those characters.

And there was a lot of other stuff too. The Lady wasn't even on the radar when I wrote Nightworld originally. There were so many things that had to change, and things kept developing through the series that I couldn't possibly foresee. Weezy was only supposed to be a minor character he met as a kid, but she started taking over the Young Adult Repairman Jack books, and at times I had to beat her back with a stick. And I said, “Jeez, I can't leave her out. Where is she now?” So I brought her into the adult Repairman Jack series. All these things I never foresaw, so I ended up having to make a lot of changes to Nightworld.

AA: As I've made my way through the Repairman Jack series, I find myself wondering when you have a major character that has to make an untimely exit from the series, do you get sentimental about that, or is it something that you do in a more clinically as a part of the overall plot?

FPW: I used to outline quite a bit. I outline less now, but I still do some outlining. A lot of times, things work fine in an outline, and, as you say, clinically there comes a point when this character has to go, and you do it. Easy. However, by the time I've written the novel out to that point, it is much harder.

If you've read Deep As The Marrow, there is a character in that book I had to kill, and it hurt. It hurt the readers, too.


AA: I've recently been reading your young adult Jack series. Do you experience any major challenges when switching between writing for more mature audiences and writing for young adults?

FPW: You know, I was at a trade show a few years ago and two women who were bookstore owners approached me. They mentioned that they'd heard I was writing a young adult Repairman Jack series. And they asked me if it had a lot of violence in it, like the adult series.  I said, “No. Most of the violence takes place 'off stage'. You'll see the results, but not the violence itself.” And then they asked about the kind of language used in the books. And I said, “Well, it's rural New Jersey, 1983. You know, there's not a lot of 'F-bombs' being thrown around.” So, then they asked about drugs, and I replied, “It's pretty much the same thing.” They asked about sex. And I said, “He's thirteen years old in the early 1980s.”

So they said, “Well, good. We can recommend them to everyone then.”

That conversation got me thinking. [These bookstore owners] have a responsibility. Someone comes in looking for a book for a twelve-year-old; they obviously can't read everything in the store. But the YA Jack books can easily be put in the hands of a twelve-year-old, and it isn't necessary for me to soft-pedal stuff, because it really isn't there to begin with.

In terms of style, well—when you do a spell-check and grammar-check in [Microsoft] Word, which is a huge pain because of all the sentence-fragments I use, it gives you a Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level. Mine usually comes out saying you need a fourth-grade education to read my books. Obviously, I was chagrined when I first saw that score. But then I realized that with the thrillers I write, the prose is in short sentences and short paragraphs. You don't have these long, compound-complex sentences. You're dealing with characters who aren't Rhodes Scholars. Most of the people [Jack] is up against are street people, so they don't have huge vocabularies.

So when it came to writing the young adult series, I didn't have to change a thing as far as style goes. It's really nice, because the adult and young adult books read the same. Except for the tone. [The young Jack] doesn't have the worldly voice of the adult Jack. He has more of the “Gosh! Wow!” kind of tone.


AA: You recently signed a contract to write a trilogy of Repairman Jack books that span the formative period between the time he arrives in New York City and the events of The Tomb.

FPW: Well, it covers only a few years; it won't go up to The Tomb. I'm not planning on having him meet Gia in those books. Those are going to be locked into 1990, 1991 and 1992 in the “pre-Disney” Manhattan.

You know, that's actually a very difficult time period to research. I mean, if you want to research New York around 1850 or post-Civil War, there are tons of books and information about the city during those times. You want 1990? You can't find a thing! Nothing! Then, as I was doing some Google searches, I did find some YouTube videos by people riding on a bus in Times Square in 1990. And I could literally see what everything looked like at that time. Those help stratify the memories. I think, “Oh yeah, I remember when 42nd Street looked like that.” But was that 1986, or was it 1991?

AA: I never really thought of YouTube as a research vehicle.

FPW: I didn't either. I was putting out all sorts of search strings, and all of a sudden videos popped up.

AA: Are you planning on making The Adversary part of the Repairman Jack prequel trilogy?

FPW: I haven't gotten quite that far, yet. Right now, [Jack] is pretty callow. He's making mistakes. He really has no idea where he's going. You know, he didn't come to New York to become Repairman Jack. He came to New York to get away, and he's simply living under the radar right and minding his own business now. But trouble comes a-calling, of course

In book 1 he meets Julio. They're not friends yet. He's going to meet up with [Ed] Burkes from the U.N. He'll buy his first gun; it comes via Abe [Grossman] but he won’t know that for a while. Abe arranged it. So, all these connections are going to be made, but I still haven't worked out every last detail.

I'm about 30,000 words into the first book, and he's just gotten himself into a jam, and he's got to get himself out. There's going to be a lot of fix-its in the trilogy, some of which he'll bungle, of course. It's just one of those things where there's a lot of irony, because the reader knows a lot more than Jack about what's going on. So, it's really fun to play with that sort of irony.




F. PAUL WILSON is the author of forty-plus books and numerous short stories spanning science fiction, horror, adventure, medical thrillers, and virtually everything between. His novels regularly appear on the New York Times Bestsellers List. He was voted Grand Master by the World Horror Convention and received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Horror Writers of America. He has also received the Stoker Award, the Porgie Award, the Prometheus and Prometheus Hall of Fame Awards, the Pioneer Award from the RT Booklovers Convention, the Inkpot Award from San Diego ComiCon, and is listed in the 50th anniversary edition of Who's Who in America.

Over eight million copies of his books are in print in the US and his work has been translated into twenty-four languages. He also has written for the stage, screen, and interactive media. His latest thrillers, Ground Zero and Fatal Error, star his urban mercenary, Repairman Jack. Jack: Secret Vengeance recently concluded a young-adult trilogy starring a fourteen-year-old Jack. Paul resides at the Jersey Shore and can be found on the Web at www.repairmanjack.com.






JESSE S. GREEVER is "The Accidental Author" and CEO of eLectio Publishing, a digital publisher for Christian authors.  If you are a Christian author and have a manuscript that you think is worthy of publication, check out the submission guidelines and follow the directions for manuscript submissions.

Greever is also a co-author of the book, Learning to Give in a Getting World, and numerous fiction titles from Untreed Reads publishing.
You can become a fan of eLectio Publishing on FaceBook:  http://www.facebook.com/eLectioPublishing
You can follow eLectio Publishing on Twitter (@eLectioPubs):  https://twitter.com/#!/eLectioPubs