S.G. Browne

Other than the two titles that made the final list, the only other books I’ve read that begin with the letter R include The Red Badge of Courage (Crane), Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), Road Trip of the Living Dead (Henry), and Rose Madder (King). I’ve never read any of the Rabbit series written by John Updike or Red Dragon by Thomas Harris or The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro, though I have Never Let Me Go on my list of books TBR.

As for other familiar titles that begin with R? If this was a category on Jeopardy!, I’d be the last one pressing my buzzer.

No Ragtime or Rebecca or Rich Man, Poor Man.
No Runaway Jury or Red Storm Rising or The Return of the King.
No Right Stuff or Razor’s Edge or Red Pony.

I’m apparently very deficient when it comes to reading my R’s. But I’ll make up for it next week. For now, I give you my two favorite books and my favorite narrative poem that begin with the letter R.

Blue Ribbon:
The Road, Cormac McCarthy
A bleak, haunting, Pulitzer Prize-winning tale of a father and son’s journey across a post-apocalyptic America in which few humans have survived. The fact that you never find out exactly what happened to cause the cataclysmic disaster only adds to the power of the narrative. Written with sparse prose and no chapters, the story is both heartbreaking and nearly impossible to stop reading.

Whatever Color Ribbon Is For Second Place:
The Regulators, Richard Bachman
Bachman is, of course, the famous pseudonym of Stephen King, having written a number of novels and novellas. Although their writing styles are similar, Bachman tends to be a little more fast-paced than King, with his narrative, coming at you relentlessly in this supernatural novel about a spirit who takes over the mind of an autistic boy and turns his suburban hometown into a wild west nightmare.

*Bonus – Favorite Narrative Poem
The Raven, Edgar Allan Poe
While I love Poe’s version, I have a hard time remembering the actual lines to the poem because I’ve rewritten parts of it several times, including my ode to turning 40 titled Poe and the Big 4-0: The Raven Reprised. Most recently, I rewrote The Raven for a Best Man’s speech that starts out: “Once upon a bachelor dreary…”

No. The Princess in the blog title does not stand for The Princess Diaries, just in case you were wondering. And although I’ve seen Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera, I’ve never read the French novel on which it’s based.

I’ve also never read The Pearl (Steinbeck), The Picture of Dorian Gray (Wilde), or Pride and Prejudice (Austen), with or without zombies. I’m not a big Jane Austen fan, so adding zombies to one of her books isn’t going to compel me to read it. You could add zombies to The Bridges of Madison County and I’m not going to read that, either. Though I do have a signed copy of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies on my bookshelf.

Some of the titles I have read include Patient Zero (Maberry), Pressure (Strand), Phantoms (Koontz), Pet Semetary (King), and Presumed Innocent (Turow). I currently have Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (Suskind) on my stack of books to read, though it keeps getting pushed back by all of these books I keep buying. Someday…

On to my favorite books that start with the letter P:

One for the money:
The Princess Bride, William Goldman
This is another instance where I read the book after I saw the film, so my memory of it is somewhat colored by the Hollywood version. But since Goldman wrote the screenplay as well, it stays truer than most adaptations. Good writing, memorable characters, great dialogue, an adventurous plot, and lots of fun twists and turns gives this one top billing. It’s a joyous romp of a read.

Two for the show:
Post Office, Charles Bukowski
A recommendation from a writer friend of mine, this first novel by Bukowski is apparently as much autobiography as it is fiction. Filled with down and out Americans, booze, gambling, failed relationships, meaningless work, and a main character who is more cynical than Sam Spade and Han Solo. This novel is a good introduction for anyone interested in reading the author who TIME called a “laureate of American lowlife.”

Three to get ready:
The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster
I didn’t read much as a kid. I hated going to the library and checking out books, which invariably sat on my dresser, unread, until the due date arrived. But I remember loving this adventure fairy tale about a bored kid who discovers a magic tollbooth and decides to drive through it into another world. A classic childrens’ story worth re-reading as an adult.

If I’m trying to sleep, the ideas won’t stop. If I’m trying to write, there appears a barren nothingness. —Carrie Latet

Where do writers get their ideas? In the first installment of Slushpile of the Mind, I told you where I get mine. Below you’ll find five authors who share where they find theirs. Check ’em out!

Eric S. Brown

Eric S Brown is the author of Bigfoot War, Season of Rot, and World War of the Dead. His novel, War of the Worlds Plus Blood Guts and Zombies, will be released from Simon and Schuster in December and is available for pre-order now at www.amazon.com and numerous other places. His short fiction has been published hundreds of times and he was a featured expert on the zombie genre in Jonathan Maberry’s Zombie CSU: The Forensics of the Living Dead.

I get my ideas from growing up reading comics, loving zombies and horror, and having that whole background to draw on. With all that genre knowledge bouncing around in my skull, it’s easy to see something happen in everyday life or on the news and go “whoa, what if this happened but with this?”

Rhiannon Frater

Rhiannon Frater is the author of the award-winning As the World Dies Zombie Trilogy, originally self-published but later picked up by Tor for release in 2011. She is also the author of the modern day vampire novel, Pretty When She Dies and the gothic horror novel, The Tale of the Vampire Bride. Her latest release is the YA zombie novel The Living Dead Boy and the Zombie Hunters from the Little Library of the Living Dead Press. Visit Rhiannon at rhiannonfrater.blogspot.com.

My nightmares are my primary inspiration. As strange as it sounds, every time I have one, I wake up thinking “Can I use it?” My vampire novels are both based on vivid dreams. Also, sometimes I’ll just have a vivid image come to mind that gives birth to a story. I “saw” Jenni standing on her doorstep in her pink nightgown staring at the tiny fingers of her zombified toddler pressed under the front door and that was how As The World Dies was born. Once in awhile, I’ll hear a conversation start up in my head (yes, I have voices in my head), and I’ll turn my attention inward to discover characters discussing their story. I have said it before and I’ll say it again, being a writer is just a way of being legally insane.

Rain Graves

Rain Graves has been published in the horror fiction genre since 1997 professionally, but she’s best known for her poetry books, The Gossamer Eye (2002 Bram Stoker Winner) with David N. Wilson and Mark McLaughlin, and BARFODDER: Poetry Written in Dark Bars and Questionable Cafes (2009 Bram Stoker Finalist), which Publisher’s Weekly hailed as ‘Bukowski meets Lovecraft…’

I get my ideas from real life horror; crime. Sometimes it’s as subtle as watching a cat toy with a bug and toss it around before killing it. Other times, it’s terrible news stories like the Fritz Lieber trial, or good old fashioned unsolved mysteries, like the Black Dahlia or Jack The Ripper.

Mark Henry

Mark Henry writes just about everything, from horror comedy to young adult fantasy to erotica. His novels include the Amanda Feral trilogy, Happy Hour of the Damned, Road Trip of the Living Dead, and Battle of the Network Zombies. His first short fiction as Daniel Marks will be published this month in the young adult anthology, Kiss Me Deadly: 13 Tales of Paranormal Love. Check out Mark’s snark stylings at www.markhenry.us.

Where do I get my ideas? That’s a hard question and one I don’t get very often, which puts me in the minority. I think people are worried about how I might answer, like I roll up out of the gutter to do my author events and those damp spots on my clothes might be urine or vomit or…worse. Understandable considering my horror-comedy series is pretty vulgar and very dark. But, oddly enough, I’m not out plumbing the depths of bondage dungeons and funeral home foam parties to put together a story. The answer is simply, the ideas come from EVERYWHERE.

Regardless of whether I’m writing about zombies or vampires or sex-changing demons, I try to infuse the stories with all the little horrors of everyday life. It’s not unheard of for me to sit around in cafes and write down eavesdropped conversations, or draw out people’s horror stories about pus extraction or relationship decay. That shit is perfectly decent fiction fodder, in my book. Food Courts, newspapers, gossip blogs. Books. Reading is a big one. Though I’m rarely inspired by my own genre. I am inspired by “perfect sentences.” Those stretches of words that are themselves self-contained stories. Vonnegut owns my favorite. But I’ll keep it to myself.

Jeremy C. Shipp

Jeremy C. Shipp is the Bram Stoker nominated author of Cursed, Vacation, and Sheep and Wolves. His shorter tales have appeared or are forthcoming in over 50 publications, the likes of Cemetery Dance, ChiZine, Apex Magazine, Pseudopod, and Withersin. His new book, Fungus of the Heart, comes out in October. Feel free to visit his online home at www.jeremycshipp.com and follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/JeremyCShipp.

My creative fire is predominantly enkindled by those beings who elicit a potent response in my organs, from the man who bolts toward my car pointing a handgun at my head, to the kitten who dies in my arms, to the zombified Smurfs in my dreams, to the wife who calls me just to say she loves me. I also find myself reacting creatively to the goings-on on this planet. I make an effort to keep my finger on the weakening pulse of civilization, and I am sometimes heartbroken, sometimes touched by what I learn. All of these people, all of these experiences funnel into me, reflect off the funhouse mirror in my soul, and transform into ideas. The ideas, then, shoot down my right arm, and squirt out of my fingers, octopus-style, and I write and I write until my brain implodes and I have to sleep for a while.

One of the questions I and other writers are often asked is:

Where do you get your ideas?

Ideas are funny things. Sometimes they’re as prevalent as Starbucks and other times, they’re as hard to find as good customer service. You can sit in front of your computer for hours and try to come up with a good one without any luck and then have one pop into your head without any warning while you’re standing in line at Safeway.

Or you can sit down to write an idea for a short story in your journal, this great idea that just came to you out of nowhere, one of the best ideas you’ve ever had, only to discover that the original idea you had isn’t nearly as brilliant as what you’d first thought. But while writing down this idea that sounded better in your head than it does on paper, you stumble upon another idea with far more promise, something that doesn’t take shape for another year. Which is how Fated was conceived.

The original idea involved some generic supernatural event that happened to some generic normal guy. I have no idea where I was going with it. But not wanting to give up on whatever it was that prompted me to write down the idea in the first place, I kept journaling, throwing out a lot of “maybe this” and “maybe thats” until I stumbled upon the idea that this character lives in Manhattan and has first hand knowledge about certain events because he’s Fate.

At the time, I didn’t pursue the idea any further than that. But the following July, while sitting on a bench at a shopping mall, watching people walk past and wondering what their futures held for them, I wrote what would eventually become the opening chapter to Fated.

In addition to shopping malls, I’ve had ideas come to me from random conversations, song lyrics, dreams, standing in line at an ice cream parlor, sitting in front of an annoying little girl on an airplane, TV commercials, a Jack the Ripper tour, a newspaper article, an hourglass in an antique store, a trip to a place called Lower Slaughter in England, Greek mythology, a painting by René Magritte, a moment standing by the bank of the Stanislaus River, staring at a poster from the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers, sitting on a bench in New York’s Central Park, and getting stuck sixty miles south of the Mexican border with a broken water pump.

All of the moments and ideas above led to short stories or novels that I’ve written. As for the idea behind Breathers, that came from my 2001 short story “A Zombie’s Lament,” which you can find in the John Skipp anthology Zombies: Encounters with the Hungry Dead. While I can’t point to any single moment of inspiration for “A Zombie’s Lament,” I just wanted to write a story about zombies that I hadn’t read before. And putting myself inside the head of the zombie seemed like the way to do it.

In the next couple of days, I’ll post answers from a handful of other authors as to how and where they get their ideas, so check back for Slushpile of the Mind, Part II.

O. I like the letter O.

The whole circular nature of things. Every end a new beginning. That sort of nonsense. But when I first sat down to figure out my favorite books that start with the letter O, I could only think of my top three, plus a couple I never read. Then I actually started focusing (which means I cheated and searched for titles on the Internet) and realized I’d read a lot more for this entry than I’d thought.

Some of the titles that didn’t make the list include Oliver Twist (Dickens), Odd Thomas (Koontz), Out of Sight (Leonard), The Outsiders (Hinton), and The Old Man and the Sea. Which should come as no surprise, considering my lack of enthusiasm for Hemingway. And since he’s already made my Classic Literature Razzies list once for A Farewell to Arms, I figured I’d let him slide this time.

Some of titles I’ve never read include On the Road (Kerouac) and One Hundred Years of Solitude (Márquez). I keep thinking I should eventually get around to them, but I’d rather watch Arrested Development on Netflix.

The Big O:
The Odyssey, Homer
I love Greek mythology and this epic poem has it all. Cyclops, Syclla, Charybdis, Sirens, a witch-goddess, sacred cows, a bunch of horny Suitors, a determined hero, death, adventure, treachery, love, betrayal, and a bunch of meddling, bickering gods screwing around with everyone’s fates while enjoying the perks of their Mount Olympus HOA.

Two for the Money:
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey
I will admit that the film version has filtered its way into my memories (since I read Cuckoo’s Nest in high school), but the book is populated with memorable characters, including the rebellious McMurphy, the controlling Nurse Ratched, and the silent Chief, through whose eyes we experience the book’s narrative. While the film version is a fairly solid adaptation and Nicholson steals the show, the novel is worth the read.

Three’s Company:
Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
While technically a novella written as a play, this is the second of Steinbeck’s Dustbowl trilogy (sandwiched between In Dubious Battle and The Grapes of Wrath). Having never read Cannery Row or East of Eden, I admittedly have a smaller pool to choose from, but this is my favorite Steinbeck novel. Painful and tender and tragic, the themes of loneliness resonate more than 70 years after the book’s publication. (Odd Trivia – Apparently, an early draft of the novel was eaten by his dog.)

Favorite Guilty Pleasure:
The Other Side of Midnight, Sidney Sheldon
Not my favorite guilty pleasure of all time (that still goes to Waterworld), but I read several Sidney Sheldon novels in high school (including Bloodline and If Tomorrow Comes), and this was my favorite of the three.