S.G. Browne

You fly up to Everett, WA, for Crypticon, a three-year-old horror convention, where you do a signing at Borders with F. Paul Wilson, John Skipp, Cody Goodfellow, and Nick Mamatas. No one comes to the signing. Well, almost no one. But you get to hang out with these other writers and have dinner with them at the Hunan Palace across from the Holiday Inn where you’re staying, so it’s okay. You don’t really want to sell any books, anyway.

You spend Friday hanging out with Tim Long and Jonathan Moon from Library of the Living Dead, getting pizza with John Skipp and Cody Goodfellow and Nick Mamatas in beautiful downtown Everett right across from Aladdin Bail Bonds, attending a couple of panels, and having drinks with F. Paul Wilson and talking about all of the annoying writers who pump out 2500 words a day on a regular basis. You’re joined at your table for drinks by Heather Langenkamp, Amanda Wyss, and Brooke Bundy from the Nightmare on Elm Street series. You give them Zombies Are People Too buttons, which is pretty cool.

You wake up Saturday at 6:30am to some ass slamming the hotel room door next to you and then turn on the TV to ESPN and watch some guy from The Netherlands soccer team flop like a little girl and writhe on the ground after getting accidentally slapped in the face. This is why you hate soccer and the World Cup. It’s filled with crybabies like this guy. You can’t wait for football season to start.

You spend the rest of Saturday hanging out with Kelly Young and Jenna Pittman (who helped to get you invited to Crypticon as a guest, thank you very much), having a great conversation with a couple who dressed up as Andy and Rita from Breathers at your book signing last year in Seattle, hanging out with Mark Henry, sharing a standing-room- only panel with him and several other zombie “experts,” moderating a panel with F. Paul Wilson, John Skipp, and William F. Nolan, hanging out with Jeff Burk, Cameron C. Pierce, and Rose O’Keefe of Eraserhead Press, and attending a Bizarro performance of Help! A Bear Is Eating Me! by Mykle Hansen. (The bear is played by Cameron C. Pierce).

You finish off Saturday by doing a reading of the first three chapters of Fated, followed by a reading of “Zombie Gigolo” (which will appear in The Living Dead 2 this September), followed by the questionable decision to sing “Fly Me to the Moon” at karaoke at the Hunan Palace, which reminds you why you’re not a professional singer. You also drink one too many greyhounds.

You wake up Sunday and turn on the TV and realize you forgot to pack your Advil. On ESPN, New Zealand ties Italy 1-1 in the World Cup and according to the announcer, this apparently is one of the great moments in the history of the World Cup. A tie. This is another reason why you can’t wait for football season to start.

You spend your Sunday hosting a couple of panels that have more panelists than audience members, the first one on Remaking Romero and the second on How To Survive a Horror Movie, but it’s fun anyway, especially when a dog starts chewing on a human arm, then you say your goodbyes to all of the wonderful people you met or who you had the pleasure of spending time with again before you catch a ride to SeaTac, which actually provides free WiFi, unlike SFO and LAX, which are capitalistic whores of airports.

You look forward to doing this all again next year.

I think this is the first post where all three books were all made into films. And, unless my brain is more full of cobwebs than I realize, I believe I saw all three of these in the theater before I read the novels.

However, I will be honest and say that none of these three would make my Top 50 books of all time. Maybe not even the Top 100. I really should make that list. But since I’m doing this alphabetically, every letter gets to participate.

So with that enthusiastic build-up, here are my favorite novels that start with the letter J:

Number 1:
Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton
Whether you consider it a straight science fiction novel or a cautionary tale on biological tinkering, the novel is a lot of fun, especially to imagine that it could be possible. One of the aspects I enjoyed most about the book as opposed to the film was that the Velociraptors, not the T-Rex, were the star dinosaurs. The whole storyline about them breeding and getting off the island by boat was left out of the movie.

Number 2:
Jaws, Peter Benchley
I saw the film when I was nine years old and that was pretty much it for me ever taking up surfing. While it’s tough to beat Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, and Richard Dreyfuss, I still enjoyed the book, which I read just a few years after seeing the movie. But I can’t help but think the film had some impact on the book ending up on this list.

Number 3:
The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan
Again, a book I’d read after the film, the book was written in vignettes from the different POVs of four immigrant Chinese mothers and their daughters who live in San Francisco. I don’t really have anything else to say, other than the fact that I liked it. How’s that for a ringing endorsement?

Favorite Short Story Collection:
Just After Sunset, Stephen King
Not my favorite of all time, but I didn’t have another J book to slot into the wild card spot. So I went with this one. Not King’s best collection (that nod goes to Skeleton Crew), but enough to renew my appreciation in his short stories. Plus he’s got a way with words that I can’t help but appreciate. He’s just a good storyteller.

I’ll be having an interview coming up on a website called The Authors Speak, which has some great interviews with authors such as Mary Roach, Christopher Moore, and Douglas Clegg, among others.

In preparation for the interview, The Authors Speak is hosting a Zombie Haiku Contest, where you can win a signed copy of Breathers and some Zombies Are People Too swag.

For those who are unfamiliar with haiku, or what it has to do with Breathers, haiku is a form of Japanese poetry that consists of 17 syllables or, apparently, moras, which are units of sound that determine syllable weight. And I’m getting this off of Wikipedia, so don’t yell at me if I’m wrong. Yell at somebody else.

Why is this relevant to zombies? In Breathers, Andy writes haiku that are zombie related, such as this one:

shattered life dangles
a severed voice screams in grief
I’m rotting inside

He also wrote several other haiku that didn’t make it into the final version:

Pine-Sol bubble baths
mask the stench of rotting flesh
I smell like Christmas

Of course, your haiku doesn’t have to be about sentient zombies. It can be from the stereotypical viewpoint with zombies as relentless, flesh eating monsters:

eaten by zombies
last thought is wondering if
I taste like chicken

Or take another perspective. Have fun with it. Just follow the directions on the web site and good luck!

While there’s no “I” in team, there are plenty of “I’s” in my library of books I’ve read. More, so far, than any other letter of the alphabet.

There’s The Informers (Ellis), Infected (Sigler), If You Could See Me Now (Straub), The Icarus Agenda (Ludlum), I Never Promised You A Rose Garden (Green), Interview With A Vampire (Rice), IT (King), and Insomnia (King again).

The three that made it on my list are a diverse group of non-linear dark comedy, true crime, and science fiction/horror. So without further ado, here are my favorite novels that begin with the letter I:

Top of the heap:
Invisible Monsters, Chuck Palahniuk
While not my favorite Palahniuk novel, it’s in the top three and has one of the best opening paragraphs of any book I’ve ever read along with one of my favorite quotes: “Another thing is no matter how much you think you love somebody, you’ll step back when the pool of their blood edges up too close.” Told in a non-linear style that from the POV of a disfigured supermodel, the writing is crisp, fast-paced, and quintessential Palahniuk.

Next in line:
In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
Possibly the only non-fiction entry to make the list, Capote’s book about the brutal murders of a Kansas family in 1959 is often regarded by critics as a pioneer of the true crime novel. While the book has been criticized for its factual account of the events, there’s no denying Capote’s talent and masterful use of the written word.

Bringing up the rear:
I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
Although George Romero credits this novel with being the inspiration for his film Night of the Living Dead, I will still argue that the book is about a vampire apocalypse, not zombies. Still, if you’re a zombie fan, Matheson’s novel is often considered as being influential in the development of the zombie genre and the concept of a worldwide disease apocalypse. If you saw the Will Smith film, you should read the novel to understand why the book lives up to its title and the film cops out.

Second favorite epic poem in dactylic hexameter:
The Iliad, Homer
I’m a sucker for Greek mythology. I wonder what my favorite epic poem might be?

I’ve been asked about my writing habits a lot, as though I need to find a way to break them.

When do I write?
How often do I write?
Where do I write?

As to the WHERE question, it’s in my apartment, usually at my desk, sometimes on the couch on my laptop. But I can’t write in cafes. Too distracting. Even in my apartment, sometimes I put on my iPod to block out the street noise by listening to instrumental music like “Green Onions” and “Comanche” and “Single Serving Jack”.

Plus I don’t drink coffee.

As for the WHEN and HOW OFTEN, that’s a little more involved.

From October 1989 to midway through 2002, I more or less wrote every morning for two hours before going into work, whether that was as a waiter or a driver or an assistant producer or as an office manager. Two hours. Every day. And if possible, another two hours at night. Sometimes I gave myself the weekend off. During this time, I wrote three novels and more then fifty short stories.

In 2002, while editing my second and third novels (both supernatural horror novels that had garnered interested from two small press publications), I began to hate what I was writing. Writing became a chore. A grinding job. A tedious two hours of sitting at my desk and staring at the computer and realizing that the words coming out of my fingertips were absolute garbage.

This went on for several months, before I decided to stop writing. To stop sticking to my two-to-four hours of self-disciplined masochism a day. To stop being a writer.

I still wrote. Sporadically. In fits. Whenever the mood struck. But I didn’t go back to the books. I told the publishers that I wouldn’t be able to send them the manuscripts. I felt that I’d let a golden opportunity slip away.

A year later, in October 2003, I started fiddling with an idea based on my short story, “A Zombie’s Lament.” I wrote a few chapters. Then I didn’t write. Then I’d write some more. Not sticking to a schedule. Not forcing myself to sit down for two hours before work or after dinner. Just whenever the mood struck. This went on for the next two-and-a-half years. Writing for weeks at a time, then doing nothing for a month or so. Binge writing. Like binge drinking. Only without the bar tabs or the hangovers. Until I finished my book in May 2006.

For the next six months after I’d finished Breathers I didn’t write at all. Nothing. Not a short story. Not a paragraph. Not a word. Then in December 2006, I started writing another novel about fate and destiny. For three months I wrote, at various times of the day, for various lengths of time. I didn’t stick to a schedule but just wrote whenever I had something to write. At the end of the three months, I’d written 45,000 words. Or approximately 180 pages.

Over the next ten months, I wrote sporadically, revising the book as I went, trying to figure out where it was going, giving up on it, coming back to it, forgetting about it, then finally realizing I needed to get it finished. By the end of December 2007, I’d written another 15,000 words.

On February 2, 2008, a week after I received an offer from Broadway Books to publish Breathers and the day before the New York Giants beat the New England Patriots 17-14 in Super Bowl XLII, I finished the first draft of Fated. 80,000 words in fourteen months.

45,000 words the first three months.
15,000 words the next ten months.
20,000 words the last month.

How’s that for consistency?

Then, for the next eighteen months, I didn’t work on another major project. I edited Fated. I wrote a couple of short stories. I blogged. But I didn’t have a schedule. I didn’t commit myself to a set time or a set amount of words per day. I just wrote whenever it suited me. And I spent a lot of time promoting Breathers, which came out in March 2009.

In August 2009, I started working on another novel. Correction. Three novels. See, I had three ideas and I couldn’t decide which one I wanted to write, so I started writing all three of them at the same time. For a few days I’d work on one, then get an idea that worked better in the other, then get tired of that one and work on the third. It was like dating three women at the same time and trying to keep all of them happy.

I went back and forth like that for six months until I finally decided I really needed to commit to just one book. So I picked one and forged ahead, plucking a few paragraphs and pages out of the ether until, at the end of March 2010, I had about 30,000 words of my new novel, or about 120 pages. And it had taken me more than six months to get to that point.

Wanting to finish my novel before the Crypticon Convention in the middle of June, I created a writing schedule. Actually, more like a word count goal. 1000 words a day minimum. Six days a week. However long it took me to get those 1000 words. So for the next two months, I stuck to that schedule, writing 27,000 words in April and another 28,000 words in May and the first week of June, finishing the first draft of Lucky Bastard on June 5.

So as you can see, over the past twenty years or so, my writing habits have been kind of all over the map. I’ve done what has worked for me at different times in my life with various work ethics, but what matters is that I’ve been happy with the results.