S.G. Browne

To celebrate the upcoming publication of Breathers less than two months away, I’m throwing a contest on undeadanonymous.com in which I’ll be giving away a personally autographed Advanced Reader’s Copy of Breathers: A Zombie’s Lament by yours truly as first prize.

In addition, I’m offering a mass market paperback of the winner’s choice for the first and second runners-up.  Kind of like Miss America, only without the flowers and the tiara.

To enter, all you have to do is promote the contest and Undead Anonymous and comment on Andy’s Diary with a link to the site or the blog or the group where you plugged Breathers and you’ll be entered to win.  Yeah, it’s that easy.

Winners will be selected by a random drawing of all entries.

The contest is open in all time zones and closes Sunday, January 18th at 11:59 PM, PST.

Good luck and thanks for the support!

I see a therapist twice a week.

His name is Ted.

Ted hates me.

I know this because he told me so.  At least I think he told me.  It’s hard to tell with all of these other voices in my head.

These people.

These characters I created with pen and paper or with any number of keystrokes across my computer keyboard.

One of them is telling me to write a story about an old man who goes fishing for marlin by himself in a one man boat.

“That’s Hemingway,” I tell him.

“What’s Hemingway?” asks Ted.

I explain to Ted that I’m being badgered by one of my characters who has plagiaristic tendencies.

“Tell me about him,” says Ted.

“He’s one of my earliest characters,” I say.  “He lacks originality.”

I’ll never forget her face.

Arched eyebrows.  Pouty lips parted in the beginnings of a gasp.  Her upturned chin.  Delicate nose.  Eyes as blue as the ocean, opening wide.  All of it framed by her platinum blond hair.

I suppose it could have been worse.

I suppose my last memory could have been of a dumpster filled with broken bottles.  Or the yellow roof of a taxi cab.  Or a parking meter.

Asphalt.  Concrete.

Oil stains and gum stuck to the sidewalk.

But when your parachute doesn’t open during an illegal base jump and you’re plummeting down the face of the Empire State Building, you never expect to end your life landing on top of Paris Hilton.

So there’s a new garage going in across the street from my apartment.  Which is apparently going to take from now until sometime next April to complete.  I’m not sure how long this phase of the construction is going to last, but they’re using jackhammers.

Awesome.

Typically, the jackhammering starts at about 8:00am.  I write from 7:00am-10:00am before heading off to my day job.  Now, while most writers I know seem to be able to take their laptops to cafes to drink coffee and pump out a few pages, I don’t go to cafes.  One, I find them distracting.  I prefer to write in the space I’ve created at home.  Plus until two months ago, I didn’t own a laptop.  Wrote longhand in a journal.  I was old school that way.

The other reason I don’t hang out in cafes is that I don’t drink coffee.  Just was never my thing.  And since there aren’t any bars open around me at 8:00am, I’m stuck in my apartment listening to the jackhammering and wondering how much trouble I could get in if I took an axe to the pneumatic hose or took a bat to the compressor.

So instead of going to jail or getting hit with a hefty fine or lawsuit, I grab my iPod, put on some Mozart, and crank up the volume until I drown out the jackhammering.  I write best to Mozart.  No lyrics.  And there’s something about his compositions that inspire me more so than Bach or Beethoven or Tchaikovsky.  And with my laptop, although I can’t get away from the noise, I can find a space in my apartment a little further removed from the noise.

So hallelujah for technology.  Praise Apple and praise Dell.  And if it could start raining soon so the jackhammering could stop, that would be cool, too.

“All the ways you wish you could be, that’s me.  I look like you want to look, I fuck like you want to fuck.  I am smart, capable, and most importantly, I am free in all the ways that you are not.”

– Tyler Durden, Fight Club

As writers, we’re always pretending to be someone else, especially when you write in the first person narrative like I do.  For some writers, that line of reality between author and character is blurred a little bit more.  For others, the voice that comes across on the page is the same voice of the author in real life.  And for those like me, our characters are the alter egos that come to life in our writing.

In much the same way that Fight Club‘s Tyler Durden is a representation of who Edward Norton’s unnamed narrator wants to be, the main characters in my novels are a reflection of me, of who I imagine I am.  My characters talk the way I want to talk and always seem to know exactly what to say at the perfect moment.  In real life, I seldom have the words I want to say at my disposal.  Most of the time I come up with the perfect response about five minutes later, which doesn’t really help when you’ve already conceded the argument or missed the opportunity to say something unforgettable.

Of course when I’m writing, I have the luxury of editing, of creating and controlling the entire situation in which my characters find themselves, so the dialogue and the reactions are re-written and crafted until they’re just the way I want them.  So yeah, it’s a little like cheating.  But sometimes, the line or the comment or the response will come out of me with no effort, with no hesitation, and I know it’s perfect.  And that’s when I get this rush, this connection with my character, that makes me realize why I do this in the first place.