S.G. Browne

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.

You wake up at 6:00am PST Wednesday morning in San Francisco. You spend all day running last minute errands and packing for a 10 day trip and trying to get all those bright yellow Post-It notes with reminders off your desk. You catch the Super Shuttle, which arrives 10 minutes early and deposits you at SFO two-and-a-half hours early, but at least you saved $30 by not taking a cab.

You board your 11:40pm flight and get as comfortable as you can, hoping to catch some sleep during the five hour flight. But you’re not sitting in first class, so you know that’s not going to happen. Especially since someone a few rows back thought it was a good idea to bring their two three year old boys on the overnight flight and one of them screams and throws a tantrum every twenty minutes.

You land at Ft. Lauderdale at 8:00am EST, awake now for twenty-three hours, and rent your car from Budget and get on the Florida Turnpike to drive up to Orlando for your book signing later that evening. As you drive on the Turnpike, you blow through the SunPass lanes, the prepaid/pre-registered lanes that avoid the hassle of having to stop and pay the tolls or dish out exact change. You do this because the guy at Budget who checked you in told you that was how it worked and the credit card you rented the car with would get charged for the tolls. As you blow through toll after toll, you read the sign that says $100 per toll violations and wonder if you’re racking up a lot more than toll charges.

You get to Orlando at noon and spend a few hours having lunch and hanging out with Tommy Castillo, zombie artist genius and karaoke god (who sang “The Rainbow Connection” in the voice of Kermit the Frog in Winnipeg) and eventually realize you’re about to pass out, so you crash on his couch but can’t sleep because his two dachshunds have decided they really, really want to climb all over you and lick your face. So you rest instead.

At 6:00pm, after a shower and a change of clothes, you’ve been awake for thirty-three hours, so you drink the 5-hour energy drink you bought at the airport and head over to Barnes & Noble in Colonial Plaza for your 7:00pm signing. Geoff and the crew at B&N make you feel welcome and have up great displays and there are actually people waiting there for you and you talk and read and sign and it makes the fact that you haven’t slept in a day-and-a-half worth it.

At 9:00pm, you get on to the I-4 to Tampa because you’re booked at the Hilton in St. Petersburg, courtesy of the editors of Zombie St. Pete, the zombie anthology you wrote the introduction for and the reason you’re in Florida in the first place. You get on the Interstate and see the EZPass lane and blow through the gate, the same you’ve been doing all day long, only this time under the red light instead of the words DON’T STOP it says WAIT FOR GREEN. You don’t notice this in time, so you don’t stop. An alarm sounds behind you and you wonder if you’ve just earned yourself a ticket for running a red light. But at least you can write it off.

At 10:00pm, you pull off the freeway to use the bathroom at Burger King and because you haven’t eaten in eight hours, you cave in and order a BK Big Fish value meal. You decide that the BK Big Fish is considerably superior to the Filet of Fish from McDonald’s. You also realize you’ve just used the word “superior” to describe fast food.

At 11:00pm you check into the Hilton in St. Petersburg and you’ve now been awake for thirty-eight hours. Before you go to bed, you get on the Internet to post a few comments to Twitter and to check e-mail. Only the Hilton doesn’t provide free Internet service and because this annoys you, you go downstairs in your jeans and bare feet to sit in the lobby instead. The next morning, you cave in and pay for the Internet service.

In response to my last entry, Blah Blah Blog, Sarah Malone commented and posed a couple of questions that I thought would be best addressed here, since they’re not just simple yes or no answers.

And if anyone has any other questions, fire away.  I’ll do my best to answer them in a timely fashion, even if I don’t know what I’m talking about.

Question #1: Are you critical of your own work and does it ever truly feel finished?
I’m definitely critical of my own work, to the point that as I’m writing, I’m wondering if what’s coming out of me is good enough. But I realize that’s what the editing process is for, to take the initial concept, the shell of the novel, and turn it into what I envisioned.

Think of the first draft as kind of like building a house and putting up the walls and the floor and the ceiling, creating a solid structure on a firm foundation. Something that will hold everything I want to put into it. Each subsequent draft fills the house with furnishings and decorations and all of the details it needs to make it complete.

Of course, sometimes, I realize I need to rearrange the floor plan or add another room or a second level or a basement, but fortunately, it’s just an analogy, so it costs a lot less.

And as far as feeling as if it’s ever finished, yes.  There’s a definite sense of accomplishment when I’ve completed the first draft and then again when I’ve made the final edits. But I can always find something six months down the road that I think I could have done better.

Question #2: The novels that you wrote before, are you planning on trying to publish them now that your name is out there?
Prior to Breathers, I’d written three novels that were straight supernatural horror, with the first two being told in third person omniscient and the third told in the first person. While there are redeeming qualities on all three, it’s unlikely I’ll pursue trying to publish the first two.

One, they’re very different from what I’ve doing now, both in style and voice. I’ve found that writing dark comedy and social satire with some kind of a supernatural edge resonates with me more than writing straight supernatural horror. And, more importantly, I don’t believe the quality of the writing is up to par with Breathers or Fated. The third novel, however, has promise, though I’d have to rewrite it to make it more darkly comedic.

Thanks for the questions, Sarah!

I know I mentioned this in passing at some point (though exactly when eludes me and I’m too lazy to look back at my posts for reference), but I’ll be flying out to Florida at the end of February to attend the release party of the zombie anthology Zombie St. Pete – a collection of zombie tales that take place in and around sunny St. Petersburg, Florida.

Although I didn’t contribute a story to the anthology, the editors were kind enough to invite me to write the introduction.

The event kicks off at 5:00PM on Saturday, February 27, at the St. Pete Pier and will include signings by yours truly and the contributors to the anthology, readings from selected stories, live music, and Thrill St. Pete’s reinterpretation of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” It should be a zombie good time. So if you’re in the area and can’t get enough zombies, come on by and join the fun.

In addition to the release party, I’ll be in Florida a few days before appearing at bookstores in Orlando, Sarasota, and St. Petersburg. You can see the details and schedule of the release party and my signings on the Events page or to the right of this post under Upcoming Events.

Hope to see you in Florida!

Michael Boatman is the author of The Revenant Road, a dark horror comedy about a best-selling mystery writer who begrudgingly enters into the family monster-killing business and has to stop a supernatural killing spree while fighting off a hangover and trying to live up to his dead father’s reputation. Think Men in Black meets Shaun of the Dead.

I met Michael in San Diego, when we shared an author reading and signing at Mysterious Galaxy Books. A gifted actor as well as a talented writer, Michael has co-starred on Spin City and Arli$$ and is currently co-starring in the Lifetime television series SHERRI.

Tell us about your first zombie experience. How did you lose your undead virginity?
The first time I ever really became aware of zombies was during an episode of The Night Stalker, way back in the ‘70’s. Darren McGavin’s character, Kolchak discovers that someone has resurrected a dead gangster and sent him around to kill off a bunch of other gangsters by breaking their backs. This zombie was a more traditional voodoo-based zombie: a dead man sent by a sorcerer to exact horrifying revenge on the sorcerer’s enemies. The climax takes place in an old auto graveyard. To stop the zombie, Kolchak has to find it while it lies dormant inside one of the abandoned wrecks. He has to exorcise the zombie by filling its mouth with salt and sewing its lips shut. I guarantee you, the moment when the zombie opens its eyes is one of the scariest, and funniest moments in television horror history.

What’s your favorite zombie film?
Night of the Living Dead is still the greatest zombie film, and one of the greatest horror films of all time. It never ceases to terrify me and I’ve watched it every year since I was in high school.

It’s the zombie apocalypse. Do you use a gun, a machete, or a Louisville slugger?
I’m gonna go for the Louisville. It’s more reliable than a gun and I could use the workout.

If you were a zombie, who would you eat first?
George W. Bush. A close second would be Maxim model/actress Sophia Vergara, but for completely different reasons.

What’s the first thing you ever had published?
My first published short story was called “The Drop.” It’s a story about a mentally retarded but unusually well endowed man named Cyrell Biggs. Cyrell plots to murder his abusive cousin/boss at the behest of the woman they both love. That story contains rude alligators, a homicidal black mermaid, Southern family dysfunction and a beatdown by crowbar. (I’m still proud of it.) It was published in Horror Garage magazine.

Who’s your favorite author?
I have so many favorites, but two guys tie for my number one spot: Stephen King and David J. Schow.

What’s your favorite book?
The Road. It hit me like a ton of bricks and I didn’t expect it to. It sets the bar for post-Apocalyptic survival stories and is simply the most horrifying, heartbreaking novel I’ve ever read.

Name your favorite guilty pleasure.
Doritos. I can eat an entire duffel-bag of Doritos. Afterward I can sit there in my car, listening to my arteries clogging and still think, “Damn…that was good.”

Other than your favorite author/book, name something that inspires your writing.
Anger. I’m from the Midwest: Therefore I am deeply repressed. I’m the married father of four children: Therefore I spend a lot of time being wrong. Therefore I do my best writing when I’m pissed. I’ve written two and a half novels, dozens of short stories, six screenplays and a million un-mailed death threats. People see me on television and form one sort of opinion about me. Then they read my stories or follow me on Twitter or Facebook and they all write the same thing… “But you seem so nice.”

If you had a theme song that played when you walked into a room, what would it be?
“The Six Million Dollar Man.”

Shameless self-promotion bonus question: What’s coming up next?
I’m working on a novel about God, which is tough for an atheist. I’m also writing a short story about wizards in a post- apocalyptic Chicago.

Michael Boatman is the author of The Revenant Road and the short story collection, God Laughs When You Die: Mean Little Stories From the Wrong Side of the Tracks.

If you’d like to keep up with Micheal’s writing and acting endeavors, you can follow him at Twitter.com/MichaelPBoatman.