S.G. Browne

“Another thing is no matter how much you think you love someone, you’ll step back when the pool of their blood edges up too close.”
—Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

If you’ve checked out Bio and Q&A on the Founder’s page on my web site or been following Breathers From A to Z (L is for Lullaby), you know that Chuck Palahniuk is one of my major influences and favorite authors.  I’m especially fond of his novels Lullaby, Survivor, and Invisible Monsters.  And Fight Club is at the top of my list of favorite films.”On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.”

But while Chuck gets props for helping me to find a narrative voice that resonates with me, there are other writers, both in fiction and in film, who inspire my own writing and have unknowingly participated in my development as a writer:

Christopher Moore (A Dirty Job / Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal / Fool)
Nick Hornby (About a Boy / High Fidelity)
Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich / Adaptation / Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind)
Wes Anderson (Rushmore / The Royal Tenenbaums / The Darjeeling Limited)
David O. Russell (Flirting With Disaster / I Heart Huckabees)
Joel and Ethan Coen (Fargo / The Big Lebowski / Raising Arizona)

As you can see, screenplay writers are as big of an influence on me as fiction authors, though I also appreciate reads by Bret Easton Ellis, Kurt Vonnegut, William Golding, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.  And although I don’t tend to read him as much as I used to back in the late 80s and through the 90s when I was devouring a steady diet of Peter Straub, Robert McCammon, and F. Paul Wilson, Stephen King is the reason I wanted to become a writer.

(Next entry:  Q is for Quitting)

So I’ve had some on-line publicity the past week and finally figured I’d get around to putting them all together in one convenient location.  So here you go…

First, I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Zombies & Toys, which is actually running a contest for a signed copy of Breathers.  Plus they have some fun zombie schwag.

Second, two new reviews popped up on the zombie radar, one from HorrorScope in Australia and the other from Bookopolis, which is affiliated with the LibraryThing’s Early Reviewer Program.  Both of the reviews were very kind, with the Bookopolis review mentioning Christopher Moore and Chuck Palahniuk, which I find flattering.

Third, I participated in my virgin Podcast last week courtesy of The Fearshop.com.  I have to admit, I realized about halfway through that I filled the gaps of the interview with “ums” and “ahs,” but I think I managed to mine those out of my vocabulary toward the end.

And finally, though this has nothing to do with interviews, reviews, or podcasts, the image above completes the theme of the title and is my brand, spanking new T-shirt I bought from Noisebot.com.

No, there are no characters in Breathers named Oscar.  And this isn’t about Oscar Wilde or Oscar the Grouch, though I am fond of both of them.  This is about a little bald, gold statue and how the film rights for Breathers got optioned.

Back in February of 2008, not long after I’d garnered a publishing contract with Random House, my agent, Michelle Brower, let me know that Sarah Self of the Gersh Agency was interested in representing the film rights for Breathers.  As it turned out, Sarah was the agent (and still is) for Diablo Cody, who at the time was nominated for an Academy Award for her original screenplay Juno.

After the Academy Awards, my film agent sent a copy of Breathers to both Diablo and to Mason Novick, the producer of Juno.  She thought Breathers would be a perfect fit for them, or vice versa.  Either way, they were both interested and signed on to co-produce.

Due to existing projects (Jennifer’s Body, 500 Days of Summer, The United States of Tara), and several other factors that affected Hollywood, things didn’t really start rolling on finding a studio home for Breathers until early 2009.  That’s when Geoff LaTulippe was attached to write the film adaptation of Breathers.  Geoff had sold his first screenplay, “Going the Distance,” to New Line and came on board in January.  I read the screenplay and loved it, found myself laughing out loud, and was (and am) excited to see what he comes up with.

A month later, in February, my film agent called to let me know that there was an offer on the table from Fox Searchlight Pictures, the makers of Juno, Jennifer’s Body, 500 Days of Summer, Little Miss Sunshine, and Slumdog Millionaire.  The first announcement of the deal appeared in the Daily Variety on Monday, February 23.

While the screenplay still has to be written and actors and a crew attached, it’s possible the film will go into production in 2010, with a release date of 2011.  But no firm date has been set at this point.

When you start writing, you always dream of having your book published and made into a movie.  But to actually have your dreams come true is a bit surreal.  I spent a lot of time the first few days after the deal was announced laughing out loud, often in front of strangers who I passed on the street, most of whom tended to give me a little extra room.

The thing is, I’ve always been a fan of 20th Century Fox (the parent of Fox Searchlight), ever since I saw Star Wars back in 1977 and I always wanted their logo to announce the start of my film.  I still get goosebumps listening to the theme music, which I have on my iTunes:

99-20th-century-fox-title

Finally, on Page 74 of Breathers, there’s a bit of a bizarre, cosmic foreshadowing that takes place.  Andy is talking about how difficult it is for zombies to escape their Hollywood archetype of the mindless, flesh-eating ghouls and change their public image:

“Then again, it’s kind of hard to hire a good publicist when you don’t have a budget to rival Twentieth Century Fox or Random House.”

(I wrote this more than two years before the book was sold to Random House and three years before the movie deal with Fox.  No editing occurred.)

You wake up on Wednesday morning after a restless night with a cold inflating your head and dripping down the back of your throat.  You pump yourself full ofEmergen -C and Day-Quil, then catch the 6:30AM Super Shuttle to SFO for a flight to Denver.  After a two-hour layover in Denver and a vegetarian burger on a crunchy role with questionable tomatoes and limp lettuce, you climb aboard a subway car disguised as an airplane for the two hour flight to Winnipeg, Canada.You land in Winnipeg and, on the cab ride to the hotel, you look out the windows and see condemned buildings and vacant lots and people shuffling along the sidewalk in a daze and you think, “If the zombie apocalypse started here, no one would notice.”

You check into your hotel, grab some questionable sushi, meet a few of the volunteers and invited guests from the convention, then call it an early night so you can get some sleep.  At 1:50AM, you’re woken up by the couple in the next room having wall pounding sex and you realize the walls are as thin as the Bush Administration’s reasons for invading Iraq.

The next day you realize this convention is going to be very small.  Maybe 50 people if everyone brings in a homeless person from the crime-ridden streets.  And you’re wondering if you’ve wasted $1000 on airfare and hotel.  But then you get to spend time with the volunteers and guests and you realize this is going to be a different kind of convention.

You enjoy a reading by Conrad Williams from his new novel ONE and a panel about the unique writing journey of Edo van Belkom.  You have drinks at the hotel bar with Joshua Gee and F. Paul Wilson, who not only both enjoy the TV series LOST but who help judge the Gross Out Contest, which you hosted.

You host a panel and have a reading and sell all six copies of your novel (which you told customs were just samples and not for sale).  You take cold medicine that containspseudoephredrine, the main ingredient in crystal methamphetamine.  You find out your hotel is frequented by aboriginal prostitutes.

You hang out with Rhonda Parrish (who thinks you have a good singing voice) and Gavin Hughes (who you strong-armed into reading for the Gross Out Contest).  You hang out with Kelly Young (who took compromising pictures of you) and Tommy Castillo (who won the Gross Out Contest).  You sing karaoke with these four people.  You’ve never sung karaoke before, but you manage to pull off a rendition of Sinatra’s “Fly Me To The Moon,” which isn’t as good as Kelly’s version of “Walking in Memphis” or Tommy’s version of “The Rainbow Connection” in the voice of Kermit the Frog, but you have a great time.

You go out to lunch and dinner with these people.  You hang out in the bar with them.  (Because that’s what writers do at these conventions.)  You have a conversation about surviving a post EMP Winnipeg and how you would get home during the breakdown of society and how when you leave the room to take a leak you come back to find out the hypothetical you in this scenario has just been violated.

In addition, you meet Cliff and Linda and John.  You meet Derek and Tim and Sherry.  You meet Nicole and Shad (who got engaged at the convention).  You meet Toni Stauffer and Thomas Sippos and Chris Angus and a dozen others who you fail to mention because your memory isn’t as good as you thought it was.  So you apologize to those forgotten and hope they forgive you and still buy your book.
When you leave Winnipeg on Sunday, you realize you had more fun at this convention than at perhaps any other convention and you realize you have fond memories of the murder capital of Canada.  But it still looks like the zombie apocalypse is just waiting to happen there.

Back in the spring of 2002, I was working on the re-writes of my second and third novels for submission to a couple of small press publishers in the horror community.  Each of the publishers had expressed enthusiastic interest for my novels and it looked like, after more than a decade of writing with the hopes of become a published novelist, I was finally going to realize my dreams.

But then a funny thing happened.  I started to hate what I was writing.

Both novels were of the supernatural horror variety, influenced by a steady diet of King, Straub, Koontz, and McCammon that I’d fed on as a teenager and young adult.  And although I was proud of both novels, the more time I spent re-writing them, the more I realized that I was growing to hate them.

What had once been fun had now become tedious, painful work.

So after struggling with the rewrites for several months, I told the two small presses that I wouldn’t be submitting the manuscripts and I kissed my opportunity to become a published novelist goodbye.

Then I stopped writing.

For the next year and a half I played a lot of golf and spent more time reading and playing with my dog.  I wrote a best man’s speech based on Hamlet (“To wed or not to wed, that is the question…”) and a 40th birthday poem for my wife based on The Raven (“Once upon a birthday dreary…”), but that was about it.

Sometime in the middle of all of this, I read Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk.

Although I’d seen Fight Club (one of my favorite all time films), I’d never read the novel or any of Palahniuk’s other books.  But for some reason, this novel resonated with me on a level I hadn’t previously experienced.  And when I was done, I had an “a-ha” moment.

While my three novels and four dozen short stories had all predominantly been influenced by my love of horror, I’d written a few short stories that were dark comedy with a supernatural edge to them.  But I’d never thought about writing anything other than straight horror novels.

Lullaby changed all that.

After finishing Lullaby, I began to think about turning a short story of mine into a full-length novel.  The story, “A Zombie’s Lament,” dealt with a group of zombies who attend Undead Anonymous meetings and yearn for civil rights.  About a year later, I wrote the opening scene for Breathers.

(Next entry:  M is for Maggots)