S.G. Browne

In July 2004, I was sitting on a bench at a shopping mall, watching people walk past and wondering what their futures held for them. I started writing some thoughts down about a character who can see what everyone will be like in fifteen or twenty years and went with it. A little while later, I’d scribbled out several pages that would eventually become the opening chapter to Fated.

The novel is narrated by Fate (aka Fabio) who’s in charge of assigning the futures of the 83% of humans who are fated to live ordinary, mediocre lives – most of whom will make bad decisions or fail to achieve anything more than a fleeting encounter with success.

Think single-term Presidents.
Think drug-addicted actors.
Think one-hit wonders.

Destiny, on the other hand, gets the rest of the population who are destined for greatness. Or at least for better things.

Think George Washington.
Think Meryl Streep.
Think The Beatles.

This makes for a frustrated and overwhelmed Fabio, especially since most of his humans are focused on filling their lives with the empty calories of consumer excess rather than a healthy diet of internal happiness. Throw in the fact that he has a five-hundred-year-old grudge with Death and that his best friends are Sloth and Gluttony and what you get is an immortal who’s become a disgruntled employee of the cosmos.

But then Fate falls in love with a mortal woman on the Path of Destiny (which is against the rules) and he starts to get involved in the lives of his humans (another big-no-no), changing their fates and causing some serious cosmic repercussions.

I described my first novel, Breathers, as “A dark comedy about undeath through the eyes of an ordinary zombie” and “Fight Club meets Shaun of the Dead, only with the zombies as the good guys.” Which pretty much gives you a good idea of what to expect. But with Fated, I’ve had a difficult time coming up with a single line or two that succinctly captures what the book is about.

While I describe it as “A dark comedy and social satire about fate, destiny, and the consequences of getting involved with humans,” that doesn’t tell you anything about how the novel is a bit of an indictment of the consumer culture.

Or that Fate and Destiny have a complicated, friends-with-benefits relationship.

Or that Karma is an alcoholic.

When it came to populating Fated with characters, I had a lot of fun taking abstract concepts like Fate, Destiny, Karma, and Death and giving them starring roles – not to mention cameos by Lady Luck, Honesty, Failure, Love, Secrecy, Truth, Wisdom, and most of the Deadly Sins. Just to name a few.

I also enjoyed taking a look at what it means to be human through the eyes of someone who is not human but who is in charge of our futures. Or most of them. I enjoyed seeing how Fate’s relationship with humans changed as the story unfolded and what happened when he started breaking the rules. Like his humans, I was interested in seeing how Fate’s decisions ultimately affected his own future.

Rule #1: Don’t get involved.

That’s how the novel opens and, obviously, it’s set up for Fate to break that rule. Though it’s not an all-encompassing directive from Jerry (aka God). While Fate, Destiny, and Death aren’t supposed to get involved in the lives of humans, the rule doesn’t apply to other immortals like Lady Luck or Fear or Anger. After all, you can’t be an Intangible or an Emotive or one of the Deadly Sins without having some kind of an impact on humans. That’s part of the job description, getting involved. But it all comes down to what humans do with their luck or their fear or their anger that determines their eventual outcome.

Now I just have to figure out how to fit all of that into the tag line.

We’re at the one month mark before the official release of my second novel, Fated, though I did receive my first copy of the book in the mail the other day, which you can tell I’m just a little happy about. The picture doesn’t do the cover justice, which is a matte coating with an overlay that gives it a great texture. And the colors, especially the spine, really pop.

Once I receive my author copies I’ll be having some contests for giveaways, so stay tuned.

In the meantime, if you live in Oregon, Washington, or California, below are the dates and general info for my 2010 West Coast Tour.

Things kick off on November 2nd with the official release at Powell’s Books in Beaverton, OR. I’ll be reading, talking, signing, and hopefully doing some audience participation giveaways. So if you’re in the neighborhood, come on out and play!

While up in the Pacific Northwest, I’ll also be doing signings in Seattle (11/3) and Lake Forest Park (11/4) before returning to California for the San Francisco Book Launch Party at Borderlands Books (11/6), followed by signings in Capitola (11/8), Fremont (11/10), San Francisco again (11/12), Pleasanton (11/13), Roseville (11/16), Campbell (11/20), Santa Barbara (12/3), Burbank (12/4), San Diego (12/11), and Pleasanton again (12/18). A full list of details can be found by checking out my Events Calendar.

I’m also planning trips in 2011 to states east of California, including Florida, Texas, and New York, among others, and will post updates on my web site and via this e-mail newsletter once I have more information.

As always, thanks for the support. I hope I get a chance to see and meet all of you at one of my upcoming signings.

The idea for Fated started out as something completely different than what it eventually became. Actually, it was almost an accident. An idea born out of another idea that ended up being somewhat less brilliant than when I initially started writing it down.

Late in the evening of September 10, 2003 (it was actually 10PM – I have the entry in one of my journals), I sat down to write out an idea for a short story that had popped into my head. The entry starts out:

“Story about a man in his late thirties who has spent his life avoiding risks until some supernatural event intervenes.”

This brilliant idea goes on for almost a full page until I realized, and actually wrote down, that the idea sounded much better in my head before I watched SportsCenter on ESPN to see if the Giants beat the Padres. (They did, 7-1.)

At that point, I had no idea where I was going with the original idea. But not wanting to give up on whatever it was that prompted me to sit down and write in the first place, I kept journaling, coming up with an occasional “maybe this” and a few “maybe thats” until I stumbled upon the idea that my main character lived in Manhattan and had first hand knowledge about certain events because he’s Fate. I even had him aspiring to be a writer so that he could tell the truth about the fact that no one, not even fictional characters, control their own fate.

I rambled on a bit with that, trying to figure out if he was human, if he had a childhood, if he socialized with humans, if he went out on dates – throwing out ideas that at the time didn’t really go anywhere but that’s what writers do. Throw things at a target and hope something sticks. Then I turned on the TV and watched the rest of SportsCenter.

The following July, I was sitting on a bench at an outdoor shopping mall, watching people walk past and wondering what their futures held for them. I hadn’t pursued the idea about Fate from the previous September, but as I started writing, I realized the ideas were connected. Five minutes later, I’d scribbled out a narrative on a page of a yellow-lined notepad about a character who can see what everyone will be like in fifteen or twenty years. This would eventually become the opening chapter to Fated.

I didn’t actually start working on the novel until more than two years later, in December 2006, after I’d moved to San Francisco. I wrote the first half of Fated (40,000 words) in three months, struggled for another nine months to squeeze out the next 20,000 words, then pumped out the last quarter of it (another 20,000 words) in January 2008. I finished the first draft of Fated on February 2, 2008, the day before the New York Giants upset the previously undefeated New England Patriots 17-14 in Super Bowl XLII.

I guess they were fated to lose.

I’m frequently asked about my writing process. When I write. Where I write. How I write.

When? Mornings and evening, mostly. I like to use my afternoons for running errands and taking naps. Yes, I take naps. Discovered them in college following late nights of, ahem, studying. I love naps.

Where? In my apartment, either at my desk or on my couch with my laptop. I’m one of those rare writers who doesn’t drink coffee. Plus I’m easily distracted. So going to a cafe to write is mostly pointless. And at a cafe, I don’t have my cats curled up on either side of me.

How? I’m like Indiana Jones in The Raiders of the Lost Ark. I make it up as I go.

Generally, I get an idea of how I want to start a story. Or where I want it to start and then I start writing. When I’m finished, it may not begin in the same place or in the same way, but that’s what gets me moving forward.

For instance, Breathers originally opened up with what is now Chapter 2. But after doing some rewrites, I ended up switching things around and beginning the book with a scene that takes place in Chapter 37 and having the first 200 pages be a flashback to explain how Andy got there.

But how he ended up in the kitchen, standing in front of the refrigerator and finding his parents’ body parts in between the mayonnaise and the leftover Thanksgiving turkey isn’t something I planned to have happen. It’s just the way the story developed.

Generally, I don’t know how my story is going to end, or at the very least, how I’m going to get there. I didn’t have definite endings for Breathers and Fated when I started, but rather a vague idea of what might happen. The eventual endings developed from the actions of the characters.

“My notion of a story is an interesting situation in which a human being has to cope with a problem, does so, and thereby changes his personality, character, or evaluations in some measure because the coping has forced him to revise his thinking. How he copes with it, I can’t plot in advance because that depends on his character, and I don’t know what his character is until I get acquainted with him.”
— Robert Heinlein

Much like Heinlein said in his quote above, plotting out what my characters are going to do before they have a chance to get there doesn’t work for me. I don’t know how my characters will react to certain situations until I put them in those situations, so I can’t tell them what they’re going to do ahead of time until I get to know them. Otherwise, I’m just forcing my will upon them. Instead, I let my characters’ actions dictate where the plot is going to go.

Of course, not knowing where you’re going can sometimes lead to moments of complete and absolute terror when you’re two-thirds of the way through the manuscript and you’re not sure what’s going to happen in the third act. But it’s what’s worked for me for most of the last two decades, so I’m sticking with it.

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.