This holiday
season, I’ve decided to promote some of my writer friends and ask some of the
questions that folks ask me. Today’s guest/victim is:
L. Andrew Cooper
First, a little something about Andrew.
L.
Andrew Cooper teaches film and digital media at the University of Louisville.
He specializes in horror film and in horror more generally, from
eighteenth-century Gothic to whatever comes after torture porn and found
footage. His publications include Gothic Realities (2010), Monsters (2012, co-edited with Brandy Ball Blake), and Dario Argento (2012). He also dabbles in fiction; if that
takes off, it may seize control of the site: his first novel, Burning the Middle Ground, was published on November 30, 2012. His B.A.
is from Harvard, and his Ph.D. is from Princeton.
At
what age did you start writing or know that you wanted to write?
I remember learning to write in
kindergarten—the vivid challenge of “owl” on a spelling test—but I don’t
remember knowing how to write and not writing stories. I first tried a novel in
the second grade, a choose-your-own-adventure, but I didn’t finish one until I
was eighteen (totally unpublishable). I know people live without writing. How
odd.
Where
do your ideas come from?
Anxieties, fascinations, passions,
which I turn into problems that I must solve by transforming them into stories,
strange and disturbing stories.
Do
you base your characters on people you know or know of? Family or celebrities?
Aspects of people I know creep into
my characters, but because most of my writing tends to be… dark… most of my
characters experience terrible things, which means I avoid basing any character
on any one person. I have, at times, made characters superficially resemble people with whom I am presently unhappy. When
those characters experience terrible things, I get some shadenfreude, but I always make those characters differ from the
people they resemble in major ways, too, so that I don’t feel like I’m ever
truly imagining someone real.
I don’t base characters on
celebrities when I craft them, but I fantasize about casting people to play them
after I’m done writing them. I’ve approached celebrities at conventions, handed
them books, and said, “You’d be perfect for…” and named characters. None of the
celebrities has ever gotten back to me directly, but one did accept a Facebook
friend request. Perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, the character I imagine
her playing has a bigger role in the novel I’m working on now… so if Hollywood
calls me, I will definitely call her (she’s been a fave for years).
Do
you plot out your stories or just make it up as you go?
All my novels and books have outlines
first, but a lot of improvisation happens in between the larger points on the
outlines, which are often just chapter-driven tables of contents. That said, my
brain usually plots far ahead of where I’m writing, and I almost always have an
ending before I begin. The ending I start with is never complete, however, particularly
where characters are concerned. Characters have minds of their own: they can
live, die, kill one another, and intervene in events in unexpected ways. They
rarely change the major outcomes for
which they were born, but they change the shapes of things, and who knows? They
could start taking over.
Do
you listen to music while you write, and if so, what do you listen too?
Some ideas require quiet. Extreme
horror or action might need some Nine Inch Nails, KMFDM, or another industrial
goody from my younger years. Lately, as my prose has played more with film
elements, I’ve been listening to Philip Glass and Angelo Badalamenti.
Which
of your characters would you most like to meet in person? Which character of
another author would you want to meet?
Many of my characters would kill me
if we met. If we could stipulate safety, I would like to meet Dr. Allen V. Fincher,
author of The Alchemy of Will, the
book of rituals with horrific results in my novels and short stories. He’s also
the architect behind the massive conspiracy that began in my novel Burning the Middle Ground and continues
in the novel I’m writing now, Manufacturing
Miracles. If meeting him somehow weren’t a very, very bad idea, I’d love
for us to chat. As for another author’s character, J.D. Salinger’s Buddy Glass.
Which
of your stories/books/works do you consider the best?
My answer varies from day to day.
Different works are better for different audiences. My horror short story
collection Leaping at Thorns is a
cross-section of twenty years of my life, so I’m rather fond of it.
How
much do you write each day/week?
I might write a twenty-page short
story in a day and then write nothing for a week. When I’m working regularly on
a book, I draft on average ten pages in a day, with editing as I go.
Can
you tell about your experiences working with publishers? Any juicy or painful
experiences?
I’ve known small presses and
publications that folded because of economic circumstances, which sucks, but my
personal dealings with publishers have been good. I’ve published in fiction,
non-fiction, and textbooks, and I have and will continue to get rejections, but
everyone I’ve met in publishing itself has been professional. Early in my
career, I got picked up by two different agents at two different times, both of
whom dropped me when they quit agenting, the first because he got into a
prestigious journalism school and the second because she got her own book deal.
Agents are not the same as publishing, but as a younger person trying to break
in, I of course thought I was on the verge of being “discovered” and had my
heart trampled. I only recently—a decade later—decided to go with an agent
again, and luckily she’s the real deal.
Do
you have a routine when you write?
With book-length projects, yes. After
the preliminaries—outlining, research—I try to develop a rhythm so that I have
a block of hours during which I sit down, usually with coffee or espresso, and
read whatever I’ve last written. I do light editing as I go until all the
threads are in hand, and then I write until I reach a stopping point.
Characters and cadence tell me how far to go.
What
is your latest project/release?
In early 2016 Seventh Star Press is
re-releasing my co-edited collection Reel
Dark: Twisted Projections on the Flickering Page as well as the collection
of my own work, Leaping at Thorns,
the new edition of which will feature three previously uncollected stories.
Also in 2016, Seventh Star will release a new collection of my work, Peritoneum, which is… insane. Almost all
the stories are interconnected. I think it’s like Sherwood, Ohio on acid, especially the final sequence of stories,
which begins with “The Eternal Recurrence of Suburban Abortion” and ends with
“The Broom Closet Where Everything Dies.”
Is
there a book or book series that you recommend to people?
If people want to understand how
Gothic horror has withstood time, they need to read Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho. Anyone who wants
to craft disturbing fiction should read Jack Ketchum’s The Girl Next Door. One imperfect piece of writing that could be a
limitless source? Poe’s Narrative of
Arthur Gordon Pym. Just ask Lovecraft.
Do
you have a dream project that you want to write in the future?
If I fantasize long enough about
writing something, I figure I’ll write about it. I refer to it as a kind of
intellectual Darwinism—if a concept survives long enough in my brain,
weathering the decay of brain cells and other perils, it is likely worth
recording, and perhaps worth publishing. I don’t try to publish everything I
write, and not everything I try to publish makes it, so “don’t dream it, be it”
doesn’t exactly “make it so,” but the philosophy tends to make action.
Do
you have a special way of generating story ideas?
Showering.
How
much of you is in your characters?
Quite a lot, but not always (I hope)
where people expect. In Burning the
Middle Ground, for instance, Ronald Glassner is a snarky gay writer, and I am a snarky gay writer, so people tend
to think he’s me, but I don’t identify with him that much. On some days he’s
just that obnoxious guy from New York… and I’m from the South, uncomfortable when
I’m in NYC… on other days he’s a hero… and I’m not. Another example is a
character in a short story that will appear in my new collection Peritoneum: her name is an obvious
parody of mine, and I give her about two sentences to seem important before someone
bashes her head in. When I show up in my work, I’m like the other people who
do. I only show up partially, and when I do, I’m in for some abuse.
If
you could live the life of one of your characters, who would it be?
Susan Penser. She’s a badass grandma
with a conscience, and she has a lot of money and power to help deal with the
crap life throws at her. She plays an important role in my horror novel Descending Lines as well as my (hopefully)
forthcoming thriller The Blue Jacket
Conspiracy. She’s not done yet, either.
Do
you read reviews of your books? If so,
have you ever engaged a reviewer over comments they’ve made?
Yes, and unfortunately, yes.
Fortunately, the only misstep I made in the engagement category involved an
academic book, and while I would advise folks just to leave reviewers alone, I
think that if there’s a circumstance when engaging a reviewer is appropriate,
it’s this one: the reviewer made factually inaccurate claims about what my book
says. I was annoyed. The review’s claims made for good soundbites, but they
also made no sense given what I actually wrote. Yes, reviewers have deadlines
and don’t always read carefully or read at all. It’s a reality. The writer must
rise above. I did not.
What
are you working on now?
Manufacturing
Miracles is book two of The
Last World War, the sequel to Burning
the Middle Ground, which I always planned as the first installment of a
series. It picks up five years after the events of the first book, with
continuing characters (those who survived and otherwise kept going) scattered
across the United States. Whereas the first book takes the scope of a small
town, this book takes the scope of the entire nation falling into Dr. Allen
Fincher’s conspiracy. Going beyond mind control, a major goal in the first
book, the conspiracy is now destroying cities as the Consortium, a group of
characters familiar not just from Burning
but also from Leaping at Thorns and Peritoneum, hatches new plans and new
monsters in Miami, Atlanta, New York, Boston, Cincinnati, Louisville, Los
Angeles, and elsewhere. Not only is the range of the evil boggling, but the
mayhem is the most visceral and colorful
I have crafted. The work is slow but delightful, as well as seriously
disturbing, so far.
Thanks Andrew. To find his books, click the link.
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