|
|
 |
The Labor Day
Weekend Interview
By Ren Richfield - 08-31-08
It’s been a while since there’s been an interview done here on the website,
so Scott and I thought that it was about time to do another one. Over Labor Day weekend 2008 I went to Scott’s home and found him in the midst of packing for his ensuing move. Instead of trying to talk over all the boxes, we went out onto the patio.
Ren Richfield: How much packing do you have left to do?
Scott Falkner: Too much. The basement is actually almost completely empty save my office stuff. The upstairs is almost finished. It’s really just the main level of the house that’s left I guess.
RR: How long do you have to finish it all?
SF: I believe the third week of September is when it’ll all have to be ready to go. This whole moving thing is for the birds, but I’m glad we’re doing it. We were ready to get away from the city… not that Madison is that large by “city” standards, but it’s large enough. We wanted to move somewhere a little more anonymous, a little more peaceful. Anyway, we’re moving up north into the sticks.
RR: How is moving affecting your writing?
SF: (laughs) It’s messing it up big time. The new collection should be completely finished – I’m talking rewrites, edits, the whole eleven yards – the thing should be officially iced by now. And it’s not. And the reason it’s not is because I’ve got my mind on about thirteen-hundred different things right now, and each one of them have to be finished on a daily basis. I mean, it’s finished for the most part. The stories are all there, six of them are completely done. Three of them are in second draft condition, and there’s one that’s being rewritten because I didn’t like how it turned out.
RR: So are you worried about the January release date?
SF: No. Not at all. The book will definitely be handed to my editor very soon, and barring any problems on the Garden’s end [Stone Garden Publishing] it’ll be released in January of ’09.
RR: Let’s talk about the book a little bit. It’s called “Exile: The Collected Helman Graff.” In the past you’ve told me that you consider short stories the hardest thing to write in comparison to novels and novellas. So I suppose my question is: what ever possessed you to write an entire book of short stories?
SF: (laughs) I wish you would have brought that up to me before I decided to do it. The idea really came out of the response to “The Feast of Catchville.” So many of that book’s readers were genuinely interested in Helman – who he was, where he came from. At the time, I didn’t think much of it. I mean, you know as well as I that we played with it a bit, we offered those “Who is Helman Graff?” tee shirts. But it didn’t go much farther. Of course, Helman had grown out of the short story in the first place. He first appeared a couple of times in an online ‘zine. And then he popped up for some reason in the Delving books.
RR: What do you mean, ‘he popped up’? You didn’t originally intend to put him the Delving trilogy.
SF: I don’t think that there was a conscious thought to include or exclude him when I first started Obligations. It just kind of happened. Let’s see, I think I was trying to come up with what sort of family it was that Jacob came from… I was running over, or rather, making up what that family would be like, and Graff just kind of popped into my head. It wasn’t really an “Ah-ha” moment, but rather a sort of shrugging of the shoulders and thinking, ‘sure, that makes sense.’ So in answer to your question, I didn’t really intend for him to be in the Delving books. Helman just kind of grew into them.
RR: I want to get back to that subject of cross referencing characters in your books, but let’s stick with “Exile” for the moment.
SF: All right.
RR: What made you realize that now was the right time to devote an entire book to Helman Graff?
SF: I guess when I was starting to write “Assassins” – that was when the idea occurred to me. I’d always had the thought in the back of my mind for doing a bunch of Helman stories… of revisiting a couple of stories that were originally released with the Graff chapbook [“Graff: Tales from the Hunt”] and revising them, reworking them, expanding them, and then nestling them in with another half dozen new stories. When I started writing the second Delving book and it became clear to me how that book would end, I saw an opportunity to use the Graff book as a sort of narrative bridge between the second and third Delving books. The challenge was to not make it mandatory to know the storyline behind Delving to enjoy the Graff book. Does that make sense?
RR: You didn’t want to alienate readers who hadn’t read Delving?
SF: Exactly. But at the same time, I wanted to give a bit of a wink and a nod to those that had read Delving. Anyway, I think I might have gone over the top a bit in linking “Exile” up with the Delving stuff – but it’s only in one of the stories. The rest of them have nothing, really to do with Delving. So… anyway. I guess either you’ll get it or you won’t.
RR: So, we’ve been posting these great illustrations all over the internet, these question marked illustrations. Since the cover of the book will be released on Monday, and you’ll explain it all at that point, and this interview will come out after that, do you want to talk about the artwork?
SF: Uh, sure. Those question mark drawings are all in reference, of course, to “Exile.” They’re all pieces that will be used as a sort of collage for the cover. Nathan Fehlauer is the artist who did all of them, and he’s the one doing the cover.
RR: How did you come to work with Fehlauer?
SF: I actually knew Nate in college. I’d fallen out of touch with him after school but found him again not too long ago on myspace, strangely enough. I knew from the get-go that I didn’t want to do the cover for “Exile” – I wanted a quote-unquote ‘real’ artist. But I also didn’t want to give up total control on the cover concept. Something else I wanted was an artist that I could trust. It takes a while for me to get to that point with another artist, but anyway, Nate sprang to mind. I’d remembered being in his apartment in college and seeing these fantastic drawings that he’d done. I don’t remember what they specifically were, but I did remember that were really, really good. Nate is currently a graphic designer, and that told me that he was still doing artwork – and not only that, but he was making a living off of it. It’s not like he was someone who sold shoes during the day but then just dabbled on a sketchpad in his spare time. I knew he was a professional artist, and he was someone that I knew – or at least I knew his personality, and it occurred to me that he was the guy I wanted to work with.
RR: Did he agree to the cover right away?
SF: Pretty much. I mean, we had some banter back and forth. Nate sent over some of his art, I sent him some of the original Graff stories, and we decided to give it a go.
RR: When did you come up with the idea for the “mystery” illustrations?
SF: That was actually Nate’s idea. The concept was to slowly, silently, sort of drop these illustrations around the internet without saying what they were for. We thought it would sort of be like a creeper campaign that studios do for movies. The reference at the time was those brilliant one-sheets for “The Dark Knight” that were floating around everywhere. Now, granted, everyone knows what the Batman bat and the Joker grin were referencing, but I liked the idea of giving readers these glimpses of Nate’s amazing drawings and then not telling them what they were for. There were lots of guesses. Some people thought they were for a graphic novel, still others thought they were for the next Delving book – it was fun to watch people run with ideas.
RR: So the campaign worked then?
SF: Well, we’ll see when the book comes out, won’t we.
RR: I believe Fehlauer did five illustrations…?
SF: Four.
RR: Right. Four. And he’s used those to complete the cover…
SF: Yeah. He used those original four, as well as some other illustrations of Helman. It also looks like Nate will be doing more pictures for the rest of the stories in the book…
RR: As in it will be an illustrated book?
SF: Exactly.
RR: Wow. That’s something that you haven’t done before. Is that something that Stone Garden has done before?
SF: You know, I’m not sure. When I saw Nate’s fantastic pictures, the idea had occurred to me to find out if we could do illustrations in the book, but I put it on the backburner. Then Nate asked me himself if it was possible, and I took the idea to Kris [Stamp – EIC Stone Garden Publishing] who gave the green light.
RR: This is great. So how many pictures total?
SF: Ten stories. Ten pictures.
RR: Color or black and white?
SF: Black and white, I believe. I remember hearing a few years ago about the advent of color printing at LS, but I don’t know if anything came of it. So I’m guessing black and white. Either way, I know that Nate’s pictures will look great.
RR: So you seem pleased with this artist’s work. Do you think you’ll work again with him in the future?
SF: From my end, it would be an unequivocal yes. But that’s just me. We’ll see.
RR: Let’s talk about the crossover stuff. Obviously there’s the linkage between “The Feast of Catchville” and Helman Graff. Graff is referenced in the Delving books. How about “Swaybuck?” Where does that tie in?
SF: There’s a killer in “Swaybuck” called Stitch McGowan. In the book he uses knives attached to his wrists called ‘Slades’ to slice an old man to ribbons. If you read the ‘Plane Station’ serial, you see that ‘Slades’ are also used in that story.
RR: Oh, right. Right. That’s at the very beginning. The evil agent…
SF: Exactly.
RR: That’s great. So I guess that brings up the question of how “Swaybuck” and “Plane Station” are connected… I mean, besides the ‘Slades?’
SF: The grand scheme is to bring all of the stories together in an eventual masterwork. Some of that masterwork has been started, was actually started several years ago, but I haven’t revisited it as of late.
RR: That was that five volume piece you’ve mentioned in the past?
SF: Yeah. But I don’t really like talking about it much. I’ve grown to really abhor speaking of things I ‘want’ to do, or of things I’m ‘going’ to do in the long term. I’ve come to realize that I hate it when other writers do that, so I certainly shouldn’t do it myself. Safe to say, I want all my stuff to tie in together, a la King’s Dark Tower or Keene’s proposed Labyrinth.
RR: Where is the… or rather, what is the interest behind that sort of thing? Why tie everything together into some sort of overall mythos?
SF: Well, I guess… of course I can’t speak for any other writer other than myself. I think my interest in it is in seeing connections in everything. The way I see the world, or the universe for that matter, is everything is somehow tied to everything else. I like that concept. It implies meaning. It implies order. I don’t want to get all Zen or spiritual or something, but… in my experiences, everything seems to be drawn together in this way or that for a specific purpose.
RR: It sounds like a kind of… Creationist mentality…?
SF: It is and it isn’t. I’m no Creationist, at least not in a Judeo Christian sense. I don’t think man should be so arrogant as to believe he has any idea as to the origins of the universe. It’s not a religious thing… it’s not a religion thing. It transcends that. It goes above it. It goes above mythology and above science. It’s more of an intuition.
RR: A gut feeling?
SF: Sort of. I guess I just like the idea of matching everything up and of making my entire body of work into one large story with all these individual strands that seem unique at first glance, but that all eventually lead back to the same core idea.
RR: Let’s backtrack a bit to your latest book to be released. “Delving: Assassins” came out this past June, and it took a bit of a twist at the end that I don’t think anyone saw coming. Without giving anything away for those who haven’t read it yet, did you know that that twist was coming when you started writing the book?
SF: No. I didn’t. When I write a book, I usually don’t outline it. My first draft is the outline. I know where I want the book to go, I have a general storyline in my head, but the book is entirely liable to soar off into a new direction at any point. The twist that you’re referring to came fully of itself. I started thinking about how that character would react to different things within the Delving world. I started thinking about how that character might be manipulated… and what sort of manipulation would have the most extreme effect on [deleted: a Delving character]. Once I saw what direction that would lead to, I ran with it. Again, it was one of those things that, once I realized it was going to happen, it made perfect sense.
RR: You said that you have the rough storylines in your mind for the books. Do you know how the third Delving book, “Delving: Culminations” will end?
SF: I have a good idea. Let’s put it this way, I know who lives and who dies.
RR: You introduced several new characters in “Assassins” and expanded the roles of several others… I’m speaking of the Delving Council. Do you plan to do the same with “Culminations,” or has your cast of characters become large enough already?
SF: (laughs) Are you ripping on me for having too many characters in one book?
RR: Not at all. I was just wondering if you were going to have another… how should I put it…?
SF: Character reload?
RR: (laughs) That sounds good. Are you?
SF: No. There’s plenty already there in the story to work with. Of course, Helman will enter the story in a physical way, along with a couple of characters that are peripheral to Helman. The Tricolytes from “Assassins” will play a prominent role, as well as the Rogues. You’ll find out why the Rogues are called ‘Reds’. The Council will be involved. There are enough characters to go around as it is.
RR: The third Delving book was scheduled to come out next summer. Is that still the case?
SF: Yeah. Barring any unforeseen disasters. I’ll start work on “Culminations” as soon as the Graff Collection is wrapped.
RR: What’s the status of “Calvin Dyer and the Reatian Horde?”
SF: It’s in the publisher pipeline. Hopefully it’ll find a home soon.
RR: Other books on the horizon?
SF: Like I said before, I’m not too keen on talking about the long term future. Right now I just want to get “Exile” done. After that, I’d like to have “Culminations” done by Christmas. That’ll allow me to leave the Delving stuff behind with 2008 and move onto something else.
RR: And that something will be?
SF: You don’t give up, do you? Uh, right now, I guess I’m leaning towards doing some straight ahead horror again. But that could always change. There are some other projects that are waiting to be attended to… it’ll all depend on where I feel like I want to go. If it’s horror, it’ll be horror. If it’s fantasy, or science fiction, then that’s where I’ll go.
RR: That’s sounds like a good place to stop. Thanks for letting me interrupt your moving.
SF: It was a welcome diversion.
|
|
