BRIAN
SAYS:
Welcome back! Chris and I hope you’re enjoying our blog so far. As we mentioned in our very first post, we wanted to do a segment called “Deconstructing the Stories” where we’ll be going behind the scenes of some of our short-stories that we’ve had published. Well, here we go!
For
“Deconstructing the Stories” Part 1, let’s take a look at “Drunken Comic Book
Monkeys in: Scary Tales of Scariness”. For those of you who might be unfamiliar
with this work – it’s a collection of short stories where Chris and I wrote
ourselves in as characters of horror stories. If you’d like to familiarize
yourselves with this book before we continue, you can order a hardcopy here at
the Fortress Site and you can order an
eVersion here (Smashwords) or here (Amazon) or here (B&N). Okay, so now that you’ve familiarized yourselves
with the book, the first question you might have is how we came up with the
idea in the first place.
As with
most ideas that Chris and I have, we ultimately found inspiration at the bottom
of a beer pitcher. But there were a couple things that happened before that.
As Chris
and I were creating Fortress Publishing, Inc., we attended a few conventions to
gather intel and generate some ideas. One convention in particular was the
Pittsburgh Comicon and one particular comic book that we picked up was “Living
With Zombies” where, as you may have guessed, the creators wrote and drew
themselves as characters surviving the zombie apocalypse.
A few
months later, Chris and I were at our monthly shareholders meeting (yes,
Fortress Publishing, Inc. is REALLY a corporation) at Hooters. Much to the
chagrin of the waitresses, our meetings would last 6+ hours and would
deteriorate into silly debates, often loud and slurred. This one happened to
be: Zombies, Pro or Con.
I find
zombies little more than moving scenery while Chris believes that they
represent man’s inherent fear of blah blah blah blah blah. During a
particularly heated part of the debate (and for those of you who don’t know us,
“heated” really means we entered the “giggle like a couple of preteen girls”
stage of our drunkenness), Chris blurted, “I’m gonna write a zombie story with
us as characters!” I replied, all too loudly as well, “Oh yeah? Well, I’m gonna
write a vampire story with us as characters! And they’re gonna be the new, hip,
sexy kind who wear black leather and listen to techno music!” We then paused in
our bickering, ignoring the looks of indignation being cast at us by the
waitresses and other patrons, and let the concept of writing ourselves as
characters into stories percolate in our alcohol addled minds. We then looked
at each other and asked, “Do we really want to do this?”
CHRIS SAYS:
Do we
really want to order more beer? Duh! Oh, wait…Do we really want to work on this
project that, in a more sober frame of mind, would likely be less appealing
than shouting “all in” while holding a deuce and a seven, unsuited? We assessed
our current situation as publishers. At that point, to date, we were the proud
publishers of a few slick looking magazines and a graphic novel. A few nice
beginner projects, but hardly the stuff of publishing legend. Brian and I both
love short story anthologies and hoped that eventually the magazine arm of
Fortress Publishing, Inc., would lead us down the path to publishing a few of
them. From that aspect we were pretty darn amped about giving this project a
shot.
As
writers, we had a few short stories and some poems published, but we clearly
wanted to get some more writing experience. We had no large writing projects
looming so as we began to flesh out this project, we decided that this was a
great opportunity to attempt to write in a few different styles, work with an
outside editor (potentially), work with deadlines (shudder), find an
illustrator, practice re-writes, find a printer we liked, and assemble a
novel-length piece into a computer file that the printer would accept. All in
all, this was a more daunting task than merely writing a few stories, and a few
more pitchers later we found that we were pretty excited about the whole
project and the experience we would get out of it.
While the
creative coals were still hot, Brian and I started throwing out story names and
suggestions at each other. Some of them made us cringe. Others made us cackle
in a manner worthy of the forcing the employees to ask us to leave. But that
didn’t happen. Instead, one of us got the bright idea that we should be
capturing these ideas for future reference (the other argued…because, hey, it’s
what we do). Fortunately, we not only write down our ideas, but somehow managed
to stow the notes in a place where we actually came across them the next
day.
Now, in
all truth, Brian and I took far different approaches to the potential selection
process. We both loved the ideas that made us titter uncontrollably, but Brian really
focused on his past movie experiences, while I delved into the literary vault
of my mind and dug out some of my favorite Gothic reads. Brian was noting
themes and tropes, while I was methodically examining very specific works that
focused on a specific atmosphere or style. In the end we wound up with a nice
blend of horror that we thought we could poke fun at through unique twists,
while maintaining a sense of respect for the original ideas.
Tune in next time when we deconstruct our
novel “The Shattered Visage Lies”…
