Michael David Wilson 0:00
Welcome to the this is horror podcast. I'm your host, Michael David Wilson, and I'm joined with my co host, Bob pastorella, Bob, how's it going? Hey, Michael,

Bob Pastorella 0:23
I'm doing great. How are you doing?

Michael David Wilson 0:25
Oh, good. Thank you. We just finished up a call with Steve and Graham Jones, so we have an exciting two part interview on its way for our listeners.

Bob Pastorella 0:37
Definitely this is going to be excellent.

Unknown Speaker 0:40
Yeah. What

Michael David Wilson 0:41
would you say some of the highlights that our listeners have to look forward to?

Bob Pastorella 0:45
Well, definitely. We talk about werewolves, Oh, yeah. And we talk about his latest book, mongrels. And we talk about some other books that he's written some, you know, and stuff that, trying to get some news on some stuff that we definitely would like to see from him. We talk a lot about writing, I mean, that's just, it's just a great episode. Or two episodes, it's going to be awesome. Oh yeah, epic, epic.

Michael David Wilson 1:18
And you just really only touching on a few things, because we covered a vast amount. I mean, we also spoke about the last year where he consciously decided not to publish a novel. So we talk a little bit about the emotional and financial implications of that. We talk about working with a new literary agent and publicist, and we also have a load of questions from our patrons that we ask as well. So quite honestly, it's vast, isn't it?

Bob Pastorella 1:57
Oh yes, yes, yes. And still, you've only hit the tip of the iceberg.

Michael David Wilson 2:03
I know, I know

Bob Pastorella 2:06
it's going to be like I said, this is definitely a couple of epic shows coming up here. Oh

Michael David Wilson 2:11
yeah, and with that said, I believe that you have his bio.

Bob Pastorella 2:16
Yes, I do. Stevie Graham Jones is the author of all the beautiful sinners, demon theory, the Elvis room, the gospel of Z after the people, lights have gone off and the forthcoming mongrels, amongst many, many other books and collections. He was born and raised in Texas. He lives in Boulder, Colorado, now with his family. He is Blackfeet. He is into werewolves and slashers and zombies. He would wear pirate shirts a lot if he could find them, and probably carry some type of sword. And that is Stephen Graham Jones with

Michael David Wilson 2:54
that said, I think Bob, we should just get right into the interview with Stephen Graham Jones, I agree. Let's do it all right. Here it is our interview Part One with Stephen Graham Jones, horror.

Steven. Welcome back to The this is our podcast.

Stephen Graham Jones 3:21
Man, thanks for having me again. I like being here.

Michael David Wilson 3:24
Oh yeah, you're always very welcome. I don't to begin with. So it's been over a year since we last spoke with you on the podcast, and I know I'd start with a pretty big question, what's the most important thing you've learned in the last year?

Unknown Speaker 3:44
Oh,

Michael David Wilson 3:45
wow. You know, I'm not pulling any punches to begin with.

Stephen Graham Jones 3:50
It's, it's probably to do whatever my publicist says as fast as I can. You know, that's the biggest thing I learned. I think, oh, but, you know, I also learned maybe to quit buying so many old trucks, because I bought me a beautiful old truck, but it's been the biggest headache in the world. Right?

Michael David Wilson 4:14
With the publicist is that a new publicist that you're working with, it

Stephen Graham Jones 4:19
is, it's my new publicist, Jesse Edwards at mongrels. She's really great, and everything she says is good. So what I've learned is to to follow her, to do what she says. Yeah,

Michael David Wilson 4:31
what are some of the lessons that you've learned as a result of working with her? Um, to,

Stephen Graham Jones 4:38
don't be like hesitant to change my schedule to allow for whatever she wants me to do, I guess. Yeah,

Michael David Wilson 4:48
what are some of the things that you have done in terms of promoting mongrels, maybe things that you did for this release that you haven't done previously?

Stephen Graham Jones 4:58
Oh, man, just was it. Yesterday, maybe yesterday, the day before I was doing I was at a symposium at it to the Stanley Hotel, this haunted, you know, this big fun thing, and, um, and then she needed me to be at a photo shoot in Denver in an hour and a half. And the Stanley is two hours from Denver, and it was snowing like crazy. You couldn't see nothing. But I made it, man, I made it an hour and a half somehow. And I even had time to stop. To stop for a double meat Whopper from Burger King.

Michael David Wilson 5:26
There you go. You've got your priorities straight there.

Bob Pastorella 5:30
Yeah, yeah. It would have been better if it would have to double meat from water burger. No, you have, yeah, that would

Stephen Graham Jones 5:36
have been so much better. I just I wish, wish water burger would come this far north, but the closest one I can find is either Amarillo or Santa Fe

Bob Pastorella 5:45
it's definitely a Texas thing. Yeah, yeah, it is,

Stephen Graham Jones 5:48
man. And that's, you know, people always ask about Texas. Do I miss the sunsets? Do I miss the wide open spaces and all that? And sure I do, but I'm just Whataburger more? Yeah,

Michael David Wilson 5:59
I don't even know what Whataburger is, so I guess it's not came to the UK, Portugal, Japan, or wherever else I've been hanging out.

Bob Pastorella 6:09
It's, it's an American food group, right? It's its own food group.

Michael David Wilson 6:16
Is it just the Texas thing or?

Stephen Graham Jones 6:19
Well, it's into New Mexico a little bit, and

Bob Pastorella 6:23
then they have them in, I think, Louisiana, but, yeah, it's definitely a rural thing. The first one was in Texas and, you know, and the town I live in, we don't have one. We've got to drive to, you know, one town over. It's a 15 minute drive either way. But, uh, it's good stuff. I've never had a bad experience there. Never had a bad meal there, ever. I mean, it's consistently good. No matter where you go.

Stephen Graham Jones 6:50
It totally is. I agree. The only, the only person I know who's had a bad experience there was one of my friends in high school. He needed, he needed a quarter one night. So we said we'd, we'd pay him a quarter if he would eat a jalapeno, like a whole jalapeno you can buy from Whataburger and and, you know, he was, he's always eating hot things, so this wasn't a big of an issue for him, but we made that. We kind of snuck around and made the jalapeno a lot hotter by soaking a few mace and mace, you know.

So yeah, he had a bad experience.

Bob Pastorella 7:26
I wasn't necessarily blaming that on water pressure.

Stephen Graham Jones 7:32
I blame it on being 17 years old at two in the morning. Yeah.

Bob Pastorella 7:36
Oh, my God, Mace, but it's a good thing you made it out of the Stanley Hotel a lot. That's yeah, man,

Stephen Graham Jones 7:45
yeah, yeah, it was. And we got to, we got to go, like, you know, late at night, since we were a special guest or there, we get to go down in the tunnels and crawl around in the rocks and go to all the secret basements and stuff. It was really fun.

Bob Pastorella 7:57
I can only imagine. Oh my god, that'd be crazy.

Stephen Graham Jones 8:01
Yeah, oh, no, I knew, I knew the guy who was staying in 217 too. That's pretty cool.

Bob Pastorella 8:10
Yeah, that would be, that's, that's a, that's a rough experience there. It's not real. It's not real.

Stephen Graham Jones 8:21
Yeah, it's nice when you're at the Stanley and the snow starts coming in hard, because you feel like you're in for the season. You know,

Michael David Wilson 8:29
I'm glad Bob that you transitioned back to the Stanley Hotel, because I was just trying to think, How can I segue from jalapenos and back into mongrel? I girls,

Bob Pastorella 8:44
I tried to get it back. Yeah.

Michael David Wilson 8:47
But speaking of mongrels, so it's a werewolf story, but also a coming of age story, a story about dealing with hostility and conflict from a very young age, what inspired the idea, and what if any, were some of the tropes that you were conscious of avoiding going in,

Stephen Graham Jones 9:10
yeah, oh, man, I could answer that for 30 minutes. Probably, um, you know, what is, what inspired? It was really a friend of mine, Jesse Bullington, called me up to to submit a story to this anthology. Was getting together letters to Lovecraft from stone skin for us, I believe, and, and he said it had to be based on a on something out of HP Lovecraft. What is it? Supernatural, horror fiction. That big essay, yeah, 7080, page essay, and, and, and so I had that on my Kindle at the time. So I pulled that Kindle out, and I searched that HPL thing for werewolf, and there was one instance of Werewolf. And so I wrote back, I wrote Jesse back, and I said, Sure, because what that meant to me was, Can I write a werewolf story? And, um, and so then I put that off and put it off and, oh, man, my. Must have been October, November, maybe early December, and I realized that story was due the next day, and I told Jesse, right when I when I told him, I do the story, I said, Yeah, I'll do, I'll do a werewolf story, and I'll base it on, on the act of telling stories. And I said, it's going to be a lot like Neil Gaiman's issue of Sandman to hunt. I forget what number that is, but it's about a grandpa telling his granddaughter werewolf story, and and so then I ate a big old jug of chocolate covered sunflower seeds I had from manatee springs, and they gave me a lot of energy. And like in four hours, I wrote that first chapter, what used to be Doc's story. And I thought that was it. I put it away, and I went and doing other stuff for a month or two, and but that story wouldn't be quiet. It kept crawling around in my head. And so then I just, I sat down, and I realized that that wasn't a story. That was a chapter one. And so I just chased it down for a couple of weeks and got the story down as for where it comes from, though, like, in a larger sense, it's just my it's my own family, my own upbringing, just the way I was raised and grew up. My first novel I ever wrote, fast Red Road. I had no idea how to write a novel, so every time I hit a wall of what comes next, instead of like, you know, posing around, being all tragic, saying writer's block and all that stuff. I just, instead of doing that, I just reached in my into my own head, into my own life, and put down a piece of myself on the page and change the names. And that's kind of been my pattern for writing novels ever since then, like what 20 books later, or whatever, is to mind my own life and mongrels does that as deeply as any of my books. I recognize all the people in it. I mean, they're werewolves, but they're my family, too. And all those cars they take from place to place or I mean, they're more or less cars we had that we had to keep running one way or another. You know, we were always moving around growing up, and I was always being a new kid at school and always in a new town that, you know, I didn't know the rules of and all that, so I just kind of decided to try to tell that story with werewolves. You know,

Michael David Wilson 12:10
we've mentioned writer's block on the show before, of course, but I think what you just said there could be the single best tip that we've had to mine your own life, because everyone has a history, everyone has a story to tell. And you do that, you put that into your fiction, and it becomes that bit more authentic as well.

Stephen Graham Jones 12:35
It does you invest in it in a different way on the page, like you actually have to slow down a bit and tell yours, remind yourself, make this real for the audience too, because it's already so so like, achingly real for you. You know you remember sitting in that water burger at two in the morning when you know you when you couldn't go home because something was going on at your house and and the trick is always, just remember to make it real for the reader, because it's already so real for

Michael David Wilson 13:02
you. Well, that ties in quite nicely to a question we've got from Jesse Lawrence on our Patreon. So Jesse, yeah, oh yeah, here he is, yeah, graduated from the booked podcast, and I shouldn't say graduated. I'm gonna get a message now from Rob Olsen, but yeah, mongrels features a lot of relocating. How many of those drives have you been on? And have you ever found yourself horror movie stranded in the middle of a trek? And if so, what is the secret to surviving such a situation?

Stephen Graham Jones 13:46
That's a good question. Man, um, man, I have burned. I have burned interstate 10 up going back and forth, east and west. And specifically, you know, my girls kind of, you know, yo, Yos, back and forth between um, either, either West Texas, eastern New Mexico and Florida, or Arkansas and Florida, kind of book, kind of both of those. And, um, when I was in working my PhD at Florida State, I wouldn't, I wasn't any kind of fan of Tallahassee. So I got out of there after 14 months. I did all my coursework and I blasted. And where I went, where I landed was Little Rock Arkansas. And in Little Rock I was editing legal briefs and just living as cheap as I could. I may have been working at Sears, too. I was always working at Sears, one place or another, it seems, and, and, but I needed the school to think I was still living in Tallahassee. For some reason I don't remember what it was like residency or what it was, but um, and so at the drop of a hat, I was always having to jump in the car after a shift or after some some job, and Just Blaze my way down to Tallahassee in 10 or 12 hours, and then turn like, sign a form at a desk, like I just came from my apartment, and then just turn right around and come back as hard as I could. And. It's like driving through a hallucination, you know, you get you get pretty tired. And then I think right after that, I moved to Lubbock, Texas, and I had to do the same thing, but it's 1010, extra hours, you know. So I would have to do a 22 hour push to get to Tallahassee. And I suspect that's where a lot of mongrels came from. Was me going back and forth on those roads, you know? It just kind of gave it a it gave the whole Southeast like this, this dream, dream like quality. And I was just punching through it at 85 miles per hour, you know. But in answer to Jesse's question, yeah, I have been, I've been stranded so many times. Definitely, I've been chasing my dog pack. She's all kinds of stupid stuff. But the one I remember the best, it's not in the southeast, it's in the West. I was driving, I was driving some car on whose car let me maybe I was delivering a car for somebody I don't remember. I was going across from probably Texas up to Washington or Oregon, somewhere up there. I was England, England, across Utah, I think it was, and I got lost, like this is way before GPS, or any of that, and I can't read a map to save my life. So I stopped at a pay phone, and I called the operator, and I said, Hey, can you tell me where I am? I'm lost. And it turns out that legally, she cannot tell me where I am. I could tell her the area code on the listed above the dial pad on the pay phone. If she could tell me that area code is associated with, like southeastern Utah or something. But she couldn't actually look on her switchboard or whatever, or screen or whatever it was, and tell me I was, you know, I was 12 miles from Provo or whatever it was, you know, which was kind of disconcerting. So I hung up and, um, you know, I was at a rest stop, and they have those wide, low bathrooms with the, you know, the kind of tile walls and the in the roof that's above the wall, like about two feet, so the sunlight can come in, so they don't to worry about lights, power and stuff. And I went in there to to hit the hit the bathroom. And, um, I was wearing sandals. For some reason. I don't know why in the world, I was wearing sandals. They're not my favorite footwear, but for some reason, that's what I had on. I walk in there and, you know, your eyes don't adjust immediately. It's all dark and lost and smoky in there, but my feet are sticking to the ground. And I think that's one of those bathrooms, you know, I don't really want to be in here very much. And um, and so I'm kind of slip, like clump, what's the word? Like, my feet are sticking, but I'm walking anyways, you know, across the bathroom floor and, um, and my eyes start to adjust, and I stopped in the middle of that big empty bathroom, and my eyes adjusted, not that I look down, I see that what I'm standing in is blood. It's just, it's like, probably three quarters of an inch blood over the whole floor of the bathroom, you know. And I really had to pee, you know. So I went over to the urinal and did that, and then I tried to step in my same footprints, the blood it was, it wasn't like scabby or congealed yet, but it wasn't quite as liquid as it as it should be, either. So I was able to kind of step where I had stepped, and I made it on the bathroom. And I was, you know, watching the stalls pretty hard because they were all closed. I didn't love the most stalls. I never looked and, um, and on the way out, I took my sandals off, I stepped out of them, dropped them in the trash can, got back in the car, and kept going into some part of Utah that I had no idea where I was, you know, but I knew I was going away from that place, man.

Bob Pastorella 18:20
Well, we just got a story

Michael David Wilson 18:21
you. You certainly delivered on that answer. Oh, man, well, I'm sure, if it hasn't already, that that event is going to appear in a future story of yours.

Stephen Graham Jones 18:37
Yeah, it could be, yeah. The rest up, rest of scary places, man. I mean, I've slept in a lot of I remember one time when I was 14, I was driving from from the reservation in Montana down to El Paso, and had a car load of people with me. We didn't have, I guess, we didn't have hotel money or something, so we're just punching through, like, 35 hours of driving or whatever, and, um, and I was getting really sleepy, and I was 14, you know, so I wasn't really able to drive anyway. Drive anyways, but, and I remember clearly that I distinctly remember somewhere probably would have been in Colorado, in the flat part of Colorado, maybe, um, I remember waking up at 75 miles per hour in a rest stop, you know, I had followed the the white line into the rest stop, and so I was just burning to that parking lot six times faster than you should go, and I was able to not kill anybody, not kill all this. But I still want the scarier moments in my life, man.

Michael David Wilson 19:30
Well, I know that Bob has some mongrels questions that you wanted to ask, so I think this is a great time to deviate away from the blood in the restroom. I think this episode, I'm not even gonna pretend to be able to smoothly segue. I can tell. I can tell already that it will be difficult. So let's just own it for what it is.

Bob Pastorella 20:02
Yeah, abrupt segues. No one thing in reading mongrels, and it's just I have to know. As a writer, I have to know was the dual POV, you know, going first person then the same character, third person, yeah, deliberate or experimental or at the suggestion of your editor. I mean, what was the, what was the, you know, impetus behind that?

Stephen Graham Jones 20:32
You know, no, it wasn't at the suggestion of the editor or the agent. I doubt if either one of them are ever gonna say, why don't you do something really crazy that people are going to wonder what's going on. It was definitely, it was definitely all on me. And, you know, I was just coming out of a project I've been writing, a novel that fell apart, that I tried to patch that novel by switching from first to third. Like, I don't know the Elvis told novels do that. And I think there's a couple of other series I read that do that. They kind of make it work. And I thought maybe I could make it work. But turned out that was not the right thing to fix whatever that was I was writing and, um, and when my students try to do this, I always warn them away, you know. I tell them, this is just a patch, you know. But, um, with mongrels, I think the reason I fell into that it wasn't it wasn't blind, no, it was definitely intentional. But when I started out writing mongrels, I didn't realize I was writing a novel. I thought I was writing a series of stories with the same character in them, and so my idea was that I'm gonna write like, eight or 10 stories with the same same character, same set of people, and then I'm going to publish them around in different places, and people are going to be able to hunt those down and kind of stitch it together into a single narrative, if they want to. But then I started, I got about halfway through that, and I realized that this was taking a shape that was more like a novel than a series or collection or cycle of stories, and it had also fallen into that pattern of long, short, long, short, like a breather between each longer section. And at that point, the first to third was already in place. And I'm the I mean, the way I just put it to myself, which may not be the final justification anybody needs are, is of use of them, is that? I mean, I don't want to know if I want to give away the secrets, yeah. I mean, I don't think it's a secret really, really, if a story is good, and hopefully my girls is some approximation of good, then you shouldn't be able to spoil it, you know. So my idea has always been that those little third person interstitial pieces are written kind of by the narrator, you know, right? Yeah. And so that's the way I've allowed myself license to do it anyways. And also I found I did try sucking them out at one point, like killing them all, because I thought maybe they're just background information that I'm doing for my purposes. They don't act doesn't actually belong in the book. So I pulled them all out, but what I found was that without padding between the longer first person pieces, that those slam together too hard. They don't like when they try to slam together. You see that there are different geographies and different dates and stuff. And it didn't, it didn't work without padding. So I think mongrels needs some sort of padding. I mean, whether those third person kind of career oriented, flashbacky kind of materials, you know, from 10 years ago, whether they're actually the right thing for padding. I don't know that they felt right to me. Maybe, hopefully they feel right to people who read them, but they're the only thing I can think, only thing I could think of, too. I

Bob Pastorella 23:47
wouldn't necessarily call it padding. I would call it more like connective breathing room. Yeah,

Stephen Graham Jones 23:52
that's a much better way. Maybe we can go back and edit your voice.

Bob Pastorella 24:00
No, I mean, it's and as a writer myself, you know, I often think that of, you know, the weird things is like, you know, probably to me, is once, once I hear the voice, that's when I can start writing. And sometimes that voice is in third person, and you kind of go, Hey, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I thought this was first person book, so it's like, maybe I could try it both ways. And that's the, that's the impression I got when I was reading mongrels. I was like, I bet you he had that, that could try this both ways. Let's see if it works. But I mean, I see where I see where you're coming from, because what your original intent wasn't, you know, initially it wasn't a novel, but it became a novel, yeah, so that's and that's really cool. I don't and me personally, just my opinion, I think that as introduced as short stories and everyone hunting them down would have been really, really cool, but as a novel, I think it's a lot more effective.

Stephen Graham Jones 24:56
Oh, thank you. I hope so,

Bob Pastorella 24:59
man and I. It was phenomenal. I enjoyed it a lot. Thank

Stephen Graham Jones 25:02
you. Thank you. I feel, you know, I mean, of course, every novel you ride is different. You come at it at a different angle. You're a different person. By the time you're writing, you need different tools to complete it. But, um, the only thing I've ever found is at the end of a novel, if I don't feel like Lucky, like I stumbled into some place that I didn't know existed. And if I don't feel like I'm getting away with something, then I feel like, then I don't think I've done my job as a novelist. You know, I'm I can't, I can't imagine finishing a novel and saying, Oh, that worked out, just like a minute to you know how smart I am. It's never been that's never happened. It's always the I mean, I've got a lot of novels in my drawer. They don't never see a lot of day because they're like that. They just worked out like I planned, you know. But it's the ones that you stumble into you like, you fall into a new narrative space part way through it, and then you you understand the story in a completely different way, and it starts to write itself. And that's the kind of magic that I'm always looking for in and with a novel, you know? And so it seems more organic that way. Yeah, no, it totally does. It totally does. So I mean, all this, all the novels I've published have, they're the ones that I've actually published instead of putting the drawer, they're the ones that I've stumbled into something that I didn't expect was

Michael David Wilson 26:18
there, you know, in terms of the novels that you've published and the novels that you've put in a drawer. I mean, what's the kind of ratio for that? And I guess as you're more established now, are you finding that the stories you start and more often than not, then published, or I could also see how it could go the other way, because obviously, with some titles to your name, it may feel like, well, there's less to prove, and you don't have to put out anything you don't want to anyway.

Stephen Graham Jones 26:50
Yeah, no, that's That's true. Um, and also, there's a now that I have, like, you know, enough books or whatever, that I have a little momentum, I could foreseeably publish one of those novels that I don't think is, like, up to snuff quite, you know, but hopefully, hopefully I never do that. I mean, I can't, I can't guarantee I won't. I probably, if I ever do that, I'm not gonna announce it and say, Well, I'm finally, yeah,

Bob Pastorella 27:16
but I needed the money

Stephen Graham Jones 27:20
as for what's the ratio? I think I've got, I don't know. I bet I've got five or six in the in the drawer right now, and I think I have what 15 or 16 published. That means. That means some ratios. I don't, I don't know how to do math.

Unknown Speaker 27:37
Sounds like a third. Yeah, that's

Stephen Graham Jones 27:38
what it kind of sounds like me too. Yeah, I'm happy with the third man. I don't mind. I don't mind having to write a lot to get a little, you know?

Michael David Wilson 27:47
Yeah, well, it's a quarter, isn't it? If you've got a 15 or 16 published and you've got five or six in the trunk, but, yeah, it doesn't really matter the specifics of it. I think what's important is there are more that have been published than are in the draw. You know, you've got it the other way around. That's a problem.

Stephen Graham Jones 28:11
Yeah, no, it is. But, you know, the last, like, I don't know, probably six years. I do have a higher ratio with stories because, um, you write a story in an afternoon or two, it goes, I don't know, 6000 words, 10,000 words, whatever, and then I'll send it to an editor. It's usually on. They usually solicit the story for me. They tell me what they need. I'll send it to the editor, and they'll say, Yes, I like it as is, or they'll say, No, it needs 80% of it overhauled, and then I can do the work to overhaul it in another afternoon or two. But with a novel, it's completely different. If I, if I submit a novel, and the editor, publisher, whoever gets back to me and says, This is 80% broken, then that's a much bigger task to try to repair, you know? And oftentimes, oftentimes, I'll try to repair it just by writing a whole new novel instead, because I really think too many writers get involved with one one novel or one project, one story, whatever, and they'll write that for for years, just trying to make it work when they never. They never really realized that there's some conceptual flaw or there's some some hindrance, something that's going to keep that novel from being what it needs to be. But they keep hammering at it and trying to make it work, and I think they lose a lot of their good writing years doing that. Yeah.

Michael David Wilson 29:26
I think particularly if you're told, you know, there's like, 80% changes that need to be to be made, you might as well take the themes, take the essence, take what it was that you fell in love with and made you write that story and then put that into something fresh. Because I think after writing a project that's so long anyway, by the time you submit it, you've kind of lost some of the momentum anyway. So if you're told you now need to change more than half. Of it. I mean, that's, that's about as demotivating a message as you're gonna get, right?

Stephen Graham Jones 30:07
Totally is. But I've had publishers do that to me too. I turned in a novel back in Oh, three probably it was, and the the editor, it was, like 250 pages, and he kept one page of it and said the rest of its trash. And so, you

Bob Pastorella 30:20
like the title? Yeah, exactly. The

Stephen Graham Jones 30:22
seven Spanish angels, yeah. And, um, we did. We did that so many times, and I by the time it was over, I'd written right around 2000 pages to get 303 50, um, and it was, it was a long, arduous process, but I wouldn't trade it either. I learned so much about just how to, how to shape a novel, how to, how to, how to craft a narrative, you know. So, I mean, it can be an educational experience if you're working with a smart person, I think, or if you're working with someone who knows the business and knows the craft anyways, do you

Bob Pastorella 30:53
find that whenever you start a project that you have to see it through completion? Or do you have many irons in the fire and try to work on all of them at one time.

Stephen Graham Jones 31:06
Oh, I don't have the brain power to do many at once. I found I can only write one novel at a time, or one screenplay or one comic script or whatever. But I don't make myself finish something if it's if it's like, rolling out of control. You know, I'm like, I don't know, probably two years ago I started what was going to be this big anthropological thriller talking about Neanderthal man and proto human origins, all this stuff. And I was having so much fun with that novel. It was just writing itself. And I got 220 pages in, and I looked around kind of at the story, and I realized I was having so much fun talking about early hominids that I had yet to even introduce the suspicion of an antagonist, you know. And without an antagonist, a thriller is not a thriller, of course. And and so instead of, instead of going back and trying to wedge an antagonist in there, I just quit, because I knew that, you know, I was really doing with anthropology, the same way I did with my very first werewolf novel, bloodlines. I wrote that back in, I want to say 99 I think it was, could have been the very first month or two of 2000 I guess. And what I did was I loved the world so much that I focused on it in a way which didn't tell a good story. I just really wanted to have an excuse to look at a werewolf, you know, and that's what I was, that's what I was doing with this anthropology story. I just wanted an excuse to look at Neanderthals and at the expense of the story. So someday I'll sit down and start from scratch all over again and do that novel, hopefully soon, because I really like the idea, but, um, yeah, it's, I mean, we should write about things we love, but we should also have control. And remember that this is a story for other people, not just for for me to look at Neanderthals or me to look at werewolves, you know, right?

Michael David Wilson 32:52
Well, if, if you don't go back and rewrite it as a novel, then I guess you've got 120 pages of creative nonfiction. If you want to spin it in a different direction, that's not a bad idea. I mean, I don't know what the market would be for that, but well, you put it out there, you find out. I don't know what your literary agent will have to say, but yeah, that

Stephen Graham Jones 33:19
would be kind of an interesting project to talk about why people, like early humans, you know, is it? Is it that they don't want to look at the modern world? Or what is it? I could be kind of fun

Michael David Wilson 33:31
in terms of the literary agent. I believe when I last spoke with you, you hadn't long changed literary agent. And I also remember that you said that you were going a year without publishing a story,

Stephen Graham Jones 33:48
yeah, without publishing a novel. Anyways, yeah, a novel.

Michael David Wilson 33:52
Sorry. I wondered what lessons have you learned from your new literary agent? And also how the year of not publishing a novel went,

Stephen Graham Jones 34:03
you know, it was my first year to not publish a novel a long time. Um, yeah, it's kind of terrifying, because I'm like, do I do I matter anymore? You realize how much like, what I realized was how much I like, um, invest my self worth, and if I have something on the shelf, you know, which is probably not a very healthy dynamic, but, um, it is a dynamic which gets a lot of books on the shelves anyways. So I don't, I don't necessarily disparage it, but, um, yeah, my new agent, BJ, Robbins, she used to be the head of marketing at Was it hot, and Mifflin, and she was a senior editor, and then she went to aging. So she's, she's bringing all that experience to bear on all the projects that she takes on, which is really nice. Like when I gave her mongrels, mongrels was 40, 42,000 words, just barely. I mean, if that even qualifies the novel to a lot of people, it doesn't, you know, like, 60,000 words is the minimum threshold for a lot of publishers, but I gave that to her, and I had two or three other novels at the time, which I thought were pretty good too, but I'm. And also she had said that she's not into genre, but so I gave this little broken, not even a werewolf novel, and, um, and she, she said, yeah, it's got a beat in the heart. And so she worked with me, and she said, it needs this here. And he's that there, like the the Layla chapter, you know, used to be called mouth breathers, but the one where he's at high school and doing the wolf kiss and all that stuff, right? Like I never would have written that if BJ had not told me, We need to see him interacting with his age cohort, with his peers, you know, because I thought I'd already done that when he has kind of a push fight with them kids in front of a convenience store. But she said, No, we need a lot more. We need to see him in contrast, and working with his his peers. And so I wrote that, and also that chapter with the bear that didn't exist. Initially, she told me, We need kind of a spike there. We need some something kind of action, you know. So I went in the went in and wrote that, and then, and then she also had me play with the order of it a little bit. And then the editor, once she got it, she had me, she didn't tell me, put this here, put that there, but she told me, it's all broken, and it all sucks right now. She means she liked enough to buy it, but she said it doesn't work. And so I had to go through and this took months. This took a lot longer than the initial writing of it did. This took probably three or four months. I had to just interrogate every single chapter for like, what it was expressing and what it was doing in the larger scope of the novel. And then I had to, like, graph it all out and map it out and put it on calendars and everything, and just make it all dovetail together so that it could be a novel instead of just like a assorted bag of stories, you know,

Bob Pastorella 36:41
so they made you do a little bit more work than you're used to. Yeah, you learned a lot in the process.

Stephen Graham Jones 36:47
I really, I did learn a lot. Yeah, and I'm, you know, the what you always think when you learn a lot in a process like that is, all right, I'm going to use that next time, and I'm going to just be the boss of that novel. I'm going to do it perfect. But I found that's not the case. The next one's a totally different animal. You know, some have needs all different tools, right? But it's, it's like the like mongrel takes place over what, like, 10 years, I guess, this next level I've done takes place over six, six and a half days, you know, which is totally takes just totally different stuff, you know? Well,

Bob Pastorella 37:17
that's, I was always find that, as far as planning in a story, the scope that the longer it is, I have to have a calendar. And it's basically what I do is I start way at the beginning, and I do, like chronological events, you know, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. And then somewhere right there at the beginning is where I go. Okay, this is a great place to start, you know, and, uh, and it gets basically, I don't like to start in the middle. I find it. I find it after that, after, if I start in the middle, then the first, you know, third of the book is me backtracking, explaining everything, yeah, yeah. So I kind of start a little after the beginning, right at a good, a good point to where. But if it's a two or three days, the whole story is going to take place in two or three days. I find I don't really need a calendar, yeah, yeah, because it's like, okay, bam, this happens. And then the rest of it is just to me, it's almost like, you know what they say? David BMA says there is no backstory. Yeah, there always is, yeah. How much of it are you going to use? And it's, it's the backstory for me that makes me have to have a calendar. The more backstory, the more calendar have to have.

Stephen Graham Jones 38:28
Yeah. And I found that Google Calendar will let you go back to like, you know, probably however far you want. I've gone back to the 90s, and it'll let you populate those days with events that your story is taking place in, you know, it does not like going back that far every time. It always finds an excuse to fast forward you up to 2016 or whatever. And so you have to, like, click the Back girl, 10,000 times more, you know. But, um, but that, I found that using, using, like, actual visual squares for days calendars, is very helpful for me often, because when I fly by the seat of my pants, then I always ended up with six things happening on Wednesday and nothing happening for the rest of the week. You know?

Bob Pastorella 39:07
I mean, luckily, on this day, a lot of important shit, exactly nothing else happened on the other days, it was just this day. Yeah.

Stephen Graham Jones 39:16
However, when you're writing like the story that or a story or a novel takes place in a really finite set of days, like two or three days or a week. You run into the jack Bower problem of when does this do take a nap, you know? Which what you have to deal with. You have to just sometimes turn it, turn it off, and let the protagonist go to his bunk and catch a few hours, you know, which is hard to it's hard to do because that's boring time in the story, you know.

Bob Pastorella 39:38
Yeah, you just made me realize that in my recently published novella, that my character did not sleep once. Yeah, I'm like, you know that's that's crazy, but oh well, no one else has said anything about it, so just, would just be quiet.

Michael David Wilson 39:58
Well, I mean, by. Of there's a lot of drugs, there's a lot of hallucinations or explanations as to why no one's sleeping. Oh,

Bob Pastorella 40:09
yeah, but I mean, it's like, you know, you always second guess yourself, and it's like, I never slept. He was up for three days. What's the deal? You know? Yeah,

Michael David Wilson 40:21
we you just admitted it. Now you could have came up with some profound explanation. Yeah, no.

Bob Pastorella 40:28
I mean, it's who knows. I mean, was it real? Was it not real? So who knows? I mean, yeah, that's the whole point of it. So,

Michael David Wilson 40:35
yeah,

Stephen Graham Jones 40:37
you know, I found, I found that the like, storytelling space that I'm the most comfortable in. Like, when I feel like I'm really in the pocket is when I have a novel that takes place over the course of a single work shift. You know, I can I feel like I'm really at home there, like, flush, boy, does that. It's like it takes place over, what is it, four or six hours, something like that. And that's I'm really, really comfortable in that space, like Stuart on ends novel last night at the lobster that felt so natural to me. It's about the very last shift at a Red Lobster before it closes down and and I just feel so comfortable to me. I'm not sure why that is. I think it. It could just be like some sort of reaction to how difficult it always is to cross time in a novel, you know, because your impulse is to document every single footstep, but that, of course, is way too tedious. It slows the story down way too much. So you have to find a place that you can fast forward and paraphrase. It's identifying those places that's really difficult, and it could be that my reaction to that is to not do any fast forwarding, just to document every minute of four hours, you know. But I think I come from that from, I mean, I come to that from kind of growing up watching Die Hard like 10,000 times, you know, because that takes place in just a matter of hours, of course. And it always felt really authentic to me how we are always with either John McClane or Hans just and it's all like clicking together, like minute after minute, you know, that just feels really, really natural to me.

Bob Pastorella 42:10
Well, you gotta, you have to avoid the, you know, he walked here, he walked there, he walked there, saying, you know, it's eventually, you know, the the reader's gonna realize that this person is, is walking, yep, yep, they're driving, if it's, you know, at a different location, they're not using some type of machine to portal themselves to their unless it, unless it's science fiction. So, I mean, you know, and it took me a long time to get rid of that stuff, you know. And, you know, I had, you know, beta readers just come in and just, you know, say, Look, man, we know he's going there. Just getting there doesn't matter how

Stephen Graham Jones 42:49
far. Yeah, no, definitely. It's the same problem. You see when people first come to first person, if they're natural third person riders, they'll come to first person, and they'll say, I heard the car start, start. I saw the bird fly. I felt the seat was cold. When you don't need to, you don't need to put yourself in front of all those. You can just say the car started. The bird flu, the seat was cold. And we're going to know that you felt, saw and heard all that you know exactly. And

Michael David Wilson 43:13
the idea of documenting everything is that a particular problem you see with writers on the creative writing course that you teach in terms of people just starting out. I

Stephen Graham Jones 43:27
don't, I don't think it's something that I see all the time. I mean, maybe I'm sensitive to it, so I probably see it more than, more than I would otherwise. But um, let me think I'm trying to think of what the most common problem is I see in beginning writers. And, you know, I think the most common problem I see in beginning writers is it's kind of what Bob was talking about. It's that they start the story where they started telling the story, instead of where the story naturally starts, you know. So they do like two, three pages of warm up, and then the catalyst happens, which sets all the events in motion in those first two, two and a half pages are really them trying to set up the world and establish the character. But you have to, but nowadays on the contemporary efficiency, and you have to do that on the run, man, you have to, you start with an explosion, and then while people are running away from that, you introduce the world. And those characters, you know, and

Michael David Wilson 44:18
I could see how what you're describing could be useful for them as a creative writing exercise to get momentum. But obviously, you know the error is if you're not backtracking and cutting that out of the final draft that you ultimately submit. Yeah,

Stephen Graham Jones 44:36
no, exactly. That's the trick you gotta you may have come upon a lucky turn of phrase or a neat angle to look at something, or just a good insight, but you've got to be, you know, grown up about it, and kill it, and only keep those things which contribute to the story, not not the things that make you look smart. You know,

Michael David Wilson 44:52
I think one of the things that I used to suffer from was just so much self doubt which would create. A paralysis in terms of submitting stories. But it's only as I've been doing this as horror, as I've been speaking with more experience, right as that I've realized, oh shit. You know, everyone has self doubt. It doesn't actually get any better. So then it you know that can either be a really freeing or a really depressing realization, but I think for me, it's like, when you realize, okay, there's always going to be some level of self doubt, it's like, well, then I'm free, I'm free to submit, because that's the way it is. That

Stephen Graham Jones 45:39
is the way it is, man, like, even like, like, mongrels, you know, it's already getting reviews and stuff and, um, and there's good reviews and there's reviews that you know aren't as positive and um, and talking about the self doubt, I always like, um, like, believe the bad reviews in a way that I know I shouldn't. You know, um, you always, you always think that, um, I'm just faking it. They're all going to see through it now, you know, they're going to see that. I'm just making the stuff up, you know, yeah,

Michael David Wilson 46:06
and it, it's ridiculous, in a way, the amount of people you know that we've heard that have said things like that, and I think it was Paul Tremblay talking about after a head full of ghosts, he was feeling really worried that, you know, he wouldn't be able to live up to that. And yeah, to someone like me, to hear stuff from people like you and Paul and Nathan ballingroot, it. It blows my mind. I think

Bob Pastorella 46:38
there's always going to be self doubt. I think a lot of it is just, you know, just, it's just normal, it's any type of creative endeavor. And, you know, the Am I worthy, you know, phase. And the thing that, the thing that really helps me out, especially over the last year, was remembering that after everything was said and done, that I still managed to send the wrong file to an editor. So it's like, if you can go, okay, you know what? It doesn't matter. You're still a dumbass and it's your own fault. Yeah? So none of that other stuff really matters, you know? Yeah. But I mean, every, every time, though, it's like, a submit, now it's like, it takes me 20 minutes before, I mean, I triple check, yeah, it's just the right one, you know, yeah. And so I've got to where I'm even naming them different. Final, final, final.

Stephen Graham Jones 47:37
Well, what I found kind of works, because I do that as well, is if I have a directory that I keep clear, like called staging area or something, and if I copy my final, final copy, to that staging area, then when I go to attach it, if I only go to that directory, then I can only pick the right file, you know, right? Yeah,

Bob Pastorella 47:54
I've started doing things like that as well. It's just Yeah, yeah, you have to, because are you going to continue to send. You know, unfortunately, that time, it was J David Osborne, so he was like, oh, it's cool, dude, I do that all the time. So you're like, oh, yeah,

Michael David Wilson 48:10
yeah, yeah. Well, Google Mail has a feature to tell you if you've said you've attached something and you haven't, but they've yet to develop a tool to tell you you've attached the old file. I don't know how they do that, but yeah, yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if in years to come they did invent something like that, particularly if you were keeping all of your documents on the Google Drive. But then, well, I know from conversations with you, Steven, that you would probably never do that because you don't trust Google anyway, but that's another conversation entirely.

Stephen Graham Jones 48:51
Yeah, I'm just, I'm lying big on, like, having my stuff in triplicate, you know, three different places or something, because I have, you know, we've all lost data, and we know that sucks, you know. So,

Michael David Wilson 49:01
oh yeah, I've got a lot of cloud storage. I've got external hard drives. That's the internal hard drive, you know, just backing things up as many places and in as many different ways as you can. And

Bob Pastorella 49:15
you could do all that and still lose stuff. Yeah, it's happened to me recently. You know, it's very frustrating, but you just you move through it. Yeah,

Michael David Wilson 49:28
we, you said in terms of not publishing a novel for a year, that there was a psychological strain in terms of doing that. And I wonder financially was so much of an impact, um,

Stephen Graham Jones 49:44
no, because I actually had money coming in from mongrels, you know. So it wasn't, I mean, it was very, very similar to what had been, you know, so, but it was, yeah, it was more just about, I mean, psychological, but it's probably really emotional or something, you know. Like, yeah, it just felt weird to suddenly not be on the shelves. You know,

Michael David Wilson 50:05
yeah, yeah, absolutely. So tying that in somewhat to another question we've got from Patreon. So Thomas Joyce wants to ask about your teaching job, and if you ever aim to or if there's a desire at all to quit that day job so you could focus even further on writing full time, and then link to that. Have you ever considered teaching a writing course online?

Stephen Graham Jones 50:40
I have taught online before. Actually, I've done it for lit reactor. I've done it for the cult, you know, I do lots of, like, one hit workshops too. One hit, that's probably the wrong word, but I'm like, I'm teaching at Clarion this summer, and different places just pull me in for a three or five day workshop. And that's tends to be kind of fun, you know, but, um, you know, sometimes, some days I think, you know, if, if I cash out or something, then maybe I would quit teaching. But then again, I do, I like being in the classroom so much the the students, they keep me, like connected to the world in a way that I kind of doubt I would stay connected otherwise, you know? Because, given my own tendencies, I'll just, I'll stay here with my old Simon and Simon episodes and my Bob Seger albums, and I'll be totally I'll be totally happy. I'll be insulated in the world I grew up in, you know? But my job, my job as a novelist, is not to stay in 1984 you know, my job as a novelist is to keep forging into the new world and our new world, you know, just the happening world, and try to write stories that interact with it, you know. And so my what my students do is they told me about new comedians, new songs, new movies, stuff that I would otherwise miss. And also they speak in languages that they use, words that I don't have any idea what they are, you know? And it really is. It's it like triggers parts of my mind that I don't think would be triggered otherwise. When I hear them say these words in ways that I can't even comprehend at first, I have to slow down and ask them what they meant, you

Michael David Wilson 52:17
know. Yeah, I know when I was speaking with David moody, so he, over the last year or so, went back to work on a part time basis, having been writing full time for a number of years, and he he was surprised at how much he actually really enjoyed it and enjoyed that connection with other people. And yeah, I can see how you could unknowingly become a little bit isolated in doing that. I mean, I hope that doesn't happen to me when I go full time at the end of next month, but we'll, we'll find out

Stephen Graham Jones 53:02
this is horrible. We'll keep you connected. Man,

Michael David Wilson 53:05
I think so I was gonna say my students speak in languages I don't understand either, but it's a little bit of a different kettle of fish.

Unknown Speaker 53:14
Yeah.

Michael David Wilson 53:16
Well, Thomas also asked, and I guess he was a very astute listener to the podcast we did with you back in episode 29 Have you figured out the secret to writing a good rom com novel yet? I don't know if you even remember mentioning, I think

Stephen Graham Jones 53:38
I just said it to somebody else too in the interview, but um, yeah. Um, I have not forgotten, but I am still chipping away at it, you know. I really still think the rom com is one of the most, I don't know, authentic forms, genres, modes, whatever you call it, you know. And I would really like to engage it at a meaningful level.

Bob Pastorella 53:57
I did have some another question about mongrels, yeah, man, is I wanted to kind of talk, or see if you were willing to talk a little bit more about the the near dark connection. Oh, yeah,

Stephen Graham Jones 54:11
man, I saw near dark. I didn't see it in the theater. I saw it on VHS, so it probably would have been 89 or 90 right around there. I think that. I think that. I think it came out in 87 and remember when I saw that, it just blew my mind, because by that time, I was familiar with the typical Hollywood representation of the vampire, you know, the the high velvet collar and all, you know, the pale skin, all that, just all the typical stuff. And, you know, I knew the staff and all that by then too, I guess, but um, near dark, what it told me, or what it showed me, I guess, was a vampire I could believe in. You know, it was a creature that isn't wrapped up in some big, centuries long war with, um, with other paranormal creatures. And it wasn't being. Were hunted by generations long species of hunters with all these specialized weapons and all that. And they weren't they weren't fighting Nazis. They weren't trying to win back the daylight or anything like that. They were just trying to eat. It's as simple as that. They just wanted to eat, to subsist, you know, and and they were doing it in the best way they knew how they were living in vans with blacked out windows, just kind of limping from town to town and using their various scams and tricks to get people up in the dark to drink some blood from them, you know. And and they they didn't have full bank accounts, you know, they wouldn't have passed a credit check if they used car lot. And this was, I mean, number one, this was people I knew, people I lived with. This was my family. This was us. But number two, it made the vampire real to me. It brought the vampire into my world, I guess, because the vampire had always been other. Had always been up there, like some elite, high class society thing, you know, but this was a monster that operated the same social strata I did, and it made it both wondrous and more terrifying for that reason. And I do think that that imprinted me in a way such that mongrels is a novel I wrote, what 2530, years later, whatever it is, you know, um, because that's, that's what these that's what these werewolves are. They're not involved in some big struggles, some generational conflict. They're not fighting other paranormal creatures. They're not fighting Nazis or anything. They're just, they're just trying to get some food in their bellies, you know. And they're trying to live without getting burned up alive. And so they move from town to town, find whatever work they can, steal what they can't, and move again the next week. You know?

Bob Pastorella 56:42
Yeah, that was, that was the impression I got. As soon as I started reading it, I immediately thought of near dark

Stephen Graham Jones 56:50
man. That's wonderful. That's such an honor, yeah,

Bob Pastorella 56:54
and so much so that I actually started trying to hunt down the soundtrack to it. Oh, wow. And, you know, because that, and it's, I'm like, and I had, like, a blank moment. I was like, who did that? Oh, wait, wait, is teetering dream, you know, so, and just, I've started, I was like, shoot, I'm gonna listen to it, you know. So, you know, I listened to it, and it's, of course, you know, it's exactly just, you know, and I had the movie, but I was like, I'm not going to watch the movie right now. Yeah, yeah, because I'm afraid if I watch it while I'm reading this book, that it's going to, it's going to taint any, any feeling. So I said I'm really, really just going to try to focus on the story. And at the end, I was like, okay, there, there's definitely a connection there. And that's what I felt. And, you know, of course, there's the connections with, with, with every werewolf movie book, you know. And it also got me thinking that werewolf fiction is, is really lacking there's not compared to vampires. I don't want to get into a mathematical fraction, yeah, again, but I mean, like we're, if we put it into a fraction, Michael mathematician there, it would probably be like maybe 10% Yeah. If you look at, you know, here you got vampires and you have werewolves, then werewolf fiction is 10% of those two, yeah, the other 90% is vampires. And, you know, in all drama genres, uh, you know, romantic, urban fantasy, horror, you know, whatever. And then, and it's like, golly, you know, why is that? And so these are questions you can sit there and ponder all day long, and you'll probably never have an answer to it. But you know mongrels. Mongrels does something for the werewolf that's never been done. And it's like, you know, golly, man, thank you.

Stephen Graham Jones 59:03
Well, thank you. Thank you for just like being sensitive to sensitive to that, because I, myself, have always been very aware, you know, people saying that the world doesn't have its, um, it's Frankenstein, you know, it doesn't have its Dracula. Um, I mean, we've had some good world models, don't get me wrong. We've had Chris, Christopher buman, those across the river. Toby Barlow, sharp teeth. Benjamin Percy, red moon. Eric Natalie, blood for the sun. Carrie Vaughn's Kitty stuff. I should have had a list. I'm sure I'm forgetting something vital. Oh. Robert mckimmons, the wolf, sour George R Martin, skin trade. We've had some really good stuff, but I agree we haven't had something like like Max Brooks's World War Z. You know, that kind of redefines the whole creature in a way, and I'm right. And you know, you asked earlier, I didn't answer it. I forgot to what tropes I was working with and against in the werewolf, and this just kind of wrapped up in that answer. Because coming up, I mean, the werewolf, yeah, near dark, was amazing and but so was the howling, you know, like in the in the for me, the werewolf was always the most fascinating creature. It was a creature I wanted to be. I was, I was willing, at the drop of a dime, to trade all in to be a werewolf. Because werewolves are cool, man, you get to run through the mesquite and eat whatever you want to, nobody can catch you. That's, that's a dream. You know, when you're going up in West Texas, that's, that's the dream. I think, you don't dream about flying like a vampire or anything, or being fast like a vampire, because West Texas is all about the sunlight. So being a vampire would pretty much suck, you know. But, yeah, but being a werewolf, you can get away with that in West Texas, I think, um, however, all these werewolves that I kept reading about and watching, they never seemed like a biological animal that actually made sense to me. They never seemed like a species. Um, they didn't adhere to conservation of mass. You know, 160 pound woman would turn into a 280 pound werewolf. And I would, I never could think where those extra 120 pounds coming from, from the ether, from magic, from the curse, from the virus. That never makes sense to me. And, you know, in a big, a big thing that I had to deal with, with Margret, which really informed the whole book, was the Wolfman, 1941 Ron Cheney Jr, you remember that, um, Bela Lugosi, when he comes through town and ends up biting that woman who is the chaperone of Larry and Gwen. I forget her name now, but she's the she's the third wheel that Gwen brings along so that Larry won't turn on predatory because she's engaged and all this stuff. When Bella gilsey bites her, he's a forefooted werewolf. You can see him. He's kind of full Yeah, he's full out. He's full on Wolf. Then he bites Larry and our Lawrence Talbot. And Lawrence Talbot turns into this hybrid, this this man body with Wolf features, you know, and that that never made sense to me. I didn't understand why, Bill, why Talbot did not become the same thing that had bitten him. And the only explanation I could come up with was that um, Bella legosi, character, who was also called Bella, I think um, had been born into it. He had been born with a body that could contain the transformation, whereas Talbot was simply infected by someone like that. And so his body was not built for it. It couldn't, it couldn't take the transformation. It can just get halfway there. And getting halfway there meant that the pain of that fizzled out his brain and made him just an eating machine. You know? It made him mad and angry and hungry and bitey and, um, he's, he's definitely, he's meant like, those kind of, like the moon dogs and Mongols. They're, they're short lived. They burn out fast because they're just, they're out there in the public biking, everything they can. Whereas the the Bellas the end, the wolves that are born into it, they might not control it totally, but they're not in as constant a state of pain as the hybrids, the man wolves, you know, so they can, they can get away with it a little bit.

Bob Pastorella 1:03:04
And that's one of the cool things about the story, is that you take that idea, you put it into the story. And it reminds me, I used to work with this guy who would always take, like, if you if you told, like, some like, I said, something that was kind of naughty. There was always that one guy who would, you know, put it in the garbage can and it, but in a good way, everyone would laugh. But it would also, you know, make you kind of throw up, yeah? And it's like, you take these ideas and it's stuff that, you know, you go deeper than than what you see on the surface, and you go, well, then they would, you know, they would be eating machines, yes. But then you're like, oh, wait, but there's another aspect, you know, what they could breed. And I'm reading that, I'm like, going, Whoa. How would I never thought of that? I'm not worthy, you know? And it's just like that. And I noticed that that's one of the things in your fiction that that draws, you know, draws so many people to it is you're fearless, and you take an idea and take it to its extreme, you know, and whether it's a good thing or a bad thing, yeah, as far as you know, how it affects the characters, yeah. And, and then, to me, that's just, oh man. It's, I hope, I hope, my mind, it begins to work like that at some level, one day, that would be awesome. Well,

Stephen Graham Jones 1:04:29
cool, thank you. But yeah, definitely, I'm trying to plumb the werewolf and just make it into a creature that people can believe in. You know, I'm, I want the world to be real for people. I want, like, really, I really, I think, I suspect I want, you know, in 2002 we, kind of, we went away from the the vampire, the vampire was on the road to being sparkly and everything. And in 2002 it gave us what Resident Evil. And 28 days later, and the zombie survival got all at once, and and that kind of started, that's kind of started the zombie Renaissance, you know. And then Max Brooks propped it up even more with world. War Z and then the Walking Dead props it up even higher. And I think we're at the tail end of the zombie renaissance right now. And since we came from vampires to get to zombies, I really feel like we're primed and ready for werewolf to be the next creature. Because the audience or the market or the industry all, maybe all three together, we cycle back and forth, or we cycled through our like Universal Pictures, creatures, action set, you know? And that's really just three things. That's the the zombie, the vampire and the werewolf, you know? I mean, there's the mummy. Has never really gone wide. Phantom of the Opera doesn't really go wide either. Maybe, maybe the Phantom of the Opera kind of started out the whole slasher thing in a way, with the mask and, you know, the burn face and all. But I don't, I don't know, but, um, the three creatures we talk about back and forth from our vampire, zombie and werewolf. And I really feel like it's the werewolves turn, you know, for too long, werewolves have been just the, the guard dog, the attack dog, the sled puller, you know. And

Bob Pastorella 1:06:00
one could, one could make the argument also for the, you know, creature for the Black Lagoon. But, I mean, yeah, what's his origins? And then you, then you realize that, hey, yeah, weird fictions having a massive renaissance right now. So there's the creature, you know.

Stephen Graham Jones 1:06:16
No, it totally is. I agree. Well, also, there's a guy, Peter, grandpa. He has a novella about the Creature from the Black Lagoon, which is so, so good. I wish everybody would read it. And I wish I had it right here at hand so I could tell you the title of it. But his name is Peter grandbaugh, G, R, A, N, D, B, L, i, s, but you might be right. It could be that the tentacle nature of the creature is somehow engendered or inspired the whole H, B, Lovecraft, Cthulhu thing and or worked in tandem with that, anyways, to deliver us up on the shore as we are now, you know, right? Yeah, yeah, that's a cool way to think about I never considered that. But yeah, I just Well, I really hope that the werewolf gets its time in the light now. And I think that, you know, you were talking about how, um, werewolf stories tend to be a small portion of the big monster pie, you know? And I think that's because werewolves have what's basically like what I call a low scourge index, like zombies and vampires. They can both breed, proliferate out of control, such that they become like this boiling mass on the horizon that's going to come eat Chicago. You know, that never happens with werewolves. Werewolf stories tend to be silver bullet. You know, look at me. I'm having a pretty fun life, but somebody in my town is killing somebody in my town as a werewolf. You know, werewolf stories tend to be, tend to be one werewolf in a small town or in a small community of some sort, which is to say, the whole world is not in peril. What's in peril is the community, you know. And I mean, that's what that's what happens in monograms time and again. It's never the whole world that the this family is going to take down on accident or on purpose. It's always their situation in this community that is in peril, you know. But I mean, I'm not saying that werewolves have never gone like had had a high scourge index. They have and like, but it hasn't. It's not been told in a compelling way. Anyways, I think Michael chaven had hundreds and hundreds of werewolves in his novel Summerland, but they were just being used as sled dogs to pull a ship across ice. I think, you know, and there's been a couple, there's been a couple of movies that have werewolf just go crazy. And, um, Benjamin Percy doesn't red moon like a whole portion of the United States is now the like in United States, or whatever it is, you know. And um, so, I mean, people, people have tried, definitely to, to make the werewolf be scary on a global scale, you know. But my, my suspicion is the werewolf operates best in those small communities, you know, which probably has a lot to do with why I plan it in the southeast, because there's a lot of small, little insular, insular communities down there, you know, I think the biggest sound they go to is Hattiesburg, no, Jackson, Jacksonville, I guess. Um, but they're never there for very long in the big places, werewolves are best, out past the city limits, just living in a trailer. You know,

Michael David Wilson 1:09:05
we would be interesting to see HBO do some sort of television series with the werewolf. And I think, I think, like, you say, like, really, it should be coming up, and how we've had a lot of zombie and vampire fiction, things in both books and television. And I mean, of course, we have seen werewolves feature in various TV shows, but they're never the central focus. So you had them as the rival gangs in True Blood. You have werewolves in things like being human. But there doesn't seem to be a dedicated werewolf television, TV series. You're

Stephen Graham Jones 1:09:48
the only, the only one, the only ones that there are. There's bitten that it's out of Canada, I think, or it's on the Sci Fi Channel. It's kind of fun. You know, the first couple seasons are, I like? And then there's also Teen Wolf. But for the first season of Teen Wolf is all werewolves, but after that, it goes crazy, and there's all kinds of other creatures involved. And that, to me, is always that's kind of the moment I tend to check out of a werewolf story, be it on TV, Cineplex or the shelf the bookshelf is when the whole novel is werewolves versus Zombies, or no, that didn't happen werewolf versus vampires, you know, because that kind of, instead of making it really be about the creatures, I can always read that as West Side Story. You know, it's this gang against that gang, and I'm they're evenly matched and and it's really just and then I wonder, why are these werewolves and vampires? Why can't they just be jocks and punks or something? You know, it'd be the same story. And anytime you have a fantastic element in a story, I think you need to be able to say the story does not work without that fantastic element, you know, or this story can be told more economically with that fantastical element, anyways. And, um, when you truck other paranormal creatures in with werewolves, then I probably selfishly just think that that takes a spotlight away from the werewolf. And I always want the spotlight on the werewolf, yeah,

Bob Pastorella 1:11:19
well, they just been like a second banana, you know, for so long, it's like, you got underworld, you know. And it's like, the werewolves, you know, that that one, that one black guy with the deep voice, played probably the best werewolf ever,

Stephen Graham Jones 1:11:33
yeah,

Bob Pastorella 1:11:34
yeah, and yeah, and he was, he was even better when he wasn't a wolf, you know? It's just like, I don't know. And it's like, and then it's people getting attacked, and it's like, you really don't know anything about them. And it's always the victim, you know. And it's, it's, it's refreshing to see something different, you know, in, you know, I never read red moon. I started to, and then I got tied up with something else. But I definitely need to read it because, you know, it is, it is an excellent piece of where we're, where we're fiction from what I understand, but it's just, you know, to me, part of it may even seem like it's almost the same, but you know, is what we've seen in the past. Yeah.

Michael David Wilson 1:12:22
Thank you for listening to the this is horror podcast with Steve and Graham Jones. We will be back in a couple of weeks with part two of the interview. Next week, we will bring you part two of our interview with Scott Nicolay, so that will be going live on Monday, the 16th of May, and I have a funny feeling that it won't be the last time that you will hear Scott Nicolay and this is horror working together. So if you've enjoyed the podcast, if you enjoyed a show, please do consider heading on over to our Patreon and pledging just $1 per month. There are all sorts of rewards and bonuses, including ebooks, including early bird access to the podcast and even the this is our t shirt, which we will be unveiling very, very soon. It's just a great way to show that you like what we do and you think it's worth paying for, and it ensures that the podcast keeps on going. So if you want to get involved with that, then just simply head on over to www.patreon.com forward slash. This is horror. All right. So with that said, thank you once again for listening. Look after one another, take care of yourselves and have a great day. You.

Stephen Graham Jones 1:14:09
Oh, hey, Bob, your your icon is BP, like, um, is that the oil company? Is that right?

Bob Pastorella 1:14:14
No, no, no, it's definitely not. The oil company stands for big person. It stands for Bob pastorella. Hey, yeah.