Michael David Wilson 0:10
Welcome to the this is horror Podcast. I'm Michael David Wilson. I'm joined by my co host Dan Howarth, and my other co host, Bob pastorella,

Bob Pastorella 0:25
I guess this morning over here,

Michael David Wilson 0:26
good morning,

Bob Pastorella 0:28
good morning, good evening.

Michael David Wilson 0:30
So we have a tremendous episode on its way for you. Today, we are interviewing Paul Tremblay, awesome. I don't really think he needs an introduction, but it would be out of character if we didn't give him one. So I believe Bob that you have his bio.

Bob Pastorella 0:51
Yes, I do. Paul Tremblay is the author of a head full of ghost, the forthcoming disappearance at Devil's rock. He's also the author of the novels The little sleep, no sleep, to a wonderland and swallowing a donkey's eye. He has a short story collection called In the meantime, his essays and short fiction have appeared in Los Angeles Times and numerous years best anthologies. He's also the CO editor of four anthologies, including creatures, 30 years of monster Tories. He coded to co edited that with John langen. He is the president of the board of directors for the Shirley Jackson awards. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts. Has his degree in mathematics and also has no uvala. You can find him online at Paul tremblay.net

Michael David Wilson 1:39
Okay, and before we get him on the show, let's have a quick word from our sponsor for the episode gray matter press.

Bob Pastorella 1:48
They're among us. They live down the street, in the apartment next door and in our own homes, where they stare back at us from our bathroom mirrors. Peel back the skin. Is a volume of horror that rips the mask off the real monsters of our time, mankind, featuring a Star City cast of award winning authors, Jonathan Mayberry, Tim labon, Ray garden, Graham Masterson and many more, peel back to skin is the powerhouse new release from gray matter. Press. Get More info@pillbackskin.com

Michael David Wilson 2:21
Okay, well, now that we've heard from gray matter that may or may not have been recorded by Bob or myself, shall we get him on the show?

Unknown Speaker 2:31
Let's do it. Go for it.

Michael David Wilson 2:33
All right. Here we go. Paul Tremblay on the this is horror podcast, horror interview. Horror.

So Paul, welcome back to the this is horror podcast.

Paul Tremblay 2:52
Thank you. It's it's great to be back.

Michael David Wilson 2:54
So it's been about a year since we last spoke with you on the podcast. So to begin with, what have been the most important things that you've learned in the last year? Well,

Paul Tremblay 3:07
it's kind of hard to believe a year has already passed. In some ways, it's it feels like a long time, and it feels like it was just yesterday. What have I learned? Geez, I don't know, geez, I don't know if I've learned much, to be honest with you, I guess I take that back. I mean, geez. I mean, I guess the good news, I guess I learned sort of the power of a Stephen King tweet is pretty powerful, you know, for a book. I mean, both in terms of exposure and I mean, it's certainly, I don't have the numbers for you, but it certainly positively impacted the sales of a head full of ghosts. Yeah, I don't even know if I can measure sort of its impact. So, I mean, that was very exciting. I don't know otherwise. I mean, it's just been a really busy year with the day job and and trying to, you know, get disappear into Devil's rock done, and now trying to figure out what the next book is going to be. And I'm not complaining. It helps being this busy helps just to keep me focused and not wandering and panicking and becoming paranoid and winning when I'm going to screw

Michael David Wilson 4:15
it all up. Yeah, I know you said you don't have the numbers in terms of that impact of the Stephen King quote. But I mean, do you remember getting an influx of more followers on social media, and I'm sure if the book sales increased, you noticed? Oh, that's a nicer check at the end of the month as well. Yeah.

Paul Tremblay 4:39
No, definitely an influx of readers. And I feel like there's an influx of, like, another sort of, like, almost like a second round to the book. Like, usually a book gets a couple of months, sort of in the eye of, you know, the press and social media and whatnot. And so, you know, his tweet happened pretty much like two and a half months, actually, just over two months after the book came out. So it sort of gave it a really nice sort of. Life from late August, you know, really through October, you know, I can say, you know, just just by viewing the peak at book scan that Amazon gives authors, you know, the first three weeks, you know, the tweet of Stephen King, and the couple weeks after that, those sales were seemed to be equal or greater than the first three weeks than when the book first came out. So, yeah, no, it's definitely been a big boon. And even anecdotally, anecdotally, I was at a Writer's Festival in Newburyport, Massachusetts, which is up on the North Shore, and this was in late April, and I did a reading, and it was probably like my biggest reading other than my release date reading, you know, where I invited all my family and friends, and at least, like, five or six of the people there said, Oh, I'm here because of the Stephen King, you know, quote, or the Stephen King tweet. So, yes, I mean, it's definitely been a huge boon. And

Michael David Wilson 5:55
what kind of pressure did that put on you, you know, to have, like, I arguably the best living horror writer, and certainly the most well known basically saying, Look this Paul Tremblay, he will scare the shit out of you.

Paul Tremblay 6:13
Oh yeah. You know, in a way, it was probably almost better that that I got, like, sort of his notice at that point in time when I when I'd already handed in a draft, a disappearance of Devil's rock, because I was already sort of, even before that, writing the book, I felt like was really difficult for me. I was sort of freaking out the whole time, you know, not that I thought like, you know, that headphone ghost was genius or anything, but, you know, I felt really good about the book. I felt like, you know, that book came as close to doing what I wanted a book to do in my writing career. And so a lot of the time I was just writing disappears in Devil's rock. I was second guessing myself and, like, Ah, this isn't going to be like a head full of ghost, you know, how am I going to how am I going to follow up that book? So I'd already put like, more pressure on myself than I probably needed to. So No, actually, I feel sort of the opposite. I kind of felt like when I got his tweet actually helped me relax me a little bit. And it was good timing. Like, Oh, wow. Like this, you know, the person I started to read, you know, because of Stephen King, I became a reader, and he thought my work is, you know, worth reading, and it actually affected him. So in a weird way, that was like, Okay, well, even if the second book isn't as good, it probably won't suck. That helped me get through the edits, and since then, I'm jumping topics all over the place, but with disappearance of Devil's rock, after I handed in the first draft, I did some, like, a ton of work, editorial wise. And after that, I felt like, wow, okay, I feel like I finally pulled that book together. So we'll see sort of starting all over again now, where I'm trying to come up with the next book idea, and I'm like, Ah, what am I going to do? But I think I have a good thread on it now.

Michael David Wilson 7:51
So are you working on deadline for that? No,

Paul Tremblay 7:54
I'm actually sort of off my deal, but I've already talked to my editor about the next couple book ideas, and, you know, she's on board. So it's just a matter of, you know, I have to write. I've already written, like, a 10 page summary, and she needs, like a partial before they can, you know, get me back on book deal. So hopefully that'll happen a little later this summer.

Michael David Wilson 8:13
You know, I'm just thinking the last time that we spoke, you were really happy because Neil Fallon, the lead singer of clutch, had read your book now. Now it's Stephen King, so of course, I'm going to ask you if you could have anyone else read your book, and we talk about it this time next year. Who would it be?

Paul Tremblay 8:40
I guess it has to be Bob mold of Husker do and sugar fame. Husker do is, you know, my all time favorite band, and basically Bob mold in general, you know, I've seen him and in his band's live, probably like 30 times. And I actually named my first short story collection compositions for the young and old from a bob tune. You know, this was way back in like 2005 I sent him a copy of the book, but never heard back. Even when I was in my early 20s, I'd had a few cocktails at one of his shows, and after the show, I hung out with a few friends, and we talked to Bob. We tried to get him to sign stuff, and he famously doesn't like to do autographs, but I was under the influence of these adult beverages, the only thing I had on me was my social security card. So I had him sign the back of my social security card. Of course, it's like, it's his signature. It's all just like a loop, so it doesn't look like anything. But so it would be Bob bold in a way I feel like I know, to me, he's like, my, my artist, my my guy, he may be become is, you know, obsessed with music. And I think that turned into eventually wanting to, to create, you know, my to create things myself.

Michael David Wilson 9:48
Well, I guess you've just got to keep plugging away, sending things to Bob. Just make sure that it doesn't take a kind of misery Annie Wilkes turn to it. I.

Bob Pastorella 10:00
Yeah, well, you've had good success in that. I mean, you you, you know, in the meantime, you know that you know page, and you met him, and he read the book and and then, you know Stephen King, you kind of met him through Twitter, you know, and he and he's read your book. So, I mean, I think that that, that Bob will end up reading your book.

Paul Tremblay 10:20
I it'd be cool. Yeah, I guess I, if I go back to the first question, I've learned that, you know, a lot of, you know, just a lot of writers, or I've, I shouldn't say I've learned this. I should have, this has been reinforced, you know, that so many writers and artists are just, they're good people. They want other people who are also artists to succeed. You know, like you mentioned, Bob page, Hamilton is such a friendly guy and so supportive, you know. And Stephen King has been, you know, very nice to me as well. Obviously, you know, sort of the list sort of goes on. So to me as a as a fan, you know, that's been like, that's been a total blast getting to meet and talk to these other people who have managed to somehow connect with my book, which is still kind of wild,

Bob Pastorella 10:59
definitely. Well, let's

Michael David Wilson 11:00
talk a little bit about disappearance at Devil's rub. So for those unfamiliar, what can they expect?

Paul Tremblay 11:09
So the novel opens with a single mother, and she's asleep and she gets sort of the dreaded post midnight phone call her 13 year old son, Tommy, was sleeping over a friend's house with another friend. So there was Tommy, Luis and Josh, their three best friends. Those three boys had snuck out in the middle of the night into a local state park, and Tommy, according to the boys, just sort of took off into the woods, and they can't find him. They don't know where he went. And so the novel sort of opens up and takes off from there.

Michael David Wilson 11:41
Okay, and we've got a number of questions from our Patreon supporters, including a few that are specific to disappearance at Devil's rock. So I don't okay if we could start with a question from Travis L so he would like to know what novels and movies did you draw inspiration from for disappearance at Devil's rock? Quite

Paul Tremblay 12:08
a few. I mean, I don't know. That's just sort of how I work. Geez. I don't know if I can give away the ones that are kind of spoilery. I think I might save those, but I will say definitely. Well, first, sort of real life is definitely an inspiration, insofar as I live close to borderland State Park, like this place is real. All the geography that is mentioned in the novel is a real place, you know. And I plan on posting, like, a bunch of pictures online about Split Rock, which the kids sort of renamed Devil's rock, you know. So the park itself, you know, I've, I've spent the last 15 years going to that park, if not every weekend, at least every other weekend, to hike around or ride my bike. In terms of movies, the first couple that were sort of starting points for me were the Peter Weir classic Picnic at Hanging Rock, which is, I don't know if you guys have seen that movie, but it's such a wonderfully strange dream like movie, you know, and there's never any explanation as well, which obviously, you know, that's sort of my thing.

Bob Pastorella 13:07
I've heard more about that movie in the last two months than I've ever heard my entire life. So I must check it out now. Yeah,

Paul Tremblay 13:14
the Criterion Collection put out a good addition. Actually picked it up one day. A comic book store had it on sale, like 50% off, and with the criteria on DVD or Blu Ray, they actually include the novel that the movie is based on too, which is, you know, it's a really cool novel as well. And then also, so that's an Australian movie. I sort of hit an Australian sort of theme here, because Lake Mungo is one of my all time favorite movies of the past 10 years. It's an Australian movie, and it's and it's about a 13 year old girl who who drowns in a nearby pond. And the movie is a faux documentary about her parents dealing with her death afterwards. And you know, it's not really an in your face scary movie, but there's this quiet sort of dread and sadness. And you know, there are some parts of the movie. There's one part in particular in that movie that I had to disengage from. I was so horrified and, uh, freaked out. That was what I made the mistake of watching the movie by myself in my dark living room, like when, when this part was happening. I couldn't, I couldn't watch it. I had to. I picked up my phone just to have that weak glow remind me that, you know that wasn't all dark around me. Yeah. I don't want to, because I don't know if Travis has read the book yet or not, so I don't want to get too spoilery. But I think there's a couple of other books that I went to in movies that I think would would give away some of what I'm trying to, I guess, hide that happens in the book. But I will mention that one of the books is by Cormac McCarthy, yeah. So I think that's sort of the big, the big three or four books, movies that I had in mind. Never

Dan Howarth 14:45
a bad place to start for inspiration. There was it Cormac McCarthy. No, definitely

Michael David Wilson 14:50
not. And Lake Mungo, which you mentioned. I mean, for me personally, I think it's one of the best found footage films out there. I. No, absolutely, yeah. And I mean, when it came out, I think it had a very narrow release. There weren't a lot of people talking about it, but I've noticed, particularly on social media, in the last two or three years, more people seem to be finding it and seeking it out. So, I mean, that's good. Now, it seems

Paul Tremblay 15:22
like the, you know, the quintessential word of mouth movie, because, you know, when I first saw it, writers, Nadia bulkin and Gemma files, I believe, you know, we're talking about it, you know, unlike Live Journal, this is way back when I, when I was still, like, active on Live Journal. And so I found it, and it was actually packaged, you know, in the US, they have like a, like a mini sort of like festival called, like, eight films to die for something like that. They usually package, like, a bunch of films together. So it was a part of that when it was showed in the US. And the the DVD Jack is actually really cheesy looking and looks nothing like the movie, but, yeah, what an amazing find. I'm so glad. I actually think that's the only movie, or one of the only movies I own two copies of on DVD, one to load out to people, and one so I can always have a copy for myself in case I loaned out the copy. Yeah,

Bob Pastorella 16:11
I think it's available on Amazon for rental, so I haven't seen it yet, but I'm going to Well, it's

Paul Tremblay 16:18
well worth your time. Definitely one of my favorites. That's the

Bob Pastorella 16:21
problem. There's no time. But,

Paul Tremblay 16:23
yeah, read the read my book first, and then you can go see the movie if you have time. Yeah. I mean,

Michael David Wilson 16:30
you've got to get your priorities

Unknown Speaker 16:33
Exactly.

Michael David Wilson 16:36
So Mark n would like to know and you touched on this a little bit before, but at what point in a head full of ghost life cycle, did you write disappearance at Devil's rock, and if it was during or after? Did you find that the success and acclaim for a head full of ghosts to be daunting in terms of what you wanted or felt you needed to achieve with the work?

Paul Tremblay 17:06
Yes, great question. So which, I guess I touched on a little bit, but first I wrote, or I started disappearance of Devil's rock after, after a head full of ghost was done, and even, you know, the edits were turned in. So I turned in my edits for a head full of ghosts in, like, July of 2014 and for that entire summer of 2014 you know, with a two book deal, I was, you know, I had to come up with another novel, and I wanted to do it sort of hand in hand with my editor. Or, in other words, I wanted to, like, have her approval for an idea of what my next book was going to be before I started it, you know, just to really sort of build and reinforce that relationship with Mia Mauro. So I had actually gone through two to three other novel synopses that, for whatever reason she wasn't wild about. There was even one that I wrote that she kind of liked. I'm like, actually, on second thought, I really don't like this one before I hit on disappearance at Devil's rock, was really like the fourth summary that I'd written. I remember the day where I sort of started having the idea I was getting a little bit desperate, because it was early August at this point, and I'm a teacher still, and school starts in September, and I really wanted to get a start on the novel before school started. So I did something I never do normally. Actually, I got a chair, I walked out into my backyard, and to the left of our house is a small, elevated grove of trees. So I walked into the trees with a notebook and just, you know, to try to get a different vantage point, different way of thinking or seeing things. And I sat down and the first so the first thing, I thought it was all right, what scares you? What are you gonna How are you gonna write something, you know, that's gonna scare other people. It's gonna have to scare you. So one, you know, one of the top things on my list was having a child go missing, and then being in the woods just made me think about borderland State Park, where you go to all the time. I'd always wanted to write something set in that place, so that was sort of the starting point. But, yeah, a head full of ghosts was totally in my head the whole time I was writing disappearance of Devil's rock. I really was, like, overly concerned with, you know, how am I going to follow up that book? You know, in some ways, I think it's a little bit healthy to have, you know, to put that kind of pressure on yourself, because you want to get better, you want to you want to be better. You don't want to just sort of, you know, stay in the same spot. But it did mess with me for a while. But many days I would just, you know, beat myself up a little bit and said, Well, I have to do something. So I would just sit and write. And then afterwards, even if it wasn't great writing, I definitely felt better, and I just sort of kept going that way.

Michael David Wilson 19:29
And Marco also wanted to know as a follow up to that, would you say that the experience of a head full of ghosts, shaped or colored disappearance?

Paul Tremblay 19:41
I mean, I think I don't know if I could pinpoint, but it would be hard for anything that I experienced, like any sort of big event, to not shape or color. You know what I end up writing about? You know, I do feel like I don't know if it was intentional, but now you know that the book's done, and you know I've been away from it for a little while, and now that, you know, I've been talking to people about disappearance of. Devil's rock, I can sort of see like, how, even subconsciously, I do feel like it's sort of a nice companion piece of the two books sort of fit together, you know, thematically, a little bit with some of the ambiguity, although I think disappearance of Devil's rock eventually gives you more answers than a head full of ghost does. But there's still also some of the concerns about how, you know, the outside, outside influences, media, social media, you know, can really put more pressure on, you know, a family or a family unit that you know it's going through an incredible trauma. So I think there's a little bit both of that, or there is both of that in both books. And

Dan Howarth 20:31
going back to something that you touched on before, about your fears about a child going missing, children in peril, is, you know, kind of a theme in both of your novels at the moment is that, you know, how far has been a parent kind of affected your fiction?

Paul Tremblay 20:46
I think it totally changed. Or, I don't know, it's hard to say. I mean, I really didn't start getting, I mean, I started writing when I was 2324 and I wasn't too serious for like, four to five years. I was still messing around with playing guitar and trying to write songs, awful, awful songs. Yeah, so I was writing a little bit, but, you know, playing, messing around with my guitar, and I didn't really get serious with writing until about 2000 and that was actually when my son was born too. So it's funny, like, right, when he was born, I definitely focused just about everything, you know, all my sort of creative, sort of juices towards writing. And, you know, I wasn't even aware of it for the longest time, until I had someone point out to me. It's like you realize that most Your stories are about kids or parenting or or, you know, vice versa. You know, the you know, parents dealing with kids, or kids dealing with parents, or kids who have grown up and dealing with their older parents. I don't know. It's just something I just continually go back to, and I'm drawn to, and I've stopped questioning and just decided to give myself over to it, I don't know, because it seems like there's just one. It's one of the few universal experiences we all have. I mean, we've all been children. We've all dealt with parents or authority figures. You know, at some points in our lives, we've all had to deal with the emotions and fears and the excitement about, you know, growing older and what it means. I think, as a horror writer, it's just, you know, infinitely fertile ground, if that's a phrase that makes sense to work with, yeah,

Dan Howarth 22:13
and let's not, let's not forget that, you know, not only is the kind of horror of something happening to kids, but also kids themselves can be pretty terrifying in horror films as well. So there's kind of, oh, absolutely two sides to the way that that they work. So

Paul Tremblay 22:26
sure, like So Thomas tryons, the other man, that's a messed up story. I don't know if you've ever seen the movie or read the book, but I would recommend that for a scary child story. Great.

Dan Howarth 22:39
Well, considering, considering that's about to, you know, I'm about to become a dad, I'll probably give that one a swerve for the time being. All right,

Bob Pastorella 22:51
I've read both. I've read the book and seen the movie, and it's both are incredible experiences, yeah, probably some of the best psychological horror ever written. And the movie, the movies, the movie's definitely not, I mean, it's an older film, but, yeah, it's, I considered a classic. I mean, it's definitely very, very well done. No,

Paul Tremblay 23:15
and I'm, I'm often surprised, it's another one of those sort of early 1970s movies that you haven't seen, like, Ah, it's an older movie. And then you see it, and you're like, oh, yeah, movies in the 70s are actually quite good and quite disturbing, you know, I think in a lot of ways more daring than, definitely more daring than, you know, mainstream Hollywood movies these days are.

Bob Pastorella 23:34
I would, I would agree, especially with that one. There's some, there's some imagery that stuck me. I've seen it at a young age, and, yeah, I was probably, oh golly. Maybe they it was, I think it was the premiere of it on actual, like, network television. Oh, wow. So, and I think the movie came out winning 7071 something like that. So, yeah, it probably didn't make it to TV to probably about 7374 right? And it was probably severely edited, but they left a lot of it in, because I've seen it since on DVD, but yeah, you know, I do remember seeing it at a young age, and it really it affected me. No,

Paul Tremblay 24:20
I hear you. It's funny. I wrote an essay that I saw a tongue in cheek called My 1970 satanic childhood that my publicists are trying to play somewhere as we speak. But it's talking about how, you know, I was born, you know, in the 70s, and I grew up in the 80s, but you talked about, you know, the other being on network TV. I mean, that's actually where I saw all these scary movies. Was on, oddly enough, like network TV on the afternoons when I came home from school, like when I came home from school, you would see you race the devil or Devil Dog, how from hell and all these, like cheesy satanist 70s movies, just waiting, waiting for me when I got home from school. It was kind of strange. Much, yeah, looking back on it now. Oh,

Bob Pastorella 25:01
and I used to show like, on Friday nights. That's whenever they had, like, the BRI the big horror movie premieres. That's when I first saw the exorcist. Oh, really. And my dad, my mom and dad had seen it at the theater, yeah, and so we're watching on network TV, and my dad wouldn't watch it because it was so edited, you know, all right, so we found it on VHS, and it was the first movie that we ever rented. My dad was like, hey, and I said, I've seen that. He goes, Oh, you haven't seen anything. This is R rated. We're going to watch this. When your mom leaves. And then my my brain got messed up really bad.

Paul Tremblay 25:42
How old were you Bob at

Bob Pastorella 25:44
the time? Probably about 1313. Okay, all right, that's

Paul Tremblay 25:47
reasonable, but you say you're like, eight years old? Yeah,

Michael David Wilson 25:49
yeah, I thought that's where it was head Exactly. We're speaking of children and horror and television shows I've been enjoying the new Robert Kirkman series, outcast, and I'm quite intrigued to see you know where that goes and how well they do that. But I think that's certainly something for people to watch, particularly if they're interested in possession stories, which, yeah, you kind of hope they might be when they're listening to an interview with the offer of a head for a ghost. Yeah, have you seen that? Paul,

Paul Tremblay 26:28
I have not seen it yet. I don't know if I can. It's on Cinemax, right? Or is it like, are they doing it with HBO as well? Yeah, Cinemax, cinema Yeah, yeah. I don't have Cinemax, so I might have to wait until it's in a format that I can see. Have you

Dan Howarth 26:42
seen it? Bob, no, I

Bob Pastorella 26:44
haven't. I'm waiting for it to come up on Amazon Prime. It'll probably be after the first season, so probably next year. And Amazon's pretty good about doing, you know, the hit Cinemax shows. So we'll see where it ends up on more than likely it'll be on Amazon, probably able to bring out a season, and, of course, by then, it'll be out on Blu ray. So,

Michael David Wilson 27:06
but they, they put the first episode out on YouTube, so you should be able to see that. All right? I did not know that. Yeah, I don't know if they put it there as a, you know, for a limited time period. But, well, you can easily check it out and find out, but it depends how you consume TV shows. Maybe you'll just get frustrated if you see one episode and then have to wait six months for the rest to be available in a medium you can consume. Yeah,

Paul Tremblay 27:39
so I will see. I'm sure I'll catch it at some point. But you

Michael David Wilson 27:42
said before that disappearance was the fourth draft or the fourth idea of a story that you wrote to your editor. So of course, now I'm wondering what's happened to the other three. Are those ideas that you're working on at the moment, or were they just so narrowly formed that you're just gonna discard them for the time being? Well, one of them

Paul Tremblay 28:10
I had, actually, I had started before a head full of ghosts. I actually gotten 100 pages into it and then put it aside to write a head full of ghosts. So, I mean, just from the fact that I put it aside, I think felt like, you know, maybe this wasn't quite working, but I may go back to it. And it's sort of a almost like a borderline YA novel about an eighth grader who wants to end the world, but if he's not an evil kid, he wants to do it because he just wants to. He doesn't like people suffering. He wants suffering to stop. It was gonna be sort of goofy and maybe have, like, a tie into, like, Lovecraft stuff at the end. So I don't know if I'll go back to that has a great title, though. It was called Charles Manson doesn't answer my letters.

Michael David Wilson 28:50
You mentioned that they have a podcast. I'm not gonna forget that title.

Paul Tremblay 28:57
There was another novel that I actually my editor seemed to like, but I wasn't totally into it, and I ended up and I ended up sort of cannibalizing part of it for disappearance of Devil's rock. So that one I definitely won't go back to. And then I had sort of like a weird vampire kind of thing that I may go back to at some point. My editor doesn't seem to be into vampires, so I'm not sure what I'll do with that, or if I'll do anything with that. Yeah, the

Bob Pastorella 29:23
first one you mentioned, yeah, the first one you mentioned is just, it sounds like cosmic horror with just a feel good vibe, yeah,

Paul Tremblay 29:34
all ages, yeah. Now the novel I'm working on now is actually, you know, totally different than those other three. And I'm, actually, I'm pretty excited about it. So, you know, obviously not prepared necessarily to say anything about it, but I feel good about this one. You

Michael David Wilson 29:50
said you wrote 100 pages of chiaos Manson doesn't answer my letters, as I said before. Oh, great, great title. And you said, you know, perhaps you'll go back to it. Well, is that something that you have done before in your career abandoned a story when you've got a substantial amount down and then return to it? Yeah? Maybe

Paul Tremblay 30:17
not to like a total Yeah, I'll say the short answer is yes. With swallowing a donkey's eye, I wrote my first draft of that before I had written a little sleep, and then it didn't sell. It came close to selling to nightshade books, but then didn't really go anywhere after that, so I just sort of put it away. My agent didn't think it would be a good book to try to have as my first novel with big publishers, because it was so strange, which was kind of hard to swallow at the time, but in retrospect, it was definitely the right decision. So after that, I wrote the little sleep, which we sold to Henry Holt. And then I wrote no sleep to Wonderland after that, and sort of in those years in between, after those two detective novels, I went back to swallowing donkeys, I did a very heavy edit slash rewrite of it. You know, before it we before I sold it to chising publications or cheesing publications. It's just so much easier to say Chinese publications, isn't it?

Michael David Wilson 31:20
I don't know, like a lot of people seem to, but I, I it. Maybe it's been in Europe, where the I is often pronounced with an E, but for me, it's the E that's all right, I don't know. Dan will probably weigh in now and say it's kissing or,

Paul Tremblay 31:40
right? Well, it's short for Kira scuro, so, so, yeah, I

Bob Pastorella 31:44
have pronounced it, and I'm from Southeast Texas, so I'm just gonna, I'm gonna leave it.

You just don't pronounce it, yeah, right? GCP, yeah, see,

Michael David Wilson 31:56
well, that ended that you're in the middle of something, no, I

Paul Tremblay 32:00
think that. I think that was it. You know, you asked for an example of, you know, if I put something away and gone back to it, and that's, that's the one that that comes back. Yeah,

Michael David Wilson 32:09
we got a little bit too animated with our pronunciation discussion.

Paul Tremblay 32:16
Yes, damn chising, cheesy, and their derailing of all podcasts with the pronunciation of their abbreviation, yeah.

Michael David Wilson 32:23
Brett savory, what are you doing?

Paul Tremblay 32:28
He's such a bastard.

Michael David Wilson 32:34
I don't even know if he listens to the podcast, but I suppose if he does, he will find out soon. Now

Bob Pastorella 32:40
he will now

Paul Tremblay 32:43
he's not smart enough to figure out newfangled technology to listen to podcasts.

Bob Pastorella 32:50
Oh, he's definitely gonna have to listen Hi, Brett,

Michael David Wilson 32:53
yeah, listen to this. We talk about you since a couple of minutes. No,

Paul Tremblay 33:02
of course, Brett is a great person I look forward to. I get to hang out with them once or twice a summer, and it's always a lot of

Michael David Wilson 33:08
fun. Yeah, who are you used to until all right, so again talking about disappearance at Devil's rock so Joe would like to know if there was any specific inspiration for the way Tommy and his friends talk, so specifically, the slang that they use and the dialog.

Paul Tremblay 33:33
Yeah, that's definitely if we're going to go like, geez, if we're somewhere like Marlon Perkins. Man, I'm Asian myself. Bob probably knows Marlon Perkins from mutual Omaha's Wild Kingdom. I forget, like, give a taxonomy to the type of teen. It's definitely northeastern United States, or, actually, more expressly, you know, just outside of Boston. Boston suburbia slang for sure. You know so many of the kids that I teach and have taught sort of sound like the boys and, uh, including my own son, sound like the boys and disappearance at devil rock sound like, you know, particularly the word, uh, hard, oh, the word that gets used in the in the novel. So a hard Oh is someone who, like, tries too hard, or, you know, is trying to look so tries too hard is the quickest way to describe a hard Oh, but it's usually if someone's like, sort of borderline showing off, and you call that person a hard Oh, at least they do in the team circles that I supervise. So yeah, there was definitely, I had some, plenty of great models to work from, you know, with the team voices.

Bob Pastorella 34:41
Well, I mean, I don't think that the even being at its, you know, East Coast thing, and me being from the south, I figured it out, because there's probably similar, similar terminology in an age group, you know,

Paul Tremblay 34:54
yeah, it's funny. Like, I've been a teacher for a long time. It's funny to see terms come and go. But they all sort of spring from the same place and sort of mean the same thing. The big, the big thing at my school now is kids talk about chirps. I think I mentioned that in the in the book too. It's like a chirp is when someone, like, like a bird chirp, like, if you just sort of like, quickly, like, make an insult at somebody. They call it a chirp. Yeah, so I don't know, to me that's interesting, just the way people talk and the way language can change, especially slang language, that's fun.

Michael David Wilson 35:25
Speaking of your teaching, I mean, now that both disappearance and a head full of ghosts have got, I'd say more attention than the previous books has that made it harder to continue your writing career and teach. Are there any plans to stop the teaching? I mean, I remember previously you said how much you enjoy the job, so obviously it could be something you're reluctant to give up.

Paul Tremblay 35:55
I do enjoy teaching in my my family enjoys having the crappy health insurance that we have, it's better than no health insurance. Yeah, geez, are my employers listening? I hope not. I've already insulted Brett. I've already insulted Brett. Savory,

Michael David Wilson 36:10
you just might as well go for a home run now. Yeah,

Paul Tremblay 36:15
I mean, I mean, ideally, I would love to make a living just writing. But honestly, part of me worries that if I'm like, alone too much, I might just drive myself a little bit crazy, like, even at the end of the summer, I find myself like a little bit squirrely from being in the house and not being around adults different than, you know, the people in my house. But that said, My son is a freshman at the school that I teach at and because I'm a faculty member, he gets to go for free, and the tuition is really expensive, so I'm going to be teaching at least until he graduates, for sure. But, you know, I do feel like it's, you know, it's starting to get increasingly challenging to sort of juggle both, because the writing stuff is really starting to make, you know, to because the writing is, you know, has taken off a little bit with these two novels. You know, there's a lot more requests for my time, you know. And now I'm, you know, I'm trying to keep up with this one book a year, or one book every other year pace, and it's starting to get a little busy. And next year I have to teach a new class, or a class that's new to me. I have to teach BC calculus, which means I have to sort of learn it this summer, too. So I'm kind of freaking out about that, but I don't know it'll get done. It always does.

Bob Pastorella 37:26
Yeah, you do the most teachers who write. There seems to be a trend where they're, you know, they teach literature, English, perhaps science, but you teach math, yep, which, that's just, I don't know, I found that very rare, I guess. Because, you know, when it comes to me in math, you know, I'm good with adding and subtracting in a calculator, so I can't even get time zones, right, you know? So, uh, I just, I mean, I just find that fascinating, because, you know, I'd read and see, I heard another interview with you where you said you were a math teacher, and I'm, like, he's joking, having to, you're, you're gonna teach, you're gonna teach yourself how to teach this class about calculus.

Paul Tremblay 38:19
Yeah, it's real. Yeah, it's the second half of it. I've taught, like, what's called AB calculus, which is essentially a first semester college calculus class, and BC calculus is a two semester calculus college class. I have to learn the second semester. But anyway, I'd mentioned, I think I'd mentioned that I came to, I know, maybe that was yesterday. I don't know. I'm mixing up who I've been talking to, but I came to writing fairly late in life. You know, I was a math major in undergraduate school, in college, mainly by default, because I didn't know what I wanted to do, and I was just, I'd always was, I was always good at math, so I just sort of stuck with it. And then I went to graduate school for math again, I sort of fell into that. I wasn't necessarily planning to go into graduate into graduate school. Let me tell you this story really quickly, because it's kind of funny. I applied to two graduate schools because I didn't have a lot of sort of like, job options at the end of college. So I didn't take math education. I did math humanities for some weird reason. So I applied to Boston University and the University of Vermont, I never heard back from BU. I remember calling them, like, Hey, did you guys get my application? Like, yeah, I think something's in the mail. And never heard back from them. And then the University of Vermont application, I didn't hear back from them either. But I remember when I went through the process, it felt like I was sending pieces of the application to different addresses. So I was like, Ah, I don't want to go to grad school anyway. So then I graduated. Summer rolled around, I have no job. Parents are divorced. You know, things are just sort of like a mess in terms of, what am I going to do? Where am I going to live? And it's late, late July. At this point, I get a call from the Dean of the math department at university. Vermont, and he says, Hey, Paul, we're moving my office, and we found your application under my desk. Would you like to be admitted? Or would you like to be considered for admission? I'm like, sure. He calls me back the next day. He says, Okay, you're in. I'm like, well, that's great, but what about like, student loans? I have a lot of, you know, student loans from undergraduate. I don't know how to swing that, so kind of call you back. So now it's like, three days later, he says, You're in and, you know, we're going to offer you a Teaching Fellowship. I said, Okay, what's that? So I go to school for free. Tuition is waived. I teach one, you know, math class per semester at the college, and they pay me like, $9,000 for the year to live. I said, Okay, so you need a couple weeks. That's how I that's how I ended up at grad school. Man, I must say it was, I mean, it was a really good experience, but was also a humbling one. So I felt like I was a smart guy. You know, I got through college with not having to do a lot of work. Man, when I went to grad school, I got my ass kicked. I feel like I barely got my degree. And the people, they were just so, like, blindingly intelligent. So it was definitely, like a humbling experience. And it was where I fell in love with reading. Like I was up in the middle of, you know, Vermont didn't know too many people. My girlfriend, who's now my wife, was living in Boston at the time, so, you know, that was like 220 miles away. So there wasn't a lot for me to do up there. So I actually, I read. I fell in love with reading. I just read, you know, all the Stephen King books, Peter Straub, Shirley Jackson that I could find. So after I got my math degree at UVM, that's when I started to get the itch, huh? You know, maybe I'll try writing a story. Man, that's a long winded answer to something that I can't even remember the question too, but oh yeah, there's a few same

Bob Pastorella 41:36
way in grad school too. It's like, I kind of breezed through high school, breeze through college, and I was, you know, I had to teach myself a couple things in college, like how to study at first semester in grad school, ate my lunch. I never went back. I was like, I'm done. I'm done with college. I'm done with, you know, to the dismay of my parents, but I'm like, I'm, you know, I told him, I said, y'all go take the class the guy's teaching from his own book that he wrote that's out of print. Come on, really? I got into workforce and never looked back. And that's about the time I started, you know, really working on my writing as well. Interesting. That's

Michael David Wilson 42:12
what loads of university lecturers do, Bob, I mean, you you've got to cram your own little book onto the required reading as well. Yeah, it was,

Bob Pastorella 42:23
it was so good, it went out of print. Yeah,

Paul Tremblay 42:26
yeah, I'm going to be teaching BC calculus out of my novels this year. So, yeah,

Unknown Speaker 42:32
don't do it.

Michael David Wilson 42:37
See, that's really why you decided to teach math, just so there was no conflict of interest. That's

Paul Tremblay 42:44
right. No, I do say it's nice. Well, I do talk to people who are writers that teach English, I kind of feel like they're totally exhausted and they're using sort of that creative writing part of their brain during the day, and it makes it harder for them to write later. And for me, you know, it feels like it's easier for me to transition from teaching math to, you know, reading for pleasure and writing like I'm not. I'm not tired out by having, oh, I've done this already today, because I haven't done that already today. You know,

Bob Pastorella 43:11
that makes a good sense, actually. Yeah, I

Paul Tremblay 43:13
made sense. Mark it down at what time was that? 40 minutes into the podcast. Trembly finally makes sense.

Michael David Wilson 43:22
Yeah, you know that I use timestamps for the notes, so that might now be going in all right? You asked for it.

Bob Pastorella 43:32
Have you said? Basically, what you're saying is you've never made sense before, until now. No,

Paul Tremblay 43:36
definitely not nonsensical, except for Brett savory, all that stuff was right on sense and true.

Michael David Wilson 43:46
So we have a question from Jake Marley via Patreon, and he said he saw that you've put some of your notes for a head full of ghosts online. But he'd like to know, did you use these notes to outline your novel, or do you just touch base with the ideas? Are you an outliner or a discovery writer? I've

Paul Tremblay 44:14
done both. It sort of, it depends on the novel. And I think, honestly, I think it's it's more fun to to be like the discovery writer, but that said, so with a little sleep my my narcoleptic detective novel, I'm not good enough at plot to be able to sort of just wing a a mystery plot as I go. So for that book, I knew I had to write a summary. I knew I needed to know, or at least have figured out most of the plot, most of the you know the twists and you know the moments of discovery and stuff like that, with a head full of ghosts. I did not write a summary. It was pretty much those notes. And there was some page I didn't include all the notes that I had written for head full of ghosts. I probably filled up half of that little black notebook with just ideas and jotting down things. But I didn't write a summary for that book. I, you know, once I sort of established what I thought the story was in my head, I sort of knew right away that there was going to have that three part structure of before, well, there would be the overall I knew there was going to be the sort of the the narrative frame of Mary talking to the writer. And then I knew there was going to be three parts before the reality show, during the reality show and then after the reality show, and I sort of just kept notes as I went from there. But yeah, there was no, there was no summary for that one. But I've also been forced into writing some summaries too. Like I said, with disappearance of Devil's rock, I wrote a summary. The book changed quite a bit, actually, though, from summary to actually writing it. And with this book that I'm writing now too, I wrote like a, sort of, I feel like a fairly bare bones summary, because I wanted the writing in this new book that I'm working on to feel a little bit more like a head full of ghosts. I just wanted to have, sort of, like the bare, sort of, you know, the skeleton of it, and be able to fill it in this time around, a little bit more freely, I guess. So I've done both, I don't know, and to me, I just try to approach it like, you know, what does this book need for me? If it needs a summary, I'll write it. If not, I won't.

Michael David Wilson 46:11
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And Jake also said he'd love to know a little bit about the revision process. And so, I mean, on that note, I'd be quite interested to just hear about the kind of time frame and stages that you go through from initial idea right up until you've got the finished manuscript ready to go.

Paul Tremblay 46:38
All right, so with a head full of ghosts, I'll stick with the my two most recent books in terms of how I sort of wrote those so the head full of ghosts. I started it in February of 2013 and for me, that book is sort of special, because it that was the idea of it sort of hit me like a lightning bolt. Was one of those sort of stereotypical writer moments that we dream of getting, that I was really sort of lucky to get. But once I had the idea, I started in February of 2013 you know, once I got going, it was, I have a goal of 500 new words a day, you know. And some days I miss it. Some days I go over it, you know. I try not to beat myself up too much if I miss the 500 words. But it's just a nice sort of daily goal to have, you know, just sort of keep me on task. So I finished the draft of a head full of ghosts, the first draft in November of 2013 now, even though I'm calling it my first draft, I'm someone who edits as they go, and usually I won't leave a chapter until I'm done. Like when I say I write 500 new words a day, I always start by going over what I'd written the day before, the day before that, and usually it's this whole chapter that I sort of pick through and then add to, and then the next day, I pick through it again and add to it. So even though it's a first completed draft, I've definitely edited it countless of times before I get to that end point. So usually I've, at this point, I have some very reliable and good first readers. So in November, I sent my first readers the book. You know, they read it. I tweaked it a little bit, and I sent it to my agent in December of 2013 and he sold it in February of 2014 so, I mean, that's a pretty quick turnaround, you know, to go from no deal and no novel to a novel and a deal a year later. It's probably pretty rare, but I'm happy it happens with disappearance of Devil's rock. It's a little bit of a different story, but a similar approach. I mean, I started in August of 2014 you know, trying to stick by that 500 word sort of rule or limit. But I feel like with that book, I definitely missed the 500 word limit more often than I then I hit it, but that was okay too. So I spent, you know, the whole next year working on that book, and it ended up being in draft form. Anyway, by far my longest novel. It ended up at 113,000 words, which, just, you know, felt like an encyclopedia to me. Usually, I like writing very short novels. And just for comparison, a head full of ghosts. Previously was my longest novel that was 84,000 word. So it was another, you know, almost 30,000 words longer. But when I edited it, I cut out, you know, 10 to 15,000 words and then put in, like another three to five. So there was some pretty major changes that happening in the editing phase for disappearance of Devil's rock. So I'd say, in general, I aim for that 500 words a day, and that's really the only thing that I sort of adhere to, because I really believe that every book is different and has different needs, and that's your job as the writer, to figure out what those needs are and to serve them as best you can.

Michael David Wilson 49:36
Thank you for listening to the this is horror podcast that was episode 98 with Paul Tremblay. We'll be back next week for part two with Paul, where we will delve a little bit deeper into him writing 500 words a day. We'll talk a little bit about self doubt, and we have a few more questions from. A Patreon from Michael we hunt and from Daryl Foster, and as with Steve and Graham Jones, we get into the pickle talk before we go, time for a quick word from our sponsor, gray matter press. They're

Bob Pastorella 50:15
among us. They live down the street, in the apartment next door and in our own homes, where they stare back at us from our bathroom mirrors. Peel back to skin is a volume of horror that rips the mask off the real monsters of our time, mankind, featuring a Star City cast of award winning authors, Jonathan Mayberry, Tim Lebon, Ray garden, Graham Masterson and many more, pill back to skin is the powerhouse new release from gray matter. Press, get more info at peel back the skin.com.

Michael David Wilson 50:47
So there it is. Check out the anthology. Peel back the skin. We've got a couple more sponsors joining the this is horror podcast, and you start to hear them from next week. And those are the magnificent publishers, perpetual motion machine publishing and Crystal Lake publishing. So keep an ear out. As always. If you'd like to support the podcast, you can head on over and sponsor us. Pledge just $1 to our Patreon. Www.patreon.com forward slash, this is horror. You get early bird access to the this is horror podcast. You get early bird access to the outer dark with Scott Nicolay now on, this is horror you can get t shirt. Cbooks, you get early bird access to announcements, pre orders, lot of things going on. I'd love it if you could join us. There. Be part of the Patreon, be part of the conversation. So as always, be good to one another. Look after yourselves, and as always, have a great day.