The story so far with . . . Kevin David Anderson
Kevin David Anderson was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, but now lives and writes speculative fiction in Southern California.
His fiction has appeared in the pages of Dark Animus, Dark Wisdom, Darkness Rising, and a bunch of other publications with the word dark in the title. His stories are also available in audio on podcasts like Pseudopod and the Drabblecast.
Anderson worked as a marketing professional, managing award-winning advertising campaigns. Currently he’s finalizing a Young Adult novel, several picture book manuscripts, and compiling his stories into a collection.
Here at Speakingvolumes we love a great story. What is the best piece of fiction you have ever read?
I have favourites but I can’t speak to their literary merits, I only know that these stories/novels have stuck with me in vivid detail since the first reading. For novels: Elie Wiesel’s Night, and Joseph Heller’s Catch 22, Short Stories: Stephen King’s The Mist and J D Salinger’s A Perfect Day for Bananafish.
Which fictional character would you most like to meet? What might you say / ask them?
Ah, good question. I have a list. I think at the top would be The HAL 9000 from Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and I’d like to ask, “Really, HAL? Nowhere in your programming did it say, don’t kill the crew? Really?”
There is also a host of Biblical characters I’d like to meet, basically so I could ask, “What the hell were you thinking?” And somewhere on the list would be Batgirl, so I could ask if she is seeing anyone right now?
The writing process . . . genuine love, a labour of love or just a labour?
It’s more a labour of obsession or compulsion. When the idea for that first draft hits me and it just won’t leave, like in-laws or herpes, there is no other choice but to get it down on paper, obsessively, passionately, and usually without bathroom breaks. That is the most exciting time for me as a writer. Not an exciting time for my family, though. From their point of view it looks a bit mental. I bumble about drinking mass amounts of coffee, talking to myself (writing dialogue out loud), missing meals and showers.
But my wife and kids are troopers and understand that every few months dad just looses control of his mind, sanity temporarily replaced by a new story idea.
If you weren’t writing, how else might you channel your creative urges?
I spent a decade-and-a-half in marketing and advertising, and if you have to work in the corporate world (and sometime we must) there is no better department than a marketing department to burn your creative energy. I suspect that is what I would still be doing.
Your ‘Eureka moment’ came when?
It came to me while reading an Anne Rice novel of the vampire persuasion, a line that just stuck out, to me, as bad. It probably wasn’t that bad in retrospect, but I was young, pompous, and having no idea how difficult it is to write a publishable novel, I said, “I can write this stuff.”
I spent years learning that it wasn’t as easy as I assumed, but that eureka moment was the first step on a long journey that has allowed me to travel to this point in what I can now call a writing career.
If you had to choose music to score your latest book, what would it be?
I think it only fitting that my novel, Night of the Living Trekkies (If you haven’t figured it out from the title, its George A Romero meets Gene Rodenberry) be scored by the one or more of the composers of the music from Star Trek. Jerry Goldsmith, Dennis McCarthy, and Michael Giacchino who scored the 2009 film.
We all have a guilty pleasure. What do you read on the sly?
Biographies / autobiographies of creative people. I do not know why but the lives of other people are somehow fascinating. Currently reading Tina Fey’s Bossypants, and next in the queue is Simon Pegg’s Nerd Do Well. A few of my favourites are Wishful Drinking by Carrie Fisher, There are Worse Things I could Do by Adrian Barbeau, Get A Life by William Shatner, and If Chins Could Kill by Bruce Campbell.
What’s on your writing desk?
Don’t have one, unless you count my legs which I cross to rest my laptop on. If so, then the answer is, hair.
Google or Encyclopaedia? Thesaurus.com or thesaurus? Do you prefer traditional research or prefer to sit in your chair and go online for everything?
Contrary to popular belief everything is not online. The web is full of revisionist history and rumours and hearsay presented as fact. I believe when extracting info from the web you need to have a buyer beware attitude.
There was a time when it was considered unethical for a journalist to print anything without at least two solid sources. Now people get their news by reading blogs and Facebook posts and just take it as gospel. This is the equivalent of getting all your world news from late night talk show monologues. Or Rupert Murdoch.
Book, e-book or can the future live with both?
I’m the wrong person to ask. I still spin vinyl at home and for the most part, live in the 1980s. It’s a nice place to be; The B-52’s, Dead Kennedy’s, Sex Pistols, The Ramones, Terminator 2 on VHS, and the feel of a good book in my hands. I think, at least in my lifetime, books will continue to be around. Whether or not my great grandchildren will know what that new-book smell is like, I can’t imagine.
Night of the Living Trekkies is available from Quirk Books. The novel has a brilliant Book Trailer:
The German version was just released (July 2011) by Heyne Verlag.
www.KevinDavidAnderson.com