Yesterday, we discussed the deluge of books related to hard rock and heavy metal. Whereas the prevailing attitude used to be that rockers don’t read, it now appears that anyone with a Marshall amp stack can get a book deal. And even if you don’t have a massive stack of amplifiers, you can still sell one of these books.

[In the interest of full disclosure, it should be noted that my own forthcoming nonfiction book focuses on musicians within the hard rock and heavy metal genre.]

The list below is by no means a comprehensive, all-inclusive compilation of hard rock books. These are just the texts that pop into my head. This list doesn’t go back forever and it doesn’t include super-small fanzines and those kinds of publications. Some of these are by band members and primary musicians. Other books are by peripheral people to the groups or journalists. Some are bestsellers while some are self-published. The point is to give a simple off-the-cuff indicator of the size of this market.

If you’re a headbanger and you can think of other books that I’ve left off this list, feel free to add the title and author in the Comments section. And if you are interested in this form of music, then you should definitely check out Blabbermouth on a regular basis. Sort of the headline news of hard rock, Blabbermouth provides frequent updates that allude to books and musicians’ literary ventures.

[Editorial Note: This post will be updated whenever news of a hard rock book is announced.]

AC/DC
–Rockers and Rollers: A Full-Throttle Memoir by vocalist Brian Johnson
–Why AC/DC Matters by journalist Anthony Bozza

Aerosmith
–Hit Hard: A Story of Hitting Rock Bottom at the Top by drummer Joey Kramer
–Does the Noise in My Head Bother You: A Rock and Roll Memoir by vocalist Steven Tyler
–Bass player Tom Hamilton quoted in the press as working on a book

Black Sabbath
–Iron Man: My Life in Black Sabbath and Beyond by Tony Iommi
–Deep Purple and Beyond: Scenes from the Life of a Rock Star by Glenn Hughes (who also sang with Black Sabbath and others)
–Geezer Butler quoted in press as working on a book

Broken Hope
–Media reports that Jeremy Wagner is publishing fiction with kRP Publishing

Def Leppard
–Def Leppard: The Definitive Visual History by rock photographer Ross Halfin

Dio, Ronnie James
–Rainbow in the Dark: The Autobiography of Ronnie James Dio, posthumously, by vocalist Ronnie James Dio, forthcoming

Guns N’ Roses
–Slash by Slash
–My Appetite for Destruction by Steven Adler
–It’s So Easy (And Other Lies) by Duff McKagan
–Watch You Bleed: The Saga of Guns N’ Roses by journalist Stephen Davis
–W.A.R.: The Unauthorized Biography of William Axl Rose by journalist Mick Wall
–Reckless Road: Guns N’ Roses and the Making of Appetite for Destruction by longtime band associate and photographer Marc Canter
–Sweet Child of Mine: How I Lost My Son to Guns N’ Roses by Deanna Adler
–Last Living Slut: Born in Iran, Bred Backstage by Roxanna Shirazi, romantic partner of several musicians, most notably to the book Dizzy Reed, a keyboard player for GnR

Gwar
–Vocalist Dave Brockie is said in media reports to be working on fiction

Hagar, Sammy
–Red: My Uncensored Life in Rock by vocalist Sammy Hagar

The Haunted
–Media reports state that Peter Dolving is working on fiction

Iron Maiden
–The Beast: Singing with Iron Maiden – the Drugs, the Groupies… the Whole Story by former vocalist Paul Di’Anno
–Run to the Hills: Iron Maiden: The Authorized Biography by journalist Mick Wall
–A photobook is reported to be in the works

Judas Priest
–Former band member Al Atkins is said in media reports to be working on a book

Keel
–Rock Star 101: A Rock Star’s Guide to Survival and Success in the Music Business by guitarist Marc Ferrari

KISS
–Kiss and Make Up by bassist Gene Simmons
–Sex Money Kiss by bassist Gene Simmons
–Ladies of the Night: A Historical and Personal Perspective on the Oldest Profession in the World by bassist Gene Simmons
–No Regrets by original lead guitarist Ace Frehley, forthcoming
–Makeup to Breakup by original drummer Peter Criss, forthcoming
–KISS: Behind the Mask – The Official Authorized Biography by David Leaf and Ken Sharp
–Sealed with a Kiss by Lydia Criss, former wife of drummer Peter Criss
–Kiss & Tell by Gordon G. G. Gebert, Bob McAdams, Danny Galgano, and Ellin Van Leeuwen
–Kiss and Sell: The Making of a Supergroup by former band associate C.K. Lendt
–KISS Alive Forever: The Complete Touring History by journalists Curt Gooch and Jeff Suhs
–The Eric Carr Story by journalist Greg Prato
–Kiss and Tell by Shannon Tweed, longtime romantic partner of Gene Simmons
–Into the Void… with Ace Frehley by alleged romantic partner Wendy Moore
–Band leaders Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley signed a deal with It Books for an oral history with journalist Ken Sharp

Korn
–Got the Life: My Journey of Addiction, Faith, Recovery, and Korn by bassist Fieldy
–Save Me from Myself: How I Found God, Quit Korn, Kicked Drugs, and Lived to Tell My Story by former guitarist Brian Welch
–Washed by Blood: Lessons from My Time with Korn and My Journey to Christ by former guitar player Brian Welch
–Stronger: Forty Days of Metal and Spirituality by former guitar player Brian Welch

L.A. Guns
–Snake Eyes: Confessions of a Replacement Rockstar by guitarist Stacey Blades
–Guitarist Tracii Guns has been quoted in the press as working on a book

Lamb of God
–Chris Adler is reported to be working on a book that is a combination of nonfiction with musical tablature

Malmsteen, Yngwie
–Guitarist Yngwie Malmsteen has been quoted in the press as working on a book

Manson, Marilyn
–The Long Hard Road Out of Hell by Marilyn Manson
–Manson has been quoted in the press as working on a new authorized biography

Metallica
–Too Much Horror Business by guitarist Kirk Hammett
–Enter Night: A Biography of Metallica by journalist Mick Wall

Motley Crue
–The Dirt: Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Band by Nikki Sixx, Vince Neil, Tommy Lee, and Mick Mars
–Tommyland by Tommy Lee
–The Heroin Diaries: A Year in the Life of a Shattered Rock Star by Nikki Sixx
–This is Gonna Hurt: Photography and Life Through the Distorted Lens of Nikki Sixx by Nikki Sixx
–Tattoos & Tequila: To Hell and Back with One of Rock’s Most Notorious Frontmen by Vince Neil
–Guitarist Mick Mars quoted in press as working on a book
–Motley Crue: A Visual History, 1983 – 2005 by noted rock photograph Neil Zlozower

Motorhead
–White Line Fever: The Autobiography by bassist and vocalist Lemmy Kilmister
–Guitarist Phil Campbell quoted in press as working on a book

Ozzy Osbourne
–I Am Ozzy by singer Ozzy Osbourne
–Trust Me, I’m Dr. Ozzy: Advice from Rock’s Ultimate Survivor by singer Ozzy Osbourne, forthcoming
–The Wit and Wisdom of Ozzy Osbourne by journalist Dave Thompson
–Off the Rails: Aboard the Crazy Train in the Blizzard of Ozz by bassist Rudy Sarzo (who also played with Quiet Riot, Whitesnake, Dio, and others)
–Former drummer Carmine Appice (who also performed with Rod Stewart, King Kobra, Blue Murder, and others) said in press interviews that he is working on a book
–Bringing Metal to the Children: The Complete Bezerker’s Guide to World Tour Domination by former guitarist Zakk Wylde (who currently helms Black Label Society), forthcoming

Poison
–Roses and Thorns by vocalist Bret Michaels, forthcoming
–A Shot of Poison: An Insider’s Tales of One of Rock’s Most Outrageous Bands by associate Christopher Long

Ratt
–Tales of a Ratt by drummer Bobby Blotzer
–Blotzer has said in public he is working on a new book
–Media reports state that vocalist Stephen Pearcy is working on a book
–Former vocalist Jizzy Pearl (who has also worked with LA Guns and other bands) has released three books

Refused
–Media reports state that Dennis Lyxzen is working on a book

Satyricon
–Media reports state that Sigurd Wongraven is working on a nonfiction book about wine

Saxon
–Graham Oliver has been quoted in press as working on a book

Scorpions
–Former drummer Herman Rarebell quoted in media about completing a memoir

Slipknot
–Percussionist M. Shawn Crahan told media outlets that he is working on a book called Maggot Bible that will collect artwork submitted by the band’s fan

Slipknot and Stone Sour
–The Seven Deadly Sins: Settling the Argument Between Born Bad and Damaged Good by vocalist Corey Taylor

Velvet Revolver
–Not Dead and Not for Sale by former vocalist Scott Weiland (who also sang for Stone Temple Pilots)
–Fall to Pieces: A Memoir of Drugs, Rock ‘n’ Roll, and Mental Illness by Mary Forsberg Weiland, wife of singer
–Also Duff McKagan and Slash, as described above in Guns N’ Roses

White Zombie
–I’m in the Band: Backstage Notes from the Chick in White Zombie by bassist Sean Yseult

He’s been featured on Fox’s The Morning Show, CNBC’s The Big Idea, in USA Today and other papers, and countless other media outlets. And he was a finalist on Oprah’s Big Give television show.

Johnson’s book, You Call the Shots: Succeed Your Way –and Live the Life You Want– with the 19 Essential Secrets of Entrepreneurship contains lots of great advice to entreprenuers, much of it applicable to authors striving to build a writing career. He spoke to me about his history, about overcoming a fear of rejection, evaluating an idea, the importance of contacts, and other topics.

Slushpile:  You launched your first business at the age of nine. As you progressed through your teens and got more and more involved in business, were there any books that inspired you?

Johnson:  Yes, most definitely. I actually began reading business biographies when I was probably only 10 years old. Success stories from such icons as Bill Gates, Donald Trump, Michael Dell, and Richard Branson. The fact that they all started at a very early age gave me the extra inspiration to get started when I was so young.

Slushpile:  Your passion is creating businesses. So why take time away from that to write a book? What was your goal in writing You Call the Shots?

Johnson:  Very good question and that’s very true. Every week, I receive hundreds of emails from entrepreneurs and from young people who either have a question, or who just appreciate me sharing my story. It’s flattering, yet it seemed natural to partner with a brilliant business editor, John David Mann, to help me co-author my book and make it available to the masses. While the book tells my story, it’s much more than that – it shares the lessons I learned along the way and enables the reader to take their own idea and get started with very little capital or experience.

Slushpile:  When you sat down to write the book, did you have any role models or other texts that you used as an example of how your book should function?

Johnson:  My number one priority was to make the book as beneficial as possible to the reader. Over the years, I’ve personally read enough business books to know what I like and what I dislike. I wanted to include as many lessons, or “secrets,” as possible and to explain those through my story.

Slushpile:  You mentioned that John David Mann received a co-author credit on You Call the Shots. What was it like co-writing with a partner?

Johnson:  John is a brilliant writer and fortunately for me, we also have a great friendship. You Call the Shots would have never happened without John’s experience and expertise.  It couldn’t have been a better experience and when I was building businesses, I would always try and surround myself with the best possible talent – and this book is no different.

Slushpile:  How did this book get published? What was your experience in finding an agent and then submitting to publishers? 

Johnson:  As many writers know, finding an agent is hard enough – yet alone getting in front of publishers. I was fortunate we were able to get the book in front of one of the top business agents who fell in love with the book. Once you have a top agent in your corner, it makes it a bit easier to get publishers interested. Luck might be the best answer as we were definitely fortunate in such a ridiculously competitive industry with so much talent.

Slushpile:  You write that one of the key aspects of being a successful entrepreneur is that “you have to put yourself out there and ask for what you want.” A lot of aspiring authors struggle with facing rejection and they have a hard time submitting their work to what might be a harsh reader. How does someone get over the fear of rejection, the fear of putting yourself out there?

Johnson:  Selling is a very important trait. Whether you’re selling yourself in a job interview or selling your book to an agent or publisher. When someone says “No,” that’s actually when you start selling. First, you have to be 100% passionate about whatever it is you’re selling and if you’re a writer, that’s most likely not your problem. Second, you have to separate your passion to then try and understand why your idea or proposal was rejected. Then, you have to overcome those obstacles.

I hate rejection and won’t say I handle it better than anyone else but we can’t let it slow us down. Chicken Soup was pitched to 30+ publishers who said “No,” before finally getting that yes. Whether you’re a writer, actor, entrepreneur, or CEO, chances are those who make it to the top – have overcome plenty of rejections. Use it as motivation.

Slushpile:  While you lead a full life of sports, friends, and socializing, you are known for your ability to focus intently on business. You devour business magazines and advise that if people “put the kind of energy into this that others put into keeping up with celebrity gossip, you’ll be way ahead.” What can aspiring authors learn by studying publishing trade journals and industry news? How does this benefit them, as opposed to keeping up with Paris Hilton’s latest escapades?

Johnson:  I’d turn that question around and ask yourself how keeping up with Paris Hilton’s latest escapades benefit you? If you take a second and write down everything we do in an average day, or week,  I think you’ll definitely see how it can be beneficial to read, and study, trade journals and industry-specific magazines. Before I published my book, I studied the publishing world and tried to learn everything I possibly could.

Slushpile:  You write that many successful businesses are based on improving an existing idea. “Never underestimate the potential of a good idea,” you write. “And never underestimate the better execution of a good idea that someone else is executing poorly.” How do you improve someone else’s idea, without seeming too similar? Even though another burger chain may introduce a sandwich that has three pieces of bread, two patties, and a sauce, don’t they need to impart their own vision, instead of just carbon copying the Big Mac?

Johnson:  Their own vision: yes. It’s rare that simply a carbon copy will succeed as you must differentiate yourself from the competition. What makes you better? Or maybe you’re cheaper? Faster? Easier to use? Any of these questions can separate you quickly from the competition. Study what works, and even more importantly study what doesn’t. I think entrepreneurs overlook the simple ideas. Apple didn’t invent the mp3 player, they just made it better and easier to use. When you look at new products or ideas, you’ll find the simple ones, and often simple variations, are sometimes the most lucrative.

Slushpile:  And how would you advise a person to objectively evaluate how to improve an idea? If I read a detective novel and think I could do a better job, what kind of questions do I need to ask myself in order to improve it?

Johnson:  What didn’t you like? Writing and writing copyrights are a bit different than a business concept or idea but the same principle applies. Being objective might be the biggest challenge and that’s one reason I always look to others for feedback.

Slushpile:  In You Call the Shots, you advise people to find great mentors. “People open doors,” you write. “That’s what connections are all about. Over the years, I have collected a powerful network of contacts. Some of them have opened major doors for me, and I’ve done the same for them.” Aspiring authors often bemoan their lack of big-time New York publishing contacts. How can someone overcome the fact that they might live in a small town in the Midwest and might not know anyone in publishing in order to build an effective network of contacts?

Johnson:  I think people are sometimes overwhelmed by the need for networking. Living in a small town in the Midwest can’t be your excuse. I was from a small city in Southwest Virginia. Perhaps look to a co-author, perhaps reach out to some of your favorite writers and ask for their feedback or advice. It sounds like a cliché’ and I guess it is, but there’s always a way.

Slushpile:  You have some very strong opinions on customer service. One of the things that you find most shocking is that “nine out of ten companies never contact their customers after they’ve made a purchase.” Now, authors selling books might be a bit of a different relationship than a car dealer selling SUVs. But what kind of advice would you offer to writers who want to build—and retain—their audience?

Johnson:  I think this is just as important for authors. Perhaps not “customer service” but developing a relationship with your reader can prove crucial. In You Call the Shots for instance, we give the readers a special website at the back of the book where they can get even more tips and online resources. There we invite the reader to join our newsletter and we give them the free tips promised. This same strategy can be adapted to just about any book, and can prove to be a valuable marketing tool. Also can be a valuable way to get direct feedback from your audience.

Slushpile:  Many writers struggle because they may love to write a type of book that isn’t popular.  They want to stay true to their art, but also build a career. In your case, all the ventures you’ve launched are a result of something you love and find interesting. Yet, you also objectively evaluate their viability as a business. How do you balance the love of a pursuit with the harsh realities of business investment?

Johnson:  That’s a tough question. The marketing ability, or potential, for an idea is something I research as one of the very first steps to getting started. So I’m not sure I’ve let myself develop a huge passion for something that doesn’t have broad market appeal. One strategy I use when creating businesses is to first find my niche and then ask myself – what can this audience use? So I actually look for the market, before I create a product or service. It’s reverse but it actually makes logical sense rather than trying to invent something no one wants.

Slushpile:  In the past, you were into soccer and scouts. How are you spending your free time these days?

Johnson:  Free time is very important – I love to travel, hang out with friends, concerts, sporting events – the same things an average 23-year old would like to do.

Slushpile:  What books are you reading?

Johnson:  Right now I’m working on my next book so I’m not reading very much other than plenty of research.

Slushpile:  What are your plans for future books?

Johnson:  When I wrote my first book, I didn’t necessarily anticipate on writing another. Now that I’ve received some great feedback from the first one, I’m passionate about writing more for my generation. There are very few books out there that are written by twenty-somethings and I think my books have a unique appeal and the unique ability to speak to my generation. Stay tuned for some exciting projects to come.

Slushpile:  You juggled a social life, high school, and creating several highly successful businesses. What advice do you have for writers who struggle to work on their novel while also meeting the demands of a day-job, family, etc?

Johnson:  My best work was done very late at night. I’m sure many writers would agree with this and I also never let my businesses run my life. I think that’s the best lesson is to not let your writing run, or ruin, your life. My businesses were a hobby and I never let them control my life.

Slushpile:  What is your single-best, most-important, can’t-live-without writing tip you would offer to aspiring authors?

Johnson:  We live in a world where the average book sells less than 5,000 copies. With that being said, the best tip is to use your talents to be incredible creative, but also keep in mind it needs somewhat of a broad appeal to succeed in the marketplace.

Slushpile:  What is your single-best, most-important, can’t-live-without publishing tip you would offer to aspiring authors struggling to break into print?

Johnson:  To not take No for an answer and to put yourself out there and make it happen.

For more information about Cameron Johnson, be sure to check out his website.

Born in Singapore to American novelist Paul Theroux and his British wife Anne Castle, Theroux holds dual American-British citizenship. This allows him to stradle the fence between cultural insider and outsider observer. From 1998 to 2000, Theroux made documentary films for the BBC. His show, Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends primarily focused on unusual American subcultures.

Years later, Theroux wondered what happened to those people. Was the porn star still working up a sweat under the bright spotlights? Was the Aryan still preparing for race war? Theroux travelled to America to find the answers and documented his journey in The Call of the Weird: Travels in American Subcultures. He journey took him from the deserts of Nevada to the magnolia trees of Mississippi and many more places. Sometimes the interview subjects were happy to see him. Other times, they weren’t.

Theroux was kind enough to talk to us about our fascination with unusual subcultures, the strategy of planning a “quest” book, and how tape recording generates too much material.

Slushpile:  In The Call of the Weird: Travels in American Subcultures, you write that this book was the product of wanting to follow up on many of the subjects you featured in your BBC documentary series. Did you complete your travels before trying to find a publisher? Or did you sell this project based on a proposal and then go out and write it after signing a deal?

Theroux:  I got a book deal based on the success of my TV shows in the UK. It was all pretty vague but there was some idea I might do something about quirky British celebrities, which is what I was making programs about at the time. Then I got the idea of revisiting some of the off-beat American subcultures I’d covered in the mid to late nineties – UFO cults and the porn industry and militias – and seeing what had become of the people I’d got to know, so I did that instead.

Slushpile:  You obviously had a successful television show. So you weren’t an entirely unknown quantity. If an unknown writer wanted to publish a book like this, do you recommend that they go out and interview one of the subjects first and then try to get a publisher? Should they write the entire manuscript and then seek publishers? Can they get by with just a proposal?

Theroux:  My advice would be to to get the deal in place first – certainly with a non-fiction idea like mine. You’ll need to write a proposal and maybe one or two sample chapters, but any more and you’re putting a lot of time and effort into something that might not come off.

Slushpile:  During your travels, you interviewed porn performers, strippers, Neo-Nazis, UFO cults, self-help gurus, and others. What do you think most intrigues us about these groups? What makes them so interesting?

Theroux:  I think we’re fascinated by the illogical or the bizarre – when someone does something that seems totally wrong-headed we’re naturally curious about their motivations. Add to that a moral dimension, people who are doing something taboo – as in the case of neo-Nazis, say – and it piques our sense of amazement and outrage… I also happen to think that there’s a tiny bit of wish fulfillment in our curiosity. In many cases these people are doing things which, in a little part of ourselves, we’d be curious to do ourselves.

Slushpile:  What most surprised you about the folks you encountered on your travels?

Theroux:  I tended to be surprised by how tenacious they were about sticking to their guns and pursuing their off-beat lifestyles, even when they’d suffered and struggled in consequence. I’d thought some of them might have become reformed characters, that they might have woken up and realized their odd inclinations weren’t getting them anywhere – and a few had – but by and large they were still the same believers and enthusiasts I’d met on my first encounters. The pimp was still pimping, the militia guy was still worrying about the UN, the Aryan Nations was still obsessing about Jews, just in slightly reduced circumstances.

If I can add a personal note, what surprised me even more was a realization I made about myself about how invested I was in the idea of having a personal relationship with these people. I realized it was, for some reason, important to me that I be something more than a journalist to my subjects – which is quite weird, when you think about it, but also very human.

Slushpile:  What most disturbed you about those same people?

Theroux:  Probably the most awkward encounter was with a space channel called Bob Short – basically he acts as a mouthpiece for an alien being called Korton during weekly spiritual sessions. Bob’s a good guy but I think I brought a set of expectations to the reunion that were unrealistic. He was one of the first people I caught up with and I had this idea that he was going to let me into his life and confide his anxieties about whether or not his gift was real and generally have a distance from his own beliefs that he doesn’t have and perhaps can’t have. And when he didn’t do these things, I became exasperated, and the encounter kind of unraveled.

Slushpile:  How did you plan your trip from England to America to conduct these interviews? Did you line them all up before arriving and then hope to add to your material as you went along?

Theroux:  I didn’t line up much before I left. I did a little googling and dug up a few phone numbers, but that was about it. The idea was to make the tracking down part of the story. I did stick some pins into a map and make a reservation at a weekly motel in Las Vegas.

Slushpile:  During the course of your travels, you met a number of new interview subjects. Oftentimes, your encounters were spontaneous chats without a lot of preparation. How did you record their quotes? Did you always use a tape recorder? Did you rely on written notes?

Theroux:  To begin with I used a tape recorder but I found I was getting too much material, so I came to rely more on scribbled notes which I would write up at the end of the day. For certain things, a tape recorder is helpful, but it sucks up so much speech that it can end up bogging you down.

Slushpile:  Did you get the interview subjects to sign any type of release form? What are the rules about including someone’s quotes in a book like this?

Theroux:  Well, I was clear with all of them that I was there to write a book, and they could see I was either recording them or taking notes, so there was no need for a release. I’ve never heard of anyone needing to sign a release for their words to appear in a book, only for a TV appearance.

Slushpile:  When you emailed or called your interview subjects, how much information about the nature of the project did you give them? How did you explain your goals for this book?

Theroux:  I usually tried to write or email first, and I’d just say, “I’m writing a book about some of the intriguing people I’ve met over the years, do you want to be in it?”, then I’d call and explain a little more. And they’d say either yes or no.

Slushpile:  As a journalist, how do you know when to request interview, when to give up if you don’t get a response, and when to surprise the subject? For example, when you interviewed Marshall Sylver, who claims to teach people how to become a millionaire, you just attended his conference. You wrote, “I was back, intending to catch him unawares.” But with other interview subjects, you made an appointment and left it at that. How do you decide on your strategy?

Theroux:  With some characters, when I heard nothing back, I stopped there – for example, I’d thought I might check in with the subculture of female bodybuilders, but when one or two emails went unanswered I reconsidered. With Marshall Sylver, I had a pretty good idea he wouldn’t speak to me, but I found his story and the stories of his followers so interesting I opted to ambush him… But I think he’s the only one I did that to. With April, the neo-Nazi mother whose twin girls are in the white power folk group Prussian Blue, she wasn’t that keen to do follow-up, but she did speak to my on the phone, so I just persevered, and in the end she relented.

Slushpile:  How did you actually write the chapters that comprise The Call of the Weird? Did you write as you were going along your journey? Or did you wait until you completed your trip and had all the material at your disposal before deciding what to focus upon?

Theroux:  I waited until I’d done most of my traveling and catching up before starting to shape the material. Then in the act of writing a few holes appeared and I did some follow-up. The idea evolved in the course of writing and researching – and it’s probably worth saying that if I had the book to write over I would have taken more time in the planning stages and maybe spared  myself a lot of misdirected energy.

Slushpile:  What advice do you have for aspiring authors who want to embark upon a book project like this, where they travel around and round up people to interview and collect stories to tell?

Theroux:  Try to be organized, have a structure in mind, and plan as much as you can. Of course your plan will evolve and change, but you’ll still benefit from the forethought you put into it. Think about the genre you’re working in and what existing examples there are. Learn as much as you can from how they’re put together. As I say, I didn’t plan much – I assumed that because I was starting from an honest motivation of something I was personally interested in doing that that would be enough and that the technical aspects would sort themselves out – and I suffered for it.

Slushpile:  Have you heard from any of the book subjects since publication? You mention that some people liked and others disliked how they were portrayed in your BBC series. Have you had any feedback from them on the book?

Theroux:  I’ve had limited feedback from the subjects of the book. JJ, the porn performer, sent a friendly email. April Gaede, the neo-Nazi mother whose twin girls formed the white nationalist band Prussian Blue, was basically positive… I think that’s it.

Slushpile:  You’ve mentioned in other interviews that you had to trim excessively to make everything fit and to boil down your interactions to their most effective length. What was the most interesting story that didn’t make it into the book?

Theroux:  Quite a lot of material from the original shows that I’d hoped to use in the book had to come out because it was throwing the newer material out of balance. Ike Turner is one example. There was a time I was with him  in Memphis when he was touring, and he’d asked for a rental car with a satellite navigation system. It had a computerized woman’s voice – but it was either malfunctioning or Ike was having trouble with it, I’m not sure which, and he and the computer got into a set-to. The computer would say, “Calculating route” and Ike would say: “Shut up! You don’t know nothin’! Calculatin’? Yeah, you calculatin’ alright!” I remember thinking, if this guy can get into an argument with a computer, he can get into an argument with anybody…

Slushpile:  In some cases, you had difficulty getting the subjects to speak with you. Yet you were able to make the quest to reach these people as interesting as if you had interviewed them. The reader is taken along for ride and experiences the thrill of the chase. What techniques did you use to make this chase portion interesting? At any point did you think, “This interaction isn’t going anywhere, I should just cut it out of the book.”

Theroux:  The quest aspect of the book was always part of my original plan for it. I think the trick is sustaining the chase – which is all to do with postponement – while delivering new characters and situations. It wasn’t always easy. I went through a lot of drafts with the Mello T chapter – he was a pimp and gangsta rapper based in Jackson, Mississippi. Eventually I realized I’d been so intent on trying to track him down that I’d failed to deliver anything new of substance. So I went back to Jackson to get some more color – went to a freestyle battle at a nightclub and then to Atlanta to interview a Mississippi rapper who’d made it big and interspersed those scenes with the “chasing Mello” scenes.

Slushpile:  There is a lot of you in this book. It’s not just a straight-forward journalism account of these people’s lives. It’s also your story of crossing the country and how you interacted with the subjects. How did you balance their story with your story? How did you decide when to focus on them and when to focus on you?

Theroux:  I have a tendency to write myself out of the story, almost out of a misplaced sense of journalistic purity and virtue; so sometimes redrafting was a matter of personalizing the material, reacting honestly to what I was experiencing. Sometimes I just had to feel my way – rewrite, reread, see if it worked, then either add more of myself or else tone it down.

Slushpile:  What is your single-best, most-important, can’t-live-without writing tip you would offer to aspiring authors?

Theroux:  Number one, have a good idea. Then, work to a plan. It’s not alchemy, it’s not a mystic art – there are things that work and things that don’t work, and to an extent there’s a roadmap – by which I mean, there are others who’ve worked in similar areas in similar ways, and you can learn from them. Also, have a great editor or a close friend or colleague who can read and offer you honest feedback.

Slushpile:  What is your single-best, most-important, can’t-live-without publishing tip you would offer to aspiring authors struggling to break into print.

Theroux:  Well, I had the luxury of starting from the position of having my own TV show, which undoubtedly helped; not to mention that my father is a successful novelist and travel writer, which I’m sure helped, too. If you don’t have these, then be talented and hard-working and have a great idea.

However, the controversy doesn’t need to be on a grand scale. It just needs to be there.

After years of success writing for magazines, Matt Diehl started publishing books and “figured out that for a book to exist, it has to be controversial in some way,” he says. “Almost every book I have written is, on some level, controversial.”

Diehl grew up in Evanston, Illinois. The area wasn’t truly urban and neither was it completely in the suburbs. But it was intellectual. “I always say it is where the hippies went to get rich,” he laughs. Reading was an important activity to the Diehl family. But he really got into journalism through punk rock.

His mother gave him a Sex Pistols record when he was 9. For his first punk show, an 11-year-old Diehl saw the iconic Johnny Thunders. At an age when most boys are still playing with GI Joe figures, he also saw the Damned, the Dead Kennedys, the Bad Brains, and the original lineup of the Misfits. As a teenager, Diehl played guitar for one of Chicago’s seminal punk bands, Nadsat Rebel. The band’s first show was opening for Big Black. The second gig was in support of Husker Du. They later appeared with Samhain, GBH, Articles of Faith, the Effigies, Naked Raygun and others.

Diehl bought into the do-it-yourself ethic of punk music, and set out to develop his literary skills as well as his riffing skills. “I felt like if I was going to be a true punk revolutionary, I had to both play punk rock in a band and write about it to further the cause,” he says. “I wanted to test in theory and in practice.”

Throughout his high school and college years, Diehl wrote for as many publications as he could find. “I never stopped writing and I never was concerned about whether it was the greatest publication or the worst,” he says. He sought to work with editors who could teach him to be a better writer and who could validate his efforts. After graduation, he eventually settled in New York City and went on to write for Rolling Stone, Spin, GQ, Vibe, The New York Times, and others.

In addition to possessing enough “punk points” to stand toe-to-toe with just about anyone, Diehl also developed an extensive knowledge of rap and hip hop. He wrote a thorough examination of pop rap for The Vibe History of Hip Hop, pubilshed in 1999. Diehl coldly critiqued the cultural place of acts like PM Dawn, Young MC, MC Hammer, and others without sneering at the often novelty acts. He also showed how the pop rapper’s goals weren’t really that different from more “serious” acts.

So what do we mean by “pop rap,” anyway? Most simply, the word pop (as in popular) signifies music that’s reaching for the biggest conceivable audience. For many rap fans, such an approach inherently means gentrification of hip hop–yet hip hop’s original intent was always about sucking the biggest possible audienceinto its groove. When DJs like Kool Herc cut up vinyl in Bronx parks back in the ’70s and early ’80s, they were trying to move as big a crowd as they could. And in the late ’90s, supposedly “underground” rappers still rhyme about getting paid, insulting their peers whose albums don’t go gold or platinum.

In 2000, after interviewing the band a number of times, Diehl endeavored to write a book about The Wu-Tang Clan. He pitched the idea to an agent, who “completely shot the idea down,” Diehl remembers. Several years later, a Wu-Tang Book written by someone else appeared. Seeing that title in the stores was a harsh lesson. “Because I didn’t know anything about writing book, I felt like this gatekeeper’s idea of what could be popular, or be saleable, or commercial, or viable, or even interesting, was sacred,” he says. “When in fact, it isn’t and it wasn’t.”

A mutual acquaintance then introduced Diehl to snowboarding instructor Danny Martin and the two collaborated on No-Fall Snowboarding: 7 Easy Steps to Safe and Fun Boarding. The book, published in 2005, challenged the notion that learning to snowboard has to be a torturous process full of bruises and aching muscles. “It was the perfect thing to sort of kick my ass and get me to start writing books,” Diehl says.

Diehl followed that effort with Notorious C.O.P.: The Inside Story of the Tupac, Biggie, and Jam Master Jay Investigations from NYPD’s First Hip-Hop Cop in 2006. Derek Parker had been with the New York Police Department from 1982 to 2002. He was assigned to a clandestine “rap intel” squad within the organization’s gang division. As such, he participated in a number of high-profile investigations involving the biggest names in rap.

By that point, Diehl was a fairly well-known journalist on the rap scene. Parker, the so-called hip hop cop, approached Diehl to write his story. The resulting book was a detailed, and controversial, look inside police procedure and law enforcement’s relationship with the rap community.

Diehl’s most recent book was originally conceived by the publisher. St. Martin’s Press wanted to produce a biography of Brody Dalle and The Distillers. They approached Diehl, the accomplished music journalist and lifelong punk fan, to write the book. But he had a different direction in mind. “I said, well, why don’t I do a book using the Distillers as sort of a test case with which to talk about the current state of punk rock?” he says. “Because nobody has really done a book like England’s Dreaming [Jon Savage’s 2002 England Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond] about punk rock today.”

Diehl signed with St. Martin’s for the punk book without having to go through the proposal process that is part of so many nonfiction publishing ventures. “I might have written like a paragraph or a page of something,” he says.

However, Diehl actually recommends that aspiring authors create a proposal. It forces you to plan ahead and provides a roadmap to your work over the coming months and years. “Writing a proposal is all the hard work of the book,” he says. “You have to figure out what your book is about, you do a chapter breakdown. The books I have written without proposals are far more difficult.”

In addition to providing a heavy dose of Distillers biography, Diehl conducted an overall examination of punk for My So Called Punk: Green Day, Fall Out Boy, The Distillers, Bad Religion—How Neo-Punk Stage Dived Into the Mainstream. From the get-go, the book proved to be controversial. “Every body has an opinion about punk rock,” he says. “You put out any book about punk rock, people argue about it.”

Indeed, finicky readers were quick to argue about which bands were included, which were excluded, who said what, and who got the most space. One punk fan offered his version of literary criticism on a message board. In an ideal punk world, the book would be produced in Kinkos and then burned before reading because “punx don’t read,” the critic wrote. Meanwhile, another commentor simply proclaimed, “reading books isn’t very punk rock.”

It’s not hard to imagine readers debating the book since its pages are full or contradictory statements from the musicians themselves. Brett Gurewitz, head of the immensely influential Epitaph Records and a founding member of Bad Religion, reminisced about the early days of punk. “Part of the appeal of punk rock, and on of its defining characteristics, is its populist nature,” he told Diehl. “Punk music is for anybody—anybody can do it. You don’t have to be a virtuoso, you don’t have to know music theory, you don’t have to be fucking skinny like Jimmy Page, you don’t have to have cheekbones like Mick Jagger. All you have to do is have heart and put yourself out there. It’s inclusive.”

Years later, Brody Dalle of the Distillers recalled a different punk scene. “Punk rock was so cliquey: you know, your hair had to be a certain way, and you had to have the right patch on your backpack,” she said. And Tsunami Bomb’s Agent M disputed the credibility of many venerable punk establishments. “As far as places with punk values, I feel like a lot of the clubs that are known for their classic punk ethics are actually just elitist,” she told Diehl.

This swirl of contradictions and controversy provided the perfect fodder for Diehl’s examination. “Well, punk rock has always been like high school,” Diehl says. “It has always had this hypocrisy and that is kind of what made it fun in a way. When I started in punk rock, people would make fun of you if you wore the wrong T-shirt to the concert.”

In spite of his love for the art form, Diehl refused to ignore controversy or gloss over the genre’s problems. But he does seem to be optimistic about it’s future. While many current punk afficionados complain about the MTV popularity of bands such as Good Charlotte, Diehl believes they serve a purpose.

Remember the gateway drug analogy: if you start a kid on Blink-182, he or she might progress to (gasp!) the Clash, and Black Flag, and then Dead Kennedys, and then, most dangerous of all, the selected musical accomplishments of Steve Albini. Most likely, he or she may choose to stay in the comfort zone of mall punk, with the familiarity of its Hot Topic clothes and MTV bands. But maybe, just maybe, punk rock will open the mind of this youth the way it opened mine.

And the journalist in Diehl saw the current punk environment as a fascinating study. He likens the role of a music critic to that of political pundits. “If you are a political writer, you don’t get to choose the president,” he says. “Often it is the worst president that makes the most interesting stories.”

Diehl offers aspiring authors a few words of advice about writing those stories. First, include as many perspectives as possible. Keep searching for more insights, more facts, more opinions. “I wrote a profile of someone and I sent it into the editor,” he says. “And they said, well, it’s good, but you only have one source here.” Diehl learned that “the most important thing is to get as much of the information from as many sides as possible.”

Second, aspiring authors should always, always meet their deadlines. “Even if you are a terrible writer and you make deadlines, you will get more work. They will love you,” he says.

And third, he believes new writers should constantly push themselves beyond their comfort zone and areas of expertise. The lifelong punk rocker, art history major, and respected music critic says you shouldn’t hesitate to review “someone on American Idol,” he says. “It may be against your value system on some levels. But you actually might learn something. That is being a professional writer. Take writing assignments that you would normally turn down for whatever reason and see what you do with them.”

In regards to publishing, Diehl suggests aspiring authors simply get their work in the public eye as much as possible. Be willing to start at the lower publications and work your way up. But do whatever you can to build an extensive body of work. “When they came to me to write a music book, I had written thousands of music articles,” he says. It wasn’t a leap where the publisher had to entrust an unknown, unproven writer with their project. Instead, they had a proven commodity.

And finally, you just have to put in the toil of writing. “It is hard when you are working a terrible job and all you want to do is write, but you make do,” he says.

McNay’s debut novel Fresh was published by Canongate in the UK and MacAdam/Cage here in the US. The Guardian said, “Menacing, witty, with snappy no-nonsense dialogue and an unambiguously shocking ending, McNay’s debut is every bit as fresh as its title.” And The Scotsman said the book ”is a novel whose edgy energy carries you forward. The picture of blight and of deprivation within which choices are made and determined, is shown in the round… A hugely entertaining, sometimes disturbing, fiction debut.”

McNay was kind enough to chat with me about awful jobs, British creative writing programs, and avoiding caricature.

Slushpile:  You’ve had a number of jobs including factory work, building work, and window cleaning among others. What was the worst job you ever had?

McNay:  For a summer I worked as a hospital cleaner. It was kind of gross. The worst part was when they assigned me to work in Geriatric wards. The elderly can find it difficult to control their bowels and bladders. I heard an old lady scream for days on end. She was in torment only she could see. I seen an old man suckle on a bottle like a baby. I realised that one day, I may end up like that.

Slushpile:  Some writers like doing more manual labor jobs because they can think of their stories all day long and then write at night. Others are too exhausted by the physical labor to get any writing done. How did working construction and in factories affect your literary efforts?

McNay:  I was mostly too tired to read decent books never mind write. All I would do was drink beer and watch telly. Although I did read the Beckett about the man who is a worker in an asylum, Murphy.

Slushpile:  You’ve mentioned that storytelling is a family thing amongst your kinfolks. Every family has the same handful of stories that get repeated at every holiday and gathering. What’s the funniest story that circulates through your family history?

McNay:  My mother says she came into our room one morning to find me and my brother covered in each other’s shit..

Slushpile:  What was your earliest literary love?

McNay:  I read The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. That was the first that seemed kind of clever, yet wasn’t a chore to read.

Slushpile:  How did you decide to pursue literature? What made you say, “I’m going to be a writer!”

McNay:  I read some Charles Bukowski short stories and thought, I’ve had an interesting life that could be written like this.

Slushpile:  What was the best thing about attending the University of East Anglia creative writing program?

McNay:  I could access experienced writers and get hints and tips about the writing world. They would read my stuff and re-assure me I could write. They told me it’s hard to make a living writing. They told me the truth about writing.

Slushpile:  Creative writing programs here in the US are somewhat controversial. Some authors think they are valuable tools for teaching the craft. Others think they are overly-political and cliquish and that they churn out writers who are all the same. What is the opinion of creative writing programs in Great Britain?

McNay:  Pretty much the same. I think they teach something that is mostly craft. I look at writing like playing guitar. The more I practise the better I get. Sometimes lessons are useful.

I don’t think I write like others who took Creative Writing classes. Sometimes the people who take the classes are all peers who did school, usually literature, around the same time, so the background culture is the same, and therefore the product can look similar.

Slushpile:  What publications (essays, short stories, articles, etc) did you have before Fresh?

McNay:  None.

Slushpile:  Your British publisher is the highly-respected Canongate. How did you submit your novel and ultimately sign a deal for publication?

McNay:  I got an agent and she did the submitting. I was offered three deals from different publishers but chose Canongate because they are so cool.

Slushpile:  How has Fresh been received in the UK?

McNay:  I’ve had some good reviews in the Times and the Guardian, The Scotsman and the Glasgow Herald. I’m fairly happy with how it is going.

Slushpile:  So how did you hook up with MacAdam/Cage? Once you had the British publisher, how does it work to line up international publishers?

McNay:  Canongate own the world rights. They sold to MacAdam/Cage. One of the reasons I chose Canongate is that they try hard to sell their product around the world.
 
Slushpile:  What differences do you see between the British publishing industry and the American one?

McNay:  I don’t know that much about the American one. Hopefully I’ll sell more books there and that will give me the opportunity to find out.

Slushpile:  In Fresh, there are these cinematic references when the protagonist Sean imagines himself a soldier or a cowboy. During these interludes, he is narrating a “scene” where he plays the part of a movie hero. What led you to include these passages?

McNay:  Sean is in a position of powerlessness. People like this tend to fill their lives with omnipotent fantasies. Sean is informed by television and film culture so these tendencies would combine and he would imagine himself occupying a heroic position that refers to movies and television.

Slushpile:  Sean’s brother, Archie, is the villain of the book. And he’s a pretty evil guy. How do you know how far to go with Archie’s cruelty? If you push it too far, the character will just become a caricature, right? So how do you know how far to go without going so far to make Archie absurd?

McNay:  I write what I write and then go back to check and make sure the characters are portraying what I want them to. With Archie I took a lot of his stuff out because he was becoming a caricature. I realized he had done the intimidation so I could just let him frighten people by being in the narrative.

Slushpile:  Fresh combines present day action with numerous flashbacks to Sean and Archie growing up. Did you write the flashbacks as they occur in the book? Or did you write all the flashbacks, then cut them up, and insert them throughout the present day action? How did you handle the writing chores of both present day action and the flashbacks?

McNay:  I wrote some as I wrote the main story. Others I wrote as they came to me in the night. The writing process meant that I had to insert them in different places because I wanted the past narrative and the present narrative to be thematically consistent.

Slushpile:  Who are your favorite writers right now?

McNay:  I’ve just read The Road by Cormac McCarthy and it has blown me away. One of the most amazing books I’ve read in a while. Reminds me of Beckett.

Slushpile:  Who is a British writer that you wish had more fans here in the US?

McNay:  Me.

Slushpile:  What are you working on next?

McNay:  I’m writing a story about a man who suffers from a narrsisistic personality disorder. He has a girlfriend who is a prostitute and a social worker who is trying to take her away.

Slushpile:  What is your can’t-live-without, must-have, single-most-important writing tip you would offer to aspiring authors?

McNay:  Write. Don’t wait for inspiration, just write and feel the inspiration arrive with the process. Get the fingers on the keyboard, or wrapped round a pen, and write.

Slushpile:  What is your can’t-live-without, must-have, single-most-important publishing tip you would offer to aspiring authors struggling to break into print?

McNay:  I got an agent and she did that for me. Before I sent her my work I made it as perfect as I could. She pointed out what she thought was errors. My job was then to put my pride to one side and listen to her, and make a judgment about what she said. Eventually it became good enough to send to publishers.

********* 

Photo credit: Sarah Lee

Puzzled and scared, Zoellner asked, “You want me to go in there?” And he remembers that “For the first time since being arrested, I began to get frightened. I could feel my hands start to tremble. Visions of an impromptu execution and a river burial began playing in my mental cineplex. They must have somehow found out I had met with diamond smugglers.”

And so goes one of the most harrowing scenes in Zoellner’s book The Heartless Stone: A Journey Through the World of Diamonds, Deceit, and Desire. Leonardo might have been nominated for an Oscar for his role in a somewhat similar movie, but Zoellner actually lived this stuff. In researching and writing his book, Zoellner travelled to fourteen nations on six continents. All in search of discovering the basis of man’s obsession with diamonds.

Zoellner’s previous work includes publications in Men’s Health and the San Francisco Chronicle. He is also the co-author of An Ordinary Man, the autobiography of Rwanda hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina that was the basis for the film Hotel Rwanda.

Zoellner was kind enough to talk to us about conflict diamonds, piling up stacks of notes and interviews in an increasingly heavy pack, and marketing efforts for authors.

Slushpile:  How did you decide to launch your research for The Heartless Stone in the Central African Republic, a country with only one legitimate way in or out for foreigners?

Zoellner:  There were reports about this nation being a way-station for diamond smuggling. I wanted to see if this was true. It was also a good place to look at the remote mines where diamonds are mined from the riverbeds. The Central African Republic also represents a puzzle, which I think is one of the central puzzles of the book. Here is one of the poorest nations on the globe, yet it is the worlds tenth largest producer of diamonds. How can this be?

Slushpile:  During the course of researching this book, you visited fourteen nations and six continents. Frequently, the locales were remote and dangerous. How much pre-planning did you do before arriving in these areas? Did you line up guides, security, lodging, etc? Or did you just arrive and take it from there?

Zoellner:  I discovered theres really no substitute for just showing up and trusting that things will work out alright. Theres a kind of magic that happens when you travel. You meet people much more easily, for one thing.

One useful trick for traveling in the developing world is to book the first two nights in the hotel where all the diplomats, U.N. staff and nonprofit workers stay. Every capital city no matter how poor — has one of these places. It will be pricey, but worth it. Your job on the first day is to fight your way through the airport, get a taxi to the hotel, change currency and sleep off the jet lag. Your job on the second day is to wander the city and find cheaper lodging. And your job on both evenings is to nurse a drink in the bar and listen for information and rumors you wont find in The Economist or Lonely Planet.

Aid workers, in particular, are champion gossips. This gives you a safe base from which to get used to the country, make a few friends and understand a thing or two about the place before you start the real reporting.

Slushpile:  At one point in the Central African Republic, you were taken by soldiers, and forced into an empty warehouse at gunpoint. You were handed a document (referred to as your statement) written by someone else in a foreign language you couldnt understand. You were then commanded to sign this document, ostensibly confessing to some unknown deed. Was this the most frightening moment during your travels?

Zoellner:  Yes. Nothing prepared me for that.

Slushpile:  Youve spoken about the crazy dreams that accompany anti-malarial medications and I certainly experienced those myself in KwaZulu-Natal last spring. What was your most disturbing dream?

Zoellner:  They were pretty bad. These dreams kept revolving around the diamonds and all the pathetic things I was learning about them. The most memorable one was not so much disturbing as it was sad. I kept having these incredibly vivid dreams about my ex-fiancee, Anne, and how we had supposedly gotten back together and were happy again.

We had broken up four years prior and I still had the engagement ring in a desk drawer. The memory of that dead relationship kept coming back to me in the diamond fields in the form of these malaria dreams. They were intense and thick and I couldnt shake them.

And I didnt go to Africa with the intention of writing about my own life in any way it was going to be strictly third-person journalism (plus, I’ve never been very good at self-debriefing) — but after having those dreams, I knew I had to explore my own experience with diamonds. I had made this stone a symbol of my own marriage-to-be, for no other reason than pure cultural expectation, and I had played a small role myself in sustaining this $64 billion commerce. It sounds kind of gooey, but thats what happened.

Slushpile:  One of the most fascinating aspects of The Heartless Stone was the DeBeers marketing information you obtained. How did you get access to these documents?

Zoellner:  I owed a lot to the foresightedness of a few advertising executives who preserved the strategy papers of yesteryear as a kind of memorial to their work. They believed that American advertising is a part of American history (which it is) and that these documents are part of the nations common property. There are archives of some of the old De Beers internal memos in the Smithsonian and at Duke University. I spent time rooting through both collections. I also got access to a few items in a small private library maintained by the American Association of Advertising Agencies.

Some of the most revealing documents, however, had already been uncovered in 1982 by a journalist named Edward Epstein who did a piece for The Atlantic on diamond advertising that year. I was very grateful for his work. More current information was given to me by J. Walter Thompsons staff in Tokyo, as well as a bit of information from the De Beers staff themselves. All this being said, we dont know what went into the shredder over the years.

Slushpile:  Were you as shocked as I was to learn that diamond engagement rings were not a widely accepted custom in America until the late 1930s? It certainly seems like a tradition that goes back much further.

Zoellner:  Engagement rings certainly have been a feature of Western culture since the tail end of the Roman Empire, but the diamond as the must-have ornament for that ring is a relatively new idea. Diamond rings were not widely embraced in the United States until the late 1930s and only after heavy prompting from De Beers.

Slushpile:  Its one thing for a reporter to go to a thirty minute press conference with a recorder or a pen and then go to the office and write the story. Its another for someone to trek through six continents, interview hundreds of people, and still keep up with all the quotes and material. While you were traveling, how did you manage your notes, recordings, and supporting material?

Zoellner:  I carried a reporter’s notebook with me at all times and wrote everything down for later reference. That was the most portable part about it. Often I would be handed a stack of memos or a binder, and there was simply no choice but to stow it in my backpack and lug it around for the rest of the trip. I would sometimes come back into JFK with a heavy pack, teeming with dirty laundry and documents.

Slushpile:  Has the early December release of Edward Zwick’s movie Blood Diamond, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, helped or hurt the sales of your book?

Zoellner:  Hard to say. It certainly gave the problem of blood diamonds a more visible profile. Oddly, the movie seems to have done almost nothing to the sales of diamond rings. Jewelers reported a generally healthy Christmas season.

Slushpile:  Have you seen the movie? If so, what did you think of it?

Zoellner:  I did see it. It cost about a sixth of the gross national product of Sierra Leone to produce, but it may have been money well-spent if it gives a permanent contour to the idea that multinational mining companies (such as De Beers) must never again allow the perception that they have provided indirect bankrolling to warlords. In that sense, it was a pretty good use of $100 million. The story and the characters are fictional, but the movie takes place against an accurate backdrop. Rebel armies really did treat diamond mines as cashboxes and the stones really did wind up in the legitimate market. The river mines as shown in the film look quite a bit like real African diamond mines.

Slushpile:  In 2003, you quit working as a reporter at The Arizona Republic, moved to Montana and started writing fiction. Were you writing short stories or novels? Did any of them get published? Are you still interested in pursuing fiction at some point in the future?

Zoellner:  I’m extremely grateful for that summer in Missoula. I was living in a cheap room next to the railroad tracks. The whole building shook in the middle of the night when the yard crews would ram boxcars together. The window looked out onto the mountains and a brick wall with a painted 1920s advertisement for a long-defunct traveling salesman hotel. The only furniture in the room was a blow-up mattress on the floor and a $5 card table and a folding chair. I set my Macintosh on that card table and made myself write a thousand words a day, every single day. No phone, no email, no job, little money, a few new friends, lots of books, lots of open space, lots of words, lots of time. That was the nub of an amazing discovery. With enough faith and discipline and dumb determination, anyone can write a book – in this case, a book-length manuscript – in just three months.

I had washed up as a newspaper reporter but found a whole new way of thinking about my place in the world and what I was supposed to do with my life. Possessions don’t make anybody happy. Social position doesn’t make you happy in the end. What brings true contentment is a more difficult equation, but I think a large part of it comes from giving good things back to the world. That’s what the best fiction can accomplish.

Writing can be narcissistic and self-indulgent, and sometimes is, but the best kind of writing – the kind that survives — is deeply altruistic, almost religiously so. Jorge Luis Borges once said he conceived of heaven as a kind of library. I think that’s an apt metaphor because literature often has a core of generosity. Fiction can bestow gifts to the reader that nonfiction cannot. A novel is a snow-globe that invites us to step inside and inhabit another world for a while. And even the unpleasant things you see inside there can be clothed in a version of beauty because they reflect parts of life that are both real and rarely articulated. I’d love to go back to writing stories someday. Minus the midnight boxcars, maybe.

Slushpile:  Who are your favorite fiction writers?

Zoellner:  I think Richard Ford has written some of the most important fiction of the last quarter-century. His pet subject is the inner life of American men, and he maps this obscure country better than anybody I’ve ever read. I’m also a big fan of Graham Greene, whose novels are always set within a particular moral universe. Ron Carlson, a fellow Arizonan and a brilliant short story artist, writes with a strong sense of place. For pure dark comedy, nobody beats T.C. Boyle.

Slushpile:  Did you have an outline in mind when you were researching this book? Or, did you just gather all the information you could and then start to organize it later?

Zoellner:  I was lucky to have a natural organizing principle from the start. The book has ten chapters and each one is reported from a different nation. Each of those ten places exemplifies a certain facet of the diamond business. India, for example, is where the majority of diamonds are polished today. South Africa was the birthplace of the De Beers cartel. Russia is where synthetic diamond machines were perfected. And so on. Hopefully this method of book-building helped drive home the point that the construct of a diamond as “something valuable” has left a unique mark on almost every culture and economy where it has been introduced.

Slushpile:  Given the amount of travel and research involved, it seems like this book was written fairly quickly. You started in 2003 and the book hit the shelves in May 2006. How long did you spend researching? How long did you spend writing?

Zoellner:  The whole thing took a year-and-a-half. I started in on each chapter as soon as I returned from visiting that particular nation. But I had no job in the conventional sense, and so I could devote all my time to diamonds.

Slushpile:  You said in another interview that the book proposal for The Heartless Stone included “an outline of where I wanted to go and what I was going to report, which felt a bit presumptuous… You shouldn’t be afraid to think big.” I often feel this way myself when putting together pitches or proposals. It seems ludicrous to say, “I’m going to interview George W. Bush and Michael Jordan for this project.” But you’re suggesting that’s the appropriate way to go?

Zoellner:  I agree with you: it feels arrogant to be ordering the lobster when you can’t even afford the soup. But a really winsome proposal has to have the lobster. So you order the damn lobster and then do whatever it takes to pay for it later. You have to throw everything you have into that thing that makes you passionate. Like in poker: “all-in.” I discovered that I could be happy next to the tracks in Montana, so I wasn’t afraid of failure or poverty. I had already been there.

Slushpile:  You’ve also been outspoken about how much work you think authors should do to help sell your book. Why do you think this is so important?

Zoellner:  There are some good people in publishing, but nobody is going to care about your book quite like you do. For them, ultimately, it is a product, and for you, often, it is an offspring. So you have to work for it on the back end as hard as you did when you were writing it.

Beware, though: Publicity is even more maddening than writing. Stupid arbitrary stuff will happen and you have no choice but to laugh through it and move on to the next thing. So all that fire in the eyes must be turned on and off like a stovetop burner. At the same time, you can’t help but feel like your worth as a person is on the line when your book is under consideration for some laurel or another.

What’s even worse is being ignored altogether, which happens to all writers everywhere at some point. This may be part of what drives many of them to the bottle.

Slushpile:  To help market your book, you hired a publicist. How did the St. Martin’s publicity department work in conjunction with your own personal publicist? What should authors know about working with these combinations of publicity personnel?

Zoellner:  I had it easy here. There was a clear demarcation of jobs. The in-house publicist was charged with national media and the independent publicist handled local press for the tour. So nobody felt like their toes were being stomped. The two publicists also got along well personally – I made sure they met one another before I wrote the check.

Slushpile:  How much does a publicist cost?

Zoellner:  The bill came to about $22,000 by the year’s end. That was for both the summer book tour and a second round of publicity near the time of the Blood Diamond movie release. I had nothing to do with the making of the film, but the subject of conflict diamonds was all over the media around Christmas. So we’d have been stupid not to make another pass.

Slushpile:  You paid for your own cross-country book tour, often driving 1,000 miles a day and sleeping in the car. How much do you think an author should invest in their own publicity campaigns and activities?

Zoellner:  As much as they can afford. The only genuine reason to write a book is because of passion. Not a desire just to see your name on a jacket at Borders, but real passion for the subject at hand: a manuscript that would have been written even for an audience of one. Those are the only books that really matter. And so if you’re totally committed — if you’ve devoted your time and your fortune and your hopes to producing that book — be sure to scrape together even more of everything for the endgame.

Slushpile:  Looking back now, what would you do differently in your publicity campaigns? How would you invest the money differently or what tactics would you use?

Zoellner:  I was lucky not to have made any major mistakes. On a personal level, it was quite a lot of fun to get on the road during the summer and reconnect with some old friends in different places. But I could never stay more than a night because of the need to drive to the next bookstore. I’d been warned that a book’s first currency lasts maybe two months, so this was unavoidable. But it still kind of sucked to leave conversations half-finished. I wound up covering more than 11,000 miles that summer.

Slushpile:  While we’re talking about money, what is your advice for freelancers who aren’t getting paid? Unfortunately, it’s sometimes a struggle because magazines lose the accounting information, payroll makes a mistake, the secretary is out of the office this week, and any number of other excuses. How can a freelancer keep pushing to get the money rightfully owed to them without being a pest and pissing off the editor they hope to work with again in the future?

Zoellner:  Freelancers have one of the worst deals imaginable on this count, and a lot of it comes from a perception that it’s a buyer’s market and a talented freelancer can be found anywhere, so why cultivate a relationship? This is part of the reason why too many magazines today put out issues full of jejune and lifeless content. Fewer and fewer writers with spark and imagination want to endure this kind of life.

My journalist friend Russ Baker, one of the good ones, makes his living exclusively from magazine pieces and deals with deadbeat editors from time-to-time. His advice to me is this: “Be friendly, but firm.”

Another way to think of it is that you’re not a needy individual begging for cash, but a representative of a corporation seeking to clear an account. You are politely (and somewhat robotically) enforcing the rules. This can help take the personal edge off the conversation and make you feel more comfortable making multiple calls. But Russ is right: never get angry.

Slushpile:  What is your single-best, most-important, can’t-live-without writing tip you would offer to aspiring authors?

Zoellner:  Well-meaning people will often tell you can’t get in to a certain place or talk to a certain person. These people are often dead wrong. Smile and try anyway.

Slushpile:  What is your single-best, most-important, can’t-live-without publishing tip you would offer to aspiring authors struggling to break into print

Zoellner:  Well-meaning editors or agents will often tell you your idea lacks a platform and will never become a book. These people are often dead wrong. Smile and try anyway.

Blush was kind enough to speak with us about his affection for this music genre, the nature of researching and compiling a book like this, and his task of sifting through more than 500 metal mags.   

Slushpile:  Your first book, American Hardcore, was published in 2001. I know you’re intimately involved with hardcore music and you’ve said in interviews that, “This was a big part of my life and a very intellectual chapter of Rock history that which was kind of overlooked and forgotten… I wrote it because of this forgotten history and I wanted to put the record straight.” Do you have any similar type of affinity for hair metal? Or was your first book a labor of love and this new one, American Hair Metal, more of academic pursuit?

Blush:  I have a unique relationship to Hair Metal. Back in those days, I was a total punk rock fan, and had zero affinity for Hair Metal, or any other “establishment” music. In Punk, I saw myself as a participant in a cultural revolution against all that. But somewhere during the Alt Rock late-90s, during that horrible Radiohead Alt Rock era, I discovered the band Cinderella – and instantly realized that under all their big hair laid a majestic bluesy groove equal parts Aerosmith and AC/DC.

In the Punk scene, it is common to speak of that Ramones album or Bad Brains single that changed your life. For me, here was the line I crossed back to sex and drugs and rock n roll.

Virtually every press outlet today —MTV and VH-1, for example—can only poke fun at Hair Metal. I’m not doing that, I truly appreciate it. As an enthusiastic outsider and an experienced author, I feel I can comfortably discuss it all in a matter-of-fact manner.

Slushpile:  What was your experience pitching, and then publishing, American Hardcore? Did you have an agent? How did you end up with Feral House?

Blush:  I am old friends with Adam Parfrey at Feral House—we knew each other from the 80s East Village scene, and he later wrote for my publication, Seconds Magazine. From the start, Adam believed in me and in the American Hardcore project. There have been no agents or other typical business shit. I am very satisfied with our author-publisher relationship.

Slushpile:  American Hair Metal is combination of photos, your own critiques of the music, outtakes from published interviews, and even fan art drawings of their favorite bands. How did you compile all this material?

Blush:  The book’s artwork largely came from my collections of rock mags and rock effluvia. A bunch of old metal friends helped me fill in the holes.  The fan drawings was my idea, to exemplify true American folk art.

Slushpile:  Did you gather all this material together before writing your critiques and evaluations of the music? Or, did you have certain critiques in mind that you wanted to write, regardless of the photos you discovered?

Blush:  The story wrote itself. There’s not a lot to analyze. So it was very easy to find which of the choice photos/artwork reflected the particular text. But nothing in the book is random.

Slushpile:  With so many photos, song lyrics, and interview quotes, how difficult was it to get clearances?

Blush:  The lyrics and quotes are used as part of a critical essay on the subject, so there were no legal problems. At the same time, we worked very hard to make sure everything printed in the book was correct, and never used derisively or out-of-context. Those quotes and lyrics are in tribute to how much these guys kicked ass!

Slushpile:  Many aspiring authors wonder about clearances and permissions. On the one hand, you don’t want to promise a publisher a certain lyric or quote and then not be able to obtain permission to use it. So one strategy would be to get the permission prior to submitting the book to a publisher. But on the other hand, some entities might not be willing to give permission without knowing exact details of the publication. So another strategy would be to wait until a book deal is finalized before asking for permissions. What is your advice?

Blush:  Just go for it and be prepared to make changes later. Your sole job as author is to finish the book. In most cases, legal changes by the publisher are a separate issue.

Slushpile:  American Hardcore and American Hair Metal are both books that rely heavily on their format, layout, and design. Aspiring authors who want to produce books like this are often confused by how “finished” of a manuscript they need to pitch to publishers. For example, if I were submitting a proposal for a book like this, do I need to include the photos and the captions and make it look like a final product? Or, should I just include placeholders for the photos and notes about what I intend to go there?

Blush:  It depends on the author or on the situation. American Hardcore was a unique situation in that I sent Feral House a completely finished book on disc. But that’s just because I’m a control freak, and demand total hands-on. American Hair Metal was designed in-house by Feral House, but with my excuciatingly detailed input. Both situations were very positive.

Slushpile:  Were there any bands that you previously didn’t like, but later developed an appreciation for through the research of this book?

Blush:  Yes, most notably:  Britny Fox, Danger Danger, Roxx Gang, Vinnie Vincent Invasion, and our cover boyz Nitro.

Slushpile:  In the introduction, you write that your conversations with some of hair metal’s key players “lacked any cool insight,” and that, “perhaps the characters’ past art embarrassed them.” Why do you think hair metal is so derided? We’ve seen a growing understanding of disco’s cultural place, a growing critical appreciation of early 80’s synthesizer music, but hair metal is still a joke. Why?

Blush:  I feel I’m the right to person to have created this book because one, I’m totally into it, and two, unlike the scene’s participants, most of whom have done everything possible to whitewash their Aqua Net pasts, I’ve got absolutely nothing to be embarrassed by.

The American Hair Metal book came out only 90 days ago, and is already in reprint. The book’s success shows that people may finally be ready for a critical re-evaluation of Hair Metal. We’ll see…

Slushpile:  You write that these bands “were pure entertainers—no tortured artist trip or subversive political intent, no stewing over Reaganomics, El Salvador death squads, nuclear holocaust, or any of society’s other ills.” What are your thoughts about the rare moments of hair metal political awareness, such as Queensryche’s Operation: Mindcrime album?

Blush:  Operation: Mindcrime is far dumber than anything Britny Fox ever did, or wore.

Remember: it’s much much harder to be smart and act dumb than it is to be dumb and act smart.

Slushpile:  You write about the hair metal uniform of bright colors, make-up, and teased hair. “The participants were not intellectuals or sophisticates and they were definitely not transvestites;” you write. “They were simply blue-collar uber-heteros who dressed sorta like chicks because that’s what got them laid.” But where did this style come from and how did it get to be considered sexy? Front men like Robert Plant (nicknamed “Percy” by his bandmates due to his outré stage presence) often displayed a bit of femininity. And of course, influential bands like The New York Dolls and T. Rex took androgyny to the extreme. But that’s still a long way from Aqua Net and lime green spandex. How did the hair metal fashion evolve?

Blush:  Hair Metal was nothing new, it was simply the biggest version of the same ol’ thing. The Stones, Led Zep and the Dolls set the stage for bands like Aersomith and Van Halen, who in turn set the stage for the Hair bands. Rock cliches like dressing quasi-fem in tight leather pants and singing in castrati vocals was the template for Alpha Males expression, so that’s exactly what the Hair bands did. These Hair bands did not dress that way out of irony or out of sexual confusion. They just thought it looked cool, and knew that it got ‘em laid.

Slushpile:  Many of the hair metal bands were infamous for their egos. “Overnight fame and fortune, rampant intoxication and unbridled sexual attention made for mind-boggling cases of self-delusion and self-importance,” you write. “Even modest levels of success led to enormously swollen heads, and bodacious claims of invincibility.” Compare this braggadocio with what we see today in rap music, where unknown MCs brag about their skills and bank accounts.

Blush:  They are one in the same. No difference at all. But while the Hair bands were dismissed as stupid and sexist, the rappers are embraced for “keeping it real.” The cultural implications to that answer are outside the realm of this conversation…

Slushpile:  You point out that after the explosion of Grunge music, the industry abandoned the hair metal bands. “The bands themselves are also to blame, as they bailed on their sound and style, too… Instead of staying true, hair metal bands tried to change with the times—and failed. Simply put, debaucherous big-haired boyz, by their own definition, could never be part of the Grunge generation.” What lessons do you think aspiring authors can learn for the musicians’ failed attempts at staying cool?

Blush:  Stay true to your art—to your vision—and you will never fail. Had Warrant or Cinderella not gone Grunge, we probably would not be having this discussion. I’m certainly not implying that these bands would’ve endured beyond the Nirvana years, but their fall would not have been so damn steep and tragic.

Slushpile:  The last third of the book is dedicated to an alphabetical listing of the important bands with key facts about each group. How did you research this section? I’m a trivia fanatic (and I thought I knew it all) about this music, but there were some facts here that were completely new to me. How did you dig up this information?

Blush:  The research of this book was quite in-depth. The majority of the book’s trivia comes from my intensive notetaking of over 500 issues of 80′s rock mags like Circus, RIP, Creem, Hit Parader, Metal Edge – a mind-numbing experience, to put it politely. The rest of the information was miniutae I picked up on over the years (and fact-checked against my bad memory!).

Slushpile:  One of the great things about American Hair Metal is the fantastic photographs of hair metal guitars. I always loved the graphics and paint jobs that 80’s axe slingers came up with. What’s your favorite guitar from that era?

Blush:  The guitar on the cover – Nitro’s Michael Angelo’s Charvel Quad X-400 with 4 necks in a V formation, each with a seventh string, for a higher octave. The most over-the-top guitar ever!!

Slushpile:  What other music genres intrigue you? Do you have plans for any future American… music books?

Blush:  I think I’ve taken this “American” thing as far as it can go…

Slushpile:  Your work has appeared in magazines such as Spin, Details, and the Village Voice. What tips can you offer for freelancers trying to place articles in publications like these?

Blush:  Newspapers and magazines exist to generate advertising revenue, and editors are notoriously self-absorbed and nepotistic, so expect frustration and disappointment. Many of your great pitches will get nixed, and your best writings will get cut or re-written—all for little pay, usually paid late. Then some features get cancelled, perhaps for no good reason, sometime with no cancellation fee. The one real upside is your byline, but expect that to be omitted, poorly-placed or omitted altogether. That said, there’s far worse jobs…

Slushpile:  What is your single-best, most-important, can’t-live-without writing tip you would offer to aspiring authors?

Blush:  Never ever give up. Once you give up, you’re no longer an author.

Slushpile:  What is your single-best, most-important, can’t-live-without publishing tip you would offer to aspiring authors struggling to break into print?

Blush:  Be prepared to starve for your art.

To learn more, visit the American Hair Metal website.

A rare few writers have this same special quality to their writing. T.R. Pearson, author of ten novels, most recently warmed his readers with the voice of his first work of nonfiction, Seaworthy: Adrift with William Willis in the Golden Age of Rafting. The book recounts the strange journeys of a man obsessed with navigating the Pacific on a homemade raft. At sixty years of age, Willis survived on rye flour and seawater as he attempted to travel from South America to Australia, a trek he repeated a decade later. This amazing story is the perfect vehicle for Pearson’s slightly antiquated and sophisticated writing voice.

For a more complete review of Seaworthy, click here. Continue reading for Pearson’s thoughts on painting houses, the use of dialect in Southern fiction, and selling nonfiction books.

Slushpile:  What was the first book that really made an impression on you?

Pearson:  Tristram Shandy. It was shocking to stumble across Laurence Sterne’s modern sensibility lurking in the 18th century. I’d read plenty of novels before I came across this one, but I’d never been so surprised and enchanted by a piece of fiction.

Slushpile:  At what point did you decide that you wanted to be a writer?

Pearson:  My grandfather was a lifelong writer. I think I inherited the impulse. I’ve been writing since I was a child. There was no deciding to it.

Slushpile:  At what point did you believe you could actually make a living writing?

Pearson:  I’ve never believed it, and with good reason.

Slushpile:  I believe you got a masterss degree in English and then promptly went to work painting houses. Some authors argue that a physically demanding job helps their writing because they come home tired, but mentally fresh. Others are too exhausted after doing something physical to write. How did your experience painting houses affect your writing career?

Pearson:  Painting houses was an alternative to teaching. I’d taught before and found
all of the attendant work too draining to allow me to write. Painting was only physically tiring. I could get up early each morning (around 4:30 in my case) and write for three or four hours. And then off to paint. Clean brushes. Drink bourbon. Repeat. I lived like that for about five years and produced three or four novels.

Slushpile:  Your first novel, A Short History of a Small Place, was published in 1985. It focuses on the small town of Neely, North Carolina and is a meandering tale, full of side-stories and digressions, perfectly capturing the way many Southerners tell stories. How did you go about getting this book published? What do you remember about getting that first acceptance letter? 

Pearson:  That manuscript was widely rejected by agents and editors alike before an agent finally saw the humor in it (no one else had). The book sold shortly thereafter for the princely sum of $7,500. It was all a matter of getting the manuscript into the right hands. That’s usually the case in publishing.

Slushpile:  Since that first book, you’ve published nine other novels. How do you think the publishing industry has changed since A Short History of a Small Place was first released?

Pearson:  Fewer and fewer people buy books and read them. I’ve a very gloomy opinion
of the future of publishing. The fundamental problem is that the business is very slow to change while the relatively small audience for books is much more agile. Charging $25 for a hardbound book given the numerous and cheaper entertainment alternatives ­ isn’t just uncompetitive; it’s idiotic.

Slushpile:  One of the hallmarks of your writing is your voice and use of the vernacular. You portray Southern dialogue without simply dropping a “g” and adding a “them thar” to the text. Instead, your characters often feature antiquated word choices. For example, in Blue Ridge, Paul Tatum says “I can’t say I ever really wanted a house, wouldn’t even have been shopping for one if Lowell hadn’t visited on me a mortgage deduction calculation.” He later says “I’m a pretty formidable housekeeper. My rooms are evermore neat and uncluttered. In truth, I’m afflicted with a bit of an overactive interest in housework, which I’ll allow anymore is within hailing distance of a clinical compulsion.” How did you arrive at this voice and style in your writing?

Pearson:  My hope is always that I can capture a place and a way of talking through
syntax rather than by corrupting spelling. Biblical turns of phrase are still fairly common in the South, and I generally aim to create characters raised on the Old Testament, or at least exposed to it sufficiently throughout their lives to have soaked it in. I find idiomatic Southernisms, not a “g” in sight ­ painful to read.

Slushpile:  How conscious are you of voice and style when you write? Is it something that just comes naturally or do you consciously work at achieving a certain sound?

Pearson:  I’m primarily interested in the narrative voice, so thats’s what I nail down
first, and then I move onto the deeper recesses of character and plot.

Slushpile:  After ten novels, what prompted you to take on the nonfiction project of Seaworthy?

Pearson:  I wasn’t at all sure I could sell another novel. Nonfiction is much more appealing to publishers just now, so I went looking for the sort of actual human who might engage to me like a fictional character would, and I was lucky enough to come across William Willis.

Slushpile:  Nonfiction books these days seem to often include the author going on some journey, or immersing themselves into the experience. I get these incredibly vivid images of an eager publicist saying “why don’t you try to raft from New York to Washington DC for your book tour?!?!” Did you try any rafting or sailing at all while working on this book?

Pearson:  I’ve sailed a little, but I left myself out of this book on purpose. Seaworthy is intended to be Willis’s stage. My agent agitated for a chapter on how I’d come across Willis, but I wouldn’t even write that. It’s Willis’s book. Truth be told, I don’t even care how I found him.

Slushpile:  The subject of Seaworthy, William Willis published his own accounts of his journeys. Since those records exist (although they’re probably out of print), what did you think was your role in retelling the story?

Pearson:  I think of Willis and his time as a bit of secret history. Every book of the era, with the exception of Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific by Raft, is long out of print. So I hoped to bring Willis back to public view along with a few of his odder contemporaries. I also found Willis to be more than a little prescient in his habits and practices. He was well ahead of his time and would fit in perfectly in our day. I do think of him as one of the first (if not the first) endurance athletes.

Slushpile:  William Willis saw his quest to travel from South America to Australia as “an endurance test–endurance of body and mind.” Completing a book is also an endurance test for new writers. Granted, they don’t have to drink saltwater and dangle from the mast, but finishing a novel or nonfiction book is definitely a challenge. What do you do when you feel your energy flagging and you’re in the middle of a new project? How do you keep yourself motivated and energized?

Pearson:  I simply stick to my routine. I write in the mornings, and when I leave my
desk, I leave my work there. I know writing books is long labor, and I’m prepared for it.

Slushpile:  Willis was this perfect combination of hero and fool. After spending so much time researching his life and adventures, what do you admire the most about him?

Pearson:  His ability to think himself utterly normal in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. He was a complete flake by the standards of his day, but Willis was convinced that his habits were right and proper, and that’s all he required. That sort of blithe self-confidence is relatively rare, Dick Cheney notwithstanding.

Slushpile:  Willis’s journeys took place in the mid-fifties and mid-sixties. Yet, the primitive conditions of his travel make the book seem like it’s documenting a much earlier time. It’s hard to imagine that these trips were occurring at the same time as The Beatles popularity, the Vietnam War ramp-up, and other more “modern” events. Did you feel that way at all?

Pearson:  Willis preferred the primitive, and seemed almost to live out of time. He remained relatively untouched by the rest of the world.

Slushpile:  While we’re talking about the time period surrounding Willis’s trips, many authors of nonfiction books go out of their way to ground a story in its particular era. They want their books to examine not just the specific events at hand, but to illustrate the entire time period. However,with Seaworthy, you avoided writing lines such as “as Willis neared the Samoan Islands, the Beatles were appearing on Ed Sullivan” or something like that. Were you trying to reinforce the anachronistic feeling of Willis’s
quest?

Pearson:  I was chiefly trying to avoid clutter. I almost wrote a chapter on the history of Pacific weather but thought better of it.  I believed that the story had enough pop without terribly much extraneous detail.

Slushpile:  We spoke about your voice earlier… did you try to alter that at all for this book?

Pearson:  I attempted to write a book that could be read in a couple of sittings, and
my primary goal was to be precise and accurate.  Unlike with fiction, I couldn’t make up the facts.  So the prose is leaner by choice.

Slushpile:  What is your advice for how a writer can tailor their voice or style to suit a particular project?

Pearson:  My advice is always the same: write the sort of book you’d like to read or, read the sort of book you’re writing.  Good writing is almost invariably the result of feel and instinct, which need to be developed.  Read and write; there is no other way to go about it.

Slushpile:  How long did it take you to write Seaworthy?

Pearson:  I guess a year or so on the research and around eight months on the actual
writing.

Slushpile:  Was this purely a research project utilizing previously published media accounts and existing books? Or, did you conduct interviews or try to gather new information in some way?

Pearson:  I quite consciously avoided living people. My intent was to make use of existing books and articles, since everybody I was interested in was long dead. 

Slushpile:  Many new writers are baffled by the fact that some nonfiction books are sold on proposal, while others are sold only when the manuscript is completed, and still others are sold based on a proposal and a handful of finished chapters. How did the sale of Seaworthy work?

Pearson:  I wrote a proposal for Seaworthy, but it didn’t sell. So I said to myself, fuck it, I’ll write the book.  I knew Willis’s life made for a good story, and I just plowed ahead. I’m far better at writing books than proposals, so I went with my strength and ended up selling Seaworthy on 100 pages or so, with the proposal as a kind of supplement.

Slushpile:  Have you started thinking about your next project yet? Can we expect more nonfiction or will you return to novels?

Pearson:  I’m researching a nonfiction book and tinkering with a novel. I’m tempted to combine the two. The sound you hear is my agent’s head exploding.

Slushpile:  What is your single-best, most-important, can’t-live-without writing tip you would offer to aspiring authors?

Pearson:  Be your own harshest critic. Whatever you think you can get away with, you
can’t. There’s somebody out there working harder, rewriting and polishing more than you are. You can’t be lazy in this business or you simply won’t be in it.  

Slushpile:  What is your single-best, most-important, can’t-live-without publishing tip you would offer to aspiring authors struggling to break into print?

Pearson:  What I’ve said above with the addition of  — polish, polish, polish. Publishing folk don’t edit anymore. Do it yourself, and do it to exhaustion. Send out only your best, finished work.

In addition to being an excellent writer and musician, Zack Wentz also conducts a damn good interview. He recently stepped up to the Slushpile.net plate and spoke to multi-talented Kevin Samsell for us. Their chat was a great meeting of artistic minds. Here’s Zack…

 *****

The Pacific Northwest has always been a hotbed (despite being such a cold, damp place) for DIY, multi-media, creative activity. Kevin Sampsell, author, editor, publisher, musician, and indispensable employee of the infamous Powell’s books in Portland, OR, is an exemplary practitioner. In addition to several books of his own, his work is all over the Internet, appears regularly in numerous literary journals and anthologies, and his press, Future Tense, has published authors who have subsequently been picked up by big houses (indicating his talent as a tastemaker, as well as an artist), alongside the enduring cult favorites, and talented new voices he works with. How he has managed to pull all this off by himself in a place that rains all but 70 days, on average, out of the year without completely losing it, is beyond most people. Here Kevin took the time to let us in on some of his activities and inspirations.

Slushpile:  You’ve stated explicitly before that Future Tense was influenced by NW indie labels such as K and Sub Pop. I can see that in your press. Especially the K angle. Everything has that personal, handmade touch. Quirky and arty, but warm, never pretentious or stuffy. How else would you say these record labels have influenced Future Tense?

Sampsell:  Well, I remember the first time I saw Beat Happening. It was in 1988 in Seattle. I was there to see Fugazi but I was mostly into Britpop at the time. I didn’t even know there were many cool American bands. Seeing Beat Happening was a totally new experience for me. I went out and bought all their records the next day. I was almost obsessed.  Then I started to check out the other K stuff. I loved that naive sort of “we made this ourselves” thing that they encouraged. I loved their mail order catalog. The weird descriptions of the tapes and records were written in this almost beatnik type of jargon. And there was this genius element of understated hype that they–or Calvin–perfected. Sub Pop took that angle and brought the hype to the front and put out records because they liked them, not because they think they’ll sell tons of everything. I started making my own chapbooks in 1990 and I didn’t even know much about zines or anything like that. And like Sub Pop and K, I have always put stuff out there simply because I like it and not always because I think I’ll sell a lot. I put out stuff sometimes that I know will only sell 100 copies, but the people who like it will really, really like it.

Slushpile:  You actually started out as more of a music guy. A DJ and fanzine head. What turned you toward books and writing in particular?

Sampsell:  I always liked to write when I was a kid, but I didn’t read books. I read music magazines and my early writing was probably as inspired by Melody Maker magazine as literature. But I fell in love with books in the early 90s. Something about reading really excites me and spurs me to write my own fiction. If I don’t read for a couple of days I start to get depressed, like I’m missing something in my chemistry. It’s weird. I can’t explain it much better than that.

Slushpile:  You still seem very involved in music. Ever make any of your own or collaborate with any musicians?

Sampsell:  I’ve been in a couple of bands. Really fun, dorky stuff. I still have these cassettes of my friend Terry and I doing these guitar and vocal punk songs back in 1986. I was very into Black Flag that year. Our band was called Neon Vomit. I was in a band in Ft. Smith, Arkansas when I lived there for a year in 1991-92. We were pretty good. I was the singer and we were called Love Jerk. I mostly yelled and spazzed out and we had a cool song about Florence Henderson.

I was in a band here in Portland about ten years ago called Moon Boots. I played a flat drum kit like Mo Tucker and my friend Vince played guitar and sang. I have good natural rhythm. We were pretty rockin’. But Vince stopped smoking pot and then gave up music. It was sad. The only thing I’ve done directly with music lately is when I wrote liner notes for the last Reclinerland album.

Slushpile:  I started looking into the online lit-zine thing recently, and was stunned by the sheer number of them and how specialized most of them are. It seemed like you had something published in every other one I checked out. Have you been involved in this community from the start? What do you think it’s doing for literature in general?

Sampsell:  I was really down on the Internet lit sites for a while actually. But I think that was because I didn’t know where the good ones were. There’s ton of crap out there–especially the poetry sites. It’s embarrassing. But there are a bunch of good ones now. And I like publishing on those good ones because they look nice and there are other good writers I’ve discovered through them, and because I can save money on postage! But I don’t believe this idea that books are dying and we’ll all walk around with e-books or whatever, reading off hand-held screens. I sure as hell hope not. People still need books. Reading books beats reading a screen always.

Slushpile:  You’re Mr. Small Press Champ. In addition to having your own, you’ve been involved with Manic D, Incommunicado and Word Riot, and help run the small press section in what is arguably the greatest bookstore in this country. Things have been rough over the last few years for a lot of indie presses, and the publishing industry in general (hell, rough for our whole economy). How do you think small presses are surviving?

Sampsell:  I know a lot of small presses who are publishing more non-fiction these days. More niche type of stuff. That’s one way to find readers. Give people information that the big houses aren’t. But I still prefer fiction and I think some great fiction can be
found in the small presses. The type of fiction that scares or unsettles publishers who need to sell 100,000 copies of a book can usually be found on smaller presses. I heard somewhere that fiction was actually making a comeback this year. I hope that’s true.
I would say the small presses who can sell their titles on a web site is extremely helpful too. Because not many bookstores will carry these books. And the stores that do carry them need to be supported and cherished.

Slushpile:  Some of your books are funded in part by grants from Oregon Literary Arts, Inc. How does that work? How are most of your books produced?

Sampsell:  Actually, I’ve only received two grants in the past eight years. So I’m mostly paying for stuff myself, which is why I mostly do chapbooks. It’s what I can afford–making books 50 or 100 at a time at the Office Depot. I only went to Kinko’s when I had “a connection” (someone there that gave me discounts!). I do the folding and stapling myself. For the paperbacks I’ve done, I do go to a regular printer and I’ve had different benefits and shows to help pay for those. It can be a challenge–I’ve had to sell records and books and furniture to pay for projects. I live paycheck to paycheck, like most of the writers I work with.

Slushpile:  Any thoughts on POD presses?

Sampsell:  When it comes to places like iUniverse, PublishAmerica, or First Books, I don’t like them. I think they charge too much for the writer and the reader and the production value is usually terrible. Dumb cover art, dull-looking print jobs, no editing. It’s a scam mostly. I’d rather see people do it themselves and go out and promote any way they can. I respect that so much more.

The POD method is being picked up by other small presses though, so it’s not all terrible. Places like Chiasmus are even doing it. If POD can make presses like that–small but serious book publishers–then it might turn out to be a good thing.

Slushpile:  You studied under the infamous Gordon Lish, and seem to belong loosely to the Ben Marcus, Sam Lipsyte, Gary Lutz school of authors that emerged from under his tutelage. How did he influence your work? Any thoughts on Lish and his influence in general?

Sampsell:  When I read Dear Mr. Capote it was a turning point for me as a reader, I think. I was immediately a fan. Then I heard that he was coming to Portland for a workshop and I thought it would be fun. That was in 1994. I hadn’t taken many writing classes at all. I went to college for one year. I never liked school.

He has some very stringent views and ideas for sure. I’m not sure I agree with all of them but I connect mostly with his views on language and how he likes his students to bend language by creating really unique sentences. Lutz and Lipsyte are prime examples of that. Marcus too, but I see a larger scope being used in Ben Marcus’s work. It does seem like a lot of great writers have been taught by him. I think his hard-to-please way of editing turns some people into really sharp writers. I also really love Diane Williams and Christine Schutt, who’ve studied with him as well.

Slushpile:  Who are some authors you think people should really be checking out now?

Sampsell:  Besides the people I’ve mentioned, I really love this Canadian writer named Miriam Toews. Her book, A Complicated Kindness, was my favorite book of the past couple years. I fell in love with it. I mean, I just want to hug and kiss that book. I always like to tell people to buy Letters to Wendy’s by Joe Wenderoth. It’s really one of the most fucked-up books I’ve ever encountered. I’ve liked a lot of prose poetry lately. It inspires me to write flash fiction, which is sort of like prose poetry, and for that I recommend James Tate or Russell Edson. Larry Brown died last year and he was one of our best. People should read him for good strong southern fiction. Jonathan Ames is also someone I’m always telling people to read–especially his non-fiction. It’s hilarious. Davy Rothbart (of Found magazine fame) has a collection of stories that is really powerful. Two books I really liked this year: Trinie Dalton’s Wide Eyed is a weirdly alluring and Kevin Keck’s Oedipus Wrecked is laugh-out-loud funny and filthy.

Slushpile:  What’s in the works for Future Tense and your own writing?

Sampsell:  I’m doing a once-a-year series with Manic D Press in San Francisco that I’m really excited about. I get to pick a book that they’ll publish and distribute as part of a Future Tense series. The first one was The Insomniac Reader, an anthology that I edited with stories about stuff that happens at night. The newest book of that series is Eric Spitznagel’s Fast Forward: Confessions of a Porn Screenwriter. It’s a very funny memoir about him trying to survive in the porn industry. I have to decide the next book in that series very soon (for Spring 2007 release). Without Manic D letting me do this series I wouldn’t be able to pay for the cost of printing a longer book, so it’s a nice opportunity for me to be involved with more than just chapbooks.

But speaking of chapbooks, I just published a chapbook of non-fiction stories by Justin Maurer, who’s a great young writer and singer in Portland punk-pop band Clorox Girls.
 
As far as my writing goes, I had a collection come out on Word Riot Press called Beautiful Blemish last year. I was really happy with how that went and I received a lot of great feedback on it. I guest-edited the newest issue of Spork Magazine. That was a fun experience and Spork is possibly the nicest magazine you’ll ever see. I’ve had some stories in some magazines and anthologies recently and in a lot of ways, I think the fiction I’ve been writing since Beautiful Blemish is probably my strongest and most complex work.

I also started writing some articles for Associated Press and other non-fiction venues. And I’m also in this goofy haiku group here in Portland called Haiku Inferno. We go out and do “performances” around town. It’s almost like performance art, but, you know, shorter.

For more information on Sampsell’s publising efforts, check out Future Tense Publishing.

Instead, he screamed “I fucking love you, bro!” as he hefted Bozza, lawn chair and all, into the pool.

This is how you get hired in Tommyland when you’re one of rock’s pre-eminent biographers.

*****

Born in Brooklyn and raised in Long Island, NY, Bozza attended Northwestern University in Chicago, majoring in African and Middle Eastern history. After graduation, he returned to New York City and wrote for a number of music and pop culture publications before landing an internship at Rolling Stone. That internship led to a staff job for the magazine and he eventually began racking up an impressive list of interviews. Bozza’s first major article was an interview with Bo Didley. He followed that by interviewing “a phlegmatic, incomprehensible Ozzy Osbourne.”

Bob Love, the managing editor at the time, assigned Bozza the Random Notes column, hallowed space in the magazine previously helmed by Cameron Crowe, Jon Landau, and Kurt Loder. As part of his work with Random Notes, Bozza interviewed artists like Ray Charles, Bruce Springsteen, Steven Tyler, Paul McCartney, Jimmy Page, David Bowie, Johnny Cash, U2, Robert Smith and Johnny Rotten. He also wrote cover stories on artists ranging from Jennifer Lopez to Nine Inch Nails to N’Sync.

In 1999, Bozza wrote the first cover story ever published on Eminem. He had been pitching the up-and-coming rapper for a couple of years but when Dr. Dre signed Mr. Mathers, Bozza was finally given the green-light. Bozza’s connection with the rapper was such that he was the first journalist allowed to interview Eminem’s mother and then-girlfriend Kim. That interview, besides being one of the first national profiles of the rapper, ultimately contributed Debbie Mathers Briggs’ decision to file a $10 million lawsuit against her famous son. And Bozza was actually deposed as a witness for the defense. He would eventually interview Eminem at each stage of the rapper’s meteoric career, witnessing the ascent from underground rapper to cultural phenomenon.

In the late 1990’s the market for music journalism was totally saturated. Blender, Spin, and other more broadly-based magazines like Maxim were competing with Rolling Stone for coverage. It became more and more difficult to elicit interesting stories from artists that were speaking to three and four reporters every day. “By the time you got to them, even with Rolling Stone, they’d probably done a few interviews, they’re giving you the same quotes,” Bozza says. “You had to find a way to get something different if you wanted your article to be anything different from everyone else’s.”

Young writers, in particular, sometimes struggle with knowing when to push an interview subject and when to ease up, when to ask a silly question, and when to play it straight. There was a painful moment in MTV’s Meet the Barkers when a journalist asked Travis Barker “Hey, do you ever dress up in a monkey suit and swing from stuff?” The Blink-182 drummer was less than amused and promptly kicked the writer out. It was an embarrassing moment for everyone who has nervously asked questions of a celebrity. Being original as an interviewer, while also maintaining a professional level of quality can be a difficult balance to achieve.

“You have to differentiate yourself,” Bozza says. “You have to find a way to get the person either onto a subject they want to talk about or off-balance, and I don’t mean that in a negative way, but surprise them.” The best way to interview and write about someone is to spend a great deal of time around the subject. But this was becoming increasingly impossible. Publicists, managers, handlers, and flaks of all sorts “kept giving less and less time to writers,” Bozza says.

With precious time allowed to the media, writers have to do conduct extensive research to draw something different out of the interview subject. Discover the musician’s hobbies, for example, or their earliest jobs. In the interview, the writer should cover the basic journalism necessities so the musician sees a certain amount of core competence. And then throw in a curveball. “Find out that they used to work at Kentucky Fried Chicken and be like ‘man, that chopping up the chicken part, is that gross?’” Bozza offers as an example.

Uninterested in writing fluff pieces that simply regurgitated the same old blather about Musician X’s latest girlfriend or Musician Y’s shopping habits, Bozza ultimately chose another path. He chose to deal with the stringent media limitations by “just quitting magazines all together and writing nothing but books,” he says.

Fortunately, he had the perfect book project in mind when he quit the magazine.

*****

With the impending release of 8 Mile, Eminem was on the verge of becoming a major cultural icon. The rapper had no interest in writing an autobiography. But due to the mutual respect that existed between rapper and writer, Eminem gave Bozza the go-ahead to work on the book that would become Whatever You Say I Am: The Life and Times of Eminem. “The kind of book I wanted to write was to contextualize him,” Bozza recalls. “Just really talking about why America hated him. And eight months later, loved him. And completely forgot they ever hated him. It’s totally hypocritical.”

When Bozza’s agent offered the Eminem book, five publishers lined up to participate in the auction. “I sat there on my couch taking calls from my agent and then talking to each of my potential editors,” Bozza remembers. “Literally, between calls, I kept saying aloud, ‘remember what this feels like,’ because it was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me. I didn’t think that moment could be topped. It hasn’t been bested, but it has been equaled.”

Anyone opening the pages to Whatever You Say I Am in hopes of gawking at salacious details about Eminem’s marriage, drug use, criminal activities, and controversy were sorely disappointed. Certainly, you can’t scrutinize Em’s career without touching on the difficulties in his life. But Bozza examined those events through a prism of solid musical scholarship and critical gaze which give Whatever You Say I Am a credibility that is lacking in more tabloidy inspections of the rapper. Consider this passage describing Eminem’s third major label release, The Eminem Show: “The album also ties together Eminem’s various styles—the lunacy of Slim Shady, the intensity of Marshall Mathers, and the savvy of Eminem—often in the same song, as in Square Dance,” Bozza writes in the book. “In this song’s second verse, Eminem interlocks polysyllabic rhyme patterns into consecutive lines, compacting the language until it is no longer possible to continue the structure, all while laying down as much of an antiwar statement as Slim Shady is bound to make.”

Interlocking polysyllabic rhyme patterns, compacting language, impossible structure. Those are descriptions better suited to graduate student explications than to music coverage in a world where album reviews are kept to fifty words or less and most critics can’t be bothered to look past Eminem’s baggy pants and tattoos.

The serious examination in Whatever You Say I Am propelled the book to the New York Times bestseller list. It was in the United Kingdom’s top three for nearly four months and has been published in seven languages. Cracking the NYT bestseller list was the experience that equaled Bozza’s auction exhilaration. “There is just no explaining what that felt like, all the more so because it was accompanied by a review on the front page of the Arts section,” he says. “It still gives me goose bumps to remember it.”

*****

For his next book, Bozza paired with another controversial musician. This time it was Motley Crue drummer Tommy Lee. Bozza wrote Whatever You Say I Am with some distance from the rapper. While Eminem, in many ways, has shared more with Bozza than any other journalist, the rapper was not involved in that project. He gave his blessing, and made people available, but this book wasn’t his. However, Lee had already signed a publishing deal for his autobiography and planned be intimately involved. He just needed a writer.

Long before Bozza made the penis literary pitch, he interviewed Ian Astbury, vocalist for The Cult. The singer was known for being particular about journalists, but Bozza made a good impression. Astbury shocked everyone by approving Bozza’s work on the first review. It was such a rare feat that Astbury’s manager, Carl Stubner, never forgot about the young writer. Stubner also happens to oversee Tommy Lee’s career. So when Lee searched for a writer to help with his autobiography, Bozza name was mentioned. “They were looking at a couple of people and he [the manager] was like, ‘Oh, my God, if he can handle Ian, I know he can handle Tommy,’” Bozza recalls.

To write a book in another person’s voice is a difficult chore that requires total concentration. “You have to definitely immerse yourself as much as possible, short of stalkerdom or forgetting your own name,” Bozza says. For Tommyland, Bozza lived with the drummer, watched him work, and listened to him speak. “I think it’s important to listen to people’s speech patterns,” he says. “The kind of language they use, how they tell a story, what they do. If you’re trying to tell someone else’s story, you kind of need to just let yourself be around them. Because on a subconscious level you’re also going to learn things about them that will come out in the writing.”

Writers who co-author celebrity books invariably encounter different levels of involvement from their subjects. For Bozza, although Tommy Lee didn’t actually write any text, he was intensely involved.

“Tommy wasn’t writing but that guy was sitting next to me posted up at his bar in his house for five months, which is pretty incredible,” Bozza recalls. The duo set up a massive 20-inch monitor so Lee could read Bozza’s writing like a teleprompter. The drummer would sit back with a watermelon martini and immediately correct the writer’s rhythm, word choices, and diction, allowing them to edit the book on the fly. “That was great. That was truly collaborative,” Bozza says.

*****

Bozza traveled to the other side of the world for his next book. He had always been a fan of INXS and was intrigued by the opportunity to work on their official biography. Bozza offers these words of warning to aspiring authors, “No matter what anyone says, the project will take up much more of your time and life than you think.” However, when he agreed to work on the INXS book, more time was simply not an option.

The project’s difficulty increased exponentially because of the band’s stint on CBS’ Rockstar: INXS. “It was really the hardest, hardest, hardest thing that I’ve had to do because of the timeframe,” Bozza says. ”Because it all sped up when they decided to do the TV show.” Work on the book began in February and he spent all of that month and most of March in Australia. Then, he had to hand in half of the book by April 15th. He met the band’s closest friends and family members in order to flesh out a portrait that had only been hinted at with the salacious gossip concerning Michael Hutchence’s death. Perseverance and lack of sleep paid off and Bozza had his third hit on his hands.

*****

Bozza’s advice to aspiring writes is simple. “School yourself, find your own way and do your own thing in terms of coming up with your voice,” he says. Even though he went to Northwestern, he did not attend the university’s famed journalism school and feels his choice paid off. “I don’t think I’d be as good at what I do if I’d gone to journalism school,” he says.

His career has been marked by hard work, excellent writing, and fantastic projects. But Anthony Bozza’s goals for his work are much simpler than rock star trappings, bestseller lists, and world tours. “I’ve always liked to write, whether it was a history paper or just a journal entry, but I didn’t set out to be a writer,” he says. “To me, if I’ve written anything that  has, even for a moment, made anyone think and entertained them while doing so, that’s all I care about. To me, that’s success.”

To learn more about Anthony Bozza and his work, please visit his website.

Such is the case with the invocation of Stephen Graham Jones’ new novel Demon Theory. The challenging nature of this novel delayed the release date, but copies are finally beginning to infect brave readers nationwide. Jones (who was one of the earliest Slushpile.net interviews) is also the author of All the Beautiful Sinners, Bleed Into Me, The Bird is Gone, and The Fast Red Road. You can learn more about Jones’ work at his website.

This time, he was kind enough to talk to me about his newest novel, horror movies, and snake venom.

Slushpile:  A novelization of a fictional film trilogy that was adapted from a best-seller that was inspired by a doctor’s case notes from his tenure at a mental institution, which may or may not exist, that were originally published in some fictional scholarly journal. How in the world did you dream up this concept for Demon Theory?

Jones:  Man, it was a total surprise for me that that scholarly journal wasn’t real. And I still kind of think it is. As for the ‘novelization,’ though, that’s just because I cut my teeth on the Friday the 13th novelizations. Always felt like I was getting the “real” story. That nobody knew Jason like I did.

Slushpile:  From first conception to handing in the final manuscript, how long did this monstrosity take you to finish?

Jones:  The first time I finished Demon Theory, it was November 1999. I took off Thanksgiving week to get it done. A wonderful week. I started, I think, about ten months before that, though I may have taken a break to write a werewolf novel, and maybe a “vampire” novel (in quotes because, strictly speaking, they weren’t vampires). Yeah, that sounds maybe-right. Almost definitely right, I think. Which, I don’t know how that’s supposed to be different from “maybe,” sorry.

Anyway, I wrote “Demon Theory 16”—that was the title of the whole thing, then—and put it to the side, because it was just too freaky of a thing. But then it wouldn’t let me go, and I was staying up so so many nights, living in it, understanding it, getting lost in it and dreaming it and waking at the keyboard because it was time to go to work again. Which is why I had to take that week off: because I wanted, eventually, to sleep.

Since 1999, though, I only turned in the final-final draft in March of this year, I’d guess. Something like that. I mean—and Jason Wood, my editor at MacAdam/Cage can attest to this (with his teeth set, I suspect)—that each time he gave it back to me to do one or two little nothings, I’d rework the whole thing, top to bottom, and just recast everything. So yeah, a bit more than six years, all-told. With breaks to write a lot of other stuff. But, this whole time, Demon Theory’s been my touchstone. But that’s prettying it up. Really, it’s been the wooden paddle, and I’m the stupid rubber ball, bouncing back to it again and again, and asking for more, please, because we can get it right this time, I promise. Go all afternoon, even.

Slushpile:  Give us an idea of how you wrote Demon Theory. Did you write each of the three screen ideas separately? Or did you write them all the way through in one draft? When did the footnotes and screenplay conventions get added?

Jones:  Yeah, the formatting and the footnotes have been there from the get-go. I mean, when I sat down to write Demon Theory, my main goal was to shake off The Fast Red Road, which I’d just finished messing with. So I tried to write the most opposite thing I could. Where Fast was Indian, I tried to go un-Indian. Since Fast was super-academic (it was my dissertation), I tried to go the direct opposite way—to the slashers I grew up with. As for why the formatting and footnotes, it may have been because I sat down to knock out a screenplay, not a novel. Except I had no idea then how to write a screenplay—turns out it’s a lot more complicated than just getting everything in the right font, tabbed over this far, all that. So, not knowing how to write a screenplay, I guess, I wrote Demon Theory.

I mean, with it, too, there were no false starts, where I tried to go at the story straight, or do the prose normal. Really, all I was doing was transcribing the movie playing non-stop in my head that year. Which—that’s probably why it’s always felt kind of like a bootleg to me, like something I’ve smuggled out of the theater in that kind of short-hand you write in the dark. As for the footnotes, they came in with that first draft as well. Because, at that point, once I was doing this hybridized whatever-it-was and knew I was doing it and was committed to it for better or worse, I was pretty sure it was just going to be exercise for me, that nobody else was ever going to be involved. So the footnotes were originally very smart-alecky, and all aimed back at me. Stuff like “Yeah, like you didn’t steal this whole cloth from Sir John Carpenter.” It was just a way of keeping myself honest, pretty much, or feigning humbleness, acknowledging thievery, I don’t know. Allowing myself to crutch forward, one page at a time.

As for the stacked footnotes—the footnotes to footnotes to footnotes, all that—I resisted that for as long as I could, tried to do it instead with clauses embedded in clauses embedded in clauses, with these parenthetical seeds at the middle of it all, making you have to reinterpret the whole footnote once you got that deep. But those kind of constructions are ridiculously delicate. Better to do the Jenga-trick instead, I say, and just stack them to the heavens, pray that they’ll stand long enough to turn the page.

Slushpile:  You have said that aspiring authors are often too enslaved by the truth. You’ve said that the most common mistake that your students make is “Not lying enough. Being too loyal to the content of their material. Not taking Richard Hugo’s advice and putting the water tower where it needs to be, instead of where it ‘really’ is.” With the footnotes in Demon Theory, how did you know when to leave fact behind and fictionalize the material?

Jones:  As this one guy who helped me in the last few days I had Demon Theory in my possession (Rob Bass) knows, that line was ridiculously blurry. Because, at one point—this was December 2005, I think—I’d blazed through the entire manuscript, and nudged all the footnotes just a bit off the truth. Because I had the great and stupid idea then to have an antagonistic narrator (her name was Lindsay Ballard, which geeks like me out they’ll know without Google), who had all these different styles, a different, “better” set of facts, etc. About melted my brain keeping it all straight, too. But then I remembered that I didn’t want to play games, that that wasn’t what Demon Theorywas about. So I tried to erase her. Except, yeah, her fingers kind of remained (the visual I get here is some kid hiding in that booth Burt Reynolds’ fingers get cut off in in Sharky’s Machine)—there were all these wrong dates, all these little prose tics, etc. Which, I think we caught them all. Maybe. I mean, I loved Lenzi so much ( I even spelled her with a ‘z,’ and probably would have dotted her ‘i’ with a heart if I could have), and miss her still, but she was clutter.

Oh, but are you asking did I lie in any of those footnotes on purpose, right? The lie I remember best is for the definition of “glom,” I think. I was really dissatisfied with the real etymology of the word, so just made my own up. Which, I mean, really, I think, that’s the most human thing. It’s Dr. Seuss, even—that “and to think that I saw it on Mulberry Street” story, where, faced with a world not quite up to his expectations, or worth recounting anyway, this kid lies about it, and, in doing so, makes it better, the kind of place that, yeah, he’d maybe like to be. So, each time I hit something like that, where the world would be better if the facts lined up this way instead of that way, I did what humans have always done: lie.

Slushpile:  I know you’ve provided this best-of list elsewhere, but for the Slushpile.net readers, what are the five best horror films? Or, give us ten titles if you can’t narrow it down any further.

Jones:  I’ll try to hit just five here. Oh—but you’re talking just horror, right? Not just the slasher? Man. This is going to be ridiculous, then. I don’t know. This:

Psycho
Halloween
Exorcist
Omen
Shining

That hurt. Deeply. Now Jason and Freddy and Krug and Ghostface and Samara and Leatherface and the rest are going to have it out for me. To say nothing of Jaws and the T-1 and this one guy named Travis. Anyway, man, I love lists, of any kind really, but, please, if you ever ask me to give you a list of the “10 Best Horror Movies of All Time” or something, and, instead of giving you ones I truly think scary, I give you ones that are “seminal” to the development of the horror genre, from, y’know, 1832 until 1996 (the year Scream changed everything), please, yes, throw something wet and ugly at me (I’m not thinking Clarice here, though), because I don’t deserve to be in the conversation anymore, deserve instead to be sticking my head up through that attic hole in The Grudge, something dark and toothed scuttling at impossible speed for my face.

Slushpile:  What are the best horror novels, in your opinion?

Jones:  Man, I’ve always been a fool for King. Of his, I don’t know. Probably It. It just makes so many smart moves. From Barker, The Damnation Game, definitely. From Straub, Shadowlands. Robert Marasco’s Burnt Offerings is a beautiful thing, too. And—I’m keeping this to five as well, just because if I don’t you’ll run out of server space—of course, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. Not because it’s central to the twentieth century horror project, any of that, but because it truly and really scares me, just thinking about it (though, yeah, if “scare” is the delimiter, not stuff officially “horror,” then Communion’s way at the top of my list). And I’m just asking to be mauled if I don’t at least whisper The Wolfen here, as an alternate. It’s the one I think about most still when I’m carrying trash out after midnight.

Slushpile:  Demon Theory is an amazingly challenging book. I know your editor was extremely supportive of this project, but what was his first response when you told him about it? What did your agent first think?

Jones:  Cool you’d ask this, because Demon Theory, it was the first thing my agent ever saw from me, the thing that got her to take me on. This would have been 2000, maybe? Anyway—Kate Garrick’s her name—from the get-go, she’s been one-hundred and twenty percent behind Demon Theory. I mean, we’ve done a lot of other stuff together, but with each one, the question was always, “Is it time for Demon Theory again?” I mean, she believed in it, and somehow saw exactly what I was doing with it, and never asked me to change any of it and never took the rejections seriously.

And then, yeah, finally, after All the Beautiful Sinners, when I decided it was going to be Demon Theory or nothing, we mailed it out again, and one day Jason Wood and Pat Walsh of MacAdam/Cage were calling. Or, no, I’m lying: one day another publisher called Kate with an offer, and then, through a truly twisted set of coincidences, we were talking to MacAdam/Cage about it that same day, and Jason, man, he knew zombies, yeah? I mean intimately, better than I know them, probably. And zombie lore, that goes a long way with me. So, yeah, I’m with them now, and happy. I mean, not only is Demon Theory their first horror, I’m pretty sure, but it’s some pretty unconventional horror at that. But Jason and the Cage never wavered. Like Kate, they believed in Demon Theory. It’s really good to work with people like that. So many writers have to sacrifice the books closest to their hearts, I mean, or, if not sacrifice them, cut them into ugly, unrecognizable pieces. Neither Kate nor Jason ever even suggested anything like that. Nevermind that I have their dogs tied up in my truck.

Slushpile:  Was there anyone who was less than enthusiastic about the book?

Jones:  I gave it to a friend in 2000 or so, a good, established writer, and she read it and gave it back and told me to hide this one far back in the drawer, never let it see the light of day. Maybe even burn it and scatter the ashes. But that’s because she wanted me to be respectable, I think. Because she cared. And then, yeah, later that year Kate and me shot it out to some places, and they all got back, saying various bad things, about half of which, I’d guess, came down to them thinking I was trying to ride House of Leaves or something.

Which, don’t get me wrong—I clearly, clearly remember reading the first seventy pages of House. It was February or March of 2000, and Danielewski had just done an interview for iUniverse with a friend of mine, and then posted seventy pages of House there in Flash. I remember reading it and just sinking deeper and deeper in my picked-from-a-dumpster chair, because, at that point in Demon Theory, it still had some of the same indeterminacy House kind of revolves around and has endless amounts of fun with, and I thought it was so ridiculous, that two people would write two things in isolation which could, on the surface at least, look similar. There’s a term for this, right? Convergent evolution or something? Different species developing the same “eye,” just by different paths?

Anyway, it would happen again with Sinners, a few weeks after it came out, bam, here came Breathtaker, a novel which also paired tornadoes and serial killing. Anyway, largely because of House, I started peeling back the layers of Demon Theory, all the extra editors and commentators and reviewers and original directors and all that, peeling them back and throwing them away, and—this was the surprise for me—I liked the thing better without them. I was starting to see the real story of Demon Theory, I mean. Or something like that. To recognize myself in it, I guess. Or admit that that was me, maybe. I don’t know. Anyway, yeah, we mailed it out at the end of 2000, maybe, and, yeah, it’s horror, it has footnotes, it must be a House-clone, there’s not enough room on the shelves for both of them, all that. But then, too, some editors were uncomfortable with poking fun of a genre from within that genre, all with the hopes of making that genre better, cleaning off the impurities like Scream did, all that. Which, I can understand that kind of discomfort, I suppose. I mean, if revolutions were approved, they wouldn’t be revolutions, right?

But now I’m trying to make Demon Theoryout to be Scream, yeah. Why not go ahead and make it Casablanca and China Town too somehow, while I’m at it. Or even something really good, like Die Hard. Sorry. How about Demon Theory’s just Demon Theory. No coat tails involved. Anyway, after those rejections and all the suicide attempts which followed, it was other books, then some other books, and then in 2002, when I suspected I was starting to stray from doing what I’d originally intended to do, which was take over the world with fiction, we shot it out one more time, and this editor read it and said, literally, this is trash, less than that, even, it’s the amoeba on the fleas on the dog, but, too, this guy can really write, yeah? So I went to work for them for a couple of novels. Oh too, before I forget: when I submitted Demon Theory that time, I’d changed the title to a line from early on in Demon Theory, “all the beautiful sinners.” Maybe because I didn’t want editors to recognize it, I’m not sure. But also just because it’s a pretty cool title. Anyway, yeah, wound up sucking that title off Demon Theory, using it somewhere else, which I’m grateful for, because now Demon Theory can be what it was in the first place.

Slushpile:  I’ve found it almost impossible to quickly describe this book to people. So I’ll let you do it. What is your elevator pitch for Demon Theory?

Jones:  Say once you were a boy, out in the snow in the nighttime, the lights from your house just behind you, and say that, for reasons more animal than not, you stop walking, to better hear something you’re pretty sure you’ve never heard before, and then, right at the moment you realize what it is you’re hearing—a small cough, out in the dark—the air thickens around you and you smile just a little, unafraid, and look up and behind, into the face of what you’ve always known was there. And then it takes you with it, and you’re never a little boy again. That’s Demon Theory. For me, anyway.

Slushpile:  So if you live in Guitar Town, Texas, what’s your axe of choice?

Jones:  Yeah, my MySpace “location,” right? Wish I had a cool, non-generic answer here, other than that I was on a Steve Earle kick that week. Because, honestly, I don’t play. Not for lack of trying, either. I mean, at one time I learned all the cords, could read the music, do all the right stuff, but it just never made into “music” for me. I just don’t have whatever it is that can make music. So I fell back on the harmonica, learned all the cords etc, and couldn’t make “music” there either. Then the piano. I mean, I still have all my Cinderella sheet music, I think, but I could never make it sound like they did. Music’s just something I don’t have, but wish I did. Same with drawing. So, instead, I just write, and hurt myself playing basketball. Hang around junkyards a lot. That kind of stuff. It’s not an unhappy way to get across the years, I suppose. To make a life, if not a living.

Slushpile:  What does it feel like to have snake venom coursing through your veins?

Jones:  It’s not at all like spider venom. For me, getting hit by a spider, that’s like a jolt of electricity, and you can kind of feel it at the muscular level, if that makes any kind of sense. Snake venom, though, it was more like I looked down and, bam, my wrist’s all swelling up and turning colors. And it was more at the bone, too. Like, when I moved I could feel things creaking. Too, though, I mean, neither of these venom-tricks were direct—with the spider, the venom I had in me was the kind a spider will inject all around it’s egg (I fell asleep in the stall with one of my steers, and a spider decided to incubate its eggs in my forearm, which, of my two choices that night, the other being a steer stepping on my head, I guess the spider’s the better one), and with the snake, it was just second-hand venom, from coming down on the snake’s head with a knifing rig blade after it tried to bite through my boot (tossing the knife in the back of the truck, I of course sliced my wrist open)—so who knows if these experiences are any kind of accurate. I am very happy to have never got any platypus venom in me, though. From what I hear, that stuff will just really mess a human up. Always had a fascination with scorpions, though. Used to, my trick to impress the eight-grade ladies was to let scorpions crawl all up and down my arm. I think it comes from being six years old, sitting outside a dressing room in Dunlap’s, waiting for my mother to try on clothes, and her suddenly screaming like she’s dying, the whole store going quiet, and me not being able to run in there because it was the women’s dressing room. Not sure I would have anyway. Turned out it was a scorpion biting her. An old saleslady told me that. I still remember her standing over me, holding me by the shoulders, leaning down to say it. Back then, I thought if a scorpion bit you, that was it, you were dead. I was very alone in that Dunlap’s, I mean.

Slushpile:  As I’m typing these questions, the Miami Heat just defeated the Detroit Pistons to take a 3 games to 1 lead in the Eastern Conference Finals. Who are you picking to win the NBA Championship this year?

Jones:  The Heat. I love to watch Dwayne Wade play. I hope they go up against the Mavericks, too. [Editor's Note: After this interview was completed, the Dallas Mavericks defeated the Phoenix Suns to advance to the NBA Finals. The Mavericks are currently leading the best-of-seven series 2-0. As I'm typing this, the score is 60-57 in favor of the Heat with about six minutes left in the third quarter of game three.]

Slushpile:  What is your favorite footnote in Demon Theory?

Jones:  Man, wish I had a copy to look at here, to remember. How about the cucumber soup one, maybe. That was a dream, how that worked out. Wholly a surprise. It’s got a little of Lenzi’s voice left, too. Maybe the only one. Though, too—and this is one Jason cut (wisely, I think)—there was one I really liked, which moved from Oliver Twist to Animal House to Full Metal Jacket in a pretty elegant way, I think. But, like so many others, it had to go. I  mean, there’s as many footnotes on the cutting room floor as there are in the text, easy. About went insane trying to get everything balanced what I thought was right, so that things slowed down and sped up at the right places—or, so there was the proper tension between the two anyway. The book I wrote right after Demon Theory was The Bird is Gone. This is where I say “obviously,” I guess, except I doubt a lot of people have read Bird. Trust me, though—after Demon Theory, Bird makes perfect sense.

Slushpile:  How long do you take to recharge after a book is released (or turned in) before you start the next one?

Jones:  I wrote Demon Theory before The Fast Red Road even went to press. And that’s the way I usually do it, though, yeah, I admit, these past few months I’ve both skipped the three-day novel contest and wrote a lot more stories and novellas than I really meant to. Not sure why, either. Oh, wait: Demon Theory. That’s it. Since the beginning of last summer I’ve been living in that book, pretty much, only allowing myself short forays out of it. Which is not at all how I usually do it, but, with Demon Theory, it wasn’t always my choice, either.

I mean, yeah, all of my books—start over: Cristina Garcia was just here reading and talking (my school, not my house), and said how, while all first novels aren’t autobiographical factually, still, they’re all autobiographical emotionally. For me, somehow, every novel’s my first novel: I mean, with The Fast Red Road, that’s me, Pidgin. And then I’m LP Deal in Bird, and Jim Doe (and Amos Pease) in Sinners, and all the people in Bleed. I don’t know. It’s stupid, kind of, how I can’t “separate” or whatever it is you’re supposed to do. Extricate yourself from the text.

But, Demon Theory—okay, for people who haven’t read it, this’ll mean nothing. Apologies. But in the acknowledgements I say something about “Darla,” I think, who was there. And she was. I was thirteen, I think, when Demon Theory happened for me, in a cotton field across from where I lived. I was Hale’s sister, sitting behind Darla on her 110 three-wheeler. We were riding for the house as fast as we could for some reason—I think I was already hurt, my three-wheeler wrecked and not working back in some other field—and the cotton was tall, pushing my right foot back farther and farther, and three times I got pulled down into that space between the peg and the tire, and dragged under, run over  hard enough that I was pretty sure I’d died, and three times I stood up again from the broke stalks and dirt, my clothes shredded to nothing, blood all over, and climbed back on again to try to make it home, and finally did. Still get all shaky thinking about it, even.

Slushpile:  Have you made any plans about your next project? What are you working on now?

Jones:  Accidentally started a novel last July, which I cut off as soon as I could, to focus on Demon Theory. But now, kind of all on its own, it’s turning into a big thing, with a supercool title I’m far too superstitious to say this early. It’s set in Texas, though. And has werewolves.

Meanwhile, anyway, I’ve got Hair of the Dog and Seven Spanish Angels and this hardboiled second-person West Texas detective novel Tar, Baby, and a collection of stories, The Meat Tree, and just last week I wrote what I think’s maybe the best story I’ve ever written, a story I don’t think I could ever write again as long as I live.

Then the week before that I wrote a story which just sucked everything, in new and kind of fantastic ways. And this week I haven’t even written a story yet, have been writing a screenplay instead, one that tries to satisfy how disappointed I always am when I see somebody on screen being tortured, and think to myself that that’s not how you do it, man, c’mon. It’s hard for me, though, the screenplay. Not natural—like writing with just half as many letters as usual. Which, yeah, is probably why Demon Theory’s written like it is: there was this movie in my head that, the only way I could turn it off was to write it down, in the purest, most honest way I could. Not like a specimen, that has a needle through it and’s dead, but like a thing that’s still alive, still breathing. Because—it’s me in there, yeah? High up in the ivory tower, in my corner with a television, watching Freddy’s tongue worm up from the mouthpiece of a telephone. That’s the only way I know to say it, really. Other than with a whole novel, I mean, with all these crazy little footnotes…

Over the course of his career, these tastes and goals have made him the vanguard for a literary movement others have labeled “fratire.” Ruby-Strauss has been quoted in several high profile articles about the books in this movement. CNN spoke to him about the forthcoming The Alphabet of Manliness release. The Guardian and the New York Times turned to Ruby-Strauss when they wanted to examine the success of books such as I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell and Real Ultimate Power: The Official Ninja Book. Although he sees his writers’ work as the star of the show, Ruby-Strauss is clearly a central figure in the success of this genre.

He’s also a determined, successful editor with an impressive string of hits. Although his manner may come across as joking and laid-back, he’s fiercely dedicated to his authors and their readers.

As he wrapped up his tenure at Kensington and prepares to start a new gig with Simon Spotlight Entertainment, Ruby-Strauss was kind enough to talk to me about hair metal, the fratire label, and running game on editors.

Slushpile:  You’ve recently been interviewed in a number of high profile articles about the growth of a genre termed “fratire.” Most editors stay in the background but you’re being closely associated with this genre. How does it feel to be the voice of what many consider the Animal House/American Pie literary movement?

Ruby-Strauss:  As an editor, I’m not really the voice of anything. I’m more like a team mascot in a chicken suit. My job is to help my guys to win, and to pump up the crowd—because the teams on the field are there for the crowd, not vice versa.

Slushpile:  Fifty years from now, if critics look back on Tucker Max and Robert Hamburger as 2006’s equivalent of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, then that makes you a contemporary Maxwell Perkins. Happy with that designation?

Ruby-Strauss:  That’s like asking me if photocopying a mirror will make you go back in time. I can’t even understand the question. Such a society would be so awesomely messed up that just thinking about it makes me want to rip up the carpet.

Slushpile:  What was the first book you acquired at Kensington that falls into this “fratire” genre?

Ruby-Strauss:  I’ve been calling this thing of ours “the house that Hamburger built.”  Tucker Max and Maddox both acknowledge that Robert Hamburger is the Virgil of fratire, holding a candle behind his back to light the way for others. Plus Hamburger’s book is the most underrated of the three. It should be studied by university professors, no joke.

Slushpile:  Do you think that label accurately captures what you’re after? Do you think fratire is a complimentary or derogatory label?

Ruby-Strauss:  None of us was actually in a fraternity. We are fraternal, and we fraternize, but that’s all the justification I can offer. Plus I know nothing about fraternities, because I went to UC Santa Cruz.  The school was so PC that if there were fraternities, they had to meet in secret. I think fratire is really about welcoming the boner back after a period of cultural exile. Even the ladies missed the boner, hence third wave feminism. Man bashing and the war on boys just outwore its welcome, as do all doctrines of hate rather than love.

Slushpile:  In Robert Hamburger’s Real Ultimate Power: The Official Ninja Book, he debates the merits of various ninja weaponry. What’s your editorial weapon of choice?

Ruby-Strauss:  Wakizashi.

Slushpile:  Where did you grow up?

Ruby-Strauss:  I was born in Oakland, California, and not the nice part either. My single mom was on welfare, and I went to Head Start. She later married and we moved to the Monterey Peninsula. I went to high school in Pacific Grove, which was so picturesque, it was hilarious. We were all punk rock, and we’d be trying to be pissed off about stuff, but then we’d see an otter floating on its back, eating abalone in front of a sunset. Not an easy place to be punk.

Slushpile:  What was your favorite comic book/toy/game growing up?

Ruby-Strauss:  Oh, man. Pulsar and Electroman and the Star Trek action figures plus the bridge of the Enterprise with a “working” transporter and the die cast Shogun Warriors. I didn’t get many toys, but the ones I had were awesome and I took care of them like a five-year-old curator.

Slushpile:  What was your earliest literary love?

Ruby-Strauss:  Oscar Wilde is probably the writer most responsible for how my brain works, the reason why I love contrarian thinking. I’ve only ever liked books of ideas. I might have missed my calling in the lucrative field of philosophy.

Slushpile:  How did you get into the publishing business?

Ruby-Strauss:  I was a Laurie Girl. No joke, I worked for a temp agency called Laurie Temps, but it used to be called Laurie Girls. Laurie asked me what my dream job was, and I said “I will wash the floor we’re standing on if you pay me.” So she kind of laughed nervously and said “what about in a perfect world?” And I said, “Book publishing.” And she said, “You start Monday.”  I couldn’t believe it. In San Francisco, where I moved right after school, you had to be born into book publishing. There’s like twenty jobs and 10,000 newly minted literature majors every year, who then become bartenders and strippers. So I was a temp for HarperReference, and then they hired me as an editorial assistant.

Slushpile:  While at ReganBooks, you edited works involving Marilyn Manson, Motley Crue, Dave Navarro, and others. You’ve described yourself as a “fanboy.” Who is the one celebrity you would most want to do a book with?

Ruby-Strauss:  I can sit on it or I can sell it, by why should I give it away?

Slushpile:  When you edit books like these, how much do you interact with the co-author and how much with the celebrity? You’re probably not talking about misplaced modifiers with Marilyn Manson, are you?

Ruby-Strauss:  It depends, they’re all different. With Manson, everything was done through Neil Strauss. With Mick Foley, I must have spent 100 hours on the phone going over commas and crap.

Slushpile:  What is your favorite hair-metal band?

Ruby-Strauss:  Motley Crue. Home Sweet Home is the best pop song ever, better than Kelly Clarkson’s Since You’ve Been Gone. I could talk about that for a while, but I know you’re busy.

Slushpile:  Favorite rap band?

Ruby-Strauss:  Over the years, I’ve given more of my money to Ice Cube’s various projects than any other rapper, but in general, I like what’s new, what’s hot. I just listen to Hot 97 for the flavor of the week, and I’m usually pretty captivated by it.

Slushpile:  You’re in charge of a new Kensington imprint, Rebel Base Books. Did you actually conceive of this imprint? Many aspiring authors don’t really understand why publishers need so many imprints. What are the benefits to carving out this different niche from the main Kensington umbrella?

Ruby-Strauss:  Rebel Base isn’t so much an imprint as a website, http://www.rebelbasebooks.com/. I’m not really in charge of it; I’ve just tried to put a focused list together through the usual acquisitions channels. Most imprints in publishing are as meaningless a TV channels. Who says “I love ABC?” The idea was to be so narrowly focused that the brand would actually stand for something, and the consumer would try something unknown based on good past experiences and faith. Kensington is good at this in general, such as their Brava and Aphrodisia imprints.

Slushpile:  Many of your most recent books are based on websites. I believe at one point you said you had three Internet books out with seven more in the pipeline. Due to the success of these books, and your high profile interviews, are you finding yourself swamped with website-related submissions?

Ruby-Strauss:  No, everyone sends me his “fratire novel,” ignoring the fact that I am a nonfiction editor only. None of the books mentioned in any article about fratire is a novel. There’s nothing less novel than a novel.

Slushpile:  What is the craziest submission you’ve received?

Ruby-Strauss:  Oh, you know, the usual all-cap-single-spaced-double-sided rant from a convict.

Slushpile:  What is Kensington’s policy about submissions? Does your company accept unsolicited, unagented submissions?

Ruby-Strauss:  Some editors do, some don’t. I look at everything, but I’ve never actually bought an unsolicited, unagented submission, so I don’t know if that’s encouraging or not.

Slushpile:  What is the difference between working on a website-based book and a regular book project? Do you edit, or approach them, differently?

Ruby-Strauss:  No, the website is like a super long proposal. It might nail the concept or we might have to reconfigure it. If you look at Real Ultimate Power, Robert Hamburger’s book, you’ll see that it is much deeper than his site. That difference was the result of eighteen drafts. But you could just tell that the guy was a genius, and that it would pay off. Tucker Max, on the other hand, wouldn’t even let me fix his punctuation.

Slushpile:  How does a book need to be different from a website? I assume that making a successful book isn’t just a matter of printing out a website. What does the author need to do differently for each medium?

Ruby-Strauss:  There are two schools on this. The Darwin Awards is the most successful web book of all time, and I believe most or all of the content was on the website. The thinking was, “If so many web people like this content, maybe general readers will also like it.” This works well for content with broad appeal. The books I do primarily appeal to the same fans that visit the website, so if you just repeat the same content in book form, they’re not going to buy it.

Slushpile:  Do you actively trawl the internet with a conscious eye towards finding websites that might make a good book? Or do you just encounter potential book projects through your own casual, normal surfing?

Ruby-Strauss:  I go through life asking. “Book?  Book?” as I watch television, read magazines, and surf the web. I’m never not thinking, Book?

Slushpile:  Tucker Max’s book, I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, is full of drunken behavior, oral sex, scatological humor, ridicule, and general plundering. Here’s a law-student who comes close to reaching rock star proportions of debauchery. Aspiring authors frequently hear about an editor who loves a project but is denied by the publisher’s larger editorial board. How did the editorial board react when you suggested this project? Was it difficult to convince your colleagues to take on this book, particularly since Kensington used to be known primarily for publishing romances?

Ruby-Strauss:  Walter Zacharius, the founder and spiritual leader of Kensington, is from the old school: the Dodgers, stick ball, egg creams, and taking risks. He talks to doormen and teenagers alike, and he pays attention when they get excited about something.

Slushpile:  What’s your own best Tucker Max-style story relating to publishing? Ever fill up a CamelBak with Everclear, Gatorade, and Red Bull and then hit a publishing party?

Ruby-Strauss:  I once spent an entire evening trying to talk a woman out of going home with Tucker. I had her flat-out denying that she would. She was insulted I thought so little of her; she would never go home with Tucker. I got her phone number so I could confirm the next day that she kept her promise. The next morning when I called, Tucker answered her phone.

Slushpile:  You told The New York Times that the success of these fratire books might be a result of the fact that men are searching for something “more rebellious, less cautious and less concerned with external approval.” That’s certainly true but I also like to think that these writers are a reaction against John Cusack. As much as I loved Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, I cringe at the fact that every male protagonist under 40 now seems to sit around whining, completely paralyzed with junior-high school angst, about their frustrations with women and inability to decide. I can’t read a contemporary male memoir without hearing a John Cusack voiceover. So I’ll raise a glass to your writers for smashing that mold.

Ruby-Strauss:  Everybody, and I mean everybody, is sick of whining and competitive victimhood. Why do you think Neil Strauss’s The Game hit such a nerve? Why is every rap video about how great the artist’s life is, instead of how oppressed? Why did my feminist grad student TA’s strip professionally for extra cash? Why can’t the Democrats win an election?

Slushpile:  Some critics accuse these books of catering to the lowest common denominator of toilet humor. While that observation can clearly be debated, do you have any plans to work on more “serious” projects in the future?

Ruby-Strauss:  The Tao is in the shit. All of my projects are sincere, if not “serious.”

Slushpile:  Your specialty was once described to me as “what’s just bubbling under pop culture.” What do you think is the next underground trend that will surface?

Ruby-Strauss:  The hetrosexual. He’s like the metrosexual, except the opposite in every way.

Slushpile:  You have mentioned the importance of audience and salability to a potential book deal. But how big do these audiences and sales have to be? We hear about James Frey selling a million copies after Oprah’s endorsement or John Grisham selling 84,000 copies in a week, but as aspiring authors without access to BookScan, we don’t know what a more realistic level of success is. How big does a book’s potential audience have to be for you to pull the trigger? What sales figures are you trying to reach?

Ruby-Strauss:  I think any publisher is happy netting 20,000 copies of anything, so long as they didn’t overpay or have unfulfilled expectations.

Slushpile:  You are responsible for introducing Neil Strauss (no relation) to The Game and to the secrets of master pickup artists. What’s your best sarging technique for writers trying to pickup a publisher?

Ruby-Strauss:  That’s pretty funny.  I’d say start GM style and quickly figure out whether or not he’s a “kino editor,” then downshift to a phase two “soft offer close.”

Slushpile:  You don’t usually edit fiction. But do you have any time to read fiction? Who are your favorite fiction writers?

Ruby-Strauss:  I’m not a big reader.

Slushpile:  Whatever happened to the can of Spam you used as a paperweight?

Ruby-Strauss:  Right, from the good old days when we did the Spam-ku book at HarperCollins. It’s in my pantry, but I don’t know why. It’s not like I’m going to eat it, but it might inspire some haiku, so I can’t throw it out.

Slushpile:  What books are you working on right now?

Ruby-Strauss:  Something called Coloring Book Land by Jim Wirt, which is a coloring book of 50’s clip art with captions that are very, very wrong, but very funny. I’m also working on Prank the Monkey by Sir John Hargrave, the “retarded Robin Hood” who runs the prank site http://www.zug.com/.

Slushpile:  What is your single-best, most-important, can’t-live-without writing tip you would offer to aspiring authors?

Ruby-Strauss:  Be famous.

Slushpile:  What is your single-best, most-important, can’t-live-without publishing tip you would offer to writers struggling to break into print?

Ruby-Strauss:  Dude, how is that a different question?  You need a nap.