Author Interview – Mark LaFlamme | Need To Stop Reading

Can we expect any more books from you in the future? Oh, yes. I’ll never stop. I often ask myself if I’d keep writing if I was stranded on a desert island and there was no chance that anyone would ever read my work. I’m pretty sure I would, provided there was a pen and a few scraps of paper floating around. I love to write and can’t imagine ever not doing it. When I was a kid, I wrote short stories all the time and then immediately stuffed them into a trunk. I got to the point of showing them to friends and family members that I liked, but that was never the intended purpose. I wrote stories because I liked playing God, lording over all those characters, and that feeling never went away. Authors today are fortunate in that they can get their stuff read in a variety of ways. They can get it out into the reading world almost instantly, thanks to programs like Amazon’s KDP. That’s both good and bad, I suppose. Me, I like it. I have a collection of shorts to go with a novella I expect to release in the fall of 2013. I’ll create something new for the following spring. And so on and so forth until I’m dead.

Have you started another book yet? After I finished “Guys Named Jack,” I started writing shorter stuff just to stay in the groove. I wrote a novella about the very first cryogenics subject revived in the distant future. It was pretty horrible because I tried rush it. Into the trunk it went. I wrote another novella called “Press Run,” about a news crew staff stranded in the newsroom after monsters start crawling out of the weird green snow outside. That one was great fun and so to my editors it went. After that, I wrote a series of short stories – I must be up over a dozen of them by now – which I like quite a lot. I’m pretty sure I’ll package the best of them together with “Press Run” and make a collection out of it. The working title is “The Sadness,” for reasons that will become clear after the third or fourth story.

Where do you see yourself in five years? Los Angeles. Or maybe Phoenix, but hopefully Los Angeles. I love the city, love the never-ending summer and the character of its streets. If I have my way, I’ll have a little house near the ocean and a nice, dark room for writing. I’ll hobnob with movie producers who want to adapt my books. I’ll have a dog named Geek and a porch swing on which to smoke pipes and pontificate. I don’t know if plans like this ever work out. If they don’t, that’s okay, too. But hey, you asked.

What are your current writing projects now? Right now, short stories are shooting out of me like I’m a Pez dispenser. I like to write shorts in between novels. This time, they just won’t stop coming so I’m going with it. I plan to publish a collection of them in the fall, probably with one of my novellas. For me, writing the next novel is impossible until I get some cosmic signal that it’s time to begin. Those signals always come sooner or later. Very mysterious.

Are you reading any interesting books at the moment? You know? When I’m writing a novel of my own, I try not to read anybody else for the duration of it. I’ll switch over to Discover Magazine or the back of Pringles cans. When I get deep into reading a novel, there’s always the temptation to parrot the voice of the author. I’ve always wondered if other writers experience this, but was too afraid to ask.

Are there any new authors that have sparked your interest and why? I always thought Jack Ketchum should garner more attention, but he’s hardly new. Still, I consider him among the more underrated of authors who dabble in the horror genre. Otherwise, I haven’t hooked onto a newbie in a while. My wife is always pointing me toward authors she’s enjoyed. That’s how I ended up reading “The Hunger Games.” Sure glad I got there one way or another. That one was a ten on the WOW scale.