•Saturday, July 7, 2007

Dear Reader,

Our final Story of the Week before going on hiatus is “The Shadow in Black,” by Alex C. Telander.

You can listen to the audio version of the story on the 54th episode of the Late Late Show Podcast, available later tonight.

You can also download a stand-alone MP3 of “The Shadow in Black.”

I greatly appreciate everyone's interest in The Late Late Show over the last two years, and wish you all the best of luck on your endeavors and hope we can all meet up somewhere a little further down the road to share another story at The Late Late Show.

All the best,
Chris Fletcher
editor/publisher
The Late Late Show
editor@latelateshow.net

• About the author:
ALEX C. TELANDER is a very busy guy. While working full time for Borders, selling books and making excellent recommendations to customers, he also reviews books almost weekly for BookLoons, as well as updating his own website, alexctelander.com every two weeks with book reviews, new writing pieces, and anything else he thinks his readers might like. Alex is currently working on finishing his mystery/thriller novel, Nothing is an Accident, about a man who wakes up and doesn't know who he is or where he is, as well as starting a comic book series about a historical account of the Battle of Hastings, called 1066. In the fall, he intends to continue working on his historical fiction novel, Wyrd, set in England in the sixth century, possibly involving Arthurian characters. He sppends what little time he has left reading, reading, and reading some more, as well as watching his favorite baseball team, the San Francisco Giants.

LATE LATE SHOW: Hi, Alex. Thanks for doing the interview. Can you tell our readers about the origins of your interest in writing?

ALEX C. TELANDER: I think it started really when I read my first Stephen King book, Four Past Midnight, and the first story "The Langoliers" just totally captured and mesmerized me.  I can still remember reading the part where the little girl is attacked with a hatchet and the detailed scene where the hatchet is removed and they have to perform surgery on her. It was so brilliantly and graphically written that it actually made me feel nauseous.

After that, I had to read everything King had ever written, and the more I read, the more I thought, “Hey, I'd like to give this a try”—especially when King's main characters were writers and just seeing the process and art of writing got me really interested.

Naturally, I had to start big with a novel called Home By the Sea that ended at about page forty.  After that, I went on to short stories, and went from there.

LATE LATE SHOW: Do you have a writing schedule? Do you write every day? How do you keep yourself disciplined, and how do you deal with writer's block?

ALEX C. TELANDER: Lots of published writers say you should write every day, that that's the only way to make it as I writer.  While I don't believe this to be true—everyone has their own system with writing; Henry James was happy when he got a sentence done a day!—I do believe that with just about everything in life, practice, practice, practice will make you better at it. While I would love to have the time and ability to write every day, sadly I do not, however I usually engage in some form of writing every other day whether it's a piece of prose, a book review, a blog post, just some form of writing, such as writing this interview.

In the past, when I wasn't employed full time, over vacation I was able to work on large projects and assign myself a section.  But now, working with an inconsistent schedule, it's just impossible to have everything perfectly laid out. However, I see my days off as precious writing time. Whether I want to or not, those are my times to do some heavy writing, which I have been doing of late.  Depending on how tired I am, or how I'm feeling or, how much I'm enjoying working on a project, I will sometimes write after work as well.

I have yet to experience writer's block (knock on laptop).  Whatever project I have attempted to start, I have always been able to do; while I may not be too sure or comfortable with what might be happening next, when I finally sit down to write, the words just come and the characters do their thing. In some ways I have the opposite of writer's block, where if I don't write for an extended period of time for some reason, I start to feel weird, like something isn't right in my life, which is the truth.

LATE LATE SHOW: Talk about a couple of your influences and inspirations. Are there any memorable moments for you as a reader that made you want to be a writer?

ALEX C. TELANDER: Like I said, Stephen King has always been, and continues to be, a big influence in my writing, maybe because he was a guy who started from nothing working at a laundromat and had a passion that he never gave up on. Another one of the rules of writing: never give up, no matter how many rejections or negative comments you receive.  Some of my other favorite authors who are fantastic writers and inspire me to write, including: Neil Gaiman, Clive Barker, Ray Bradbury, and Michael Chabon. Chabon is one of literature's greatest writers currently, and is still relatively unknown.

When I read a piece of amazing writing by any of the authors mentioned above, it makes me want to put the book down, open up the laptop and create my own world and characters just as good as theirs.

LATE LATE SHOW: What's the easiest part of writing, and what's the hardest part?

ALEX C. TELANDER: This is going to sound cliché, but it's the truth for me: the easiest part is also the hardest part, which is the writing. I can think and think about what to do next with a story or the chapter of a novel, how I should do it, what the characters should do. I'm doing it right now in fact, thinking about the last part of the current novel I'm working on. How can I do it so that it will be amazing and different and every reader will love it. I'll do this for a little longer and then finally sit down to write with some sort of idea and direction.

I'll set everything up and then start writing and...the story will take on a mind of its own—this is the easy part—the characters will do only what they can do because they are restricted by who they are. But whatever planning I might have had will rarely happen and whole new things I never would've thought of will happen.

In my last spurt of writing, a whole new character showed up who shocked me but then made perfect sense. This is my favorite part of writing, when you're in the “zone” and you're on a roll, but you're just basically putting the words on the page, while the characters are doing what they can to make happen what they want. In some ways, it's kind of magical, and in some ways, kind of scary, because it feels like they have control and I don't, but it's also an amazing feeling because you're distilling the writing from your subconscious which makes it all the more human and realistic.

LATE LATE SHOW: What are some linguistic pet peeves that you find in your own writing and in the writing of others?

ALEX C. TELANDER: Hemingway also said he had a big problem with adverbs and hated them.   King has also agreed to this, somewhat. I don't mind adverbs. Sometimes adverbs work very well, and you shouldn't change the word just because of what it is. Of course, at the same time, adverbs are an easy way out.

It's a lot easier to say “the man launched himself through the air quickly,” while the harder but more colorful and interesting way to say it would be “the man launched himself through the air like a falcon diving for its prey.”

This being said, there are some adverbs I don't like so much. Such as quickly. It's kind of a cop out when more effort will produce better writing.

Now my biggest pet peeve is whenever I read or write (which is almost never) the word SURPRISINGLY.  It's the cheapest word in the English language. Again, sometimes it's the only word that works, which is fine, but to use it over and over for the situation is just so cheap that it infuriates me. Writers like James Patterson, Robert Ludlum, and Dean Koontz use this word way too often in their books. I think you should be allowed to use it once or at a maximum twice per book.

LATE LATE SHOW: What aspect of your own writing would you say has improved the most over the years, and what's something with which you still struggle?

ALEX C. TELANDER: I've always been a very formal writer, laying everything out in a long-winded way. Thankfully, over the years, I've rectified this more and more, using contractions and catching most of this through editing. That's the beauty of editing.

I think one area I'm still working on is dialogue.   While I feel comfortable writing it, I know there are times where I feel the dialogue can be better and more fluid.  Again, thanks to editing, this is made possible. But it's something I'm constantly working on and improving.

LATE LATE SHOW: How much work do you do before you sit down to write? Do you need to know where you're going ahead of time, or do you prefer the thrill of the open road?

ALEX C. TELANDER: I once went to a reading by John Irving and he explained his process of writing a novel: he gets the idea, spends a year or two planning every single little scene and incident out to the last detail, then spends the next three years writing it, rewriting, editing, writing, and rewriting over and over until he thinks it's perfect.

Hearing this the first time actually made me feel sick. To me, the true magic of writing is how something so amazing and incredible can come from nothing. A blank page transforms into a story that is compelling, interesting, and astonishing.

I tried planning out a novel once, and the book got about a third of the way done and then died and I was unhappy with what I'd written. I got the plan from a book called The Marshall Plan For Novel Writing, which had you plan out each scene, each character, and a specific number of scenes were required with each character.

The next book I started I had very little planning and it just flowed.  I finished that book.  The book I'm currently working on I made a two-page outline with paragraphs for each part, that's all. The rest has come at the whim of the characters and I'll probably have that finished by early or late August.

Some planning helps.  For the most part, I love the thrill of not knowing what's going to come next, and then reacting when a surprising thing happens, and not knowing where it's going next.It's like just getting in your car and driving and having no clue where you're going. It's definitely an escape from life, which is what stories are supposed to do, whether you're the reader or the writer.

LATE LATE SHOW: You grew up in Spain. How has having lived in two different cultures influenced your writing?

ALEX C. TELANDER: California is my home, and has been for over seven years now. When I went back to Spain recently, it felt like I was on vacation and visiting. But even though this is my home, and Spain was my home, I don't feel like I've ever truly belonged to any one place. And I believe this is reflected in my writing.

If you look at every book and probably most stories I've written, you'll find a character who is in a new or alien world, coming from another, and maybe doesn't feel they belong, or is looking to fit in.   Sometimes there is a feeling of alienation.

In my novel Kyra, the main character—Kyra—dreams of a fantasy world, she leaves our world and travels there, feeling she has always belonged.

In the current novel I'm working on, Nothing is an Accident, the characters don't know their background—due to a severe form of amnesia—and are looking to discover this.  Another novel I'm working on that I plan to go back to in the fall, Wyrd, is set in the fifth century and the main character travels across Europe and is in Britain at the time of the Saxon invasion and is trying to understand the feeling of nationality, patriotism, what it is to have pride and be willing to sacrifice yourself for your country.

I never planned or intended to have this be a part of my work—it's been becoming a part of it inadvertently, subconsciously.  I think it is an issue that will continue to be a part of my writing for the rest of my life. And what better place than the United States—consisting of people who have left another place to come here and now hold immense respect and patriotism for this country, as do I.

In college, I took a writing class where the professor, Brian Alan Lane, told the class that all writers are always trying to answer one of three questions in everything they write:

Where are we from?

Why are we here?

Where are we going?

I'm always trying to find an answer to “where are we from,” which ties in to everything mentioned above, but also explains why I'm fascinated with the history of humanity, pre-civilization, and the Middle Ages when the western world was essentially reset and had to begin anew.

LATE LATE SHOW: What's your favorite book you've read so far this year and how might it inform your writing in the future?

ALEX C. TELANDER: My favorite fiction book so far is The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon, with Blaze by Richard Bachman a close second.  Blaze is a return to classic Stephen King and Yiddish Policemen's Union is Chabon doing what he does best.   Both books when finished didn't end but continued to develop and change in my mind and have made a lasting impression on me that I can take to my writing.

My favorite non-fiction book is Invisible Sex, by J. M. Adovasio, et. al., which is a book that traces humanity on the evolutionary scale over millions of years, and with evidence proves that our idea of cave dwellers with the men being the food gatherers is completely wrong and was in fact a job performed by all members of the family or tribe. While the book proves that what we've thought up until now is wrong, it also makes the point that we are not always absolutely certain in what we think, that ideas, theories, and ways of science can be totally changed with new ideas and evidence to back it up.

This is what I see in writing, with my ability to write changing and improving, but also creating new stories that haven't been written before. It's why I write. There is always something different and new to be written that may change things, or make people think differently. I know through the years it has changed me, and will continue to for the rest of my life. Just as life is based on an evolutionary process, so is writing.

You can find out more about Alex C. Telander at his website, www.alexctelander.com