Babel Clash

Paul, thank you for joining us on Babel Clash.  With your last post or two, please take this opportunity to tell us anything else that you’d like us to know about Jack Secret Circles, your next “adult” Repairman Jack novel or any other project that you have in the works.

If anyone else has other questions for Paul, this is your chance!

I’m often asked what’s my favorite book.  I don’t have one.  I like many books for many reasons.

But ask me what has been the best experience of my writing career and I’ve got only one answer.

Hands down: creating and scripting FTL Newsfeed for the Sci-Fi Channel.

Paul, I was very pleased to see volumes of your Adversary Cycle return to print after several years out-of-print.  The 2nd Adversary novel doubles as the 1st Repairman Jack novel, but Jack isn’t a prominent figure in this cycle.

Many fans may be less familiar with the Adversary Cycle.  It was finished back in the early ’90’s.  Can you speak to how it feels to have these books back in print or the process to get them back on the shelves again?

How did your experiences with the Adversary Cycle affect your creative approach to the Repairman Jack series?

Paul, in your latest “adult” Repairman Jack novel, you tackle a topic that couldn’t have been easy.  Jack is tangled up in a mystery involving 9/11 conspiracies, an alternative history regarding the collapse of the Twin Towers and Osama bin Laden.

Was tackling these topics a difficult choice?  What was at the root of the decision to take the story in this direction?  Were you happy with how it turned out?

With the Repairman Jack series approaching its 15th volume, I get asked about this a lot.  I’m probably not the best person to ask, because I did not want to start a series at the time I wrote The Tomb.

Some background: After The Keep I started a new novel that stalled.  One night I had this frustration dream about being trapped on a rooftop and chased by something.  No matter what I did I couldn’t kill it.  I woke up in a sweat and knew I had to use that. But it wouldn’t fit in the current book, so I started fresh.

I had to come up with a character who could survive that scene, but for the hell of it I decided to turn all the cliches for an action hero on their collective heads.  I wanted the anti-Jason Bourne.   No special forces training - he’s not a former Ranger or SEAL - no history with the CIA or any government agency, no black ops skills, no training of any kind.  Everything he knows is self taught or learned on the street.

Okay.  Then I took it a step further and made him an anarchistic urban mercenary with no identity.  He has no SSN and has never paid taxes.  He can’t call up old buddies in the government to run a set of prints or a license plate for him.  He’s on his own, on a wire, with no safety net.

When I finished The Tomb I knew I had a series character on my hands, but I didn’t want to do a series.  I had my next 2 novels written out in my head.  So I left him bleeding to death at the end of the book.

But he wouldn’t die.  The Tomb never went out of print and readers bugged me for years for a sequel.  Finally, 14 years later, I gave it to them.  He’s since taken over my writing career.

How to create an iconic series hero? Start by smashing all the icons.

Borders in one of the few stores that maintains a distinct Horror section.  At Waldenbooks, horror titles find a home in fantasy or general fiction.  B&N shelves their King, Koontz and Straub books with general fiction.

Horror fans seem to appreciate our commitment to their genre.  On the flip side, trying to identify which titles belong in which section can be tricky.  We feature Kelley Armstrong in fantasy but Kim Harrison in horror (her adult books anyway).  We often keep an author’s work together.  So Stephen King’s Eyes of the Dragon is a fantasy, but it’s shelved in horror.  Dan Simmons’ Hyperion and Ilium novels stay in Science Fiction, but the Terror and Song of Kali live in Horror.

Sure, it would be nice to shelve a borderline book in two places.  Financially, it could mean buying twice as much inventory.  Technically, our computer system can’t handle it.  Third, we’d risk confusing customers, who might find a title only in horror one week and then only fantasy the next, as one or the other sold out.

As genres blur together (which I encourage, mind you), determining the best home for a title gets trickier.  The line between fantasy and horror is especially blurry.  For better or worse, vampires, werewolves and zombies are everywhere from Young Adult to Romance.  Zombie Romance?  Really?

F. Paul Wilson, our latest guest, has made a nice home for his work in our horror section.  What do you think?  Did we find the right home for Repairman Jack?

Our next guest is F. Paul Wilson, author of the Repairman Jack novels.  His latest, especially for young adult readers, is a Young Repairman Jack novel called Secret Circles.  His latest book in the adult cycle is Ground Zero.  Please join me in welcoming him to Babel Clash and please feel welcome to comment and join in our discussion.

Tune in tomorrow to learn the topic of our next debate.

Thank you again to Dan Abnett and Graham McNeill for a great conversation.  To all of you who have visited Babel Clash for the first time particularly for Dan and Graham’s conversation, please continue to visit.