Today’s interview is with Michaelbrent Collings, author of BILLY: MESSENGER OF POWERS and the newly released RUN. He talks about the mine that inspired RUN, chatting with Dean Koontz and what he would do if he woke up one day and found everyone was out for his blood.
LUX ZAKARI: Can you tell readers about your new work, RUN? What inspired the premise?
MICHAELBRENT COLLINGS: The inspiration for RUN was actually a trip I took to Colorado. I visited a silver mine in one of the small towns, and actually got to go into the workings of the mine. It was totally fascinating, and I couldn’t think of a place that would be more inherently scary to get lost in. So my brain just started shooting out random sparks of stories that wouldn’t revolve around a mine, but would end up with some key scenes in one. And I ended up (at the end of the process) with RUN. Of course, the basic premise of RUN —a guy who lives in this little mining town wakes up one morning and more or less everyone in the town is trying to kill him—has nothing to do with the mine itself, but I specifically set it in a mining town just so I could have an excuse to have some chase scenes in the mine.
LZ: What about that particular mine was so frightening/disturbing?
MB: During the visit, at one point the person leading my group through the tour turned off all the lights. People talk about things being “pitch black” or “completely dark.” I submit that until you’ve had all the lights dimmed when you are hundreds of feet below a mountain, you’ve never experienced anything approaching “pitch black.” In those seconds, the miner talked about the dangers of being stuck in a blackout underground or losing your way. I couldn’t imagine anything more terrifying than being stuck in the dark hundreds of feet below ground. And then I added to that little scenario a splash of “what if you’re also being pursued by a mob of people intent on killing you?” and I suddenly found myself in a completely terrifying—and fun to write—worst-worst-worse-case situation. It was the stuff nightmares are made of. Which meant I had to write about it.
LZ: The tagline for RUN is “What do you do when you wake up one morning and everyone you know—friends, family, everyone— is trying to kill you? Answer: you RUN.” What would be your answer?
MC: Ha! So the new tagline is “Michaelbrent wakes up one morning and everyone he knows—friends, family, everyone—is trying to kill him. What does he do? Answer: he curls up into a fetal position and starts sucking his thumb and praying for Batman to rescue him.”
Seriously, I would like to think I’d have half the ability to keep my wits about me that my protagonists in the book do, but I just don’t know. I’m actually a bit of an oddity for a writer: I’m also a very physical person and am actually a black belt martial artist who’s writing a book about how to teach martial arts. So I probably would do a bit better in your average “everyone is trying to whack you” scenario than many folks would. But still, if you wake up and not just your enemies (like that one guy at the grocery store who you called out for going into the 10-items-or-less line with 14 items), but everyone is trying to kill you, that’s the stuff aneurysms are made of. How could you not just feel your brain start to melt?
LZ: What influences your work the most?
MC: I had a lot of influences growing up. My dad was an English professor, and he was one of the few of the “elite” educational establishment who thought horror was actually able to be classified as serious literature. He wrote dozens of books on Stephen King, Peter Straub and the like. So as a kid I went to sleep with the sounds of typing or screaming coming out of my dad’s office as he watched various horror movies and wrote “serious” literary critiques on them on his old Apple computer. That warped me early. And then I got to actually meet a lot of horror luminaries, like Dean Koontz and Frank Darabont and some others: I was rubbing elbows with all these guys who wrote scary movies or scary books, and that inevitably inclined me to ask the universal questions of life, like: “What would happen if a guy with a hook for a hand was following you?” or “What would I do if I woke up in a bathtub full of ice and couldn’t feel my kidneys anymore?” All that combined to turn me into the well-rounded, thoroughly warped person I am today.
LZ: You said you’ve met several horror writers – with whom did you have the most memorable exchange?
MB: Probably the most memorable exchange would be one I had with Dean Koontz. This was years ago, and I had just started writing screenplays. I had written one that I thought was pretty good—a script called ALONE— but I didn’t know what to do with it. So I harassed my dad until he let me have Dean’s phone number—which my dad had for a number of reasons, not least being that he had been a fan of Dean’s writing from very early on. Then I called Dean literally out of the blue. I expected to get a secretary, followed by a polite shove-off. Instead, Dean picked up the phone himself, and he literally dropped everything to chat with me. I don’t remember tons about the words that were said, but was totally overwhelmed by a sense of “Wow, this guy is a multi-million-book bestselling author, he is incredibly busy doing Very Important Things, and here he is dropping it all to chat with me.” Dean was always very nice to my father and to my mother—he invited them to his home on several occasions—and now it was my turn. He was not charming or shmoozy, just genuinely nice. He listened to me talk about the script, then gave me some very helpful tips and other assistance. I’ve since corresponded with him every few years—just a letter here or there to say hi or to thank him for a particularly good book he’s written—and he always writes back. He’s been a gentleman since day one, and continues to be so. I literally cannot say enough about how nice he has been.
LZ: As an author, what marketing advice do you have for writers just starting out?
MC: Well, the biggest piece of advice I can probably give is to not expect others to come to you. It’s not enough to just have a cool book or even to be available; you have to actively go out and pound the pavement yourself and beat the trees until fans start falling out. Plus you have to constantly be providing new entertainment for people: I have a blog at www.whoisbillyjones.com/mylittlethoughts and a Facebook fan page at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Michaelbrent-Collings/283851837365?ref=ts that I am constantly updating and adding information or essays to in order to attract more people. Then there are the interviews (like this groovy one), the speaking engagements…they all come from you getting out there and asking other people if they’d like to hear from you. You can’t wait in front of your computer and pray a magical discovery of your work. If you’re not out there constantly trying to sell yourself, chances are that no one will come a-knockin’.
LZ: Is there something important you hope to convey to your readers, a theme most commonly appearing in your work?
MC: In all my work, from my YA novel BILLY: MESSENGER OF POWERS (which is currently the No. 1 Highest Rated book on smashwords.com, and also doing good sales on amazon.com), to the suspense-thriller RUN, to my screenplays and TV work that I’ve sold or am developing, there’s always a theme of hopefulness. It may sound trite, but I think you have to live a life with hope, or else you will have no reason to go on when faced with the tough moments. And that comes out in my work. In RUN, there’s a central question of what makes a person a person: is it just biology, or is it something more? And the answer comes down to the simple ability of humanity to have hope and act with goodness in the midst of horror. That kind of theme really runs through all my work. Every protagonist—even in the “lighter” things—is really looking down the barrel of a gun (figuratively) at some point, and what makes them interesting and fun to spend time with is their ability to stare down the barrel of that gun…and then smile and make a joke. The ability to find light in the darkness, to look behind the shadow for the substance…those have always been key hallmarks of my writing.
LZ: What do you have in store for readers next?
MC: Well, BILLY: MESSENGER OF POWERS is currently sitting on top of several online bestseller lists, so I’m probably going to have to do the sequel for that at some point. (Plus, BILLY is my wife’s favorite book, so she’ll flay me if I don’t pick up the story again at some point). But more immediately, I’m working on a book about how to teach martial arts, and I also have two top-secret TV shows in development. I can’t say much about them because they’re so secret-secret-hush-hush, but I can say they’re both a hoot. And there’s a movie I wrote a few years ago that got picked up by a major production company, which is scheduled to have principal photography start this winter, so I anticipate getting calls on that to do punch-ups or make the little last-minute changes that happen on so many movies. But that’s another one I can’t talk too much about since I literally had to sign a non-disclosure agreement promising not to give away any details of the movie. So I have a lot of balls in the air right now, and it’s pretty much anyone’s guess which one will drop into my hands next. It’s nice to have too much work, though, as opposed to sitting around with writer’s block wondering when my Muse will start working again. ;o)
LZ: Can you share with readers how you got to be involved with the TV and movie projects?
MB: I got involved with the TV and movie projects the same way I got involved with RUN or with BILLY: MESSENGER OF POWERS: by writing. I have always enjoyed writing scripts—they’re very challenging and very different from novels. So a few years back, I entered the Nicholls Screenwriting Competition, which is probably the biggest and most prestigious screenwriting competition in the world. I had four screenplays make it to the quarter- and/or semi-finals, which is more screenplays by a single writer than had ever been advanced so far. Needless to say, I got a lot of phone calls. I ended up doing a ton of meetings, and basically for every meeting I’d get a card, send a thank-you note afterward and try to stay in contact with the people I had met. A lot of Hollywood revolves on making connections with the right folks at the right time. So eventually the people I’d kept in contact with needed something that I’d written, and I was able to (happily) oblige. Basically it was a practice of just hanging onto relationships until a mutually advantageous opportunity came around for selling a screenplay, or where a group I’d had some good meetings with in the past remembered me and thought I would be right for some project or other that they were working on. Being pleasant and willing to do rewrites on your work (not getting overprotective) goes a long way with people.
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To purchase RUN, visit www.amazon.com/Run-ebook/dp/B003PPD9NM/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=books&qid=1275843590&sr=8-1.
To purchase BILLY: MESSENGER OF POWERS, visit www.amazon.com/Billy-Mesenger-of-Powers-ebook/dp/B003K16OMY/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1274845719&sr=1-1.
For more information on Michaelbrent Collings, visit www.whoisbillyjones.com.
