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Know a Nominee Part Twenty-Two: Joe McKinney

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Thank you for joining us for the latest installment of “Know a Nominee,” the interview series that puts you inside the minds of this year’s Bram Stoker Award nominees. Today’s featured author is Joe McKinney, who’s nominated in the category of Superior Achievement in a Young Adult Novel for Dog Days (Journal Stone).

 

 

DM:  Can you please describe the genesis for the idea that eventually became the work for which you’ve been nominated? In the 139860168516988.jpg2case of a work wherein you’ve written multiple stories (like a collection) please choose your favorite part and discuss.

JM: My YA novel, Dog Days, is a coming-of-age story. Nothing new there. The horror genre is full of coming-of-age stories. But if you think about it, most of those tales, such as Stephen King’s “The Body” and It, Robert McCammon’s  “Boy’s Life”, Richard Laymon’s ” The Traveling Vampire Show”, Dan Simmons’ “Summer of Night”, Ray Bradbury’s “Something Wicked This Way Comes”, and even the more recent additions to the genre, such as Brian Keene’s “Ghoul” and Christopher Golden’s “Straight On Till Morning”, are set in small towns. That’s great, and I love all those stories, but that wasn’t  MY coming of age experience. I grew up in the suburbs. My coming-of-age summer had to do with defying parental authority, and discovering that one of my best friends was turning into a drug addict, and dealing with bullies, and getting turned on to new types of music, and learning that death could haunt even the most well-lit streets. And I did it all in a neighborhood full of cookie-cutter houses on streets with names like Clearcrest and Spring Forest and Dunmore Lane. So, really, the nascent idea behind Dog Days was to take the coming of age horror story and make it feel genuine for me, and that meant capturing the suburban experience of the early 80s.

 

DM:  What was the most challenging part of bringing your idea to fruition? The most rewarding aspect of the process?

JM:  Nearly all of “Dog Days”  was pulled from real life. Well, everything except the werewolf and the scene with the alligator. The rest of it happened pretty much as I put down in the book. That means that most of “Dog Days”  is straight up autobiography, and as such I felt like it had to live up to the source material. Deciding what to leave in and what to leave out was probably the hardest part. After all, when you write so close to home it’s easy to get lost in the weeds and lose focus on the fictional element of the story.

 

DM:  What do you think good horror/dark fiction should achieve? How do you feel the work for which you’ve been nominated fits into that ideal?

JM:  It’s hardly an original observation to say that horror is the only genre named for the emotion it intends to evoke. If you’re going to call your work horror, and I definitely consider “Dog Days” horror, then it needs to scare people to be successful. But that’s really window dressing for what’s really important, and that’s story. I’m a story guy. That comes first for me. I think telling a tale that people can’t get enough of is about the best thing any writer can hope for, and that’s what I try to do with my own stuff.

 

DM:  I’m curious about your writing and/or editing process. Is there a certain setting or set of circumstances that help to move things along? Where do you often find yourself getting stuck, and why?

JM:  I used to have to write things out longhand. I would sit at the kitchen table and scribble out stories on loose-leaf notebook paper. I still have dozens of binders filled with my early stories, all of them written at that table. These days, mostly out of necessity, I’ve gotten used to writing anywhere I can, be it the kitchen table or on my phone or at my desk or some hotel room somewhere. It helps that I outline everything I do before I start writing. Usually, my outlines will go anywhere from seventy to ninety pages, and they are detailed enough that I could write Chapter 3 today and Chapter 14 the next and Chapter 5 the day after that. About the only place I really get stuck is writing the beginning. Those first few pages are murder. After that, things really start to fall in line, but only because I worked so hard in those first few pages to find the story’s voice.

 

DM:  As you probably know, many of our readers are writers themselves. What is the most valuable piece of advice you can share with someone who may be struggling to make their way in this life?

JM: Writing is not like riding a bike. You can’t just get back on the seat and ride like you never lost a day. If you want to make a go of the writing life, it has to be part of your life. Like every day. You have to want it. You have to need it. If it’s only a part-time whim, you will never reach your full potential. I make it a point to do fifteen hundred words a day, at a minimum. Sometimes it’s more, but it’s never less.

 

DM:  What are you most looking forward to at this year’s Bram Stoker Awards/WHC (if you are attending)? If not attending, what do you think is the significance of recognitions like the Bram Stoker Awards?

JM:  The best part of the ceremony is seeing old friends and meeting new ones. There’s really nothing quite like getting to know someone through email and Facebook and Twitter, and then finally connecting with them in person. For me, that seems to happen the most at the Stokers. I love it.

 

 

About Joe McKinney
Joe McKinney has been a patrol officer for the San Antonio Police Department, a homicide detective, a disaster mitigation specialist, a patrol commander, and a successful novelist. His books include the four-part “Dead World”  series, “Quarantined”, “Inheritance”, ” Lost Girl of the Lake”, ” The Savage Dead”, ” Crooked House”  and  “Dodging Bullets”. His short fiction has been collected in “The Red Empire and Other Stories”  and  “Dating in Dead World”.  His latest novel is the werewolf thriller, “Dog Days”, set in the summer of 1983 in the little Texas town of Clear Lake, where the author grew up. In 2011, McKinney received the Horror Writers Association’s Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel. For more information go to http://joemckinney.wordpress.com.

 

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