Robert Cales

It was at the age of sixteen when the urge to tap into my creative mind first hit me. An incredible imagination had been my life long companion and I recognized this urge as the perfect outlet for it. At this point in my youth I was certain about two things. First, pen and paper were much cheaper than a movie camera and all that went with the visual medium; second, one good book made into a movie by experienced film makers was all that was needed for a foothold in life.

So at the age of sixteen I made the conscious decision that I wanted to be a writer, but I didn’t have the slightest clue as to what I wanted to write. It brings to mind a quote from Shakespeare. I may be paraphrasing and I’m no longer certain which of his plays it comes from, but I believe it was Macbeth.. “I have no spurs to prick the sides of my intent, only my vaulting ambition which overleaps itself and falls upon the other.” I may not understand the entire quote, but certainly the part about having intent, but no spurs.

I dabbled in Science Fiction and I went through a political phase. I did produce some material, but, my God, it was awful, truly awful. And when I wasn’t working at trying to show somebody else what my imagination was showing me, I was consuming the product of other people’s imagination. I consumed Horror movies with wild abandon. Thanks to Dracula Has Risen From The Grave, which I watched at the tender age of seven, Horror became my very first true love in life.

Now, let’s be clear about something. I say I saw Dracula Has Risen From The Grave when I was seven, but the truth is, I only saw part of it. The movie scared the hell out of me and I made my Dad take me out of the theater before it ended. God, that movie scared me, but it did something else. It left me with an unquenchable thirst for Horror. And, by the way, I’ve seen the movie a couple times since and it’s not that good. Christopher Lee was great playing Dracula, but as movies go, it was a little lame.

So, growing up I mainly did two things to excess. I consumed all the movies starring Lon Chaney, Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee and Boris Karloff, and I tried to write. I tried to write but I still had no spurs to prick the sides of my intent. As I grew older I still wanted to be scared senseless, but I was tiring of what was being produced for the big screen. Everybody was doing a Dracula or Frankenstein remake or some kind of werewolf movie. That was when I discovered Stephen King. Salem’s Lot was the book that started a relationship that has lasted, a relationship, which is still going strong. A number of years later I discovered Anne Rice by reading The Vampire Armand. After that Anne was added to my literary diet and I have since read all of the “Vampire Chronicles”, consuming them with the same wild lust that drives Lestat to consume the blood of his victims.

Although Stephen and Anne remain the primary components of my reading diet, I never lost my love of scary movies. I continued to see them, but was no less disappointed by what the studios were offering me. It was before the release of the original Alien when a great three-way collision occurred between my imagination, my desire to write and my love of Horror. After seeing my last disappointing movie I remember saying to myself in disgust: “I could do this good”. CRASH! The sudden and quite unexpected three-way collision occurred and exploded in my mind. I found the spurs to prick the sides of my intent.

Devil Glass is much more than my first novel; it’s the vehicle by which I learned to write. It started as a short story, a story that I continually rewrote because I was dissatisfied with the emotional impact. What I ended up with was a sixty-eight page short story that I found flat and lifeless. That’s when I learned my first major lesson in writing. I needed more character development. That’s when it hit me that Devil Glass had to be a novel.

It’s been a long road with plenty of potholes and detours, but I finished the journey of becoming a writer and producing my first novel. Now I’m working on my second novel, The Bookseller, and waiting to be discovered by that right person.

C. Robert Cales
8/9/02