Mystery Morgue Interview

MM: As to your educational background, have you taken any formal writing classes, participated in any writers’ conferences or workshops?

CRC: I’m almost completely self-taught. I took one “continuing education” class on fiction writing in about 1980. Other than that my education has been at the hands of my two unwitting mentors, Stephen King and Anne Rice. The writing of Devil Glass was a labor of love (which I will bring into focus with a later answer) and I was absolutely anal about the quality of the writing, continuously comparing my work to that of King and Rice.

MM: How/when did you first become interested in mysteries?

CRC: I’ve taken the liberty of changing one word in your question. Changing mysteries to horror creates a much more interesting answer. I was about ten when my mom started bowling on a summer afternoon league. We only had one car, so my dad either had to be stranded at home with me for the afternoon or drive my mom to the bowling alley. He chose the car, which left us with some time to kill while my mom took her frustrations out on the bowling pins. The Ohio Theater was just across the street from the bowling alley, so it wasn’t exactly an intuitive leap as to how to spend our time. I saw a lot of movies with my dad that summer, but I only remember the name of one of them, The Horror of Dracula starring Christopher Lee in the title role. My God, the things I saw that afternoon! I eventually reached my saturation point and asked my dad to take me out of the theater before the movie ended, but an amazing thing happened when I got outside in the warm sunlight. Looking back at the darkness of the theater I realized that having the crap scared out of me wasn’t really all that bad. I grew up watching all of the movies starring Boris Karloff, Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Vincent Price and Lon Chaney, but there came a point in my tenure as a consumer of these movies when I began craving something different. All of the studios were doing remakes of Dracula or Frankenstein or another werewolf movie and I wanted new stories. I wanted fresh material and I wasn’t getting it. The day of reckoning came for me at the end of a particularly dissatisfying movie. As I left the theater a thought leaped into my mind: I could do that good. The thought created an explosive three-way collision between my desire to write, my imagination and my love of horror.

MM: What did you try writing before your first novel?

CRC: I dabbled in Science fiction and some political stuff (this was before the collision that awakened the horror writer in me) but nothing was very satisfying, not to mention that I couldn’t write. My work had no passion in it and I realized that I didn’t have a clue as to what I wanted to write. I spent a couple years simply honing my descriptive skills by describing scenes devoid of plot and character development. I eventually had my great awakening and I started working on my first real project. That’s when it all really started for me and I was filled with a completely new passion. I was driven to give something back to the Horror genre, something that would satisfy my own need for fresh material. I was beginning my labor of love. Devil Glass was originally a short story with which I was dissatisfied. After two rewrites I had a version of the story that was sixty-eight pages, but I was still unhappy. It didn’t have the emotional impact I wanted. I finally concluded that more character development was the only thing that would help. That’s when I realized I had to write a novel to tell the story.

MM: What did you learn writing Devil Glass ?

CRC: Everything I know about writing, but probably the most important to the quality of my work was character development. Some writers put plot before character and I think that’s a tremendous mistake. Plot is nothing without character and it’s very easy to provide an example. Something has just climbed out of the ground at the edge of a cemetery and is chasing somebody. It eventually captures our character, begins ripping them apart and eating them while they scream and struggle. In the first scene we examine the character is almost a complete stranger. The scene is ugly and bloody and maybe we want to turn away, but after a moment it’s over and after a few more moments it’s nothing more than a fading memory. Now, let’s examine that scene again, but this time we change the character a little. Now it’s your high school buddy. You’ve known him since first grade and he’s your best friend. Now things are different. Now you have emotional attachment, you suffer with him and the experience is something that clings to your soul instead of evaporating. Without character development any plot will be flat and lifeless. And, of course, there are many other things I’ve learned.

I think there are three principal elements in good writing beyond character development and plot that need to be in balance. Action, dialogue and the character’s inner thoughts and feelings need to form a cohesive unit. If there’s too much of any single element at any given time the piece wobbles out of balance. The action in a story doesn’t help much in defining your character, but dialogue and inner thoughts and feelings are crucial to the development.

And certainly the most painful lesson I learned was that when you think a piece of work is perfect there are actually a number of mistakes lurking in the shadows, waiting to jump out and torment the writer. Part of the problem with proofreading Devil Glass was that the story is so absorbing that it’s difficult to read it and remain outside of the story and unaffected by what’s happening. And, of course, as soon as you get involved in the story the objective eyes of the proofreader shut down. I can’t tell you how many times my wife and I read the manuscript before it went to the publisher. When the book got released the first readers were family and friends. Everybody who read Devil Glass was knocked out by the story but each reader was pointing out a couple of mistakes. The trouble was that everybody wasn’t pointing out the same two mistakes. Every time I recognized another mistake it was like having a hot nail driven into my head. My baby was out there and it had MISTAKES! Yikes!! And there were eighteen of them! What a blessing Print On Demand publishing was to these circumstances. I listed the mistakes and the publisher corrected them. The equation for my second novel will include a real proofreader.

MM: How long did it take to write?

CRC: I have to qualify my answer so nobody faints. I was working full time, raising a family and dealing with every day life. All of that left me with about two hours in the evening for writing. I eventually became very disciplined about the time, which I suppose is something else I learned. I was also teaching myself to write and, as stated earlier, I was completely anal about the quality of the work. Only with all of that said could I admit to taking eighteen years to write Devil Glass. My second novel, The Bookseller, is going much faster because I have a lot of lessons under my belt and I know the lay of the land, so to speak. The Bookseller sounds fairly tame compared to Devil Glass, but don’t count on it.

MM: Have you traveled? If so, has it contributed to the content in your book?

CRC: I haven’t traveled a great deal, but it doesn’t really impact my stories. Stephen King taught me that very good tales could be set anywhere, even a little city in Maine or Ohio. Story location is only as important as you make it. The Bookseller is set in Boston. I’ve never been in Boston, but a good map, pictures and a friend from Boston make the point unimportant. Anne Rice’s writing style demands that she be intimately familiar with the story setting, but that’s because she makes location such a big element. I think when you have a really great imagination it makes it less important that you’re intensely familiar with the location of the story. I grew up in Lima and know it like the back of my hand, yet there are some physical attributes of the town that I really enhanced.

MM: How do you do your research?

CRC: I did very little research for Devil Glass . It’s almost 100% pure imagination. My second novel, The Bookseller, is different. The Bookseller demands a lot more research because my main character is a rare book dealer and the antagonist is a rogue spirit that has incarnated as multiple people throughout history. To make my rare book dealer sound authentic I had to become very familiar with early authors and literature, but I also needed facts about real people like Vlad the Impaler and Adolph Hitler. The Internet is a very efficient research tool. So that’s the secret. I get on line, find what I want and get the hell out, just like I do when I go Christmas shopping.

MM: Where did you get the idea for Devil Glass ?

CRC: We haven’t talked much about my imagination, have we. It’s been my life long companion. I was an only child. With no siblings to entertain me the door was left wide open for an imagination to take root and grow. I made a conscious decision very early in my life to not let it whither away but give it free reign and now it never ceases to amaze me. I was about sixteen when the urge to write hit me. It wasn’t so much of an urge as a need. I needed an outlet for what had become an incredible imagination. I thought about making movies, but the expense was obvious even to a sixteen year old. It was also obvious how cheap pencils and notebooks were, so I chose to write. It quickly became apparent that I didn’t know how, but it’s no reflection on my imagination, none at all. My imagination had been creating for a very long time. It took me eighteen years to learn how to show readers what it was showing me. The idea for Devil Glass came from the depths of that vast imagination. When I had my great awakening concerning the direction of my writing I turned to my imagination with only one condition. Whatever it came up with had to be completely new, something the world had not seen before.

MM: When you create a character, how much of that character comes from your personal experience? Are your characters just an extension of your own life and are their experiences from your own life, or are they completely fictional.

CRC: Sometimes there is an element in the character’s makeup that is attributable to my life. Joyce Robbins, my main character, is an only child like me, but beyond that the similarities end. She is emotionally crippled and I’m married to my best friend. The characters I create have their own history and their own lives, sometimes to a startling degree. Sometimes they tell me things that I had never considered. That’s precisely why I don’t believe in outlines. An outline does nothing more than provide a box in which you lock your imagination. When I write I simply start with a premise and begin adding characters. After a certain point the story writes itself.

MM: How did you select archaeology as the background for your novel? Did you study the subject in school or elsewhere?

CRC: As soon as I determined that the story was going to involve an artifact, which was very early in the process, I knew a museum would also be involved. Archaeology was the natural selection. One way or the other, this artifact was coming out of the ground since the Indians (way before they were called Indians) encased Antitheus Vitrum in wood along with a warning and dumped it into quicksand. I also thought that a beautiful redhead working in the museum as an archaeologist might be a nice touch, too, and look what happened: Devil Glass . Sometimes I look at it and wonder how I created something so good and then I remember. It was a labor of love.

MM: Is there a story behind your fascination with horror movies/novels? In what respect do you find fault with them.

CRC: Yeah, the story is that Christopher Lee scared the crap out of me when I was ten and I found out I liked it. If I have an obsession in my life it is with horror, but I want it to be good horror. And I guess that’s the fault I find in so many of them. They’re not good. If the bodies are piling up five minutes after the movie starts or the book opens chances are you’ve got a lemon. For horror to be good there has to be an emotional connection and it takes more than a few minutes to build it. Without that connection it becomes just so much blood and gore for its own sake. Really good horror isn’t something that happens all the time. Every once it a while truly amazing novel comes along, something like Anne’s Rice’s The Body Thief or Stephen King’s Bag of Bones. I’m very happy to present to the world its next great horror story, Devil Glass.

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