Writing a novel from a twitter thread
Wages of Sin, Mothership Month, and an Upcoming Live Q&A
Two things: Tuesday, November 12 we’ll be launching Wages of Sin as part of the first (annual?) Mothership month. Follow along here to get notified on day one and get some exclusive swag.
Additionally, Thursday, November 7 at 7pm CST I’ll be doing a livestream Q&A about Mothership Month and Wages of Sin. What they are, what you can expect to see, and generally fielding questions about Mothership. Sign up to get notified here.
Mothership Month is pretty huge. It represents a ton of work from 20 different creators and hopefully it’s the start of a pretty amazing tradition. If it works we’ll be transitioning it into a virtual con in the coming years.
A big part of what we’re doing, besides Wages of Sin, is releasing an oversized magazine called MEGADAMAGE. We envision this as a sort of White Dwarf meets Heavy Metal Magazine kinda thing. It’ll have comics, short fiction, articles, interviews, and more. The focus will be more on Mothership universe stuff rather than say a collection of gaming advice (though there will be some of that). We got a wide range of cool articles and fiction as well, all of which I think will make you a better Warden for reading it.
One of the short fiction authors is Anthony Herrera, one of my favorite writers of all time and an old friend of mine. He recently released a coming of age horror book called Aikman, which is now on Amazon. I highly recommend you check it out, it’s just phenomenal in like an Earthbound meets Goosebumps sort of way. We carved out some time to talk about his first novel, and what the writing process is like for him.
Sean: So this is pretty exciting! When we first met I thought of you as mainly a playwright, which I thought was just the coolest thing in the world. Your work, I’m thinking of your play Ruckachusettes, just has a lot of punch and excitement going on. Saying you write page turners is a cliche, but your characters just sort of crackle with energy that tends to leap off the page. I hadn’t read anything like that by a peer before, most everyone I knew was just trying to put coherent scenes together. From there we worked together largely on short form comedy sketches, which also had that same energy, but in a more condensed format. What made you decide to pursue a novel?
Anthony: Honestly, I think this book was the product of a midlife crisis. Though I wasn’t technically old enough for one when I started writing, the mechanism seems the same. I just woke up one day and was struck with the thought, “You’re almost dead. You need to do something,” and seeing as how I had no marriage to destroy or the funds to buy a lamborghini, I decided to write a novel. Of course, this sudden urge to create something to battle existential dread was helped by the fact that I’d been subconsciously writing Aickman on social media for over a year before I ever thought about releasing a book.
Sean: I remember those posts, they’re some of my favorite on twitter and they’ve gotten an insane reaction over time. Did you find that helped with the writing, just collecting these snippets of tone and mystery? How did you go about turning this thread of bangers into a structured story?
Anthony: I would describe the process as intuitive chaos. The origins of the book go back to a random thought that popped into my head while in the drive-thru at Dairy Queen, “Beware the tall grass beyond the car wash. It waves against the wind.” That was the first post and I just kept adding little weird bits to this ongoing thread and I realized I was describing the childhood of someone who grew up in a very strange and sinister town. So when I got the bug to write a book, it was obvious to me that it would have to be an expansion on these humorous and nostalgic yet horror tinged memories. That’s when the process became me going through the posts and deciding which ones would be elaborated on and which wouldn’t. Once I’d chosen the posts that felt right, I then had to decide what about those particular posts I would use. Some became whole chapters, while others became just random history that I sprinkled throughout the book. The most important tweets were the ones that gave me the characters. My writing is very character first. My background is in theater so when I’m writing, I’m usually performing the conversations out loud as the characters to see if what they’re saying feels right. When you look at the characters the way an actor would and think to yourself, “How would a paranoid gray alien respond to being hunted down by neo-fascist children with baseball bats?” that helps you locate the reality within any situation no matter how absurd. So once I had the characters and the events of the story all picked out, structuring the book became a completely intuitive process based on nothing more than what felt right.
Sean: It’s hard to develop that sense of what feels right, but I know what you mean. Do you imagine an ideal reader? Are you writing just to entertain yourself? You have such a strong voice and I know part of that must come from the – I mean you’re just a voracious consumer of stories, and so much of it is off the beaten path. That’s a huge chunk of our relationship is just you introducing me to shows or books or comics that I’d never heard of. Can you think of an example of something that just didn’t feel right or authentic to the story that you had to cut?
Anthony: I mean, I have to entertain myself first. If I’m not having a good time then how can I expect anyone else to. I don’t know if I do have an ideal reader. I guess it would be the “voracious consumer of stories” that you have accused me of being. Anyone who has room in their heart for the free mixing of genres and tone and tropes in ways both atypical and, some would probably say, inadvisable. My ideal reader is someone who wouldn’t mind having an alien and the messiah of a chaos snake cult in their found family and engage in such classic American pastimes as severed toe fights and cryptid bone hunting. Also, my ideal reader should probably know how to read. That seems important. As to what did and didn’t feel right, it mainly came down to what was too familiar. I didn’t want any classic monsters like vampires and werewolves. I wanted the reader to be on as unsteady ground as the characters themselves. There is no folklore or tradition to help them deal with their problems. The supernatural situations the kids face are as unpredictable as real life so I never wanted them to be in a place where if you just follow a certain set of rules then you’ll be fine. That’s not how growing up works. So I don’t really have any specific examples of cuts or changes other than reading the chapters over and over again to find any way that I could make the story even stranger.
Sean: That makes total sense. Can you talk about your day-to-day? Do you try and hit a daily word count? Do you work with an outline? What’s your sort of approach to working? You’ve always been prolific. But I know a lot of people out there struggle with dealing with an empty page. How do you handle that?
Anthony: I’m nowhere near as disciplined as I should be. I don’t target word counts at all unless it’s a project with a tight deadline and even then if the writing feels like trying to walk through a bog I might abandon it for the day. In those cases, if the deadline is looming, fear of being yelled at will eventually get me to cross the finish line. In the case of Aickman, there was no deadline. I was on my own. So the way that worked, and how my writing works in general, is that I don’t start until I have things mapped out in my head. I have to have at least three big targets or beats that I want to hit in a chapter or short story swirling around my mind just sort of marinating a bit. While those beats are swirling, bits of dialogue and action come into focus in moments where my mind has gone passive, usually in the shower or while working out, and then I’ll create an e-mail chain that I send to myself with the dialogue and actions that had come to me. Once I get about five emails deep, I then feel confident enough to begin writing. With all those targets in place, I just sort of create on the go while trying to reach those targets and sometimes I come up with stuff way better than I planned so I change things on the way but I need that very loose outline to begin with. And Aickman is, by far, the largest project I’ve ever worked on so I did that process in macro for the whole book. I looked at the tweets that I had picked and put them in a very loose order, but I began writing before I had the structure of the book finalized. Also, I didn’t write the book in order. The first chapter I wrote comes in the middle of the book and from there I just jumped around to whatever story was grabbing me the most at any given time. But the thing that always takes up the most time is the editing. It’s my favorite part honestly. I re-read chapters so many times looking for cuts and tweeks. I love it when editor-me can look back at what writer-me wrote and be all like, “You f@#*ing idiot, you useless piece of S, how did you think that was ever going to work?” and then delete whatever nonsense writer-me had wasted editor-me’s time with. I’m quite the sadist when I’m editor-me.
Sean: I feel the same way about editing but with less yelling at myself. If I find something that needs changing and I feel like I know the right answer it’s really satisfying. In non-fiction, like writing game books, this is a lot easier for me honestly. Particularly the way you write, non-linearly, that’s exclusively how I write game books. I have to. You work on a rule here or a section there as the ideas percolate. I would never just start at the intro and write all the way through. But for fiction I find that harder.
Anthony: Well, it helped that the book is divided into self-contained adventures with little hints of future plot points seeded throughout. A bit like how Cowboy Bebop is structured. Weirdly, Cowboy Bebop ended up being the biggest influence on the book even though it doesn’t feature any space cowboys. But Bebop is ultimately about the brief existence of a found family and that is very much the story I am telling in Aickman.
Sean: That’s wild to me. I think when people want to take something away from Cowboy Bebop it’s ultimately about mood and aesthetics, or the way they felt when they watched it as a kid. But yeah, that theme of found family I can absolutely see running through your work.
Recently, you’ve written a lot for Mothership. First you did two issues of a comic called LOVELAND, which is just this amazing story of psychic revenge against a corporation facilitating weapons testing on an unsuspecting colony. And now you’ve written two short stories for our upcoming anthology magazine MEGADAMAGE that we’ll release this fall as a part of Mothership Month.
Sci fi horror is really interesting to me because it’s like a niche of a niche. Its fans are super dedicated, but it’s never like the main thing. Do you have any foundational touchstone works that come to mind when you think of sci-fi horror? Anything that helped you when you were working?
Anthony: It’s funny but I didn’t realize how little sci-fi horror I’ve actually read until you asked that. All my touchstones for the genre come from film. The Alien series was of course huge for me growing up, particularly Alien 3. I know people hate that one but there’s just something about the textures and sense of hopelessness in that movie that spoke to me at a real young age. To ostensibly end the series with a working class woman having everything taken from her and cast into the final circle of capitalist space Hell in order to basically become the new Messiah is the reason stories exist as far as I’m concerned. The original Cube film has also stuck with me. It was basically the sci-fi version of Saw but came out way before Saw and was on a grander scale and probably much smaller budget. Then there’s the 1990 short film adaptation of Richard Lupoff’s story 12:01 PM starring Kurtwood Smith. Think Groundhog Day but the loop is only an hour long and there’s no escape. Looking at my picks here, I think what I respond to the most in sci-fi horror is the existential angst of reality. This sense of adding everything up and coming to the conclusion that, yep, as we hypothesized, there is no hope. Thanks, science!
Sean: That’s a great analysis of what they’re doing in Alien3, it’s been nice to see people come along on that one. The grunge era Alien movie. So what’s next for you? I think your book is incredible and I really feel like if you’re into say Earthbound and the X-files this will be a great fit. Do you have anything coming down the pipeline?
Anthony: You mean I have to do more stuff!? WHEN DOES IT END?! Anyway, I got a short story called Down Home Cooking with the True Gospel appearing in a body horror anthology called Nightmare Fuel 2024 which should be available on Amazon now. Outside that and the stuff I’ve done for Mothership, I’m just plugging away writing short stories and making weird TikToks for the people.
So that’s all for this week. A lot more is coming with Mothership Month. So keep an eye out and give us a follow if you haven’t already. Day one backers are getting a free exclusive patch along with their physical pledge.
For Anthony, you can find him here:
“sort of White Dwarf meets Heavy Metal Magazine” sounds like the greatest thing in the history of the universe
Is there a list of all current creator projects?