Guest Author - Heather Cox

I interviewed author Michael Arnzen to find out more about how he writes, why he thinks horror fiction is so appealing to people, and what he's currently working on.

Heather: Thanks again for your time and you've got a great website. I like the refrigerator of the damned.

MA: Thanks! Everyone loves messing with my damned fridge. The word
"magnets" are actually derived from my early "Gorelet" poems, and I'm
fascinated with how many different variations people can come up with using the same language. Maybe that's the appeal of all writing, I dunno. But it's pretty cool. In fact, there's a small press book (called Cemetery
Poets) which includes a section of poems written by all the contributors to
the book, all using the virtual fridge magnets from gorelets.com. Is that
cool, or what?

Heather: Your email newsletter, The Goreletter, won the Bram Stoker award for alternative forms this year. Can you tell us a bit about it and how you got the idea to start it?

MA: I first launched gorelets.com as a part of a poetry experiment: using
the internet, I would send a poem every week to subscribers who would
download them to their "Palm Pilots" (or PDA devices and handheld
computers). The poems were small enough to fit on those teensy screens,
hence the term "gorelets." After doing that for a year, I ended the
project, but found that I missed sending new work out to my readers on a
regular basis. So I looked into e-newsletters, and when I read the ones
that other writers were doing, I was appalled at how boring and well,
uncreative, they really were. Most writers don't like to give away their
creativity for free, but I can't not be creative. So I approached the
Goreletter as a way of continuing the "gorelets" series once a month, while also thinking of it as my own creative sketchbook and playground. I'm surprised it won the Stoker, but I'm thrilled that people enjoyed it enough to give it a literary recognition of that caliber. I'm energized to keep it up now.

Heather: You write in such a variety of forms - poetry, short stories, flash fiction, novels. Do you have a favorite? Is one more fun than the others? More challenging? Does the variety drive you nuts or does it keep you on your toes?

MA: It's all the same language soup and I like to slurp it -- sometimes
with a ladel, sometimes with a straw, sometimes with a shoe. I like to
surprise myself when I write, so doing different forms really makes the
surprises come fast and furious. Plus the variety actually keeps me
working, because I never get writer's block or in a rut by doing things
myopically. Maybe I'm a workaholic, but I like to multi-task, to juggle
different forms at once. I prefer short forms, if only because I find them
easier to revise: having the entire text laid out before me in a page or
three really makes it easier to move things around and conceptualize the
proverbial "big picture." Novels and longer tales are harder for me to
revise because I always feel like I'm looking through a windowpane on a
whole world which I cannot see in one view. Plus there's the time involved; novels are very demanding and I have difficulties returning to projects after taking a break. I prefer to get it all out of my system in one
marathon dash.

Heather: You also use use a variety of media and have been successful with both print and electronic media. Is there a difference between writing for print media and writing for electronic media?

MA: The old saw "less is more" is true for both forms, but especially for
online media. It's the difference between paging and scrolling. Although
I've basically just won the highest literary award in my genre for doing new media writing, people might be surprised to learn that it actually took me a long time to "warm up" to publishing my creative writing online. I always loved the internet -- spent a lot of time reading on it and communicating with others -- but I was afraid that my "intellectual property" would be cheapened or -- worse, stolen, if I put it on the internet. But once I realized that it's just another market option among many, I decided to give it a whirl. And I tried to do it right: in for an ounce, in for a ton.

Heather: You're also a very prolific writer. How do you keep the ideas constantly flowing?

MA: They're always there. Maybe I'm just more receptive to them. Always got my eyes open for the strangeness. Coffee helps.

Heather: Why do you think horror fiction is so appealing to people? Isn't reality scary enough for us?

MA: Horror is actually comforting. It's one way our culture collectively
recognizes that we're all weak and feeble and afraid. How else can you
explain Halloween? Plus it's funny more often than scary. At least, if you
look at it the way that I do. Horror also has a lot more creative freedom
than other genres in popular fiction -- in it, one expects the unexpected.
So that gives the writer a lot of license to do different things. I love it.

Heather: What do you have currently in the works?

MA: I'm working out a deal with a publisher right now for the hardcover
edition of my second novel, Play Dead. This was a book I wrote as my
Master's thesis many years ago and I'm eager to see it find a home. It's a
book about gambling, told in 52 chapters, structured like a deck of cards.
And it's very sick. The editor who is considering it said that they
wondered how I would out-do Grave Markings, and felt that I really had
accomplished that. So that's cool. Another book coming out soon is
Freakcidents -- my first hardcover poetry collection, a series of character
studies about impossible sideshow mutants. It's gotten some great reviews already and it very well might be the best poetry collection I've ever done.

I'm also currently working on a very dark and intense suspense novel but I
don't want to talk too much about it until it's done. All I say is that it
involves pet hoarding. I'm trying to write with a female protagonist, and
though I think I'm very empathetic to women, it's harder than I thought it
would be to write what amounts to another gender's perspective. I wrote
nearly half of the thing then discovered that my protagonist was a
bubble-headed victim. So I'm starting over again, making her into a much
more complex adult.

Heather: And is there anything else you'd like to tell BellaOnline readers about your work?

MA: I want to invite anyone reading this to subscribe to The Goreletter. It's free, it's funny, and it's full of links to weird stuff online. Since
a lot of what I do as a horror writer means letting my unconscious run wild I can write some pretty strange and sick stuff, but not so much with The Goreletter. I try to keep it somewhere between PG-13 and R, if only because I never know who is reading it and there aren't any ticket takers on the internet. Subscribe at Gorelets.com. And keep reading scary stories, no matter who the author is. Try someone new. Sometimes you've gotta take risks if you want the pay-off of the surprises.