*A spotlight centers on a dais with two people
sitting at a table with a red tablecloth. There are various stakes, holy water,
and a cross on the table. The audience cheers from the darkness.*
Hello, everyone. Today I’d like to welcome Beck
Sherman to Trip the Eclipse.
1. Who is your favorite author and why?
Stephen King has been scaring and inspiring me
from the very beginning. His older books are some of my favorites, like The Shining. I went to see him speak
once in Rhode Island
2. What, in your opinion, are the most important
elements of good writing?
Writing good ─ ahem, writing well. Grammar is so important. Bad grammar is a distraction and no
amount of brooding heroes or stellar plotting will change that. Next up, the
ride, especially for my kind of writing: horror. The reader needs to be kidnapped,
essentially, and not let go until the very last word. Finally, the
protagonists, your heroes, should be loved, in my opinion. Create characters
that people will root for.
3. What were your feelings when you first saw the
cover of the finished product?
For my first book Revamp I thought “Whoa, wasn’t expecting that.” The cover was
designed by a friend, Chris Deal. It was bold and unlike anything I had seen
out there, which I liked. For my second book Goodbye Nothing I was involved in all of the stages and prototypes.
I laughed, I cried. It’s been quite the trip. You can check out the final
product for yourself at the BBF cover reveal going on now at my blog DyingToWrite.
4. If you could leave your readers with one
legacy, what would you want it to be?
A slew of novels that makes them hide under their
covers at night but not before getting up to close and lock all of the doors and
windows. And as an avid supporter of the underdog, stories that tell the
freaks, the geeks, and the outcasts that they’re not alone in their struggles
and that the world is silently rooting for them.
5. How do you feel about the horror boom of the
80’s and early 90’s?
Is this a trick question? I LOVED it. And that
torch is still burning. This is when horror was good. Friday the Thirteenth, Nightmare
on Elm Street, Halloween, Gremlins, Poltergeist, The Lost Boys
(one of my favorite movies). The torture porn of today hadn’t really hit the
scene. The movies were about deep, in-your-gut scares, sometimes with a large
topping of cheese. Ah, those were the
days.
6. What was a time in your life when you were
really scared?
A couple of years ago, a friend and I went on an
excursion to an abandoned insane asylum in Massachusetts
7. Do you ever come up with anything so wild that
you scare yourself and leaves you wondering where that came from?
My spouse calls me the “creepiest nice person”
and to my dismay sometimes uses that moniker to introduce me to new people. I
don’t think a “normal” person can write horror and not surprise themselves. On
the other hand, if you’re Jack the Ripper, then decapitating someone in the
story is just expected, and probably not all that interesting.
8. What do you think draws people to horror
novels? Why do we, as readers, like to be scared?
People desire the adrenaline rush of horror, but
the safe horror. Books, movies, funhouses. Because being scared in real life
sucks. Your plane is actually going down. That sucks. You’re actually being
chased by an axe-wielding maniac. That sucks. A giant shark is actually tearing
you in half. That sucks. To be able to experience terror from the safety of
your sofa, without the pain or the death, is really something else.
9. Do you ever research real events, legends, or
myths to get ideas?
I research, but not so much to get ideas. Those
just come to me. You’ll know if you see an energy-saving light bulb appear above
my head.
10. Tell us your latest news. Any new thrills we
can expect from you?
Find
out more about Beck Sherman.
Awesome interview!
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