James Chambers, horror legend in his own right, one I’ve admired for a really long time.
So, what do I do with authors I admire? In James Chambers’ case, I sat him down, told him, “Lie, or the stuffed bunny gets it,” and BAM!
But here I thought I was the corrupting influence … Ha! James Chambers set me straight by being the exceptional wordsmith he is. I mean, at some points during our interview, I was almost certain he was telling the truth—almost. Yes, the stuffed bunny almost got it, much to James Chambers’ horror, but luckily I held myself back.
I have to admit, though, I have a suspicion that James Chambers is actually an undercover lawyer, because only lawyers can lie as smoothly as he does. 😉
Alas, I won’t keep you from James Chambers’ glorious Wrong Answers Only Interview, which is both insightful and so very untrue. Enjoy, my Darklings!
Oh, Such Fun Awaits …
What inspired you to start writing?
A mean-spirited gnome who lived under my childhood bed. He threatened my family and promised not to hurt them if I made up stories for him every night. From there it became a habit. I kept it up even after a neighborhood cat ate that gnome. Eventually I realized it was the third surest path to fabulous riches and immeasurable fame. Or maybe the gnome told me that. But if he was lying about that… what else did he lie to me about?
If you weren’t a writer, what would you be?
A person who gets the recommended hours of sleep each night and never knows the sweet caress of obsession over ridiculous details of story research.
How do you handle writer’s block?
I treat it like any other block. I use it to build towers then knock them down while pretending I’m Godzilla. When you have enough writer’s blocks you can build really high towers. But if you build too high God will strike down your tower and then every single paragraph in your work-in-progress will suddenly be in different languages. That can really be a setback. So it’s best to keep writing.
How do you develop your plot and characters?
Develop them? Do other writers really do that? Oh, well, fine. Adding that to the “to-do” list.
What is the most surprising thing you discovered while writing your book(s)?
My grade-school teachers told no lies when they said spelling counts. Sheesh. Oh, and apparently, if you give a character a name at the start of the story, editors and readers expect them to have the same name throughout the whole story. How boring is that, anyway?
Where do you draw inspiration from?
The Inspiration Well. Writers don’t like to talk about it, but we all drink from there. The Inspiration water tastes like coffee, whiskey, or Coke Zero, depending on who fills the bucket and draws it up. So if you don’t like one of those drinks you can’t be a writer. Or at least you can’t be an inspired writer. Well, maybe you can if you’re one of those weirdo writers who finds inspiration in the real world all around us and rich history of literary traditions—but who has time for that?
Who is your favorite author and why?
J.D. Salinger. His books are really, really short, he published only, like, three of them, and they’re all quick reads. So I’ve read them all. Yeah, I’m almost an expert on that Salinger guy. I might even read those books again someday they’re so short. It used to be Harper Lee, but her book was kind of long compared to J.D.’s, and then she published another book, so that really turned me off.
What is your favorite book?
1984. George Orwell had one heck of a sense of humor and a wild imagination, didn’t he? Can you imagine if anything in that book ever really happened? If people and governments ever behaved like that with all the thought crimes and five minutes of hate stuff and history being revised every time you turn around to suit the needs of whoever’s in power? We have always been at war with Eurasia! Big Brother is watching you, tracking your location, knows all your private data! Haha! That Orwell. Such a card.
What were the key challenges you faced when writing this book?
Thinking of the words and putting them in the right order. Getting the commas and semi-colons in the right places. Remembering to put those little dot things at the ends of sentences. Indenting—man, that was a rough go. All those paragraphs, and they have to be indented the same amount of space every single time. And then my publisher was all like, “Hey, these stories need titles!” And I was like, “What? How many more words do you want from me? You’re crushing my soul!” But it all worked out in the end. We persevered. It was just tense after our initial disagreements over whether one or two spaces should follow the end of a sentence.
On a typical day, how much time do you spend writing?
The least amount possible. We writers generally get paid by the word so it really makes good economic sense to throw down as many words as you can, as fast as you can, in the shortest time possible, and then kick that story right off for publication so the big checks can roll right on into your back account. I know writers who keep daily writing schedules and take time for beta-reading and do rewrites and revisions and then carefully choose the markets to which they submit. That’s all wrong. Fifteen minutes and a stack of cocktail napkins equals 5,000 words, and you submit it before the ink dries. That’s serious bank right there.
About James Chambers
James Chambers is an award-winning author of horror, crime, fantasy, and science fiction. He wrote the Bram Stoker Award®-winning graphic novel, Kolchak the Night Stalker: The Forgotten Lore of Edgar Allan Poe and was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award for his story, “A Song Left Behind in the Aztakea Hills.” Publisher’s Weekly gave his collection of four Lovecraftian-inspired novellas, The Engines of Sacrifice, a starred review and described it as “…chillingly evocative.”
He is the author of the short story collections On the Night Border and Resurrection House and several novellas, including The Dead Bear Witness and Tears of Blood, in the Corpse Fauna novella series, and the dark urban fantasy, Three Chords of Chaos.
His short stories have been published in numerous anthologies, including After Punk: Steampowered Tales of the Afterlife, The Best of Bad-Ass Faeries, The Best of Defending the Future, Chiral Mad 2, Chiral Mad 4, Deep Cuts, Dragon’s Lure, Fantastic Futures 13, Gaslight and Grimm, The Green Hornet Chronicles, Hardboiled Cthulhu, In An Iron Cage, Kolchak the Night Stalker: Passages of the Macabre, The Pulp Horror Book of Phobias, Qualia Nous, Shadows Over Main Street (1 and 2), The Spider: Extreme Prejudice, To Hell in a Fast Car, Truth or Dare, TV Gods, Walrus Tales, Weird Trails; the chapbook Mooncat Jack; and the magazines Bare Bone, Cthulhu Sex, and Allen K’s Inhuman. He co-edited the anthology, A New York State of Fright: Horror Stories from the Empire State, which received a Bram Stoker Award nomination.
He has also written and edited numerous comic books including Leonard Nimoy’s Primortals, the critically acclaimed “The Revenant” in Shadow House, and The Midnight Hour with Jason Whitley.
He is a member of the Horror Writers Association and recipient of the 2012 Richard Laymon Award and the 2016 Silver Hammer Award.
He lives in New York. Visit his website: www.jameschambersonline.com.
On The Night Border
NOW AVAILABLE!
Dark things stir in the night. When the world sleeps and quiet settles in, shadows assume sinister shapes, guilt and regret well up from the mind’s deepest recesses, and the lonely face their greatest fears. Darkness bares the secret truths whispered on the lips of the lost and the desperate. At night, terrors come alive. For those who journey too far into the dark, no escape remains–but there is a place from which to view these nightmares, a place…on the night border.
The fifteen stories collected here come from the last edge of the light and deliver glimpses into the dreadful, the mysterious, and the strange. These stories offer readers unsettling and weird visions from across the border, visions out of history and from the world around us, visions of cosmic horror, personal madness, and agonizing heartbreak.
A literary legend confronts the reality of a chaotic, uncaring universe. A young girl grows up in the shadow of a ferocious monster. A man seeks to kill his memories. Love defeats death in an odd world not unlike our own. An artist’s drawings unlock a terrifying truth of his adopted city. A mask burns. The mother of plagues offers a deadly future.
Readers will find here all of these and many other visions of what lies on the far side of the line, including, by special arrangement, stories of Lin Carter’s Anton Zarnak and Kolchak, the Night Stalker. Walk up to the edge. Listen to the whispers on the wind. Peer across at the terrors beyond from your vantage point…on the night border!
