The Next Best Book Club discussion

I love all things zombie! The more an author plays with the genre, the more I appreciate it : )

GO21 was a fave of mine from the collection. And I really liked the quiet tension of Renee. Some other top stories were No Toil, No Trouble, and The Man After Me.

I'm a big ole fan of dropping the quotations!

I remembered reading this write up on McCarthy's use of punctuation a while back. I'd be interested to see how much of this you agree with/practice in your writing, Eric.

http://www.openculture.com/2013/08/co...

Ethan wrote: "I remembered reading this write up on McCarthy's use of punctuation a while back. I'd be interested to see how much of this you agree with/practice in your writing, Eric.

http://www.openculture.c..."

Lori--I could have guessed GO would be your pick.

Ethan,

I agree in spirit with pretty much everything McCarthy says in that piece. My overriding rule is that if it sounds right, use it. Vonnegut said that semicolons only prove you went to college, but I hear a unique pause with a semicolon, in my mind, that naturally fits with where it ought to go in a sentence. Sometimes that correct pause is integral to the sentence and its poetry, sometimes you can get away without it. It all depends on the sound. I wrote a very long book last year, and that one, I think, (don't quote me) uses semicolons and more--just, no quotation marks.

Eric, Am I really that easy to peg? (awww nuts!)

Hey, I have a question... Now that 8th Street Power & Light has a release date set, I was wondering....

(1) Did you always know Above All Men would be a trilogy?
(2) How long did it take you to write 8th Street?
(3) What made you decide to set it in the future, with Sam as a grown man?

Lori wrote: "Eric, Am I really that easy to peg? (awww nuts!)

Hey, I have a question... Now that 8th Street Power & Light has a release date set, I was wondering....

(1) Did you always know Above All Men woul..."

1. I think I knew that there was easily more to the stories of these characters. There might even be a tetralogy. (Or I could get fed up working on number three and decide there's only two. Who knows?)
2. Much like Above All Men, the first draft of 8th Street didn't take very long--I think about five to six months. But, as with AAM, it's been through draft after draft of editing, probably nearly a year's worth. I finished that first draft back in 2012.
3. I don't know that I'd say Sam is grown (but that may just be my opinion that you don't really hit adulthood at, say, 21, nor does trauma necessarily age you.), but there wasn't much of a story in the intervening years--sort of a montage, at best. I wanted Sam to have had time to harden, to internalize his wounds, and heal them a little, before he was put through the wringer again.

How long did it take you to compose all of these stories? Were there ones you wanted to include but dropped them? If so, what was your reasoning?

Tiffany wrote: "How long did it take you to compose all of these stories? Were there ones you wanted to include but dropped them? If so, what was your reasoning?"

Hi, Tiffany!

Altogether, I'd say these stories and their revisions probably took me around a year to complete. The length on each varied, of course--with GO21 and Rene taking the longest. It's hard to say with any accuracy because I wrote these stories over such a length of time--all through my career.

There was one story that wasn't in a state to be included, and another that my publisher and I felt was hitting stale notes, already covered by other stories. That story, unlike every other story in the book, took place in a major city, so it felt quite different, too. Aside from that, the choices were actually pretty clear.

Eric, were you a big reader as a child? If so, what books or authors influenced you into adulthood? Did you write fiction when you were a kid?

Peg wrote: "Eric, were you a big reader as a child? If so, what books or authors influenced you into adulthood? Did you write fiction when you were a kid?"

Peg,

I was a big reader. I don't think any of the books I read back then had any influence on me--none that anything short of psychoanalysis might reveal--but I read them, nonetheless. I read all the Brian Jacques Redwall series up until I outgrew it, and K.A. Applegate's Animorphs. Bridging the gap between childhood and adulthood was, I'm a little embarrassed to say, Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins' Left Behind series. By the time that series closed, though, I was old enough that one day I just read a few lines and thought, "what the hell is this?" Quit reading after the penultimate book. And while you might see an easy relationship between those end times and the end times I tend to write about, I think I've always been interested in the apocalypse.

I wrote a lot of comics as a kid. Very few, very fragmented, short stories. The comic thing started and quit until I reached college, when I switched over to straight prose.

Oh wow, Redwall. I chewed those up as a kid.

And Eric, I too share the embarrassment of having read the Left Behind Series. I only read the main series (the first 12, I believe), not that side-crap that came out in addition to it. The good thing about those books... they read super fast and were so simply written that it was almost like watching a tv series. A guilty pleasure show...

Another guilty pleasure read of mine was The Death Gate Cycle. Gawd, looking back, it's crazy to see what I had read in my youth. Then again, at least I was a reader : ) And a voracious one, at that!

Lori wrote: "Oh wow, Redwall. I chewed those up as a kid.

And Eric, I too share the embarrassment of having read the Left Behind Series. I only read the main series (the first 12, I believe), not that side-cr..."

I started to write a Redwall fanfiction story as a kid, now that I think of it.

Yeah, I should thank my stars I was a reader, too. I had read hardly any of the classics in high school. Had to start my real education as soon as I graduated. There was a definite path I considered taking that just involved working at the nearby Honda plant (as a translator, admittedly) and being a relatively regular Joe.

Was there ever a time when you almost decided to stop writing? If your answer is yes, how did you get over it?

Lori wrote: "I love all things zombie! The more an author plays with the genre, the more I appreciate it : )

GO21 was a fave of mine from the collection.

We had to put that one in for you.

Haha Leah!

Eric, are you a full time writer now, or do you have a 9-5 job? What's the worse job you've had?

Osman wrote: "Was there ever a time when you almost decided to stop writing? If your answer is yes, how did you get over it?"

I never thought I'd give up on writing, though I have despaired about certain books. I made the decision years ago to be a writer, and I told myself that I wouldn't let anything stop me. That lunatic faith has remained despite everything, and I think it's extremely important for an artist to have. Rather than get down on myself as an artist, instead I put the focus on the work. It's a more proactive stance. Years later, it's rare that I abandon a project--instead, a failed work just means I haven't worked hard enough.

Lori wrote: "Haha Leah!

Eric, are you a full time writer now, or do you have a 9-5 job? What's the worse job you've had?"

I'm in the real world, working as a security guard. I'm lucky enough to have a post that allows me to write and edit while I'm on the job, which means I'm also, in a way, writing full time.

The worst job I ever had is probably a tie between knife salesman and my brief stint as--I dont even know what to call it, officially. A technical term could be "disaster mitigation technician," which sounds badass but really means I was scrubbing mold in basements and carrying around giant fans to dry rich peoples' carpet.

Thanks for having me here, everyone. I'll try to keep an eye out on this thread in case there are any latecomers, but I can always be reached at my author page here on Goodreads, and I'm pretty easy to find elsewhere online. Thanks so much for reading and sharing your experiences of Moon Up, Past Full with me!

hey Eric! thanks so much for hanging with us ask week. I had a blast seeing what questions everyone had for ya!

and thanks so much to Alternating Current fit making copies of your book available to us ;)

This was a wonderful discussion! It's been fun reading along, and thank you so much for your support of Eric Shonkwiler and Moon Up, Past Full. If you have any more questions about the book or Alternating Current Press, you can find it listed here, and you can reach me directly at alt.current (at) gmail (dot) com. Thank you all again for your support!

Leah Angstman
(Editor-in-Chief of Alternating Current)

Sorry I'm late to the discussion - I got all sidetracked with the Snowpocalypse. In looking at "Above All Men" and some of the stories in this collection, I note a theme of characters who have a disdain for or live outside of the law. Inspiration? Autobiographical?

John wrote: "Sorry I'm late to the discussion - I got all sidetracked with the Snowpocalypse. In looking at "Above All Men" and some of the stories in this collection, I note a theme of characters who have a di..."

Hi, John. Hope you're out from under it, now. (Here in Nashville, it only took one good day for all the snow to melt.)

There's not really a source of inspiration for that bent in my writing, I don't think. I tend toward it because I feel like there's room for exploration in that periphery--characters like the protagonist of "For the Man After Me," who aren't doing legal work but are hardly the focus of humanity's disdain. That's interesting to me, particularly in finding that once a life is your life, you tend not to think of it as breaking any law at all. The accommodation of crime, once it becomes commonplace. While not nearly as dramatic, we all know people who live at least part of their lives in this space. I think I'm rather taken with the idea that law is not necessarily moral, and once thrust into a situation, people realize that, and find they're without that guide which has supposedly been there all along.