For the book that became The Long Trial of Nolan Dugatti, I kept a kind of running diary of the writing of it, The Camopede Files. Was fun. It made me kind of look at my process in a new way, a helpful way. So, when I started Mapping the Interior, I figured I’d try the same thing. Here is that thing.

18 August 2016

starting this journalthing now, but I need to wrap up the week before, right quick:

➔ I had a story to write over the weekend. I wrote 2 or 3K words on it Saturday, decided t…

Me in my office, playing with all things werewolf related. At least those I could reach without getting out of the camera’s eye. Also some talking, some reading, some injudicious swaying from side to side, like I just spilled koolaid on the couch but nobody knows about it, and I really-really need to get outside, like acres away, and play for about fifty-four hours:

…

I wish I’d taken more pictures. A part of my heart is still with each of these trucks. I remember dragging a chain out of the bed and leaving a big gouge on the bed rail of one. I remember loading a piano into one of the tall ones, in the sun, when I wasn’t sure I had gas money to get home. I remember a dog I picked up one day to get it a little farther down the road, and how it kept biting me and biting me. I remember pulling over in the ditch to write. I remember working through the ni…

mix Buzzfeed‘s “23 Things that Prove Society is Doomed” with Salon‘s “War & Peace on the Subway: How Your iPhone is Saving Literature,” then angle it through my publicists’ rose-colored glasses, and you end up with something a lot  like:

1. Sitting together and reading still counts as socializing:

2. It’s considered polite not to read over your date’s sho

Back in the late nineties, I’d see Stephen Dixon stories all over and flip back to his author bio at the end of the journal or whatever not because I didn’t already know it, but for the rush: it always said he had some three hundred stories published. I had maybe six at the time? Three hundred was an amazing, impossible, never-get-there kind of number. And I’m not there yet. This isn’t that post. Though I did just total up my stories from print- and e-mags a…

I keep thinking about these two kids who left the theater early. Say, ten minutes shy of the end, right when things were at their goriest, most sacrilegious frenzy. I mean, first and of course, eight- and ten-year-old girls shouldn’t be seeing The Conjuring. Boys either. I’m not even sure I was old enough to see The Conjuring, really. But I did stick it out all the same, and, because I stayed, I was processed through the horror. I saw the daylight at the end of the tunnel, and I …

[ this is the script of the pre- and post-words I gave for a charity event Cabin-screening Friday night, down in Manitou Springs ]

wolf kisses and bear traps

The slasher. We can all make a list of our ten favorite, yes? Which of course we consider the ten best. So . . . that list starts where? Psycho, Peeping Tom? Bay of Blood? Maybe, maybe not. Definitely Black Christmas in seventy-four, anyway. And let’s not forget Texas Chain Saw Massacre from that same year, which gave us a mask…

Don’t be afraid to embrace a song, or how it makes you feel. Remember the person you were when it touched you, or where you were — Brian Azzarello

At the end of December 2011, I finally read Robert McCammon’s A Boy’s Life. One of the more amazing reading experiences I’ve had—maybe I’d somehow known to save it for the month before I turned forty? Anyway, somewhere in it the grown-up narrator says how important it is to always keep listening to the new music, how that keeps you a…