October 2004
Do you write every day? How do you balance writing with your day job and personal life?
I don’t write every day, but I try to work most days. If I’m away from a project too long, it takes a while to get it back into my head again. Writing, though, comes last of the top three priorities in my life, the other two being family and day job. I do my best not to disrupt either of those other priorities, taking advantage of the times when everyone else is busy. I’m a morning person, so I work while my family is either still asleep or getting ready for work and school.
Tell us about how you got the job writing your column “Stephen King News: From The Dead Zone” for Cemetery Dance magazine, how you balance it with your other work and how you have been able to use it to your advantage with your writing career.
The magazine had been on a bit of a hiatus during 2000 because of CD Publication’s rapid growth. I e-mailed Rich Chizmar in early 2001 about something. When he responded, he asked if I would consider taking over the King news column. I don’t remember how Rich knew enough about me at the time to consider me for the job.
A column seemed like a natural extension of what I was doing already: reporting upcoming events to places like alt.books.stephen-king and SKEMERs. The sort of activity that inspired Steve Spignesi to call me “they eyes and ears of King fans.” I agreed without hesitation. I’d been reading CD for years, so the opportunity to be part of the magazine appealed to me greatly.
I remember warning Rich that the first column would be long, since there was so much to catch up on. Turns out, that column ended up being typical in length—about 7000 words each issue. Fortunately, I’m a disciplined person—I don’t often leave things to the last moment. I work on the column continuously during the two-month period between issues, so when deadline comes along, it just needs some proofing and polishing.
The column has definitely opened doors for me and gotten my name out there. King reads the magazine, so when I proposed The Road to the Dark Tower to him, he had some basis on which to make his decision whether to endorse the project or not. He already knew my style and general approach.
Explain your general feelings on Stephen King’s Dark Tower series as a whole. How do you feel it compares to the rest of his works and how has it influenced your own writing?
I think I’ve been a more patient reader than many I mention in Chapter 1 of The Road to the Dark Tower! It would never occur to me to write to an author to ask when the next installment of a series is coming out—or to demand it. I understand the creative process well enough to know that things come on their own, or not at all. I’ve been with the series almost since the beginning, and I’ve taken each installment as they arrived and been thankful for them.
While there’s no question that King—and everyone else that I read; I’m a voracious reader—has influenced my writing, I can’t identify anything in particular from the Dark Tower series. The things King does well in general are skills I wish I knew how to learn from what I read—but therein lies the mystery. Though millions of people have read his works, no one has ever duplicated his aptitude at pure storytelling and incisive characterization. A couple of my stories—“The Lady of Lost Lake,” which appeared in issue 1 of this magazine, for example—were obviously influenced by King, but I don’t think that is representative of the types of stories I write. I lean toward crime fiction and suspense rather than horror most of the time. Non-supernatural, or ambiguously supernatural.
Where did the idea of The Road To The Dark Tower come from and how was such a project submitted to NAL?
When I heard that King had finished the first drafts of the final three books, it occurred to me that the series might merit close scrutiny. King’s total output is overwhelming—to do an in-depth literary analysis of his oeuvre would take years. I regarded the Dark Tower series as a microcosm of his career. A manageable, bite-sized portion representative of the whole. It brackets his career—he started before he wrote Carrie and finished at a point where he’s thinking about winding down—and extends tentacles into much of his other fiction.
I sent an e-mail query to the publisher at Viking, outlining my idea and the fact that King supported it, which made the concept attractive. She passed the query to the guy who ultimately became my editor, Ron Martirano, who is also a Dark Tower fan. He asked me to submit a proposal, so I wrote Chapter 1 and prepared a detailed chapter-by-chapter outline of my concept. That was the basis for NAL’s decision to publish the book.
With so much to cover in all seven Dark Tower books, related short stories and novels, how were you able to narrow down what you wanted to cover in The Road To The Dark Tower?
My guiding principle was to stick to the major tie-in books and stories. I didn’t want to identify every little connection. The Stephen King Universe already does a fine job of that. Readers may notice that I don’t devote much space to It or From a Buick 8, for example, because I didn’t believe that these stories contributed much to the Dark Tower mythos. Instead of starting at the central seven books and exploring where the tentacles led from there, I focused on the core mythos and looked for outside texts that illuminated the series in important ways. That allowed me to define the scope of the book and everything else sprang naturally from there.
How closely did you work with Stephen King and his office in the writing of The Road To The Dark Tower?
I tried to bug people as little as possible. King’s office—in the person of Marsha DeFilippo—bore the brunt of my queries, but I also interacted by e-mail with King, his publisher, his editor, his publicist and with Robin Furth, his research assistant. I hoped that by spreading out my requests for information I wouldn’t overload any of these very busy people.
King’s biggest contributions were his authorization, supplying me with the pre-publication manuscripts of the last three Dark Tower books, and his generous cover blurb. He passed along some interesting tidbits that helped illuminate the book. When I was ready to submit the nearly finalized manuscript to my editor, he asked to see it too, to vet it for factual errors. He requested no changes.
You chronicled the process of the writing, production and marketing that went into The Road To The Dark Tower on your website message board. What was your motivation in doing this and your overall experience connecting with your fans on a daily basis?
A web site seemed like the perfect medium to build an audience. I enjoy going to web pages frequented by writers I read and being able to interact with them, so I decided that I’d make myself available on-line. A lot of what goes on at the message board is pure community. People find it a fun place to hang out.
My message board is also an online journal. Not everyone will be interested in all the day-to-day landmark events that a writer experiences on the road to publication. However, I don’t keep a diary, so the board became my way of chronicling events for myself for posterity.
For over thirty years fans have been waiting in anticipation for the conclusion of the Dark Tower series but because of your work with Road To The Dark Tower, you were only one of a few to have read the final books in advance. What was that feeling like and how difficult was it to keep the ending a secret?
Keeping the ending a secret wasn’t hard. I have no problem keeping things to myself. Not having anyone to discuss it with was more difficult. After a few months, my editor received permission to read the manuscripts, too, so I finally had someone that I could brainstorm with. That helped a lot, and obviously made his job easier, too.
There are countless Dark Tower fan websites, fan groups, message boards, unofficially produced Dark Tower merchandise and cartoons and recently the first Dark Tower fan conference was held in Portland, Maine. What is it about the Dark Tower series that make fans go crazy?
You could pick any epic series and find web sites where people discuss and speculate. I’m sure there are a million Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings sites. Epic fantasy sweeps people away. Readers spend a lot of time with these characters and become invested in their journeys. They want to share that with other people. In the case of the Dark Tower series, its long road to publication meant that readers had lots of time between books. A large portion of the activity at the Dark Tower sites has been speculation about where the series was going and what would happen in the final books.
Are you a fan of the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter series? Can you compare their popularity and literary merit to King’s Dark Tower series?
I’m a big fan of The Lord of the Rings. I first read the trilogy in high school and reread it every six or seven years. When I lived in Oxford one summer, I found all the places Tolkien lived and ventured way up north of the city on a miniscule bicycle to visit his grave. I eagerly anticipated and have been impressed by the movies. I haven’t read any of the Harry Potter books, though I keep telling myself I should. I saw the first movie, that’s it.
The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter are both more popular than the Dark Tower series—and I don’t see that situation changing dramatically. A lot of King’s core audience hasn’t read the books because they aren’t the same as the “typical” Stephen King novel.
The Lord of the Rings is an accomplishment that will probably never be repeated. Tolkien spent his entire academic career developing the background that enabled him to create Middle Earth and its mythology. Not many writers have that luxury. He inspired much of the fantasy that came after him. His literary stylings and character treatment probably don’t impress serious literary critics—but I don’t count myself among that group. I do think the Dark Tower series is more approachable because the characters are more realistic. Not because they are human, but because Tolkien’s characters are archetypal. Heroic. Elevated. I wrote recently that Frodo gathered a ka-tet of future Kings, Wizards, refined Elvish folk and the like. Contrast that to the ragtag team of misfits that Roland is saddled with: a junkie, a woman with multiple personalities, a stray critter and a kid. Fragile characters with serious faults to overcome.
Which are you more proud of and why? Having a short story (“One of Those Weeks”) published along side Stephen King in the award-winning and prestigious Borderlands series or having Stephen King himself providing you a glowing cover blurb for The Road To The Dark Tower and being highly marketed along side King’s own Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower.
I’m proud of having conceived The Road to the Dark Tower, an enormous and potentially daunting project, and completing it to my own satisfaction. I read sections of it from time to time and feel that I did the best I could. But I’m proud of all of my work. “One of Those Weeks” has received some flattering compliments from people who I respect, and it had the good fortune of ending up in an anthology that gave it a lot of visibility. That pleases me, of course. We all want to be read. And I’m also proud of “Kane’s Mutiny,” a noir detective story just out in Fedora III. I reread it for the first time in a year and was very satisfied with it. They’re all my children.
Tell us about your unique project The Illustrated Stephen King Trivia Book co-edited by Brian Freeman which is coming out soon from Cemetery Dance. What was it like working with another editor and the hundreds of fans who submitted questions for the book?
The trivia book was a fun project. Brian and I brainstormed the approach and the format for quite a while before we announced it. I chronicle some of the book’s evolution in the introduction. Once the questions started coming in, Brian and I just sat back and waited until the deadline, which was our only interaction with the contributors. Then we sorted and validated the submissions. I also wrote more questions, especially for the end of the Dark Tower section, and to beef up other chapters that were under-represented.
After that, we tag-team edited. At first, we each worked on different chapters. Later we passed the total document back and forth for editing. The biggest boost I got was when Brian suggested we get Glenn Chadbourne to do some chapter illustrations, an idea that evolved into having Glenn do illustrations as trivia questions. For me, that elevated this book from a simple trivia collection into something special and unique. We have over 50 of his wonderfully intricate works of art in this book.
You have many published short stories and a book of nonfiction under your belt. Have you started work on a full-length novel and if so, what large differences have you noticed in the writing process?
A couple of years before I wrote The Road to the Dark Tower, I finished a novel that made the rounds of agents but didn’t attract much interest. Since I finished Road, I’ve written the first draft of another. Having read my short fiction, my agent actively encouraged me to work on a novel. He read the first draft and liked it a lot. I’m now working on revisions based on his feedback.
For me, writing a novel is a very linear process. With Road, I jumped all over the place, doing a bit here, a bit there, which was possible because the book was outlined. I knew what each chapter would discuss and the overall structure of the book. When writing novels, I sometimes know roughly where I’m headed, but not exactly how I’m going to get there, so I’m constrained to take it one step of a time toward the final destination.
The biggest difference between writing short stories and novels is obvious: length. I can write an entire short story in a day or two, revise it for a couple of weeks and it’s more or less done. The entire story is in my mind all at once, which makes revising much easier. I can make a complete editing pass through a story in a single sitting. With a novel, there’s a lot more to keep track of, and the editing process is much more laborious. It can take a couple of weeks to make one pass, and the better part of another week to key my edits into the document. Then I have to go back and do it all again. It’s intense work.
What current projects do you have going on and what can Bev Vincent fans be on the look out for next?
The next thing out will be the trivia book. After that? I have a proposal in with NAL for the follow-up nonfiction book, waiting to hear if they’re interested in the subject. I also have another novel proposal with an editor to see if it captures her attention. That’s for a planned paperback series with different authors writing each book. There’s the current novel, of course, and I have a fragment of another novel that I was working on before Road came along that I would like to go back and revisit. More stories, of course, more CD columns and interviews. A Dark Tower essay in “Studies in Modern Horror 5” that will also appear in French in Le Livre des Livres de Stephen King. Whatever I can manage to fit into my spare time!