Back when Fear Zone first launched, one of our first author reading videos was Nicholas Kaufmann reading an excerpt from his Bram Stoker nominated novelette General Slocum's Gold, which we selected as our Best Short Fiction for that year (although Nick pointed out it wasn't all that short). For one year, this New York based author wrote "The State of the Genre", and he currently writes a similar column, "Dead Air," for The Internet Review of Science Fiction. This is a big year for Kaufmann: Chizine sold out the limited edition of his new novella, Chasing the Dragon, which will be published in December, and November sees his first published mass market novel, Hunt at World's End, one volume in a new series of pulp adventures written by different authors under the pseudonym of "Gabriel Hunt," adventurer extraordinaire. Visit his website for more information and future announcements.


Have you lived in Brooklyn all your life?


No, but I've lived here for about half of it. I was born in Manhattan, spent the years between ages 3 and 11 in Westport, Connecticut, and then moved back to Manhattan. After I graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, I moved to Brooklyn and shared an apartment with some of my friends. At the time, Brooklyn was a much cheaper place to rent an apartment than Manhattan was. You got a lot more space for your dollar. I can't say that's true anymore; the rents have become astronomical. Anyway, it was 1991 when I shared that first apartment, and I've been in Brooklyn ever since. In the same neighborhood, no less! I've seen a lot of changes, a lot of gentrification and the rent increases that go hand-in-hand with it. Hopefully, I won't be priced out of my neighborhood, my roots have grown deep here, but with the way things are going it's not hard to imagine that at some point the rents will become way too high for me to stick around.


When did you start writing seriously? Or when did you start taking your writing seriously?


I've been writing for as long as I can remember. I started writing stories back in fourth or fifth grade, I think, and like most boys that age who write stories, mine usually involved aliens, dinosaurs and monsters. I remember writing a story--this was in fifth grade, I think--when I was supposed to be paying attention in class, something about a boy who wanders into a crypt and a monster comes out of the sarcophagus and frightens him, if I recall. The teacher caught me, and in what must have been an attempt to shame me out of such delinquent behavior, she read the story out loud to the whole class. It kind of backfired on her, though, because my fellow students were absolutely enthralled. I suppose that was the moment I realized I was on the right path.

I didn't take writing seriously until many, many years after that, of course. It was 2000 when I fully committed to being a writer by eliminating all the other safety nets in my life that had previously prevented me from doing so, including a full-time job. I made my first short story sale almost immediately and thought, "This is going to be a snap." Boy was I wrong! Nine years and hundreds of rejections later, I feel like I'm still just getting my feet under me, still learning, growing and striving to become a better writer.


Your out of print collection Walk in Shadows features two of my favorite short stories of yours, "The Jew of Prague" and "Go." As both a reader and a writer, are you as attracted to short stories as you are to novels?


Thank you! I consider "The Jew of Prague" and "Go" to be two of my best stories. I do enjoy short stories from time to time, but when it comes to reading fiction I tend to gravitate toward novels more often than not. As a writer, though, I used the short form to hone my craft before feeling ready to move on to longer works. It's funny, when I was fourteen I had no problem cranking out novels. Sure, they were awful, but the length and breadth of novel-length projects didn't seem daunting at all--mostly because I didn't know what I was doing, and didn't care. I was just having fun. Once I started taking writing seriously, suddenly I started caring, and that changed the dynamic. I wanted to write good novels but didn't feel I had it in me yet, because I knew I had quite a bit to learn, which I tried to do through focusing on short stories. Turns out that wasn't really a very good strategy. I know now that much of what I needed to learn is actually learned through experience, through trial and error. I firmly believe that every word you write makes you a better writer, even if that word eventually gets cut. If I had stuck with it and kept trying to write novels (as well as reinforcing my learning process by reading good novels) I probably would have become a novelist much faster.


Was your Bram Stoker award nominated novelette General Slocum's Gold the longest piece you had written up until that point?


Actually, it's not! Not counting those early "practice novels" that I wrote in my youth, there is an original novella in Walk In Shadows called "Voir Dire" that's a smidge longer than Slocum. But Slocum is a much better piece, in my opinion. "Voir Dire" went virtually unnoticed--and for good reason; writing a horror/legal thriller hybrid didn't really work out as well as I'd hoped--but Slocum racked up a bunch of great reviews, sold an unusually large number of copies for a chapbook, and as you mentioned, it garnered a Bram Stoker Award nomination, which was a real honor.


You recently announced your intention to take a year off from working so you could write full time. Approximately one year later, you're looking at your first published novel, Hunt at the World's End, which is a mass market paperback published by Dorchester this month, and the novella Chasing the Dragon, which will be published in a variety of formats from Chizine, starting with the sold out limited edition hardcover in December. Don't you love it when a plan comes together?


Ha! Well, technically the plan didn't come together quite the way I thought it would. When I left my job as the manager of a local video store in January of 2008 to be a fulltime writer, I had no idea the stock market, where most of my savings was held, was about to crash and we would enter the worst economic downturn since the 1930s. Talk about bad timing! As I'm sure you know, being a writer doesn't always pay the bills even in the best of times, so I had to scramble for some work again, and fortunately some came my way. Still, 2008 was an incredibly fertile year for me as a writer, and I consider myself lucky to see it come to fruition now.


For the Gabriel Hunt series, you and other authors created pulp adventures under the singular pen name of the title character. How specific were the parameters you were given to create your adventure, and what were the submission and editorial process like? Were you ever told that Gabriel would never behave in a manner which you had depicted?


I'm deeply honored that Gabriel Hunt, through his good friend Charles Ardai of Hard Case Crime, who's editing the series and also wrote one of the novels, chose me to be one of the authors to tell his story. The fact that Hunt at World's End, which just hit bookstore shelves on October 27th, is my first published novel makes me very grateful that they had such faith in me.

Charles drew up a series bible for the Gabriel Hunt novels, so the parameters were pretty specific from the start, which I found helpful as a writer. The other authors and I were made intimately aware of Gabriel's background, as well as that of his philanthropist brother Michael, his weird loner sister Lucy, and his mysteriously vanished parents, professors Ambrose and Cordelia Hunt. He gave us a bunch of supporting characters to play with too, if we wanted, as well as guidelines about what kind of person Gabriel is, where he lives, what his interests are, and especially what we can and cannot do to him, which makes sense. After all, if you're only writing one novel in a multibook series, you can't have Gabriel suddenly lose an arm in a sword fight, because then he would have to be one-armed for all the subsequent books. Plus, it's kind of hard for Gabriel to fight the bad guys with only one arm, since he's usually using the other to hold onto whatever gorgeous woman was unlucky enough to get caught up in his latest adventure with him.

So while the incidental parameters were set, the other authors and I got to pitch fully original ideas for our novels. Once Charles okayed my pitch for Hunt at World's End, I began writing it. The rough draft took me about two months, the revisions another couple of weeks, and then I sent it to Charles for his editorial input. Luckily, he never told me that Gabriel wouldn't act in any of the ways in which I depicted him, but we did wind up cutting one character from the novel because he was way too over the top. While I was sorry to see him go, he was definitely better suited for a fantasy or horror novel than an adventure novel, even one that's slightly tinged with the supernatural like the Gabriel Hunt books are. So I'll save that character for another project.

The series is truly Charles' brainchild, so he edited all the novels, including mine, on both a macro- and micro-level to make sure there was a consistent tone running through all of them, and that the recurring characters didn't act in contradictory ways. I have to say, it's probably not the most traditional of publishing experiences, but it was an absolute joy working with Charles Ardai. He's a lifelong Indiana Jones fan, so he's passionate about adventure stories, and that passion really came through in working with him. That kind of joy is contagious, and it definitely helped keep me motivated and having fun with it. I hope the Gabriel Hunt series is a huge hit so we can write even more novels after these first six come out. I'd return to the world of Gabriel Hunt in a heartbeat!


I roll my eyes when someone asks, "Where do you get your ideas from?" so I'll try to be more specific: do you recall the genesis and evolution of your concept for Chasing the Dragon?


Chasing the Dragon started out very different from the final version, conceptually. I remember I was in the shower, which is where I, like many other writers, do my best thinking, and because I like to listen to music in the shower I had a Trivium CD playing. A song of theirs called "Becoming the Dragon" came on, and as it played I imagined a fantasy story about a kingdom where the throne stands empty and anyone who kills the dragon that's terrorizing them would be made king. So someone manages to kill it, and is made king, and he becomes jaded and corrupt from power, and the more corrupt he becomes the more he starts to physically transform into a dragon. Finally, he becomes a full-fledged dragon that terrorizes the kingdom, and the next hero kills him and takes the throne, and the whole cycle starts over again, as it has for centuries. Not a bad idea, really, and I liked it as an allegory about how power corrupts politicians, but there was one problem: I'm not good at writing high fantasy. It's not something I enjoy reading anymore the way I did when I was in high school, and as a result it's not something I would enjoy writing either. What I seem to be better at is writing horror, suspense and dark fantasy stories that take place in a contemporary setting. And that's what Chasing the Dragon ultimately became.

I can't remember the full evolution of the fantasy idea into what the novella is today, but I do remember wanting to use both meanings of the title phrase, to combine heroin addiction with hunting down an actual dragon. All the mythology that's in the story, such as Georgia, the protagonist, being a descendant of St. George, who himself was a descendant of classic dragonslayers throughout world mythology like Siegfried and Thor and Marduk, came to me as I started to write and I think added a lovely extra layer of depth to the story. I also included a small nod to Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater for readers who enjoy catching those kinds of literary allusions.


Since your experiences with Dorchester and Chizine were so close together, I'd like you to compare them.


They were very, very different experiences. As I mentioned, Charles had a ton of editorial input with the novel, from fine-tuning my pitch to editing the finished manuscript so it would be consistent with the other five Gabriel Hunt novels. By contrast, Brett Savory of ChiZine Publications only had some mild line edits for the finished Dragon manuscript, with no major alterations. Also, I discovered that ChiZine Publications was much faster about getting my advance to me than Dorchester was, since they're a much smaller operation and don't have a backlogged Accounts Payable department. Ultimately, though, my experiences with both publishing houses were very positive ones. In fact, I bet Charles and Brett would get along great if they ever met!


You served as a Trustee for the HWA, but you've recently left the organization. Why leave when you have two such ambitious projects being published within a month of each other... or is that reason enough?


I think the HWA took me as far as they could in my career, and I'll always be grateful to them for that, but it was time to move on. There were a number of other factors involved, including financial ones, even though their annual dues are quite reasonable, but needing to move on was the major one. Other than that, after being a member for some 13 years, I started to feel like I didn't fit in there anymore, that I was perceived more as an audience than a colleague. The great majority of communication I received from the membership centered around trying to get me to buy their work, or consider their work for the Bram Stoker Awards, and after a while it left a bad taste. I guess I just don't like to be marketed to. But that's just a side effect of being in any writers organization anyway. I'm sure the same happens in the RWA, SFWA and all the other groups out there. I met a lot of great people through the HWA, though, and even without being a member anymore I hope to stay in touch with them.


You keep a regular Live Journal, but have steadfastly avoided message boards. Tell the folks at home your reason for this.



It didn't take me long to realize that horror message boards weren't for me. Personally, I find there's a very low signal to noise ratio at those sites. I especially don't like the elitist attitude I often find on message boards that says horror can only be presented in a one particular way--that is, with a straight forward, meat-and-potatoes writing style--and that any author who uses the occasional four-syllable word or tries to write something that's more than the sum of its parts is somehow "pretentious" or writing something that isn't "real" horror, whatever that means. I also find these message boards to be something of a boys' club, with female authors generally relegated to the roles of exotic novelties (one message board post I saw recently was from a reader who expressed genuine surprise that a horror novel he'd read by a female author was good!) or unworthy usurpers who slept their way to a publication deal.

Between the people who like to mouth off with knee-jerk reactions on topics they know nothing about, and then shout down those who do know what they're talking about when they try to set the record straight, and the people who seem to worship mediocrity in the name of blind genre allegiance, it just wasn't an atmosphere I was comfortable in. I don't mean to paint everyone with the same brush, obviously. There are some friendly, intelligent, literate people to found on message boards too, it's just that they often get browbeaten into holding their tongues or leave altogether, as I did, when they realize just how hostile an environment those places can be to anyone who doesn't toe the party line.

I suppose I'm more comfortable with my blog on LiveJournal (http://nick-kaufmann.livejournal.com/)because I can control the conversation. I can talk about whatever I want to talk about without worrying about someone else hijacking the conversation to accuse me of trying to kill the horror genre because I dared to criticize it, which is another odious attitude that I ran afoul of on message boards. Also, with LiveJournal I can read the blogs of other people I find interesting or talented or smart or funny without having to wade through post after post of headache-inducing nonsense like on message boards. It's an environment I enjoy a lot more.


What is the next fiction you're writing - a short story, novella, or novel?


I'm working on a novel right now, the first in a planned series. It's an urban fantasy, though of course it's got a healthy dose of horror too. I'm still me, after all. The tentative title is Not Dead Yet. We'll see if that sticks. It's about a man with two very interesting problems: one, he's an amnesiac with no memory beyond the past year, and two, he can't die. Every time he dies, he comes back to life again fully healed. The catch with his particular brand of immortality, though, is that every time he comes back to life, someone else dies in his place, so he still needs to be extremely careful and not simply put himself in the way of a bullet like Superman. The novel is still in the early stages, but I'm already having a lot of fun with it. Hopefully when it's published the readers will too.