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An Interview with N.A. Williams

 

The following interview is courtesy of Smashwords.com, and is from January 2014, just prior to the release of The God Cure. Be sure to check out Furious Deep's work on the Smashwords retail site.

 

 

When did you first start writing?

 

I just started writing fiction recently. I have always loved to create things, and that love has progressed into writing. I found myself with this persistent idea for a story, I could see it in my mind so clearly, but it just kept evolving into something bigger and more complex as time went by. Eventually, the story became so intricate that no other medium would suffice. I couldn't draw it, paint it, sculpt it, mold it, cast it, or even film it. Every medium I had ever tried was full of limitations, and demanded exorbitant amounts of resources. It had to be written. It was the only way to make it real.

 

What's the story behind your latest book?

 

I had this idea for a story that I had been kicking around in my head for several years. I had been scribbling notes in an old spiral bound notebook next to my bed for years. I tend to think a lot instead of sleeping, and sometime the only way to get some rest was to get the ideas down on paper so I could put them out of my mind. So, I had this notebook laying around for years, and I always thought of this story as more of a movie. I had story boarded the scenes in my head, but I knew I had no way to make a film. I just left it all locked away in the bedside table. It would have ended there, were it not for a scary turn of events.

I had been sick for a couple of weeks with a bad cold. I was home alone with my five year old daughter trying my best to sleep it off and keep her entertained. She was hanging out in the living room watching Adventure Time when I became violently ill. I stumbled into the bathroom and passed out on the floor. I remembered hearing my daughter watching her cartoons when I came to, and I was praying that she would stay in the living room and not find me on the floor. I kind of went into shock, drenched in sweat, cramping and retching, and I thought I might be having a heart attack. I eventually managed to crawl over to a phone and call a family member to take me to the hospital and watch after my daughter.

My wife met me there, and later told me that I was confused and barely conscious. I was dehydrated, and the ER doc said I had pneumonia. They admitted me to the hospital, gave me four liters of IV fluids and some IV antibiotics. I was feeling back to my normal self by the next day when the hospitalist came to visit me in my room. He told me that the CT scan of my chest that was done in the ER showed two small tumors in my lungs, and one larger one in my thyroid. The radiologist report said that they were uncalcified, and the hospitalist was concerned that they were cancerous. He said that thyroid cancer rarely spreads, but it was possible that the larger tumor in my thyroid had metastasized to my lungs. My daughter and my wife were in the room when he told me this, and it felt like a death sentence.

I went home that evening terrified. My stomach was in knots, and I spent most of the evening in the bathroom. When I wasn't in the bathroom I was digging through paperwork trying to find out what kind of life insurance coverage I had. I was trying to make sure my family would have something if I died. All I could think about was the hospital bills for the treatments and surgeries draining them of everything, and when it was over all they would have was mountain of debt to remember me by. Even worse, I couldn't imagine not getting to see my daughter grow up. It was one of the scariest times of my life.

When the initial shock passed, I thought more about what I would be leaving behind, and for some reason I thought about that notebook in the bedside table. I had already started on an outline and an intro, and I decided that if I was going to be checking out early, I was at least going to get this story out.

I started writing frantically. Everyday that I was off work, I would drop my daughter off at school and then come straight home and start writing. I wrote from 8 AM until 2 PM, then I picked my daughter up, came home, and wrote some more. It took me a little over two months of writing non-stop to hammer out the rough draft. That may not seem like a long time, but the story had been growing in my head for years, and with the unknown looming over me, it felt tortuously long.

In truth, what I was working on wasn't really a manuscript... It was an act of desperation.

Not too long after the rough draft was finished, I started having my first round of follow up appointments with the endocrinologist and pulmonologist. A needle biopsy was done on my thyroid, and the result came back negative. The tumor was thankfully benign. The pulmonary doctor reviewed my CT results with my family in his office. He said that he believed the nodules in my lungs were histoplasmids that are fairly common in my part of country. The only way to be 100% positive would be to have another CT scan done in a year, and then another a year after that. However, he assured us that my risks of having lung cancer were extremely low, and he was fairly certain I would be fine.

It was like getting a reprieve from the governor in the 11th hour.

The whole ordeal was really scary, but I guess everything happens for a reason. It caused everyone in my family to re-evaluate our lives and bring our focus back to what is really important. We found new priorities in life, and one of mine ended up being to get this book published.

 

What motivated you to become an indie author?

 

Well, as mentioned the motivation to write was a little bit life or death, but the motivation to be independent took some research. I think it was an interview that I read with Hugh Howey that put me over the edge. He talked about the benefits of owning your work and just getting it out there. Strip the DRM and let the chips fall where they may.

 

When you're not writing, how do you spend your time?

 

I am a medical professional in my real life, and I work in a busy emergency room. Although my writing is purely fiction, there is sometimes a grain of truth in everything. I have seen a lot of really sad and disturbing things in emergency medicine, and it would be a lie to say that those things don't affect me or find their way into my writing. I see people die almost everyday. It can be hard, and it can be very rewarding work at the same time. My writing has become a sort of therapy for dealing with that. Life is often stranger and more graphic than fiction.

 

What is your writing process?

 

Years ago, I had a friend who had started writing a book. He gave me the first few chapters to read, and I remember telling him how amazed I was that he was actually doing it. He was actually committed to his work, and he was writing a novel. It seemed like something insurmountable to me. It was something that was just too big to undertake. I told him about my ideas for stories, and that it just seemed like a pipe dream. He quoted another writer to me, and it is something that I will never forget:

"It's black on white. That's all there is to it."

Black ink on a white page. Black pixels on a white screen. That's all.

Those where the first thoughts I had when I sat down to write this novel. No excuses, just sit down, shut up, and put black on white.

 

Do you remember the first story you ever read, and the impact it had on you?

 

I remember the first book with out pictures that I had ever read on my own when I was a kid. It was called, "The Cat Who Wished to be a Man" by Lloyd Alexander. I never really liked to read until I read that book. I remember being stuck at my grandma's after school one day, and all I had was that book to stave off the boredom. I had grabbed it from the library at school during library time, and I had only picked it because I liked cats. I ended up reading it as a last resort while languishing in my grandpa's overstuffed recliner. I don't know exactly when it happened, but I realized that as I was reading I stopped seeing the words on the page and instead was seeing pictures in my head. I was stunned! I thought maybe the book was somehow magical. Once I had broken the trance, I was worried that it wouldn't happen again. I started reading again, and found that I could lose myself over and over again. It was the closest to enlightenment I have ever come. I still think it is magic, and I still have a copy of that book to this day.

 

How do you approach cover design?

 

Practically. I have read many people's opinions that you have to make your cover clear enough that people can make out everything important even if it is shrunk down into a tiny thumbnail image. I think this is sound advice.

 

What is your e-reading device of choice?

 

I like the Kobo, and I like Nook Simple Touch Glowlight. I prefer an e-reader that is a dedicated device with a simple black and white e-ink display. Everything else is a distraction.

 

Where did you grow up, and how did this influence your writing?

 

The town I grew up in is unapologetically weird, and it has a prominent roll in my work. I won't tell you where it is, but anyone who is interested could easily figure it out from the clues and legends in my writing.

 

Published 2014-01-30.

A Post-Apocalyptic Sign of the Times:

I did a special guest feature on Micah Akerman's blog about the popular appeal of post-apocalyptic fiction. Micah is the author of the soon to be released horror novel Wormwood. You can check out the post (and the rest of Micah's site) here:

 

www.micahackerman.weebly.com/blog.html

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