Warmed and Bound: A Velvet Anthology (45 page)

ROBB: Is there anything else before we start wrapping this up that we forgot to talk about that you'd like to talk about or mention? 

STEPHEN: Let me think. Slashers, we haven't talked about Slashers, have we? That's one of my favorite things to talk about. I live for Slashers. My dream, my most pure dream is to write a Slasher and see it up on the big screen, you know, I'd love love love to do that, it's my favorite genre of anything, by far. 

LIVIUS: I've always been very partial to Layman's style for the Slasher book. I don't know how well they translate to the big screen; I don't think anyone's tried to do them. Or, like, I like to refer to it as 'horror porn' for the gratuitous violence. 

STEPHEN: I mean, porn is not content, it's the shape of a story, a series of set-pieces strung together by the flimsiest narrative, you know, that's how a Slasher can work as well, these set-piece killings strung together by "Oh, we're at camp, we're at a cornfield," that stuff. But the trick is doing that stuff in a way in which the audience both sees through it and willingly goes there. That's the magic of Slashers, I think, it's like these remakes of Slashers, I'm not against them, I love
Sorority Row
,
My Bloody Valentine
. I think one of the drawbacks of these remakes is they're upping the production value so much that we're losing seeing a boom mic or the graininess of the development, and in loosing that, used to when you'd see that, when you'd rent your VHS and it's been through VCRs for twenty years and it's all these warped places and everything and you'd have to lean so far forward out of your couch and out of your chair and into the movie in order to believe any of it, in order to suspend your disbelief that you then become vulnerable to whatever that movie's trying to scare you with, but with production values really, really slick and glossy, you can just lean back and you don't have to be scared anymore because you're not investing yourself, you're not trying to believe, and I think trying to believe is one of the fundamental dynamics of how horror fiction, horror movies work. You've got to kick start that urge, not that urge, that need in the audience and the reader to want to be in the story even though they know bad stuff is going to happen. 

LIVIUS; Again, and only because it's come up in this series of interviews no less than four times and we're talking about horror movies,
Paranormal Activity
: thumbs up or thumbs down? 

STEPHEN: Thumbs up for the first one, and I'm excited for the third one, as well, I've got an article on Popmatters, The Pinocchio Effect I think it's called, where I go in to how
Paranormal Activity
works and what it does and it's dynamics and all that, but for me it was a very powerful movie. I've very glad Spielberg got them to tack that ending on; too, it was kind of scary for me. Still, when I wake up at two or four in the morning and it's dark in my bedroom,
Paranormal Activity
is the movie I think of, and then I step off the bed and I think of Emily Rose laying there, and it's just terrible and I never get to sleep.

 Interview Transcript:

 
Pela Via

Hosts
Robb Olson
and
Livius Nedin

Transcript of a live interview produced 7/22/2011 by
Booked Podcast
 

Audio available at
bookedpodcast.com

LIVIUS: Pela, thanks for taking time out of what must be a very busy schedule this week to talk to us. 

PELA VIA: Yeah, no problem, it’s my pleasure. 

ROBB: How about we kick it off with you telling us a little bit about how you came to be involved with The Velvet. 

PELA: I picked up writing just really out of nowhere, a few years ago, and it didn’t take long to figure out that I was doing something that I wasn’t finding in the stuff that my friends were reading, and so I wanted to find something that I could identify with, find what other authors were doing that I liked. And anyway, it just really didn’t take very long and I ended up finding
Kiss Me, Judas
through Amazon. So I read that, just dove right in. In fact I think I was on The Velvet before I got the copy in the mail. And something about the personality of everybody. It’s kind of weird, because I was a little bit snobby about message boards or online communities; it’s not like I was looking to join up with a whole bunch of writer friends. I just couldn’t stay away. Once I got there and I started talking to people, I was just kind of finished, hooked, and immediately read all the other authors, and made friends with all the guys and girls there, so that’s pretty much it. 

LIVIUS: Very cool. Can you tell us a little bit about how
Warmed and Bound
came together? 

PELA: Well, the weird thing is that even though I’ve been around The Velvet for a couple years, I am still kind of considered a newbie. These people have been there a while, and so I know that the anthology idea was around for a long time, and I think they all had talked about just putting something together from the stories that were already published on the internet, and just kind of a best-of. And I got the feeling that it was supposed to be more of like “for us, by us” kind of thing, just self-published, just to see everybody’s work bound and together was just kind of the idea. 

A year ago, Richard Thomas started talking about it, again—he’s just so ridiculously ambitious, so this is something that he wanted to start again and I kind of happened to be there like the hour that he posted something about “Hey, we should do this, again” or “we should start talking about this again,” and I popped up and said “Yeah yeah yeah—let me in,” and I think he asked, “You want to maybe edit it, or get it started?” “Yeah, yeah, of course I do.” So, I just ran with it, and I don’t think a lot of people knew I was working on it for a really long time. I was kind of just collecting ideas and talking to people I knew that had little presses, but I was really scared to pull the trigger, quite honestly. I wasn’t all that confident in my abilities to do very much. So right around the time that Logan decided to do that big fundraiser last November or December, someone led him to me, when he wanted to know who was working on the anthology. So, with him trying to combine all the different things that we had going on, and amp everything up, and really just improve The Velvet in multiple ways — with that, we just started to work together on it, and I put out a call for submissions, and he kind of held my hand with certain things. And from that point on it evolved and snowballed and grew into this monster thing that nobody was predicting. 

LIVIUS: Can you tell us how much actual story editing went into the project? 

PELA: Quite a lot, actually. A few stories that came in, I didn’t really touch apart from copyediting. But for a lot of the others, some were great, some were polished, finished, perfect stories, and some were not quite ready, and they didn’t do what they were supposed to do, they didn’t show off what the author can do. And so if I felt like I knew what the author is capable of, and it wasn’t in the story, then I wasn’t okay with it. So, I spent really a weird amount of time on story edits and working with people, and I’m surprised I don’t have more enemies at this point. [laughs] All of the emails I sent back and forth with people just bothering them about their stories. So, yeah, a lot of time went into this book for sure. 

LIVIUS: I just find the actual story editing process kind of fascinating as somebody who has dabbled a little bit in writing and never had anyone other than Robb really look and make some corrections and stuff. I always wonder how much a story can be changed by a second set of eyes and shifting a couple things around and just a few suggestions, if it can actually take a story that’s a “meh” decent story and make it into something good, so that’s one of the questions I was kind of curious about. 

PELA: I think so. There were some stories that got a whole lot of work done to them, and it doesn’t mean that the authors weren’t talented or skilled, or whatever, just that particular story was maybe autobiographical or something and they couldn’t remove themselves far enough to be able to see how things might come across from the reader’s perspective, or something. 

ROBB: As Livius mentioned when we did the Chris Deal interview, he felt like Chris’s story was pretty much a perfect choice to end the book. What was the process really for deciding the order of the stories, how they went? 

PELA: There was a natural flow to it, once I started to pair up things that go together, and to find where the real meat of the whole collection is. I don’t know, I think it came together kind of naturally once I decided that it needed to feel a little bit like a novel, in that it needed to have a climax, and a setup and a resolution. So, I didn’t plan it this way, but I think the middle, or the climax of the book, is Clevenger’s story because it embodies a lot of what the whole book ended up being about, which has a lot to do with humility. So from there I just kind of built the end and the beginning, and it came together well, I think. 

ROBB: This is just kind of random, but I thought of it when you were talking about the substance of the stories and stuff like that. I noticed, and this won’t spoil anything, but, I haven’t read all of the stories, but a couple of them I noticed either use of the word
velvet
or a
warmed and bound
kind of feel to it. It was enough to make me think: was this something that was encouraged, or maybe was it happening so much it was discouraged, or was it just kind of incidental in some of the stories? 

PELA: Yeah, a couple people did that and I saw it, and it would make me smile. It wasn’t so frequent that I was bothered by it at all. They were neat little Easter eggs, and there were a few other things, the more you know The Velvet the more you will catch things here and there, tributes to other books or whatever. So it’s just kind of a neat thing. We have a lot of affection happening within The Velvet.

ROBB: Great. 

LIVIUS: Will Christopher Baer. For people who are familiar with The Velvet, they probably know a little more about this than some of our other listeners, and obviously he’s come up frequently as one of the “big three” that the web site was kind of based around. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about why Mr. Baer is not present in the anthology? 

PELA: Sure. Publicly there is not an answer right now for where he is or why he has chosen to kind of back off and do his own thing. And so, given that we’re all trying to be respectful of each other, we definitely want to respect that and give him his space. We don’t want to be demanding readers or fans or whatever, so we just kind of let it go. People do their own thing, and that’s totally fine. 

LIVIUS: I actually had a friend of mine ask me as we were talking about this, and I had mentioned to him that even the title comes from basically a Baer line, and he said, “Well where is the guy?” And I said, “Eh, he’s really not around a whole lot.” So as we were talking about it, we thought, you know, there are people who don’t know that, and it’s kind of an obvious question. 

PELA: It definitely is, and that’s totally fine to ask, and we wish that he was around. Either way, we hope that he’s doing well and enjoying his family and his life and whatever he’s up to, and that’s fine. He’s done plenty for the literary world, so we’re happy. 

ROBB: Well now if you get that question again, you can just point them to this, you don’t have to go over it again. You can just give them a link and say, “We’re done.” 

LIVIUS: Back to kind of the editing portion of
Warmed and Bound
, what was the biggest challenge you were faced with as an editor? 

PELA: That’s tough. I think just trying to pull everything together. You know, stick with a deadline and keep everyone happy and not piss people off. People are really into what we do, and we’re all close and excited and passionate about this, so one wrong step and I could piss off a lot of people in a big way. If I turned it into something weird, or whatever . . . there’s that pressure to keep everyone’s interests at heart. I think that’s probably it. It’s always difficult working with a lot of people. It’s one thing to work with 40 people, and it’s whole other thing to work with two people on a close level. I mean, that can be a nightmare, too, sometimes, if you aren’t seeing each other’s perspective, that can be really hard as well. 

ROBB: Okay. To kind of get off of the editing topic, or to get away from it, is the question of you getting away from editing. We noticed that you mentioned in your blog that you’re stepping away from editing and it sounds like you’re going back to focusing more on writing. Is that the reason you decided to step away from editing, to focus on writing? Or is there something else? 

PELA: Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Editing is really tempting for me, especially if there’s a future with Velvet Press and there’s more things to put out and more of the same experience over and over. I don’t know how I would turn that away, honestly. It’s been so much fun, and so rewarding for me. But, when I’m editing day to day, I’m not really writing. I just don’t know how to do both. So, when I’m not writing, I’m kind of back to square one, where I’m not as happy, I just don’t do as well. So, yeah, that’s what that was. Just trying to get myself back to basics. 

LIVIUS: When we had Anthony Neil Smith on the show awhile back, we had a conversation about noir, and he compared it to heavy metal music. He said something to the effect of, even though the bands sing about women, it’s written by men, for men. Which I thought was a really clever way for him to put it. Even though you’re the editor, you’re one of only three female authors in the anthology. How much truth do you think there is in that statement: is noir just really a boy’s club? 

PELA: Yeah . . . well, I can’t speak for all of noir, but within The Velvet, it’s all there as well. When I put out the call for submissions for this book, I didn’t get a single submission from a woman. Not a one. So I was putting the book together, and I was just going to have to be the only girl, and deal with that. Not that I minded, to tell you the truth; it’s kind of fun. And then, I know you guys talked to Amanda, and we’re all in Write Club, and this is well after the submission deadline had passed, and we were talking about it and she was just discovering The Velvet—I think so, I think that’s accurate—and kind of lamenting that fact that the timing was poor. So I got her to send me something, and same thing for Gayle Towell, got her to send me something, and was just lucky on my part that they were both good, because I wanted to accept them. I think at first, actually, I said, “No, we’re too full. I want to, but I can’t,” and then I went back like a week later and said screw it, I’m doing it, I’m kind of just going to do whatever I want to do here to make this good. I think we were at, like, 22 contributors, and I was stressing like crazy thinking,
This is too many contributors. It’s going to be way too long. What am I going to do?
and then I just kind of hit that point where I said screw it, and then I blinked and we were at 38 contributors. I don’t quite know what happened. 

LIVIUS: Hey, Robb? Does that sound at all familiar to you? 

ROBB: Sounds a lot like when we were planning a collection of interviews, as a matter of fact. So when we were talking to Amanda we brought up a similar question and everything, and the encouraging thing, or the nice thing she said about the community was that in general, gender was basically a non-issue, that it was never something that came into consideration. You were judged almost entirely on the merit of your writing and I guess character in general. Is that how you feel, too? 

PELA: Yeah, I do. I mean, I think as a woman, you have to just be good, and I mean… I realized as I was saying that I was kind of making myself sound like I’m good, which isn’t really what I mean—I have done a very limited amount of stories, so, I can
pretend
like I’m good for a while. But I think, as a guy, they automatically accept you unless you’re terrible. And even then, they’re friendly with you, it’s just that in order to get the respect, that’s the only difference, I’d say. For a girl, you have to prove yourself, that you can do it, and for a boy, you have to prove that you’re not a complete hack, and then you’re fine, you’re in.