BooksChatter: ✉ Ten Random Things You Don't Know About Me

Today Bram Stoker Award Winning author Tim Waggoner takes over our blog to tell us about Ten Random Things You Don't Know About Him.

His latest novel, They Kill (11 July 2019, Flame Tree Press, 240 pages), a Horror, will be out on Kindle on 25 July 2019.

"Oh boy!! This was one wicked ride from start to finish. [...]
This book was a direct hit to my senses, unexpected and bold, with multitude of gross indecent behavior, inner lust, and extreme violence. The author certainly did not shy away, even when parts of me did. But the rest of me stopped analyzing and just sat motionless on this wild ride. Did I want to get off? Nopes, not once." ~ Shalini's Books and Reviews

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Ten Random Things You Don't Know About Me

by Tim Waggoner

When I was in sixth grade, I wanted to be a comic book artist, and I started writing primarily so I’d have stories to illustrate. I created a comic called The Bionic Team, which featured myself and my friends as cyborg superheroes, and I’d get angry when my friends would tell me my art stunk but the stories were great. I didn’t want to be a writer, damn it!

The cover for an issue of The Bionic Team.

I eventually gave up on the idea of being an artist when I realized I could communicate so much more using words than I could with pictures – and I could do it faster!
I was nine when I truly became aware of death. I had a double whammy that year: My uncle, who was like a second father to me, died unexpectedly of a heart attack, and I almost drowned in a lake while on vacation with my parents.

For the next two years, I suffered an existential depression. I wondered what the point of life was when Time stole our happy moments the instant we experienced them, when nothing was permanent and everything – including the universe itself – would ultimately cease to exist. Heavy concepts for a kid to grapple with!

I eventually came out of that depression and made an uneasy peace with Time and Death. But the idea that life – including the universe – is fragile and impermanent has become a cornerstone theme of my horror fiction.
I walk around the house singing silly made-up songs, and most of the time I’m not aware that my family is listening and laughing at me. I’ll make up songs about anything – the laundry, the dishes, mowing the yard . . . Thank god I don’t do this in public. It’s embarrassing enough that I do it at home!
We have two dachshunds – Lucy and Bentley – and I “translate” for them, saying what I think they would say if they could speak. For example: “Lucy says, ‘Give me belly scratches, human! Serve me now!’”

Lucy Bentley helping with decorating.
My first published novel was an erotic comedic mystery called Dying for It. It came out in 2001 from a short-lived publisher called Foggy Windows. The publisher’s focus was on producing books of erotica featuring married couples, the idea being that married couples would read and enjoy the books together.

Russell Davis, a friend I’d once collaborated with on a short story, was the editor at Foggy Windows, and he asked me to pitch him some book ideas. I’d never thought about writing erotica, but I came up with an idea featuring a husband and wife PI team who couldn’t keep their hands off each other while working – which was started to have a negative impact on their business.

I couldn’t take the idea seriously, so I wrote the book as a comedy. It was a fun novel to write, and you can still find used copies out in the world.
I dislike playing games of any sort. Card games, board games, video games . . . I find them all incredibly boring. They’re nothing but a set of made-up rules for purposeless activities that produce no real, meaningful result. There’s no room for individual imagination or creativity.

I did enjoy role-playing games when I was younger, but those eventually got dull for me too, since you’re always playing in a setting someone else created.
I started off as an acting major in college. In high school, I tried every creative activity there was: writing, art, music, theater . . . and eventually I decided to focus on acting. But on the first day of acting class, the professor told us that the only reason anyone should become an actor is because they absolutely had to. The life of an average actor is so difficult that the only way someone can survive it is if they were 100 percent dedicated to it.

I realized I didn’t feel that way about acting, so I changed my major to theater education. That degree focused on three fields: theater, English (as a secondary teaching field), and education – three things I was interested in. I figured at the end of four years I’d figure out which of the three I wanted to dedicate my life to. And I was right!

Except I focused on both English and education. For the last thirty years I’ve taught college writing classes, including creative writing, alongside writing and publishing my own work.

Representing at College Career Night, 2012.
I’m a cancer survivor. When I was thirty-one – shortly after the birth of my first daughter – I was diagnosed with testicular cancer.

In general, testicular cancer is very treatable, but I was terrified that I would die and not get to see my little girl grow up. I underwent surgery, and the cancer was removed. Five years later, my second daughter was born.

It’s been twenty-four years since my cancer diagnosis, and I’ve got to see both of my daughters reach adulthood. Screw you, Death!
People who read my horror often think I was influenced by writers like Clive Barker or Edward Lee. But the truth is that my two biggest influences were Stephen King and fantasy author Piers Anthony, both of whom I started reading in my early teens.

From Stephen King I learned characterization, atmospheric setting, and creating suspense, and from Piers Anthony I learned the joy of letting your imagination run wild to create weird, intricate, fun fantasy worlds. Put those two writers in a blender, add in my existential crisis when I was a kid, and you get Tim Waggoner-style horror.
I’ve been writing seriously for thirty years or more, and even after all that time, I’m still surprised by how many people think horror writers have to be sick, twisted individuals to write what we write.

Once, a reader emailed me to say he had a bet with his wife. She said horror writers write from imagination, but the reader said he believed horror writers had to write from experience. I wrote back and said if I did the things the characters in my books do, I’d be insane, imprisoned, or both!

A few years after that, a woman in Florida ran across my novel Pandora Drive. After reading it, she sent a letter to the police department in Dayton, Ohio (where the college I teach at is located). She was concerned that someone who could write a horror novel like Pandora Drive shouldn’t be working with the public, and she urged the police to investigate me to make certain I wasn’t a serial killer or some kind of cultist.

I think people want to believe that horror writers are crazed lunatics, at least a little. The idea makes us seem creepy-cool, I suppose. I hate to disappoint people, but I’m just as normal as everyone else. To quote Norman Bates’ mother at the end of Psycho, “I wouldn’t hurt a fly.”