Interview w/ author Thom Brannan, by Lindsey Goddard

Hi, Thom. Thanks for joining us.

Howdy hey, thank you for having me! It’s a joy to be on any website with “weird” in the title!

How long have you been writing?

I’ve been at it seriously since 2008, with a big old vacation in the middle there, from about 2015 until late last year. Things in my life went to H-E-double-hockey-sticks and for a long while, I just could not be assed to put pen to paper.

Also, every time I answer this, I have to give thanks to my 12th-grade English and Language Arts teacher, for awakening this in me. Mrs. I.V. Gonzalez has passed on to the next phase of things, but her influence has continued. (There’s a big gap between then and when I started writing, but that’s just life.)

I enjoyed your short story “Shadow Copy” in the anthology, The Asylum of Terror.  It was a nail-biter, like watching a trainwreck in slow motion and being helpless to prevent it… and I mean that as a compliment. What inspired that story?

No kidding? Thank you! I’m really bad about reading anthologies I’m in. I used to devour them, and then, you know, there were always so many better stories, so it became kind of intimidating, so I stopped. Isn’t that silly?

The phone in the story there, the Tether, was a creation of David Jacob Knight, (from the novel The Phone Company) and they have given me permission to write about apps which may or may not be available in the app store. As for the story itself, I have been watching my wife play The Sims for over a decade now, and it occurred to me, wouldn’t it be nightmarish if you created somebody in there as an homage or tribute and it took on a life of its own? And the name is, in IT terms, a file which has been deleted but still shows on the file table, sort of. All that together made the thing you read.

Thank you again. Now I have to read that anthology, don’t I? Ha!

Please tell me about a novel you’ve written and why people should read it!

Oh, jeez. Well, since it’s the Weird Wide Web, the best answer for that is World of Trouble: Tribulation of Dax. It’s a post-post-zombie apocalyptic adventure, meaning that Z-Day has come and gone and things are back to… not exactly normal, but we’re well on our way to a cyberpunk dystopia. Corporations are too powerful, there are giant blacked-out spaces on the map where you shouldn’t go (there are still zombies there) and all kinds of fuckery abounds. In the story, I’ve got some survival horror, some crime adventure, a pirate-themed street gang, a little bit of the supernatural, and zombie evolution. It’s my homage to Land of the Dead, to all the Parker novels by Richard Stark, to the movie version of The Running Man, as well as the Universal Monsters, though I’m the only one who knows that.

(There are sequels in the works, and those will or should clear up what I mean here.)

Who were your writing influences?

My biggest influences are H.P. Lovecraft and Robert B. Parker. HPL, you know, does not really hold the reader’s hand and is dependent on them to create their own fear, and I’ve taken that and run with it. I trust my reader, and I know they’ll fill in the blanks in all the best ways.

Robert B. Parker, he wrote a series of novels about a Boston P.I., Spenser, and his use of language really shaped how I work. He’s very economical, able to get things across in a way which requires very few words. Of course, I can only strive for his efficiency, but I’m working on it, I’m working on it.

Also, big big shout out to D.L. Snell, my writing partner on several novels. He plots and plans and thinks about things in a much deeper way than I would have ever considered, and I think being exposed to his method of putting together a story has made me a better writer.

When I said I was starting a podcast, you sent me a theme song, so I’ve been meaning to ask more about your music. What kind of projects have you made music for, and where can we listen to your work?

Right now, the only thing I’m working on which isn’t strictly for me is a soundtrack to Autobiography of a Werewolf Hunter and its sequels by Brian P. Easton.

However, I do have things available now, on Bandcamp. When I was at the tail end of my Navy career, I wrote a concept album around the series of events for the 20 July, 1944 plot to kill Hitler. (And I’m very old, so this was before the movie with Tom Cruise, ha.) I recorded a demo of that, and years later bought some home studio gear to re-record it in a good way.

As practice for that, I wrote and recorded a series of songs (we’ll call it an album, why not?) for indie books I read and loved, from Z.A. Recht’s Morningstar Strain trilogy (initially) to C. Dulaney’s Roads Less Traveled series of books and Jason S. Hornsby’s two novels (at the time). That is called Welcome to the Strangerhood, and it is available here.:

https://zartanbur.bandcamp.com/album/welcome-to-the-strangerhood

I also wrote music to record with several of Jonathan Moon’s poems, with permission. The EP is called Moonsong, and it is available here:

https://zartanbur.bandcamp.com/album/moonsong

Your mileage may vary, of course. If any of your people decide to take a listen, I thank them.

What / who are your musical influences?

Black Sabbath holds a lot of sway on me, as does First-Three-Album Danzig. Alice in Chains, Zakk Wylde, Pink Floyd, Faith No More, Drain STH, et freakin’ cetera. There are also bands out there whose music I love but do not wish to emulate in any way, like Mushroomhead or Lisa Loeb or Indigenous.

Of all your creative projects, what are you most proud of completing?

I had a couple of projects which withered and died on the vine when I took my Great Hiatus from writing, and when I started up again, I finished three or four of them, whiff bam bang. I don’t know how good they are, but those are symbolic of a triumph, will and perseverance over apathy and self-doubt.  One of them, the third book in my Urban Fantasy series Tales of the Century, should be available soon. How soon, I can’t say, as I’d like to have everybody involved paid up before I put it up for sale, ha.

Do you mainly write what you know, or do you find yourself researching distant places and time periods you’ve never been to?

I’m not well-traveled on my own, but I’d been to plenty of places while I was in the Navy and while I worked offshore. I pull a lot on those experiences when I can.

For other things, I do the homework. I think I’ve been able to strike a healthy balance between writing what I know and, ah, bullshitting.

It’s also good for everybody to know, if there’s something you need to know about and you don’t have the scratch to buy one of those academic publications, just look for the person (email or social media) and ask. For the most part, these people will fall all over themselves to help you.

For the last thing I wrote, I was in contact with a person from the Panama Smithsonian about a bee he co-discovered forty years ago, and he sent me so much information, you guys. Way more than I needed.

What do you find most challenging about writing?

Honestly, it’s the self-promotion. It all feels like I’m shouting “GIVE ME MONEY” in a fish market with all the other bookmongers. It’s so tiring, and I don’t have the budget to hire somebody to shout for me, so some of the time (a lot of the time) it just doesn’t get done.

Do you have any creative projects on the horizon we should expect to see soon?

Like I had mentioned up above, the next Century book is coming. It’s titled Smoke & Mirrors, and it serves as a mini-finale. It isn’t the end of the series, but it is the last book (for now) with the two main protagonists whose adventures I’ve been chronicling. They’ll be back, sooner or later, but I have a couple of books planned without them.

A little about the series, I guess? The Century is a loose organization of one hundred wizards whose job it is to enforce the Great Pact, which established the rules we live by, natural and supernatural alike, that we can all thrive in harmony.

I got the idea, of course, after reading the first several 007 books, and wondering why we didn’t have more supernatural adventures in this vein. My good friends all said, “Write it, dummy,” and I haven’t looked back.

Where can we find you on this weird wide web?

I’m on the Book of Faces under this name, same on X and Blue Sky. (I’m not hard to find.) My own website is dubya dubya dubya World of Trouble dot net.

Bio:

Thom Brannan (est.1976) has been a nuclear submariner and offshore oilfield trash and now works on automatic machinery for whoever will let him. He’s a freelance editor for hire, and has been published in several anthologies, in several genres. Thom finds his inspiration equally from Robert B. Parker and H.P. Lovecraft. He is the author of SAD WINGS OF DESTINY and WORLD OF TROUBLE: TRIBULATION OF DAX, as well as the Urban Fantasy series Tales of the Century. Thom lives in or around Austin, Texas with his lovely wife, Kitty, a boy, a girl, and a cat. Find him at the usual places online, he don’t bite much.