Growing up on a diet of 1980s movies gave me a taste for the ‘high concept’. Almost every story and novel I have published can be simmered down to a what-if question or single idea. For instance:
“What if a woman was impregnated by a incubus and began to have maternal feelings for the baby?” (Ghost Kiss)
“What if a woman switched the traditional roles on Hollywood’s infamous casting couch?” (Hollywood Hearts Ablaze)
“What if an alien being gave a man superhuman powers but he couldn’t control them?” (‘Modifications’)
“Could a town subsist on cannibalism alone?” (‘Trouble with the Locals’)
“What would happen if a man was trapped in a toilet during the outbreak of a zombie apocalypse?” (‘Mere Symptoms of Living’)
“What if a pool became haunted by the ghost of a drowned child?” (‘Blue Diamond Pool’)
Now, while those ‘elevator pitches’ more or less sum up the short stories, they are only the nuclei of the novels. Both Ghost Kiss and Hollywood Hearts Ablaze went on to be much richer than the above descriptions might suggest. But those ideas provide the initial pow! that gets me started, whether it’s a 3,000 word story or a 100,000 word novel.
The high concept for my new novel Invasion at Bald Eagle came to me in 2006. Back then, the first murmurings about putting a man on Mars had begun and there were articles written about the almost insurmountable challenges scientists and astronauts faced in making it happen. Given how difficult it was to reach one of our nearest celestial neighbours, I began to wonder how any life form could feasibly travel across the galaxy. Even at the speed of light, it would take longer than humanity’s entire span of existence.
My solution to that problem was the inspiration for the aliens in Invasion at Bald Eagle. But that only provided the seed. The corresponding egg arrived a short time later, in the form of a documentary I caught by pure chance on late night TV. It delved into the realities of living in a hippie commune during the 1960s, among them the ideal of free love and how it had began to crumble when the natural human instinct for pair bonding kicked in.
Some quick research showed that Colorado had been a hotspot for hippies in the 1960s, and all at once I had my setting and basic plot for Invasion at Bald Eagle.
I wrote the novel during the summer of 2006-2007, and when I first started to shop it around to publishers and agents in early 2008, it went under the name of Commune. I sent it to dozens of markets and received a lot of replies that included the word ‘unfortunately’. By 2009 I had become completely disheartened and decided to move on to other projects.
Unlike other novels I had abandoned, however, I could never quite let it go. It felt like the most honest book I had written, the sort of thing I enjoyed as a reader: high concept, character driven, with a fondness for language not always evident in sci-fi or horror. In early 2013, with another four years of writing experience under my belt, I decided to give the manuscript an overhaul.
The first thing to go was that dreary title. I then went on to cut nearly 3,000 words from the manuscript l had been shopping around all those years earlier. I also added the first small chapter (it’s really a prologue, but publishers and agents have become allergic to the P-word for some reason) to hook the reader.
When the manuscript was as good as I could get it, I rolled up my sleeves and began the unspeakable drudgery that is writing a good synopsis. My hatred for this process is monolithic and so it was something that, in the past, I had neglected to my detriment. This time I was determined to get it right.
Once I was satisfied with the synopsis I commenced my second campaign to have Invasion at Bald Eagle published. There was a sniff of interest from Permuted Press, but when the company changed hands that interest vanished. It was an encouraging start nevertheless. In the middle of 2014, following a couple of other rejections (this is publishing, after all), I sent it to Grand Mal Press and got the good news a short while later.
Only during covert art discussions with GMP’s editor Ryan Thomas did I notice how much the book owed to ’80s horror flicks. No, let me rephrase that: only when Ryan pointed it out did I see he was right. Its setting and basic premise have echoes of Creepshow (1983) and The Curse (1987), while the shifting-perspective narrative and the vignettes that peer into the lives of minor characters call up classic-era Stephen King novels such as The Stand (1978) and Firestarter (1980).
So it was an unconscious homage to all the things I loved to watch and read as a kid. But it was also something original and from the heart. When I first gave up on Commune, I always dismayed that no one else would get to meet Bert Grayson, Derek Brolin, Marcus Barkley, Hank Williams and the extended supporting cast in the town of Bald Eagle, Colorado. I do hope you will acquaint yourself with them.
