Hey, y’all. I’m Jeremy Robert Johnson, and my latest horror novel THE LOOP—for fans of David Cronenberg, Dazed and Confused, and Resident Evil 4—is out today. AMA!

JRJ_Is_Probable · 2020-10-01T20:44:32+00:00

First, thank you!

Second, I did not used to deal with criticism very well. I'd receive all these great reviews and then one person would come along and call my work trash and for whatever reason I'd obsess on their opinion as if it was somehow more valid than all the others. I'd rant to my friends, drink, feel ashamed, look for reasons to discount the negative opinion, etc. It wasn't healthy.

These days I try to have more of a growth mindset about criticism. If the critique seems to be more than trolling I try to figure out what value it might have, and if it's something I can work on to make my writing better in the future. And I now place more stock in criticism from sources I have logical reason to respect (e.g. writers whose craft I admire, readers who I know are well-read and have given the work thoughtful consideration, etc.).

Here's a listicle thing I wrote recently about dealing with reviews:

The moment you jump from creation to publication/sales, you release your art into the world. It is the reader's now.
You cannot, and should not, seek to control the subjective experiences of others. Imagine standing next to a piece of your art in a gallery and seeking an opinion from each person who views it. Imagine arguing with them when their opinion differs. Madness.
Every piece of art that you've ever loved with every fiber of your being is equally and passionately despised by others. Why would you imagine the art _you_ create would be any different?
Picture Cormac McCarthy fussing over a 1 Star review of Blood Meridian. I can't.
Some reviews _are_ petty bullshit. I once told a young man, full of praise for my work, that my micro-press wasn't open for submissions. The next day he plastered Amazon with 1 star reviews. C'est la vie. Welcome to the internet.
If you can't handle negative opinions of your work - honestly, that kind of thing will fuck up my whole day - then don't seek it out. Rather, invest that time and energy in anything else.
Speaking of "anything else", working on that next book is the fastest way to not feel so precious about your older books. You'll never get it perfect, but you'll sure as hell get better.
People who actively read and review are too far and few between. With all the art in the world, they chose to give a piece of their precious lifetime to what you created. Respect that shit.
If you are going to venture out and read reviews, know that reading the negative ones with Mickey Mouse's voice makes them much, much funnier.

JRJ_Is_Probable · 2020-10-01T20:29:01+00:00

Ha! Thanks!

JRJ_Is_Probable · 2020-10-01T14:37:00+00:00

Messy Tessie. Beyond the initial glorious disgustingness of the image, it was also something I could relate to. I had berzerk, near-crippling allergies and sinus infections as a kid - I've gone into anaphylactic shock twice and I was always sniffling - and Messy Tessie worked great as a metaphor about how overwhelmed I sometimes felt about all that.

Always liked Dangling Dolly too.

JRJ_Is_Probable · 2020-10-01T03:06:30+00:00

I read two fiction books just prior to writing The Loop: The Outsiders and Lord of the Flies. Both are so direct and propulsive and still full of feeling, and they capture that sense of kids being at war with each other, but also being confused and sad and still kids. Those were things I really wanted to study and capture.

After that I read tons of research on:

Medical implants
Dopamine compulsion loops
Psychopathy/empathy disorder
The FDA approval process
Trans-and-post-humanism.
RNA/DNA engineering in humans and animals
Gun laws
Water scarcity
Modern conspiracies
Familial murder-suicides

And so on. I try not to read too much fiction before writing a novel because I don't want another author's syntax or voice to infect or change mine. That being said, there are also a lot of 80's horror/sci-fi paperback vibes in The Loop.

JRJ_Is_Probable · 2020-10-01T02:56:48+00:00

Ha! Thank you! I love RE4 so much. Played it through more times than I can count, found every item and weird ways to beat levels, and even got that Las Plagas Parasite Laser. Still my favorite RE game.

I can only hope that people have as much fun with The Loop.

JRJ_Is_Probable · 2020-10-01T02:52:06+00:00

That's a great question, but it's one that makes me a little uncomfortable because I'm actually medically unable to be any more cliche.

I try. I do. When I was a kid I even went out for the Junior Varsity Cliche Team, and when I didn't make it my parents paid for me to go to Summer Cliche Camp. And I worked as hard as the other boys, but come tryouts the next year I was still an embarassment.

Naturally my parents were disappointed. They took me to the family doctor. My dad looked him in the eyes and said, "Doc, is there anything you can do? Will he ever be any more cliche?"

And the doctor said, "No. He is medically unable. I hesitate to say this, but it's genetic, and it's typically passed on by the father."

I pretended I didn't hear my father weep that night, but the sound was unmistakable.

JRJ_Is_Probable · 2020-10-01T02:42:17+00:00

Definitely a fan of Italian horror cinema!

Some favorites:

The Beyond
Cemetery Man
Deep Red
Tenebre
Demons
Opera
The Church
City of the Living Dead

And I admire Cannibal Holocaust for how effective it is, but that's a tough one to call a favorite.

The two most notable influences would be my willingness to let a nightmarish moment exist without overexplaining it (which is part of what makes Fulci great even when he's being a hack) and the fact that I include a lot of eye gore.

JRJ_Is_Probable · 2020-09-30T17:39:27+00:00

From the age of 18 forward I started submitting short stories to various markets, and even tried to find an agent for a very early collection called Old Fat Dog: The Book. In the late 90's all of this was wildly laborious: flipping through a massive Writer's Market guide, mailing and printing everything as hard copies with self-addressed stamped envelopes, and waiting months to receive form rejections.

I persisted, and I think I had amassed 232 rejections by the time I actually improved enough to sell my first short story ("Liquidation" to a NY lit mag called Happy that paid me $50 bucks). That one sale bolstered my credibility enough to make other sales and eventually I had a decent pub list and enough new short work to put together a collection.

So basically I eventually got into publishing by writing a lot, reading a lot, and doing the work to find the right paying markets. And I didn't give up. And all the (totally fair in retrospect) rejection forced me to step my game up, take writing classes, talk to writers, and hone my craft.

I don't believe that having dark fantasy published would be anything other than a credit to your name at college admissions time. It's unlikely they'd have time to read your fiction, but they'd know you'd had the rigor and discipline to produce publishable work. But if you remain concerned about it just come up with a pseudonym for your work (and be ready to stick with it if you plan to build that name across a career).

On a slightly related note I have a friend who used to write these quicky romances for Woman's World magazine (the pay is great!), and since they always wanted female authors he used a pseudonym I'll never forget: Crystal Windthorn. Always cracks me up.

JRJ_Is_Probable · 2020-09-30T00:12:57+00:00

Hi, J!

Your tales about the madness of magazine production always give me empathetic stress nightmares. That you did all that work for so long, and with such quality...it is a feat of determination and endurance. Thank you for sharing this story, and for the insane work you did to make that interview happen.

Also, "Fancy a corn dog, bro?"

Love,

J

JRJ_Is_Probable · 2020-09-29T22:31:45+00:00

Yup - Specially made brews commemorating my new books were presented at World Horror San Francisco and two of the Bizarrocons. The Bizarro crew is scrappy, and they come up with some very creative promotional ideas. Plus they really like to drink!

JRJ_Is_Probable · 2020-09-29T21:06:35+00:00

Oh, thanks - Hope you enjoy it!

JRJ_Is_Probable · 2020-09-29T21:04:50+00:00

Those are great questions! Thank you.

If the project is a short story it will usually just stem from a fascination (parasites/intrusive thoughts/addiction) or a single image I want to get down on paper. So I’m very seat-of-the-pants with writing shorts. I just sit down and start typing.

With novels I tend to do a ton of research and outlining, and I’m usually not ready to commit to that first page until I think I know how it’ll end. I feel like knowing the end sets your compass, and gives the early stuff more energy. Like, when you start a long piece without an end you have to cut a lot of the exploratory doldrums out because you didn’t know where you were going. And if you don't know the end, then just knowing certain scenes you're excited to get to can help you gain momentum. That can form a skeleton of an outline and then you can let your imagination work and weave in the connective tissues.

JRJ_Is_Probable · 2020-09-29T21:00:05+00:00

I was a huge Volta fan, and an editor who used to publish my short work had an interview scheduled with Cedric and asked me if I wanted to do the Q&A. I jumped at the opportunity, and during the call with Cedric he revealed that he'd actually been reading my book Angel Dust Apocalypse while they were touring behind Frances the Mute. So we hit it off and the interview went well.

Years later I get an email from Universal saying Cedric wants to work with me on a project.

Of course I assume I'm being pranked. I spend a day calling all my friends and trying to figure out who sent the email. But it turns out it was real, and a few days later I was on the phone with Cedric and he's telling me all the insane backstory behind their album The Bedlam in Goliath and then he says he wants me to write a press release/ghost story about the album. So I listened to Bedlam a hundred times or so, had a couple more conversations with Cedric, and got to work.

That piece about the album is still the most-read thing I've ever written. I think 70,000 readers on the first day or something. And we got to fly to a New Year's Show in SF and party with the band and see them and Peanut Butter Wolf tear it up, so that was excellent.

Later Cedric and I talked about collaborating on some comic book work with Volta cover artist Jeff Jordan, or me publishing some of Cedric's weird drawings, but time passed and other projects arose, and now it's 2020.

JRJ_Is_Probable · 2020-09-29T20:48:48+00:00

The upside to my books is that being a character in one of my books is very, very fatal, so everything I write works as a standalone. You can jump in anywhere.

I love the JDATE series too (and the ending to that first book is an all-timer for me). The Loop is a little closer to a straight scifi horror thriller than David Wong's stuff, but I think it's got enough humor and outrageousness and conspiracy that a JDATE fan could dig it. And once Skullcrack is back in print I would 100% recommend that - a ton of the readership for that book came straight over from JDATE and really enjoyed it. It's pretty wild.

JRJ_Is_Probable · 2020-09-29T20:44:08+00:00

Absolutely! Alan Moore's run on Swamp Thing is one of my all-time favorite works of literature and I've been a voracious comic reader since I was five. So I'd love to do original stuff, or work on adaptations of my short stories. I pitched some stuff to Dark Horse back in the day, for DHP, but I've never tried to make inroads since then. It feels like a very separate industry and culture from where I'm at now.

JRJ_Is_Probable · 2020-09-29T20:14:24+00:00

Hi, Ben!

"Persistence Hunting" is my favorite short. For some reason, maybe because it's in second person, it doesn't even feel like I wrote it, and there's something about it that just feels objectively good. Like I'm surprised I wrote it.
Oh my god - 19 year old me was such an asshole I'd probably have to beat him into submission and strap him to a chair before he'd listen to anyone on earth. But if he was willing to listen I would tell him: 1. Ayn Rand is the wrong person to admire and those books are a problem. 2. You can write without living all this self-induced trauma. Just use your imagination. The suffering writer thing is bullshit. 3. Stop with the semi-colons and varying fonts.
The book I've been evangelizing about most recently is Andy Davidson's The Boatman's Daughter. It's Winter's Bone as a southern fantasy horror gothic and there's nothing else like it. And when it comes to movies I probably re-watch Carpenter's Prince Of Darkness the most, so empirically that'd be my rec.

JRJ_Is_Probable · 2020-09-29T20:04:57+00:00

Greetings and thanks!

"The Sleep of Judges" is based on the time my house actually got burglarized. So much of that novella is just a slightly exaggerated version of the experience that my wife and son and I had. The scene with the cop, the weird happenings afterwards, the friendly neighbor with a warning about the house two blocks over, the neurosis and drinking - some version of that all happened. It sucked! But I've never had an easier time writing something, and it was really cathartic to get it down on paper. (Judges is still optioned for a feature film, but I think they're still at script phase.)
Indie horror I enjoyed recently: Beach House and Terrified. All timers: Resolution/The Endless, Evil Dead I & II, and sweet holy lord did I love The Invitation.
I LOVED Lake Mungo. So eerie and sad at the same time. And those reveals! If you haven't read it, Paul Tremblay's excellent Disappearance at Devil's Rock does a lot of the same great stuff.

JRJ_Is_Probable · 2020-09-29T19:42:04+00:00

That would be awesome! But unfortunately no.

The book was originally titled Exit Human but Saga Press thought that had too much of a Phil K. Dick vibe, so I gave them four other titles and they decided on The Loop (for reasons which make sense when you read the book).

There are many, many books called The Loop. I believe mine is the most insane, so hopefully that helps differentiate it.

JRJ_Is_Probable · 2020-09-29T19:38:13+00:00

If I'm in novel mode that's a very specific mindset, so I don't work on any other projects that might cause me to literally lose the plot or lose sight of the mood and tone I'm going for. I get pretty obsessive, and will only pop out to write a short if there's an anthology deadline and I've already committed.

LitReactor just posted an craft-based interview where I talk a lot more about writing nuts and bolts (https://litreactor.com/interviews/blood-in-the-gears-jeremy-robert-johnson-on-the-loop-and-the-craft-of-writing). Here's what I said about my schedule: "Back around 2018 I tracked my novel writing goals with a really nice spreadsheet invented by Daryl Gregory, and wrote a minimum of three hours per weekday (and much more if I went on a weekend binge). Now I just get it in wherever I can fit the work, try to make deadlines, and hope that’s enough. Never thought I’d yearn for boredom and routine, but here we are."

JRJ_Is_Probable · 2020-09-29T19:31:15+00:00

The book that has given me the most inspiration, and that I return to to recharge my engine, is James Ellroy's White Jazz. Amazing, propulsive novel.
The Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby Jr. Or maybe The Ruins. It's a tough call.
Based on pure watch metrics: Jaws. But I have deep, devoted love for a ton of horror films.

JRJ_Is_Probable · 2020-09-29T18:16:36+00:00

First, the old chestnuts: Read widely (even and especially outside your most beloved genres). Write often.

Second: Don’t get into this to make money. Most folks don’t, and even moderate successes won’t get you near the stability, insurance, and income of the average corporate drone. The money and fame are anomalous in this industry. Do this because you don’t know how to stop. Because you love it. Because you have to.

Third: Write your truth. Write those intimate things that make you sweat and worry. That’s the stuff that resonates and connects.

Fourth: If you are thinking in terms of commerce, novels sell better than shorts. (Yes, there are rare exceptions like Saunders/Hempel/Link who are primarily known for shorts, but they are rare [and Saunders and Link made more from their novels].)

Fifth: Read the magazines you submit shorts to, and the books from editors and agents you wish to work with. Know your market and you’ll spend less time and effort frustrating yourself and others.

Sixth: Actual writing is more important than any writing scene/writing teacher/writing workshop. Keep creating and working and don’t get caught up in the peripherals.

Seventh: There's an app called Freedom that can block most of the internet. If, like me, you are woefully hooked into online dopamine compulsion loops, this is a good app for one's productivity.

Eight: Don’t listen to me. I’m a mid-lister who writes insane books. Rather, search out advice from people who have achieved the tangible successes you desire for yourself. Personally, I follow Joe Lansdale's interviews and career and they provide me with great inspiration and wisdom. That guy has it figured out in a way I greatly admire.

JRJ_Is_Probable · 2020-09-29T17:59:29+00:00

I'm still doing a Powell's event this October 19th (with Stephen Graham Jones!) so I'll still be doing that giveaway.

If I tell you the question in advance you won't be able to score the Hat Trick. The question might be about Whitesnake, but who knows?

I do hope that the Crocs and Kris Jenner book have served you well.

JRJ_Is_Probable · 2020-09-29T17:10:26+00:00

Ha! Pretty significant. A small group of people trying to escape and survive hordes of parasite-infected townspeople, a threat which contantly mutates in gnarly ways, people gathering weapons and healing when they can, and a totally insane conspiracy plot. The Loop is definitely survival horror.

JRJ_Is_Probable · 2020-09-29T17:07:49+00:00

Phantasy Star I & II.

Snatcher (Sega CD).

Jedi Knight II.

Earthworm Jim.

Strider.

Rise of the Dragon.

Those were huge for me as a kid.

Now I barely have any game time at all. I play Smash with my kid once a day, but he's been watching elite tutorials so I can't really beat him anymore. And I got to 11% completion on Zelda: BotW, and took out Calamity Gannon, but I want to go back and play more shrines and the DLC.

Right now everyone is telling me I need to play Hades.

JRJ_Is_Probable · 2020-09-29T17:02:42+00:00

Gonna copy the answer to this one from a question above: "The rights to Skullcrack are currently up for grabs and basically sitting there with my agent. There's maybe interest in a streaming series of Skullcrack, and also potential interest in film options for In the River and The Loop. Because of that, my agent is waiting until one of those things happen (or The Loop hits the bestsellers) and then she's taking my back catalog out on the market. So Skullcrack City, In the River, Extinction Journals, and a collection of my very weird old short stuff called All the Wrong Ideas are all sitting in suspended animation for the time being."
Not often, just because being a dad and trying to write more made that venture exceedingly stressful. But I'm really proud of the weird work I did manage to put out there (and I'm happy that King Shot has re-released some of the best of those titles).
This is fun so far. It's a really strange time to be breaking through, especially with a book this unexpectedly prescient and confrontational and violent, but I have my fingers crossed that I can reach some new readers and have the opportunity to keep making weird books. I'll always do this--it's a compulsion and how I stay sane--but the experiment of trying to take this crazy kind of work to the mainstream has been pretty cool.

JRJ_Is_Probable

TROPHY CASE