 I was honoured to interview D A Watson as part of a panel at the fabulous Cymera Festival, and has kindly answered some of the questions I posed to them on the panel. D.A. Watson was halfway through a music and media degree at the University of Glasgow when he discovered he was actually better at writing. He unleashed his debut novel, In the Devil's Name, on an unsuspecting public in the summer of 2012, and plans of a career in music education left firmly in the dust, later gained his masters degree in Creative Writing from the University of Stirling. He has since published two more novels; The Wolves of Langabhat and Cuttin' Heads, plus several prizewinning articles and stories, including Durty Diana, which was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in the US in 2016, and the Burns parody Tam O' Shatner, a competition winner at the Falkirk Storytelling Festival, runner up in the Dunedin Burns Poetry Competition in New Zealand, and nominated for the People's Book Prize in 2018. "The Christoper Brookmyre of horror. Readers will be very very afraid." - Louise Welsh, bestselling author of the Plague Times trilogy "Ambitious and spectacular." - Undiscovered Scotland As an icebreaker here is a light-hearted question to get the ball rolling, with modern horror being more than things that go bump in the night, if we were to look under your beds what monster would we find lurking there? There’s a fair to even chance you’d find my eight-year-old son skulking there, possibly armed with a lightsabre and looking for misplaced Nerf darts. Horror has always been a genre that has reflected the world we live in, how do you see the horror genre developing with regards to the current state of the world? Well I know that I personally have a couple of stories in progress that are influenced by the events of the past few years, and have a very apocalyptic eco-horror flavour. With the political climate as it is, I can imagine a lot of writers will be looking at similar themes, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see more material akin to The Dead Zone (mental president) and The Death of Grass (environmental disaster). You just need to look at more modern novels like Adam Nevill’s Lost Girl or Stephen and Owen King’s Sleeping Beauties to see how current affairs are reflected in horror. Horror like many other genres always seems to have a foot firmly stuck in the past with regards to style and inspiration, why do you think authors such as Lovecraft, Poe, Shelly and Hill still have such an influence on modern writers, and who do you think of the more recent writers will become the inspirations for style and themes for future generations of writers? I think any art form, whether it be painting, music, sculpture, film or literature, always has its greats that produce work that’s so good it simply stands the test of time. For example I personally think music peaked in the late 60’s to early 70’s, what I refer to as the Age of Heroes. When you get people as good at what they do as Jimi Hendrix, Vincent van Gogh, or Edgar Allen Poe, the sheer quality of the output has a timeless factor that might not always be so appreciated in that moment, but that will eventually be recognised as being benchmark quality and go on to influence the people who come after them and who learn from them. As for modern masters, outside of the obvious pick of Stephen King, I think people will be talking about guys like Adam Nevill, Robert McCammon, Joe R Lansdale and Dan Simmons. How do you deal with any negative feedback you have received? Personally, I’m happy to get any reviews at all! The thing with publishing with indie presses like I’ve done so far is there’s very little if any budget for marketing, meaning you’ve got to take on the bulk of the selling work, and it’s hard to sell the books, and consequently get reviews from people, even friends and family. Add to that the Amazon policy of deleting reviews if they discover it was written by anyone with a connection to you and it’s an absolute drag. It’s great if you can get a review site or book blogger to pick up your story, but that’s a time consuming process which can be just as lengthy as submitting the book to publishers. Plus these types of sites and bloggers a lot of the time have huge to be read piles, and are so snowed under with requests they’re closed to new ones. As for negative feedback, I’ve been in the game long enough to know a troll from someone who honestly read the book and just didn’t dig it, which is fine. I’d much rather receive an honest two star review from someone who knows what they’re talking about and who has something worthwhile to point out than get a 5 star review that says nothing Another aspect that the modern day horror author has to deal with is the murky waters of fandom, the uproar over the final season of game of Thrones is a prime example of this, and one of the most basic forms of advice for a writer is write about what you know and love, how do you ensure that you get as close to staying true to your writing while at the same time ensuring that the final product is as accessible to your fans as possible? I think you can tie yourself in knots if you start writing with the goal of appeasing any set of people, even your own fans. I thought that whole Game of Thrones reaction and the online petition to have it re-written was a real toys oot the pram moment. I believe you just have to write what feels right to yourself, do the story justice above all, and just trust / hope that the folks who liked your previous work will also be into the new one. If they don’t, then fair enough. Far as I’m concerned readers don’t owe writers any loyalty any more than writers are obligated to write what their fans want to read. In the past authors were able to write about almost anything with a far lesser degree of the fear of backlash, but this has all changed in recent years. These days authors must be more aware of representation an the depiction of things such as race and gender in their works, how aware are you of these things and what steps have you taken to ensure that your writing can’t be viewed as being offensive to a minority group? I did worry about some of the terminology I was using in the book I have out on submission just now as there’s a large Native American element in it. I had to do a fair bit of Googling to find out what were and weren’t offensive terms, and when it was appropriate to use them and not. Weird thing is I worried the most about referring to Native Americans as Indians, but found out later that’s not really an issue with them. Using terms like ‘squaw’ and ‘brave’ however, which I thought were okay, aren’t as it turns out, and in the book, these were terms used by a character who’s half native himself. Strangely, I worried less about using blatantly racist terms like ‘skins’ and ‘timber niggers’, which were common derogatory names among whites in the 1880s when the book is set. It’s being offensive when I don’t mean to that’s the problem! The modern world is scary place, as horror authors do you feel horror is in danger of losing its power to scare when your readership is bombarded with images and stories from real life that are way more scary than anything that you have committed to paper? Not really. The day I see a report on Sky News about an outbreak of vampirism or a zombie outbreak, then I’ll know the jig is up. Or if Donald Trump’s revealed to be a hostile alien in disguise, conducting some sort of nefarious social experiment, which I’m not 100% convinced is not the case, then maybe I’ll start worrying about my ability to come up with freakier than real life storylines. It’s true though. Life is scarier than any book. Put it this way, I’ve never read anything that’s scared me so bad as when my kid gets sick. Genre fiction has allowed us to look at the world, do you think writers have an obligation to tackle socio and political topics in their writing, and if so what topics are close to your heart or should you just be concerned with creating a fun read? I don’t think there’s an obligation. If you want to write about politics and societal problems, fire in, but I don’t think any writer should feel that they have a duty to take on these kinds of things. Like I said before, yeah, I’ve been playing about with a bit of eco-horror based on what I’ve seen on the news, but I’m doing it because it’s interesting to me, it’s fun, and I think there’s an entertaining read there. I’m certainly not doing it because I feel I have any sort of obligation. David you are Scottish writer whose main body of work is set in and features Scottish characters, how do you feel when you encounter Scottish characters from authors who aren’t Scottish? Why in this more enlightened age does it seem like it is still acceptable to have the cultural representation of groups of people such as the Scots based on the auch aye the noo cliché? As long as a character’s believable and their dialogue comes across as genuine, I don’t care where the writer’s from. I think outside of Scotland there’s probably a healthy reluctance to write and even act Scottish characters as the accent’s notoriously tricky to get right, verbally and on the page. I’m sure there’s plenty of really bad ones out there, but luckily I’ve not come across many. That said, I’ve heard very disturbing things about Steve Alten’s locals in his Nessie creature feature The Loch! I know what you mean though. When there was the big stink about Apu being stereotyped in The Simpsons, who was sticking up for poor Groundskeeper Willie? But I think in a way we kind of like the stereotype. Look at the Tartan Army at any Scotland game and the sea of See You Jimmy hats and kilts. I think we just don’t take ourselves that seriously and mostly see take it in good humour. Plus, in my experience we certainly don’t mind the stereotype when people equate heroic hunky Braveheart and Outlander type characters with your average Scot. David, in Cuttin’ Heads you have written about the modern phenomenon of the desire for instant fame, and the willingness to do almost anything to achieve it, and it can be found within the horror fiction community, what are the things that new writers should avoid or take on board to ensure they don’t fall victim to this? Don’t expect to become famous at all. If you’re writing to become famous, you’re in the wrong game. Measure your expectations I say, prepare for endless rejection and disappointment, and if you keep at it long enough, keep improving, keep writing and sending out your work and you don’t kill or at least cripple yourself with self-doubt, you might, you just might, get a book published. If you’re super super lucky you might even publish one with one of the big publishers instead of a small indie press. Even then, you can throw out any notions about being mobbed in the street by legions of adoring fans. Even Stephen King doesn’t get that. You’re a scribbler, not a rock star. As author you have crossed genre boundaries with your writing, how do you ensure that you gain new readers, while at the same time maintaining your fanbase from your previous genre outings? I think the only thing you can do as a writer is work on your craft, keep trying to improve as a storyteller, and hope that whatever attracted any fans you already have doesn’t get lost in the process, because different people respond to and like different things. Look at the backlash Bob Dylan faced when he picked up an electric guitar. He lost a lot of fans, but his stories, his lyrics were as good as ever, and they only improved as his career went on. To wrap things up before we open up to the questions to the audience, can you tell us about your latest books and what you are working on next? That offensive 1880s set western of mine is currently being looked at by a number of publishers, so hopefully that’ll be out sometime this year, and I’m currently well into the first draft of a novel dealing with the witch trials that took place in my home village of Inverkip in the 17th century. There’s also a post office robbery somehow involved in it. And a giant snake. My son’s helping me with some of the ideas on this one. To find out more about D A Watson and to follow him on social media check out the links below Amazon Youtube Cuttin' Heads by D.A. Watson   Comments are closed.
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