FIVE MINUTES WITH AUTHOR JAMES SABATA

James Sabata is an award-winning filmmaker and author. Since graduating with a MA-Creative Writing from the University of South Dakota, James has published over twenty short stories and two novels. His novel ZER0: Lancaster's Greatest Supervillain, shows how bad things can get when the supervillain controls the media and convinces everyone he's the good guy.  His upcoming novel Fat Camp features overweight teenage boys stalked down by a machete-wielding maniac.  One teen has to overcome his own self-hatred to find the courage to save himself and his friends. Filled with allusions to the Slasher movies of yesteryear, Fat Camp delivers horror, humor, and a little slice of nostalgia for anyone who grew up at least somewhat afraid of the dark. James is a father of four, residing in Phoenix, AZ. 

James has also written a guest review of The Creepypasta Comic which you can read here 
Could you tell the readers a little bit about yourself?

I've been publishing horror stories and other short stories since 2010.  I've sold the rights to six short films, four of which won awards at various film festivals, the other two are in pre-production.  I published my first non-horror novel in February, ZER0: Lancaster's Greatest Supervillain. My latest novel, Fat Camp is basically a horcrux holding my soul.  It's a combination of my insecurities growing up overweight mixed with my fear a serial killer will murder me while I'm on the toilet with a small dash of my never ending ability to surprise myself with what I'm actually capable of accomplishing in life.

What do you like to do when you're not writing?

I live in Phoenix, AZ, so I spend a lot of time in the pool, especially this time of year.  I go to a lot of movies. If you want to be a successful writer, you need to read voraciously.  If you want to make films, you need watch films.  My wife would argue that I do not watch films, so much as I dissect every aspect of their writing and overanalyze minute details.  That's true about my interactions in my daily life as well. My favorite activity is just meeting new people and listening to their stories. You never know what you'll learn or where that information will lead you.

Other than the horror genre, what else has been a major influence on your writing?

Other humans, in general. I spend a lot of time wondering, "Why the hell do humans do these things?" and that exploration of motivation and looking for answers fuels my writing.  Music is always a big influence.  I usually have a sound track to my work in progress.  When I wrote my upcoming novel FAT CAMP, I listened to Fozzy's "Judas" and "Painless" back to back whenever I wrote a kill scene.  That's not unusual for me. I try to listen to things that either describe my character's motivation or things I think that character would listen to. It helps me live in the scene and bring it to life on paper.

The term horror, especially when applied to fiction always carries such heavy connotations.  What’s your feeling on the term “horror” and what do you think we can do to break past these assumptions?

I have heard a lot of people's voice change when they go from "Oh, wow, you're a writer!" to "Horror? Why?"  There's a connotation that horror is unimportant or childish; that it's what people do if they can't write "real" stuff.  I usually fight this by asking people what they do like and point out that horror is in everything.  It's in every genre.  The entire plot of a romantic comedy is lost without the terror of being alone or the horror of losing the person you've fallen in love with.  A drama needs the terror of death or hardships.  I also think people think horror fits nicely in one definition. They don't like blood or gore, so they hate horror, but Dr. Who has no blood or gore and it's one of the greatest horror programs of all time.  Horror is such a broad genre and each subcategory is so complex. I think education of those subcategories might help.  At the end of the day, I think people like what they like and bash what they don't. I don't think we'll convince everyone, so the answer in my own life is to embrace the people willing to learn and help them find something they love in horror world.

A lot of good horror movements have arisen as a direct result of the socio/political climate, considering the current state of the world where do you see horror going in the next few years?

Ironically, this is the entire premise of the panel I'm doing at Phoenix Comic Fest May 24 with Dr. Rebekah McKendry (Blumhouse), Donald Guillory, and horror author Vincent V. Cava.  I think horror will continue to shift, as it has been, to a more reality-based setting; much like how the most recent season of American Horror Story ditched the supernatural and it was actually more terror inducing.  I think the way people attack one another "anonymously" online and how easy it actually is to track someone online will be a juxtaposition that gets explored nonstop. Technology has repeated caught up to the imaginations of horror writers and each generation is forced to push it further.  I think we will start to see the counter push, showing us what happens if society has to deal with losing that technology, after growing dependent on it.

What are the books and films that helped to define you as an author?

Books - Misery. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. The Turn of the Screw by Henry James.  Weird Tales. Anything by Ray Bradbury. Comics like Tales from the Crypt, Vault of Horror, Tales of the Unexpected. 
Films - Pretty much any slasher film.  I remember Texas Chainsaw Massacre terrifying me as a child who shouldn't have been watching it. Halloween, Friday the 13th, and Nightmare on Elm Street. Pretty much any random slasher at Blockbuster with a great cover or anything on HBO late at night on a weekend.  Silence of the Lambs really kicked it up, as I learned how terrible humans could be and that the monster could look like me.   Also television shows like Twilight Zone, Tales from the Crypt, Outer Limits, and Tales from the Dark Side. 

What new and upcoming authors do you think we should take notice off?

I'm a huge fan of Christopher Coake. He wrote my favorite short story of all time, "Knitter." Vincent V. Cava has some awesome stuff going on.  He helped bring back the horror comics I loved as a child in his team up with Mr. Creepy Pasta for their comic. I really like VE Schuab's take on superpowers and the undead in her Villains series.  John FD Taff never fails to blow me away.  Josh Malerman recently dropped Unbury Carol and his books are a master class in writing atmosphere, so people should check him out.
 
I think writers would do well to stop thinking solely in terms of print.  There are so many amazing podcasts or YouTube shows or people making their own web comics, five-minute video shorts, or even how some people use social media to tell horror stories.  It's fascinating.  One of the joys of horror is that it can't be contained or defined fully, so I love that it can't be contained to a single form of media.  I also love that horror relies on senses a lot more than some genres, so the ability to manipulate the audience on multiple levels that other forms of media allow really impresses me.

How would you describe your writing style?

Chatty. Informal.  I write the way I speak.  Choppy sentences. Ellipses. Each individual thought is a sentence. That is the language my brain speaks to me, so it's what hits the paper.  I try to use words almost anyone can understand. I don't need people getting ripped out of my story to go look up words, even if they're only clicking a button on their Kindle. That minute might have killed the whole thing for them.  I'm never afraid to drop some profanity. I have a hard time believing that someone would be chased by a machete wielding maniac and yell, "Oh Gosh! Darn you to Heck!" when they're stabbed. 

Are there any reviews of your work, positive or negative that have stayed with you?

I recently received a rejection that read, "I cannot use this story, as it doesn't fit the audience we currently have, but I want you to know that I'll be thinking about this story for a long time. You ruined my breakfast. Thank you."  I printed it, because I love that rejection so much. 

What aspects of writing to do you find the most difficult?

Marketing.  100%.  Writing is easy.  Brainstorming, outlining, pacing, characterizations, all of that comes with practice and insistence.  Marketing is a whole other world. NO ONE becomes a writer in order to spend their time trying to sell their books.  They do it because they miss that step in the understanding of the process.  Writers write.  Many hate editing (I'm not one of them. I live for editing).  But EVERYONE hates marketing. If you somehow get it down to a science and you're making a good living at this, the first thing a writer often does is hire someone else to deal with the marketing aspect.

Is there one subject you would never write about as an author?

I haven't found one so far.  I tend to write a lot about women who find their power and fight back against the world.  In that vein, I've covered rape, incestuous rape, and domestic violence.  Unfortunately, for every terrible concept I lay out on paper, I see something worse in the news, so if there's a subject I won't touch, I don't know about it yet. With that said, each thing would have to fit the story. It would have to serve a purpose.  I don't write anything for shock value and I don't make things gory to make them gory.

How important are names to you in your books? Do you choose the names based on liking the way it sounds or the meaning?

My writing basically appears to me in my head like a movie I'm watching, so a lot of times, people have names attached to them already.  Or, at least, that's how the main characters work.  Most of them don't have deeper meanings.  My upcoming novel, Fat Camp was a little different. I ran a Kickstarter to fund it and one of the rewards levels allowed people to name a character (with some provisions) and decide whether that character lived or died.  I have very rarely used names that had a deeper meaning.
 
Writing, is not a static process, how have you developed as a writer over the years? 

I think it's almost an evolution in the fact that I don't really see it slowly shifting as I grow. One day you look back and realize how far you've come, but I don't really notice it as it occurs.  I used to half-joke that I wrote screenplays because I was terrible at description and only had to write, "Large house".  At some point, I came to see setting as a character of its own accord and I learned to control it better. Now I get more compliments on descriptions of rooms than my tight plotting.  Reading certain writers really helped with it as well, particularly Josh Malerman who is one of the best in developing settings and atmosphere in horror.  I think the biggest development was coming to understand that "writer" means a lot more than "storyteller." It means editor, marketing guru, publisher (if you go indie), convention panel presenter, and constant networking/relationship builder.  The best part is each one of those pieces is constantly evolving, so I have to adjust to them and learn more each day.
 
What tools do you feel are must-haves for writers?     
    
Empathy and an undying desire to learn at all times.  Without empathy, you cannot create characters that are unlike yourself. You can't make a believable group of characters who have different motivations, feelings, and reactions.  And the desire to learn is an absolute must. If you're not willing to learn new things, your settings will be flat, your characters will be uninteresting, and you'll never be able to write anything you haven't personally experienced. 

What is the best piece of advice you ever received with regards to your writing?

Bram Stoker Award Winning editor Doug Murano gave me the best advice I've ever received.  "Ass in chair."  That's it. Three words.  But what it means is get your butt to the writing desk every single day and make that cursor dance.  You aren't a writer by thinking about writing.  The other motto I live my life by is "If it's important to you, you'll find a way. If it's not, you'll find an excuse."  That literally hangs in my office near my computer.  You have writer's block?  You can't write today? You can't make this scene work?  Well, if it's important to you to finish, you will.  Otherwise, keep finding excuses to not finish.

Getting your worked noticed is one of the hardest things for a writer to achieve, how have you tried to approach this subject?

I've gotten a lot better at it the last year, but I wish I could go back in time and tell myself what I know now.  The biggest obstacle I faced is I thought no one would care.  I didn't want to tell them what I was writing, because they might think I'm weird or maybe it doesn't sound as good as it does to me.  I just didn't tell people about it.  Guess how well that worked out?  Then I started celebrating my accomplishments.  When I'd sell a short story, I'd link to the anthology on my social media accounts.  What's weird is that I don't know when it changed. At some point, I stopped worrying about what people think about my writing and I just beat them over the head with it.  I post links to my Kickstarter or my anthologies or my new novel CONSTANTLY on my social media.  If my friends get sick of it, maybe I need better friends.  I don't know about anyone else, but I'm sharing my friends' works.  I'm trying to get people to notice them.  I'll tell people what I loved in a friend's last book.  To me, your friends and family should be the biggest supporters of your work. Outside of them, I stopped expecting a no.  I write sites and ask if they'd be interested in reviewing my novel or post links to my short films on my Twitter account. 

What piece of your own work are you most proud of?

I am most proud of an unpublished piece of work exploring Capgras Delusions, a rare form of schizophrenia (also witnessed in some traumatic brain injury cases and sometimes dementia). It's a psychological condition that prompts a person to believe that loved ones have been replaced by identical duplicates of themselves.  Extreme cases of Capgras Syndrome have ended with the brutal, horrific murder of the loved one.  In 2014 in New Orleans, a man decapitated his disabled son, believing the child had been replaced with a CPR dummy.  Another man killed his father, believing Dad was a robot.  He cut into him to find the batteries inside but found nothing.  Horrible things like that.  So, my next novel explores this subject.  I wrote the screenplay version a few years ago and that is the project I'm most proud of, but it's a story that's never left me and I feel it wants to be a novel, so that's where I'm going with it.

And are there any that you would like to forget about?

I try not to forget any writing project I've ever undertaken, because I tend to learn more from my failures than from my successes.  I would like to forget some of the terrible poetry I wrote cute girls in high school.  I'm sure they'd like to forget it as well.

For those who haven’t read any of your books, which of your books do you think best represents your work and why?

Fat Camp, which comes out Friday, July 13, 2018, represents my work and my life.  It's humor. It's horror. It's all of the insecurities I grew up with as a severely overweight teenage boy in love with a cheerleader.  The voice is so true. When the main character degrades himself even when he's doing well, that's me.  That's how my brain works.  But Fat Camp represents my overall passion for horror that makes motivational and psychological sense.  The Killer's motivation is very true to life.  Each character has a reason he is at the camp to begin with, something different they want out of it. They're all there to lose weight, but that's the physical aspect of the true motivations.  I'm also one of those people who is horribly inappropriate at terrible times.  I make jokes at funerals to keep my friends from crying.  I love word play and innuendo, and sometimes sound like a fifteen-year-old boy instead of a forty-year-old man, so I think Fat Camp really showcases my work as well as my actual personality.

Do you have a favorite line or passage from your work, and would you like to share it with us?

My favorite line is from an unpublished screenplay I wrote called Scattered.  It's basically the story of 20-something-year-old stealing his dead father's ashes and going on a road trip to scatter them, as he promised his father... but the ghost of his dad comes along for the ride, telling him stories about why places were important to him or how they shaped his life.  There's a flashback to when the Dad was alive and he's first diagnosed with cancer.  The main character has a voice over explaining the meaning of the diagnosis:
 
"Stage 4 - T3N2M1. It really is a countdown. It means your life clock is ticking so fucking loudly you can literally feel it in your chest. Stage 4 - The final stage. Over forty percent of people are already at Stage 4 when they find out they have lung cancer.  T3 - The T scale is in reference to the size of the tumor. T3 means it's fucking big. N2 - The N scale states where tumors have invaded the lymph nodes, how heavily they've invaded, and how far it's spread. N2 means the tumors hit a lot of lymph nodes, but not ones that are far away. Yet. M1 means the cancer metastasized to other organs.  Stage 4, T3N2M1 means you are royally fucked."

Can you tell us about your last book, and can you tell us about what you are working on next?

My last book is not horror. It's a superhero fiction novel, as I mentioned earlier. I wrote it so that my kids would have something I wrote that they were old enough to read. My next two projects are short films with the Head Feathers Only production company in Minneapolis.  My next novel will be the Capgras Delusion.
 
If you could erase one horror cliché what would be your choice?

Medicine cabinet mirrors.  It's so overdone.  We get it. It's a mirror that moves and we can get a jump scare out of it.  Then people flipped it so it would be a quick scare, but it's not a threat. It's a normal person there to throw us off.  Then sometimes we get the empty medicine cabinet mirror gag, where NO ONE is there, but then they get stabbed from another camera angle.  I hate it. Do away with the medicine cabinets.  No more!

What was the last great book you read, and what was the last book that disappointed you?

The last great book I read was the horror anthology Behold: Oddities, Curiosities, and Undefinable Wonders, which won the Stoker for best Anthology this year.  Every single story in it sang.  The author list is spectacular, but the writing inside makes you forget to care who wrote it.  Each story takes you in a different direction and there was nothing in it I'd completely seen before.
The last book I was disappointed with was AJ Finn's The Woman in the Mirror. It felt like a cliched rip off of an Alfred Hitchcock movie, with an ending stolen from another film. The main character works really hard to make sure she's always a victim and reminds us every couple pages that she's drunk or high.  It just really wore on me.  I finished it, but I was greatly disappointed in the endeavor.

What's the one question you wish you would get asked but never do?  And what would be the answer?

Is there any difference between holding your completed book in your hand and watching one of your short films?
There's an absolute difference. They're both fantastic but in completely opposite ways.  When I create a novel, I go through the full process alone.  I live with the characters, record their voices, build their worlds, tell their stories.  I work with small press publishers and complete almost all the marketing myself. Aside from beta readers and their feedback, a novel is 100% me.  A short film is interesting because when things go exactly as I saw them in my mind, it's weird to see outside of my head.  In our short film This Stays With The House, Lauren Kincaid did an amazing job and brought her character to life EXACTLY as I saw her in my head, right down to the cadence of her voice.  It scared me to be honest.  When things don't go according to how I envisioned them, I'm reminded it's a team effort and what I'm seeing is the result of a collaboration of many brains working to make something that they each believe in. 
 
The other question I'd like to have asked is, "Can I option your book for a movie?" I'm pretty sure the answer would be yes.
 

Where can we find you online?
Website: http://JamesSabata.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/JamesSabataAuthor
Twitter: www.twitter.com/JamesSabata
IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm8516263/
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7522067.James_Sabata
FAT CAMP PRESALE: http://JamesSabata.com/fatcamp

​THE CREEPYPASTA COMIC BY: VINCENT V. CAVA AND MR. CREEPY PASTA