Writer Wednesday: Jan Kozlowski

My pal and fellow Horror in Film and Literature lister, Jan Kozlowski, first fell in love with the horror genre in 1975 when the single drop of ruby blood on the engraved black cover of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot hypnotized her into buying it. She sold her first story, Psychological Bacchanal to the EWG E-zine in 1997. Her short story, Parts is Parts, won awards in both the International Writing Competition sponsored by DarkEcho’s E-zine and Quoth the Raven’s Bad Stephen King contest. Another short story, Stuff It, was sold to an independent film producer and went into production as a movie short called Sweet Goodbyes. Her short stories have appeared in: Remittance Girl’s A Slip of the Lip Anthology, Lori Perkins’ Hungry for Your Love: An Anthology of Zombie Romance and Fangbangers: An Erotic Anthology of Fangs, Claws, Sex and Love.

She is extremely proud and excited to announce that her first novel, Die, You Bastard! Die! debuted February 7, 2012 as part of Lori Perkins’ new horror line, Ravenous Shadows, edited by the legendary John Skipp.

Q: What do you write on? Computer, pad o' paper, battered Underwood? Give us a vivid picture.

I do the majority of my writing on my cherished MacBookPro laptop. I tend to turn my MacBook on at 6:30am and not shut down until 9pm or later most days [Ed: Hmmm, you can shut them down?]. If I either get stuck or get a jones to feel pen against paper, I’ll pull out my old white L&M Ambulance Company clipboard loaded with scrap paper and start scribbling. The board is a souvenir of my days as an urban EMT in Hartford, CT and I keep it around as a reminder of what I COULD be doing for a living.

Q: Do you listen to music while you write? Does it influence what you write?

I almost always listen to my local Dinosaur (Classic) Rock radio station when I’m working. Since Die, You Bastard! Die! is such an ultra violent story, I tried putting together a play list of heavier metal like Avenged Sevenfold (my granddaughter’s favorite band), Testament, Broken Hope, Disturbed, but I ended up distracted by the unfamiliar songs. Listening to the rock I grew up with in the 70’s like Bob Seger, The Eagles, Bruce Springsteen and Aerosmith, with a little Tom Waits, Frank Zappa, Nathan & the Zydeco Cha-Chas, Bon Jovi and Bacon Brothers thrown in via iTunes works best for me.

Q: Do you write in short bursts or carve out long periods of time to work? Is it a habit or a vice?

For me, writing is a business. I’ve been freelancing since I was about 12 and sold articles about raising tropical fish to my hometown newspaper. For the past 15 years or so I’ve run my own freelance writing shop doing all sorts of business and web related writing, editing and research work. Over the past two years, I’ve slowly been moving away from the business projects in order to focus on my horror fiction, but whether I’m writing fiction or non-fiction my work style is the same….commit to the project and write until the client, the editor or I’m happy with the finished product.

Q: What writer would you most want to read your work? What would you want to hear them say?

That’s already happened…on one of the drafts of Die, You Bastard! Die! I think I managed to gross out my editor, legendary Splatterpunk King, John Skipp! Now if I can, one day, pay Dean Koontz back for the creeps he gave me with his novel Whispers, I’ll die a happy writer.

Q: On the days where the writing doesn't go so well, what other art or career do you fantasize about pursuing instead?

When I was a little girl my grandfather used to tell me stories about his adventures working for a funeral home during the pre-embalming fluid days. I always thought I would have loved working in mortuary sciences, but when I was going to school women weren’t exactly welcomed into the funeral services industry. Now that times have changed and we have a first class Mortuary Sciences degree program at our local college, I’ve always thought that would make a fabulous Plan B, even now at age 50+.

Q: What do you read? What do you re-read?

I try to read a little bit of everything. I get some great ideas from newspapers and magazines. I just discovered and am now devouring Mad Money Wall Street guru, Jim Cramer’s books. I try and read as much classic horror like Robert Bloch, M.R. James, Fritz Leiber, H.P. Lovecraft, Richard Matheson, Edgar Allan Poe and J.N. Williamson as possible. I also try to keep up with who’s publishing today beyond Bestsellersaurus Rexes Stephen King and Dean Koontz. I’m a huge fan of Edward Lee, Neil Gaiman, Joe Hill, Joe R. Landsdale, Jonathan Maberry, Elizabeth Massie, Yvonne Navarro, Weston Ochse, Monica O’Rourke, John Skipp and Andrew Vachss.

I rarely find time to re-read anything unless I’m researching a specific writing technique, like how Jonathan Maberry handled the fight scenes in his Pine Deep trilogy or how Dean Koontz ramped up to the reveal of the cockroaches in Whispers.

Q: Where did the idea for  Die, You Bastard! Die! come from? Do you have a surefire way of sparking inspiration? And is that an awesome title or what?!

The idea for Die, You Bastard! Die! came out of a lovely dinner Ravenous Shadows publisher Lori Perkins and I had during the 2011 Northeast Writer’s Conference, known as NECON. Lori mentioned she was looking for a story about an adult child coming home to take care of her abusive parent and it matched up with a story I had been kicking around for years about a survivor of childhood sexual abuse coming home to deal with her past. After the conference I got home, wrote up the proposal, Skipp green-lighted it and we took off from there. I realize that’s not the way most writers get a book deal but it goes to prove that if you consistently put the hard work in, you WILL find yourself at the right place, at the right time with the right story. 

Writing inspiration and story/character/plot ideas are everywhere if you’re open to them…and my motivation for being open to them usually is based on my memories of being paid $5 an hour to be projectile vomited on as an EMT or waitressing at Friendly’s for .60 below minimum wage. 

John Skipp raves about this book:

Die, You Bastard! Die! is one hard-as-nails crime story indeed, with a crime at its core so heinous it boggles both mind and soul. That said, it is also a horror story, a mystery, and an insanely taut suspense thriller. Categories are funny like that. 

But human monsters don’t get more humanly monstrous than Big Daddy. And it don’t get much rougher and tougher than Jan Kozlowski’s violently matter-of-fact, emotionally ass-kicking, downright incendiary son of a bitch. 

I love this book, and stand behind it 100%. Hope it blows you away, as it did me. And has you coming back for more. 

Drop by Jan's blog or website and follow her on Twitter. Find her on Facebook and check out her Amazon author page. Thanks, Jan!

Writer Wednesday: John Claude Smith

John Claude Smith is a writer of dark speculative fiction, music journalism, and poetry. Most of the short fiction veers into horror, while the novels tend to meander into a weird mix of magic realism, psychological and supernatural nuances, and, again, horror. Late 2011 saw the publication of his first book, The Dark is Light Enough for Me, a collection of short stories. He presently exists in the SF Bay Area, though soon he will be in Rome again, where he truly lives.

Q: What do you write on? Computer, pad o' paper, battered Underwood? Give us a vivid picture.

A: Usually on a computer, though many tales and, in particular, poems, start by putting pen to paper.

Q: Do you listen to music while you write? Does it influence what you write?

A: I can and often plan specific music for a mood I want to incorporate into a story, but ultimately, when locked in with the writing, it doesn’t matter. I hear the voices and motivations of the characters and the music is nothing more than white noise whispering for attention in the background.


Q: Do you write in short bursts or carve out long periods of time to work? Is it a habit or a vice?

A: When I’m deep into a project, specifically a novel, I write for specific periods of time on a daily basis. In between the novels, of which there are two down, with the third novel in the second draft, while I align research for the fourth, I will allow for a less regimented process. It’s a part of me as even when not writing, I’m thinking writing. The brain is quite cluttered with stories, stories and, yes, stories.


Q: What writer would you most want to read your work? What would you want to hear them say?

A: There are too many to consider, but the “pop-up” in my brain keeps registering Harlan Ellison as the one, and I would simply like him to enjoy the work…but express his enjoyment in traditionally effusive Ellison manner, perhaps.

Q: On the days where the writing doesn't go so well, what other art or career do you fantasize about pursuing instead?

A: A musician for a post-punk band cut out of the mold of all the bands from England circa 1978-1982 or so, though I have horrible tendencies when playing guitar to turn into a thousand-notes-a-second speed-freak wanker, which derails my fantasy and sends me back to words.

Q: What do you read? What do you re-read?

A wide variety of everything, though for re-reading pleasure, I tend to lean toward a lot of writers whose work stretches even the genres they are slotted in, like Lucius Shepard, Laird Barron, etc. Actually, last summer I did an in-depth reading and re-reading session with those two and a handful of other writers whose work sets the highest standard for what I enjoy, both stylistically and imaginatively, real quality and potency. It was a form of research. I plan to dig into a lot of Weird Fiction writers soon, to research much of what they do, dig into the heart of the weird.


Q: Where did the idea for your latest collection come from? Do you have a surefire way of sparking inspiration?

The idea was there for quite some time as I have about 3-4 books worth of short stories. It just took my agent to say, hey, how about an ebook, and me responding, why not? I think of it as a good introduction to my work. Inspiration comes to me by simply listening to the world around me, reading widely, living without restrictions. Paying attention. The littlest odd notion can lead to something huge.

Here's a little taste of The Dark: The excerpt is from the story “The Sunglasses Girl.” After an evening of sex in his car with what he thought was a prostitute, our main character, Trane, learns his assumptions were wrong:

She smiled, all teeth, vicious, gleaming with disgust, and took off her sunglasses.

“Remember, you made this choice,” she seethed.

The moment was brief. Description was useless, but Trane’s mind flashed with unexpected images: vast gulfs of infinite, starless space; yawning abysses where the lost tumbled for eternity; black scars that oozed blindness. He felt an oppression begin to suffocate him. She had no eyes, per se, just the empty sockets where they should be, empty sockets that defined the word “empty” in new, disturbing ways: fathomless wells in which the echoed response of the dropped stone would never speak. They epitomized nothingness, a vast, turbulent nothingness that indicated there was no soul within her, no self, nothing of substance—nothing!—but something of unspecified definition that roiled like a cavern of agitated bats. The nothingness started to leak like viscous black rivers from a whirlpool of resentment and hatred and loathing and spite and so much more negativity—negativity, that was what he witnessed; the whirlpool writhed with an omniscient negativity—Trane’s head pulsated with the pummeling weight of her wrath. He gasped, his erection went south, and she put the sunglasses back on.

It was only one moment. 

You can find John on Facebook and Twitter as well as at his blog. Find out more about The Dark is Light Enough For Me and read reviews at Amazon and Goodreads. I just got started reading the collection while traveling back from Scotland and can recommend it for anyone who likes dark horrors with an almost Lovecraftian sense of unease. Thanks for being my guest today!

Authors After Dark

All authors must wear a tiara: shouldn't this be true every day, everywhere?

Good-bye, Salinger