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Interview With Nick Kaufmann Page 2

Q. Let's talk about your background for a while. At what age or at what point in your life did you know you wanted to be a writer?

A. I think I actually wrote my first story in third or fourth grade about a little three-year-old boy and his dad who get whisked off to another planet and have all sorts of bizarre adventures.

Q. Was this something assigned in school?

A. No, this is something that I did in class instead of the work. Then I stapled it and showed it to people. And I drew the pictures, too.

Q. Do you remember what it was called?

A. It was probably something silly like, "The Mysterious Planet"or "Boy and Father Get Kidnapped to Mysterious Planet."

I didn't realize at the time, of course because I was pretty young, but it was only through later self-analyzing that I realized that this was a direct result of having almost no relationship with my father when I was growing up.

And then around sixth grade I wrote a story in class -- again, instead of listening to the teacher -- about a boy who goes to a cemetery and goes into a mausoleum. This body starts coming out of the grave and the boy runs away. The teacher picked it up and read it in front of the class, I think either to humiliate me or because she was proud of me, I don't know which. And everyone in the class enjoyed it so that felt really good.

Q. So, based on these childhood stories, it seems like you always wanted to write horror or mystery type stories.

A. I always wrote what's known as speculative fiction, which is science fiction, fantasy, horror, everything that is sort of not quite realistic. As a kid, I loved Abbott and Costello. They had these movies where Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein or the Mummy, stuff like that. I loved those. And my other favorites were the Sinbad movies where he would fight the giant Cyclops. It was so incredibly fake but I loved it. I lived for that stuff. So that kind of thing informed what I later wound up writing.

When I was between the ages of 15 and 18, I was working on and off on this god-awful fantasy trilogy. I actually never finished it and it will never see the light of day. It's in my file cabinet. I can't quite bring myself to throw it out just because it's a document, a testament, of where I was at a certain time. But, there is no way anyone will see it, including myself. I can't look at it again.

Q. Till your death?

A. Till my death, and then it will be published and be some huge hit.

Q. What did you major in college? Did you go the English route?

A. Yeah, English and comparative literature at Sarah Lawrence. It was a concentration of mine, writing and studying literature. I tried to take a poetry class but it was just god-awful. Not the class. It was the poetry I wrote. It was all that "woe is me" high school stuff that I should have gotten out in high school but because I didn't write poetry in high school, it stayed until college.

Q. All about you?

A. Yeah, exactly. It wasn't terribly gothic or dark, but it was very pretentious. You know, I had a very lonely childhood so a lot of the poetry turned into this, "I'm all alone. Who could possibly love me? I'm a hermit."

Q. Did you wear a lot of black?

A. I still do! Black is very slimming. It's fashionable and slimming. It has nothing to do with my mindset whatsoever.

Q. So, when you told your mom and dad you wanted to be a writer...?

A. I'm not sure I ever told them that. I think they just saw me doing it and talking about it and understood. Or, at least if I did tell, they knew before I made that, you know, big announcement.

Q. What are your strengths as a writer?

A. It is a very recent strength, but I try to engage the reader emotionally. There's a lot of horror and suspense fiction out there that doesn't care about the characters. The author has done no work to make you care about the characters so it's really just an exercise in violence or monster creating. If the reader doesn't care about the characters, the reader can't sympathize or empathize or even identify with the character in any way, it's a bore. That's a new strength of mine. It's something that I've worked towards and I think I'm finally getting a handle on it. It's made my stories that much better.

Q. What are your weaknesses?

A. I still have trouble with description, and this is really where revising comes in because on the third or fourth edit of a story sometimes the word that you were looking for will only pop up then. Another weakness I have is that I sometimes write too long. It's very hard to sell short stories, and most of my stories wind up between 6,000 and 8,000 words. But that's still very long. And, it's hard to find a market, especially a good-paying market, for stories of that length. There is something inside of me is saying,"What you need to be doing now is work on a novel".

Q. Who do you think reads your stuff?

A. That is a good question. I don't know. I think they are fans of the genre. I don't know if I have any fans- and I'm talking true fans, not just friends and family- that are not fans of the genre. I'd like to break out of that. I think that the short story collection coming out in the fall will help out with that. It will bring me a lot wider audience because I've been published in a lot of small press anthologies that really don't sell that well outside of the almost incestuous genre. So I think this will help.

Q. It seems like you have a crime story feel in your style of writing.

A. Two of my most successful stories, and by successful I mean gotten the best feedback from, not necessarily the best money from, mixed crime with horror elements. One of them,"The Dead Stay Dead,"was about an assassin for the mob whose victims all start showing up at his house. The other one was called, "The Jew of Prague," and that was about a jewel thief who goes to Prague looking for a big diamond, called the Jew of Prague, that was buried in a rabbi's grave in a Jewish cemetery.

Q. What's your favorite story that you've written?

A. That's a tough one. They're all my babies. I can look at stories and tell you which ones I don't like so much.

Q. Which one did you enjoy writing the most?

A. Writing is hard work. It's hard to say. I like "The Jew of Prague" a lot. And I like one called "Street Cred" a lot, which takes place here, in an alternate Brooklyn, where the dead have come back to life. It involves a street gang called the Necro Fiends. I really do like that story a lot. I feel that it's pretty well-written and I love the characters.

Q. Do you feel the stories you like the most are the ones you put the most work into?

A. Yes. The earlier stuff I think I put less work into. I mean, it was still a lot of work, don't get me wrong, but less work was put into it and it shows. At least to me now, looking back.

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