Rumored to Exist
Questions and Answers
Rumored to ExistQuestions and Answers |
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Here are a bunch of random questions about Rumored to Exist and their answers. Got a question? send it to me and I'll answer it.
It's about $15.95 plus shipping and handling.
Seriously, the book started out with the idea that there would be these small segments that would be thoughts in a persons' brain. And if you somehow downloaded or siphoned out a part of their reality and just looked at it, you'd have this weird disconnected story, with parts of it being dreams and part being reality, and part fantasy, and so on. And reading this stuff randomly, on a flat piece of paper, would be much different than reading John Steinbeck or something.
The book didn't turn out that way, mostly because the small pieces got bigger, and the characters got slightly more developed. Now, the book has a bit of a linear story, but it's still very disconnected. You follow John Conner through the book, and he's in a struggle to find himself, but that's about all I can really mention without going into specifics. Don't beat yourself up if the story isn't that apparent to you, because it's not supposed to be.
Another aspect of the book is that I wanted to write a book that was dense, with an incredible amount of detail, but that would also be fairly accessible and easy to pick up and jump into. On one hand, I wanted to write something as tight and complex as, say, a Yes or Dream Theater album, a very detailed and thick piece of work. But I know that some writing that's experimental and very heavy is completely inaccessible and almost impossible to read for extended periods. I wanted to make something that you could randomly open to any page like it was a Farmer's Almanac and just start reading, like the way people flip through channels on the TV. Usually, these things are mutually exclusive, but I've tried to create something that was a mix of the two.
No, there never was an outline. Stuff was written as it was written, and then during editing, I worked out the order and either edited stuff to fit better, or moved it to a more optimal location. It was much more like putting together an album than writing a book in that aspect. At times, I kept notes, or a list of what I'd written, so I could make sure I wasn't repeating myself. And at one time I tried to outline the book by writing things on index cards and arranging them, but that became a complete waste of time.
I came up with ideas from every way imaginable. I thought of things during the day, from things that I saw; I based things on people from the past and present; I parodied actual movies, books, and TV shows; I kept a dream log and borrowed dreams; I wrote in notebooks; I mis-heard conversations and morphed them into ideas; I used the cut-up method; I borrowed things from abandoned short stories, old emails, and even book reviews I wrote for amazon. I really scraped for thoughts, because there were so many ideas in each paragraph of the book. I always said that three or four segments in Rumored had more original ideas than most 200-page books.
I cataloged ideas in every way possible, from a Palm Pilot to scraps of paper to notebooks to computer files. These pieces and "riffs" would eventually end up in a text file. I'd expand these and/or push them together, and eventually, they would turn into an actual piece of writing, and go to the book.
This temporary dumping ground was also the home to things that I pulled from the ongoing draft as I was editing. At one point, this grew dramatically, but by the end of the book, it was down to about 7,000 words. I'm not sure if I can do anything with these leftovers, but maybe later I'll wring a short story out of them.
Although I didn't find out about them until I was underway, my biggest literary influences are Mark Leyner and Raymond Federman. To a lesser degree, I'd include Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, and Hunter S. Thompson. During the writing, I read a ton of non-fiction, and I get a lot from stuff like Gray's Anatomy, Vietnam war almanacs, gambling guides, tool catalogs, professional wrestlers' biographies, gardening books, or whatever else I think is neat at the moment.
Film and TV are constant influences, but a list of film that hit me the most during writing would be Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, American Psycho, Fight Club, Kentucky Fried Movie, and especially Slacker. The South Park cartoons (as well as any of Parker and Stone's movies) are absolutely great, and I loved the Upright Citizens' Brigade show when it was on.
Music is a huge deal when I'm writing, and I think the reason I write the way I do is because I always wanted to be a musician, but it never worked out that way. The same with art, I wish I could do something more tactile than write, but I can't even draw a stick figure. I know little about art theory, but I think Jackson Pollock's painting is truly incredible, and I'm a fan of Dali, too.
I don't have RCS logs for everything, but here's a combination of later logs and my memory:
As far as changes, about 2/3 of the first draft was just strange observations and forgotten memories about Bloomington, and reminded me much more of Summer Rain than anything else. The other 1/3 was corny jokes or stuff that didn't work out. I trashed a lot of this and in the second and third draft, slowly started to find my voice. By the fifth draft, I had the writing skills, but it took a lot more editing to get something in shape. The core of draft 6 was complete, but took a lot of cleanup and glue to get it into a finished book. And I am not even sure that the published version is a finished book; I'm pretty sure I would have continued editing it for years if I didn't send it to the publisher first.
There are no published derivatives of the complete manuscript. After publication, I started working on an annotated version of the book. If you already have the book and you ask really nice, I can give you a PDF of this.
It's a former subplot in Rumored to Exist that was removed and spun off into another book. It had to do with a John Conner from the future coming back to John Conner in 1997 and giving him a time machine hidden in a Nintendo GameBoy so he could go back to 1992. The book was never completed, although it's possible it will be finished at some point.
Nobody can spell Jon Konrath, and I have spent my life with people calling me John Conrad, John Kornad, and so on. In 1992, I interviewed the band Type O Negative, and they thanked me in the liner notes of their insanely popular album Bloody Kisses, but they spelled my name John Conner. So it's been an inside joke since then.
No, they are not intentionally the same character. I think if you read both books back to back, there would be many similar connections, and I can't think of any contradictions between the two. The John Conner of Summer Rain probably couldn't have become the John Conner of Rumored in the ten or so years between when the books too place.
John Conner is roughly based on me, although many, many events are fictionalized in the course of the book.
Nick is based on my friend Ray Miller. He's also been given a large dose of fiction to his otherwise normal life (although the part about his obsession with Lego and Godzilla is real - you should see this dude's house.)
Lars is based on my friend Larry, who is currently a practicing lawyer in Chicago. Just in case someone from the American Bar Association reads this, all of the illegal and inethical stuff I wrote about with him was fake.
Tito is completely fictional, although in my mind I pictured him as being similar to Benicio Del Toro's role in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
There really was an Alfred Ely Beach, and he really dug a pneumatic subway under New York about a hundred years ago. He didn't make his money off of a cocaine syrup, though. And his grandson is fictional, although I modelled him after many other crazy scientists, most notably Nikoli Tesla, and Doc Emmett Brown in the Back to the Future movies.
It's assumed the book takes place in "the near future", which would be a few years forward from 2002. However, a lot of the book takes place in flashbacks, hallucinations, and jumps forward. Also, many dated items were written prior to 2002 and are assumed to have happened in the past.
All over. John Conner lives on the road, but has previously lived in Seattle, New York, and several places in Indiana. It's also mentioned that he lived in Chicago, Provo, and a half-dozen other cities. The book starts in New York and ends, more or less, in Elkhart, Indiana.
I ghostwrite a column for Metal Curse zine called "Dear Death"; it is a fake advice column where the fourth horseman of the apocalypse answers questions that (fake) people write in. I always had to come up with more and more outrageous stuff for this column. and in issue #9, I wrote a letter and answer from someone who had a fetish for having sex with bowls of vomit. I think I originally got the idea from a sick and hilarious alt.tasteless post on the internet called The Joy of Vomit.
Suddenly, puke became a big inside joke between me and Ray Miller (the creator of Metal Curse), and what's funny is that after that (1996 or 1997) there were tons of death metal bands, zines and labels, in the underground with vomit-related names. So the joke continued years later and wound up in the writing.And yes, there are people who are sexually turned on either by vomiting, or by watching someone vomit - they are called emetophiles. And no, I'm not one. It was just a joke to get a rise out of people, so please don't mail me bags of puke or anything.
Ivan's House of Sheep originally started almost 15 years ago in a sketch written by Jia Myers and myself when we were making comedy tapes on a jambox and hoping to someday be the next Cheech and Chong. The sketch was about a guy named Ivan who sold disease-free sheep for sexual purposed behind a 7-Eleven.
I continued the joke in the book, where Ivan sells sheep, along with various other types of contraband including drugs. I don't know what race or nationality Ivan is supposed to be, although on the tapes, he was played as being Russian, and in the book, I hinted at him possibly being Arab, despite the name.
No, I'm an atheist. I have read the Satanic Bible and read about the Church of Satan, but I've never joined and I don't believe in Satan or God. I grew up a Catholic, and I was also raised in the very religiously conservative state of Indiana, so I have a lot of good reasons to make fun of Christians in the book.
Believe it or not, I've never used illegal drugs; I did all of my drug research online. The same holds true for explosives, although I was into model rocketry for a while, and considered getting an explosives permit from the BATF. I wanted to step up to the larger motors in the amateur rocketry that required a permit, but I was losing enough rockets already with low-impulse motors. They have a neat website, though.
Yes. Early excerpts of Rumored appeared in:
All of the excerpts came from whatever draft was current at the time, and many of these excerpts didn't end up in the final draft of the book. The excerpts for Extent were rewritten in article format. The pieces that appeared in Drunkenscrawl was actually stuff that didn't end up in a draft and were reworked for the site's format.
I'm still interested in publishing excerpts from the finished book in zines. Drop me a line if you have a zine that jives with what I'm writing.
He's a fake reviewer invented by Sony and used in ads for several of their movies. They got in a ton of trouble over this.
I primarily used emacs running on the Linux OS. Over the writing of the book, I had four different desktop computers plus a laptop, so I went through a lot of different Linux distributions, using Slackware, then Red Hat. I also used a Palm Pilot for some notetaking.
After the book was complete, I used MS Word to get it ready for the publisher. I'm not sure how they do the actual layout, but I'd guess FrameMaker.
During the writing, I used a lot of little scripts and other stuff in Linux. I had a script I wrote to keep track of wordcount, and I used RCS for version control.
The cover is an eastern view of Bond Street from Broadway, in New York. I took the cover photo with an Olympus D-460Z digital camera, during the break of a rainstorm. After taking the photo, I ate dinner at the Kiev, while I marked up a draft of Rumored with a felt-tip pen. Right after that, I got stuck in the rain, and the hour or so of work was turned into pink goo. The strangest part of this photo was the date; I took it on 9/10/01.
The front cover layout was done by Ray Miller in Photoshop. The iUniverse staff did the layout for the spine and rear cover, using text I sent them.
Last updated
Monday, 06-Jun-2005
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