An accomplished writer featuring success in several different genres, author Gord Rollo has brought his skills to a series of novels and stories in his career with several celebrated releases over the years. Now, in honor of the release of his upcoming novel "Beneath Still Waters," I talk with him about his early interest in writing, the process he goes through in his books, and the book itself.
Me: Hello and thank you for taking the time to do this. First off, when did you get into horror in general?
Gord Rollo: No problem. Nice to speak with you. Horror and dark fantasy have always been the genres that interested me most, although I do write some crime, comedy, mystery, and western fiction as well. I am the youngest of four sons, and I grew up sneaking downstairs and staying up late watching horror movies with my older brothers.
Me: Were you into genre films growing up? What films specifically got you into watching horror movies?
GR: Absolutely. As I said above, my brothers were older than me and they all watch horror movies. I also grew up in the 1980s so video stores and VCRs were all the rage. I was too young to go see horror movies at the theater, but we rented hundreds of them over the years that I watched. I was a huge fan of the Halloween and Friday the 13th franchises but also loved some of the lesser-known moves like Terror Train, My Bloody Valentine, and Humongous. All the 1980 slasher films, basically.
Me: Who were some of your favorite writers growing up? Do you try to take influences from their style with your own voice in your work?
GR: I grew up on King and Koontz, of course, and later Clive Barker and Lovecraft, but I gravitated more toward writers like Richard Laymon, Jack Ketchum, John Saul, and Robert R. McCammon. I loved King and Clive but I never thought I could write like them. It was Laymon and Ketchum who gave me hope. They wrote in a more down-to-earth, less literate style that appealed to me.
Me: What was the starting point of becoming a writer? Were you always into writing growing up?
GR: I've been writing stories since back in grade school. My father wrote poetry and Western fiction as a hobby, and his love of reading and writing was passed along to me at an early age. I could read before I went to school, and basically, I've been writing ever since.
Me: What is your writing process? How do you stay focused on writing?
GR: Great question. I hear about writers who can sit down and bang off 10,000 words in a day and finish a novel in a month. That is definitely not me. If I’m on a roll I can certainly write a decent word count but for me, the reality of life always seems to get in the way. I can only dream of writing full-time and getting up each morning to head to my computer with a cup of coffee. I work full-time to keep a roof over my head, and writing—as much as I love it—has to come second place to paying the bills. I write when I can and don’t stress myself out too much over it. Some weeks are better than others. I do tend to stick to one project at a time, and I like to have the starting point and the ending to my stories/books before I start the actual writing. I’m fine with winging it a bit in the middle, but I need a few fence posts to guide me in the right direction so I don’t get too lost along the way.
Me: How did you settle on the plot for your novel “Beneath Still Waters?”
GR: I wrote this novella specifically for this collection. I'd had the basic idea for a really long time and had wanted to write this as a full-length novel for many years. I just hadn't gotten around to doing it yet. Don D’Auria, the executive editor for Leisure Books had approved this idea for a novel back in 2009 or 2010, but with the eventual demise of that company in 2011, it never happened. The idea never went away, though. When Kevin Kennedy and Simon Clark started discussing some ideas for the theme of our collection, I knew right away this was the right spot for Beneath Still Waters to finally come to life.
Me: Was there any special significance to making the small-town setup present in the story? How much prep-work went into adding the traits of the creatures into this type of story?
GR: I like writing about small towns. There is something more intimate and isolated in a small town that fits so well with the horror genre. Beckley, Nova Scotia does not actually exist, but gypsum mining is the heart of Nova Scotia mining, and I’m sure there are several small towns in the province that could stand in for Beckley easily enough. I do a lot of research but try not to get too bogged down in the details. My creature was born out of a Native American legend that I found, but other than the general idea of a “water demon,” the rest is purely out of my imagination.
Me: Was there any part of your real self injected into the human characters?
GR: In this story, not a lot, other than I am a trained scuba diver and there are a lot of diving scenes in this novella. I try to use my training and experience underwater to make realistic scenes and give readers some of the claustrophobic experiences that I’ve had on my many diving adventures.
Me: What was the most surprising thing about the arc of the story that emerged as you were writing it?
GR: What surprised me most was when I realized my creature wasn’t contained to only swimming in the lake. No spoilers but it was a present surprise when I started thinking about having it walk out onto the shore. I’ll leave it at that.
Me: Once it was finally written, what was the process for having it published?
GR: The good part of about this novella was that we already had an offer to publish the collection of novellas before I sat down to write the first word. It doesn’t always work out that way, of course, but as the years go by you start to write less on speculation than you had to when first starting out. That was the case here with Beneath Still Waters. I’ve always wanted to work with Joe at Crystal Lake Publishing, so it was a win/win for all of us.
Me: How do you do to keep your creative energy flowing?
GR: Another good question. I’ve never really not had that creative energy. Like I mentioned, I don’t always get to write every day like I would love to do, so when I do eventually make it back in front of the computer, I am usually chomping at the bit to get my ideas down. As with everything, some writing sessions are better than others and there are days I seem to be getting hardly anything accomplished, but that’s part of the writing game. You keep plugging along as best you can, and never stop trying.
Me: Lastly, what else are you working on that you'd like to share with our readers? Thank you again for your time!
GR: Several things. I'm expanding an old novella of mine called "The Dark Side of Heaven" into a full-length novel. It's a dark fantasy/horror that is nearly complete. Hopefully, it will see the light of day this fall or winter. Likewise, I will be releasing a dark fantasy novella called "Only The Thunder Knows" in that same timeframe. Perhaps the most exciting thing I am working on is a collection of short stories all set within the same insane asylum. I've written several stories in the past set in "Ashbury Creek Asylum for the Criminally Insane" and I'm in the process of writing several more. I've already completed a new novella that will be the showpiece of the collection, so I'm hoping to have the entire collection completed by the end of the year. We'll have to see how it goes.
You're welcome. Cheers!
Gord
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