“Can’t I just like horror because it’s great? Does there have to be some big explanation?” – Stephen Graham Jones, ‘My Heart Is A Chainsaw’
Promise to keep this short. Felt like it’d be worth writing a little “where are we going, how did we get here.” Behind With Knife is a very different project from Vine. We started work on Vine back in 2015ish, when Brendan and I were younger and the world seemed more open. We thought we would be making short films as well as writing stories and releasing albums and making a podcast, because I guess if you have enough whiskey time stops mattering. We were throwing story pitches around and dreaming a lot. “Let’s rewrite the Bible,” I drunkenly texted one night. We hammered together a novel-in-stories that we’re still proud of. This time around, though? Both sober, we wanted to write something both shorter and a little more straightforward.
The idea of releasing a novel as a blog is one I’ve been in love with for a long time. Many decisions I make as a writer result from me thinking “would I have thought it was cool that R.L. Stine was doing this” or “would I have thought this was cool while working the 2 a.m. shift in the student union in college.” Blogs, to me, are fun—basically bonus writing, in an ideal world. Maybe that’s quaint. Point is, these fiction projects should be fun. For you and for us.
So the driving force propelling Behind With Knife was to make a pulpy, hopefully page-turning thrill ride. Every Thursday, you get a kill, not that we’d give that away. The calendar blessed us this year, with five weeks in October slotting us a nice five-act structure and a final chapter releasing on Halloween. We’ll probably try to keep the chapters shorter next time—really wanted to cap them at 1000 words, but alas.
Writing a pulpy page-turner when you’ve spent your career in poetry is harder than it seems, at least for me. Not sure how Brendan felt, but I wanna take a paragraph to talk about myself—is this a good practice, since you don’t have your own book out yet? That’s the nagging Calvinist in my brain. The answer is yes. It’s such a good thing, writing a book with a friend. I am shy about collaboration and busy enough to put up the disclaimer “please do not ask me to collab right now” but I would encourage doing something like this. I feel like my own writing gets better, doing this stuff with Brendan. Plus, it’s art outside of capitalism. That’s important to do.
There’s a good way to end, because I want to end with some encouragement. When I was in Maine over the summer, my delightful friend Maya Williams asked my wife, “so how does your creativity get expressed?” Those aren’t the exact words they used, but it was something like that, and I think that’s a great question to ask someone. How does your creativity get expressed? Publishing these novel(la)s on our website, we don’t have to play the submission game, the waiting game, or even much of the promo game. We’re just telling a story. Since 2020, Brendan’s put out an album, I’ve put out an album, we’ve put out a collab album, we’ve put out two books, and we do a twice-monthly podcast. Yeah, our creativity is coming out.
Here’s chapter 1. If you haven’t yet, go read Behind With Knife!
Sorry you got an email,
Chris