| Tim Curran lives in Michigan, works in a factory by day, and writes horror, crime, and westerns by night. A member of the HWA, he has appeared in nearly a hundred different magazines and anthologies, including Flesh and Blood, City Slab, and Black October, as well as in anthologies such as Vicious Shivers, Sick, and Darkness Rising. Two dark westerns, SKULL MOON and GRIM RIDERS, are available from Amber Quill Press. And his supernatural horror/western, SKIN MEDICINE, has just been released from Hellbound Books. You can find Tim Curran on the web at: http://www.darkanimus.com/curran.html |
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| LB: In your biography you said you think your writing was predestined. I’ve heard many other authors say they feel this way, like they have no choice in picking up the pen. What do you think it is about writing that grabs a certain type of person and turns the written word into such a necessary part of their lives—right up there with eating and breathing? TC: I think storytelling in general is very inherent to who and what we are as a race. And with some us, even more so. Once you realize that you can do it, that you’re as least as good as those who inspired you…or nearly…it becomes like a drug, an addiction, this idea of creating worlds and fictional realities, toying with the lives of your characters. I think it’s like playing piano or painting a picture, it’s a creative release and when people appreciate what you’re doing, it gets you off. If there wasn’t such a thing as horror fiction, guys like me would be sitting around a fire doing the same thing and calling it folktale. As long as there’s an audience, we’d be spinning tales…and probably if there wasn’t one. LB: Your first published tale was THE BLACK OCEAN. Could you tell us a bit about this story and the feeling that came with your first publication? TC: I was reading a book about some WWII flyers who had to ditch into the ocean, were lost out in the Pacific in a raft. I thought, that’s terrible, but what if you were on an alien world 50 or 60 light years from home? Now that would be truly hopeless, adrift on a raft in a foggy, weird alien ocean, your ship on the bottom. Once I had that basic theme, it was very easy to write. As to how I felt when it was published…that was a strange experience. I was happy, of course, but at the same time I felt violated or something. Here was my story laid out for everyone to read. For so long, my fiction had been mine alone, a private sort of thing and now it belonged to everyone. I’ve talked with other people about this and they had similar feelings. All writers want to be published, I think, but I wonder if at some primary level we horror writers are somewhat embarrassed about what we do. Writing this kind of stuff definitely separates you from the herd and people start wondering what kind of fucked-up mind you have to come up with these things. So maybe there’s something to that…maybe that general sort of opinion about us and what we do makes us feel like we’re coveting a terrible secret, you know, like hiding in the closet with a needle and spoon or a stack of dirty books. I work in a factory and the people there are very working class and I use to cringe when somebody would be discussing a book by Stephen King and they’d say, Jesus, this guy must be pretty sick to come up with this stuff. And I’d think, shit, what happens when they find out about me? |
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| TIM CURRAN |