Literary to Paranormal: Guest Post by Dan Holloway

Jul 14, 2011

Today my guest is Dan Holloway. He’s got an interesting story, because he started out as a literary author, but then branched into self-publishing YA paranormal romance. Quite a jump, isn’t it? But I think it just shows how difficult it is to box in smart people. Most of us have more than one interest, and I’ve known many authors who want to write more than one thing. But publishers encourage us to narrow our focus, rather than broaden it. So I’m always interested to hear how people share their various facets. So, here’s Dan! Welcome, Dan, and thanks for being on the blog today!

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Hi. I’m Dan. I write literary fiction. Books a bit like Haruki Murakami or Banana Yoshimoto. Oh, and transgressive poetry and short stories that I read in dingy bars and dodgy galleries.

Look. That’s me. See – I’m so transgressive I transgress the laws of nature and stand at 45° when I do readings.

So it made perfect sense that when I was looking for a new project earlier this year, I decided to write…

A seven part young adult paranormal romance series.

Here’s part one. It’s just out, and it’s called Black Heart High. I’m rather proud of it. And whilst it is assuredly on the darker side of the paranormal spectrum, its beating heart is most resolutely a romance of the spans-the-ages-breaks-your-heart kind.

I love that I can change tack like this. It’s one reason I self-publish and have no interest in either a publisher or an agent. I can take on any project I want, whenever I want. But it has raised some challenges, and some questions. The first of which, I suppose, is why? Well, it’s something I’ve always wanted to do, for several reasons. I’m an utter sentimentalist being just one of them. I love something that makes me cry. Be it in a film, like that bit in Blade Runner when Rutger Hauer spouts about C-beams over the Tannhäuser Gate (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTzA_xesrL8) (what’s a C-beam? Where’s the Tannhäuser Gate? Who cares, pass a hanky!); or in a book, like the end of Murakami’s Norwegian Wood when Toru listens for Midori’s voice from a place that isn’t a place (where’s that? Who cares, ‘nother hanky!); or music, like The Kills’ Black Balloon (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruc1jTK2H_s) (elevator into your skull? Really? Hanky!).

And I’ve always loved the whiff of the supernatural (even my favourite so-called serious authors Banana Yoshimoto and Haruki Murakami are hardly tied to the laws of physics). And I will still argue with anyone at the bar who’s still listening that The Craft (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoM4OXQVCcE) is the most important film of the past 20 years.

The thing about the paranormal is that when you write it you can be more true than you can be otherwise. Which sounds odd but it’s, er, true. The thing is you’re not tied up in facts. You can tell the truth that matters. The truth about what’s in your characters’ hearts. The most true scene I’ve ever read is in Murakami’s Sputnik Sweetheart when a character is trapped on a ferris wheel and watches herself being raped through her bedroom window. You can’t write that in a book that cares about facts more than truth.

It’s not just that you have to justify changing tack to yourself, though. Or to your literary writer friends who look at you gone out (I still get e-mails from friends who say “you’re reading what?” when I say I’ve just read the latest Amanda Hocking). There were some serious practical considerations about readers/career arcs and branding. The things that form the awkward flip side of being a free-to-do-whatever self-publisher.

My first thought was to write under a pseudonym. At first because I didn’t want people to be put off when they saw my backlist. Being so flighty, it’s hard for readers to go “Ooh I loved that Oxford-based thriller I want to read something else. Ooh look, he’s written loads. Here’s a…wait a sec, this says a Murakami-esque coming of age tale about a gay teenage girl  living in Hungary. WTF!” Adding more to the mix certainly wouldn’t help.

Then I liked the idea even more. I thought I could keep it totally secret and try to build a following from scratch and then write a book about how I did it. So I came up with what I thought was a coolio pen name, Blue Farrow, registered websites, created twitter accounts. And then two things happened. First, one of those literary type friends read the book and said he actually liked it, and could see it was very “me”. And second, I remembered that awkward thing about in the real world there being only 24 hours in a day.

And so I decided to write as me. And I’m rather glad I did. My backlist may comprise a Lecter-style thriller, a gentle literary coming of age tale, a collection of transgressive performance pieces and a sprawling postmodern meditation on pain and reality, but they make a surprising amount of sense as a set.

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Bio

Dan Holloway (http://danholloway.wordpress.com) is a novelist and spoken word performer who runs the eight cuts gallery literary project (http://eightcuts.com). Winner of the 100^th Anniversary episode of Literary Death Match, his show spoken word The New Libertines played to sell-out crowds at the recent Stoke Newington Literary Festival and Oxfringe, and will be coming to the Covent Garden Poetry Cafe on September 15^th and Edinburgh Fringe in 2012. On July 28^th he will be part of the Rising Stars panel of new novelists at Blackwell’s Bookstore in Oxford where his novel The Company of Fellows was recently voted “favourite Oxford novel” in a poll of readers.

Dan’s other novels, all 70p, are:

Songs from the Other Side of the Wall

The Man Who Painted Agnieszka’s Shoes

And a collection of his shorts and poems called (life:) razorblades included