Read It with Whiskey Podcast featuring William R. Hincy

Exciting News! Today (June 29, 2021) I'll be appearing on the Read It With Whiskey podcast hosted by Laura Juntunen! Tune in for an engaging, fun conversation ranging from Without Expiration, LA traffic, the difference between listening to an audiobook versus reading a book, and Appalachian pirates (which fans of this site will know are very near and dear to my heart). To listen to the podcast on your favorite platform, check out the http://www.readitwithwhiskey.com/ website. 

And for a behind-the-scenes look, below is the pre-interview questionnaire. These help the podcaster determine what questions they want to delve into and help the guest think about their answers ahead of time. What is said is very rarely exactly what is written, as conversations have a life of their own. Oh, and be sure to listen for the announcement of a HUGE raffle (details also available on my home page). Don't miss out! 

1. 1. Why did you decide to start writing &/or become a writer?

The short answer is I grew into it. As a kid, I was mostly alone. My parents both worked, and we transplanted from western Pennsylvania to California when I was four, so there wasn’t much family around. I didn’t have many toys, and the desert town I grew up in (Palmdale, shout-out!) was just being developed. So my imagination kept me company as I tromped about in the fields and through empty housing developments. At home, everyday items became actors, taking on different roles in the narratives I created to keep myself entertained. It was during this time that I learned to use story as the main means by which I interacted with the world around me. And in doing so, the desert and the people opened up to me in such fantastical and visceral ways that I was never bored.

 

My parents worked long hours and commuted, so by the time they got home, they ate dinner, watched some TV, and went to bed. But on the weekends my mom would go on and on about genealogy and about growing up in Appalachia. Genealogical narratives certainly have elements of nonfiction—facts that are beyond dispute or verifiable, like so-and-so were married on this date; George had brown hair; Bill was a sarcastic jackass—but it quickly became apparent to me that they were also colored by point of view biases, misinterpretations, foggy memories, and other tiny fictions that popped up during an unending game of generational telephone.

 

But rather than dulling my fascination, the fictions were more stimulating than the facts. I found truth, humanity, substance, beauty in those elements that couldn’t be verified. It became clear to me that the narratives we tell ourselves shape our characters, our responses to events, our relationship with society in almost unimaginable ways. And in harnessing that, you can understand far more about yourself and the world than you ever could through other means. It’s like connecting with something primordial and instantaneous all at once, and I was hooked before I could even competently put crayon to paper.

1. 2. Are you a full-time author, do you have a part/full-time job, or multiple streams of income? Elaborate.

Until roughly two years ago I worked full time as the Director of Quality/Regulatory for a medical device company, but I transitioned to a project-based role and reduced my hours to part-time. I now work 50/50 on the day job and my writing. With the extra hours I’d become accustomed to spending writing, I’m basically a full-time writer with a part-time gig.

 

To be sure, it took 20+ years to get here. I had my first daughter at twenty, then a second a year later, and found myself a single father trying to balance work, parenting, my dreams, and some semblance of a social life. I managed to write and publish fairly regularly through the chaos, and then in my early thirties I married my wife, Claire, blending our families, buying a house, and having a son, William Wallace (FREEDOM!), of our own. Prior to the pandemic, we made the decision to adjust our lifestyle so I could pursue writing as a career and not just a side-hustle. So at 40, I began pursuing my passion, and luckily I had a trove of writing to sculpt and release in short order.

1. 3. What is your favorite part about being an author?

The knots. I love the challenge of bending myself into emotional, logical and literary knots, then figuring out how to untangle them all that’s satisfying to myself and my audience. I guess you could say I’m like a hypothetical contortionist with a masochistic streak. That’s the journey to me—the discovery comes through the pain, the ordeal, the confrontation with fear and self-doubt. And it is the self-discovery that’s the reward—not the resolution or the arrival at a specific place and time. With my current project, I find myself asking “am I mad?” or “am I capable of writing this?” every couple of days, and it’s precisely those questions that reinforce to me that it’s EXACTLY what I need to be writing.  

1. 4. How many books / works do you have published?

Two at present, with a third imminent.

 

Without Expiration is a personal anthology of short stories I published in November 2019, which was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award and named one of Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2020. The stories vary from satirical to tragic (sometimes in the same story), but the underlying question in them all is: “are we bad people who do good things, or good people who do bad things.”

 

My novel, But the Ripping Apart, chronicles a single father’s painful journey to self-awareness as he attempts to help a retired schoolteacher with her hoarding and alcohol addictions. Some people run from their demons—Jack and Ms. Lyons sit down and have cocktails with theirs.

 

This fall, I’ll be releasing A Fire for Christmas, a collection of satirical, hallucinatory, perhaps even deranged, Christmas stories. The premise: “It’s Christmas 2020—be careful what you wish for! After meeting at a pre-pandemic writers conference, struggling sci-fi novelist Jeffrey Dahl attempts to rekindle a romance with renowned holiday erotica author Lourdes D.P. Ivy. But stay-at-home orders, social distancing, and communication gaffes lead to a series of old-fashioned letters as the would-be lovers exchange Christmas stories.”

1. 5. Why did you choose self-publishing over the traditional publishing route?

My intention has always been to be a hybrid author, publishing some pieces traditionally and others independently. Theoretically, trad publication can help with visibility, wider distribution, perhaps get your work in bookstores and libraries. Meanwhile, going indie allows for complete creative control and a larger portion of the profits. By going hybrid, I’m aiming to bridge the gaps and, as Hannah Montana would say, “Get the best of both worlds!”

          

Both have their pluses and minuses, to be sure, as I learned the hard way. An earlier version of my novel But the Ripping Apart was traditionally published under a different title roughly eight years ago. And wouldn’t you know it, I hit the unholy trinity of the bad trad publisher experience: ignored and forgotten (judging by other authors I've met, this is just their way of doing business); no say on the final packaging (resulting in a hideous cover and goofy author photo... although I guess I can't blame them on the picture considering the model); and literally NO copy-editing, which was the greatest sin in my opinion. After the novel languished for years, I decided to take my career into my own hands and requested out of my contract. I spent two years editing, revising, repackaging, and working with the exceptional editor, Dario Ciriello, to produce the “remastered”—if I can borrow a term from 90s VHS tapes—cut of that novel. (Disclaimer, I don’t believe this is the common publisher experience by any means.)

 

Being that so many of the stories in Without Expiration had been previously published and I had such a godawful experience with my first publisher, it was an easy decision to go indie. Furthermore, to be true to the subtitle, A Personal Anthology, I felt I had to have complete creative control to develop an artistic expression unique to me. To do that, it felt imperative that the collection be diverse and unusual and bold. The contemporary trend is for anthologies to have an overarching tone and storytelling style, so it’s unlikely I would’ve been able to package “Amen” with “A Study in Discontinuity” because tonally and narratively they are so different. But for WE to truly be a personal anthology, both works had to be included.

1. 6. What is your most recent book / project?

My current WIP is an epic absurdist satire titled Pirates of Appalachia. Set in the post-Trumpocalyptic future, it revolves around a band of bootlegging pirates who sail the Ohio River to sack the Independent City of Pittsburgh. The citizenry is the manifestation of our social media personas come to life, and from that starting point the characters journey back to their humanity in alternatingly fantastical, dark and surreal ways. Oh, and there are mermaids!

1. 7. What is your writing process? Do you work from scratch or do you plot everything out prior to writing? Combination?

I usually begin with a challenge. For instance, the idea for “A Study in Discontinuity” (one of the fictions featured in Without Expiration) stemmed from the following: can you write a compelling, human piece of fiction in the format of a scientific research paper? Similarly, the surrealist religious satire “Amen” originated when I tasked myself with writing a story in FIRST-person omniscient. Other times I challenge myself to get to the root of the humanity of a character who may not appear likable. And other times, it’s just a flash of inspiration, an almost biological imperative to bring a specific idea into existence.

 

As far as developing a story, I tend to think of myself more like a sculptor than a writer. Rather than outlining or writing character synopses, I usually write what is sometimes referred to as a “zero” draft. I think of this part of the process as finding my materials, but rather than granite or clay, I’m cobbling together clay and backstory, marble and context, wood and irony, story and shadow and distorted points of view. After I’ve finished the zero draft, I step back, examine what I have, and begin shaping. Sometimes this requires adding material here and there, or it might involve whittling down to the essential core of the thing. For example, the short story “Teeth” began as a 12k word story and was distilled down to a 1k word piece by the time it was published.

 

Generally after the zero draft, though sometimes before, I step back from the idea and consider what process is needed for that particular work. Changing or adjusting your process is not for the faint of heart: it can be unsettling, scary even, and requires a lot of grit to tough your way through the inevitable self-doubt. But it helps to produce variety and opens you up to possibilities a rigid, constant process is unlikely to unveil. For instance, Pirates of Appalachia has a range of POVs. To stimulate distinctness and liveliness between characters, after the zero draft I worked out a full outline of the events, then wrote the next draft one character at a time, charting my way through the story and their development as I went. In the process, I learned that a couple characters I thought were minor were in fact pivotal, and exchanges between characters suddenly took on exciting new meanings. For the final draft, I’m going work through the book front to back to ensure unity and cohesiveness.

 

A final note, I do almost all of the heavy-lifting—from ideation, story development, momentous sections, and difficult passages—subconsciously. I purposely set my schedule so that I write for a few hours, then go for a bike ride, take a shower, lift weights, or another activity where I’m not actively engaged in language-based thinking and my imagination has free range. I also spend time writing or editing before going to bed, so what I’m engaged with is front and center in my mind while I sleep. Once I feel a piece is too conscious that I have a hard time stepping away from the nuts and bolts, I let it rest and work on another piece.

1. 8. How did you feel the first time you held your proof / published book in your hands?

Underwhelmed. That may sound counterintuitive, ungrateful, or just plain depressing, but it taught me that it’s not the product that excites me, it’s the process. I’m a big journey guy, and not just the band (but who doesn’t love Journey??). It didn’t help that the cover the publisher put together was metallic teal and featured what looked like swirled vomit with abstract geometric patterns.

1. 9. Where does your inspiration for your books come from? *Use a specific plot point / book example if you want to.

It varies from story to story. The idea for But the Ripping Apart came to me after an encounter my wife and I had with a hoarder when we were first dating. That encounter made me reflect on where I was in life, where I was going, and confront where I’d been. The character of Jack began as a vessel for that examination, and then morphed into a character all his own that I don’t see much of myself in.

 

Other times it feels like I’m just dancing to drawstrings pulled by the muses. Pirates of Appalachia is the culmination of multiple inspirations, ranging from dreams of Mark Twain to the serendipitous occasion of flipping the channel from a presidential debate to WWE wrestling. Often, stories or characters begin swarming through my mind as I ride my bike.

1. 10. What are the most common questions your readers have about you / your book?

The most common question across my work is about the ambiguity. (In fact, I’ll be presenting on the use of ambiguity in fiction at the Short Story America Festival later this year.) That’s not to say my writing is obscure or coy—but it is layered, and I intentionally leave spaces for the reader to insert themselves into the proceedings. And that space and layering leads to a variety of interpretations and impacts. 

 

I also find it hard to believe that any of us know exactly why we are thinking or doing something, so my characters don’t either. There are so many masters we serve simultaneously. Societal pressures, upbringings, emotional and intellectual pulls, and much more—they confound our every move. And rather than shy away from that, or distill it into something manageable so that I can hold the reader’s hand and present to them an unmuddled account of reality, I serve them the cocktail. Stiff. Shaken, not stirred. Alcohol forward. And I’ll drink with you all night, but the next morning we’re left to deal with our hangovers on our own. To me, that comes closer to glimpsing beauty and truth. So in “Bermuda Triangle” when an adulterous couple share their last night together talking around the one subject on their minds, the reader can interpret that as it being too painful for them to confront, a purposeful aloofness, heartbroken verbal meanderings, resigned acceptance—or all of the above. And all of those would be equally valid readings.

1. 11. What is something your readers do not know about you?

I am a devil on the karaoke mic! I can’t sing a lick, and I don’t always know the words, there’s even be occasions where I didn’t know the language, but I make up for all of that with unbridled enthusiasm. There’s a frustrated rock god trapped inside these screeching tones and spastic gyrations.

1. 12. What is your favorite whiskey?

Ouch! That is such an IMPOSSIBLE question. I’m an Old Fashioned guy, and my go-to is Bulleit Rye. But I love sippers, as well. Currently, you can find me sneaking bottles of Navigator—a super smooth bourbon aged in red wine barrels with a peppery finish—to the park for Sunday picnics, or filling my flask with Uncle Nearest for movie nights, which are finally at long last a thing again.