David Wellington

David Wellington, who applied the "page 69 test" to Monster Nation back in March, was interviewed last month at Murderati by Mike MacLean.

Part of the interview:

MM: What made you decide to serialize this work online rather than to take it to a publisher?

DW: A friend of mine, who is now my webmaster and chief online marketer, Alex Lencicki, had a website -- a blog to be exact. He came up with the idea of writing a web serial. I thought it might be an interesting experiment. I really wasn't thinking about publishing the story at all. I had an idea for a zombie book I wanted to try and he said it sounded great, so I asked him for six months to do research, to work up an outline, and so on. He said the web didn't work like that -- I would be starting the following monday. I had to write the book in real-time, basically, putting up a chapter every monday, wednesday and friday and doing all the research and editing in between posts. It was exhilarating -- and maddening.

MM: What other challenges did you face writing a serialized work?

DW: Well, I'd never done one before. There just weren't a lot of opportunities for serials before the web came along -- it was a lost art form, something Dickens and Conan Doyle used to do, a nineteenth century thing. I actually went back and read a lot of old pulp stuff trying to see how they worked. It's a very restrictive medium -- every chapter has to end in a cliffhanger, you can't expect people to remember subtle details when it'll be months between plot developments. Yet it also infused the book with a crazy anarchic energy I'd never seen in my writing before, and I think that's what really drew people to it.

Read the entire interview.

The Page 69 Test: Monster Nation.

--Marshal Zeringue