On today's spotlight, I interview the crazy mind of author Clinton Boomer. This man not only shares my town, my age, but he is also incredibly brilliant with an awesome sense of humor, and a prose that will keep flipping pages. Boomer is one of the few people I know who can make you smile and make you laugh regardless of the day you are having. He is also the type to take you to strange new worlds beyond the parameters of normality.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Clinton Boomer...
Clinton Boomer
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... and here are my answers to your EXCELLENT questions!
The interview:
When did you first want to write for a living?
There was never a time that I didn't want to write for a living. Now, my day-job ... or night-gig, I suppose ... is as a bartender, and I love it, and it pays the bills, and I'm very lucky to get to do it. I've been working at the Cafe, slinging drinks and talking shit, for over 6 years, and I wouldn't give that up for a million dollars; I get to meet interesting people and hang out and listen to awesome music, and it's made me a better person and a DAMN good writer. But my passion is for putting words on paper ... if I can do both, I sure as hell will.
What made you decide on horror/Sci-Fi/Thriller?
My love of speculative fiction goes back to ... forever, I think. My brain is attuned to make-believe and what-if scenarios, especially. Explosions and fist-fights and laser-sword duels and things going bump in the night. I dig on urban-fantasy & horror-noir in particular, so it would have been really weird if I'd dived into romance novels, instead.
How long have you been writing?
I began writing before the time of my own recollection, predominantly by dictating stories to my ever-patient mother about fire-monsters and ice-monsters throwing misbehaving children into garbage cans; since high-school, I've been carving larger and larger chunks out of paper with my pen. I've been writing professionally since 2008, predominately freelancing, but this novel represents the first big dive into the hard stuff.
What kind of inspirations do you have?
Well, I'm obviously inspired by my experiences playing White Wolf and Unknown Armies and Call of Cthulhu and ShadowRun and gritty, city-based Planescape games; like most writers my age, I'm as influenced by music videos and comic books and video-games and internet subculture as I am day-dreams and the poetry of the classics.
Favorite authors/or books?
Where to start? The big ones are Lovecraft and John Tynes and China Mieville and Warren Ellis and Neal Stephenson; I'm also huge-giant fan of Cracked.com - especially David Wong & John Cheese, and the writings of Dan O'Brien and Robert Brockway, Word Puncher. Above all, I would be a filthy liar if I didn't include Matt Forbeck - his novel 'Amortals' knocked me on my ass.
What can we expect to see from you in the near future?
Man, I've got a lot on my plate at the moment! Everything from future freelancing gigs for companies like Rite Publishing and Legendary Games and Paizo to my independent fiction; I've got a couple more books in the works. Right now I’m working on several novels, novellas or book-ideas, including the direct sequel to "The Hole Behind Midnight" – ‘The Thirteenth Impossibility’ – and a project called ‘Big American Hell: the Sad, Sweet Song of Scarf-Boy’ for the Hellcrashers setting.
There’s also an apocalypse/cyberpunk book called ‘flickering degenerate fluorescent dystopia’ that’s struggling to get out of my head and on to paper, a very odd infection/invasion piece called ‘Cityskin Pariah’ that’s rattling around back there as well, and of course I can’t forget my old loves: the sci-fi tale ‘Soapscum Unlimited,’ my young-adult novel ‘The Brand-New Knockdown’ and the Pathfinder Tale ‘Road to Varno’ ... plus 'Frugal Despot' and 'Kohai of the Many-Fanged Monkey God' and something I'm currently calling 'Johnny Iajutsu: Kicker of Demon Ass.'
I'm a weird guy.
A Little more about Boomer:
Clinton J. Boomer, known to his friends as ‘Booms,’ resides in the quaint, leafy, idyllic paradise of Macomb, Illinois, where he attended 4th grade through college. He began gaming with the 1993 release of Planescape, which shaped his Jr. High years, and he was first published professionally in the Ennie Award-winning Pathfinder Chronicles Campaign Setting from Paizo Publishing after placing in the Final Four of Paizo’s inaugural RPG Superstar! Competition.
He currently devotes a full 99.9% of his waking hours to thinking about fantasy-adventure in general or ninjas, more specifically. Boomer is a writer, filmmaker, gamer and bartender; his short comedic films, the “D and D PHB PSAs,” have over 3900 subscribers on YouTube and and have been viewed more than a million times.
A member of the WereCabbages creative guild, a frequent freelance contributor to Rite Publishing, Sean K. Reynolds Games, Paizo Publishing, Reality Deviants Press, Zombie Sky Press, Legendary Games and the Hellcrashers setting, his debut novel The Hole Behind Midnight was released in 2011; Daniel O’Brien, columnist for Cracked.com and contributor to the New York Times bestseller You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News called it “ … Raymond Chandler meets Douglas Adams by way of a fantasy nerd’s fever dream. And it’s AWESOME.” Boomer is currently the happiest he has ever been in his whole life.
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