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Welcome M. Ryan. Please tell us a
little bit about yourself.
I was raised
in Rochester, New York, in a house that was constantly full of writers. On
nights when my parents and their friends were holding court in our living room,
I would practice the fine art of evading the little kids in the next room,
setting up camp among the grown-ups, and being quiet long enough that they
would forget I was there, and that it was past my bedtime. All my best dirty
jokes were picked up this way.
I studied
theatre performance at Northeastern University, where I spent a little time
onstage, and a lot of time reading plays. I fell in love with Sam Shepard,
Arthur Miller, and Nicky Silver. Exposed to plays day in and day out, I honed
my ear for dialogue, and learned firsthand that if the writing doesn’t ring
true, no amount of brilliant acting would make it right. I wrote my first play
(terrible, melodramatic, with characters whose names did absolutely nothing to
mask the real people they were based on). I showed it to no one. It’s probably
still on my computer somewhere.
In my life
before Brimstone, I’ve worked as a telemarketer (I’m sorry) administrative
assistant, waiter (badly, briefly), clerk and occasional story-time reader in a
children’s bookstore, and professional hawker of everything from magazine
subscriptions to national television advertising. I was better with magazines.
I now live in Chicago with the love of my life, and my snarling, seven-toed
demon-cat, Clara. No Bad Deed is the
first book in the John Arsenal mystery series.
No Bad Deed is set in Brimstone, a city we know
better as Hell. Brimstone is actually a city quite like the cities we are used
to, only much, much worse, and it’s inhabited entirely by the worse scum of the
earth. In Brimstone, the damned arrive without any memory of who they were
before they died, which is a problem for our hero. John Arsenal would like to
think of himself as a generally decent person, but of course knows that he must
have done something terrible while he was still alive in order to end up in
Hell. John is approached by Mireille, a beautiful woman who claims that she can
remember her life before Brimstone, and that she and John once knew each other.
Mireille offers to tell John about who he once was and what he did, in exchange
for his help finding Mireille’s missing sister, Sophie.
What inspired you to write this book?
Believe it
or not, it came to me in my sleep! Or rather, I was almost asleep, just
starting to drift off, in that place right before you’re really dreaming. And I
just thought, “A detective in Hell. Yeah.” I popped out of bed to write it
down, and that’s how the prologue was written: In the dark, in my apartment in
Boston at 1am. John Arsenal’s voice was right there, fully developed, like I’d
been writing him for years. I went back to bed and didn’t think much of it
until the next morning when I read what I had, and thought, wow, I might really
have something here. Interestingly enough, sleep has been a huge theme
throughout this book, and in the next one as well. John, my protagonist,
suffers from insomnia and nightmares, and sometimes if I’m really on a roll
with John, I’ll pick up a bit of insomnia myself, something that I never really
dealt with before this book. I’ll wake up at 3am and not be able to go back to
bed until the scene I woke up thinking about gets written, or I’ll have a
nightmare, and the next morning think, “That could work in the book.”
Excerpt from No Bad Deed:
I took the car on a drive through downtown Brimstone,
watching the sky turn sulfur, then green, as billowing plumes of vapor veiled
the light. It was evenings like this I wondered about the geography of our fair
city. There was a sky over Hell, that much was obvious. But there was also the
sensation that baby-shit green was not a natural color for a sky to be. And of
course there was never any sun, just the constant radiating light and heat.
When I first got off the boat I used to wonder about the physical location of
this place that had a sky and a climate, but no sun and no moon, no seasons.
I’ve since learned that worrying about that stuff doesn’t make a damn bit of
difference, and that it’s best to do it as little as possible. Still. That sky
never failed to put a sick, uncertain feeling into the pit of my stomach.
As I drove, Tent town stretched out alongside me, nothing
but bleached-out A-frames draped with sheets and tarps as far as the eye could
see. I took a left and found myself in an obnoxiously artsy part of the city
called Millville, where the resident frustrated artists and actors had turned
the skeletons of ruined industrial buildings into a series of trendy clubs and
improvised theater spaces. I pulled up in front of a bar called Virgil’s and
killed the motor.
What exciting story are you working on
next?
I’ve just
finished the first draft of the next book in the John Arsenal series. This one
is a serial killer mystery, which is particularly interesting because of course
in Brimstone, everyone is already dead. But as it turns out, when you’re killed
in Hell, there’s something even worse than death waiting on the other side. It
was a lot of fun to be able to follow John into this new chapter, because of
course he had to go through so much in No
Bad Deed, some of those demons are still hanging around for him, and will
be for quite some time.
When did you first consider yourself a
writer?
That’s such
an interesting question, because I feel like a lot of writers suffer from a bit
of imposter syndrome. A lot of writers who are very serious about their work
but don’t yet do it full-time hesitate to call themselves writers, which I
actually think is too bad, because that self-doubt is an impediment to being
able to advocate for your own work. For me, I hit a point about halfway through
No Bad Deed where I realized I had a
plan. I knew where the book was heading, and I knew I could finish it. I was
really proud of what I’d already created, and I knew the next thing I had to do
was create a game-plan for how to get it out into the world. The moment I had
that mission worked out was the moment I started to consider myself a writer. I
started telling my husband I was working
when I would lock myself away in the office to write, and I feel like owning
that word, work, made a really big
difference.
Do you write full-time? If so, what's
your work day like? If not, what do you do other than write and how do you find
time to write?
I don’t yet
write full time, but I’m extremely lucky in my day-job. I work remotely from my
home, so if I have a great idea for the book, I don’t have a long commute
between finishing my job and being able to sit down and write. I can simply
open up my manuscript and go. I’ve found that that’s really important to me,
being able to write whenever inspiration strikes. I know a lot of writers swear
by a set writing schedule, but I’ve never been able to make that work for me. I
need to be able to write whenever it feels good, which sometimes means writing
at 3am, or taking 30 minutes in the middle of the day between working on something
else. When I’m not writing, you’ll find me in the kitchen. In my other job I
work for a cooking magazine, so I’m constantly finding new and exciting recipes
I want to try out during my day.
What would you say is your interesting
writing quirk?
I have a
tendency to talk about my characters like they’re real people, which can
sometimes creep people out if they don’t know me well. My husband will ask me
how the writing went that day and I’ll say, “You know, not so great. John just
wasn’t talking to me today,” or “Gavett did this crazy thing today that I never
even thought of, but now it’s turned the whole book around.” I like to leave
some of the movement of the story is in the characters’ hands, almost like I’m more
of a stenographer. It’s a fun way to write, because it means that even though
I’m writing the story, I can still be surprised by the things that happen.
As a child, what did you want to be
when you grew up?
Not a writer!
My mother is actually a novelist as well, so I was constantly asked if I wanted
to be a writer too, and I always said no, which I think was more of a kneejerk
reaction than anything else. I changed my mind a lot about what I wanted to be
as a younger kid, but as a teenager I finally settled on acting. I was in all
the school musicals, and did acting camp during the summer. I ended up studying
theater in Boston before I discovered that writing was my real love. I feel
like I’m still acting, but in a different way. As a writer, I get to play all
the parts as I’m writing the story. I get to play roles I would never be able
to play in real life, which is a great feeling. I love being able to play some
giant thug, or a really sinister bad guy.
Anything additional you want to share
with the readers?
There is light
in this world of Brimstone, as well as darkness. Something that became
immediately apparent to me when I started writing John Arsenal is that he has a
real sense of humor, even in this dark world. I don’t think people would
necessarily associate humor with this type of story, and yet more than anything
else, the thing that I hear from readers is that they love that John makes them
laugh, and they love his friends, who tend to be a quirky, motley crew. It’s
not all anguish and torment in Brimstone—there’s levity too.
