Steve Wedel Author

The following interview is with Steven E. Wedel, author of Okie Werewolf Seeks Love in The Beast Within.

Hi, Steven. Could you start us off with a little info about yourself? We here on the forums are so used to seeing text and avatars that it can be easy to forget there are human beings behind the words. What’s a day-in-the-life-of-Steven Wedel like?

A: A day in my life? hahaha Yeah. My alarm goes off at 5:30 a.m. and I’m generally conscious and moving by 6:20. I drive about 20 miles to the inner city high school where I teach English, tell jokes, play therapist, fundraiser, grade papers, etc. Then I generally come home and piss off my 14-year-old daughter because of a cell phone or boyfriend issue. The 16-year-old boy is fairly self sufficient these days, but the 8-year-old daughter and 6-year-old son have homework, want food, need booboos bandages, etc. I make dinner, my wife comes home, I stare at the TV while she talks about her day. Put the kids to bed. Shower. Then maybe I get to write for a little bit. I can’t sleep without reading for a while, so I do that until around 12:30 a.m. Five hours later the alarm goes off. Rinse and repeat.

That may sound like I’m not happy, but that isn’t the case. I’ve had a lot of jobs and three careers since graduating high school in 1984, but I can honestly say I’ve never had a job I liked as much as being a teacher.

The only thing I’d change about the above is my older daughter. I miss her being Daddy’s little girl.

As a writer, what do you find is the most challenging part about crafting fiction, and how do you overcome it?

A: Finding the time is my only real problem. Once I’m sitting down and in writing mode I don’t have too much of a problem. Because it sometimes takes me a while to actually get to the keyboard, I get to mull the story over in my head a lot, so when I sit down I know what I want to do and it flows pretty fast and smooth.

Then my wife reads it and tells me where I screwed up.

What initiated your interest in the horror genre?

A: Halloween II. That’s 2, not 11, or whatever the franchise is up to now. I hadn’t seen the first one, but me and some friends went to the second one and I was impressed with Michael Myers’ body count. Then my high school sophomore composition teacher assigned us a short story, so I wrote a piece that’d get a student arrested these days. It was called “Insanity” and was about a kid who was picked on and how he offed his enemies in cool, gory ways.

Eventually I matured and realized that horror fiction is the only place you can really explore supernatural and violent themes.

Any personal experiences where you might’ve felt like a character in a horror novel?

A: There was that time I was feeding my daughter’s ex-boyfriend through a meat grinder ?

Actually, I have a bird phobia. Send a werewolf after me. Throw me in the vampires lair or drop me into a horde of zombies. Just please don’t make me walk through the Wal-Mart parking lot when those big black birds are hopping between cars and wheeling around looking for roosts or scraps or fresh eyeballs.

You’ve explored the werewolf mythos in your novels, even been typecast as a werewolf writer, yet your fiction isn’t always limited to the werewolf sub-genre. Could you tell any potential new fans out there what other types of horror fiction you’ve written?

I have a new novelette that will be out about the same time as The Beast Within. It’s called Little Graveyard on the Prairie and I really think it’s my best story to date. It has a maturity I don’t think I’ve explored before. It’s a ghost story, but not all the ghosts are dead people. Bad Moon Books is publishing it as a limited edition.

Another published novella is Seven Days in Benevolence. This was my foray into extreme horror. It’s another ghost story, this time about a newly single mother and her two daughters who move into a new house in a small town. There are some ghosts residing there, too, and they’re kind of at war with each other. The ending is very graphic and has turned off some readers.

In 2010 Bad Moon Books will publish The Prometheus Syndrome, a novel with deranged hillbillies, a mad scientist, a zombie, a ghost, and rock-n-roll. I have a few other non-werewolf things I’m still shopping around, too.

Writer’s block strikes sooner or later; are there any home remedies or writing exercises you use to stave off the dreaded curse?

A: I used to work for a daily newspaper. For the two years I was there I consistently led the newsroom in number of bylines per month. I don’t believe in writer’s block. You don’t write, you don’t get paid. You don’t get paid, you don’t eat.

That’s not to say I don’t procrastinate. I do. Big time. The thing to do is put your butt in the seat and write something, anything, just start writing and once you hack away for a while the good stuff will start flowing again.

Could you give us a non-spoiler synopsis of your story Okie Werewolf Seeks Love?

A: I suppose I should mention that I step outside the rules that apply to most of my werewolf fiction for this one. Still, I’m sure someone will write to me and say, “In Shara you say werewolves can only do _________ when they ________, but in this story it’s different.” That’s cool. They’re paying attention. Stepping out of my mythos was a conscious decision, and now I can point to this interview as proof that I knew what I was doing.

I wrote this story specifically for conventions. I have this Okie twang that I can’t mask, so I try to come up with some redneck humor/horror stories I can read at the conventions I go to. This one was originally written as a telephone call-in dating message, but I changed it to a letter to the editor. Basically, Randy Bragg is a good ol’ boy living on welfare and whatever odd job money he can get when he’s bitten by a werewolf. That means he’s gotta bathe a little more often, and use flea shampoo, but he gets to lick himself in places he couldn’t reach before, so he feels it’s a pretty fair trade. His ex-girlfriend, however, wasn’t so happy about it, so he wrote this letter looking for a new woman. He’s willing to share his gift, and he might even share his next six-pack if the babe is really smokin’.

Thanks, Steven!

(ps: if you want to read a REAL interview with Steven, check out this link: http://www.fearzone.com/blog/interview-wedel)

And now, here’s an excerpt of Okie Werewolf Seeks Love from The Beast Within:

OKIE WEREWOLF SEEKS LOVE, BY STEVEN E. WEDEL

Dear Beasts & Babes Magazine,

First, I sure want to thank you for the service you provide. I love the articles and pictures. I had no idea this here kind of magazine existed. Thank God for Google!! Anyhoo, after reading about those hot babes what liked German shepherd love, I thought maybe if you printed up this letter for me it would help me find a woman that likes furry loving.

My name is Randall William Bragg. I’m a single white male living in Moore, Oklahoma. I ain’t got a lot in the way of income. Just what I make with my old Chevy pickup, hauling firewood, trash, moving furniture ? that kind of stuff. I do some lawn work in the summers and sometimes go all the way up to Edmond for odd jobs. I get some government money, too, on account of my grandma being a Cherokee Indian. And ’cause I keep losing regular jobs.
I had a girl, see, but I lost her. She left me. It’s OK, though. I’m over her. You’re not getting a guy on the rebound. Nope. Chelsea Bryson is history. Water under the bridge.

Bitch!

Anyways, yeah, I’m about six-one, with some extra baggage. I like my beer, you know, and don’t get no regular exercise. I’m forty-one years old, with most of my teeth and in pretty good health. I almost graduated high school. I would of, but I got kicked out of the vo-tech when me and Ronnie Crawford was lighting farts in the bathroom. The fire wasn’t as bad as they said it was. After that, I figured I didn’t need no more schooling. They’d already learned me how to repair farm machinery, so that’s what I did for a while. But, after Old Man Henry’s tractor blew up and kilt him, nobody’d hire me to do that shit no more. Weren’t my fault.

Anyhow, see, I guess there is something you probably should know about me, besides my income and health and stuff. About nine months ago I got myself bit by a werewolf.
I swear it’s true. Swear it on a stack of Bibles!!
I was clearing some brush out of Emily Drummond’s back pasture last summer. She’s a good-looking woman, though a little older than me. Her husband’s in the National Guard and got sent off to Iraq, so she ain’t got nobody to help her. She don’t pay much, but she looks good in her tight shorts and T-shirt. Woman never wears no bra, neither. But, like I was saying, she’d hired me to clear some brush off her spread out by Newcastle because of the fire danger. I chopped and bundled all morning, then sometime after noon I knocked off for lunch. I had me a peanut butter sandwich and a beer. Maybe two beers. I don’t know. It was a hot day and the work was hard. I fell asleep in the shade of my pickup.

When I woke up, the first thing I noticed was the smell. Something nasty was blowing in my face. It smelled like somebody’d put a fan behind a freezer full of meat that had gone bad. It was all warm, too. I opened my eyes and it was night, a real dark night under the cloudy sky. There was something real close to my face. It was so close I couldn’t see nothing. I kinda crab-crawled away from it a bit. That got me away from the meat smell, but then I could smell something like wet dog.

I tried to get up, but when I done that, the thing grabbed my ankles and jerked them out from under me. I fell on my face, and then the thing was on my back. I thought maybe it was a Bigfoot. It pinned me there for a while, then started shifting around all strange-like. That worried me. Cuz the last thing I wanted was to get rear-humped by a Bigfoot, even if it would get me on the front page of one of them funny-papers they sell up near the registers at the grocery store. That’s when it bit me. Right in the meaty part of my left thigh. Hurt like hell! Well, I looked down, and saw it was a wolf what had bit me.

I swear, it wasn’t a wolf before. It was huge. Man-size or more. Like a Bigfoot, ya know? Standing on two legs. Wasn’t no wolf.
Well, then this wolf just ran away, and I was all alone. I hauled my ass back to my truck and got home. I poured some whiskey?good Jack Daniels?on the bite to clean it. Course, had the bottle open, so I drank some of it, too. Why not? Didn’t go to the doctor on account I ain’t got no insurance. If you answer this letter, I’m hoping you do have insurance, by the way.

Also, I heard the rabies shots really hurt. That wolf wasn’t foaming or nothing. I knew it didn’t have no rabies. So, you see, wasn’t no real need to go to the doctor, anyway.

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