Derrick
Ferguson: Who is Percival Constantine?
Percival Constantine: I was born in Illinois and lived
in the northwest suburbs of Chicago until shortly before my 25th birthday.
While growing up, I subsisted on a pretty consistent diet of superhero comics,
action movies, TV shows and video games, which I have to thank for warping my
mind into its current state.
DF:
Where do you currently reside and what do you do for a living?
PC: Currently I live in Japan’s Kagoshima prefecture.
Don’t feel bad if you’ve never heard of it, most people outside of Japan
haven’t. The claim to fame of this place is that it’s home to Shinmoe-Dake,
which was used for the exterior shots of Blofeld’s volcano base in “You Only
Live Twice”. At the moment, I teach English lessons in several elementary
schools, but that will hopefully change in the near-future as I’ve been
speaking with some local colleges about job prospects. I also write and edit,
and I do the occasional comic book lettering job, all while pursuing my masters
degree online. I’ve also started doing some cover design and book formatting,
since apparently I’m not busy enough.
DF:
How does it happen that a nice boy from the Midwestern U.S. finds himself
teaching English in Japan?
PC: I always had an interest in Japanese culture,
probably first caused by shows like “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” and “Power
Rangers” that I watched while growing up, plus dubbed anime like “Dragonball Z”
and video games like “Final Fantasy VII”. But what really cinched it was when I
was in college, I became really interested in live-action Japanese movies—films
by guys like Akira Kurosawa, Takashi Miike, Seijin Suzuki, Takeshi Kitano,
Kinji Fukusaku, and others, plus the novels of Haruki Murakami. Around this
same time, I discovered the JET (Japan Exchange & Teaching) Program, which
invites people from native speaking countries to work in Japan as assistant
language teachers in Japanese public schools for 1-5 years. I applied for the
program, hoping to end up in a bustling metropolis like Tokyo or Osaka, but
instead I got sent out to Kagoshima. At first I didn’t like it, and the plan
was to return to the States after my first-year contract was up, but one year
turned into three, then three into five, and now I’m in my sixth year in
Kagoshima.
DF:
Tell us as much about your background as you’re legally able to.
PC: Well, if it’s only stuff I’m legally able to discuss,
that’s going to be a short story. As a kid, I fell in love with the “X-Men”
animated series, and that led me to collecting comics—first X-Men, then later
Avengers, and more and more titles, primarily Marvel. When I was around 10
years old, I had a few teachers who had us write stories as assignments, and I
would write superhero stories, some of them featuring characters I was a fan
of, some of them featuring my friends and I becoming superheroes. And that’s
really what led to my desire to be a writer.
DF:
What is your philosophy of writing?
PC: Don’t bore yourself or your readers. I’m very much
from the school of thought of guys like Elmore Leonard, where it’s focused on
characters and dialogue over description. My favorite rule from Leonard’s Ten
Rules of Writing is “avoid the parts readers tend to skip.” And not boring
yourself also applies to what you’re writing in addition to how you write it.
Write what you enjoy, regardless of whether it’s popular or marketable, and to
hell with anyone who tells you otherwise.
DF:
You actually intended to be a comic book writer and not a novelist. True?
PC: Absolutely true. Ever since I started writing, the
goal was always to become a comic book writer. Outside of the stuff I created
as a kid, my first serious attempts at writing my own original characters and
ideas were written as comic book scripts, not novels. Many of them later became
novels, but comics were always my first love.
But being a poor college student when I started writing
meant my options for paying artists page rates were limited. I hooked up with a
number of different artists for a number of different projects, but something
always got in the way. Sometimes it was as simple as the artist getting offered
a paying job, which naturally is fine—if you get offered a project for money as
opposed to royalty sharing, then you should take that project. But what became
really frustrating were the artists who would just plain stop answering emails.
After about two or three instances where that happened, I decided to focus
instead on prose.
I would still love to do more comics work, particularly
for Marvel or DC. Those are the characters I grew up with, so getting the
chance to write them professionally would be a dream come true. Don’t get me
wrong, I also love doing my own thing, but it would be a lot of fun to work on
my favorite characters.
DF:
You enjoyed an extensive and successful career in writing DC and Marvel fan
fiction. What are the benefits of writing fan fiction and what are the
drawbacks?
PC: The biggest benefit is, provided you hook up with a constructive community, it’s one of the best training grounds you could ask
for. It’s a lot easier to jump into a world and characters you grew up with and
know inside and out than it is to come up with your own from scratch. I would
not be the writer I am today if I didn’t spend my teenage and college years
writing fanfic, that much I can guarantee. In that time, I learned a lot about
characterization, description, dialogue, plot, and even editing. It also gave
me confidence to eventually move beyond into original fiction.
The drawback is, of course, you won’t be able to make
any money off it, nor do you own these characters you’re writing about. Fanfic
is still frowned upon by a lot of people as a waste of time and energy. Of
course, if you’re willing to put in the effort, you can take a story that began
life as fanfic and turn it into something that’s all your own creation. I did
that with my second novel, Chasing The
Dragon, and it’s been done by other writers as well.
DF:
You’ve done work for professional comic book companies as a letterer, haven’t
you?
PC: I have. When I was initially putting together Love & Bullets as a comic book, I
had found an artist, but a letterer was still out of reach, until the day I
found the Ninja Lettering website. I followed their tutorials for using Adobe
Illustrator to letter comics, did a number of practice pages, and then began
lettering the first issue of Love &
Bullets. To my surprise, I actually really enjoyed lettering, and so I
began seeking out work. I lettered a number of submissions that were never
picked up, and also did work for a few independent companies, most notably AC
Comics. While lettering stories for their Femforce
anthology comic, I developed a very good relationship with Mark and Stephanie
Heike, the editors on that comic. That relationship led to my first published
work-for-hire in the form of a finishing off the final two parts of a
three-part story featuring their character of Threeta.
I still keep an eye on the various job boards for
letterers, and if there’s something that catches my interest (and I have an
opening in my schedule), then I’ll apply for it. I would like to do more of it,
though.
DF:
You’ve also tried your hand at screenwriting and film directing, correct?
PC: Also true. Screenwriting and comic writing are very
closely related in a lot of ways, so I found it pretty easy to switch between
the two, and movies were and still are a huge influence on me. During my
undergraduate years, my minor was in mass media with a heavy focus on film
studies and it was during that period that I did some directing work on some
short student films. Only one was ever completed, and that was a short film
called Russian Roulette, based on a short story written by a friend of mine
named Anastasia Peters.
She had asked me to critique the story and I thought it
was incredible and while reading it, I kept picturing it playing out as a film
and so I asked her if she’d let me adapt it. I had several friends who were
skilled in different areas of film, so we came up with a script and shot the
film in three days.
The masters degree I’m pursuing involves a
screenwriting concentration, and I’d love to write and/or direct another
project at some point in the future. It’s just a matter of finding the right
idea for a script and all the necessary elements to translate the script into a
movie.
DF:
Your output is diverse. You’ve written Fantasy, Espionage Thrillers, Science
Fiction, Pulp Action/Adventures. Is the diversity to keep your readers from
getting bored or you?
PC: More to keep me from getting bored. The nice thing
about New Pulp is that we’re not restricted by genre. We don’t have to stick to
Horror or Crime or Sci-Fi or Fantasy. We can play in all these different areas,
sometimes all at once. If I get the inkling to write a Horror novel, I can just
do it. If I want to write a Western, I can just do it. It’s a nice way to keep
me from getting bored, but it’s also a great way to challenge myself. Recently,
I wrote a Western story, and it was the first time I ever wrote a Western. It
was just an idea that came to me one day, it coincided nicely with an anthology
that was in the works, so I pitched it and was given the greenlight to write
it. Even if I didn’t get the greenlight, I probably would have written it
anyway and figured out something else to do with it.
DF:
Tell us about The Infernum series.
Infernum began
life as a film project, initially titled Codename:
Black Widow, if I recall correctly. It was the brainchild of a very good
friend of mine, Kyle Shire, who wanted to direct it as a student film. He came
up with a basic outline and asked me if I’d be willing to write a screenplay,
and of course I was more than happy to do that. The film never happened, but
Kyle gave me his blessing to write it as a novel.
Infernum
is an organization of assassins run by a mysterious and charming power broker
known as Dante. In Codename: Black Widow,
which later became Love & Bullets,
the main character is named Angela Lockhart, a former operative of a government
organization called the Agency. After the death of her husband, she goes rogue
and gets recruited by Dante as an assassin, the deal between them being that
Dante will use his resources to help her find her husband’s killer.
Love
& Bullets was followed up by Outlaw Blues, which involves a lot of the same characters, but in
different roles. The protagonist in Outlaw
Blues is a retired hitman named Carl Flint, who gets brought out of
retirement by Dante for one final job. It ties into Love & Bullets in several ways, but is also its own
story—whereas Love & Bullets was
more of an espionage spy vs. spy novel, Outlaw
Blues is more of an urban western.
I do have plans for future books. I’ve been kicking
around ideas for the next book, tentatively titled Gentleman Rogue, for a while, but have had other projects I wanted
to focus on first.
DF:
I’m a big fan of The Myth Hunter, Elisa Hill. Tell us about her.
Elisa Hill is my attempt to try my hand at a more pulpy
adventure story. I came up with the character a while ago, initially as a pitch
for the now-defunct original fiction website, Frontier. In initial form, Elisa
was a vampire hunter, but that morphed over time into what she is now.
Initially I tried to do it as a comic, but when that fell through, I decided to
try it as a novel.
The basic premise is that all the various mythologies
of the world are rooted in fact. Pursuing these legends are people called myth
hunters. Some are mercenaries, some are knowledge-seekers, some are treasure
hunters. Elisa is the daughter of two myth hunters and she initially became one
of the rogue myth hunters, working with a mercenary named Lucas Davalos. But
after the death of her parents, she came back to their way of thinking,
attempting to continue their research with the help of their good friend and
her mentor, a retired myth hunter named Max Finch.
In the first book, The
Myth Hunter, Elisa and Max pursue the myth of the lost continent of
Lemuria, while also trying to avoid the reach of the mysterious Order and a
vicious mercenary named Seth. During the course of that book, Elisa ran into
Asami, a kitsune or Japanese fox spirit, who can change between fox and human
forms and possesses some degree of magical abilities.
The sequel, Dragon
Kings of the Orient, has Asami seeking out Elisa’s help to protect the
Dragon Kings of China from Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, a powerful demigod who
sought revenge on the Dragon Kings for imprisoning him. The lives of the Dragon
Kings are tied to the oceans of Asia, and so if they die, that could mean chaos
for the continent. Of course, things aren’t what they seem.
There’s been another addition to the Myth Hunter series in the form of “The Wild Hunt,” a short story featured
in the PulpWork Christmas Special 2013, which is now available in
digital and print formats. “The Wild
Hunt” has Asami traveling to Hokkaido in Japan where she runs across a
yuki-onna, or snow woman. But there’s something else, something far larger at
play.
DF:
What are your future plans for Elisa Hill?
PC: Elisa will be back. Dragon Kings of the Orient ended on something of a cliffhanger, and
that will lead into the third book. The ending of “The Wild Hunt” also hints at something else coming down the road
for Elisa and her allies. At some point in the future, I’d also like to invite
other writers to contribute stories about Elisa and her allies and put out an
anthology of those stories, but I haven’t put that into action just yet.
DF:
You’ve got a new novel out. Tell us about SOULQUEST.
PC: SoulQuest,
like almost everything I’ve done, began life as a comic book pitch. It never
went anywhere and some time later, I pitched it as a serial for the Revenance original fiction site. The
first chapter was posted, but Revenance
went down shortly after that. I had already written several pages and continued
it for a bit, but ultimately got distracted by other projects.
Then last year, I was struggling with a project for
NaNoWriMo and I started looking through abandoned manuscripts (of which I have
more than a few). One of those was SoulQuest.
I began jotting down notes and found myself quickly sucked back into that
world.
SoulQuest
is basically my love letter to the Final
Fantasy series, in particular Final
Fantasy VII, which is my all-time favorite video game. The book focuses on
Zarim, who is a pirate along with Ekala, Zarim’s lover and a consummate thief,
and Swul, a hard-drinking exile of the faerie kingdom. From the airship
Excalibur, they live the lives of mercenaries, traveling wherever the money is.
But when the legendary Soulstones surface, they’re tasked with locating them.
Also pursuing the Soulstones is Lord Vortai, a powerful sorcerer who basically
controls the empire. With the Soulstones, Vortai could have the power to remake
the world as he sees fit.
It’s part fantasy, part science fiction, part
steampunk, with a lot of action thrown in. This book was me really pushing
myself out of my comfort zone, especially after a very long dry spell when I
came close to quitting writing altogether. And it’s out now in print and for
Kindle.
DF:
Is SOULQUEST going to be a series? And if so, what can we expect in future
books?
PC: I had considered making it into a series, but for
now, it’s just this one book. Given what happens in this book, I think a
follow-up where the stakes are the same or even higher would be very difficult
to pull off. I might consider revisiting the characters in short stories set at
different points in their lives, because it is a big, ensemble cast, and
there’s a lot that can be done with the different characters. But there are
other projects that I really want to work on at the moment, and so I’d like to
focus on those.
DF:
What’s A Day In The Life of Percival Constantine like?
PC: My work schedule is kind of all over the place, so
if it’s a day when I have classes, then I’ll usually get up around 6 and drive
anywhere from 40-90 minutes to which of the eleven elementary schools I teach
at. If I have free periods during the day, I have my laptop with me and I’ll
work on whatever projects are on my docket, be it formatting, editing,
lettering, studying, or writing. If I have a day off from work, I might be recording
or editing episodes for the two podcasts I’m part of, working on the
aforementioned projects I have to work on, or just relaxing in front of the TV
or reading comics or books.
Derrick
Ferguson: Anything else we should know?
Percival
Constantine: I’m a writer for WhatCulture and a contributor and regional
partner at JapanTourist. As mentioned, I also produce two
podcasts. One is The
Exploding Typewriter, a podcast that features me and a member of the
New Pulp community discussing whatever aspect of pulp that creator wants to
talk about. To date, I’ve done interviews with Tommy Hancock, Ron Fortier,
Barry Reese, Derrick Ferguson, Jim Beard, and Richard Lee Byers, with other interviews
planned. It’s great fun talking with these various guys and getting their
insight on the world of New Pulp.
The other podcast is called The
Geek Screen, and I co-host that with one of my good friends from
Chicago, Juan Bracich. We talk about geeky movies and TV shows, focusing on a
different film or show each episode as the main portion and also touching on
different news and whatever other tangents we might find ourselves on.
Other than that, please pick up a copy of SoulQuest and the PulpWork
Christmas Special 2013. Those and all my other books are available
at various places all over the net, and if you head over to my website, PercivalConstantine.com,
you can find out where you can buy all those books and in what formats.
And also, thank you for the interview! It’s always a good time
when you and I get to sit down and chat a little.
Percival Constantine
Writer, Editor, Letterer
pc@percivalconstantine.com
percivalconstantine.com
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