So is that your process, to work in your head? And then when you have it altogether…?
Yes. Mm-hmm.
I know a lot of writers who tend to write stream of consciousness and just start writing. You can get yourself into a hole that way.
You can. Yes. I don’t map the whole thing out, and I don’t have it on paper. It’s all in my head. But I know the beginning. I usually know three or four points along the way. Major things that have to happen to make the book work. And I know roughly how it’s going to end. I know who’s going to end up where. I don’t always know all the details of how it goes down, or how all the pieces tie up.
There is structure, but also freedom to go down different roads.
Yes. And the path is certainly winding along the way. And I just never, “Oh, I kind of went off over here.” But because I have that next point that I’m writing to, I manage to keep it on track that way. And then as I get to the end and I realize how all the pieces tie together, and all the details I have to include, I start jotting things down. I have a ripped piece of legal paper and a napkin and a post-it note holding the two together, and a series of notes with arrows. And they actually go around to the back of the paper about how, you know, as I decided how things were going to tie up, and specifically how it was going to end as I got closer to the end. I was like, “I have to write this, but first this happens, and then that.” And so I started jotting those things down. It’s the only writing I have from it.
Like storyboarding; it’s an efficient way of doing it.
I hope so.
So God’s Eye has just come out as an audio movie. What is an audio movie?
An audio movie is a movie without the visuals. So it’s an unabridged copy of the book. It’s the audio book version. But unlike a standard audio book where somebody reads you the book, it’s acted. It has the sound effects. It has a score that’s been written just for my book, which I always find very amazing. But, for example, in God’s Eye, when the demon is in the room with Katherine, you hear the footsteps around. It gave me the chills, and I was laughing at myself when I heard that snippet of the track at first, because I thought, “Oh, my god. That’s creepy. Okay, I wrote this. I know what happens.” But I was still really creeped out by the sound effects and the—
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