Heather’s Bookshelf: Author Interview with B. Robert Conklin

Book Title:  An End to Etcetera

Released:  11/30/22

Genre:  Psychological Suspense

Interview by Heather L. Barksdale

What inspired you to write “An End to Etcetera”?


Conklin: Inspiration for An End to Etcetera goes way back to my grad school days when I became fixated by a single word I came across in a poem during a course on Middle English literature at the Ohio State University: “thuster.” I dropped the course after three days, but the word, meaning “darkness” or “shadow,” stuck with me. It brought to mind the image of a small, silent boy digging through the trash of a garbage dump at twilight. From there, it evolved into a short story along the lines of Stand By Me with three adolescent friends who looked after the boy and tried to keep him safe. The story ended with the boys having to go to the extreme measure of drowning him in a lake as, ironically, the only means of keeping him from harm. Well, I wasn’t sure if the victim was imaginary or real, so I brought in a psychologist to “interrogate” the victim’s closest friend, a boy named Leal. To get at the truth, a number of sessions were needed, turning the story into a novel.

How did you come up with the names of your main characters?

Conklin: The psychologist’s name was originally Karen, which is also the name of one of my sisters. Unfortunately, “Karen” doesn’t produce very positive associations these days, especially with so many “Karens” being shamed on social media. The psychologist’s new name, Selena, derives from Selene, goddess of the moon. This seemed to fit the aura of the novel since so many of her revelations occur at night. “Leal,” the name of the 13-year-old who has confessed to drowning an autistic boy left in his care, means “loyal” or “trustworthy,” which is ironic, since it is next to impossible to separate fact from fiction in the stories he weaves in Selena’s office.

Is there anything that you want readers to know about you, your writing process or your book?

Conklin: About me? Well, perhaps the most interesting fact I can toss out is that my grandparents on my mom’s side emigrated from Transylvania. My grandmother would tell us kids stories about her childhood in her village in the Carpathian mountains. Nothing about vampires, though. I grew up in a house adjacent to an old cemetery, which served as a playground for my sisters and me, as we played “ghost in the graveyard” literally. It may sound morbid, but we also enjoyed inventing backstories for the people buried there. Childhood influences aside, my worldview was shaped later on as an English major when I was exposed to the writings of Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, and Albert Camus, giving me an appreciation of the Absurd in both literature and life. I should also mention I’ve only taken one creative writing class, for which I received a B. The instructor said I didn’t take enough responsibility for my characters’ actions and motivations. I must admit, my characters often do and say things that completely baffle me as the author.

My attitude toward the writing process can be summed up by the quote “I don’t like to write, but I like having written,” most recently attributed to George R.R. Martin, although it might have been first stated by Dorothy Parker. I enjoy brainstorming and revising. It’s just all that stuff in between that can be a bit arduous. To get through it all, I find I have two modes. If I’m composing on a word processor, I tend to type and type and type, accumulating tens of thousands of words in the process—not all in one sitting, of course! The only trouble with this method is I tend to burn out and frequently hit a dead end. My other mode is more relaxing as I sketch out ideas and scenes on a yellow legal pad, filling in the details later. This I call the Bob Ross method of writing based on the process practiced by the PBS painter. You’ve probably seen his show where he uses broad strokes to paint a mountain and sky and valley, providing a good sense of the overall picture, then fills in “happy little” streams and trees and cabins, building up a painting in layers. Same thing with my yellow legal pad approach. You can proceed at a quite leisurely pace.

Regarding this particular book, it’s gone through at least ten major revisions and probably a hundred edits of the various versions. As a murder mystery, it’s not your typical whodunnit. We know the alleged perpetrator and the alleged crime. However, we don’t know if a crime has actually been committed or even if a victim really exists. With each major revision, I kept coming up with new theories about what “really” occurred. In fact, it wasn’t until about six months before publication that I tacked on the final two chapters and epilogue, bringing it to its final version. Before this, I had ended it with Chapter 19, thinking this was the bitter end. Boy, was I wrong!

If "An End to Etcetera" was adapted into a movie, who would you like to see cast to play your lead characters?

Conklin:  This is a tough one because anything I say might unduly influence the reader, putting an image in their head that becomes fixed. My first thought for Selena Harris, the psychologist protagonist, was Selena Gomez, based on her performance as a quirky investigator in Only Murders in the Building. But a better fit might be the actor [Kelly McCreary] who plays Meredith’s sister Maggie on Grey’s Anatomy (my wife and I are fans, at least through Season 17). She’s the kind of doctor who obsesses about her patients and has plenty of personality quirks to make her interesting. For Leal, I’ll go

with the teen actor [Jackson Robert Scott] who played Bode in Locke & Key. He seems all innocent on the surface, but dig a little deeper and you have a very troubled kid. The

boy [Haley Joel Osment] who played Cole in Sixth Sense would also be a good match, but I’m sure he’s all grown up by now.

When you encounter writer’s block, what do you do to break yourself out of it?

Conklin: I’ve mentioned how, when freewriting, I often write myself into a proverbial corner. Actually, it’s more like getting to the end of a maze and not finding any cheese as a reward. In this case, I retrace my steps and look for places where the protagonist had to make a decision. Then I play a game of “what if.” What if she had gone left instead of right? What if he had said this instead of that? What if they took a plane instead of a boat? Or I’ll just let the pages sit for a while and go onto a different project, returning to it later to find out if my subconscious has come up with anything new.

Mostly, though, I try to take a proactive, preventative approach to writer’s block. The physicist Richard Feynman in his book Surely You’re Joking describes how he got stuck for ideas in physics, his mind going blank when he tried tackling new problems. He finally decided to relax and just “play” with physics. So he would study the arc of water from a drinking fountain or the wobble of a spinning plate and come up with calculations to explain it. His colleagues were like, Why waste your time with such nonsense? But his reply was that he was having fun. And as soon as he started having fun again, he was able to come up with more profound ideas … which eventually led to the Nobel Prize. I’m not saying this approach will guarantee you a Nobel Prize in Literature, but the point is to not take yourself and your writing so seriously. This is where my yellow legal pads come in as a sort of free space to allow the subconscious to roam with scribbles and jottings and doodles.

It sort of goes along with advice you’ll often hear from successful authors to “turn off your inner critic.” For me, I also have to turn off my imagined hostile external critic. This is my imaginary reader who is rating everything I write as a 1 or 2 on Goodreads. You know the kind who says things like, “I really wanted to love this piece, but …” The trick is to ignore the “buts” until you’re done with a rough draft.

Are there any tips that you would like to share with other aspiring authors?

Conklin: My advice to aspiring authors? Don’t get so caught up with a quest for fame or fortune or recognition or followers or [fill in the blank] that you lose sight of the original reason or reasons you began writing. Maybe it’s the love of words. Or you enjoy world building. Or these characters keep popping up in your head demanding to be rendered in fiction. For me, it goes back again to Richard Feynman, who wrote an essay called “The Pleasure of Finding Things Out.” Of course, he meant finding out things about the physical universe. But it’s just as exciting, I think, to discover things about your fictional universe.

Also, don’t get discouraged as you do pursue your quest for fame or fortune or recognition. I submitted An End to Etcetera (it was originally titled Still Life in Dungarees) in its various versions to more than 75 literary agents before deciding to self-publish. I would have kept submitting, but I didn’t want to end up finding success posthumously. Fortunately, I received a few requests for a partial or full manuscript along with several personal replies, a couple of which took a full page to explain in excruciating detail why they liked my story but just couldn’t represent it. Sigh. Still, I was able to take this feedback as encouragement that I was on the right track.

What is your favorite genre, book, and/or author?

Conklin: My favorite genre is magical realism, especially in works where the magical elements are taken at face value by the characters as simply part of the structure and texture of their world. One novella I’ve read recently that fits this mold is Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi in which the idea that you can revisit a moment your past in a time-traveling café is a given. The only catch is you have to return to the present before, as the title states, your coffee gets cold. Otherwise, you’re stuck in that one moment forever. One of my favorite books in this genre, however, is Mark Helprin’s Winter’s Tale, which takes place in a surreal rendition of New York City in a mythical time lost to history. I can’t recall all the details, but it’s on my list of books to re-read. So yeah, this might be my all-time favorite book. My favorite authors have included Kurt Vonnegut, Philip K. Dick, Eudora Welty, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Shirley Jackson. My new favorite author, however, is more into realism without the magic: Claire Keegan. I’ve enjoyed Small Things Like These and Foster and plan to read more. My wife would tell you I like her because her works are novellas that can be read in a single sitting. I admit I don’t always have the patience for long novels, but I do admire the evocativeness of her language, given that it’s so succinct.

What are you working on next?

Conklin: Currently, I’m revising a novel that I hope to publish later this year. It’s another murder mystery, more of a cold case with a little romance thrown in. Basically, it’s about a drifter on the run following a life-shattering accident who becomes entwined with a debutante planning to throw herself from a bridge on the anniversary of her mother’s apparent suicide by the same method. The drifter is challenged with solving a case that has lain dormant for 20 years in an effort to prove the young woman’s mother was murdered so as to convince the woman to stay among the living. Otherwise, it’s back to my yellow legal pads to develop a sort of parody of a YA fantasy that I have in mind.

Thanks again, Heather, for taking time with me today!

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