Heather’s Bookshelf: Author Interview with Jeff Debing

What inspired you to write “Killing the Reapers”?

Debing: When coming up with ideas, I often play the “What If?” game. This story started with “What if the Grim Reaper really existed?” and “What if instead of the scary folklore figure, he was actually an organization of undead civil servants, essentially just a bunch of working stiffs performing their mundane task of ending people’s lives?”  Logically, this was followed by, “What if they accidentally reaped a guy decades before he was supposed to die?”  There’s been variations done on these ideas, especially in movies and TV shows, so I tried to think of an opposite way to go with it.  Finally I wondered, “What if someone started killing the Reapers?  How the hell would that work?  They’re already dead and are literally the top of the food chain, right?”

Then I became interested in the idea of a young man who has his whole life ahead of him and gets cheated out of it on what should be his happiest day.  I wanted to create an afterlife mythology that existed in the real world, where life and death were under the purview of a decaying bureaucracy of undead office workers and field agents.  I was intrigued by the concept of a hero whose job was to save lives and must now save those whose job is to end lives.

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

Debing: For everything I write, I try to come up with some kind of “naming theme” for all of the characters. I’ll take an idea and base all of the character’s names on variations of this concept. Such as when I wrote a story about characters lost in the woods, I took obscure tree names and tweaked each one slightly to give a wide variety of interesting character names. I do this for fun, to limit myself so that making name choices is easier and to force myself to be more creative.

 For Killing the Reapers, I took the obvious route and based on the names on variations on words related to death or dead. The name of the main character, Ross Lasser, who dies too early, is a tweaked variation of Lazarus, the man brought back from the dead in the Bible. His fiancée, Theda, who plays a big part later in the story, has a name that’s an anagram for death. Most of the reapers’ names are versions of the word “death” in different languages.  Dodd is based the Norwegian word for death. Toth is similar to the German word. Other characters were given names based on the general death concept, Graves and Skulton, for example.

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

Debing: Probably the most unusual facet of this novella is that it’s written in present tense. Some readers hate this, others don’t mind and a few don’t even notice it. The reason I wrote this novella in present tense was because I’ve been toiling in obscurity for years, writing scripts, which are always in present tense. And it was very difficult to force myself to write in past tense after I had been doing it the other way for so long. Many writers can switch back and forth, but it was difficult for me, probably some creative defect on my part. I tried it for a while, but kept falling into present tense without realizing it. After doing a little research, I discovered that this style is becoming more common, especially in YA novels. So I just embraced the present tense and accepted that many readers may not care for it. In addition to that, since scripts don’t describe what a character is thinking, this is a feature I have to work on. I definitely need to improve on showing more of the character’s inner monologues and thought processes.

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

Debing: Maybe I’m one of the lucky ones, because I never really get writer’s block. Unfortunately, my day job requires me to work massive amounts of overtime, which restricts my writing time to my weekends. When a day off finally does arrive, I’m eager to plant my butt in front of the computer and get to writing. Especially after I’ve been chewing on the story in my mind all week.

If I ever did have writer’s block, I guess I would just push through it and keep writing, despite it being garbage. And even though I know I would delete almost all of it, I would still just put the words down. I figure you have to push all the sludge out of your brain to get at the good stuff underneath anyway. If that didn’t work, I would just switch over to a different project for a while. Usually that fires up the creative juices.

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

Debing: Probably the only tip I could give is to be always working on your story, especially when performing mundane tasks. Many authors have made the same observation, but often your best ideas seem to come when you’re doing something that requires very little concentration. Such as driving to work, cleaning around the house, going for a walk, etc. It’s such a cliché, but a true one. Your best ideas will come while in the shower. You could be stuck on some story problem, but the minute that hot water hits you and your brain disengages, suddenly the solution becomes clear. There’s something about being on autopilot, it frees up the creative part of your brain. You come up with interesting new directions to take your story or amazing character details that will surprise you.

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

Debing: I read a wide variety of books but my favorite genres are Horror, Sci-fi and Fantasy, with Historical Non-fiction close behind. It’s almost a cliché to say your genre favorites are Tolkien, Lovecraft and George R. R. Martin, but they happen to be among my favorites too. But I’d have to go with another common answer and say Stephen King is my number one favorite author. Though there’s a good twenty or thirty books by various authors that I really enjoyed reading, my favorite book has to be King’s The Stand.

What are you working on next?

Debing: I’m working on a lot of different ideas, but one that I’m really enjoying is a sci-fi horror tale that’s completely different from Killing the Reapers. It’s about a recovering addict and her young daughter being trapped in a remote mountain truck stop during a brutal blizzard during Christmas. They’re stranded with a few other characters, including an unstable soldier and a mall Santa. And then the sprawling structure catches on fire. And during all this mayhem, they are unknowingly being hunted by a large alien spider.

 Holiday fun for the whole family! (no, not really—mall Santa is one of the giant alien spider’s first victims. It’s a pretty gruesome death.)

Interested in checking out the book for yourself?

Find it for purchase here or on Kindle Unlimited

Interested in submitting your book for review? Visit my review page for guidelines and submission requirements.

review