Interview: David Conyers

David Conyers is a science fiction/horror writer living in Adelaide who has come to prominence in the Australian SF small press after years of writing Call of Cthulhu role-playing gaming material and related Lovecraftian Cthulhu Mythos fiction. He has published dozens of short stories in such publications as Agog! Ripping Reads, Dark Wisdom, Arkham Tales, and Hardboiled Cthulhu. Following Ditmar and Aurealis award nominations, 2007 has been a stellar year for Conyers with the release of his chapbooks Cthulhu Australis 1 & 2 (Rainfall Books) and a Call of Cthulhu supplement, Secrets of Kenya (Chaosium), and a win in the 2007 AHWA Flash Fiction Competition. His latest book is The Spiraling Worm (Chaosium), co-authored with John Sunseri - which was reviewed on HorrorScope here.

With Aurealis and Ditmar award nominations last year and now having published The Spiraling Worm, do you feel you have achieved all you can with short fiction?
There is still a lot of short fiction I want to write. These days, with a co-authored novel and the nominations behind me, I’m now feel confident enough to submit to the semi- and professional magazines, and to anthologies by up-and-coming and established small press publishers. If all goes well, I’ll again aim for something bigger, and work out what that will be when I get there.

Concurrently, my other big challenge is to complete my far-future science fiction novel, which is half written. Once that’s done, I’ll go looking for a publisher. Long ago, I decided not to focus on ‘how’ my writing career was going to happen, just on ‘what’ I wanted it to be. By knowing what I want and staying focused upon my goals, I find the ‘hows’ just comes to me, exploring options on how to get there, and then trying out the hows see if they work - or not. Eventually, something does.

I think I’ll be writing short stories for some time to come, mostly science fiction, some dark fiction and horror, and some Cthulhu Mythos fiction.

You have travelled extensively through developing regions such as Africa. How has this influenced your writing?
Fascination with the developing world began at a very young age, from reading Tintin comics and watching Indiana Jones movies, and devouring novels such as King Solomon’s Mines by H. Rider Haggard. My first overseas trip paid for off my own back was to Africa, where I spent time backpacking with fellow Australian speculative fiction writer David Witteveen.

In Africa, I came face-to-face with a wild elephant along the Zambezi River, attended an African reggae concert where there was gunfire, wandered accidentally into a police camp on the island of Lamu and was escorted out again on the end of an M16 rifle, and met local people who were afraid of their own secret police. At the same time, we saw magnificent herds of zebra and wildebeests in the Masai Mara, were blown away by the shear majesty of Victoria Falls, and hung out with UN officials, NGO journalists, and Kenyan business people in nightclubs and hostels in Nairobi. It was an experience I’ll never forget.

Early on in my life, something about Africa captured my imagination, so I started reading all about it. Mostly history books, or by watching documentaries, and soon I discovered this fascinating history and culture that was so different to my own. I found I wanted to write about these places. Drawing comparison to western culture and African culture, looking at how global economics and politics can have good and bad results on both sides. It was also a land of mystery for me, because there are still pockets in that continent such as the Congo rainforests that have still not been completely explored, and that appealed to my desire to tell adventure stories.

I’ve travelled in six continents, including extensive travels through outback Australia, but the other part of the world that I love is South America. That was another adventure: swimming in a tributary of the Amazon River, walking the Incan Trail in the middle of the night to watch the sun rise over Machu Picchu, braving Ecuadorian riots and street blockades to reach the Peruvian border crossing before nightfall, nightclubbing in a local’s only Latin club in the middle of the desert at three and a half thousand metres, and not having enough oxygen in my lungs to dance.

Such experiences help to write about people displaced from their familiar comfortable environments, whether that is a modern day setting or some far future setting on alien worlds.

Looking back over my stories now, most are set in Australia, Africa, or South America. I guess these are the continents that have inspired me the most to write about.

What drew you to the Cthulhu Mythos?
Initially, I was introduced to the Cthulhu Mythos through the role-playing game Call of Cthulhu. The first Cthulhu Mythos collection that I read was New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos edited by Ramsey Campell, with some fantastic tales by Stephen King, T.E.D. Klein, David Drake, A.A. Attanasio, Brian Lumley, and Ramsey Campbell. Both the game and the anthology enticed me with this strange world of cosmic gods, utterly alien monsters, bizarre and terrifying sorcerers and cultists, and a fictional setting that had been built up by writers over the decades encompassing a secret history predating and influencing humanity’s entire existence.

It was only later that I discovered the works of H.P. Lovecraft himself, the author who started it all. I found his ideas compelling and really imaginative, but his prose and style terrible and frankly, just really hard work to read. I think if I discovered Lovecraft first, I would never have bothered to go any further. But then reading some of his contemporaries who were writing with him in the 1920s, 30s and 40s, I can see why he is considered the best. Lovecraft’s tales like “The Call of Cthulhu”, “The Shadow Out of Time”, “The Whisperer in Darkness”, “The Haunter of the Dark”, and “At the Mountains of Madness” have some great ideas even today.

The last one, “At the Mountains of Madness”, is in the preliminary stages of being made into a movie by Guillermo Del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth) and if it ever gets made, it could be a brilliant movie.

You have a track record of writing Call of Cthulhu role-playing game material, including this year's Secrets of Kenya game supplement. What started you in RPG writing, and do you prefer RPG writing over fiction writing?
When I was very young, I was diagnosed as having dyslexia. I had great visual sense in that I could read and write upside down or in the mirror, was ambidextrous, and did well at mathematics, but I couldn’t spell, do grammar and I’d missed words completely when I was reading. The difference between quiet/quite, their/there, here/hear, its/it’s were a complete mystery to me. I’d always mix up my tenses when I constructed any sentence, and I spelt words phonetically. In high school, my English teachers told me I had the ideas, I just didn’t know how to articulate them. Basically, through my childhood years, I thought I would never be a writer because of dyslexia. I believed what everyone told me.

After completing an engineering degree, which I hated, and then working in the engineering profession, which I hated even more, I managed to sidestep into a marketing role for engineering companies - writing their tenders, web pages, brochures, presentations, and so on. I was so good at it, I eventually ended up running a marketing communications department. I came to the conclusion that, perhaps all things considered, I could write.

I’d always wanted to write science fiction ever since I was six when I saw Star Wars for the first time. That desire has never left me. I’d tried writing a novel, and then another, and those few publishers who did give me feedback said something very similar to what my English teachers said: the ideas are there but your grammar is terrible. So I decided to try my hand at writing role-playing games, which seemed easier to write. I started with the Call of Cthulhu game, which had always been a favourite.

Role-playing writing has less nuances and a more practical style to its narrative, so it is a much easier form to write in than fiction. I sent some of my work to Chaosium’s chief editor, Lynn Willis, and he came back to me over that Easter weekend many years ago, saying he wanted me to write a gaming book for him. From there, I just seemed to have a knack for it, so I wrote more and more gaming material, and it was a lot of fun. Secrets of Kenya was the pinnacle of that work, a book written and illustrated by myself when so many of Chaosium’s books are collaborative efforts of half a dozen or more authors and artists. It was a big achievement for me.

Meanwhile, I still wanted to write fiction, so I decided to stop listening to everyone who kept telling me that I couldn’t write, and found a way around dyslexia. Basically, instead of learning the rules of grammar, which I still don’t understand on an academic level, I just wrote and wrote and wrote and kept reading my own work to myself out loud, dozens and dozens of times until it sounded right.

For a long time, I received rejections, again because my grammar was not professional. Then one day that all stopped, and I was suddenly being selected for magazines and anthologies. I’d found a way to get past dyslexia so that my grammatical mistakes were no longer a problem. Because of my prior contacts with writers and editors in the Cthulhu Mythos sub-genre of horror, that was where my first successes happened. Now I have a novel and over twenty-five short stories sold to various anthologies and magazines around the world.

What I learnt from this experience was that the worst thing you can do to yourself is believe what other people tell you that you cannot do. When I stopped believing them, and started believing in myself, it all started to happen.

Now I write fiction because that is my first passion. Although I enjoyed writing for role-playing games, it no longer provides the satisfaction that it once did, because I’ve been there and done that. However, that is not to say I didn’t get a sense of achievement writing for the Call of Cthulhu game, I did, and the experience taught me a lot about publishing, writing, the structure of plots, character motivation and the commercial side of telling a story.

What was your inspiration for The Spiraling Worm's co-protagonist Major Harrison Peel?
Initially there was no intention to write Harrison Peel as an ongoing character. The first story I wrote about him was “Impossible Object”. The way it was written, it is ambiguous that he even survives the ending. But then I had another idea for another story, a sequel called “False Containment” that ended up in the Elder Signs Press anthology Horrors Beyond, and that too featured Peel. I had an idea for another tale, “Made of Meat”, which was well suited for Peel, and suddenly I was developing a series.

Not long after, John Sunseri contacted me to say he liked Peel so much he wanted to use him in his own tale “Resurgence”, featuring his own protagonist, an NSA agent called Jack Dixon. Then I wrote a sequel to John’s story in “Weapon Grade” and together we realised that we were one story short of a collection of interconnected tales that would make up a novel. So Peel kind of just evolved, and all the stories I just mentioned now appear in The Spiraling Worm in a connected narrative.

I’ve been a long time fan of spy thrillers and found that I was writing the Harrison Peel stories along those lines, using the conventions of that genre. My strongest influence would have to be the Arkady Renko character in Martin Cruz Smith’s Russian trilogy of Gorky Park, Polar Star, and Red Square. On another level, Peel is kind of like a Jason Bourne mixed with a John Constantine, a spy fighting in the dangerous world of the occult and demons.

From the start, I wanted Peel not to have special powers and no special training that characterises so many other ongoing characters in literature and the movies who fight against the supernatural. For instance, Peel might be Australian Army and works in intelligence, but he’s never been a special forces soldier. He doesn’t use magic, nor does he develop contacts with higher supernatural powers that he can call upon. He and Dixon essentially only have their own wits to survive through their otherworldly encounters. Mind you, they also have each other as support, and perhaps a nuclear bomb or two!

Can we expect more stories featuring Harrison Peel and other characters from The Spiraling Worm universe?
We call it the Jack Dixon/Harrison Peel series. The sequel is in development, and assuming sales of the first book go well, Chaosium has agreed in principle to a second stand-alone book featuring Harrison Peel and Jack Dixon. We’ve got well-known Cthulhu Mythos author C.J. Henderson joining the team with his own agent and his own stories.

The sequel, tentatively entitled The Unseen Architect, will again feature linked short stories but this time there will be a much stronger overriding story arc. Again, it will be more spy stories set across the globe involving dimensional tears into other realities where horrific monsters lurk. The showdown will be in the outback of Western Australia, featuring some old Lovecraftian favourites and some scenes that we’re quite excited about.


Read part two of this interview here.