Dan Interviews J.C. Hutchins author of Personal Effects:Dark Art

There is an interesting thing happening in the publishing world right now. Where once upon a time if you wrote your great American novel, and after shopping it around and found out it wasn’t quite what the publishers were looking for, for some reason or another. The only home it would find is in your dusty desk drawer between last years tax return and that really great script you wrote in high school after seeing The Matrix. But now that isn’t the end of the line for authors looking to get published these days, thanks to podcasting and the publishing industry is starting to take notice.

J.C. Hutchins is one these authors that started out giving his great American novel away in podcast form on Podiobooks.com as a sort of serialized audio drama or “Podcast Novel” if you will and over the years it has become one of the most downloaded “podcast novels” in history. The 7th Son trilogy still receives over 100,000 downloads each month and this led to his eventual book deal with St. Martin’s press, not bad for someone who has up until Personal Effects: Dark Art never had a novel published the old fashioned way.  With the podiobook and social media route authors like J.C. are building their audience by promoting their own work and by proving to publishers that there is an audience for their work making dream of the great American novel into a reality.

J.C.’s first book with St. Martin’s press Personal Effects: Dark Art was released this week, and it is what you would expect from someone who has made a career thus far of using all the tools at his command to tell a more compelling story his own way. The book is not simply a book but a true transmedia experience. With the book you get a envelope of “personal effects” which tie into an online alternate reality game, so once you have finished with the book you can further explore the story online adding to the experience. Due to the nature of the book itself and these “personal effects” the book will not see an electronic or podcast version to better keep the experience as it was intended. I do have to say being a designer by trade a lot of work went into creating the business cards, drivers licenses. photos and birth certificates that come with the book. Don’t fret he is currently releasing Personal Effects: Sword of Blood the prequel to Dark Art as a free podcast.

I am a huge fan of the J.C.’s work and hope you enjoy my interview and in true transmedia fashion the interview is also available as a downloadable podcast because quite honestly I couldn’t fit it all here so enjoy!

Check out the interview after the jump!

-For my readers who are just getting introduced to J.C. Hutchins could you tell us a little about yourself, like how you got started podcasting your fiction and how that helped bring you to where you are now with the release of your newest book Personal Effects: Dark Art?

So from 2002 to 2004 I wrote an epically long techno-thriller, set in present day called 7th Son, and it was a lot of fun to write. 7th Son was my first real work of fiction that I’d ever done, I’d been a newspaper reporter before then, and I worked really hard in 2005 to find an agent for it.  Now at the time I completely ignored the reality that a 1300 page novel would never ever Ever EVER see the light of day from a first time novelist.  So I was politely declined everywhere I went and by the end of the year I was kind of depressed and had my head in my hands.  But in 2005 I had been listening to podcast novels by people like Scott Sigler, Mark Jeffrey, Tee Morris, Jack Mangan, and Matthew Wayne Selznick to name a few and I became persuaded to turn a corner and realize that well, if I can’t sell this book, I might as well share it with people out there and see what happens. I can’t get the thing published, so let’s just tell a great story. And so, in February of 2006, I began releasing the 7th son podcast novel trilogy starting with  Book 1: Descent.

What I did was chopped that big ass novel into three sections: the first act became book one, the second became book two, etc. I should have realized that a long time ago. It seems pretty elementary now but at the time it was like a revelation.  And thanks to the support and evangelism of my listeners, the audience size for 7th son continued to grow and grow and grow. When I was releasing the podcast of 7th Son Book 2 or I was between book 2 and book 3, I received a phone call from an editor at St. Martin’s Press at the time, name David Moldawer, he’s no longer with the company, but we are still in touch and we’re close friends. David Moldawer said well “It seems like you are  doing great stuff with 7th Son I’m listening, I’m a fan, lots of really cool thrills and chills,  we’re thinking about doing  a supernatural thriller with a guy named Jordan Weisman.” I immediately knew the name and I’m sure that a lot of your gaming readers know that name, he’s the guy that founded FASA and popularized BattleTech and Shadow Run and then went on to popularize Crimson Skies and HeroClicks the little table top super hero battle game that used licensed characters from DC and Marvel and what not. Then he went on to kind of a be a pioneer in what we now know as Alternate Reality Games storytelling which is at it’s simplest a kind of like scavenger hunt based narratives that require  a community of people to solve riddles and puzzles to unlock the next steps in an unfolding narrative that takes place online and sometimes even in real life. I said “What do I need to do to make this happen?” and David Moldawer and I started talking about Personal Effects.  I was then introduced to Jordan Weisman and we began to collaborate on what we now know as Personal Effects: Dark Art.  As that was unfolding, I was blessed enough to talk to the folks at St. Martins Press, and they also said  “How about this 7th Son thing? Is that available?”  And I said yes. And so 7th Son will also be coming out this year.  So it’s been a crazy year so far and I’m really excited to see how Personal Effects: Dark Art and 7th Son: Descent do in bookstores.

-For those not in the know, what is the elevator pitch for Personal Effects: Dark Art?

Well Personal Effects: Dark Art is a super natural thriller that focuses on Zach Taylor, who is a young and optimistic art therapist working at Brinkvale Psychiatric Hospital in New York. Brinkvale Psychiatric Hospital is the dead end of mental health care in New York state. It’s where all the hopeless cases, the hard cases, the people that no one can treat or wants to treat ends up.  The facility is actually built underground in an abandoned brownstone quarry it’s a windowless and a hopeless place.  Young Zach Taylor is there as an art therapist to treat people and do his very best. He’s a true believer in what he does and he’s enthusiastic and he soon finds himself staring into the blind eyes of Martin Grace his most recent patient, and latest case.  Martin Grace is under suspicion and is facing murder charges for murdering a local hop hop artist a few years back and is suspected in 11 other murders as well.  The man is psychosomatically blind.  How can a blind man murder all these people? That is one of the main mysteries that Zach wants to unfold, and he wants to treat Martin Grace to find out if the guy is competent to stand trial.

But Martin Grace wants nothing to do with this. He is absolutely shutting Zach Taylor down at every single turn.  He doesn’t want to be treated, he doesn’t want to be cured but he also insists that while he didn’t kill these people, he is responsible for their deaths. He blames the murders on a supernatural entity called the “Dark Man”. Some kind of demonic force and if he sees you with his eyes, you can be marked for death. Which Zach Taylor reckons is why the guy went psychosomatically blind.  This makes sense.  So, in order to facilitate a breakthrough,  Zach Taylor is very keen on helping Martin Grace.  He soon embarks on a quest to kind of unlock the secrets of Martin Grace’s blindness and past by looking through Martin Grace’s personal effects, the stuff that was cataloged when he was processed at the hospital.  Which then sends him to Martin Grace’s apartment where he finds other items, secret things about Martin Grace’s past. Using these personal items, he then moves forward in the story and moves forward in the treatment and gets closer and closer to Martin grace’s hidden secrets and closer to the reality that demonic force called the “Dark Man” may very well be true. So that’s the pitch for the novel.

But the really cool thing about this book is that it actually comes with these tangible personal effects that are mentioned in the novel.  So, for instance, ID cards, business cards, photographs, family photos, faxes, legal documents, it’s all there, all the stuff that is literally mentioned in the book, comes In a pocket is in the inside cover of the novel.  Clues that are based in the novel, plus clues that you will find in these transmedia artifacts, these out of book artifacts will propel you into another narrative, that unfolds online, in faxes, and emails and phone calls and phone messages.  So you actually become, not only a reader, but an active investigator. You actually become part of the story in a way because you can follow Zach Taylor as he dives in to this mystery and the cool twist is that you may find out key plot point and interesting things about characters and the past that our hero Zach Taylor may never discover.  That’s the really cool, ‘out of book experience’ that accompanies Personal Effects: Dark Art.

-You’re known for putting puzzles in your books there was some interesting ones in the 7th Son Trilogy did that lend itself to the ARG that is part of Personal Effects: Dark Art?

I think that may be actually one of the reasons why David Moldawer reached out to me back in 2007.  I call those sequences in 7th son ‘puzzle based peril’ Where it’s like, you know – unlocking a secret but it will often lead to your doom. So for Personal Effects: Dark Art this is something that resonated with them and we were able to kind of leverage that in a really creative way not necessarily within the pages of the novel but certainly the game play and the deductive reasoning, that a reader will be required to assemble these clues from the text of the book and these transmedia artifacts to send them in to the out of book experience that was definitely a part of it. Now we made sure that out of book experience and unlocking those secrets wasn’t particularly hard, you wouldn’t need to be a cryptographer to do this.

This is an entry level ARG experience and it’s highly managed and it’s a very small transmedia story when you compare it to I Love Bees or the Dark Knight, both very popular ARGs.  We wanted to make sure that people expended some effort and the more effort that they expended for certain elements of this story the more they are rewarded for their curiosity and their efforts.  We actually built an alternate ending, a plot twist that can only be experienced outside the pages of the book, that completely changes the entire perception of the events seen in the novel.  It’s a lot like the Sixth Sense in that you could watch the Sixth Sense from beginning to ten minutes before the movie ends and that’s a great little movie because by the end Bruce Willis has helped the kid who sees dead people to help put restless spirits to rest. That’s how that movie pretty much ends.  Then you watch the last ten minutes and everything changes.  That’s exactly what we’ve done in Personal Effects: Dark Art with a particularly nice plot twist that can only be experienced outside the pages of the book.  To do that, to experience it, you have to jump through a few logical hoops to make that connection and unlock that secret.

- How closely did you work with the makers of the ARG?  How much influence did you have over that?

Quite a bit. To be clear, the plot of the novel came first, with Jordan and I sitting down and working very closely on plotting out the novel and finding opportunities to tell these little portals into a transmedia experience and then as we were about halfway through plotting the book then we starting coming up with story enhancing tales that we could tell beyond the pages of the book and that influenced the plot. But I remember actually flying to Washington to meet up with Jordan in real life and we had a nice little Personal Effects: Dark Art pow wow. This was in late 2007, and that’s when we really sat down and banged out, and conceived, perfected the transmedia experience that people will experience when they read Personal Effects: Dark Art now.  That was the product of Jordan’s creative thought and a collaborator named Jessica Price that works at Smith and Tinker. I came in and said that I didn’t think that my original idea, that I had works at all and we need to kill it.  They agreed, and we kind of worked on it.  It was about 65/35, 70/30.  70 them and 30 me, and it was very productive and creative and collaborative experience.

-I know one of the characters in Personal Effects is now blogging for Suicide Girls, whose idea was that and how did it come about?

Mine Mine Mine!  Me! I did that!  I’m so proud of this really creative cross promotion that we’re doing with Suicide Girls.  And when I say we, I mean me.  One of the things that I pitched when I was writing Personal Effects: Dark Art is that I wrote Rachel Webster, who is Zach Taylor’s girlfriend to be a tattooed, pierced, dyed hair hottie that that who was an avid video gamer, a geek and empowered.  She really was the anchor in their relationship.  Zach can be a daydreamer but Rachel is very grounded, down to earth and progressive.  I pitched this idea:  Let’s make her a video game blogger, let’s have her have a blog, because that’s a nice little transmedia portal and Smith and Tinker and Jordan Weisman said sure, no problem. So I wrote that into the book. As we marched closer towards publication, in late last year we started updating the PixelVixen707.com blog and Rachel Webster began to blog in real time. In fact, in the novel Personal Effects: Dark Art takes place in early November and if you actually go back to early November in the archives, you will see her reference that.  She was writing that in real time, there is no back dating, no alteration of the dates or manipulation she was live blogging.  It was this bizarre convergence of events that I had written a year ago with real time being told by a fictional characters perspective in real time in real life.

-What’s next for you after Personal Effects: Dark Art is released?

Right now, I’m in the midst of still writing Personal Effects: Sword of Blood and in fact I will probably find myself during this pretty grueling promotion thing, because I’m always trying different kinds of crazy promotions for my stuff and I’m always over-committed but that seems to be the only way I know how to roll.  I probably will be writing the chapter and then recording it and releasing it that very same week.  There’s going to be a point where I’m flying off the seat of my pants. The immediate future is Personal Effects: Sword of Blood and also releasing, and continue to release online promotional content like the video trailers or the video blurbs I’ve been releasing and shamelessly relentlessly promoting myself and the novel in the podcasting space and probably on the street corner, who ever will listen to me.  I will do everything I can to make sure that I will be able to go to sleep at night, knowing that I did personally everything I could to make this book a success. Then after that, I think that will peter out, that intense experience will probably conclude in late July, mid-August, and then I start prepping for the print release of 7th Son in late October and what I’m going to be doing is rerecording the novel, the print edition version of the novel and have that ready for audio podcast release in mid-October. I also have plans to write a seven short story prequel anthology featuring each clone from that story, because that story is about seven human clones, each clone will have his own story that leads up to the week before the events seen in the beginning of 7th Son Book 1. After that, in January I will probably nap for about a month, then I will wake up and then it will be time either start working on a sequel for Personal Effects (if it’s green lit), but I have tons of ideas for horror novels and supernatural thriller novels and techo-thriller novels that have been sitting in my head for the past two years that I haven’t been able to move on because of all these other commitments.  2010 is going to be a great year because I’ve got a podcasting fiction project that I want to pursue called The 33, and during the release of that, I hope to be writing my next novel. For the rest of the interview download the podcast below.

For more check out the complete audio interview here. Order the book below!

Podcast music by Celldweller

J.C. Hutchins pic by JR Blackwell

Special thanks to my wife for helping me transcribe this.