Interview with author Greg Crites, aka HavePenWillScribble

Greg Crites, otherwise known as HavePenWillScribble is a long-time member of the TheNextBigWriter, a voluminous novelist, and a great critiquer. Since joining the site in December 2005, he has posted and received feedback on 8 novels and done over 1,000 reviews.

His effort is starting to pay off and his brand of zany, irreverant humor, mixed with larger than life characters, is starting to be recognized. Three of his novels posted as audio books have been downloaded over 80,000 times each on iTunes and Podiobooks. He has also sold hundreds of electronic copies of his novels from his own site Veinarmor Publishing.

We wanted to learn the secret behind his extraordinary ability to churn out funny novels and market them over the Internet. Here's what we found...

Hello Greg, how many books have you written over the last couple of years since you’ve been a member of TheNextBigWriter.

Howdy, Sol. Let’s see, it’s ten completed novels...eleven if we count the soon-to-be-available anthology of my short nonsense. I’d written about sixty pages of No, You Can’t Have It when I noticed TheNextBigWriter during one of those Google searches I made looking for the lucky publisher who’d give me my first million-dollar check. I think you had only been up for a couple months. I joined and started posting. One day I woke up and had eight complete novels written and posted on TNBW. They were, in order,

• No, You Can’t Have It
• Dunkin the Vampire Slayer
• Something Porcine This Way Comes
• Bluetooth Bayou; Hard Boiled Headline
• Dunkin the Vampire Slayer II: Death Rides A Pale, Pink, Porcine Horse
• Devlin, Abnormal Investigations, Case File: The Hell Hermit
• Zane Sickle, Comic Adventurer For Hire
• Crusade
  

Do you have a favorite?

It’s hands-down Zane Sickle. Some weird combination of poor diet, smog, alcohol, biorhythms, horiscopical-gyroscopical-alignment, and steady bowel movements coalesced to put my jokemaker in overdrive. I wrote it for Nanowrimo, did 55,000 words in thirty days, cranked out the last 15,000 at a more leisurely pace and had the entire thing written in two months. I believe it’s the funniest thing I’ve done; with more laughs per page than anyone has a right to write. Modesty forbids me from continuing to bray about its essential comic genius. Heh!

What inspires you to write at such a furious pace?

I keep four books going at once now. So whatever mood I’m in, there’s something in-progress I can work on. Sometimes, I hit a patch of manic momentum on a book and crank out three or four thousand words a day for a solid week. I'm beginning to realize that immersing my feeble brain into those characters, into that situation, engages more senses and produces cleaner work. If I’m slumming, I can see it when I read the previous day’s swill. I toss a lot of work out; it’s killing my productivity.

You’ve gone the self-published route. How has it been?

A huge, monstrous waste of time and energy I could better use writing more stuff. You have to promote, promote, and promote. Then you have to market, and it’s a coin toss whether it makes any spike in sales. I have no advice for others as I have not yet broken that threshold a reasonable human would consider as remotely resembling financial success as a writer. I can say be prepared for little or no activity. Zero visits to the website, dribbling sales, and a massive work-to-renumeration ratio no sane person would consciously seek.

I heard you are getting 40,000 downloads on your books and selling hundreds of pdf copies. Tell us about it.

Yes, in the last three months I had the brilliant idea to record a couple of my books as audiobooks and GIVE them away FREE. On the surface this seems the height of imbecility, but I had a harebrained scheme, and I’ve learned that if you aren’t trying something, you dang sure aren’t going to accomplish anything. Turns out my spoken word reading skills appeal to a large number of weird people, the stories are fun, and there are many people laughing while at work, in their car, or wandering aimlessly with an iPod and headphones.

What are you working on now and what’s next?

Well, I’ve finished two additional novels: Devlin, Abnormal Investigations, Case File: Cleft Behind, and The Boy With the Pale Skin is complete, that’s a novel that can almost be characterized as young adult (Don’t know what happened there). I have Devlin III, Plan Fore From Outer Space underway, Dunkin III I’m still working on and faaaar behind schedule. I’m piddling with I Am Not Your Enemy, and plotting several other fun books. I’ve found that while I can force myself to write in different genre’s, it’s more like work. Humor comes naturally, so I’m hoping to reenter that zany state and peck out something so damn funny people will bring full rum bottles and place them at my feet.

How has TheNextBigWriter helped you?

Sol, I can honestly say I’d be far-the-poorer had I not stumbled on to TNBW. Despite my experience in the newspaper business as a reporter, editorial writer, and feature writing hack, I was woefully unprepared both grammatically and mechanically to produce well-punctuated novels. Fellow members have been more-than-helpful... far beyond measure, and I’ll never forget them or TNBW. I still urge everyone off-site who writes to give this place a trial run. If you take a sensible approach, you can’t go wrong here. As long as you give as good as you get, use the good advice, ignore the bad, and go with your gut instincts, you will get better every day. TNBW is indispensable thanks to the site dynamics, its structure, its quality of membership, and just the simple fact that you ain’t going it alone all the time.

• Be sure to visit Greg's website at Veinarmor Publishing for free samples, downloads, and more.
• Listen to an excerpt of Greg's book Devlin, Abnormal Investigations: Case File: The Hell Hermit on Booksie.com.