Talking with A.B. Funkhauser
Good morning, everyone. Today, I'm letting A.B. Funkhauser take over for a whole and talk about herself and her books. Come along for a wild and crazy ride!
I
see you around the Twitterverse especially at #FF Character Name. Where do you
get those names from?
I love Follow Friday’s! They’re terrific for
community building and also spark great questions like this one. Character
names? Well—
I’m Kurt Vonnegut-inspired. That burst of whimsy at
the forefront of really big themes. Wow! He was a master at setting those
things up. But what really got me hooked were his character names. How they
sounded—serious, humorous, threatening—made a difference, I think, so much so
that when I started writing I REMEMBERED to do the same thing.
Poonam Khanzada Rajput from Shell Game is a woman of
obvious power who doesn’t know it in chapter one, but by the epilogue, look
out! Alma Wurtz from Scooter Nation—old world, maybe not even of this world.
Think of the damage someone like that can do to the unsuspecting? And my most
enduring creation Jürgen Heuer. People have a tough time pronouncing his name
and that’s the point. He was put on this earth to wreak havoc and make people
feel uncomfortable, so, of course, Enid Estelle Krause (EEK) is drawn to him.
What horrors they conjure!
I hope that made sense?
In
addition to unusual sounding character names, you have spun stories that win
horror and humor prizes. How did you manage that?
It was a very organic thing with me. When I sat down
to write, it wasn’t with any particular genre in mind. I was driven by
circumstances that had my emotions whipped up. I think I write best when I’m
angry. Anyway, I thought as the story unfolded that I was writing some kind of
paranormal romance, but by the time I got to the third draft, something started
happening. The characters literally hijacked me. They took me to really dark
places—botched embalmings, Nazis, character assassination, murder—and humorous
ones too. Heuer’s spirit willing the tree to fall on the neighbor’s above
ground pool was beyond nasty, but I couldn’t stop laughing. Was it him or was
it me? I don’t know. I thought it was a one off. But then it kept happening in
Heuer and repeated in Scooter Nation and Shell Game, this blend of anger and
whimsy. I think I have an inner imp trying to get out.
You
founded your own hashtag game on Twitter. Tell us about that.
I got into Twitter hashtag games about three years
ago and thought they were absolutely brilliant. Share one liners from your WIP
within a proscribed theme and do it all with only 140 characters. It was
amazing! First, it really taught me how to edit on the fly. Suddenly, all of
those darling lines that I couldn’t part with before were chopped to fit the
format, and I never put them back because the edited version was so much better.
The next thing was community. The Twitterverse is HUGE, but when you play the
games, you meet people week after week who like your lines and you like theirs.
Before you know it, you’re doing review and blog swaps and sharing out What’s
New? with the larger community. It’s like a venn diagram run amok! Anyhow, I
had hashtag games for every day of the week except Thursday. There was nothing.
So I took a page out of a friend’s book and created my own— #Thurds Words on
Thursday—but with a difference. At #Thurds, we post one liners to a theme each
week, but we also allow posts from published work AND buy links and website
links.
Promos
on the hashtag games aren’t encouraged.
That’s right, but my thought was: “I spent a year
writing this, and now that it’s done I can’t talk about it on the hashtag
circuit?” This is precisely when it should be talked about. LET’S GET READ.
That’s our motto at #Thurds.
You
recently re-released a book. How different is it from the first run?
That would be Heuer Lost And Found which first
released in 2015 and now again in 2018. This time, it has a new cover that
prominently features the protagonist/antagonist of the title. I did this based
on reader feedback. I thought the backdoor on the first cover was cool because
it marked the boundary between Enid and Heuer’s twilight world of death and
regret and the “sunnier” more positive world outside. But, no, it was Heuer all
the way. So there he is, in all his dark glory on the cover trapped between
worlds. As for the rest of the book, there are no significant changes other
than a few misspelt words corrected and a couple of very, very long sentences
that I just had to shorten. Oh, and there’s an intro where another writer
assesses the work. That’s such a cool bit and a little unreal—I can read about
my motivations in third person!
And
you’re working on something else?
Yes! It’s the prequel to Heuer Lost And Found and
I’m loving every minute. It starts in 1979 where Enid and Heuer are alive and
well and doing as much damage as possible. It’s a real trip for me.
Books by A.B. Funkhauser
Available through Solstice
Publishing and Amazon
Heuer Lost And Found
Unrepentant cooze
hound lawyer Jürgen Heuer dies suddenly and unexpectedly in his litter-strewn
home. Undiscovered, he rages against God, Nazis, deep fryers and analogous
women who disappoint him.
At last found, he
is delivered to Weibigand Brothers Funeral Home, a ramshackle establishment
peopled with above average eccentrics, including boozy Enid, a former
girlfriend with serious denial issues. With her help and the help of a
wisecracking spirit guide, Heuer will try to move on to the next plane. But before
he can do this, he must endure an inept embalming, feral whispers, and Enid’s
flawed recollections of their murky past.
Winner Best Horror,
Preditors & Editors 2015
Medalist Winner
“Horror,” New Apple EBook Awards 2016
Scooter Nation
Aging managing director Charlie Forsythe begins his work day with a
phone call to Jocasta Binns, the unacknowledged illegitimate daughter of
Weibigand Funeral Home founder Karl Heinz Sr. Alma Wurtz, a scooter bound
sextenarian, community activist, and neighborhood pain in the ass is emptying
her urine into the flower beds, killing the petunias. Jocasta cuts him off,
reminding him that a staff meeting has been called. Charlie, silenced, is taken
aback: he has had no prior input into the meeting and that, on its own, makes it
sinister.
The second novel in the Unapologetic Lives series, Scooter Nation takes
place two years after Heuer Lost And Found. This time, funeral directors
Scooter Creighton and Carla Moretto Salinger Blue take center stage as they
battle conflicting values, draconian city by-laws, a mendacious neighborhood
gang bent on havoc, and a self-absorbed fitness guru whose presence shines an
unwanted light on their quiet Michigan neighborhood.
Medalist Winner “Humor,” New Apple EBook
Award 2016
Winner Best Humor, 2016 Summer Indie Book
Award
Shell
Game
Carlos the Wonder Cat lives free,
traveling from house to house in a quiet suburban neighborhood. Known by
everyone, his idyllic existence is threatened when a snarky letter from Animal
Control threatens to punish kitty owners who fail to keep their pets indoors.
The $5,000 fine / loss of kitty to THE MAN is draconian and mean, but before
Team Carlos can take steps, he is kidnapped by a feline fetishist sex cult
obsessed with the films of eccentric Pilsen Güdderammerüng. Stakes are high.
Even if Carlos escapes their clutches, can he ever go home?
5 Star Reader’s Favorite 2017
About
the Author
Toronto born author A.B.
Funkhauser is a funeral director, classic car nut and wildlife enthusiast
living in Ontario, Canada. Like most funeral directors, she is governed by a
strong sense of altruism fueled by the belief that life chooses us, not we it.
A devotee of the gonzo style
pioneered by the late Hunter S. Thompson, Funkhauser attempts to shine a light
on difficult subjects by aid of humorous storytelling. “In gonzo, characters
operate without filters, which means they say and do the kinds of things we
cannot in an ordered society. Results are often comic but, hopefully,
instructive.”
Her most recent release, Shell
Game, is a psycho-social cat dramedy with death and laughs that takes aim at a
pastoral community with a lot to hide. “With so much of the world currently up
for debate, I thought it would be useful to question—again—the motives and
machinations championed by the morally flexible and then let the cat decide
what it all means.”
Find
Her
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