R. E. Kurz on the novel that took 12 years to write

This is a machine-generated transcript. Errors are possible. The audio file is the definitive record of the episode.

Lee Schneider: Let’s start at the beginning. These characters came to you quite early. And that’s interesting. And it’s also interesting how the story built out and stayed alive. Because look, lots of people get interesting stories come to them, but only a few have the endurance to actually write the whole book. So talk about how it first came to you, but then how you kind of kept the juices flowing.

R.E. Kurz: So I first started coming to me when I learned about the character of Jack Frost, like he’s an archetype folklore character, and I learned about him in like a book by Laura Ingalls Wilder, which I thought was interesting, you know, I was in middle school, so I reading a lot, and also Rise of the Guardians introduced a more visual version of him. So then that like sort of became like a bit of a fan fiction at first, but then I started really developing the character. Yeah, that’s how the story idea like first came to me. was Linda and Jack always. I really like the idea of exploring their friendship. As they went on like supernatural hijinks with all like the nature spirits and things like that. But then the reason I don’t know why it stuck with me necessarily. I just loved the characters so much. Recently, I realized that
It was sort of like an old friends to return to over the years. And that was like, you know, so much changes as you grow up. And it was really nice to have something to return to repeatedly whenever I was stressed or whenever I just wanted to have some nostalgia. And that’s how it sort of stayed alive for me. makes sense.

Lee Schneider: Cool, yeah, I can vibe with that definitely. I like going to visit characters. It’s sort of like I look forward to picking up where I left off with them. But it is a marathon. There’s an old expression about making movies that it’s like a stagecoach ride across the early American West and there will only be a few survivors. I don’t necessarily feel like that, but…

R.E. Kurz: Thank you.

Lee Schneider: I’m curious to know also, now this was a 12 year process, let’s call it more than a decade. How has writing changed for you? Your process, the way you work with things, everything really, how has it changed?

R.E. Kurz: It’s changed drastically. I know my style of writing has changed. There was a point during one of my many revision processes where the beginning of the book looked extremely different from the end and like tone and vibes and like every way. But the process changed a lot, especially for me when I was in college, because I didn’t take any creative writing courses. I went to Fordham University, so it was a very robust core curriculum. So didn’t have that much time to explore, but I did take a lot of medieval literature courses.

**R.E. Kurz:** And my professor at the time, he really had us dive into analytical approaches and I really enjoyed that. So that sort of in turn affected how I approached and viewed my own creative story. It wasn’t just for fun anymore in some ways. It was like I was literally analyzing it as I was writing it and trying to understand.

**R.E. Kurz:** what the structure meant as well as like what the meaning of each character like dialogue, inner dialogue, monologues, etc. So I definitely started to change my thinking in that way.

Lee Schneider: Yeah, you definitely get a sense, one does, of this is dialogue, this is inner dialogue, this is the description, whereas a reader might be all of a flow. I also want to know how did your physical process change? Have you always been writing by hand? Have you switched to fancy schmancy computers or none of the above?
**R.E. Kurz:** That’s changed as well. I had a few dedicated notebooks when I was younger. I filled in almost an entire notebook when I was a kid and then I started like branching out. as I started going to like college, know, a lot like you’re on the move all the time, like it’s not the same. You can’t just sit at home after school and write. So I started writing a lot like in the notes app on my phone or Google Docs on my phone, whatever was available on my computer.
R.E. Kurz: and it really just became whatever modality was easiest to keep that story alive. So that’s the biggest difference. It’s usually ending up being like whatever I have on hand. Sometimes I’ll still write on napkins if that’s like what’s most easily available.
Lee Schneider:
Yes, I kind of like that part of the process and I have notes on every kind of media that you can think of. I have notes in a computer, I have notes verbally, I have notes in notebooks, I use everything. So let’s talk about… No, go ahead.
**R.E. Kurz:** Yeah.
**R.E. Kurz:** Yeah, I was going to say ideas don’t stop.
Lee Schneider:
The ideas don’t stop. the scary thing is, Stephen King has said that he never writes anything down, and if it’s good, he’ll remember it. But I don’t believe that. I need to write things down. I have to write things down, because it’ll drive me crazy. I’ll be falling asleep or something. And what was that idea I had? So I keep notebooks by the bed. I have notebooks all over the place, just because I want to write things down.
**R.E. Kurz:** Yeah.
Lee Schneider:
So let’s talk about the external process a little.
Lee Schneider:
we all finish a first draft and we may call it a first draft, but we know there’s a lot of work to be done. Who, what, how, the greatest influence on you? Beta readers, an editor, a colleague, a friend, who helps you shape the next level of the book?
**R.E. Kurz:** I’d say a combination of like, like some friends. My mom has read my book a lot over the years. Like she has the patience of a saint at this point. and time also helps. Like after I finish a draft or I just am getting tired of looking at it, I’ll just walk away. Sometimes for like a week or sometimes more.
**R.E. Kurz:** taken breaks from it for months. I mean, it was like a over a decade long process. usually my mom is the biggest supporter and then I’ve had some friends who’ve been interested here and there over the years too. So it’s a bit, it’s like a community effort in some ways.
Lee Schneider:
Do you find it hard to listen to people? Are you open? What’s your attitude?
**R.E. Kurz:** I try to be as open as possible. Sometimes it’s easier and sometimes it’s harder. mean, ego always gets in the way for people, like it’s hard to not.
**R.E. Kurz:** or it’s hard to hear difficult feedback of like, wow, this really doesn’t work. I try to be as open as possible because one of the biggest things I learned about the writing process in grade school and in college is that you’re never as good of a writer as you think you are. And everything looks better to you than it does to other people. So only way to improve as a writer is to listen to feedback. And my ultimate goal is to always improve as a writer. I look forward to that all the time.
Lee Schneider:
Yep, that’s a great goal. We mentioned in kind of a sideways glance your degrees and I want to read them so I have them write, Biological Sciences and Medieval Studies. Interesting combination, you we’ve heard of science fiction and fantasy writers, maybe tech degrees and things like that, like Arthur C. Clarke or someone like that. How have…
Lee Schneider:
your interests in these areas shaped what you’re doing.
**R.E. Kurz:** Yeah, so actually it wasn’t officially a full medieval studies like dual degree of biology. I only had time for a minor, but if I did have time I would have gone for like the whole way. But yeah, they definitely influenced me. Both can be extremely analytical and that’s what I’d say a balance of analytical and creative. Like I worked in a lab at Fordham for a little bit.
**R.E. Kurz:** And you have to be just as creative as you have to be like analyzing each step because like if an experiment doesn’t work you have to like step back and think about why, what can you do differently, or something’s actively not working, you know, that whole thing. Also like my, I really love nature and that was like a big reason why I pursued biology. And so that definitely informed my book with Jack Frost, All the Plants and like nature spirits as I call them, and Mother Nature of…
**R.E. Kurz:** So was a massive influence, if you can see it, and most of the words on the page, I spend a lot of time talking about how pretty the leaves are. medieval literature had a big influence for different reasons. Sometimes I picked up on the medieval styles of the way things were written. I just thought it was fascinating to see how literature was approached from a different time. I really enjoyed reading about the Mabinogian, which is like a…
**R.E. Kurz:** medieval Welsh text and I really enjoyed the themes in it and like how random it is but it kind of becomes, it usually becomes cohesive at the end, sometimes it doesn’t. I just thought it was really fascinating so I enjoyed trying to, sometimes I’d use like those influences intentionally to see how I could push myself to expand on what I already knew just for fun.
Lee Schneider:
Kind of a geeky question, but when you’re looking at medieval literature, are you feeling the way the words feel, the cadences, the music of the words, or are you looking at those stories structurally and saying, hmm, this is an interesting way to tell the story, or both?
**R.E. Kurz:** Honestly, usually read translations. My professor, sometimes he would show us the real versions, but I usually read more like early and high medieval literature. like Middle English wasn’t really a thing for most of my courses, but I all of it was beautiful. liked, you know, just the way they would describe.
**R.E. Kurz:** I can’t think of specific example, but I’d like how they just describe simple things in text, even, you know, like in Beowulf, that’s always like a big, there’s like Kennings and different ways of describing like simple, like things with someone’s mouth. And I thought it was so fascinating to read.
Lee Schneider:
It of makes, as an amateur, that’s how I approach medieval literature, but not like you, but as an amateur, I often wonder if the bulk of the writing that came after has kind of messed us up because we don’t have time. when you read earlier writing, I was reading some old books on fairies and elves that were the original texts a couple of months ago, they have time.
Lee Schneider:
They have time to describe things. They’re not worried about a hook or, you know, keeping our interests. And I wonder if that’s just the times then, because they did have time and reading was special. Or I wonder if it’s, you know, there’s just so much stuff in our head at this point that we can shortcut everything practically.
**R.E. Kurz:** definitely complicated because some of these used to be like oral stories that were eventually written down and then all these like biases and whatever are mixed in there and some of them you know monks if some monks were the ones writing them sometimes there’s other people I’m going to totally butcher his name like like like Kretien de Troy he wrote a lot of famous stories like especially anyway I’m getting off track but
**R.E. Kurz:** there’s a lot of influence in lots of different situations that don’t exist in the same way anymore.
Lee Schneider:
I wanted to ask you about writing for this audience, a younger audience, a paranormal fantasy audience. I’m not going to, no spoilers here. I won’t give anything up, but there’s cursing, there’s adult situations, kind of, there’s serious romance, there’s people dealing with some pretty troubling things. And maybe I’m naive, but whenever I read,
Lee Schneider:
books that I think, this is for kids, it’s pretty sophisticated. It’s pretty complicated. There’s a lot going on there. So my question to you is, are you feeling held back or liberated in this genre?
**R.E. Kurz:** I wouldn’t say, I guess there are like sometimes there’s constraints, but for example, I don’t know if you’ve read Percy Jackson, I read that like way too much as a child, like I reread it multiple times, but there’s a lot of, when I started reading it again as an adult, there’s a lot of really adult situations I wasn’t expecting and it’s considered middle grade. And so I kind of use that as a bit of a guide almost to like check like, okay, what’s appropriate, what’s not.
**R.E. Kurz:** because a lot of like kids, whether we like it or not, they’re really thrust into adult situations all the time or ones that are beyond the level of maturity they should have anyway. Because, you know, kids parents can die or like Linda, like her best friend died. That’s like a really intense situation, but it could happen to anyone, unfortunately. So or even with the cursing, I included in there because when I was in school, like most of the kids in my classes cursed, it was just I grew up in New York City. So maybe it’s a little bit different there.
**R.E. Kurz:** but I thought that was just realistic. know, it just, especially if there’s like bigger displays of emotion, like you’re more likely to curse even as an adult. So I approached it like that. tried to strive for authenticity more than anything about like sort of teenage experience. It can be either really like vanilla and benign or extremely traumatic for some people. So you never know.
Lee Schneider:
Hmm.
Lee Schneider:
Yeah, it definitely works in the sense that it’s genuine, it’s real. I felt I was in those high school situations. And I think it’s hard to make a situation that matters to a high schooler, make that matter to someone who’s not a high schooler anymore, but they can remember it, or it evokes that, or somehow connects to that. And I think part of the way is the realism you’re describing, just what are the emotions, and how do people really talk?
Lee Schneider:
And I thought that really worked well in the book.
**R.E. Kurz:** Thank you.
Lee Schneider:
Yeah, mean, Percy Jackson is a good example. Also, Neil Schusterman, we’ve read a lot of his work here and there’s a lot of really, there’s violent stuff. There’s things that I was really surprised at and my kind of knee jerk response as a parent, which is not necessarily the best response, but that’s what I had was, this is because of all the video games. You know, they can kill people and bring them back or people can die and
Lee Schneider:
There can be violent situations, but they somehow get repaired because it’s video games. But of course, if you read any fantasy or any fairy tales or almost anything, that happens a lot where people come back to life or there’s a extra real, extra reality situation. But I have been amazed at really how many authors are just taking it to the realism and the kind of a brutal reality. I don’t remember.
**R.E. Kurz:** you
Lee Schneider:
I too grew up in a suburb of New York. didn’t go to school in New York. And there were some pretty rough things that happened, but it would take a mindset change for me to write about it. Whereas I see you and the Percy Jackson books and lots of other books, they’re right in it. Like they’re going for the genuine experience, which is interesting.
**R.E. Kurz:** Thank
**R.E. Kurz:** Yeah, I think it’s really fascinating to see how things sometimes change like that over time, but also like the middle school I went to, I read The Fault in Our Stars when I was in seventh grade. I was not mostly prepared for that. That was a lot more realism than I was ready for at the time. Or we read lots of books about bullying that were really intense. So to me, in some ways it was like,
**R.E. Kurz:** whether or I was experiencing those harsh realities, I was being presented with them constantly, like even if it wasn’t my own personal life. So for me to some extent, like some of those things are very real all the time.
Lee Schneider:
Yeah, and what about, you don’t have to reveal anything if you don’t want to, but what about the primary plot movements and character developments of the book? Are those, how much of those are from your life or how much of them the characters, I always say, told me to do it?
**R.E. Kurz:** I’d say nothing is directly from my life. there’s, it’s not a memoir or like autobiographical by any means, but some of my experiences or just some of my emotions that I felt, I tried to infuse that in the story.
**R.E. Kurz:** So, for example, like Linda’s depression, I experienced depression when I was a little bit younger. so I felt a lot of those things, maybe not exactly, but similarly, I didn’t experience a loss of a loved one until I was older and I was fortunate to wait until then. But yeah, there are a lot of things that it’s like never direct, but always influenced. It’s easier to write when you have more life experience, fortunately and unfortunately.
Lee Schneider:
Yeah, it very much rings true. A lot of the emotional stretching that people do, it definitely rings true. I wanted to ask you a few career kind of questions. If you were giving advice to a first novelist in fantasy, paranormal, romance, whatever we’d call the genre, what’s your advice to them?
**R.E. Kurz:** Thank
**R.E. Kurz:** I’d say to focus on your craft first and foremost and enjoy it. Like there’s no point if you’re not enjoying it. You have to write it for yourself. I think those are the first things I’d focus on because then especially when you start developing your craft, hopefully you’ll find like a writing oriented community. You’ll learn a lot from each other. And I’ve learned the most from other writers.
**R.E. Kurz:** I’d say. Even if it’s like a professor in literature, you just learn a lot and there’s a more people willing to help and guide you than you’d expect. So I’d say just kind of, you know, focus on yourself, like not, not selfish, but like just focus on your craft, focus on what you want to learn, what you want to get out of the writing experience instead of the end goal. I think it’s a lot more rich that way.
Lee Schneider:
Yes, I think that’s very good advice. So the book just came out as we’re recording this, so we don’t have a lot of runway here, but I’m curious what you anticipate will be the way that you build an audience for this book.
**R.E. Kurz:** Yeah, it did just come up. plan to continue posting more on social media, just because I’ve met some really great people online so far, and I’m hoping to continue that. And I’m hoping to do outreach to local bookstores or libraries, because those are definitely the backbone of the book.
**R.E. Kurz:** community at large, like writers, readers, et cetera. So I hope to expand more in that direction. It’s still obviously in the works.
Lee Schneider:
Sure, well, it’s always evolving. mean, we all have to experiment. There’s no sure thing, I don’t think. We have to just make it up as we go along or get good advice. If you could have written any book at any time, what book would you pick?
**R.E. Kurz:** Yeah.
**R.E. Kurz:** if I would write any book.
Lee Schneider:
Yeah, if you could write it, if you know, it’s book that’s already out, if you say, I wish I wrote that, what book would it be?
**R.E. Kurz:** That’s a hard one. I don’t know, this might just sound really nerdy, but I really like reading other people’s works because there’s so much to learn. So I don’t know. There’s a lot of books I aspire to the level of that I could answer about that. I don’t know if there’s any that I could, I could specifically wrote that if that makes sense.
Lee Schneider:
Mm-hmm.
Lee Schneider:
Yeah, maybe what books have really, we’ve talked about this a little bit like with the Rick Riordan series, but are there other books that you may keep on the shelf and occasionally look at or be influenced by?
**R.E. Kurz:** Yeah, one of them is definitely The Fellowship of the Ring by Tolkien. He was a huge influence in me starting to write. Like, read The Lord of the Rings in sixth grade and I just was hooked literally ever since. Another book I read in the past couple of years is The Witches of New York by Amy McKay. I really loved that novel. I still think about it a lot and like the implications of it and everything like that.
**R.E. Kurz:** I those are my two, other than like Percy Jackson, who’s like my top favorites. I have a lot of others, but I always like think about those. And of course, you know, anything from medieval literature, I still think about that, even though not in school anymore.
Lee Schneider:
Any author you’d love to meet, living or dead, anyone at all.
**R.E. Kurz:** Rick Riordan hands down. Dream come true.
Lee Schneider:
Mm-hmm. Right, cool, yeah. So I’m curious what your workspace looks like where you do the writing.
**R.E. Kurz:** I do it everywhere. I was not exaggerating when I said that. Sometimes I literally just work from my bed because I also have chronic pain sometimes. I just work from my bed. Sometimes I work at my desk. I often write while I’m commuting or sometimes during a lunch break if I have enough mental energy. I don’t have a set writing space. I have a desk, but I usually use that for remote work at this point.
**R.E. Kurz:** I try to get away from it other times.
Lee Schneider:
And here’s my wide angle question. In your view, what is the state of science fiction and fantasy writing and publishing today?
**R.E. Kurz:** Thank
**R.E. Kurz:** I will say it’s not what I expected it to be. I mean it’s always different when you’re in the middle of like the publishing industry versus outside of it. There’s still a lot I do not know and I’m it’s really interesting to see what goes into a novel being published and
**R.E. Kurz:** It’s so interesting, like just from a almost academic perspective, just the different people focus on like high fantasy and low fantasy and like all these different kinds of fantasy because I read more fantasy than science fiction. And I think it’s so interesting how labels have become a huge part of it. I remember when I was younger, I was also younger, so I had a different perspective then. But I don’t remember seeing labels as much or like tropes being such a big part of it that it is now.
**R.E. Kurz:** So it’s interesting to see how everything’s kind of being put in little boxes. And sometimes it works out well and people can find what they love and sometimes they can’t.
Lee Schneider:
I hadn’t thought about it that way, but it can help and hurt. It can mean that people, can lead you to the Amazon recommended category, or you may never find what you want because it’s something special that’s not named or not named in the way you expect it to be. So yeah, that’s very true.
Lee Schneider:
thanks so much for being on the podcast. It was a pleasure having you here.
**R.E. Kurz:** Well, thank you so much for everything. was a great time. I enjoyed talking with you.
Lee Schneider:
Thanks for listening to The Future Lab. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. And if you take a moment to leave a rating or review, it helps more people discover the show. For more of my work, you can sign up for my newsletter, 500 Words. It’s at buttondown.com slash 500 Words. Or visit leeschneiderbooks.com to explore my books. I’m Lee Schneider. I’ll see you next time inside The Future Lab.