Page Created: 11/13/22. Last Updated: 01/19/23.
CLAY MCLEOD CHAPMAN
ONLINE
Website: https://claymcleodchapman.com/
FaceBook: https://www.facebook.com/claymcleodchapman
Twitter: https://twitter.com/claymcleod
BOOKS
Ghost Eaters
Whisper Down the Lane
The Remaking
Miss Corpus
The Boy
Rest Area (Collection)
Meeting Date: January 14, 2023.
Meeting Site: Bergen Highlands United Methodist Church. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey.
Attendance: 19 + 10.
Meeting Program: Talk, Q & A with Horror Author.
Notes:
Newsletter Account:
The following account is reprinted with permission THE STARSHIP EXPRESS Copyright 2023 Philip J De Parto:
Notes on Talk:
THE EARLY DAYS
Clay McLeod Leonard was raised by his single mother in Virginia. His mother was a potter who traveled up and down the East Coast selling her pottery. His mother's pottery work may have interested him in works of craft. They moved to Richmond, Virginia when he was of school age where he discovered a long list of things he was no good at: sports, music, dance. He had ADHD and didn't test well.
Susan B Royer, his sixth grade teacher, said he was on track for repeating the grade. She liked him but didn't want him in her class again. She pointed to the poster of the Young Writers for the Theater competition open to grades 6 - 12 and told him that if he entered that, she would give him extra credit so he wouldn't have to repeat the class. He submitted three plays: Durk the Daring, Writer's Block, and The Perfect Crime.
THE TURNING POINT
Letter came back informing Clay that he had made the cut! He joined the other winners, most of whom were significantly older (he was 12 years old), at college for playwright summer camp. Writer's Block, a Twilight Zone-esque play, was produced with real actors and sets. He now knew what he wanted to do with his life.
The experience did not magically tranform him. He was still a horrible student, but he applied to the contest and every year until he aged out and always made the cut, It became his summer camp.
Theater taught him how to write dialogue and write from someone else's perspective. It taught him to love talking to an audience. Theater needs an audience; movies do not need an audience. Books also need an audience. The author is in dialogue with the reader.
INFLUENCES & LIKES
Our speaker's most important influences were the work of the poet, Ai especially the poem, The Kid, which Clay says changed his life. Another seminal work was Katherine Dunn's GEEK LOVE, which he read when he was 13.
He liked Stephen King, but his true horror idol was Edgar Allen Poe. Poe is considered a son of Richmond, and there are tributes to him everywhere. Our guest loves Poe's use of unreliable narrators and how he draws you into his characters,
THE ROAD TO PUBLICATION
Mr Chapman attended Sarah Lawrence College and wrote incessantly. He spent a year abroad living in an Irish Castle. He did nothing but write during the first half of his stay there. He continued writing and felt his work was at the point were he could start submitting it. Books Ireland published his short story, Rest Area.
His next challenge was to land a literary agent. He went to Barnes & Noble and copied markets and agents out of THE WRITER"S MARKET. He queried 30 agents and included The Rest Area with the query. He received 29 rejections but piqued the interest of one agent.
The agent was Heidi Lang. Ms Lang did not even handle fiction. Her specialty was nonfiction. But she was intrigued and asked if he had any other stories. Yes, how many do you want? Send me 4? These are interesting. Do you have any more? Sure, how many do you want? Do you have 30? These are interesting. Do you have any more stories? Yes, how many do you want? All of them. It was an improbable Cinderella story. The Ms Lang got an editor interested. They signed a two-book deal with Hyperion in 2000. [A side note: The success led her to ask if there were any other works of fiction in the slush pile. It turned there was, a novel called ANGELS AND DEMONS by this guy, Dan Brown.]
THE DARK YEARS
The first book Hyperion published was REST AREA, a collection of the author's stories. Short story collection releases by a new author are practically unheard of, so no one was particularly surprised that the title didn't sell. But everyone had their hopes up for his next book, MISS CORPUS,
MISS CORPUS is a case study in how NOT to write a novel. First off, Clay had never attempted the long form and hadn't a clue about writing one. So he wrote a 500 page book with 33 narrators whose climax was in the center of the book. The editor was so upset that she refused to communicate with him for a month. Finally, he was given a month to rewrite the book. The manuscript had to be trimmed from 500 to 200 pages. The number of narrators had to cut from 33 to 2. The title was released. The Amazon reviewers slammed it. It had massive returns and sunk without a trace. Our speaker was sent to writer's jail. He was considered toxic. No one in publishing would speak to him.
THE ROAD BACK
During the lean years he learned the magic of the word, YES. Can you write a screen play? YES! Can you write a podcast series? YES! Can you write comic books? YES!
Following the ancient adage that those who can't do, teach, Clay returned to Virginia and taught writing. He also became an instructor for the theater program at which he had once been a student. One of his students, Ellie Pyle, went to work at Marvel Comics, rose in the ranks, and started feeding him assignments. Stephen Wacker was his editor for Spider-Man.
The moral of the story is be nice to everyone because you never know.
After a reading at KGB Bar, audience member Craig William Macneill told him they should make a film. He didn't have the money to make a feature length movie, so they did a 10 minute film, Late Bloomer which made it into the Sundance Film Festival. They still wanted to do a feature film and still could not get the funding. So they did another short, Henley, using a supporting character from the work they desired to make. The short made it to Sundance where it drew the attention of Elijah Wood. The result was the film, The Boy. He is also one of the writers of the Netflix animated movie, Wendell & Wild.
The Netflix connection led to him writing the horror 2022 podcast series, Quiet Part Loud from Monkeypaw Productions.
Journey of a movie, The Boy. 2003 - 2005: Craig and Clay meet and create Late Bloomer. 2007 - 2008: Film makes the Festival Rounds. 2012: Elijah Wood sees Henley and Late Bloomer. 2015: The Boy is released as a feature film.
PRESENT STATUS
He is now published by Quirk Books. His first two books with them had lackluster sales, but the current novel, GHOST EATERS, is doing well. This is his first book to earn out his advance, so he is actually earning royalties. Quirk is positioning him as the Poor Man's Grady Hendrix.
The book's success did not go unnoticed. PenguinRandomHouse will release WHAT KIND OF MOTHER in September.
Our speaker's career can be summed up as a Series of Fortunate Events, Interrupted by Explosions.
ON HORROR
Clay considers himself a horror writer. He likes to slip in a bit of humor in with his horror. Humor is a mechanism to make the audience vulnerable. There is a tremendous range of films within the genre, with SKINAMARINK and M3GAN being completely different versions of horror.
ON COMIC BOOKS
Comic books are always behind schedule. Everyone is always running around in a panic, but somehow they happen. His Marvel claim to fame is the creation of a horror version of Spider-Man in the Spider-Verse.
PERSONAL
He is married with two boys. One child is ADHD. Things are so much better now for people with the condition. You have to arrange to get them into special programs, but the programs exist. He met his future wife who was in the audience of an off-off-off-off Broadway black comed yplay he had written (and acted). She was the only one in the audience who was not laughing.