Benjamin Percy
Benjamin Percy
Benjamin Percy is an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, comics writer, and screenwriter...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth28 March 1979
CountryUnited States of America
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There is no cure for prions. They are a protein-based disease that, among other things, targets and transforms your brain. The symptoms reveal themselves differently in each host, and you might go months or you might go years before you realize you're infected.
voice puppets might
My voice dropped when I was 14. And when I was 14, I might have weighed 75 pounds. So you can imagine how strange that must have been: like James Earl Jones speaking through a sock puppet.
birthday came car fruits grew instead playful received vegetables
Yes, I grew up with guns. For my 16th birthday, in fact, I received a .357 instead of a car. But there was nothing playful about them; they were tools. My parents went through a back-to-the-land phase. Most of our vegetables and fruits came from our own garden.
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The USDA labs in Ames, Iowa, are level-four security clearance. Every nasty thing you can imagine is stored there. Ground zero for the apocalypse. And there's a day care right across the street.
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My voice is rather quirky. It's abysmally low. People often think I'm putting it on at first. Think drunk Darth Vader. Or Barry White singing country. It suits my dark material. When I do readings, I really play it up and go subterranean. I can make the phone book sound terrifying.
bottom growing head mountain passed side throw time truck weekend
Just about every weekend when I was growing up, we would throw rods and rifles and tents and shovels and pickaxes into the back of the truck and then head off to the side of a mountain or the bottom of a canyon. Hiking, fishing, hunting, rock-hounding: this is how my parents passed the time.
craft early four hours house incredibly kicking letters novels pages saw sent thousands work
It's still incredibly hard. Not just honing my craft but kicking down doors, getting my work published. Early on, I could have wallpapered my house with all the rejection letters sent my way. I put thousands of hours and pages into four novels that never saw the light of day.
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I travel often, so my routine is always getting scrambled. But on a standard sort of day, I get up at 6, pack lunches, hustle the kids off to school, then brew a pot of coffee and head downstairs to the dungeon, as I call it: my cobwebby office in the basement.
takes ten time twelve
I can write ten or twelve screenplays in the time it takes me to write one novel. This allows me to offload all of my stories. But it's also not as creatively fulfilling.
remain sustain
Novels will remain my meat and potatoes, what sustain me imaginatively.
begin spend
I typically spend a year thinking about a book before I begin writing it.
dragon grew
I grew up on genre. If it had a dragon on the cover, I was interested. But horror, especially, really gripped me in its bony fist.
acres grew served western
I grew up in western Oregon, just outside Eugene, on 27 wooded acres that served as my playground.
I don't flinch from darkness, but I've always been bothered by what I call gore-nography.