Will Millar is the author of Infernal Machines, a new horror novel being published by Immortal Ink. He was kind enough to answer my Blogger Book Fair Mini-Interview questions. Take a look and get to know this new author!

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Brandon Luffman: To start things off, tell us a little about yourself. What do you write? Why do you write?

Will Millar: Hey, my name is Will Millar. I’ve worked on a lot of different projects, but mostly I write Horror.

BL: What’s your latest release?

WM: My latest is called Infernal Machines. It’s my first full-length novel. It’s set in the early 1980’s and it’s kind of a throwback to the sort of stuff I really dug into when I was growing up.

BL: Do you have a process when you write? What do you do to make it all come together?

WM: I don’t really feel like I have a process, it’s more like a habit. I write a minimum of about 2,000 words a day and then a story just kind of emerges. Most of the time it’s like I’m flailing around in the dark until I hit something and then I try to latch on to it as tight as I can until it either turns into a story or dies.

BL: What about the editing and revision stage? What’s your process there?

WM: I’m a pretty merciless self-editor. Infernal Machines started out as about 1,200 handwritten pages. It went through 4 or 5 rewrites before I showed it to anybody, and by then it was pared down to just fewer than 500 pages or so. This was before the guys from Immortal Ink (my publishers) helped me trim some more of the fat away and really bang the story into shape.

BL: What’s something not related to writing that no one knows about you?

WM: I once bit into a burrito and found it had a penny in it. So I took the thing apart and found another penny, a nickel, and what I’m pretty sure was part of a “Lee press-on nail”. I was really hungry though, and didn’t feel like walking back to the taco stand so I just put it back together and ate it.

BL: What’s something about you that you want everyone to know?

WM: I had nothing to do with the Lindbergh kidnapping.

BL: When you get an idea for a new story, what do you do with it?

WM: I’ve got piles of scrap paper all over my house with all of these weird notes that are either story prompts or character sketches, or sometimes just random jumbles of words that I managed to wake up and scribble out in the middle of the night. Most of the time they don’t amount to much, but every once in a while I’ve cobbled a story together from that stuff.

BL: Who is your ideal reader? Describe who you feel your books are directed at.

WM: That’s a hard question to answer. I’m happy when anybody likes something I write, but mostly I write Horror for the people who are fans of the genre. They can be old or young, male or female – as long as the reader has a penchant for blood and monsters and isn’t offended by some salty language they’ll probably get a kick out of what I do.

BL: How did you decide to take up writing as a serious pursuit?

WM: Once I hit my late twenties, I realized that my career as a Bette Midler impersonator wasn’t really going anywhere and so I took a long, hard look at what made me happy. I’ve been writing stuff for most of my life, but I didn’t try pitching anything to a publisher until about 7 or 8 years ago when I finished my 1^st book. It didn’t work out, but that might have had a lot to do with the fact that the book was objectively terrible. However, I learned a lot about myself in that time and I knew I could succeed as a writer if I kept at it. It took almost a decade, but here we are.

BL: What’s next for you and your work? What’s your next project?

WM: I’m currently putting the finishing touches on a novella that will probably be released sometime this summer. It’s another Horror story, but it takes place in the current day, outside of the universe depicted in Infernal Machines.

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About Will Millar

 

Will Millar was raised in Commack, a quiet and unassuming town close to the northern shore of Long Island. As a kid, his primary passions were horror and hell-raising. As he tended to cultivate the latter to a greater extent than the former, by the time he was 17 years old, the whole town decided they’d had quite enough of his antics, and would he please just take his act on the road, thank you very much.

He enlisted in the Marine Corps, where his penchant for fire, explosions and general mayhem were tolerated, if not somewhat approved. At this point, Will also discovered the writers of the Beat Generation and began to write more consistently, submitting his less profane poems to underground ‘zines and belting out the more terrible stuff to unsuspecting audiences at various open mike nights throughout the Pacific Northwest.

Throughout the last 15 years, Will has worked as a writer in various mediums, though horror continues to remain his favorite. He sometimes contributes articles to Cracked.com, and his short stories are available in several different anthologies. Infernal Machines is his first novel.

At the present, Will lives in Phoenix AZ. He is a father of four, owns two dogs and has a wonderfully understanding girlfriend, all of whom somehow manage to put up with all of his crap.

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Paulie and Stoner aren’t bad seeds; they’re just a little too smart for their own good. They stole their first car in kindergarten, and as for the homemade rocket launcher in Stoner’s garage … well, it’s best just not to ask.

With 9th grade just around the corner, Paulie and Stoner find themselves on the wrong side of some real bad kids, an older band of w​hite supremacists that go by the name of “Twisted Cross.” When a rumble at a high school keg party turns fatal, it sets off a chain of events that test the limits of Paulie and Stoner’s friendship, and their very sanity.

Welcome to Chapel Harbor, a town where everybody buries their secrets deep, and nobody is quite who they seem. A town where the ghost of a serial killer known as The Junkman is rumored to stalk the woods at night, and where an unassuming magic shop and its mysterious proprietor, Arthur Cardiff, may possess the key to an ancient and terrible evil.

Packed with hairpin turns and twists that will keep you guessing until the very last page, Infernal Machines is a blood drenched, adrenaline fueled, roller-coaster of a horror story that’s at once a paean to the Pulp Horror classics of the early 80’s and a meditation on the enduring power of friendship.

 To Buy This Book, Visit Immortal Ink Publishing!