BG:  Nate, take a moment and introduce yourself.

NS:  Hi, everybody. I’m Nate Southard, and I’ve been writing steadily for about twelve years now. I can neither confirm nor deny that I’m currently ranked eighth among bald horror writers with facial hair. For the past ten years, I’ve been living in Austin, Texas, where it rains awesome.

How did you get into writing? Was there an "ah-hah!" moment where you knew this was what you wanted to do?

I first started writing when I was a kid, but that was mostly because I loved playing with the family typewriter. Over the years, I used a few dozen ribbons writing everything from jokes to scary stories to Dungeons and Dragons adventures. The closest thing I had to an “ah-hah!” moment came during a horror movie marathon some friends and I had one summer. About three movies in, I was thinking I’d like to take a crack at writing a horror movie. One year later, I had moved to Austin and was enrolled in the University of Texas’ School of Radio, Television, and Film. Over the years, my interests shifted from film to comics and finally to prose, where I’m happy to stay.

Talk a little bit about your approach to writing. What kind of schedule do you keep? Do you outline, or just let the story unfold as you write?

When I’m working on a big project, I try to write every weekday, waking up shortly after 4AM and working until I have to get ready for work two hours later. My goal is to knock out 10,000 words a week. If I don’t reach that during the week, I’ll play catch up on the weekend. If I don’t have a big project on my plate, I’ll usually fall to 1,000 words a day or less, just getting a few ideas down on paper.

Who (or what) are some of your influences as a writer?

The “who” would be Warren Ellis, a comics writer with a mean and nasty streak wider than most super highways. He’s a clever bastard too, and some of my more sarcastic cadences come from reading his work. When I made that final shift to prose, Jack Ketchum was one of my first major influences. Ketchum has this ability to make the most vile characters sympathetic, and he can twist his voice around better than any writer I know. In the past couple of years, Laird Barron and Peter Straub have really surged to the head of the pack. They’re not just masters of incredible ideas, but they can do things with the language that just leave me amazed.

As for the “what,” I get a kick out of the places you don’t quite see, that are kind of left behind.  Abandoned buildings, the dark corners of empty parking garages. My step-dad had a three car garage he’d converted into horse stables, and you could wander around that compact area for hours and never find your way out again, just moving from stable to stable and hallway to hallway. I love the idea that our world has all these little nooks and crannies in it that we’ve created and then forgotten.There could be some really terrible things waiting in those places.

You've been publishing regularly since 2004, and recently have landed work in some big markets like Cemetery Dance, Shroud, and PS Publishing. What do you consider your biggest breakthrough so far?

A few months back, I sold a story to Ellen Datlow for her upcoming anthology Supernatural Noir.  That antho will be the first book I’ve appeared in that’s widely available in bookstores, and it’s a huge thrill. Over the years, I’ve constantly shifted my goals. Selling a short story became selling a short story for pro rates became landing in Cemetery Dance became selling a novella, etc. Selling a story to Ellen Datlow was one of the goals I never really thought I’d reach, and it was a huge honor to check it off my list!

In 2006, you adapted a handful of stories by Brian Keene for the graphic collection Fear. How did that project come about? What was it like working with Keene?

I’d had some correspondence with Brian in the year or two preceding that. I’d been a fan of The Rising and the short stories I’d managed to track down, and he’d been kind enough to blurb Drive, my first graphic novel. After my second graphic novel, A Trip to Rundberg, I asked Brian if the rights to his novella The Garden Where My Rain Grows were available. Somebody was already trying to turn Earthworm Gods, which included the novella, into a series, so we struck a deal to adapt a few stories as one volume of comics. Brian was incredibly easy to work with, and outside of saying things like, “This story’s fine to use,” and “I dig that artist,” he let me run with it.

Fear is not the only comics project you've worked on - what's are the differences in writing for comics versus writing prose?

Writing prose doesn’t include the exhausting and heartbreaking step of finding an artist with the talent, chemistry, and commitment to see your story through to its final stage. My hard drive is full of half-completed stories that never found artists. Aside from that, there’s a real need to think visually when working with comics. You need to decide what image will convey the most story with the least amount of work, and then you have to trust your artist with it. It’s much closer to film than prose, only you’re directing an artist instead of actors, and you have an unlimited effects budget.

Do you have a preference between the two?

Prose, by far. While that whole artist-hunt is a great thing to avoid, I just love working with words. Comics are great for adventure stories and action scenes, but they’re a little lacking in that ability to grab the reader by the guts and make them squirm. When used correctly, words can crawl into a person and infect them in a way static images just can’t. H.P. Lovecraft based a large part of his career on that idea.

Your debut novel Red Sky is coming out from Thunderstorm Books in November. Tell us a little about the book.

Red Sky is the story of a group of bank robbers fleeing into the desert with their wounded and a hostage after a botched back job in El Paso. Low on gas and with a psycho bleeding out in the back seat, they decide to hole up in the abandoned home of Red Sky Manufacturing. Unfortunately for them, the factory isn’t as abandoned as they first thought, and there are some terrible things waiting in the factory’s darker corners, as well as some even worse secrets just waiting to be uncovered.

Where did the idea for Red Sky come from?

Red Sky was one of those stories that came from one scene. In this case, it was the novel’s penultimate scene. Not even that, but one image in that scene. I spent a few months trying to sketch out different plot ideas, everything from werewolves to an alien abduction, all trying to work my way to this one image. The plot I ended up with was the one that got me there the right way.

You recently embarked on a week-long blog tour to promote Red Sky, invading the cyber-homes of authors like Brian Keene and Tim Lebbon to talk about the book, writing in general, and that really funny story about the night you thought someone was breaking into your house. How'd the idea of a blog tour come about? What kind of response did you get?

The blog tour was another one of the many helpful suggestions Brian Keene has tossed my way over the past few years. I’d been trying to think of ways to promote Red Sky, and I was considering making a movie poster for it. The locations from both the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the remake can be found within thirty minutes of my house, and I thought I’d get some friends together to stand in for the book’s characters, bloody them up a bit, and have my brother, who’s a budding photographer, take some shots that we could turn into a poster to be given away with each copy. Brian was able to convince me that the blog tour idea would be much more affordable. I still kinda want to make that poster, though!

Every few years, someone proclaims that horror is dead, and the almost immediately is proven wrong by a resurgence in the genre. What is it about the genre that just won't die? And what do writers and filmmakers need to do to continue to keep the genre fresh?
                                                                                           
I think a lot of it comes down to the fact that, at the heart of it all, horror is an emotion and not a genre. Even when they stopped writing horror in big, dripping letters on the spines of paperbacks, you could still find real horror in novels ranging from popular dramas to crime novels. Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero wasn’t promoted as a horror novel, but it’s got some incredibly horrific stuff in it. Silence of the Lambs wasn’t promoted as one either, but now it’s considered a classic of the genre.

What are you reading in horror (or out of horror, for that matter) these days? Any new voices you'd recommend?

I’ve already mentioned Laird Barron, but he deserves a second mention. His collections, The Imago Sequence and Occultation, contain some of the best horror I’ve ever read. The past year has been a really good year for collections, with Norman Partridge’s Lesser Demons and Paul Tremblay’s In the Mean Time leading the pack. For novels, I’ll snatch up everything Sarah Langan and Gillian Flynn write. In my opinion, no one today is writing better books. Flynn’s Sharp Objects is one of the best, most terrifying novels of the past few years. Other favorites include Keene, Lansdale, Piccirilli, and Lee Thomas.

When it comes to new voices, I’m excited to see Kelli Owen’s Six Days.  I read an early draft, and it was great back then. The Kingmaker Trilogy by Maurice Broaddus looks like great fun, and Maurice is one hell of a writer. Rhodi Hawk’s A Twisted Ladder is an amazing debut.  Though he’s not exactly new, I’ve been getting a big kick out of Nate Kenyon. He’s really tapped into a style that reminds me of early 80’s Stephen King, and it’s just a hoot to read.

After Red Sky, what's next from Nate Southard?

My novella This Little Light of Mine should be out sometime in the next few months from Burning Effigy press. It’s a claustrophobic little monster story set in a collapsed parking garage.  A novella I co-wrote with Lee Thomas, Focus, should be out from Thunderstorm Books in time for next year’s World Horror Convention. There’s the story I wrote for Supernatural Noir, “The Blisters on My Heart,” and another short called “Going Home, Ugly Stick in Hand,” which should appear in an upcoming issue of Black Static. My story “I Found a Little Hole” is set to show up in Shivers VI from Cemetery Dance. There’s one more big project in the works, but it hasn’t been announced yet, so I’m not allowed to say anything more just yet. Other than that, I’m just typing away, working on the next thing and hoping I can find it a good home.