The Write Stuff
Get to know Dean through his commentaries and essays. His wit, his insights and views are worth the stop!
Insights
The Darkest Ice Cream of the Year
I once said writing a novel is sometimes like making love and sometimes like having a tooth pulled--and sometimes like making love while having a tooth pulled. I arrived at one of those joyful yet excruciating moments while working on THE DARKEST EVENING OF THE YEAR.
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"Starring" Dean Koontz? You've Got to Be Kidding!
My publisher's Creative Marketing Department lives up to its name in every regard: The folks there are creative, they know marketing, and they have their own department. Considering that they also have to put up with me, they would be well advised to rename themselves the Patient Creative Marketing Department.
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ABOUT ODD THOMAS
So I was in the middle of writing THE FACE, polishing page 345 of the manuscript, focused to such an intense degree that even an attack by a pack of wolverines failed to distract me from the keyboard (a team of out-call physicians treated me in my office chair: 124 stitches, a series of rabies shots, a procedure to reattach my left foot, and nine operations by a plastic surgeon to reconstruct my nose - all of which cost me only four hours of writing time.)
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THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING ODD
When I wrote ODD THOMAS, the title character came to me fully formed, as if he were a real person whom I had known all my life. No character in any of my previous novels led me through his story with such grace, with his voice unfailingly strong in my mind's ear, making revelations about himself and his family that were surprising - even shocking in some instances - yet seemed inevitable to me the moment they were made.
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Funny Bone
THE ORIGIN OF AUDIO BOOKS
Ten thousand years before the first word of history was written, the first audio book was created by Og, brother of Nogg and Plogg, son of Vog and Noog, grandson of Zogg and Heather. Og was a born storyteller frustrated that paper had not yet been invented. He wrote his first book on slabs of wood, burning the words and pictures into the surface with sharp pieces of stone superheated in fire fed by Wooly Mammoth fat. He is credited by some with inventing the words "hot," "ouch," "S***," "***k," "D**n," and "************," as well as the exclamation point.
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THE MURDER OF A PEN NAME
During the first fifteen years of my career, my income per novel was so small that I might have done better trying to sell hamburgers to Hindus. The proceeds from one novel per year would have sustained me only if I had crafted all my clothes from leaves, wild grass, and bird feathers, with no concern for the cruel stares that rude people would direct at me, and with a willingness to tolerate the pain from being pecked by all those angry, bald birds.
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