What are some of your favorite childhood books?
Learning to be a storyteller.
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| 1950s Mom & Dad Picture taken by first child. |
As a child, Andy loved Dr.
Seuss. Later, A Collection of Short
Stories, by O. Henry was a favorite, and as a teenager, he was fascinated with
The Illustrated Man, by Bradbury.
Growing up, Berk was on the lookout for Edgar Rice
Burroughs, and as he got into junior high and older, he was always searching
for new and interesting sci-fi writers.
In addition, as youth, we read all kinds of mystery and horror,
including stories published by Alfred Hitchcock, with titles like, Stories
My Mother Never Told Me. We loved
those scary stories, and in fact, our mother did tell us some of the best
scary stories.
Pitch Green and Mojave Green are
the first two books in The Dimensions in
Death young-adult horror series. The
first book is based on a scary story we told as kids. The general outline for the novel-length version
of our first book came together late "one dark and stormy night" in November of 2010. We were attending a writer’s conference in
Manhattan. As we rode the subway from
one end-of-the-line stop across town to the opposite end-of-the-line stop, and then back again, we mapped out the basic elements that we needed to expand the childhood
story into a full-length novel.
Andy wrote the first rough draft, then Berk took it over to edit and expand the tale. In writing the first book, the ground
work was laid for many sequels and prequels in a young adult horror series.
The second
book, Mojave Green, is a continuation of the first story, but that part of the
story has no history. It was written new
from scratch. Same with the third book,
Fatal Green, due out later this year. Each
book combines horror, suspense and mystery, moving forward as our protagonists fight for their lives in a battle with a monstrous
evil presence, hiding in the old, deserted Searles Mansion in a small mining
town, Trona, California, the perfect setting for a horror series.
While there
actually was once a Searles Mansion, built in 1888, not far from Boston, MA,
that mansion is now long gone and has nothing to do with our tale’s mansion in Trona. The original childhood story had a mansion in
it and that is the source of our Searles Mansion, named after John Searles, an
actual Nineteenth Century Death Valley prospector.
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| 1970s Mom & Dad With their first grandchild. |
Trona is a real mining town,
located in Searles Valley, not far from Death Valley, but there is no actual
mansion in Trona. In high school, we
explored the hundreds of square miles of isolated desert and high-mountain
country around Trona. Those experiences
provide a location and backdrop for the events in The Dimensions in Death series.
We have always been story tellers,
first to siblings, then to our children, and now to our grandkids. Scary stories are a family specialty. We can’t count the number of times Mom scared
us witless with her scary stories. A
few years ago, Berk started writing a young-adult science fiction series, so
when Andy also tried his hand at writing fiction, it didn’t take long for us to
come together as The Brothers Washburn (as in The Brothers Grimm) on a new
young-adult horror series. Mom would be
so proud. We have also written the first
two books in an unrelated young-adult science fiction series.
We both find that once we start
telling a horror or sci-fi story, the bounds of the story are limited only by
our combined creativity and imagination, and that no matter how mature we get
in the real world, we are both still starry-eyed kids in our worlds of horror
and fantasy.
