Author Interview: John Urbancik

For my interview this week, I chose horror author John Urbancik!

What got you into writing? 

I was young when I started, but it was probably a healthy mix of Star Wars, Batman, Edgar Allan Poe, Ray Bradbury, and children's versions of novels like Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and the Three Musketeers that ignited my imagination. I was writing my own comic book scripts as early as fifth grade and drafted my first "novel" in seventh. I'm not sure I ever got started writing so much as I started this whole life already a writer.

Tell us about some of your published works.

Recent stuff includes collections of poetry, John the Revelator and Odyssey, and a novella, The Night Carnival, that's a dream--or is it?--narrated to you. Choose Your Doom puts you into the horror novel with over a hundred ways to die. The six-novel DarkWalker series starts with a man who can walk through the dark untouched by all the things in the night, in book two goes to Hell and in book three goes to Virginia, and it just gets stranger as it goes. My nonfiction book, InkStained, on Art, Creativity, and Writing, is all about how to nurture your creativity.

What is your favorite genre to read and write?

Fantasy, Dark Fantasy, and Horror.

What are you working on right now?

Follow-ups to two of my previous novels, Sins of Blood and Stone (which was my first, published back in 2002!) and Stale Reality, which might be one of my darkest.

What’s your ‘day job?’

I have a "stupid little day job" in which I earn enough money to pay the rent and get health insurance doing something mindless for a giant evil corporation.

Do you have any advice for aspiring writers? 

Never stop writing, learning, trying, pushing, experimenting, and failing. Finish what you start, but abandon the things that have lost your heart. Be true to yourself. Be brave.

 

 Author Bio:

John Urbancik shares a birthday with B.B. King and David Copperfield (with their combined talents, he can make the blues disappear), as well as England’s King Henry V. Also, in the year 16, Julia Drusilla (sister of Caligula). None of which means anything.

He began writing at a young age, creating one-page comic scripts in fifth and sixth grade, and later went on to write Star Wars–at least, an awful variation of it. Fortunately, no copies of that story exist. He saw his first published story in 1999, “A Portrait in Graphite”, and couldn’t say today where all his various stories, articles, and poems have appeared.

He spent his youth in New York City and Long Island, leaving for upstate to attend college (where he studied video and audio production, skills he rarely put to use after). Fate conspired to send him to Orlando, Florida, where he spent many long years. Fortune’s later conspiracies led him briefly to the other side of the world, Sydney, Australia. There, he met spiders. Lots of spiders.

He describes his fiction as “fantasy, dark fantasy, and horror”; his stories span these and other genres, and are often difficult to categorize.

When John Urbancik arrived in Australia, he possessed a very nice camera. (It was not his; he merely carried it), and thus began a love of photography. One day, he might actually study the craft.

At first glance, his life does not seem colorful. No time in jail or in the armed forces, and no game show victories. However, he feels lucky to have been able to see and do all he has. Among his several mottos for life: “Go everywhere, do everything.” Another is: “It’s all fun and games until someone gets eaten alive by a tiger shark.”

Currently, his whereabouts are uncertain, though he’s recently been spotted somewhere in Florida. He has several books and stories coming out in the near future, and many more to be written.

 

You can learn more about John and his books at www.darkfluidity.com.