J.C. Hutchins - Personal Effects: Dark Art
Tags: JC Hutchins, Personal Effects Dark Art, th Son, PixelVixen
J.C. Hutchins is modest about his abilities, but he's at the forefront of some major innovations in storytelling. He's best known as the author of the 7th Son trilogy, an epic techno-thriller that follows the exploits of seven clones who discover that they must cooperate to track down the evil genius from whom they were cloned in the first place. When 7th Son didn't get the attention it deserved right away, he podcast it for free, gaining the attention of several thousand loyal fans and St. Martin's Press. The first book in the trilogy, 7th Son: Descent, will see print later this year.
In the meantime, J.C. is applying his knack for thrills to a project that's a little more...unconventional. What's so revolutionary that even a pioneer of podcasting like J.C. is convinced it's breaking new ground? It's called Personal Effects: Dark Art, and is a book-centered project that takes reader participation to a new level by blurring the line between fiction and reality.
J.C. provides the compelling characters and chilling story -- a psychological thriller that pits a young art therapist, his SuicideGirls-inspired geek goddess girlfriend, and his wisecracking younger brother against the mind of an accused murderer with a bizarre condition: psychosomatic blindness. To get to the bottom of the mystery, our hero has to face his own worst fears at Brinkvale Psychiatric -- also known as "The Brink" -- the unsetting underground hospital where he's been able to help every patient...until now.
Personal Effects: Dark Art is more than just a good story, though. Parts of the book also exist in real life, thanks to Personal Effects creator Jordan Weisman, a game-industry legend who has put together viral games and elaborate treasure hunts for huge properties like Halo and The Dark Knight. The book comes with some of the personal effects of Martin Grace, the creepy blind patient -- you can see some of them in an amazing photoset featuring Suicide Girls Annika and Lumi which will go live on Tuesday June 9 -- and those lead to phone numbers, websites, and other ways to unravel more of the book's puzzle in real life. If you can follow all the clues, you'll wind up looking at the ending in a completely different light.
Suicide Girls talked to J.C. about breaking new ground in the fiction world with Dark Art, and also got the whole story about a Suicide Girls columnist who has more to her than you might have suspected.
Jay Hathaway: So, who is Jordan Weisman, and what is Personal Effects?
J.C. Hutchins: Jordan Weisman is a living legend in the gaming community. In the early 80's, he founded a company called FASA, which was one of the first very well-known role-playing game companies. His company, among many things, had the license for the Star Trek role-playing game, and was also really instrumental in making BattleTech and Shadowrun into really well-known games. In the early 2000's, he pioneered a new form of storytelling called the Alternate Reality Game, better known as ARGs, and he and some co-conspirators designed one of the very first and most memorable alternate reality games, which was codenamed The Beast.
The Beast was designed to promote the movie release of AI by Steven Spielberg. Imagine a game where you'll never be able to read a rulebook and where pattern recognition and the dependence on your friends in person or online makes all the difference. They were embedding clues in the film credits, movie posters, all throughout the web, telling a narrative online that was filled with puzzles and mysteries and intrigue.
Since The Beast, Jordan went on to create the I Love Bees alternate reality game for the release of Halo 2, and he was involved with the alternate reality game that promoted the Nine Inch Nails album Year Zero. You might remember that, where people were finding USB sticks in bathrooms, and there were clues actually stenciled on the tour shirts.
He pitched a supernatural thriller series to St. Martin's Press called Personal Effects, with a similar concept: let's tell really cool supernatural thriller stories that involve interesting characters, where those characters are assembling tangible items throughout the course of the novel, and those tangible items, like photos, business cards, faxes and whatnot are included with the book, and they will propel the readers into a completely different, story-enhancing narrative in other venues -- sort of like an alternate reality game. I had an editor friend at St. Martin's Press who was familiar with my work from 7th Son, the podcast novel trilogy. He mentioned me to Jordan Weisman, and within a few weeks, it was pretty clear that our storytelling philosophies are so in sync, it's really creepy.
The Beast was designed to promote the movie release of AI by Steven Spielberg. Imagine a game where you'll never be able to read a rulebook and where pattern recognition and the dependence on your friends in person or online makes all the difference. They were embedding clues in the film credits, movie posters, all throughout the web, telling a narrative online that was filled with puzzles and mysteries and intrigue.
Since The Beast, Jordan went on to create the I Love Bees alternate reality game for the release of Halo 2, and he was involved with the alternate reality game that promoted the Nine Inch Nails album Year Zero. You might remember that, where people were finding USB sticks in bathrooms, and there were clues actually stenciled on the tour shirts.
He pitched a supernatural thriller series to St. Martin's Press called Personal Effects, with a similar concept: let's tell really cool supernatural thriller stories that involve interesting characters, where those characters are assembling tangible items throughout the course of the novel, and those tangible items, like photos, business cards, faxes and whatnot are included with the book, and they will propel the readers into a completely different, story-enhancing narrative in other venues -- sort of like an alternate reality game. I had an editor friend at St. Martin's Press who was familiar with my work from 7th Son, the podcast novel trilogy. He mentioned me to Jordan Weisman, and within a few weeks, it was pretty clear that our storytelling philosophies are so in sync, it's really creepy.
JH:
And you were already starting to do some of this multimedia stuff on the web for the 7th Son novels ...
JCH:
You're right, because I had purchased domain names to reference in the novel, and those domain names were mentioned in the book. I had these little mini-websites up in case people's curiosity fueled them to the web, just to see what was up. In the most rudimentary way, I was already curious about blurring that line between fiction and reality. In the case of Personal Effects, we're blurring the line between being a reader and being an active participant in unearthing information about the narrative.
JH:
Will you be doing any podcasting for Personal Effects: Dark Art?
JCH:
I'm best known for my podcast fiction. The 7th Son trilogy ran from 2006-2007, and I released an interesting narrative experiment called 7th Son: Obsidian in 2008. So I turned to my keepers and said, "You know, guys, we have a really interesting opportunity to create an audio version of Personal Effects: Dark Art and release it into the wild, and this would be a cool loss leader to get people interested in the book."
But it clashed with the philosophy of the novel, which is that you have to hold these things. You have to hold these tangible items, and look at them, and feel the different paper qualities. These credit cards and IDs we have, you tap them on the desk and they click, just like real ones. So we couldn't do that, but I know that my people are still going to want podcast fiction.
I am writing and recording and releasing a novella called Personal Effects: Sword of Blood, which is a prequel to Personal Effects: Dark Art. In fact, it takes place a day or two before the events we see in Personal Effects: Dark Art. And that is currently being released in the wild right now, and it's a really cool universe-enhancing story, because the events in Sword of Blood are actually mentioned in the novel. People are getting a cool sneak peek at the universe and the characters.
But it clashed with the philosophy of the novel, which is that you have to hold these things. You have to hold these tangible items, and look at them, and feel the different paper qualities. These credit cards and IDs we have, you tap them on the desk and they click, just like real ones. So we couldn't do that, but I know that my people are still going to want podcast fiction.
I am writing and recording and releasing a novella called Personal Effects: Sword of Blood, which is a prequel to Personal Effects: Dark Art. In fact, it takes place a day or two before the events we see in Personal Effects: Dark Art. And that is currently being released in the wild right now, and it's a really cool universe-enhancing story, because the events in Sword of Blood are actually mentioned in the novel. People are getting a cool sneak peek at the universe and the characters.
JH:
Personal Effects: Dark Art has even more secrets and hidden information than a traditional thriller. Has it been hard to bite your tongue and keep from giving away the secrets online before it's released?
JCH:
Oh, ahh! I want to tell you everything! Yes! Absolutely! We're talking about two different forms of being coy. I've got the responsibilities of a traditional novelist, in that no author wants to give away the ending of his book. But I've got this other minefield in that the transmedia experience that is fueled by these tangible items is just stellar. When readers follow up on the clues they read in the book, combined with the clues they might find in these tangible items, and are sent to telephone numbers, listening to voicemails, hacking email addresses, visiting websites, they will be experiencing narrative-altering plot twists.
Personal Effects: Dark Art is written as a standalone novel that you can read from cover to cover and be satisfied with, but if your curiosity propels you into this transmedia experience, your perception of the events of the novel, and in particular, the ending, is completely different. We do the Sixth Sense thing, where we learn something that we intended to just be a gasp moment, where it's like "Wait a minute, what does this mean about the events that I just read, and the sanity of our main character?" Am I dying to tell you about this? Fuck yeah! But I just can't.
Personal Effects: Dark Art is written as a standalone novel that you can read from cover to cover and be satisfied with, but if your curiosity propels you into this transmedia experience, your perception of the events of the novel, and in particular, the ending, is completely different. We do the Sixth Sense thing, where we learn something that we intended to just be a gasp moment, where it's like "Wait a minute, what does this mean about the events that I just read, and the sanity of our main character?" Am I dying to tell you about this? Fuck yeah! But I just can't.
JH:
Let's talk about some of those characters. Zach Taylor, the protagonist, is an art therapist. What did you know about art therapy when you started writing the novel?
JCH:
Nothing, nothing! And I didn't do much research, to be honest with you. My impressions of the mental health industry are far less bleak than what you see in the novel. My father worked in the mental health industry, my mother worked in the mental health industry, my sister worked in the mental health industry. So throughout the years, the decades, and the osmosis, I have an informed idea of how patients are treated and how one should approach a patient if you're a therapist.
But really, just like most businesses, the day-to-day life of a therapist is pretty boring. Not only is it pretty boring, but there's rules that nail that therapist down to not be able to talk about it. You can't tell your family about your patients. You have to respect the boundaries of a patient in a certain way, and you certainly can't break into his home and look for clue that could help unlock the secrets of his psychosomatic blindness.
There's a very needed and formal structure to being an employee in this industry, and knowing all that...I said "fuck it!" and threw it over my shoulder. I crafted a character who would be likely embrace an intensely curious side, working at an institution that appears to tolerate his cavalier attitude because he gets results. He does things that would get any other art therapist fired in real life, but I reckon if you're reading a book, the last thing you want to do is read about real life.
But really, just like most businesses, the day-to-day life of a therapist is pretty boring. Not only is it pretty boring, but there's rules that nail that therapist down to not be able to talk about it. You can't tell your family about your patients. You have to respect the boundaries of a patient in a certain way, and you certainly can't break into his home and look for clue that could help unlock the secrets of his psychosomatic blindness.
There's a very needed and formal structure to being an employee in this industry, and knowing all that...I said "fuck it!" and threw it over my shoulder. I crafted a character who would be likely embrace an intensely curious side, working at an institution that appears to tolerate his cavalier attitude because he gets results. He does things that would get any other art therapist fired in real life, but I reckon if you're reading a book, the last thing you want to do is read about real life.
JH:
And even in real life, you can't tell me that if you got a case like that, you wouldn't go home and tell your girlfriend at least a little about it.
JCH:
Exactly! That's one of the reasons why there are code names in the book. Like the autistic kid who's obsessed with the game Monopoly, he's nicknamed Park Place by the staff. You can go home and say "Oh man, Park Place gave me such a hard time today," so I'm not really compromising his identity. I challenge anyone who's actually spent any kind of quality time in the mental health industry to tell me that they know someone, or they themselves have never uttered a syllable about their patients. Perhaps there's a sliver of truth in Zach's blabbermouth tendencies.
JH:
And to the extent that a place like The Brink has ordinary patients, we're definitely not talking about an ordinary patient, here, either ...
JCH:
By no means. The only thing that's stranger than the 12 murders Martin Grace is suspected of is his psychosomatic blindness. And his strange insistence that he didn't murder these people, but he is absolutely responsible for their deaths and doesn't want to defend himself in any way. He's ready to be sent to the electric chair. Why would anyone want that, particularly if he didn't commit the murders? That's the challenge Zach Taylor faces as he steps into that patient room for the first time, to meet this bastard named Martin Grace.
JH:
I feel like we should also talk about the supporting cast that Zach has in his brother and his girlfriend, and I especially want to talk about Rachael, since she has such a strong connection to SuicideGirls. Was she directly inspired by the SuicideGirls aesthetic?
JCH:
The short answer to your question is "Fuck yes."
JH:
Awesome.
JCH:
[laughs] I have been a SuicideGirls superfan for years. The women at SuicideGirls aren't just beautiful, you also get to know many of them from their profile pages and their blogs. They're not just gorgeous, they're brilliant. They're geeky, they're empowered, they take shit from no one. As I poked around and explored the site, I was like, "This is exactly the kind of person that my hero, Zach Taylor, would be with." It absolutely informed the creation of Rachael.
It was pretty cool that she was a fact checker and a technical writer, but I decided she wouldn't stop at being that, she would have a creative side herself. Let's make her a video gamer! She's covered in ink, she's hot as hell, she's brilliant, and she's a video game blogger. And this was back in 2007, when I conceived of this and started writing the story with her. So we thought, let's give her a video game blog that's updated every once in a while. As we got closer to the release of the novel, we decided to have Rachael be a blogger that you wouldn't just like to read, but you would love to read. So Rachael began to blog at her website, PixelVixen707.com, and quickly got a very interested and very engaged fanbase...and then they found out she wasn't real.
It was pretty cool that she was a fact checker and a technical writer, but I decided she wouldn't stop at being that, she would have a creative side herself. Let's make her a video gamer! She's covered in ink, she's hot as hell, she's brilliant, and she's a video game blogger. And this was back in 2007, when I conceived of this and started writing the story with her. So we thought, let's give her a video game blog that's updated every once in a while. As we got closer to the release of the novel, we decided to have Rachael be a blogger that you wouldn't just like to read, but you would love to read. So Rachael began to blog at her website, PixelVixen707.com, and quickly got a very interested and very engaged fanbase...and then they found out she wasn't real.
JH:
So what happened? How did they react?
JCH:
They freaked out. Rachael, in her emails to other gaming journalists and bloggers, telling them about about her site and about herself, was dropping hints to her unreality. Like, here's a link to the newspaper where I work. You visit the website and up at the top of the page, it says, "Bandwith provided by the people that created me." These are small little glints, and nobody picked up on it. Until the day that Rachael blogged about an event in her personal life, in which she mentioned Zach and she mentioned going to Brinkvale Psychiatric and whatnot, and people started clicking those links to Brinkvale, and clicking those links to the newspaper, and the fiction was finally exposed.
A great many of Rachael's readers who had become, in a way, her friends, freaked out. They felt hoodwinked. And then they realized -- and it took some time -- that the quality of her work hadn't changed, that she was not shilling for the novel. Rachael lives in the Personal Effects: Dark Art universe, which is very similar to ours, but she will never say that she's in a book. There was a very intense week or two, and I wasn't following it very closely, because I had stuff to do -- I'm not Rachael Webster, I'm not writing that blog -- but once everyone realized, "She's just as real as me in nearly every way," then everything was OK again.
A great many of Rachael's readers who had become, in a way, her friends, freaked out. They felt hoodwinked. And then they realized -- and it took some time -- that the quality of her work hadn't changed, that she was not shilling for the novel. Rachael lives in the Personal Effects: Dark Art universe, which is very similar to ours, but she will never say that she's in a book. There was a very intense week or two, and I wasn't following it very closely, because I had stuff to do -- I'm not Rachael Webster, I'm not writing that blog -- but once everyone realized, "She's just as real as me in nearly every way," then everything was OK again.
JH:
It will be interesting to see how the people who know Rachael as a gaming blogger and a Suicide Girls columnist react to seeing her in the book, where things really get crazy ...
JCH:
Things get crazy in two ways, and the first and most important way is that Rachael is exposed to dangerous elements. We had to nail down a chronology for when the story takes place, and Personal Effects: Dark Art takes place in November of 2008. Where were you in November of 2008? Rachael was experiencing these traumatic events, but much like you, Rachael doesn't talk about November 2008 in her day-to-day life. While she's blogging in real time now, she might be reminded of something, but she's over it, just like anybody would kind of be over it. But if you go back in the archives of her blog to early November, you'll see that she references this peril. It doesn't give away the plot, but certainly implies that there was trauma and that she and Zach were going through a hard time. And this is where my nose starts to bleed: that post was actually written on November 3rd, 2008.
JH:
I was really interested in all of the slang you created for the book. Zach's brother Lucas has this great, quirky vernacular that all the other characters start to pick up and use themselves. Where did you come up with that?
JCH:
With Lucas, I wanted to created a personality that was at high contrast to Zach's, that loved life, that was absolutely like a living spring. Boing boing boing! You can't shut the guy up. Combine that with my love for slang. I have always, since I was kid, wondered "Where did 'chill out' come from?" I had always quietly wanted to be one of those people who said that really clever thing that was the initial pebble in the pond, and as I went through my life, I quickly realized that I would never be cool or clever enough for that to happen. But, oh my gosh, here's an opportunity to live vicariously through someone who might be that person. So Lucas, instead of saying "How's it going?" he says "Welcome up!" Instead of saying "that's really cool," he says "katabatic!" For those who know, katabatic is an Antarctic wind that cools the planet. At one point he calls something that's troubling him a "foolbiscuit." That was something that spilled out of my mouth when someone cut me off on the road. By the end of the book, when someone says "'dore," everyone knows what he's talking about, including the reader.
JH:
7th Son was a sci-fi thriller, and Personal Effects: Dark Art is a psychological thriller, but would you ever write something that takes place in a slightly more mundane world?
JCH:
[laughs] Not an underground mental institution for the damned? Well, there's something to be said for writing stories that do not have extremes, like human cloning or a blind serial killer, but I love extremes. I love Alfred Hitchcock movies, because quite often a person just as normal and reserved and dorky as you or me gets thrown into these improbably situations and is forced to take care of business. The person who you meet in the beginning of North by Northwest, Cary Grant, is a borderline drunk, a dandy, and certainly a chump, is doing battle on the face of Mount Rushmore by the end of that movie. How fucking cool is that?
We all have these personal dramatic moments in our own lives, the personal, daily equivalent of doing battle on Mount Rushmore, and while that's interesting to me, I like -- I hate to sound pretentious -- but I call it "widescreen fiction." I love it when the stakes are really, really big. Do I have ideas for stories that are far smaller in scope? Absolutely. But right now, I'm full of piss and vinegar. I want to tell big stories, I want to kick people in the balls.
We all have these personal dramatic moments in our own lives, the personal, daily equivalent of doing battle on Mount Rushmore, and while that's interesting to me, I like -- I hate to sound pretentious -- but I call it "widescreen fiction." I love it when the stakes are really, really big. Do I have ideas for stories that are far smaller in scope? Absolutely. But right now, I'm full of piss and vinegar. I want to tell big stories, I want to kick people in the balls.
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