Will Christopher Baer has written three books Kiss Me, Judas, Penny Dreadful and Hell's Half Acre all using the character of Phineas Poe, a disgraced former cop who spent six years in Internal Affairs with the Denver Police Department. His first adventure began after he picked up the wrong woman and she stole his kidney. He then promptly fell in love with the organ stealer, a sociopathic femme fatale named Jude. In the Hell's Half Acre, the latest adventure, Phineas has been searching for Jude for five years, ever since she left him after being tortured and brutally raped by three men. Now he catches up with her in San Francisco, just as she's catching up with the creeps who attacked her.
Check out the official site of Will Christopher Baer
Daniel Robert Epstein: Hey Will, how are you?
Will Christopher Baer: Im good, just in my office.
DRE: What office is that?
WCB: My day job as a newspaper editor.
DRE: What paper?
WCB: The Santa Barbara Independent. Its like the Village Voice.
DRE: I should have known you werent living off these books.
WCB: I sort of have an equal love and hate for this particular job. Im the news and Op-Ed editor so I get a lot of local street council shit and affordable housing stuff. Then at the same time I get a lot of interesting stories about Iraq. You get that adrenaline rush of newsroom chaos sometimes.
DRE: So do I call you Will or Chris?
WCB: My friends call me Chris so lets be friends.
DRE: [laughs] Cool, so I hear your wife is pregnant. Is this your second kid?
WCB: I have a nine year old boy from a previous, sort of disastrous, relationship. Hes an amazing kid. Its my wifes first child and were expecting a girl. I hear that a girl is a delightful challenge all the time. Girls and their fathers, 18 years of pain. I expect to spoil her.
DRE: Your previous relationship wasnt with a girl named Jude, was it?
WCB: No but I have dated Jude a couple of times. Shes a conglomeration of a couple of people Ive known.
DRE: Thats terrifying. I understand maybe that could happen with the personality but not with the insanity and the violence.
WCB: Ive never had an organ stolen but I have woken up with a gun to my head.
DRE: Was she nuts or on drugs?
WCB: A little bit of both. But she was a lot of fun at the same time.
DRE: I know what you mean.
WCB: Im so stupidly happily married now that all those former relationships seem foreign to me. My wife is a really amazing woman who makes me laugh and shes smarter than me.
DRE: Does she like your books?
WCB: She does. Last week I had this short story, called Blood Porn, I was pulling out of the woodwork to put on my website. My wife was using my laptop and she said there was a large amount of copy on the clipboard and its called Blood Porn. She sounded like it was something nasty she found in the bathroom that she doesnt want to touch. But she is a really good editor too. She read the Hells Half Acre manuscript and gave some really sharp edits on it.
DRE: Jude uses this cool little knife called a stinger, is that real?
WCB: Yeah its like a dental tool. When I was going to a dentist as a teenager they had this sort of long sharp pointy tool so its sort of a curved stiletto.
My one scary stalker situation, where I had to change my number and stuff, was when this woman called me out of the blue when I was living in San Francisco. I answered the phone in the middle of the night and she said Will this is Jude. That really freaked me out. I thought it was one of my friends playing a joke but it turns out she was the biggest freak on the earth. She had read the books like 50 times and she was a dental hygienist. She said that she has the tools and she bought all this leather underwear. She wanted to meet up with me and do all this role-play. I told her I had to go. I told my agent and he told it me she was a stalker and that I had to change my number. It turned out she had called my ex-wife and posed as my cousin.
DRE: What kind of people show up at the signings?
WCB: I havent had anything bad lately. The book tour I just finished was cool and was pretty low key in terms of craziness. A lot of people came out of the woodwork. I had a bunch of guys drive like six hours to get to the signing. They remind me of myself when I was 20 because they want to be writers and they read these books like they are going to tear them apart. I did that once with a writer named Madison Smartt Bell. He published like a dozen books and did pretty well. He was in that Jay McInerney niche. When Bell read in Memphis, I had my copy of his Waiting For The End Of The World that was practically falling apart. I went to the reading, I didnt have any money to buy his new book and he looked at the book then looked at me. He was really tickled by the fact that the book was like ripped apart. That kind of shit makes a writers day.
DRE: With people like Chuck Palahniuk, Craig Clevenger and yourself there seems to be a revival in modern noir. Im a big fan of older noir writers like Jim Thompson and Charles Willeford.
WCB: I love Jim Thompson and Charles Willeford. That book Willeford wrote, Cockfighter, is great.
DRE: I love that one.
WCB: I guess there is a little west coast noir thing bubbling up. I grew up in the south.
DRE: In the first book your descriptions of Phineas disgusting wound was so good I could almost smell him.
WCB: Thats my thing. Its sort of visceral details. When my mother first read an early version of Kiss Me Judas she called me up and asked if I could give him a sandwich or something. He was starving to death, wont bathe and hes just dying on every page. That was the point.
DRE: A lot of these new ones seem to revolve around pharmaceuticals. Where does your fascination with that come from?
WCB: Any sort of addictive behavior fits in pretty well with these kinds of stories. Everything thats in the Phineas Poe books I have sampled. At the last reading someone asked me how I get into that voice and the truth is thats my default voice. Thats the most natural voice for me to write in and thats how I see the world. Obviously I ramp it up a bit by torturing Phineas and putting him through existential paces. I think that drugs are just part of the landscape.
To a degree its the calling card of this kind of character. Ive had a lot more contract with fans in the past six months or so than I ever had before. Some are young writers and they have that notion that being a writer is all about being an alcoholic, suicidal and being in pain. You cant write if youre acting like that. You have to experience a lot of stuff but its not going really going to help youre writing.
DRE: The only thing that helps your writing is putting yourself in front of that blank screen to write.
WCB: Yeah its serious work. For me every book is painful. Its killing yourself by a thousand cuts.
DRE: If youre ripping away your skin, whats it like when youre actually published?
WCB: Its like a scab thats on full display that you pick at. Its such a private internal experience then there is a stack of them at Borders and theyre making espresso. Its just weird. My favorite readings are the ones that are in bars and coffeehouses because it seems more real.
DRE: I like Barnes and Noble and Borders, even though I dont like how theyve put other stores out of business, because they let you read all the books you want for free. The stores are a bit too nice and clean. They dont have that smell of a bookstore.
WCB: Yeah I spent so much time as a kid lurking in bookstores with that smell of the books. It was a good kind of claustrophobia.
DRE: I read that in Littleton, Colorado some kid had been handing out free copies of Kiss Me Judas and was told to cease handing out unauthorized, non-curricular literature or face suspension.
WCB: Yeah his handle is Joey Colorado because he was one of my street team captains. It all went down during banned books week. Here is 16 year old white male who reads books and gets his friends to read books but they are squashing that right. It was funny and sad. These books are not going to make kids do violent things.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
Check out the official site of Will Christopher Baer
Daniel Robert Epstein: Hey Will, how are you?
Will Christopher Baer: Im good, just in my office.
DRE: What office is that?
WCB: My day job as a newspaper editor.
DRE: What paper?
WCB: The Santa Barbara Independent. Its like the Village Voice.
DRE: I should have known you werent living off these books.
WCB: I sort of have an equal love and hate for this particular job. Im the news and Op-Ed editor so I get a lot of local street council shit and affordable housing stuff. Then at the same time I get a lot of interesting stories about Iraq. You get that adrenaline rush of newsroom chaos sometimes.
DRE: So do I call you Will or Chris?
WCB: My friends call me Chris so lets be friends.
DRE: [laughs] Cool, so I hear your wife is pregnant. Is this your second kid?
WCB: I have a nine year old boy from a previous, sort of disastrous, relationship. Hes an amazing kid. Its my wifes first child and were expecting a girl. I hear that a girl is a delightful challenge all the time. Girls and their fathers, 18 years of pain. I expect to spoil her.
DRE: Your previous relationship wasnt with a girl named Jude, was it?
WCB: No but I have dated Jude a couple of times. Shes a conglomeration of a couple of people Ive known.
DRE: Thats terrifying. I understand maybe that could happen with the personality but not with the insanity and the violence.
WCB: Ive never had an organ stolen but I have woken up with a gun to my head.
DRE: Was she nuts or on drugs?
WCB: A little bit of both. But she was a lot of fun at the same time.
DRE: I know what you mean.
WCB: Im so stupidly happily married now that all those former relationships seem foreign to me. My wife is a really amazing woman who makes me laugh and shes smarter than me.
DRE: Does she like your books?
WCB: She does. Last week I had this short story, called Blood Porn, I was pulling out of the woodwork to put on my website. My wife was using my laptop and she said there was a large amount of copy on the clipboard and its called Blood Porn. She sounded like it was something nasty she found in the bathroom that she doesnt want to touch. But she is a really good editor too. She read the Hells Half Acre manuscript and gave some really sharp edits on it.
DRE: Jude uses this cool little knife called a stinger, is that real?
WCB: Yeah its like a dental tool. When I was going to a dentist as a teenager they had this sort of long sharp pointy tool so its sort of a curved stiletto.
My one scary stalker situation, where I had to change my number and stuff, was when this woman called me out of the blue when I was living in San Francisco. I answered the phone in the middle of the night and she said Will this is Jude. That really freaked me out. I thought it was one of my friends playing a joke but it turns out she was the biggest freak on the earth. She had read the books like 50 times and she was a dental hygienist. She said that she has the tools and she bought all this leather underwear. She wanted to meet up with me and do all this role-play. I told her I had to go. I told my agent and he told it me she was a stalker and that I had to change my number. It turned out she had called my ex-wife and posed as my cousin.
DRE: What kind of people show up at the signings?
WCB: I havent had anything bad lately. The book tour I just finished was cool and was pretty low key in terms of craziness. A lot of people came out of the woodwork. I had a bunch of guys drive like six hours to get to the signing. They remind me of myself when I was 20 because they want to be writers and they read these books like they are going to tear them apart. I did that once with a writer named Madison Smartt Bell. He published like a dozen books and did pretty well. He was in that Jay McInerney niche. When Bell read in Memphis, I had my copy of his Waiting For The End Of The World that was practically falling apart. I went to the reading, I didnt have any money to buy his new book and he looked at the book then looked at me. He was really tickled by the fact that the book was like ripped apart. That kind of shit makes a writers day.
DRE: With people like Chuck Palahniuk, Craig Clevenger and yourself there seems to be a revival in modern noir. Im a big fan of older noir writers like Jim Thompson and Charles Willeford.
WCB: I love Jim Thompson and Charles Willeford. That book Willeford wrote, Cockfighter, is great.
DRE: I love that one.
WCB: I guess there is a little west coast noir thing bubbling up. I grew up in the south.
DRE: In the first book your descriptions of Phineas disgusting wound was so good I could almost smell him.
WCB: Thats my thing. Its sort of visceral details. When my mother first read an early version of Kiss Me Judas she called me up and asked if I could give him a sandwich or something. He was starving to death, wont bathe and hes just dying on every page. That was the point.
DRE: A lot of these new ones seem to revolve around pharmaceuticals. Where does your fascination with that come from?
WCB: Any sort of addictive behavior fits in pretty well with these kinds of stories. Everything thats in the Phineas Poe books I have sampled. At the last reading someone asked me how I get into that voice and the truth is thats my default voice. Thats the most natural voice for me to write in and thats how I see the world. Obviously I ramp it up a bit by torturing Phineas and putting him through existential paces. I think that drugs are just part of the landscape.
To a degree its the calling card of this kind of character. Ive had a lot more contract with fans in the past six months or so than I ever had before. Some are young writers and they have that notion that being a writer is all about being an alcoholic, suicidal and being in pain. You cant write if youre acting like that. You have to experience a lot of stuff but its not going really going to help youre writing.
DRE: The only thing that helps your writing is putting yourself in front of that blank screen to write.
WCB: Yeah its serious work. For me every book is painful. Its killing yourself by a thousand cuts.
DRE: If youre ripping away your skin, whats it like when youre actually published?
WCB: Its like a scab thats on full display that you pick at. Its such a private internal experience then there is a stack of them at Borders and theyre making espresso. Its just weird. My favorite readings are the ones that are in bars and coffeehouses because it seems more real.
DRE: I like Barnes and Noble and Borders, even though I dont like how theyve put other stores out of business, because they let you read all the books you want for free. The stores are a bit too nice and clean. They dont have that smell of a bookstore.
WCB: Yeah I spent so much time as a kid lurking in bookstores with that smell of the books. It was a good kind of claustrophobia.
DRE: I read that in Littleton, Colorado some kid had been handing out free copies of Kiss Me Judas and was told to cease handing out unauthorized, non-curricular literature or face suspension.
WCB: Yeah his handle is Joey Colorado because he was one of my street team captains. It all went down during banned books week. Here is 16 year old white male who reads books and gets his friends to read books but they are squashing that right. It was funny and sad. These books are not going to make kids do violent things.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
VIEW 3 of 3 COMMENTS
phineas:
fuck yeah. this guy is amazing.
tiredjaw:
yeah, and its only going to get better. after finishing the trilogy he says somewhere on the internet that now he thinks he knows how to write, or something to that effect.