We are delighted to welcome author Bryn Schurman to Omnimystery News today.
Bryn's new comic crime novel is Further Complications (April 2015 ebook format) and we recently had the opportunity to spend some time with him talking about it.
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Omnimystery News: Introduce us to the lead character of Further Complications.
Photo provided courtesy of
Bryn Schurman
Bryn Schurman: Marty Bowers is a timid college dropout who has doesn't deal with adversity very well. We meet him at a point in his life where he is frustrated with his job at a movie theater and his relationship with his girlfriend. The temptation of a hot new coworker and a set of lost keys brings him well outside of his comfort zone and he finds himself telling wilder and wilder lies to keep up the charade with the sports car he "borrowed".
I liked the idea of a crime novel with a completely unsuitable protagonist, a person who has never touched a gun in real life but thinks he knows how to handle himself based on film and TV cliches. Likewise, he's obsessed with slasher movies but has no first-hand experience with violence or murder, and the sight of his own blood is enough to make him almost pass out. His imagination often gets the better of him and tends to paint a vivid worst-case scenario that sometimes becomes a self-fulfilling.
OMN: We called Further Complications a comic crime novel. How do you think of it?
BS: I think the best genre description I can come up with is Screwball Crime Thriller. There are elements of horror, mystery, thriller, and wacky Florida crime novel all rolled into Further Complications. It might fit better on the comedy shelf, but I hope that the novel's pacing and themes will hook thriller fans as well.
OMN: Give us a summary of the book in a tweet.
BS: Timid movie geek steals car to impress girl. He should have checked the trunk first. #funnycrime
OMN: Is the storyline based on a real event?
BS: The general inspiration was based on a real event. About ten years ago, I had lost my car keys at a movie theater in Miami. Nobody had turned them in until the next day and it made me imagine a would-be thief stalking through the garage and trying every car before giving up. I decided to revisit this idea from a different perspective, and try to put a different character behind the wheel. One who, although more sympathetic than my original idea, would still live to regret it.
OMN: How true are you to the setting of the book?
BS: The locations are based around some industrial "parks" and suburban areas south of Miami. I wanted to portray a different side to the city, less of a rum-drinks and bikini atmosphere.
OMN: What is the best advice you've received as an author?
BS: For me, the struggle was in getting an ugly first draft to paper. I tend to be a perfectionist in some ways, so I would find myself grinding to a stop to find the perfectly evocative description for some inconsequential detail. The NaNoWriMo challenge, with its daily wordcount goals, helped me get past this. Tell the story first. You can worry about interior decoration once foundation's poured and the walls are up.
OMN: Was Further Complications your working title for the book?
BS: Further Complications came much later, maybe halfway through the second draft. My working title was something along the lines of "Cut-rate Orgies Near You", a line culled from a particularly eye-catching spam email I received a while back. This stuck for a while, but it wasn't quite the right fit for this story.
OMN: What kinds of books did you read when you were young?
BS: I grew up on a pretty strict diet of horror. Except for a Douglas Adams binge, Stephen King and Clive Barker were just about the only authors I read through high school, at which point I discovered H.P. Lovecraft and weird fiction. My current literary influences include Christopher Moore, Chuck Palahnuik, Neil Gaiman, Joe R. Lansdale, Neal Stephenson, Michael Chabon, the first two Jeff Lindsay Dexter novels, David Wong, and Elmore Leonard.
OMN: What's next for you?
BS: In the near future I am revising and editing my second novel, tentatively titled Casey Stripe: Discount Necromancer, recording drums and vocals with my band Identity Collapse, and working on audio production projects for video games and a podcast.
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Bryn Schurman is a Key Largo-based author, musician, and sound designer. He writes novels, short stories, song lyrics, and blogs on sound design. When he's not pounding away at the keyboard, he's playing drums in Identity Collapse, creating ambient soundscapes as Caustic Reverie, recording sound effects for video games, or trying to photograph the perfect Florida Keys sunset.
For more information about the author, please visit his website at TungstenFilamentGroup.com and his author page on Goodreads, or find him on Facebook and Twitter.
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Further Complications by Bryn Schurman
A Comic Crime Novel
Publisher: Bryn Schurman
Stealing the car was the easy part. Enjoying his date afterward was another story …
Marty's night keeps getting more complicated as he tries to seduce the new coworker with a joyride through the streets of South Miami.
Thievery and lies don't come easy to this neurotic projectionist and he soon finds himself hopelessly over his head, wondering what to do with the grisly baggage in the trunk.
— Further Complications by Bryn Schurman
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