“I started writing while I was working, and I loved the process,” he says. “I got a taste of the publishing life. When those came out and did pretty well, I thought, ‘Oh, this is cool.’ It led me down that path where ‘I think I’m going to be a writer.’”
And that path led him from New York to Colorado, where he’s now a feature writer for the Durango Telegraph, and has released Good Days, Bad Days – A Collection of Short Stories, an addictive read. Made up of 30 stories, Mosberg pulls you in with quick tales that have a knack of sticking with you long after you’ve put the book down.
We spoke with Mosberg about what to do when you’ve finished your first novel, genre-hopping and where he gets some of his ideas.
Q: Is it cool to read it out of order?
A: Absolutely. There’s no sequence. Which did you start with?
Q: The first story I read was “Fire Fight” – can you talk about it? The rule, generally, is to write what you know …
A: Well, yeah, that’s sort of what people say, but for me, particularly why I like writing short stories is if I don’t know anything about it, maybe that’s what the curiosity is that got me started with it. I was in the service in ’64, so, I mean that’s pretty rich material for me, but … (the story) is an excerpt from my first novel, which I never published.
Q: Why not?
A: A writing teacher once said to me, when you write and you finish your first novel, put it in a drawer and start on the second one. Now, that’s not 100 percent the reason I did it, but it’s good advice. I think if I went back and rewrote it, it would be completely different.
Q: How long did this book take?
A: They were on and off probably about a year and a half. There was a period of time when I didn’t write anything. It wasn’t writer’s block; I just sort of got sidetracked and didn’t know what I wanted to do with it.
Q: You definitely skip around in genre, I think. You hit science fiction, was that hard?
A: I don’t read a lot of books, oddly enough, but I read a lot of magazine articles, and I’m very careful about what I read. Mostly, I read things like Smithsonian Magazine or Vanity Fair. Vanity Fair has such a breadth of material; Smithsonian’s the same way. They’re in-depth and so well researched. And they spark ideas, you know? Sometimes I think, “I want to know a little more about that …” and that’s how it goes. I might see something on TV … it’ll stay there for a while, in my head. I write a lot in my head.
Q: So when you sit down …
A: I pretty much know where I’m going with it. But some things I write, I have no idea, no clue where it’s going. … and I don’t always finish and it gets canned. I can’t resolve it properly. I think that’s the fun of short stories is you have to resolve it very quickly.
Reader Comments