W.D. Kilpack III Interview Published on: 20, Sep 2024

To be honest, the experience when I was 9 was not the most significant writing experience of my youth. At the time, my dream job was to open my own comic-book company, where I would do the writing as well as the art. (I still love comic books!) The competition was through the local newspaper and open to all ages, so I took first place over adults. When they published the winners’ poems, however, all the credits included the entrants’ ages, except mine. I was kind of offended that they would not include my age when they published my entry. A much more significant experience for me was when I was 12, when Mrs. Ferrin, my sixth-grade Gifted & Talented and Language Arts teacher, told me to write a new chapter in a novel instead of doing the regular writing assignments. (I guess she saw something in me.) As a result, by the end of the year, I wrote my first fantasy novel. That was the “aha” moment for me, when I decided that I wanted to be a novelist, rather than a career in comic books.

There are different messages that underlie my stories. In the New Blood Saga (Crown Prince, Order of Light, and Demon Seed are books 1-3 of the series), one of the messages is that life can be hard and people can endure. No matter how hard it can be, no matter hard the decisions, the human spirit can endure and rise, even shine. A common method I use throughout my science fiction and fantasy, however, is the use of distortion. Through the use of exaggeration, extending certain elements beyond normal parameters, aspects of the human condition can be made more apparent, for better scrutiny.

I don’t have a lot of routine per se. That said, I am a big believer in ritual. So I write every day, without fail. Some people have asked me how I maintain that level of discipline, but it’s not a matter of discipline for me. I’ve been doing this since I started writing and drawing my own comics when I was 6. I can’t not write. In high school, I had a red, three-ring binder full of lined paper that I carried around with me so I could write whenever the urge hit me. I viewed it as a necessity. I didn’t think much of it but, later, at high-school reunions (particularly after my publication credits started piling up), people started mentioning that binder. I had no idea that people noticed it, let alone that it made enough of an impression on them to bring it up years later. So that’s what I do: I write. When I have an idea for a book, I start. That’s the most important step to writing anything, be it a short story, a poem, a news story, a screenplay, a novel, or any other piece: starting.

I think that everyone enjoys receiving recognition for their work. Writing a novel is a lot of work. I do a lot of research, I put in a lot of hours, I lose a lot of sleep at times, et cetera. To have someone, somewhere, read it and “get it” is just an amazing feeling. If it’s an award or a review or someone talking to me about my book, it’s all the same feeling, and they each make all that effort feel like it’s worthwhile. The thing with awards, though, is that they convey to others that someone with some expertise “gets it,” which can inspire others to pick it up and take a chance in order to share that same experience.

Being a journalist is hugely significant in my writing career. For one thing, it helped me develop a thick skin. I’ve written news articles that resulted in hate mail. That makes thick skin a necessity. Writing news also requires clarity. Being an editor allowed me to read a lot of other writers’ work and learn from it. I not only learned a lot about different subject matter, but also about style, and about what not to do. Having been in the seat of screening and selecting submissions for publication, I have had a bit of a leg up on a lot of others when freelancing.

It’s all about time management and balancing priorities. I’ve worked in marketing for almost 35 years, so that work doesn’t require a lot of time in terms of research. Writing for marketing is pretty quick for me. I’ve never met anyone who could turn out solid marketing copy as quickly as I could. Producing graphics is more time consuming, because art takes time. It’s just the nature of the beast. So, whenever possible, I try to work things out where marketing duties for one can overlap with the other, getting the most bang for the same buck, sort of like multitasking. As far as screenwriting, I’m a faster screenwriter than a novelist. There is less detail required, so less time is required. As far as my time as an author, like I said previously, I write every day, without fail.

My undergraduate degree in communication had a journalism emphasis, which is extremely influential, as I described earlier. My master of professional communication had a writing emphasis, which is also extremely influential, because it forced me to learn so much more of the technical end of writing. The professor who taught many of those courses described the technical aspects as a writer’s “tools,” and she was right: they are the tools with which a writer builds whatever creation is under construction. With an undergraduate degree in philosophy, the result is different than I ever would have expected. Whereas, with philosophy majors where it’s the only major are often viewed as dreamers, if it’s a double-major, people often view me as a workaholic. (Which is true.) I didn’t see that coming. Another thing I didn’t see coming is people asking me, “Do you ever actually use your philosophy degree?” The answer is yes. I use it every day, many times a day, particularly when faced with hard decisions. If nothing else, my studies in logic help me break down difficult situations to make more logical decisions. My studies in ethics benefit me a great deal in so many other aspects of life, because decisions about right and wrong, at many different levels, are part of everyday life. On a more practical level, Natharr, the main character of the New Blood Saga, at the core, was inspired by Socrates, who would go into a trancelike state and come out with an epiphany. He called it being seized by the Daemon of Philosophy. Natharr is seized by the Daemon of Sight, when he is given glimpses of the future or the past, and must make decisions (sometimes extremely difficult ones) about the well-being of Mankind.

Coaching wrestling for 25 years was incredibly gratifying. No one coaches kids to make money. They do it as service, to give back. I had some coaches growing up who were incredibly influential on me. I coached in hopes of providing a similar positive experience for some kids like those coaches did for me. As far as how it affects my creative work, in order to teach wrestling technique, after wrestling for 12 years and qualifying to represent the United States in Greco-Roman wrestling, I had to figure out how to take something that was literally reflexive for me (sometimes done as much from muscle memory as thought) and be able to articulate it to teach it. As a writer and college professor, I went to pen and paper: I wrote a syllabus. I planned the techniques I would teach and broke down the moves step-by-step, to ensure that I wasn’t missing elements that I did without thinking. Then, over the next few years, I sometimes did things during practices and my assistant coaches said, “You just did something that you didn’t explain. What was that?” So it would be added to the step-by-step for that wrestling move in my syllabus. How that influences my writing is that it helped in terms of refining my eye for detail. More significantly, however, it influences how I write action scenes. My action scenes are broken down with a lot of details that other writers may not include, either because they do not have the expertise or because they do not think to include it or do not think it necessary to include.

When I started college, I was trying to decide if I wanted to major in communication or English. My college-entrance counselor said, “If you want to teach, go into English. If you want to write, go into communication.” I didn’t want to teach, so I went into communication. (I know, I taught college for 25 years … that’s a long story.) I was originally an art minor. However, after my first year of college, I was only able to take one art class, because they were several hours long. I had a lot of college credit from Advanced Placement classes in high school and was also in the college Honors Program. If I wanted to remain on schedule for graduation, art was not going to work. I had taken some philosophy classes because I liked them, so I switched to a philosophy minor. Then I was selected to be editor of the college newspaper. That selection required that I stay an extra semester longer than I needed to graduate. I had to take a minimum number of hours to maintain my scholarships and that number of hours was exactly what I needed to go from a philosophy minor to a philosophy major. So, my last semester, my editorials in the newspaper were very philosophical.

Cooking is art. It is extremely creative. It’s also procedural. I have spent years as a technical writer, which is all about procedures. Both that and my creative writing go alone with my cooking. I have always enjoyed cooking. Having wrestled for 12 years, I cut a lot of weight for a significant portion of my life. So, when I could eat, I did. I also really appreciated being able to eat. Having people appreciate my food is the same kind of high that I receive from people appreciating my writing. That said, I really enjoy it and enjoy cooking for people. I worked in the food industry throughout high school and while getting my undergrad. I had to have enjoyed it to do it that long. My wife says that feeding people is my love language. However, cooking is much harder for me than writing or drawing. So, when I cook something for the first time, the sense of accomplishment is a pretty big high. Having something not turn out at all (which doesn’t happen often, but is still way too often), is very discouraging. I have been known to throw pans of hot food into the garbage can, accompanied by some choice words, where I don’t delete stories or books or destroy drawings. I suppose it’s because cooking doesn’t come as naturally to me, when I really, really want it to.

There isn’t anything to balance. However, the lessons I learned through my athletics permeate everything I do. First, wrestling is the hardest sport there is. After 12 years of that, at the level I was doing it, the only thing I’ve experienced that might compare in terms of being “hard” is divorce, and that’s a whole different kind of hard. Wrestling taught me to have a very intense work ethic. As an employer, if I had people apply for a job who listed wrestling experience on their résumé, they automatically got an interview, because I knew they would work harder than most of the others in the stack. It was a given. It didn’t mean they would get the job, but they would get a shot at selling themselves. When I decided to retire from teaching and coaching to pursue writing full time, my wife was extremely supportive because she said she knew that I would put in the same kind of effort that I did in everything else in life and those things had all turned out. They turned out largely because of the nature of wrestling requiring an “all in” level of dedication in order to succeed. I don’t know how else to do anything. If I’m going to do something, I’m going to do it 110 percent.

Since I haven’t lived anywhere outside the Salt Lake Valley, I don’t know if I can answer this question. I’m sure there are opportunities in big cities that I have not been able to access for much of my life due to distance. However, since the coming of the Internet and how it shrunk the world, those distances have become less and less of a hindrance. Case in point, I’ve received 5 stars from professional reviewers all across the United States, as well as in Canada, England, Wales, Australia, and India. That’s amazing!

I could not find time for all that. I had to make choices. My writing goals with my novels got put on the back burner. I didn’t stop writing (I can’t not write), but I couldn’t continue freelancing like I had been since I was 15. My youngest graduated college right before Covid hit. I could not, in good conscience, continue coaching a sport where controlling the spread of Covid was impossible. I was going to be teaching online, so no more commuting to campus and back. It seemed like the time was right to take my novel-publishing goals off the back burner and go full-steam ahead. That’s what I did. After about 18 months, I decided to retire from teaching to put even more time into writing, and haven’t looked back.

Right now, I’m doing the “final” edits on Vengeance Borne: Book Five of New Blood. I am also working on the screenplay for my sci-fi novella, Pale Face, which is in movie development. I am currently writing Battle Calm: Omega Message, the sequel to my most recent release, a dystopian military sci-fi novel. I also have almost 30 more novels written at various stages of editing waiting in the bullpen that I wrote when raising kids.

AllAuthor is an interesting platform with a great mix of elements that I haven’t seen elsewhere. (I have created accounts in every platform of this type that I can find, so I have an idea of what the others offer.) I have enjoyed using the platform and it generates traffic to my Web site, the communication hub of my dreams. I don’t know what else could be asked of it.