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J.C. Hutchins burst upon the podcasting scene over 3 years ago with the release of his 7th Son Trilogy. Since then the combination of his tireless efforts to build and mobilize a rabid fan base, nicknamed the Beta Clone Army, and his exciting techno-thriller podcasts have proven to be the perfect recipe for success.

J.C. Hutchins burst upon the podcasting scene over 3 years ago with the release of his 7th Son Trilogy. Since then the combination of his tireless efforts to build and mobilize a rabid fan base, nicknamed the Beta Clone Army, and his exciting techno-thriller podcasts have proven to be the perfect recipe for success.  June 9th was the release date of his first print novel, Personal Effects: Dark Art, from St. Martin’s Press.  Later this year fans will also have the opportunity to curl up with the print edition of 7th Son Book One: Descent.

Personal Effects: Dark Art is not just a regular suspense novel. Can you tell us a little bit about the interactive reality game aspects that come with the book?

Dark Art is a super natural thriller, and it takes place in a hopeless mental institution for the criminally insane. If you are there, you’re not getting out, that’s the scenario of Brinkvale Psychiatric Hospital, also called The Brink by locals. There’s a young and optimistic art therapist there named Zach Taylor and he has this uncanny ability, he’s very talented at what he does. Although he hasn’t been doing it for every long at all, what he has kind of stumbled upon is this idea of using peoples personal effects, the patients personal items that are catalogued either during their committal process, or things that he has found by reaching out to family or friends.  He is given a new patient, Martin Grace, a blind man who is accused of multiple murders. So, he sets about obtaining Martin Grace’s personal effects in order to examine them, and discover the secret of his psychoses. In doing so unearths what appears to be a supernatural entity, or demonic force, that has been plaguing Martin Grace’s life for several years. 

Those personal effects that we mentioned in the novel, such as business cards, faxes, photos and legal documents actually come with the book. So, when you open up the book, the inside cover is actually a pocket, and inside that pocket are the very same photographs, ID cards, credit cards and business cards that you read about in the novel. If you take clues embedded in the novel, they’re coyly camouflaged in there, with the coyly camouflaged clues in the artefacts that come with the book, and combine these two narratives, your curiosity can propel you into another narrative that unfolds online, via phone mail messages and email messages, where you are literally hacking into web sites and into people’s voice mail numbers and putting together all of these disparate clues.

It’s not just a story enhancing experience where you can visit a web site and glean a few little cool details that weren’t mentioned in the book, the actual ending of the novel can be fundamentally changed, and your perception of the entire book, and our hero, can be fundamentally changed as you explore this out of book experience. 

How did your collaboration with Jordan Wiseman work? Were you each responsible for certain aspects of the production, or was it more of a back and forth effort?

It was highly collaborative. Jordan Wiseman is indeed the creator of the Personal Effects concept.  I connected with him through a contact at St. Martin’s Press who was a big fan of my 7th Son podcast novel trilogy and thought that I might be a good fit for this supernatural thriller series that Jordan Weisman had in mind. Jordan and I started talking, and at first, it was a real education because he’s been telling these transmedia stories since 2001, with the debut of the Alternative Reality Game that is now nicknamed “The Beast”. It was the first of these amazing, innovative, mostly online-based stories. He went on to do stories promoting Halo, The Dark Knight and Nine inch Nails’ album Year Zero.  He’s a freaking storytelling master, and so part of this was me getting immersed and getting my head around the transmedia storytelling genre.

We have a lot in common, he and I, and most of it is that this is a nigh-egoless experience. If you’re a diva, don’t even show up, because we are servants to the story. The story and the narrative are the most important things.  The emotional experience of telling a great story had to extend well beyond the pages of the book.  So we were really highly, highly collaborative in nailing down the plot of this novel. Basically, I would go off, and I would plot it out, and then I would present it and we would talk it through on the phone.  Those early days were so memorable because there was just a lot of excitement; I was learning how to do the work with someone. This is my first collaborative fiction project.  Once we nailed down a lot of that, say around ninety percent of it, with a relatively loosey-goosey idea of what kind of things we were going to pay off in the transmedia experience, I sat down and began to write. 

Meanwhile, we cut to Washington State where Jordan is based, and Jordan and his team, mostly led by a woman named Jessica Price began to nail down some really awesome opportunities for the transmedia experience.  So what I would do while we were plotting the book, I would say we will have a transmedia experience that pays off this big detail, but the steps to get there, I never really described any of those, because that was not my expertise.

I actually flew out there, we had a nice pow-wow, the team at Smith and Tinker, his company, and it became so clear. I have this memory of walking into this room, and there’s a white board, and this thing is absolutely covered with notes on how to execute the transmedia experience, and I remember just seeing names of characters I created, and website addresses, and it crystallized it. This is going to happen; they are absolutely fricken serious about making this happen. And that’s exactly how it went down.

Your 7th Son series spanned three novels and an anthology, so you obviously spent a great deal of time in that world. It was more of a technological thriller involving assassinations, clones and government conspiracies. Did you have any problems switching from this style of writing to the darker and more fantastic mode for Dark Art?

Absolutely not. In fact, these are the stories I like to tell, and the stories I like to read. I am such a Steven King geek it is upsetting.  I think that I have paid for at least one or two bricks of his house. I’m just so smitten by him, not just his horrific presentation of things, and his way of viscerally moving and creating reactions in readers, but his characters and his plotting and his pacing, all of these things. I mean, he’s just a really great writer to follow.  In addition to that, I’m a really big fan of a writer named Jeffery Deaver, who’s a fantastic procedural thriller writer. Often his protagonists are tracking down multiple murderers. So you’ve got King and Deaver, and here’s an opportunity for me to pay homage and create my spin on both a procedural story, and the supernatural and horrific aspects that increasingly begin to arise in the novel as it progresses.

For me, even though I hadn’t written a supernatural horror, it was almost like coming home, because that’s the kind of literary language I like to read anyway.  And actually, while I am known widely as being a science fiction writer with 7th Son, I don’t read much science fiction at all.  That’s the irony of the 7th Son versus the Dark Art experience. But I know that people who have listened to 7th Son and who will go on to read 7th Son when it is in print, they will absolutely get Personal Effects: Dark Art, and they will know that it is a J.C. Hutchins book.  The stuff that I’m known for, the cliffhangers, and the thrills and the occasional plot twist here and there, that’s all in there.

Working in horror is liberating in a way. You can go to places in horror that typically you are not permitted to go.  Sometimes you need to rip someone’s jaw off, and there are genres that you simply cannot do that in.  For me, because I love the darker fiction, it gave me an opportunity to swim in that darker water, and it was a lot of fun to do.

Do you think this is the future for publishing? Will we see more and more transmedia books?

It will take some time, but I think we will see more and more. Will it become the norm? That I’m not entirely certain of, I have to reserve judgment on that.  But I will say that there are pluses and minuses to this kind of storytelling, and the minuses are not beholden to the reader in any way.

The pluses are that you are able to craft a tale that works not only on the page, but through a tactile experience. While you are holding, for example a legal document, that was printed just a month ago, that sheet of paper feels twenty years old, and looks twenty years old, it’s absolutely convincing.  And there’s a physical voyeuristic thing that comes with that. We are not permitted to look through people’s wallets, or purses, or their medicine cabinets at the cocktail party. If we do, we don’t tell anyone.  This is absolutely taboo, and yet we all have that curiosity, I defy anyone to tell me that they are not curious.  So, here is a highly managed, perfectly safe way to do the things we often want to do, look through those personal items, look at that ID card, listen to that persons’ voice mails, read their emails.  If you can craft a way to make the reader an actual part of the experience, a protagonist in a way, than you are creating brand new ways of emotionally investing them, and blurring the line between fiction and reality.  I think that this is absolutely trailblazing, and those are the pluses of it. I think readers win. 

The minuses are that these are highly complicated things to pull off. I don’t know if a single person can execute them on their own, because not only are you having to craft a story that stands alone in print form, which is exactly what we did with Personal Effect: Dark Art. You can read the book and not touch any of the artefacts and have a satisfying narrative experience.  But you also have to craft more layers of the story that can only be experienced through these different media.  And these different media, they have to be created.  They have to be designed, and manufactured.  For me, that thrills me, that’s exciting, this highly collaborative process, where it doesn’t matter who came up with the idea, it’s a great idea, let’s run with it, and this really great ways to bend people’s brains and kind of retrain them on how fiction can be experienced, and that’s really awesome. But it comes at a price, and the price is a highly collaborative experience.

You have done novel, interview, anthology and informational podcasts. How did you find each compared in terms of workflow and preparation needed? Do you have any preferences?

Given my schedule and how hectic it has been for the past while, the ones that require the least amount of preparation are my favourites.  I say that 90% jokingly, but none of this stuff is easy to do, it’s just a matter of becoming familiar enough with the tools that it’s predictable, it’s never easy. And there are layers of complexity.

Something like my UltraCreatives interview podcast that I rolled out in 2008 was an absolute blast. I loved connecting with the names in social media and entrepreneurship; those guys are rock stars in the social media space. Guy Kawasaki, Jeff Pulver, Chris Brogan, Jason Calcanis, how did I swing that?  The amazing things about that were the great learning experiences. The downside was, being a former newspaperman, I know how important it is to have at least the illusion of expertise in their particular story, so that I can ask informed questions. That means a hell of a lot of research so that I can craft insightful questions.  And because I was asking insightful questions, the interviews went longer, and that was also difficult to manage. There was a lot of front-end investment there. 

My current nonfiction podcast, called Hey Everybody, is much more informal. It’s often an interview, but it’s an interview with people whose work I am already familiar with, so I don’t even write down questions, I just turn it on and we talk.  Or it’s often just me rambling about something or bragging about something, or gushing about some neat thing I saw online. Comparatively speaking these are easy things to release, I just turn on the mic and we go.  In contrast, the most complex podcasts for me to do are the fiction podcasts.  Recording and editing would take me upwards of six to eight hours each episode.

And then with 7th Son: Obsidian, there was a whole other level of front-end management of other people. I didn’t write any stories for Obsidian, it was all administrative, so I was wrangling writers, and I was wrangling other kinds of podcast storytellers, and then I was soliciting fan made content for it, so I received damn near 150 pieces of video and audio content, and then it was up to me to listen to it and curate it. And with the video content, it was me putting them all together into one longer episode. One of the great things about listening to or reading any entertainment is that if you are sufficiently entertained, you are not thinking about how complex and how time consuming it was for that entertainment to be crafted.  As long as all of the people don’t realize it was put together with bubble gum and a prayer, we are okay.

Who do you listen to? What are some of your favourite podcasts?

I love and hate this question. I love it because I get to talk about programming I like; I hate it because the longer I have been a podcaster the less I have time to listen to podcasts.  I remember in 2005 and 2006 when I was conceiving the 7th Son podcast experience, I was a podcast super fan. I was listening to like forty shows, I was mainlining the stuff! Now that I’m up to my eyeballs in professional commitments, it has plummeted.

To keep up to date on the alternate reality gamespace and transmedia storytelling I listen to a podcast called the ARG Netcast. I listen to a lot of C.C. Chapman, he has a fantastic music podcast called Accident Hash, but he also has a very insightful social media marketing podcast called Managing the Grey that I listen to and find very inspirational. The only podcast that I will ever pay for is the Coast to Coast AM podcast. It is an extremely popular late night talk show, and it’s all about aliens and conspiracies, the Illuminati, the Mayan calendar. It’s just such a crazy, crazy show. It’s rare that the hosts of the show will say “Yes I think demons exist,” but they take their interview role very seriously.  The people that they have on the show, at least within these microcosms, are very authoritative.  There are a couple of reasons why I listen to it, it’s very entertaining, and it is such an endless source of story ideas. All it takes is a half sentence for me to just spin it out into a different direction. But you need to be exposed to that scrap before you do it, and this is a scrapbook, it’s just filled with that stuff. 

To this day, I still listen to the Dragon Page Cover to Cover, by Michael R. Mennenga and Mike Stackpole. That was the second podcast I ever listened to and I am still subscribed today.  A lot of Leo LaPort, MacBreak Weekly, This Week In Tech, Adam Christiansen’s’ The MacCast, I’m a Mac user, so that’s really good. Mur Lafferty and Scott Sigler are two really excellent storytellers that I listen to religiously. There is a rotating supporting cast of characters that swings in and swings out whenever time permits, but that’s the beating core of what I listen to.

Do you ever listen to your own podcasts?

All the time, I study it.  For me, the act of listening isn’t masturbatory; it’s studying what I have done. If it’s fiction, it’s studying performances. With character voices it’s memorizing them, helping to keep those neural paths set in terms of performance and cadence and so on. 

But with my nonfiction stuff, I try to study it in terms of, while this appears to be an effortless presentation, but what resonated, with either people or what resonates with me?  What shouldn’t I do next time?  Oh, I rambled on too long there, I should have cut that, I should make it more succinct, or I should have expanded that.  I’m always analyzing what I do so that the next episode or the next big concept, whatever it may be, will be better based on my highly subjective and critical view of myself.  I’m always studying beyond performance to narration itself, to analyse that too.

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For more information about J.C. Hutchins and his podcasts, check out his page.

Click here to order Personal Effects: Dark Art.

Visit PixelVixen707, the blog of one of the characters found in Personal Effects: Dark Art.