Meet Wes Verde | Writer & well-caffeinated busybody
We had the good fortune of connecting with Wes Verde and we’ve shared our conversation below.
Hi Wes, have you ever found yourself in a spot where you had to decide whether to give up or keep going? How did you make the choice?
It’s happened more than once where I will start a project, only to realize that it’s just a total dud. Sometimes it’s the result of over-ambition or mistaking a concept for a complete idea or even something as simple as “not feeling it.” It’s frustrating and no fun… but let’s not call it giving up. That’s harsh and I don’t like to admit defeat (unless it’s to the cat… fine, Waffles, you can sit on the keyboard).
Before I managed to string together my first full novel, I had a folder of about fifty or so half-baked ideas that sat lonely and abandoned like an old sock. I think of it as my digital scratch pad. It contains dialogues, character quirks, and anecdotes that all seemed like great ideas at the time, but were never quite enough to stand on their own. However… they work great as a sidekick to a more complete work.
The scratch pad went from wall-of-shame to the junk drawer. And sometimes it’s just fun to read through it – a reminder of the fact that one may give up in the short term only to persevere over the course of years.
But sometimes there’s no way to salvage something. You just have to face the music and own up to the fact that a project is simply a complete disaster. Maybe it’s like that fourth IPA you had before deciding to write – a regrettable error that resulted in nothing but gibberish (however amusing it seemed at the time). Well… in that case, at least we figured out what not to write… and who knows, maybe we had some laughs along the way.
Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
I have found my literary home in historical fiction. The Interwar Period is an oft-overlooked treasure trove of characters and stories and something that I really wanted to explore as a setting. As a setting, the 1920s offered more than its share of explosive events, murder, and even radioactive quackery, bookended by the arguably more dramatic events of the World Wars. Usually, I will try to write a little bit every day, but sometimes I’ll “take off” a few days (sometimes weeks) for research.
Reading about history is simultaneously the most rewarding and most challenging part of this game. I love to learn. Especially about things that were glossed over during my formal education. Sometimes the reason is simply mundane. Near my hometown was this reservoir that was rumored to contain the remains of an abandoned town.
Spooky, right? Naturally, I had to know more. The truth ended up being somewhat more mundane, but still interesting. For those interested, I wrote a full article about the topic on my website. The punchline is that there was indeed a town where the lake is now, but only foundations remain. Contrary to rumor, a man was not drowned in the church when it flooded, but a diver did drown during the dam’s construction.
However, what interested me most was the cemetery located in what would become the lake’s center. According to newspapers at the time, there is reason to believe that it was not moved before flooding. To me, the realistic image of a cemetery underwater is more intriguing than the dramatic but fictional image of a whole town. This is precisely what the 1920s in New Jersey provide as a setting. I always try to integrate real history into my stories.
That’s what 1920’s New Jersey provides as a setting. And I always like to include real history in a story.
Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
Well, my best friend would probably want to hang out by the fire pit and debate whether Hot Fuzz or Snatch is the more rewatchable movie (Yes, we could do that for a week), but let’s run with this.
Northern New Jersey is kind of a sweet spot in terms of options. More or less an hour’s drive from both New York City and Philadelphia, we’re like the younger sibling of both and get picked on as a result.
Still, the cities have their appeal. Day 1 would probably find us at a concert in New York. Foo Fighters are playing Madison Square Garden? Hell, I’ll take off work for that.
Day 2 will probably find us in need to recover. For that, there are plenty of great places to hike (yes, I consider that to be “recovering”). Maybe we don’t have the Rockies in our backyard like Denver folk, but the Poconos have their own charm. In fact, let’s make that days 2 and 3. Day 4, maybe we will be ready to head south to Philadelphia, home of several places of obscure interest. If you’ve never heard of the Mütter Museum, it is fascinating but not for the squeamish (and that includes me…). The battleship museum USS New Jersey is right across the river and definitely worth checking out.
And no trip to New Jersey would be complete without visiting the beach – The Shore as we call it. That’s easily days 5-7. Our coast runs the gamut of quiet Oceanside cottages to Atlantic City (incidentally, the setting of the game Monopoly). After a busy week, we would probably lean more towards the latter, and finish things much the way they started, with beers by the firepit and discussing the Blood and Ice Cream Trilogy in its entirety.
Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
To Emily Connors, my friend, and a middle school English teacher who dared to hold her nose and beta-read my first draft. Her sometimes (but deservedly) brutal critique helped forge a lumpy and jumbled pile of pitiful prose into something resembling an actual book.
Website: https://wesverde.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wesverde7/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wes.verde.33/
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIHTOfMDk2yj5oInbugMUZg
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