Wednesday night marks the beginning of a big year for Doug Dorst. His reading at BookPeople coincides with the publication date for his first novel, Alive in Necropolis, a supernatural literary thriller in the mold of Paul Auster and Haruki Murakami. Next April, he will release his first story collection, The Surf Guru, also from Riverhead Books, a division of Penguin. Not a bad string of accomplishments-- but then again, this is a guy who won Jeopardy! three times.

Doug recently took time to talk to Austinist about his new book, his other projects, and his writing life in Austin. (Full disclosure: Doug and I work together at Austin Bat Cave, a non-profit kids' writing center that connects a diverse population of young writers with a vibrant community of adult volunteers here in Austin.)

First off, congratulations on the book's release. How long did it take to write it and get it out?

The book was sold on the basis of a few chapters and an outline... It only took me another seven years to finish it. (Every mistake that can be made, I made, at least twice.) My editor is a very patient man.

Did you write much of it in Austin? Any favorite places to write around here?

I wrote some of the second draft and all of the third in Austin. I like working at coffee shops-- Flightpath, Epoch, and Genuine Joe, primarily. Pulled more than a few all-nighters at Epoch in the final push to the deadline.

The main character is a police officer in a town full of cemeteries who finds himself investigating the dead. How did you come to write a novel about ghosts?

Originally, this novel wasn't a novel, wasn't set in Colma, wasn't about a cop, and had no dead folks in it. It was a short story that took place in Iowa City (where I was living at the time), and the main character was just a guy who liked to take his dog for walks through a cemetery. I couldn’t make any headway with it though, so I put it away for a year or so, until I was back living in San Francisco.

Then it occurred to me that the right setting was right there, pretty much in my back yard-- and that I had a friend who was a cop in one of the neighboring towns, a damn fine storyteller, and an eager technical consultant. Once I decided to set it in Colma, I figured that it would be a shame to let such a fine cast of dead people go to waste. It wasn't a conscious decision to write a ghost story, or a story with ghosts, or whatever -- it just seemed like it would be a fun thing to try, and if I was going to tackle a long-haul project like a novel, I'd better be able to have fun doing it.

Were you ever concerned that your book would be shoehorned into the "fantasy" genre?

Not really, because I was pretty sure my editor didn't see it that way. I was more concerned that because the book makes use of several different genre conventions without belonging fully to any of those genres, people who were reading it with a particular set of expectations might feel cheated. Would people expecting a pure fantasy narrative be disappointed? What about people who love police procedurals or mysteries? Horror readers? Twentysomething-slacker-coming-of-age-story readers?

I decided to quit worrying and just follow the characters where they led me. Now that it's coming out, I guess I can start worrying again.

Were there other writers you were looking at as models for blurring the line between fantasy and literary fiction?

A lot of people are doing it really well right now-- Michael Chabon, Kevin Brockmeier, and Kelly Link, just to name a few.

I loved (and continue to love) how William Kennedy integrated dead people into the narrative in Ironweed. He simply asserted their presence; they were part of the emotional landscape of the book, period. As a reader, you simply have to accept that they're there (and that the question of how "real" they are isn't an important one). T.C. Boyle's World's End also makes use of dead folks without being a ghost story in any traditional sense, and that was one of the first books that got me really fired up about writing.

It seems like this book involved a lot of research on notable dead people. Did you spend much time out in Colma? Any seances?

Oh, man. Seances. I totally should have thought of that.

I spent some time in Colma-- wandered around the cemeteries, talked to the docents at the Colma Historical Society, spent some time at Molloy's (the town watering hole), did a ride-along with a Colma police officer. I wasn't an obsessive researcher, but I did want to get to know the place well enough to get the flavor of it.

A lot of the historical research was via books or the web, and that was fun, too, because there's no shortage of fascinating stories about people who are buried there. It was too much fun, probably. It's easy to rationalize not writing when you bury yourself in research. It lets you pretend that you're being productive.

You have another book-- a collection of short stories called The Surf Guru-- set to come out early next year. Are your stories similar to Alive in Necropolis? Have you been working on both at the same time?

About half of those stories were written before I ever started the novel; the rest are stories that I worked on at the same time or after I turned it in. (I also wrote a collaborative play while the novel was going on, which was really helpful-- it was a much more social process, a real relief from sitting alone in a room and trying to make words appear on a screen.)

The stories are a little different... some involve experimentation with form, and some are pieces of straight realism... but many are set in worlds that are a few degrees off from our everyday reality, the way the novel is. I don't think the collection will be seen as a shocking stylistic departure.

As a writer, what drew you to Austin? What do you think of the literary scene here?

Actually, what drew me here was my girlfriend (now wife), who was accepted into a Ph.D. program at UT. I had visited Austin many times, though -- most often as a SXSW tourist-slash-music-geek -- and I'd always thought I would like living here. We both knew that Austin was an incredibly arts-friendly, vibrant, and progressive town, which made the decision to move here clearly the right one, for both of us.

We get a lot of great writers coming through town, we have a lot of people doing interesting work about which they feel passionately, we have some killer bookstores and a lot of avid readers, and this is a place that has great respect for creative expression. Hard to ask for much more out of a literary scene, I think. It might be a bit more socially diffuse than San Francisco's or New York's, but it's certainly friendly and supportive-- and free of competitiveness and/or backstabbing, which is pretty great.

As a teacher at St. Edwards, you work with young writers. Any advice for our readers who may be working on a first novel or thinking about trying to get published?

Yeah-- all the advice that my teachers gave me when I was younger, which I ignored. If I were any good at listening to people, the novel wouldn't have taken so damned long to write.

More specifically, though: when you're working on a novel:

(1) Develop the most consistent work habits you can. You can have some success on the basis of talent and inspiration alone, but there will almost certainly come a time when that's no longer enough. You have to train yourself to keep grinding it out when the act of writing is painful and the words you're writing are painfully bad. Get out what you can get out, fix what you can later, and get used to throwing away the unfixable.

(2) Above all else: Keep moving forward. Get to the end. You're going to have to go back to revise, anyway. I spent a ridiculous amount of time polishing my first 50 pages. Guess what that got me? Fifty shiny-brite pages, and the vast majority of a book still to write.

As for trying to get published:

(1) Try not to focus on trying to get published. This is just my opinion, obviously, but I think that it's far healthier to think of writing as an act of self-expression and self-education than as a way to make some product that someone will want to buy. It's so easy (and counterproductive) to get sucked into valuing product over process -- and there's no greater way to kill the joy that you can find in writing. The irony is that if you devote yourself to your process -- to becoming a better writer, to taking risks and trying to do things on the page that you don't know how to do, to trying and failing and learning how to improve your stuff -- then your product will end up being orders of magnitude better, anyway. But that's an approach that's hard to maintain, because it goes against nearly everything that we've been taught in a culture that values product, instant gratification, and validation by the marketplace. All of which sounds incredibly pompous, I know... but that's what I think, for whatever it's worth.

(2) See (1).