John Pulver
John Pulver didn't set out to become a novelist. He set out to make his friends laugh in a diner booth at Crazy Otto's, telling stories about a group of bikers who'd wandered in one night and left an impression. What started as a bit between friends turned into a first draft, and the first draft turned into Bill the Biker.
Since then, the stories have gotten darker and stranger without losing the humor that started it all. Hollywood Bodies, co-written with longtime friend Robert Jablon, won the Grand Prize in the Writer's Digest 13th Annual Self-Published E-book Awards. Prima and Killswitch followed, each one pulling at a different thread: ambition, danger, the systems we trust without thinking about it.
Read the Writer's Digest Magazine interview
JR Waterbear
John also writes with coauthor Robert Jablon, under the name of JR Waterbear, a pen name with a stranger origin than most. The idea came out of a conversation about tardigrades, the microscopic creatures sometimes called "moss piglets" or "water bears" for the way they look under a microscope: small, tough, and nearly impossible to kill. They liked the image of something so small surviving conditions that would destroy almost anything else, and the name stuck.
Under that name, they have written stories that lean further into the strange and the personal, including A Howling Good Time, a short piece that tells the fuller version of the JR Waterbear story.
Robert Jablon
Robert Jablon was a professional journalist with Associated Press who lives in France. He is married to a wonderful and long-suffering woman and has a dog. Not a big, heroic dog; a beagle whose life revolves around food (much like the characters in his fiction). He grew up as an Army brat and has intimate knowledge of deserts and BF-nowhere towns. That is why he now lives in France.
How the Writing Happens
Most of it still starts the same way it did at Crazy Otto's: a story told out loud first, tested on whoever's in the room, before it ever hits the page. John and Robert have been writing together for years now, long enough that the line between "who came up with what" has mostly worn away. The partnership works because neither of them takes it too seriously until the story demands it.
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