Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 26, 1994 TAG: 9407140044
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: By SU CLAUSON-WICKER SPECIAL TO ROANOKE TIMES & WORLD-NEWS
DATELINE: FAIRLAWN LENGTH: Long
For instance, one day he looks out at the neighbors' idle garden, wondering why they're not putting in potatoes by now. So he makes up a fantasy in which the neglected garden becomes a sign from a gifted psychic that the apocalyptic times are upon us.
In another Saplak fantasy, he speculates on what goes through a woman's mind when she sees that her leg hair is growing out as long and dark as an animal's. He creates a bored, suburban housewife who feels compelled to spend more and more time in the woods until she moves there completely. He also invents a civil servant who receives patriotic programming through her optic nerve and an idiot who gossips in rhyme.
"In fantasy you're never limited by anything," says Saplak, whose stories have been anthologized between Edgar Allen Poe's and H.G. Wells' in a Hitchcock horror collection. "There's nothing you can't shake up."
Saplak enjoys nothing more than giving the commonplace a bizarre twist. Many of these everyday situations, often set in New River Valley towns, have been showing up in "the year's best horror" anthologies and winning national science fiction awards. The twists he adds always occur for a reason; he always has some underlying commentary, whether it's about government, religion, feminism or human relations.
One of his publishers found these truths universal enough to translate Saplak's futuristic story of duty to a government into Chinese, making Saplak one of the first Americans to be paid by the Chinese for fantasy. ("I think the check only came to $8," he said. "But I was assured I could have lived well for awhile on that in Shanghai.")
Saplak has won awards for both his poetry (a nomination for the Pushcart Prize) and for his mainstream fiction (a grant from Berea College), but he prefers fantasy because of what he can say there.
"Fantasy," Saplak says, "is not escapism. You must have a kernel of something very true in the writing. In fact, I've found you can say a lot more in fantasy because people accept it better. They don't develop a reaction to an entertaining political satire the way they do to an essay. Perhaps fantasy's distance from the subject makes it easier to digest."
Although Saplak's own life cannot be called a retreat into fantasy ("too many bills to pay"), it has taken some interesting turns. Saplak admits he never wrote much as a teen-ager. "I didn't have a lot to say then," he said. After growing up near Beckley, W.Va., and graduating from West Virginia University with a degree in psychology in 1982, he worked for Bell Atlantic in the Washington, D.C., area for two years and then enlisted in the U.S. Navy.
"I had no discipline or direction, " he said. "I knew I'd learn discipline in the Navy or find out I didn't have the capacity to succeed. I picked up a lot there about goal-setting - plan of action with milestones, they called it - and I'm still using it today ."
Saplak served as an officer on board ship and as a naval ROTC instructor at Virginia Tech. In 1990, he left the Navy to write. "I had reached the point where I wanted to get into it for the long haul," he said. With the support of his wife, Karen, and daughter, Charlene, now 5, he earned his master's in English from Radford University and started a full-time program of writing. To supplement Karen's income as a telephone operator, he teaches classes at New River Community College and has just started working as an operator himself.
But his real work for the past four years has been writing. He writes in solid blocks day or night, or - in moments when he can't write - works out plot structure. He has goals - a story a month, a finished novel and a draft of a sequel by the end of the year. So far, he's met them all, even in the earlier years when he worked like a maniac to produce a story a week. He writes with the discipline he learned in the Navy, according to rules he picked up early in his writing career: write every day, finish every piece you write, and market every piece you finish.
Last year he passed a milestone - 100 sales - and switched gears.
"Now my aim is to get every story I do into a prestigious market. I want to write each work as if it were my last," he said.
The book shelf above his couch is lined with his published works. Some are glossy magazines with names that include Expanse, The Urbanite, Bone Saw, Argonaut, The Leading Edge, and Tales of the Unanticipated. But lately he's been adding hard-cover books to this collection. His stories are included in ""Alfred Hitchcock's Tales of the Supernatural and the Fantastic," "The Year's Best Science Fiction and Horror 1993," "Writer of the Future" (for which he won a trip to California to meet with fantasy professionals), and "Cthulhu's Heirs," an anthology based on myths by H.P. Lovecraft. He hopes his recently completed first novel - a coming of age story set in a fantasy re-creation of the Holocaust - will join them soon.
Despite his passion for writing, Saplak can often be found sitting in front of his impressive bookcase, watching television with the family or reading children's stories to his daughter. "We're a big distraction; we like him out there eating popcorn with us," says Karen, his wife.
Charlene's imagination fascinates her dad. The 5-year-old insists she's followed around by a miniature clown who talks to her in Chinese. She also likes to stop Saplak in the middle of reading one of her stories and say, "Let's twist this around."
So they take the story and give it two or three hearty twists, a Saplak trademark. They've even collaborated to create their own story about a girl who turns into a dolphin. The adult fairy tale by Charles and Charlene Saplak is being considered by several magazine publishers.
"This story is set in the same world as my novels. I'm spending a lot of time there these day," he said.
by CNB