Processing: How Mads Gobbo and Miles Klee Wrote Double Black Diamond
The authors on literary collaboration, small press publishing, hooking readers with unusual sentences, and the need to “speak other futures into existence.”
On a semi-regular basis, I interview authors about their writing processes and the craft behind their books. You can find previous entries here. This time, I talked with Mads Gobbo and Miles Klee about their co-authored story collection, Double Black Diamond, which was released earlier this month by the new small press Double Negative. Double Black Diamond is a rollicking and rambunctious collection of stories that veer between subject matter and genres but are united by a sensibility and sharp-as-switchblades sentences. There are teen murder cliques, corporate office birds, meals of mutated shrimp, a stench plague, and lots more. If you love weird, wild, erotic, and macabre stories then you too might love Double Black Diamond.
I spoke to Gobbo and Klee over email about literary collaboration as love letters, small press publishing, hooking readers with unusual sentences, and the need for authors to “speak other futures into existence.”
Double Black Diamond is the kind of story collection that reminds me of rocking a good mixtape, from the design and art down to the stories that span genres and styles. The vibe of one story might vary wildly from the next, which I really enjoyed. As a first question, how did you go about picking the stories for this collection and ordering them?
Miles: Honestly, these are just the stories we managed to finish and refine. There are countless half-drafts of ideas that just sort of fizzled out for one reason or another. We were working on one that was going to be about a couple getting stuck in a weeks-long traffic jam, but then I happened to read Julio Cortázar’s “The Southern Thruway,” which is the exact same concept, and unbelievably good, and I thought, “Well, we can’t top that.” As for order, we tried to vary the tempo and themes so you never get two similar stories in a row (this zigzagging also fits the title of the collection). It was important to spread out the longer stories with elaborate alternate realities, because they ask a little more of the reader, but we also wanted to start with an especially gonzo example of those, “Total Farce,” to plunge you into the deep end right away. And how can you not end with “The Last Vanilla Milkshake on Earth”?
Mads: Slurp slurp. I love the mixtape comparison because in high school I had a habit of making mix CDs and leaving them on people’s cars. It was a manic pixie seduction technique that netted me exactly zero action. But I discovered a lot of good music. As we were writing these stories, Miles and I were also making collaborative playlists with titles to soundtrack our long distance love affair: “lust coast,” “hump symphony,” “Endless Makeout.” We revealed ourselves through art we admired, then our own writing. Writing collaboratively was the next natural step. The narrative and sonic structures we built reflected the ways we fell in love, and for me, re-reading this collection evokes specific moments and emotions in our relationship, which now spans over a decade. To contradict Miles, there’s a secret internal logic to the order of stories I couldn’t articulate if I tried.
Each story includes an illustration at the start, which helps set the vibe for each story. (I promise I will not use the word “vibe” again in this interview). What was the process of illustrating the stories and deciding what image would best suit each tale?
Mads: I give credit to another important collaborator, our publisher and co-founder of Double Negative, Nick Greer, for helping deliver the illustrations and overall look to such sickening success. Nick and I are collaborators on an erotic science fiction comic (Forbidden Pleasures, coming to bookstores everywhere as soon as we figure out how to print it), and I appreciate his relentless idea drive and elaborate folder systems. We created a monster art direction document and collected influences from Where’s Waldo to Goosebumps to the text-forward cover designs of 1970s pulp science fiction. I’ve always loved the scratchy pen-and-ink illustrations you find in classic chapter books, like Quentin Blake’s art for the works of Roald Dahl, and I knew I wanted a representative image for each story. Nick and I went through the text and pulled out phrases or images we thought would illustrate well, things like “dead goose (need stinky lines)” or “confessional booth glory hole,” argued until we were both dissatisfied, and then I went to work with my Tachikawa nib pen. I’m attracted to the nib pen because it blurs the distinction between drawing and writing, forcing the holder to evaluate letters as artistic forms and transform scribbles into language. The scribbly cover illustrations and endpapers are a nod to that ambiguity. Black ink illustrations also helped to keep the printing cost low.
Collaboration is such a common practice in many art forms, but it is uncommon to see a novel or story collection with shared author credit. What did collaboration bring to the project? What excites you about collaboration in general?
Miles: A lot of these stories were first composed when we lived on opposite sides of the country, and that became a valuable way of keeping in touch (and, at times, even working through our emotions about being painfully separated). Our method has always been sort of epistolary—one person writes a page or a paragraph, then trades it off to the other to keep it going. That was exciting because you got to be continually surprised by the narrative even as you were working on it. The goal was always to entertain each other; we had no readers in mind besides ourselves, and I think you see the intimacy and the freedom of form that resulted from that.
Mads: I experienced a small panic attack a few hours before our book launch, thinking of all the people who would now get a peek at my most secret love letters. But the magic of collaboration is transformative: the finished product is greater than the sum of its parts. Because these stories have lived with us for many years now—and undergone many rounds of revisions—I can no longer tell you which of us wrote what sentence. Together we shaped these raw emotions into something new and surprising even to ourselves. Our culture grants great weight to the solitary artist, his (it’s usually his) singular vision, even when the artistic process involves the labor and ideas of many other people, as in film or publishing. Art is always communal and relies on the good-faith collaboration of others: at minimum, a viewer or a reader. When a dream is shared, it gains the power to shape reality in its image. That alignment excites me.
Can you talk about the process of publishing this book? How long it took to complete, revising, finding a publisher, etc. Whatever you are willing to share.
Miles: The original stories themselves took about five years to write, off and on, roughly 2014-2019, during which we were far apart and then, right in the middle, moved in together. It’s revealing that one of the latest stories, “Castle Doctrine,” involves two people simultaneously breaking into the same house, and “Glashaus” concerns the contested ownership of a semi-magical property. We never exactly sought a publisher, having placed the stories in a handful of nice little outlets and having no success getting others into digital or physical print (we never understood why “Your Whole Body Is Also Light” and “The Old, Old, Very Old Man” couldn’t escape the slush pile, but we had worked them hard enough that we stood behind their execution and didn’t care if a random editor didn’t vibe with them). It was only when Double Negative was launching that we really entertained a full collection. Then, even while our editors flatteringly told us that the stories were all pretty close to ideally polished already, we took the better chunk of a year over 2024-2025 to figure out every weak spot and bring each story to its fullest perfection, with these surgical readers identifying every possible beat and line where we could do better. It was thrilling and challenging to go from the one-on-one dynamic to a two-by-two game.
Double Black Diamond is the second book published by the new small press Double Negative. It’s often said, correctly IMHO, that small presses publish much of the most interesting and innovative books these days. What should readers know about Double Negative? And what would you say are the advantages of publishing on a small press?
Miles: Double Negative is a brand-new press founded by our friends Nick Greer and Ingrid Wenzler, who met at the MFA program at the University of Arizona. Double Black Diamond is the second book they’ve published, following Mike Powell’s novel New Paltz, New Paltz. No doubt your newsletter readers know all about the challenges of selling fiction to a major publisher these days, especially if the work is not easily classified or falls outside the mainstream, so it was a delight to us when Nick and Ingrid suggested that we collect our stories—about half had appeared in literary journals, but the others had never lived anywhere but our Google Drives—in a single volume. They started Double Negative as a home for more eclectic prose than you’ll find at the Big Five, and as a way to publish authors in their orbit. At its most basic, the pitch was, “Why wait for other people’s permission to put a book out?” Yes, it meant forgoing an advance and handling lots of the logistics ourselves: Mads, a fabulous illustrator, worked intensively with Nick on our cover design, for example. But that also meant we had a level of control over the finished product that is basically unheard of in the industry, and we were overjoyed with how the actual books turned out. That it was just the four of us having all these discussions and making all these decisions, without input from conflicting corporate departments, meant we got exactly the object we wanted, not some market-optimized, committee-approved version of it. Can’t put a price on that.
Mads: As a former bookseller, I’ll tell you that the most exciting published work, the most daring ideas, the most thrilling forms, cannot and do not exist without the under-paid and unpaid labor of small press workers. Small presses champion writers throughout their development and give them the space to work outside of commercial considerations. If we had a healthier distribution model, instead of the current market domination by giants like Ingram and the Big Five, small press work would be easier to access, the workers would be paid a living wage, our national discourse would improve, and we’d achieve world peace. I don’t believe anyone benefits from consolidation of ideas and information into a few corporate-controlled channels. Recently a group of small press folk banded together to form a new distributor, Asterism, which is just punk and cool as hell, and you can order our book through them. Don’t waste your life complaining about gatekeepers. Make a gate for yourself and walk through it!
The back cover description starts with the phrase “The future is fucked and it is already here.” This really does describe the feeling of the stories, many of which exist in an alternative present in which speculative elements like office-working birds or “Emergency Vivification Services” exist. At the same time, these fantastic elements collide with more mundane realities we can all relate to like boring office jobs or teenage cliques.
What excites you about combining the bizarre and the familiar?
Mads: I think we live in a bizarre time. Fascism is inherently absurd. We go about our days while our neighbors are kidnapped off the streets and our taxes fund genocide in Gaza. Our technocratic overlords consume too much science fiction and think they own the future. Progressives shake their heads and say “I can’t believe this is happening here.” But belief is a tool we can use to fight. The conditions that make this country ripe for cruel absurdity also make possible utopian or communistic ideals. Not to get on a high horse, but I believe people with imagination have a responsibility to speak other futures into existence. Surreality as a writing technique serves to awaken the reader. I think of it like a Seek-and-Find, where you have to pinpoint the details that differ between two images. The suggestion of change casts familiar surroundings in a new light.
Since these are craft-focused interviews, I thought it would be fun to start asking authors about specific techniques. Something that stood out to me in these stories are the first lines, which grab the reader’s attention and open that “curiosity gap” that makes one want to keep reading. Some sample first lines:
“The man under the bed held his breath.”
“I’d asked my priest friend to get me pregnant.”
“None of us had been murdered before.”
“She cruises the badly lit suburb, seeking a boy to take the needle.”
What’s your approach to first lines?
Miles: When I write alone, I typically start with a voice, and the first line can change dramatically through multiple revisions. But when Mads and I write together, we start with some sense of a premise and talk it out a little before either of us is even looking at a blank page. I think solidifying the idea with a partner first gave us both the confidence to come charging in with bold opening lines that heighten anticipation for whatever new world we’ve imagined—and I believe very few of them, if any, changed throughout revision. They became useful anchors for how we wanted to calibrate the mood and language of each story, from our sci-fi noir to our imitation of Russian surrealism from a hundred years ago to our relatively matter-of-fact erotic blasphemy. Another way of looking at these first lines is as the generative engines of the stories—we came up with unusual or unexpected sentences to hook the reader, then we had to justify them.
Mads: Think about how hard you work on a message to a new lover. The number of times you delete and retype and wait for the right moment to hit send. The friends you consult for editorial advice. The miserable clarity you feel after sending, when the recipient doesn’t respond. The ecstatic thrill when they finally do. That same intensity drove these compositions. If you want to try high-wire writing, do it with someone you have a crush on.
Lastly, what are you both working on now (together or separately)?
Miles: Now that Double Black Diamond is out in the world, it’s time for me to embark on the billionth draft of the novel I’ve been trying to crack for years. It’s a thriller about terrorism and the art world that got a little too bloated and needs to be streamlined so it’s leaner and meaner. Also, through the newsletter collective Flaming Hydra, I’ve been irregularly publishing chapters of what I’m thinking of as a serialized autofiction novel, though a lot of it is entirely made up. Together, we have talked about going back to a TV pilot script we came up with a while ago, theoretically an animated comedy centered on a mystery bookshop in a small town on the Oregon coast where people are constantly getting murdered. We think of it as Bob’s Burgers meets Twin Peaks. It’s called Red Herrings.
Mads: I’m looking forward to polishing up the aforementioned erotic comic and getting that into some stores, though with the current state of the comics industry, we may start hawking copies on a street corner. Here in Los Angeles, I’m a proud member of Rax Will Writing Group, which is NOT a cult. With their support I’m making headway on a short novel about two elderly women who undergo psychic training to cure their dementia, to horrifying results. My family will ask if the main character is based on my grandmother. She absolutely is.
My new novel Metallic Realms is out in stores! Reviews have called the book “Brilliant” (Esquire), “riveting” (Publishers Weekly), “hilariously clever” (Elle), “a total blast” (Chicago Tribune), and “just plain wonderful” (Booklist). My previous books are the science fiction noir novel The Body Scout and the genre-bending story collection Upright Beasts. If you enjoy this newsletter, perhaps you’ll enjoy one or more of those books too.
Those collaborators a couple? Otherwise that would be one uncomfortable photo session : )