The Rhuins
Trivia/Facts about All I See Is Red
How All I See Is Red Came To Be
Like most of my stories, All I See Is Red came at me in pieces, starting in 2007 or 2008, when I was a reporter working a very rural farming county in the far Northwest Suburbs of Chicago. Unlike city beats, tens of miles separate assignments in rural areas, and I was doing a lot of country driving.
One afternoon, I was on a rural route between photo assignments and saw a barn come into view in the distance. One side of its roof was angled straight and stopped about twenty feet up while the other side was sloped like a quarter-pipe and reached nearly to the ground. Seeing it, I immediately thought, Wow, that looks like a ramp. But for a giant.
And there it was. The conception of All I See Is Red.
My brain bit on the image and sparked a story...but it wouldn’t fully ignite for another year or so.
Additional Trivia
All I See Is Red is not the book’s original title. It was originally titled Man and Monster and was only changed very recently while designing the cover.
While the line “All I see is red” is spoken twice by two different antagonists in the story, it’s also a play on the old news riddle: “What’s black and white and red all over?”
The opening scene and ending scene of the prologue are very loosely based on real events that happened to me while on assignment.
The first draft of All I See Is Red finished at approximately 120,000 words, which is incredibly long for a first novel (though this is not my first novel). About 35,000 words were edited out, which included several story and plot reductions. The oldest surviving scene is the character Richard Gentry reacting to protagonist Dutch Kanin’s phone call...I think.
The character Marcus Thrugood was not originally developed for All I See Is Red. The name was but the essence of the character was pulled from a character developed for another story. Additionally, much of Marcus Thrugood and Iris Redgrave’s combined backstory was pulled from the same story.
While it may appear that this book was written over a course of about twelve years (see “How All I See Is Red Came To Be” above), it really wasn’t. Long hiatuses were taken during the writing, during which I wrote many other things, started a newspaper, moved, and had a son. Consecutively, the book took about three years to write and edit.
The scene that was most rewritten is when Dutch visits the giant to retrieve his memory card.
In the book, The Register’s newsroom shares a wall with a mechanic. This is based on an actual newsroom I worked at once, which did share a wall with a mechanic. You could hear the impact wrenches working all day, and it’s not a bad sound to work to.
Iris Redgrave is not the character’s original name. She started off as Heather. Same thing with Lucy Aimes. She was originally Jamie Haylette. And while Dean Kroizer’s first name has never changed, he had a number of last names including various spellings of Kroizer. Biggest of all, though, is Dutch’s. In his earliest incarnation, Dutch was Jackson Ray Vaughn, Jack for short, which is the pseudonym he goes by during his employment in Kadoa.
Though it’s never stated in the story, All I See Is Red contains themes from King Kong and the story of “David and Goliath.” And it was partly inspired by Noah Gunderson’s “David.” (One of my favorite musicians, by the way.)
In the final edit, the character Marcus Thrugood was almost removed from the story.
