Travis Heermann's Blog, page 10

How Bad It Can Get and What Comes Next

If you have a writing career that ultimately spans decades, it will inevitably fluctuate with highs and lows—and so will the exultation and despair that follows such fluctuations. Contracts and literary agents may come and go. Publishing companies can dissolve and your rights can be lost in a morass of legalese and bankruptcy. The “Mid-List Author Death Spiral,” as it’s called, is a phenomenon well-known to several of my author acquaintances. And this is beyond the usual barrage of rejections we all have to cope with. Unless you’re prepared to go quietly into that good night, you will have to find ways to bounce back from setbacks like these—or else you won’t.

I’ve written extensively about these experiences, and you can find a more detailed story in the Cautionary Tales for Writers Part 1 and Part 2 elsewhere on this blog. I’m approaching these from a different direction here.

In the mid-1990s, I was one of those young writers desperate for industry validation, ripening me into the perfect fruit for the illegitimate predators out there. These were the days when the Web was in its infancy. There were no valuable websites like Writer Beware, Preditors and Editors, and the Association of Author Representatives out there waving red flags about snake-oil peddlers and con artists. Of course I was delighted when the Deering Literary Agency agreed to represent me. All they wanted was $800 to do it. I studied the contract closely, consulted a lawyer, but everything seemed legit—except for the fee. Young (erm, naïve is the more proper word) and desperate as I was, despite being broke, despite the warning bells, I went through with it.

A year passed with no word. Eventually the Deerings (an entire family of con artists) came back to me asking for another $500 for another year’s representation. More warning bells, more phone calls, but like I said, they were con artists and knew exactly what to say to get me to fork it over. So I did.

Six months later, they called me with contract offer. Joy! Exultation!

The contract offer was from Commonwealth Publications, of Edmonton, Alberta. Hmm, never heard of them before. The sample covers they sent sucked, comparable to a middle-school art class. I mean, terrible, not even by the talented art students. Warning bells, warning bells. Calls to agent—who are these people?—much reassurance. And what’s this clause they’re calling “joint venture,” wherein they require the author to contribute $3,850 to “share the publishing costs”? Oh, well, that’s a pioneering new publishing model. Authors share the costs but get a much higher royalty percentage.

So, despite the warning bells, I borrowed the money (remember, I was broke) and handed it over. This was about 1995. I was 25 years old.

I’m going to abbreviate this long, wrenching tale and say that my book, an epic fantasy titled The Ivory Star, was published in the spring of 1997, a year behind schedule. Dozens of other Commonwealth authors never even saw their book published.

Three months after publication, Commonwealth Publications evaporated. Their owner/CEO, Donald Phelan, looted the company of millions of dollars and fled to the Bahamas, leaving his company to implode and all the authors to drown in a pile of steaming excrement.

I never saw a dime of royalties.

One silver lining: the authors formed a class-action lawsuit, sued in Canadian court, and received our rights back, plus a judgment of $10 million. None of this judgment was ever paid because Commonwealth possessed no real assets, and Donald Phelan agreed to the settlement only on the condition that he not be named personally as a defendant. He was able to take the money and run, leaving authors holding the empty sack.

And about the time Commonwealth was imploding, the Deerings had decided to launch their own version of the same scam. Dorothy, Charles, and Daniel Deering formed a company called Sovereign Publishing and started bilking more naïve, desperate authors out of “representation fees” and then “selling” those books to Sovereign Publishing, which then garnered another round of “joint venture fees.” Unlike Commonwealth, however, Sovereign never published a single book, because the FBI came sniffing around.

The good news? The Deerings were all convicted of various types of fraud, and spent several years each in federal prison.

The bad news? They’re out of the pen now, and I suspect working on similar schemes, heedless of the dreams they crush.

FBI agent Jim Fischer has written a book about the case called Ten Percent of Nothing. There’s also plenty of information on Commonwealth and the Deerings on the website Writer Beware.

But there’s one more kick to the solar plexus in this Insult to Injury Extravaganza.

An unscrupulous few of Commonwealth’s former employees banded together, cooked up a scheme, and bought up the company’s stock of printed books for pennies on the dollar when all of the company’s assets were sold at auction in a vain attempt to cover some of its debts. With this warehouse full of almost-free books, these people formed another “publishing company” called Picasso Publications, and attempted to present themselves as the publisher of these titles and sell the books on Amazon. Authors were never contacted nor informed of this move. As soon as wind of this spread and Amazon shut them down, Picasso evaporated just like Commonwealth did, and an unknown number of books along with them.

Whew. Long story, wasn’t it?

Try living through it.

But this is just the prelude. I still haven’t reached the point of my essay.

After three years in total of this sort of emotional pummeling, when it finally all unraveled, I had stopped writing. I just couldn’t do it anymore. As far as I was concerned, my career was a smoking wreck with a flaming oil slick trailing behind. The self-flagellation never quite reached the clinical level, but only because I found other outlets for my grief and shame.

I plunged myself into other creative avenues, such as minitature wargames, roleplaying games, video games. The storytelling urge that had turned me into a writer made me a pretty good GM. I painted hundreds of miniatures. Orc armies, dark elf armies, Norman armies, troll armies, samurai armies, Viking armies, space marine armies. I got pretty damn good at it over a couple of years.

For about two years, I didn’t write a word.

But then something happened. Not all at once, but more like someone slowly turning up the volume knob on that voice in my head that had started saying, “You should be writing,” the urge to write again slunk back like a coyote hovering around the campfire of my consciousness. Eventually I decided to feed the damn thing.

So I started on a new project. A samurai novel. I threw myself into research, into nights at the library, into reading history books and encyclopedias, and into watching more samurai films. The story I was writing became Heart of the Ronin, the first book of my Ronin Trilogy.

And over the course of the next decade, this decision—to write again—turned my life around.

With my shiny new chapters in hand, I attended my very first writing conference in 1999. At that conference, I met real agents, real editors. Lo and behold, they were just people! Kind people! Friendly people! People interested in what I was working on! One of the agents, Sue Yuen, took the time to offer me some feedback on my samurai novel project, and even though she ultimately declined to represent me, I still feel very much indebted to her for that guiding hand. For the first time, I had the professional validation I had been yearning for.

Writing the story that became the Ronin Trilogy led me to throw my life out the window and start over. I moved to Japan and lived there for three years. During this time, I found representation with a real literary agent, one of the big NYC ones, who sold Heart of the Ronin to Gale-Cengage’s Five Star imprint. A decade out from the Commonwealth/Deering cesspit, my career train was back on the tracks.

With my employment contract in Japan coming to an end, I returned to the U.S. and went to grad school, like I had always wanted to. I started going to conventions and networking with agents, editors, and other writers. I wrote more books and sold them to small presses. I attended the Odyssey Writing Workshop in 2009. My train was starting to roll out of the station. Nowadays I feel like it’s moving at a slow but steady pace, with opportunities to pick up some speed popping up occasionally.

I have more books to write, and I’ll be damned if I ever suffer another setback like what Commonwealth and the Deerings did to me.

What I would like the Conscientious Reader to take away from all this is a number of points.

Lesson 1: Money always flows to the writer, never, ever, ever the other way around. Not to agents, not to publishers, not to anthologies or magazines. No reading fees. Period. Full stop.

Lesson 2: Trust your instincts. If something stinks, best pay attention and start digging. These days, the internet is a powerful research tool that I didn’t have twenty years ago.

Lesson 3: If you’re a writer whose Muse has scarpered off to grace someone else’s lap, whose desire to write is just gone, you can expect that the urge to write will return. Doesn’t matter if you’ve experienced your own train wrecks of whatever scale. The Writer Instinct may be retreat into a dark, little hole, but it’s still there, waiting for the coast-is-clear.  And if it doesn’t?

Your heart would certainly be safer if it stayed away.

But writers don’t believe in playing it safe. We’re already insane, and we embrace it.

If it’s gone for now, trust that it will come back, and it just might change your life.

Launching a New Pen Name

Authors often try to keep their pen names secret, like Stephen King did with Richard Bachman for many years. But not always. Others wear their pen names on their sleeves, like Kristine Kathryn Rusch, who openly writes under a different for each genre of her books. One name for SF, one for romance, one for mystery, etc. In cases like this, it’s strictly a branding issue.

I feel it is time to bifurcate my brands, so I’m launching a new pen name, T. James Logan, to represent my efforts in YA fiction. T. James Logan’s first book will be Night of the Hidden Fang, a rebranding of my novel The Wild Boys, with two more Kickstarted books to follow very soon.

Check out the T. James Logan website here.

Until circumstances require, the rest of my fiction will still be written under my real name.

Screenplay Wins Award

Over the weekend of February 16-18, 2018, I had the great pleasure of attending the Famous Monsters Silver Scream Festival in Santa Rosa, CA.

I’m a monster geek from way back, so it was total thrill to be hanging out with film industry people and geeking out about horror films. I got to meet several icons of horror cinema: Ricou Browning, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, who was celebrating his 88th birthday that weekend; John Russo, the screenwriter on Night of the Living Dead; Jackie Kong, director of the cult classic Blood Diner; Kelli Maroney, actress in such classics as Chopping Mall and Night of the Comet; and Barbara Crampton, who starred in two of my favorite horror films, Re-Animator and From Beyond.

The capper, however, was that my “steampunk heart of darkness” screenplay Where the Devil Resides, won the award for BEST HORROR/FANTASY SCREENPLAY.

I’m so gratified to the contest organizers for putting on such a great event. Now to find someone who’ll produce it…

The Fruit Ripens

It was an incredibly up-and-down year, 2017 was. Tumultuous. Fraught. But with incredibly uplifting moments. For me, seeds that I successfully planted came to fruition. I had several short stories come out in 2017, some of them twice.

Fiction River: Superpowers

My story “The Ballad of Osmosis McGuire” made the Tangent Online Recommended Reading List for 2017–with THREE STARS.

Fiction River: Last Stand

“Death Bunnies of Toxic Island” is certainly one of the quirkiest stories I’ve ever done.

Fiction River: Pulse Pounders Adrenaline

“Redline” is the redneck muscle-car mayhem story you never knew you needed. Series Editor Kristine Kathryn Rusch called it a story that will really stick with you.

Fiction River: Visions of the Apocalypse

One of the darkest stories I’ve ever written, “Demon-touched” reveals a plague we didn’t see coming.

 

 

But that ain’t all. My Halloween horror story “Bones of Change” did double duty, appearing in two collections, On Hallow’s Eve and Stars in the Darkness.

 

 

 

 

Here’s hoping the seeds I’m planting today bear fruit as successfully as these. Onward!

There’s No Better Time for Stories about Justice

I’m excited and honored to have a story included in this is new anthology about justice in worlds gone off the rails.

My story “Bones of Change,” which you may recall was also in the Halloween bundle, On Hallows Eve, is about the dead coming for some payback.

All proceeds from this collection will be donated to the  Southern Poverty Law Center and the Human Rights Campaign.

 

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Just in Time for Scary Season: On Hallow’s Eve Bundle

Want to see something really scary? How about a specially curated bundle of Halloween-themed short stories?

My story “Bones of Change” can be found in the On Hallow’s Eve bundle. The cool things about ebook bundles is that you can pay what you want, support indie authors, and support a great charity.

Like scary stuff? Like many flavors of Halloween “candy”? Please give this one a look.

Death Wind Joins New “Bump in the Night Thrillers” Storybundle

If you’re ready for summer thrills and chills (ones that don’t even require air conditioning), I’m delighted to show off the brand new “Bump in the Night Thrillers” storybundle, which just launched today. Sixteen suspenseful, fun, and entertaining reads.

Just click the image above, or go to this URL –> https://storybundle.com/thriller

Storybundle is awesome because you get to name your own price. Then you get the eBooks via instant download in your preferred format. You support indie authors, AND a portion of the proceeds goes directly to charity, to support the worthy cause of the Challenger Learning Centers for Space Science Education. How cool is that?

The bundle books include compelling urban fantasy reads with some of the strangest detectives you’ve ever met, including Kevin J. Anderson’s Dan Shamble Zombie P.I. in Unnatural Acts, as well as ghosts, elves, vampires, sorceresses, modern-day dragon slayers, immortal Shakespearean characters, and more in Dean Wesley Smith’s The Deep Sunset, R.R. Virdi’s Grave Beginnings, Patrick Hester’s Into the Fire, Susan Sizemore’s Living Dead Girl, J.A. Pitt’s Night Terrors, L. Jagi Lamplighter’s Prospero Lost, Alex Berg’s Red Hot Steele and Cold Hard Steele.

For thrilling adventures in other times and places, there’s Death Wind, by yours truly and jim pinto, plus Lady Sherlock by Brooks Wachtel. For straight suspense with a high-tech or a darker edge, you’ll enjoy the Daredevils Club novel Artifact, and The Demon in Business Class by Anthony Dobranski, Whack Job by Mike Baron, and The Devil’s Churn by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

If you like all kinds of fast-paced fiction, my short story “Redline” debuts in Kevin J. Anderson’s new anthology Pulse Pounders 2: Adrenaline. Kristine Kathryn Rusch called “Redline” “one of the most powerful stories I’ve ever read.”

The bundle is only available through August 16. Get a huge bundle of reading material, help support indie authors, as well as the Challenger Center.

A Nice, Cuddly Post-Apocalyptic Western Revenge Story

One of the cool things about being a writer is that sometimes other authors let me play in their sandbox. Aaron Michael Ritchey, author of the Juniper Wars series, a Young Adult story about a family of teenage sisters on a post-apocalyptic cattle-drive, invited me to contribute a story to his world and this was the result.

I wouldn’t call this story YA (it’s more like The Hateful Eight meets The Crying Game), but it was a whole lotta fun to write.

You can download the ebook and PDF files here.

A Nice, Cuddle Post-Apocalyptic Western Revenge Story

One of the cool things about being a writer is that sometimes other authors let me play in their sandbox. Aaron Michael Ritchey, author of the Juniper Wars series, a Young Adult story about a family of teenage sisters on a post-apocalyptic cattle-drive, invited me to contribute a story to his world and this was the result.

I wouldn’t call this story YA (it’s more like The Hateful Eight meets The Crying Game), but it was a whole lotta fun to write.

You can download the ebook and PDF files here.

Women in Horror Month: Scary Confessions – Audrey Brice and Briana Robertson

Audrey Brice

Audrey Brice writes paranormal thrillers, mysteries, and horror stories where spirits, demons, and occult practitioners are both heroes and villains.

As a girl I was terrified of ghosts and physical manifestations of the spirit world after having numerous strange supernatural experiences. By the time I was twelve I set out to explore the unknown. Aside from delving into the occult and participating in ghost hunts, I began writing about those experiences in both fiction and non-fiction in hopes to confront those fears and make sense of them. In fiction, I like to explore the unknown and the dark, but continually find that darkness is within the individual and the unknown isn’t so terrifying once you shed light on it.

GIVEAWAY: Everyone who signs up for my newsletter on my website in February will be entered in a drawing to win a Thirteen Covens ebook, or a copy of the audiobook A Rising Damp.

Website: http://www.sjreisner.com

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Audrey-Brice/e/B003ZFW3DE

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/audreybricewriter

Briana Robertson

Briana Robertson is the author of all things dark–horror, fantasy, poetry, and more. Advocate for mental health and suicide awareness. Wife and mother of three.

Real life scares the crap out of me. Well, that and spiders.

In all seriousness, though, it is the horror of everyday life that terrifies me. As someone who suffers from clinical depression and anxiety, I know firsthand how scary–and desolating and isolating–it can be to feel like no one understands, like no one’s listening, like you’re destined to fail, like life isn’t worth living.

I’m also a mother of three girls, ages 6, nearly 5, and 9 months. You wanna talk about terrifying? What if they run out into the street (anybody read “Pet Sematary”)? What if someone snatches them? What if someone touches them? I mean, the statistics say one in three women will be sexually assaulted at some point in their life; the knowledge that the numbers say at least one of my daughters will go through that–it’s kept me up more than one night.

I don’t need the supernatural to scare me–life is scary enough.

So how does that influence my work? Well, many of my characters have a mental illness of some sort; this causes their perception of the world around them to be warped, which more often than not leads to not-so-happy endings. My soon-to-be released collection “Reaper” includes stories that deal with suicide, rape and psychological torture, the loss of a child. There’s also a sweet short story entitled “Phobia” which was inspired by my own personal dealings with arachnophobia and claustrophobia. And while these stories may not be “scary” in the typical sense of the word–there’s no hack and slash, no major gore, no monsters under the bed or serial killers stalking from the shadows–they pack quite the emotional punch to the gut. They are a gruesome reminder that bad shit happens to good people and death doesn’t discriminate.

And seriously–what’s more terrifying than that?

Website: https://www.stitched2016.wordpress.com

Amazon https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B01K5S2T9G

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Briana_R_Author