Travis Heermann's Blog, page 2

Trailer! Demon for Hire

You may or may not be aware that I’ve been working on my first short film for about the last year and a half, a horror comedy short called Demon for Hire.

I give you…..

THE TRAILER

ROGUES OF THE BLACK FURY are BACK…

…and they’re meaner than ever.

Rogues has been out of print for several months now, but now it’s back with this snazzy new cover!

Sometimes a character just charges out of my subconscious and says, “Write my story. Or else.”

So of course, what am I to do except exactly that. Commander Rusk of the Black Furies demanded a story as big as he is.

There are a lot of influences that went into this book. Glen Cook’s Black Company, Richard Marcinko’s Rogue Warrior series, the real-life stories of special ops warriors like Marcus Luttrell, even going all the way back my sword and sorcery roots with Conan the Barbarian.

Rogues has been out of print for several months now, but now it’s back with this snazzy new cover!

If you like stories hard-bitten heroes on hopeless quests against insurmountable odds, you’ll love this new re-mastered edition of Rogues of the Black Fury.

How can you not love this snazzy new cover?

Available on Amazon Kindle and as trade paperback wherever the cool print books are sold.

“Bold, colorful characters pull the reader into an unforgettable adventure with the perfect mix of suspense, intrigue, and action.” -Jeanne Cavelos, author of The Passing of the Techno-mages and director the Odyssey Writing Workshop

“Rogues of the Black Fury mixes a berserk action thriller sharp as a mercenary’s sword with hard-bitten fantasy so gritty it might scour your bones clean by the time you’re done.” – Matt Forbeck, author of The Blood Bowl Omnibus and NYT Bestselling Halo series

“Heermann’s Rogues is epic, exciting, and a hell of a lot of fun! From the very beginning, the world he crafts feels alive and real. By the last page, I didn’t want to leave. Adventure at its finest, honed to a gleaming bloody edge.” – Marcus Pelegrimas, author of the Skinners series

“A rollicking read choc-a-bloc with pace, action, and adventure.” – Fantasy Book Critic

“A very entertaining read … For fans of Glen Cook or Jeff Salyards, Rogues of the Black Fury could be a great read for a dark winter afternoon.” – A Fantastical Librarian

Draw Steel Here

The Ronin Trilogy Goes Box Set!

The Complete Ronin Trilogy is now in an ebook box set!

It also contains the bonus short story “The Ronin and Green Maiden”, which has been available only as a stand-alone for a while, a mini-adventure as our hero is traveling to meet his destiny.

Extra bonus if you’re a Kindle Unlimited subscriber, where you can read the whole thing for free.

Legend of the Ronin Issue #3 is LIVE

Among the many things the pandemic derailed was my comic book series Legend of the Ronin, which is adapted from my Ronin novels, with pencils and inks by Ramón Pérez, colors by João Rodri, and cover art by Wayne Tanaka.

I feel so fortunate to have these amazing artists lend their talents to this project.

Amazon just rolled out a cool new feature for Kindle users called Guided View, which makes comics way more readable on an electronic device, because it automatically zooms in on each panel so that you can read it easily. Previously the text on a full comic book page was too small to read easily on a small screen, and zooming in was difficult or impossible.

Now, reading comics on your phone, tablet, or Kindle is slick and easy.

And just in time, because I finally put the finishing touches on Legend of the Ronin #3 this week.

All three issues are now available on Amazon and ComiXology.

And you know what this means??

If you’re a Kindle Unlimited subscriber, it’s yours for free!

For non-KU folks the price is $3.99.

Get it now!

“But I love print comics!” you say.

I got you.

All the print comics are available in my online store (or in local Denver area comic stores). If you’re a collector, these first print runs are gonna be super-rare, as I’ve only printed a hundred of each at this point.

Go to online store!

HEART OF THE RONIN Back in Print

It’s done. All files are submitted to distributors and printers.

Heart of the Ronin is now–twelve years after it’s first publication with Five Star, then E-Reads, then Open Road–back in print, but under the Bear Paw imprint.

It seems like such a long road from that initial Five Star edition. It was such a beautiful book. But, oh how times have changed in the publishing industry, and what a tortuous path this book has trekked upon.

I spiffed it up with new interior illustrations by Alan M. Clark, AND I put back in all the beautiful calligraphy that hachi-dan calligraphy master Naoko Ikeda did for me, which the last two publishers omitted.

I’m so excited to offer this new edition that for a limited time I’ve slashed the e-book price to $2.99 everywhere.

The trade paperback is available on Amazon right now, but will be percolating through other distribution channels over the next few days.

With 4.5 stars and 167 reviews to date, you can’t go wrong by grabbing yourself a copy wherever you love to get your next literary adventure.

Demon for Hire – LAUNCH DAY

It’s here. Putting together a crowdfunding campaign is a lot of hard work. And so is making a movie, I have discovered much to my delight.

Put them both together and what do you have? A $#!+load of work.

I’m writing, directing, and producing Demon for Hire, a horror-comedy short film that mashes up a mouthy puppet, live actors, and some cool creature effects. It’s been my dream to make a movie since I was about twelve, imagining how I might goof around with our old 8mm movie camera. I’ve been marching up that learning path for about the last decade.

Yes, I’m not just writing fiction now, I’m branching out, reaching for my lifelong dream of making movies (however small, in this case). ? Unlike previous crowdfunding projects, I’m not using Kickstarter this time. I’m using a new platform specifically for filmmaking, called Seed & Spark. It works slightly differently than Kickstarter, in that the project gets “greenlit” (i.e. funded) if it hits 80% of our goal.

So please jump on board with us! There’s a wide range of support levels, with some fun incentives. We want to make this a fun ride.

$25 – A link to view the film when it’s finished, a shoutout on social media, a personalized video thank you from the main character, and a digital ID badge with your photo for the Demon for Hire Detective Agency.$40 – All the above plus a DVD.$75 – Special Thanks in the movie credits, plus above.

If you’d like to support us but not monetarily, that’s okay! Here’s what you can do instead:

Click this link, then hit the “Follow” button on our campaign at Seed & Spark! Once we hit 250 “followers,” regardless of how many people pledge, we’ll start unlocking creator discounts for this and future projects.Share the campaign on your social media. Here’s some easy cut-and-paste text:

Help @TravisHeermann and his diverse independent filmmaking team by supporting the horror-comedy short film project DEMON FOR HIRE .@seedandspark! Join them here: https://seedandspark.com/fund/demon-for-hire?token=96fa0cb3dd00757da224f330605f125311479b593e5b544f9f1de4711289e5fe

Forward this link to anyone you know who might enjoy our puppet, monster, and mayhem! Your siblings, your roleplaying group, your Bad Movie Buddies, anybody who you might like to geek out with about horror movies and indie filmmaking. Particularly any friends you suspect may be secret millionaires … we all have one. We have Producer credits for those folks. ?

After a year of pandemic hell, it’s time to stop waiting around. Life is too short. Everybody has to start somewhere. Please help us make our little comedy nightmare.

Author to Screenwriter to Filmmaker

At about the time when I started writing my first novel at age twelve (a 250-page single-spaced Barsoom-esque epic), I was also dreaming of making my own movies. My mom found an old, silent 8mm movie camera at a garage sale, so we took to making home movies. It came with a bank of blinding floodlights that were necessary for indoor shots, so whenever we used it indoors, everyone was constantly shielding their eyes. But I dreamed of making movies with it. I tried to do some stop-motion a couple of times, but it just didn’t have that capability. And in the middle of nowhere Nebraska where I grew up, there was no such thing as film school.

I loved movies so much, but it was like their creators existed in an entirely different realm, one I could never reach myself. And then I went to college, got in a relationship, and life took over.

I’ve always had a storytelling instinct. Writing is a big part of that, but over the course of my life, GMing roleplaying games for years also scratched that itch. Even tabletop wargaming filled that space for me, because battles were a story, especially if I had spent many, many hours hand-painting my own armies. The writing was always important, but often it took a back seat to a weekend’s Call of Cthulhu or Vampire: the Masquerade session.

It was in my late 30s, when I was in grad school, having just spent three amazing years in Japan , that a close friend gave me a copy of The Artist’s Way, and we decided to do it together. For the unfamiliar, The Artist’s Way is basically a twelve-step program for re-awakening and re-connecting with our innate creative drives. I strongly recommend it for anyone who loves walking a path through the arts, no matter what media. During one of the exercises, I was asked to think about what kinds of things I would be creating if there were no limits on time, opportunity, money, any of the myriad of things or circumstances that hold us back.

For me, one of those things was screenwriting. I pondered this for a while. My first script was one I was actually paid to write as a freelance project. It was a fun little sci-fi feature, and I discovered quickly that I loved the format of a screenplay, and I loved the idea that I was actually writing something that could become a movie. As far as I know, it never went anywhere, but it was a great learning experience.

I ran into my buddy jim pinto (who hates capital letters) at GenCon and we cooked up the idea to write a screenplay together. So working virtually we cooked up a romantic-dramedy that formed another great learning experience.

There were several things I didn’t realize at first about how this works.

First and foremost, it’s all about belief. Belief in oneself, first and foremost, belief that it can happen.

The same can be said of writing fiction. Part of a fiction career is building up your skills, but it’s also about believing you can make it, believing that your skills are there, that you have stories other people should read. So you send that query. You publish that first book. You submit that short story to your dream publication. And you cultivate insane levels of perseverance.

The walls to enter the film and TV industry are even taller than in publishing, and the gatekeepers are far more brutal and careless. In the publishing industry, you can get an actual rejection. In film and TV, all you get is…crickets. And disingenuous crickets at that.

Gatekeeper: “Wow! That story sounds amazing!”

Me: “Can I send it to you?”

{chirp…chirp…chirp}

It was jim and I’s next script, a Lovecraftian horror-western, Death Wind, that flung wide the doors of belief for me. It won the Grand Prize in the screenwriting contest at the Cinequest Film Festival, an award that came with some actual cash, and told us we had a story with some legs. No one picked up our script, but we subsequently adapted it into a novel I’m really proud of.

But then my screenwriting dreams went fallow for a while, it seems. It was 2017 before I threw myself into it hard again, adapting my novella Where the Devil Resides to script and submitting it festival contests. Its first reward was a trophy plaque and my name in Famous Monsters magazine (which felt like a huge milestone for my little monster-lovin’ heart), and an amazing weekend at the Silver Scream Horror Film Festival, where I got to meet and hang out with John Russo, who wrote Night of the Living Dead, share birthday cake with Ricou Browning, the Creature from Black Lagoon, who had just turned 89, and have a wonderful hang-out with Barbara Crampton, scream queen star from Re-Animator and From Beyond.

If my 17-year-old self watching those movies would have known I’d someday hang out with the lead actress and she’d be really gracious to me, I might have keeled over and died.

Since then, I’ve been to some great film festivals. Shriekfest, Crimson Screen Horror Festival, Genre Blast. Just this month, the Where the Devil Resides script is a finalist at the Filmquest 2021 Film Festival.

Through submitting my scripts to those festivals and scoring some more wins and finalist placement, my belief that I CAN DO THIS has solidified incrementally. Not unlike a fiction writing career as one builds recognition and publication history.

And the single most fun, most important aspect of going to those festivals, like for writers going to conferences, is meeting other filmmakers. They’re a slightly different breed than fiction authors, more outgoing, but passionate from head to toe. I’m really fortunate to have been accepted into that circle of wildly creative people.

Through those levels of acquaintance, acceptance, and mutual geekery around genre films, hanging out with other filmmakers, I realized I now know people with whom I could make my own movie.

It was like a long-buried fossil idea emerging from desert sands.

Because here’s the next most important thing after belief: having that network of friends who are filmmakers is how your movie gets made.

There’s a reason producers and directors work with the same actors and crew over and over again.

Filmmaking is a small, incestuous industry, abounding with flakes, poseurs, and hangers-on. Finding reliable people you enjoy working with is how your movie gets made. Because, at the opposite end of the spectrum from the solitary, introverted pursuits of a writer, filmmaking is the most collaborative artistic venture in existence. Any given MCU movie has literally thousands of people in the credits, because they all had to work on getting that behemoth made. If you start digging just a little, there are tons of amazing movies that didn’t get made (e.g. earlier attempts at John Carter and Justice League films), that stalled or had the plug pulled somewhere along the tortuous process.

At Genre Blast in 2019, where my short script That Long Black Train won a cool trophy, one of the screenplay judges, Sam Kolesnik (who’s now one of those awesome filmmaker friends) came up to me and struck up a conversation.

As I recall it, the conversation went something like:

“Your writing is really good!”

“Hey, thanks, uh….”

“What you need to do now is just make a movie.”

“Uh, me?”

“Yes! Just do it. It will probably suck, but that’s okay. Do it anyway. It will still be awesome in its own way. Because that’s what everybody here is doing. Just making their movie.”

And if we extrapolate from a fiction career: then when that one’s done, if you love it, do it again.

That conversation apparently stuck with me, because the idea emerged full blown from the COVID-desiccated sands of my pandemic brain back in February—2021 would be the year I make a movie. So I contacted some friends I had made at film festivals, who had made a number of indie shorts and features, and they jumped on board. That was the beginning of our production team.

So I wrote a short script that mashes up some of my favorite things: cosmic horror, comedy, (m)uppets (don’t tell the Mouse I used that word), and cool creature effects. And voila, we have Demon for Hire, the story of a demon private detective who helps mortals with their problems while corrupting them to the Dark Side.

Aside from collaboration, you know what else is required to make movies? Money. There’s no two ways about it. Films can be done on micro-budgets with enough ingenuity and chutzpah, but everything has a price. So, once again, we turn to crowdfunding in the hope that enough people will think this is a project worth doing.

We hope you’ll think so. We’re launching the crowdfunding campaign on Seed & Spark on May 11, where it will run for a month.

Even if you’re not interested in helping out monetarily (which is totally okay!), a simple FOLLOW is a huge help. If the campaign garners enough Followers, Seed & Spark unlocks some really helpful promotion and distribution bonuses. You can also share the campaign with someone who might love to help. Your siblings, your roleplaying group, your Bad Movie Buddies, anybody who you like to geek out with about horror movies and indie filmmaking.

Just click on the image below. We could really use your help making this happen. Thank you for your support!

https://seedandspark.com/fund/demon-f...

Coming Soon – DEMON FOR HIRE!

A lot has happened since my last post, the one about Ruminations on Time. Something must have clicked, because I’ve been in high gear pretty much ever since.

In late February, I decided to make a movie, so I sat down and hammered out the first draft of a script that became Demon for Hire, a horror-comedy short about a fuzzy blue demon — a puppet — who helps mortals with their problems while he corrupts them to the Dark Side.

I’m making my first short film, a horror-comedy called Demon for Hire. Rather than tell you about the project itself, I’ll point you the attached link for the upcoming crowdfunding campaign.

What I want to tell you about here is what I’ve been up to.

When I was in seventh grade, my home town’s auditorium burned to the ground, the only building with a stage. So I was in a couple of gradeschool theater productions, but nothing in high school, because the town council was too cheap and shortsighted to rebuild the building with a stage. Stage theater didn’t exist where I was from, so I’ve never really been around “The Theater” (imagine a British accent here).

So now that I’ve jumped into filmmaking with both feet, I’m neck deep in theater people. Writers are different from theater people. Like that old Garrison Keillor joke, the extraverted writers look at the other person’s shoes.

But I digress. For the last few weeks, I’ve been setting up everything that necessary for this film venture.

Wrote a first draft of the script.Launched a new film company, Bear Paw Films LLC, and built the website.Since this movie has creature effects, I found a local guy, Kevon Ward, who does incredible stuff in the movie monster realm and hired him to get on board.Acquired a whole suite of digital effects (flames, smoke, shockwaves, etc.) and musical score.Put out feelers through all the filmmakers I’ve met over the last few years, and brought on an experienced team, Michael Epstein and his wife Sophia Cacciola of Launch Over, who do Production Sound and Cinematographry respectively.Started putting together the crowdfunding campaign and all its attendant work, pitch video, incentives, etc., along with the help of the inimitable Ann Myers on the graphics.Through the grapevine, acquired a Production Designer, Troe’ Williams, who has forty years of theater experience to handle costuming and set design.

(this project is already WAY more work than I was imagining)

Over the last couple of weeks, put out a casting call and started auditioning actors for the four roles in the film. I was really gratified that over 30 actors applied, and over the weekend we made the decisions. I’m super-happy with the folks we found.Secured two of four locations to shoot. I’m still looking for a noir-style P.I. office.

The list of things to do is still enormous before we’re ready to start shooting.

Find the location for Sully’s office.Develop storyboards and shooting script.Launch crowdfunding campaign and see it through to successful completion (a full-time job by itself).Buy props.Actor rehearsals.Shoot some test footage and practice greenscreen compositing and digital effects so that when we get to the real shots, I know where the pitfalls and must-dos are.

It’s going to be an interesting summer. All this is, of course, on top of all the writing I need to do. Tokyo Monster Mash is out. Tokyo Demon Parade (Book 3) is on hold for a couple of months.

I would be much obliged if you could click the link to Seed & Spark, then click FOLLOW. 

Even if you’re not interested in monetary support, a simple Follow helps a great deal.

Why? Because if we can get 250 followers, Seed & Spark unlocks some really sweet bonuses that will help the film get attention both before and after it’s finished.

Thank you for being here! It’s going to be another wild ride.

Ruminations on Time

This all sort of came to me this week when I was journaling, and it’s something that’s often on my mind–ruminations on time.

The things we spend our lives doing. Are they worthy? Will they make us proud in the end? Are we building things? Feeding people? Educating people? Saving people? Healing people? Delving into the secrets of the universe? Touching people with art and music?

I’m hoping to have a good few decades to go, but you never know. In the last year, I’ve lost two friends younger than me to cancer. I could get COVID-19 from a trip to the supermarket and be dead in two weeks, like more than half a million Americans. (Yes, the disease has now depopulated a city the size of Kansas City.)

So the older I get, the more I feel the accelerating approach of the end. The pressure it creates to get things done, to finish what I started, to pursue dreams I’ve been reaching for since I was young, is a powerful thing.

That’s probably why I have so many irons in the fire. Currently those irons consist of four novels, two comic books, a short film, and scripts I’m still shopping around, scripts still to write. Books still to write.

Thank you for being here to read them.

As you may recall, I’m a huge fan of the HBO series Deadwood. This weekend I finally took the opportunity to watch the Deadwood movie, which came out in 2019, thirteen years after the show was unexpectedly cancelled in the middle of its third season. I’m not sure why I waited so long to watch the movie, maybe wanting to savor it?

It’s rough, it’s gritty, and it’s not for everyone, but Deadwood is some of the finest writing ever produced for television. The dialogue just sings, Shakespearean in its wit and pathos. The characters are fascinating in their depth and complexity, taking real historical figures and making them come alive.

Deadwood: the Movie was a shining capstone on a story that ended before its time, a powerful story beautifully told.

I think the reason it resonated so strongly with me is because its central theme was Ruminations on Time, something that shows up in my own writing, probably most of all in The Hammer Falls.

We have an entire cast of characters–and they were all back–twelve years later, older, sometimes wiser, but all of them with a rough set of extra miles on them, all there to confront the greatest of the story’s many villains. There weren’t many white hats in Deadwood.

It wasn’t just the story that struck me, though. As I watched the special features afterward, I kept thinking about how the series creator and writer David Milch looked really frail, and several people talked about how what he was going through was reflected in the story, and how working with him this time was so different than before. He had lost much of his vigor.

It turns out that David Milch was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s about the time this movie was being produced. And then I kind of lost it, and all I could think was, “What an amazing mind to be lost to such a horrible disease.”

Milch has been around a while. He made his career writing Hill Street Blues back in the 80s, a series that revolutionized cop shows. Even as a kid, I recognized how good it was, without being able to put my finger on why. I just knew it was different from every other cop show in all kinds of ways, and so much better.

Knowing that he had entered the long, cruel, tragic twilight of his life, I was even happier to know that he was able to put a beautiful capstone on an amazing, artful TV series.

So, ruminations on time. The power of Milch’s stories, the quality of his writing, the depth of his characters, these are things for a writer to aspire to. Now, with his light fading, it falls to writers who admire his work to pick up the torch and carry on.

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