Travis Heermann's Blog, page 6

Junk Magic and Guitar Dreams – The Audiobook!

About five years ago, I was at a birthday party for one of my wife’s colleagues, and was busy circulating around the room, chatting with people, drink in hand. I struck up a conversation with a woman who raised horses for a living.

“So, what do you do for work?” she asked me.

“I’m a writer.”

“Oh. So, you don’t then.”

Rather than purposefully spill my beer on her, I quickly found other people to chat with.

For a society that so voraciously consumes art, we don’t seem to place much value on those that create it. Musicians, painters, screenwriters, anyone who wishes to live a life dedicated to the arts, has heard from someone, “So, you want to flip burgers, then, do you?”

I was fortunate enough to have family who supported my weird pursuits, even if they didn’t understand them. Many writers or musicians, etc., didn’t have that luxury. But I did grow up in a place where everyone was expected to “work for a living,” so I was steeped in those attitudes from birth. It took me a couple decades longer than it should have to embrace the writing life.

In many ways, musicians have it worse than writers, because music, by its nature, is ephemeral. The black marks I put on a page stay there. Until the advent of recording technology, sounds just dissipated in the air. But musicians create something that is incredibly powerful, something that sticks in our brains in ways nothing else can. How many songs can you bring immediately to mind, even if you haven’t heard them for years? (Or worse, advertising jingles. Ugh. It annoys me that a certain portion of my brain space is permanently devoted to the Oscar Mayer bologna song. But I digress…)

Music permeates us. At work. In the car. Television shows and movies. It can jog other memories, like experiences of a high school dance forever associated with the song playing at the time. We all have songs that make us bounce, tap our feet, or cry. 

This is where Junk Magic and Guitar Dreams came from. The story of a boy with a guitar and a dream, dealt a bad hand by life. How do you get from being an orphan half a step away from the street to the beginning of a career in the only thing that matters to you?

The Junk Magic and Guitar Dreams audiobook is here.

The Narrators!

Ian Hawkins travels the renaissance festival circuit as a craftsman and a boothie. He is a perpetually beginner mandolin player and loves good stories. After decades of reading to friends and family, he discovered that’s an actual job, and now narrates books professionally.

Najah Johnson is a union actress and singer who has been seen on the NJ and NY stage and screen. Reading as a teen and adult have always brought her joy, and she was so excited to be part of this project. Najah’s rendition of Lika’s scenes are just incredible. Like Ian, she doesn’t just narrate; she acts. Her voice brings an endearing warmth and a thoughtful depth to Lika’s character that I won’t soon forget.

Junk Magic and Guitar Dreams is getting much wider distribution than my other audiobooks, and it’s appearing on new platforms almost every day.

If it’s not yet at your favorite audiobook outlet, don’t despair. It soon will be.

Click the image below for available retailers.

It’s a Book Birthday!

Let’s have birthday cake.

Who’s Watching the Watchmen?

This week, I want to talk about Watchmen, the graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, and carried on in the stunningly good HBO series of the same name, helmed by Game of Thrones showrunner Damon Lindelof.

When the TV series debuted last fall, many of my friends talked about how good it was, but as usual, I’m a little slow to get around to things.

I started watching the HBO series a couple of nights ago…and binged the first three episodes. They knocked my socks off.

The wild thing is how incredibly relevant it is now, in the midst of nationwide protests about racial inequality and police brutality and white supremacists slithering out of the woodwork. Over the 4th of July weekend, a black activist escaped an attempted lynching, caught on video, in Indiana.

The first episode opens with one of the worst instances of white supremacist violence in the history of the U.S., the Tulsa Massacre of 1921, where hundreds of people were slaughtered, thousands left homeless, and an entire, affluent black suburb was erased from the map in a single day.

This new story dovetails, becoming kind of a sequel, with the events of Moore and Gibbons’ graphic novel and the Zack Snyder film adaptation. The story is so different thus far, three episodes in, and yet it feels 100% Watchmen.

I teach the graphic novel in my university SF Literature class, and when Time called it “one of the best novels of the 20th century,” I think they were spot on.

So these first three episodes were so good, I felt compelled last night to go back and watch The Ultimate Cut of the film, which includes the Tales of the Black Freighter animated side-story. A lot of people hate on Zack Snyder for changing the ending from the graphic novel, but I’m not one of those. I understand why he did it. (I do hate on him for what he did to Superman in Man of Steel, but that’s another story.) I’ve long admired how effectively he took an incredibly complex work like Watchmen and translated it to a different medium. Tons of shots and visual motifs in the film are taken directly from the graphic novel.

And that’s part of what makes the HBO series so effective. It is full of shots, ideas, visual motifs, and dialogue that hearken back to both the film and the graphic novel. The same dark and gritty themes, familiar shades of moral ambiguity. It is a picture of an alternate history America eating itself alive. Just like now.

After watching the movie, I have Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are a-Changin'”, Simon and Garfunkel’s “Sound of Silence”, and Jimi Hendrix’s “All Along the Watchtower” on endless loop in my head. The music coupled with the film’s visuals are burned into my brain.

Since showrunner Damon Lindelof left the series at the end of Season 1, saying he’d told the story he wanted to tell, HBO is calling it a Limited Series with no plans for a Season 2, so this is all we’re going to get, but it’s shaping up to be a real gem.

What I’m up to…

**Waves a sniffly good-bye at the month of June…**

How about an update of everything I’ve been working on?

On the fiction side, I’ve started outlining the second book of my Shinjuku Shadows Trilogy. Book 1, Tokyo Blood Magic is at the publisher, Shadow Alley Press, churning through the editing process.

Another smaller, but no less important, project is the next book in the Adventure Kids series, Blackbelt Chloe and the Birthday Cake Catastrophe.

I typically write short stories in the cracks between major projects as a kind of brain cleanser. It gives the creative brain cells a fresh flavor, and has the added benefit of helping erase the major project from the memory banks. This is necessary for the editing/revising process; I can go back with fresh eyes, but in a shorter time frame. The key to effective revision is to look at a piece as if for the first time, which is tough when it’s still in your head. I might have to put down a finished draft for six months, but I don’t have that kind of time to wait. Working on something else shortens that time drastically.

I’m also working on Book 2 of a ghostwriting project, a contemporary fantasy series. Book 1 is out now. If you’re curious about where to find it, whisper to me privately and I’ll spill.

The audio production of Junk Magic and Guitar Dreams is in full swing.

I have to tell you, the two voice actors are knocking that book out of the park. As I review the files, I cry, I laugh, and so will you.

Ian Hawkins brings a youthful voice and energy and some well-executed comic timing to Otter’s scenes. Najah Johnson‘s warmth and verve make Lika’s scenes jump out of the headphones. And both of them have serious acting chops. I couldn’t be more pleased.

I’ve auditioned voice actors before, but for some reason, this project went to a whole new level. About 110 talented voice actors sent audition samples, so the winnowing down process took some time. A small percentage were clearly not a good fit, but even cutting the field in half was hard. By the time I was down to the Top 10, I had to enlist my Chanel and Kaylen to get it down to the Top 5, then the Top 3.

In the end, however, we all agreed on Ian and Najah. I’m so excited seeing it come together.

Screenwriting News? 

As you may or may not know, I’m an (aspiring) screenwriter. I’ve won some awards and contests, a couple of trophies, but as yet nothing has been produced or optioned. So when something positive happens, it’s a great shot in the arm and lets me know I’m on the right path. As the movie industry is so notoriously capricious, I keep my fingers crossed but my expectations low.

Last year at the Crimson Screen Horror Film Festival, I met an interesting guy, a talent manager for a number of well known actors and directors, including the director who invented the modern zombie genre. If you’re a horror fan, you know who I’m talking about. Anyway, last year, this manager had directed and produced his first short film and it won a couple of awards at the festival that weekend, as well as many other awards in the subsequent months. He and I hit it off and have stayed in contact.

Last week, he called me, asking me if I had any scripts that met a certain set of criteria, things that could be filmed under current COVID restrictions. (COVID has literally shut down the entire film and television industry. No one is shooting anything due to social distancing restrictions, and probably won’t be for several more months.) He told me he was reaching out to a select handful of folks he’d met at festivals last year, and did I have anything that might fit these guidelines. So I said, “Absolutely,” did a revision of Where the Devil Resides over the weekend, based on some great notes I’d gotten from another screenwriter, and fired it off this morning.

The film industry is, in fact, all about who you know. There’s nothing nefarious about it–although it can be cruelly exclusionary as a side-effect–it’s simply that because filmmaking is such an intensely collaborative undertaking, people like working with their friends, people they know they can rely on (in a sea of flaky weirdos). That’s why you so often see directors working with the same actors over and over. 

So, film festivals are great for getting to know filmmakers and actors. They are also great for spending a whole weekend just geeking. the. hell. out. over movies.

Regardless of whether anything comes of this, it felt like a milestone. A long-time industry pro called me, and asked to read something of mine.

Fingers crossed, expectations low…fingers crossed, expectations low…fingers crossed…

They Call Me…Wyatt Lee – A New Adventure Kids novella!

I’m excited to present to my newest middle-grade story, They Call Me…Wyatt Lee.

This one is by far the longest of my Adventure Kids series, reaching true novella length. Nevertheless, it’s as long as it needed to be, with all the jokes, action, and weird aliens I could cram into it.

I call it The Last Starfighter meets Galaxy Quest and Super Mario Kart.

The Adventure Kids books are perfect for kids 9-12, and each paperback includes some pages for kids to personalize their book with drawings, perhaps inspired by the story.

And the ebooks are only $1.99. Just two bucks!

Vrooom-a-zoom-zoom~! Get yours now!

Where the Devil Resides – Now in Trade Paperback!

Several years ago, I had the idea that wanted to do a kind of neo-pulp character, like the Shadow, or Doc Savage, or Conan, somebody larger than life. I wanted to tell pulpy stories, but with a more modern sensibility.

What came out of that brainstorming was a phrase that I couldn’t get out of my head, and I don’t know where it came from, Black Rose in the Garden of Eden.

From that phrase came the character Black Rose, a nineteenth century sorceress who wears a tricorne hat and carries a bullwhip. One of the hallmarks of larger-than-life characters is that their stories are often told from the point of view of the people whose lives they impact. The heroes become the catalyst for other people’s stories.

So that’s what I set out to do, starting with a short story featuring Black Rose.

But what started out as a short story passed the 8,000-word mark and I was like, “Well, maybe I can finish it in 15,000 words.” When it passed the 20k mark, I was much chagrined, because I hadn’t even reached the climax yet. The final product turned out to be about 31k, novella length. Unfortunately it is darn near impossible to sell a novella to traditional markets. It’s just an awkward length for current publishing models.

Fortunately, Lawrence M. Shoen of Paper Golem Press thought otherwise. He published Where the Devil Resides in the fourth volume of his novella anthology series Alembical in 2018, where it resonated in strange ways with the other novella in the volume, “The Ground Is Full of Teeth” by Catherine Schaff-Stump, which features werewolves and themes of abused children.

I’m proud to announce that Where the Devil Resides is now available in both ebook and trade paperback! I’m pleased that it’s already gotten a couple of excellent reviews.

Here’s one:

“As a novella, this is a lot of fun, a little bit pulpy, but at the same time serious, and dark. The bad guys and underlying evil is like what you’d find in a Lansdale or Vachss story, but you have a bit of Lovecraft and even Poe peppered in here. The unreliable narrator and very crafty layering of meanings among the characters, their words, and their actions make this the single best thing I have read by Travis Heermann. The author attempts some things that I would classify as culturally risky, but totally pulls it off through artful arrangement.”

Amazon Reviewer

Get it now!

Cover Reveal!

I’m super-excited to show you the new cover for my steampunk horror novella, Where the Devil Resides.

The previous version was something I put together on InDesign, and it wasn’t terrible, but I do not possess this kind of stellar illustration skill.

The artist here is Vincent Sammy, an illustrator from South Africa. I hired him when I discovered that he was the artist who the cover for the issue of Apex Magazine where my story “Screaming Without a Mouth” appeared in March 2016.

He calls this one, however, his “favorite cover ever.” He really knocked it out of the park.

Check out his work on Deviant Art here.

Get it now.

The Hammer Goes Wide

Up until now, the ebook edition of The Hammer Falls has been available only on Amazon.

I get it. Lots of people would rather not give any money to the Eight Hundred Pound Gorilla Monopoly. Believe me, this author gets it.

Now you can get my dystopian cyberpunk gladiator novel from a wide variety of ebook outlets.

Kobo
Apple
Nook
And more…

Just click the cover and the subsequent page will take you to your favorite ebook dealer.
Spoiler alert: the Good Guys win.

50% OFF at my online store!

In a normal year, I would have an author table at various conventions. I love connecting personally to potential new readers, but all those plans have been nixed for 2020. This leaves me with a pile of books that have nowhere to go.

Until the end of June, you can use the coupon code MEMORIAL50 to get 50% off everything in my online store.

Yup. 50% off everything.

Signed copies of art prints, trade paperbacks, collectors edition hardcovers, novels, anthologies, and comics.

Just click here and apply the coupon code at checkout.

The World Burns

I attended my first ever Nebula Awards Conference this weekend, virtually, of course. What should have been a joyous occasion, sharing a weekend of camaraderie with science-fiction- and fantasy-writing colleagues, celebrating the nominees and winners of the best speculative fiction of the past year, was overshadowed by the ongoing horrors and injustices taking place all across U.S. soil. It cast a pall over every panel discussion, every conversation. We all felt it. We all talked about it.

So, I feel like I would be remiss with you if I didn’t at least address the fact that we are living through an incredibly difficult and dangerous time. As I write this, American cities are burning, and a deadly new disease has killed enough of us to fill two major stadiums, with untold more people still suffering and/or permanently damaged from the experience.

A lot of people are traumatized, hurting, angry, sick, beaten, outraged, and terrified. The U.S. is hurting. Much of the civilized world is watching our pain and hurting with us. The last three months have felt like one trauma after another, with no respite, no moment of peace.

So we turn to art for solace, for escape.

I want to give you a powerful sentiment from Lord of the Rings.

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.

[Or in the movies, Frodo says, “I wish the Ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.”]

“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

In the midst of all this, I often find it difficult to keep going.

And then I remind myself that art is one of the things people live for.

So I keep up my work in the ink mines.

They Call Me…Wyatt Lee, the next volume in T. James Logan’s Adventure Kids series, is almost done. I’m getting busy on not one, but two ghostwriting projects, one a fantasy novel and one a TV pilot script. And I’m also putting on the finishing touches of Tokyo Blood Magic, an urban fantasy features monsters, ninja-sorcerers, and a mouthy cat.

————

This morning as I was cruising through social media, growing more horrified, saddened, and outraged by the minute, I had a moment where I remembered one of the greatest sentences ever written in English.

This week’s One Cool Thing is an excerpt from “Letter from Birmingham Jail” by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. If you’ve been a long-time subscriber to this newsletter, you may recall that I’ve discussed this before.

Before the excerpt, I want to point out that about 80% of this excerpt is one single sentence. When I say it is one of the greatest sentences ever written in English, I invite you to examine its structure, its emotional impact, and the way it perfectly melds theme with content.

As a former instructor of composition and rhetoric, I can say it is one of the most powerful and effective sentences that exists in English. Note the succession of dependent “when” clauses. The heart of the sentence, the subject and verb appear, do not appear until the very end. I have highlighted the sentence in yellow so you can see what I’m talking about.

———-

“We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we stiff creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging dart of segregation to say, ‘Wait.’ But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: ‘Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?’; when you take a cross-county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading ‘white’ and ‘colored’; when your first name becomes ‘nigger,’ your middle name becomes ‘boy’ (however old you are) and your last name becomes ‘John,’ and your wife and mother are never given the respected title ‘Mrs.’; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of ‘nobodiness’ then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.”

———-

Yes, that yellow part was ONE SENTENCE. Throughout its length, he was making the reader wait for his ultimate point.

That is powerful stuff.

If you would like to read the entirety of “Letter from Birmingham Jail”, you can click here. 

This posting includes a color-coded rhetorical analysis of the whole letter, so you can examine how Dr. King deftly, artfully, powerfully used appeals to logic, emotion, and authority to make his point.