Steven S. Drachman's Blog, page 6
March 11, 2013
Thanks for a great day
Just back from Maryland, and had a really great time at the Bethesda Writers Center. A big crowd showed up to see me read my new Watt O'Hugh adventure, and also to hear the great local poet, Doritt Carroll. Anyway, thanks to everyone in DC and Maryland for making it a good one.
February 2, 2013
When Brisco County Jr. Met Watt O'Hugh the Third
January 27, 2013.
Twenty years back, I was a lawyer working at one of those huge firms where middle-aged men (like me) worked when they were twenty years younger than they are today. During one grueling week, I worked all night long, and then the next day, and then the next night, until the dawn came and I found myself in the emergency room. In my case, I discovered (the fairly obvious fact) that drinking coffee like water to stay awake for days at a time is not good for me.
The emergency room doctors sent me to bed to recuperate. Before my wife left for work on my first morning of my convalescence, she slipped a VHS tape into our VCR.
“This is a show my sister taped for us,” she said.
It was back in the era before TiVo and TiVo-esque devices, when people videotaped TV shows and forced them on their friends and family, an annoying phenomenon, but in this case a blessing.
The show was The Adventures of Brisco County Jr., a Fox series about a 19th century Harvard-trained lawyer turned old West bounty hunter, played by Bruce Campbell back when, like me, he was young and handsome (or, in my case, young and more-handsome-than-I-am-now). Within the first few minutes, a banker/robber baron criticized Brisco’s change of career as a “shameful waste” of an education, and Brisco replied, without missing a beat, “Better than a shameful waste of an entire lifetime.”
At that particular moment in my life, this meant a lot to me; and I was hooked.
Brisco County fell into the “Western Science Fiction” category, and it was not the first, but it was the first time that I really cared.
Brisco was on the trail of the outlaw gang that killed his father (that great Western hero Marshall Brisco County Sr.), and along the way he came into contact with the adorable Dixie Cousins, a gangster moll and sometime-dancehall singer who first stole, then won, his heart; a glowing orb from the future; a small-town Western sheriff who bore an uncanny resemblance to Elvis Presley (years before the real King would be born); a gang of kung fu Chinese mobsters; and a mysterious boardinghouse eerily reminiscent of the Bates Motel.
Some people might call this a bag of anachronisms. Sometimes it was. In one episode, a bomb exploded in Brisco’s hotel room, and he quipped, “I thought this was a non-smoking room.” It was a stupid joke, and something that would have been meaningless to a man in 1893. But in most cases, I think there was something smarter at work, a sort of overarching theme to the show that asserted that a hint of the 20th century was blowing around in the wind of 1893, a seed amusingly planted in the soil of the old West.
Because it was great and because I loved it, of course, it was canceled at the end of a year, at which point Jonathan Matson, my agent – a patient pillar-of-the-industry who had stuck with me throughout my journey from journalist to lawyer – suggested, grasping at straws, that I propose a novelized continuation of the Brisco series to the program’s executive producer, Carlton Cuse.
I pitched the idea first to Bruce Campbell, who pledged his support. Then a short letter to a CAA agent received a surprisingly quick response and won me a lunch of turkey tetrazini with Cuse in the commissary at CBS, where he was developing Nash Bridges for Don Johnson.
For Brisco’s further adventures, I invented a turn of the century war that would split the continent in two. To join our Harvard bounty hunter and his faithful companion, Lord Bowler, I invented another sidekick, a third wheel named Watt O’Hugh, a crusty old gunslinger whose aim is always deadly accurate, but who disclaims any particular skill. I believe in ghosts, he says: ghosts who steady his trigger finger and steer errant bullets away from his heart.
Cuse seemed to give me a tentative green light; but a few weeks later, he split with his agent, and our project died. Matson suggested that I keep Watt O’Hugh alive along with the war I’d invented, tell his backstory and wind the whole thing up at the turn of the twentieth century, as originally planned. I began writing the first book of the trilogy, set in 1873, but I didn’t finish it till 2011, the better part of two decades later, and long after Matson and I had last spoken.
Lazy and impatient, I published it myself as The Ghosts of Watt O'Hugh, and most readers and critics seemed to like it, and I figured I should finish the trilogy.
I’m nearly done with Book 2, and approaching Book 3, the climactic chapter of my saga, in which the 20th Century dawns, and the Sidonian War roars across North America like a tornado.
At this point, Watt O’Hugh is meant to fight alongside Brisco County, loyal soldiers, both.
What is to be done?
The simple fact is that I have lived with the Watt O’Hugh story for so long now that it has taken on a life of its own.
To wit: over a year ago, when I gave a reading at the Wyoming Territorial Penitentiary – once a prison, and now a museum – I asked to see cell number 17, which had once held Watt O’Hugh and his cell-mate, the other-worldly Billy Golden.
And there it was. Watt O’Hugh grew even more real for me.
Yes, I know that Watt is fictitious; intellectually, I know he never stayed in that cell. But in his world, he did. And in his world, he met Brisco County Jr. around 1902 or so. And the two fought together in the great Sidonian War, the young bounty hunter, Brisco, and O’Hugh, the weathered old Civil War vet. Hoping for the best, when Book 1 was published, I wrote on my blog that “if I can sell enough copies of my book, I’m going to see if Warner Bros. will allow an appearance by Brisco in Book 3, which is going to be set around the turn of the 20th century.” Well, I had a good run for a while, sales-wise, but Warner Bros. has not come calling (yet).
I cannot change the story. But legally I cannot tell you the whole story.
The ironic thing is that Watt O’Hugh has come across so many great figures of the 19th century in his strange and varied career — from banker J.P. Morgan, playwright Oscar Wilde and outlaw Tiburcio Vasquez to the evil mathematician Leopold Kronecker and the famous and unbelievably beautiful Swedish soprano Christine Nilsson – and it is all detailed at length in the pages of the first two books. Nothing prevents me from telling it all to you, because no one owns the dead. But Warner Bros. owns Brisco County Jr.
So the only thing that I cannot tell you about is the adventure that gave rise to them all, the battles Watt O’Hugh fought at the side of Brisco County Jr., as the new century blossomed.
Twenty years back, I was a lawyer working at one of those huge firms where middle-aged men (like me) worked when they were twenty years younger than they are today. During one grueling week, I worked all night long, and then the next day, and then the next night, until the dawn came and I found myself in the emergency room. In my case, I discovered (the fairly obvious fact) that drinking coffee like water to stay awake for days at a time is not good for me.
The emergency room doctors sent me to bed to recuperate. Before my wife left for work on my first morning of my convalescence, she slipped a VHS tape into our VCR.
“This is a show my sister taped for us,” she said.
It was back in the era before TiVo and TiVo-esque devices, when people videotaped TV shows and forced them on their friends and family, an annoying phenomenon, but in this case a blessing.
The show was The Adventures of Brisco County Jr., a Fox series about a 19th century Harvard-trained lawyer turned old West bounty hunter, played by Bruce Campbell back when, like me, he was young and handsome (or, in my case, young and more-handsome-than-I-am-now). Within the first few minutes, a banker/robber baron criticized Brisco’s change of career as a “shameful waste” of an education, and Brisco replied, without missing a beat, “Better than a shameful waste of an entire lifetime.”
At that particular moment in my life, this meant a lot to me; and I was hooked.
Brisco County fell into the “Western Science Fiction” category, and it was not the first, but it was the first time that I really cared.
Brisco was on the trail of the outlaw gang that killed his father (that great Western hero Marshall Brisco County Sr.), and along the way he came into contact with the adorable Dixie Cousins, a gangster moll and sometime-dancehall singer who first stole, then won, his heart; a glowing orb from the future; a small-town Western sheriff who bore an uncanny resemblance to Elvis Presley (years before the real King would be born); a gang of kung fu Chinese mobsters; and a mysterious boardinghouse eerily reminiscent of the Bates Motel.
Some people might call this a bag of anachronisms. Sometimes it was. In one episode, a bomb exploded in Brisco’s hotel room, and he quipped, “I thought this was a non-smoking room.” It was a stupid joke, and something that would have been meaningless to a man in 1893. But in most cases, I think there was something smarter at work, a sort of overarching theme to the show that asserted that a hint of the 20th century was blowing around in the wind of 1893, a seed amusingly planted in the soil of the old West.
Because it was great and because I loved it, of course, it was canceled at the end of a year, at which point Jonathan Matson, my agent – a patient pillar-of-the-industry who had stuck with me throughout my journey from journalist to lawyer – suggested, grasping at straws, that I propose a novelized continuation of the Brisco series to the program’s executive producer, Carlton Cuse.
I pitched the idea first to Bruce Campbell, who pledged his support. Then a short letter to a CAA agent received a surprisingly quick response and won me a lunch of turkey tetrazini with Cuse in the commissary at CBS, where he was developing Nash Bridges for Don Johnson.
For Brisco’s further adventures, I invented a turn of the century war that would split the continent in two. To join our Harvard bounty hunter and his faithful companion, Lord Bowler, I invented another sidekick, a third wheel named Watt O’Hugh, a crusty old gunslinger whose aim is always deadly accurate, but who disclaims any particular skill. I believe in ghosts, he says: ghosts who steady his trigger finger and steer errant bullets away from his heart.
Cuse seemed to give me a tentative green light; but a few weeks later, he split with his agent, and our project died. Matson suggested that I keep Watt O’Hugh alive along with the war I’d invented, tell his backstory and wind the whole thing up at the turn of the twentieth century, as originally planned. I began writing the first book of the trilogy, set in 1873, but I didn’t finish it till 2011, the better part of two decades later, and long after Matson and I had last spoken.
Lazy and impatient, I published it myself as The Ghosts of Watt O'Hugh, and most readers and critics seemed to like it, and I figured I should finish the trilogy.
I’m nearly done with Book 2, and approaching Book 3, the climactic chapter of my saga, in which the 20th Century dawns, and the Sidonian War roars across North America like a tornado.
At this point, Watt O’Hugh is meant to fight alongside Brisco County, loyal soldiers, both.
What is to be done?
The simple fact is that I have lived with the Watt O’Hugh story for so long now that it has taken on a life of its own.
To wit: over a year ago, when I gave a reading at the Wyoming Territorial Penitentiary – once a prison, and now a museum – I asked to see cell number 17, which had once held Watt O’Hugh and his cell-mate, the other-worldly Billy Golden.
And there it was. Watt O’Hugh grew even more real for me.
Yes, I know that Watt is fictitious; intellectually, I know he never stayed in that cell. But in his world, he did. And in his world, he met Brisco County Jr. around 1902 or so. And the two fought together in the great Sidonian War, the young bounty hunter, Brisco, and O’Hugh, the weathered old Civil War vet. Hoping for the best, when Book 1 was published, I wrote on my blog that “if I can sell enough copies of my book, I’m going to see if Warner Bros. will allow an appearance by Brisco in Book 3, which is going to be set around the turn of the 20th century.” Well, I had a good run for a while, sales-wise, but Warner Bros. has not come calling (yet).
I cannot change the story. But legally I cannot tell you the whole story.
The ironic thing is that Watt O’Hugh has come across so many great figures of the 19th century in his strange and varied career — from banker J.P. Morgan, playwright Oscar Wilde and outlaw Tiburcio Vasquez to the evil mathematician Leopold Kronecker and the famous and unbelievably beautiful Swedish soprano Christine Nilsson – and it is all detailed at length in the pages of the first two books. Nothing prevents me from telling it all to you, because no one owns the dead. But Warner Bros. owns Brisco County Jr.
So the only thing that I cannot tell you about is the adventure that gave rise to them all, the battles Watt O’Hugh fought at the side of Brisco County Jr., as the new century blossomed.
December 16, 2012
Please "like" the Watt O'Hugh Facebook Page
I can promise you now that I will never try to get you to become my twitter follower, but I have given in and created a Facebook page devoted in part to the Watt O'Hugh trilogy. I would greatly appreciate it if you would "like" it. Click here , if you would, and check the "like" box. Thanks!
This is NOT a personal page about me (with pictures of my kids and the latkes I cooked last night, browning in olive oil) but instead a page devoted to the Watt trilogy. But in addition to getting news about the next book in the trilogy, scheduled readings and other events, and giveaway offers, we'll also talk a bit about the Indie Western Science Fiction Fantasy niche in general, so if you know any fans of the genre, please spread the word.
This is NOT a personal page about me (with pictures of my kids and the latkes I cooked last night, browning in olive oil) but instead a page devoted to the Watt trilogy. But in addition to getting news about the next book in the trilogy, scheduled readings and other events, and giveaway offers, we'll also talk a bit about the Indie Western Science Fiction Fantasy niche in general, so if you know any fans of the genre, please spread the word.
November 11, 2012
Dragons Were Real
In my western science-fiction novel, The Ghosts of Watt O’Hugh, my eponymous hero and outlaw is camping out in the middle of Utah when a lizard flies across the night sky. A great lizard with “hundreds of scales on its body, the head of a camel, a demon’s eyes, a cow’s ears, antlers like a deer, the neck of a snake, a clam’s belly, a tiger’s paws and an eagle’s claws.”
“Dragons are real?” Watt O’Hugh asks his traveling companion, a one legged counterrevolutionary named Madame Tang.
“A dragon just flew over our heads!” Tang replies, exasperated.
What, after all, could be better evidence of the existence of dragons than seeing one fly right over your head?
And, as far as I am concerned, what could be better evidence of the past existence of dragons than rare but documented dragon sightings from every society on Earth, societies with no contact at the time of the sightings? Everyone from ancient China and Israel to Europe of the Middle Ages had their dragons.
As Desmond Morris, a dragon expert (but a non-believer) wrote in his foreword to Karl Shuker’s Dragons: A Natural History:
Shuker, for his part, is more open to belief. Are dragons, he wonders, “mysterious living creatures still awaiting formal discovery by science”?
In my novel, Madame Tang gives our hero a history lesson on dragons. Only in the modern era was there even any doubt expressed about the existence of the great, noble lizards, she says.
You may have noticed that the name for the dragon slayers is awfully close to my surname, Drachman. I like to think (without a shred of evidence) that my ancestors were dragon slayers. My great grandfather claimed, on the contrary, that we were Greeks who immigrated to Germany, where they named us after the currency, drachma, that we carried in our pockets when we arrived. A less ripping explanation.
One of the audience members at a reading last year asked me, “Were dragons real?” and I said, “Yes.” That brought the whole thing to a thudding close. A friend of mine once said to me, “One day, you’ll be up for something important, like senator, or attorney general. And I’m just going to walk into the room and say, This guy believes in dragons.”
Still, as idiotic as it may be, I’m sticking to my guns. I do not believe in unicorns. I do not believe in fairies or leprechauns. But I will insist that dragons are probably extinct, flying lizards that never breathed fire, the missing link between dinosaurs and birds. A thousand years ago, they were not yet extinct, though exceedingly rare. While dragon sightings were reported, no dragon’s lairs were ever found, so they were probably well hidden. Because of their rarity, and their ability to hide, a dragon’s remains have never been found by modern scientists.
Nevertheless, I fully understand that I am probably completely wrong about this. Wouldn’t be the first time. But I will go on believing in dragons, because it’s nicer to believe than not to believe.
“Dragons are real?” Watt O’Hugh asks his traveling companion, a one legged counterrevolutionary named Madame Tang.
“A dragon just flew over our heads!” Tang replies, exasperated.
What, after all, could be better evidence of the existence of dragons than seeing one fly right over your head?
And, as far as I am concerned, what could be better evidence of the past existence of dragons than rare but documented dragon sightings from every society on Earth, societies with no contact at the time of the sightings? Everyone from ancient China and Israel to Europe of the Middle Ages had their dragons.
As Desmond Morris, a dragon expert (but a non-believer) wrote in his foreword to Karl Shuker’s Dragons: A Natural History:
No other imaginary creature has appeared in such a rich variety of forms. It is as though there was once a whole family of different dragon species that really existed before they mysteriously became extinct. Indeed, as recently as the seventeenth century, scholars wrote of dragons as though they were scientific fact, their anatomy and natural history being recorded in painstaking detail. … From now on, the concept of the dragon would have to be tossed into the cauldron of fiction ….
Shuker, for his part, is more open to belief. Are dragons, he wonders, “mysterious living creatures still awaiting formal discovery by science”?
In my novel, Madame Tang gives our hero a history lesson on dragons. Only in the modern era was there even any doubt expressed about the existence of the great, noble lizards, she says.
“There aren’t many left,” she continued, “and those that still live stay mostly out of sight. In China, by the turn of the Millennium, they were already so rare that whenever a dragon appeared, everyone thought it was auspicious. If a dragon appeared in your home village on the day of your birth, it sealed your future. Sometimes it was really an omen. Sometimes a dragon just wanted to stretch his wings.”
“Real fire-breathing dragons?” [Watt] said, more than a little amazed.
She sat up and leaned back on her elbows.
“How could a dragon breathe fire?” she said. “This is real life, O’Hugh, not a bedtime story. If any reptile breathed fire, it would burn up its lungs and its mouth. Plus, reptiles by definition are cold-blooded – no mechanism for making fire, or even keeping warm. No, here’s how that myth began: In the old days, dragons would often fly in thunderstorms – less likely to get a spear through the chest – and the next morning the crops and forests would be burning. Caused by lightning, but blamed on dragon. The drachenmanner – dragon-slayers – found they could get better pay if they fought a fire-breathing dragon, so they had an incentive to propagate the rumor. More danger to it, the villagers were more worried, more eager to find an outsider to kill their dragons for them. So the traveling drachenmanner moved through Europe, and the stories grew through the years. I say Europe, because in China, we didn’t kill our dragons. But no, dragons never breathed fire. They’re just big flying lizards, dinosauria that didn’t quite die out and that never evolved into birds. Didn’t you ever study Darwin? Everybody knows about this.”
You may have noticed that the name for the dragon slayers is awfully close to my surname, Drachman. I like to think (without a shred of evidence) that my ancestors were dragon slayers. My great grandfather claimed, on the contrary, that we were Greeks who immigrated to Germany, where they named us after the currency, drachma, that we carried in our pockets when we arrived. A less ripping explanation.
One of the audience members at a reading last year asked me, “Were dragons real?” and I said, “Yes.” That brought the whole thing to a thudding close. A friend of mine once said to me, “One day, you’ll be up for something important, like senator, or attorney general. And I’m just going to walk into the room and say, This guy believes in dragons.”
Still, as idiotic as it may be, I’m sticking to my guns. I do not believe in unicorns. I do not believe in fairies or leprechauns. But I will insist that dragons are probably extinct, flying lizards that never breathed fire, the missing link between dinosaurs and birds. A thousand years ago, they were not yet extinct, though exceedingly rare. While dragon sightings were reported, no dragon’s lairs were ever found, so they were probably well hidden. Because of their rarity, and their ability to hide, a dragon’s remains have never been found by modern scientists.
Nevertheless, I fully understand that I am probably completely wrong about this. Wouldn’t be the first time. But I will go on believing in dragons, because it’s nicer to believe than not to believe.
October 6, 2012
Where have you gone, Elizabeth A. Lynn?
More than 10 years ago, the award-winning, acclaimed author Elizabeth A. Lynn wrote a truly great book called Dragon’s Winter, the first of a projected trilogy. In 2004, the second book came out, called Dragon’s Treasure, which served mostly as an intriguing set-up for what promises to be a spectacular conclusion to one of the most beautifully written, literate and literary fantasy trilogies of our time.
Then 8 years kind of … crawled by.
Yes, I have been waiting an awfully long time for book 3. A year ago, I wrote her a letter, but received no response. I’ve googled her and yahoo’ed her, but I can find nothing less than 8 years old. You can actually find more recent and abundant information on the web about your average midtown receptionist.
Today, I found a reference to a 2010 book to which she’d contributed a short story. Unfortunately, on further investigation, I learned it was a reprint of a 2001 publication.
The trail has definitely gone cold.
I’m starting to worry.
So this post is the fanboy version (er … fan-aging-gentleman version) of one of those posters you see on bus stations looking for old guys who have wandered off.
Does anyone know where Elizabeth A. Lynn has wandered off?
Any and all information would be greatly appreciated.
Then 8 years kind of … crawled by.
Yes, I have been waiting an awfully long time for book 3. A year ago, I wrote her a letter, but received no response. I’ve googled her and yahoo’ed her, but I can find nothing less than 8 years old. You can actually find more recent and abundant information on the web about your average midtown receptionist.
Today, I found a reference to a 2010 book to which she’d contributed a short story. Unfortunately, on further investigation, I learned it was a reprint of a 2001 publication.
The trail has definitely gone cold.
I’m starting to worry.
So this post is the fanboy version (er … fan-aging-gentleman version) of one of those posters you see on bus stations looking for old guys who have wandered off.
Does anyone know where Elizabeth A. Lynn has wandered off?
Any and all information would be greatly appreciated.
June 24, 2012
A Thought on the Failure of Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter
Well, anyone following the box office -- and really why should anyone follow the box office? -- has noticed by now that Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter went belly up, like John Carter before it, like Cowboys vs. Aliens before it, like Wild Wild West before it. And on the small screen, Firefly failed a decade after Brisco County Jr. failed.
How do I feel, having seen the evidence that moviegoers and TV watchers hate hate hate Western science fiction and space Westerns? (A clinical explanation of the difference between those two genres will have to await another day.) The very genre in which my novel, The Ghosts of Watt O'Hugh, happens to fall. Well, I feel ... vindicated?
I got a couple of queries from genuine Hollywood moguls when my book first started getting a little press, and while I would have been happy with the money (to the extent that I'm ever happy with anything), I felt pretty sure that I wasn't what they were looking for. There is absolutely a place for weird stuff like this in today's popular culture, but weird stuff doesn't generally land at #1 on the box office charts.
Some of us continue, still, today, to cling to Westerns, to watch old Sergio Leone movies and even reruns of Maverick, and to insist that said Westerns are great -- as we also contend with respect to John Carter, Brisco County and Firefly -- and we are, you know, absolutely right. But we won't convince most of you. As I've written before, the only thing that most Americans know today about Westerns is that they don't like them, but aren't sure exactly why.
So this is where the Indie book industry comes in. Indie books are not for writers who cannot get published because they are bad, nor for writers who cannot get published because they don't know the right people. It's for good writers who take a step out of the mainstream, and who might inspire wild devotion among those who notice, but not the sort of universal wild devotion that will make them #1 at the box office.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
Now would be the time for me to quote myself quoting critic and novelist Charles de Lint writing about Indie author Sara Kuhns’s novel, A Sigh for Life’s Completion, but, aware of Jonah Lehrer's problems with self-plagiarism, I'll just supply a link instead. Needless to say, he sees a place for Indie authors in today's publishing world and justifies it better than I ever could.
What do you think?
How do I feel, having seen the evidence that moviegoers and TV watchers hate hate hate Western science fiction and space Westerns? (A clinical explanation of the difference between those two genres will have to await another day.) The very genre in which my novel, The Ghosts of Watt O'Hugh, happens to fall. Well, I feel ... vindicated?
I got a couple of queries from genuine Hollywood moguls when my book first started getting a little press, and while I would have been happy with the money (to the extent that I'm ever happy with anything), I felt pretty sure that I wasn't what they were looking for. There is absolutely a place for weird stuff like this in today's popular culture, but weird stuff doesn't generally land at #1 on the box office charts.
Some of us continue, still, today, to cling to Westerns, to watch old Sergio Leone movies and even reruns of Maverick, and to insist that said Westerns are great -- as we also contend with respect to John Carter, Brisco County and Firefly -- and we are, you know, absolutely right. But we won't convince most of you. As I've written before, the only thing that most Americans know today about Westerns is that they don't like them, but aren't sure exactly why.
So this is where the Indie book industry comes in. Indie books are not for writers who cannot get published because they are bad, nor for writers who cannot get published because they don't know the right people. It's for good writers who take a step out of the mainstream, and who might inspire wild devotion among those who notice, but not the sort of universal wild devotion that will make them #1 at the box office.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
Now would be the time for me to quote myself quoting critic and novelist Charles de Lint writing about Indie author Sara Kuhns’s novel, A Sigh for Life’s Completion, but, aware of Jonah Lehrer's problems with self-plagiarism, I'll just supply a link instead. Needless to say, he sees a place for Indie authors in today's publishing world and justifies it better than I ever could.
What do you think?
June 6, 2012
Watt O'Hugh wins again ....
The Ghosts of Watt O'Hugh has gotten another commendation! My novel was named Winner in the Fantasy Novel category last week by the Indie Excellence Book Awards. (It was also named a finalist in the Action Adventure category by the Next Generation Indie Book Awards a few weeks back.)
Please take a look at their website, maybe read a book or two from the list of winners, and help support independent publishing.
Thanks to the Indie Excellence folks, and thanks to all of you.
Please take a look at their website, maybe read a book or two from the list of winners, and help support independent publishing.
Thanks to the Indie Excellence folks, and thanks to all of you.
May 28, 2012
Next Generation Indie Book Awards - Full List
As promised, I post the full list of the Next Generation Indie Book Awards here. Thanks to the NextGen folks for making Watt O'Hugh a finalist in the Action Adventure category.
Now please everyone go out and choose a book from this list, and support authors working outside the publishing mainstream.
Now please everyone go out and choose a book from this list, and support authors working outside the publishing mainstream.
May 12, 2012
Next Generation Indie Book Awards
The Ghosts of Watt O'Hugh has been named a Finalist in the Action/Adventure category of the 2012 Next Generation Indie Book Awards.
The press release hasn't come out yet, but when it does I will post it here, to spread word of the winners.
Thanks to the folks at Next Generation for their support of independent publishing generally, and for recognizing my novel.
The press release hasn't come out yet, but when it does I will post it here, to spread word of the winners.
Thanks to the folks at Next Generation for their support of independent publishing generally, and for recognizing my novel.
April 25, 2012
The Indie BookSpot Interview
Steven S. Drachman, author of The Ghosts of Watt O'Hugh, talks about his approach to writing and his plans for the future.
Why do you write? Is it something you’ve always done, or always wanted to do? Or is it something that you started fairly recently?
I’ve written since before I knew how to read. Happily, I had scribes back then – my mother wrote down stories that I made up as I recited them, and then my kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Scott, took an interest. So I always dreamed that I would grow up to be a writer.
Tell me a little about your book.
The Ghosts of Watt O'Hugh is a Western sci-fi historical fantasy novel set in the 1870s. Watt O’Hugh is a civil war vet, orphan, former Wild West star and dime novel hero searching for his lost love, Lucy Billings, who disappeared in New York city just as the Draft Riots started to boil over. Of course, along the way there are fantastic adventures, a terrible plot by a sinister Wall Street banker, a 2000-year-old Chinese mystery, a couple of dragons, women of the dark arts, J.P. Morgan, Oscar Wilde, crazy romance, a shoot-out in Nebraska. You know, the usual thing. I tried to make it an exciting fantasy and action story, but with some real history and genuine period atmosphere, with solid research behind it. The response from traditional media reviewers, bloggers and readers has been really gratifying. People who have managed to find it seem to really enjoy it.
To read the whole interview on the Indie BookSpot website, click here.
Why do you write? Is it something you’ve always done, or always wanted to do? Or is it something that you started fairly recently?
I’ve written since before I knew how to read. Happily, I had scribes back then – my mother wrote down stories that I made up as I recited them, and then my kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Scott, took an interest. So I always dreamed that I would grow up to be a writer.
Tell me a little about your book.
The Ghosts of Watt O'Hugh is a Western sci-fi historical fantasy novel set in the 1870s. Watt O’Hugh is a civil war vet, orphan, former Wild West star and dime novel hero searching for his lost love, Lucy Billings, who disappeared in New York city just as the Draft Riots started to boil over. Of course, along the way there are fantastic adventures, a terrible plot by a sinister Wall Street banker, a 2000-year-old Chinese mystery, a couple of dragons, women of the dark arts, J.P. Morgan, Oscar Wilde, crazy romance, a shoot-out in Nebraska. You know, the usual thing. I tried to make it an exciting fantasy and action story, but with some real history and genuine period atmosphere, with solid research behind it. The response from traditional media reviewers, bloggers and readers has been really gratifying. People who have managed to find it seem to really enjoy it.
To read the whole interview on the Indie BookSpot website, click here.
