Nicholas Grabowsky's Blog

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Nicholas Grabowsky: The Norman Rockwell of White Trash

Nicholas Grabowsky: The Norman Rockwell of White Trash

March 18, 2014 at 7:43pm

Nicholas Grabowsky:The Norman Rockwell of White Trash

Red Wet Dirt reviewed by Tales of the Talisman Magazine



Red Wet Drt
Nicholas Grabowsky
Published by Black Bed Sheet Books
ISBN 978-0982253007
392 Pages
$16.95

If you like Joe R. Lansdale, best known as the author of Bubba Ho-Tep and writing arguably, the strangest horror stories.on the market today, you’ll love Nicholas Grabowsky. Grabowsky is known to diehard fans of the Halloween film franchise for
writing the novel adaptation of Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers. In his anthology, Red Wet Dirt, we get a better sense of his style and imagination. You’re in for a ride.
Red Wet Dirt has nearly every writing format:
novellas, short stories, poems, random thoughts, experimental fiction, and a screenplay. Grabowsky sometimes overdoes it with run-on sentences and many of his narrative scenes would have been more intriguing if they were allowed to play out with dialogue and further descriptions. These critiques, however, don’t outweigh his palpable passion and unpredictability.
You’ll never experience Christmas the same way again after reading his short story, “Yuletide Thing,” which involves sunbathing next to a beating heart. In another short story, “Freeway Reaper,” Grabowsky gives us an excellent theory as to why we have all been stuck in. traffic only to see no source for the delay. The novella, “Father’s Keeper,” exemplifies Grabowsky’s talents as he is able to effortlessly insert history without drowning out the actual story. In it, a ghost from an ancient civilization tells his tale through a psychic medium about the collapse of his society due to an undead plague-carrier and an overconfident king. His third short story, “Looks Like a Rat to Me,” is the strongest of his anthology. Its creepiness makes Stephen King’s “Graveyard Shift” look like the mice in Cinderella. The screenplay, “Cutting Edges,” has a villain I promise you won’t see coming.
Grabowsky’s finest aptitude is his ability to set the scene around him. He not only gives you a visual, but also audio, smell, and temperature. He also creates characters who are appalling, but oddly appealing at the same time. He is the Norman Rockwell of white trash.

— Dan Graffeo
From TALES OF THE TALISMAN Volume 4, Issue 2

Note: TALES OF THE TALISMAN MAGAZINE is still going strong with innovative and exciting content -horror fiction & poetry and original articles.....so check them out, subscribe and LIKE their FB page!

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Comic/graphic novel/film adaptations inspired by RED WET DIRT:

The Father Keeper
The Yuletide Thing
Cutting Edges - feature film
Cutting Edges -full graphic novel

Let RED WET DIRT inspire and horrify YOU!


Download a free PDF sample here: http://www.downwarden.com/Red%20Wet%2...

Hear an MP3 of the author reading the PDF sample here: http://www.downwarden.com/Red%20Wet%2...

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The Black Bed Sheet Stimulus Project

2 More hours for our Stimulus Project and it's back to work tomorrow! There's still time to help make a difference!

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A Writer’s Questions for Black Bed Sheet Books –An Interview with Nicholas Grabowsky by Vincent James Russo

(Out of all the submissions I get, sometimes I get one with many questions attached and with this one, submitted by writer Vincent James Russo…well, we decided to make it a legitimate interview. –Nick Grabowsky)

Question: Do you have a 2013 Submission Deadline?
No, but technically we’re all booked up for 2013 and it would be a little late for an author whose submission was just accepted to expect to be published this year. I always leave room for any factor of special circumstances to come into play, which is why I say “technically.”

Question: Is Black Bed Sheet Publications accepting Novellas?
We’re accepting them as in we’ll take a look. I look for something that can sell on its own, and if a novella’s too short, unless it comes attached with another novella or original stories we can tack onto it and sell it as a collection with the novella as a feature, it’s going to look like a cheap leaflet in printed form all by itself. In terms of print, it would stand a better chance in ebook only and we do that too, to the right ones. A good example of a novella we’ve published in print: Unholy Repression by Jessica Lynne Gardner. Good example of an ebook-only novella: Bone Sai by Ruschelle Dillon.

Question: How many words can my novel be?
I have no word limits, as long as it has so many as to reasonably fall into the category of “novel,” otherwise see Novellas above.

Question: How many pages can my novel be?
I have no page limits. If it’s War and Peace or The Stand or something, however, it’d better be exceptionally worth every word.

Question: There is a fair amount of sexually explicit scenes in some of my stories as well as hidden sexual undertones and innuendoes. Some of the material that I write is quite vulgar or brutal depending on the subject matter. I also have a pretty violent and graphic rape scene in one of my stories. I also have a story about High School Teenagers participating in (Sex, Drugs, Drinking.) I tend to write certain stories that may or may not be resolved. But a good majority of my stories that I do write have some kind of purpose regardless of the outcome. How would you go about handling or editing certain situations in my novel? Or would you even accept that kind of material?
What’s important is STORY, and how well you tell it. If any material offensive to the large majority of society is there just for the sake of being there, then it’s only marketable to the small audience of the kind of people who are drawn to that. But if it’s there for a purpose and works, it’s scary and compelling and that’s what we’re looking for. When it comes to the editing, I work with the author and if you ask any of the others I’ve never yet taken out a single description or scene of that nature unless it was the author’s idea, I’ve never yet had a reason to. Good examples: Merciless by Brandon Ford, Spinner by Dustin LaValley, Blood Related by William Cook.

Question: My first novel is an Anthology of Thirteen Short-stories that I am currently writing. The stories are Fiction of course as well as Urban Legends and Folklore. They are told from the original stories point of view as well as putting my own personal spin and twist to it. The genre I am writing for this falls under Horror, Sci-Fi, and Fantasy etc. Will Black Bed Sheet Publications accept that?
Yes, that kind of thing is right up our alley, case in point is S.C. Hayden’s Rusty Nails, Broken Glass, which we just released April 6, a collection of stories based on urban legends and folklore. The thing about that though, is we get a few hundred submissions a year at least, many of which is similar material, and we can only pick a tiny select few each year so they have to be exceptional.

Question: If I were to sign a contract with you, how long would I remain with Black Bed Sheet Publications? Would you require one book a year from me, or during my time with you do require several novels of mine during a legitimate length amount of time? Also, if another publishing company was interested in me and wanted to hire me and I was already in a contract with you. How would you go about handling that?
I try to keep it simple for both of us. The standard contract is good for one year….I have up to one year to publish it, and then it’s one year from the date of actual publication from there. That’s one year per title. Sometimes an agreement is brought to the table where the author has a series or a trilogy and they want to make a deal with all three and we do that. Oftentimes in retrospect one year doesn’t always seem to be long enough but the author is free to extend their contract after that time and about 90% do. It’s 2013 and I still have a fair amount of the books I signed in 2008. I don’t believe in owning an author. All I want is to invest my time and money into a book they wrote and hope we make something off of it and in the process give their writing careers a little boost further up the ladder, depending on the time they’re willing to put into helping me do it. I encourage them to publish elsewhere too. I encourage authors to spread themselves around their industry, don’t just stick with me alone. A serious author has to keep writing, keep getting their stuff out there….magazines, other projects, other books, with other publishers. Once an author is with me and they want to submit a follow-up, their submission always takes priority, though, and I haven’t yet turned one down. As a result, over the years about half my authors have accumulated more than one project with me. After all, I believe in them or I wouldn’t have published their last material.

Question: Since my book would be an ebook first and someone happens to purchase it online. I too would get a certain percentage of that money correct? Also, if my book goes to print does Black Bed Sheet Publications produce both Hardcover and Paperback? or just Paperback? Would I receive in the mail several copies of my print book to sell on my own accord to Family and Friends? How many print books would I get to have for myself?
No one said it would be an ebook first; we mostly do (and pride ourselves in doing) print books, trade paperbacks. Those books are also sold as ebooks. But we do publish books in ebook only. Novels, collections, and because ebook content is so flexible we publish ebook stand-alone novellas and shorts like Bart Brevik’s Demon of Despair. Because ebooks are cost-effective we’re able to reach out to what we feel is great talent on a broader scale and, of course, if things work out for both of us we’re happy to put them into print. Some ebook-only authors are even able to have limited print runs for appearances from time to time. We’re also trying out in-person, in-store ebook-only signings where you can purchase an ebook personally from the author and they’ll sign it on their laptop and hand it to you. And nope, we don’t do hardcover, at least not yet, because of cost. I’ve put out hardcover editions of some of my own novels through BBS from my ‘80’s paperback days, but that’s it so far. Also, every author gets only one free author copy unless we make arrangements otherwise, but most publishers only give their authors ten-twenty percent off retail for authors copies and I charge a dollar-fifty per copy above what I pay to get them (it used to be two dollars a copy), and that averages out to be 55% off, about what stores would pay for them wholesale, sometimes less. On top of that, I recently made it so all BBS authors can purchase each other’s books at each one’s author’s prices too, to encourage them to read each other’s works.

Question: My first novel like I mentioned is an Anthology of Thirteen Short-stories that I am currently writing. I have a few local Artists who are friends of mine that are interested in doing the illustrations for my stories. Basically, it would be Thirteen B & W drawings that they would do themselves to go along with the story. If I do decide to go down that road and go about adding drawings into my novel, do I pay them out of my own pocket or does Black Bed Sheet Publication pay them? Also, how much do I pay them either if it’s just one person or several individuals all together that want me to include there Artwork that I may or may not use in my novel? I just want to know how that works?
We are small, independent, and perhaps maybe “underground,” if you will, with a very limited almost bare-bones budget. We want to be able to be in the financial position to pay an outside artist if the artist is good enough. On the other hand, if we were able to pay then our standards for accepting outside artists would go up and we’d be more picky. But if the author really believes in this artist we have no problem with it, we work with the author in every way possible. Most of the time when that happens, the artist is trying to get themselves known and does it at no cost for that very reason, or as a favor to the author. If that artist expects a fee, though, and the author insists on using him/her, it’s up to the author and the artist to have that worked out between themselves.
Ultimately, BBS reserves the right to have the final say or manipulate the artwork in marketing & merchandising for the benefit of the book and how we feel it’ll sell best. Selling it best is what ultimately matters, after all. For now, we won’t let the lack of funding in our little outfit stop us from whatever the author wants to bring to the project’s table if he wants to bring it.

Question: I do like some of the cover art that Black Bed Sheet produces. But also I have in mind a few outside cover artists that I would like to go with myself. If I were to go with an outside cover artist of my own and they agree to do the artwork for my book. Do I myself or does Black Bed Sheet Publications pay them? Also, do I pay the Black Bed Sheet cover artist or does Black Bed Sheet Publications take care of there own?
I’m the cover artist. I have fourteen years in graphic design, thirty years as an author in the industry and I have an advertising background. I do 90% of the covers, banners, posters, marketing ads, design. In fact, I started BBS doing every facet of it and I’m still essentially a one-man show. I have an equally lengthy experience in editing and marketing. The reason Black Bed Sheet Books exists stemmed from my making a deal with Trancas Films to release a special edition of my Halloween IV novel and I did that myself, and, having the rights back to my previously published works, I decided to self-publish a number of my own works, design them myself and put them together and market them, and I simply got to thinking, if I can do all this, maybe I should go into business and do the same thing for a handful of other authors each year and be a publisher. Another thing was, I’ve been screwed by many a publisher and seen countless other authors go through the same thing, and I wanted set an example in doing it all the right and honest way. Fundamentally, the right way to be a legitimate publisher is to invest his own money in something he can publish that can hopefully make him some money back, and it’s the publisher’s responsibility to put that book together, inside and out, and to try and sell it for all the reasons he chose to publish that book in the first place. That goes for the cover, too. As with everything, the author can and has brought their own artists to the table or worked with me together on the cover. Sue Dent’s Electric Angel was the result of Sue independently working with a photographer and a male model, then I would take the photos and design them into a great cover. They did it because it was fun and they were capable and being Sue is an accomplished author and they were friends, there was no money involved and they get their names out there a little further. That’s the spirit of what we’re about, and it works great. One of these days we’ll be prosperous enough to afford opportunities to employ outside cover designers and artists, we want that. But between myself, artist friends of authors, and working together, the author doesn’t need to spend their own money on covers but can if they want to. They just never pay us.

Question: Would Black Bed Sheet Publications market one of their own Authors who are relatively unknown to do book signings at Barnes & Noble or any other Book store outlet in order to market them and spread the word amongst the Author circuit about them? Would Black Bed Sheet Publications promote and market their client at a Horror and Comic-Con or any other Conventions etc? Does the Author pay the Conventions He or She attend in order to market themselves or does Black Bed Sheet pay the people who run and are responsible for the Convention?
Black Bed Sheet has been responsible for many appearances of many authors, directly or indirectly. Our books are orderable through Ingram, Baker & Taylor, any book store can order our books and negotiate a signing and the returnability of those books. We work best with independent stores. Many of our authors have had Barnes & Noble signings, though not all B&N do small press author signings, either, unless they’re local but sometimes not even that. Many of our authors have had successful convention appearances. I’ve orchestrated my own BBS convention events about twice a year on average…we usually have a strong presence at Horrorfind or the World Horror Convention and have sponsored our own tables, readings, hotel parties, and broadcast live with our 200,000-listener internet radio show Francy & Friends from most of them. The Meet & Greet author Brian Keene arranged for us at the Horrorfind in PA a few years back and its hotel party was legendary. We’ve had great moments like that and hope to keep having them! Also there are many, many cases where the authors arrange their own event appearances and do it all themselves and I just make sure they get their books on time. They sell their own merchandise or merchandise I designed for them that they bought from me at cost to sell or give away, and they proudly display BBS banners and sometimes even other BBS authors’ books as well as sell whatever other books they have from other publishers alongside their BBS books. This year (2013), although our authors have many appearances and thanks to author Shannon Lee (Mythic Blood) we have a presence at the World Horror Convention in New Orleans this summer, I’m not personally investing in conventions in favor of putting one together locally myself instead with BBS written all over it. But in the cases of even those conventions BBS itself had tables and events with me there, the authors have had to pay for their own trips/rooms though some would room together. Again, we’d love to one day be prosperous enough to afford to.

Question: Does Black Bed Sheet Publications start up a Web-Site for the Author or does the Author have to come up with making up their own personal Web-Site?
The author is responsible for doing that, and should be. We’re serious about the books we’re publishing for them, but they should be serious enough about the scope and direction of their careers to have that taken care of independent from us. In fact, when I look for an author deal, I not only look at the work itself, how well its written and its potential and if I can get excited about it, but I look at the author and their willingness to work as much of their ass off as they can, their ability to self-promote, their passion, how serious they view writing as something they want to do far more than simply indulge in. In considering an author’s work, it’s often very frustrating trying to look them up online to see what else they’ve done and find they don’t even have a website. NOT that not having a website turns me off completely. I’ve taken on authors with no websites and now, with a tiny bit of direction, they do.

Question: Would you advise an Author to put both an E-Mail and P.O. Box in the beginning or the end of his or her novel for Fans or other people to get in contact with them?
An author should always have a way for fans to get a hold of them and they should make that way known anywhere they can. In all of our publications, we always put an author bio and all that information in the back. We also have advertisements of our other titles in the back of every BBS book.

Question: Would you advise an Author to put his or her Facebook, Twitter, etc on his, her or the Publications Web-Site?
By all means! Why not? Unless an author wants his or her best ways of keeping up-to-date with them kept secret. You don’t want to be a secret pimping a book you wrote that you want many people to buy and read. I don’t know, though….with some of the generally graphically violent/scary material we publish, you’d think maybe some of us would have SOMETHING to hide! Just kidding.

Question: Would you have a problem if the Author wanted to submit his or her work to a Magazine?
Not at all. For reasons stated above, I highly encourage it. If you’re talking about the work I’d be publishing, not the whole thing, of course, but excepts or a single story from a collection maybe. But you can submit any other story anywhere at any time to anyhoo while you’re with us with the one we’re publishing for you.

Question: I noticed the Authors on the Web-Site have his or her brief Bio up on the site. Does Black Bed Sheet Publications write the Authors Bio on the site or do the Authors themselves write their own Bio for themselves to put up on the site?
Usually it’s the authors themselves with input from me. Sometimes it’s me. Mostly the authors already have one that I use on mine and it updates from time to time. It’s often the same bio that’s found in the backs of their books.

Question: I watched one of the videos you made yourself on YouTube and you said that in 2013 you would like and are trying to have a weekend convention at a Hotel over by you just with “Black Bed Sheet” Authors. Is that still in the works?
Not just Black Bed Sheet authors but highlighting them, and with lots of independent horror talent. Yes, it’s in the works and taking shape. It’s called DAYS OF TERROR and has its own Facebook page (please like!), and it looks like we’re focusing on the beginning of next year. It involves the efforts of BBS and other Northern California horror celebrities I’ve pulled together, notably Miss Misery whose “Miss Misery’s Days of Terror last year was a tremendous success.

Question: How and when would you go about telling one of your Authors in regards to getting a Manager and Agent for themselves?
You are your most important manager or agent, first and foremost. More likely than not, you can get a lot farther on your own. That’s not to say the right one won’t help you, as long as they don’t take your money but rather earn it from a deal they get for you, but you’re probably going to find that most won’t really do anything more for you than what you could’ve done in the first place with a little extra effort and resourcefulness. The more people you meet who do what you do, the more connections you make….not just in social networking but getting out there yourself to events and placing yourself in the midst of opportunity, that can get you far and that’s just you doing it. In a sense, I act as an agent in regard to an author’s publication with me. I’m always looking to my resources and connections to find foreign rights deals and film and comic book deals. Some of our authors have such deals albeit nothing beyond the realms of the independent world, nothing to make us rich. At least not yet.

Question: How much does a “Black Bed Sheet” Author earn a year?
If they spent it all in one place, maybe enough for a good family dinner at Denny’s without using coupons. It’s a tough, competitive business and it seems every Joe and his mother has a book out these days. The market’s oversaturated. Many, many presses large and small go under and the small ones rise, take a leap, and splatter all over the pavement. I do this full time, and in doing it I face financial calamity every single month barely being able to keep my life afloat, working for that one big break or deal or success I need to make it easier to bring Black Bed Sheet into the resounding and profitable and influential institution it’s meant to be for myself and all its authors. Right now, the reality is an author makes very little when their book is sold through a distributor compared to books that are sold direct. The authors who generally make the most money so far have been authors who buy their own copies and personally sell them. Then there’s sales direct from our online store where authors get a large chunk of their royalties. Oftentimes, a retail store book signing can seem to be a success but when the remaining books are returned through the distributor, those sales are swallowed by so many extra costs it eats into profits. Most print sales through online stores, by the time the profits filter through the stores and distributors and me to the author’s 14% of what I get, we have to really sell to make something of it that way.

Question: How do you pay the Author?
Quarterly royalties, check or Paypal, based on the percentages in our contract. Usually it’s about 14%. Sometimes I’m a few weeks late, but they get ‘em! I’m the BBS accountant, too.

Question: Does “Black Bed Sheet Publications” loan their Author some spending money before his or her book is even out?
I wish. I really do. I wish we gave out advances against royalties, but that’s not within our budget yet. I sometimes wish someone would loan me a good chunk of spending money that I could use on authors, but I haven’t yet found the right investor. That’s an option I’m keeping a keen but reluctant eye out for.

Question: Does “Black Bed Sheet Publications” have any Independent/Mainstream connections to turn one of the Author’s books into a Feature Length Film, Series, Mini-Series, TV Show?
We have a plethora of independent connections in film, television, plenty of resources on my end with my career, then Francy’s show of course and all her genre-related guests and connections and friends we have in the industry, our partners Shot in the Dark Comics and Hacker’s Source Magazine, etc. As I’ve said above, some of our authors have deals as a result of being BBS authors, latest case in point being Jason Gehlert and his Quiver werewolf feature with Wits’ End Entertainment as well as so many things we have going with Shot in the Dark. I’m also supposed to be doing my Cutting Edges creature flick soon.

Question: What can I look forward to as an Author to be a part of the “Black Bed Sheet” family?
Aside from what I stated above and depending on you: a wild ride of experience, an opening of doors, direction, and, as many BBS authors have conveyed to me, it may change your life despite the fact we ain’t none of us rich yet. And in ways already, we’re influencing the book industry, gained genre-wide respect, and are taking over the world. Check out our expanding universe athttp://www.downwarden.com/blackbedsheet and buy our excellent books athttp://www.downwarden.com/blackbedshe...
About Nicholas Grabowsky

Nicholas Grabowsky’s novels of horror/fantasy and mainstream pulp fiction, both as himself, as Nicholas Randers, and as Marsena Shane, have generated worldwide acclaim for over three decades and praised by many of today’s most popular horror gurus in the literary world. He began his career in traditional publishing houses with brisk sellers in mass market paperback horror and romance, and the last ten years have seen him hailed by many as a mentor and advocate to the smaller presses, which has become to him a passion. His body of work includes the award-winning macabre aliens-among-us epic The Everborn, The Rag Man, Pray Serpent’s Prey, Halloween IV (and its special edition), Diverse Tales, Reads & Reviews, The Wicked Haze, Sweet Dreams Lady Moon, June Park, and Red Wet Dirt, numerous anthologies, magazine articles, and self help books, with projects extending to screenplays, poetry, songs, film, comics and graphic novels, and a wide variety of short fiction and nonfiction since the 1980’s. He’s a veteran special guest at numerous genre conventions and makes appearances and signings across North America. He has been in the limelight a radical gospel preacher right out of high school and in the following years a rock vocalist, teacher, lecturer and activist, editor, publisher and founder of the Sacramento-based Diverse Media small press, which has recently blossomed into the subdivisions of Black Bed Sheet Books, which publishes “exemplary literature, fiction & non” but specializes in horror/fantasy, and Black Bed Sheet Productions, which produces independent film, and sponsors both the hit Blog Talk Radio show Francy & Friends and the popular web stream Black Hamster TV. Currently, Nicholas is at work with numerous anthologies, graphic novels and comic books, an Everborn sequel and the novels The Downwardens and The Sirens of Knowland. His independent film projects include the upcoming slasher creature feature Cutting Edges.

READ the 1992 SHOCKER II Treatment Written by Nicholas Grabowsky for Wes Craven FREE!

Folks have been hounding me about Shocker II now and again, and I finally came across it in a file cabinet from the bowels of my parent's garage! The 38-page treatment director WES CRAVEN got me to write in 1992 as a sequel to his film SHOCKER, starring Mitch Pileggi as Horace Pinker. I and my agent at the time were going back and forth with Craven’s assistant about novelizations which led to the director’s interest in my published work at the time and he wanted to see where I took his characters if I wrote the story. I didn’t have a story. I was poking around for novelization deals because Halloween IV really worked for me. So, in light of this interest, I set to work and wrote a detailed treatment . I was very excited about it, and I read it now and I wish I could just wave a magic wand and see it made. The original Shocker was fun….it seemed obvious Craven was attempting a new brand of Freddy-like villain to market, and the television channel chase….well, you kinda have to be stoned to truly appreciate it….and it had a massive promotional campaign. When I saw it in the theaters around 1989/1990, I thought it was entertaining but a bit hokey. But when Wes Craven wants to see what you can do with it in a sequel…..well, I just HAD to! Reading it now, it’s chock full of the style and elements my own work is known for, and I think it’d be a damned shame if I returned this jewel back to the file cabinets, so I decided to share it with all my horror friends, my writing friends, and all my horror writing friends.

And I’m giving it away for free. Even though I wrote it, it’s based on Craven’s characters & situations, so I can’t make a profit. But as free fan fiction, I can certainly show it off. It’s available to download in most ebook formats at the online store of the horror book publishing company I run, Black Bed Sheet Books, in its ebook section (see link at bottom of note).


All I ask from those enthusiastic horror fans who’d love to download and read it is this:

please “LIKE” Black Bed Sheet Books on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/pages/Black-B...

......and while you’re at the Black Bed Sheet Book Store downloading your copy (see link below), please consider giving our authors and their astoundingly kickass books a read. We have print books, instantly downloadable ebooks available in all formats, and they’re all mostly HORROR, baby! After you’ve liked us on Facebook, and you download and read Shocker II, I’d also love your feedback. So feel free to post your responses.

Go here for SHOCKER II:
http://blackbedsheet.goshopper.net/c/...

Inspiration & Horror, Baby,
---Nicholas Grabowsky

BLACK BED SHEET NIGHTMARES –AN INDEPENDENT HORROR PUBLISHER’S RANT

I think this is the very first time I felt I had to openly address negative issues and certain frustrations some of you may have as current or non-current BBS authors, so I figure I’ll just go all out and throw everything on the table from beginning to end. The first time I set to write this, I steadily drank until 5 in the morning and it was originally titled “Why Horror Publishing Makes Me Want to Just Shoot Myself in the Head and Die.” For four years I’ve been doing this, this Black Bed Sheet Books thing, and absolutely only that. As most of you know I have no side job, no other income except from my own books. Some of you hear me talk about how I labor endlessly until 5 am working on one thing or another, someone’s edit, someone’s book cover or trailer, or that a computer broke down, or how I’m so intensely gosh darn hellishly busy it takes me sometimes two weeks to even months to answer some emails.

For now, I’m going to take a deep breath and reflect a bit for you, self-evaluate my performance as a publisher, address all the issues, explain a few things, and hopefully something good will come from what I have to say and I won’t need to write another one of these essay-length things.

There was a time I thought I had a good job managing a large retail book store. That went out of business and everyone lost their jobs. Then, after living all my life in Southern CA, my sister was abducted from her school and I went to join the search for her in Northern CA. When her body was found, I decided to stay there with my folks. In a month’s time I got a job at the Walmart down the street from them and worked for them full time for five years doing everything from mixing paint to being in charge of the front check-out lines. One week in December before the year 2000 hit, I smoked some pot. The next week at work, someone needed me in the Garden Department to bring down some Xmas tree stands from atop the tallest overstock risers (back when there was such a thing} from the top step of the highest wheeled ladder in the store, and when I retrieved them, as I was making my way down, I stumbled and spilled those stands everywhere in front of a ton of customers and employees. After I got up off my ass, I announced to everyone that I was okay, there was nothing to see here, and I limped away. Next day, my ankle was hurting so bad I opted to have it seen by a doctor, but a drug test in the process told Walmart about the pot I’d smoked the previous week, and regardless of how much of myself I’d given that store, I was let go.

I got a job with Homebase right after, a hardware chain that at the time in our area rivaled Home Depot, and I gave that job 100% too. They went out of business, laid off everyone. Employees that worked there for twenty years lost everything. Then there was House 2 Home, a brand new big home decoration/improvement chain were I was hired as a department manager and so many other people had quit very respectable positions at Target and other places to work for them. Within not even six months, the entire chain went under and when we all got the news at a morning meeting, people actually fell to their knees and wept.

I got a part time weekend job with Volunteers of America as a mentor to foster teens in a transitional housing program which I ultimately managed to keep for five years afterwards, but I needed full-time employment. So then I also found a job at Lowes, another huge home improvement store. I worked full time in Garden, got my forklift license, and fulltime from six am I busted my ass stacking bags of fertilizer and cement blocks with supervisors telling me to hustle all the freaking time.

Then one day when I was working, a supervisor came up to me and escorted me to the manager’s office, where I was joined by the manager and a security guard. The manager asked me if I had a DUI in 2000. I thought he was trying to get to some other point. But he told me when I filled out my application several months prior that I put a check mark on the wrong box where it asked me if I had any misdemeanors. It was the only misdemeanor I’d had in my life, but I apparently marked “no.” So I was fired, I was escorted to my locker, cleaned it out, and was escorted to the front exit with all my fellow employees looking at me like I stole something.

That summer, I looked and looked and looked for jobs. I went through so many interviews and was trying to go for retail management and had many second and third interviews at the same places. During that period, I started putting on my resumes that I’ve had this rich history of being a respected horror author for quite a while. I thought it would help, let possible employers know I don’t screw around with my life and have ambition and the whole nine yards. You’d think if I were sitting down with a manager at Safeway or Home Depot or Hollywood Video for a third interview that I got the job. Instead, what I got, believe it or not, were supervisors sitting behind their desks handing me manuscripts of books they’d been writing, asking me for advice or if there was any way I could help them in getting their book published. My inability to get a job was confounding, and by then I was living in Roseville in a house with a woman I’d worked with at House 2 Home whom I was going to marry and where we were raising our baby son Charlie.

That October, I was under all kinds of pressure to make ends meet, and one night I visited a friend, had some beers, and tried out his motorized skateboard scooter. I was drunk and stupid and fractured and dislocated my shoulder after flying over the handle bars and landing shoulder-first in the middle of the street. I was screaming the entire time I waited in the hospital emergency room because it really hurt like hell, and when the doctors saw me they didn’t realize my shoulder was dislocated. So I couldn’t move my arm for two months. Then some other doctor told me my shoulder was indeed dislocated and had healed over, and recommended I sue the hospital because I could’ve been fixed that same night. I went through surgery where my shoulder and arm had to be essentially taken off and put back on right. I spent several months with my whole upper torso and arm in a big metal sling-like contraption and underwent all kinds of therapy to be able to use my arm and feel the nerves in my hand again, from taking a rubber ball and rolling it up a wall dozens of times each day just to get my arm to lift and go back down because I couldn’t for the longest time get that sucker to raise past my waist.

The upside to that was I did file a lawsuit and we settled out of court. Said and done, I got thrity-five grand out of it. It’s the story of my life sometimes: certain tragedy turns itself into something positive later. I took ten of it and split it between my parents and my fiance’s parents. I put some into improvements to the house we lived in. I put the rest of it toward my writing career. Among the first things I did in that regard was set up convention appearances across the continent over the next couple of years and invited up-and-coming authors from as far as the UK to join me at these conventions by paying for their tables and supporting them.

Then my publisher, a guy who basically ran his business from his home for five years up until that point successfully, just up and flaked on everyone, disappeared leaving authors at book signings with no books and owing 125 authors royalties, it was a complete mess. He was supposed to publish RED WET DIRT for me and with lots of hoopla. I was so disappointed. But I had a history of disappointment with publishers for as long as they’d been publishing me, up until then about nearly 20 years. I was never paid anything for Halloween IV or any of my books as Nicholas Randers. Back then I had to promote myself because no one else was doing it. I made my rounds to local supermarket distributors and developed relationships with them so my paperbacks could be alongside King’s and Koontz’, did my own flyers and mail order ads. Back then everyone with a published novel was published the hard traditional way unless they had spent thousands and thousands on a vanity press.

Once there was a time my early books were everywhere, and I was working at Video Giant. There were times where people would buy Halloween IV and Pray Serpent’s Prey at the Albertson’s supermarket that shared our parking lot, come in while my boss was busy yelling at me for not straightening the shelves fast enough, and ask me to sign books I would never be paid for.

There were many reasons I started Black Bed Sheet Books, and one of the strongest was because I’d been through so much with publishers that I vowed to do better. But an equally powerful reason pertains to why I gave you a brief history of my recent working life. I stopped believing there was such a thing as job security anymore. Most of what I learned in life had become to me a redundant adage, the thing about doing something yourself if you want to get anything done. But it was more than that, I wanted to take control of my life. I didn’t want to have to worry about endlessly looking for a job anymore, or ever getting fired, or the company going out of business. This time, I was in charge, and my success was up to me. I had absolutely every reason you can think of to decide that this was what I was going to do for the rest of my life and I was going to do everything it took to make it work.

To make me even further determined, I lost the weekend job I had for the last five-plus years as a youth mentor. I’d been actively making a difference in the lives of foster teens, helped found a library for them, taught them healing through writing, and was even going to publish a short anthology they would all write so they could all have one big book signing and it would inspire them. Being they were a conservative Christian organization, they had a problem with me influencing their group homes with cool horror literature and movies like Pan Labyrinth and used an instance where I couldn’t make it to work one day to fire me.

In launching BBS, people emerged from all life’s avenues to show their support, from the writing world to the local business world to my family of relatives who largely had never been enthusiastic about my being a writer, to my fiancé. The first order of business was to start where my last publisher left off, to publish RED WET DIRT. After that, I worked night and day publishing other people, focusing on those who just needed a break. I poured the rest of my shoulder money into the business, had a screenplay/movie deal going, picked up some good author friends’ works, had a deal with Mountain Mike’s Pizza where my face was on a box of every pizza in town.

8 months later: I found myself sitting on my parent’s front porch with my laptop running Black Bed Sheet, living in their guest room like I did when I first came up there in ’95. My laptop and my parents were the only things I could count on. The pizza thing didn’t go over well, little girls’ birthday pizza parties weren’t a good atmosphere for selling horror books. I was flat broke. I was only allowed to see my four-year-old at a park for three hours on Tuesdays with one of my ex-fiance’s lawyers spies watching me to make sure I took him potty every hour. My only possessions were dumped in front of the house I once lived in and were placed in storage. My parents were spending money they didn’t have for a lawyer. I wound up in the emergency room after having something like a heart attack in front of my parents. The prior months had been filled with increasingly countless arguments where my money ran out and I didn’t make a profit right away and everything turned into “get a job” this and “you’re nothing but a hopeless loser” that, not just from her, but her family. So one morning when I was getting our son ready for school my fiancé came at me after drinking all night and that time I slapped her. And then even the courts started telling me I was a hopeless loser and to get a job. Funny how things can change in eight months.

But there I was, with my laptop and cigarettes and beer and reasons enough to crawl under a rock forever, and I popped out seven books that summer, designed, edited, covers and all, on time for their release dates. One of them was one of Forest J Ackerman’s last written works, and that year I won 5th Best Publisher in the Predator’s and Editor’s Reader’s Poll, and came out with more releases later that year. My determination has been like that ever since also, and I can understand how on one hand I can be so persistent and obsessive filling all my time with Black Bed Sheet that I neglect my significant others and they get frustrated, but on the other hand that same persistence has overcome ridiculous adversity.

That first year and ever since, my personal life has tossed me around a bit with adversity that I face and somehow conquer all the time. Having to pay child support hadn’t been part of the plan, and leftover books from author book signings and other book returns started swallowing up profits because they force you to pay back almost twice as much as you thought you made when the stores first ordered them. That would wipe out pay periods where I had to pay royalties out of pocket. Every month I have bills to pay to maintain BBS, from credit card companies, virtual registers, website hosting fees, printing fees, distribution fees, regular fees to keep titles active. I rarely have any money left over for myself, it all goes right back into BBS or to catch up on bills at my current apartment with Francy. Just after that happened with my ex, my BBS business account went into collections, and I eventually fell behind on child support. So there’d be times when an author would send me money for books, or times when rent was due, and suddenly that money would be gone because child services would seize it out of the blue. I’d have to get a loan, or earn that money back right away by doing yardwork for my dad, for example. On the surface, authors never know, because the author book orders always get filled, royalties always get paid, releases come out, everything gets done. I don’t like talking about that, because as a rule in business you never let any more problems out of the bag than you have to, lest in my case the authors lose faith in you, and who would want to be with a publisher who complains about problems all the time in the first place?

Computers and circumstance and ghosts in the machine: this is outright my biggest headache, and half my time is wasted on it….problem solving, troubleshooting and dealing with computer problems. That’s half my time being forced to be unproductive. Emails get lost, computers go out, programs fail, and I don’t rest until everything is functional again. It happens all the time, always putting me off schedule and eating into valuable time when things really need to get done, and everything piles up on me. And then there’s the fact that I can’t always count on printers and distributors and people I do business with to be timely. Often, they seem to have stupid people working for them, or they change their policies, or I have to wait two weeks for them to do something that normally takes two days. And oh the irony, some companies I’ve relied on with BBS go out of business themselves, just the type of thing I was trying to get away from.

And then there’s the authors themselves. I have the utmost respect for authors, authors of any kind. But I’ve always had a special kinship with authors of horror and genres close to it, and a mutual respect. Before BBS, I was already known for years to help independent struggling authors. It’s embedded into my entire life: writing and inspiring others to write, since before most kids my age even learned to write. But I tell you, in many ways it’s a whole different world when you’re a publisher. You’re in a position where you can truly make authors happy, or on the other hand let authors down. I’ve done both these four years, time and again, more happy than otherwise, but the ones who felt let down…...some of them really get pissed off.

For me, authors are a lot like customers in a busy retail store, and I’m running the store by myself. Although they are there for my services, I paid for them out of my own pocket to be there from as soon as they walked through the front entrance, and the longer they stay, the more I have to keep paying. And just one or two simply won’t do, I have to have an amount reasonable enough to keep the store open, at least an average of twelve new titles a year with releases disbursed through the seasons to keep us fresh with new product to compliment the old, I can’t stagnate. Most of the time you’ll see me running in every different direction around the store, trying to fill all my obligations and a multitude of special needs. One time I’d be stuck at the paint counter while a line of impatient people are piling up at the Sporting Goods counter waiting for help, and I’d excuse myself to run over there and bring the line down, then on my way back someone would catch me to ask me questions and to take a bike down for them in the toy department, then I’m needed at the service desk, then UPS is banging at the back door, then customers complain that nobody’s answering their phone calls, someone spills hazardous waste on aisle 12 and the plants in the Garden Center haven’t been watered in over a week. Some days are better than others, some days I don’t have to run around as much, some days everything works. Then other days I can’t even use the restroom without people pounding on the doors.

I lost a few friends over this business, let alone a fiancé. One was an author who was extremely enthusiastic at first and was determined to sell a million copies. Then he ordered 500 copies for himself, drew most of the attention to selling those copies, and then wanted out of his contract because I wasn’t selling enough for him. I had a close author friend who signed with me, and the day after a real successful Francy show with her as the guest, I received a very bitter email from her complaining how I failed to get her into a particular Books-a-million like I’d promised. It turns out the manager had turned her down time and again and according to her my promise to get her in that store was the only reason she signed with me, otherwise she would have published the book herself. There was a juicy anthology of about 12-15 authors that would have gone over well if only all of them lifted more than a finger to promote it instead of a small few. I’m really shocked at the kinds of authors who come in, expect me to do everything for them while they disappear somewhere, and some of them I never hear from again, even after their contracts expire. I took on one author who was supposed to be well-known but struggling with publishers who insisted I did everything her way, from cover to edit, and I spent so much time with that edit that it was eating away my work with Xmas releases. Then her and her co-author demanded I take the book to a pro editor that charges $2,000. I dissolved the contract, and the next week she was up on a site raising that same $2,000 for an editor. The book came out two months later with a publisher that had only two releases, and I bet the edit’s exactly the same as mine.

Some authors expect I’m going to sell them tons of books, some expect I have to do things their way. Some expect me to take their book on and then when it’s published point to every other place under heaven but BBS for readers to buy their book, barely mention BBS on their site, nothing. Sometimes their numbers at Amazon are the only thing important to them, or don’t understand the debilitating reality of book store returns and still insist it’s vital to their careers to get into Barnes & Noble. Some authors are completely happy one week, then the next are extremely frustrated, then get happy again, and go back and forth that way. Some demand a lot of my time at the expense of the other authors and the business. Regardless, in all situations, I’m always finding myself struggling to make everyone happy all the time. Whenever anyone’s not happy, I get worried and depressed and even that sometimes slows things down.

Whether I’m to blame for one thing or someone else is to blame for another, it’s hard doing this. Neither my relatives nor family nor the court system acknowledge this is a real job. When I watch American Idol, the part where the final contestants get to visit their hometowns and there’s always lots of fanfare and keys to the city…..if I get truly successful doing this, I’d be lucky if my triumphant homecoming would have all of three people in a backyard with a piece of cake. And believe me, the people I get the most complaints from are not authors, but bill collectors, child support people, and my mom. Even Francy complains. I’m always busy, I’m always feeling like I’m a week away from being homeless and I pound and pound away at my computers because I’ve got this stubborn undying certainty that this is all for my future, the future of my family, my calling in life. Writing too. I keep forgetting about writing.

I’m not saying I’m blameless and never fall short. Some writers are serious and well-meaning, and I always encourage them to speak up and tell me what’s on their mind and we work together to resolve issues. And I get tons of emails, some get lost. Some of my emails to them get lost. Sometimes I only have a half hour each day to answer emails because I otherwise get nothing done, and the first fifteen minutes is spent sorting out the nonsense. It’s rarely really a communication problem, it’s more of a responding-to-communication problem on my part. I also come from a background where it was common to take six months for my own agent to get back with me, let alone a publisher, and now I see all the reasons why other people in my shoes have always taken so long in the past. The bulk of the reason why I chose to do this newsletter/essay was to address some of the complaints that I get, and I’ve really turned over the matter of it taking awhile for emails for four years. I don’t know what else to say about the matter except I apologize, I still have no idea how I can be quicker unless it requires my attention right away. I don’t even know why that’s so much an issue. I talk to BBS authors all the time on Facebook on a regular basis. Shoot me messages or chats, remind me of things, don’t be afraid to be a pest sometimes and always voice your concerns. Just never assume I’m giving anything less than one hundred percent, that I’m neglectful or slacking or trying to get away with anything I shouldn’t. I’m entirely the real deal.
I’m in the business of giving writers a break, particularly horror authors. I do that. I accept a handful a year out of maybe two hundred, invest time and energy and money into them, produce as professional a product as what I’d expect from my own works. I also act as their agent for that product, looking for foreign deals and adaptations, movie deals, comic book deals. I spend time gathering partners and affiliates, promoting my titles wherever I go in person and online and through all the outlets and networks I’ve built over the years, feature them in our catalogs, create merchandise and web marketing tools for them. Sometimes that looks to authors as if I haven’t yet done anything for them, because sales are too low or they feel like I’ve neglected them, they haven’t a movie or comic deal yet, or I haven’t hooked them up with a live podcast like I promised.

If you want your book to go further, it depends on you. You must realize that a one-year contract isn’t much time at all for a publisher to market a book. By the end of that year I always feel like I haven’t done enough even though I have. I also need you to get with other authors, exchange and review each other’s books, help in the effort to work as a team. Not very many of you do that. A lot of BBS authors get their book signings, appearances, readings, interviews, book reviews, publicity and hoopla with no problem, with my help and without, and their experience with me has brought them a few steps up the ladder in their careers and further in the industry.

This was supposed to be a rant about the negative things, to get points across and address issues. I’m not known for complaining or negativity. I just really felt the need to get this out. We are in the midst of exciting growth and expansion, a great Fall/Winter season, our authors are getting comic and movie deals and getting their works and names out further in the world, we have remarkable partners and created many memorable events and appearances across the country, been responsible for innovative industry firsts which raise the bar for the rest and continue to do just that. We have a popular radio show, a web TV channel and the ambition to take over the world. We’re recognized as among the best and most sought after small independent publishers of book-length horror fiction in the world. I do my best to run it and sometimes I fall flat on my face, but it will always be here as the other publishers come and go, and we’re always moving forward.

Inspiration & Horror always,
---Nicholas Grabowsky,
Black Bed Sheet Books
www.downwarden.com/blackbedsheet

TO ALL HORROR WRITERS AND PUBLISHERS EVERYWHERE

I wrote and posted this on Myspace a handful of years ago, just for horror authors, and I received pages of positive responses. All this time later, after I came across it again, I thought I’d resurrect it, because in my mind nothing’s changed…….except for the fact that these days, I’m not only an author, I’m a publisher of many authors…..

To all horror writers, large and small, big press, small press, even smaller press, self-published, not even published at all:
In my youth, my dad would every once in awhile take me fishing off any given pier in the Pacific Ocean off Southern CA.....Newport, Huntington, a few others. He'd wake me up super early, we'd salvage enough twinkies and sandwiches to fill an Igloo, get our bait, drive, find a nice spot amongst the other fisher people there doing what we were about to do, and then cast our lines and do it.............sitting there for hours trying to catch something, among countless others doing the same thing, rooting for one of us that brought in something big, wowing over the guy with his little daughter who caught something so tiny they threw it back but nonetheless it was still quite a spectacle....it was all a thrilling experience for me. A couple of times, we caught a nice one. Other times, somebody else did, and it was bigger than mine and others took photographs. Some talked about the big ones that got away, and you could never really know for sure if they were telling the truth. One time, a fight broke out between two of the fisher people, and I had to move out of their path. I forgot what happened with that; either they settled their differences, had to be escorted out, or just stayed away from each other. I guess it didn't matter....if they didn't cease to exist sometime afterwards, they had to still be fishing, somewhere, eventually, if that's what they love to do.

The way I see it, from within the industry and without, down to the smallest aspiring horror writer, from the Kings to the Keenes to the most noble amongst us down to the guy in Nebraska who's horror's biggest fan but just can't get past chapter number three in his hoped-for debut novel, we're all of us fishing on a pier with a box full of twinkies and some bait we hope will catch us a big one. Maybe you caught a big one already, maybe you have a long history of award-winning big ones we all love or aspire towards, maybe you're constantly asking those who caught a big one just what bait they used. We've all had our lines in the water, all sitting at that very long pier doing what we strive to do best, and as far as I'm concerned we're all in this together, trying to do the same goddamn thing.
Write horror. And hope people like it.

Maybe you're not serious enough, and you'd just as well take your fishing pole and go home to something more suitable to what you really want, towards a direction in your life just as notable. I'm talking to the ones who want to stay, as well as to the ones who have stayed there and done very well for themselves.....

We're all on the same pier, always fishing, fishing for that first one, fishing for more, and it's a long-ass pier. Let's make this pier the best fucking pier the book industry has ever seen, turn it into the 2-plus bookcase section at Barnes & Noble the horror section well deserves and hasn't seen for a long time, turn the genre on its heels and make the reading public love us. There's desire for it. There are many people out there who love horror and just won't read. Let's change that. Let's nurture each other for the love of horror and its written word, and embrace each other in this art form and set aside any differences you may have, speak to the public in one loud, clear, decadent voice.

And who am I? Nothing really but just another fisherman. And I embrace all of you others. I'm a horror writer, and I'm damn proud of being so. I’m also a full-time horror publisher, so not only have I invested my life on my own works but I’ve placed my career secondary to the benefit of publishing and promoting others, kind of like putting my money where my mouth is or practicing what I preach, and I work day and night with one goal: making smalltime horror big time. But no matter what else I've done, I've been a horror writer first and foremost, as fate would have it, and will die being one. Every last one of you suit my cause and are my kin, whether you’re another writer, publisher, or whatever…..horror is horror, and we need to mutually work together with networking rather than competition for the greater glory of making our genre the equivilent of a full book case at Barnes & Nobel again, regardless of the ever-changing climate of the book industry.

Let's support each other.
Peace.
---Nick
PS: If it behooves you, please like Black Bed Sheet Books on Facebook

Nicholas Randers Interviews Nicholas Grabowsky

(The guy who interviewed me here ended up recently blacklisted by everyone involved in my genre for plagiarizing a lot of people’s stuff, including Stephen King’s. But that interview took some time to do, so I reworded his questions with my old pen name and slapped it all down on this here blog, for enquiring minds who want to know, and serves as a nifty update too.)

NR: Okay, so you were at varying times an actor, rock singer, screenwriter, evangelical preacher, book store assistant manager, phone room sales manager, door-to-door salesman, stripper, composer, drug addict, Japanese Exchange Student Coordinator, gardener, forklift driver, choir director, and were convinced you were a vampire all through elementary school. So…why the interest in the horror genre again?

NG: That’s a question I’ve tried to answer too many times, but it’s a noble one, and sometimes I try to be philosophical about it, I can tend to create these great lengthy reasons why, but really when it all boils down to it the answer is this: I just don’t know. For a lot of people, there seem to be clear reasons, and I’ve heard many times from horror authors things like “I didn’t get into horror until I was 25” or “I saw this movie when I was ten and it changed my life.” I think I was born this way. By the time I went to kindergarten I was convinced I was a vampire and chased girls at recess trying to bite them, flapping my jacket like I was flying. I would stay up late at night in my bed and pretend I was talking to Dracula, The Wolf Man, and Wile E. Coyote. I suppose, though, my dad watching those old Universal monster movies on television helped, and when I saw the Rankin/Bass classic “Mad Monster Party,” it changed my life at four years old. I could have been a normal kid, but, nope.

NR: You have been praised highly by such noted authors as Stephen King and Clive Barker, which is no small accomplishment. Have you ever had the pleasure of meeting them in person?

NG: Yes I have. I met King once around 1992 at the American Book Sellers Association convention in an Anaheim Convention Center hallway after someone told me he finished a signing there and should be headed that way on his way out. We probably spoke for about thirty seconds. Later that night, I shared a table with several literary agents and we all enjoyed King singing in his band “The Rock Bottom Remainders.” With Clive, I did a signing event the same day as he did once at Dark Delicacies in Burbank and our meeting there led to a phone call from him, a nice chat, and a handwritten letter in the mail sometime afterwards praising my work with encouraging words. In the early ‘90’s, living in Southern Cal, I attending many of his readings (as well as Dean Koontz’s, whom I often came to for good industry advice).


NR: Take a moment to tell me about your book, Pray, Serpent’s Prey.

NG: It was my first full-length novel, and my first one published. That being published got me the job doing the “Halloween IV” book, and many others. I signed with Critic’s Choice Paperbacks, who was distributed by Carol Publishing, so when its street date hit you could find it on the supermarket paperback racks almost anywhere. It was a dream come true. I started the story in my tenth grade math class when I was bored one day, and it was supposed to blossom into a Christian allegory (being that I actually preached in Baptist and Penticostal churches back then, I wasn’t allowed to write horror really). Then events happened in my life which turned me away from the church-going crowd, and I made the story darker and let loose a bit. It’s basically about a church pastor and a group of rebellious teens joining forces to defeat snake/vampire people before evil overwhelms their small Montana town.


NR: As a man who was once deeply into the church scene, were you ever surprised to find out how many churchgoers were actually into the horror genre?

NG: Back in the day I was surrounded with the belief that you had to be on fire for Jesus. I think I heard once on the news that someone took that literally with gasoline and a Bic. But the consensus was back then that if you loved the Lord, you’d avoid the things of the world…horror movies, books, heavy metal and anything related was, well…if you were caught liking them in any way, it was like being caught shooting up heroin and you’d have a lot of people praying for you and begging you to repent. I’ve known churches to boycott “The Wizard of Oz.” People can be extreme that way. I was inching my way further and further into the limelight in the church world, and I cried for the souls of friends of mine who went to the theaters to see a Halloween film. Looking back, I was also really crying on the inside, because the Lord wouldn’t let me see one myself and enjoy it. Basically, if it wasn’t about Jesus, it was sinful, and that went for the movies we watched and the books we read, the music we listened to, all that. I’d been writing all my life, but eventually I found myself writing a horror novel (“Pray Serpent’s Prey”) instead of trippy cartoony fantasy fiction with the excuse that it was a “Christian” horror novel with an allegorical theme: demons infecting a town and the town’s pastor learning to bend to God’s will in order to cast them out. No one in church thought that was a good idea. I myself never heard of a Christian horror novel, and nobody understood what I was doing. Then something in my personal life erupted and separated me from church, and I found myself at liberty to rewrite the story however way I wanted. That felt damn good. It’s funny all these years later that Christian horror has become quite common—-something that I tried to do twenty-five years ago—and I especially relate to the writers drawn towards that sub-genre. It is so cool there’s so many these days. Really, it never used to be that way.


NR: What’s your connection with Walter Koenig, ‘Chekov’ of Star Trek?

NG: I dabbled with acting around Los Angeles in the mid-‘80’s, just before I was first widely published, and made a small living for a short while as a Hollywood extra. I answered an ad in an industry newspaper for acting classes taught by Walter, auditioned, and made it into the class. I met a lot of cool people there, got to hang out at the Koenig home and attend a screening of Walter’s “Moontrap” at the Director’s Guild. He had a Science Fiction novel coming out that year and his publisher’s sister was in our class. So I talked to her about “Pray Serpent’s Prey” and sent a copy to her brother, who telephoned me a few months later with a contract offer. The rest is history. On a side note….years later, when I was well more established, I connected Walter with a publisher friend who published a version I edited of that very same Science Fiction novel, “Buck Alice and the Actor-robot.” Another Star Trek side note is I recently published Matthew Ewald’s HUMAN NATURE, and Matthew plays James T. Kirk in “Star Trek: Phase One.”


NR: Did your sister’s death have a profound effect on your outlook on life in general? On your career?

NG: Yes it did. That experience was terrible. She was abducted from her school and all of Sacramento, it seemed, was looking for her. The story was on the news all the time for awhile. It’s what made me move from Southern Cal in 1995 to be with my parents up North. The wife of one of O.J. Simpson’s attorneys offered us her services and drove us around town to investigate potential sightings, thinking she was being prostituted around. In October of that year, two kids found her body in a drainage ditch. It was so decomposed they thought she was a Halloween costume, and she had to be identified by her dental records. I was there when my parents got the phone call. The mystery of what exactly happened to her went cold case. But she was autistic, and I’ll never forget when my parents told me a Sacramento police officer’s opinion was that perhaps she fell into that ditch herself. If you want to talk traumatic events, that shook my world. But when I was in junior high, I came across my grandmother’s suicide with several margarine-sized buckets filled with her blood under her bed and blood palm prints all over the walls. My cousin died when he hooked up his chest to his guitar amplifier to hear his heartbeat right after he took a shower, and my aunt found him dead when she went to wake him up for school. The very night my parents said their goodbyes when they first moved up to Sacramento with my sister, my other grandma died in her sleep, and my aunt who lived with her died suddenly of an unforeseen blood disorder while dialing 911 soon afterwards. Has this had an effect on me? Certainly. But I was writing horror and bizarre stories all throughout and before. But I think experiencing tragedy has had a direct effect on my philosophy that writing, for whatever else it is, is therapy. It’s the best therapy I ever had. Music, too.


NR: How is Black Bed Sheet Books coming along?
NG: Black Bed Sheet Books, much like my personal career, has never taken a step backwards, always moving forward, no matter to what degree, but if you only knew the half of the obstacles I’ve overcome to maintain BBS and compare it to what BBS has accomplished for my authors as well as myself, I’m comfortable in saying it’s moved all involved a bit forward in our career goals. Now that doesn’t mean we’re all making money off of this. Financial backing and fundage is scarce and often hurts our abilities to advertise in ways that are too costly. We rely on not only the exceptional material we publish, but the ambitions and abilities of our authors to help us promote them after putting the blood sweat and tears it takes for me to package their works into impressive, sellable products that say “read me” all over them and can make an impression in the industry and broaden the author’s readership. I started BBS because I’ve seen too many authors get taken by others in this biz, and because I have a real desire to publish and invest in people who are just like me in that I strive to write for a living (in our case predominantly in the horror genre). And looking at our past year and a half I’m proud that BBS has established a solid presence in the horror community, and for some authors we have made dreams come true, put out titles to be proud of, and we do that these days better than ever, through previous trials and errors and minor flaws. I think so far BBS has published a couple dozen solid books in a year and a half, and looking back at a few of them I could’ve done far better had I published them now. BBS is a constant education for me, my living, my way of life. That sounds profound, but it’s what I chose to do. So, lately, as of this writing, I renewed some contracts, just released four exceptional Summer titles, we have awesome late Fall/Christmas titles, have a radio show and video show in the works, and are working with foreign translation rights. Last year, the P&E poll listed us as the fifth best independent publisher in the country, something like that. And we’re branching off into BBS Productions, where I hope to produce independent film somehow, and an imprint which does Children’s and cook books called BANANA PHONE BOOKS. Because of my fiance Francy’s blogtalk radio show, which is Fox affiliated, I’m doing a cook book with some cool HELL’S KITCHEN alumni.


NR: What’s the key to success in the world of publishing these days? Print media seems as though it is in a slump.
NG: A key to success is persistence. There’s no real key. There’s a combination of keys. It’s like a lock to a safe you’ve stored your success in and you don’t know the combination and you have several digits to work with. The combination works different for all of us. One digit could represent writing a good novel, another digit involving what you do with that novel, another digit can represent a balance in your personal life, another one nothing but chance –like running into someone important that leads to the right combination number clicking into place, another one representing how well you use your resources……you get the picture. You know, I think the real key to success is what you’re willing to put into it, and how well time works with you. Most people die before ever opening that safe. If you put your mind to it, you can sell a print book as much as you can a book in any format.


NR: What’s on the horizon for you right now?

NG: A radio show, blogtalk radio anyways, and directing my first feature “Cutting Edges.” Also, A SHOT IN THE DARK COMICS has out its first issue of comics inspired by the stories in my collection RED WET DIRT. A graphic novel is due soon from my “The Father Keeper” zombie novella. My book THE DOWNWARDENS is on the horizon. Maybe a Michael Myers anthology with BBS???????


NR: Any last words for your readers?

Buy BBS books and products! Support us and all indy horror, in print, on screen, on stage and in fine art and comics, and music. Peace, love, and progress to all! Inspiration & Horror, baby!

HAPPY HOLIDAYS & BBS BOOK STORE OPEN FOR BUSINESS!

I am very proud to announce that our official online store...the one I've been obsessively working on for the last couple of months...is now open for business. I've made our prices the best on this globe for our stuff, and I believe this is the most important online marketing tool we have. We don't have to refer our readers to Amazon or any other online store, because not only do all of us get the royalties we deserve from this store more than any place else, but we provide better promotion on your personal pages and additional revenue with merchandise to keep us up and running. We're already receiving orders, and I'd like for all of you to assist me in promoting this store like there's no tomorrow.

For BBS authors, please check out your individual pages....check out the whole site and let me know what you think, or if you have any questions. All of you who have been trying to get a hold of me recently, I've been obsessed with this project and now that it's done you'll be hearing from me soon.

After the holidays, we all have a lot of work to do.

The official store site can be found at our homepage, but more precisely at http://blackbedsheet.goshopper.net .

We are currently working on receiving orders worldwide, but postage calculations have restricted us to US and Australia orders until we figure that out. On the site, we are open for worldwide orders but international customers must contact us first for those postage calculations.

I'm extremely proud of having finally done this. There are good reasons why it took so long, but here we are, and whereas most other small press publishers have day jobs, this is all I do, day after day after day after day, so because my living depends on it, and because otherwise I'd be homeless and would have to do all the daily hours it takes for me to keep all this up and running at internet cafes after standing on street corners holding signs, I'm always 100%. Rest assurred, I'm working my ass off for the greater good, each and every day for long hours. I practically have no other life.

So let's get to it, to promote this puppy, with success to all of us involved.

To everyone else, this is the best damn underground independent online book store around, with all original titles and merchandise for sale at unbelieveable prices. Please check us out!

And again, HAPPY HOLIDAYS.

THE BLACK BED SHEET BOOK STORE

---Nicholas Grabowsky
www.downwarden.com/blackbedsheet
http://blackbedsheet.goshopper.net
www.twitter.com/blackbedsheet