Smile and start again…

I have a lot of things I’d like to talk about and say on my new site in the days and months to come, but before we move on to the future I think it might be a decent idea to take a quick trip into the past. I won’t bore you with too much here, but this blog/website is all about my writing career and I think the events of the last few years deserve a recap.

I’ve been writing for a long time now – hell, since I was about seven years old – but I never got serious about writing as a potential career until about 1992. I’d been working on lots of short stories, a play, a few bad movie scripts, and some other forgettable stuff, but when I was in the middle of writing what would eventually become my novel CRIMSON something seemed to click for me. Maybe it was just wishful thinking, but somewhere in that novel I began to believe I was going to be a REAL writer. We can debate all day about what becoming REAL means, but for me it was an honest belief in my abilities and the drive to pursuit this dream to the bitter end.

Well, that end nearly came last year. I’d worked hard – really hard – to improve my writing to the point where I’d finally had 4 novels published by a major New York publisher and there was talk of movie deals and foreign translations and all sorts of other fabulous things. I wasn’t making big bucks or being sent on lavish book tours around the world but for the most part I was satisfied with my progress and still had that dream burning within me that things were going to keep steadily building and the best was yet to come.

We all know what happened with Dorchester Publishing and Leisure Books so I’ll spare you those sad details, but I will say I don’t really harbor any bad feelings toward anyone there. Yes, I was screwed out of money that was owed to me but that can really only be blamed on the corporate black hole that swallowed everyone’s royalties. Don D’Auria (my editor at Leisure Books) was and still is fantastic to me and I have nothing but respect and admiration for everything he did building such a great line-up of top notch talent. I didn’t have a lot of contact with many of the other employees but in the end they were all just doing their job and none of them can be blamed for what ultimately happened. It’s just business. Ebooks rose up out of nowhere and bit Dorchester on the ass. They weren’t the only ones and they won’t be the last, but they weren’t prepared or set up to deal with this strong new publishing force of nature and they couldn’t survive. For me, I was admittedly only a small cog in the big wheel of New York publishing but I am extremely proud to have been published beside the ranks of such notable authors as Ramsey Campbell, Tom Piccirilli, Brian Keene, Michael Laimo, Ed Lee, John Skipp, Jeff Strand, Sephera Giron, Tim Lebbon, John Everson, Wrath James White, Richard Laymon, and so many wonderful others.

But as they say, that was yesterday. What happens now? I’ll be honest here, for a time I thought about packing it all in. It wasn’t that I didn’t still love writing or that I wasn’t happy with the many fine people I’ve worked with in the small press because that simply wasn’t true. Guys like Joe Morey at Dark Regions Press, Roy Robbins at Bad Moon Books, and Tom Moran at Sideshow Press have been (and hopefully will continue to be) great to me. Better than great, actually, and I’m honored and blessed to be published by them. My decision to stop writing had more to do with my dream dying a little. Dying a lot, I guess. Maybe it’s just writers my age (I’m 44 btw) but I grew up dreaming of seeing my books in the big bookstores alongside Stephen King and Dean Koontz; not some tiny thumbnail picture on Amazon.com. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not an ebook hater and I’m not so much of a dinosaur as to not see how powerful and important e-publishing is for authors and their careers. Without a doubt, ebooks are the future and a decent writer can make a lot of money in this new day and age. It’s just not the same dream I grew up with – if that makes any sense. So for a while I wallowed in self pity and hardly wrote a word but writers are writers for a reason – it’s in us to create things and damned if I could let that part of me die.

So I didn’t. It has honestly been hard for me to get back up on the horse but I’ve done it. In the last year I’ve finished a new novel I’d been working on (it’s called THE TRANSLATOR -but I’ll give you more on that later) and I’ve finished a novella (THE DARK SIDE OF HEAVEN) that was released at this years World Horror Convention in Salt Lake City. I’m currently working on a new novella and a brand new novel too so I have lot of things to keep the fires burning for a while. I have no idea if I will ever get another New York publishing deal or whether I will be diving head first into the deep end of the ebook pool. In a perfect world I’ll get to do both, but for now all I can do is go back to the beginning and write for the sheer love and joy it brings me, because it does. Nothing in the world makes me feel as good as sitting at my computer when that vague story idea suddenly comes together and I know – I just KNOW – where the story is headed. It’s a thrill I never want to stop having.

So onward and upward, I guess. I have no idea what lies ahead career-wise but what the hell, I’ll figure it out as I go.

Cheers!

Gord

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