The Basics

Derrick Ferguson was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY and has lived there for most of his life. He worked security for many years at a various establishments before retiring to take care of his health and dedicate his life to his true passion: writing and sharing exciting stories.

“I’ve been writing as long as I can remember. Usually I would simply rewrite stories I read in comic books or saw in cartoons on TV. My first crack at true creative innovation came from when I was possessed with an inexplicable obsession with MAD Magazine’s “Spy vs. Spy.” I filled up whole spiral notebooks writing two and three page stories about them,” Derrick said. “From then on I just went on writing whatever struck my fancy. I was writing fan fiction before I even knew what fan fiction was as I wrote stories about my favorite superheroes.”



Derrick wrote mostly for the Star Trek and Marvel/DC fan fiction communities and for his own personal enjoyment throughout the ’80s and ’90s. During this time he submitted a fair amount of manuscripts to various publishers who “sent them back just as fast as [he] sent them out.” New opportunities came about, however, with the advent of the internet. Derrick and several of his fellow fanfiction writers joined together to create Frontier Publishing, a fiction website devoted to publishing serialized novels. The site ran several serials, including Derrick’s own novel Dillon and the Voice of Odin.

Unfortunately, Frontier Publishing had to close up shop after a couple of years, and that may have been the end for Derrick’s writing career and his now-beloved character Dillon if Derrick’s friend and fellow writer Russ Anderson hadn’t cajoled him into sending the completed serial off to a publishing house for one last shot at getting his writing into print.

“If anybody has read and enjoyed my Dillon stories then they should go right now and send Russ a thank you email. If I’m Dillon’s daddy then Russ is his granddaddy,” Derrick said. “If it hadn’t been for Russ kicking me in the ass and throwing considerable support behind me to get that book published, you might not still be reading Dillon adventures today.”

Thanks to Russ, Dillon and the Voice of Odin was finally published in 2003 in paperback—or “dead tree format” as Derrick facetiously calls it—, Derrick’s professional writing career began in earnest, and over the years Pro Se has been graced with a number of thrilling tales of Dillon’s adventures as well as many other great works of new pulp.

Like any great writer, Derrick is a voracious reader, and it was quite difficult for him to narrow down the list of writers who have influenced him over the years. “That would be a really long list if I had to name all the writers who have influenced me,” he said. “But I’ll just give you The Dirty Dozen of the writers I love the most and who I feel have influenced me the most: Robert E. Howard. Chester Himes. Roger Zelazny. Ishmael Reed. Mike Resnick. Jim Steranko. Ian Fleming. Larry McMurtry. Robert R. McCammon. Lester Dent. Charles Saunders. George C. Chesbro.” With a literary pedigree like that, it’s little wonder he’s made such a mark in the world of new pulp!

But awards and hyperbolic praise not what drive Derrick in his career as a writer. “I like telling stories,” he said. “It is no deeper than that. For some reason God gave me the gift of making up outrageous stories and the ability to communicate them in an entertaining manner through prose . . . What do I hope to achieve? That my stories can entertain and maybe make somebody’s day a little easier and maybe make them forget their troubles for a couple of hours.”


Derrick is working on a number of exciting projects for the future: the DILLON ANNUAL COLLECTION Vol. I which will collect six Dillon novellas and short stories, the SEBASTIAN RED anthology. VOODAH, LORD OF THE SAVAGE EMPIRE, continuing the adventures of the hero of the award winning short story, "Voodah of Thunder Mountain" and a fictional pulp adventure based on the real life World War I flying ace Eugene Bullard

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