Derrick Ferguson: Who
is Thomas Deja?
Thomas Deja: You know
who I am, you....
Oh. For the readers.
I’m a lifelong New York
resident, author, and podcast celebrity.
That sounds really
arrogant, doesn’t it?
DF: Where do you live and what do you do?
TD: For the last 23 years,
I have resided in Ridgewood, on the Brooklyn/Queens border. This seems to be my destiny, as I’ve lived in
Highland Park, Brooklyn and Woodhaven, Queens--both on the border--during my
youth. As for what I do, these days it’s
mainly struggle for existence.
DF: For those folks who don’t know you, give us a brief history of your
background.
TD: Born in Brooklyn. Moved with my mother after her divorce to
Queens. Went to Hunter College in the
80's and studied Media--and oddly enough, only just recently got the degree I
earned there. Was a freelance consultant
and temp during the 90‘s. Have been
writing since I was eleven, and a professional one (i.e. have been given a
check for the privlege of publishing same) for almost twenty-five years off and
on. And now...novelist.
DF:One question I get asked all the time is where and how did we meet.
What’s your version?
TD: Here’s how I remember
it.
When I was writing
Daredevil for Bill K’Tepi’s MARVEL: YEAR TWO site, I received a fan letter from
you praising me for the references I made to Stu Hart’s Dungeon and Derek
Flint. We conversed through email back
and forth and somehow discovered that a) we shared a lot of commonalities and b) we were a matter of miles from each
other. One of us gave the other a phone
number, and we started talking, which led to me inviting you to the Horror
Writers Association of New York’s private screening of Hellboy--where we sat with F. Paul Wilson, who I did not know you were a major fan of--and
our friendship has grown since then.
DF: How long have you been writing?
TD: At the risk of being a cliché,
almost my whole life. I used to attach a
bunch of looseleaf paper sandwiched between construction paper together with
brass fasteners and write ‘books’ which invariably featured different
imitations of giant monsters beating each other into paste, although I also
recall a series featuring a masked detective called ‘The Curlew’ and one that
pitted Frankenstein’s Monster against The Creature of The Black Lagoon.
As far as professionally, I
began placing pieces in the seminal Brooklyn-based satire-and-stuff ‘zine Inside Joke in the very late 80‘s. This led to my placing about three dozen
stories in various small press magazines like After Hours, Rictus and Not
One Of Us, and, after some bumps along the way, where I am now.
DF: What do you love most about writing?
TD: I had a friend once who
would tell anyone who met me that I was ‘so bardic’...and I guess that’s
true. I write because I am compelled to
tell stories, and publishing them in little booklets and online sites for cash
means you’re not just a crazy person boring those around you with tales of the
folks in your head. And when I connect
with people, let them feel what I felt when I let those voices out, that’s the
greatest feeling.
DF: What’s your philosophy of writing?
TD: I once interviewed Ben
Manilla, a local morning DJ, for my college newspaper, and he told me there’s
only one reason to be a writer--because when you look in the mirror and ask
yourself ‘what do you want to be when you grow up,' you can think of no other
thing to be.'
There are two other things
I hold very dear to me regarding writing.
One is that if you write to move yourself, you will move others. All too often, I read novels that come off as
nothing more than script treatments that we’ve been asked to pay for, stories
that are written because they feature what will sell, not what they’re
passionate about. Those stories end up
having no soul. You need to put
something of yourself in what you write to truly make a connection with your
reader, and I try my best to do so every day.
The other thing is that the
ability to write is a muscle; you have to build it up, you have to maintain it,
and if you don’t, you lose it. You have
to write every day, you have to constantly seek out new stories to tell in your
head. If you start recycling other
tales, or telling other people’s stories under your name...well, you’ve
misplaced your drive.
DF: You used to work for FANGORIA magazine. What did you do for them and
how was it working for them?
TD: Considering that I
ended up working for them by accident, quite a lot. I started working there as the writer of
their Episode Guides for The X-Files--the
guy they originally assigned flaked out on them on the day my friend, and Fangoria editor, Michael Gingold and I
were having lunch, and I said ‘I’ll do it’--but I also ended up doing book and
movie reviews, author profiles and even briefly edited their online literary
magazine for a while.
I had my disagreements with
the magazine at times, and there were some hairy moments (some X-Files fans were so scary I wrote a
story, ‘Baron Wyvern Wants Your Love,' as an act of catharsis), but for most of
the almost twenty years and three owners I was with them they were great
employers. There was a stretch of about
ten years where I didn’t have something in the magazine proper. It was only until that growing belief that
paying freelancers was optional that I had to stop working for them. Trust me, if it wasn’t for that, I’d still be
cranking out book reviews.
DF: You were involved in writing Marvel and DC fan fiction for many
years. Why fan fiction?
TD: Because I went through
something traumatic in 2000, and I couldn’t write the horror fiction I was
known for at the time. When Bill K’Tepi,
who coordinated a pair of PBeM games I participated in, decided to start DC:
YEAR ONE (and later MARVEL: YEAR ONE), he asked me to take on Green Lantern in
one and Daredevil in the other, and I’m glad I did. Those years when I did fanfic kept those
writing muscles supple during that time when my muse had crawled into a closet
and cried herself into a coma. It also helped that I received some positive
reinforcement, particularly due to my lesser known series such as THE SWORDSMAN
and BIRDS OF PREY, that kept me from abandoning my craft thoroughly in the
midst of my angst.
Plus it led me to contacts
that led to my return to original fiction several years down the
line...including yourself. If it wasn’t
for my years in the Fanfic mines, I wouldn’t have created Don Cuevo--who began
as a character in BIRDS OF PREY--or ONYX REVOLVER, which led to the creation of
The Chimera Falls Universe.
DF: Tell us about The Shadow Legion. Who are they and why do they
exist?
TD: The Shadow Legion grew out of my frustration with super-hero
comics as a whole, comics in general, and DC’s ‘New 52‘ specifically. It was the news of DC’s total line-wide
reboot, and the anger than it engendered in me, that prompted me to write up a
fanfiction proposal where I renovated a number of DC characters suggested to me
by my friends. When I finished the
proposal, however, I discovered that the characters had strayed so far from
those characters’ original conception I might as well make them original
characters...which led to me sending the proposal out to some of my writer
friends, which led to Ron Fortier of Airship 27 to name those characters 'The
Shadow Legion’ and offered to publish their adventures.
As for what the Legion are
in the context of NEW ROADS TO HELL....they’re
a quartet of mystery men who find themselves charged with the protection of
Nocturne, The City That Lives By Night.
As readers will learn, Nocturne is something of a nexus for supernatural
activity, and something is growing within its city limits that has attracted
the likes of Black Talon and Dreamcatcher to its shores.
DF:Tell us about NEW ROADS TO HELL.
TD: NEW ROADS TO HELL is the first book in the Shadow Legion
trilogy. My hope is that the trilogy,
and the ancillary CASEBOOKS, will
provide a history of the heroic history of Nocturne before we hit the present
day. It formally brings all four of our
heroes together, provides origins for two of them, and debuts what many of the
people who read the book so far feel is its breakout character...namely, the
Girl With The Talent For Murder, Rose Red.
And when she decides that triggering a race war is just what’s needed to
give her control of Nocturne’s underworld, well....
DF: You’ve created an entire original superhero universe. How did you
do it and what advice would you give to aspiring godlings who want to create
their own universe?
TD: I did it by starting
small. People forget that Marvel and
(especially) DC didn’t start out with a universe; their individual comics
started weaving in and out of each other naturally until they became a coherent
shared world. That’s what later attempts
at creating a universe like Dark Horse’s Comics Greatest World failed--they
forced it, presenting their universe as fully formed.
Advice? Know what you want going in and grow it
slowly. I knew the kind of stories I
wanted to tell, I knew the characters I needed, I knew the events I wanted in
the initial trilogy and I started building my own world from there. I also planted seeds that could potentially
lead to more of this universe, but I’m not going to feel compelled to elucidate
them until a story comes along. A lot of
the coolness of the Marvel Universe was the way Stan, Jack and Steve hinted at
a greater tapestry without requiring us to learn everything. That’s the sort of feel I want to capture in
The Shadow Legion and its ancillary stories.
DF: Prose superhero stories is a genre that is growing in popularity.
To what do you attribute this to?
TD: I think Prose Superhero
Fiction is growing in popularity for the same reason New Pulp Fiction and
Superhero Movies are popular--there’s a large base of readers who have a taste
for action-oriented, colorful, over-the-top adventure with a strong moral
center who are no longer being serviced by superhero comics. They still want to read about dashing heroes
and dastardly villains in crazy costumes without having one tear the head off
another one. Hell, they want to escape
from the tough times we’re living through, and if they can’t get it through
Marvel or DC, they’ll get it through Van Allen Plaxico’s Sentinels, or Lee
Houston Jr.’s Alpha, or my own stuff.
I just hope those readers
enjoy my admittedly blood-splattered baby and want to see it grow in future
collections and novels.
DF: Tell us about your future plans for The Shadow Legion.
TD: Well, the next thing
you’ll see is ‘A Waltz In Scarlet,' a novella featuring The Ferryman and
Dreamcatcher that’ll appear in Airship 27‘s Mystery Men And Women V. 4.
When we last see Ferryman, he’s...a little disconnected from his humanity, and
in the story we see what happens when his abilities bring him into contact with
his human emotions. Plus, there’s a big
ol’ scary new menace.
That novella will be
collected in The Shadow Legion Casebook V. 1. If NEW ROADS TO HELL is a
graphic novel collecting a major Shadow Legion storyline, the Casebooks (there’ll
be one appearing between each novel) represent one of those plastic bags of
comics you’d find in Walmart with random issues of each Legionnaire’s solo
series. I already have three of the
novellas, featuring Ferryman, Black Talon and Nightbreaker, in the can, so the
collection may come out sooner than later.
After the first Casebook
will be the second novel, which takes place in 1966. If New Roads were Nightbreaker’s and
Ferryman’s story, then the next novel will focus on Black Talon and his
relationship with Dreamcatcher. There
were some things revealed about the price the Talon pays for his powers, and we’re
going to explore how that shakes out, and why his ‘patrons’ in the Circle of
Life are so approving of his choice of mate.
I hope that, just as New Roads was reflective of the
Golden Age of Comics, the new novel will reflect the Silver Age, as a more
science-fictiony menace rises to wage war on humanity and the Legion and its
new allies.
DF: Any other projects you’ve got in the works you can tell us about?
TD: I think I can safely
say that my pair of Western Heroes--the frontier exorcist Don Cuevo and the
steampunk scientist Doc Thunder--will make appearances soon through Pulpwork
Press’ third volume of How The West Was Weird and this year’s Christmas Annual
respectively. There’s a novella for Monster
Earth 2. There’s some stuff I can’t talk about
just yet--including another novel that’s in the Chimera Falls Universe, but has
a more science-fiction-y bent to it. So
yeah, I’ll be pretty busy.
Derrick Ferguson: Anything else we need to know?
Thomas Deja: If you buy my
book, I’ll be your friend. You buy
enough of them, we’ll have cake.
Hard to believe I’m still
single, huh?
