Kickin' The Willy Bobo With: PERCIVAL CONSTANTINE

Derrick Ferguson: Who is Percival Constantine?

Percival Constantine: I was born in Illinois and lived in the northwest suburbs of Chicago until shortly before my 25th birthday. While growing up, I subsisted on a pretty consistent diet of superhero comics, action movies, TV shows and video games, which I have to thank for warping my mind into its current state.

DF: Where do you currently reside and what do you do for a living?

PC: Currently I live in Japan’s Kagoshima prefecture. Don’t feel bad if you’ve never heard of it, most people outside of Japan haven’t. The claim to fame of this place is that it’s home to Shinmoe-Dake, which was used for the exterior shots of Blofeld’s volcano base in “You Only Live Twice”. At the moment, I teach English lessons in several elementary schools, but that will hopefully change in the near-future as I’ve been speaking with some local colleges about job prospects. I also write and edit, and I do the occasional comic book lettering job, all while pursuing my masters degree online. I’ve also started doing some cover design and book formatting, since apparently I’m not busy enough.

DF: How does it happen that a nice boy from the Midwestern U.S. finds himself teaching English in Japan?

PC: I always had an interest in Japanese culture, probably first caused by shows like “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” and “Power Rangers” that I watched while growing up, plus dubbed anime like “Dragonball Z” and video games like “Final Fantasy VII”. But what really cinched it was when I was in college, I became really interested in live-action Japanese movies—films by guys like Akira Kurosawa, Takashi Miike, Seijin Suzuki, Takeshi Kitano, Kinji Fukusaku, and others, plus the novels of Haruki Murakami. Around this same time, I discovered the JET (Japan Exchange & Teaching) Program, which invites people from native speaking countries to work in Japan as assistant language teachers in Japanese public schools for 1-5 years. I applied for the program, hoping to end up in a bustling metropolis like Tokyo or Osaka, but instead I got sent out to Kagoshima. At first I didn’t like it, and the plan was to return to the States after my first-year contract was up, but one year turned into three, then three into five, and now I’m in my sixth year in Kagoshima.

DF: Tell us as much about your background as you’re legally able to.

PC: Well, if it’s only stuff I’m legally able to discuss, that’s going to be a short story. As a kid, I fell in love with the “X-Men” animated series, and that led me to collecting comics—first X-Men, then later Avengers, and more and more titles, primarily Marvel. When I was around 10 years old, I had a few teachers who had us write stories as assignments, and I would write superhero stories, some of them featuring characters I was a fan of, some of them featuring my friends and I becoming superheroes. And that’s really what led to my desire to be a writer.

DF: What is your philosophy of writing?

PC: Don’t bore yourself or your readers. I’m very much from the school of thought of guys like Elmore Leonard, where it’s focused on characters and dialogue over description. My favorite rule from Leonard’s Ten Rules of Writing is “avoid the parts readers tend to skip.” And not boring yourself also applies to what you’re writing in addition to how you write it. Write what you enjoy, regardless of whether it’s popular or marketable, and to hell with anyone who tells you otherwise.

DF: You actually intended to be a comic book writer and not a novelist. True?

PC: Absolutely true. Ever since I started writing, the goal was always to become a comic book writer. Outside of the stuff I created as a kid, my first serious attempts at writing my own original characters and ideas were written as comic book scripts, not novels. Many of them later became novels, but comics were always my first love.

But being a poor college student when I started writing meant my options for paying artists page rates were limited. I hooked up with a number of different artists for a number of different projects, but something always got in the way. Sometimes it was as simple as the artist getting offered a paying job, which naturally is fine—if you get offered a project for money as opposed to royalty sharing, then you should take that project. But what became really frustrating were the artists who would just plain stop answering emails. After about two or three instances where that happened, I decided to focus instead on prose.

I would still love to do more comics work, particularly for Marvel or DC. Those are the characters I grew up with, so getting the chance to write them professionally would be a dream come true. Don’t get me wrong, I also love doing my own thing, but it would be a lot of fun to work on my favorite characters.

DF: You enjoyed an extensive and successful career in writing DC and Marvel fan fiction. What are the benefits of writing fan fiction and what are the drawbacks?

PC: The biggest benefit is, provided you hook up with a constructive community, it’s one of the best training grounds you could ask for. It’s a lot easier to jump into a world and characters you grew up with and know inside and out than it is to come up with your own from scratch. I would not be the writer I am today if I didn’t spend my teenage and college years writing fanfic, that much I can guarantee. In that time, I learned a lot about characterization, description, dialogue, plot, and even editing. It also gave me confidence to eventually move beyond into original fiction.

The drawback is, of course, you won’t be able to make any money off it, nor do you own these characters you’re writing about. Fanfic is still frowned upon by a lot of people as a waste of time and energy. Of course, if you’re willing to put in the effort, you can take a story that began life as fanfic and turn it into something that’s all your own creation. I did that with my second novel, Chasing The Dragon, and it’s been done by other writers as well.

DF: You’ve done work for professional comic book companies as a letterer, haven’t you?

PC: I have. When I was initially putting together Love & Bullets as a comic book, I had found an artist, but a letterer was still out of reach, until the day I found the Ninja Lettering website. I followed their tutorials for using Adobe Illustrator to letter comics, did a number of practice pages, and then began lettering the first issue of Love & Bullets. To my surprise, I actually really enjoyed lettering, and so I began seeking out work. I lettered a number of submissions that were never picked up, and also did work for a few independent companies, most notably AC Comics. While lettering stories for their Femforce anthology comic, I developed a very good relationship with Mark and Stephanie Heike, the editors on that comic. That relationship led to my first published work-for-hire in the form of a finishing off the final two parts of a three-part story featuring their character of Threeta.

I still keep an eye on the various job boards for letterers, and if there’s something that catches my interest (and I have an opening in my schedule), then I’ll apply for it. I would like to do more of it, though.

DF: You’ve also tried your hand at screenwriting and film directing, correct?

PC: Also true. Screenwriting and comic writing are very closely related in a lot of ways, so I found it pretty easy to switch between the two, and movies were and still are a huge influence on me. During my undergraduate years, my minor was in mass media with a heavy focus on film studies and it was during that period that I did some directing work on some short student films. Only one was ever completed, and that was a short film called Russian Roulette, based on a short story written by a friend of mine named Anastasia Peters. 

She had asked me to critique the story and I thought it was incredible and while reading it, I kept picturing it playing out as a film and so I asked her if she’d let me adapt it. I had several friends who were skilled in different areas of film, so we came up with a script and shot the film in three days.

The masters degree I’m pursuing involves a screenwriting concentration, and I’d love to write and/or direct another project at some point in the future. It’s just a matter of finding the right idea for a script and all the necessary elements to translate the script into a movie.

DF: Your output is diverse. You’ve written Fantasy, Espionage Thrillers, Science Fiction, Pulp Action/Adventures. Is the diversity to keep your readers from getting bored or you?

PC: More to keep me from getting bored. The nice thing about New Pulp is that we’re not restricted by genre. We don’t have to stick to Horror or Crime or Sci-Fi or Fantasy. We can play in all these different areas, sometimes all at once. If I get the inkling to write a Horror novel, I can just do it. If I want to write a Western, I can just do it. It’s a nice way to keep me from getting bored, but it’s also a great way to challenge myself. Recently, I wrote a Western story, and it was the first time I ever wrote a Western. It was just an idea that came to me one day, it coincided nicely with an anthology that was in the works, so I pitched it and was given the greenlight to write it. Even if I didn’t get the greenlight, I probably would have written it anyway and figured out something else to do with it.

DF: Tell us about The Infernum series.

Infernum began life as a film project, initially titled Codename: Black Widow, if I recall correctly. It was the brainchild of a very good friend of mine, Kyle Shire, who wanted to direct it as a student film. He came up with a basic outline and asked me if I’d be willing to write a screenplay, and of course I was more than happy to do that. The film never happened, but Kyle gave me his blessing to write it as a novel.

Infernum is an organization of assassins run by a mysterious and charming power broker known as Dante. In Codename: Black Widow, which later became Love & Bullets, the main character is named Angela Lockhart, a former operative of a government organization called the Agency. After the death of her husband, she goes rogue and gets recruited by Dante as an assassin, the deal between them being that Dante will use his resources to help her find her husband’s killer.

Love & Bullets was followed up by Outlaw Blues, which involves a lot of the same characters, but in different roles. The protagonist in Outlaw Blues is a retired hitman named Carl Flint, who gets brought out of retirement by Dante for one final job. It ties into Love & Bullets in several ways, but is also its own story—whereas Love & Bullets was more of an espionage spy vs. spy novel, Outlaw Blues is more of an urban western.

I do have plans for future books. I’ve been kicking around ideas for the next book, tentatively titled Gentleman Rogue, for a while, but have had other projects I wanted to focus on first.

DF: I’m a big fan of The Myth Hunter, Elisa Hill. Tell us about her.

Elisa Hill is my attempt to try my hand at a more pulpy adventure story. I came up with the character a while ago, initially as a pitch for the now-defunct original fiction website, Frontier. In initial form, Elisa was a vampire hunter, but that morphed over time into what she is now. Initially I tried to do it as a comic, but when that fell through, I decided to try it as a novel.

The basic premise is that all the various mythologies of the world are rooted in fact. Pursuing these legends are people called myth hunters. Some are mercenaries, some are knowledge-seekers, some are treasure hunters. Elisa is the daughter of two myth hunters and she initially became one of the rogue myth hunters, working with a mercenary named Lucas Davalos. But after the death of her parents, she came back to their way of thinking, attempting to continue their research with the help of their good friend and her mentor, a retired myth hunter named Max Finch.

In the first book, The Myth Hunter, Elisa and Max pursue the myth of the lost continent of Lemuria, while also trying to avoid the reach of the mysterious Order and a vicious mercenary named Seth. During the course of that book, Elisa ran into Asami, a kitsune or Japanese fox spirit, who can change between fox and human forms and possesses some degree of magical abilities.

The sequel, Dragon Kings of the Orient, has Asami seeking out Elisa’s help to protect the Dragon Kings of China from Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, a powerful demigod who sought revenge on the Dragon Kings for imprisoning him. The lives of the Dragon Kings are tied to the oceans of Asia, and so if they die, that could mean chaos for the continent. Of course, things aren’t what they seem.

There’s been another addition to the Myth Hunter series in the form of “The Wild Hunt,” a short story featured in the PulpWork Christmas Special 2013, which is now available in digital and print formats. “The Wild Hunt” has Asami traveling to Hokkaido in Japan where she runs across a yuki-onna, or snow woman. But there’s something else, something far larger at play.

DF: What are your future plans for Elisa Hill?

PC: Elisa will be back. Dragon Kings of the Orient ended on something of a cliffhanger, and that will lead into the third book. The ending of “The Wild Hunt” also hints at something else coming down the road for Elisa and her allies. At some point in the future, I’d also like to invite other writers to contribute stories about Elisa and her allies and put out an anthology of those stories, but I haven’t put that into action just yet.

Also sometime in the near-future, probably before I have the chance to write the third book, Elisa will be appearing in another story written by someone other than me and featuring her teaming up with one ofthe biggest New Pulp characters! So keep an eye out for that.

DF: You’ve got a new novel out. Tell us about SOULQUEST.

PC: SoulQuest, like almost everything I’ve done, began life as a comic book pitch. It never went anywhere and some time later, I pitched it as a serial for the Revenance original fiction site. The first chapter was posted, but Revenance went down shortly after that. I had already written several pages and continued it for a bit, but ultimately got distracted by other projects.

Then last year, I was struggling with a project for NaNoWriMo and I started looking through abandoned manuscripts (of which I have more than a few). One of those was SoulQuest. I began jotting down notes and found myself quickly sucked back into that world.

SoulQuest is basically my love letter to the Final Fantasy series, in particular Final Fantasy VII, which is my all-time favorite video game. The book focuses on Zarim, who is a pirate along with Ekala, Zarim’s lover and a consummate thief, and Swul, a hard-drinking exile of the faerie kingdom. From the airship Excalibur, they live the lives of mercenaries, traveling wherever the money is. But when the legendary Soulstones surface, they’re tasked with locating them. Also pursuing the Soulstones is Lord Vortai, a powerful sorcerer who basically controls the empire. With the Soulstones, Vortai could have the power to remake the world as he sees fit.

It’s part fantasy, part science fiction, part steampunk, with a lot of action thrown in. This book was me really pushing myself out of my comfort zone, especially after a very long dry spell when I came close to quitting writing altogether. And it’s out now in print and for Kindle.

DF: Is SOULQUEST going to be a series? And if so, what can we expect in future books?

PC: I had considered making it into a series, but for now, it’s just this one book. Given what happens in this book, I think a follow-up where the stakes are the same or even higher would be very difficult to pull off. I might consider revisiting the characters in short stories set at different points in their lives, because it is a big, ensemble cast, and there’s a lot that can be done with the different characters. But there are other projects that I really want to work on at the moment, and so I’d like to focus on those.

DF: What’s A Day In The Life of Percival Constantine like?

PC: My work schedule is kind of all over the place, so if it’s a day when I have classes, then I’ll usually get up around 6 and drive anywhere from 40-90 minutes to which of the eleven elementary schools I teach at. If I have free periods during the day, I have my laptop with me and I’ll work on whatever projects are on my docket, be it formatting, editing, lettering, studying, or writing. If I have a day off from work, I might be recording or editing episodes for the two podcasts I’m part of, working on the aforementioned projects I have to work on, or just relaxing in front of the TV or reading comics or books.

Derrick Ferguson: Anything else we should know?

Percival Constantine: I’m a writer for WhatCulture and a contributor and regional partner at JapanTourist. As mentioned, I also produce two podcasts. One is The Exploding Typewriter, a podcast that features me and a member of the New Pulp community discussing whatever aspect of pulp that creator wants to talk about. To date, I’ve done interviews with Tommy Hancock, Ron Fortier, Barry Reese, Derrick Ferguson, Jim Beard, and Richard Lee Byers, with other interviews planned. It’s great fun talking with these various guys and getting their insight on the world of New Pulp.

The other podcast is called The Geek Screen, and I co-host that with one of my good friends from Chicago, Juan Bracich. We talk about geeky movies and TV shows, focusing on a different film or show each episode as the main portion and also touching on different news and whatever other tangents we might find ourselves on.

Other than that, please pick up a copy of SoulQuest and the PulpWork Christmas Special 2013. Those and all my other books are available at various places all over the net, and if you head over to my website, PercivalConstantine.com, you can find out where you can buy all those books and in what formats.

And also, thank you for the interview! It’s always a good time when you and I get to sit down and chat a little.

Percival Constantine
Writer, Editor, Letterer
pc@percivalconstantine.com
percivalconstantine.com

16 Months Later With MARK BOUSQUET

It’s been a while since the original Kickin’ The Willy Bobo interview with Mark so I thought it about time we caught up with what he’s all about and what he’s doing 16 MONTHS LATER…

Derrick Ferguson: Any major changes in your life since we last talked?

Mark Bousquet: Nope. Life is going well. I love living in Reno and I love my job. There's some uncertainty lurking on the horizon - my contract is up in June and won't be renewed for various departmental regulations (basically, a person is only allowed to hold my position for 3 years and then they have to leave - it doesn't matter how good or poor they have performed the position) so I don't know where I'll be living or what I'll be doing seven months from now, but that will take care of itself when the time comes. Maybe I'll still be in academics, or maybe I won't, but that's a question for the future. Right now, I'm happy to be doing what I'm doing where I'm doing it.

DF: How’s Darwin doing?

MB: He loves living in Reno even more than I do. Reno sits at the eastern edge of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and we live far enough away from downtown that we're in the hills almost every day. He couldn't ask for a better situation. I hope wherever we end up has the hiking possibilities it does here. Even after almost 2.5 years here we're still finding new paths and trails to hike within an hour's walk of our front door. He'll be 7 in December but whenever we head outside he's still as active as a pup.

DF: As a writer, in what ways do you feel you’ve grown and developed?

MB: I think I've developed a better sense of layering my stories and grown more comfortable with letting the story dictate itself instead of forcing it into a pre-determined box. THE HAUNTING OF KRAKEN MOOR was a huge positive in this regard. That novel (which takes place in the Gunfighter Gothic universe, though on the other side of the Atlantic) introduced a whole lotta new firsts for me: first horror novel, first first-person novel, first time writing as a female character, first time structuring the novel as a journal. I wrote the novel in "real time" as much as possible. Which is to say that even though the story is taking place in 1864, I wrote the January 1 entry on January 1 and so on. I even tried to match the time of day as much as possible. It was a fascinating experiment, given that writing in a journal is completely different act than writing a story, so there are moments in the book where the reader is frustrated by Beatrice's reluctance to include certain details, or her unwillingness to see every subplot through to the end, or her being contradictory. All of these elements are very human, I think, but it's not a standard way to write a novel.

I found it very liberating, and that led to two of my best pieces: "Why Grant Jannen Can'tHave Sex," available for free at my Atomic Anxiety site  and "The Pretty Girl with the Ugly Name," published in the PsychopompPunk Special from Artifice Comics. Both of these works show off a new narrative voice for me. Usually, I favor keeping the "me" parts of writing simple and neutral and I let the characters provide all the personality, but in these two pieces, just as in KRAKEN MOOR, I'm letting the author have a bit more say about the story's style.

DF: Have any of your attitudes about your work or your style of writing changed completely or modified in any way?

MB: I think all of us who write and publish in the Print on Demand area go through the cauldron when it comes to sales. There have been times when I've been really focused on how many copies I sell. Right now, though, I'm at the opposite end. I'm back where I started, just trying to tell the best stories I can in my own voice and letting the sales fall where they may. Finding a creative outlet with the various Artifice Comics publications (of which my contributions are all prose and not comics) has been a huge blessing. When I look at KRAKEN MOOR, "Grant Jannen," and "Pretty Girl," I can see a different voice than I usually use emerging and that's exciting. It's just more arrows in the quiver.

DF: In what direction do you think your work is heading in now as opposed to 16 months ago? Or is it going in the same direction?

MB: It's a much darker direction now than it was 16 months ago. KRAKEN MOOR stars a runaway American girl who goes to work at a castle estate in England where demons torture, kill, and sex everyone they can. There's nothing fun in that story. People die. People have sex with werewolves who turn around and eviscerate them. People make huge sacrifices.

The answer to the title of "Why Grant Jannen Can't Have Sex" is because he has the power to make people do what he wants. He's not aware of it for a very long time, but I wanted to examine the idea of what happens to a man when he finds out that all of the women he's ever had sex with only did so because of his superpower of influence. And if you can't stop your power, then how can you actually ever have sex again without knowing you might actually be getting someone to do something they wouldn't normally do? Check out the opening to the story, and you can see an example of a different voice than I usually use:

"By the time Grant was 24 years old, he had raped 47 women.

None of these rapes occurred in dark alleys. None of them involved stalking. Or violence. No woman had ever bit him or clawed him or struggled with him. No woman had ever said No. No woman had ever said Stop. No woman had ever complained in any way. There were no files on him in police stations, save for a marijuana bust last winter. Neither the state of New Hampshire, where he was born, nor the state of Minnesota, where he went to college, nor the state of Montana, where he now lives, nor the federal government of the United States considered Grant to be anything except an upstanding citizen who paid his taxes, always voted, had never married, and liked to travel alone.

Grant liked to travel alone because that had prevented him from raping anyone.

Two years, eight months, and a pocket full of days for change had passed since he raped Martha Teagarden. She did not complain. She does not regret what happened. She still calls every now and then.”

Not happy fun time.

I'm also writing less reviews but more travel writing which is a genre I very much enjoy working in.

DF: Update us on GUNFIGHTER GOTHIC: BLOOD OF THE UNIVERSE. What has been the feedback on that? Do you have a sequel in the works?

MB: Feedback has been very positive on GUNFIGHTER GOTHIC, which is good because Hanna and Jill are two of my favorite creations and I plan on releasing two or even three GOTHIC collections in 2014. I love how flawed they are - they fight, they bicker, they're grown-ups who sometimes still act like they did when they were kids, and they make plenty of mistakes. Yet, through it all, they can give each other crap in even the most ridiculous circumstances. I love that.

They have a complicated history - while they grew up in the same house, Jill is the merchant's daughter while Hanna was a servant's daughter. They got in all sorts of mischief, and Hanna eventually fell in love with Jill, and Jill returned that love only when it was convenient for her. Now, they're partners and on the same level and that allows for a whole lot of fun exchanges.

The sequel to BLOOD is done. It's called UNDER ZEPPELIN SKIES and it picks up where BLOOD left off, with Hanna and Jill on a zeppelin undergoing a zombie outbreak. 

There are four short stories (maybe 6 if I decide to include two reprints). As much as I love Hanna and Jill, ZEPPELIN was a hard book to write because the story kept spinning away from me. Or rather, the tone kept spinning away from me. It's a weird western, but it kept wanting to be ridiculous and fun, too, and it took a while for me to let it be what it wanted to be, which was to pepper UNFORGIVEN with a good heavy dose of BRISCO COUNTY, JR. The first story, "Waltzing Zombies Prefer Dixie," gives a bit of a different spin on the zombie story, as post-Civil War Confederates release a virus aboard a zeppelin that turns supporters of the Northern cause into zombies. People can slow, retard, or even stop that virus by acting in a pro-Confederate manner. People on board were pro-Union and the zombie infestation puts those ideals to the test. 

The other stories are "The Vampires of Jesus Christ," "Colorado Kaiju," and "Demon Winter," and I kept going back and forth between making ZEPPELIN a novel or a collection. There's an overall story of Jill and Hanna tracking down Jill's ex-fiance, but in the end I decided to go the short story route and minimize Dotson's direct involvement until the final story.

I have also just released a Kindle exclusive short story entitled "Thanksgiving at theHouse of Absinthe & Steam," which has Hanna and Jill fighting the weird in London. It's a very dark story but Hanna and Jill keep things fun - for the reader and for me. They're far from perfect, and end up getting drunk alongside the woman they're supposed to protect and one of them ends up getting buried alive. The story takes place after ZEPPELIN, yet is going to be published first, but it's designed to work as a stand-alone story. Eventually, "House of Absinthe" will wind up in GUNFIGHTER GOTHIC VOLUME 2: EUROPEAN HOLIDAY. It's interesting to me that the further I take Hanna and Jill away from the "western," the "weird" increases.

DF: I really loved THE HAUNTING OF KRAKEN MOOR. In what wonderfully diseased recess of your mind did that story come from and are you going to write any more stories in that style?

MB: First, thanks. KRAKEN MOOR has been a huge influence on GUNFIGHTER GOTHIC; the darker direction of "The House of Absinthe & Steam" is because of KRAKEN MOOR. In fact, the final story of ZEPPELIN is a sequel of sorts to KRAKEN MOOR, as it takes Hanna and Jill into the castle.

As to where it came from - I was sitting in my apartment last New Year's Eve, and around 1 or 2 PM I decided I wanted to do something new. I like being able to look at my bookshelf and say, "That's my western, that's my kids' book, that's my cosmic pulp, that's my urban fantasy," and I realized I couldn't point at anything and say, "That's my horror novel." I decided to take a bunch of the various things I wanted to try (horror, first person narration, writing in a woman's voice, etc.) and put them together. When I wrote the first entry, I had no real idea of what the story was going to be other than there was going to be a young American woman working in a haunted castle. From there, I let things progress rather organically. I was writing and posting the story online nearly every single day, so there was no time to go back and change things (though I did relent on this point a time or two) - most everything had to be done on the fly and I let my own reader response guide me. If I felt the story was getting a little boring, I introduced something exciting. Because I wanted a creepy horror story, that usually involved demonic sex. There are a few moments in the novel where this gets away from me, but on the whole I am tremendously pleased with how it turned out and I think it's my best full-length work.

DF: And then you can switch gears and do children’s books that are equally as imaginative and captivating to read such as STUFFED ANIMALS FOR HIRE and ADVENTURES OF THE FIVE. Do you have to consciously switch on a part of your brain to write children’s books or does it all come from the same place?

MB: Honestly, one is therapy for the other. When I spend too much time writing dark stories, it's nice to be able to go write some bright, shiny kids' stories for a while, and vice versa. As an academic, one of the things I look for are the intertextual connections between books. You can take any two stories and see what one says about the other one, and I like to do that when I'm writing. So if I'm writing a western, I'm not watching or reading other westerns. I'm watching Hercule Poirot movies, and when I write a detective story, I'm not watching POIROT, but I might be watching a bunch of spaghetti westerns. When I go write a detective story (as Idid for Artifice's Halloween special, resurrecting my old, briefly seenFrontier Publishing stomping grounds, Chalifax, the City of Dying Magic ) I knew I was going to hear Agatha Christie and David Suchet and Hugh Fraser anyway, so watching other genres helps me make sure I'm doing more than aping their style.

DF: I think it’s really exciting that you have opened up the DREAMER’S SYNDROME universe to other writers. Can you first explain DREAMER’S SYNDROME to those not familiar with the concept?

MB: Sure thing. God goes into hiding and sends an order back to the angels to remake the world so that everyone is transformed, overnight, into their childhood dream. If you wanted to be a pirate, you're a pirate. If you wanted to be an astronaut, you're an astronaut. The world is transformed, too, so the modern American southwest is largely reconfigured as the Wild West and New York is remade as a place for superheroes.

DF: Why did you decide to open it up to other writers?

MB: Over on Facebook, Greg Rosa asked when I was going to do it. I said, "I'd do it right now if there was interest" and he assured me he could line up a handful of writers to participate and between his writers and those responding to the Call for Proposals it looks like there might be enough for two collections. There's still time to submit, too, so if anyone out there is moved, send me a proposal. The majority of submissions, so far, are from people with very few publications and that's very exciting.

DF: You’ve taken a break from writing movie reviews. Can you tell us why and will there be another collection of your movie reviews coming?

MB: There's 700-800 reviews at Atomic Anxiety and I was getting burned out. I love writing DOCTOR WHO reviews and when I couldn't bring myself to keep up with the latest season (which I really liked), I knew it was time to step back for awhile. I've got enough reviews for a solid sci-fi collection, but there such a random collection of movie reviews, I'm wondering how to arrange them, and if I should wait until I get a few more classics reviewed. I've got the Marvel Comics on Film book out and it covers every Marvel movie I could watch through last year's AVENGERS (including the old '70s TV movies, of which DOCTOR STRANGE is a real standout). I'd like to go ahead and tackle DC's movies, at some point, too.

DF: Hollywood calls you up and says that they’re going to spend $500 million to make a movie out of one of your books and let you pick the director. Which book do you let them have and which director do you choose?

MB: Man, I've been pondering this question all week and I'm still not sure. I'm tempted to offer up combinations of GUNFIGHTER GOTHIC and J.T. Petty (director of the excellent and largely unseen THE BURROWERS) or DREAMER'S SYNDROME and Joe Cornish (director of the excellent and largely unseen ATTACK THE BLOCK or HARPSICHORD & THE WORMHOLE WITCHES and Matt Reeves (director of CLOVERFIELD) or STUFFED ANIMALS FOR HIRE (which is basically The A-Team for kids) and Gore Verbinski, but I think if we're gonna roll with a big budget, I'd pair ADVENTURES OF THE FIVE with Andrew Stanton. I think Stanton has demonstrated a fine ability to balance good humor with big emotions, and that's what THE FIVE is about.

DF: Recommend a movie, a book and a TV show.

MB: Movie: THE HOBBIT. We live in such a jaded age that people can't wait to turn on the things tomorrow that they loved yesterday. There's a certain segment of fandom that seems to be in a race to declare something awful. It's like there's a whole tribe of Dennis Millers, always with a cynical, snarky putdown at the ready. I get not liking a movie, but I do not understand when people decide to mount their own personal campaign against a movie whose only crime is that other people like it. THE HOBBIT is a big, fun movie. Is it as good as the LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy? No, but that doesn't mean it ain't a really good film.

Book: I'm reading two books right now that are both fantastic: David Shoemaker's THE SQUARED CIRCLE, a history of professional wrestling, and Hal Needham's STUNTMAN!, an autobiography of his time in Hollywood. I'm in the beginning stages of both, but Needham's story is told very conversationally. I feel like he's sitting with me at a bar and telling stories about John Wayne and Burt Reynolds. I've been enjoying Shoemaker's writing on wrestling for years (he was the author of the "Dead Wrestler of the Week" feature at Deadspin, and he now writes for Grantland) and SQUARED CIRCLE sees him at the top of his game; he has a unique talent to always talk about the present in the context of the past that gives his writing some real power.

TV Show: MISS FISHER'S MURDER MYSTERIES. Netflix has finally started streaming POIROT, but they only have the first 6 seasons, which I devoured in a couple weeks. I went looking for another mystery to fill the void and stumbled onto FISHER'S. It's set in post-WWI Australia, and it's one of those shows where they set it in the past but fill it with a whole bunch of modern sensibilities. It's nothing deep, but like POIROT it's a whole lot of fun watching Phryne Fisher solve some really nasty crimes.

Derrick Ferguson: Anything else we should know?

Mark Bousquet: Until the end of 2013, anyone who wants a free .pdf copy of "Thanksgiving at the House of Absinthe & Steam" can have one by sending me an email at bousquet.mark@gmail.com. No strings attached - you don't have to write a review and you won't be put on a mailing list. 2014 is going to be a big year for GUNFIGHTER GOTHIC (time willing, I'm going to try and get Hanna and Jill in as many different anthologies as would be appropriate) and I think "House of Absinthe" is a really good intro into this world. Volume 1 will be out in late January or early February, so now is a good time to jump on board.

ADVENTURES OF THE FIVE: THE CHRISTMAS ENGINE will be out before Christmas, so anyone looking for a fun book for kids might find it to their liking.

I'm on the web at my personal website (themarkbousquet.com), my review site (atomicanxiety.wordpress.com), and on Twitter (@mark_bousquet), and all my published works can be found at my Author Central site (http://www.amazon.com/Mark-Bousquet/e/B004WWUTNU).

That covers it. Thanks, as always, for the chat, Derrick.

Kickin' The Willy Bobo With: NICK AHLHELM

Derrick Ferguson: Who is Nicholas Ahlhelm?

Nicholas Ahlhelm: Man, I’ve been asking that question for years now! The short answer is that I’m a writer, editor and blogger living in Eastern Iowa. I’m a lover of all things superhero and a whole lot of wrestling.

DF: How long have you been writing?

NA: Since I was knee high to a grasshopper. I started the site that would evolve into Metahuman Press back in 2003 and published my first book back in 2008.

DF: For the folks at home who don’t know you, clue us in on your background.

NA: I was born and raised in Iowa and have lived there for most of my life outside brief excursions to St. Louis and Springfield, Illinois. I mainly used my allowance to buy comics, first issues of G.I. Joe and Transformers before jumping into basically every superhero comic I could find on the newsstand. That history shaped what I wanted to do as I reached adulthood and decided to start a serious attempt to become a professional writer.

DF: Writing. Editing. Publishing. Which one is the most difficult and which one gives you the most satisfaction?

NA: Editing is by far the most difficult. The publishing process is complicated, but can be learned, and once you have it down, it remains just a variation on the same theme to usher one book as another. Editing on the other hand can take you anywhere. Some stories require a firm hand while some need a lighter touch. And some writers respond better to one than the other. It can be a hard thing to figure out what works best until you’ve started to know your regular writers a bit.

The most satisfying personally will always be writing. Ushering my own stories from a blank sheet of paper (or at least a blank screen) to a final draft remains astonishing to me. I still sometimes find it amazing I can accomplish it at all. 

DF: What’s the best thing you’ve ever written?

NA: I promise I’m not just saying this because I’m here to talk about it, but the answer is Lightweight. Two and a half stories into the first collection I can already say this is the most solid tale I’ve ever told. The character is strong and the story around him has literally had twenty years of gestation before making it to the page.

DF: You are most definitely a superhero fan to the max. What do superheroes represent to you?

NA: Untapped potential. While conceptually superheroes have been around for seventy something years, they still possess so much room for amazing stories. Years ago it was Steven Grant that I first heard describe superheroes as a setting rather than a genre. By that he meant they were just a trapping layered over sci fi, mystery, historical fiction or whatever. And that has shaped how I’ve seen super powered fiction ever since. This is room to tell new stories and stretch the reality of fiction, no matter the form it takes.

DF: Why are we so fascinated with the concept of superheroes?

NA: I think in many ways, superheroes are the action hero of the twenty-first century. When we can see people in real life doing stuff like parkour and our technology in our phone can do half of what we saw in any 80s sci-fi movie, society needed something bigger in their heroes. And I think because of that, the comic book style superhero rose to prominence for the same reason kids loved them for years: they are larger than life, but still grounded in a level of reality.

DF: Superhero prose fiction is hot right now. You’ve been involved in that genre years before its current popularity. Why is superhero prose popping right now?

NA: I’m not sure if it’s hot now, but it does seem to be the growing market trend. I think the reason is two-fold. Obviously, the popularity of superhero films has a lot to do with it. Superheroes have money potential, even if so many of the comics don’t really realize it.

Secondly, I think that a lot of writers have latched on to the fact that a lot of story potential exists in superheroes, either by expanding the concept into new territory or by subverting it into something else.

DF: Tell us about Metahuman Press.

NA: Metahuman Press is my small press outfit. I’ve been running it for several years, dating back to the first printing of Freedom Patton: A Dangerous Place to Live and the early numbered Pulp Empire volumes. In the last few years, we’ve expanded with a few original novels, but our main focus is still super powered and new pulp anthologies.

DF: Tell us about Lightweight.

NA: LIGHTWEIGHT is my attempt to innovate super powered fiction. Comics have ran character’s lives for decades and decades month in and month out. Lightweight is my attempt to tell a prose storyline through approximately 8000 word chapters, each published as an ebook monthly and collected periodically. The goal is to tell individual tales that will build a greater narrative as they continue, until they form a massive project that truly follows the life of a super powered young man.

Lightweight is the tale of Kevin Mathis, a 17 year old high school senior that suffers from dreams of floating. Only he learns those dreams aren’t just dreams. He finds himself in dangerous situations and feels a compulsion to act. With a costume in place, he becomes Lightweight. But even as he embarks on a career in crime-fighting with the help of his friend Millie, he begins to learn his entire world may be at the center of a centuries old war.

DF: Why Kickstarter?

NA: My goal with taking Lightweight to Kickstarter is two-fold. I wanted to make sure my cover artist Brent Sprecher, a veteran of the gaming world, gets paid a professional salary for his cover work.

At the same time, I also needed to prove that the concept had enough power to draw in fans of superheroes. My plan is to dedicate a significant portion of my life to Lightweight in the future. I want to make sure I can find a market for monthly super powered prose before I dive into it feet first.

DF: There’s a plethora of Kickstarter projects so why should the good folks at home throw their support behind Lightweight?

NA:While Kickstarter is always filled with great projects (which I spotlight every Monday in fact on my SuperPoweredFiction.com blog), this is the first time anyone truly attempted a monthly ongoing superhero prose story, at least outside fan fiction sites. My plan is to keep Lightweight going for years to come. I have plots for nearly three years of stories with outlines for nearly five more. But without proof of concept, they may never see light of day.

DF: What’s the future of Metahuman Press and Lightweight?

NA: Metahuman Press has several projects coming in the near future. Supernatural West, I Was A Teenage Metahuman and the second volume of Modern Gods are all in some stage of the production process with several more books to follow through the end of the year and the beginning of the next.

The future of Lightweight is in the hands of the people out there. If you’re a fan of superheroes, support the project on Kickstarter. It could be years before I attempt a project of this scope again should the Kickstarter not succeed.

DF: What’s the future of Nicholas Ahlhelm?

NA: A lot more writing. I have a “Fight Card” novel I’ve been ushering into publishable form in the last few weeks, followed by a half dozen short stories for various Airship 27 and Metahuman Press anthologies. Of course, I’ve already got my annual Nanowrimo project in the development stages for this November, a huge tale that will serve as a back story for Lightweight.

And of course, if Lightweight is successful on Kickstarter, a whole heck of a lot more writing for him. Here’s hoping I get to tell my complete tale of Kevin Mathis and company over the next several years.

Derrick Ferguson: Anything else we should know?

Nick Ahlhelm: I just want to thank all the backers that have supported the project so far and will do so in the days ahead. Nothing makes a writer’s heart happier than knowing someone is reading his work and wants to read more.

Kickin' The Willy Bobo With: THOMAS DEJA

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?

THE SHADOW LEGION: NEW ROADS TO HELL is available in paperback and for your Kindle from Amazon

THE NOCTURNE TRAVEL AGENCY