M.J. Preston: A Random History of Moi

By M.J. Preston

So what do we have here? A baring of souls. A memoir? Call it what you will, but it is what the title says. M.J. Preston: A Random History of Moi. In coming blogs, I am going to be candid about my life as it relates in some form or other to my writing. I promise not to be too stuffy or explicit. I can’t promise I won’t throw you the odd red herring, or joke in the hope of painting a smile across your face.

Okay, enough with the preface, let’s go.

I got into the writing gig in 1974. That same year I started reading books that were much more adult than you’d expect a nine-year-old kid to be reading. I was into books like Peter Benchley’s JAWS and David Morrell’s thriller, FIRST BLOOD. I didn’t understand every word in those novels, but the more I read, the better my comprehension became. 

In 1974, Tobe Hooper released the controversial movie about a grave robbing serial killer family extravaganza called: THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE. That year an unknown author named Stephen King published a book called: CARRIE with Double Day Publishing.  There were no such things as home computers or smartphones back then. Googling was something you didn’t want to get caught doing in 74. That was when my long-suffering as an aspiring author started. For years, I had to endure writing my stories with either a pencil or pen. Even at the tender age of nine, I wanted a typewriter, asked for one, two Christmas’ in a row, but didn’t get one until I was eleven.

In 1976, I got my first Olivetti manual, and I know my mother had to save for this gift because our family didn’t have a lot of dough. Often, times were tough, as my mother and my stepfather struggled financially throughout my pre-teens years. My stepfather was a European immigrant who was a hardworking, honest guy with a zeal for the use of profanity that had almost a poetic ring, which my close friends sometimes parodied. He worked as a logger. Seasonal work that paid well, but was dangerous, and prone to layoff because of fire season and winter shutdown.  Some times my mother worked two jobs as my stepfather worked under the table to try and squirrel away a few bucks. And that’s my long-winded writer way of telling you that typewriter meant the world to me when it came into my possession. Not only did I understand that hard work and sacrifice, coupled with parental love, had delivered this magnificent beast to me. 

But there was also something else.

At the age of eleven, I was about to unleash my imagination. No longer would I be writing with pencil or pen on paper, I  would instead deliver my brilliance by pounding the keys against that black-over-red ribbon. And thank goodness, because my penmanship sucked then and it sucks now. 

I wrote piles of stories and compositions, and I’m sure I plagiarized the heck out of everything I saw and read. But as I continued writing fiction and even penning a few letters to the editor, I began to understand that I needed to find my voice. So I went for originality, and I wrote outlandish stories that included satanic demons and giant ants. Yes, together. There might even have been freshwater great white sharks and piranha’s in that same story, as I recall. Yes, they were coexisting.

I know, it’s funny to look back on now. But that was my first attempt at a book in my youth, but not my last. I think it was fourteen pages. I was under the influence of a decade that talked about mutually assured nuclear destruction. I’d seen both film adaptions of Richard Matheson’s I AM LEGEND. First, with Vincent Price in THE LAST MAN ON EARTH and Charlton Heston as THE OMEGA MAN. Eventually, I grabbed that Matheson paperback and dog eared it to death. 

Then I began writing dystopian stories set in a not too distant future. 

I recall the title of one story was: THE 1990 CRUCIFIXION.

Here’s the setup

After a limited nuclear war takes out most of the world, two buddies that are camping return to the civilized world only to find it uncivilized.  For reasons I can’t now explain, one of them is outed as the Messiah, and humans being humans do what is most unsavory. 

They crucify him. 

Hence the title. 

And yes, I know it sounds silly because it was, but that was also when the magic was the most potent when the ideas churned out like crazy little Roger Corman vignettes, but with an even tinier budget.

God love Roger Corman; he made entertaining movies.

I continued to write, I took a shot and publishing in magazines, receiving the first of many rejection slips around 1979. Honestly, I wasn’t deterred in the least. I kept submitting, and they piled up from Twilight Zone Magazine, from Night Cry, and even Chatelaine and RedBook. I’ve been turned down by the best of them, including Playboy and Omni. I understood early on that rejection is part of the game, so I kept writing and kept submitting, I sold my first story to a forgotten little literary magazine for five contributor copies.

I attempted writing a novel called: THINGS TO COME. 

This story was another heavily influenced “end of the world vehicle” that, unfortunately, would not be completed. It, along with those rejection slips and my literary contributor copies, would disappear from my life in a misplaced box, but they served as a stepping stone in making me a better writer. I kept writing, even after I joined the military lugging along an IBM electric, my mother had bought me on my 17^th birthday. Influenced or not, that was when my muse was a doppelganger of ideas.

Working on The Equinox  winter 1987

I started my first novel, THE EQUINOX, on that electric IBM, and that first draft would fall silent in the darkness of a moving box for over a decade and a half, possibly two because I don’t remember the exact year I started it. Thankfully it didn’t end up in the same box with my rejection slips.

So, this is where it all began and stopped when I paused for numerous years, but only in fiction. I continued with military reportage for our military paper. It maybe didn’t seem like much, but I kept writing, and unable to lug along my 300 lb IBM electric, I was reduced to again putting pen to paper.

Even though my fiction was on pause, I knew that writing was what I was supposed to do. 

So, I kept writing, and fate found me.

That’s enough for now, but next time I’ll tell you a bit more.

Come and Find Me!

M.J. Preston

Building the Perfect Beast

Find out more about THE EQUINOX here!

My first novel, THE EQUINOX, garnered a lot of love. People love monsters, and I believed, when I wrote it, that they were worn out on vampires and zombies. So, I wanted to write something beyond the usual trends. In retrospect, I might have to rethink that, considering that the vampires and zombies are still around. Walking Dead, What We Do in the Shadows, and so on…

In the case of THE EQUINOX, our protagonist Daniel Blackbird has been banished from the Chocktee Village known as Spirit Woods. Why has he been expelled? Well, first he got the Chief Elder (his grandfather) killed, but worse he has let loose upon the world his peoples curse. The curse comes in the form of a shape changer, known as a skinwalker, that kills people daily and then dines on their internal organs. Blackbird heads out into the world following a debris trail of murder and mayhem., chasing an impossible task that will last 14 years. His quest takes him from that northern village to the red-light district in Chicago, and eventually to a small prairie town called Thomasville, where police are investigating the serial murder of 17 young boys.

MJ Preston building The Equinox's Skinwalker aka Skin

When I set out to write this book, I drew my inspiration from author John Farris’ THE FURY, and also from a newscast I heard as a child, and an article I read in a men’s magazine in my early teens.

Let’s talk about Farris first.

In THE FURY, a father who works for an intelligence agency gets double-crossed when they abduct his son to exploit the child’s telekinesis. There’s plenty of double-dealing, gore, and intrigue, but it was the quest of a father to find his son and reap vengeance upon the abductors that fascinated me. I truly loved this book, and by the time I finished it, the paperback was dog-eared and beaten. That quest idea stuck with me, and I thought that one day, far in the future of the 12-year-old kid who had read it, I would pen a story with a quest to right a wrong.

Inspiration came on two other occasions where art would imitate life. One morning in 1978, the news reported on a killer, named John Wayne Gacy, arrested after 26 bodies were found buried in the crawl space of his Des Plaines home in Illinois. All the victims were teenage boys, first molested and then killed by Gacy. The victim count would rise to 33, and Gacy would be sentenced to death. Strangely, not long after I read another account of multiple child murders in Houston, Texas, at the hands of Dean Corll, who abducted, tortured, raped and murdered 28 plus boys with the help of two teen accomplices, named David Brooks and Elmer Wayne Henley. While both crimes were horrific in nature, the Corll murders stuck out because Brooks and Henley were both around the same age as their victims. Why would they become a party to such evil? In reading about the excavation of these bodies, in horrendous forensic detail, I understood that monsters walked among us in the guise of everyday citizens.

MJ Preston and Skin make the local news

Dean Corll would never see the inside of a courtroom after being shot dead by accomplice Elmer Wayne Henley. Henley had angered Corll, who was a homosexual sadist killer, after bringing a female to a party which involved drugs and alcohol at the Corll residence. When Henley awoke, he found himself and his friends bound, and only after pleading with Corll to release him and agreeing to kill his friends, Corll made the fatal mistake of untying Henley who then shot and killed his partner in crime.

When the police arrived, Henley was first thought to be a hero, but then the story between Brooks and Henley began to unravel. Both David Brooks and Elmer Wayne Henley confessed to their involvement in the abduction and brutal sex slayings. They led authorities to four separate dump sites. The bulk of the victims were found wrapped in plastic buried in the floor of a boathouse. In a filmed phone call to his mother, Henley confessed, “Momma, I killed Dean.” What would follow would be a view into a world of absolute revulsion. Investigators exhumed body after body, most so deep into decomposition that authorities measured out equal amounts of bones into bags, only to be later sorted and identified by forensic experts.

Gacy would find his end in a death chamber when an intravenous needle was inserted into his arm, and a cocktail of deadly drugs was be administered by the state of Illinois. But justice, if the death penalty could be considered so, only came 16 years after he was arrested. I watched an interview with Gacy, in which he claimed not to be the killer, but an accomplice guilty only of running an illegal graveyard. Both men were master manipulators, but Gacy maintained his innocence until he was executed.

I had no illusions of Gacy’s guilt. One does not live above the decomposing bodies of murdered children without involvement in the crime. He tortured and killed his victims, but his outlandish claim stuck with me and played into writing my first book, THE EQUINOX.

So, I got down to writing. My protagonist, Daniel Blackbird, sets out on a quest to stop a monster that kills daily and feeds on the internal organs of its victims. Blackbird’s hunt leads him on a decade-long chase that will take him from Chicago, Illinois, where prostitutes are being killed. After a near-death confrontation, he is drawn to a small prairie town called Thomasville.

In Thomasville, police are investigating a farmer/serial killer, named Stephen Hopper, whose backfield holds the bodies of 17 missing children. Blackbird is drawn to the town, just as he was drawn to the creature’s other killing fields. The Chief of Police, David Logan, is informed by the killer that he is merely a caretaker and that the real killer is a demonic monster demanding to be fed.

I’m not going to tell you any more than that about the plot. You can read the book. But I will tell you that this story is full of native mysticism, otherworldly creatures and plenty of action. The Equinox is, at its core, a monster story. It is an exploration of native mythos coupled a with a serial killer, known as Stephen Hopper. 

Along with writing, I dabble in art and photography. So, when I wrote Equinox, I also began to render pieces of digital art and decided one Halloween to create a life-sized skinwalker. Although I don’t consider myself a commercial artist, I created the creature which you see in the pictures. The sculpting of the skinwalker took a long time, first starting with the head and then moving on to the body. By Halloween night, the skinwalker, named “Skin,” was staged on my front lawn amid cornstalks and other creepy crawlies including giant spiders, vampires, gravestones and the odd demon. It also caught the attention of local media. Two reporters came out for a look. THE GRIMSBY NEWS and the SAINT CATHARINES STANDARD conducted separate interviews with me, and “SKIN” made the front page of THE GRIMSBY NEWS. I thought that was cool, and I have to say that the kids who came, loved the layout and were fascinated by the creature. The only downside was that after being overrun by hundreds of children, we ran out of treats to give the kids darn quick.

When it was over, I packed up my monsters, gravestones, and Skin for future Halloweens. When I moved from Ontario to Alberta in 2015, Skin was picked up in a yard sale, and is presumably entertaining children at someone else’s Halloween Haunt.

Check out MJ’s latest book HIGHWAYMAN here!

That is how I work as a writer. I employ everything I have in my artistic toolbox. Writing, rendering and even sculpting. I am happy that THE EQUINOX has found a second run with my new publisher, WildBlue Press. It gives new readers a chance to read this exciting book about monsters. In revisiting the manuscript, I was, again, reacquainted with a story I started thinking about when I was a kid.

In future blogs, I will talk about my other books and the journey of creation. With each new project, comes an odyssey, and in the case of my second book, a real adventure.

Thank you for tagging along, and I hope you’ll join me as I revisit these stories and recount their genesis.

 ...................................


Filed Under: Blog, HIGHWAYMAN Book 1, Horror, MJ Preston, THE EQUINOX Tagged With: beast, HIGHWAYMAN, Horror, horror book, Horror Fiction, horror novel, MJ Preston, scary, supernatural, supernatural thriller, THE EQUINOX

Meet MJ Preston, Author, And Artist At Large

Author MJ Preston

I thought I’d tell you a bit about myself. I am what could be categorized as a horror/science fiction/thriller author. I have always had a fascination with the darker side of humanity, and I suppose that is what led me to write in these genres. My love affair with storytelling reaches all the way back to my childhood. Early influences were authors, like Stephen King, Robert R. McCammon, and Richard Matheson.

I started writing at the age of eight, penning short stories and submitting them to magazines. I eventually landed a gig writing movie reviews for my hometown paper in Chilliwack, British Columbia. For me, this was a bonus, because I loved movies. I got to review films like Goodfella’s, Mean Streets, Friday the 13^th and others until I signed up for the army in 1986.

Once there, I volunteered, or as they say in the army, “was voluntold,” to write military reportage for the artillery unit I was serving in. All kidding aside, I was happy to report on my military adventure in the first person, while I continued my quest to publish short fiction.

It was a tough gig writing fiction, and while I aimed for higher markets to publish my work, I only sold a few shorts to little literary magazines. On the side, between training, I started penning a novel that would eventually be published, but just after sitting dormant for almost a decade. But I’ll get to that shortly.

Unfortunately, soldiering is a young man’s game, and I was told by an orthopedic surgeon that I wasn’t a young man anymore. This was something I sneered at. In 1998, I was medically released from the military after enduring three separate leg operations. By the time of my release, I had risen to the rank of Master Bombardier and was the commander of a gun detachment aboard a self-propelled M109 howitzer.

Transitioning from soldier to civilian was a real change for me. It also led me down a new writing path, in which I started a blog called the Canadian Veterans’ Alliance, CVA for short. CVA hosted a consortium of writers. I began reporting on the difficulties endured by veterans after medical release. My passion for this cause landed me on the CBC nationally televised show, TALK TV, with Anne Petrie. Our interview addressed the shortcomings of Veterans Affairs Canada in taking care of wounded veterans. After that, I carried on by using the web as my voice and along the way was able to help wounded vets on their quest for support. This included reporting on a scandal in which soldiers exposed to PCB’s in the Former Yugoslavia had their medical records shredded by military officials. I also penned a three-part story on the adverse effects of the anti-malaria drug, mefloquine.

As with most former soldiers, there comes a time to move on. So, I decided to try my hand at driving an 18-wheeler, and this is where, yet another adventure began. After successfully completing training, I started work with a long-haul trucking company.  I trekked all over Canada and the United States. It would be those travels that would lead me back into the world of writing.

One day in 2011, I fished a battered, half-finished manuscript from a box of old stuff. It was my first real attempt at writing a full-length novel. As I held it in my hands, I thought, I wonder if I can finish this?

I decided to give it a shot, and with the aid of modern technology I transcribed what I had in print and began writing the rest of the story. The story was called, THE EQUINOX and it was a tale of murder intermingled with native mysticism and monsters. I finished it in 2012 and published THE EQUINOX independently. I also submitted it to the Amazon Breakthrough Awards. This was an extraordinarily strange time because I was expecting my little horror novel to be bounced from the competition early on. Maybe beat out by a nostalgic book about flowers or maybe puppies. To my surprise, it kept moving from one level to the next. Submissions for Amazon Breakthrough Awards was somewhere around 30,000 manuscripts. I made it into the semi-finals which was just under 100, and a reviewer from publishers weekly called THE EQUINOX “A solid straight horror novel.” I also received praise from the horror community.

Horror World’s reviewer, TT ZUMA, wrote: M.J. Preston’s, The Equinox, is an old school horror novel that manages to utilize a fistful of tropes in unique ways. In fact, Preston does such a good job with the familiar that it never occurs to devoted horror readers that they’ve read bits and pieces of this story before.

That same year, I was about to embark on a new adventure that would solidify my next writing project and open me up to a world I had never seen. I speak of the Northwest Territories, where my career path as a trucker would lead me onto the worlds longest ice road. Yep, you guessed it, I was about to become an Ice Road Trucker. An amateur photographer, I carried my trusty Canon camera and began snapping photographs in the north. I shot everything I could see. Playful ravens, foxes, wolves, the arctic tundra and the majesty of the world famous aurora borealis, better known as the northern lights. I shot over 10,000 pictures that first season. I’ve included a few here for you to see. Being up there 105 miles below the Arctic Circle did something else. It awakened my muse and the set-up for my new novel.

After that first ice road season, of which I would return twice more, 2013 and 2016, I began penning a novel based on everything I saw with a twist of course. My main character, Marty Croft is forced into a world he thought he’d left behind. Blackmailed into a diamond heist, Marty finds himself running the ice roads for the son of his former gangster boss. Unbeknownst to Croft, the Acadia diamond mine has found something buried in the ice. Something not of this world and it is about to be unleashed.

In the fall of 2014, I completed the horror/science fiction novel ACADIA EVENT, which would capture the attention of a screenwriter, named Gregory L. Norris, who wrote for the television show Star Trek Voyager and the SyFy Channel.

Norris wrote: Author MJ Preston creates an epic page-turner in his newest release, ACADIA EVENT, with Canada’s frozen north as the setting and the Earth as the ultimate prize for whichever side wins the war.

Acadia Event was met with positive reviews, and my experience as an ice road trucker strengthened my ability to paint a picture of the north in the minds-eye of the reader.

In between projects I also write freelance short fiction. My stories can be found in anthologies around the world. But let’s get to why I am here today as a WildBlue author.

Last year I set out to write a two-book project known as the Highwayman series. Highwayman is about a serial killer in the United States who endeavors to be the most prolific and notorious killer of all time.

Using my extensive travels in the United States, I began planning. Research is a huge component in writing a book. Writing one about serial killers, made me realize that if I were to write a full-length novel, or two, on this subject would mean intense research. So that is what I did. I read and watched as much about the subject as possible. Immersed in a sea of source material, my research found me in the world of serial murder and the people that hunt them. From books, by FBI profiler, John Douglas, and Robert Ressler my research offered a plethora of source material from which to build my characters and backdrop. I also gorged on many true-crime books, and this is what led me here.

Highwayman available at WildBlue Press

Highwayman is available from WildBlue Press

By chance, as I was wrapping up the second draft of the first book in the Highwayman project, I ended up contacting WildBlue author, Kevin M. Sullivan. Sullivan has penned several books on the serial killer Ted Bundy along with notorious killers like Vampire, The Richard Chase Murders. I would go so far as to say that Kevin Sullivan is one of the worlds most knowledgeable historians on Ted Bundy. After getting to know Kevin, a friendship ensued, and I decided that WildBlue press might be a good fit for my new project. So, I submitted it. After the usual submission period, the Highwayman Project, along with my two previous novels were accepted by WildBlue Press.

And here we are.

I am proud to be a part of this innovative talent pool of writers, editors, and publishers. WildBlue has so much to offer readers. Not only true-crime but thrillers, horror, romance, science fiction, and police procedural.

So, after all that, who is MJ Preston? I am a writer, but I am also a regular guy who has soldiered and worked blue-collar. But as you can see, I’m also somewhat of an adventurer.

I am proud to be a part of the WildBlue family and sharing my tales with you the reader. I look forward to you joining me in the pages ahead.

Let the adventure begin.

Filed Under: HIGHWAYMAN Book 1, Horror, MJ Preston, THE EQUINOX Tagged With: Book 1, HIGHWAYMAN, Horror, horror book, horror novel, horror series, MJ Preston, Suspense, THE EQUINOX, Thriller

And the dead are but for a moment motionless

“Shadows of Shadows passing... It is now 1831... and as always, I am absorbed with a delicate thought. It is how poetry has indefinite sensations to which end, music is an essential, since the comprehension of sweet sound is our most indefinite conception. Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry. Music without the idea is simply music. Without music or an intriguing idea, color becomes pallour, man becomes carcass, home becomes catacomb, and the dead are but for a moment motionless.”  --Edgar Allan Poe

...and the dead are but for a moment motionless.

I love that line. I first heard it spoke aloud by  Orson Wells, in the introduction to THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER found on The Alan Parson's Project debut album, TALES OF MYSTERY AND IMAGINATION.

There is much to be gleaned from the above quote. Poe has always been a source of inspiration for me as a writer in that he does what most writers do. He identifies, sometimes dissects, and then draws an idea or thought from the source. He talks of poetry of which music is an essential.

And without the idea? Music is simply music.

The art of writing is drawn from all the senses, sight, sound, touch, smell and taste. As tellers of stories, be it fiction or non-fiction, the writer must have the ability to translate those senses and present them on a page where they will hopefully be read and consumed by hungry readers.

The senses we use to write can be enhanced as well. Hunter S. Thompson used drugs to enhance his writing experience, not recommended, but many use music to set the stage. Music, whether it's Classical, Rock n Roll or even Death Metal, can bring forth creativity,  deep concentration, and illumination.

I've written four novels to date. My first, a horror novel called. THE EQUINOX, the second, a science fiction horror called ACADIA EVENT, the last two are about the evolution of a serial killer and the law enforcement tracking him, HIGHWAYMAN, and FOUR.

All of these novels are quite different, except for the evolving style of the storyteller. I liken the writing style of most writers to the Charles M. Schulz comic strip PEANUTS.

What do Snoopy and Charlie Brown have to do with writing?

Well, first of all, Mr. Schulz was a genius, he managed to draw these characters in which a sad-sack kid, Charlie Brown, bumbles through his adolescence in a perpetual state of angst, while his dog is off fighting the Red Baron, being Joe Cool, and is readily accepted by Charlie's peers.

If you look beyond the brilliance of delivering a pleasurable story with a minimum of words coupled to a storyboard of cartoon characters, there is something more to learn. Look at the art, you can Google it, and what you'll see the constant improvement of an artist's talent.

The same goes for writers. The more we write, the more we review our own work and learn from it, the better it gets. That is until fame and fortune taint us, we become drug or alcohol addicted, rest on our laurels and become another tragic genius.

My first novel, THE EQUINOX, which I still hold a deep affection for, was the first time I made love with words on such a grand scale. It was exhilarating and terrifying at the same time. While I enjoyed writing the story, there would be critics, and once I released it, there would be no going back. I learned an awful lot of things writing that book. While working 70-hour work weeks in a day job that took me from home, I somehow found time to bring a story to life that was more than 100,000 words. Like most aspiring writers, I had to carve out time and in that frame, I had to find my muse and get down to it.

Part of that was getting into a frame of mind, a "writer's zone" and running headlong into the abyss. One of the essential tools for that is music, or what I now refer to as "My soundtrack for writing."

Music with the idea. That first novel had a soundtrack that ranged from Progressive Rock, Heavy Metal, Folk, Instrumental and even alternative Country. The music awakened senses, casting shadows upon blank pages,  and then... Click click click.

All of my books have a soundtrack. I can recall Ozzy Osbourne's, "No More Tears, cadence beat, in ACADIA EVENT, to the terror my protagonists abducted wife, Maggie, tied up in the back of a car being driven to the hideout of a murderous Irish Gangster named Jude Shamus. Also found on the ACADIA soundtrack are THE DRIVE-BY TRUCKERS, THE ALLMAN BROTHERS BAND, and ACDC's, "Thunderstruck."

In HIGHWAYMAN, I found myself drawn to harder rock with sometimes dark lyrics. I would actively search out music that seemed to fit the crazy stuff swirling around in my head. I could hear the band CLUTCH singing, "You should have closed your windows and got another dog. You should have chained up all the doors and switched up all the locks." in "The Regulator."

In Highwayman's sequel, FOUR, I listened to, "There's a bullet in my pocket burning a hole. You're so far from your weapon and you wanna go home." in THE DEAD WEATHER'S, "So Far from Your Weapon." For one character, this set a tone of reckless abandon while making a run for the river.

And what am I giving you? Snippets of my writing and the music that played on. The soundtrack to the ethereal musings of author M.J. Preston. As the journey continues, the music changes along with a landscape and it's demographic of characters.

But a constant remains.

Without music or an intriguing idea, color becomes pallour, man becomes carcass, home becomes catacomb, and the dead are but for a moment motionless.

See you in 2020.