TRUE COVID -19 CONFESSIONS

I am going to open by being humble. Like pretty much everyone else, I have been affected by the pandemic. After the publication of my latest novel, FOUR, the Highwayman Books were on a definite upward trajectory, but since the lock-down, sales and reviews have stagnated. On the positive side, the reviews that FOUR and Highwayman received were mostly positive, and some were downright fantastic. The challenge is reigniting that interest and getting my books into the hands of readers.

So how do we do that? Well, the most effective way to stir interest is word of mouth and reader feedback. I have said it in the past, and I'll repeat it, I need reviews, but I also need referrals. So, I need you, my friends, readers, and everyone else to make this lifelong endeavor for me to become a full-time storyteller successful. I am not looking for fame or fortune. A few bucks would be nice, but the end game for me is sustainability.

There are 168 hours in a week. Presently, I work a day job of roughly 50 to 60 hours a week, and I sleep 60 - 70 hours a week, when not interrupted by an evening pee, or two. I estimate that it leaves me roughly 40 to 60 hours every week to take care of the following. Personal business, work around the house, banking, eating, some entertainment, hang out with Stormy and the beagles, and tending to family needs. Quite honestly, it isn't a lot of time, and from that remaining 68 hours, I also must dedicate that time slot to promotion and writing. 

When I published Highwayman in July of 2019, Steve Jackson, the head haunch over at WildBlue, asked when FOUR, Highwayman's follow-up would be ready for publication. I suddenly found myself on a deadline. I panicked a little, the book was about a third to half done, and I wasn't sure where it was going or how it was going to end. I sent a note off to Steve, told him my progress and said I would work tirelessly to get it done. Steve came back with something like, "Don't work tirelessly; just write another great book." That's not it exactly, more like what we used to term in the military as: "words to that effect," and maybe I added the "another great book" part.  Regardless of what Steve said, I still knew that I had a deadline to meet. 

I got down to work. I shut down all social media. Then what I did for approximately four months to meet that goal was to rise a couple of hours before I'd have to get to work on weekdays, between 4 AM and 5 AM and write until 6 AM if I didn't have to be in early. On the weekends, I dedicated a good portion of my remaining time in front of my computer, working drafts, and getting the story finished.

That has pretty much been my schedule since I embarked on this crazy mission. Almost a year and a half ago, I submitted my work to a publisher called WildBlue Press, and they accepted Highwayman and contracted the yet to be finished FOUR. They also took on my two independent novels, The Equinox and Acadia Event, a rare occurrence as those books have already been published independently. 

This has been a strange and cool year. A good friend of mine, named Brad, said something that rings true. He said, "You've put out four novels in the last year." And that is true because my first two books were going onto platforms, they initially didn't have access. All my books are now available in print, digital, and audiobook format. The publisher was pulling out all the stops. But along with this comes the difficulty of promoting four books at once while trying to write another book.

The business reality of writing is this. Publishers take on your work because they need to generate sales, and to cover the costs they foot upfront. It's nice to think that they are all about the art, and they are, but the art must pay the bills. Costs include editors, voice talent, cover design, and advertising. While it would be nice to write and throw it out there even to a small demographic of readers, the reality is that if the books don't make money, the author's future works with a publisher can end up in jeopardy. 

I've been on both sides of this equation. I published my first two books independently, and then recently had all my work accepted to my publisher WildBlue Press. Being with a publisher opens doors and venues that usually aren't readily available to an indie author. The reason I add "usually," because there are independent authors who have pulled out all the stops. Some of them have gotten their books onto all platforms, but it comes at a cost. Some have had their work professionally edited, but that comes at a cost as well, unless you have writer friends willing to donate their time and talent to the task of editing someone else's novel. That happens, but being with a publisher has definite advantages. I also have a publicist who gets out there, pushing my name, arranging the reviews, interviews, guest blogs, and let me tell you; I don't know what I'd do without Mickey Mikkelsen. 

So, I'm busting my hump to get the word out. I know I write engaging and often dark stories, and I'm confident that readers dig what I do. But is it enough, and how far do you want to take this? I want to go all the way, and take it to the Max.

Let me close by saying, my name is MJ Preston. I write horror, science fiction, and thrillers. I just published four novels with WildBlue Press, and I'm hoping you will help me complete the mission of my craft.

Come and Find me!

http://mjpreston.net

THE EQUINOX  ACADIA EVENT HIGHWAYMAN   FOUR

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.

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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