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In this episode of The Urban Fantasy Author Podcast, bestselling urban fantasy author Joe Nassise joins M.D. Massey for an interview and a first-chapter sample reading from his novel, The Heretic.
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Click here to purchase Joe’s novel, The Heretic
Transcript of This Week’s Author Interview:
M.D. Massey:
Hello everyone. This is M.D. Massey and I’m back again with this week’s interview for the Urban Fantasy Author Podcast. Now this week with me I have Joe Nassise. Joe is a New York Times and USA Today best-selling author of more than 40 books, including the internationally best-selling Templar Chronicles Series, The Jeremiah Hunt Trilogy and The Great Undead War Series. He also writes epic fantasy under the pen name Matthew Caine and a new take on the Arthurian mythos under the pen name Rowan Casey.
Joe’s work has been nominated for both the Bram Stoker Award and the International Horror Guild Award and has been translated into half a dozen languages to date. He has written for both the comic and role-playing game industries and also served two terms as the president of the Horror Writers Association, the world’s largest organization of professional horror and dark fantasy writers.
Joe, welcome to the show.
Joe Nassise:
Thanks. Pleasure to be here.
M.D. Massey:
Yeah, man. It’s funny. I had read Joe’s Templar Series, the first couple of books, a few years back and of course new of him in the urban fantasy world of authors. He showed up in my reader’s group a while back. I was like, “Okay well maybe he just showed up here just to check it out or something. I don’t know.” I send him a private message and I was like, “Hey man, if you want to join the group that’s fine but it’s mostly a reader’s group.” He was like, “Oh well I am a reader.”
I took that as a huge, huge compliment. I really appreciate, Joe, that you took the time to check out my books.
Joe Nassise:
Hey, I enjoy them man. When I find good reading I want to hang out and find some more. It was great to be there and I’m looking forward to seeing what you’re releasing next.
M.D. Massey:
Yeah, well I’m working hard on book eight but we should be talking about your books instead of mine. Why don’t we start off, let’s get into some questions. Tell us a little bit about your background, both before you became a writer and also how you got into writing.
Joe Nassise:
Okay. I have a degree in, of all things, Soviet politics.
M.D. Massey:
Whoa.
Joe Nassise:
There wasn’t a huge future in that. I went to work in the IT industry for a while. I wrote my first book in college on a dare to win a case of beer. Yeah, one of those-
M.D. Massey:
That’s awesome.
Joe Nassise:
Cool origin stories, right? I had read a thriller that I really couldn’t stand. Apparently I couldn’t shut up about it because my roommate finally said, “Look, I’ll bet you a case of Bass Ale that you can’t finish writing a novel, nevermind write a decent one.” Well that’s throwing down the gauntlet. I worked security nights on campus in this little booth from midnight to 8:00 AM with pretty much nothing to do.
I wrote a novel longhand, proved to him that I could do it, got my case of beer. The whole thing went into a shoebox for about 11 or 12 years until my wife found it when we moved into our first house. She asked to read it and suggested I submit it. I did. Simon & Schuster picked it up and away we went.
M.D. Massey:
Whoa, that’s crazy. Which book was that?
Joe Nassise:
That was a horror novel called River Watch. That was my debut title back in 2001 or 2002.
M.D. Massey:
That’s crazy. It’s also funny because my wife did the same thing to me. She bought me a Kindle way back in the day when they first came out and I started downloading different books. About every fifth book I would complain to her and go, “Aw, this book’s horrible. It’s garbage.” Blah, blah, blah. Then finally I was like, “I could write a better book than this.” Then she turned to me one time and said, “Well why don’t you?” Yeah. It’s funny how a dare can turn into a career.
Joe Nassise:
That is.
M.D. Massey:
Yeah, well tell us a little bit about your work and especially what I would say is your flagship series, which is the Templar Chronicles.
Joe Nassise:
Yes. I love urban fantasy, first of all. I’ve been reading it since Jim Butcher started the genre way back when. It’s what I love to read. Obviously it’s what I love to write as well. It’s funny how those go hand-in-hand a lot of times. The Templar Chronicles actually started with a novel, The Heretic, back in 2005. It was the sophomore novel of my career. The series is about modern Templar knights who defend mankind from supernatural threats and enemies. I’ve been writing the series for more than 10 years now.
Book seven just came out, Darkness Reigns. That came out last week. But there’s seven novels, five novellas, a handful of short stories that make up the world. It also caused a spinoff series. The Jeremiah Hunt Trilogy is set in the same world and feature some of the same characters that jump from book to book.
M.D. Massey:
Okay. Tell us first about Cade, who is the protagonist in the Templar Chronicles, and then tell us about Jeremiah Hunt.
Joe Nassise:
Sure. Cade Williams, you’re right, is the main hero of the Templar Chronicles. He leads what they call the Echo Team. It’s the Templar’s special combat or SWAT teams. He’s in charge of investigating various artifacts, supernatural creatures, and things that show up. What’s interesting is he became who he is because he had an encounter with a fallen angel that we call the Adversary in the series. The Adversary slewed Cade’s wife, Gabrielle.
At the start of the series, he is really on a vengeance trip. He’s trying to hunt down the adversary to repay him for what he did to his wife. But as the series goes on, we discover certain things about Gabrielle’s demise and certain things about the Adversary and Cade himself. The story gets much more intricate as the books go along. They can be read as individual volumes but they’re better read if you read them one at a time and in order. But he’s almost an anti-hero more than a hero. The Templars live by a particular code.
Historically they did and I try to mirror that as much as I could in the urban fantasy series. But Cade’s one of those folks who will break the code whenever he needs to in order to reach the end that he’s trying to get to. He’s a darker figure, a bit of a grim figure, but people empathize with him because of the loss he has suffered and what he is trying to do to make that loss right. He’s a bit of a contrast to Jeremiah Hunt. The Jeremiah Hunt series is about a guy who gives up his sight in order to try to find his missing daughter.
He makes this Faustian bargain with this supernatural entity known as the preacher. When he gives up his regular sight, he gains the ability to see the supernatural world around him.
M.D. Massey:
Wow.
Joe Nassise:
His story’s more of a redemption story. He feels guilty for the disappearance of his daughter. He’s trying to deal with his guilt. He’s trying to deal with what his life has become in terms of he’s given everything up for this search, and obviously the ability to see the supernatural certainly takes his life and gives it a hard left turn really quickly. Yeah.
M.D. Massey:
That is an interesting premise.
Joe Nassise:
Thanks, thanks. He’s got two ghostly companions named Whisper and Scream. The three of them, in the first book, they’re searching the city of Boston for his missing daughter Elizabeth.
M.D. Massey:
Now going back to Cade would you say he’s full-on anti-hero or somewhere in between?
Joe Nassise:
I’d say he’s somewhere in between. He’s been given a couple different abilities with the encounter with the Adversary. He comes out of that encounter with the ability of psychometry. He can lay his hands on an object and see the last events that occurred around that object. If you had a watch and you were holding the watch he could come and hold the watch, and he would see that you were holding the watch.
That gives him a little bit of a darker side, particularly with Templar knights or Christian-oriented very do-gooders. They’re the type who warn their enemies before they attack which takes away the element of surprise. That’s one of the rules Cade likes to break a lot. Yeah, he’s not quite a total anti-hero. He’s not like Lucifer from the TV show. He’s much more, I’d say, a guy who’s fallen on a hard place. In that way he is very much like Jeremiah. They both have this event that they’re dealing with and trying to find redemption from.
M.D. Massey:
Just as in Dragons, nothing like a Paladin to screw up a surprise attack, right?
Joe Nassise:
Exactly, right. In his case he’s the wolf among all the Paladins, right?
M.D. Massey:
Nice. I got to ask you because I’m always fascinated with historical mysterious stuff in history, unexplained, whatever. Conspiracy theories and whatnot. I just think it’s fun stuff.
Joe Nassise:
Yep.
M.D. Massey:
I’m always looking at things like that just to get inspiration I guess for stories. But tell me how much of the actual history of the Templars played into creating the Templar Chronicles.
Joe Nassise:
Well I tried to keep much of the organizational structure and the things they believed in intact. In the series, the basic premise is that they went into hiding after they were ex-communicated and their Commanderies burned and rounded up by the French king and Pope Pius XI. But in the wake of World War 2, in our world, Hitler starts using occult powers to try to help him win World War 2. The Templars come back out of hiding and that’s when they establish themselves as a global entity.
They’re a nation-state that exists all across the globe but they exist in secret. The other major nation-states don’t realize they exist. I tried to mirror what they had been and tried to say, “All right, fast-forward several hundred years. What would they be like now in modern times?” They have a rule that they go by, The Templar Code. There are certain things that they will or will not do that govern the way act when they encounter these entities.
They’ve got some historical figures that they have been dealing with longterm. The Adversary is one of them. He’s popped up at various times during history. The Templars have always been there to try to quell his ambitions. By the time we get to the series itself, the present time, he’s getting uppity once again and he’s started to impact things. They are there to stand in the way.
M.D. Massey:
Okay. I’m curious because there’s always different types of antagonists in urban fantasy novels. What’s it Lori Drake said in an interview the other day? She called it the monster of the week.
Joe Nassise:
Yep, yep.
M.D. Massey:
I do that. In the Templar Chronicles is there a main antagonist? The Adversary, is he the common theme throughout all the books or is there more variety?
Joe Nassise:
He is the man behind the scenes.
M.D. Massey:
Okay.
Joe Nassise:
In each one, I guess monster of the week is a good way of looking at it actually, because in book one, The Heretic, the Echo Team faces off against a group of Necromancers. In book two, A Scream of Angels, they face off against an angel that has been brought back via DNA technology.
M.D. Massey:
Oh, really?
Joe Nassise:
In book three, A Tear in the Sky, it’s an army of Chinese vampires. But each of those entities are all driven behind the scenes by the Adversary who is manipulating them and trying to get them to do certain things. As the series progresses, the Adversary comes out more and more into the open and more into the center of events. By the time you get to the final trilogy which will be probably book seven, eight, and nine, you get the final confrontation between Cade and the Adversary himself. You come full circle from the first book in which the Adversary is the one who ended up making Cade who he is. Now we’ll see what happens at the end.
M.D. Massey:
Nice. Yeah. I always love a good, satisfying, major showdown between-
Joe Nassise:
Yeah.
M.D. Massey:
…the hero and the big bad.
Joe Nassise:
After building for nine books, I better pull it off well.
M.D. Massey:
Yeah. Yeah, well I’m sure you will.
Joe Nassise:
Right.
M.D. Massey:
I’m sure all the readers out there will be looking forward to reading that. Now, tell me a little bit about your writing process. This is something I’ve been asking all the authors that come on this show that I interview. Tell me about your writing process. What’s your processing for turning your ideas into novels?
Joe Nassise:
Sure. I’m a big structure guy. I believe that books are designed to take our readers on an emotional journey. If they aren’t put together in a certain way, we ultimately fail to do that. If you’ve ever read a book where you get a third of the way through and you have no interest in it, or the middle really starts to sag and the storyline falls apart, that’s usually not a story problem. It’s usually a structure problem.
The emotional highs and lows haven’t been ordered in a proper way in order to tell the story in its best form, I guess would be the way to say that. One of the things I do is I actually run an online course called “Story Engines” which takes a look at story structure and teaches writers how to ply in those emotional beats and build the story from the ground up. I use that process myself.
My typical process is I come up with a basic idea. I want to write a story about, I don’t know, a baseball player. Then I’ll try to build that more into a working concept. Well it’s a baseball player who’s got an arm injury who has to find a way to stay on the team. Now we’ve got a hero, we’ve got stakes, we’ve got a problem that they’re trying to solve. Once I have that general concept, what we might call a premise, then I sit down.
I call it the “vomit on the page process” where every idea I have about this book just gets written down on an index card. Normally when I start thinking about a story, you start envisioning these various scenes. Often that penultimate showdown scenes is one of the first things that you think about. I want to get all that information out of my head before I forget it.
I let that just percolate for a couple days, couple weeks. It depends on the project itself but usually by the time that is done I’ve got 40 to 60 scenes or so that could potentially be in the book.
M.D. Massey:
Interesting.
Joe Nassise:
Then I’ll take those scenes and I’ll build them into my emotional structure. I’ll figure out the actual chronological play of how these events come out. Some of the scenes get left out because they don’t work with the others. Some of them I need to come up with to build bridges between scenes. But by the time I’m said and done, I’ve got the complete story planned out in individual scenes.
The reason for that is really important because I don’t write books in order. It’s one of those really weird processes. My brain just doesn’t work that way. When I sit down to write, I have to write whatever is really enthusing me on that particular day.
M.D. Massey:
Ah.
Joe Nassise:
I’ll write chapter three and then I’ll write chapter 40. Then I’ll write 27, and then I’ll write chapter 39. Whatever is driving me that day. I have to know exactly what’s going to happen before I sit down and write. That lets me chew through. The writing schedule is everyday. Pretty much six days a week. I’ll sit down and say, “Okay. This is what I’m going to write today.”
I’ll churn it out until I’m done with that and that’s that day. Next day I’ll get up and say, “Okay what scene am I enthused to write today?” I’ll write that scene. At the end, once I have a rough draft, pretty much my second draft is going in and just making sure all the bridges and transitions work, and smoothing out and polishing the prose itself. But that’s typical for me. Two drafts and I’m done.
M.D. Massey:
That is a really interesting process for writing a novel. It reminds me of when I did sales copy writing when it was taught that when you’re coming up with headlines, and the headline is supposedly 80 percent of the sales letter, when you come up with headlines for a sales letter you just write every headline that comes to mind on index cards. You throw them all out on a table.
Joe Nassise:
Yep.
M.D. Massey:
Then figure out which ones you want to keep and narrow it down from there. It’s so interesting that you do that with scenes. Then you go and you look at your story structure, and you insert scenes if I’m understanding this correctly in the places where you think they belong. Then wherever you need bridge scenes you develop those after the fact.
Joe Nassise:
Correct. Yeah, I’m a believer in the idea that there are really three game-changing moments in any story. Once you have those … Obviously you got the things that lead up to those scenes and the things that lead down from those scenes. Sometimes you find that you’ve got your cards all laid out and maybe you’ve got an event. I always talk about Fonzie jumping the pool of sharks from Happy Days way back when.
If you’ve got that scene, he’s going to jump the pool of sharks, well maybe you forgot the scene where he gets the motorcycle so he can do that. You need to add that in. On the backend he’s got to come down from that jump. What happens after that? You’re filling in to make sure that the chronological flow of the story is correct and that you’re hitting those real important, emotional beats.
Once you have that, you can pretty much tell if the story’s going to work or not. It’s one of the ways I avoid getting three quarters of the way through a story and hitting a dead wall, or having to rewrite half the book because I’ve screwed up the plot structure. I know before I write word one if the plot structure is going the work. That saves me a lot of time. Previously when I wrote in order, I would do about one book a year. Now I do about five.
Once I found the process that worked for me, that made me far more productive and far more efficient as well.
M.D. Massey:
Yeah. Five books a year to me it’s a really good, solid, quick writing pace.
Joe Nassise:
It’s a comfortable one for me.
M.D. Massey:
Yeah.
Joe Nassise:
I know guys who do 10 or 12 a month and I just shake my head. I can’t write that fast at all.
M.D. Massey:
Yeah, that’s not going to happen for me. Usually I’m doing about four or five books a year right now. I agree, that’s a comfortable pace.
Joe Nassise:
Yep. You get enough done, it’s enough work to support you in the marketplace but you’re not killing yourselves and sticking your elbows in ice buckets everyday.
M.D. Massey:
Yeah, well it’s not just that but if I try to push it faster than that I get really burned out and I just don’t want to write.
Joe Nassise:
Yep. Yeah, you want to avoid it. When you find yourself folding laundry instead of writing, you know you’re reaching that burnout phase, right?
M.D. Massey:
That’s the truth. Yeah, or when I find myself wanting to do day job work instead of writing.
Joe Nassise:
Right, right. Yep.
M.D. Massey:
Yeah, for sure. Let me ask you this and I think you probably already said this but what would you say is your greatest strength as a writer?
Joe Nassise:
Hmm, good question. Structure is definitely one of them. I put stories together well and they’re stories that tend to pull in the reader with emotional hooks. That’s good. I also like action scenes. I’m an archer, I’m a gun enthusiast, and I hold three different black belts in three different martial arts. Action scenes, I love to write those. I think I do those well as well.
M.D. Massey:
Yeah, it’s funny. I keep running into urban fantasy authors that are black belts. I think I might have told you this, I don’t know, but I taught martial arts professionally for 20 years.
Joe Nassise:
Yep, yep.
M.D. Massey:
I’m very heavily involved in the martial arts industry. It’s funny because I keep running into all these fantasy authors that are martial artists and I just think it’s great.
Joe Nassise:
Well how can you write a fight scene if you haven’t actually been there yourself?
M.D. Massey:
Yeah.
Joe Nassise:
I started out as an amateur boxer, a featherweight boxer.
M.D. Massey:
Oh, that’s cool.
Joe Nassise:
Then from there I got into Tae Kwon Do in college and competed nationally in that. I’ve done Tang Soo Do and Kyusho Jitsu. All of those things end up in my writing somewhere. I find you can tell someone who has never paid attention to the way a fight evolves in their writing. I try to be as authentic as possible without obviously cataloging every single little twitch and move.
M.D. Massey:
Yeah. It’s funny because I think in a lot of ways … It was probably back in the ’80s when the Ninja craze was such a big deal, but I read those Nicholas Linnear ninja novels.
Joe Nassise:
Yes, yeah. White Ninja and all the rest of them, yeah.
M.D. Massey:
Eric Van Lustbader, he was just so good at immersing you in what felt like a very authentic but yet technically sound fight scene.
Joe Nassise:
Right.
M.D. Massey:
Yeah. I loved those books. They were just great.
Joe Nassise:
Yeah, he picked up the Bourne Identity series after Robert Ludlum died.
M.D. Massey:
Oh, okay.
Joe Nassise:
He writes those now. Yeah.
M.D. Massey:
That’s winning the writer lottery in a way.
Joe Nassise:
Exactly, right?
M.D. Massey:
That’s the author lottery for sure. Yeah. Let me ask you this. You’ve obviously been at the craft for quite some time. Ten years seems like an eternity in today’s world of hybrid indie publishing and digital publishing.
Joe Nassise:
Yep.
M.D. Massey:
Tell me this, if you were to start all over again today is there anything you would do different?
Joe Nassise:
Interesting question. I began my career in traditional publishing. I was doing one or two books a year. I wrote for Simon & Schuster first, then I went over to Harper Collins. I worked on a series for Harlequin called the Rogue Angel Series, which was an Indiana Jones/Tomb Raider story. I began in that career but then in 2010 I started doing some Indie publishing when the Kindle came out and all that stuff. That obviously revolutionized our lives.
M.D. Massey:
Your were right there at the head of the pack, so to speak. Right there-
Joe Nassise:
Yeah. Early on I don’t think I jumped in with both feet. I had one foot in each world. I was trying to do traditional projects but experimenting a little with self-publishing. Mainly books that had come back to me. The rights had reverted from New York and I had them in my control again. I put them out self-published. Now probably 90 percent of my career is self-publishing and I still do a few occasional projects with New York.
I think if I would do it all over again I would have made that switch more wholeheartedly early on. 2010 through 2014 or so I could have put a lot more effort into my self-publishing and released quicker and more frequently. But I was still searching for that traditionally published deals. If I had to change I think I would have said, “Hey I’m making more money the other way. Everything’s under my control. I’m having a heck of a lot more fun. Why am I bothering?”
But you grow up in a certain sphere of influence and you think that’s the best way to do things. It took me a while to see the light, so to speak.
M.D. Massey:
Yeah. I have a friend here that I’ve made locally. He’s a traditionally published thriller author. We’ve met a couple of times over coffee and I’ve discussed indie publishing with him. He’s starting to dip his toes in indie publishing waters. What’s interesting to me is just he’s been traditionally published for decades and decades. The indie publishing world is just baffling to him.
Joe Nassise:
Yeah. I see that a lot in the people I know as well. It’s a total switch of the mindset. You really got to turn off everything that you were taught to believe earlier and look at everything from a whole new light. Those people who have, have done pretty well. I think anytime we can control our characters, we can control our own intellectual property, we can control what we want to do with our series, I think that benefits writers in general.
I have another series, The Great Undead War, which is a World War 1 steampunk series with zombies. The German army pretty much. Zombie-shot troops.
M.D. Massey:
Nice.
Joe Nassise:
Manfred Von Richtofen is actually the imperial German leader. The rights are still controlled by Harper Collins. Here we are five or six years after the second book came out. I would love to continue that series but it’s hard to do that when somebody else controls the rights to the first two books that aren’t really all that available all that well anymore.
Things like that where you want to kick yourself like, “Ugh, if I had just put that out myself I’d be on book seven or eight at this point in that series.” All of that profit would have come to me. I look at writing both as a pleasure and as a business. That’s what puts food on my family’s table. Being able to control the works that you’ve generated is a big thing in my mindset these days.
M.D. Massey:
Yeah, I see that topic coming up a lot in the author groups that I frequent on Facebook. Reversion of rights, rights reversion, and getting them from the traditional publisher.
Joe Nassise:
Yep.
M.D. Massey:
There seems to be a huge issue with people who have gone the traditional route first.
Joe Nassise:
Yeah because we sign contracts where that was the only option back then. Then as these new technologies and these new ways of doing things have come out then we’re stuck with contract language that gets a little ambiguous. When that contract language gets a little ambiguous of course the publisher’s going to view it from there side, and the writer is going to view it from there side. Trying to solve that you end up in court and spending a fortune.
It’s easier to just wait and let the rights run out. Whereas contracts I’ve signed in Europe, European contracts tend to be very time-specific, five to seven years. Then the rights automatically revert. American contracts tend to be, “The rights revert after a certain amount of time when x number of books have been sold for x number of consecutive periods of time.” It’s a lot more convoluted.
M.D. Massey:
Yeah, the stars all have to line up for you to get your get your rights, basically.
Joe Nassise:
Right, right. The stars and the planets with the comets going in the right direction. Then maybe you get your rights back. That said, I did just get the rights back to the Jeremiah Hunt Trilogy. Was originally published art cover by Tor. They were great. The time came around, the rights came back. Last month I put all three books back out under new covers. I’m excited to see that series gaining new readers again.
M.D. Massey:
Congratulations for getting those back, by the way.
Joe Nassise:
Thank you.
M.D. Massey:
Yeah. It’s a big deal. It’s almost like not seeing your children for years and then all of a sudden they come back home.
Joe Nassise:
Right, they show up and they need to be fed again. Right?
M.D. Massey:
Oh yeah, for sure. Yeah. It’s interesting for those listeners out there, it’s an interesting facet of being an indie author. You constantly have to tend to your back list in order to keep it selling.
Joe Nassise:
Right.
M.D. Massey:
Yeah. Okay let me ask you this, and I think you might have already answered this as well, but what do you like to do when you’re not writing?
Joe Nassise:
I like archery. I mentioned that. I like going down to the gun range and shooting a few rounds. I love to play board games. My wife and I are big on board games. We’re big on going to the movies. I probably see one movie a week, at least. We binge-watch Netflix a lot.
M.D. Massey:
Oh yeah.
Joe Nassise:
We’re your average American couple.
M.D. Massey:
Yeah, nothing wrong with that. By the way did you binge Travelers?
Joe Nassise:
I have not. I just watched the first episode probably earlier this week. We’re just getting into it.
M.D. Massey:
Oh, I got sucked into that series. When season three came out I watched the whole thing in, I don’t know, a couple days.
Joe Nassise:
We’ve been big on British crime dramas lately. Broadchurch, Shetland, Hinterland, The Fall. That’s been consuming us while we wait for Game of Thrones, right?
M.D. Massey:
Yeah. Geez. Oh my gosh. The thing is, it’s the final… I can’t even say it. I can’t even say final season.
Joe Nassise:
Yep. Yep, nope.
M.D. Massey:
Oh, it’s painful. Painful. All right well let me ask you this. As far as reading goes, I know that a lot of authors will say, and I’m the same way, they’re like “When I’m writing, I don’t read fiction.” Or, “When I’m writing I don’t read my own drama.” Which is typically what I do. But what is your favorite series or your favorite author to read? What are things that you like to read when you have downtime?
Joe Nassise:
Sure. I’ll say first I’m the opposite of you. I tend to read more when I’m working on a project than less.
M.D. Massey:
Oh, wow.
Joe Nassise:
Yeah. I like to immerse myself in other writers in the genre because that tends to prime the pump for me.
M.D. Massey:
Oh.
Joe Nassise:
It generates more creative energy. But my favorite series out there is a series of books by John Connolly called the Charlie Parker thrillers. They are a series of books set in Maine about a private investigator but they’re more supernatural thrillers.
M.D. Massey:
Interesting.
Joe Nassise:
There’s events that go on that very slowly as the series progresses more and more of this supernatural background to what’s going on gets revealed. They’re fascinating. Connolly is a phenomenal writer. Part of the reason I love them is they’re set in a part of Maine where … I grew up in Boston and my family would vacation to that part of Maine every summer. The places he’s writing about I’m intimately familiar with.
He does such a great job of bringing those places to life, despite that fact I don’t think he had ever visited Maine before book eleven. He’s an Irish writer that has been writing these things for years without ever setting foot in the town that he’s writing about. I found that fascinating as a writer, that he could bring it to life so well without having been there in the early part of the series. He’s my all-time favorite.
M.D. Massey:
Yeah, that’s nuts. I have to write in settings that I’m familiar with. I can’t imagine writing … Oh, wow.
Joe Nassise:
Yeah.
M.D. Massey:
Nine books in and then he finally visits?
Joe Nassise:
That’s what I understood, yeah. Just before book 10 he went over. Yeah. I hope he keeps going. He’s on, I don’t know, 13 or 14 at this point. If he keeps putting them out, I’ll keep reading them.
M.D. Massey:
Yeah, I’m going to check it out because I’ve been looking for a series to sink my teeth into. I like that supernatural thriller thing.
Joe Nassise:
Yep.
M.D. Massey:
Jonathan Maberry has the Joe Ledger novels which I love. Every time a new one comes out, I just devour it.
Joe Nassise:
Yep. It’s funny. One of my influences early on was Clive Barker. I had a chance to meet him at an art showing in the early ’90s. We chatted a little bit about writing back then. One of my favorite novels is, well it’s actually a novella, his book Cabal which became the movie Nightbreed.
M.D. Massey:
Ah.
Joe Nassise:
The story of a city of monsters. The story looked at who is the real monster? The monster themselves or the humans that are hunting the monsters? I loved that story for years. Just recently I was able to partner with Clive to produce a book called Midian Unmade which was an anthology of short stories that took place after the end of Cabal. At the end of Cabal the city gets destroyed and the monsters disperse into the world.
Midian Unmade talks about where those monsters went and what happened to them. It was fascinating to be able to work not just with someone that I had looked up to as fellow writer for years, but being able to play in the world he had created as well, produce those stories, and pick and choose the selection for the anthology. It was just a dream come true.
M.D. Massey:
Yeah. That’s funny because I see authors that are out there that are doing anthologies in series and worlds that I like to read. I’m like, “Gosh that would be so much fun.”
Joe Nassise:
One of the ones we did, Harper Collins hired me to edit a project called Urban Allies, which we took urban fantasy series and partnered up two of those writers to write a collaboration.
M.D. Massey:
Ah, yes.
Joe Nassise:
People like Kelly Armstrong and Seanan McGuire, or Carrie Vaughn. Joe Maberry and Larry Correia did a combination story from the Joe Ledger Series on Maberry’s side and Correia’s Monster Hunters International Series. They were paired up to do a collaboration. It was 10 collaborative stories.
M.D. Massey:
I need to hunt them down.
Joe Nassise:
Oh, it’s a great book. I loved it. I had so much fun working with other writers who are so ingrained into the world of urban fantasy. The fans like it too, which was always a bonus.
M.D. Massey:
Yeah. I like Larry Correia’s work. His pacing is great but then also he gets all his gun stuff right to the point where I learn something new when I read every book.
Joe Nassise:
He’s such a huge gun enthusiast, too, that I couldn’t imagine him screwing something like that up.
M.D. Massey:
Yeah. That’s funny too because the first serious I wrote was post-apocalyptic. A lot of people who read post-apocalyptic novels, they’re gun guys, gun gals. Some of that readership came over to my urban fantasy series. I used a term improperly. Colin always carries a Glock because I love Glocks. He said, “Locked and loaded.” This guy took me to task and I thought he was never going to leave it alone. You got to get your stuff right I guess.
Joe Nassise:
Well in the Templar Chronicles I say that the church forgave the Templars when they came back after World War 2. I had someone write to me and say, “They were ex-communicated. There’s no way this would ever happen.” About two weeks later, they found a document in the Vatican archives that show that the ex-communication had been forgiven by a subsequent Pope and that they actually had been unbranded as heretics.
I couldn’t resist. I had to send the article to that gentleman.
M.D. Massey:
Yeah, like, “In your face.”
Joe Nassise:
I didn’t mean it that way but I could see it might have been taken that way. But I was just so astounded that just after that conversation took place they found this actual historical document that said what I had envisioned had actually happened. That was neat.
M.D. Massey:
Yeah. I don’t know. Sometimes you just got to let things go, but yeah. That’s always satisfying to people in real life.
Joe Nassise:
Well and we all have these screw-ups, right? In Riverwatch, my very first novel, it had been read by myself. My wife had gone through it. My editor, the senior editor for Pocket Books, had gone through it twice. The copy editor. All these people look at this text multiple times before it goes to print. In the first print run the characters go up to the third story of a building and they come down from the second story. They somehow magically teleported from the third floor to the second floor without anybody knowing about it, because all of us missed it in seven different proofreads.
M.D. Massey:
Oh, yeah.
Joe Nassise:
Sometimes you have those little errors that, “Hey, oh well. It’s just life.”
M.D. Massey:
Yeah. Early on I was guilty of characters suddenly changing last names.
Joe Nassise:
Right, exactly.
M.D. Massey:
It’s like, “Oh. Sorry about that. I’ll fix it.” That’s the good thing about digital publishing though is that you can fix things so quickly.
Joe Nassise:
That’s right. If you have an error you can change it tomorrow and not worry about it. Yep.
M.D. Massey:
All right, Joe. Well we’re coming up on time. Let me ask you this first. I know you just had a book release. Let’s hear about that and then also tell us what you have planned in 2019.
Joe Nassise:
Sure. Latest book just came out last week, Darkness Reigns. It is book seven in the Templar Chronicles Series. Coming up in 2019 will be the final two volumes in that series; Nephilim Rising and Angel’s Regret. Probably spring and fall if all plans go right. In the meantime I’m writing a horror series with my friend and fellow writer Tom Levine. We’re doing a take on the four horsemen of the apocalypse.
M.D. Massey:
Ooh, nice.
Joe Nassise:
The first volume of that drops in January. We’ll probably drop one a month thereafter or somewhere along those lines. That’s what’s in the immediate future.
M.D. Massey:
Nice, okay. Finally, before we cut off, why don’t you tell everybody out there where they could find out more about you, where they could find your books and so forth?
Joe Nassise:
Cool. Website is josephnassise.com. The last name is spelled N-A-S-S-I-S-E. I’m also at the same place on facebook.com/joenassise. Twitter is twitter.com/jnassise. Basically plug in my last name and you’ll find me.
M.D. Massey:
Excellent, excellent. Joe I want to thank you for coming on the show. This is a budding project, as you know, for me. I appreciate you coming on, taking time out of your writing schedule to do this. Now you’ve got me interested in that four horsemen in the apocalypse project. You got to let me know when that book drops. It sounds exciting.
Joe Nassise:
I will. Thanks for having me today. It’s been great fun.
M.D. Massey:
Excellent, excellent. All right, everybody. Stick around because in just a minute you are going to be treated to a sample reading of one of Joe’s books by the author himself.
Welcome to the inaugural episode of The Urban Fantasy Author Podcast! This week M.D. Massey introduces the podcast with a brief “self-interview” and a reading from the prequel novel to his Colin McCool series,