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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, Blood Scent.
M.D. Massey’s Weblinks:
https://www.facebook.com/mdmasseyauthor
https://twitter.com/mdmasseyauthor
https://www.instagram.com/authormdmassey/
Purchase Blood Scent on Amazon
Author Interview:
Hey folks, M.D. Massey here and I want to welcome you to the inaugural edition of the Urban Fantasy Author Podcast. Let me tell you a little bit about this podcast, why I started it, and what we hope to accomplish with it. Well, the Urban Fantasy Author Podcast is an idea I’ve had brewing in the back of my mind for some time and I’ve been sitting on it for about a year and finally decided I would get off my duff and get it rolling. The reason why I started it was really just to get the word out about urban fantasy authors to the urban fantasy reader community. I frequent several urban fantasy groups online and I noticed people are constantly asking for tips and recommendations on urban fantasy authors that maybe they haven’t read, new books to read, etc.
I thought, “Wow, wouldn’t it be a good way to help people discover new urban fantasy authors, new urban fantasy books through a podcast?” Let people hear interviews with the urban fantasy authors themselves and also let them hear the authors read excerpts from their books. I think it’s a good way for people to be able to sample a new author, to hear what they’re about, hear about their stories, hear about their background, hear about their characters, their world, and also to sample their books themselves. Doing it in audio and hearing the author read their own books, I just thought it’d be a cool idea. That’s why I started it. Of course, I’m an urban fantasy author myself. I have been for about five or six years. I got into writing urban fantasy after being a private consultant, a business consultant. That was my day job. It still is. I still maintain that day job.
I had been writing nonfiction books as a part of my consulting gig for quite some time. Well, in my spare time I read a lot of fantasy and urban fantasy, some sci-fi, but mostly fantasy, and I had been writing urban fantasy books on my own, or at least trying to. I struggled for several years trying to finish a novel, as most new writers do. Wrote everything I could on writing fiction, took some classes, and so forth. Finally, I stumbled across James Scott Bell’s book, Plot and Structure, and that kind of cemented a lot of things for me and helped me finish my first novel. Now, I will say my first novel in retrospect, it was not that great. That’s pretty much the case with most urban fantasy authors and most authors period, is that the first thing that you finish, the first book you write, or whatever, publish it, it’s going to be kind of a clunker. That was okay.
We went back years later, because that book had quite a bit of background story and history for my main series and the main series character, Colin McCool. My editor and I went back and we edited the book heavily, and revised it, and republished. Some of my readers really enjoy that book, some people don’t. It has, I think, about a four out of five stars on Amazon rating, which is fine. It was my first book, so I still like it. I’m rather fond of it. But I will say as an urban fantasy author, that it’s kind of hard sometimes to be able to get out there and reach readers where they’re at. Many times we as authors, we don’t want to invade reader’s spaces. For example, recently I was in one of the urban fantasy groups that I frequent and I noticed there was a post there that was just trashing my series, which is fine. I understand some people are going to hate my work, that’s fine, perfectly fine.
But, I kind of felt like I had to kind of mention something, maybe just stand up for my series a little bit without being rude, being perfectly polite. I noticed after I interjected my two cents, which was very polite, very courteous, and very respectful of the person that created the original post, one of the other commenters on the post, one of the group members had said, “Gosh, now that the author has chimed in, I feel really bad about saying that I don’t like his books.” For those reasons and other reasons, authors, we tend to try to stay out of reader’s spaces on Facebook, and reader groups, and especially on places like Goodreads. I thought, once again, that this … Starting this podcast would help authors get out there, kind of get the word out about their books and so forth. Both indie authors and trad-pub authors, traditionally published authors.
I’m not partial to either one. No matter what route somebody’s taking, whether they’re indie published, or traditionally published, or hybrid, that’s great. All I care about is, are you writing books to please your fans? Those are the types of authors I’m going to try to interview on this podcast and I hope you’ll join me for that. Now, this podcast, this initial episode is designed to be a pilot episode, and so I wanted to give people kind of a taste for the way that we’re going to run this podcast. What I’m going to do today is I’m going to kind of do a little mini interview, which is really just me reading off some of the interview questions and answers that I’ve given in the past for author interviews on a couple of different sites. Then I’m going to read you guys an excerpt from the prequel to my main series, which is Blood Scent, and Blood Scent is the prequel.
The main series is the Colin McCool series, which is about a young druid apprentice that has kind of stumbled into the supernatural world, not really by accident, it’s more by fate. But he doesn’t want to be there and he’s tried to get out and he keeps getting sucked back in. That’s the gist of that series. I’m going to read you an excerpt from the prequel for that series. But first, let’s get into some questions. One of the questions that I was asked in one of these interviews was, what drew me to the job, or what drew me to urban fantasy? My answer is, everybody always says write what you know and that’s kind of what I did. Like I said before, I read a lot of urban fantasy, or I used to until I started writing full-time. Now I don’t have as much time to write anymore. But lately my writing schedule and keeping up with my day job gig, which is now my side hustle, I don’t really have time to read as much.
But in the past, I read quite a bit of urban fantasy. Some of the authors that I enjoy in urban fantasy, I read Jim Butcher’s first two books. Didn’t read the whole series, I’ll admit that. But I really enjoyed his stuff. I would say, oh gosh, now I’m blanking out. John Conroe is one. Really enjoyed John Conroe as an indie author. Also, Patricia Briggs, really love her Mercy Thompson series. I think those are the types of books that drew me to the genre and inspired me to start writing as well. Now, as far as being inspired to write, one of the questions I was asked, again, is what inspired you to write urban fantasy featuring fae, or as some people would call them fairies? Honestly, I’ve been fascinated with fairies since I was a kid and it’s a preoccupation that started when I first read the story of the Cottingley Fairies. When I was a kid, I was into weird stuff. Kind of weird news and unexplained things.
My uncle had these, I think they were Time Life books that you could order out of a magazine or something and it had all these different articles about the weird and the unexplained. I was reading through them and I came across this story about the Cottingley Fairies and I think that’s where I heard about it first and I became fascinated with it. Of course, even as a kid you could tell the photos had been faked, but the idea that the so-called fair folk could be lurking in my backyard, or in the woods where I enjoyed playing, that was enough to spark my imagination. When I decided to write my first novel, I was absolutely certain that I wanted the fae to feature prominently, because I thought that it’s just such a fascinating part of folklore and legend.
One of my early abandoned manuscripts was about a fae hunter, not a fae hunter, but a human who hunts fae. It was pretty bad, but later that idea evolved into Colin McCool and the Vampire Dwarf, which was that first book I wrote that I told you was rather horrible when I first wrote it. Later, of course, that idea morphed into the Junkyard Druid novels. Here’s another question, tell us more about Colin McCool. Why is he such a relatable character? How has he grown as a person through the series? I will tell you, Colin, deeply flawed, deeply flawed person. A guy who basically is good at heart. He’s just kind of trying to do the best he can. But, he has issues. He’s angry. He’s brash, prone to violence, and he’s a shifter. Not a typical shifter either. The thing that he shifts into, it brings out a very sociopathic side and he really can’t control it, at least during what went on in the books.
He’s expressed quite a bit of pain in his life and he compensates for that by trying to right wrongs and protect other people. Besides that, he’s your typical smart ass, which is pretty common in urban fantasy novels. But I like smart ass heroes and I like anti-heroes even more. To me, it’s hard to dislike a character like that. Now as for what inspired me to become an author, like I said before, I love to read. If I had a vice, it would probably be buying way too many books, besides my whiskey tasting habit. My mother, she was a teacher, English teacher actually and during my preschool years she would let me pick out a Little Golden book whenever we went to the store. I started reading at a very early age. I was kind of a precocious kid, like a lot of veracious readers are. I was reading books like Homer’s Odyssey and the Silmarillion before I was tall enough to see over the counter at the public library.
These days, if I walk into a bookstore, it’s very difficult for me to leave without an armful of books, especially at Half Price Books here in Austin, because you can get some great deals on books there. I love going to that place. As most people know, avid readers tend to become aspiring writers. Me, being no exception. When I was in my 20s, a journalist friend encouraged me to write and publish a nonfiction book, so I did. I think I talked about that earlier. Then by my late 30s I had writ and published a few moderately successful nonfiction books and I thought, “Gosh, how hard can it be to write a fiction novel?” I found out, it’s pretty damn hard. It’s not easy. Unless you’ve attempted to write a novel or written a novel, you don’t know how hard it is just to finish a novel. Then to write something that people actually want to read, that’s damn difficult. I took writing courses, like I said. Read a lot of books on fiction, stumbled through a few unfinished manuscripts.
Then once again, as I said before, when I read James Scott Bell’s Plot and Structure, that kind of … Things kind of snapped for me. I completed and published my first novel in December that year and I haven’t looked back since. I think that was 2013, 2014. Okay. Next question, if you were a teacher, what book would you assign to your class? I’d say that depends on what I was teaching. If I were teaching creative writing, I would start with the book by James Scott Bell I mentioned previously. But if I were teaching literature, I would tell my students to read whatever interested them. A good example of this, my son recently fell in love with Dav Pilkey’s Dog Man books and before those books came along, we couldn’t get him to read much at all on his own, but he loves to read every day now. What I would do, is I would assign my students the task of finding a book they would enjoy reading and then I would tell them to read that book for the shear enjoyment of it.
Typical day in a writer’s life. This is the next question. I wake up about … Between 6:00 and 7:00. Lately, it’s earlier than that because I got to get my kid off to the bus stop. I drink some coffee, check email first thing, and then I get on the treadmill for a little while. During that time, I kind of take care of some of the day job stuff, some of my admin stuff for my day job. After that, I listen to Writing and Publishing podcast while I shower and get dressed. Then after I’ve made myself presentable, I get more caffeine in my body before I hit my writing desk at 9AM. Then I write until I get my word count for the day. Typically, I set a word count goal of about 3,000 words. Some days it’s more, like if I have a deadline that I’ve set for myself to get a book out. I’ve written up to 10,000 words a day, although I don’t like to do that. As I’m writing, I take five minute breaks every hour.
When I’m done writing for the day I grab some lunch, do more day job stuff, and then I train martial arts, or I read, or I catch up on a show on Netflix. By then, it’s time to get my kid from school, so I spend my time with him until his mom gets home. Then after that, I do whatever additional work that I need to do that day, or I relax by reading again, or watching more TV before I go to bed no later than 10PM. The thing is, I used to like to stay up late, but I find these days if I stay up past 10:00 I’ll wreck the next day and I can’t write. My writing output really suffers. I’m kind of an early to bed, early to rise kind of guy. Finally, last question. Bam, you’re a superhero. What’s your superpower? Well, I’ve always wanted to fly. I actually wanted to be a pilot when I was a kid, but my vision was too poor. I wore really thick glasses, used to get made fun of for it actually.
I would definitely want to be able to fly, preferably at super speeds, because necessarily when you can fly at super speeds, that superpower comes with other superpowers. You have to have some sort of limited vulnerability or thick skin because of the stresses of high speed flight and you have to have high stamina, of course. I think it’s a pretty cool power. Pretty versatile, actually, and I think people could probably tell that I’ve really thought that through quite a bit. Finally, last question. Where can readers discover more of my work or interact with me? Well, you can visit me at my website at mdmassey.com. That is M-A-S-S-E-Y. Or you can reach me on Facebook at my page, which is Facebook.com/MDMasseyAuthor, or on Instagram at Instagram.com/AuthorMDMassey. That’s it for this author interview. In the future, when I record future podcasts, obviously the future episodes will feature other authors. Once again, this was kind of a pilot podcast episode.
I hope you’ve enjoyed it. I hope you’ve enjoyed hearing about me and hopefully you’ll enjoy the book excerpt that’s coming up. If not, well, that’s okay too. I can guarantee you that you’ll hear from many other authors, urban fantasy authors on this podcast in coming weeks. I actually have about a half dozen episodes lined up. I have about a half dozen interviews lined up with author friends and so forth. Some of them very well known, some of them not. I’m going to try to do a mix to where I’ll feature authors that are pretty well known out there, that are best-selling authors, and then feature authors that are up and coming, because if I just feature the authors everybody knows about, obviously that’s not going to be good for discoverability. I want to introduce the listenership out there to authors they haven’t heard of and hopefully we’ll be able to do that over the next year. I have the opportunity to do about 50 episodes over the next year and I’m really looking forward to doing that. Hope you guys will stick with me for the journey and I appreciate you tuning into this week’s podcast. Thank you.