Superheroes — and their creators — lurk in all corners of the globe.

In this case it was Bethesda, Maryland, at the SPX (Small Press Expo) comic book convention, around 1997 or so.

After hours — maybe 1 a.m. or so — I was hanging out at a party in one of the hotel rooms with my pal and comic book fan extraordinaire Tom Peters, putting back a few beers. And who should wander over but Frank Miller.

Dark Knight Returns. Sin City. Daredevil. Elektra Assassin. Ronin.

Yep. That Frank Miller.

Having known Tom for many years at that point I knew his love of comics and the various encounters he’d had, so I turned to the famed creator and said, “I’ve got a Frank Miller story for you.”

Slightly amused, Frank Miller indulged me as I queued up the scenario for Tom. For the record, I don’t remember Tom’s original Frank Miller anecdote, but I sure as heck remember what happened next.

As background … Tom is more than a comic fan. He’s a comic book aficionado. Even 20 years ago he saw comic books as a true art form, and is in a very real way a comic books scholar. He wasn’t your typical comic book ‘nerd.’ Continue reading

My latest novel, Crossline, is a scifi adventure about two men — a civilian space pilot forced through a wormhole and into a war-torn parallel Earth, and the CEO of the corporation who launched the pilot to begin with — and how their journeys intersect.

But underneath the scifi elements lies a more personal story– a trilogy, in fact — that I wrote in high school. It was my first real attempt at fiction, and, all things considered, it wasn’t half bad.

It was based on the ‘troubles’ in Ireland, which, of course, I knew absolutely nothing about, but when you’re trying to impress a girl, well … you make stuff up and hope for the best. The girl, in question, did like the stories, and she was impressed. But not so much that things went the way I wanted.

And in terms of the written material itself, here’s the real problem:

I lost them.

Or, I should say, I lost parts two and three. I wrote those stories by hand, and then typed them up, because this was back in the mid 1980s, before everything we did was on computers and saved on a hard drive. And, because, I was a putz. Continue reading

My Darkest Night? Agent Ambush

My memory is hazy on the some of the details.

But that’s what happens when you get pulverized. Shock overtakes your system.

In the fall of 2008 I attended a Backspace writer’s event in New York City. What particularly drew me to the event was a session wherein new authors submit a portion of their work, to have it read aloud in front of a group, and a panel of agents gives commentary.

If things go well, you just might find yourself with an agent, and, even better, a book deal.

At the time I was polishing up my debut novel Finders Keepers, feeling it was just about ready for prime time. So I submitted a page from the prologue — not the version I ultimately published — but a page of manuscript that I was certain was going to absolutely kill.

It killed all right. It killed me.

There I was, sitting in a NYC hotel conference room, listening to various passages from other emerging writers, and thinking that some were actually half-way decent, and others were, well … less so. But either way it didn’t matter to me, because I knew — absolutely knew — that nobody had anything as clever and inventive as what I had with Finders Keepers. There was simply nothing like it out there. Continue reading