I’ve been asked a few times where the ideas for my books come from, and honestly, it’s been a different process for each of them. 

Desolation is a book I’ve had kicking around in my head for over 20 years, ever since I read The Demon in the Freezer. 

That said, it originally was a story about fighting cannibals and rebuilding society, the same tired old tropes used in just about every post-apocalyptic book these days (to my credit, this wasn’t that common back then, lol). It even had a Mary Sue main character, who was somehow great at survival and fighting, even though I suck at both those things. 

But something very interesting happened on the way to middle age… I grew up. And somehow, despite all evidence to the contrary, I must have matured. Because when I sat down to actually write the damn thing, I realized that the more interesting, more powerful story was the very personal story of one person trying reach those he loves and being out of his mind with worry for them. 

Once I had that realization, the book mostly wrote itself (almost literally, I discovery wrote it). 

The Artifact, on the other hand, has a quite odd origin story. It began, actually, with a Reddit writing prompt. I was trying to write every day, and I had just finished Desolation, so my mind was a kind of mush, and I had nothing I really wanted to work on. But this one prompt sparked some excitement in me, and I got to work:

"A man enters a police station drenched in blood with a shotgun in his hands. He's angry. He walks past the front desk and the receptionist merely glances at him. He continues through the police station, stalking past dozens of police officers, who either walk past him or remain at their desks." : WritingPrompts (reddit.com)

And here’s what I wrote from that:

The man walks into an office, clears the weapon, and drops it unceremoniously on the battered steel desk. The office door proclaims, in scratched and faded paint on cloudy glass, that the office’s owner is Det. Parker Wilks.

A side-chair, metal framed with cracked black vinyl over deflated foam stuffing, sits by the wall, overflowing with papers and folders. Similar debris covers the desk, the shotgun resting haphazardly over the spread of papers, droplets of blood occasionally dripping down and staining the eggshell a dingy reddish-brown.

The man grimaces at the mess, then turns and strides back out the doorway, nearly running over a small, tubby man in a shabby suit who was entering at the same moment.

Bouncing back from the brief contact, the small man exclaims: “Just what in the fuck happened out there, Wilks?”

Wilks, a beefy man at 6’3” and over 230 lbs., pushes past the small man without acknowledging the question, eyes fixed further down the hall.

The small man grabs Wilks by the arm, hand clawing into the flesh of his bicep in a grip surprisingly strong for his size. Wilks turns to face him.

“Chief, I get that you want some answers. But do you mind too goddamn terribly if I go wash the perps brain matter off my face before I report?”

Wilks eyes, hard little points of black under his ridge of a brow, bore into the chief of police from nearly a foot above him.

The chief’s eyes soften. He sighs and releases Wilks.

“Fine. Get cleaned up and then report immediately.”

Wilks turns around and stalks off towards the locker rooms, the chief, and his question, already out of his mind.

Clearly, this isn’t Rev, but it’s the gritty, noir kind of feel that really grabbed me and I just had to write something like that. Also, I liked the idea of writing a gentle giant, but one who was perfectly capable of not being gentle. So the seeds of Rev began there, and from that, I wrote the first two chapters (the story of capturing and returning Turbo) as a short story. After I workshopped it, I liked it, and Rev, so much, I knew I had to write a novel with him as the main character. 

I knew I didn’t have Rev developed enough at this point to build a novel, much less a series, with him as the backbone, so I found several character worksheets and began filling them out. Once I finished those, I created an RPG character sheet for him, mostly on a lark, but it actually came in handy. 

See, I wanted Rev to be capable, but not a superman. I wanted him to be flawed, and have weaknesses, and by creating a character sheet, I had a nice guide to what he was and was not capable of. 

The theme for The Artifact came about because I wrote the book I wanted to read. See, I’m a huge fan of the Call of Cthulhu pen-and-paper RPG, and have been running games in it for many years. I love the lore and atmosphere of it, as well as Lovecraft’s mythos, but I can’t stand Lovecraft’s writing style (not casting shade, just personal preference). 

I wanted to read a book that brought the mystery and excitement and, yes, despair of the RPG into a novel. I looked and looked, but the only books that seemed to try this were all very pulpy, which also didn’t appeal to me. I wanted a realistic supernatural horror story. 20

Anyway, being fully aware that this might be the smallest market for a book imaginable, I embarked anyway to create not simply one book, or even a trilogy, but an episodic series that can span an almost unlimited amount of books for a market that doesn’t even exist because, well… I’m stubborn.  I want what I want. 

In any event, if you had wondered why Rev and The Artifact are such odd ducks… now you know.