Meet Alan Draven, Author of Bitternest.
Bitternest. A Louisiana city of sunken dreams and drunken ambitions. A
hidden gateway to hell infused with dark myths and a sinister history
where evil lurks in every fog-shrouded corner. A pandemic of avian influenza is slowly crippling the world. Oddly, only this city appears to be resisting, but at what cost?
Following
a grim discovery, Detective Terry Graves is taken to a secret
underground crypt, and thrown into the dark realm of vampires. There he
learns that their numbers are dwindling; their only salvation lies in
creating an alliance. Together, they must face a new breed of creatures
waging war to both man and vampires while a drug lord with a hidden
agenda plans the city’s downfall.
Nothing is what it seems.
Terry finds himself drowning in a web of deception. Upon seeking
answers, he realizes that something much worse is looming in the city,
for an ancient evil has been unleashed—and cannot be stopped.
Alan Draven lives in Montreal, Quebec with his wife. Bitternest was his first novel.
Bitternest has been out for awhile now. How are you feeling about it?
Bitternest has done beyond my expectations in terms of reviews, and
the acceptance from readers has been tremendous. I’ve developed a loyal fan
base with this book and I am extremely thankful for it. It has been a long and
hard journey. The first couple of months were brutal and I didn’t see many
sales. Then as reviews kept appearing and the more I promoted the book, things
started to pick up. The pricing of the book has always been an issue—at $19.95,
it’s been a major hurdle in my promotional efforts. I’ve had countless readers
tell me they can’t afford to pay that much for a book and I completely understand,
especially when it’s a first time author you’ve never heard of. Unfortunately,
I have no control over pricing and even fought to get my publisher to lower the
retail price. This is why I wanted to make sure that Sinister Landscapes would be affordable for everyone. I think my
future books will really help boost the sales of Bitternest as new readers will discover me and seek my first novel.
Do you find it hard to promote Bitternest while working on so many other projects?
Tell us about Sinister Landscapes, your up and coming anthology. What inspired you to undertake such a big project?
I’ve wanted to put together an
anthology for as long as I’ve been writing. I had to make sure I knew my craft
well enough before I undertook the task of editing other writers’s stories.
This spring I was in a good place. I had short stories appearing left and right
online and in print, I’d developed good relationships with many writers with
whom I wanted to work with, I was in command of my craft, and I had a great
idea for a theme for an anthology. So I went ahead and came up with some
guidelines and posted them for the world to see.
I chose a gothic theme because we
rarely see gothic anthologies nowadays on the shelves in bookstores. I miss
them dearly and my love of the horror genre comes directly from gothic horror.
Robert Louis Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde
is one of my favorite books of all time and M.R. James’s ghost stories are
still unmatched when it comes to a good ghost story, in my opinion. Movies also
played a big part in this; I have many fond memories of watching the old Hammer
horror films with Chris Lee and Peter Cushing and all those Poe adaptations
that Roger Corman directed starring Vincent Price. I wanted to recapture some
of that magic and these memories in this book and I think we’ve succeeded in
creating a diverse anthology with echoes of the old gothic ghost stories and
we’ve put a spin on them for the readers who like their horror to be more
up-to-date.
As far as ongoing promotion is
concerned, I seldom promote Bitternest
these days. It’s been out for a year and three months. After a year, I decided
to move on and focus on my current writings and editing Sinister Landscapes. I still have some ads scheduled to appear in
magazines before the end of the summer and word of mouth has been generating
some good sales. I’ll also be bringing a bunch of copies of Bitternest with me to signings this fall
while I promote Sinister Landscapes.
This will be new for me; I’ve never done signings before. This will be my first
time going out there with the book and shaking hands with readers. I’m excited
and scared at the same time. I’m more of a recluse when it comes to my craft
and getting myself out there on the Internet is no problem for me. But doing
signings and readings in front of a crowd is another story. It took all this
time for me to feel confident and comfortable enough to do this. Also, since I
couldn’t give the proper discount to bookstores in order for them to carry Bitternest (another serious obstacle),
it wasn’t easy to get in there. Sinister
Landscapes will open new markets and will be much more accessible to both
readers and retailers.
After editing such a large body of work, do you find you have a taste for editing/publishing, or do you prefer the writing aspect of the craft?
I’ve really developed a taste for
editing and I love the publishing process (even though the formatting part gave
me many headaches). When you put a book together from A to Z, from cover to
cover, when the end result exceeds your expectations (something that rarely
happens in my case), you can’t help but be proud of what you’ve accomplished.
I
had a great time going through the submissions and commenting and doing
revisions with the authors. Coming up with the cover was a challenge and I’m
thrilled with the finished product; this is a book that I think we can all be
proud of.
My writing has taken a backseat
these past months and I will play catch up for the rest of the summer until the
release of Sinister Landscapes. I
wrote half a dozen short stories while I was editing and am now a little over
halfway through my second novella. I’ll be starting my third novel (I’m
currently seeking a publisher for my second novel) sometime in August, so I’m
looking forward to that. I miss working on longer works which is where I feel
more in my element. I’m a novelist first and foremost, but editing and
publishing is a close second after this wonderful experience. I’ll have
guidelines up again April 1st
2009 for next year’s anthology.
Tell us about your new publishing company. How did this come about and what are your plans with it?
I wanted Sinister Landscapes to have the widest distribution possible and
thus was born Pixie Dust Press. Many anthologies are released these days
through Lulu and most of the time, they’re only available through Lulu. While
there’s nothing wrong with that, I wanted to be a bit more daring and put out a
book that would be available everywhere online and try to get it in brick and
mortar stores as well. I would do a small book tour with everything that it
entails: signings, readings, interviews, and a massive viral campaign which is
currently underway.
One of the goals of my small press and these anthologies is
to give us independent writers more exposure. A reader might buy the book for
two or three writers and discover a handful of writers they’ll like in the
process. They might wind up picking up a new author’s books and our collective
fan base will expand considerably that way.
This project is all about working
together; egos should be checked at the door, because we’re all equal in this
book. It isn’t my book, it’s our
book. This is what Pixie Dust Press stands for—independent writers united. I
just make sure that everyone comes together and that it all fits like a perfect
jigsaw puzzle. There’s also the combined force of eighteen or so writers to
promote the book which gives this project even more impact.
Themed short story anthologies
will become a staple of Pixie Dust Press. For the first anthology, the
contributors received a PDF of the book and a hefty discount if they wanted to
purchase copies. Next year I will find a way to pay them a monetary
compensation for their stories. I’m hoping to be able to increase the pay to a
professional rate eventually.
And starting in 2010, I want to release two books
a year; the short story anthology in the fall and a novella collection in the
spring. This would be an invitation-only collection where I would invite three
writers to each write a novella following a theme. This would be a
royalty-paying publication and an excellent opportunity for writers to showcase
their storytelling talents.
I want to make sure I have some strong foundations
before attempting anything bigger such as venturing into publishing novels and
releasing more than two books a year. I leave the door open to all kinds of
possibilities, but it’s also a question of time. My writing will always come
first and I will not publish a book if I don’t have the time to promote it
properly. It’s also very time-consuming to read submissions, edit stories, and
do the layout of a book. With a goal of writing two novels a year and releasing
two books a year through Pixie Dust Press, I think I have my work cut out for
me.
I'm curious about the short stories you've been writing. Give us the low down.
In January of this year, Amazon.com published my
story The Bypassed Mind as part of
their Amazon Shorts program. I often get asked if I only write horror; the
answer is no and this is the proof. This is a time travel story and it is more
of a romantic suspense. It’s the first story I wrote after I decided to take a
shot at writing for a living. It has now since become a personal favorite. It
can be purchased on Amazon.com as a PDF file for only $0.49 by clicking
In April, the popular anthology series Darkened
Horizons published my story The Errand
in their fourth volume It’s the story of a man goes through a forest to run an
errand and on his way back he will find his life changed forever. The book can
be purchased through Lulu by clicking
In June, my story Breaking and Entering appeared in the excellent NexGen Pulp
Magazine’s June/July issue. This is what I consider to be my finest short story
yet and it’s about a man who enters people’s homes just for the thrill of it
until one day he makes a shocking discovery. It can be purchased in hard copy
or electronic form by clicking
In July, the free e-zine SNM Horror Magazine
published my story Hershell’s Motel,
about a couple who spends the night at a strange motel in Bitternest. It can be
read until the end of August after which it will disappear.
Next, I have a story in the afore-mentioned Sinister Landscapes, titled Beyond the Doomed Cave. This is a coming
of age tale set in a churchyard. The gothic anthology will be available
wherever books are sold in September. For all the details, visit my publisher
page:
Out of the numerous short stories you've written, do you have any favorites?
The Bypassed Mind, which features Aldous Finch, a character from my
novel Bitternest, has a fond place in my heart. This is a story that I find has
aged well over the last two years. It also pays homage to Richard Matheson’s Bid Time Return (filmed as “Somewhere in
Time”). There’s also Breaking and
Entering, which I consider my best short story. As a writer, I constantly
evolve and I get better at my craft and oftentimes stories that I wrote early
on in my career tend to show their flaws over time. I’m particularly proud of
these two tales.
Are there any characters you've created that you love? hate? wish you'd never created?
I don’t think I hate any of the
characters I’ve created … yet! Timothy Crane who is hinted at in my first novel
takes center stage in my second novel, Fractured
Time, as a powerful antagonist and one of the most evil men that has ever
walked the earth. I think he’s more the type of character you love to hate than
one you would hate because of what he does. He hasn’t done anything morally
disgusting for the time being. My next novel, Alicia’s Last Stand, a revenge thriller, will have many characters
that both readers and I will hate. It is filled with some of the most repugnant
human beings I’ve ever encountered.
As far as characters that I love
go, Aldous Finch, an old eccentric Englishman well versed in all things
supernatural is a personal favorite. And to this day is the character my
readers seem to love the most. I have received many e-mails and messages from
fans who requested more of him. Terry Graves, the protagonist of my first novel
who has also made appearances in short stories, is another that I really like
and identify with. Ritchie Campbell, one of the supporting characters from my
second novel, is another one I dearly love.
Do you ever feel bad about killing your characters?
Oh yes; I killed plenty of them in
Bitternest and I tortured one in Fractured Time and it was hard at times
to write these scenes. Kind of like watching someone you know suffer or losing
an old friend. I always try to keep the twists coming and I never want readers
to think that just because a character is one of the main protagonists of the
book, they are safe from death’s grip. In my stories and books, anyone can die
in the blink of an eye.
What advice do you have for writers; both published and aspiring?
Read as much as you can. Know the
genre you write in well. Also read outside your genre. Write as often as you
can, even if it’s only 500 words every two days. The more you’ll do it, the
better you’ll get at it. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that you can’t make it
as a writer. There is no surefire way to get published or to achieve success,
but know that there are many ways to get there and in my opinion, none of them
are wrong. Get your work out there any way you can; the important thing is to
be read. Stay humble and always remember where you came from. Treat your
readers with respect because they spend their hard-earned cash on your work.
You owe it to them to write the best stories your mind can come up with.
Always.
Any parting thoughts?
As an independent writer, I’d like to invite all
book lovers and horror nuts to pick up a book from an independent author; it
will be greatly appreciated. You’ll see that we write stories that come from
the heart, and that we are passionate at what we do. A lot of the time, even
more so than authors from the big NY houses. Visit me anytime at
and if you have a MySpace page, send me an invite
at
