This past week, Mysterious Galaxy bookstore hosted the launch of my new novel, The Burning Ground. At a time when so many bookstores, independents and chains alike, are closing their doors, this specialty shop (science fiction, fantasy, horror, mysteries, thrillers), an icon in San Diego for nearly two decades, added a second store in Redondo Beach, near Los Angeles, last year. I guess they’re doing something right.

MG also hosted the launch for Fire Dance, my last novel, a year ago almost to the day. As that event unfolded, it occurred to me that MG had me in to do a book signing for my previous novel, The 22^nd Gear, a satirical science fiction novel and the third in a series. I had to think about that one for a minute. How come?

Because that event happened in 1994.

You’re right, that was a long, long time ago. Mysterious Galaxy was in its fledgling period, while I had come to the end of the publishing line—or so I thought—with the release of my nineteenth novel. So it’s nice to know that, in 2012, both of us are still going strong, and we just picked up where we left off. I’m looking forward to many book launches to come.

I gave a talk at last year’s book launch, one that I repeated shortly afterward as keynote speaker at the Southern California Writers’ Conference. In explaining why I stopped writing at that time, I included a variation on a song that you likely know well: Don McLean’s American Pie. I thought you might like to “hear” it. (I recited it for my audiences; my singing voice would make you lose your lunch.)

A long, long time ago,

I can still remember when

the book signings used to make me smile.

And I knew if I had the chance,

that I could make the readers (fire) dance,

and maybe they’d be happy for a while.

But the publishing business made me shiver,

with every rejection they’d deliver.

Bad news on the doorstep,

I couldn’t take one more step.

I can’t remember if I cried,

but I really took a hit to my pride,

and something hurt me deep inside,

the day my writing died.

So long live writers, long live writing, and long live real bookstores. I don’t know how long they’ll be around, but for now, I’m glad they are.

And ditto for libraries. In The Burning Ground, town librarian Dana Bowen is walking down the main street of Lodestar, California and makes an interesting observation about ten-year-old Billy Grider. Here is the scene:

Ahead, Dana saw the Griders in front of Weston’s, loading groceries into the bed of an old, beat-up Ford F-150. Billy Grider loved to read, a fact that had become evident to Dana when the boy started showing up in the library a couple of times a week soon after she’d arrived in Lodestar. Although she’d seldom spoken to him it gratified her to know that, in a world of video games and so many other high-tech electronic distractions, someone his age still held a fascination with the written word.

UPDATE: If you haven’t had a chance to look at the website, Swords and Specters, check it out. I’ll be adding to it often. Right now I’m re-editing one of my early sword & sorcery novels, which I’ll be releasing soon as The Sons of Ornon. Zebra/Kensington published it a long time ago as The Twentieth Son of Ornon. I liked the story enough to dedicate it to my favorite writer, Edgar Rice Burroughs. (For this version, the dedication will be to my three granddaughters. They’ll like that.) I’ll tell you more about it in upcoming posts.

This Tuesday, February 14^th—Valentine’s Day—is the publication date for my new ghost story/horror novel, The Burning Ground, from ZOVA Books. Is that odd? I don’t think so. While there are enough juicy, gory, creepy scenes to satisfy the horror purist, the story is also about relationships—in particular the relationship between three diverse characters: a former major league ballplayer, a woman with a tortured past, and a lonely ten-year-old boy. More about them shortly.

Romance in ghost stories is nothing new. I mean, who wasn’t moved—often to tears—by scenes in Ghost, one of the most popular movies of the nineties? Patrick Swayze, Demi Moore—Unchained Melody? Oh, man…yeah, you’re right, my softer side is showing. But honestly, that was an awesome film.

Or more recently, how about the immensely popular Twilight series, both books and film? Without the romantic element we would have yet another vampire/werewolf story—and how many of those have been done since the dawn of time?

I wrote my first horror novel, The Well, during my gore-splattering Sword & Sorcery/Sword & Planet period, and it shows. No romance in this one as a family struggles to prevent the emergence of a demon from an old well on their property. Still, it’s a pretty good story, and Bantam Books thought enough of it to publish The Well in the early nineties. I have since reissued it as The Modoc Well.

Demon Shadows, my second horror novel, was my initial attempt at a romantic element. The protagonists, Gail Farringer and Paul Fleming, meet at an artists’ and writers’ colony in the high Sierras, where the descendants of a Donner-like party continue to repay an ancient debt—in blood, of course. Paul’s “baggage” is minimal: he’s a bestselling novelist dealing with writer’s block following a difficult divorce. Gail, on the other hand, is seriously messed up. I loved the challenge of bringing these two together. The formula must’ve worked, because Bantam Books sold about 30,000 copies of it before they stopped sending me royalty statements. I also reissued Demon Shadows a couple of months ago.

In my 2011 ghost story, Fire Dance (ZOVA Books), Mark Alderson is a Richard Kimble-like fugitive tending bar in a small desert town, and Tracy Russell is a single mom whose ex-husband abandoned her and her young son after gambling away everything they owned. Here were two people with serious issues of trust. Bringing them together amid the backdrop of wandering spirits trapped there since the nineteenth century—one of them quite evil—was another challenge. A great deal of positive feedback—much of it from female readers—tells me that I must have pulled it off.

So when I wrote The Burning Ground last year I decided, with regard to a romantic element, to raise the bar, both in the number of characters and the degree of “baggage” that they brought to the table. Barry Cordell had been a star pitcher for the San Francisco Giants before being struck in the face by a line drive. His physical injuries healed, but the fear of standing on the mound forced him from the game. Now an embittered man, he has come to the small Sierra Nevada town of Lodestar for the solitude of hiking and camping in the surrounding foothills.

Dana Bowen is Lodestar’s librarian. A decade earlier, while in college, Dana was gang-raped by three men, who left her for dead. Now distant from everyone, including her family, she merely exists.

Billy Grider’s mother left Lodestar shortly after giving birth to him. He has been raised by an old, spinsterish great-aunt, and to a lesser degree by his father, Ray Grider, one of the town’s most distasteful lowlifes. Ray is a “thief of time,” a grave robber who desecrates Indian burial grounds to dig up artifacts for wealthy collectors. With a family such as this, and hardly any other kids in the small town, Billy’s life is one of loneliness.

So, did I pull it off, or what? I’ll let my readers be the judges of that. One thing I’ll say is that this story seemed to write itself, and I had a ball going along for the ride. Whether blood and gore or a romantic “people story” is your game, you’ll find that The Burning Ground has something for everyone. Happy Valentine’s Day.

Q: How did you get the idea for The Burning Ground?

 A: One of the most used and abused books in my collection is A.L. Kroeber’s Handbook of the Indians of California. (“Handbook” is a misnomer; you can barely hold this thick tome in one hand.) I used it to research the Washo tribe in my novel, Demon Shadows, and the Modoc tribe in The Well (now The Modoc Well). When I read about the burial customs of the Maidu people—they actually called their cemetery a burning ground and set fire to brush spread across the graves to help the dead pass on to the next world—and then learned that most of the Maidu had been slaughtered during the Gold Rush, the old “what if” kicked in. What if, because of the violent way in which they died, the spirits of those from one particular small village remained trapped in their burning ground? Then, in more contemporary research, I read about the (still ongoing) desecration of Indian burial grounds by people digging for artifacts. What if the graves of the Maidu from this village were desecrated, releasing the spirits—who are really pissed off by this time? And so the plot evolved.

Q: What research was involved in fashioning the life and culture of the Maidu?

A: Just about any and every book about California Indians that I could get my hands on (not too many), though again, Kroeber was the primary resource. A cultural anthropologist, Kroeber spent seventeen years among California’s indigenous population in the early twentieth century. The scope of his research is remarkable. (His daughter was Ursula Kroeber, better known to readers of science fiction as Ursula LeGuin.) Three lengthy chapters are devoted to just the small Maidu tribe. TMI for most people, but I loved doing the research.

Q: How do you feel your work as an editor helped or hindered your writing?

A: Well, I would think that you, as my editor, probably appreciate the fact that my manuscripts require minimal work, as evidenced by the handful of changes that we made in both Fire Dance and The Burning Ground. As a perfectionist, I probably go overboard in being anal. As an editor, I don’t want any typos or other errors. As a writer I want every detail to be correct. This doesn’t always work out 100% of the time, but I do my best.

Q: What writing habits do you keep?

A: I take a long walk in the morning and then start writing about mid-morning. Late in the afternoon, four, maybe five o’clock, the “creativity” button in the brain shuts off, and I stop. The usual output is 1,500 to 2,000 words. That’s the day-to-day routine. The bigger picture: I prepare an outline and do extensive preliminary research before I write word one. Then I write the first draft, beginning to end, not stopping at all for research. The second draft consists of grunt work—trimming the fat, filling in the many blanks I leave while focusing on getting the story down, that sort of thing. The third—and final—draft is my favorite, for it always follows a trip to the locale of the story. For The Burning Ground I traveled to the active ghost town of Downieville, population 325, in the Sierra Nevada foothills. This “living research” breathes life into my stories.

Q: Have you ever considered writing a sequel to any of your horror novels?

A: I suppose a sequel can be made to anything. Cripes, in Star Trek III they brought Spock back to life after Trekkies revolted! But mine have so far been stand-alone stories. I mean, how many people get the calling to help spirits move on to the next world (Fire Dance and The Burning Ground), or drive demons back into the hell that spawned them (Demon Shadows and The Modoc Well) more than once?

Q: In what way do you feel this book stands apart from the rest of your catalog of work?

A: When I dug farther back into the decimation of California’s indigenous population I became appalled at the extent of this genocide, beginning with the arrival of the Spanish missionaries and encompassing the decade or more after the Gold Rush. While my other two Native American-themed novels, Demon Shadows and The Modoc Well, have a comment or two about the treatment of Indians, none come close to The Burning Ground. This includes an Author’s Note and a significant plot adjustment with regard to the Maidu spirits—though sharing that here would be revealing too much.

Q: Are there any writers or books that were influential in this particular novel…or in your career in general?

A: Not this particular story. But for my career? That answer is always the same: Edgar Rice Burroughs. Tarzan, John Carter of Mars, Pellucidar—all of his 100+ books were among my favorites. Without ERB I would have never become a writer.

Q: Looking back at the books you’ve written over the years, how has your work developed with time and experience?

A: I re-read many of my early works over the past year or so in preparation for making them available again under my own imprint, Atoris Press, via my second website, Swords and Specters. Most of them made me want to hurl. Each one will require extensive revisions before I would ever let anyone see them. As a teacher, editor, and writing coach these past couple of decades I also learned a great deal. With every book—with every page—that you write, you should be improving your craft.

of SR 49 in California’s Sierra Nevada foothills read, “Entering Downieville.” On the other side of the same sign it said, “Leaving Downieville, Thanks for Coming.”

Okay, I’m totally kidding here. No town is that small. But Downieville is…well, pretty small. I went up there last summer for final research on my novel, The Burning Ground, which will be published on Valentine’s Day this year. (A ghost story on Valentine’s Day; go figure.) After mile upon twisting mile of nothing but trees, rocks, and tributaries, I suddenly found myself in the heart of “downtown” Downieville. Before I even had a chance to slow down and look for my inn I had crossed a one-lane truss bridge and was back amid nature, on my way up to the next town. Whoops, back I went. Not easy making a u-turn on a mountain road.

I had come across Downieville, noted on various websites and in guide books as a “semi-ghost” town (population 325, give or take), during my preliminary research for The Burning Ground. Seems I needed a model for my fictional town of Lodestar, where most of the story takes place. The location I envisioned, on or near either the middle or north fork of the Yuba River, made Downieville a candidate. But there were others: Nevada City, Grass Valley, Sierra City, just to name a few.

So why did I keep coming back to Downieville? Maybe it was the “semi-ghost” part, for obvious reasons. Or maybe the fact that the town was founded in 1849, the year in which my opening chapter takes place. In a nod to my morbid side, perhaps it had to do with Downieville being the only town in California to have ever hung a woman. (I even saw the gallows there, or a reasonable facsimile.)

Whatever the case, here I was, for the better part of four days, in the venerable town of Downieville, surrounded by the majesty of California’s Sierra Nevada mountains. What I absorbed there—what I saw, heard, smelled, touched—brought the setting of the fictional Lodestar to life in my subsequent third and final draft of The Burning Ground.

And as a topper, something really weird happened on my second day there…

First things first, though. I saw buildings that had gone up with the founding of the town. I sat on the bank of the swiftly flowing Yuba River’s north fork, where miners had once dug up gold nuggets the size of softballs. Climbing up a steep hill (this became routine), I visited the “Masonic Graveyard, Circa 1860.” I stopped at the offices of the Mountain Messenger, “California’s Oldest Newspaper,” and talked to the editor, Don Russell. (Same name as one of the characters in my last novel, Fire Dance—moderately weird.) The “Mayor” of Downieville, an elderly gent named Dave Farmer, invited me to lunch and was a fount of information, as was Dave Marshall at the Sierra County Museum. (I thanked him by purchasing one of the museum’s tee-shirts; never met a tee-shirt I didn’t like.) The list goes on.

But you want to know about really weird, right? Okay, but in order for it to make sense, here is some backstory. You already know that The Burning Ground is about ghosts, and gold mining. The contemporary story takes place over a period of nine days encompassing Labor Day weekend 2012, with Lodestar hosting an annual event called Gold Rush Days, which brings hordes of tourists in to bolster the town’s economy. Many locals hang out at the Forty Rod Saloon (“forty rod” was cheap, nasty rotgut whiskey sold during the Gold Rush), where the owner sells souvenir bottles of forty rod, “Just like the miners used to drink,” to the tourists. Bottles of it line shelves behind the bar, in front of an ornate mirror. The building itself is an old western-style saloon, swinging doors and everything. The saloon is where one of the story’s most intense scenes takes place.

Okay, so I’m wandering up (or possibly down) another hill a couple blocks from downtown when I spot an old, western-style saloon—in miniature. Yep, swinging doors and everything. The Forty Rod Saloon, just as I’d envisioned it. I want to take a photo, but I see a woman inside, and out of courtesy I walk into the small place—there’s an ornate mirror behind the bar and shelves with whiskey bottles lined up—and ask her if that would be all right. Cherry Simi, the proprietor of the mini-saloon (it’s not a working bar, she tells me, just a place for town meetings and other social gatherings), is fine with that but wonders about my interest. So I tell her who I am and what I’m doing, and also a bit about my book. She thinks this is pretty cool. Then she tells me about an old mining tunnel that runs from the back of the saloon up to her house. With much enthusiasm she asks me, “Wanna see it?”

After a brief bout with the willies and a silent plea for Masters Yoda and Obi Wan to protect my butt, I follow her in. The wide tunnel is neat, even more so when I see what Cherry has lined the walls with: ghosts and skeletons! Yeah, I could hardly believe it either.

But it doesn’t end there. We go back inside the mini-saloon, and Cherry mentions that it’s pretty quiet in town during mid-summer, as I probably noticed. She suggests I come back up when things get busier, over Labor Day weekend the following month. “Uh, Labor Day?” I mumble. “What happens then?”

The town hosts a festival, she tells me. It’s called—Gold Rush Days.

No, I’m not making this up. And if you’re thinking that I probably saw it in my preliminary research and just forgot about it, wrong-o. Upon returning home I went through everything I’d read or downloaded, thinking the same thing, but the only event of significance mentioned was Downieville’s annual mountain bike race earlier in the summer.

This isn’t the first time something like that happened to me while researching my books. Maybe I’ll write about other really weird experiences another time. Just remember, when you engage in “living research,” as I call it, just open up your mind and be prepared for anything.

And when you’re in Lodestar, California while reading The Burning Ground, remember its prototype—the historic, semi-ghost town of Downieville.

From the late ’70s through the mid-’90s I had published nineteen novels. Horror, Sword & Sorcery, Sword & Planet, even a Tom Swift young adult story (Tom Swift and His Electric Grandmother Meet RoboDog, or something like that). My publishers were not chopped liver: Bantam Books, The Berkley Publishing Group (Penguin-Putnam), Pocket Books, Kensington. But alas, the meter ran out, and I had no more quarters, and a real job became a necessity. (Okay, no more metaphors, I promise.) So I joined the staff of a small newspaper, and in addition, instead of being a writer I worked with writers as an instructor, coach and editor. A good path to follow, especially when many of my writers became published—and it paid the bills, too.

My initial “second chance,” a big one, happened late in 2009, when I nearly bought the farm (oh damn, another metaphor) from blocked arteries. Recovering from quadruple bypass surgery in 2010 with a second chance at life, I got to thinking, why not write again? Yeah, I thought a lot about writing but didn’t do much about it.

Then, a small start-up publisher in southern California, ZOVA Books, asked if I had any previously unpublished manuscripts that they could turn into a published novel. Well, heck yes! Fire Dance had been “commissioned” by Bantam many years ago, but they backed out of the deal just as I was finishing the story. Another chance at publishing! ZOVA published Fire Dance, a desert-themed ghost story, last year. The story received much critical acclaim and led to a second chance with the publisher, this time a Native American-themed ghost story titled The Burning Ground, due out in February. (Think: raising the dead.) You’ll hear a lot more about that one in subsequent blogs.

Okay, I’ll admit, this next “second chance” is not as significant as surviving quadruple bypass surgery, but for a writer who has written about thirty novels, published and unpublished, it’s pretty cool. It is all about righting old wrongs. Let me explain.

Mega-bestselling author Dean Koontz is a contemporary of mine—so close in age that we both qualified for Medicare at about the same time not too long ago. I think he began writing a bit before me, and some of his early stuff, like mine, was Sword & Planet and other fantasy, under a variety of pen names. At a book signing well into the successful part of his career, a fan asked him to autograph one of those early books. Dean wrote (possibly paraphrased by me), “A collector’s item—save, but for heaven’s sake, don’t read!”

So what did he mean by that? Simple. Whether an author has been writing for four years or four decades, the earlier writing should make him or her cringe. We are—or should be—improving our craft with every story we write. In Dean’s opinion, his early work sucked.

So did mine.

Over the past year or so I have re-read most of my first thirteen published novels. If I had to grade them, here’s what the report card would look like. Storyline: C- to B+. (One was so bad that it brought the average down; this is on me. For the most part I liked the stories, none of which I remembered too well.) Writing/presentation: D- (this is also on me). Editing: C- for one publisher, F for the other (that’s on them). Bottom line: these books were nothing to be proud of (he said, by way of understatement).

That’s where the second chance comes in: I get to rewrite them! (Once again I’m “raising the dead.”) Last year I launched my own imprint, Atoris Press (see if you can figure that name out), and a new website, Swords and Specters (www.swordsandspecters.com), for all of my books. The “specters” part was easy: in addition to my two ZOVA titles, I cleaned up and made available in e-book and paperback formats my Bantam horror novels from the early ’90s, Demon Shadows and The Modoc Well. They required minimal revisions, having been written at a more advanced stage of my career. Check them out—there are links on the Swords and Specters website.

The “swords” titles—well, not so easy. Each one will have to be stripped down and put back together again. But it’s going to happen over the next couple of years, so watch for news of each release in this blog, or on Swords and Specters. The Sword & Planet genre seems to be coming into the mainstream. Think Avatar, and also think John Carter, a forthcoming movie based on the Barsoom (Mars) series by my personal writing hero, Edgar Rice Burroughs. I have two series (nine books) that fit the exact bill.

Did you figure out Atoris Press yet? “Atoris” is my last name spelled backwards. Funny story on that: in my 1991 satirical SF novel, Bicycling Through Space and Time, I created a nasty character named Atoris the Evil. My brother Alan, who has since passed away, called to tell me that he enjoyed the book. I asked him what he thought about Atoris the Evil; he had no clue that it was our name.

So, welcome to my blog, welcome to my world, and I hope you enjoy everything you find on Swords and Specters, both now and in the future. Let me know your thoughts.