Since I come from a background of magazine feature writing I have the writers’ knack of becoming obsessed with a topic –for a while. Aside from the martial arts books I’ve written, I’ve also written articles about dating, mixology, jazz, blues, film, gastropod farming (no, that’s not a typo), business, parenting, writing, technology, folklore and dozens of other topics. When I’m in research mode I want to know everything I can about a subject, and then I find that one element –the hook—that will give me something unique that I can pitch.
For books, I feel that I’ve kind of ‘been there, done that’ with martial arts. I’ve been an active jujutsu practitioner for 46 years now and I’ve written extensively about it. In 2002 I ‘moved on’ from that topic and became more fully enmeshed in folklore, which has always been a passion of mine. I suppose it’s the closest thing to an abiding ‘obsession’ with me. There’s so much to say on the subject, even within my area of specialty, which is the folklore of the occult and paranormal.
My first book on that subject was The Vampire Slayers’ Field Guide to the Undead, which is the only book I ever did under a pen name (that of Shane MacDougall, an alter ego I’ve since bumped off).
That book gave me a taste for the supernatural and after I landed my agent I gave her a proposal for a new book on vampire folklore, VAMPIRE UNIVERSE, which is a collection of folklore and myths about vampires and other monsters from around the world and throughout history. That was bought by Citadel Press and before I’d even finished writing it the deal got tweaked and expanded so that I was suddenly under contract to write three more books in the same, um…’vein’.
The second in that series, THE CRYPTOPEDIA (co-authored with David F. Kramer) just debuted on September 1 and we’ve been touring bookstores doing talks and panel discussions. That one is an occult/paranormal dictionary covering thirteen different subject areas (from divination to UFOs).
