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INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR
1. What initially got you interested in writing?
When I was a child, I enjoyed telling stories to my friends, including relating horror movie summaries to them. I also wrote stories, my own horror magazines, and even made my own comic book. It was written and drawn with ballpoint pin on stapled notebook paper. For my horror magazines, I cut up professional monster magazines for photos. Then I sold this one issue I’d made. No copies. I don’t think Xeroxes existed back then – we’re talking the late 1960s-early 1970s. My comic book was inspired by an older kid I looked up to: Rick Gibson. He had made his own comic book, so I had to do my own as well. My superhero was “the Masked Marble.” Get it? I promised a follow-up issue featuring “Bug Versus the Man of Blood.” Realizing that I could never write a story that could possibly live up to that plot description, I never made good on the promised comic, much to the disappointment of my readership, I’m sure. I did grow up to write real comics for Image (Heaven’s War and Lorna, Relic Wrangler).
2. How did you decide to make the move into becoming a published author?
I was excited by the short story magazine market that was alive and well in the not-yet-electronic media world that was the 1980s. I would have sold my first story to the venerable Weird Tales but they had already bought a long story that centered on a vampire, as did mine. They weren’t keen on following up with a similarly themed story so soon, so I was out of luck.
3.What do you want readers to take away from reading your works?
Among other things, I want them to have taken a trip to the world I’m presenting and met some characters whom they have come to care about, whose adventures they’ll reflect on afterwards. I’d like it to be just as though they’d made some friends they had to leave behind when their vacation was finished.
4.What do you find most rewarding about writing?
Getting an idea and developing it into a full story. The more off beat the idea, the better. I also like developing characters, coming to understand them psychologically, and hopefully creating some who are memorable. I also enjoy revision and making the prose more clear and vivid.
5. What do you find most challenging about writing?
Revision and making the prose more clear and vivid.
6. What advice would you give to people wanting to enter the field?
Don’t get in a hurry.
7. Is there anything else besides writing you think people would find interesting
about you?
about you?
I teach composition, literature, and film, and I am also a minor film historian. My area, though, is definitely at the fringe of Hollywood. Maybe I’m interviewing the director of what could have been a ground breaking film that was never completed. Or researching the life of a mentally challenged sideshow performer who was living in poverty at the same time he was being featured in one of the “Head Movies” popular with the ‘60’s drug culture. I have a historical novel that I’ve written based on him.
8. What are the best ways to connect with you, or find out more about your work?
Look me up on Facebook. I’m the Micah Harris with the wanted poster of “Killer Bob” from Twin Peaks as his icon. Most of my books can be found in print and/or in digital copies on Amazon. Here are links to some of them: