My Writing History and Permuted Press part 1

Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6

    Today, I dissolved my contract with Permuted Press. This was a hard decision because I had a contract for ten books with them. Seven books for Cthulhu Armageddon and three books for the Esoterrorism series. These books are still coming out, thankfully, but they won't be with Permuted Press anymore.

    I have a great deal of gratitude to Permuted Press for taking a chance on a first time novelist but our situation wasn't satisfactory to either party anymore. I could leave it there but this is a very big decision on my part and the purpose of blogs is, at least last time I checked, for unprofessional types like myself to ramble.

    Some background for those who are unfamiliar with Permuted Press save through my extensive reviews on their books. Permuted Press is a independent horror publisher founded by Jacob Kier a number of years ago in order to publish some zombie fiction which couldn't get published anywhere else.

    This was before The Walking Dead took off and zombie fiction was popular. It was a labor of love for Jacob and he soon found himself publishing other books which caught his fancy. Eventually, he published the first editions of John Dies At The End and Ex-Heroes.

    Enter me and my writing.

    In 2010, I was just beginning my writing career or perhaps I should say re-beginning. To say I'm a first-time writer is both true and misleading. I have been an author since I was six years old and actually had been involved in writing novels since I was twenty. The problem was my first publisher was, well, smoke and mirrors.

    It wasn't a scam, per se, but they misled me a great deal in their enthusiasm to appear better than they were. I got arrogant, myself, and tried to bring on some friends and the whole thing turned out so poorly that I didn't write anything for another four years.

    The writing bug, however, would not die. I had a new manuscript, eventually, which led me to go attend an author's conference in West Virginia. There, a Literary Agent talked about how to get into publishing. She explained to me that I needed to do two things if I wanted to make in the publishing industry:

    1. Get thee to a writing group.
    2. Try Permuted Press.

     Heading to Permuted Press' website, I found them open to submissions for a lot of things I liked. They loved Cthulhu, zombies, post-apocalyptic fiction, and more. Sadly, I wasn't quite ready to publish with them yet. You see, I'd written a lot of books but none of them were really GOOD per se. I also signed up for two writing groups. One of which was Permuted Press' "Pendulum" group that was for authors looking to get published with the host of their forum.

    What happened next would change my world.

     Putting aside my old manuscripts, I decided to write a book exclusively for Permuted Press. I wasn't a big fan of writing zombies, even if I loved reading about them, so I went the Cthulhu route. Thus, were the seeds of Cthulhu Armageddon born. I would spend six months writing it and incorporating tips from my writing group.

     I'd also resign from the other writing group as I found they were less interested in pointing out my mistakes than congratulating each other on every sentence. I would also branch out and write a "funny" novel in The Rules of Supervillainy and later the first volume of my Red Room series, Esoterrorism.

    You may wonder why none of these books are out yet because this was all in 2010 and I had four years to get all of this in place. Well, the answer is that I was interested in making the best book possible versus doing something that was adequate. Jacob Kier had only a small window every year for accepting new publications and by the time I was ready with my first book, I decided I could do better. There's an old saying that your first million words are always going to be crap. Well, I thought that.

    And I was wrong, but we'll get to that.
   
    It was 2013, almost three years later, when I finally had improved my novels and writing skill to the point I wouldn't be embarrassed to see myself in print. Other stuff had happened during the meantime like getting married, graduating with my Masters degree, and publishing my Tabletop RPG Halt Evil Doer!.

    I was determined that Esoterrorism (Red Room 1#) would be my first REAL book. Which was a stupid thing to think because there's no such milestone. Every author views their last book as horrible by and large while thinking their NEXT book will be perfect. I would learn this lesson the hard way. Anyway, I was ready to get Esoterrorism published with Permuted Press.

    Which is when the company was sold and the forums where I'd learn to hone my craft all this time were about to be shut down.

    Oh boy.

   Continued in part 2.