I Write Everything, Man

Or, all the stuff you didn't know about

As a writer, I’m known among different communities for different things. Comics fans know me (if they do at all) for the comics I’ve written and for my marketing and editorial work at different publishers. Series I’ve created include Desperadoes, Hazard, and Countdown, but I’ve also written licensed comics and publisher-owned comics by the dozens—close to 200 comics stories, in all.

Fans of tie-in fiction know me primarily through their various fandoms. Without naming everything I’ve written tie-ins for, the list includes Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, CSI (Vegas and Miami), NCIS (L.A. and New Orleans), Star Trek, Tarzan, Charmed, Zorro, Narcos, Superman, Spider-Man, 30 Days of Night, Conan…and many, many more.

Horror fans might know me for my original horror novels, which include The Slab, Missing White Girl, River Runs Red, Cold Black Hearts, Season of the Wolf, 7 Sykos (with Marsheila Rockwell), or my many horror short stories—and/or for some of the tie-in work mentioned above.

Western fans might be familiar with my Cody Cavanaugh books, or the Joaquin Murrieta book Blood and Gold, which I wrote with Murrieta’s descendant Peter Murrieta, or some of my Western short fiction—but also possibly through the comic series Desperadoes.

And so on. Different readerships that often don’t cross over into other books. Which can be a problem, because I don’t like being constrained by genre. I like to write what I’m feeling at the moment, which is how my next novel, the dark thriller Flesh of All Sorrows, came about. But around the time FoaS is published, there will also be an original Western novella about Billy the Kid, and an authorized sequel to a science fiction novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs. So, yeah, it can be confusing.

But that’s all background, because what I’m here to talk about today is the stuff that almost nobody knows. I’ve written for a living in many, many ways.

The first piece of writing that appeared in print for public consumption, with my name on it, was a letter to the editor. A newspaper aimed at US military/civilian personnel serving overseas—not the official Stars and Stripes; this was more of a tabloid that carried things S&S never would, like the R-rated comic strip Sally Forth, by the great Wally Wood—asked readers who the greatest rock band of all times was. This was in 1972 or ‘73, and I was in my senior year of high school, living in Worms, Germany. My answer was the Beach Boys, because they had sold the whole world on the paradise that was sunny California (and they’d sold me, because in September of that year I flew to California—which I’d never even visited—for college, and I stayed there for the next 31 years).

My next published piece bearing my name was in Bay Area Music (BAM), a newspaper-style music magazine focused on California rock, and my piece was an interview with former Monkee Michael Nesmith conducted on the streets of Carmel-by-the-Sea, where he lived. That came out while I was in college, as did a letter to the editor of the school newspaper that made me a hero to some but an enemy to others, including many of those who would otherwise have sided with me ideologically. I wrote in favor of freedom of speech regardless of viewpoint. Many thought that freedom should be viewpoint-restrictive, and the only allowable view was theirs. Another letter to the editor brought me an invitation to a radio station to read it on their air.

I wrote press releases and ad copy when I managed Hunter’s Books in La Jolla, CA. My first short story, “The Last Rainmaking Song,” was also published while working there, in the prestigious science fiction anthology Full Spectrum from Bantam Books.

That story led to my first gig in comics: writing 100 trading card backs for the WildC.A.T.S card set issued by Topps. In my various comics business jobs, I wrote hundreds or thousands of solicitations—the blurbs that went into distributors’ catalogs describing each individual issue before it goes on sale. I wrote copy for posters, for toy packaging. I wrote press releases and speeches and hundreds of print ads.

Jim Lee’s WildC.A.T.S

While working in comics, I wrote a column that ran in 23 of the 24 published issues of the comics magazine FAN. The column was called “Behind the Lines,” and discussed the inner workings of a comics publisher. And I started writing comics, as mentioned above. It was also during this period that my career as a novelist began.

In 2004, I left the comics business and California behind, and moved to a little ranch property in Southeastern Arizona to focus on being a full-time writer. I still wrote comics, and I sold original novels to major publishers like Simon & Schuster and Berkley/Jove (now part of Penguin Random House). But I also wrote things almost nobody knows about, like a CSI DVD game and a comic based on an MMORPG called Freaky Creatures, that never really broke out.

Pseudonymously, I wrote three childrens books. I’ve also ghostwritten some books, including one that earned a six-figure deal from a major Hollywood studio. I don’t get credit or a piece of that pie—them’s the breaks in the ghost business.

I continued writing letters to various editors; one published in Time Magazine resulted in a phone call from the great photographer Jay Dusard, and a long friendship resulted from that phone call. I wrote an interview with Charlaine (True Blood) Harris for Famous Monsters Magazine. I wrote an essay about Jeffrey Deaver’s great novel The Bone Collector for a book called Thrillers: 100 Must Reads; the book was an Edgar Award winner for nonfiction. I wrote a piece about tie-in writing for a book called Tied In, published by the International Association of Tie-in Writers. More recently, I wrote a short piece for the 2025 Stephen King Annual, about one of my early encounters with King.

Some of the projects mentioned are shown here

I still write, nearly every day. I have works out with publishers for consideration, I have works on the way, and I have works in progress. If you stick around you’ll hear about those as they happen. The writing game is frustrating sometimes—stuff doesn’t sell, even though the writer thinks it’s great. Stuff goes out into the world but hardly anybody reads it. If I quit writing, I’d have a lot more time to read and watch movies and listen to music, but I can’t seem to do it. Like my late friend Robert B. Parker, when I breathe my last, it’ll probably be while my fingers are at a keyboard.