Are you ready for an open discussion with the best of the best and the best of what's next. Welcome to the Tony DUrso show. Join in on a great conversation today with some of the world's great influencers as they showcase great advice and techniques that made them the game changers they are today. Now here's Tony DUrso.

Tony:

Welcome. I'm your host Tony DUrso. I interview some of the most successful people in the world and I thank you for joining us. This show is dedicated to helping you turn your vision into reality, and here's a successful entrepreneur who provides insights and guidance you can use to move along your vision path, and you can listen to all of my shows on most podcast platforms. If you have Apple podcasts, AKA iTunes, please subscribe. Now before we get going, here's a big thank you to some amazing sponsors of our show. Please stay tuned for an important message from LinkedIn® on how the right hire can make a huge impact on your business. Hey, I said huge. Do listen for that. Coming up is a significant message from REMrise® and take their sleep quiz to help you sleep really good. More on that shortly and a special note to help you find your message and build your tribe. I want to give you Russell Brunson's book for free through the mail. More info on them just ahead so please stay tuned. Today's shows with JG Faherty, multi award nominated horror author. Let's see what we can learn today. Here's some info on JG. His paranormal thriller, The Cure, was a finalist for the 2015 Bram Stoker Award® for Superior Achievement in a Novel, and his young adult paranormal romance The Ghosts of Coronado Bay was a finalist for the coveted Bram Stoker Award® for YA Horror in 2011. In addition, his supernatural thriller The Burning Time was a finalist for the ITW Thriller Award in 2013. Both The Burning Time and The Ghosts of Coronado Bay earned Readers’ Choice 5-Star awards. Now at the end of this interview, I'm going to do a summary recap of what we went over. So stay tuned for that. Here we go. Welcome to the show, JG. So great to have you on with us today.

JG:

It's great to be here. Thank you for having me.

Tony:

The honor is all mine. I am a writer nonfiction, and believe it or not, I am not a horror reader nor do I watch horror movies. I don't think I've ever watched a horror movie. It's not my interest. Now nonetheless JG, and I want to make it very clear, I marvel at your amazing success and it goes to show, especially to my dear audience of visionaries, you can do anything you like and be wildly successful if you follow your vision and stay on purpose, and we're going to jump into JG and follow his journey to success. So with no further ado, JG, can you tell us how did it all start for you? What's your backstory?

JG:

Well, you know, it's pretty interesting. I wanted to be a writer when I was young and by young, I'm talking 12, 11 years old and I dabbled a little bit. I did what kids do. I wrote comics and things like that, but I never really gave it a thought until college. I was a huge horror fan all my life. I grew up on the universal monsters and Edgar Allen Poe, Shelly, Stoker, all of these kinds of classics, and in college, I was reading Stephen King and the contemporaries at that time. I tried my hand at writing and I knew nothing about the business. You know what I mean? This was the early eighties. There was no internet so there was no business that I could really be aware of. I didn't know about editors. I didn't know about first drafts, second drafts, anything like that. So I wrote three chapters of what I thought was a great horror novel. And then when I read it back to myself, I said, wow, compared to Stephen King, I'm terrible. This isn't me. I can't do it. And I stopped and I never gave it another thought until probably about 2001, 2002 when I had a part time job writing test preparation guides for the Princeton Review. I was writing the English guides for the third grade, fourth grade and fifth grade. Part of that involves writing fantasy reading passages, and then you would write the questions for them and I really enjoyed it and it came naturally to me. So I tried my hand at a short story and I came really, really close to getting into an anthology. And the editor of the anthology emailed me and said, look, you didn't get in, but you've got a real talent for this. You should keep at it. So I did, and a year later I had my first short story published. I did short stories for several years. And then in 2010, my first novel was published.

Tony:

That is quite something. Let's kind of go back into this, that you have a vision of where you saw yourself going, because you've won or you've been a finalist in some of the most prestigious awards around. What was that vision? What brought about that success? You obviously weren't just winging it. You had some sort of a concept or an idea of where you were going to be.

JG:

Well, I would love to say that I started off with that kind of concept, but I really didn't because again, I knew nothing about the industry. I just jumped in blindly and I was lucky enough I lived near New York City, and there were at the time a few horror conventions for writers, not like Comicon, but these are just where writers get together, and there are panels discussions and things like that. And I got to meet some of the really big names in the business and sit down with them and they kind of took me under their wing and told me what publishing was involved, what editing involved, who to submit to if you're writing this type of book versus that type of book. And from listening to them, I kind of got an idea like, all right, this is how I want my career to go. I want my career to follow in their footsteps in terms of the steps that they took, and not necessarily writing the same type of books as them or anything like that, but just creating a block, stepping up on top of that block and then putting another block down and stepping up on that and climbing that ladder and just getting better. Each year my goal is to do something better than the previous year and so far, it's working. So I guess that's my career path is you could say, it's look forward and my end goal is just to always get better at what I'm doing. You know, you can't say my goal is to win this award or that award, or my goal is to sell X number of books, because if it doesn't happen, then all of a sudden you would start to feel like a failure because, Oh, I didn't achieve my goal. Well, my goal, isn't a specific number. It's just to be better this year than I was last year. Everything else after that falls in place.

Tony:

I can totally see how that helps you bring more and more stories and do better and better. I think that's a great vision. I interviewed once, I've interviewed someone who's very well known in the world as a writer and this person's purpose is simply just to entertain and nothing but entertain. I just thought that was so interesting because this person does it so well. He's some major New York Times bestseller. What's your purpose for this?

JG:

I would say that that is definitely one of my purposes. I do like to get my stories out there and into the hands of readers and provide them with some entertainment. Growing up, I loved to read. I loved it more than television. I loved it more than movies - I still do - and I want to bring that kind of experience to other people. I want them reading books. I want them to sit down and take whatever it is - two hours, six hours, three days. You know, some people read faster than others to just immerse themselves in my characters, in my stories. It's an escape from the real world and even though it's scaring them, perhaps it's also bringing them some joy, some happiness.

Tony:

JG, I mentioned earlier that I don't watch horror flicks, horror movies, read, but it came to me that I did see a movie called Ghost Rider years back with Nicholas Cage because I was into comics and I thought it would be interesting. I didn't know anything of what it was like, and I happen to notice that you have a book coming out, a novel called Hell Rider. Now the cover of that looks very similar and I know I'm kind of going off a little bit, but I wanted to correct myself and also ask, could you tell us a little bit about what's the difference between Ghost Rider and Hell Rider?

JG:

It's funny that you bring that up. When I wrote the book and pitched the concept to my editor at the publishing house, that was his first concern too was that, is this going to be just like Ghost Rider, because just based on the story, I was already developing the cover concept in my head that I wanted them to kind of use. That's a big worry, not only because you never want to step on infringement issues, but you also want to be original and Ghost Rider and Hell Rider, while they might sound the same and they both deal with a motorcycle rider, that's kind of where the similarities end. Hell Rider is about a motorcycle gang member who tries to go straight. And when he does that, the members of his gang murder him in a very violent way, and he's always had a bad temper and his temper is so great that it kind of allows him to come back from the dead as a ghost, and he makes it his mission to take revenge on all the people that killed him. In the process, he kind of goes a little insane so he's not the hero the way Ghost Rider is in the comics. He's not an avenging superhero. He's avenging, but he's a mad man and he's actually the antagonist of the story rather than the protagonist. The story follows two paths. One, you're watching this person who started off with great intentions slowly go mad, and it's sort of a take on the old ultimate power corrupts ultimately. He has these supernatural powers as a ghost. He can possess people. He can call down lightning, he can do a few other things, and as his power grows, his madness grows. And the only people in town that know that this is happening are his little brother and the brother's girlfriend, so you've got a love story forming at the same time that they're coming together to try and stop. He's got to basically find a way to destroy his own brother. So there's a lot of subplots there that worked through, and it was a lot of fun to write. It's very Grindhouse. If you think Quentin Tarantino with ghosts, you have a good idea of what the book is like.

Tony:

That's really something, JG. Where do you get your ideas from this? You've written so many books. That is very unique story. Where do these come from, these ideas?

JG:

You know, it's funny as a writer, you get that question a lot and it's easy to answer and it's hard to answer. The easy answer is they come from anywhere. I've had books come to me in dreams. I've had books and stories come to me because I'm listening to a certain song or I'm watching a TV show or a movie and I say, wow, if this happened, instead of that, the plot would go in a completely different direction, it would be a new story. That would be cool to write. I wrote a book for teenagers. It's called The Ghosts of Coronado Bay, and the idea for that came to me. I was watching a commercial for a show that's not on TV anymore that was called the Ghost Whisperer. It was about a woman who can see ghosts and she tries to help them move on by solving their problems, whatever problems they still have in this life. Nobody else can see the ghosts but her, and I thought, what if she could not only see the ghosts, but if she touched them, they became solid and everybody could see them and nobody even knew they were ghosts? So that became the basis for a whole YA novel. So, things could come.... I've written several short stories just listening to songs. You hear a song.... my novel, The Burning Time, I got the idea of listening to a song by John Fogerty called "The Old Man Down the Road", and the song is upbeat and fun, but the lyrics are kind of creepy. This old man coming into town in snakeskin boots. What's in his suitcase? And I got the idea that this guy is some kind of dark magician coming into the town to destroy the town. And a couple of years after it came out - a little side note - I got to meet John Fogerty at his book signing, and I gave him a copy of the book and I dedicated the book to him inside. I said, this is based on the song you wrote. Without you, I couldn't have written this book and he was really thrilled about it. We got to talk for a few minutes.

Tony:

That is so cool. He's been one of my favorite musicians growing up and that is really a cool story. I thank you so much for sharing that. This is the Tony DUrso Show where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Just ahead, the chat continues with JG Faherty, multi award nominated horror author but first it's time for us to take a short break. See you back here in just a moment.

Tony:

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Tony:

All right. We're back on the Tony DUrso Show where you can learn from the wisdom of success of others to help you move on your vision path. Let's see what we can learn today. Today's shows with JG Faherty, multi award nominated horror author. At the end of this interview, I'll give you a summary of what I got out of this, and I'll share some pointers with you. Stay tuned for that. JG's works range from quiet, dark suspense to over the top comic gruesomeness. A fan of horror and science fiction since he was able to change the channel on the TV, one of his earliest memories is seeing Planet of the Apes and Night of the Living Dead as a double feature at the drive in with his parents. Do you remember drive-ins? All right, and now back to the chat with JG.

Tony:

And what was his reaction by the way, not just to meet you, but to see a whole book dedicated to one of his creations, where that came out, that spawn from one of his creation?

JG:

I like to think that he was really excited about it. I mean, he seemed thrilled. He was like, oh my God, thank you so much. And you know, at a book signing, there was a long line and he's a big star. There were dozens and dozens of people waiting there and you were only supposed to hand the book, get the signature, pose for a picture and move on so you had like 20 seconds with him. Well, he stopped the whole signing and stood up and we talked for a few minutes off to the side about it. So I like to think that he was really excited. I hope he read it. I didn't give him a business card or my email or anything like that and he never looked me up online, but...

Tony:

He didn't exchange information? Cause I was going to say, I'd love to interview him and one of the questions would be about that moment as well.

JG:

Someday I hope to be able to talk to him about it. I do know a few people in the rock industry, but we don't have mutual friends where I could like get an email or a note or something to John and say, Hey, did you ever read that book? What did you think? For all I know, his manager took it and threw it somewhere and he never had a chance to read it, or maybe he loved it and he just doesn't use social media. Who knows?

Tony:

Or third idea here, maybe someday you'll hear a song about it.

JG:

That would be great.

Tony:

JG, this is really interesting. And again, I mean no slight when I say it, that horror is just not been one of my things. However, again, it's a huge industry and it keeps growing and growing and growing, and more and more movies. There are more and more books and films and so forth. Why do you think the genre is growing and has remained so popular?

JG:

I think there's two reasons. Number one - maybe even three reasons - number one, people like to be scared. Now the reasons people like to be scared are different, depending on the person. For some people, it's a release of tension or their own inner fears. You know, you're worried about the economy, your relative that has cancer, your job, whatever it might be. Well, you go and you watch a scary movie for a couple of hours; it allows you to release all those emotions without actually having to deal with the problems that they're based on. If you look throughout - I don't want to say history - but recent history, the 1940s till now let's say, whenever the economy or the political climate has been particularly troublesome, horror has experienced a big boom. So in the 1950s when everybody was worried about Communism and the atomic bomb, you had all those science fiction movies like Them with the giant ants that were created from atomic testing, movies about giant tarantulas, Godzilla, King Kong in the years before that, but they became popular again in the fifties. It was people dealing with their fears in a certain way. In the sixties and the seventies, horror kind of diminished. It wasn't really popular. You had a lot of mysteries. You had a lot of thrillers, but not horror movies with supernatural monsters. And then in the late '70s, all of a sudden, the world started changing again and what people were reading and what people were watching in the movies changed too. You had Rosemary's Baby, you had the Exorcist, you had Jaws, and then '79, boom! Stephen King hit the book racks and the next thing you know, horror was everywhere. And then in the late eighties and the nineties, when the economy was just going gangbusters and everybody had money and it was just a party every place, horror diminished. You had some silly comedies like bloodsucking freaks and weird things like that that was just geared towards teenagers, but you didn't have real deep thought type of horror coming out., and the book market for horror crashed. And it wasn't until about 2000 when it started picking up again, which again, coinciding with issues starting to happen with the economy and with politics.

Tony:

JG, very interesting on how horror has made this amazing comeback. But I want to call you out on the statement that I know you've made somewhere, and I would love you to explain it. You said that horror is the one genre that can encompass all the others. Can you please explain that?

JG:

Yes. I'm happy to because I'll actually be teaching about that next July at a writer's retreat. Horror is one of the basic genres that there are, because fear is one of the basic emotions. And if you think about it, you've got fear, comedy, humor, and romance, and every story is built around those in some way. So if you look at horror being entwined with everything else, like you mentioned earlier that you don't read horror, you don't watch horror. My wife says the same thing. My mother's not a big fan of horror in general. A lot of my friends say they don't like it, but in a way they all watch it and they all read it. Have you ever seen the movie Alien?

Tony:

Yes, you're right. That's horror. Of course. You know, I don't think of it. You know why? And it's my fault totally. It's a... what is it? It's a preconceived notion. I'm thinking of blood and knives and things like .... what was that movie back then? The movie at the motel, things like that.

JG:

Oh yeah. The Bates motel was one.

Tony:

Alfred Hitchcock. I'm thinking of that as horror, but when you say movies like Alien, that is actually also horror. So I actually stand corrected. Horror is more out there than we think. Maybe we just have different labels on it.

JG:

Sure. I mean, like I said, it entwines with everything. The object of horror is to make you fear or send a chill up your spine and it can be found in any genre. So Alien is a great example of horror and science fiction. So is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Everybody says Mary Shelley created the science fiction novel, but really what she created was the science fiction/horror novel because part of the object of Frankenstein is to scare you. Look at fantasy. A lot of Tolkien’s works, a lot of George R R Martin's works, they're fantasy. They've got elves and dragons and everything else, but they're also dark and scary in many places. You wouldn't want your five-year-old kid to watch Game of Thrones, cause there's murder, there's monsters, there's mayhem so there's horror there. If you want to go into like the thriller category, Michael Crichton with the Andromeda Strain. That's a science fiction thriller, but it's awesome meant to scare you. And he did the same thing when he wrote Jurassic Park. So it's in all of these different areas. You can find it in westerns. You can find it in romance. I mean, Gothic romance - castles and ghosts and chains rattling - that's horror.

Tony:

You are so right. If there's an element of scare or a fear that actually qualifies that work as a horror piece.

JG:

Sure. And that's why a lot of times, you'll see horror sub-categorized - science fiction horror. It's a horror thriller. It's a mystery horror. Paranormal romance is actually horror because it's got werewolves and vampires in it. You could categorize horror into really any genre and you can split it and split it and split it again. At what point does a murder mystery or a thriller become horror, or at what point isn't it? A long time ago, I was at a convention long time ago, like eight or nine years ago, not decades. Do you know? You've heard of Gillian Flynn who wrote Gone Girl?

Tony:

No, I'm sorry. I haven't.

JG:

Okay. It was a book that she wrote and it became a movie, a bestselling movie with Ben Affleck a few years ago, and it's basically a murder mystery. That's all it is, but it's scary. Some of the things that happen in the book is even scarier than the movie is. Jillian herself, here she was at a horror convention telling us I don't read horror and I don't write horror. I don't think of it that way. She goes, but my publisher says it's horror because it scares people. She goes, I can't watch those movies. I hate blood. I hate guts, but yet she's writing what gets categorized as horror. So there's so much blending of the genres. There's so much overlap, but horror is the one universal that could be found in any of them, because you can have horror without romance, but you can't have a Gothic romance without horror.

Tony:

JG, do you feel, or do you see the future in this? Do you see a lot more horror? Do you see it dominating the market? Are was just looking at .... when we go into our Barnes and Noble or our bookstore, are we just seeing the tip of the iceberg? Is there a flood coming after this?

JG:

I think the flood is already hitting. Right now, horror is huge and a lot of that has to do with eBooks and Amazon because they've paved the way for so many small publishers to get books out there for independent writers to self-publish. It used to be that if you weren't published from the big five publishing houses in New York, odds are you really probably weren't going to get published. There was a couple of smaller press companies around, but not many. Now there's a lot of them, and even more than that are the people doing the self-publishing. There are entire companies that only publish eBooks. They don't even bother with print. And what this is allowing people to do is there are some people that don't publish novels. They only publish short stories. Only a few anthologies of short stories come out a year, so what you can do is you can just publish your own short story on Amazon and just sell that one story.

Tony:

This is JG Faherty, multi award nominated horror author. You can find him at www.jgfaherty.com. I'm going to spell that. That's J-G-F-A-H-E-R-T-Y.com. www.jgfaherty.com

Tony:

This is the Tony DUrso Show where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Just ahead, the chat continues with JG Faherty, multi award nominated horror author but first it's time for us to take a short break. See you back here in just a moment. Some people have trouble falling asleep. Some have trouble staying asleep. Some people have trouble with both. On average, people are getting less quality sleep than ever before. I've always been a light sleeper as I think you get trained that way from waking up every morning nice and early when you're working a job. I always believed that I slept well and that I didn't need anything. In fact, I was originally hesitant to sponsor this product as I mentioned before. My wife reviewed all the ingredients and said they were top quality. So I said, okay, I'll do the test. More on that in a moment. Tackling sleep issues shouldn't feel impossible, but existing sleep aids aren't effective and make you groggy in the morning. That's why there's Remise. I love how deep my sleep is. I mean, deep. And when I arise, I really wake up easier and more refreshed. I am really surprised by this. It's something you really need to try to discover for yourself. No more stumbling in the morning for coffee. Remrise is a personalized sleep solution that uses natural plant-based formulas to help calm the mind, relax the body and get your circadian rhythm back on track for better, more restorative sleep. It's drug free with no groggy side effects in the morning. All you have to do is go to get Remrise.com/D-U-R-S-O and take their free sleep quiz. I took the quiz and the sleep profile said I was tired and recommended some supplements. I went ahead and I took the supplements and I discovered an amazing difference. My sleeps are so good. I just love it. Now, do what I did and check out Remrise today. Go to get REMrise.com/D-U-R-S-O. Take their sleep quiz and when you sign up, you'll get your first week of REMrise free. Just pay shipping. You won't find an offer like this anywhere else. Get your free week of REMrise for free when you sign up @ getremrise.com/D-U-R-S-O. Get REMrise.com/D-U-R-S-O. So, I'll spell that. G-E-T-R-E-M-R-I-SE.com/D-U-R-S-O. All right guys. Check it out, sign up and tell me how much you love it.

Tony:

All right. We're back on the Tony DUrso Show where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Let's see what we can learn today. Today's shows with JG Faherty, multi award nominated horror author. At the end of this interview, I'll give you a summary of what I got out of this, and I'll share some pointers with you. Stay tuned for that. And now back to the chat with J G.

JG:

You can sell a novella. There are publishers that specialize in novellas, which for people who aren't aware, they're short novels, like Frankenstein was a novella. Usually they're only about a hundred pages or so, as opposed to 300 for a typical novel and they don't sell well. The big publishers in New York, they don't want to publish those because you don't make much money. You can't put a high price tag on a hundred page novel, but a small press publisher can put those out and you can sell them, and in the eBook, God, it's great because you can read one in a third of the time that it takes to read a novel, but you're getting a full story. It's much more in depth than a short story. So, all of these different models for the business are allowing many more writers to have works put out there, and that's allowing horror to expand in a lot of different directions and attract new readers. If you go to any library and I deal with libraries a lot, they'll tell you that after like the Harlequin romances and that type of romance, horror is the number one most popular genre with both adults and teenagers.

Tony:

Because they want that thrill? They all want to be afraid of something? They want to feel that fear?

JG:

That's part of it, but also because it's so complex and again, we have to get away from the idea that horror is just Freddy Krueger or who's the guy with the clown face there? I forget his name. It's more than just slashers and blood and guts. It can be subtle. It can be quiet, suspenseful. It can be romantic. You know, there's all different ways that horror can go, so there really is something for everybody and people like a thrill. So you might not enjoy a thriller, like a spy novel, James Bond or some of the books by Ludlum or Mitchum or these kinds of people. You might want something a little bit less realistic than that. Those novels tend to take place in the real world with political stuff going on and military and everything. Maybe you want a cozy little suspense novel of a haunted house, but you still want something that's going to keep you at the edge of your seat and thrill you. So horror can do that in different ways than some of the other genres and I think that's really what it comes down to with people who read it. They want a thrill. They want that rush, that excitement, that little adrenaline burst.

Tony:

JG, as part of working in libraries, which you just mentioned. I know that you work with a lot of young readers. So, what are you teaching them? Are you teaching them to write horror? Is this part of the reason why it's exploding on the market these days, or because I know you like to instruct and help young readers and help them get off on the right foot. So kind of take us through your methodology and how you help these young readers.

JG:

I do it in several different ways. Locally, I go to a few of the libraries that we have in my area and I teach classes. Now, some of the classes are just basic writing, so if the library has their own teen writing program, I might come in as a guest speaker and say, okay, these are some of the tricks that we use to improve dialogue or to improve setting or to improve characterization. There are other libraries where I actually teach a four-week course on genre fiction writing, and it encompasses horror, fantasy and science fiction. I use examples from all three for the lessons, but we cover all the main areas - characterization, plotting, setting, dialogue, that sort of thing. And they get writing assignments. So if we talk about dialogue, I'll say, okay, go home and next week you have to bring in a two-page written assignment about three characters having a conversation. Now, while I'll use examples that mostly come from science fiction or horror, because that's my wheelhouse. I'll tell them you don't have to necessarily write something scary. You don't have to write something that involves a monster or a ghost or a serial killer. They might want to write something about rockets, or they might want to write something about elves, or they might want to write something just about three real people on the street. So whatever they want to write is fine. I just teach from what I know and my examples mostly deal with horror. And then on top of that, through the Horror Writers' Association, which I'm a Board member of, I run their library outreach program and we have nationwide programs that we run. One is called Summer Scares, where we get some guest editors and guest authors and people from various library organizations to select some of their favorite books in the teen category, the middle grades category, the adult category, and then we promote those to libraries and we put on programming for them so that they can come in and learn about those books and then bring that to their patrons. So there's a lot of different ways that we can help people because the more people we get into libraries, we're helping them read. We're introducing them to new authors and they in turn keep the industry alive because if they like somebody, they're going to want the library or the bookstore to order more books from those people. And if the publishers see that horror authors are selling, then, well, hey, let's sign more horror authors to be published. So it gets more writers work. It gets more people reading and it gets more people into library. So it's a win-win for everyone.

Tony:

It's a very good cause and I like it, even though I write nonfiction, I absolutely love it because I also think it encourages more people to read because I see a dwindling in the reading level of society. So reading books helps bring back more education, more literacy in people. So I think that anything that does that is just fantastic.

JG:

Yeah. It's really necessary. I mean, studies are showing that a lot of teenagers love to read. They love to read, but when they get out of college, the number of people that read drops 50%. People just stop.

Tony:

Understood. Yeah. Take us into writing a book. What's your writing process like when you start? Paint a little picture on this.

JG:

I would imagine that my writing process is similar in some ways to many people and very different. I'll come up with an idea, and the first thing I do is jot it down wherever I am, because I have a terrible memory. So I have to write at least one or two sentences down in my phone, in a notebook, something just to remind myself about that idea later. And then I'll go back at some point and flesh that out to a paragraph or two. If that still makes sense and it seems exciting, then I'll expand it a little bit to about a page and I'll say, okay, the hero has to do this. The villain has to do this. The monster has to do that. These kinds of things have to happen for this to be the ending. And then if it makes sense, I'm like, okay, we can make a book out of this. I'll sit down and write the first one or two chapters just off the top of my head, whatever comes out, and usually by that point, I start to get a little lost. So I say, okay, now it's time to stop and make an outline. So I'll outline everything that I want to happen during the novel and cut and paste those things together in the right order a few different times. Once that's set, then I can start working on the actual book, and all of that is fairly common to how writers work. Where I become different is that every day when I sit down at the computer, I don't know what I'm going to work on. I like to say, oh, I'm working on this novel today and I'm going to keep working on that novel every day until it's done, but the truth is sometimes I get sidetracked and I come up with an idea for another novel. So I'll write three chapters on that, and then two weeks later, go back to the first novel, or I get an idea for a short story and I stop. So I'll have anywhere from 8 to 10 or 12 different projects going at any one time. What that means is that some years I don't get a single book published, and then a year or two later, I might have 3 come out because I finish them all. Some years, I have two or three novels and only one short story coming out. Another year, it's one novel and ten short stories. So whatever creative burst I get that day, that's kind of the project I work on even if I want to work on something else. I have to kind of go where my mind takes me. And then once something is done, you put it away for a while and then you come back to it and do the editing. I mean, that's the same for fiction or nonfiction.

Tony:

Yes, it is. JG, I understand how you kind of not fell into it, but you kind of went with the flow and kind of evolved and evolved, and here you are, a very well-known horror writer, but you've stayed in horror. Despite it all, you keep writing horror so there has to be this underlying, strong interest in horror because you didn't switch into science fiction or fantasy or anything. Your mainstay is horror. It's your wheelhouse as you've mentioned. What's that strong interest? What else do you get out of this so much that just keeps you writing another horror novel after another one?

JG:

I think it just really goes back to my childhood. I've always loved things that are scary. I've loved monsters. You know, we talked a little bit about all the different sub genres of horror, where you can go anywhere from serial killers to science fiction. I've never been big either in what I like to read, what I like to watch or what I like to write on the whole serial killer thing. Some of my books do have some scenes that might have some blood and guts in them, but overall, the whole book isn't about someone going through town and chopping people up like Jason or Freddy Krueger. I don't write that kind of stuff, and those kinds of books and movies, you know, as a teen, I loved them. Now they kind of bore me because I don't find them scary. They're visually stimulating, I guess you could say because there's blood and action, but I would never pay money to go see one of those at a movie house. I'll wait till they come on TV. As a kid, and I know my memory doesn't go back from before kindergarten or anything, but my parents have told me I was watching the Twilight Zone and Star Trek and all these different kinds of things. The Universal movies, Frankenstein, The Werewolf, Wolfman, Dracula. I was watching all of that stuff on TV as a little kid.

Tony:

This is the Tony DUrso Show where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Just ahead, the chat continues with JG Faherty, multi award nominated horror author but first it's time for us to take a short break. See you back here in just a moment.

Tony:

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JG:

The first books I can remember reading were either books about dinosaurs cause I love dinosaurs. What little boy doesn't and Edgar Allen Poe and Frankenstein, things like that. I devoured the Hardy Boys mysteries and yes, they were mysteries, but they were all scary books to a little kid. Then I got into both horror and science fiction. I read stuff by Jules Verne and 20,000 leagues under the sea. I loved all that stuff. So by the time I was a teenager in the '70s, I was completely hooked. I loved reading horror. Every week, I would go to the bookstore in college too, and I had to buy every horror book that came out then. The paperbacks were king back then, so you could always count on three or four or five new ones coming out every week, and any dollar I had was spent on buying those books. I still have most of them and I've got shelves and shelves of books in my office and boxes of them in the attic. I've dabbled in other stuff. I mean, I read the James Bond books. I read a lot of science fiction in my teenage and early twenties, but it always came back to horror, horror, horror. Why? Yeah, I know. I was going to say why? I can't explain it.

Tony:

Yeah, why? We want to know. Why?

JG:

No. I mean, where I grew up here in the Hudson Valley of New York which is that stretch between New York City and Albany and they call it the haunted Hudson Valley. Dozens and dozens of ghost stories. You know, we had the Revolutionary War being fought here, the native American ghost stories. Right where I live, the County where I live is considered the UFO capital of New York for all of the sightings that they had in the '80s and '90s. So, I mean, I'm sure that played a role in it. On either side of my house growing up, a couple of streets over were cemeteries that went back to the Revolutionary War and even earlier. So I was surrounded by this stuff, but so were all my neighbors and they didn't become horror writers, so there was something else going on. What is it? I don't know. But like Stephen King once was asked the same question and he said, there's no explaining it. If you put four writers at the edge of a lake with a sunset, the guy who writes westerns will write a Western about that scene. The guy who writes horror will write something about a monster coming out of the lake, and the guy that writes romance will write about two lovers sailing into the sunset in their boat. It's just whatever is in us.

Tony:

What are you looking to accomplish in the next few years? What's your, let's call it your long-term objective?

JG:

Well, I've got the two books that just came out this year. I've got another one that's on my editor's desk. We're waiting to do the edits on that so that'll come out next year. I'm working on the next novel for my publisher, which is going to be sort of a combination of Lovecraft and Frankenstein set in the 1800s. After that I have got at least seven or eight novels that I want to do, and they're outlined. They're sitting here in files on my desk waiting to be written, and really, it's just a matter of time. You have to sit down and write these and I want to get them all out. You know, as time goes on and you get older, one of the things probably driving me more than anything else, more than awards, more than sales, more than anything is I've got all these ideas and I want to get them into print before I'm too old to do it.

Tony:

JG, what's your personal habit? What is it that you do that's your routine that you ensure that you do that helps you make this all come about?

JG:

I function best with a routine. Some writers are okay just grabbing an hour here an hour there at some point the day and doing their writing. I like having sort of set times. I get up in the morning and the first thing I do is take my dog for a walk. That is obviously necessary for the dog, but it also helps wake me up and clear my head. I come back and for the next hour or two, an hour and a half, I write whether I'm working on a novel or a short story, I just write and then I have a day job so after that, it's work. Then at the end of the day, I take the dog for another walk. I clear my head of everything that had to do with work for the day, and then I sit back down at the computer and I either write for another hour or an hour and a half, or I edit what I wrote earlier in the day, depending on which mood strikes me. I keep going that way, going that way. On the weekends, I extend my morning writing from an hour and a half to about three hours, but I don't write in the evening and you can get a lot of words written just with those few hours a day. I write in total silence. I'm not one of these people that likes to have music on when I'm writing. I can't have a TV in the background. I can't even have people talking around me and I write at home. The only time I don't write at home is if we're on vacation. I'll bring a notebook with me and a pen. I don't write on a laptop ever, and I'll use that vacation time to just jot down ideas or outline something or work out problems that I'm having, but I don't actually physically work on whatever novel or short story might be back at home.

Tony:

That's very smart because when I take a laptop on vacation, I'm on it too much.

JG:

Yeah, yeah, and honestly, who wants to try and carry it through an airport?

Tony:

Exactly. Any great resources that you would like to share with our audience visionaries? We have a lot of entrepreneurs, small business owners, people that want to take their game to the next level or starting off something. What resources do you think would be really good for them to have?

JG:

Well, obviously if they want to be writers, social media is important and that includes Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Connect with other writers. It's just like any other business. If you wanted to, I don't know, start a restaurant, you would want to connect with other restaurateurs, and you'd want to take classes. You would want to learn how to cook or learn how to be a restaurant manager. It's the same with writing. You need to connect with other people in the industry, learn the ins and outs and you don't have to become an expert, but at least have an idea of how to write a cover letter when you submit a piece of work to a publisher. How to look for an agent, how to make sure that you're sending your things to the right person. If a magazine only publishes science fiction, don't send them something about serial killers just because you like to read that magazine. They're not going to want your stuff. It’s all about research and treating it like a job because it is, so you need to set it up like a business. Work at it like it's a business, and in that respect, anything that applies to a business applies to being an independent writer, cause that's what you are. You're a contractor and you're working for publishers, so focus; don't take it lightly. Have a plan in mind for what you want to accomplish, whether that's I need to write 500 words every day in order to finish my book by next January, whether it's I need to make a list of publishers so that I know who to send stuff to, and who's open for submissions and who's not. And I think more than anything and this probably applies to almost any business, be .... what's the word I'm looking for... is be focused on what you're doing. You can't take anything lightly, but at the same time, you need to get a break from it. You need to have a life. And I would tell this to people who are stockbrokers. I would tell this to people who are writers. I would tell this to people who are in any job. At the end of the day, the work day is over. You're not going to be good at what you do if you're not also feeding your body and your mind. Exercise, get out, visit with friends and relatives, do things that you enjoy, have hobbies outside of what you do. You need to be taking care of yourself in order to do your best at what you do.

Tony:

Great advice and great resources. Once again, this is JG Faherty, multi award nominated horror author, and you can find him at www.jgfaherty.com. Faherty is F-A-H-E-R-T-Y. www.jgfaherty.com. JG, thank you so much for regaling us with all this. It's taken me to a whole new level and yes, I now see why this is so important. I see how it's grown and grown in the value that it has to society, so hats off to you and what you're doing. I hope you win many more awards and I really look forward to more of your books coming out. I want to just thank you so much for this.

JG:

Hey, it's been my pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Tony:

To my visionary audience, thanks for hanging out with me while I featured an elite entrepreneur who took his vision to reality, and I really hope it was as inspiring for you as it was for me to this interview. I learned so much, the insights are so valuable. How did you like this interview - JG Faherty, multi award nominated horror author. I need to make another correction. Earlier in the interview, I said that I write nonfiction. It's true, but as you probably know from hearing other interviews and from knowing some of my books, I actually write fiction - or better stated - I wrote fiction in the past and then I was told I couldn't write fiction because an author can't do both, so I have discontinued my fiction books and I'm not publishing any more of my fiction books and I'm just doing nonfiction. And so the story goes, unless I come out with a pen name so it is correct where I said earlier that I only write nonfiction, but now you know. Just to fully correct myself. And now back to the interview. JT said that while he started off just winging it, he began to form the vision and goal to do better, to be better the next year than the year before. Always do better. Always try better. Always pushed to do a little more. That is the start of great success that I see in so many elite entrepreneurs. That's a very workable end goal - to always get better at what you're doing. I do the same in that I always seek to make my interviews better and better. JG's purpose seems simple, but it is powerful. This goes to show that when you have the right reason for what you're doing - your purpose - it can really put you where you want to be. It's like the gasoline in your car. It helps you get to your destination. If your business isn't going as well as you'd like, perhaps you should go over your purpose once again. I wrote the Vision Map to help you tear this apart and get it right on point. It's a free download for you on my site. And on another point, I stand corrected when I said horror wasn't one of my interests. As JG pointed out, horror is really in a lot of the books and movies that we read and see, but they're not classified as such. He's right in that horror is the one genre that can encompass all others. Have you written a book or are considering writing a book? Whether it's fiction or nonfiction, there are some basics. I've known people who said they wish they could write, or they wish someday to write a book. To them I say, just take action. Just start., Start writing and let it flow from you. Just begin. As you go on, you can reform and reorganize it, but the process has to get started. So just begin and you may amaze yourself at having a finished book sooner than you ever thought. Just start. JG gives his process for writing a book from the beginning. I recommend listening to that again after the 39-minute mark. There's so much more I got out of this interview. What did you get? I'd love to know how you use this information to help you in your business or career. Tell us, tell the world. You can tweet me at Tony D-U- R-S-O. Now guys, I want you to grab hold of your vision. Decide you're either going to start something great or take it to the next level. You have to decide first. It always starts with a decision and you can get my Vision Map to help you along the process. The free eBook is at Tony D-U-R-S-O.com. I created my empire in just a few years. That's all it took. I had the Vision Map as my guide. I wrote it up for you. You can do it too. And please follow me on social media. You can find most of those links on the homepage at Tony D-U-R-S-O.com. And if you have iTunes or access to any Apple device, look up my name, Tony D-U-R-S-O and subscribe to my show. A kind review there will get you tremendous appreciation back in return. Thanks, and remember: just take action. Success awaits those who persevere and remain steadfast despite the odds. Sow good seeds, do good deeds and join me on the next episode of the Tony DUrso Show. Announcer: We hope you've enjoyed this week's edition of the Tony DUrso Show with his key influencers. Be sure to tune in again next Friday at 5:00 PM Eastern time, 2:00 PM. Pacific time on the Voice America INFLUENCERS channel.