Meet Travis Heermann

Today we’d like to introduce you to Travis Heermann.

So, before we jump into specific questions about your career, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
Basically, I’ve always wanted to be a storyteller. I was writing and drawing my own comics in grade school. I wrote my first novel when I was twelve, 250 single-spaced pages of Edgar Rice Burroughs homage, pounded out on my mom’s Smith-Corona manual typewriter.

My first real novel, THE IVORY STAR, was published in 1997, but thanks to an overabundance of youthful naivete, it was an incredible debacle that resulted in two entries on SFWA’s Writer Beware page, one for my literary agent, one for my publisher. So my first foray into publishing was rocky at best. The full story of that experience is under Cautionary Tales for Writers on my blog. http://travisheermann.com/blog/cautionary-tales-for-writers/

After a couple of years to lick my wounds, I started writing again, what would become my Ronin Trilogy, and that was a project that changed my life. My research into Japanese history and culture led me to learn the language and ultimately abandoning my engineering career and moving to Japan to teach English. I lived there for three years. During that time, I acquired a real literary agent, who sold HEART OF THE RONIN to Five Star Publishing, and that was the real beginning of my professional career. Throughout the 2000s, I was also ramping up a freelance writing career. I was fortunate enough to work on some exciting properties in the game industry, most notably Dungeons & Dragons 3.5, Legend of the Five Rings, Battletech, and the Firefly Roleplaying Game. During that time, I was also going to grad school and got a Masters in English in 2010.

Since then, I’ve written eight novels, the most recent of which is THE HAMMER FALLS, a dystopian gladiator story.

There are so many dips and peaks, ebbs and flows, milestones and missteps, between now and when HEART came out. I’m now an active member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA), Horror Writers of America (HWA), and the Authors Guild, so I feel like I’ve achieved a certain amount of professional cred.

I recent years, I’ve also taken to writing screenplays, none as yet produced, but I feel like I’m getting closer. My screenplay WHERE THE DEVIL RESIDES is an adaptation of my novella of the same name (published in ALEMBICAL 4), and it’s been a finalist in several film festivals, and won Grand Prize in two of them. Just this year, I now have a short screenplay called THAT LONG BLACK TRAIN, another short story adaptation (SHIVERS Vol. VII), that won Best Unproduced Short Screenplay at the Crimson Screen Festival. Getting the trophy for that felt like a big moment, a step along a long road (hopefully) into the film industry. My love for comics has also come back to a head the last couple of years, as I’m in the process now of adapting my Ronin Trilogy into a comic book series. It’s an incredibly fun process, so my fingers are crossed that it’s going to go well.

There were some challenges at the start, but looking back has it been a relatively smooth road since?
Not smooth AT ALL. I already mentioned my first literary agent and publisher. My literary agents did 3-5 in the federal penitentiary for fraud. The owner of that first publishing company looted the company and fled to the Bahamas, where he still lives. That whole experience derailed me for a couple of years. It was just devastating. But eventually, the writing bug came back. Publishing can be a soul-crushing industry, as authors are too often forced to watch their beloved books be savaged by hyenas. The hyenas take many forms. Unscrupulous publishing companies mostly, but also contracts I should have read more closely and considered the implications thereof, plus living in a culture that doesn’t value artists and creators (all it takes is a little travel outside the U.S. to bring this sad fact into sharp focus), and a world that’s utterly indifferent to how much heart and effort goes into every story, how much practice and study it takes to be able to write a good book.

Please tell us more about what you do, what you are currently focused on and most proud of.
I write novels, short stories, screenplays, and now comics. I play in a variety of genres, most SF, fantasy, and horror, but I also love Westerns and Japanese history. I love playing in a variety of sandboxes. My work is not for everyone, largely because I eschew the mainstream, but I’m pretty darn good at what I do.

Let’s touch on your thoughts about our city – what do you like the most and the least?
I love that the Denver area (in fact, the whole Front Range) is home to a huge community of writers and other creative people. The size of the community is comparable to New York, Seattle, and Los Angeles, and the best part is that it’s really supportive. Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers and the Pikes Peak Writers are great organizations.

I didn’t realize how important this community was to me until my family and I moved to New Zealand for a year. The absence of that community, or anything resembling it, highlighted how important it is.

If you’re a writer and you live in this area, there is no better place to find your Tribe. Writing is such a solitary endeavor that it can be really isolating, disheartening for all the reasons I’ve already mentioned, that having a support network makes it all easier.

Contact Info:

• Website: http://www.travisheermann.com
• Email: travis@travisheermann.com
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2335175340061310/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/TravisHeermann

Getting in touch: VoyageDenver is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.