Jim Melvin 002, "The Death Wizard Chronicles" author: Mr. Media Interview, Pt. 2

(Return to Part 1)

Death Wizard Chronicles Web Site

Book Excerpt

BOB ANDELMAN: You’re a dad, and you’re a dad a second time around. What is an appropriate age group? Was thinking do you need to be at least in college or high school to read this?

JIM MELVIN: Well, as we all know, some 15-year-olds are as mature as 25 and vice-versa, but I would certainly say 18 and above. And I’m sure there are adults who are very conservative who would find this at least mildly offensive, and then there are young adults who probably wouldn’t. But I would certainly recommend 18 and above. I’m not out to offend anyone, and I want to be honest up front. You never, of course, want to lose potential customers, but I don’t want to offend anyone either.




ANDELMAN: Right. You mentioned this. There is some rougher sexual content.

MELVIN: Yeah. It’s funny. When you write sexual scenes, you’re writing it just like you write anything else. You’re writing it one word at a time, one page at a time, and you’re dissecting it in a very kind of bland, scientific sense. So when you’re writing it, it seems not the least bit offensive. But then you find when people read it, it has a much different effect on them than it did on you as the writer, and it’s kind of surprising. I’m just gonna have to wait and see how that plays out.

ANDELMAN: Once you got to the third and the fourth book and the fifth and the sixth, did you have to go back to the first couple of books and make some tweaks? Did you find your style changing, or was it meshing? From the writing point of view, how did you adapt?

MELVIN: That’s a very good question, actually. And it’s a good question mainly for the reason that this really is my debut as a novelist, and I didn’t have 15 novels under my belt and a style firmly established. I certainly had a style established as a writer cause I’d written a lot for the newspaper, but fiction is a different animal. And so my style did evolve. In fact, you never want to sell yourself short, but this series actually gets better as it goes along. Book Two is better than Book One. Book Three is better than Book Two all the way across the board. Part of that probably is because my style evolved.

Another part of it is that’s just the way the story goes, and also because the first two books and especially book one had to have more back-story, which tends to slow things down a little bit.

But the bad news for me early on, once I got my agent, was that I began getting rejections from the first wave of large publishers. And large publishers now-a-days, first-time fiction is a very difficult sell. They might have one opening a year for 5,000 or more entries. But the good news was, because it took me two or three years to finally secure a publisher, it gave me the time to go back. I could be in the middle of Book Four and then go back into Book One and add some foreshadowing or change something or tweak something or decide, “This character in Book One isn’t quite as consistent as he is in Book Four.” And so now, the quality of Book One, in that regard, is as strong as Book Six. And a lot of fantasy writers, especially the big guys who are releasing one after another and Book One is out while they’re writing Book Two, can’t go back into Book One and can’t go back into Book Two. And so I’ve been able to do that, and it has created a very strong sense of continuity.

ANDELMAN: How much of the book was written before your agent started trying to sell it, and how much of it was written by the time it finally sold?

MELVIN: When I first started the series, as I’ve said now several times in the interview, I played it out over and over in my mind. And I knew scenes, and I knew characters, and it really started to pour out of me, but still, I didn’t start out knowing that I had a six-book series. I thought that I actually might’ve had only one very long book, like about a 1,000 to 1,200 page book. And I knew that I wanted to write a long prologue, maybe about a 30-page prologue. Well, the 30-page prologue became book one, which is 300 pages. That’s when I knew things were starting to develop. Well, as soon as I finished Book One, I began querying agents and very quickly got one. And so I started book one in September of 2004 and secured an agent in February of 2005.

ANDELMAN: How much was written at that point?

MELVIN: At that point, 300 pages were written. Book one is, by far, the shortest of the books. Again, it’s only 300 pages. The rest of the books are all about 500 pages or in the 525 to 550 range. So only 300 pages were written, and I think that was part of the reason that it was a tough sell to the major publishers because, again, I’m a first-time guy. Not only are they taking a risk with a first-timer, but they’re even taking a risk that I’m gonna finish it.




ANDELMAN: And by the time Rain Publishing acquired it…

MELVIN: I signed my contract with Rain in March of this year. By that point, I had written the first draft, I believe, of Book Five.

ANDELMAN: Wow. They knew what they were getting, and you knew what you had.

MELVIN: Exactly. Yeah, exactly.

ANDELMAN: So I have to ask. After all those years of waiting and dreaming what it was gonna be like to hold a Jim Melvin novel in hand, how did it feel? What was that day like when the book arrived for the first time?

MELVIN: You actually said something to me when you and I were talking several years ago about this, about how when you’re finished with a book, you’re really not finished. It’s just the beginning of the work. So I assume that everyone would think that when you’re holding the book in your hand that it’s this incredible, marvelous experience, and it is in some regards. But your mind is so occupied with all the other things you have to do that you still almost don’t feel like it’s finished because you know how much hard work it’s gonna be to get people to even know that the book exists and to read it.

ANDELMAN: You’re just getting started with all that. You’re starting the interviews. You’re gonna start doing book festivals and all that kind of stuff.

MELVIN: Yeah. I’m in one book festival already. I’m close to two others. I’ve got, I believe, six or seven book appearances, and I’ve got another three or four that are virtually official. I also have a lot of friends in the newspaper business all over the country. I’ve been contacting friends in hopes of getting first in line in terms of reviews and features. It’s all starting right now, and unless, again, you’re with one of the mega publishers who have the mega marketing machines behind them, there’s a lot of marketing involved. There’s a lot of hard work, both by your publisher and by you, and the more work you put into it and the harder you go at it, the better things are gonna be. All that said, it’s gonna be several months before I really see how much this pays off in the tangible sense.




ANDELMAN: Did you ever think about just writing a simple novel instead of okay, here are 300 pages, and it shows that I can write a beginning, a middle, and an end rather than commit. Holy cow! We talk about it almost casually, but the decision you made to just put everything aside and commit to this thing -- it’s really an amazing story.

MELVIN: Well, thank you. That goes back to what we discussed earlier about having this opportunity to sort of step out of the rat-race. I had really been in the rat-race, in my opinion, since about 12 years old. I started mowing yards when I was 12 years old. Then I started frying chicken, and then I started working at restaurants. I went through college in about three and a half years and went to work at age 20. And I was in the rat-race, like I say, from age 12. Well, now suddenly, here I am about 46. I don’t have to work, and I said to myself, “Jim, if there’s ever a time that you’re gonna achieve your dreams and write the story that you want to write, now is the time to not blow this,” and I didn’t.

That said, once the series is done, I think I’m gonna do exactly what you just suggested. My next book, I think, is gonna be a relatively average-length stand-alone, probably either in the horror genre or now-a-days, apparently vampires and werewolves and that kind of thing are really popular and easy sells. So that will probably be my next project. I’m definitely not gonna write another six-book series unless The Death Wizard Chronicles were to become a big hit, and then prequels and sequels were a request that I would certainly love to do that.

ANDELMAN: Sounds like fun. Sounds like a good thing. How did you deal with people over the last couple years as you weren’t writing? You were writing, but you weren’t working at a traditional kind of thing. I’m sure people asked, “What do you do?” and you’re like, “Well, I stay home and I type.”

MELVIN: Well, basically, I immediately started calling myself a novelist, which I guess is accurate. I didn’t necessarily say published novelist, but I said novelist, which became my identity. And that actually felt really good to me because, like I said, basically from certainly my junior in high school year on, that’s who I was. I really wasn’t a journalist. I wasn’t a reporter. I wasn’t a designer. I wasn’t a supervisor. I was a novelist, and it felt good to say that.

© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

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