Hello Readers!  We’re back for another exciting interview with Eric Trant, who is in high-spirits today with the release of his SciFi book, Out Of the Great Black Nothing!

 

Eric is about to cross the threshold to a new experience as well as a new reality. With your drinks and snacks ready, let’s raise a toast in congratulating Eric for a job well done! We’ll hear what his path has been for him, to get to this time in his life, and how he’s feeling about it!

 

 

Deborah: Congratulations to you, Eric.  Are you ready to start?

 

Eric: Yes, I’m ready! Let’s go!

 

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Deborah: We’ve probably covered this in your previous interview, but now that things are changing for you, I wanted you to explain your transition from the beginning.

 

Eric: In 2009, I decided to begin submitting my work. I had been writing since high school, or the ’80s, but everything I had written was tucked safely away in a private vault. Most of what I wrote between those years is still tucked away.

I started poking around online for submittal sites for short stories. I had a ton of shorts to submit, and I came across An Honest Lie, Volume 1: Contributing to the Delinquency of Your Inner Child, from Open Heart Publishing. I believe I found it through Duotrope. For that theme, I had the perfect story tucked deep in my private vault, “The Apple Tree”. It was a story that I wrote in the early 2000s about a couple of boys who discover a most unusual tree. I submitted that story along with one other to Open Heart Publishing. They accepted “The Apple Tree”, but said my as-of-yet-unpublished short story “Lady’s Milk” was too visceral and did not fit with the theme for the An Honest Lie anthology. 

So, as you can see, I was both accepted and rejected at the same time.

“The Apple Tree” was published without further edit. It is word-for-word what came out of my vault, and is a wonderful story with which to begin my writing career.

 

Deborah: What a great start for you in the writing industry! Rejected and accepted at the same time, which is a little unusual, but then that is what it takes sometimes! What did you do to win the writing contest for Volume 2?

 

Eric: When An Honest Lie Vol. 1 came out, the founder/owner of Open Heart Publishing, Debrin Case, created an incentive program to boost sales. That program was simple: sell the most copies of An Honest Lie and win a book deal. 

For the second volume of An Honest Lie, Delusions of Insignificance, I submitted my story “One Small Step”, the very same story upon which my novel Out of the Great Black Nothing was based. I sold mainly to family and friends and co-workers, and won the contest with a fair margin between me and the second-place winner. I was lucky in the respect that there were no sales-ringers, and I like to think that at least some of my success was owed to my writing an enjoyable short story that people spoke about after they read it.

The bottom line lesson is that I worked for my book deal. I proved myself to the publisher, and in the process built up a fan-base following that has helped me sell subsequent books. I created network connections that keep me both motivated and informed, and I now have a growing pool of beta readers from which I can beg early readership.

 

Deborah: Yes, Debrin’s ideas are awesome! Plus, you really understand the marketing concept. Readers that was a great tip for you! Eric, you said that your short story “One Small Step” transcended into writing Out of the Great Black Nothing.

 

Eric: “One Small Step” is about Percy Freebottom and his spacesuit. It turned into quite a popular story. My wife networked it at her work, and I sold to whomever would listen, and before long I had a fair number of sales, and a growing fan-base. One of my readers even bought an astronaut statue and had the name Freebottom painted on the lapel.

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That same reader, a co-worker, helped proof-read the subsequent novel, Out of the Great Black Nothing.

The novel version of the Percy Freebottom came about like this: I was forced into it against my will.

The original concept of Percy Freebottom was intended to be a novel, but I could not get the story to come out right. I spent 2009 hacking on the novel, gave up, and in order to purge it from my system, I wrote the short story in a fit of spurts over the course of two early morning sessions. Debrin read the story, accepted it for An Honest Lie Volume 2, and for the book deal, asked me to turn Percy Freebottom into a novel.

So that is what I did. 

I titled the book Out of the Great Black Nothing, and I spent most of 2011 working on it. I wrote a draft in the spring, polished it in the summer, re-wrote it in the late summer, sent it for beta-reading in early fall, and underwent final line-edit in November. The Senior Editor, ME Johnson and I edited the entire book over eight days.

 

  

Deborah: Wow, you really busted through time on this! With only eight days to edit? I do believe I hear the sound of our Senior Editor’s whip active here! How do you feel about your novel hitting the shelves?

 

Eric: Now, after a year of work on a concept that began in 2009, Percy Freebottom and Out of the Great Black Nothing are about to hit the shelves, and I can’t wait to see how it is received! 

Out of the Great Black Nothing is my debut novel, and as with every first-anything, you only get one shot at it. I will never have another first novel, will never again have that initial giddiness of the unknown, and will never again be ranked among unpublished authors and unpaid freelance writers. 

I will no longer be an artist whose work is too intense for public viewing.

I will be a published writer, and that changes everything.

I will have an ISBN number (for the book). I will receive royalty checks, book reviews, and maybe do some autographing and bookselling at my favorite local coffee shop and this brew-pub next to said coffee shop. People will take me seriously when I say I am a writer. The book from cover-to-cover will be my book and my words.

This truly is a life-changing event for me, and one I have dreamt about since I was a boy. Writing a novel is one of those things on just about everyone’s bucket list, and checking this off my list is something very few people get to do. I am grateful to Open Heart Publishing and my editor, ME Johnson, for helping and believing in me, and for bringing Percy Freebottom to life for the world to see.

As for how I feel about other people reading the book, strangers who do not know me, it is a bit unsettling. It is like being naked in public. You’re not sure if people are going to laugh, clap, stare, or ignore you completely. My only hope is to make a good showing, and pick up a few fans that cannot wait for the next book, and the next, and the next.

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Readers, now you know how Eric’s path began, and how he made it end with a book deal. All it takes is good writing, submitting your work, and doing your best to promote your work!

Congratulations again Eric! I know I can’t wait to read your book!

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Eric Trant is the author of several short stories and the novel Out of the Great Black Nothing, releasing now through Open Heart Publishing. Eric writes during whatever space he can wedge in, between spending time with his pre-teen son and daughter, his infant son, and his wife, all of whom encourage him to selflessly stoke the coals of his blossoming writing career. None of them read his stories. They don’t need to, because Eric tells the stories whenever one of them says, Daddy, tell us a story, which he does, often with embellishment well beyond what the reader finds in print. This, in fact, is how his stories are meant to be shared. 

While he lives and sleeps and works in a brick box with several doors and windows, Eric prefers to spend a good deal of his waking hours outdoors hiking, camping, swimming, or indulging in whatever other activities he feels like indulging in. He spends precious little of life’s capital watching television, other than cartoons, which he considers the most intelligent thing on the box, and the weekly movie he shares with his family. 

 Aside from writing and family, Eric is a Chemical Engineer who holds a patent for statistical outlier modeling. To learn more about Eric, visit him at http://diggingwiththeworms.blogspot.com/.

Pick up your copy today by clicking the cover image