Please introduce yourself and tell us about your background as a writer.
Hi, I'm Rev. Joe Kelly, writer of fantasy and horror, metalhead, fitness and bodybuilding enthusiast (which is a nice way of saying I'm too damn lazy to go for max gains) and a minister in the Universal Life Church of Modesto, CA.

I started writing for fun in college. I was finishing up a Bachelor's Degree in Literature, and the whole last year was nothing but literary theory. While I won't say it was TOTALLY useless, it was the most boring, mind-numbing, and generally painful slog of a subject I've ever been forced to get through. To escape from the stress of studying gender theory and Lacan's pseudoscientific garbage he passed off as psychoanalysis, I started writing a book. It was nothing but bikers, drugs, drug-stealing Nazi bikers, and the Vietnam vet turned hitman who eventually wastes them all.

It was a lot of fun to write, and it was also absolute garbage. It made the Executioner books look like Mark Twain. As was my second book; but my third, when it was finished, was actually looking saleable. A few years ago, I committed myself to actually writing fiction as a profession. At the same time, I got back into fantasy after becoming disillusioned with Tolkien way back in High School. So, I also switched over to writing fantasy and horror, and that's where I'm looking to make my name (though I might just go back and rewrite that biker book one day.)

What are the most prominent influences on your writing? How do you incorporate those influences without being derivative?
Oh, boy, there's a lot. Early on, it was mainly Carl Hiaasen and Elmore Leonard. The latter is one of the best writers America ever produced, and he's still a big influence on my writing; the way I build my characters is still heavily inspired by his crime novels.

Once I got back into fantasy, I immediately picked up on two big names: Robert E. Howard, and Andrzej Sapkowski. Sapkowski clicked with me right away, because he's got a beautiful ability, particularly with his novels, to create a gorgeous, fantastic, almost fairy-tale world, and then fill it with the same grit and ordinary sons-of-bitches as you'll find in an Elmore Leonard or a John D. MacDonald book. As for Howard, he's basically the opposite sort of influence: his worldbuilding is light and breezy, and his characters, at least when taken story by story, are two-dimensional at best, just stock characters meant to propel a narrative. But my god, the atmosphere of his stories is incredible; above all, no one can do action like Howard. It's brutal, sanguine poetry.

As for not being derivative? That's a struggle for me. I'll be the first to admit I'm not the most creative writer. One bit of great advice I once heard is, as an artist, you need to do something better, or do something different. And with writing, doing something genuinely different requires you to either have a story nobody's really heard before, or to be genuinely brilliant. I'm neither. So, the best I do, is to take what I've learned, and try to do better. I'll never write action as well as Howard, and I don't know if I can ever match Sapkowski or Joe Abercrombie when it comes to plot and character, so I just mix the two, and hope it's good enough to look fresh for my audience. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. And honestly, deep down, I'm always worried I'll just turn out to be a slightly more competent Lin Carter, just rewriting other people's stories for the rest of my life.

Many authors say marketing is one of their biggest challenges. What tactics have you found to be most effective for getting your name out there?
To be honest? I haven't. I'm a fairly introverted person, and self-promotion, especially on social media, does NOT come naturally to me. Plus, I've only just started getting stories published on any sort of regular basis, so I don't even really have much to advertise.

I will say, my next book is going to be self-published, since I think I've finally gotten to that point of competence as a writer. But when I do get it out there, I'm seriously thinking about finding a social media guy to, at the very least, help me with the promotion, if not handling the bulk of it himself. That's the pain in the ass of being a writer: unless you're one of the chosen few who blows up and becomes a household name, you've got to have money, an income, already to support yourself and to spend on your writing career. And that's not just independent and small-time writers: even the big publishing companies nowadays will just dump your book on the market with zero exposure. And when you ask, what the hell, why aren't you giving me any exposure, the response is just, "Oh, everyone's tech-savvy nowadays, everyone's on social media. You can just promote it yourself! It's easy! Just get yourself out there!"

Yeah, hence the self-pub route. I'm not banging my head against the wall for years, trying to get in with the big boys, just to have them drop my book and walk away like a dog dropping a turd by the side of the road. But the only advice I've heard, that seems to have real applicable value, is be ready to spend some money on your writing, and spend it in the right places and the right ways. In other words, find yourself a guy.

How much do your audience’s expectations factor in to what you write? Does this ever cause you to hold back from experimenting?
Beyond basic questions of quality--is this dialogue snappy? Does the action grab you? How about the characters, the setting?--I don't think much about their expectations. I write the stories I want to read, and just hope like hell other people want to read them.

One of the big problems with short form sf-fantasy fiction is that most of the people willing to spend money on it, aren't interested in the subjects I'm writing about. There's a market for sword-and-sorcery and fantasy-horror stories, but it's not very big. I hold no resentment against the audience; if they want to read the plotless, rambling stream-of-consciousness that Clarkesworld and Fantasy Magazine are printing, more power to them. I read some absolute trash, and I'm not gonna judge other's taste.

But it does mean that I'm writing for a very small niche at the moment. It means, perversely, I don't have to worry about having much of an audience to lose, because I'll just find another small niche if I do. And I'm not even worried about losing my current audience, for that matter, because I really don't experiment a whole lot; I write old-school fantasy, and that's about it. There's already plenty of styles and subjects that are fairly forgotten nowadays, like the James Allison stories, or Abraham Merritt's surreal lost-world adventures, or Jack Vance and Clark Ashton Smith-inspired weirdness, that I can use for inspiration. For right now, I just try to have fun, and hope others join in.

Have you had any new stories published recently? Are you currently working on any?
Like I said earlier, I've only just started getting published. This is the first year I've gotten published anywhere but Cirsova. Aside from Cirsova and my piece in Samhain Sorceries, I had a swashbuckling fantasy-horror come out in Heroic Fantasy Quarterly early this year; a CAS-style, mystic sort of horror story in Wyldblood Magazine, a British publication; and I had a story in Whetstone 5. But that's it so far. I also spend much more time working on novels than on short stories, so I don't have a whole lot of them either being worked on or out for submission at any time.

I will say, the novel I've just started has me excited. It's inspired by classic horror like Dracula and the Mummy, as well as A. Merritt, and E. C. Vivian's Gees books. I won't bore you with a whole synopsis, but basically it involves mass hypnosis, ancient gods of the void, a secret Pictish society keeping the spirit of a certain Dark Man alive, and an archaeologist who unearths a sarcophagus from an Irish barrow, unwittingly unleashing the un-living woman inside. Just a bunch of hog-wild shit in the tradition of the old pulp magazine novels.

Name one newer and one older book you have read and enjoyed recently. (“Newer” meaning from the past year or so, and “older” meaning written before 1980.)
You've got me with the new titles. I've got a few on my list--I've heard good things about Kings of the Wyld, and A Gathering of Ravens and Rage of Dragons are both sitting on my shelf--unread. The closest I can come to "recent" is that I just recently read Joe Abercrombie's First Law trilogy; and while I enjoyed it, the end left a sour taste in my mouth. It was top-tier fantasy, and it would have been among my all-time favorites, had I read it when it came out and I was still an angry young man in my early 20s. But I need something more hopeful nowadays, and as much as I can't find any fault with Abercrombie's skill as a writer, I greatly preferred Sapkowski's more poetic and melancholy approach to darker fantasy.

Older is a way easier subject. It's all I read. And I recently reread Treasure Island, which I think any fan of fantasy and/or adventure should read. It's an almost unbelievably modern book in every way; and I have to especially hold up Long John Silver as one of my all-time favorite characters. Morally gray characters sometimes get a bad rap in the pulp community; and I get it, everyone sick of watered-down, Great Value ASOIAF Grimdark. But John Silver is the kind of character I would call, rather, morally complex. He's the villain, there's no room for argument on that. But he's the kind of bad guy who's so well-developed, who's so real, that you want him to get away with it in the end. And you're given good reason to like him; he redeems himself in the end, even as he remains a scoundrel to the finish. Or, maybe I feel that way because I'm the kid who always rooted for the Disney villains. In any case, that's the kind of villain I strive for in my stories--the kind that you're almost wishing could get away with the evil plan, because god damn are they cool.

Any final words?
Yeah, just that the novel I mentioned, Cara Biúllo, should be coming out, end-of-next-yearish? Maybe, hopefully. It all depends on if I can line up a couple good editors and some other people to work with. And if I'm lucky--because success, really, is 10 percent sweat and 90 percent dumb luck.