Hello everyone. Thank you for checking in on my website and Facebook, and of course for reading my books and supporting my work.

Supporting “my calling”, I ought to say, and I’d like to talk a little bit about that today and what it means.

As most of you may know, I did “retire” a few years back. I thought I was done. This was not really my decision, but a set of circumstances that led me to the conclusion that I was finished as a writer and there was no point in going forward. At that time, I figured I would just kinda coast and find out what else life had in store for me.

Well…it happened through another set of circumstances that I was “called” back. Yes, really. I heard that calling very clearly. Things happened that brought me back into the field of writing. I am not the same as I was and certainly not in the same place I was. It’s interesting to me that after ten years of being “back” many people who read my earlier work have no idea I am back writing. If they find out, it’s usually a big surprise to them. But I am working, and working very hard, and I believe my best book is still ahead of me.

I have always been very blessed to be able to “see” something in my head and write it down as I see it. I have been blessed to be able to put stories together, create people, and essentially build worlds that did not exist before. The creative process to me is still amazing. It’s mystic, really. A mystic journey into the unknown. I still don’t understand it, but I surely do appreciate it.

I am asked—as most writers are—where I get my ideas. There is no one answer to that. I just know I am “open”. Only recently I got a story idea from an old photograph in a book. The wheels started turning. As will happen, my mind will work this idea like a Rubik’s Cube over the next year or so, while I’m working on another book. There will be a place in my head where this book idea will be “tested” for strengths and flaws, and slowly but surely I’ll decide if it’s a viable subject and if I will remain interested enough in it for the seven to nine months it takes to get the story written. This is how it happens. An overheard comment…a photograph…a dream…a news story…a wish or a fear: the book may be born from all those, and more.

An important thing, this is…I want to be able to write what I feel I want to read, but I can never read it unless I write it. It of course has to hold my interest over a long period of time. It has to have a depth that fascinates me and keeps me going. I have said it’s like a painting that comes to life, revealing all sorts of  colors and layers that you didn’t know were going to be there where you made the first brushstroke.

It’s a long journey, to be sure. Each book has a different personality. Each has its own problems to be solved and offers its own rewards. I’ve worked on books that posed tremendous problems of timing, in that characters had to “be” in a certain place at a certain time. I’ve worked on books that worked on me in my sleep, causing me to try to solve their problems in dreams. I’ve worked on books where characters resisted the actions I wanted them to perform, and seemed to “correct” me or take off on their own.

Oh yeah…the characters. I’m working on something now where I’d planned the lead character to die in what would have been—hopefully—a very  wrenching scene. Well, this bad boy says “No way, Mac! After what you put me through, I ain’t goin’ out!” So there you go…he refuses to be killed as a reward for his bravery, and so he will live to fight another day.

As I say, it’s a mystic journey. I don’t work from an outline, so sometimes I am very surprised as to how things develop. I think the work is more difficult and slower because I don’t use an outline and haven’t solved all the problems beforehand, but to me the work stays fresh this way and I always am excited to come back to it.

Someone asked me if I ever get “stuck”. No, I don’t. Here’s my secret: when I finish writing for the day, before I get up from my desk I always type one letter for the next line. The letter is random. D…H…K…B…whatever. So when I come back to work, I begin the next sentence with that letter. Might not work for everyone, but it does work for me.

My calling. I’ve often thought what else I might have done or been in this life. I always come up thinking that, for better or for worse, I am exactly where I need to be. I don’t think I chose writing as a career, I think it chose me. Does that sound strange or pretentious? I was writing short stories in the first grade. I was “seeing” things that I wanted to express and describe at a very early age. My calling. It called me, even when I thought I was done. Especially when I thought I was done. It reached out for me and brought me back.

Now, it didn’t and does not and never will promise an easy road. I will tell you that this is one of the most difficult callings a person can have.  Imagine…you have a story to tell and you must tell it, you have characters to birth and worlds to create and you must—you must—do this to be true to the fire that illuminates you…yet you must do this alone. No one can help you define and refine these visions. You must be apart from other people, for such a long time. It is a very lonely calling. No one can do this for you. The mystic journey cannot be shared by anyone else.

It is a solitary trip, with an uncertain destination…because how can you be sure when this book is finished that any publisher will want it or anyone will want to read it?

But if it’s your calling, you have to take the risk. As a matter of fact, your entire life becomes a risk. How long do you devote to a project, if it’s not immediately coming to life? Is the breakthrough on the next page? In the next chapter? Would you be better off working on something else? But…if you give up…are you a failure? Or are you a failure if you keep on working at some creature that you thought would come to divine life only to find that it is a half-life, an artificial life, a forced life…and you should have known a hundred pages ago to let the creature sleep?

Risk and rewards. Or risk and no rewards. But always risk.

The book must be my Paradise. It must be a place I want to visit and revisit, and live in for not only seven to nine months but for the rest of my life…because it’s going to have my name on it. It may have gone through many hands…some tender and caring, some dumb and rough…but in the end, it always has my name on it and so I take responsibility for every word and every thought.

There are not very many other professions where one person signs their name to the work. One person. Opening yourself up to whatever may come to praise you or to bury you. So toughness is also part of this journey. That, and understanding you will never be perfect. You will never write the perfect book, the book that has no error (or typo!). But still, even knowing that…you do have to try.

And that I guess is the heart of my calling. The eternal effort. The trying and trying, as much as someone might try many keys on a difficult lock to open the door to a room that entices and beckons yet promises nothing. What is beyond that door? I don’t know…but I have to find out.

The eternal effort and the curiosity. The risk, the toughness, the work that can only be done alone. The feeling that no book can ever be perfect, yet the next one might be. The drive that says if you wish to read this, you must write it…because no one in the world, no one who has ever existed or ever will exist again, can create it in the same way that you will.

So I embrace my calling. I embrace all of it, the highs and the lows…the past, the present and the future. I am, as with every other writer, part of the heart and soul of the world of creation. We are the night workers, the daytime dreamers, the fighters in the trenches for so many things that lie on the edge of being lost. Our calling is huge, vital and important. Without the voice of the writer, who could sing? Who would speak for those who often can’t? And who would dream for those who have lost faith in dreams, in our troubled and very uncertain age?

I embrace my calling. And though it does not and never has promised an easy road on this mystic journey, I am sure without a doubt that it embraces me.

Thank you for being here, and thank you so much for reading my work.

Best Wishes,

Robert McCammon

Sample shirts for featuring Vincent Chong's art

The T-shirts we did for The Five were popular enough that we decided to offer T-shirts featuring the cover artwork from Mister Slaughter and The Providence Rider.  Vincent Chong’s fantastic covers look great on a T-shirt!

The purpose of the shirts is simply to help promote the Matthew Corbett books. In order to keep the costs down, no profit is made from these shirts; the prices shown are the actual costs of the shirts from Spreadshirt.com. A variety of shirt types, colors, and sizes are available.  Additional shirt styles can be added to the store, so if you don’t see the type of shirt you want, drop me a line and let me know what you want.

Robert McCammon T-shirts at Spreadshirt.com

Note that the printing and shipping of the shirts is handled entirely by Spreadshirt. In my experience, it takes about 7 to 10 days for U.S. orders to be delivered.

The covers for all of those have been added to the Book Cover Gallery, along with a second printing ARC for The Providence Rider, an advertisement for a 1992 book signing in Nashville, the cover art for the recent hardcover edition of Illustrated Masques, and the cover of a UK edition of Otto Penzler’s recent Zombies anthology.

Speaking of Illustrated Masques, a trade paperback edition of that book will be published in July 2012 by IDW. The book includes a graphic adaptation of Robert McCammon’s “Nightcrawlers.”

• Review by Nik Houser (posted to the forum at RobertMcCammon.com)
• Starred Review: The Providence Rider, posted by Mark Sieber at Horror Drive-In
• Book Review: The Providence Rider, posted on Famous Monsters of Filmland and HorrorNews.net

The Providence Rider will be published in May 2012 by Subterranean Press.  You can pre-order several editions from Subterranean Press.

As with Mister Slaughter, I did a number of B&W interiors, but for this one I also provided colour endpaper art (which you can see below) and two colour interiors, one to go with the new story, Death Comes for the Rich Man (another Matthew Corbett adventure), that accompanies this volume.

You can click on the images below to view larger versions of the art. The Providence Rider can be pre-ordered here.

Congratulations to Vincent, who last year received two British Fantasy Awards for ‘Best Artist’ and for ‘Best-Non Fiction’ for his art book Altered Visions. He was also nominated for the 2011 World Fantasy Award for ‘Best Artist’.

Bethany’s Sin
by Robert McCammon
(preorder—to be published in October 2012)

Dust jacket and full-color endsheets by Tomislav Tikulin

Limited: $75
ISBN: 978-1-59606-497-3
Length: 368 pages
Lettered: $250

Bethany’s Sin is a tiny, picturesque village in rural Pennsylvania. Its tree-lined streets, beautiful houses, and manicured exteriors offer—or appear to offer—both peace and a place of refuge. Evan Reid, a man haunted by his memories of the Vietnam War and by a history of viscerally disturbing dreams, comes to the village with his wife and daughter, hoping to make a fresh start after a series of discouraging setbacks. At first, all goes as planned. Evan resumes his career as a freelance writer while his wife, Kay, begins teaching math at a local college. But there are things going on in Bethany’s Sin that no one wants to talk about: unexplained disappearances, houses that stand strangely vacant, half glimpsed figures that appear to be female, the impossible sound of hoof beats in the night. At the center of it all stands a single imposing woman: Dr. Kathryn Drago, a scholar and community leader who holds the key to the mysteries that enshroud the town.

First published as a paperback original in 1980, Bethany’s Sin was Robert R. McCammon’s second novel. Like its predecessor, Baal, it offers a frightening, thoroughly imagined portrait of ancient forces set loose in the modern world. Like Baal, it is both a notable accomplishment in its own right and an invaluable glimpse into the formative years of a major writer, a man whose raw narrative talent was apparent from the start. This deluxe new edition offers McCammon’s many fans the definitive version of a significant early work, a book that foreshadows the later—and larger—accomplishments to come.

Limited: 1000 signed numbered hardcover copies
Lettered: 26 signed leatherbound copies, housed in a custom tray case

You can pre-order the book by clicking here.

A signed, limited edition of the book will be co-published by Guantlet Press and Borderlands Press. The limited edition is available for pre-ordering now.  It comes in two states: a limited edition signed by all authors except Mr. Bradbury ($75) and a lettered edition signed by all authors including Mr. Bradbury ($500).  You can read more about the book and place your order on the Gauntlet website.

The Robert McCammon story is entitled “Children of the Bedtime Machine.”  Other contributing authors include Harlan Ellison, Neil Gaiman, Joe Hill, Thomas F. Monteleone, Ramsey Campbell, Ray Bradbury himself, and 19 others. The full contents can be found on the Gauntlet website.

Things on the Robert McCammon front have been really busy of late, so we thought we’d offer a quick guide to what’s going on.

Baal

• Limited Edition: All copies shipped and en route to customers or already in their hands.
• Deluxe Limited: Waiting on slipcases. Projected to ship in Jan/Feb.
• Lettered Edition: Waiting on traycases. Projected to ship in Jan/Feb.
• Ebook: Now available for Kindle and Nook.

The Hunter from the Woods

• Limited Edition: All copies shipped an en route to customers or already in their hands.
• Lettered Edition: Waiting on traycases. Projected to ship in Feb/Mar.
• Ebook: Now available for Kindle and Nook.

The Providence Rider

We’ve just approved the rough sketches for the five black-and-white interior illustrations that will appear in all editions of the book. In addition, we’ve given Vincent Chong the okay for the two color plates exclusive to the limited and lettered editions, and the full-color endsheets (about which, see more below). The bonus novella—the first time Matthew encounters the supernatural—has been dropped into the limited edition and is being proofed. The Providence Rider is likely to be our most attractive McCammon production yet, and one hell of a thrill ride of a novel. We expect it to land on many fans’ lists of favorites of 2012, so don’t miss out.

We’ve decided to add the full-color endsheets to the signed trade copies (but not the unsigned trade edition), to make them an even better value to collectors. There are only 1000 of these, unlike the nearly 2000 copies that Robert McCammon signed for The Five, so please get your order in soon.

Two McCammon limiteds that aren’t on our immediate schedule, Bethany’s Sin and Stinger, have already been fully designed, and are working their way through the production process. 2012 is really going to be the year of McCammon here at SubPress.

Feel free to head over to our site to order all but the ebooks, where Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal are accepted.

Note: this Subterranean Press ebook is only available in North America. An international ebook will be available in January from Open Road Media.