Episode 5: Jeremy Flagg on preparing to escape to Scotland

Jeremy Flagg

Crys: Welcome, Jeremy Flagg. I’d like to introduce Jeremy real quick. He is the author of the Fhildren of Nostradamus dystopian science fiction series and suburban zombie young adult humor series, taking his love of pop culture and comic books. He focuses on fast paced action packed novels with complex characters and contemporary themes.

Jeremy spends most of his free time at his desk reading snarky books, and when he gets a moment away from writing, he watches too much Netflix and Hulu and reads too many comic books. Jeremy, a Maine native, resides in Clinton, Massachusetts, and can be found in local coffee shops pounding away at the keyboard.

Except now we’re stuck in our houses, but that’s okay. There’s still a lot of coffee there.

Jeremy: There’s still plenty of the coffee. Other than that, not much has changed lately.

Crys: Maybe an extra bit of Netflix and Hulu.

Jeremy: Hulu is getting a workout right now.

Crys: This is a bit different interview than my last three have been.

My last three guests have all kind of achieved the full time writing life. But you are on the path right now, not necessarily to full time writing, but to more of a free life in general. so why don’t you talk about where you’re at right now?

Jeremy: I’ve been publishing since 2006 and when I started, I had a lot of angst about my day job at the time. I work as a high school teacher and I couldn’t kill the kids in my classroom, so I made them zombies in a book. I found a mildly constructive way to deal with this problem. And when I published it, it was really just, I’m just going to publish it. My mom wants to buy a copy, no big deal. And all of a sudden they started to sell and I realized strangers were buying my book, and this was not ever part of the plan. I just enjoyed writing for the sake of writing, and at that point I realized, Oh. People are interested in some of the stuff I have to say.

The second book happened, and then the third book, and at this point I was participating in NaNoWriMo and it was just a good way to get out and meet other people and to be doing some sort of activity and really forcing yourself to write more. And ultimately I wound up working with a publisher and getting the first two books in my superhero series published. It was with a romance publisher, and I don’t write romance at all. They were looking to branch out into science fiction, but that’s not where their strengths were. So ultimately, I became the entire division of science fiction. Last year I, got my rights back and I decided to republish my superhero series.

Everything’s under my name now. I can exert full, crazy control over what I want to do. And that’s been kind of my goal at the moment. Superhero fiction is a kind of a hard sell because our fan base are comic book readers, and just because people like comic books doesn’t mean that they’re going to like superhero novels, just like comic book fans don’t necessarily watch the movies or the superhero movie fans don’t read the comics. It’s kind of a medium specific things.

That’s been a little bit of a struggle, but I’m expanding my world and my superhero books now take place in a universe. And the series I’m working on right now is actually more urban fantasy, but it ties into the superhero theme overall.

I’m working on my third series, and this is the second in my superhero universe. The ride’s been kind of crazy at this point. It’s been fun. It’s been. Weird to think of myself as an author. When people ask what you do, I kind of stopped saying that I work in education and I tell people that I write novels. People just kind of don’t understand that you can make money writing novels.

It’s been a great ride so far, and now we’re in that weird phase of “what could the future hold?” The five year plan has gone from five years to “what could the rest of my life look like?” That’s where I’m kind of sitting right now. The transition from this part time gig into looking at the potential for full time status and what would I have to change in my life to make that viable without, you know, resorting to ramen every night.

I’m a big guy. Ramen’s just not going to cut it.

Crys: Oh yeah. I actually miss ramen. I have to be gluten free and sometimes like just a cup of ramen would be lovely, but yeah, you can’t live on that. You have a really clear vision of where you want to be in the near future. However, and I’m really interested in this. Tell me what your ideal near future looks like.

Jeremy: There’s a long story to this, and I’ll abbreviate it, but for a while, when I started writing, I was feeling really homesick. I come from a very small town in northern Maine, and it is unlike anything else I could possibly describe to people. And I always tell stories about where I grew up. I would try to explain to people how all freshmen in high school are required to take drug and alcohol awareness, sex ed, oh—and hunter safety. It’s all one class.

People would constantly look at me and say, are you serious? Well, so I wound up writing a book about it, and it’s all about growing up in the small town in Maine and what life is like and what it means to be a Mainer and how we’re just a very weird breed of people.

And while I was doing this, I started researching my family tree. I am not close to any of my grandparents except for my, my mother’s mother. And her last name was Cowain. I wanted to learn more about her last name, which is an estranged grandfather’s last name. As I was researching this, I found out that my ancestors are actually from Scotland, and I decided, you know, someday I’m going to go there.

And you constantly say that someday I’m going to do this thing. And one day I went to the post office and I got my, passport application and I was like, sorry, it’s just going to happen. Let’s just do this. And in the course of just a couple of weeks, I planned the entire trip to the UK and I spent ten days in London, five days in Scotland.

I got to see the, the town of Luss, which is where my clan resides. I got to meet, the Cowain bagpipers, which are a nationally recognized organization. And I got to meet family. |People were so kind and sweet, so nice. And it was just this amazing trip I went on. I went by myself. I enjoyed every moment of it and I got to see this whole new world.

So I kind of made the joke, you know, someday I’m going to move to Scotland. I really want to be connected with my heritage. I really liked the people, and it just became this kind of ongoing joke about, Oh, I’m now certain that I’m Scottish. I already wore kilts. It just now has a reason. And then I kind of put it out of my mind because you know, that’s an international trip and I’ve only ever been to Canada a couple times.

So fast forward to a year later. I get really annoyed because my then job won’t let me go to the 20BooksTo50k Summit conference in Vegas. And I was like, man, my day job is really getting in the way of my life. And just by chance, I happened to hear on a podcast that they were doing something in Edinburgh Scotland.

And I said, okay, well let’s check this out. Well, come to find out it was in the summer. I can go. Right then and there, with no knowledge of what was happening, I booked my rooms, I signed up and sent payment to Craig Martel, and Scotland. Here we come.

I went for two weeks and I got to see both sides of the country and go into the countryside, and it was just kind of this confirmation that this is where I want to be. The pace of life is so much slower. It’s very similar to what I grew up in Main and it confirmed a plan that I didn’t know was a plan, and at this point I decided this is where I need to be. This is the lifestyle I want, these are the people I want to be around, and farewell America, I got places to go.

Crys: The most important question, do you now have a clan Cowain kilt?

Jeremy: Oh, I absolutely did. Crys was asking me earlier about Texas, and I drove all the way to Texas to buy a cowboy hat which I wear when I am writing in the morning, religiously, while drinking my coffee. And I flew all the way to Scotland to buy a kilt.

It just seems that I like to buy things from the source and it requires a lot of airplane travel.

Crys: So what’s the next item on the list?

Jeremy: Oh, that’s a good call. I want hand-blown glass from the Island off of Italy that all that they do is blown glass. So I guess Italy is on the list now. Excellent. And I really want sushi from Japan.

Crys: Oh, I feel you. I’m a food traveler. I will travel to the most remote place to try like the one dish that they’re famous for and that’ll just be happiness to be

Jeremy: I did grad school in Savannah and I used to go to use the library to research my thesis, and it was really just an excuse to have biscuits and gravy.

Crys: Nice. Southerner at heart, whether you are born and raised in the north or not.

Jeremy: All about the biscuits and gravy.

Crys: What are you doing right now to get to the dream?

Jeremy: There’s a couple of things that are happening. It’s taken me a while to understand that everything has to fuel back into a very specific mission. And for awhile it was kind of like, so I wrote a young adult zombie series. It was great fun. I enjoyed it. I market it, but it doesn’t feed into my bigger series and the universe that I’m building.

And what I learned was I have to look at every project I do as, “Well. Will this advance my career? Will it bring in the money that I need? And will it give me the potential for either a reach with fans, open more doors as far as podcasts, for instance, or interviews or access to readers that I don’t already have?”

And so right now my superhero series, that universe is where I kind of want to be for a while. I’m a geek at heart. I have no problem staying in this universe for the long haul. But my first series was very action adventure. Think X-Men, think, you know, Avengers. While it did well, it’s kind of a hard sell because you’re pitching it to comic book fans and comic book fans want comic books.

What I’m doing with the series that I’m working on right now is it’s very classic urban fantasy. It’s a young female, urban setting. She has psychic abilities. She’s coming into her own. She’s emerging as kind of power. there’s a little bit of romance, not enough to be romance, but enough will-she-won’t-she that there’s some intrigue there.

My goal for this is in on Amazon, in the superhero category, superhero authors cannot place in the top one hundred. It’s too overrun with urban fantasy masquerading as superhero. So I’m literally writing an urban fantasy book. Masquerading as a superhero novel or the other way round. I’m writing out of my genre to place in my genre.

I know that doesn’t sound logical, but after two years of watching the Amazon charts, it’s the way to get in. I’m gonna use this to access a new reader base, a more urban fantasy base, and use it as a potential fuel into my superhero novels and vice versa. At the moment, it’s banging away at the keyboard, making as many words happen to finish out the third book in this trilogy.

Crys: Yeah. We, we’ve recently talked to a friend of ours who, they were writing a new, cozy mystery series. They had one series out already and this new one, they realized, also fit in a new genre called paranormal women’s fiction, which is, paranormal stories featuring women age forty plus, and they realized that the cozy mystery they were currently writing fit in the paranormal women’s as well.

They kind of slotted it into both categories and it’s doing really well. The dual slot can be really effective.

Jeremy: My action adventure book takes place in 2032. So it’s very light sci-fi because it’s still attainable. Sci-fi except for the giant robots.

But. Yeah. This one, however, it takes place in the forties during World War II. There was the discussion about, “Oh, is that urban fantasy or is this alt history?” And after doing some research, when I was pitching the idea to my cover artists, I realized that there is a lot of potential for an alt history overlap.

It has a lot of the urban fantasy tropes. It might even find a better home in all history. So that was definitely a nice little surprise to see it confirmed that it really fit into this. And after seeing the Mary Robinette Kowal, the Ghost Talkers cover…

Crys: Yeah. I’m a big Mary Robinette Kowal fan, for sure. Alt  history is definitely my jam. We were talking just before this, the whole situation that everybody’s going through right now—for listeners who are listening to this not in time, but in the future, we’re in the midst of the COVID-19 lock down. We’re all stuck at home. And you have been utilizing that really heavily, as you said, as a test run for what it might look like in the future.

Jeremy: When everyone talks about going full time, there’s this weird—and I hear everyone say that when they start, they think it’s going to be like a full time job. It’s eight hours. You can sit at a desk, you’re going to type away or do whatever admin task, and then you go about your business.

The truth of the matter is writing does not work like that. You can’t force a creative endeavor. To go for unsustainable amounts of time. And some people, I’m certain that they could write for eight hours a day.

I have been known to once in a great while, but yeah. What I have found is this has been a good trial run for “what does a real writing schedule look like? What does getting up in the morning?” Checking my emails, making breakfast. Soon as breakfast is done, it’s time to go to the office and I stay here until I have done between 1500 to 2000 words, which is actually on the low end.

I think I want to start trying to bump that up between into the 2000 to 3000 range. Just because it’ll help me reach a production schedule that is, I guess it’s lightning years beyond what I’m used to, but I think that that would allow me to frequently be able to release a book every quarter, which I think is my personal sweet spot. I can definitely write more, but yeah, I found rapid release in my genre didn’t work particularly well.

I think knowing that I could do a book every three months and then create the system that allows that to happen, which includes, you know, your cover artists, your proofreaders, your editor, time to write, time to do all your, advertising, your promotions. It’s not just sitting down at the keyboard and clacking away at the keyboard. It’s all that other stuff that comes with it. And that has been a little bit surprising—and I don’t know why—it’s the same stuff I do every day, but when I was like, “Oh, this is a chance to pretend I’m a full time writer,” I’m not writing a whole lot more. I’m just being more productive with the time I sit at my computer. So. It’s weird and it’s not what I thought it would be, but I don’t know why I thought it would be anything different, if that makes any sense.

Crys: No, it does make total sense. And I really liked the way that you’re intending to slowly bump your words—I often refer to as building up your word muscles the same as building up your physical muscles.

Most people don’t come right out of the gate writing 5,000 words a day. And if you don’t use your word muscles frequently, they atrophy. I’ve had a really hard year and I am super comfortable with a thousand to 2000 words a day. My goal is to get up to about 3000 words a day, but I’m not pushing myself there straight out of the gate. It honestly takes physical training to sit there healthily, and it takes mental training of being in the words and being in the creativity and setting that pattern and that system up of, “These are my triggers. When I get to the computer, these things trigger my creative brain to engage.”

Jeremy: When you look at it like a traditional, a traditionally published author, Laurell K. Hamilton’s a great example. I follow her on Facebook. And she’ll applaud herself for, you know, a 500 word day, and that might be all she writes that day.

And I think, how could you possibly—oh, that’s because you released two books a year, whereas indie authors could be releasing, you know—last year I released five, six books. Four of them were written that year. Three audio books. All those assets take time. And if your publisher is not doing them for you, it’s your time.

I have a pretty good team that works with me, but at the same time, I’m one person, and that’s where the day job becomes problematic because. I can do a little bit of writing while I’m at work, or I can dictate in the car to and from work, but there’s still umpteen million other tasks I need to be doing and those I can’t do while I’m at work or in the car.

It’s not just about the writing at the keyboard and producing a book. One of the authors in my writing group only has one book out and he’s been making bank on it, and it’s because of all the admin stuff that he does to keep that book afloat. So there’s this weird balance that I guess I thought would be different as a full timer, but…

Crys: One of the things I do love about indie publishing is that freedom to publish either one book or two books, or—how many is Mallorie Cooper publishing per, per year? 20-some books per year? We have the freedom to set up whatever systems fit us and make it work that way, versus being limited by a publisher to one book a year or so.

Jeremy: And something I’m doing a little bit different—my first book in my superhero series is 80k words, then 90k then 105k and then 120k and it, those books had to be thick because there were six point of view characters and you know, it just requires that much space.

Well, this series is in first person. There’s one point of view, and so now I can drag those page counts down to 70k, which is telling a much tighter, cohesive story, and it still feels like I’m getting more story because there’s only one point of view character. Whereas if I was traditionally published, they might say, “Well, you can’t publish any faster. We don’t have space on our list or your fans have been expecting a book of this size. You need to keep up with that.”

I like the freedom of being able to say, Hmm, this didn’t work out quite the way. I wanted to. Let me adjust something and see if this’ll be better this time around. That that freedom to take risks and not rely on a sure thing is definitely why I love indie publishing far more than I ever did when I was traditionally published.

Crys: You have both points of view. Well, this has been an amazing conversation and the plan with Jeremy is that we’re going to follow back up once he’s achieved the Scotland dream and kind of do a before and after comparison conversation, which I’m super excited about cause I don’t think it’s gonna take too long before you get there.

Jeremy: The weird difficulty—it’s weird to try and think that I’m trying to become an immigrant. It’s not part of my vernacular from where I grew up—trying to move into another country is a lot more work than I thought. And I’m applying for university positions because to move into the UK and use your book sales, you have to prove that for two years you lived off nothing but your book sales. And unfortunately, I live in a very nice house with a very big mortgage and I can’t prove that I pay it with just book sales.

The goal is to go there, be a writer, be a professor. Go around wearing tweed jackets in tartan as much as they’ll let me, which is funny cause Scottish people don’t actually wear kilts, but I’ll do it anyways.

Crys: Excellent. Well, can you tell our listeners where to find you?

Jeremy: Probably the more interesting place to find me would be my website, which is www.childrenofnostradamus.com. it’s where I have a serial going. I’m building up the website, for when someday, I want to get into RPG in my universe. So I’m prepping it. Or if you want to go just the more boring authorly stuff, it’s just www.remyflagg.com.

Crys: And you have a podcast as well.

Jeremy: The podcast came around because I decided that because of this whole Amazon not reflecting our superhero novels really well, a whole bunch of superhero authors have created a kind of a justice league, if you will. And we started a website called www.superhero-fiction.com where you can find vetted superhero novels that are only superhero novels. And as part of this experiment, which is going quite well, my cohort, Trish Heinrich, and I have started a podcast called Geekorama, which is exactly what it sounds like.

Crys: Excellent, and I will have notes for everything that Jeremy has mentioned in the show notes, so those will be really easy for you to find. Thank you so much, Jeremy.