Featured Posts

Trey vs. the Nut-Punch (How I Got a Book Deal, Part II)

October 5, 2014

Spock vs. Spock

September 20, 2014

Trey vs. The Recovery (How I Got a Book Deal, Part III)

October 8, 2014

1/6
Please reload

Recent Posts

Trey vs. the Puppy

June 18, 2015

Trey vs. The Curve (Or How to Deal with Being "On Submission")

November 4, 2014

Trey vs. The Recovery (How I Got a Book Deal, Part III)

October 8, 2014

Trey vs. the Nut-Punch (How I Got a Book Deal, Part II)

October 5, 2014

Trey vs. The Call (How I Got a Book Deal, Part I)

October 3, 2014

Trey vs. Jealousy

October 1, 2014

Trey vs. the Blog Hop

September 29, 2014

Batman vs. Dracula (or How I Became a Writer)

September 25, 2014

Lulu vs. The Great Dane

September 25, 2014

Spock vs. Spock

September 20, 2014

Please reload

Search By Tags

batman dracula writer lying college subliminal advertising

heart attack book deal recovery rejection revise

lulu dog anatolian

video star trek spock audi

writing agent editor book deal rejection

writing baseball submission rejection protectors

writing book deal editor rejection revise heart attack

writing ideas process time unlimited time travel cat robson

writing jealousy loki success

Please reload

Follow Me
  • Facebook Classic
  • Twitter Classic

Batman vs. Dracula (or How I Became a Writer)

September 25, 2014

I get asked frequently how the whole writing gig came about.  Questions like "Did you always want to be a writer?" "What got you started?" and "Why are you irrationally handsome?" are perfect examples.  Well, the first two, at least.  I wrote this blog post last year to address those questions, and (as usual) the answer is probably longer than you'd like--but it's the truth.

 

***

 

I’ve always enjoyed telling stories (or ‘lies’ as they are referred to in more uncultured circles), beginning with my parents as a child—

 

“Yes, as crazy as it sounds, my baseball glove ‘slipped’ out of my hand and hit Steve Solomon’s bike wheel as he was riding by.  The fact that the glove got stuck between the spokes, stopped the front wheel from turning, and subsequently launched Steve over the handlebars, resulting in a broken arm, was therefore a tragic accident, and completelynotmyfault.”

 

This skill was sharpened in business school, when I blew off a Marketing term paper/lab experiment until the day before it was due.  During an all-nighter, fueled by No-Doze and pure desperation, I fabricated an entire experiment on subliminal advertising.  Yep, clipped an ad from Playboy Magazine about a cassette tape of contemporary music with hidden messages guaranteed to seduce any woman who listens to it…lied and said I’d ordered the tape…invented a questionnaire…described all of the in-depth testing of the tape on women from my dorm…sadly divulged the conclusion that the tape DID NOT successfully result in mass seductions, and then proceeded to completely rail against the ridiculousness of subliminal messaging for the five required pages of the term paper. 

 

Result?  A+.   When I got the paper back, the professor actually sounded disappointed for me in his comments.  I showed the grade to my roommate (a computer science major who frequently pulled his own hair out while struggling with differential equations), who simply shook his head and said, “If you make more money than I do when we graduate, there is no God.”

 

These were mere stepping stones on the path, though.  It wasn’t until my late 20’s when Batman and Dracula joined forces to make me finally sit down and write something for real.  See, I’ve always been a big comic book… ahem, GRAPHIC NOVEL fan, and one day I read that D.C. Comics was developing a Batman vs. Dracula extravaganza, the likes of which had never been seen.  My favorite hero versus my favorite villain?  Holy crap, I was jazzed.  Batman vs. Dracula = Excitement which could NOT be ruined.  I breathlessly awaited its arrival, only to find out…I was wrong.  So very wrong.

 

Seriously?

 

The book blew.  Excitement begat excrement.  Batman got his ass kicked all over the place, then agreed to become a vampire to defeat Dracula.  After throwing the book down at the end, I finally got the inspiration so many writers get at one point or another: “I could TOTALLY write that better.” 

 

And that’s when I sat down and started to turn some of my crazy ideas into actual stories.

 

 

 

Tags:

batman dracula writer lying college subliminal advertising

Please reload

  • Facebook Classic
  • Twitter Classic
  • c-youtube

​FOLLOW ME

© 2014 by Trey Dowell. Proudly created with Wix.com

Author Trey Dowell

Official website of author

TREY DOWELL

  • HOME

  • BLOG

  • BOOKS

  • BIO

  • NEWS & EVENTS

  • CONTACT

  • More