Michael Heffernan, author
My writing career started, that is if I had to pick one specific point in my life, with a short piece that I wrote in the seventh grade that was scribbled down hastily in an exercise book. It was a poor rip-off of Salem’s Lot and was filled with the sort of titillating stuff that makes a story great to a young kid. Unfortunately, the teacher caught me doing a re-write during class-time, confiscated it, and called home. She proceeded to inform my mother that she felt that I was “disturbed” and that I might need counseling.
Thankfully, my mother had better judgment and just felt that I was expressing myself artistically. Through the rest of grade school Stephen King novels and movie-tie ins by Alan Dean Foster and Simon Hawke kept me going. Then, in high school, I wrote a novella, a play, and a comic. None of which I’d prefer to discuss the details of. They were all rather lurid and messy.
Since then, writing has come and gone. The better part of seven years of university and a daughter have taken priority. But that itch that all writers feel has never left. The fact that I’ve been unable to find employment as a researcher has offered me the opportunity to concentrate on writing again, and about a year and a half ago, I started work on my first novel. It was to be an epic zombie masterpiece of poverty and social decay in a small out-port community.
I think I bit off more than I could chew with that one, and it just never really panned out. But I pulled up my bootstraps and kept trudging onward. Thankfully, several published short stories have followed since then. Currently, I’m editing an anthology of zombie shorts from such authors as Douglas E. Winter, Steve Niles and Gary Brandner. Entitled Aim for the Head, I’m shopping it around to prospective publishers and I think I’ve found a home for it.
What was the first book you read?
When I was in grade school – seventh grade, I think – a friend of mine gave me a badly written trashy horror novel entitled Jack in the Box. From what I can remember, it surrounded a young boy who was haunted by Nazi ghosts, which possessed a jack-in-the-box. Somewhere in the middle of all of this was an equally ridiculous sub-plot about calling Satan out of hell to re-establish the Third Reich in the U.S. Foolish, I know, but gloriously evil to a twelve year old.
Describe your reading atmosphere?
I’m a stay at home father now, so the only chance I get to read is for a few short hours on the couch during my daughter’s mid-day nap. But when I’m in writing mode, there really isn’t any time.
What musical style do you prefer?
I have an eclectic taste – everything from metal to country. I just picked up the new Bruce Springsteen and Nine Inch Nails. You can always find Drive-By Truckers in the CD player, too.
If you had one wish, what would it be?
I read in Publishers Weekly once that only six hundred writers in the U.S. work full-time at their craft. And, as any writer will tell you, it’s hard to make a decent buck. It’s really a dog-eat-dog business. So, I guess my one wish would be to support my family with writing horror fiction. I’m not talkin’ about hundred thousand dollar advances here, just enough to pay the bills and put food on the table.
What is your favorite cartoon?
I don’t watch much cartoons now – sitting through Dora the Explorer with my daughter is about it, and we’ll keep that just between us shall we? – but as a kid GI Joe was the be all end all of Saturday mornings.
What’s your most embarrassing moment?
…clogging my friend’s toilet and having it overflow. The pipes had to be replaced. Enough said.
If there was a movie about you, who would play you?
Ed Harris or maybe Nick Nolte. I have an immense amount of respect for those actors. Pollack and Affliction are some of my favorite films. There is an unflinching hard reality and a deep honest to their performances in them. That isn’t to say that I’m as disturbed as Wade Whitehouse or Jackson Pollack.
What was the last good movie you saw?
Chopper with Eric Bana. He stars as Mark “Chopper” Read – a notorious gangster in the Melbourne underworld. I’ve seen it at least twenty times. It has to be one of the best prison movies – one of my guilty pleasures – that have ever been made. There really isn’t anything like it around. Some really gritty films have come out of Australia , and this is the best of them.
Who would you most like to meet?
The writer in me would have to say Clive Barker. I admire his early work so much. The Books of Blood and The Hellhound Heart inspired me to write seriously in the first place. His prose are always just amazing – like reading poetry. But the historian in me would have to say Adolph Hitler. Yes, Hitler. That wasn’t a misprint. I wrote my M.A. thesis on the forced conscription of Ukrainian slave labor by the Nazi regime, and I specialized in Holocaust Studies. Outside of the Bible, there hasn’t been more written on one subject in the history of the human race than on the Third Reich. Yet so many questions still remain about that period.
What inspires you to write?
My life. Stephen King defined his early work as “working class horror.” I try to write stories about real people who we all might have known at some point in our lives. I think that those are the most effective stories. Scares are the easy part, but making the reader care about your characters is just so difficult.
