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.