Episode 494: Co-Writing a Memoir, Becoming a Publisher, and Finding the Passion with Jeremy X. Wagner

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“As a reader, if I were a fan reading this book, I want the good, the bad and the ugly. I want you to rip the band aid off and tell the truth. Because, from my from my experience, I’ve read a lot of memoirs that are super boring and just fluff.” — Jeremy X. Wagner, co-author of Curtis Duffy’s Fireproof: Memoir of a Chef (Dead Sky Publishing)

We have Jeremy X. Wagner (@jeremyxwagner) on the show today. This dude is a stone-cold badass and the co-author/ghost writer of Fireproof: Memoir of a Chef (Dead Sky Publishing). Jeremy, man, he’s a heavy metal musician and founder of the death metal band Broken Hope.

He’s the author of novels Rabid Heart, which was nominated for the best horror novel at the 2019 Splatterpunk Awards, and the novel The Armageddon Chord. He has a new novel coming out in January, I believe, titled Wretch, so stay clued into jeremyxwagner.com for more info on that.

A little more about Jeremy: He’s the CEO of the TV/film company Aphotic Media and the indie publishing company Dead Sky Publishing. He has a very varied creative life which I find inspiring and really fucking cool.

In this conversation we talk about:

How he became an accidental publisher
Playing guitar
Being turned on to Ride the Lightning
Passion and imagination as a driver
Learning the business inside and out
Competition
Trust
And how he translated Curtis’s voice onto the page

Jeremy’s CNFin’ Snippets

“We were poor, so I just had a guitar. I didn’t have distractions. I was always reading a lot of books, and I had my guitar, and that’s all I cared about. So that dedication and applying yourself, because you’re so into something. It’s one thing and part of that demands a lot of focus and not distractions.”

“I’m blown away by anyone that can play a guitar or an instrument and sing at the same time, because I can’t. One, I can’t sing. I can’t even do proper backups or anything. When I try to even talk while playing guitar, I can’t do both at once. It’s like where people say I can’t walk and chew gum at the same time. It’s like that for me.”

“My passion for reading was a constant, and my mom was very encouraging with that as well. Passion really is the one thing, the one fire inside me that’s just never gone away. And as I got older, I would write lengthier short stories, and eventually those became novels. And in my band, I always wrote the lyrics for Broken Hope. And, yeah, it’s just all about passion, anything you do, someone who works with wood, or someone who likes baking cookies, it’s like, if you love what you do, there’s a passion there, right?”

Jeremy’s Recs

King of Ashes and Razorblade Tears

The band Sanguisugabogg

Boardwalk Empire

Parting Shot: On Learning the Biz

There was a moment in this conversation where Jeremy riffed on having to know the business you’re in. It’s a great passage from Fireproof where Curtis talks about knowing the food business inside and out.

A few parting shots ago, I talked about a writer who was adamant that they their job was not to sell their book, it was to write books and leave it up to everyone else to sell it. This is a recipe for a bitterness, resentment, and self-sabotage, if I’m being honest.

Likewise, a chef or restaurateur might just want to cook and create recipes, but that’s only a fraction of it. Yes, it’s the most important fraction because if your craft is garbage while you get good at promoting, you’re just promoting how bad you are. Mastering your craft is imperative, constant improvement, attention to the subtleties, experimentation.

But as independent contractors, we need to know how to pitch, how to handle our finances (skim off money from that check for the tax man), there’s platform building and community building, there’s attending the readings, and you have to study the masters of the past and the masters of the present. So when you turn pro, there’s all these other elements you have to be aware of unless you want to be invisible and wallow in obscurity. So much of doing this kind of work is not the work you signed up for, but make no mistake, it’s part of the job.

It’s easy to get washed up or carried away by social media and confuse that with the work. Because, in a way, it feels like work, but it’s really not. It’s a sliver but I see far too many writers wasting time on the wrong things, a failure of priority, putting second things first, as Steven Covey once wrote

The writing and the craft always comes first, but it isn’t the one and only. I’m sure there are myriad chefs who just want to cook and perhaps scoff at the chefs who have cultivated a public image that draws them more attention and thus a fuller dining room night after night. It’s the same with writers … unless you’re in that sliver of the 1% who draw a regular salary and have institutional support that does the promotion for you, then you must learn about the business.

You have to read books about the publishing industry, you need to know how it operates and what you’re options are. You need to read Jane Friedman’s The Business of Being a Writer so you understand the totality of the job. Or the archive of The Writer’s Co-op with Wudan Yan or something. I think she sunsetted it, but there are lots of conversations there and you can very much tell she and Jenni think about it the dollars and cents of it. I’m one to give everything away, they are definitely think about charging for the extras, worksheets, etc. But that’s why she’s a boss and I’m decidedly not.

This business does a really good job of frustrating people into bitterness or PR or law school. As artists, it’s hard to think about the things that keep the lights on. I see many painters who do these paint and sip nights. They might have fun, but you know it’s below them, but those classes populated by many a drunk white woman help keep the lights on so the artist can really ply their trade. I’m not sure what the writer equivalent of that is, but you do yourself a disservice by not learning about the totality of the industry you’ve adopted.