[00:00:08] Speaker A: Hello and welcome to Small Publishing in a Big Universe. I am your host, Lisa Jacob. It's been a while.
I had emergency back surgery and I was out of commission for six months.
So now I'm back.
Brian Boole stepped in for me to be a guest host so I am going to turn it over to him. So enjoy.
[00:00:33] Speaker B: Welcome to Small Publishing in a Big Universe. As you can tell by the sound of my voice, things are a little bit different this month.
The short story is My name is Brian Buhl and I'm filling in for Lisa. The fictional story is I have broken into the Small Publishing in a Big Universe compound, stolen the equipment away, and now I'm locked into an undisclosed location broadcasting this and will continue to do so until they bust down the doors and take the equipment back from me. This month our author is Arlo Z. Graves, author of the Old west horror novel Black Rose. I had the pleasure of hearing Arlo Z. Graves read before and trust me when I say this is a really special story that you want to get your hands on. Before we get to the interview, let's talk about our sponsors.
From Graveside Press, a new novel in their Gradeside Stories Young Readers program, Kim Reaper by Greg Stewart and the Damage we do by David Rose from their Tiny Terrors short fiction program from Water Dragon Publishing, the Heroborn by Miko Rahala, the Shadow Minister by Lawrence Raphael Brothers and their latest Dragon Gems collection, Dragon Gems, Spring 2025 and from Cupid's Arrow Publishing, Madison Murphy by Jessica Gleason.
[00:01:50] Speaker A: And we're back to October 2025 from Water Dragon the Reunion by MD Neu A Dragon for Christmas, also by MD New and Hawaiian, a novel by MD Neu from Paper Angel Press One Last Dance by Ernesto Patino From Graveside Press, Dr. Herzog's collection by Robert Bagnall and Twisted Souls by Sky Crawford.
Stay tuned for our interview.
One Last Dance by Ernesto Pitino Devastated by the tragic death of his fiance, Marco Annisi sets out to find the woman who received his beloved Susan's Heart copyright. Convinced that her spirit has reached out to him in a way that he would understand, he finds Julia in Tucson, where she works as a dance teacher. He signs up for lessons hoping to develop a relationship. Can two hearts that beat as one in life be parted by death? Get One Last Dance in hardcover, trade paperback or digital editions from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Smashwords and other online booksellers, or support your local independent bookstores by ordering it through bookshop.org for more information, go to their
[email protected] Today we have Arlo Z. Graves.
[00:03:47] Speaker C: Thank you for having me. This is exciting.
[00:03:49] Speaker A: The first question that I have for you is, what is your most recent book about?
[00:03:55] Speaker C: My most recent book is Black Rose and it is Van Helsing meets Tombstone on four times the recommended dose of Robitussin. I love it. That's how I actually pitched it to Steven.
[00:04:06] Speaker A: That's a good pitch. Why did you write Black Rose and what was your inspiration for it?
[00:04:12] Speaker C: Okay, this is kind of a story.
Back in the day. I was a teenager when the movie Van Helsing came out. And for some reason I was just obsessed with it. I don't really have a good reason why. I watched it recently and was like, okay, I was very into that. I guess I wanted to be Van Helsing. I wanted to be the monster hunter in the coat. Like, I swear to God, I wore this, like duster coat to school every single day. It's in my yearbook photos. It's a whole thing. I cosplayed Van Helsing. I just really wanted to be Van Helsing for some reason.
And I still wear long coats. And I attribute it to that obsession. So while I was going through that obsession phase, for some unexplained reason, I was also really fixated on the movie Tombstone with Kurt Russell and Wyatt Earp. And they barely show it, but he had this Colt Buntline revolver. And they do like a pan across it in one of the scenes. And it's just got this really, really long, ridiculous barrel. And I don't know why, but I just aesthetically, it stuck in my brain. I'm like, that's so gorgeous. I started writing fan fiction. Keep in mind, I only wrote about 20 pages of absolutely garbage teenage fan fiction where the character Van Helsing goes to the American Old west and he fights this creature in these ruins.
Silver haired character had Wyatt Earp's revolver. It was really dumb, very immature, poorly designed. I think it was probably less than 20 pages, but very short. And for some inexplicable reason, my dad liked it. I don't even know if he like read it or if he just heard me like talking about it. But he really liked this story for some reason. And ever since then, as I've been working on writing and working towards a writing career, he has always asked me, when are you going to write the Black Rose? When are you going to write the story about the black Rose? The black rose is the gun. And in 2020, there was a whole situation involving A wildfire. And my parents got back in and fought the wildfire and we weren't there. We didn't get back in, but my parents and the neighbors did. And my dad literally, he was 70 years old and he drug a fire hose full of water up the hill and held it over our cabin while Cal fire did the back burn 15ft away from our house.
And my parents saved our house. The fire was stopped there, so it saved the neighborhood. It was just like one of those like ridiculous, this can't possibly be real stories.
And after that, as I started getting back into writing, we were all traumatized. It was not great. I think I started writing again in like 2021. And he kept asking, are you ever going to write that book, the Black Rose? And I'm just like, you know what, I need to write it. I need to write it for him. I want to give him something. But there's no story. This is like such a stupid concept. And then for some weird reason, everything just fell into place literally all at once in maybe like a two day span. And I sat down and wrote the rough draft in I think about 13 days. And that's how it happened. And I went to Bacon and did a live pitch and the rest is history. We kept it a secret from my dad. He didn't know. We told him that my first book was something else entirely. And we revealed it to him on Christmas Eve this past year. So it was really special. Yeah, it's this whole thing involving this really dumb.
I keep saying it was dumb. I should just say it was like childish. I shouldn't talk down about it, but a very childish idea of combining these two things into the slash fanfic and then eventually looking at it from a more mature perspective and asking like, what could this actually be about? What was the core of Van Helsing that I really liked? And it was the moment where one of the characters asks him, how does it feel to become the monster who you have hunted so passionately? And that was a line that came at the almost the end of the movie. And I'm like, well, that was really cool. What if the whole story was the monster hunting monsters?
It's really close to my heart. It was something that I wasn't sure I'd ever be able to write. It just didn't seem like there was a good story. And then it just. It happened.
[00:08:10] Speaker A: Sometimes the muses take a few years to get the call to.
[00:08:13] Speaker C: Yeah, this one took solidly 20 years.
[00:08:17] Speaker A: Does your real life work influence your novels?
[00:08:21] Speaker C: Yes, I'M going to try to answer this in kind of two ways. I try to bring a lot of my own experiences into writing and of course like I write speculative fiction, so I make in a lot of things up, but I try as much as I can to ground things in reality. And something that I didn't actually think of it when I was writing Black Rose, but it ended up there. Anyway, in my next project is I have a. An illness that causes chronic pain and other things and that just kind of gets into my characters in some way or another, either intentionally or unintentionally. And I live in a very rural area that works its way in.
My parents were both firearm safety instructors and so I got to have a lot of real life hands on experience with weapons that gets in. A lot of people I meet along the way end up in the stories. A lot of things from my real life and real life experiences get sort of recycled or upcycled into fiction. But then I also try to do as much like grounded research as possible for each project. So for Black Rose specifically, after I had written the rough draft and I knew where it was taking place, I went to all of the locations with a notebook so that I could keep track of what they're actually like. And I'm so glad I did that because I had only googled what Nevada in the desert and the ghost towns looked like. And it was way different in real life. It looked so like barren and desolate in Internet pictures. I visited Goldfield and Rhyolite and Beity.
And while I was there, they were just gorgeous. There were all these plants and flowers and all sorts of different stones. And some of the ravines were like dyed, kind of like a tarnish color from the silver mining. It was just. It was so neat and like so much of actually going to those places got rolled into the later drafts of the story. So I like to do as much hands on stuff as possible.
[00:10:19] Speaker A: That's a good idea for most writers.
I understand that you have Black Rose and you had historian dalliances from Cupid's Arrow Publishing. It's been quite a year now. How do you feel about that?
[00:10:33] Speaker C: Oh, I feel great about it. I would say the only downside I'm experiencing is I am very bad at stopping and celebrating milestones. It's like as soon as something happens, I'm like, all right, next thing, next thing, next thing. There's more. I think we're slated for December. I'll have a tiny terror coming out from graveside. And then next year I have a piece in the Spicy Monster anthology as well. We're just going, oh, like, oh, my God.
And I am in the extremely fortunate and privileged position to be able to focus on writing right now. And it's like. It feels kind of, like, surreal that I'm getting traction in any. It just. I don't know, it's like I've been working towards it, but it feels very, very strange to get there. And I'm definitely not. Not celebrating at every point that I should be, and I need to make a concerted effort to do that.
[00:11:23] Speaker A: You just told us on your elevator pitch, what was your experience like when you did pitch it and how did you feel when you were doing it?
[00:11:32] Speaker C: And, well, first of all, Stephen is an absolutely wonderful human being who I would say went out of his way to make the experience not suck. So I'm just going to start with that.
He is so considerate to the people who are pitching and the people around him that it wasn't what I was expecting after playing Pat a Cake with, we'll just say some. Some other elements of the industry. It's very. It was very lovely. So we'll start with that. I really didn't want to do a live pitch. It's something I've been aware of for a very long time. And I'm like, no, I don't want to do this. I want to sell my writing with writing. I don't want to be seen. I don't want to be perceived. I don't want to talk to people. Oh, I really didn't want to talk to people, which is, like, so cringe. Like, now I'm talking to, like, everyone.
And then I met a very wonderful author, Lillian Sernica, and she mostly writes romance. Anyway, somehow she got me to go to Bacon. She basically coached me through doing a live pitch. She's going to hold your hand. I'm going to walk you through the basics of doing a live pitch. You should do it. You should try. You should talk to the publishers that are there. And then I ended up doing the live pitch. I was still laughing about it. I had to look this man in the eye and say, the thing about this is Van Helsing meets Tombstone. It's had four times the recommended dose of Robitussin, because that's the shortest way I can get the vibe into a little nugget. And he, like, socket. He's like, okay, I'd like to hear some more about that. And then we talked about it. It was not the horrible experience I had built up that it would be the takeaway from that is it's so important that I just not put up my own roadblocks for myself. Like it's okay to try new things even if they're scary. Like, don't make rules for myself that aren't necessary. I'm definitely hoping to try new and scary things moving forward.
[00:13:22] Speaker A: Where can people contact you?
[00:13:24] Speaker C: Well, I have a website. I'm on arlozgraves.com I'm on all the socials, but my preferred is Threads. I'm Arlo Z. Graves everywhere. No punctuation and they're just all one big blob. I yeah, I'd love to interact with more people on like Mastodon or Blue sky, but honestly, Threads is my my main social media at the moment and I I love chatting with people over there. We have a pretty cool group of people.
[00:13:49] Speaker A: Thank you very much for your time.
[00:13:51] Speaker C: You're welcome. Thank you for your time with the book. Thank you.
[00:14:05] Speaker A: In 1937, Frederick Rudolph plans to flee the German Reich with his boyfriend aboard the Hindenburg. But when disaster strike, he wakes in 2025 at the Moffett Field airship port near San Jose.
There, Leo Asher, concierge of the Hawaiian sun, awaits his newest butler as they Prepare for the 8th annual Queer Cruise. Frederick and Leo bond quickly, but secrets linger. Frederick's mysterious arrival and Leo's hidden medical condition threaten to upend the voyage.
Amid luxury airships and 200 queer guests, they must confront the past to find love in the skies.
Welcome aboard the Hawaiian sun, where elegance takes flight.
Get Hawaiian sun from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Smashwords and other online booksellers, or support your local independent bookstores by ordering it through bookshop.org for more information, visit Water Dragon Publishing Hawaiiansun.
[00:15:19] Speaker B: Thank you again to our guest author, Arlo Z. Graves. As I said in the intro, this was one you want to look out for. I think you really want to pick this up because they are an amazing storyteller. As of this recording, we plan on publishing a new episode every month. If you'd like to know more about Smallpox Publishing in a Big Universe, visit our
[email protected] and subscribe to our newsletter. Send us your feedback by using the Contact Us link or you can like us on Facebook where we are SPBUpodcast or on Instagram at SPBU Podcast. To find out more about the books and other products featured during this episode, please visit the small Publishing in a Big Universe
[email protected] this podcast is recorded and edited by Lisa Jacob. Executive producer is Steven Radecki. Theme and ad music is provided by melodyloops. This month's episode was sponsored by Graveside Press, Water Dragon Publishing and Cupid's Arrow Publishing. You can listen to our podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and most of your favorite podcast services.
Final Word About Me My name is Brian Buell. I am an author with Water Dragon Publishing. You can find my books, the Mel Walker Stories from the Water Dragon website and on Amazon. Thank you very much for listening and we will see you next month.
