Benjamin Kane Ethridge lives in Southern California with his wife and two children. He won the Bram Stoker Award for his novel Black & Orange and is out promoting his latest novel, Bottled Abyss.
When he isn’t writing, reading, videogaming, Benjamin’s defending California’s waterways and sewers from pollution.
What was the hardest part of writing your book?
After many years of taking my two hundred pound influence, my chair is an uncomfortable place to work. It’s distracting and painful. A muscle in my lower back just twitched as I wrote this.
When did you first start writing and when did you finish your first book?
I was probably twelve or thirteen years old. I wrote about 300 typed pages and figured I was done, because you know, DRAGONLANCE books were about that long too. I never thought of editing the manuscript, although when I read over what I’d written, I realized changes would need to be made… some day. I hope the characters in that book haven’t been holding their breath this whole time.
Can you tell us about your challenges in getting your first book published (if any)?
I sent my Bram Stoker Award® winning novel Black & Orange out to about a dozen places. Some returned form rejection letters and others gave words of encouragement with the looming shadow of N-O across their courier fonted missives. I was lucky I’d recently made friends with the brilliant author Michael Louis Calvillo, who believed in me for some reason. I still fail to understand what he saw in me, but I’m glad he saw it. Anyhow, he went to bat for me and Michael, may he rest in peace, was a formidable slugger. He had a book out with independent publisher BAD MOON BOOKS, and he told them they should read my novel. They did. Next, history knocked at the door to inform me it would take it from there.
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