Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Chad Huskins. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Hi Chad, thanks for joining us today. It’s always helpful to hear about times when someone’s had to take a risk – how did they think through the decision, why did they take the risk, and what ended up happening. We’d love to hear about a risk you’ve taken.

A very large risk you take as any creative person trying to turn it into a living is that it simply isn’t as reliable as, say, a job you pick up down the street by submitting and application or resume. Those jobs have hierarchies of titles, ranks, positions with specific job titles and requirements–in other words, “have this much experience and a bachelor’s in that, and then you can expect X amount of pay, for a few years, and you should expect to move up in the company by X amount of years.”

As an artist, it is the Wild West. Audiences’ tastes change, technology makes some of what you do obsolete, and here you’ve given up all the years you could have earned in a field that pays (like, say, being a doctor or an accountant) and all you’ve got is a portfolio full of artwork, manuscripts, things that are absolutely useless in seeking a 9-to-5 job.

So, when you set out to become an artist, it’s very difficult to have a “normal” job, and also a family and friends, because so much of your time is in the “training” stages–like a boxer having to give up so much time at the gym, sparring, working out and whatnot. So when so much of your free time at home must be dedicated to not only crafting a new piece of art, but actively training to get better…you can find yourself friendless, or close to.

But then, you can’t exactly just jump right into a writing career, can you? Not without a “normal” job to provide income, no sir. You have to have stability.

So the risk you take as a creative is the same at Day 1 as it is at D 9,000. What happens when this doesn’t immediately pay off? Where the hell am I gonna go? Will I even have money for a car? An apartment? Hell, is anybody going to want to be my friend if I’m broke all the time? Jesus, will I be freakin’ homeless?

I chose to take the risk at about 15 years old. I just said, “Hell with it, you only live once, and I don’t wanna do anything else.” And I think it happened because knew soooo many people who were successful financially, but were always unhappy. Like, always. And the common denominator down through the years was that they wished they’d opened that bakery, or created that boardgame they had in their head, or, in my father’s case, that he’d just gone to Alaska with his best friend when he was 19 and bought land there, and never come out of the wilderness.

My father was a firefighter that committed 33 years of his life to service, and he was proud of his time, but I always felt a lingering regret in him. He sometimes talked about it, when it was just he and I alone. He was proud of his firefighting service, but he always wanted to move in the deep, deep wilds, like Robert Redford in that film Jeremiah Johnson, or else be a country singer. He would’ve been great at either. But things happened that kept him in Georgia, made him a family man (which I’m certain he enjoyed, as well), but there was always that nagging question: “What would’ve happened if I’d done what I always wanted to do?”

My father chose the safe path.

Most people choose to go the safe path, and I absolutely understand them and their decisions. But I’m built different. I need to see what’s out there, and what I can do. Sometimes that’s meant some lean years.

Chad, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I read a book called Sphere, by Michael Crichton, when I was about 14 years old. Two of my best friends were leaving for summer vacation, and I lived in the middle of nowhere, so obviously my friends being gone all summer meant I was going to be alone in hell. When I bemoaned my plight to a friend, he tossed a book at me and said, “Here, read a book!” He was joking, of course. It was just some random book he picked up from somewhere in the house, but it was Sphere.

I’d never read a book all the way through before. Not on my own, anyway. In fact, I was in remedial reading up to the fifth grade. I hated reading. So I’m not sure what compelled me to read Sphere–but I think it might’ve been the cover. It’s a sci-fi novel about scientists who find something strange at the bottom of the sea, and encounter something unprecedented. The cover had this shadowy guy staring ominously into a giant spherical object, with numbers spiraling around it. I read through it in three days, then reread it a few more times. I was entranced.

I was instantly addicted to reading.

I started gobbling books up left and right: Star Wars novels, Stephen King, Tom Clancy, Ann Rice. I started buying old, dingy books in bookstores, out-of-print sci-fi and fantasy novels, by authors like H. Beam Piper (a sci-fi writer who killed himself back in the 60s and is severely underrated, I might add), short story collections I found in my grandmother’s house, and anything that caught my eye in the school library. I was always a movie buff, but now I was a book buff, too. I couldn’t stop myself.

I also had (at the time) undiagnosed OCD. Not the kind people usually mean when they say they like things in a certain order. I had real obsessive-compulsive disorder, where I had to touch everything six times, walk through doorways eight times, and say words backwards because…something bad would happen if I didn’t? I don’t know, to this day OCD is still very misunderstood, but at the time, mine was severe, to the point I know I became the “weird kid” and made few friends, and so when I started writing at like 15 years old, I had to write 2,000 words a day.

Like, I had to.

So, if I woke up, I’d write maybe 500 words (and do a word count before I left for school), then come home and try to hammer out 500-1,000 more after dinner, and before I went to bed, write another 500. It had to be at least 2,000. I did this for about five years, and never missed a day. I have still have ungodly amounts of those first (awful) novels in storage somewhere.

Then I started taking classes. I joined meet-up groups for writers, joined book clubs, and taking fiction intensives classes. I got into martial arts and became an instructor for almost a decade, and during that time just kept writing. I rarely dated, I was all about reading, writing, and martial arts. I had six good friends at the time, and that was about all I had time for, because I was either working towards another rank in Kali or Jiu-Jitsu, or was working towards finishing my next novel.

Then, because of my skills in the martial arts, I met some people in the Atlanta film scene. Stuntmen. I trained with them for a while, then was introduced to some people in the industry. A lot of things are a blur, but eventually I was introduced to the widow of Aaron Hernandez, the NFL player convicted of murder and who hanged himself in prison. Her and a film producer were working on her story, and asked me to do a pitch. I interviewed Aaron’s widow and others around him, wrote a script, and sold it. To this day it is in “pre-production” limbo, but maybe one day it will be made into a feature-length film.

I also met some people who wanted to buy the film rights to my novel series “Psycho Save Us.” It’s an urban fantasy thriller about two young girls with a gift for telepathy who are abducted off the streets of Atlanta by human traffickers. They use their telepathy to communicate with one another, as well as a car thief in Atlanta, who can somehow pick up on their telepathic thoughts–kind of like picking up someone else’s phone call.

I have had scattered success, and I’m kind of mercenary in my way of finding writing work. Right now I’m finishing up a dark pirate horror novel called “Pirates of the Long Night,” and an action-comedy called “Silent Night of a Thousand Ninjas.” I’m also experimenting with the LitRPG genre with a book about Vikings, called “Needful Iron.”

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.

I would say that non-creatives struggle (and will always likely struggle) with understanding that creativity is not really a science. For instance, if you need to build a house, then you need to be precise with your measurements, and those measurements will be determined on many other precise things: the foundation you pour, the kind of climate this house must endure, etc. All of these are very predictable things, leading to very predictable questions you can ask your contractor: “What will this house ultimately look like? Can you give me an estimate on cost? Can you show me alternatives to the materials you’re using?”

All very sensible questions, with concrete answers.

But when you create something brand new, especially in the world of fiction, the idea you have in your head…it is amorphous. It is without true form. I compare it to a planet or solar system at its beginning, when all the hot gases and raw materials are swirling around, hurtling through space, smashing into each other, gravitating and agglutinating with one another, and slowly, slowwwwwly, taking form.

In all that chaos, you cannot predict AT ALL what the solar system will ultimately look like. You have to wait for the dust to settle, for things to cool down, and then you begin to see its shape. Then, at last, the idea is formed, and you may start writing it down, painting it, or whatever.

I know this is often frustrating for non-creatives who employee creatives to do creative work, but all we can do is try to communicate our needs to each other (client and creative), and set realistic expectations at the beginning. Be honest, and listen to each other. Listen to each other honestly. And exercise patience. Because creatives and non-creatives are always going to butt heads, because non-creatives want deadlines met, and creatives want to make something they can be proud of. A lot of times, rushing a creative only makes subpar work, and in that case, neither the client nor the creative is happy.

How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?

Phew, well, this is a big topic.

I’ll start by saying the elephant in the room, the thing all artists right now are afraid of: A.I.

Artificial intelligence such as Midjourney and now ChatGPT. Midjourney is a kind of bot for creating AI-generated art, which, at first, I think a lot of artists dismissed, because the pics weren’t very good. But now, it is learning, and Midjourney is creating such amazing art that it is winning art competitions!

And now ChatGPT is creating whole books. Whole. Entire. Narrative. Books. And some people are now flooding the self-publishing world with AI-generated novels, in the hopes of earning a quick buck.

This is really bad. Like, really bad. For all of us.

If artists become easily replaced, then there becomes no outlet for creatives to make ANY income. We are inching closer to a future where we remove even the concept of nurturing human creativity, where kids in school will not value art at all, because they’ll say, “Why do I need to learn anything about art at all, and why even learn to write or exercise creatively, when I can just get BookBot99 to write a novel for me?”

You know, there is such a thing as “lost technology,” when we, as a race, slowly drift away from an art or a technology so seamlessly that all of civilization forgets how to do it. We once lost the ability to paint in perspective, for like a few hundred years. It can happen.

So what happens when, after a hundred years or so of AI-generated art, makes it so that nobody ever picks up a pencil or paintbrush to learn the techniques it takes to create a Mona Lisa or draw a comic-book superhero? I don’t know. I won’t be around to see it. But in the immediate future, I can see artists taking a f@*%ing HUGE hit to their income.

So, what can society do to support artists, you ask? Resist AI-generated art being submitted to art competitions. Resist AI-generated art taking the place of artists working in videogames, films, books, comic books, and television. Resist it everywhere. Don’t encourage it, and insist that companies that pay living, breathing artists to do the work. That’s my take.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://9dusks.com/
• Twitter: @ChadRyanHuskins

Image Credits
Chad Huskins and Micah Champion (artists)