We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Dave Niemitz. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Dave below.

Hi Dave, thanks for joining us today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.

The first piece of learning to write is reading, widely, and understanding your own taste. Engaging with stories told by other people is the first step in creating your own style. The second step, of course, is writing, and I’ve been doing that for thirty years now.

I can remember as far back as 4th grade taking a short story assignment from my teacher and turning it into an epic! -in nine year old terms. I took creative writing classes for a minor as an undergrad, and tried to learn from every professor I had, even when we disagreed.

As a teacher, I spend much of my time modelling literary analysis for my students, and of course sustained, close study of meaningful texts naturally leads to reflection on your own writing. When I went back for my masters, I chose to study Creative Writing at a graduate level, and my first novel, A Sea Cold and Deep, germinated in New Jersey during a summer weekend at Fairleigh Dickinson.

Like any craft, writing is a skill you never stop working to improve. I could have gone back for that MA earlier, but would the inspirations that led to that novel have congealed in the same way if I had? I don’t think so. It was heavily inspired by breaking technological developments, and I was constantly saving articles to use as inspiration.

As far as obstacles – I’m still paying off what I learned in the grad program, and I was lucky enough to be able to take out a student loan. I was also lucky enough to have an academic record that would get me accepted to the program. Not everyone can take that route, and I recognize the ways in which I’ve been lucky.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I self-published my first novel, A Sea Cold and Deep, in August of 2022. My second novel, the first in a Fantasy Trilogy, is The Faerie Knight, which released this past June; and the sequel, The Graal Knight, is due on the 6th of December.

We’re in something of a fortunate time for self published authors – the existence of services like Kindle Unlimited and Patreon allows people to make a living without being beholden to the traditional mainstream publishers. Of course, for every runaway success story, there are thousands of people turning out wonderful fiction and not getting anywhere.

I’ve been lucky enough to join up with a group of friends in a writing coop that we call Caffeinated Terrier press, and we give each other a lot of support as a group. I’ve also been fortunate enough to have the audio rights for Faerie Knight and Graal Knight picked up by Tantor Media, and I’m very excited that the former will release through them on December 31st, narrated by Richard Trinder.

There’s a lot of turmoil in writing and publishing circles at the moment about the use of Large Language Models, somewhat mis-termed AI. People are turning out AI covers, using AI to edit, or even to churn out books more quickly.

My novels are, and will remain, 100% produced by humans, at every step of the process, including the cover art – which is produced by my very talented wife, Sarah.

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

I think we need a widespread recognition that artists, musicians, writers, actors, and all creative people deserve to be paid for their time and work. There are websites that scrape novels and post them for free, and people need to recognize that very few authors are rolling in money. This is not a situation where the entity being harmed is a faceless corporate monolith or a billionaire.

Whether you download an ebook, subscribe to Kindle Unlimited or Patreon, or purchase a physical hardcover, the cost to a reader is not high. We’re counting on numbers to be able to do this full time, and pirating directly keeps us from being able to do that.

Engagement is incredibly important. If you like an author, follow them on social media, share their posts, comment. Go to amazon and review their books after you read them. We’re all at the mercy of the algorithms that determine visibility.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

When I was a kid, I remember going to the public library in my town and tearing through the fantasy and science fiction shelves (they weren’t very extensive). When I had a bad day, or was feeling lonely, I could fall into worlds that felt like wonderful dreams, and be consumed by them.

If so much as one person gets that magical feeling when reading one of my books, then I’ve done what I set out to do. If that happens, I’ve done my part to keep a sense of wonder alive in the world, and that seems like a pretty good legacy to leave behind.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://caffeinatedterrierpress.com/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61558007085046
• Other: https://a.co/d/hjsnXly
  https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/22724087.David_Niemitz
  https://tantor.com/the-faerie-knight-david-niemitz.html
  https://patreon.com/DavidNiemitz
  https://www.royalroad.com/profile/356745

Image Credits

Art & Map by Sarah Murphy