Dissecting Michael J. Stiehl

Welcome to the new Black Hare Press Dissecting Author interviews. Each month we’ll slice open an author to find out who they are, what they write, and what keeps their creative juices flowing. Today we dissect speculative fiction author Michael J. Stiehl and spill his writing secrets and author aspirations. Welcome Michael!

Who is Michael J. Stiehl?

Michael J. Stiehl’s lifelong passion for fiction, in particular horror, comics, mystery, adventure, and science fiction, has led him to write stories that live in-between genres. Having spent his career working in academia, he is thrilled to be pivoting away from academic publications and toward the kind of writing that has always inspired him.

Michael lives in the Chicago suburbs with his wife, two kids, and their very silly poodle Jack. When not writing fiction, Michael spends his time riding bikes, camping, reading books, obsessively listening to music, and playing D&D with his friends. In short, he hasn’t changed at all since junior high.

He has published stories with Rogue Blades Entertainment, Black Hare Press, and World Castle Publishing.

Follow Michael here:
Amazon: www.amazon.com/author/michael_stiehl
GoodReads: www.goodreads.com/michaelstiehl
Facebook: www.facebook.com/michael.stiehl
Instagram: www.instagram.com/michael.stiehl
LinkTr.ee: linktr.ee/michael.j.stiehl

Tell us about yourself. When did your passion for reading and writing start?

My passion for reading started early in elementary school. My mom would take me to the library with her every time she went, which was often. At first we would go to the local library, but later she took me to Central Library in downtown Milwaukee. If you wanted to give a kid the message that reading is important, there was no better place to make that point than Central Library. With its marble floors and columns, arching ceilings, and grand staircases it feels like something out of a Victorian fantasy novel. I fell in love with it immediately.

Whenever we entered Central Library, she would let me rove the sprawling stacks of the kids’ section completely unsupervised. It didn’t take me long to realize those books contained worlds upon worlds, and all of them right there at my fingertips. It was pure joy.

The one that changed everything for me was Dr. Suess’s On Beyond Zebra! It’s about the letters that exist beyond ‘z’, with a new creature to demonstrate how to pronounce each of them. The idea that there could be more than the 26 letters I already knew was a revelation, and that moment was the first time I experienced the power speculative fiction has to ask the best question ever – “what if?”.

As for writing, once I saw what was possible in fiction I knew I wanted to do that too. I’ve dabbled at fiction writing most of my life, but only seriously in the last five years. I feel like I have a lot of lost time to make up for, but I’m grateful to be finally moving down this road.

Have you ever based a character on someone you know?

In the past, my characters were just altered versions of myself. Usually when I’d write a scene, I’d act out each part in my head, kind of like a one man show.

There are two exceptions to this. The first is my short story Shadow & The Wraith which appears in the anthology No Ordinary Mortals: A Heroic Anthology of Supers by Rogue Blades Entertainment. The main character in that story is loosely based on my wife. I didn’t intend to do that, it just sort of happened, but it’s okay because, just like Shadow is in that story, she is my hero.

The other is the character Mansell in my novella Sanctuary. I have no idea where he came from, he’s not like anyone I know or me, but I sure am glad he stopped by. He’s one of my favorite parts of that story.

Recently this has changed. I started working on something new that is slightly autobiographical. It takes place in a location I lived in, during a time when I was alive, and it’s full of characters who are made up of bits and pieces of actual people I knew. None of the characters are swiped whole cloth from any single person, but more than one is a composite of multiple people smashed together. The results have been fun and gratifying.

What’s your favourite part of the writing process?

The first draft. I love barreling through a story and seeing where it goes. I often write from an outline but that only takes me so far. Typically I veer off the outline quickly once I realize how incomplete it is, and then I just make stuff up to fill in what’s missing. The fun part happens when I put a well-made character in a situation I haven’t completely figured out yet. Sometimes, if I’m true to them, they will surprise me.

I had this experience with my novella The Maiden’s Sleep. There is a scene in that novella where the main characters are caught sneaking into a keep. I rewrote that scene dozens of times trying to get it right until I realized that one character, Freneck, wasn’t being himself. Once I stopped trying to force a particular outcome, and let him be, everything clicked, and I ended up with one of my favorite moments in that story.

Where do you find inspiration for your stories?

After reading Stephen King’s On Writing, and the pandemic, I got into walking. He recommends long walks in that book as a way to unlock ideas. I thought I’d try it out, and now I walk about three or four miles every day, no matter what the weather.

On those walks I listen to music and let my mind wander. Without fail, stuff pops into it. Sometimes that stuff is super mundane, like remembering to change the laundry or pay some bills, but, every once and a while, a real gem shows up. Countless times on those walks I’ve had a great idea that made me come to a complete stop so I can jot it down in the notes app on my phone.

The other place I get ideas from are failed stories, books or TV or movies where, if they had just changed one little thing, it would have been awesome. Nothing is more inspirational to me than that. For example, I’m completely convinced that the Star Wars prequels would have been better if there had been a love triangle between Anikin, Padme, and Obi Wan, especially if, after having had her advances spurned by Obi Wan, Padme would have turned to Anikin for consolation. I think that would have amped up the tragedy of Ankin’s fall and made the climactic Duel on Mustafar much better. Fortunately, I can just put that idea into a story of my own someday.

What’s brewing? What are your next big writing goals?

I’m almost done with my first, full-length novel called Twist of Cain. It’s about a teenager named Chris, who’s going through some tough times. Those times only get worse when he finds out that his former elementary school friend Donnie, who recently died, has become the subject of some twisted rumors around school. Specifically, that he recorded a suicide message on a cassette tape that causes the people who listen to it to go crazy.

When Chris finds out that the popular kids at school intend to play that tape at a huge spring break party, he becomes hell bent on stopping them. Along the way he gets dragged into a mystery much bigger than a high school kegger, and way darker than he can imagine.

After that I’m about two-thirds of the way done with a historical fiction novel called Harry Houdini & the Valley of Souls. In it, Houdini is a secret agent for the US Government who defeats real evil magic. It’s set on the battlefields of World War I, and has him sneaking behind enemy lines to stop the German army from unleashing a true supernatural horror in a last-ditch effort to win the war.

Finally, I also have several sequels planned to the novellas I’ve already had published. It’s been exciting to have readers respond positively to those characters and, just like them, I’d like to find out more about where these characters go and what happens to them.

What’s your most favourite under-appreciated novel?

Far-Seer by Robert J. Sawyer (1992)

This is the first book in Sawyer’s Quintaglio Ascension trilogy which is worth reading in its entirety. Set on an alien world populated by intelligent dinosaur-like creatures, the story follows a young Quintaglio named Afsan. Afasn is an apprentice astrologer whose world is turned upside down when he begins to observe the universe with his far-seer (essentially a telescope).

This is basically a retelling of Galileo’s fight with the Catholic church over the Earth’s position in the solar system only with talking dinosaurs. Its sounds crazy, but Sawyer does so many things with these books that make me jealous as a writer. With great economy, he not only builds a truly believable world but populates it with real characters that you both cheer for and against.

It’s also a wonderful example of science fiction doing what that genre does best – building interesting thought experiments that stick with you long after you finish the book. In this case, Sawyer’s world is a place where he explores the tension between faith and science and how the former, while often getting in the way of the latter, can be so fundamental to how we perceive our reality that we will ignore obvious truths to maintain it.

Which other authors are you friends with, and how do they help you be a better writer?

I would not be a writer today without the support and encouragement of my good friend Benjamin Chandler. I have known Benjamin for more than 30 years, and it was Benjamin who pushed me to write fiction in 2018, after patiently listening to me talk about it for decades.

Benjamin is my first reader on everything I do. No matter how harebrained the idea, or rough the draft, he reads my writing with great care and honesty. He will always tell me when something doesn’t work and offer helpful suggestions for how to fix it. He’s exactly the kind of partner you’d want as a writer, and I’m so grateful that we are friends.

Benjamin is also a gifted writer, whose short stories and novels never cease to astound me. His grasp of mythology, art, and literature are so much greater than mine, and it shows in the worlds he builds and the characters he fills them with. His novel Lasturia is available on Amazon, and if you love old, pulp fiction, hollow earth stories (think Edgar Rice Burroughs) you shouldn’t miss this one. It’s not only a rollicking tale of adventure but also a lovely, and believable, romance.

But as much as I love Lasturia, it’s his unpublished Elath the Thief trilogy (which I’ve been lucky enough to be the first reader on) that is truly brilliant. It is my sincere hope that one of these days some crafty publisher will put these books out, I’m convinced people will love them once they read them. They are a brilliant, expansive, and glorious meditation on identity, family, and the places we choose to call ‘home’ – plus there are some sweet monsters in them too.

If you could tell your younger writing self anything, what would it be?

Keep writing and be patient.

In one way or another, I’ve been jotting down stories since High School. Along the way I talked myself out of the idea of pursuing writing as a career, since it seemed unlikely to me that anyone ever finds success as a fiction writer.

Being a practical Midwesterner, I felt I had to find some reasonable way to make a living, which I eventually did, and it most certainly didn’t involve writing stories about monsters and adventurers – although don’t ask me how my Bachelor’s Degree in Geography made more sense than one in English, okay? It just did.

While I truly believe the internet is a bit of a mixed bag, the doors it has opened for me to publish my stories has been a huge motivator. Back in the pre-internet age it felt impossible to find open calls for short stories or publishers who were willing to take a chance on first time writers. That made it easy for me to feel like writing was a waste of time.

Now however, finding open calls is much easier, and having had some success getting my stories out into the world has been incredibly encouraging. Also, it’s such a high to receive positive feedback from complete strangers on something I’ve written, and that makes me even more determined to get all the stories rolling around in my head out into the world.

In relation to your latest book:

What sparked the idea for this book?

I can’t overstate what an inspiration music is for me in the writing process, and my novella The Bauer Ranch is a great example of this. I’d been struggling with how I wanted that story to end for a few days, I knew the big beats I wanted to hit, and thematically what I wanted to say, but specifically how I was going to accomplish that had become a sticking point. The solution came to me one night during an after-dinner walk.

It was dark out, and randomly The Rhythm Of The Heat by Peter Gabriel came on my headphones. As the song unfolded, with its eerie, slow building rhythm – so evocative of a rolling train car or wobbling mine cart – I started to get a feel for what Able Reed was going to be up against. At the four-minute mark, when Gabriel, with a soaring voice, bellows “the rhythm has my soul!” and those thundering drums started pounding in my ears, the idea of demons controlling an undead army of corpses with drums made perfect sense.

That song has such a spectacularly hellish vibe to it, which probably says more about my psyche than anything else. I believe Gabriel wrote it about an experience Carl Jung had with an African drum ceremony, but the magic of music is that we all get to pull our own meaning from songs. And the experience I had that night, one of an epic struggle against an all-consuming evil, inspired me to sketch out the end of that story as soon as I got home.

Is there a particular message that you hope readers will take from the book?

That there is always hope. Able’s situation at the beginning of The Bauer Ranch is so dire and miserable. He’s completely trapped by decisions he made in the past and he feels like the future will never be any different than the present.

But then, in the place he would least expect to find it, there is a glimmer of hope. The very person he’s been sent to kill offers him just the slimmest chance to change his fortune, and he takes it. We don’t know by the end of the story how that choice works out, but at least he believes things are looking up, and maybe that’s enough.

I think that’s true of life. There are lots of times things can seem bleak, and hopelessness can definitely be a spiral that just keeps pulling you down. But, if you try hard, sometimes you can find a bright spot and it can be enough to break that spiral. It can be the first rung on a ladder that starts to pull you up.

One of the blessings of living in Chicago, a place notorious for terrible weather, is finding genuine gratitude for something as simple as a nice day. For every sub-zero day, or crushing gray week of endless rain, there are those wonderful first warm days of spring, or epically beautiful summer days, that remind me that change is possible, nothing is bad forever, and that the future contains the promise of happiness. That feels like the definition of hope to me.

Thank you, Michael, it was a pleasure dissecting you to learn more about you and your writing world.