Daniel Aegan
Villains, humour, and indie publishing
Hey everyone,
This interview was done via a series of questions rather than an ongoing conversation at the creator’s request, but was still great fun to read through. Daniel Aegan is an indie author of genre fiction novels and short stories that combine comedy with other genres including sci-fi, horror, fantasy, and villainpunk. We get to talk in this interview about books, writing processes, and writing terrible people.
Chaos Gays: Can you first, for people reading, describe a little about your books and who you are as an author?
DA: I sure can! Let me say right out of the cannon that my brain turns into something of a soggy noodle when I’m tasked with writing about myself. I don’t always trust that I’ll speak the correct way about Dan Aegan the author and the books I’ve written and self-published over the years. It’s also difficult to speak about everything I’ve written as a whole since I tend to be all over the place with my choice of genre and subjects for my stories. I tend to find myself funny, which was a hurdle growing up because my deadpan sense of humor got me into tons of trouble. Most of what I’ve put out into the world has had some comedy aspect to it, though I have written some extremely dark stories. I enjoy my special style of comedy mashed into what I write for the most part, and I hope that has shined as much as I feel it has in what I’ve put into the world. This is what speaks to me more than taking a genre like horror or sci-fi or fantasy and just pumping out an interesting story with any given narrative. I have a lot of fun meshing genres and pumping them full of corny jokes, and it should make them more fun for my reader. Who I am as an author is poured into every page of my books. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not all jokes and fun. The balance between the joking and seriousness of certain stories is a fine line to walk, but I enjoy walking that tightrope. One of my characters goes around a corner, and you don’t know whether they’re going to get a pie in the face or see a loved one get thrown off a cliff. That, as I’ve been told, is what it feels like to know me in real life. People often don’t know when I’m joking or genuinely upset because my face and mannerisms are the same in either situation. Like in my books, you never know what you’re going to get.
Chaos Gays: You talk about writing villains and terrible protagonists - can you tell us a little about some of them? What made you want to write them that way?
DA: This is an interesting question, and it’s something I’ve been asking myself lately. As of the time of me answering these questions, I’m doing my proofreading of Humans Are Trash, which you could guess from the title has some pretty shitty characters in it. Hell, I expect some readers to actively root for them all to die from the start of chapter one! I missed the creative writing class where we were told your protagonist must be a “good guy”. On some self-abusive level, I find horrible people fascinating. What makes a billionaire who actively wants poor people to suffer so compelling? Honestly, the most compelling thing about them is the imagined scenario where I can roll a guillotine up their driveways, ring the doorbell, and wait for them to come outside to see it. Maybe I’d shout “trick or treat” when they do, even if it’s in the middle of March.
Writers are prone to torturing their main characters. It’s in the job description. So, if I’m going to spend my time creating Hell on Earth for someone, I might as well enjoy it. To be fair, I don’t always write villains and terrible people as my protagonists, but they’re so much fun to beat up. There is the aspect of getting into their head and figuring out what, if anything, they can do in some half-assed attempt at a redemption arc, but some people are beyond redemption. Take the supervillain main character of Dr. Everything from my villainpunk book Reign of the Unfortunate. His character arc starts with wanting to kill the city’s premier superhero and use that momentum to take over the world with a team of other supervillains he hand-picked himself. But what happens when—spoiler alert—something more sinister comes along and tries to take away what he believes he’s rightfully won? Does he don the cape of one of the so-called good guys, or does he fight this new threat like a bully protecting shit he stole from the kid down the street? If it just so happens that saving the world lines up with his villainous vision, would that redeem him and make him a hero, or is he a villain simply fighting for himself? One of the best lines in this book—again, spoiler alert—is when people are under siege from an otherworldly threat after he’s taken over, and he addresses his fellow villains to say, “People are cowering in fear of these space locusts when they should be cowering in fear of us!” I feel that illustrates how a true villain would react. Other media has explored this lately, mostly in the superhero genre of things, but they like to go the route of them completing the hero’s journey and seeing the righteous light for what it is. I want to write characters who would see a movie or read a book with that and call bullshit.
Chaos Gays: As a creator, is there a goal for you when it comes to reactions from readers? Is there any particular way you want people to understand, or a thing you want people to understand about your writing?
DA: I probably want the same reaction most writers want when someone reads their stories. A good “holy shit” is a decent reaction I’d enjoy when someone hits a good twist they weren’t expecting. In the case of my more humorous books, a laugh every now and then is a good thing to elicit. At the end of the day, if someone enjoys one of my books for any reason whatsoever, that’s a great feeling.
There’s a mindset I get into when I write, and that’s reflective of how I’m feeling at the moment in time I wrote the story. The first thing I self-published was the first of three Blood Drive books that features a pair of vampires transporting a shipment of stolen donor blood—Blood Drive… Get it?!—across the United States. They’re joined by an ornery werewolf and chased by a gun-toting priest and a couple of New Jersey ‘family men’ who may have seen one too many episodes of The Sopranos. The first book doesn’t delve too hard into any commentary about the state of the USA or anything else. I’m not saying there aren’t any poignant moments because there are. I might have written the first draft of this as far back as 2013 or 2014, and it went through multiple rewrites since it would turn out to be my first published book. The sequel—The New Council: Blood Drive 2—featured a mass shooting in the middle of the book that was integral to the plot even though it was seemingly random. The third and final book in what I’ve come to call The Blood Drive Thrillogy is titled The King of America and features a fascist vampire who wants to claim kingship over America—if the title didn’t give it away. Blood Drive 3 features a riot in DC along with a lot of what I was feeling during the time I wrote it. The first draft predated the riots on January 6, 2021, and I wound up doing a rewrite of those scenes to reflect what had happened in real life. All that being said, I would want people to understand the fear of these issues like mass shootings being a horrible reality for people and the rise of fascist monsters in our midst, though I feel an ancient vampire doing this is far less scary than the types of people doing it in real life.
Don’t get me wrong. The Blood Drive books were still a lot of fun to write. It walks that tightrope of funny and horrible I mentioned earlier. Reflecting on it now, I would say I want people to know there can still be happy endings when things are at their bleakest. Hell, there is a ton of horrible shit happening right now that blows any evil scenario I’ve written about out of the water! I think I lost the thread here, which I tend to do, but this brings me back to wanting to portray an understanding that there are ways to cope with the awful shit we see other people going through daily. Vampires aren’t going to fight fascism for us, but perhaps the vampire inside a particular reader will do what they can to fight it on their own terms.
There, I think I saved that one from going too far off the rails in the end…
Chaos Gays: Your work is humorous and manages to poke fun at your terrible people as we follow the story, which creates a lighter tone than some might expect, is there a motivation for this?
DA: The terrible people I put in the forefront of these stories, Humans Are Trash in particular, are caricatures of terrible people in real life. Some of them are mashups of multiple people. I stated earlier how I enjoy torturing these characters. It’s a lot of fun to put garbage people through horrible situations, even if it’s fictional. A big part of it is the realization that they’re vapid, bigoted, or just plain shitty. I recently read creative people often joke about that which gives them anxiety to take some of that off their mind, so it may stand to reason that my disdain for people like this has seeped into my books. Having them meander around a place like an alien space station only to find out they’re not as adept to their dire situation as they thought they would be creates a lighter tone for a story as you suggested. If I had someone there you want to see succeed, the setbacks would be more tragic instead of funny. I believe that’s the joy of writing characters like these, and I hope my readers feel the same way reading them. It can be cathartic to take part in a little schadenfreude and have a good laugh at some fictional assholes who deserve a little suffering in their lives. The much shorter and more concise answer to the question of what motivates me to do this is that it amuses the hell out of me. The sillier version of that answer would be “for shits and giggles”.
Chaos Gays: What parts of your writing process feel the most natural to you?
DA: I’m not sure if any part of it feels unnatural at this point. I’m rarely in a position where I’m forcing myself to work on my books, and that includes all the parts of the process from crafting the story for the first draft and consequent drafts that follow. Once a story starts flowing, it’s easy for me to get lost in the process. Take this interview for example. I said early in it that I don’t like writing about myself, but as soon as I get going it turns out I’m way too prolific and verbose for my own good. Getting into the zone takes a little time for me. Even revising, editing, proofing, and formatting has a natural feel to it. I do so many drafts of every story during this three-year cycle into which I’ve fallen. When I get back into a story I’ve already written, it feels a lot like hanging out with an old friend.
Chaos Gays: I’m still very much learning about the indie market myself, and it sounds like something you’re very passionate about, do you have specific worries about the market? Or vice-versa, is there anything you really love about the direction indie publishing is going in?
DA: As far as indie publishing goes, I’m more focused on what I’m putting out there instead of the market as a whole. I do support indie writers, obviously, and I buy more self-published books than traditional ones. I hope that didn’t sound like I’m white-knighting myself. The traditional publishing scene is a mess I’d tried to navigate in the early stages. I tried to get an agent or a publisher for my early books: Blood Drive, Excalibur Nights, and I’m in Sci-Fi Hell were all books I wrote years before I started self-publishing and wanted to see in the mass market. I’m sure a lot of people reading this are familiar with the querying system the author agents have put into place. Some people can get through it with no problem, and other people never quit trying to land someone to represent them. I give a shitload of credit to those in the latter category. I couldn’t last long at all. Begging someone to read just a few paragraphs of what I bring to the table felt awkward, and I found the whole process dehumanizing after a short while. In the end, I decided it was best for me to go about it on my own after being told books with a humorous tinge weren’t something they could sell. The straw that broke the writer’s back was when I was told to skim through the hottest sellers on Amazon and write how they wrote. I never got into this to churn out books I wouldn’t want to read myself, and I wasn’t prepared to strip the personality from my stories to fit some cookie-cutter vision of what someone says I should be. Self-publishing gave me the freedom to write my stories on my terms, and I haven’t looked back. Sure, it would be nice to be making Stephen King money off something I created, but I’m happy writing the books I want to see in the world.
Indie publishing is what you make of it. There are plenty of independent publishing houses out there too, but the scene is fraught with vultures, scammers, and sometimes viler people than the characters in my book. At least two times a month I see a post on social media of an author in the indie community posting a horrid take, outing themselves as a bigot, complaining publicly about a bad review they got while naming names, or other gross behavior. I’m not saying this kind of bullshit is indicative of indie writers in general, but it’s felt hard by the community as a whole when someone goes into this realm. It’s an unfortunate thing to say after all this time, but self-publishing still comes with a bit of stigma attached to it. Writers doing the things I described drags the whole indie community down, and the advent of untalented and fake writers using AI programs to do the writing part of…um…writing adds a whole new layer of fuckery that people can point to and say, “See! This is why I don’t buy indie books!” If anything is worrisome about the future of self-publishing, it’s a whole slew of wannabes feeding prompts into a machine to get a book that sounds as bland as a pair of dingy tightie whities.
That being said, there are a lot of things I do love about the indie market. I’ve mentioned a bit of this already, but the freedom to write whatever you want without someone berating you for it is one of the top reasons. The community, especially my fellow queer writers, are great as well. It’s almost funny how things work out. When I started writing and putting my stuff up for sale, I lost a ton of friends who thought I had “sold out” or whatever shitty labels they dumped on it. But as it turns out, the people I met since going on this writing journey in the indie community have been so awesome. We read each other’s drafts, send notes and feedback, and endlessly support one another through the entire process. I even run a daily hashtag game on BlueSky for indie authors—shoutout to my SmoreWords peeps—that encourages us to gab back and forth about our progress and whatever questions I dump on them. The sense of comradery and friendship I’ve gotten from this group of truly awesome people and fellow writers who, quite frankly, give me a surge of happy jealousy when I see their skills come to life on the page. If anything makes being an indie author worthwhile, it’s the people with whom I’ve had the privilege of writing.
Chaos Gays: You describe the genre as ‘villainpunk’ where did this come from and what does it mean to you?
DA: OK, this might be a bit of a long story—surprise! Keep in mind it’s not a good story. It features a certain shitty someone who won’t wind up in a book of mine because some people are too shitty to become a decent heel of one. Not to put too fine of a tip on it, but I did what all good villains do and took the genre of ‘villainpunk’ for myself from someone who didn’t and still doesn’t deserve it.
Let me explain.
As I said, I’m not going to name the author who coined the term in the first place. His reasoning for doing it was as nefarious as it could be. The long and short of it is they were in trouble for…ahem…sexual misconduct among other things. When I first came across them and read about their devotion to villainpunk, I was hooked. I had an idea in my head for the longest time about a group of supervillains who want to take over a city after killing its premier superhero. That’s right, you heard about this one already: Reign of the Unfortunate. If it hadn’t been for me coming across this person’s villainpunk posts on the dead bird app (that’s what I adorably call Twitter), I may have never written what had once been a Spider-Man fan fiction in my head. I wouldn’t have continued to write in the villainpunk genre, meaning Bad News the following year or the upcoming My Good Friend Dr. Debaucherous, which will be out later this year, would never come to fruition. I found out much too late for my liking what this guy had been doing and that he started using villainpunk because he got drummed out of the steampunk community for his devious actions. In fairness to all parties involved, I’m doing villainpunk better anyway.
I never claimed to invent villainpunk, but it’s too big of an idea in my head to allow someone so petty and perverse to taint it. I took an idea that came from the need to escape one’s actions and turned it into something else entirely. I don’t relate to this person, I don’t credit them for villainpunk, and I don’t even mention their name.
Villainpunk belongs to the miscreants and those of us shunned by those who are supposed to be our peers. What defines a villain to me is what society dictates as one. I don’t need a dictionary or a literary expert to tell me a villain must be the antagonist of a story. If the popular kids are going to look down on me because of who or what I am, I’ve become a villain to them, and I’ll wear that label with pride. My villainpunk stories aren’t about bad guys running amok to give the good guys pink bellies or titty twisters, and I’m not writing from the point of view of some fascist who wants to enslave everyone because they want the world to fit their fucked-up narrative. Well, I do sometimes write from that point of view, but only in the stories where they’re the antagonists. Villainpunk to me isn’t writing something like Megamind or Suicide Squad or The Boys. I believe wholeheartedly it means that for some people who also write in this genre, even if they don’t know the term, and that’s great for them. I’ve read some spectacular stories that fall into this category. For me, however, it’s about featuring the outcasts, losers, and other wastes of life who want nothing more than their moment in the sun. Sure, there’s a supervillain looking to take over the world here and there, and their stories are valid too! Just because something doesn’t feature a classic villain doesn’t mean it’s not villainpunk. You don’t have to wear dark capes and black masks to conventions to be one. For a lot of us, it’s just being who we were meant to be. That’s what’s best about being a villainpunk writer. You can blaze your own path and say, “Fuck conventional genres and how you think I should write them!” The second you tell someone what they should and shouldn’t be writing in any genre, you’ve become the wrong kind of villain.
Chaos Gays: Big dreams for these books? Any idea of the spaces you’d love the books to reach, or the audience you’d like to find you?
DA: Right now I’m enjoying my time writing without any grandiose fantasies. It would be awesome to strike up a multi-movie or streaming show deal for something I’ve written, but I know how slim of a chance that is for a relative nobody like me. I don’t know the right people or run in the right circles. It’s part of being that specific type of villain to which I compared myself earlier. If the people who go out of their way to read my books enjoy them, then I’m happy. To paraphrase Dire Straits: I’ve got a day job—I’m doin’ alright.
There’s another aspect to this I’d be remiss if I didn’t bring up. I know myself well. In fact, I know myself so well I can tell you with zero uncertainty I’d let whatever fame came my way turn me into a huge asshole. Don’t get me wrong. I’d still be a righteous asshole like I am now, but it would make me a thousand times louder. It wouldn’t take long for me to become unbearable as I drag my soapbox with me wherever I go to shout at anyone who can’t help but listen about whatever the hell I feel is important at that particular moment in time. Everyone would say, “He let success change him,” and they’d be correct in their statements. I wouldn’t care, either. We’re supposed to change, and them seeing me using my fame and newfound wealth to say what needs to be said and help the underprivileged would do a number on their views about me.
See, you didn’t think I’d go there in the end, did you?
I’ve always been a firm believer that you’ll grow the audience you’re meant to have. OK, maybe I didn’t believe it with that exact phrasing, but the spirit of it is something I’ve believed for sure. Not every writer, particularly my fellow indies and I, is gifted the chance to build up a fanbase like writing superstars like Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, or Chuck Tingle. I’m grateful for every reader I have. As awesome as it would be for my books to be lining the shelves in every bookstore in the world, it brings me an endless amount of joy that there are people who look forward to reading my corny-ass books. The people who are with me now on this journey are the ones I don’t want to forget when my first Netflix series debuts and my ego spirals out of control.
Chaos Gays: Last, light-hearted question: since you’re writing villains... do you think you would survive in the world you created? And what would you be doing out there?
DA: Oh gods no, but I don’t understand how I survive in the real world. I don’t think there’s a single world or a dimension in anything I’ve written that features a place I would ultimately survive if I were shunted out of this horrible reality and into it. This goes double for the books where I purposely make the world into a place that’s about to end or came close to ending, which happens from time to time. I’d probably do OK with the ones vaguely modeled after real life like Humans Are Trash or last year’s In Search of Channel Void, but only if I could sidle into a life similar to what I’m living now. I don’t have the wherewithal to survive in a world full of heroes and villains. I’d be an innocent bystander to the clusterfucks I’ve created for the sake of driving the plot forward. In most instances, I’d probably be trying to live my life under the asinine circumstances of my existence in a fictional world. It’s pretty much what I do now, but at least there would be a little more style to it.
Chaos Gays: For any readers, I got to read this interview in a fashion not entirely different to the way you did. I’ve laughed, and enjoyed Daniel Aegan’s wit transferring not only into novels but into life. For those of you who want to see a bit more of it, the links are below as always!
Links
Website: DanielAegan.com
BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/danielaegan.bsky.social
