This week the spotlight is on JD Cowan, author of The Pulp Mindset and numerous short stories that have appeared in Cirsova, StoryHack, and a variety of anthologies. Rather than sticking to a specific subgenre, he specializes in adventure stories with a touch of the weird.

Please introduce yourself and tell us about your background as a writer.
My name is JD Cowan and I started writing around a decade ago. It took awhile for me to find direction. I struggled around looking for just what I wanted to write until I looked into older pulp and adjacent stories such Abraham Merritt's Burn, Witch, Burn and G. K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday. It was then that I realized how much you could actually do in this medium and have been writing stories in this vein ever since. We need more Adventure!

What are the most prominent influences on your writing? How do you incorporate those influences without being derivative?
For me, it was the weird story that stuck in my mind. My definition of a weird story is one where the Weird invades on a "normal" situation and it is up to the protagonists to deal with it and bring back the normality worth striving for. The difference is that I like my "normality" to be a bit different, adjacent to the Weird. Writers such as C. L. Moore and Clark Ashton Smith had a way of making even the otherworldly seem natural, but on top of that was another layer of invading weirdness that confronted the characters and put them in peril. My main aim as a writer is to capture this.

Many authors say marketing is one of their biggest challenges. What tactics have you found to be most effective for getting your name out there?
Writing and submitting as much as you can is the best way to get your name out there. Eventually readers will recognize your name because they see it everywhere! It also helps to talk to as many similar-minded writers as you can and learn from them. You should also have something like an author site and a mailing list to point readers toward so they know where they can find you and get more of your writing.

How much do your audience’s expectations factor in to what you write? Does this ever cause you to hold back from experimenting?
The only thing my readers seemingly expect from me is action, and even then my best-selling work is The Pulp Mindset which is a non-fiction book. Suffice to say, my readers apparently expect me to do off the wall things. Perhaps it comes with being a weird writer that your audience expects you to write weird things? I can't say. Nonetheless, if my readers ask me loud enough to do something, I always consider it.

Have you had any new stories published recently? Are you currently working on any?
I just recently had my story "Dead Planet Drifter" published in the summer issue of Cirsova. It's the second story I've had published featuring Galactic Enforcer Ronan Renfield as he deals with otherworldly happenings in the distant future, the first being published in StoryHack #7. I have a few other stories written, both about Detective Renfield and not, including three I will be submitting when certain markets open up. I have a lot in the works!

Name one newer and one older book you have read and enjoyed recently. (“Newer” meaning from the past year or so, and “older” meaning written before 1980.)
For a newer book, I recently read The Eyes in the Walls by David V. Stewart, a small book about a Gen Y kid from back in the 1990s as he deals with seeing what might be a ghost and how it spirals out from there. It was an exciting and very tight read.

For an older book, I went through The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury. I'm not sure what it is with Bradbury, but he has such a knack for making the supernatural and the natural feel like they are one and the same, completely intertwined. Every story inside offered something completely different aside from that, and made it a delight to read.

Any final words?
I want to thank all my readers and anyone who has ever given one of my stories a chance. I hope you'll keep reading what I put out and join me as I continue on this journey ahead. That's what it's all about, after all!

Keep up with JD at his website, Worlds Between the Wasteland and Sky.