Today we’d like to introduce you to Ryan Neely.
Hi Ryan, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
Wow. Okay. So…the first memories I have about my desire to be a storyteller started in middle school. A friend of mine and I worked for weeks on a shared drawing of a fantasy creature. We would tell each other the story of this creature as we drew him: why his fur was the way it was, how he evolved to have a bifurcated tongue, and why his tail had a spike on the end. That kind of thing. We wanted to understand the evolution of the creature–the WHY behind WHAT he was.
That friend had a group of friends who played Dungeons and Dragons, so he was good at coming up with backstories. My parents wouldn’t let me participate in the game, so hanging out with this kid on my own was my first foray into storytelling.
During my freshman year, I wrote short stories and attempted to write a novel (which was terrible). I continued to be interested in storytelling throughout high school, but life (as they say) sometimes has other plans, and I am a learner, so I found myself with more interests than I could pursue.
As a teenage boy, one of those interests was girls. Another of those interests was math and chemistry. After three years of high school, I hadn’t completely abandoned storytelling, but I was determined that I was going to major in analytical chemistry in college. Before Sheldon Cooper was a thing, I wanted to be the Sheldon Cooper of the chemistry world.
The thing about a liberal arts education is, they require you to take electives so you can get a “well-rounded” education. I didn’t want to take electives, or, if I was going to take an elective it was going to have as much to do with my chosen degree as possible.
Since I was interested in chemistry (and girls), and there was this part of me that still wanted to tell stories, I thought, “What better elective to take than photography? It involves chemistry. It could be a way to talk to girls, and it lets me tell stories through a visual medium.”
So, I took a photography elective. Then I took another, and another, and another until I realized that I loved photography. The chemistry part was fun. Having an excuse to talk to girls was fun, but I loved the challenge of trying to tell an entire story through a single image.
I quickly moved to Santa Barbara, California where I enrolled in Brooks Institute of Photography and studied fine art portraiture. The thing that interested me the most when it came to telling stories through photography was how a simple change of lighting could drastically alter the emotional subtext of an image.
When I was through with photography school, life (and love) threw me another curve ball. I found myself following a girl to San Francisco. There, I wanted to continue my journey into visual storytelling, so I enrolled at the Academy of Art University where I studied 3D Animation and Visual Effects for Film and Television.
My advisor at the school helped connect me to a local filmmaker who needed help managing the production of a short film he was making. That filmmaker introduced me to several other industry professionals, and it wasn’t long before I was working [more than] full-time in film and television in San Francisco.
The majority of that work was spent helping to produce television commercials (there’s more money in commercials than there is in film or television, though it can be less rewarding). However, I did have the opportunity to work on films like Zodiac and X:3.
Just when I was finding my feet in the film industry, again, life took a different turn. Three things seemed to happen all at once. The first was that I was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. As soon as I finished treatment and was designated “no sign of disease,” my wife’s sister was diagnosed with breast cancer. That was the second blow. My wife and I relocated from San Francisco to the middle of Iowa to help her sister through treatment and to help her sister’s two young children (four and seven-year-olds) work through the grieving process when my wife’s sister died. During this time, that third thing was an epiphany I had.
It seemed as though, for just over a decade, I had been relocated about once every two to three years. Each time I would have to find a new job, and I was never finding a way to make a career. Somewhat adrift in middle-of-nowhere Iowa, all I had access to in way of income was customer service or industrial service jobs. Nothing I was passionate about.
If we were going to continue this trend of moving all over the place, I needed a career that I could do from anywhere. Something that could move with me. So, I turned back to writing. I started by taking a correspondence course out of Canada. Just a kind of self-teaching course that was more like auditing a couple of creative writing classes than earning an actual degree.
I enjoyed the learning process behind good storytelling so much that I decided to finish a degree in English with a minor in Creative Writing. So, I enrolled in the online degree program at Southern New Hampshire University… just as we had decided to move away from Iowa.
I worked on the course load for my English degree while we transitioned from middle-of-nowhere Iowa to middle-of-nowhere Minnesota. We talked about moving to one of the Portlands first (both Oregon and Maine). We even talked about immigrating to Canada, but my in-laws run a resort in northern Minnesota and they were desperate for good help to keep the resort going.
That’s what brought us to Akeley.
I finished my English degree and immediately began working on writing novels. Over five years, I wrote about five novels. I also worked toward getting published by writing dozens of short stories. Those first five novels sat in a file on my computer for years while I worked on larger projects, all to find a literary agent who would help me work with a traditional publisher to get my books published.
After another five years (and what would equate to another six novels), I studied the state of the publishing industry and my current role at the resort I manage for my in-laws and realized that the traditional publishing path would never work for me.
So, I grabbed one of those old novels that had never left my mind and put it through the same rigorous process as any traditionally published novel would go through. I went through the process of forming my own publishing company and hired professionals working in the industry the same way that Penguin Random House would.
A year later, my first novel–Maxwell Cooper and the Legend of Inini-Makwa–was released, and a little less than a year after that it was a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award. I published the book under the pen name Simon Hargreaves. Maxwell Cooper and the Legend of Inini-Makwa is a young adult supernatural suspense novel that will eventually become a series (I’m working on a sequel now), but I also write in other genres under other pen names.
People always ask about the use of pen names, and every author has his or her reasons. Mine is exactly as I mentioned above. I write in several genres. Some of those genres absolutely should not intermingle. It’s easiest to keep them separate by using different pen names. This way, a middle-grade kid looking for the next adventure on Bear Tooth Point doesn’t accidentally pick up a thriller about a man who doesn’t feel emotion except through the act of murder, or an erotic romance that delves into the world of human trafficking.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
It has not been a smooth road.
First of all, I’m a slow writer. I need time to let the story ruminate and breathe and build. I also have commitments such that I work the equivalent of two full-time jobs. So, getting the words in and then getting them packaged and discovered is super challenging.
That was one of the reasons I realized the traditional publishing route wouldn’t work for me. I cannot reliably produce good material once a year (or faster). There are just too many things going on.
It’s also been a challenge to train my family and those who rely on me for certain aspects of life to recognize that writing is a career path and when I’m home pounding away on my computer, I’m not just playing. It isn’t free time for anyone to request my resources at a whim. Guarding that writing time has been a huge undertaking.
Also, because the market is so saturated with content, it’s challenging to be noticed in the first place, and when people find out you’re an independent publisher, sometimes they assume the work will be sub-par because, unfortunately, there has been a precedent set by other authors who realized that, so long as they were cranking out the product on a fast basis, many readers didn’t seem to care about quality. They were after quantity, which has affected the perception of the entire industry.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I’m an author.
I write books.
I write in about four different genres under four different pen names. Two of those pen names have books published.
Two are still in the making.
I’m proud of the fact that one of my books was nominated for the Minnesota Book Award (Maxwell Cooper and the Legend of Inini-Makwa).
I think what sets me apart from most other authors is that I’m extremely critical and am interested in high-quality content, even if that means low quantity.
What does success mean to you?
Baby steps.
Success is about having a goal that is seemingly unattainable and then working away at that goal in slow increments. It’s like that cliché about how to eat an elephant. One bite at a time.
There will never be a moment when I have attained “success.” It’s a process–a journey, not a destination.
Pricing:
- Paperback: $16.99
- Hardcover: $29.99
- eBook: $5.99
- Audiobook: $13.99
Contact Info:
- Website: simonhargreavesauthor.com
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/simonhargreavesauthor
