I was able to sit down and chat with self-published author Paul Telegdi recently about his life and career as a writer. His latest entry in his paranormal/crime anthology series, was made available for sale in e-book format on Smashwords on November 19th.
Dreamcast 4 continues the story of Travis, who has the gift of ESP, and uses his mental telepathy to help the local police force solve hard-boiled crimes. However, this time around the threats and dangers Travis is faced with through his mental powers hit a nerve in his home life. In one story, Travis’s wife is threatened by a hostile shaman, and in another, Travis’s powers spark the interest of an secret agency.
All four books in the Dreamcast series are available in e-book format on Smashwords for $4.99 each. The first three novels are available in carbon format on Telegdi’s website, found here. According to Telegdi, Dreamcast 4 will not see a physical counterpart to its e-book version.
The Dreamcast series marks Telegdi’s first venture into the self-publishing world. Most of Telegdi’s creative writing dwells in historical middle-age fiction, but a few years ago, after flipping through Stephanie Meyer’s debut novel, Twilight, Telegdi was intrigued by the idea of writing a story in a first-person perspective, whereas everything else he had penned was in the third person.
He said there was a kind of intimatimacy in the first person perspective, as the reader and the narrator have a direct link to each other, which can help establish a more relatable bond for the reader.
As such, Telegdi wrote a short story about an art student named Travis, who was wrongfully convicted of his friend’s murder when he claims to have known (through telepathic power) how she died. From that first story, the ideas kept flowing until Telegdi found himself with a handful of short stories that dealt with the Travis character.
Because of the short length of the stories, which are all interconnected to each other through Travis’s growth in age and worldly experience, Telegdi decided to compile the short stories into seperate anthologies — the perfect opprotunity for self-publishing, he said.
Teledgi looked into a number of self-publishing outlets for the first Dreamcast book, which contained two of the short stories. He researched various venues, such as Trafford, Lulu, and Indigo’s iUniverse services until eventually settlling with a small, one-man operated, self-publishing house in Cambridge, Ont.; a venue he used to also publish the second and third volumes.
In terms of his writing technique, Telegdi said he never writes an outline when he sits down to pen a short story or novel.
“The story writes itself from the first sentence,” Telegdi said, adding that it’s the characters and their experiences that drive the story, not him. He’s just along for the ride — but that is part of the excitement of writing without a predetermined path for the story to go.
Telegdi lives with his wife, Melanie, on the outskirts of Bradford, Ont. Telegdi works as an assistant to Melanie, who is a psychologist in in-town.
Nearing retirement, Telegdi said he is looking forward to writing more, and is craving for a new adventure to go on — but because of the advent of self-publishing and e-publishing, he feels the need to go back and refine the remainder of his fifteen unpublished novels before he can roll up his sleeves and start on a new literary journey.
The Mud Puddle 