Today we’d like to introduce you to Cody Langille.
Hi Cody, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
After falling in love with reading in the 6th grade, my desire to become an author developed shortly after. I picked up a copy of The Crystal Shard by R.A. Salvatore and devoured it. After that, I was hooked. I consumed nearly every Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance book I could get my hands on.
Then, I moved on to Ravenloft, Wheel of Time, etc., and eventually, my foray led me to Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Bentley Little, and H.P. Lovecraft. I was already an avid horror fan due to my mom introducing me to horror movies as a kid, but reading the genre was something else. There’s something about your imagination filling in the blanks that can make something way more terrifying than anything the screen can show.
I was already interested in writing after reading so many fantasy books and had even attempted to write a few stories (not great by any stretch of the imagination). Horror books lit a different fire inside me, and I knew that writing horror was where I would focus my attention.
I graduated high school early and enlisted in the Utah Air National Guard when I was 17, turned 18 in basic military training (I didn’t tell a soul. That wasn’t attention I wanted there). I spent 20 years in the military as a full-time member of the Air National Guard, but on the side, I continued to write and hone my craft. One of the things I did to keep learning and getting better, was attending Seton Hill University for their MFA: Writing Popular Fiction program. That was a great experience and I learned so much there, not to mention met a lot of great professionals in the business.
I’ve gone through the struggles of getting published. Having been published both traditionally and via the self-publishing route, I started to see certain things occurring. Not all publishers are the same and I’ve worked with some great ones and I’ve worked with some that were less than stellar. So when I retired from the military, I got a crazy idea to maybe create my own publishing company and model it to be a publisher that I would want to work with. Therefore, in January of 2021, Timber Ghost Press was born.
I wouldn’t be where I am today without the love and support of my family. My wife always gave me the time I needed to write, work on projects, and support me. My mom always encouraged me to keep writing when I was younger. Without those two, who knows if I would have even stuck with it all, but they helped create a stable foundation for me to stand on.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall, and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Smooth road! Lol, oh my goodness, no. While I haven’t had to hurdle huge obstacles and I consider my life to be pretty blessed overall, it hasn’t always been smooth sailing. Writing is a strange beast. It consists of a lot of hard creative work that may never pay off.
Even when it does, the majority of authors only make scraps for the amount of time they put into a story. Of course, there’s the troll under the bridge called rejection. It’s part of the hustle and I’ve had way more rejections than acceptances. It can be hard to get rejection after rejection though. Plus, running a small publishing company comes with its speed bumps. Some of our titles do great, others hardly move more than a couple of copies a month and it can be hard to figure out why.
You put tons of time, effort, and money into something and then it just doesn’t perform like you hoped it would. It can be somewhat disheartening at times. However, I have to remind myself why I’m in the business to begin with which is to publish quality weird and creepy novels, novellas, and anthologies while taking care of our authors. I believe we hit all of those notes.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
Someone once said my stories were creepy Utah cowboy stories. I’ll take that. I like to write a lot of cosmic horror set in the Old West. I think the setting of the Old West fits perfectly with horror. It plays on the theme of isolation and self-reliance. I mean, even if you lived in a town, help could still be days or weeks away.
Plus, taking the cosmic horror subgenre and mashing it up with the Old West is a match made in heaven. There’s just something about taking those juicy cosmic horror tropes of crazy alien gods, cults, forbidden knowledge, etc. that mesh up with the rough-and-tumble feel of the Old West. I have a book titled Branches and Bone about a Pinkerton, Evelyn Horn, who is looking for a missing Pinkerton in the Utah Territory in the late 1800’s. She stumbles across a cult trying to resurrect an ancient entity in the forest during her investigation, setting off a chain of events that takes place over 20 years. Evelyn is probably one of my favorite characters I’ve written.
Lately, I’ve started incorporating more and more queer elements in my writing as well. After retiring from the military and really having the freedom to explore some bottled-away truths, I came to realize that I am transgender. Once I fully accepted that part of myself, it was like opening the door to a whole new part of my being. New themes have popped up in my writing, incorporating some of the real-life horrors members of the trans and LGBTQIA+ community have to face and twisting them with my nightmare-fueled ideas (as if the real horrors aren’t terrifying enough).
Are there any important lessons you’ve learned that you can share with us?
One of the biggest takeaways I’ve learned over the years, as both a writer and publisher, is to be genuine. People can tell when you’re just in it to get ahead. You have to be kind, sincere, and real.
When you do that, when you own your mistakes (and it is going to happen one day), then you can make a meaningful impact.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://link.heropost.io/crlangille
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/timber_ghost_press/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TimberGhostPress
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/timber-ghost-press/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/press_ghost
Image Credits
C.R. Langille, Jenn Langille, and The Legendarium
