This digital edition of that book has been radically cropped, leaving out a lot of 'Hertzan Interviews' members of the horror small press, and it's currently 16,000 words. Why? Well, it's all about competition, lover - and we don't help the competition, now do we? But mostly because it didn't quite fit what I wanted this digital edition to focus on, the writing/process of the invented persona.
In late 2003, after ten years of Loki-ing the horror small press, I decided to give Hertzan Chimera his marching orders. I killed him. Yes, and it was very much like killing one of the family. But it had to be done. Hertzan Chimera had gotten too big for his boots, was becoming more important than the writing, was bigger than the ideas themselves, was getting recognised at Writer Conventions (!)
And we can't have that.
You'll notice, if you're awake (and/or aware) that Chimericana Books has published a companion piece to this book called Hertzan Chimera - THE SUB-ATOMIC UNIT. The companion book deals with a fake-science article I was commissioned to write for Pam Creais' Dementia 13 monthly magazine back in 1985, and it says a lot about why there's a science/fictional dichotomy in much of the horror writing of the once-rampant writing unit. It's all 'that article's fault'.
The Hertzan Chimera Entity was the writer that was never supposed to be.
The Hertzan Chimera Unit that spawned his pseudonym was 'that daft sci-fi plaything' we were never supposed to take any further.
