by Jay Wilburn
As of the publication of this post, the Z-Day series from Daniel Humphreys is on book 2 with A Place Called Hope. It began strong with A Place Outside the World. He released the second book in October of 2017 and he’s working on the third right now.
Daniel Humphreys has had the writing bug probably since he won movie tickets in a story contest in the 3rd or 4th grade, he says. By the time he was in my early twenties, he’d written drafts for three science fiction novels. He got serious about it and started querying agents. One responded positively, and he thought he was on his way, but it turned out she was a scam artist. A somewhat famous one, in fact. We won’t name names in this article, but he may tell you, if you ask him nicely. Not many people can say they signed with a literary agent who tried to fake her own death to evade prosecution. So, that whole experience was kind of a shot to his morale, and for a long time, he just focused on his non-writing career. He’d write little things here and there, but he never really did anything with the work.
Around 2014 or so, he got a promotion to a virtual office job which freed up probably 12 hours a week that he wasn’t spending in the car commuting back and forth. His wife encouraged him to take a pro writing class, he made some contacts there, and he was off to the races. It took him a while, but he finally achieved that goal he set for myself back in elementary school. Readers should be excited that he did, I think.
Fade is the first book in another series by Daniel Humphreys. Fade follows a young man named Paxton Locke who’s had magical powers thrust upon him by the actions of his mother, who’s the primary antagonist in the first story arc. In the first book, he’s roaming the country making a living doing fake ghost removals for people who are convinced their houses are haunted. To assuage his guilt over that, he provides his services free of charge to the people who really do have issues – sort of a philanthropic Peter Venkman, Humphreys explains. When he encounters the spirit of a young boy, he learns that there are far worse things out there than spirits and poltergeists, and things that even haunt ghosts. This book and series is getting a re-release with a sequel to Fade in June 2018.
Humphreys had a couple stories come out in anthologies recently. I asked him about his approach and style with short fiction. It’s kind of funny, he said. He doesn’t read many anthologies and he’d never really enjoyed writing shorts. He wrote a 600-page first novel, so keeping wordcount tight is not necessarily his strong suit. But he was invited to contribute something to a couple anthologies and thought, why not. He particularly likes the short which appears in Secret Stairs, as it ties into the larger Paxton-universe. As a reader, I’ll tell you that short story is a nice little Easter Egg for those who decide to read those Paxton books.
As readers pick up on the work of Daniel Humphreys, they can expect book 3 of the Z-Day series to come soon. At some point down the road, he’s going to have a follow-up trilogy that jumps 10 years ahead, following along with some of the younger characters introduced in the original series available now. Fade, the Paxton Locke series, was re-released in e-book and paperback May 22, 2018, I believe, by Silver Empire Publishing, and the sequel, Night’s Black Agents, comes out in June. Humphreys tells me he’s still in preliminary discussions, but a publisher may have some interest in publishing a short story collection set in the Z-Day universe. Though he did not start off with a love for short form fiction, he believes he has enough unused material to put together some good stories, if this collection comes through for him. I’m looking forward to it.
I hope I have made the case for Daniel Humphreys. Check out book 1 of his Z-Day series now or any of the other work linked above as well.
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