Benjamin Deer’s inspiration for an adventure fiction book series bubbled up in the most unlikely of places: a bubble bath.
“I was taking a bubble bath and I was just relaxing,” Deer said. “I went under to wash my hair and I saw an image. It wasn’t like a vision … but it was an image that when I closed my eyes I saw and everything the book encompasses stems from that one image.”
He said the image was of two needles, like drills, going into a character’s eyes.
“I came up out of the water and I said, ‘Well, that was interesting,’” he said. “Being a creative writer I had that as the main focus and built a story around that image.”
Deer, a 2006 Guilderland High School graduate, graduated from SUNY Oneonta and became managing editor at “The Freeman’s Journal,” a weekly newspaper covering Otsego County. But Deer decided to move back to his hometown.
Once living in Guilderland again he latched on to his inspiration to craft a series around main character Johnny Engleheart.
“I just told myself that I had these ideas for this series and I just said, ‘Why don’t I just go for it?’” he said. “Sometimes, I was staying up until like three in the morning … working and staying up. I saw it in the distance and I just followed it and made a beeline to it.”
The first installment of Deer’s adventure fiction series, “Emerus: The Beginning,” was welcomed during a launch party on Friday, Oct. 11, with family and friends offering congratulations and hugs to the newly published author. The book was published through Xlibris, a “print-on-demand” service company.
In the book, it is discovered Johnny, an 18-year-old kid, finds a strange metal chip implanted in his neck after he faints during a baseball game. His once normal world is suddenly filled with frightening nightmares, and he finds himself playing a key role in a situation that could determine the fate of the world.
Deer said the experience of publishing his book was “surprising” and unlike anything he imagined it would be.
“I thought writing was the hard part,” he said. “That was not the hard part. Everything else was the hard part.”
The majority of his book was written between September 2012 and this May and is meant to be a quick, thought provoking read that comes in at 188 pages. The series is planned to be three parts in total, but Deer said it could stretch to up to five parts. He plans to have the second part done in April.
“Originally, I had thought this was going to be one book, and I had seen the ending and I had the beginning already written,” he said. “Along the way, so many things happened with character development and plot sequences; it got so much bigger as the book progressed.”
Deer said his interest in creative writing was spurred as a child, because his mother was something of a writer, too. His mother died when he was 12 years old, but that inspiration has stuck with him.
“I learned from her about the freeing quality that creative writing can give to you,” Deer said. “I have been writing things ever since I was 10. This first book is the culmination of everything I have learned up to this point in my life.”
Deer’s grandmother, Doris Bourgeois, said he was always a “great writer” and remembered his early works fondly.
“In high school I remember some of his essays and things he would show me,” Bourgeois said. “I said, ‘He is going to be great and I have a lot of confidence in him.’”
Bourgeois said she could “definitely” see her daughter come through in his writing.
“She was a great writer, too,” Bourgeois said.
For more information or to purchase the book, visit www.benjamindeerbooks.com. The book is available as a hardcover, softcover and an ebook.