When Christopher Nadeau was managing editor of his college newspaper, he wrote that he’d been raised by Siberian wolves until he was found by a group of traveling Tibetan monks at the age of eight. He hadn’t expected a disturbing amount of people to believe him. But they did, thereby confirming he was either one hell of a fiction writer, or people at the college level are sadly no more intelligent than their non-college counter-parts. Either way, he was now more convinced than ever that his destiny included fiction with his name on it.
He wasn’t always so sure; four years prior, he’d attended the world-famous Science Fiction Writers Workshop headed by the equally world-famous Professor James Gunn, renowned science fiction author and the first man to teach science fiction as part of the English curriculum in the U.S. Still in his early twenties, Nadeau’s writing was, by his own admission, far too heavily influenced by television and movies. Unfortunately for him, he was in a room filled with nineteen other aspiring writers who had no problem pointing that out, especially when discussing one story in particular. He nearly gave up after that, despite assurances from former Pocket Books Star trek division editor John Ordover that Chris was indeed a writer and from Gunn that the rewrite of the story in question was a vast improvement.
However, after a three year bout of writers block during which he only tinkered with previously written material, Chris returned to that workshop and was hailed as the most improved writer in such a short amount of time Gunn had ever seen. He also got to participate in the ridiculing of one of the writers who hadridiculed him three years previous, which he describes as “the sweetest plum of them all.”
Vindicated, Chris wound up dealing with his mother’s increasing bad health and eventual death as well as financial issues galore that never prevented him from writing, but certainly kept him out of “the game” for longer than he’d hoped. Still, he worked as a journalist for a few small papers and performed editing and even tutoring services while working on two novels at the same time. He attended Annabelle MacIlnay’s Writing Workshop for years, honing his craft and meeting a group that would become some of his closest friends and colleagues. He also held down jobs that, while having nothing to do with writing, provided him plenty of fodder for his fictional body counts.
“Dreamers at Infinity’s Core” was the first of those novels to see print with COM Publishing.  Described as “a wild, twisted ride” by SFRevue, Nadeau’s novel is a wonderful mixture of literary philosophical ponderings and flat out adventure in a dark fantasy context. The Amazon user reviews have been glowing as well.
Although the sequel to “Dreamers” is slated for release sometime this year, Chris has also published several short stories in various periodicals, anthologies and other collections. In fact, he set a goal in 2011 of ten stories published for the year and was so successful he had to reset that goal three times! By November, he’d had twenty stories accepted, not including one reprint.
Christopher Nadeau attributes much of his publishing success to what he calls, “Knowing who the bleep you are.” As he puts it, when someone he’d just met referred to him as a horror writer, he initially took umbrage with that description and then started to think about what it really meant.
“She meant is as a compliment,” Nadeau said, “So my reaction, while internal, was rather inappropriate. Besides, what is horror but a raw examination of the human psyche and what motivates it to often extremes of behavior and thought?” He began writing horror and found the editors in the genre far more receptive than those in the science fiction community.
“I’m a huge fan of SF, but it saddens me to admit the industry and fandom that’s grown up around it has become elitist and self-serving. With a larger acceptance seems to have come a hostility that has turned the genre inward in many ways. I’m not saying every story I sent to a SF editor was a gem, but it’s kind of interesting that nearly all of the ones that were rejected were accepted and published by horror and dark fantasy publishers. I never thought I’d say this, but those two genres have become the real houses of ideas.”