Dan Maurer has published his first book, “Snow Day,” a thriller novella in E-book and audio book formats. “Snow Day” blends equal parts nostalgia and nightmare as it takes readers back to 1975. “It recounts the tale of 10-year-old Billy Stone, who played carefree in the snow — until an adventure gone awry left him far from home, staring death in the face, and running from a killer bent on keeping a horrible secret,” says Maurer.
Raised in West Windsor, Maurer traces his love of storytelling and his desire to be a writer to his early days. He was born in Teaneck, and lived with his parents, Margaret and James; and four older brothers in Palisades Park. The family moved to Lancashire Drive in West Windsor in 1977. Maurer was a student at St. Paul’s School and graduated from Notre Dame High School.
“In my younger days, I was a jock, and Little League baseball, Pop Warner Football, the Mets, and the Yankees, all consumed my life,” says Maurer. “When we first arrived in West Windsor, I didn’t have many friends, just lots of brothers, who were entering high school. I was too shy to enroll in the local sports leagues where I didn’t know anyone.”
During Maurer’s childhood, he and his brothers made super-8 movies — mostly super hero adventures, sci-fi, or kung fu films. “I was in front of the camera with my brother Paul and our neighborhood friends most of the time, and my brother John was behind it yelling ‘action,’” he says. “I think that’s where my love of storytelling really began.”
As the days of movie-making faded away, Maurer discovered books. “I made friends in time, but books were always my closest friends in those days. They were another form of storytelling, and I ate it up.”
His father worked for F.W. Woolworth Company. “A friend there would send my parents a sample box of paperback books each month as a gift,” says Maurer. “My mother would let me pick through the box and take what I wanted.”
The first adult novel he read was “The Amityville Horror.” “Within a year, I was hooked. I was only in the eighth grade, but I knew I wanted to be a writer,” says Maurer. “If we hadn’t moved to West Windsor, I don’t think I would have fallen in love with stories, or writing — certainly not in the same way.”
The Robbinsville resident met his wife, Lori, in college at East Carolina University, and they married in 1989. She is a group vice president at Philips-Van Heusen, the apparel company. Their daughter, Caroline, is a freshman at Robbinsville High School and is active in the drama club.
“My first involvement with theater was at Notre Dame watching my brothers John and Paul perform in shows,” Maurer says. “I got into the act by playing drums in the orchestra.”
During high school he developed a love of storytelling through novels and film and began to study literature and various storytelling techniques. “I devoured issues of Writer’s Digest, and pored over books about how to write, develop characters, and structure stories,” he says.
During college, he majored in English with a concentration in writing. A film and theater critic for the student newspaper, he moved up to be its editor and general manager.
After graduating and returning to West Windsor, he worked at Doubleday Books as an editorial assistant and Houghton Mifflin Company as an associate to the editor-in-chief. He worked with many talented writers and editors including Al Gore with “Earth in the Balance,” Pulitzer Prize-winner Rick Atkinson with “Crusade,” screenwriter Richard Price with “Clockers” and “The Color of Money,” and the late sport journalist Dick Schapp with “Bo Knows Bo.”
In 2004, when his brother and sister-in-law, John and Diana, founded Maurer Productions OnStage, Dan, who had left book publishing, had a career in Internet marketing. “I had been looking for a way to get back into a creative environment, one where I could use my storytelling skills again, so I joined Maurer Productions OnStage,” he says. He has worked as the marketing director, producer, stage manager, and director for shows at Kelsey Theater. His original short play, “The Road Not Taken,” was produced at the Arts University’s Short Play Festival in 2007.
Maurer recently decided to pursue writing full-time. “Lori and Caroline are very supportive of my writing,” he says. “They are my first and most important readers.”
“Snow Day,” running about 30,000 words and about three hours in recorded form, is fiction written in the style of a memoir, so it lends itself well to audio interpretation. “I’m very fortunate that Lynn Baskin came on board for this project,” says Maurer. “He’s an accomplished actor with an engaging style and a voice that fits the material well. His reading really gave ‘Snow Day’ a whole new dimension — very accessible, yet very creepy. Once I heard the finished recording of his reading, it gave me chills.”
The audiobook edition of “Snow Day” marks the third time Maurer and Baskin have collaborated. Most recently, Maurer directed Baskin in a 2011 production of Elton John & Tim Rice’s “Aida” at Kelsey Theater. Before that, they worked together in the same capacity on a production of “Driving Miss Daisy,” for which Baskin won the NJACT Perry Award for outstanding lead actor in a play.
“Snow Day” is a form of new publishing. “It’s an example of authors circumventing the publishing industry’s antiquated model for discovering new talent, and going directly to readers; basically letting the readers decide what is worthy of their investment and what is not,” says Maurer.
“Snow Day” is available at Amazon.com for $2.99, and the audiobook will be launched on April 30 through Audible.com, Amazon.com, and iTunes. Copies will be available from BarnesAndNoble.com, Smashwords.com, and the Apple iBookstore this fall.
Maurer’s plan is to publish several more novellas this year. “My strategy is to publish them individually as E-books and audiobooks,” he says. “Once I have three or four finished, I will pull them together into a collection and offer a printed trade paperback. I will also be exploring adapting some of these stories into graphic novels as time and funding allows.”
“Setting things in 1975 gives the story a whole different frame of reference when it comes to children; how they were treated, and how they were supervised,” Maurer says. “Back in those days, you sent your kid out to play in the morning and didn’t see him again until the sun went down and he came home for dinner. You wouldn’t think of doing that today in this age of play dates and the highly scheduled lives that we create for our children. Looking at that period of time was both nostalgic and frightening for me. I hope readers will feel the same.”
