Royce Buckingham was born in 1966 in Richland, Washington and grew up in the 70’s near the Hanford nuclear plant. Richland is in the eastern Washingtonian desert on the Columbia river, one of the largest rivers in the world. Buckingham used to take a trip each summer with his family to his grandparents’ working ranch in the mountainous Bozeman/Livingston area of Montana. As a young child in Richland, Royce was a Cub Scout, loved sports, and he was fascinated by fantastic tales such as 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, The Phantom Tollbooth and The Mouse and the Motorcycle.   

As he grew older, the author moved on to The Hobbit, Conan the Barbarian and anything Stephen King. He collected comic books too. Movies were a big event in his small, government town. Royce saw Jaws at the theater the day it opened in 1975 at age nine, standing in the sold-out line again in 1977 for Star Wars when he was eleven, and again for Alien  at the age of thirteen. VCR’s didn not exist back then. 

Around twelve, Royce discovered the fantasy role-playing game Dungeons&Dragons and began to create his own fantasy worlds. He was a Little League baseball player filled with wonder and dreams and a fascination for stories.   

After graduating from high school, Royce left home for Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. It’s a small liberal arts school. He played college baseball there for a couple of years, but was primarily there for the academics. Buckingham majored in English literature and traded Stephen King and the X-men for Milton and Hemmingway. He also gave up baseball his junior year to go abroad and study English in…England.   

About this time, the author had begun tinkering with creative writing. However, he felt that he should be responsible and pursue a “real career.”

Buckingham applied and was accepted at the University of Oregon School of Law. He didn't know anything the profession but discovered an area of law he found interesting—criminal law. In his final year at law school, Buckingham studied all things crime and even wrote a fifty-page thesis-style paper on juvenile criminals. He also took an undergraduate creative writing class for fun and wrote a dark little literary/horror story. At the suggestion of a professor, he sent his thesis to a law review. At the suggestion of a friend, he sent his story to a literary magazine.  
 
As law school came to a close, the Willamette Law Review contacted the budding lawyer about publishing his article on juvenile offenders. About the same time, he got a call from Reed Magazine, the Literary Magazine of San Jose State University. They wanted to publish his short story…as written. These were two early writing successes that couldn’t have been more different.   

The legal article went onto his resume, the short story went into his drawer, and Buckingham began looking for a job to begin a “real career.” His first interview was at the Whatcom County Prosecutor’s Office (DA’s Office) in Bellingham, Washington, a gorgeous little University town north of Seattle overlooking the San Juan Islands. The receptionist noted that there were over 100 inquiries for the job. The interview consisted, in part, of the entire office of experienced attorneys watching applicants do a mock opening statement and mock cross-examination of a witness in a real courtroom. It was terrifying, but Buckingham prepared hard and apparently did well, because he got the job. 

In contract to going after bad guys in real life, Buckingham began to write fantasy, sci-fi and horror short stories in my spare time and submit them to publications. In 1993, the author collected over one hundred rejection letters. One especially mean-spirited letter said, “your story is moronic, don’t you have anything better to do with your time?” It was discouraging, but Buckingham made up a file entitled, “reasons to keep writing,” and kept all of those letters as motivation. Eventually, he had seven short stories published in small magazines that nobody had ever heard of. He later discovered that a 7% publication rate for short stories is actually pretty good. Buckingham showed his stories to anyone who was willing read them. People often called it weird, which Royce says he took as a compliment.   

Next, Buckingham sat down and wrote a novel. It took a year. He didn’t know anything about the publishing industry at the time, and the book didn't sell. It was discouraging. It took too long to write a novel just to learn at the end that nobody would buy it. But short stories didn’t get fans or much money.About this time, Buckingham discovered the screenplay format.   

It was the mid-90’s, and Royce had advanced to a position as a juvenile court prosecutor. Rap songs about violent gang members were popular, and he handled many serious juvenile offenders.   

He was writing screenplays at this point, the first was an adaptation of his novel. Buckingham loved the screenplay form. It was very direct, like him. He wrote another and entered a contest. To his delight, he was a finalist, and the script was performed as a stage reading in Seattle.

Then Demonkeeper happened.

"Demonkeeper began as a short story inspired by a street kid I used to prosecute regularly in juvenile court," says Buckingham. "The boy was thirteen, had a green Mohawk, and I’d see him downtown begging change. One day he disappeared, and nobody seemed to notice. Even his parents didn’t know where he’d gone, or care. I imagined the chaos of street life as a monster that rose and ate him up while people weren’t paying attention, as it does with so many lost children. I wrote a screenplay from that story. The script evolved into a much more lighthearted and fun tale than that short tale I wrote years earlier, but the message remained—kids need stability, family and a home."

The Demonkeeper screenplay married Buckingham's love of fantasy with the themesheI was seeing in the courtroom during his very somber day-job. It began to win competitions. He wrote other scripts, and they earned awards as well, but Demonkeeper was always the favorite and garnered the most notice. The awards kept the writer going like addictive little nibbles at success, and they regularly reminded him that, “hey, he can do this.” By 1999, he was writing more scripts and sending his work to L.A. in the hope that something could sell.   

For the next five years, Buckingham wrote hard and tried to sell a script. As a result, he ended up winning the quadruple-crown of northwest screenwriting competitions, including the Washington State short script competition, the Pacific Northwest Writers Association feature length script competition, the Washington State feature length competition (with Demonkeeper), and the Seattle International Film Festival’s Pitch Competition all in the space of two years. Some Hollywood producers got interested in Demonkeeper, and it looked like Buckingham was about to break through. He even took the time to translate Demonkeeper into a novel.   

But as excited as he got about my amateur success, the writer's big-budget fantasy about street monsters eating lost kids did not get picked up by a studio. In the meantime, he had children of his own and had also gotten promoted at work. He moved to adult felony prosecutions—robbery, arson, abuse, negligent homicides, burglary, etc.. Buckingham's wife was working full-time too. The author had to write at night after everyone else went to bed and was typically up until two a.m. -- and often later -- either writing or preparing for jury trials. This…was a problem. His intense day job and his writing were taking time away from his family. Buckingham even fell asleep sitting upright at his desk once. As good as the signs were for my writing, the fact was: he wasn’t breaking through, wasn’t making any money at it, and he'd been doing it over ten years. It was tough to justify the commitment. 

Buckingham had submitted Demonkeeper to the Nicholl Fellowship, a contest put on by the Academy for amateur screenwriters. He’d done so every year for some time. They receive up to 5000 entries annually and are regarded as the best competition for screenwriters—heck, they’re the Academy Awards people! Winners often obtained representation and/or sold scripts. He’d done well in the competition before, but, as with his attempts to sell his work, he’d never won. In 2004, with all of his other obligations weighing on me, the young author resolved to quit writing seriously after receiving the results of that year’s Nicholl Fellowship. 

That same week, Microsoft e-mailed him. They’d heard about Demonkeeper from a friend in Seattle. They wanted to hire a screenwriter to create an original story for an Xbox video game. Buckingham was floored. After they read the script, they offered him the job. He sat down with his wife who took one look at their choice between his dream vs. his secure “real career” and told him…“go for it.” Completely contrary to every conservative lesson he’d ever been taught, Buckingham “went for it.” He left his “real career” and wrote Microsoft an incredible story. A few months later, Microsoft cancelled the project, and Buckingham came crawling back to the prosecutor’s office to beg for his job back.

Here, Buckingham relates his experience in his own words:
 
"This time I felt I was truly done with writing. I’d been doing it for almost twelve years now. I’d won almost everything I could win, and still I hadn’t sold anything. And I almost lost my hard-earned, secure government job as a prosecutor.

Then I received a letter from the Nicholl Fellowship. Demonkeeper had made it to the top 2% and was being considered for the final round of the competition. I was elated.
Then it lost. I was done, this time for good. I shut off the computer.

Along about here, Michael Kuciak at Atchity Entertainment International (AEI) gave me an innocuous call and asked if he could read the script that had done well in the Nicholl Fellowship. I sent Demonkeeper down to him and, frankly, forgot about it. I’d sent lots of scripts out, and only once had producers gotten legitimately interested. I returned to my stabbings, shootings, and robbings prosecutions. At least, I thought, I’d given my dream of being a writer a shot with the Microsoft gig. On my deathbed, I could say that I tried.   

Then Mike called me. He’d read Demonkeeper. He loved it. His bosses had read it. They loved it. They wanted to represent me. I mentioned that I had written it into a novel and asked if they cared. The response from them was surprise and delight. It turned out that AEI specialized in taking literary properties first to New York, then to Hollywood. Ken Atchity at AEI told me that they’d sell my novel in NY, then sell my script in LA. Yeah, right, I thought, but they did indeed work quickly to get my novel ready for publishers in New York to review.

In late 2005, Penguin Publishers read it Demonkeeper…and they loved it. They bought my novel sometime around Christmas of that year. Wow! We celebrated. I jumped up and down.   

The sale was announced in Publishers Weekly shortly thereafter, in January of ‘06. It turns out that Hollywood studio scouts read Publishers Weekly looking for new material. Fox 2000, a division of 20th Century Fox, called AEI the day the announcement was printed. They wanted to read the novel. Ken was ready. He asked them, “wouldn’t you rather read Royce’s award-winning screenplay?” Fox read the script and made an offer the next day. Double wow! I spent a week pinching myself each morning to make sure I wasn’t dreaming.

THIS WAS IT—AFTER THIRTEEN YEARS OF TRYING TO GET DISCOVERED, I’D SOLD A BOOK AND A MOVIE ALMOST SIMULTANEOUSLY.   

Ken and AEI had delivered exactly as promised. And that hasn’t been the end of it. My second novel, Goblins, sold to Penguin later that same year. I now have three books out in the U.S.: Demonkeeper, Goblins! and The Dead Boys. Demonkeeper I was a best seller in Germany and third book of that series was released in November 2011. Demonkeeper has also sold to and/or been released in France, Italy, Finland, Spain, Peru, Russia, Romania.

The whole idea of Penguin publishing my novels and 20th Century Fox making a movie out of my crazy monster fantasy was overwhelming at the time, and I still pinch myself some days. But looking back over this letter, I think things were meant to work out this way. The other day I found a scrap of paper in my Cub Scout handbook in my parents’ basement. It was a one-page story written in a childish cursive script with a No. 2 pencil. The story was about a man who found a ray gun and accidentally made himself disappear—a spooky science fiction tale. The story had my name printed neatly at the bottom, and my age. I was eight years old." RB