Storytellersunplugged

I have been wondering about the mentality that leads a person to want to publish another person’s work, but that bypasses the pangs of guilt that should accompany not paying for it. No-advance anthologies proliferate, and in the end most of them end up being no-pay anthologies where the postage to send out royalties costs more than the checks cut to the authors.

Yes, it’s fun to be involved in publishing. Having your own “e-zine,” or semi-pro magazine, or even fanzine can be a wonderful experience (or an awful one) depending on what you invest in it. Yes, it’s a gratifying sensation to bring the work of a talented author to light and share it with the world. Yes, pretty books are nice, fancy web coding can make a wonderful presentation, and cool, themed anthologies are “fun.”

Still, there are things you should take into consideration before you decide you want to be involved in any of the above. If I knew a friend who was a mechanic, and I needed my starter fixed, I would not ask him to fix my car and then not pay him. If I had a friend who grew vegetables, and I opened a new market, I wouldn’t ask him to give me the vegetables on the off chance I could someday pay him for them. Am I getting through? No one should be expected to write for free. If the work is good enough to be published, and read, it is good enough to be compensated. If an accountant wants to be a publisher, but doesn’t have enough cash on hand both to publish the book he wants to do and to pay the authors something up front for the trouble of writing for him, he should do some more accounting, save some money, and publish the book when he DOES have enough money. Otherwise, he should not publish at all.

When I published THE TOME – even though all the money came from my own pocket and the stupid thing never turned a profit, I paid at least a pittance from day one. I worked up to 1 cent a word, and one of the reasons I quit publishing the magazine was that I couldn’t find a way to make it profitable enough that I could pay professional authors a reasonable rate to include their work.

I think it’s fine if a bunch of friends get together and publish their work in the hope of selling it and making money. I think it’s fine if a bunch of friends put up a web site and share their fiction with everyone. I even believe it’s fine (though not the best way to make money at it) if an author wants to publish his or her own novel, or a collection of short stories, and try to peddle it to the world. I’d
caution against calling any of these things a sale, though.

Those examples, of course, are not the same as a person announcing an anthology as a “market” and taking the work of others without compensation. If you believe your anthology will sell and bring in a profit, put your money where your mouth is and pay your authors fairly up front. If you don’t think you’ll make enough to cover costs and pay for the stories, DON’T PUBLISH.

Authors should keep in mind that they have almost literally no way to know if a “royalties only” anthology sells a few, or a lot of copies. This is true of all markets, of course – there are ways to check with distributors and bookstores to see how many copies of something have been moved, but on a smaller scale, where one person or a couple of people handle all the books themselves, the accounting, distribution, and the payments, how do you keep track of what’s going on with YOUR
work? Yes, it’s still your work, and you are still owed for it. My thought is if that “publisher” wasn’t serious enough to find a way to compensate you for the work up front, they either are doing it on a lark and have no idea what is involved, or they intend to hedge their bets…make as much as they can off the book and pay when they have to. They are, of course, only making money off of someone else’s work.

If you want to publish something, be willing to make it worth the author’s time to work with you. If you have to wait longer to put your book out, so be it. If you are an author dying to be published, don’t get sucked into these markets. They don’t pay – the average, according to a survey I saw taken not too long ago, seems to be about .55 total royalties on a story in a market where only royalties were offered. They do NOT provide “exposure”. They aren’t bought, they are seldom read, and when they are the exposure you generally get is in a poorly designed, poorly edited book full of marginally written fiction. It isn’t worth it.

If your work is good enough to be published, it is good enough to be paid for. Don’t sell yourself short, and don’t take easy roads to publication while convincing yourself that they are the same thing as professional sales. They aren’t now and never will be.

On a side note, as a reader, I would not buy a self-published book, or a book where I knew that the stories were not paid for. The reason is simple. I have limited funds for my reading pleasure, and limited bookshelf space. When I buy a book I expect it to be well written, packaged cleanly, and edited at a reasonably professional level. In other words, I want my money’s worth. I wouldn’t buy a cake from some guy who figured it out on his own at home if I could buy a cake from a bakery for the same price and be assured of the quality.

Enough said…I just wanted to put a few more paragraphs on this subject onto the net where someone might find them, just in case they missed the similar paragraphs in other places with the same warning. Be proud of your work; be careful and particular where it appears. Don’t sell yourself short.

David Niall Wilson

Thanks to all of the junk posts coming in as anonymous comments, I’ve had to disable them for the time being. Comments can still be made by registered users.

Thanks,
The Administration

Greetings and salutations, dear readers. Coming to you live from seedy, I mean sunny, California, this is your friendly neighborhood filmmaker with this month’s Storytellers Unplugged column.

Instead of continuing the Parallel column I started last month, I’d like to switch gears and talk about something else very interesting that is cooking. Parallel is going very well. This month has been devoted to lawyers and signing contracts and that would make for a very dull column. Filming is planned for first quarter 2006 and next month I’ll be back with an update on the project.

For now, I’d like to talk about a little project that’s in the works that you might not have heard about yet…

LETTERS FROM HADES!!!

That’s right. The brilliant Jeff Thomas was kind enough to allow me to option his magnificent novel in hopes that we could bring it to the big screen for all to see. Well, ladies and gents, this month has seen that come a few steps closer to reality.

For those who don’t know exactly how things like this work, here’s the general rule of thumb.

When Stephen King and John Grisham release books they are bought in galley form for millions of dollars months before they are ever released. When Bret Easton Ellis’s Lunar Park hits bookstores next month, it will already have been bought by a movie studio many moons ago. Small press writers fly under the radar and their work, usually better than everything on the bestseller list, is not seen by studios unless word of mouth and substantial press brings it to the attention of some guy working for a production company or studio who can barely read an interview in the latest issue of Playboy, much less actually finish a book.

That’s why it’s up to writers, directors, and producers who appreciate those heavy things they sell at Barnes & Nobles to find the hidden gems that aren’t reviewed in Entertainment Weekly. Namely, geeks like me who would rather read the latest issue of Cemetery Dance or the newest Leisure title than read Variety or the Hollywood Reporter.

I read a lot of horror fiction. I probably go through a book or two a week. And I am always reading in the hopes of stumbling across a potential film project. There are a lot of wonderful books floating around. But a great book doesn’t necessarily equal a great movie. There are many, many, many good books that should not be made into films because they are simply not movies and never will be unless you turn them into something completely different than the author intended. There are also many books that have been made into bad films. The Bonfire of the Vanities, anyone? Goodbye Columbus? Just about every Stephen King adaptation. Once every blue moon, a good book is turned into an equally good movie. Check out this month’s The Constant Gardner, with Ralph Fiennes, based on John le Carre’s excellent novel. Check out Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient and The Talented Mr. Ripley. Check out The Shawshank Redemption, Rosemary’s Baby, The Godfather, Waking the Dead, Requiem For A Dream, etc. There’s a slew of great movies out there based on books.

Well, when I read Letters From Hades, I was convinced after one reading that it could be a terrific film, as subversive as Fight Club, as moving as Shawshank, set in a world as visually stunning as Lord of the Rings.

I passed the book to my agents, who promptly agreed. I contacted Jeff, I begged him and offered numerous sexual favors for the ability to shop his book around with myself attached to adapt it. After reading Parallel, he promptly agreed and didn’t even take me up on my offer of sexual favors, which was nice of him.

This week, Original Artists, the agency that reps me took the book, artwork, and my treatment for the film out to a number of amazing production companies. Basically, when you take a script or book out you don’t go to studios, you go to production companies with strong track records that have a first look deal with a studio. You partner with the right company and they will take you and the project to the studio in the hope that the studio will purchase the project and make the movie.

All the companies my agents brought it to were Parallel fans. Almost all of them flipped over the book, and as of today… We have an amazing production company on board to produce the film. They have a first look deal at New Line, which I believe is the only studio that would do this book correctly without compromising the theology behind it, and the production company are currently producing several high profile films including Bruce Willis’s next flick.

This has been a good week. Jeff and I have made a great team thus far.

The next step…

The production company is taking the book to some big directors, we’ll attach a director, and then take the package (book, writer, director, production company) to New Line and ask them to buy the book from Jeff, pay me to adapt it, and make the movie.

So far so good. I’ll keep everyone updated as things progress.

If all goes smoothly, I can adapt Hades while prepping to direct my first feature, Parallel.

Keep those fingers crossed, my friends.

-JOSH BOONE

I’m pretty sure that my affinity for writing horror comes largely from the fact that, for as long as I can remember, I have had chronic, hellishly bad dreams. They’re usually in 70mm Cinemascope and Technicolor, with THX sound, and some of them have lingered through the years more vividly than any waking experience. In fact, as near as I can tell, my earliest living memory is of a nightmare. Yep, and I can tell you that the sheer power of these intimate, emotionally charged experiences is what most often compels me to write scary shit. I suspect that this is not uncommon among those of us who frequent this joint; so I hope you’ll forgive me if I share few of my most significant memories from beyond the wall of sleep.

I don’t know exactly how old I was, probably around two, but I distinctly recall being in bed with a tall railing, which required careful scaling in order to escape. (Hey — shut off those searchlights, willya?) I woke from a sound sleep, or so I thought, only to find myself mesmerized by the low, rhythmic beating of my heart. I then heard something thumping in counterpoint, coming from the basement stairs that led up to the kitchen. Too young to know anything about curiosity killing cats, I scaled the rails, made my way to the kitchen, and found the basement door gaping open. And bouncing up the stairs was a tall, armless thing with a stitched, football-shaped head and a single eye glaring malevolently at me. I screamed and woke up — actually sitting in the kitchen at the top of the basement stairs. My parents came running to see what the squalling was all about, and to this day, my mother recalls that incident as being particularly unnerving because I was so adamant about what I had seen.

Then, in college, around 1980, I got that famous feeling of someone walking over my grave: in art history class, I again encountered the very thing I had seen on the stairs all those years ago. In a painting by Giorgio di Chirico.

Here is an image of the painting what done it:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v665/damnedrodan/chirico.jpg

Okay, I guess I can safely assume that, at that young, impressionable age, I had seen a copy of the painting and then had a nightmare about it. Either that, or we had some mighty messed-up-looking trespassers back in those days.

This was far from the last terrifying dream I had as a young’un, but it was quite seminal, I believe, in my psychological development. Even today, I expect I find de Chirico’s paintings somewhat more disturbing than does the casual viewer.

When I was 11 or 12, I experienced the worst night-horror of my entire life — the most nerve-shattering portions of which eventually made their way into my story “Fugue Devil” (1991). The dream featured a rather hellish varmint, which struck me as an amalgamation of the Creature from the Black Lagoon, the She-Creature, and the demon from CURSE OF THE DEMON. (So I watched a lot of horror movies back then; big deal.) The nightmare unfolded with the clarity of an actual waking event, and I’m sure there’s a deep crease in my brain that stores every wondrously awful second of it.

The dream opens with a black, unidentifiable shape sailing across a late afternoon sky, zig-zagging from horizon to horizon, trailing black smoke. Naturally, it isn’t long before the demon appears to me in my backyard, and what should happen but I wake up in a cold sweat - the first and only time I’ve ever experienced such a thing. When I finally manage to get back to sleep, the dream takes up right where it left off — and soon the creature shows up in front of both my younger brother and me. Again, I wake up, even more frightened than before, and now I find myself actually short of breath — an honest-to-God panic attack. Eventually, though, I do go back to sleep, and again the dream continues. I’ve taken refuge at my best friend’s house, but the thing finds me even there; it gets into the house and, this time, it reaches out to get me. Now people, this thing has great big tuskies sticking out of its mouth, and huge claws on the end of its feet.

That’s when I woke up, and that was all she wrote for sleep for the rest of that night.

A few years later, in college, I frequently had dreams of large, mindless but malevolent crowds of people chasing me (which might have had something to do with the frat parties I crashed, but that’s another story). In one of the most noteworthy, I was driving my car through a small town, with my good friend Doug Craft in the passenger seat. Mobs of people were milling about purposelessly, and after a while, we saw a body fall from some height and splat on the pavement very near my car. Looking up, I realized that a number of people were queued up on the roof of a nearby building, and one at a time, they were hurling themselves to their deaths. We got out of the car, and suddenly, some of the roving rabble grabbed Doug and pulled him away from me. Duty, of course, impelled me to go searching for him, but what I eventually stumbled upon was a circle of undead-looking people passing around a bucket of nasty goop, from which each would take a hefty gulp. They passed it to me, and that’s when I woke up, mercifully spared from drinking any chuck, nice and scared and thoroughly sleep deprived by sunup the next morning.

That’s just a small sampling from a huge catalog; I remember countless more examples just as vividly. In college, I took a seminar on dream analysis, and it was interesting in that its stated purpose was to help you deal with waking issues by teaching you to exert control over your subconscious mind. I can’t say I mastered the control part very well, but the course did involve writing down dreams, so, for that period of time, I have a detailed record of my nightly sojourns. A clear majority of them were frightening.

As I’ve grown older, somewhat to my chagrin, my dreams have tended to be less dramatic. I’ve always believed that dreams largely reflect issues in one’s waking life, and as one works through them, the dreams adjust themselves accordingly. While there are some day-to-day conflicts from my younger years I’d just as soon not suffer through again, I have to confess I miss the challenges those old nightmares presented to my sleeping self. And there are certain aspects of the present I would happily trade for issues that seemed insurmountable during my naïve adolescence. However, I still occasionally have nighttime adventures that give me right much of a charge, even when, at the time, they seem outlandish, upsetting, or downright terrifying.

Whatever the reasons for them, I relish my most dramatic nightmares. Deprived of them, I imagine I would lose my most passionate creative drive.

A line penned by a newspaper reporter in 1974 sums it up pretty well, I think. Because I had written an article for THE MONSTER TIMES (remember that one?) and started up a fanzine (JAPANESE GIANTS) when I was 15, the local paper did a feature about me, which the Associated Press subsequently picked up. During the interview, I talked a little about my affinity for nightmares, which — somewhat to my glee — left the reporter scratching her head in disbelief. The article ended with, “Mark Rainey’s idea of Heaven is apparently a place populated by creatures that, to the rest of us, surely belong in Hell.”

I reckon I couldn’t have said it better.

–Mark Rainey

Someone once said that there’s no such thing as an original plot idea; it’s all been done before. The thing about this game is that the inventiveness and the freshness revolves around how that idea is spun. It can be as old as the hills but as long as the telling is something new, or not even new, but entertaining, then that’s what makes a good book or story. King exemplifies this in the simplicity of his ideas. Let’s think about some of them. A big dog goes bad. A car goes bad. A fan goes bad. A clown goes bad. There’s nothing particularly fresh or original about these ideas. It’s all in the telling or in the twist that puts familiar things together in a new way.

Sometimes I wonder at our readership. Some time ago, after the release of my second novel, Metal Sky, I was virtually accused online (including by Amazon reviewers) of plagiarism. I will come back to the subject of Amazon reviewers shortly. The simple fact of the matter is that the book is an unashamed homage to The Maltese Falcon. There is a great tradition within literature and film, especially in genre, of the homage. Witness Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai followed by The Magnificent Seven and thence to Battle Beyond the Stars. How many times has Shakespeare turned up in a plot somewhere else. Even Clive Cussler’s done it. I can’t remember the title of the book, but it was a new twist on King Lear in a few ways. Despite this, one reader even wrote to me, copying my editor, complaining about what I’d done. I answered, of course very politely, explaining the tradition of the homage and how it worked.

My first novel, Wyrmhole, drew heavily from The Big Sleep, and again, this was unashamed. I guess it just wasn’t so obvious, or people weren’t as familiar with the movie. I love noir, I love the images and the darkness and the grittiness. I love the underbelly and the wisecracks that go with it. The hardbitten, jaded protagonist, somewhat lost in the world as an iconic figure stands as an existential moral to us all. These are some of the things that inform and shape my writing, just as the things we live and the things we read influence the words that come from our fingers. Plagiarism? No. Writing about what I love? Yes.

The difference is, that not only do I love noir, I love the genre, our genre, in all its forms. Science fiction, fantasy, horror, dark fantasy, but with my novels, it’s not a car gone bad, or a big dog gone bad; it’s a classic noir figure stepped into a science fictional world.

So, where does this take us? The readers are important, always will be, yet sometimes I am dismayed at the reactions posted on message boards, or more damaging, in places like Amazon. The particular posts I was referring to earlier said things like “It was a good read…but”, or another which said “Entertaining but troubling.” Come on people. Isn’t that what we want? Entertainment and a good read. Taking it the step further and calling it plagiarism, well, that’s something I find entertaining but troubling. Why people don’t get it, and feel a need to post to the world that they really don’t get it is beyond me.

Still, someone once said to me that reviews are like horoscopes. If they’re good, it’s wonderful. If they’re bad, well, who believes that stuff anyway?

The past year has seen my writing transform me from mild-mannered game designer to international man of mystery, which is another way of saying I’ve racked up an impressive number of frequent flier miles on various video game writing assignments. This has both its good and its bad points. The good ones are obvious – seeing new and exciting places on someone else’s nickel, the chance to work on exciting and interesting projects, and of course, free in-flight movie and beverages.
The bad points – jet lag, meeting new and exciting pathogens and bringing them home to meet my fiancée, having to learn "I am a stupid American, please take my money" in Romanian – are pretty obvious as well. But there’s a non-obvious one, which is to say that it plays hob with my writing schedule, or at least it tries to.
Now I know lots of writers who say they can write anywhere. Give them a coffeeshop, a park bench, a temporarily paralyzed mime in a horizontal position, whatever, and they’ll set up the old laptop and starting pounding away. Me, I can’t do that. I suspect it’s a deep and abiding character flaw, but there you have it. I have to be comfortable when I write. I need to nest, to tune my environment so that it feels like someplace I can focus entirely on the words in front of me.
Starbucks doesn’t pass the test. Not in North Carolina, not in Paris, not in Bucharest. Hell, I don’t even drink coffee, and I only sneak in the occasional cup of tea on the side. There are too many people, too many distractions, too many other possible stories walking by every minute. See the guy over there with the scraggly little beard and the black-rimmed glasses? What’s his story? Maybe he’s waiting for a friend or a study partner, or maybe it’s something darker and more ominous. And my mind starts running down those tracks at a million miles an hour, with all of those stories jostling to be first in line. What if, what if, what if.
The poor novel doesn’t stand a chance. It’s like watching Gulliver take it in the shorts from the Lilliputians.
Airplanes aren’t any good for me either. Using the tray in front of you for a laptop desk requires two very important things to happen. One, you have to be skinny. Two, the person sitting in front of you has to decide that they do not in fact want to recline. If, however, you are not a slender, waif-like thing and the passenger in front of you has decided that on this night, they recline, then you have the choice of having your laptop folded into thirds, or trying to type on something that is resting more or less on your sternum. That doesn’t work so well for me, as it requires me with my elbows flailing in best hockey goon fashion, and the people sitting next to me generally don’t appreciate that. Either that, or the drink cart whangs me as it scoots down the aisle, and there’s nothing like a five minute funnybone stinger from a can of Sprite to make you reassess your definition of the words "hostile work environment".
So that leaves the hotel room, my home away from home. And that’s what it has to turn into. Jet lag must be banished, the writing desk must be mimicked, and the iPod must blare the same sort of moody gunk I listen to at home. This, incidentally, is much easier to do in France, where they don’t have anything even vaguely resembling SportsCenter on late at night to serve as a distraction. "I’m just waiting for the score on the Phillies game" can swallow a productive hour alive in an eyeblink.
And then, maybe, I can settle in and write. Except that the only reason they put me on the road these days is to write, to write all day long and to do so in the proper style and format for video games, which is to say short and sharp. Every word costs money, after all – money to hire actors, to get studio time, to place in the game, to put it on the disc. So there’s no room in video game writing for descriptive passages, for internal monologues and character descriptions. It’s all right up there on the screen, and you just get to do the talky bits for 8 or 10 or whatever hours a day. Forty-seven variations on "Arrggh! I’ve been shot!" and ninety-two on "Got him!" Twenty missions’ worth of "Please boil down this incredibly complex mission design document into a three sentence briefing, using words of no more than three syllables." You get the idea. And to go back to the hotel after all that, to try to stretch out from the box you’ve forcibly crammed yourself into all day, well, that takes some doing. You  know you’re just going to have to tamp all that stuff down again right around the time you hit the continental breakfast bar (Note: very few hotels on the Continent actually have continental breakfasts. It’s one of the mysteries of international travel, along with "Why are the French mad for peanut butter", "Why must all European currencies contain at least one bill that is orange", and "Is there the slightest chance that this convenience store clerk will not attempt to rip me off as I purchase a can of shaving cream"?). It’s easier just to leave it all right where it is, to save yourself the energy of switching back and forth between modes when time and travel and tight deadlines with a hundred dependencies are already nagging at you.
But.
Still.
If you say, "I’m too tired from traveling to write," then you start saying "I’m too tired from mowing the lawn" and "I’m too tired from cleaning up cat barf" and just that plain old "I’m too tired." Start with that and you never stop, and all of the marvelous things you pick up in all of those business trips to Outer Borgistan get wasted.
So I make the hotel room my cave. Pull the drapes down, kill the lights, hide all of the reminders that I’m not in my little cocoon of an office, and get to work. I don’t look at the clock. I don’t let myself think about work, about how I’m going to have to pack up the kit come morning and start the cycle again. There’s no energy or time to spare for that stuff. Sometimes it works better than others – some nights are thousands of words, some are dozens. But there’s always something. In the end, there pretty much has to be.

——–
Richard E. Dansky
Writer, Game Designer, and Cad
(Not necessarily in that order)

As one of the senior members of this motley crew, in years, anyway, I feel it incumbent upon me to start trouble every once in a while. That’s one of the prerogatives of age and, dammit, I’ve earned it.

If anyone has a good, juicy, troublemaking topic, feel free to send it to me. If it buzzes my mean button or my mad button, I’ll put it out there on the 26th of whatever month it comes my way. For now, I’m picking my own set of waves: ANTHOLOGIES.

What are my qualifications for tackling this prickly subject, you might well ask. I’d like to answer by saying go to my website (www.janetberliner.com). Heck, I will say go to my website (www.janetberliner.com). For those of you who don’t or won’t, let me say that I’ve edited a bunch of them (anthologies) and appeared in a whole lot more–from literary ones like Harper’s Ariadne’s Thread to straight genre like 100 Wicked Little Witches. I’ve been making a living at this game for decades, I’ve had well over a hundred stories published, mostly in anthologies, and I still shake in my boots before I say, “I don’t do spec stories” or “How about an invitation?”

Like so many writers, I read short stories in anthologies I never heard of before and I wonder, why does no one think of me? Remember me? Not even the ones who were in the books I did. I don’t have an answer. Not really. What I can tell you, however, is what it takes to put together the concept for an anthology, sell it to a publisher, and take it through to publication.

All right, so what then are the steps in creating and selling an anthology? What are the controversies that seem to plague each and every one of them?

The anthologies I’ve done were created by me. For the most part, the spark was lit because I had written a story that begged to be in print. With the (David) Copperfield anthologies, he had to “approve” my stories but insisted that he wouldn’t do the books unless I put my money where my mouth was and did two originals to use as examples of what we wanted. For Immortal Unicorn I & II, HarperColins insisted that I contribute two original stories (as did my co-editor). For Desire Burn, the publisher made the same demand. And then there was SNAPSHOTS. My co-editor was Joyce Carol Oates. She did the same thing David did. “You will do a story,” she said. And I did.

That takes care of that part of the topic. The next part is, how do you go about putting together a pitch package for an anthology in a climate where editors and publishers hide their heads at the mention of the word? Well, like the song from “Gypsy” says, “You Gotta Have a Gimmick.”

Tom Clancy has a real tank in front of his house. We know who =he= is and still, he has a gimmick. “O” is a musical circus, partially performed underwater; Ziegfried and Roy…Hmm. Scratch that thought, so to speak.

So, you have to have a gimmick, one that appeals to a wide enough audience to induce marketing to become enthusiastic. That’s where it is, you know. It’s all about marketing. Take Blair Witch Project as an example. No brilliant acting or photography or story there. What they had was–all together now–”A gimmick.”

Okay, so let’s say I have the gimmick. Now I have to put together a package. What do publishers require on that package?

Sigh. All together now–Big Names.

Now I’m treading in quicksand. If I call in Markers from the Biggies I know and the project doesn’t sell, my credibility is down the toilet. If I use reprints, the publishers will want originals. I can’t get originals without money. And the wheel turns. I ask five or ten Names for contingency commitments, but I need those in writing. The contingencies are a) Find a publisher b) Pay us what we think we’re worth C) If we have time.

Does the potential publisher understand? Yes. Does he care? No. He says, “Five biggies?” I think, five if you’re lucky? He says, “Anthologies don’t sell. Our last one didn’t do well. Five names out of seventeen or eighteen stories? Not enough. Give us a list of all of the names. Show us some stories…” Guarantee us a Preface by someone famous. Be sure you have introductions or afterwords for each story.

The wheel goes around and, while it’s turning, always and forever, there are the following issues: open versus closed anthologies; BIG name versus no name; cliques versus individuals. Any way you go, people will berate you.

Now for the money end. Here, too, there are decisions to be made. Do you pay per word, the same per word to every one? After the initial advance, do you pay equally for each story. Or do you pay per story? Do you pay some people more than others? How much are reprints worth? Do you pay a kill fee out of your own pocket if the publisher decides against a particular story or cuts the book down in scope and size? I generally do–which more often than not means that, for all of my trouble, time, and work, I’m lucky to break even.

And the Rights. Let’s not forget about those. When it’s a reprint, you have to track down the original printing, make sure you have the right permissions for the right country from the right person. That can be unbelievably time-consuming.

You have now put in a lot of hours and spent not inconsiderable money out of pocket. You’ve put together your sales package, made sure the gimmick is highly visible, and addressed the issue of marketing.

So what’s the next step?

If you have a (potential) coeditor, address the question of a contract, copyright, and payment. Put a contract together for your writers. Make sure you have the right of refusal if there’s a story you don’t like or a writer who won’t take editorial guidance. Once you have all of the stories and they’re perfect, you need to decide on their order of appearance and acquire updated bios for each author. Then find out if checks (Dear God, let there be checks) will go directly to them or via their agents, who generally treat you with no respect at all because you’re paying their author so little. Next you have to note which authors and agents prefer to hear from you via e-mail, fax, telephone, snailmail.

Is it soup yet?

Oh no, baby, not by a long shot. The sale hasn’t even been made.

Fast forward and assume that, miracle of miracles, a sale has been made and the numbers have been crunched. Now it’s time to solicit the rest of the stories, hand out deadlines, and make sure you have an approved back-up list in the event of non-delivery. Then you read the stories, edit them and/or make rewriting suggestions where necessary, deal with fragile egos. I have held the anthologies I’ve done to the highest possible standard. The other thing I have always done is insisted upon the right to invite in a small percentage of relative unknowns, people whose writing talent has caught my attention but who have not yet made it to the big pond of NYT bestsellers.

When the stories are all in and you’ve reconfirmed that there will be enough copies of the book sent to you for all of the contributing writers–each to be sent out by you individually–the crud begins. The outcry by the uninvited, the innuendoes, the determination that never again, in this lifetime, will you do another anthology.

Until the next time.

Maybe.

–Janet

When my first novel, The Unwelcome Child, was finally accepted by a publishing house, I thought I could finally relax, or at least get to work on another project. However, these days I find myself busy composing queries to reviewers, magazines, and websites, creating a website of my own, not to mention writing a monthly essay for this blog. Because I’m new to this business, I’d assumed that the publisher who bought my book would handle all the P.R., the promotion, etc. But then reality began to settle in, and I realized that if my book was going to have any chance of being read by other than friends and family, I had to be not only a writer but a salesperson, too. Now, for someone like me, whose favorite pastime is to sit in the dark and rock in my rocking chair for hours at a time, the idea of having to go out into the big world and convince people to buy what I’m selling is daunting, to say the least.

Because my background is in the theater, you’d think this would be a contradiction in character. After all, don’t most performers love to be the center of attention? In a way, yes. But to be the center of attention while pretending to be someone else is quite different from wanting that attention as yourself. In the theater, you become that character, and it’s not Terese Pampellonne you’re watching anymore. Instead, it’s a chain-smoking psychiatrist like that in Agnes of God, or a deaf starlet as in House of Blue Leaves. In those moments on the stage, I cease to be me, and that freedom can be exhilarating. Not to mention that understanding a character’s motivations requires a psychological flaying that many of us would be extremely hesitant to perform on ourselves.

And as far as audience reaction is concerned, in my opinion it’s easier for an actor to insulate a fragile ego from rejection, (though perhaps not canned goods, such as that time in Tunisia when the audience expected break dancing, instead of modern dance). An actor can blame the writer, the director, even their fellow actors for a flop. But as a novelist, there’s no one to blame but yourself if your book is deemed awful by the reading public. It’s your idea, your words, your execution of the storyline. No wonder writer’s use pseudonyms. But of course, none of this matters if no one reads your book, with or without a pseudonym, and that brings me back to my quandary: How do I, an introverted writer, make herself become a world-class self-promoter?

To be a salesperson you have to be out-going. But if I were an outgoing person, I probably wouldn’t be a writer. I’m sure I would hate the solitude, the lack of interaction with other people. But I do like it. It’s comfortable. There’s no one to challenge me but myself, the only conflict I have to deal with is between the characters in my stories, but perhaps what I appreciate most of all is that I don’t have to change. I can stay my introverted self.

And needless to say, if I do that it’s a guaranteed certainty that my book will never sell.

So, I’m trying to see this ‘learning to be a self-promoter’ as a good thing. A way of forcing myself to open up, and perhaps thereby expose me to a whole new world of possibilities (as well as the occasional tossed canned good, I’m sure). But I have the feeling it’s going to be slow going, judging by my attempt the other day.

For weeks I’d been casing a bookstore, wondering if they held readings but too chicken to go in and ask. I’d heard bookstores don’t like first novels because ‘they don’t draw a crowd.’ However, one day I decided to go in and get it over with. After browsing their minuscule Birthday card section for over half an hour, I finally got up the nerve to ask if they had a book reading series and if so, could my novel be included. The girl didn’t smirk and dismiss me as if I were trying to sell her a copy of Street News. Instead, she smiled and very politely told me, “No. Unfortunately, we’re just too small.” I can’t tell you how relieved I was. Not because there would be no possibility of a reading, but because I had at least asked, and wasn’t any worse off for the effort.

Greetings from Bien Hoa, Vietnam!

I’m writing from the living room of my in-laws, and frankly, trying to determine what I should talk about this month. But there is no shortage of things to say about this, my second visit to Vietnam – it’s more a matter of what specifically to do with all that raw material. And this reminds me of my first Storytellers Unplugged essay, having to do with the subject of writing of what you know. I’m overflowing with images and impressions of Vietnam, just aching to find their way into a nice fat novel…but that novel hasn’t formed yet, despite several stillborn (and sometimes near lunatic) possibilities. With a Vietnamese wife, and more trips to visit the in-laws in my future, that novel is an inevitability. But for now, my impressions of things Vietnamese have been limited to shorter works like the forthcoming novellas THE SEA OF FLESH and CLOSE ENOUGH – and presently, to this essay.

It’s unfortunate and unfair to think of Vietnam solely as the location of an American war, since it’s a country with a history that long precedes it (try to search out anything about Bien Hoa on the internet and you’ll pretty much find yourself limited to war-related sites), but the horror writer in me can’t help but rub its hands together in glee at those things we Westerners might find strange, exotic and grotesque. For instance, my in-laws do not live in squalor, but one must accustom oneself to showering with geckos clinging to the bathroom walls (hey, they eat the bugs), chattering and flicking their tails at each other in reptilian morse code. This week I was nearly run over by a motorbike when crossing a street (city streets swarm with bazillions of them), and nearly mauled by a deceptively cute black bear that reached imploringly to me through a hole in its cage; luckily its sudden swipe was ill-timed, launched a second before it could sucker a lame-brained tourist into stroking its formidably-clawed paw. But what is exotic to one man is mundane to another. Vietnamese don’t look twice at the hordes of dragonflies constantly swimming in the air above the heads of bathers on the shore of the South China Sea, and think nothing of handling live prawns as big as small lobsters, with long blue arms and pincers that can grip your finger pretty damn hard (yes, it’s terrible seeing them cooked live, but no worse than what we do to the aforementioned lobsters). Commonplace or not, it’s all pretty magical to me. I don’t doubt at all that I would have conceived my city of Punktown (featured in books I’ve written like, oh, PUNKTOWN) in quite a different way had I been exposed to cities like Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City), Dalat, Bien Hoa, or Seoul, Korea for that matter, before constructing it in my mind, based more on my impressions of Worcester and Boston, Massachusetts. And however fantastical I have tried to make that imaginary city…well, it sounds trite but it’s true that reality is often more bizarre and fascinating than the strangest things we try to dream up in our imaginations. Real cities are built brick by brick from the imaginations of millions; a lone, humble fantasist can’t compete with that.

There has been one blatantly horrific attraction I’ve experienced, designed to be so. At a place called Suoi Tien Resort, which is more of a surreal theme park, one part historical and three parts breath-takingly tacky, my wife Hong and I ventured into the equivalent of a Vietnamese walk-through ghost train ride, situated inside an immense dragon head, from which reverberated an eerie and, to me, indecipherable voice. Inside, we witnessed a kind of trial by mannequin, with the soon-to-be-damned kneeling before glowering judges or demons. Descending into the bowels of Hell, Hong clinging to my arm (heh heh), we encountered day-glow skeletons and tombstones, and scene after scene of the damned in their torments. As in a movie like NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, the low production values only made the terrors more effective; a week before coming to Vietnam I took my son to Disney World, and the admittedly wonderful technology behind the Haunted Mansion just doesn’t have the same unnerving effect as seeing these figures in their blood-splashed white pajamas, each one’s face obscured ala THE RING in long black hair, undergoing tortures that are hard to make out, inflicted by demons even harder to make out (though I vividly recall one demon dipping a figure in and out of a vat of sizzling fire, and another using a tremendous saw to split a man’s head down the middle).

Well, this isn’t the only intentionally horrific attraction I’ve been to in Vietnam, but I was trying not to get into the war. Still, it’s hard to shake images from the War Remnants Museum in Saigon, where one can see fetuses deformed by Agent Orange preserved in bottles…blown-up photos like that of an American soldier holding up in one hand the upper half of a tattered corpse, a big grin on his face as if he’s displaying a prize-winning trout…and a gun-toting (and also smirking) mannequin of a US soldier, rather comically exaggerated with his large pointed nose and the cigarette butt hanging out of his mouth as a hut burns in the background (I’ll bet he used that butt to start the fire). My outrage at the horrors of war (inflicted by BOTH sides) didn’t prevent me, however, from eagerly paying extra to fire live rounds from an AK-47 and M-16 on the grounds of the famous Cu Chi Tunnels (and if you want to experience horror, try subjecting your big American body to five minutes crawling through one of those!). It’s pretty crass and ironic that you can come out of the exhibits at the War Remnants Museum and buy souvenirs made from rifle shells, but hey, people have to eat. At this museum last October, I bought a Vietnamese/English dictionary from a guy who’d lost multiple limbs (he offered me a stump to shake) and an eye to an American land mine; talk about a guilt trip.

And getting back to eating — can I scare you with some of the things I’ve consumed? No, not dog, though the washed-out mongrels here don’t look so furtive and distrusting for nothing. I’ve drunk rice wine from a bottle in which a dead cobra was preserved (good for the libido, I’m told) and a cool drink made from the saliva of birds (they use it to hold their nests together). Squid, deer, pig tongues…mmm. Actually, Vietnamese food is fantastic, and my stomach has pretty much behaved itself — but the horror to top all horrors is to rush into a bathroom and realize there’s no toilet paper to be had, though you might get lucky and see some scraps of newspaper wrapped around the dispenser’s roll (as elsewhere in the world, the Vietnamese use water instead, but it’s a bit disconcerting to have to resort to).

Ah yes…earlier this month, Disney World, and now Vietnam. The brain reels from the input. In a hallucinatory fusion of the two, in the four days Hong and I stayed in beautiful Dalat, I would see a garbage truck coming around that announced itself to citizens with trash to dispose of by playing, without cease, “It’s a Small World”. It is, indeed! That in itself might keep people from visiting Vietnam…but I am made of stronger stuff. Ahem.

I’ve filled notebooks with these experiences, and taken countless photos. It’s all so vivid. It’s all waiting to be put into service…

Will the inevitable novel, hefty enough a box to contain this treasure of souvenirs, be gratuitous in its detail, actually overburdened with my impressions — a travelogue masquerading as a fiction? I hope not. I hope, instead, that my enthusiasm for the subject, the locale, will be translated into an exciting STORY, first and foremost. But I hope that my enthusiasm will become infectious. That it will make the reader feel they too have whipped down a Saigon street on the back of a motorbike, or walked across the red volcanic soil of a Vietnamese forest. Behind me, my nephews (who take pleasure in saying “hello” to me in English several million times a day) have been playing with clay, modeling sword-wielding figures and menacing snakes. Now, the clay is in my hands, so to speak. Waiting for the shaping to begin.

– Jeffrey Thomas

While researching this essay about the negative buzz that rings through the Writer’s Community (I use the term Writer’s Community for lack of a better one) every time a new Harry Potter book comes along, inevitably breaking every sales record in publishing history, I came across a piece about the new Pontiff’s take on the insanely popular Boy Wizard. So, I’ve decided to widen the scope a bit. After listing the three top reasons I’ve heard other writers give for their not-so-glowing opinions of J.K. Rowling’s wildly successful Harry Potter series, along with my rebuttals, I’ll stick my other foot solidly in my mouth by telling you exactly why I think folks with a religious objection to Harry Potter would do better to just keep their opinions to themselves.

Top three Harry Potter peccadilloes:

#1 – J.K. Rowling’s Love of the Adverb.

I’ll admit that I tend to favor Professor William Strunk Jr’s rule against adverb use in my own writing (though you might have noticed I’ve thrown a few in here just for giggles). I’ve heard counts of up to fifteen per page in the Harry Potter books; a bit excessive, I admit. However, her use of adverbs has never dampened my enjoyment of the Harry Potter books, and I’ll take it from the almost seven million copies of The Half-Blood Prince that sold the first day, that other readers agree with me.

In his book On Writing, Stephen King makes his point against adverbs, taking special care to tell readers how much he dislikes them in speech tags. King later refers to J.K. Rowling as a “Master of Back-story,” but neglects to mention her love of the adverb. While silence does not necessarily mean consent, he evidently didn’t feel her breaking of the no adverb rule was worth commenting on.

#2 – Weak Writing.

Now, I don’t know about that. Rowling’s writing is certainly simple (and I don’t mean that in a bad way) and straight forward, but a lack of poetic and flowery prose does not equal bad writing. I’ve seen her writing improve with each book, and her stories continue to grab me.

Some folks simply don’t like her writing or stories, and I accept that tastes in both style and subject matter do vary, but I don’t accept that she’s a weak writer.

#3 – Harry Potter is Literary Junk Food.

J.K. Rowling is not Marcel Proust. I see her as more of a modern Charles Dickens, remembering the story of a mob of Dickens fans who overcrowded a dock while waiting for a ship to deliver the final installment of The Old Curiosity Shop. Several unlucky fans fell off the dock and drowned.

J.K. Rowling’s work will probably not be studied by scholars, or taught by Literature Professors in a hundred years (except maybe for the pure economic effect it has had on the publishing world – Harry Potter is a 100 megaton nuclear warhead in a field of bottle rockets and firecrackers).

For me, her work is pure addictive fun, and for me, that’s enough.

Now on to the Pope.

In a letter sent March of 2003 to Gabriele Kuby, author of Harry Potter - gut oder böse (Harry Potter- good or evil?), a German language book accusing J.K. Rowling’s books of “corrupting the hearts of the young,” then Cardinal Ratzinger wrote:

“It is good, that you enlighten people about Harry Potter, because those are subtle seductions, which act unnoticed and by this deeply distort Christianity in the soul, before it can grow properly.” (Notice Ratzinger’s shocking use of adverbs? Tisk, tisk!)

See http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2005/jul/05071301.html (Pope Opposes Harry Potter Novels) for the full story.

Does this viewpoint surprise me?

Not at all. Religious groups and leaders have stigmatized the Harry Potter books almost from the start.

Does this viewpoint bother me?

Yes, just a little. Harry Potter is, at its core, a story of good vs. evil, and the line between the two is clearly drawn for the most part. Any obscurity can be put down to a Who-Done-It sense of mystery, rather than an attempt at any kind of moral relativism (a recent example of moral relativism being a line from Starwars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, where the newly christened Darth Vader says “from my point of view the Jedi are evil”).

Albus Dumbledore, Harry Potter, and The Order of the Phoenix are good guys, Lord Voldemort, the Malfoys, and The Death Eaters are bad guys. There it is, crystal clear. You’d think a discerning religious community would appreciate the absence of a sticky middle ground between the two, but apparently, many don’t.

This viewpoint is not universal among the religious. My wife, Shawna, is a Baptist and loves Harry Potter, but she seems to me to be the exception, rather than the rule.

Is the religious community’s constant condemnation of the Harry Potter books as evil productive to their goal, which I assume is to get people not to read them?

Hell no.

My wife and I took our first step into J.K. Rowling’s world of Wizards, Muggles, and Hogwarts because my son wanted to read one, and Shawna was concerned about all of the squawking coming from religious groups who opposed the series. We took it on, more in the spirit of a chore than anything else.

Need I say we became instant and enduring fans?

Yes, I was among the crowd of “Potterheads” hanging out at the bookstore at midnight on the release day. I was the third to grab a copy (two, as a matter of fact) from a pallet of six-hundred that was probably gone within hours.

Stop laughing. At least I wasn’t dressed in Hogwarts school robes.

Do I resent the new Pope’s opinion of J.K. Rowling’s books?

Nope. It is his opinion to have, and many share it. However, had religious objectors kept this opinion a little closer to their vests (or in Ratzinger’s case, his robe), the fire-storm of controversy that brought Harry Potter to the world’s attention might never have happened, and J.K. Rowling might now be a lowly mid-lister, or Scholastic may have even canceled the series altogether.

I don’t think the controversy gets full credit for Harry Potter’s success though. J.K. Rowling’s sales might have already been good, I don’t remember that far back, and I’m too tired to research that at one o’clock in the damn morning. The bad religious publicity may have put a spotlight on the series, but that spotlight would have burned out quickly if the story itself weren’t so universally loved.

And to clarify, I don’t really think the Pope is a half-wit, but once that line occurred to me, I had to use it.

Brian Knight