Storytellersunplugged

If you write for money, you know what it’s like waiting for the check to arrive. Show of hands from you professionals out there: how many of you are waiting for checks that are very, very late?

Don’t lie, Rick.

I tell you this, if all the cashish that publishers owe me were to arrive in tomorrow’s mail, I’d be sitting pretty for at least a couple of months, and Christmas would be bountiful for our friends and family.

As it is, we’re scraping by, and I’m selling stuff on Ebay and in other venues to help keep our heads above water. Christmas? I hope folks are not insulted by receiving homemade cards from us in lieu of gifts. (Fortunately, our friends and family are mainly of the highest caliber.)

Yes, both my wife and I have day jobs. Not terribly shabby ones. (She’s also got major health problems that tend to undercut us at the least opportune times — if there’s such a thing as an opportune time.) Without extra income above and beyond our regular paychecks, “non-extravagant” would describe a golden lifestyle still out there waiting to be achieved.

Just in the last few weeks, several of my most recent queries about payment for work already published have gone unanswered (though the editors are still buying fiction). Now, I’m not referring to fly-by-night rags here; these are solidly established, well-regarded, pro-paying publications. How much you want to bet they paid their printers for services rendered in a timely fashion? How many other writers, I wonder, are hounding them for payment as well?

I’m sure you just noticed that I took a half-hour break. In one of those peculiar instances of synchronicity, my good friend and fellow writer, William R. “Mr. Bill” Trotter, just darkened my doorstep, and before I could even mention what I was in the middle of writing, he began a certain poignant lament — on guess which popular topic.

If I’d had my druthers, back in the day when God was infusing my brain with all the things that would make me tick, I wonder if I might have asked that he bequeath me a passion for plumbing or electricianing or automechanicing or something equally practical. Something that might put me, as a provider of goods and services, a bit higher on the totem pole of Those Who Must Be Paid.

Yet those of us with this unsane nature continue to do this thing, and we do it diligently and enthusiastically, if not always optimistically. Best that I can figure, we’re wired funny. And we also have the audacity to attempt to influence others who want to write to aim high; to go for the money, of all things; to swear off writing “for the love of it” and set professional goals.

Why on earth?

Because — apart from being sadistic and desiring to share the pain — I believe that if everybody did it just for the love, the professional writer would become an anachronism (which some folks of the more pessimistic persuasion say is more or less inevitable anyway). We fuss and bitch and moan and are forced to spend ungodly amounts of time playing castrated collection agent when, by rights, we should be spending that time on our next creative project — which we still have to make happen whether we have time or not. Except for a select minority who have reached the rarest echelons, that’s the reality of the writing world — and I have it on good authority from lots who’ve attained levels far beyond mine that conditions there aren’t too terribly different. In fact, in my experience, it’s often the major publishing houses who, with their creative accounting and cracks in their corporate structure that could swallow Godzilla, can effectively make one wait as long as they feel inclined to make one wait. Timely royalty statements? Well, occasionally, but accurate? Who the heck knows? I’d have to ask the auditor I can’t afford to employ.

Well, we’ve chosen to accept this calling, and we deal with it, and I know precious few in the business, no matter how harried, who have even thought about dropping out altogether. Most of us are conceited enough believe that our words absolutely must be inflicted on unwitting readers, and that come hell or high water, we’re going to be reimbursed for the blood we’ve sweated. Well, we have to, or we are not professionals but dilettantes, and while there may be no shame in that, neither is there the kind of reward that comes with doing it both for the love and for something a bit more tangible. Even if the tangible is far from a living wage, which is the case of the majority of us, it’s what I like to think of as high-octane validation.

Doing it for the love is wonderful; but unless you’ve ventured into the waters of the professional publishing pool, I gotta ask — is it really love, or is writing just a fair-weather friend? Speaking for myself, I think it takes love and more to willfully become a cog in the sometimes-grotesque editorial machine. Lacking such experience, rare is the soul whose words are quite as sacred as he tends to believe them to be. (One need only read slush for a short time to discover this.) But then those who contribute to the slush are, in their fashion, attempting to work their way into the cogs, and those who move beyond the slush and into the rank-and-file help are actively perpetuating our status as wordcrafters of some value.

Now, in the interest of fairness and balance, let me point my pointy fingers at a couple of publishing houses whose conduct has not only impressed me but has exemplified the way I believe the business ought to be run.

The folks at Thomson-Gale, which published my novels The Lebo Coven and Blue Devil Island (forthcoming in January) under the Five Star imprint, have been a pleasure to work with (as have Marty Greenberg and company at Tekno Books, who are responsible for Five Star’s acquisitions — not to mention tons of other projects they’ve packaged). Five Star isn’t big, but their products are excellent and, with me, they have met their every obligation and commitment since the day I began working with them.

World Fantasy Award-winning Sarob Press, which just released my novel, The Nightmare Frontier, has been the epitome of professionalism in my dealings with them. It’s a very small, two-person outfit in the UK that specializes in collectible editions, but so far, I’ve found their integrity to be more than refreshing. May they live long and perspire.

Well, here’s to funny wiring. See you at the asylum.

—Mark Rainey