So I’ve alluded to the fact that I have a file with a LOT of rejection letters in it. I thought it might be interesting to pull one at random from time to time and post it, so everyone can experience the fun of reading what I like to call “you suck” letters (even though they don’t generally actually say “you suck”). So here’s one from 2000, for a short story called “Leech Field”.
Category: Writing
Galley Ho!
This is just a short note to let all who may be breathlessly waiting for Dragon Stones know that it has entered what might be called the “galley” phase, where I order finished copies from Lulu.com and go through them with a highlighter to fix any remaining formatting or style issues (at least, things that I consider formatting or style issues). I’ve already been through this process with Long Before Dawn and it probably took about two months, but I expect it to go faster this time now that I’ve already done one. I expect to hit my target of releasing Dragon Stones some time in June, though it won’t be available from book stores until 6-8 weeks after that due to the ISBN lag time.
In the meantime, I’ve started editing my next release, Father’s Books, a ghost story (of sorts) that I wrote after A Flock of Crows. By now I’m sure everyone realizes that I can’t write a “normal” ghost story, but that’s the easiest way to label Father’s Books right now so I’ll stick with it. More information will surely follow!
The Amazon Kerfluffle
Last month, it came out that Amazon.com is instituting a new policy that print-on-demand publishers, such as Lulu.com and Hard Shell Word Factory (publisher of Night Watchman), must use Amazon.com’s own POD service BookSurge* or have the print editions of their books dropped from the main store (though they can still be sold by third parties through the Amazon marketplace). Some companies, like Lulu, quickly caved … uhhh, agreed to use BookSurge; others, like Hard Shell, are taking a harder line and refusing to accede to Amazon’s new rules. The net result, for me, is that Night Watchman may be disappearing from the Amazon.com store in the future. I will be watching to see if this happens; so far, it’s still there, but they only have one copy left (“order soon — more on the way”).
I haven’t quite decided yet what I think of this whole thing. I’m not really sure that Amazon doing anything differently from Wal-Mart, which is notorious for beating up suppliers to cut costs and lower prices. I don’t think Wal-Mart runs its own factories and requires its suppliers to use them, though. (I could be wrong; if I wanted to do stuff like “research” and “fact-checking” I would be writing non-fiction.) I guess I’d have to say that on the face of it Amazon is being anti-competitive and the ultimate upshot is likely to be higher POD costs, but we’ll see how it shakes out. I don’t have much to lose whether my books are on Amazon or not. The ones who do have something to lose are, I think, the small publishers; a lot of folks in the small press and self-publishing world are extremely agitated about Amazon’s move, and some are calling for a boycott. Will a boycott succeed? Probably not; it’s likely to be more symbolic than anything else. After all, Amazon has been boycotted before, notably over their one-click patent. The Internet was a smaller place then (fewer tubes) and the boycott still had no noticeable effect. The current issue at hand is about as arcane as the one-click patent issue, and just as few people care about it; I think Amazon will just get away with it, until and unless it attracts attention from regulators (i.e., never). In any case, I am neither an economist nor an MBA, so my opinion on such matters is probably worth about as much as I make on sales of my book from Amazon.com — i.e., next to nothing.
Anyway, if you’re looking for a copy of Night Watchman and you can’t find it at Amazon, you can always buy it directly from any number of places, like Barnes and Noble or directly from Hard Shell. Or you can just swing by the house and pick up a copy; I’ll even sign it, too.
*Disclaimer: I used BookSurge to tear apart, scan, and republish A Flock of Crows is Called a Murder after the original publisher, DarkTales, went out of business.
Interview With The Dragon
Somehow, an interlocutor has managed to interview T’Sian, the dragon from Dragon Stones, without getting burned, eaten, or squashed. Perhaps that’s because the interviewer is a very cute chow-chow mix. You can read the interview at Cody Bear Asks. Don’t worry, the interview is spoiler-free!
Book-In-Progress Review: “World Without End”
Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth is one of my favorite books (even before Oprah featured it), so when the quasi-sequel World Without End came out, I immediately wish-listed it over on BookMooch. A few weeks later it arrived in an enormous package — this is one massive book, just like its predecessor. I’m not that far into it yet so I can’t do a full review, but I can say that it doesn’t hook the reader immediately the way that Pillars did. However, it does seem to be better than the last Follett book I read, Night Over Water.
One thing that is obvious already, though, is that the author’s breast fetish is operating at full tilt — pretty much every single female character who wanders across the page has her breasts stared at, felt up, fantasized over, or otherwise put front and center (so to speak) of her character’s description. Some would suggest, accurately, that all this indicates is that Ken Follett is a dude. But come on, Ken! We’re supposed to at least pretend to occasionally raise our gaze above chest level! You’re going to make the ladies paranoid, and that’ll just make it tougher on all of us …
Having said that, I have of course written my share of such descriptions, especially in my vampire book, Long Before Dawn (available now!). But you know how vampires are; being dead and all, they don’t have many amusements besides stalking humans and drinking blood (Spike’s addiction to the soap opera Passions notwithstanding; most vampires don’t have television in their crypts), so they spend a lot of time being horny. Which, I guess, makes them not so different from Ken Follett and the rest of us guys … 😉
“Dragon Stones” Cover
I mentioned that for my book Long Before Dawn, I took the cover photo myself. For the Dragon Stones cover, though, I had a bit of a quandary … I could hardly find a dragon and take a picture of it (they’re notoriously camera-shy and tend to eat paparazzi), and I’m not so good at the drawing thing, so I couldn’t make my own picture unless I wanted a stick figure dragon; so I delved into a couple of artwork sites (iStockPhoto and deviantART) looking for dragon illustrations. I ended up working with a group of Italian artists called Red Frog to get a modified version of their vector dragon illustration.
I just finished working on Long Before Dawn (except for getting an ISBN for distribution purposes), so it will still be several weeks before Dragon Stones comes out, but here’s a preliminary version of the Dragon Stones cover:
Feedback is welcome!
“Long Before Dawn” Available From Lulu.com!
Long Before Dawn is now available from Lulu.com in both print and electronic versions. Huzzah! It will eventually be available from Amazon.com and other booksellers, but that is still a week or two away as I have yet to receive my ISBN. I will post a follow-up when this is ready. In the meantime, if you’re interested in purchasing a copy of Long Before Dawn directly from my Lulu storefront, you can do so here (check the link in the sidebar) or here.
In the past, I’ve made a habit of giving free, signed copies of my books to anybody who asks for one. This is partly because I’m more interested in having readers than in making money (although I wouldn’t turn down big bucks for the movie rights), partly because hardly anybody asks for one, and partly because I’m not really comfortable exhorting people to buy my stuff. (This is why I need an agent.) However, it’s been pointed out that giving away books online could get prohibitively expensive, so I’m going to have to forgo the “free” part, and exhort people to buy my stuff*. I will still be more than happy to sign copies, though. If you’re interested, drop me a line.
Thanks, and happy reading!
*Please buy my stuff. (Maybe if I keep saying it, I’ll get used to it.)
Underground with the Mouthless Girl
Back when I wrote mostly horror, I accumulated quite a collection of reference books of ghosts, spirits, and various and sundry monsters. (This was before we could just hop on the Internets and pull information out of the worldwide series of tubes.) One of my favorite reference books was The Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits, which listed literally hundreds of ghouls and beasties from around the world. “Underground with the Mouthless Girl” is about a rather nasty ghost from India called a churel, which is the restless spirit of a woman who died in childbirth. “Underground with the Mouthless Girl” appeared in “The Earwig Flesh Factory” from Eraserhead Press in the summer of 2000.
This story is not particularly gory, but I’ve always considered it one of the most creepy and unsettling things I ever wrote. You have been warned.
The girl catches Michael Osborne’s eye as he comes out of the men’s room. She’s sitting on a tall stool at the end of the bar, with one long, impossibly shapely leg extended toward the floor, like a dancer doing a pirouette. Silky black hair flows over her shapely neck and shoulders with the grace of a waterfall, concealing what her scanty red summer dress would otherwise reveal.
Osborne slides onto the stool next to her; it is inexplicably unoccupied on this noisy, crowded night. She looks at him and smiles. Her skin has a lustrous walnut sheen that goes perfectly with her jet hair. Her eyes are wide and dark and shaped like some exotic nut. For a moment Osborne finds himself speechless.
“Hello,” she says.
Osborne finds his voice before he begins to stutter or babble. “Hi. I’m Michael. You can call me Mike.”
“I’m Madhur.” She has a slight Indian accent. Aren’t they the ones who do all that kinky Kama Sutra stuff? “You can call me …” She looks him up and down. “… anytime.”
Just who is picking up who, anyway?
Free Software for Writers: Celtx
By now you’ve probably gathered that I write short stories and novels. Although publishers tend to put formatting restrictions on the submission of these types of manuscripts, the restrictions are usually easy to meet: Double-spaced, flush left, courier font, wide margins. Other types of manuscripts–screenplays, for instance–have much more specific requirements. Although you can try to implement the required format in a word processor, it’s much easier to use software specifically designed for that purpose. Enter Celtx.
Celtx bills itself as “the world’s first fully integrated solution for media pre-production and collaboration”. In addition to its screenplay formatting ability, it contains facilities for defining characters, storyboarding, index-carding, and production scheduling, as well tracking props, wardrobes, sets, and cast members. It even permits collaboration with other users. I only used Celtx briefly, when I thought I might dabble in screenwriting (an experiment that didn’t last long), but I found it easy and intuitive to use. Even non-screenplay writers might like it for its organizational power. I don’t do index-carding or outlining (tried it once and the end result bore no resemblance to the outline), but many authors do.
Celtx is available for Linux, OS X, and that other operating system whose name I can’t remember at the moment.
As a side note, writers who are interested in learning more about Celtx (and about Linux in general) might want to check out episodes 93 and 94 of the Linux Reality podcast. Episode #93 is an interview with a writer (not me) who uses Linux, and episode #94 is a rundown by another writer who uses Linux (also not me) of various Linux applications that are of value to authors, including OpenOffice and Celtx.
Thanks and happy writing!
“Night Watchman” Review
I stumbled across an Epinions review of Night Watchman today. I was surprised to see this, given that Night Watchman came out over five years ago, but it’s nice to know people are still reading if after all these years. (Yes, it’s a recent review … 1/26/08.) Although the review is not unalloyed praise (3 out of 5 stars), it is positive overall, and raises some valid points that I would probably address if I were rewriting the book now. Still, I think Night Watchman does hold up pretty well for a novel that I wrote when I was about 23 years old. (Never you mind how old I am now.) You can visit the reviewer’s Epinions page here and his home page here.
Long Before Dawn is an even older* book than Night Watchman; I started working on that shortly after getting married, and finished it at the ripe old age of 22. But since Dawn was never published, I’ve had the opportunity to go back and “improve” it a couple of times since completing it. I think that this most recent set of revisions, done to get it ready for Lulu publication, has tightened up the plot and characterizations significantly. We’ll see if the readers (all ten of them) agree!
*In fact, Long Before Dawn is so old**, I originally wrote it using the MS-DOS program PC-Write. PC-Write couldn’t handle a document that long, so I had to split it into three or four files for editing. Ahhh, good times …
**And Long Before Dawn isn’t even my oldest book; there’s one more, older still, called Three Detectives, that I actually had an agent working on for a while. He was never able to sell it, unfortunately. This is a (you guessed it) detective novel, set in Utica, NY, that I wrote after a marathon Nero Wolfe reading session. Perhaps it will see the light of Lulu some day, but I doubt it.
Viscosity 