Bev Vincent

I’m doing something a little unusual today. Not with this blog—in real life. For two-and-a-half hours, I’m going to be standing in front of an audience of writers and other interested (hopefully) parties talking about my writing career trajectory in a presentation titled (though not by me): Skills Learned on the Path to Publication. It is sponsored by the Houston Writers Guild and takes place at the Sugar Land (Houston) library.

As I was thinking about my writing career to date I wondered: where should I start? Have I always been a writer? Well, yes and no. Because I grew up in a rural setting with few neighbors my own age and only one channel of television, I became a voracious reader. I probably would have been a reader in any setting, but who knows?  I think reading leads to the desire to write in many people. I certainly took my stabs at it at an early age. I wrote an Agatha Christie knock-off for an eighth grade English assignment. Along with two other stories, mine was cited by the teacher as “good enough to publish.” High praise, and completely untrue, but it was the sort of encouragement I needed. At least the teacher recognized some potential.

I remember tackling a novel one summer in my teens. I wrote it on a plastic-shelled manual typewriter, nothing nearly so romantic as the old Royals or Caronas of earlier generations, but it was mine. I wrote on mill paper, which was plentiful since my father worked in the paper mill. Rough paper about the same color of brown as some fast food chain napkins. My influences at that point were Mickey Spillane’s I, the Jury and Charlie’s Angels. I remember very little about the plot except that it had to do with murder among a group of acquaintances who were traveling somewhere, one of them a Farrah clone described in Spillane’s lurid prose. Did I mention I was a teenager? I got at least a hundred pages into that book, typing a page at a time with no idea where I was going or what I was doing. Alas (or, perhaps, fortunately) that manuscript is forever lost.

When I went to university, I continued to write. Having discovered horror novels and stories, I began writing short stories in that genre. Most of them were handwritten in a blank journal with the university crest on the front. Story ideas were listed in the back pages, and the stories themselves sloped and slanted across the lineless pages. Many of them were completed and typed up, though some trailed off into blank space without resolution. I used to share these stories with some of my dorm neighbors, but I never considered submitting one for publication. I wouldn’t have had a clue how to go about doing such a thing.

Then I ratcheted things up a notch. Twilight Zone magazine was in its heyday and they announced a short story contest, which I decided I would enter. I can’t remember for sure if my submission was typed on white paper or on the mill paper I was still using for scratch. Somehow, I suspect the latter. I probably violated every manuscript rule under the sun, including stapling the pages together and failing to double space. None of my typescripts from that era survive.

The story was called “A Change in the Weather” and had to do with a young boy trapped in a country store by a particularly virulent and no-doubt supernatural storm. Peter Straub was one of the judges for that contest. I am very happy to report that he has no recollection of my story whatsoever. Dan Simmons won the contest. Did I mention I was way out of my league? Oh, well. Small steps. Live and learn.

Unlike my early novel attempt, those short stories still exist in holographic form. For a long time I couldn’t find them, but I finally turned up the journals a number of years ago. In fact, I’ve rewritten a number of them and even had a few published over the years. The core ideas weren’t all that bad, though the execution was amateurish. Some of them are hopeless, like a rip-off of The Mist crossed with “Trucks” that has a bunch of people trapped in a greasy spoon diner after all the dogs in a city (maybe in THE WORLD!) go mad and start attacking people. (Frankly, the story, simply called “Dogs,” isn’t as good as it sounds!)

Now we get to the gap years. If you aren’t familiar with the term, a “gap year” is a year someone (usually young) takes off between one stage of his or her life and the next. Between high school and college, or between undergrad and grad school. Usually the person travels or works.

My “gap year” from writing lasted from about 1987 through 1999.

I honestly can’t explain where my interest in writing went for all those years, and why it returned. I certainly didn’t stop reading voraciously. For two of those years, I was living overseas, so I traveled and worked, but I certainly had a lot of  alone time when I could have been writing if I’d been so inspired. For most the rest of those years, I was living by myself in an apartment in a foreign country (the U.S.!), again not writing. It simply didn’t occur to me that it was something I might want to do with my copious free time.

Then, the urge reappeared. At first, I was handicapped. I would dig my notebook computer out of its carrying case and set it up on whatever perch was convenient, write a few pages, and then return the computer to its hiding place where it would remain for days, weeks or months. The process of starting to write had a level of inertia that I could easily allow to overcome me. If I was going to write, something had to change.

My wife, bless her soul, asked me what I wanted for Christmas in late 1998. After some consideration, I answered that I wanted a place to write. Somewhere permanent, somewhere that could remain undisturbed, where I could sit down, turn on the computer and start writing without having to find a place to set up. She bought a lovely roll-top desk and we found a suitable place to install it. The roll-top was a stroke of brilliance on her part. I tend to generate piles of papers, books, and notes while I am working. At the end of a session I could just back up the day’s work, turn off the computer, pull down the cover and—voila!—my clutter was hidden beneath the handsome, dark, corrugated cover.

That really represents the beginning of my second career as a writer. From that point on, my productivity grew. By 2000 I was being paid to write both short stories and essays and I haven’t stopped since. Writing is now as much a part of my daily routine as breakfast and working out at the gym. I now have my own office, so rolling down the desk’s top is no longer a necessity (nor even remotely possible at the moment).

Sometimes I think I hadn’t lived enough to write when I was younger. What did I know about other people’s lives, let alone my own? I am constantly amazed by very young writers who have something meaningful and universal to say. I know I sure didn’t. Not at 21—not even at 31. Now that I’m in my (very) late 40s I think I’m starting to hit my stride. My necessary gap years are at an end.

I used to write short stories for fun when I was a college student. I shared these creations with a few friends, but I never considered submitting them for publication. I did send one in to the Twilight Zone fiction contest (the contest Dan Simmons one — boy, was I out of my league!) but otherwise I was content to simply create.

Then I became an aspiring writer for far too many years.

We all know aspiring writers. They’re the people who talk a lot about writing, about how they want to write, even about the stories they plan to write, but never get around to the actual process of putting words down on the page. They come up with any number of excuses for why they aren’t writing, some of them valid.

It wasn’t until about ten years ago that I became a writer again. I found the time to write most days, I devoted myself to improving my craft, and I started submitting things for publication.

I met an aspiring writer last week at the place where I normally have breakfast in the morning between my writing session and my day job. I’d been aware of him for a while. Each Thursday morning, he and several other men meet for breakfast. It’s not a very large place, so I often overhear their conversations. This guy talks at length about the novel he wants to write, going into great detail about the characters and the plot, other works it’s similar to, stuff like that. The other men give him a hard time–not because he wants to write, but because he’s been talking about writing for so long.

They aren’t very encouraging. This week I overheard him talk about an article he’d stumbled upon when he was going through his research material for the novel. One of his friends laughed and made a disparaging comment about the amount of dust he must have encountered. I’ve heard him mutter and laugh whenever the subject of the book comes up. They’ve heard it all before.

Last week, the fellow introduced himself to me after seeing a flyer I’d posted on the message board about my most recent book. He waited until the others were gone and proceeded to ask me questions about my writing. More than once he replied wistfully about how he wanted to do this and wanted to do that, but he couldn’t find time. I described my routine to him and I could see his internal conflict. He wanted to be able to do something similar, but for some reason he didn’t seem convinced that he could pull it off. I’m not sure what his stumbling block was — maybe he didn’t really have any faith in his ability to pull off a novel. Maybe he had talked about the book for so long that he had essentially already written it in his mind and so to put it down on paper seemed like drudgery. Perhaps his personal circumstances — family obligations or the demands of his day job — did not provide him with the necessary time and energy to work on his writing for any amount of time on a regular basis.

It’s probably difficult for any one of us to explain the transformation — what it is that convinces us to change from being aspiring writers to the real thing. I remember the excuses I used to come up with in the years before I started writing again. I had nowhere permanent to work. Every time I wanted to start working, I had to set up my computer somewhere and assemble my papers, and it just took too long. I didn’t want to lock myself away in a room and ignore the rest of the family. All very good excuses, and all surmountable, at least in my case. My wife bought me a rolltop desk, and that took care of the logistics. I summoned the gumption to get up at 5 a.m. each day, a time when no one else in the house was awake, to do my work, so I didn’t have to worry about ignoring people. And I mustered the stick-to-it-iveness to keep at it, day after day, week in, week out.

There’s a quote attributed to Dorothy Parker that says, “I hate writing, I love having written.” Aspiring writers never get to enjoy the second part.

The biggest problem with my first novel, I think, was the fact that it straddled genres or defied easy classification. I used to refer to it as a “maybe ghost story.” It’s not all that unusual a concept. There’s a ghost in the book if you believe one character, and it’s all in the character’s mind if you believe another.

Graham Joyce does this all the time, to great effect. For every putative supernatural event in his books, there is almost always an equally mundane alternate explanation. Mass hysteria. Delusions. Dreams. The affects of mind-altering substances. Misperception. Psychosis.

As a reader, I have no trouble whatsoever allowing my imagination to accept ghosts and vampires and any of the other tropes of the supernatural. The only time I have problems is when the author tries to explain something using real-world science that doesn’t make sense. That’s one of the reasons I disliked Cell, for example. The pulse worked for me as an inexplicable event, but once the hand waving about rebooting brains and save-to-disk memories kicked in, I checked out.

However, I have a much harder time with the supernatural as a writer. I’ve written stories where inexplicable things happen, some I’m quite proud of. I think of “Special Delivery,” published in Cemetery Dance, where a writer has boxes of ideas delivered to his door. That’s clearly supernatural, but to me it falls more into the realm of the inexplicable.

I have a hard time pulling off ghosts and werewolves and vampires and zombies with a straight face. My clinical, methodical mind almost always looks for the mundane explanation. I’m not very interested in these supernatural creatures themselves. In the stories where I’ve used them, my focus is more on the other characters’ reactions.

I’ve written two zombie stories that don’t have a single active zombie in them, for all intents and purposes. In one, “Groundwood,” workers in a converted paper mill dispose of zombie carcasses. In another, a group of survivors make a last-ditch attempt to flee to somewhere safe. The zombies are almost McGuffins in those cases. In my only werewolf story, the protagonist only thinks he’s a werewolf when, in fact, he’s just a homicidal maniac.

I like writing suspense stories, and the supernatural can be used to generate suspense, but it’s not strictly necessary. My first published story, “Harming Obsession,” concerns a man with an obsessive-compulsive disorder that is amplified by something he has to do on Halloween.

These days, I read more crime fiction than anything else, and my writing is evolving in that direction, too. I was recently asked to write a contemporary vampire story for the eVolVe anthology. It didn’t take me long to come up with an idea, but it was an idea for a crime story rather than one that involved vampires as a menace. What if vampires were the objects of hate crime, I asked myself. The protagonist is a cop who has to investigate vampires as victims rather than as victimizers. I was delighted by this idea, because it let me explore something classic and—let’s be honest—overexposed these days from a different angle.

The novel I’m working on now is far easier to classify. It’s a straight crime novel with a private detective protagonist, although I’m throwing in a couple of other angles to make it more interesting. For this book, at least, I plan to abandon anything supernatural, because that just feels right. That doesn’t mean I’m giving up the ghosties and the ghoulies for good. There are a couple of crime series where eerie and inexplicable things happen, and I’m open to that possibility in future works.

For the time being, however, I’m sticking to the real world. That’s scary enough for me, most of the time.

– by Bev Vincent

Busman’s Holiday: (n) a holiday spent in following or observing the practice of one’s usual occupation.

What does a writer do on vacation? A better question might be: is it really possible for a writer to take a vacation?

A writer is always gathering material, no matter what else he is doing. I’m not sure what triggers this process. Though I would like to think that I’ve always been a writer, the truth is that I spent a lot of years not writing, and not thinking about writing, either. However, once I decided that I’d procrastinated long enough, a switch flipped inside my brain that turned me into a sponge, constantly absorbing details and processing them as fodder for stories.

Case in point: my wife and I spent Labor Day weekend at a beach house on the Gulf of Mexico. It was a complete getaway. No cell phones, no computers, no internet. Off the grid, as they say. No one knew where we were. We had no idea what was going on in the world—we didn’t even turn on the TV. For four days, we enjoyed quiet time, mostly spent watching people frolic on the beach and listening to the waves crashing on the sand.

We weren’t there for more than three hours before my mind started conjuring up a scene inspired by something trivial I observed. The details coalesced. I knew who the observer was and why he was there, and I extrapolated the real situation into a purely fictional event. One minute I was sitting on the balcony watching someone on the beach and the next I had this little nugget of fantasy, fully formed.

When I went to sleep that night, my mind continued to work, painting in the real-life details that would make the scene more concrete and vivid, and creating the fictional tapestry that differentiates the process from simply recording an observation.

We were supposed to be on vacation, though. I had no tools of the trade—not even a journal or a notepad. Besides, I wasn’t supposed to spend our time writing—I was supposed to be recharging my batteries and relaxing. That’s what a vacation is for, right?

Fortunately, my wife understands. The next morning, when we went to a nearby department store to stock up on provisions, she encouraged me to get a notebook so I could write down my inspirations. I plucked a 15-cent spiral notebook from the back-to-school sale pile and, when we got back to the townhouse, composed four hand-written pages.

The scene was still as vivid as when I had first conceived it. The words flowed out without interruption. There are only a couple of scratch-outs where I started sentences backwards and took a second stab at them. There’s a smudge on the first page from a raindrop. I was sitting on the balcony at the time and a brief sun-shower passed over, but I didn’t stop. (According to an old saying, if it rains when the sun is shining, the devil is beating his wife. Now there’s an idea for a story waiting to happen. But wait! One idea at a time!)

Having transcribed the scene onto the page, I was able to go back to soaking up the sun’s rays, breathing in the fresh air, absorbing the mesmerizing sound of the sea, and generally enjoying the time with my wife.

And yet . . . the scene ended but the story didn’t. It was just getting under way. There were numerous implications for the main character. Things were bound to develop as a result of what he had seen and done. Why had another character acted as she had? Those thoughts rolled around in my mind for the rest of the vacation, off and on. It wasn’t a distraction, though. It didn’t keep me from relaxing. But if there’s a second switch that lets you turn off that kind of mental activity, I haven’t yet found it. I worried at that ribbon of story the way a puppy chews on a dangling thread. I came up with a couple of ideas for what happens next, and I’m biding my time until I have the opportunity to explore them. I still have no idea whether I have the beginning of a short story or a scene from a novel, but I know that it will be used sometime.

So that’s what I did on my summer vacation: I wrote part of a short story and came up with the idea for this essay. I wonder if that makes it tax deductible . . .

– by Bev Vincent

Last month’s essay would be difficult to top. The piece had more than triple the average number of views of an average Storytellers Unplugged essay, and it has garnered over eighty comments to date. That doesn’t take into account the number of other blogs where people used elements of the essay as the launching point for other discussions. It didn’t quite go viral, but it was at least mildly contagious. I think I would be safe in saying that it inspired more vigorous response than anything else I’ve ever written, and the scope of the topics that developed amazed me. Gender bias can be extrapolated to other kinds of prejudices and assumptions about people based on preconceived categories. 

Like I said, a hard act to follow. I wish I had something equally profound to write about this month, but I don’t. At first I thought I would write a review of all of the interesting blogs that referenced my piece, but you can easily find those yourself if you’re interested. This link should get you started. Those other people express their opinions better than I ever could in a synopsis piece, and their points of view are worth reading, if you have the time. Suffice to say that the little hitch I encountered with one short story and one editor is small potatoes compared to what some people face regularly and persistently. 

August is a lackluster month here in Texas. It’s hot, oh boy is it hot, especially this year. It’s usually already over 80° when I get up at 5 am for my daily writing session. Most days, when I leave work at 5 pm the digital readout on my car’s thermometer reads something in the 100-105° range. Hot and dry. It takes something out of a person, all this heat, even though we are air conditioned to the hilt. At least there haven’t been any hurricanes to worry about. Not yet, at least. 

August is also a month of transition, though people don’t always make that association. For many, the real summer is coming to an end. School starts a week from today around here. Even though I no longer have school-age kids, that creates a subtle shift in my reality. Speed zones that I’ve been safely ignoring for a couple of months are reactivated. The loose, less scheduled existence that many other people around me have fallen into during the summer months all of a sudden snaps back into a more rigid state defined by the comings and goings of their children. Summer television series wind down in preparation for the fall season. 

When I look back on July and August, I don’t feel like I’ve accomplished very much. I got everything done I was supposed to—I even got a few things in early. I still have over fifteen short stories circulating, so I haven’t fallen asleep at the switch, though editors seem to be a little slower to respond during the summer so it hasn’t exactly been arduous keeping up with submissions. I’ve written or revised a few short stories, penned several reviews and essays, read a bunch of books, whittled my to-do list down to two or three items (and, once this essay is finished, it will be shorter still), but I feel like I’ve been treading water. I’m ready for the next big thing. 

I have a new book coming out this fall, but it’s finished and copies should arrive from the printer within the next month, so there hasn’t been much to do with it lately. I’ve been spreading the word, but since the publisher, Barnes & Noble, isn’t yet accepting pre-orders, I’ve been holding back. Closer to publication date I’m sure I’ll be promoting it more aggressively, but the B&N model for their readers’ companions is to position them in prominent places in their stores and let them sell themselves. They don’t produce galleys and don’t seek advance reviews. It’s a completely different process than for my previous book, one that seems to contribute to the doldrums of these summer months. 

I planned to start work revising a novel at the first of August, but that date has slipped past as other short-term obligations came and went. I had a long conversation with my agent about the book over a month ago. I have a strategy and several pages of notes for the rewrite, but I haven’t opened the Word document once since that discussion. I wanted my desk to be clear of distractions so I could focus on it exclusively, but I’ve discovered that such a state of nirvana, the clutter-and-obligation-free desk, doesn’t exist. 

So, it’s back-to-school time for me. Time to put away the summer toys, the figurative beach balls and inline skates and picnic baskets, and get back to work. Anticipate that school bell each morning and show up with my pencils sharpened and my homework ready to hand in. Maybe even strive for some of those extra-credit problems I always used to like to do when I was a kid.

It would help greatly if it wasn’t still so hot out, but we writers have to create our own weather. If we wait for the dog days of summer to be over, we’ll never get anything done.

– by Bev Vincent

I’m including my picture in this month’s essay. It’s somewhat important to the piece, especially if you don’t know me other than as a name on the screen or on a piece of paper. If you don’t know me from Adam (or Eve), in other words.

In 2007, I was invited to submit to an anthology by an editor with whom I’d worked in the past. The general theme was near and dear to my heart and he was offering pro payment so I was willing to participate. I had a story that I thought would be a match. We spent a few weeks going back and forth, with me performing significant rewrites to satisfy his requests, and ultimately we arrived at a version that both of us were happy with. (Note this fact—it’s also important.) The editor sent me a contract, which we both executed. End of the story, right?

Wrong.

The editor turned the manuscript in to his publisher (you’ve never heard of them, so don’t worry about who it is), and it languished on someone’s desk for months. Finally they got around to it and did something unexpected. They sent the manuscript out to another editor for review.

Now, if I was the original editor, I’d be somewhat miffed by this, having turned in a finished manuscript that I was happy with. A few weeks ago he received a set of editorial comments back from the publisher, which he then had to distribute to his stable of contributors. This is six weeks before the book is supposed to go to the printer, mind you, and over eighteen months after the last time any of the writers have looked at their stories.

If you think all this is unusual, I haven’t gotten to the best part yet. The notes on my story consisted of two full single-spaced pages of text. It was savage. Among the first comments this editor (and I do not know who he or she is) offered: “It’s quite a challenge for a writer of one sex to explore writing from the perspective of the opposite sex. Bev Vincent has not done a convincing job.”

The protagonist in my story is a man.

I’ll sit here for a few seconds while that sinks in.

Me, the guy who’s pictured above, failed to do a convincing job of writing from the perspective of a man.

I’ve heard female writers talk about gender bias in the industry before, but it’s always been an abstract concept to me. Not something I’ve ever experienced. Oh, sure, people often think I’m female based on my name—it’s a common enough mistake, which I’ve had to deal with all my life. I like to tell the story about how I was almost assigned to the women’s dorm at university. However, I’ve never before had an editor criticize my writing based on a false assumption concerning my gender. Or make blatantly biased statements about the male perspective. Read on.

The editor says: “The story seems far too personal, introspective and emotional for a man . . . It is hard to imagine a fellow from a place like [the setting] uttering the following line.” The editor then provides three sentences from my story as examples. He or she continues, “And I can’t think of many guys from [setting] who call home every Sunday afternoon to talk to their family” [Emphasis his or hers]. Another brilliant insight: “Most men don’t think deeply about the dewy greenness of nature.” The ultimate conclusion: “She [sic] needs to write more convincing [sic] from a man’s perspective.”

I pause here to note that this was the most autobiographical story I’ve ever written, and all the things that the editor complained about were my real observations and my real thoughts cast into the mind of a fictional character participating in fictional events. I did, in fact, call home every Sunday afternoon to talk to my parents, while they were still alive.

To compound his or her arrogance, the editor claims that my prose is “overly elegant,” which is presumably his or her way of saying that a man would never write or think in elegant terms. Guess that means I write like a girl.

He or she goes on about other matters, but by this point I’ve lost all faith in anything this editor has to say. Some of the other criticisms—the ones not based on assumption about my gender—might have been perceptive, insightful and accurate—but it was impossible for me to credit any of it given his or her obvious wrongheadedness concerning a man’s perspective. My perspective.

The editor who invited me to contribute to the anthology tells me that this is a “very well respected editor,” without disclosing his or her identity. He apologized for the “gender confusion” as if it was simply a matter of the editor mistakenly referring to me as “she.” He didn’t seem to get the point that a major part of the critique was based on a faulty and biased impression about the way men think.

I’ve gone back and forth between laughing about this and being outraged. As you might suspect from the tone of this essay, indignation is winning. The original editor asked me to make the changes this unidentified editor requested. All of a sudden, my story had serious flaws that needed to be addressed—even though the acquiring editor had accepted it after revisions in 2007. I could have two weeks to completely rewrite the story.

Usually I’m pretty agreeable when editors request changes, but this time I balked. I reread the story for the first time in over a year and a half and I liked most of what I saw. I told the acquiring editor that I would fix a few clunky sentences if he wanted, but I wasn’t going to re-imagine the story at this other editor’s behest. That wasn’t the story I’d wanted to write . . . and it wasn’t the story he had accepted and contracted. It was the proverbial line in the sand, and neither of us would cross. End result: a 4000-word hole in their manuscript six weeks before publication for them and a pittance of a kill fee for me.

However, this essay isn’t about a contract issue that led me to withdraw a story from publication. For me it was a real eye-opener that a supposedly “well-respected editor” could make such an utter fool of him or herself and still be taken seriously. What I wouldn’t give to know who it is so I could present myself to him or her face-to-face and wait for realization to sink in.

I checked. Undid the zipper and looked, just to be sure. I think I am reasonably qualified to write from a man’s perspective.

– by Bev Vincent

Most of what I’ve written about here at Storytellers Unplugged has been about writing. However, writers are also voracious readers. It’s hard to imagine a writer who doesn’t consume books at an impressive pace.

I started young, a preschooler reading road signs on family vacations, much to my parents’ chagrin. A few years later, I picked up copies of The Jungle Book and Tales of Mystery and Imagination in a discount bin on one of those trips. The former I must have read, but the latter had a profound impact. Poe’s short stories loom large in my memory—they seem almost as long as novellas in my recollection, and I’m always astonished when I go back to reread one and discover again how brief they were.

I moved on to the Hardy Boys and Agatha Christie, went through my science fiction and fantasy stage when I started university, switched to horror in my early twenties, but always went back to my first love, which is crime fiction. Anyone who follows my book reviews on Onyx Reviews will probably know that the majority of what I read falls into that genre.

As an adolescent, I was the guy who always had a paperback in his back pocket, even at school dances. During a two-year period when I lived abroad, I read nearly 200 books. The walls of our house are lined with bookshelves, and my to-be-read pile has evolved into to-be-read shelves and is now almost a to-be-read wall. I can read anywhere, and can easily put a book down in the middle of a chapter, paragraph or even a sentence if the situation demands.

As writers, we spend a lot of time staring at a computer screen. We usually read and revise our own drafts that way. Our colleagues and friends send us electronic copies of their works, which we often read from the screen as well. As a group, we’re probably more likely to read at length on a computer than a general audience. We may gripe and complain about it, but we do it as a matter of course.

Two weeks ago, I received a Kindle 2 as a gift. It was my idea, however, having seen someone using one in the airport on a recent trip. I never travel without at least two or three books, since I can often read an entire novel on one leg of a journey. Books weigh a lot, and they take up space. The Kindle is light and even smaller than I imagined. Less than 1 cm thick, it can hold somewhere in the neighborhood of 1500-2000 books. If you run out of things to read, you can go online with it and buy a new book and have it in your hands within a minute (so long as you’re in the US—the wireless network doesn’t work anywhere else, at present).

My main trepidation was the reading experience. I’m not a big fan of reading from the computer screen, despite what I wrote above. I often print out documents longer than a dozen or so pages so I can read them in comfort away from my desk. However, the Kindle affords me that possibility. I can read from it in bed, on the couch, in the car, in the back yard—hell, even in the hot tub if I’m careful.

The screen is a bit smaller than a standard paperback page, but the text is very legible and you can increase the text size if you need to. If you encounter an unfamiliar word, you can just move the cursor over it and the definition pops up at the bottom of the page, because there’s a built-in dictionary. If you’re really curious, you can enable the free wireless and look something up on Google or Wikipedia. It’s not blazingly fast as a browser, and you have to do a fair amount of paging around, but it satisfies my innate curiosity. I’m always looking stuff up, and now I can do it right from my book. You can create bookmarks, search for specific text, and add notes to any document. The clunkiest thing about the Kindle is the process of scanning back a few pages to pick up a detail you think you might have missed—you have to go one page at a time, one click at a time. Not a big deal, but not as easy as flipping a few “real” pages.

I’ve become a rapid convert. I suspect I’ll do the bulk of my reading from the Kindle in the future. Amazon has a mechanism where you shoot them an e-mail with an attached html file or Word doc (PDF is also supported, but it is still experimental owing to the rigid formatting of PDF files) and they return a file in the right format for the Kindle, which you can then transfer over by USB (for free) or they will send it to the Kindle by wireless (for 15 cents). I transferred the manuscript of my most recent novel to it so I’ll have it on hand when I talk to my agent. I also had a friend send me an electronic ARC of her upcoming book. If I could convince publishers to send me review copies this way, I’d be a happy camper.

There was a time when I thought I’d reread books but, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to realize that such a privilege will be reserved for only a special subset of books. There are simply too many new books to read to spend precious time with ones I’ve already read. My recent trend has been to buy a book, read it and sell it while it still has some resale value. With NY Times bestsellers costing less than $10 for the Kindle, the net cost is about the same. I may also be inspired to tackle some of the classic novels I’ve always wanted to read—many of which are free for Kindle.

I still love physical books, the smell of the paper, the whisper of the pages turning, the texture of the rough edges and the embossed covers. But in the end it’s more about the words than the package and I’m perfectly willing to give up the pleasure of holding many books in physical form. The environment will thank me for it, I suppose, since I have probably clear cut a small forest over the course of my life due to the vast number of books I’ve purchased.

Besides, I don’t want to have to build an extension to the house just to house the next decade’s worth of books.

– by Bev Vincent 

In the introduction to The Green Mile, Stephen King talks about his unique treatment for insomnia. When he lies awake in bed, he tells himself stories. Each night, he starts at the beginning of the current tale and takes it little farther. After a while, he grows bored with one of these remedy stories, abandons it and starts a new one. The Green Mile was an exception.

Most writers are reluctant to talk about stories or novels we’re thinking about or are currently writing. It’s a kind of superstition. We believe that if we talk about a story, it will lose it magic, the wind will go out of the story’s sails, and the whole thing will collapse at our feet. Or we’ll grow bored with it and lose the motivation to put the words down on the page. Writing is about discovery, we say, and if we discover the story before we write it, what’s the point? By the time Alfred Hitchcock got behind the camera, he had already mapped out a film so clearly in his mind that he reportedly found the final part of the process boring. The actual making-of-the-movie part.

The other reason we don’t want to talk about plots under development is that we don’t want anyone else to make suggestions before an idea is fully formed in our minds. People love to make suggestions. How about if he does this? What if she did that? Another superstition—we’re scared that another person’s input will steer a story in a direction other than where we intended to go, as if our own intent isn’t strong enough to hold the course. 

I’m usually reticent about talking about stories, for these very reasons. However, I had an experience recently that made me reassess my position. 

I was invited to contribute to a loosely themed anthology by an editor who had previously accepted one of my stories for another project. I had an idea that melded the themed situation with another genre that is near and dear to my heart, which made me think I could come up with a story that would be different from most of the other contributions. As the scenario developed in my mind, I saw a subtext that added what I considered to be a significant level of meaning to the story. I don’t usually write with metaphors in mind, but this one was too good to ignore. 

The invitation came several months ago, when I was deep in the throes of working on a large project with a short deadline. However, since I’m an agreeable guy, I accepted the invitation, which had a three-month deadline. I was confident that I’d have plenty of time to work on the story once I finished the current project. 

The closer the deadline came, the greater my anxiety level. I’m not usually subject to stress, but I was feeling it. I had made a commitment to submit something, and it just wasn’t happening. The idea still seemed solid, as did all of the elements I foresaw, but the words weren’t coming. I wrote the first page or two, which set up the situation, and there it sat. With a little less than a week to go before the story was due, I was faced with a business trip that was going to take me away from my normal writing routine for four days. 

On the day I was scheduled to leave on the trip, I went out to breakfast with my wife, part of our weekend routine. As we sat in a secluded corner, sipping our tea, I decided to tell her about this story I was contemplating. At that point, I knew the main character and the general setup, along with the high concept, but not the plot. As we discussed the metaphor, my wife’s enthusiasm for the story was infectious. Her suggestions were not about the plot but rather helped me gain a deeper appreciation for the symbolism.

I didn’t get any farther with the story during that discussion, but when I got back home, I opened my document and wrote two single-spaced pages of notes to myself. Thoughts and ideas that arose out of that conversation and the general thrust of the plot poured out. In essence, a loose outline, although I didn’t get to the climax of the story–that was still unseen to me–and some of the details ultimately changed. However, I had about 2/3 of the story dancing around in my head. 

Later that afternoon, on a three-hour flight, I rewrote the first two pages of the story in longhand in a blank journal and then took off. By the time I landed I had a cramped hand and fifteen pages of the story, approximately 3000 words. I typed them up after I got to the hotel and, by the end of the week, I finished the story. Submitted it after a couple of intensive editing sessions and had it accepted with revisions a day later. 

As always, I’m not sure there’s a take-home message here, just a window into one incident in my writing life.The story might not have been finished on schedule without our little tête-à-tête. I’ll probably still be reluctant to discuss my stories as I work on them, but I now know that talking about one isn’t a death knell. After all, storytelling started out as an oral tradition. Where would we be today if stories couldn’t survive being told before they were written down?

– by Bev Vincent

The acquiring editor is the person most writers—and, perhaps, readers—are familiar with, at least in general. We submit stories to them, they accept (or reject) our work, and changes to the overall flow, structure, and content of the material originates with them. I think of them as conceptual or big-picture editors. A while back I wrote about what a good editor can do for a writer.

This month I would like to introduce you to copy editors, the unsung heroes of the publishing process. After the editor and the author have ironed out the major issues with a project, the manuscript then goes before the sharp eyes of the copy editor.

The first thing she does is to build a style sheet for the project to guarantee continuity from the first page to the last. The publishing house probably has a style manual that it uses as its Bible, but there will inevitably be things that aren’t addressed by the style manual, so the copy editor makes a decision about how such things will be handled, adds rules to the style sheet, and sweeps through the manuscript to make sure the rules are obeyed. How will times be represented: a.m. or AM? What numbers will use digits and which ones will be spelled out? Will essay titles in the text be italicized or put in quotes. Will certain words be hyphenated or represented as compound words? Will the serial comma be used? These are just some of the decisions the copy editor makes and enforces.

The copy editor also flags grammatical errors and catches errors in fact. She looks for overused terms or duplication of words in close proximity. In a work of fiction, a good copy editor will make sure that Jane, who has blue eyes on page 17, doesn’t turn into Jean with green eyes on page 317. In a non-fiction work, she will notice that an author has referred to a publisher as Everett House throughout when, in fact, the company is Everest House. The copy editor makes sure that trademarked names are correctly spelled. She catches vague references and ambiguities.

When I was working on The Road to the Dark Tower with Penguin several years ago, once the hardcopy manuscript went to the copy editor, it was “locked.” All subsequent changes were made on that printed version of the manuscript. The copy editor sent the manuscript back to the author with her notes in the margins and the author addressed the comments and suggestions in the margins using a different color of ink. For complicated or lengthy changes, the author could insert pages into the manuscript, but that version was sacrosanct. I often wondered what would happen if it were lost in transit. To be honest, I was surprised that a major publisher still did all that work in pen on paper—it meant that someone had to sort out the stets from the deles, interpret the handwritten insertions, and key them into the electronic master. It all worked out in the long run, but it seemed like an unnecessary step in the electronic era.

For my current project, the copyediting phase was done electronically. I received a version of my Word manuscript by e-mail with changes tracked and notes inserted where clarification was required. The style sheet came as a separate attachment. I went through the manuscript, again with changes tracked, and responded to comments and questions with my own comments and responses, accepted certain changes, rejected others—providing my reasons for doing so—and reworded passages that required clarification.

Copyeditors, in my experience, seem to be deferential people. They know that it isn’t their job to rewrite what the author has created, only to improve it. Often, alterations that were made to my manuscript were accompanied by queries that asked, “Change okay?”

After the author addresses the changes,the first pass of the book’s layout can be created. This is the point where proofreaders come into play—and the author is to be counted among this group. That’s the point I’m at with my current project. The first pass is on its way to me as I write, and I will have a week to go through it. In general, all I would need to do is proofread, but since this is a profusely illustrated book, I’ll also be seeing proposed design elements for the first time, and I’ll have to write captions. It’s been a fascinating project to work on, let me tell you.

I have the utmost respect and undying gratitude for the copy editor who caught all my silly mistakes and will make the finished product (and me) look better.

– By Bev Vincent

There’s a legend that Stephen King’s mother, acknowledging his need to please people, told him that if he were a girl, he’d always be pregnant.

I can relate.

After struggling to get noticed as a writer for a number of years, people have started asking me to contribute to projects that I would never have heard of once upon a time. I get invitations to write stories for closed anthologies, or to write essays for fun projects like the Book of the Month Club calendar I contributed to last year. I almost always say yes.

Generally those projects don’t happen all at once, so it’s not a problem. Every now and then, though, all the chickens come home to roost at the same time. My project calendar starts to get crowded, with different projects competing for the same precious few hours each week.

I’m in the midst of one of those times right now. Every time I think I see the light at the end of the tunnel, I take stock of what I still have left to do and realize that the crisis is not yet over.

I’m not complaining—that would be silly. I got myself into this fix, after all, and I’ll get myself out of it. It’s partly about prioritizing—but it’s also about living up to commitments. If I have to stay up all night, I’ll hit all my deadlines, and not only turn something in, but turn in the best work I possibly can. That’s just the way I roll. It would bother me to no end to do otherwise.

The main cause of my current situation is a big project that I’ve been working on for most of 2009. The one that I talked about last month, for a book packager. January and February were taken up with principal writing, and the manuscript arrived back on my doorstep about 10 days ago with editorial changes and a short deadline. At the time, I was trying to write a short story for the next Mystery Writers of America anthology, which had a March 15th deadline. I haven’t been writing much fiction lately, so getting back into the groove of producing a short story worthy of such a fine publication would be a challenge at the best of times. Losing out on several working days added to the problem.

In this case, prioritization was easy. The big project had a contract attached to it and a decent payday. The MWA story was on spec and wasn’t something I’d committed to (other than to myself, and I’m an understanding guy). It stands a very good chance of not being accepted. So guess which squeaky wheel got the grease?

As it turns out, something lucky happened—my deadline for the MWA anthology got extended by several days, which gave me enough time to finish my story and get it in the mail. But if push came to shove, I was willing to purse my lips and concede that there simply weren’t enough hours in the day to get it done.

But that’s all in the past now. This essay is being written in a hotel room 200 miles from home two days before it’s due. I like to get these essays done at least a few days early so I can prune them down, but not this month. There may be warts in this one. Sorry. Because of day-job work commitments I’ve had to do a lot of work in hotel rooms lately.

What next? I have another essay and a short story due at the end of the month, two book reviews due in mid-April and three other essays due not long after that, along with another short story. All of these are things that I’ve promised, so they’re going to happen, come hell or high water. There’s a very real chance that I’ll get another set of editorial notes from the downstream editor on the book packager project, however, so I have to be flexible.

More than anything else, though, for the time being, if you ask me to do something that would be due before the end of May, there’s every chance that I’ll have to do the unthinkable: say no.

The word doesn’t come easily to me, though, so if you catch me in a moment of weakness, there’s a very good possibility that I’ll say yes, of course I will.