Bev Vincent

If you’ve ever read an author’s blog for any length of time, or followed his or her Facebook feed, you will no doubt be familiar with the tradition of posting sporadic or daily word counts. It is, perhaps, the only metric that writers have available to measure our productivity.

My favorite anecdote comes via Stephen King in On Writing in which he recounts of a possibly apocryphal encounter between James Joyce and a friend. The friend finds Joyce in a posture of utter despair at his writing desk. Being familiar with Joyce’s issues, the friend asks, “How many words did you get written today?” Joyce answers, “Seven.” The friend is impressed. “That’s good…for you.” To which Joyce responds, “But I don’t know what order they go in!”

People comment on how prolific certain writers are, producing two or three books a year, even more. When I stop to do the math, I’m astonished that more writers aren’t that prolific. On a typical day, which for me means an uninterrupted writing window of no more than 90 minutes, I can write 1000 words. Some days it’s 750, some days it’s 1250, but 1000 is a good figure. If I did that every day for a year, I’d have the total word count of three decent-sized novels. If I were able to write longer, I could imagine writing 3-4000 words per day. I think my personal record is something on the order of 8000, which I cranked out at a beach house while on a working vacation during a NaNoWriMo marathon.

Of course, not all “writing” involves producing new words. On another sort of productive writing day, I can crank out -500 words. Yes, that’s negative five hundred, which means I’ve cut that much fat from a manuscript. I tend to write long on the first draft and it’s unusual if I can’t remove at least 10-15 percent of the total word count from a short story upon revision. How does one measure that type of productivity? It’s a different type of accomplishment, one that is at least as important as the one that created those words in the first place.

An efficiency expert might look at my process and tell me how much better off I’d be if I hadn’t written those 10-15% extra words in the first place, but I simply can’t. To do so would require editing every sentence as I wrote it and that would interrupt the flow, that mysterious gush of words that comes from a source I can’t define. I wouldn’t dare place a governor on that lest it slow to a trickle and stop. I don’t mind editing yesterday’s work before I start today’s—that’s one of my favorite ways to get that gusher going again—but I have to write things that I know deep down won’t all survive. At least not in that shape or order.

What about the days we spend on the internet doing research, or driving around a neighborhood to pick up local color, or reading a book to gather information on a particular subject, or simply sitting in a dark room or taking a walk to think about the work and where it’s headed? Our word count meters don’t record that creative homework, but it is part of the process, too, and contributes to the end product. Those words that we count don’t always just spring into our minds. We have to feed the mind with information at times.

The ritual of posting word counts is one way that we assure anyone reading our blogs—and ourselves—that we are hard at it. Doing the work. If too many days pass without anything substantial to show for them, we start feeling nervous, like a batter in a slump. At the end of the day, though, all the research and ruminating in the world is for naught if we don’t get AIC (ass in chair) and produce words. Because words count.

P.S. In case you’re interested, I wrote 2000 words today. Nearly seven hundred in this essay and a little over 1300 on my current work in progress. A very good day indeed.

No one can tell you when to start a short story.

People can give you all kinds of advice about how to write one, but only you can decide when you are prepared to start.

This is something I deal with all the time. I’ll have a window of opportunity where I can work on a short story, and I’ll have a market in mind, and all I do is spin my wheels when I try to think about the story itself.

Case in point: I want to submit a story to an anthology that has a submission deadline fast approaching. When I first heard about the theme back in 2010, I did some relevant research, created a file, scribbled some notes and put it aside to gestate. Now that several months have passed, I’m only a little bit closer to having a story than I did back then.

That’s not entirely true. Last weekend, I started doing some location research. I have a scenario of sorts in mind. In fact, I plan to resurrect a couple of characters from another story, and I know why they are where they are and how the story opens, more or less. I stumbled around looking for a setting and I found one that is absolutely perfect. So, for the past couple of days I’ve been learning everything I can about this place. I wandered its streets on Google Earth (and isn’t that an impressive tool). I found news stories and a few videos that give me an even better sense of the location and the scenario that forms that background for the location and the story.

But I still don’t really know what is going to happen to the characters after they make a significant discovery.

Sometimes, a story happens like this: anthology theme, “clever” take on the theme, figure out who the main characters are and what they want, start writing.

Right now, I have the anthology theme, my twist on the theme and the characters, but I still don’t feel ready to start writing because I haven’t come up with the consequences of the twist.

It is possible, on occasion, to start with these elements and let the words flow from that mystical source from which they come. The characters do things and the story develops. I don’t know where the story is going, but it goes.

And yet, when I get to the computer these past few days, I can’t bring myself to create that new Word document and write the first words. That tells me the story isn’t quite ready. I’ve plowed ahead and hit brick walls often enough to believe that this sort-of block (something akin to Mike Noonan’s block in Bag of Bones, though not nearly so severe) is telling me I’ll be wasting my time if I go that route. I just need to think about the story a little more. I can see over the first hill or two, but there’s at least one more hill I need to crest before I begin. I don’t need to see all the way to the end—I rarely do with short stories, but I need to see far enough to build up that momentum that will help me get there.

That being said, though, there’s nothing like a looming deadline for motivation. At some point, if I really want to submit to this market, I need to stop dithering and start writing. And hoping the story comes…from that mystical source from which they all come.

Though my field of expertise is in chemistry, I hold a minor in math. I’m not sure that there has ever been a study to confirm or refute this, but I maintain a strange calculus: one acceptance letter is equal to any number of rejections. That is to say, an acceptance wipes the slate clean. I feel good about my writing again and I even feel armored against the next few inevitable rejection letters that will follow.

Another way to say this is: you have to develop a thick skin in this business and be persistent. I saw a beginning writer comment somewhere about a phenomenon described as “submission terror.” The condition was so disabling that the writer couldn’t convince himself to send anything out. In other words, he’s taken to writing his own rejection letters.

There is much to be said for persistence. I had a short story published recently by a pro-paying market that was originally written for a themed anthology in 2007. It didn’t make the cut (the editor told me he might have considered it if he’d received it less close to the deadline, and there’s another lesson to be learned there, assuming he wasn’t just sparing my feelings), so I de-themed it and started it on its rounds. Until the day it was accepted (I repeat, by a pro-paying market), the story had accumulated nine rejections, not including the original one. Each time I got it back, I updated my submission log, found a new market, and sent it right back out again.

That’s by no means a personal record. A fairly recent story found a home on lucky submission number thirteen. I published another that had been written eight years previously and accumulated 15 rejections, in a glossy magazine with national distribution.

When do I give up? Rarely. I have one story that I really like that has been rejected 20 times. I’ve rewritten it a few times over the years and, though I’ve yet to find the right home for it, I think it’s out there. It’s just a matter of keeping at it and researching the marketplace. I’ve never truly trunked a story, though some are in submission hiatus because I can’t think of any viable place to send them at the moment. I will occasionally consider a semi-pro market if it has a reputation that appeals to me, and I often give literary magazines a shot even though they rarely pay more than a pittance. I favor print over electronic publication, too, though I have published a number of stories in electronic media.

I still hesitate a moment before opening an e-mail that I know is a response to a submission. I feel myself cringe. I know the odds are against me, still, despite having published over sixty stories. I haven’t done the math, but I suspect that rejections lead acceptances by at least 3:1. Maybe higher overall, but in recent years that feels like the right number. But every one of those acceptances carries with it enough weight to overpower a number of rejections. I celebrate every one of them.

Rejections are rubber bullets. They may bruise but they damage no internal organs.

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.