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.

– 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

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?

– Bev Vincent

Recently, a representative of a book packager contacted me with a proposal for a project they wanted me to consider. 

Errrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. That’s the sound of my brakes squealing across the pavement. Book packagers? What’s that? Sounds kind of dodgy. Some sort of scam, mayhaps? 

Before committing to anything—or indeed, even responding to the unsolicited e-mail—I had to educate myself on what this book-packaging thing was all about. Book packagers are exactly like publishers. They produce books. They have researchers and editors and marketers and foreign rights departments, and all the other things that you might expect a publisher to have. They have artists and illustrators, book designers, the whole nine yards. They even have their own organization: The American Book Producers Association. 

What they do is bring together all these creative people to assemble a “package,” which is just another word for a book. This book idea either originates with another publisher—perhaps even one of the big, famous, New York publishers—or the proposal is shopped around. That’s right—the book packager also acts as a literary agent for the project. 

Why do they exist? Because publishers don’t always have all the resources necessary to produce labor-intensive books—ones that have a lot of photographs or illustrations, require a lot of research or involve the acquisition of rights and licensing. That’s the stock-in-trade for a book packager. The volumes they produce would look right at home on your coffee table. Big, lavish volumes with photographs. Every page illustrated and intricately designed. Book packagers (also known as independent book producers) make complicated books easy for a publisher to publish. 

As was the case with the project I was offered, another publisher often comes up with a concept, perhaps prepares an outline or some guidelines, and then hires the book packager to produce the finished volume. 

So, what’s the deal? As with any other publishing relationship, the sky is the limit. It’s difficult to generalize. The conventional wisdom is that the writer’s end of the deal with a book packager is much like “work for hire.” That means, you get a flat fee for your words—which, after all, are just part of the package—no royalties. And, sometimes, not even name credit on the book or a transfer of copyright to the book packager. It’s like being a ghostwriter. Those terms may be deal breakers for some people. 

However, everything is negotiable, and not all deals are the same. The book packager in this instance offered both royalties and name credit. Though the boilerplate contract stipulated a transfer of copyright, my agent successfully negotiated copyright in my name. During negotiations, he told me he enjoyed working on this deal because it was a different type of contract from the usual ones he was used to seeing. Different kinds of clauses and concerns. 

There was something else to consider—though I will get a royalty on every copy sold, the royalty is based on the sale price to the publisher who initiated the project, not on the cover price. That’s not the way things normally work—it’s more like the terms of a normal contract for “deeply discounted” copies, except in this case, every copy is deeply discounted. 

On the other side of the equation, though, the books are sold to the publisher on a no-return basis. I will get a royalty for every copy printed. None of that nasty “reserve against returns” that appears on typical royalty statements—money held back by the publisher in anticipation of a certain percentage of returned books from stores. 

There’s another dimension to this project: I’m essentially a servant to two masters. I have an editor I’m working with at the book packagers, and another editor downstream with the publisher who solicited the project whose name I don’t even know. It is possible that I will “finalize” the manuscript with one editor only to find out that more work will be required at the behest of the second editor. So far, the second editor has been agreeable with everything we’ve done, but it’s something to keep in mind should you find yourself considering a deal with a book packager. 

Things tend to move very fast in the world of packaging. The editor first contacted me at the end of November 2008. After a few rounds of discussion, both by e-mail and phone, I was intrigued enough to get my agent involved. He went off and did his thing with them while I prepared a detailed outline for the project, which I submitted in early January. 

After the outline was approved, I got straight to work. Because of the accelerated timeframe, I had 1/3 and 2/3 point deliverable deadlines—both to keep me on track and to provide the photo researchers with material to work from. 

The editor has been a delight to work with, as enthusiastic about the project as I am and very supportive of the work I’ve done to date. Exactly the kind of environment every writer hopes to have while working on a book. 

Now, less than three months after the initial contact, I have an executed contract and a completed manuscript. Because these books are so lavishly illustrated, the word count tends to be fairly low. In this case, 20-30,000 words was the contracted text. 

In parallel, the photo researcher and documents experts have been gathering material for the book. I don’t have any involvement in that, though I have been able to facilitate access to certain materials. The book will be published this fall—about a year after initial contact. It’s hard to match that in “mainstream” publishing. 

So, that’s what I’ve been up to during 2009 to date. I had the first draft finished at the end of January and I spent the first couple of weeks of February revising and polishing the manuscript and I turned it in last week—two weeks early. 

The advance is probably more than I would get for a first novel from a paperback house and for much less work—and there’s the possibility of further revenue if the book is popular, or if side deals are executed for subsidiary rights. All in all, a very pleasant process. Especially in this economic climate, and with the fairly dire state of affairs in publishing, it was a welcome surprise to have something like this drop into my lap.

And, at the end of the year, I’m going to have copies of this beautiful book in stores across the country. Guess what all my friends and family are getting for Christmas this year?

–by Bev Vincent

I’ve written about this subject before in On Writing Horror as part of an essay on marketing myths. However, I thought a real-life example might help drive a message home.

Four years ago, I read a call for submissions for a royalty-only e-anthology. If there’s anything you should run from faster than a royalty-only anthology, it’s a royalty-only e-anthology.

“Royalty only” means you don’t get paid up front for your story. You are promised a pro-rated percentage of a fraction (typically 50%) of the total proceeds from sales. In theory, that sounds promising. If the book sells a thousand copies at $10 each, you’ll be getting a cut of $5000. Assume twenty authors in the book and all stories roughly the same length, and you’re looking at about $250, not bad for a short story.

The problem is, very few anthologies sell a thousand copies—especially those from the small press. A hundred copies is more like it. My largest royalty check for this type of anthology is $18.00. Not quite as attractive as $250, right? And that’s the largest check by an order of magnitude. I have received two checks for one anthology in the amounts of $1.05 and $0.87 respectively. Laughing all the way to the bank, I tell you. And when you translate that into the number of eyeballs on the page, well, it’s a sad, sad situation, as Elton John once said. I’m not going to get into the debate between writing for art or for visibility versus filthy lucre here. (If you want to read a recent debate about pay rates and professionalism, read through this recent thread on Shocklines.) Suffice to say that I like getting paid for my work. It’s one of my favorite things. I also like to have my stories read.

If print anthologies are a tough sell, e-anthos are worse. The rumored wave of online readers has yet to materialize, and the demise of books—printed books—has not yet come to fruition. People are staying away from electronic books in droves. If an e-anthology falls in the wood, no one will read it. (At least no trees were sacrificed.) Your precious story will be “lightly published” at best, and first serial rights are gone forever. Any subsequent appearances will perforce be as reprints, and you’re not likely to get $250 for one of those.

Naïve as I was, I wrote a story for the anthology, submitted it, had it accepted, and had the gumption to feel proud of the accomplishment. I wish I could plead youth and foolish innocence, but the truth is, I wasn’t all that young. Foolish, perhaps. Innocent, arguably, at least in the ways of the publishing world. Desperate, more like—desperate for publication credits and willing to sacrifice any number of things to get there. I bought into the belief that you had to work your way up the ladder by starting small as you learned your craft instead of learning your craft and then aiming high.

However, as it turned out, fate had other plans for my story and me. The publisher behind the e-anthology closed up shop and the editor returned the story rights to me. What was once accepted became unaccepted, and I had the story back in my grubby little paws, unviolated.

Remarketing stories written for theme anthologies can be problematic. I didn’t know what to do with the story, so it stayed in my filing cabinet for a while. Dormant, but not dead. A year or two later, I saw the guidelines for a no-entry-fee contest (the best kind) that I thought the story might fit, but only after some fairly major reconstruction. For one thing, my story was set in the wine district of Australia. The contest mandated that the stories be set in New England. I needed a wine district, mountain overlooks and a beach. Fortunately, after a little research, I was able to find all of these where I needed them. A complete rewrite also removed many of the elements I included in the original version to make it fit the anthology theme. A complete rewrite also improved the prose. A different story went off to the contest. I had high hopes—I always do.

Unfortunately, the story didn’t win. However, the contest organizer informed me that several judges had rated my story highly. That gave me more confidence, so I printed out a fresh copy and aimed high.

Last week, I received an acceptance letter from Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. I have a list of top-tier markets, places I’ve dreamt about being published. Cemetery Dance magazine was one, and I’ve had the good fortune to publish both fiction and non-fiction in that periodical. Others on the list include Asimov’s, F&SF, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine…and EQMM.

What do these dream venues all have in common? They’re pro markets, true, but there are a decent number of those around. These are pro markets that have been around for years. Decades in many cases. And they have significant circulations. That means visibility. That means exposure. Don’t let any other type of market seduce you with the promise of “payment in exposure.” The only place where you’ll get serious exposure is in a book or magazine that appears on the shelves in your local bookstore or is sent to a large subscriber database. Your readership will instantly expand far beyond the people who read only small press publications. People from Seattle to Key West and San Diego to Presque Isle (look it up) who like crime fiction will have the opportunity to read my story. Tens of thousands. EQMM, launched in 1941, is the longest-running mystery digest of all time and has a circulation of nearly 200,000.

That’s so much better than the six people who might have paid to download the e-anthology that never was. Including four friends, a guy I work with. And me, of course.