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.

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.

Bev Vincent 

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When I was a kid, the National Film Board of Canada ran short documentary vignettes between TV shows. One that I remember vividly was about Christopher Columbus’s expedition to the New World. The film was stop-motion with ships rocking up and down on conspicuously fake waves. The line that stands out in my mind explained how long the journey lasted and how some people were getting impatient. “The days passed. The nights passed. The crew began to grumble.” ¹

The passage of time testing our patience is familiar to writers. We wait to hear about submissions. When we’re fortunate enough to have something accepted, we wait for the work to make its way through the publication process. A recent New York Times essay asks the quasi-rhetorical question Why Does it Still Take So Long To Publish a Book? In it, Rachel Donadio writes, “For writers, few steps in the publishing process are as strange as the state of suspended animation between submitting a manuscript and seeing the book appear in stores. The sudden change in cabin pressure from writing to waiting can be jarring — and can last a very long time.”

Waiting is part of the business, but there is a limit to what most of us are willing to put up with. The publisher can’t acquire your work and then just sit on it indefinitely. Well, let me phrase that differently—if you have done due diligence, the publisher can’t do that. However…

I sold a short story to an anthology four years ago. The anthology had an editor, of course, a publisher, and a tentative publication date. Editorial work was performed on the story. Contacts were executed. And then the waiting began. The publisher slowed down. They regrouped. They waffled. I didn’t pay a lot of attention to things because the editor kept us up to date on the ever-shifting publication date. It wasn’t one of those worrying situations where everything goes quiet.

I’m a patient guy, and it was just one story out of many. However, at a certain point I grew frustrated. The publisher was going to release the book as an expensive hardcover, which meant it probably wasn’t going to sell many copies. I decided enough was enough, so I went to the file cabinet where I store my submissions to look at the contract to see when the rights reverted to me. That’s when I discovered my oversight. The contract lacked a reversion clause.

Now, I’m not a contract lawyer, so there may be conditions under which I could have reclaimed my story rights any way, but I felt stuck. The days passed and the nights passed. The weeks, months and years, too. I didn’t grumble—well, not much, anyway, and not to anyone where it would have mattered.

The story has a happy ending, though, in that the publisher ultimately decided not to release the anthology in question and the story was returned to me. I made a personal vow: to never again sign a contract that did not have a rights reversion clause.

A good and fair contract protects both parties—in this case, the author and the publisher. Short story contracts tend to be fairly simple documents; occasionally, as I discovered, to their detriment. A reversion clause is not complex. “It is understood that if the Anthology is not published within twenty-four (24) months of the signing of the Agreement, all rights granted thereunto the Editors will automatically revert to the Author, and any advance paid will not be deemed returnable.”

Mind you—this clause was written by the editors, and it is solely for the author’s benefit. Isn’t that cool? It’s part of a fair arrangement between the two parties. If the editor can’t get his or her act together and produce the book containing your work, at some point they’ll throw up their hands and say “uncle.” What’s especially cool is the final clause: any money I’ve been paid in advance is mine, mine, mine. Woo-hee. The clause is a motivator for the editor, anathema to procrastinators.

I’ve also been the beneficiary of reversion clauses. My agent sold translation rights to my first book to a foreign publisher. The contract gave them two years to produce the book. They didn’t. If some day they decide to get their rear in gear and proceed with the translation, they have to ante up all over again. In the interim, I’m at liberty to pursue other options.

The language can vary. Here’s another version “In the event that the above-mentioned Anthology has not been published within 24 months of signing of this agreement, rights revert to the Author, and the Author has the right to sell or arrange for publication of the above-named Work in any manner. Author is expected to make no repayment of advances if for any reason—publication delays or otherwise—rights under this agreement have reverted to the Author.” This one spells out what the word “reversion” implies, but it all means the same thing.²

It’s easy to overlook something that isn’t there. We read and reread our contracts, looking for a word out of place, or a rights grab, or an excessive period of exclusivity, but it’s very easy to miss something that’s missing.

Failing to include a reversion clause is a fairly common occurrence in small press contracts. I’m a member of a mailing list where a group of writers are discussing the fates of stories they have had accepted for a couple of anthologies that have been delayed.

The days are passing, the nights are passing—it’s a shame to hear the crew grumbling.

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¹The documentary had an ironic ending. Just as the lookout discovered land, a Viking longboat is shown in the distance heading back across the Atlantic for home, a nod to the fact that Columbus didn’t actually discover terra incognito. But that’s neither here nor there.²This isn’t the end of the story when it comes to reversion clauses. Different language is required for works that remain in print—book-length works, in other words. Contracts for these works must cover the circumstances under which the book is declared out of print, at which time rights should once again return to the author. That’s another issue altogether.