Brian Knight

During the last few months of pregnancy, usually around the fifth but sometimes as late as the eighth, a woman’s nesting instinct kicks in.  Some primitive switch hidden deep inside the female brain flips, and the most laid-back woman suddenly becomes Robo-maid; cleaning, rearranging, putting away, and throwing out.  Childproofing and smoothing all the rough edges of her environment.  Home becomes not just a place in which to live, eat, sleep, and watch Big Brother, but a place of warmth, safety and security for the expectant mother’s child.  Though the actual birthing is most often done in a hospital room in our developed corner of the world (and a less warm and comforting environment I cannot call to mind, except perhaps a mortuary), it wasn’t so long ago that Nesting also meant creating a comfortable, calming place to drop your little bundle of joy.

The Nesting Instinct is not unique to human women.  Rodents and rabbits will seek the lowest sheltered spot they can find in which to nest, dogs will favor an empty box, cats will find a crawlspace or the far corner beneath their favorite human’s bed, and birds, who should conceivably already have a nest, will simply refuse to leave it.

The Nesting Instinct fulfils two obvious functions; to give the mother-to-be a comfortable, homey place in which to perform the physically and emotionally stressful act of giving birth, and to give their new life a safe place in which to be born and grow strong enough, eventually, to leave.

I suspect that most women will disagree, perhaps militantly, with the comparison I’m about to make, but since I think the analogy is a good one, and because I’ve already dedicated three paragraphs to it, I’m going to carry on.  Please direct all hate mail to David Niall Wilson.  I happen to know he adores it.

I’ve heard it said more than once that writing is like giving birth, and in all but the physical sense I think it’s true.  It certainly can be painful (if only emotionally), exhilarating, frightening, and at its culmination, baring a miscarriage, one of the most satisfying experiences in the world.  It’s a long way from bringing a real life into the world, but it is something.

Like the expectant mother, the expectant author should find a comfortable place to gather their will, focus their imagination, and begin their long labor.

To the non-writer, a writer’s peculiar rituals must seem both eccentric and egocentric.  I know they do to my family and my wife.  My habit of Nesting is one I know the rest of my family just doesn’t get, which is why, I think, the garage I spent a summer converting into my writing office is now more family room than sanctuary, as much my wife’s office (probably more, considering the amount of homework she does there) as it is mine.  Consequently, as Spring’s playful glances toward this cold patch of the Pacific Northwest become longer, steadier, and the evenings are approaching a near-tropical fifty-degrees, I’m beginning to contemplate reviving my outside office, the one which saw me through my most productive writing season ever.  A few years ago, from late Spring to early Fall, I managed two novels and a few short stories in that outdoor office, which consisted of an old loveseat, its ripped upholstery covered by a demoted comforter, a small end table with an AM/FM radio, and my laptop.  Under the cover of the back patio roof, and still too close to the high traffic back door, I managed to make myself a fantastic nest.

I doubt if I’m unique in my preference for the outdoor nest, but I’m willing to bet I’m in the minority.  The majority of writers who have described their nests to me paint a quaint picture of the quiet, dark room, seldom, of ever, visited by friends and family; a solitary place reflecting the inhabiting writer’s tastes.  A place where the laboring artist can work in mostly uninterrupted peace.

Sounds nice, but alas, such has not been my experience. 

It is possible to work without the benefit of the private space and closed door, but (once again, this is only my experience) having to work this way isn’t ideal, and anyone unwise enough to rouse me from my work is likely to experience the occasional, grumpy outburst.  I’ve seen laboring cats do the same thing to a person unwise enough to poke their faces in too close to a dark, under-bed nest.  Having been dragged up from my creative doze more than once to find a curious face hovering over my shoulder, I have to say I sympathize with the cat.

If the private room behind a closed door is simply not a possibility, you must at least try to find some other comfortable place, and do your best to convince the non-writers you cohabitate with to respect that space, at least when you happen to be occupying it.  If you are going to be productive, you’ll have to convince them to respect you enough to give you some privacy while you give birth to your new masterpiece.  Unfortunately, this might necessitate the occasional scratch or bite (metaphorically speaking, of course – actually biting your significant other falls well beyond the range of acceptable eccentricity), but if that’s what it takes to convince them you’re serious, and if they are going to be persistent enough in their disruptions to warrant such action, you’ll just have to bare your teeth and do it. 

It beats the alternative.  I’ve been desperate for privacy in my time, but never desperate enough to set up office in my dirt-floored crawl-space.  Hopefully, I never will.

Brian Knight

I’m in a bubble-bursting mood today, but I’m not sure that’s really a bad thing.  Some bubbles need bursting.  Most of these little lumps of coal are meant for the newbies in this crazy business, who need every bit of advice they can get, and who also need a good bubble bursting every now and then to keep them honest. 

1. All publicity is not good publicity.  Rampaging across the Internet like a lunatic, making jackass posts on public forums, and starting pissing matches with people well established in the business just so people will see your name will not translate to sales.  People will think you’re a moron, and will stay away in droves. 

2. Sometimes, out of pure goodness, or maybe temporary insanity, a BIG NAME writer, and by BIG NAME I mean someone you’re likely to find on the shelves of any book store you visit, and often in the Best Sellers section, will stick their neck out and offer the accumulated wisdom of their experiences, both good and bad. 

You may or may not like what they have to say (this depends largely on your ability to accept reality), but calling them out as elitists and pissing on their advice is one of the worst things you could do.  You will look stupid, and the BIG NAME in question will decide trying to help the new generation of writers is not worth the hassle.

People will remember that you are the reason one of their favorite writers no longer posts on that particular forum, and they will hate you for it.  See above – All publicity is not good publicity. 

3. Writers are crazy.  Failed writers are crazy and hostile.  New and inexperienced writers are crazy and desperate.  Handle all the above with care. 

4. Five years is too long to wait for an editor’s yay or nay, but sometimes we still have to wait. 

5. You are not the next Harlan Ellison or Brian Keene.  Pretending you are will only make you look foolish. 

6. You are not the next Stephen King or Peter Straub.  Telling people you are will only make you look foolish. 

7. People love to speculate and gossip.  Writers aspire to speculate and gossip for a living.  Be careful which of your writer acquaintances you confide in, or you may find the most sensitive aspects of your private life made the topic of the day on one or more of your favorite writer’s message boards. 

8. You can’t polish a turd. 

9. If you publish your turd through Lulu.com or Publish America, you will still only have a turd (and a large hole in your bank account that said turd will never be able to fill). 

10. A large percentage of the people who need this advice will call me an elitist snob and ignore it.  To the remaining percentage, who are at least willing to consider this type of advice, good luck to you!  May the coming year be a productive, and instructive, one. 

Brian Knight

In the summer of 1995 I decided to get serious about something that had, up until that point, been not much more than an occasional hobby, one I took up every now and then to amuse my friends and myself. Every now and then I would write a short story, realize that I was probably the best writer since Stephen King, submit it to a couple of magazines, realize I sucked, then give it up for a while.

This time I was serious! I would paper the house with my rejection letters, I thought (not knowing just how close to the truth that thought was), until I finally sold my story.

My problem, I realized, was that I was writing short stories when I should be concentrating on a novel. Short stories were a waste of time. I certainly wasn’t going to get rich selling shorts.

I broke out my old Brother word processor, tracked down the floppy disk with the first few pages of an abandoned novel, and dedicated myself to finishing it.

This was my second attempt at a novel, the first having ended badly some five years previous when I loaned the first fifty handwritten, my only copy of them, to a girl I worked with (and had a huge crush on). The girl, Jennifer, forgot those pages after a late shift. The next morning the janitor found them on the break table and threw them out.

After another six months or so of working on second novel, the one I resumed while working a five dollar an hour construction job in Mountain Home, Idaho (an odd name for the town, since Mountain Home was splat in the middle of southern Idaho desert, and there was not a mountain in sight).

Some Kind of Hero, it was called.

Some Kind of Hero might have made a good comic book in the right hands, but as a novel, my novel, it stunk on ice. My first complete novel, much like other first novels I imagine, was not worth the stamps it cost to mail out submission packets. I eventually lost count of the number of submissions I made. I sent them to publishers, both large and small, and agents, and the only interest I generated was from a vanity publisher and a guy called Bill Appel from a company called Edit Ink.

These letters of interest came as a surprise, since I made a point of not sending subs to vanity publishers, and I had never even heard of Edit Ink, and in both cases, after coming down from my euphoria (Oh my god! They like me! They really, really like me!), I decided that Edit Ink was likely an expensive scam, and vanity publishing would be an empty victory. I am luckier (or maybe just smarter) than a lot of would be authors who threw money away on Edit Ink’s special services, but maybe not much luckier (or smarter). I was raising a family of four on five dollars an hour, and my wife did not work, so I didn’t really have the money to spend on them.

I have since deduced how Edit Ink got their info on me. Another agent sent me a rejection letter, with a request to resend the material once Edit Ink has had a chance to work with it. This rejection came with a very informative brochure about Edit Ink and their services.

I sometimes wonder how many agents and publishers were in on that scam with Edit Ink. I wonder if anyone other than Bill Appel and his partner in crime, Denise Sterrs, knows just how far spread this Quid Pro Quo went. I do know that Edit Ink set up fake agencies and publishing houses whose only purpose was to refer writers back to them.

Clever bastards.

A few years later another agent, responding to a query concerning my next novel, the equally horrible Black Day, requested that I seek out the services of Edit Ink and then resubmit. I rewrote the novel myself, even paid a local English professor to help me edit, and then resubmitted the work to her. It was, of course, rejected, as it should have been. It just wasn’t very good. Given the Edit Ink ties, however, I question whether she even read the resubmitted work.

I never did seek the services of Edit Ink, but they didn’t let that discourage them. I’m guessing quite a few of the agents I queried were affiliated with Mr. Appel, because he eventually took a personal interest and contacted me. He called my wife while I was at work, told her he was an editor, and that he was interested in one of my manuscripts.

I did return that call, thinking he was a real editor, and I still count that return call as one of the biggest disappointments in my life.

I can feel this wanting to veer off course and become a rant against agents, and I don’t want that to happen. Writers need agents. Despite my less than stellar past relationships with them, I’m still trying to land one. Maligning an entire branch of the literary field because of the sins of a few wont help me, and letting my frustration with a few crooked agents color your perception of them won’t help you.

This essay is not about agents. It is about vampires, bloodsuckers, leaches, and bottom feeders. This rant is about the people who put on pretender’s hats and call themselves editor, book doctor, and yes, sometimes agent.

After the multi-million dollar civil action filed against Bill Appel and Denise Sterrs by New York Attorney General Dennis Vacco, I assumed that Edit Ink had been shut down, but upon further research, I’ve discovered that they may still be in business, pending an appeal.

Still in business, scamming naive writers.

Also still in business, the agent who referred them to me after receiving a query for Black Day, one Alison J. Picard.
Writer beware. Here there be monsters.

New writers need to know that these people are still out there, spewing false promises from their lying pie-holes, patting us on the back with one hand and picking our pockets with the other. Still trying to get their greedy mitts on our money. New writers must research every individual and business with which they intend to do business.

Google.com is your friend.

There are other online resources available to writers. In this era of the information super-highway, it has never been easier to arm yourself against the scumbags and swindlers who make their living off the trusting and naive.

There is Preditors and Editors. Yes, I know predators is misspelled. I assume they did it intentionally.

There is the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America. I am not a member. I am not yet accomplished enough to meet their membership standards, but their website is still a valuable source of information.

There is www.duotrope.com.

There is www.ralan.com.

There is the account of Matthew Warner’s personal experiences with Edit Ink at Horror World.

There are also countless writers groups and communities on the web. If you’ve found your way to Storytellers Unplugged, chances are you already found one or more of these. Seek out the real pros in these groups, and by pros I mean writers who have worked with established houses, writers who write for a living, working with publishers who publish for a living. The guy who just sold his bukkake haiku to Billy-Bob’s Poetry Slam webzine may have good intensions, but any advice he offers is likely to be less than sound.

As long as you’re already here, look up and down the contributor’s list. Most of the folks on it are much more qualified to give advice than I am. Stick around and get to know them. If you have even a scrap of talent and dedication, you could benefit from their experiences and advice.

Don’t take my word for anything.

Take theirs.

Brian Knight