I’m still musing over the relation, if any, of punk rock and writing fiction. I know my previous discussion of The Replacements’ may have seemed strange in this context, so here are some more thoughts.

Writing and music are very different art forms. Music has a live performance angle, it has a group dynamic, it has abstraction in the use of sound that is very different then words on a page. As noted earlier, you can’t be too punk rock in writing because, as they say, writing has to make sense (does John Zorn? The Fall?). Can you, as punk rock does, break the rules of grammar and syntax and expect to have anyone accept you? Hey, Ho, Hell No! At least not in the final draft.

So where does a punk rock spirit exist in the writing world? Attitude and subject matter for sure (Bukowski and Crews come to mind), but I think the heart of a punk rock ethos in writing is in how you approach drafting stories. Not the final draft. Think of that as they demo tape, where you cleaned up the vocals a bit and doubled up the guitar tracks to make things thicker than your dime-store imitation Les Paul and five watt shitkicker amp could handle. (I miss my shitkicker amp, not very loud but it had the kind of distortion that would have made Link Wray and Husker Du proud).

That first draft can be very punk rock. Just gun it. Try something new. Who gives a rat’s ass, no one is watching you anyway, so go for the throat and kick out the jams. Brainstorming can be punk rock: cranking out different ideas than you normally would, stranger stuff than your normal meat and potatoes. Experimenting in form, content and genre can be really punk rock: give a western a whirl, a crime tale a shot, a horror story a stab, a fantasy a chance, a space opera a crack. This really reminds of the ‘Mats, who would occasionally do an all rockabilly set or do covers of Black Sabbath endlessly or switch instruments to create some fresh danger (and their version of Hey Good-lookin’ is a bona-fide classic with one of the WORST guitar solos of all time, yet it makes me smile every time I hear it).

Risking something different in the face of the status quo (including your own) is very punk rock. I tried some of that this week. I did free-writing to an acoustic CD my lady bought me. Just wrote whatever came into my head as the song filled the space. The results weren’t stories, but little vignettes that could be stories. The coolest thing about it was that while the content of the these sketches and images were 100% my voice, the form they took was miles away from any of the stories that I was planning on writing. These vignettes were coming from somewhere else, as if I’d found a trapdoor to new material that was strange yet familiar at the same time.

Some of them were bad. Others really neat. Others average. Some feel like flash fiction, others snippets from novels, and some short stories. Others are just vignettes. But in an hour I generated fourteen possibilities that would have never, ever crossed my brain unless I got out of my skin and tried a new approach, took a risk going somewhere new instead of pounding the same old pavement. And yet, they still feel like my kinda stories.

Now that, boyos, is punk rock.

JSR

I am back from Montreal and about as flattened as I've been in awhile. A very uniquely terrific conference, though, and one I would make a repeat visit if I thought I'd still be in the northeast next year. But I suppose if Tom Buscaglia can fly out from Seattle for it I have little excuse. We shall see. Considering the short amount of time I spent out there I came back with a remarkable amount of takeaway. Very dense, friendly, professional, and high energy.

My talk was on the intersection of parenting, game development, and censorship (violence) as a collective quality of life issue. More to come on this later, including possibly a new SIG proposal for the IGDA and some interesting information from a journalist I spoke to with the Montreal Gazette. All I can say is that Mark Twain had it right:

It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.
--Mark Twain

It is amazing what so many people know for sure just ain't so. The phrase "anti-Jack Thompson" came up frequently. Curiouser and curiouser. But away from politics and back to art.

Danny Ledonne of Super Columbine Massacre RPG presented a session as well, and also talked to the Gazette -- I understand he and I were the two mainstream 'transfer' subjects at the conference, a change from last year where there was a great deal of common interest material as opposed to industry-specific. Check out the website. This thing is more than it seems, something that I will certainly admit I didn't know prior to MIGS. There is now a documentary out about the Slamdance-initiated controversy around the game.

Many in the documentary make the case that these are the kinds of games that need to be made; that they take gaming to a new level. This was underscored, I understand, to some extent by Jonathan Blow's design keynote, which sadly I missed due to outer-Montreal traffic and a lack of familiarity with the region. At any rate, it had me thinking about the various roles of art, whether interactive or not.

The rise in attention on Ledonne's really rather fascinating project -- in that category of "serious game" that is supposed to make you feel uncomfortable rather than trigger your fun-happy reflex, but of a quality that, whether purely for its subject matter or not, is hugely emotionally resonant, which many serious games can fall short of -- comes timed with the rise of another very strange phenomenon coming from games...

http://animalcrossingtragedy.ytmnd.com/

--a warning for those who haven't seen it yet, that link is not a joke and not lighthearted. It's pretty heavy stuff. Non-graphic, but heavy.

This came from a Korean comic strip by the narrator who had that experience. Having played quite a bit of AC, the story was chilling to me -- touching, chilling, and genuinely tragic in the truest sense. Wrenching.

Unlike Ledonne's project, the Animal Crossing situation comes from emergent gameplay, not something specifically and intentionally designed into the mechanics. It's obvious once you look at the game features -- maybe even inevitable -- but it is an example of containing a piece of memory in an interactive environment in a way that I believe is unprecedented. The Animal Crossing characters in their quirky ways exhibit emotionally acute behavior, the whole of which has an impact on us that makes us think about the nature of tragedy, the nature of memory, the nature of life experience. Super Columbine Massacre RPG has a similar trajectory; it invites exploration and analysis of crucial, complex experiences, evoking feeling in a safe environment where, hopefully, our ability to manipulate the forces at work can give us some processing, some perspective. Or maybe they just call up those memories so that they can be respected through thoughtful consideration and experience.

This is certainly a kind of art. One of the most amazing things about interactive media is that these new frontiers are all around us. I don't think that there's anything wrong, or ever will be anything wrong, with creating entertainment media. But I think, regardless of the format through which we are expressing ourselves, it is important to, every once in awhile, consider the capacity of the format and use that format as thoughtfully as we can to explore the human experience. Text has immortal and unchallengeable advantages, as does music, as do games. We are still finding niches and voices for fiction. The important thing is to find those core resonant themes (like Mike, I am a theme-driven writer) and express them while we still have time and breath to do so.

In a previous post I mentioned writing books I thought were helpful. An eclectic one I had not yet mentioned is Denny O’Neil’s book The DC Comics Guide to Writing Comics. I recommend it to anyone interested in writing, period. The specific technical advice is for the collaborative world of comic books, but the ethos of the book is good for any writer. In a section on dialogue, O’Neil says,

“Observe how other writers use dialogue. You’re not going to copy them, exactly. Rather, you’ll try to learn what effects they achieve and how they achieve them. As the great haiku poet Basho suggested, don’t imitate the masters but seek what they sought.”

I think this sentiment applies to more than just dialogue. I think it reflects a great value in how writers should read and learn from texts. What do they take away from a work that helps them do their job. Seeking what your heroes sought on your own terms will help your own storytelling voice grow and strengthen and become more dynamic. What is it that Shakespeare or Dante or Homer or O’Neil or Whoever was seeking in their work?

Most writers have one grand subject that they keep returning to, some master level theme that they explore through a series of permutations. David Morrell, in Lessons from a Lifetime of Writing, had his early mentor Philip Klass (who wrote under the SF penname William Tenn) describe this major theme, the one that is most important to you, as a ferret that hides in your subconscious. It darts, hides, mutates, and does not want to be found. Writing stories to discover as well as reveal and explore this theme is a lifelong gig, but as you do so you do see these themes crop up. Morrell often writes of orphans in search of family and the nature of individuals in a hard world. Philip Young argued that Hemingway’s big theme was that of a wounded man trying to become whole. Poe was obsessed with death and the wonder at its precipice. Harlan Ellison’s work often deals with revenge and redress of injustice at heavy prices.

The more you write, the more the edges of this major theme come into sight. Noticing these things can be enlightening and uncomfortable. What if your great theme has dark edges? According to Klass, if you fear your theme, you are on the right track. Fight it, wrestle it, turn it into art both ugly and beautiful and see how it flies. When these themes emerge and you work them into stories, you start to notice others who are near the same camp, writers who sought what you’ve just discovered. I know I read a lot of writers who touched on themes that seemed to interest me before I knew they were part of my work, but the more I looked at my stories, the clearer that picture became. I still think one should read as wide as possible, but there is also much to be gained from learning from those closest to your own fictive worlds, writers who have found what you’ve just begun to discover.

JSR

I recently read the oral history of post punk hellraisers and balladeers The Replacements. One of the infuriating and endearing qualities of this band was their booze fueled attitude problem grinding against or with their talent. On any given night, you’d hear they were the worst band in Hell’s creation, and on others they were the greatest rock and roll band in history. Each night was one more time to get it right or wrong.

I loved The ‘Mats. They were for me what The Ramones and the Stooges were for other generations. A band that said, “anyone can do this, give it a whirl, who cares if you screw up, just crank the knob and let fly!” I couldn’t do that with Led Zeppelin or any rock god of any era.

But I’d “let fly” a lot as a musician a la the ‘Mats. We’d practice hard, but then go live with a different energy. Fueled by the beer we were paid with, we’d hit the stage and run through sets with that enthusiasm you can only summon when you’re seventeen and nicely refreshed and actually think you could make it. Most nights, I’d say, we were pretty damn good, even if notes were missed and beats skipped and vocals blacked out when the PA went belly-up.

I write now. The guitar is just a buddy, not working colleague. You can’t be too punk rock about writing because spelling and grammar boo boos ain’t kosher. But I’ve listened to so much chit chat on the current state of short fiction (not as good as a some golden era; competence ruining things; people more interested in publishing than writing well) that it makes me yearn for a vintage Marshall with tubes and a 60 watt amp and my old SG to blur the words to noise as I hammer an open chord through a fuzzbox.

All writing advice is idiosyncratic. What works for one will not for the other. I have no competence to make an argument on the state of the short story field. I like a lot of work out there and editors I respect are still buying stories for magazines and anthos I like. But I’ll leave the qualitative assessment of the state of short stories as a field to those with some data and not gut feelings behind them.

But these discussions tend to generate questions in my head about my own work. Are you more interested in being published than writing well? Are you experimenting enough? Too much?

That’s when I reach for my copy of the Mat’s Pleased to Meet Me and crank it. When the noise settles, what remains are some basics to take into condiseration when faced with these questions:

Write the best story you can today. Don’t listen to the noise unless it’s helpful. Decide if you’re a Robert Aickman (who emerged almost fully formed in the field) or a Joe Lansdale (who published a lot of early stuff, some good, some great, some meh, but always getting paid). There is a long tradition of genre writers learning by doing, having their early days published. I wonder if some of this comes from the pulp ethos of the genres, of that “make a living as a writer” attitude that fueled guys like Bradbury and Frank Gruber during and after the Depression. And that has a punk rock sensibility, where the Aickman approach is much more like a classical concert. Two different kinds of good, perhaps.

I don’t have an answer here, just suggestions. I don’t know that my point is clear. I do know that all writers have to decide what is best for them and do what their job is: write the best story they can. Today. Then tomorrow. Then the next day. Keep learning, keep improving. How you define best is up to you. But if you try to live up to someone else’s standards, if you try to be something you’re not, you are on a one way trip to mediocrity. Some folks are born to be Aickmans. Others Lansdales. You were born to write your stories. How best to do that is a life long gig. Just keep hammering, learning, fighting. And if a story is the worst drek in hell’s creation, so be it. The next one will have to be better, right?

Now I’ve just added to the noise I was complaining about. Gah. “Color me impressed.”

JSR

Outside, it is quiet, but if you listen closely, long enough for the cold to sink under your skin (the season's first snow is on the ground), the animals are going crazy. I am reminded of Liz Hand's night hammerer. If this were California I would be expecting an earthquake.

In the distance there is some flock of insane Canadian geese intermittently honking away as if experiencing grievous injury. This noise is followed a few seconds later by the crowing of my neighbor's chickens. All this at fifteen minutes to midnight. The chickens then set off the geese again, and this whole little symphony, augmented by the creak of the ventilation turbines on top of the shed next to the cottage, from indoors sounds remarkably like the distressed barking of my neighbor's aging border collie. Like me, she lives alone (and the cottages are a couple hundred meters apart, with trees between), so all this leads me to gear up and go outside equipped with cell phone to make sure everything is all right, and identify the poultry chorale under the bright half moon and the now powdery snow blowing through the trees.

Hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving!

The outpouring of support I've gotten for my very loose open source speculative fiction magazine model has been really staggering. In addition to early pingbacks from Paolo Bacigalupi and Clarkesworld, I was surprised and very pleased to see the commentary from Warren Ellis and Lou Anders. I'd just picked up a copy of an anthology edited by Anders last weekend, so that one in particular had me hopping up and down a bit.

As is now noted over at the Clarkesworld livejournal, I've been exchanging some emails with Neil Clarke (of CW) and John Benson of Not One of Us, and John Klima of Electric Velocipede is now looking for a community maintainer. If you dig the social networking stuff, give him a holler -- you could do far worse than be part of the staff of such a terrific magazine. (Disclaimer, I have a poem coming up in the summer issue of EV, but that's not what I'm talking about -- Klima prints Hal Duncan for crying out loud.) If you don't know much about social networking but are interested, drop me an email and I'll be glad to help. This stuff takes time but it isn't hard.

And I had three separate offers of funding for the project.

I know enough about crazy internet ideas to know that just because a notion creates some buzz doesn't mean it has long term weight, and also doesn't mean it's not going to be a royal crapload of work. But I have to say that the level of discussion triggered by this is really exciting. And I do 100% think that an evolved model of the magazine I outlined could work, and rock the spec fic world hardcore. I am prepared to see how far it can go. Doing it properly is going to take some time, so don't expect any results right away, but I expect to be working on this with more attention by the end of Q1 2008. We'll see where it goes.

This note from Warren Ellis, though, is the primary reason for this post:

Special attention should be paid to An Open Source Model for Online Magazines: I think it’s wrong in many particulars, but, as an Open Source model, it’s supposed to be. It’s a good starting point for thinking and conversation.

Following my post, a number of other blogs posted their ideas for what would make a great speculative fiction magazine. I was probably more excited to see this kind of thinking going on than I was to see any of the other commentary. I would ask those bloggers, and anyone else interested in this topic -- ye vast disillusioned masses -- to hie yourself to the newly minted pbwiki Open Source Speculative Fiction Magazine Model site:

http://opensourcespecfic.pbwiki.com

It is an open pbwiki. Have at. I've seeded it with my original model, and I'll soon be going through and collecting many of the ideas from the comments on the original page and using them to modify that model. Getting started is as simple as asking this question: what would your perfect specluative fiction magazine do and be? What would make a website that you would use so much that you'd set it as your homepage?

In a comment to last week’s post about the risk of First Drafts as Final Drafts, my writing colleague Pantsless Justin asked if I think a story could be critiqued and/or revised too much. Absolutely. Patrick Nielsen Hayden, editor at Tor and instructor at a workshop I attended, calls this “crit burn” (like freezer burn) and says he can see it in manuscripts.

I don’t know exactly what tips him off, but I have seen heavily critted manuscripts that read somewhat scattered, as though they’re trying to do too many different tiny things. With critiques of my own writing, I can easily dismiss suggestions that are completely different from what I’m trying to achieve in that piece. And there are always suggestions that are brilliant–Charles Coleman Finlay says that if a crit suggestion is so cool that you wish you’d thought of it yourself, put it in.

Where I sometimes have trouble is the area in between. I can’t speak for anyone else, so for this discussion I’ll have to use myself as the example. I often wonder if suggestions that are slightly beyond my original focus might not be good things to change. I also often find myself subconsciously giving more weight to comments from people whose own writing I respect.

Part of this self-examination does come from the fact that I’ve only sold two stories. I have themes and types of stories that I like to write, and I have my own personal style, but I’ve only caught a couple editors’ attention. As with any new writer, there’s no way to know if I just haven’t hooked others’ interest or if there is a fundamental flaw in my fiction. So I always wonder if interesting comments are things worth pursuing so I can hook more editors.

Perhaps this is one of the points that the proponents of the First Draft is Final theory are trying to combat. The first draft may be your most original and pure, and changing it based on the comments of others might dilute that originality. But other readers can also see a draft from a far more objective vantage. Their comments can reveal ambiguity and erroneous interpretations. The benefits of finding those outweigh any risk of losing originality. All workshopping writers must eventually develop a balanced approach to heeding critique comments, especially if they want to become objective enough to someday be able to critique their own work.

Writing is a hard profession, let alone craft. The challenges that face you, from writing, revising, and submitting your fiction, to the uphill battle of publication, require endurance, strength, and courage. Not the same kind of endurance, strength or courage a Tommy in the battle of the Somme needs, to be sure, but required just the same.

As rejection pile high, and editorial advice helps or hurts, most writers worth their salt try to become better by not just writing, but taking the advice of other writers in workshops and writing books. I’m a believer in using both to improve your craft and gain insight on how you write so you can, on your own, write the best story you can. But both workshops and writing books can be a retreat from writing rather than an aid to it. Robert Sawyer once talked about things that “feel” like writing that keep you away from your number one job: getting the words on the page. Writing books can certainly be like that. If you finish reading any writing book and do not get back to work, you’re missing the point.

I take a mercenary approach to writing books. Almost all of them have the same advice for the young writer to do with the fundamentals. Those are nice to brush up with, especially if there is part of your skill set you’ve been letting get rusty. But I skip the “writing is hard” chapter because I know it. I skip the “strategies to find time to write” section because I have never needed someone to put a gun to my head to write. I skip any of the inspirational chapters dealing with god or angels or muses because they mean next to nothing to me and my approach to writing. In short, I only take the good bits that apply to me. As such, I have a large stack of writing books. Some have provided more insight than others. Here are my top three that I read about once a year.

1. Lawrence Block, Spider, Spin me a Web. Block’s third non fiction writing book follows the method of its predecessor (Telling Lies for Fun and Profit), a collection of essays originally printed in Writer’s Digest on a host of writing issues. Most of these self contained essays are nice gems on particular issue: writer’s block, revisions, on writing for yourself, etc. These aren’t lessons so much as ruminations on particular aspects of writing and many of them are great and, at times, inspirational (without inviting gods and angels and mystical forces into the discussion)

2. Nancy Kress, Beginnings, Middles, and Ends. Like Block, Kress wrote for Writer’s Digest and has many other fine writing books out there. I’d argue her non fiction on writing is the best in print from a pro writer. Terrific examples, lessons, and a clearly organized, structured, and well executed chapter system on the nature of plot make this a must re-read. Her section on the form of the literary short story helped me decipher some of the wonder in Carver’s short stories that I had only glimpsed. Any writing book by Kress is worth the price. Period.

3. David Morrell, Lessons from a Lifetime of Writing. Morrell’s book has helped me more than I can say. The form of outlining he detailed, of having a conversation with yourself about the story, provided me a method of plotting that had been hidden from me for years (I hate formal outlines and index cards). His section on finding his great themes and how to look inward to project outward on the page just rang true to my ears. I got less out of his chapters on working in Hollywood, but pound for pound this book has helped me more than any other in terms of writing better stories.

Other books I just steal bits from. Carol Bly’s The Passionate and Accurate story infuriated me on an average of once per page, but some of the exercises were very helpful. Walter Mosley’s novel writing aid was slight and over priced but the first chapter, dealing with despicable characters, was what I needed to hear with regards to some of my stories. Richard Rhodes How to Write was an early favorite, and his point about pushing past the first idea to find a better one has always rang true for me.

Writing books can become addictive and act as a replacement for actually doing the job. But, if used in a mercenary manner, they can sharpen your skills and provide new tools of creation and analysis to improve the next story.

JSR

There's been a lot of discussion on the state of short fiction magazines recently in the specfic community. Warren Ellis seems to have started it with a post on subscription numbers primarily of the Big Three in genre, Cory Doctorow brings up excellent points about online marketing, Scalzi jumps in about the lack of relevance of the big three to this generation's writers, and then Paolo Bacigalupi chimes in with a series of excellent posts about SF magazines in general.

These guys have already given the issue pretty thorough treatment, and I'm sure I've missed others (my apologies -- the internet is full of things), but I thought I'd point my laser of online marketing and video games at the subject to see what might happen.

I'm really not that concerned about the big three. They seem content with their lot, unless that's just the public front, and in the end there may not be much they can do if their publishers keep them in the box of print markets with no budget for online marketing. There are distinct techniques and things that can be done to promote print properties online, but unless the business minds behind those endeavors are willing to front that cost, which is ultimately unavoidable, I suspect the decline will continue.

We are reaching or have reached a turning point in the delivery of fiction, and when those turning points happen, industries must evolve or die. Successful evolution can mean radical or gradual change, but it does NEED change, as exemplified by the modern businesses that continually innovate.

And here's the latest thing. The paper subscription model is inherently flawed. Print media is falling all over the place, while at the same time, we have more small presses popping up every day because of the increased ease in publishing. The market is diversifying, and even the titanic music industry has come to realize that the subscription model is no good -- given the option to select their own content rather than buying an entire $15 CD for one or two songs that they actually like, buyers flock to the freedom and decreased waste. This, incidentally, is why I did not renew my subscription to F&SF this year -- when it runs a great story, it's great, but the number of stories I didn't like per issue eventually tied up too much of my time and energy. It became easier to just wait until the end of the year for the Best Of anthologies to hit and pick up those -- which is another trend specific to genre fiction.

If the music business can make this realization, and shift its gigantic weight to start putting CD burning stations in malls, can it be that difficult for speculative fiction to adapt?

I love the old magazines, I truly do; I have collections of old F&SF, Asimov's, and others from the heydays of Robert E. Howard and Asimov himself -- but to expect that a business model that many decades old can remain viable while technology and creative approach rapidly reinvents itself is simply absurd.

So I think Paolo and others are on the right track that starting from scratch is what's necessary. The Big Three certainly can evolve, and I hope that they do, but experimentation and innovation typically don't come from the established players in a field; Amazon and Google are exceptions.

The place where I come to disagree with Paolo and others that have talked about new magazines -- and I should point out first that I thought his blog posts were extremely thoughtful, forward-thinking, and the best that I've seen in this discussion so far -- is in the focus on marketing alone, and what appears to me to be a lack of understanding in the specfic community on how online marketing and online business building works.

What the Big Three have done effectively, and what constitutes a tribute to their longevity (which, in the big scope, is noteworthy), is build community. That is ultimately what online marketing exists to do, and represents a shift in the technology and approach to marketing as a whole. Saturation advertising has a provable low turnaround; high precision viral marketing is exponentially more effective (and I strongly believe that anyone running a small business today really needs to read that book I just linked). Get the viral going and use it to carefully cultivate a sustainable growing community and you generate an engine that feeds itself, markets for you, and brings in both business and revenue. The Big Three have lasted this long because of that construction of brand identity and community, to which subscribers develop loyalty and emotional attachment.

Modern smaller magazines today are not focusing enough on this community growth. They aren't growing their online forums, they aren't giving their subscribers the opportunity to express themselves and connect with each other, they aren't holding location-based annual events specifically designed to get subscribers connecting and generating their own communities. They aren't providing social tools or branching into the explosively growing social networking movement. They aren't organizing their subscribers in online communities to raise money for themed charities. They aren't running enough contests. They aren't talking to their subscribers and making them feel like part of the community and experience. The closest thing I've seen to this kind of modern marketing campaign in genre fiction is Fantasy Magazine's recent "blog for beer" effort, which, though cute and neat, is really pretty sad as the sole example of effective modern social marketing in the community.

For the existing magazines, there are some modern online marketing basic
- People love free stuff. This stuff doesn't have to be high investment. Give them a single download and it's better than none. Have your artists make resolution-sized wallpaper versions of magazine cover art and archive them on your website.
- People love to express themselves. Give them tools to create a media kit out of artistic elements from the magazine (because one thing the magazines do have is the sustainable budget for really high quality new fantasy artwork, something the online magazines will not have -- get mileage out of it) and you will have people advertising for you by using your MySpace, Livejournal, WordPress etc themes and skins.
- People love to give stuff away. Put codes on limited content and then give subscribers the codes, with no restrictions on who they can pass them around to. Corollary: people like exclusive content.
- People love to be generous. Run a campaign giving proceeds and awareness for a charity and you leverage your media insertion for a good cause and make your subscribers feel good at the same time. See "Free Rice", which is currently running rampant all over the damn internet.
- People love to play really simple stupid casual games. Give them the opportunity to play a lightweight, simple game (as with Free Rice, answering trivia or vocabulary questions works), slap a leaderboard on it, and you have a high degree of web activity and blog conversation about achievement ladders.

Those are off the cuff ideas, and don't get me wrong -- this isn't trivial and it isn't easy. But its growth potential is enormous, and i t IS what the competitors are doing. However, the thing to remember with this kind of marketing is that the growth of community is the end goal. Anything that hurts that -- like saturation advertising, bringing in people who disrupt your community chemistry, providing poor customer service -- should be immediately addressed. And your community doesn't have to grow FAST -- it just has to be stable, and you have to be consistent. This is the one mistake that small magazines make so often, approaching marketing from a BOOM perspective, and then not being able to handle the repercussions across the long haul. It comes down to an absence of a business plan.

So back to the magazine-from-scratch. This is something I've had in the back burner of my mind for a long while, and an undertaking I wanted to broach eventually, but my own writing takes precedent, which puts it years off. I greatly admire the proprietors of small magazines like Electric Velocipede and Not One of Us -- the vision of their work creates a kind of community all on its own, and their focus means that they've stuck around while other small magazines have come and gone.

But if I was going to build a magazine from scratch, this is what I would do. And this is what you can do, if you're so inclined.

An Open Source Model for Online Magazines
Start up a website and tap trusted and competent people for editorial positions. Assume from the beginning that the first year runs at a loss; aim to break even.

Magazine runs as an online subscription ordinarily. One story delivered by email once a week to a paid subscriber list. The beginning of each story is posted to a blog; subscribe to read the rest, or purchase a story by item for $1. Once a month, stories are combined into a nicely formatted PDF with high end cover art, posted to the website for free download, and the link emailed to the subscription list. The PDF constitutes an "issue". Two issues per year will have guest editors from other magazines; subscribers can suggest/request guest editors on the forums. One issue a year will feature hyperlink fiction, which can link outside or within the story ("choose your own adventure" style).

Each story has a tip jar. Readers on the website can tip stories if they like them, in any denomination. House takes 10% of donations; the rest go direct to the author via Paypal or are donated to the charity of their choice.

One story a week plus breaks for planned holiday and maintenance weeks equals 48 stories a year. Of these 48, 12 get bound into an anthology at year's end to be released the following spring. In November, voting opens on the website for subscribers to select 2 of the stories for the anthology.

Payment for initial online publication is $.01/word. However, if the story is selected for the anthology, the author gets two contributor copies plus an additional $.03/word payment.

In addition to the web forum features indicated above, forum users will also be able to give discounted gift subscriptions and gain points for bringing new readers into the community. Nonfiction appears on the website monthly and is linked in the weekly newsletter. Subscribers can purchase membership at different levels, which will be displayed next to their profile on the website; annual large contests will be held for best fan-created items such as crafts, artwork based on stories in the magazine, and numbers of new subscribers brought to the site.

---

That's a start. It's simple, and it's not high gloss, like Paolo's Armored. The crossover potential between video games and genre fiction is another long discussion entirely. But generally speaking, I do not think the glossy print magazine format is a great one either for the genre community OR for the video game community. Plus, it kills a lot of trees. The Armored notion is fundamentally a different kind of business, scaled differently and with different intentions (bringing new readers to fiction), but I think those intentions can be separately achieved -- and, again, that's another topic entirely.

Joyce Carol Oates wrote a great essay entitled “To a Young Writer.” I read it about once a year because no matter how many stories I write I still tend to feel young and the advice still rings true. Oates argues you write your best when you are fearless and “write your heart out” and that there is much wisdom to be gained by becoming obsessed with an author or genre, and conversely just as much if not more to be had by reading outside of your comfort zone.

The essay always gets me thinking about the value of variety to a writer. Not everyone loves variety in their reading life or approach to their craft. I have friends who know in their heart of hearts they are horror writers or fantasy writers of children’s writers, or only read mysteries or science fiction novels. I love their enthusiasm for their form, and have certainly gone through phases of loving certain authors, but it has been a long while since I considered myself “just” a horror writer.

I love variety. In music. In movies. In fiction. Jeanne Cavelos in her article “Innovation in Horror” makes a good argument for innovation being the product of blending a variety of influences in a single form. I won’t make any claim to being an innovative writer, but I certainly enjoy genre smashing when I do it. I’ve had hard boiled stories with gargoyles as protagonists. Fantasy stories with six guns. Horror stories where the monsters are never on stage. I think some of those stories are among my best work.

To keep the “spice of life” on the brain I tried to read widely. Every pro I spoke to while attending Odyssey said that to write your best you have to read outside your genre. Classics. Poetry. Other fields and forms. Each is an example of the form, each is a case study. I spent the first two years after Odyssey reading as many different short story writers as I could. And I’m glad I did. I opened myself up to the talents, voices, and rich worlds of Raymond Carver, Annie Proulx, Robert E. Howard, Shirley Jackson, Robert Aickman, Ernest Hemingway, Lucius Shepard, Jeffrey Ford, Steve and Melanie Tem, Patricia Highsmith, and many others.

That “short story odyssey” is now done, though I still follow the ethos of reading wide and deep. And I think that’s helped me develop my craft. Which reminded me of my approach to music, back in my punk-rock days. I never understood folks who ONLY listened to punk or metal or blues. I loved it all. I liked Johnny Cash as much as Black Sabbath and John Lee Hooker and The Clash. And I loved bands that mixed genres. Like Tom Waits

In Innocent When You Dream, Waits remarks that he was awakened to writing new kinds of music across the spectrum by his wife, who is his writing and producing partner. She came at a hinge point in his career-

“I kind of got stuck. I needed someting to kick me. I needed some kind of car wreck or something. She was the one that started playing bizarre music. She said, ‘You can take this and this and put all this together. There’s a place where all these tings overlap. Field recordings and Caruso and tribal music and Lithuanian language records and Leadbelly. You can put that in a pot. No one’s going to tell you you can’t. You like James Brown and you also like Mabel Mercer. There’s nothing wrong with that’ We’re all that way. We all have disparate influences. And we all know people that don’t know each other! Right? I mean, some people are afraid to have parties and invite them all.”

And Waits does. His albums are romantically sad sonic worlds with punk and calypso sharing a drink in one corner, and jazz and country throwing dice in another, while we won’t say what the blues is getting up to with the tango in the shack.

Now, I don’t know if you can invite all your influences at once in a single story and still have it hold together, but I think inviting a handful to mingle on the page is a good way of turning a love of variety into a good opportunity of great fiction.

I think I’ll spend some time testing this theory. While listening to Tom Waits. For I am a raindog, too.

JSR