Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him out to the public.

Winston Churchill

I’m too busy to post anything of true value, so here is some wisdom from Omond Solandt, whose professional biography I’ve almost completed.

“One of the very real dangers to our North American civilization is our worship of conformity. In almost every walk of life the person who conforms most pliably to the accepted standards of dress and behaviour is most likely to succeed. We must recognize that this enforcement of conformity will finally result in universal mediocrity. New ideas, especially in human relations and often even in science, come from those who refuse to conform.”

Omond McKillop Solandt, 1954

Hail, hail.

JSR

My Lady Erin and my buddy Mike Deluca have both had stories accepted to Mike Allen’s highly anticipated anthology Clockwork Phoenix. Three huzzahs to my Homeless Moon brethren for such a stellar accomplishment so early in the new year. The line up is very strong and my friends are in such good company.

Such victories give me hope. In this case, it is so justly deserved. Two wonderful young writers on the same TOC with some other young guns and veterans. Can I get a HELL YEAH?

HELL YEAH!

Now back to thermonuclear weapons policy debates in Canada, 1953.

JSR

I received a phone call today from a nice administrator lady at the Writers of the Future contest. I have been named one of eight Finalists, for the First Quarter of 2008. (The formal announcement will appear on their blog.) The eight Finalists’ stories, I’m told, will be sent to the external judges, the famous-name writers. Then the First, Second, and Third Place stories will be announced in mid-March.

I’m delighted to have made it this high in the contest. I happen to know, through various writing workshops, three of the twelve place-winners from last year: Andrea Kail, Aliette de Bodard, and Kim Zimring. The high quality of their fiction leads me to suspect that all the Finalists’ stories must be quite good, but I think mine is damn good too. So, into the breach!

I found a nice review of my story “Excision”, which appeared in Weird Tales #347. It’s by Jeremy Tolbert, a neo-pro SF/F writer whose work I had not heard of, but whose name I recognize as a former editor of Fortran Bureau. I’m glad that he was intriuged by the healing magic and that he wants to read more in this setting. I am currently outlining a new story that fits perfectly into this setting, so hopefully I can make it work.

My personal favorite in WT #347 so far is Amanda Downum’s story “Catch.”  It’s not the sort of setting or tale I usually enjoy, but the characters’ emotions just dripped off the page.  Very well done.

I hit a milestone this week. I currently have forty stories in the market. I’m proud of this, and believe each story to be a solid read and I’m happy to have my name attached to them. Some are new and fresh and full of vim, others are old veterans still trying to find a home. A handful are in good places and awaiting final decision. All in all, I’m happy with this state of affairs.

There are writers who take a year to write a single story. Others can crank out a nearly clean draft in a week. There is no one-best-way to write fiction. Scientific management principles don’t apply, since so much of writing is subjective. There has been a lot of discussion on LJs and elsewhere on rates of production and rates of quality. I thought I’d share some tid bits I picked up from the days when a short story writer could live off his words in a desperate age: the “Pulp” era.

I won’t wax nostalgic about the Shadow, The Spider, or Doc Savage. I dig these icons of the era, and if you do too you should read Don Hutchinson’s Pulp Heroes. I want to talk about Frank Gruber.

Frank who?

Frank Gruber was a workhorse of the pulp era. Born in 1904, he only lived to see his sixty-fifth birthday. And I think I know why. Frank Gruber climbed the ladder to make some good money in the pulps as well as novels. He wrote everything he could get his hands on. He created three series characters (Johnny Fletcher, Otis Beagle, Simon Lash). He had a number of novels and a short story collection and wrote his own autobiography, The Pulp Jungle, two years before he died.

Gruber’s story of survival in stories during the 1920s and 1930s is harrowing. He wanted to be a writer like his hero Horatio Alger. He had little to no formal schooling in letters, but an absolutely astounding work ethic. He started writing in 1922 and received his first sale in 1925 to a Sunday School publication. He lost his job and while finding more work kept writing. Between 1932 and 1934, he had a handful of sales. But his output was scary :

“I wrote a grand total of one hundred and seventy four ‘pieces.’ The total wordage amounted to six hundred twenty thousand words, the equivalent of about eight book.”

This did not include revisions. Of these he sold 107 pieces. This was not just fiction but articles, poems, anything he could get his hands on to make some cash.

“Nothing was too low, nothing too cheap. I wrote Sunday School stories, I wrote spicy sex stories, I wrote short stories and I even wrote a novel.”

Some were rejected as much as twenty two times before selling, and every story that was rejected was sent out to a new magazine that day. He studied the markets, became an expert on certain military subjects, and sold to military periodicals. His success at writing sales articles got him a job as editor of a small magazine.

Gruber moved to New York and lived the desperate life of a writer in the city, going to pulp mags to drop off his stories, joining writers groups, making friends with the likes of Steve Fisher, a colleague in arms whose friendship helped sustain him through years of hunger and eating “automat” soup. After getting his face, name, and work known, an editor called. He was in a bind and needed a story and gave Gruber a single night to crank out a 5000 word story for the popular spy mag “Operator Five.” It was a harrowing night of bad plots, wild ideas, and finally a draft about a pole vaulting super spy who saves NYC. It sold, and Gruber’s fortunes began to change.

In 1935, he’d written fifty four stories and sold all but two of them. And as his career bloomed he set higher goals, aiming for those great five cents a word markets like Black Mask. Some magazines were impossible to crack, like Argosy or the Dell mags, but that didn’t stop Gruber from trying. He was lured into the possible funds of Hollywood for a character he’d created called the Human Encyclopedia, but soon became disillusioned. Hope and avarice crushed him:

“A month ago I had not even thought of Hollywood. Now it was the foremost in my thoughts. I could not work. What was the use of writing stories for fifty, sixty, or even a hundred dollars when out there, in California, they were paying thousands and thousands of dollars?”

Waiting for agents and golden handshakes crippled his ability to write. So he said to hell with Hollywood.

“I was a pulp writer. I was getting a cent a word for my stories and I could make a very good living from it. All I had to do was work like hell. Perhaps I could become a good pulp writer and get my rates up to a cent and a half a word. perhaps—even two cents a word.”

His pride got the better of him on occasion, ruining some relationships with editors that thinned his marketability. He learned to be more professional in his conduct and keep any attitude he had for the stories and not confrontations he couldn’t win. Better to write a story they’ll regret passing over than telling everyone you’re a genius. In doing so he increased his game and managed to crack into Black Mask, the King of the Pulps, and helped Steve Fisher do the same. After that, it was upward and onward, working his ass off and creating characters and stories year after year until he passed away, two years after writing his memoir of the pulp era.

I wonder, reading this over, how much has changed and how much has stayed the same? Old wine, new bottles? New wine, old bottles? Some lessons I’ve taken from Gruber’s epic story of survival confirm most of what I’ve learned on my own, eighty-plus years after his salad days.

 

1. Know the genre,

2. Know the editors,

3. Jump on opportunity and you just may get it

4. A cast-iron work ethic can keep you alive where others die

5. Don’t think you’re too good to write certain kinds of stories

6. Desperation can occasionally be a source for inspiration

7. Pride almost always goes before the fall

8. Pay rates for short stories are worse now than in the 1930s

9. Colleagues who are at the same station as you are just as critical to your well being as mentors

10. Always set goals that force you to grow as a writer

The only major warning to take from this may be the question I raised at the beginning: Frank who? Maybe toiling like this will prevent you from writing quality. Maybe this approach is only suitable to hacks and pretenders whose work is now forgotten. I mean, who has heard of Frank Gruber?

Well, I have. And now, so have you.

Maybe Gruber wasn’t destined to be Shakespear II: Electric Boogaloo, or James Joyce III: The Search for Finnegan, or Gene Wolfe IV: The Quest for Urth or whoever. Maybe that’s ok, There was room for him as well as Hemingway in the 1930s. Maybe that’s ok, too. Maybe there’s wisdom to be gleaned from his experience even for those who want to aim higher than Operator Five. Regardless, I have a lot of respect for Gruber’s ethic and his memoir was a treat to read. Not sure if I want to burn myself out by sixty, but I still find his life story inspring.

Questions, comments, snide remarks?

JSR

NOTE: all quotes and data taken from Frank Gruber, The Pulp Jungle (Los Angeles: Sherbourne Press, Inc., 1967)

 

 

Spurred by Simon Owens’s blog post that I blogged about yesterday, several other people have chimed in on the viability of the genre e-zine, including John Kilma, Publisher and Editor of Electric Velocipede.

I usually find his posts very insightful, and I agree with pretty much everything he says here. I had the exact same reaction to ESPN.com when they started charging–I went elsewhere. I also think that e-zines have the potential to hook casual fans reading online in free moments at work, but that type of reader likewise would not pay for content.

My friend Erin, who has great ideas about building online community, thinks that e-zines could snag funding from the ad budgets of big companies like game publishers. I think such arrangements are more luck (Sci Fiction) rather than repeatable strategies, because those companies are going to expect a return on their investment and the e-zine audience doesn’t overlap enough with their customer base to provide it. I think the only way to make a genre e-zine work right now is the Strange Horizons model–set it up as a non-profit company and depend on the kindness of donations.

I’ve been thinking a lot the past six months about web-based genre fiction magazines. It’s one of those never-ending online or blog-post discussions, perhaps because every short fiction writer or editor seems to have an opinion about the viability of the medium or the best format to exploit it, or perhaps because writers just enjoy talking!

Regardless, I saw a blog post today by writer Simon Owens that sums up many of the questions raised in this overall never-ending discussion. Owens also adds some neat behind-the-scenes details about several well-known e-zines, taken from his interviews with their editors.

Any general thoughts on e-zines must also include my writer friend Erin Hoffman’s excellent suggestions on e-zine format. Erin has worked for a long time in the computer gaming industry, and she has a novel vision for e-zine format based on many of the techniques that make gaming sites so popular.

All fascinating food for thought….

A few days back, Mike posted about his experiences and concerns about reading outside one’s primary genre. As he noted, I’m a big believer in this approach. Every professional I’ve asked has confirmed its value and warned that only reading within one genre can lead to stagnation and myopia regarding the craft. In her excellent essay “Innovation in Horror,” (in the On Writing Horror book by the HWA), Jeanne Cavelos argues that while new ideas are often rare birds, innovation can be harnessed by taking differing influences and bringing them together in interesting ways. She mentions Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, a hybrid of high fantasy and spaghetti western, and Gibson’s Neuromancer, information SF fused with classic noir aesthetics. Both are good examples.

My own concern here is that I no longer feel a terribly strong attraction to one genre. Once I felt I was an SF writer, then a horror writer, then a crime writer. Truth is, as my previous post on “The Genre I Want” indicated, I want to be all genres and none of them when the need fits. How do you read outside your genre when you don’t call any particular one home? By reading what you want and keeping in mind the value of variety as a well of inspiration.

For about a year, when I thought I was a horror writer, I read tons of modern horror authors to see who was who in the zoo. I found inspiring work from Joe Lansdale, Richard Laymon, Gary Braunbeck, and Tim Waggoneer. I also read a lot of drek that convinced me modern horror was not a bottomless gold mine. But reading The Harmoney Society and The Drive In and In Silent Graves and the Traveling Vampire Show made it clear that horror was a genre that I dug.

I recently read Nancy Kress’ excellent Beggars in Spain. I haven’t enjoyed SF in a long time but I loved the ideas, the characters, and the telling of this story. If I’d sworn off SF because I was a horror writer, I’d have denied myself the pleasure of Kress’ wonderful work. I’m now enjoying Peter Straub’s Shadowland, a completely different kind of novel in terms of structure, character, and prose than Beggars in Spain, but just as delightful. Each showed me different paths to writing compelling stories at novel length. If I was only reading SF or only reading Horror such lessons would be denied me.

I’ve also realized how much I like stories with ensemble casts of characters. After reading short stories for two years, this is like a new world to me. I know that novels with multiple view points characters are a rage in fantasy (inspired by George R R Martin’s excellent use of this structure, I suppose), but my favorites have been two different genres and mediums. I’ve been watching Babylon Five at dinner, enjoying and learning from this epic SF novel-as-tv-show (and I mean learning from the good, the bad, and the ugly: no show is perfect), especially its use of multiple view points. I’ve had the same enjoyment with the comic book 100 Bullets, where each of the characters create a different emotional landscape for this noir/conspiracy/alternate history opus.

Some writers I know find genre labels helpful. They say “I’m an SF/Horror/Fantasy writer, it is what I love to read and write and that’s good enough for me.” To which I say, terrific, fill your boots, I’m glad for you.

Me? I’m less certain. Still discovering. Still learning and searching. I think of all the stories I would not have written if I’d solely focused on one genre, and I cringe. If I need a label, I’ll go with fantasist because it can mean just about anything. But until I hear a good argument against reading widely, I’ll read what I want, keep looking for new authors, and try and find something positive in each genre. Who knows? Maybe it will lead me to similar enjoyment as King and Gibson as I try to write a noir, high-fantasy, western, SF story . . . with SPACE NINJAS!

JSR

I just found the announcement that Renard's Menagerie #5 is now available for ordering, and with it my whimsical short story about the evolution of parrots, "A Matter of Scale".

This was an older story and one that was pure fun to write. I wrote it back in 2005 as an application story for Odyssey, and so also thanks go to the famously wise Jeanne Cavelos for her critique of the story. Many of her points were echoed by pantlessjohnny of its scribe_fu posting, so thanks there also.

I was particularly excited about the fantastic artwork that Amber Hill created for this story. I first contacted Jennifer Miller (nambroth) to see if she might be available, and she suggested Amber (vantid), whose work I also have greatly admired for years. Amber put a tremendous amount of work into this. After I connected her with Fox I didn't even realize they were actually going ahead with commissioning her for the magazine, so I just sent a couple of emails and several months later this is what she showed me! Not only is this a fantastic piece of art (I can't wait for the prints to become available), she also put in a couple of specific birds -- Smeagol is there in the bottom right, and nambroth's Khu is perched on the dragon's shoulder.

The story is very lighthearted and full of inside jokes for parrot owners. I don't generally talk about my actual writing process in blog-space -- I certainly understand the drive of writers who do, but for me it's a bit too under-the-hood. However, I will say that this one was, no pun intended, a "pet" story of mine and I'm both glad for it to have found the home it did and of course ecstatic about the artwork.

In other publication news, I heard a few days ago that my short poem "Theoria" has been accepted by John Benson for a future issue of Not One of Us. It is another outside-my-usual-milieu work dear to my heart for its peculiarities, so good stuff there. It must be that kind of week.