Simon Hawke's Blog

Why I Won't Read Your Stuff

Harlan Ellison once said, and I paraphrase fairly closely, that it is an omnipresent conceit among the laity that anyone can write, that the average person wouldn’t think that he or she could be a brain surgeon or a prima ballerina or an opera singer, but that somehow the average person seems to think that anyone can write. Well, it simply isn’t so. Not everyone can sing, as watching “American Idol” surely must have proven to the general public, and not everyone can write. (Although I suspect a great many more people can sing than can write, but I digress.) People who can write tend to discover that fact early. They might not do anything serious about it for a great many years, as in the case of Joseph Conrad, for example, but they tend to know it, just as people with natural musical talent tend to discover it early. The average person doesn’t simply wake up one day and decide to be a classical violinist. It takes talent, talent that not everyone has, not to mention lots of training and practice. But there is no shortage of people who think that they can write a book. And, apparently, they don’t seem to think that it requires talent, training, or practice.

Now, this is not to say that people cannot be taught to write clearly, simply, and grammatically. (Though these days, that seems to be asking the impossible, given what’s become of our educational system.) However, it is one thing to be able to write a lucid business memo, and it is quite another to craft an essay on the level of Christopher Hitchens or Gore Vidal. And it is one thing to write an entertaining Facebook post, but it is quite another to write an entertaining novel.

You want to make a writer cringe? Ask him to read your stuff. Tell her you are going to publish your memoirs and you’d like to get her opinion, or worse yet, her help in getting them published. I won’t presume to speak for all writers. Doubtless, there are those selfless, noble souls out there who are perfectly willing to read your short story/memoirs/Great American Novel (though I suspect they just don’t know how to say “No!”) In fact, I used to be one of those poor, benighted souls. In trying to be empathic, in the past, I had often agreed to look at people’s writing and to give them “feedback,” or a “critique,” but you see, that wasn’t what they really wanted. When people want you to look at their writing, they don’t really want your honest opinion. They might tell you that they want your honest opinion, and they might even fool themselves into thinking that’s what they want, but what they really want is validation. And when they don’t get it, they tend to get pissed off.

Think back to all those early episodes of the aforementioned “American Idol” program, when people came in to audition who had voices that sounded like cats being fed through meat grinders. Now, they didn’t THINK that they sounded like cats being fed through meat grinders. They thought they sounded like Adele. And, assuming they were not completely crazy, which some of them clearly were, they were under this delusion because their relatives and best friends told them they sounded like Adele. You saw the would-be stage mothers on the show, getting all bent out of shape and insisting that the judges “just didn’t know REAL talent!” And, chances are, you laughed. Because, after all, that’s why they put those people on that show, to amuse the audience and be exploited. (Which is one of the reasons why “The Voice” is a much better program, because they do not exploit deluded people.)
Writers often have to deal with the same sort of thing, except that it can take a great deal more time out of your day to have to read something that somebody wrote, rather than to simply listen to them sing a few bars of “Unchained Melody.” The truth is, I have never found a kind enough way to tell someone they can’t write. And perhaps kindness is not the way to go. Perhaps some Simon Cowell bluntness should be called for. And the aforementioned Mr. Ellison has certainly been known for that. But even he stopped teaching writers’ workshops because, as he put it, he could no longer stand the pain he caused in the name of good writing.

It’s not that I don’t wish you all the success in the world. I do. Really. There isn’t enough good writing out there, and I would love to see more, because I love to read good writing myself. But I don’t want to read yours. Not until it has been published. And even then, I don’t want to tell you what I think of it. There are writers that I have known for years, professionals whom I consider friends, to whom I will not give my opinion of their writing. (Assuming, of course, they asked, which they are far too well-mannered to do. Either that, or they simply don’t give a damn about my opinion. Probably a combination of both.) So no, I don’t want to read your memoirs, or your novel, or your wonderful short story, because I don’t want to disappoint you, or upset you, or make you angry, or damage your fragile ego. And, ultimately, because my opinion doesn’t really matter.

As writer Robert Asprin once said, “The only person whose opinion (about your writing) matters is the one who can sign a check and send it to you.”

The Case for Minimalism

In the last couple of years, I have gradually started to re-issue some of my novels that have been out of print for a long time, in part because readers have been asking for them and also because it seemed a shame to just have them sitting on my bookshelf, unavailable to anyone but me. For some thirty years or so, I made my living (if you want to call it that) as a fulltime writer, which can be something of a blade dance, as many writers know all too well.

A lot of people seem to labor under the misapprehension that writers tend to make a lot of money. Well, this happens to be true for writers that most people have heard of, those authors whose work routinely tops the bestseller lists and whose novels are adapted to film and TV. And then there are the rest of us, the “silent majority,” to borrow a phrase from a former president. And these are writers who either live on the ragged edge of poverty much of the time, or else have to work at full or part time jobs in order to make ends meet.

Over the years, I’ve held a score of part time jobs. To name just a few, I’ve worked as a sound engineer at the United Nations; an armed guard for Hollywood celebrities; a bookstore clerk; a bartender; a factory worker; a rock musician; a disc jockey; a motorcycle salesman; a dishwasher; a tobacconist; a data entry clerk; a comic book grader; and a college professor. During that time, my primary vocation was writing, which was my main source of income. However, this also meant that I had no health, dental or vision insurance, no 401K, no sick time, and no paid vacations. When you’re young and single and living a semi-nomadic existence out of little more than a motorcycle and a couple of saddlebags, this is all a bit of a grand adventure. As you grow older, however, it starts to become progressively less amusing, especially when you decide to settle down with someone.

Some years ago, I was attempting to juggle several teaching jobs at the same time. The term “adjunct faculty” might sound impressive to some, but what it actually means is “part time teacher to whom we do not have to pay benefits.” It also means that from semester to semester, you have no guarantees of work. At the same time, you have to do a ton of grading, which tends to seriously cut into your writing time.

One day, I was discussing this with several of my students, and I said that I would really like to quit at least one of my two teaching jobs, perhaps find something part time that I could do that had absolutely nothing to do with writing or teaching. Maybe something I could do with my hands, just to have a change of pace and clear the cobwebs out. A couple of my students happened to work as cashiers for a large home improvement store and they suggested that I apply to their company, which they said was a great place to work.

Well, it just so happened that I used to work in a little mom-and-pop hardware store when I was a kid, selling nuts and bolts and mixing paint, so I thought I could probably do that. Long story short, I applied, they hired me, and after I’d been there for about six weeks, the store manager told me that he liked my attitude and my work ethic and anytime I wanted a fulltime job, all I had to do was say the word. No one in academia had ever made me such an offer. I did a quick cost/benefit analysis and took him up on it, and this month, I’ve been with the company sixteen years.

During that time, I didn’t get much writing done. Less and less each year. My agent died and I didn’t seem to have much luck finding a new one I felt good about. My books gradually went out of print. And some people, apparently, concluded that I had passed away. I found that last bit amusing when a co-worker told me he’d overheard a clerk at Barnes and Noble telling a customer that I had died, which is why there weren’t any new Simon Hawke books.

At the same time, it was rather nice to know that there were still people out there who liked my work enough to ask about it. And now that there were Kindles, why wasn’t my work available for that? I started to look at some of the books I’d written that had simply been sitting on my bookshelves and I noticed that they were starting to get a little old. It wouldn’t be long before they started to degrade. And I thought about all the time I had put into writing them, and the fact that there were people who'd enjoyed them, and I thought, “What’s the point in just having them sit there on my shelves, fading and gathering dust? Why not try to rescue them?”

The only practical way to do this, since New York publishers seemed to have no interest, was to put them out myself. And the most effective way to do this was to put them out with Amazon’s Createspace division. Since I had no data files for any of these novels, and indeed, a good number of them had been written on typewriters, this meant cutting the binding off an original edition, scanning it in with a flatbed scanner one page at a time, and then uploading it as a PDF file to Createspace, where the process to re-issue the novel would begin.

The resulting trade paperbacks were larger than the original editions, nicely packaged, and, at least with the first five Time Wars novels, had the original artwork on the covers. This proved to be somewhat expensive, however, and limited my ability to get the novels out again. In an attempt to make the process a bit more cost effective, and be able to price the novels a bit more favorably, I decided to go with minimalist covers on some of my other books. This was, perhaps, a little risky.

With just a plain, colored background and title graphics, and no artwork at all, the books would look, well, plainer. But I could afford to put them out more quickly, and at a better price point. And while I would love to continue having great artwork on the covers, the fact is that, with the exception of the first five Time Wars novels, which had great art by David Mattingly, the rest of the series, and most of my other books, had, at best, forgettable covers. At worst, they had atrocious ones, because authors, with only rare exceptions, have little to no say to what goes on the covers of their books. This way, using a minimalist cover, I would at least have complete control of the entire process, and perhaps more people would be able to afford buying my books.

I rather like the minimalist look. It’s simple. And it’s clean. And, hopefully, people will come for what’s inside the book, rather than what’s on the outside. I suppose that time will tell.

Iron Meditation

Writers are not generally known for being very physically fit, although there have been some notable exceptions (Ken Kesey and Sylvester Stallone come to mind). Indeed, it is not an occupation (or avocation) that requires or allows for fitness. If you expect to get any writing done, you need to sit and write, and this sedentary practice does nothing for your level of fitness. In fact, it can really screw up your lower back. For this reason alone, if for no other, I believe that it is very beneficial for writers to work out. This does not necessarily mean you have to be a gym rat (as I confess I am), but it has a salutary effect if you simply go for a good walk at least several times a week, or do some yoga. Some writers like to run or jog. That’s fine, although it’s not my cup of tea. I find it hard on my knees and feet. I find that I get more than my share of aerobics in my day job, plus I also like to fitness walk and kayak. But my primary mode of exercise is working out with weights.

I am always somewhat hesitant to term what I do “bodybuilding,” though strictly speaking, that is what it is. The word “bodybuilding” tends to bring to mind steroid use and growth hormones and massive supplementation and flexing in the mirror, none of which I do, because, quite frankly, it’s not healthy. (Except for the flexing part. That never hurt anyone, so far as I know, and if you’re into competition, it’s a way to keep track of your progress and chisel in those extra bits of definition.) Competitive bodybuilding is all about the massive physique, and for most people, it is really not possible to build the kind of physique that one sees in magazines without “juicing,” as they call it (and, no, I don’t mean the Jack La Lanne kind). I do the same kind of workouts that professional bodybuilders do (although with considerably less weight), and aside from taking a multivitamin and blended shakes after my workouts, the only other thing I do is try to stick to a clean diet, though I confess that it was easier to quit drinking than to resist the occasional binge on potato chips or cookies. Over the years, I have learned to vary my workouts, and at present, I do a full body work out three times a week, completing a total of about fifty sets, which usually me takes about an hour or so. (I once had a fellow in a gym, who came in at about the same time I did, snidely comment, “What? You done already?” To which I replied, “Yes, because I don’t spend my time talking.”) On my off days, I either walk, kayak (if possible), or do some yoga.

What does any of this have to do with writing, you might ask? Well, aside from the fact that it’s helpful to your long-term writing career if you stay fit and healthy, I find that it actually helps my writing. Working out, among other things, improves circulation, and improved circulation benefits the brain, which is, presumably, the primary tool one uses to write. The famous “pump” one gets from bodybuilding is actually quite energizing, which is also beneficial for the imagination. Arnold Schwarzenegger once likened it to sexual climax, which was something of an overstatement. (If that were true, I’d never leave the gym.) I also find that it can be a very useful and focusing tool for meditation. In fact, I practice something I call “Iron Meditation.”

A lot of people like to listen to music when they work out. I am old school. I like the sound of weights, and find music a distraction to keeping focus on my muscles and the form of the exercise. However, I have also studied zen, and what I incorporate into my workouts is yogic breathing and meditation. I will finish a set, having worked to failure, then, sitting up straight, place my hands upon my knees, my thumbs and middle fingers touching lightly in a mudra, and with my eyes closed, inhale for a slow count of four, filling my lungs, and then exhale for a count of four, emptying them. I will do this ten times, following my breath in my mind’s eye. In addition to the calming, focusing, meditative effect, this helps to better oxygenate the lungs and recover from the previous set, and works much better than the out-of-breath panting that many people do when they complete their sets. I do this after every set, and in addition to assisting recovery and focus, it’s good for the lungs, and it assists in keeping pace between the sets. And when I get home, after a blended drink of greens, protein, almond milk and fruit, followed by a shower, I am primed either for my workday or for a focused, energized session of writing. Beats the hell out of booze, cigarettes and coffee.

A Journey Through Time

Recently, I received some questions on here from a woman named Claudia, who said she was writing a thesis about my work and wanted to get some answers directly from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. Since they were not questions that could be answered briefly, I thought I would address them in a blog, as they might also have some general interest for other readers. (And I don’t get around to writing blogs too often, so why not?) She wanted to know how I came to write the Time Wars, how I felt my time travel stories were different from other time travel stories, what writers influenced me, what movies, and so forth. Well, okay, I’ll give it a shot.

I’ve always loved adventure stories and historical fiction. As a boy, my mother used to read to me from the books of Capt. Mayne Reid, stories about a Seminole Indian chief in Florida named Osceola. She read me those stories in Russian translation, so I have no idea what they were like in the original English, and have only the vaguest memory of them, but along with other stories that she read to me, such as the tales of Rudyard Kipling, and the Russian fables of Krilov, and Grimm’s fairy tales, those were probably my earliest influences. Later on, I discovered the Horatio Hornblower books of C.S. Forester and read every one of them, as well as the historical fiction of Kenneth Roberts and Raphael Sabatini, although in Sabatini’s case, I came to his work from having first seen the films that were made from them, starring Errol Flynn. (Captain Blood, Robin Hood, The Sea Hawke.)

Unlike many SF writers, I came to science fiction fairly late, when I was introduced to it by a friend. Until that time, I was not aware that science fiction existed as a genre, and I did not know about any of the magazines that published it, magazines such as Galaxy, Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Amazing Stories. But once I had discovered it, I began to read SF voraciously. Not only were they great adventure stories, but they were also full of wonderful ideas. I loved the Foundation books of Isaac Asimov, Frank Herbert’s Dune, the stories of Robert Heinlein, Michael Moorcock, Robert E. Howard, Harlan Ellison, Fritz Leiber, and many others. Years later, after I began to sell some short stories of my own, I got to know Harlan Ellison and he took me with him to my first World Fantasy Convention in L.A. I wound up in a suite, at a party with some publishing people, none of whom I knew. (My ticket to entry to this party was the fact that I had sold my first professional short story to the host, Jim Baen, who was the editor of Galaxy magazine and later became the founder of Baen Books.) At one point, the conversation turned to which writers were admired by the various guests. A number of names were mentioned, and when it came around to me, one of the names I mentioned was Fritz Leiber. At that, one of the gentlemen in attendance said to me, “Well, some of those others, I suppose I can understand, but Fritz Leiber? Really? He’s not so hot.” Well, at that, I went into a rant about how great I thought Fritz Leiber’s work was and how no one else in the room was fit to shine his shoes and so forth, words to that effect (I don’t really recall what the hell I said, because it was a rant, you know?) And at one point, I suddenly became aware that everybody in the room had stopped talking and all of them were either smiling or stifling laughter. Realizing that everybody was in on some joke that I was clearly not in on, I trailed off, in puzzlement, at which point, an elderly gentleman seated on a couch directly across from me got to his feet, came over to me, held out his hand, and said, “I’m Fritz Leiber, and I’d like to thank you for all the kind words about my work.” I just about fell through the floor as Frederick Pohl (who had set me up), Marion Zimmer Bradley, Poul Andersen, and a number of other pros whose work I had admired all sat there and laughed at me.

Ironically, I had started writing science fiction before I knew that there was such a thing as science fiction. I had read the stories of Jules Verne as a boy, but did not think of them as science fiction. I had no idea that there was such a thing. But I am a first generation American, whose parents came to this country after World War II. They both worked, and I was raised primarily by my maternal grandmother, who lived with us and spoke very little English. The language I learned first was Russian, and when I started school, I was still not very comfortable speaking English. Also, as a child of the 50's, I grew up during the time of Senator Joe McCarthy and the Cold War, when it was not too cool to be of Russian descent. On top of that, I was socially awkward (something a lot of SF fans can probably understand) and I didn’t really have any friends. More often that not, I’d get beaten up in the playground for being a “Commie.” Somehow, as an unconscious form of self-therapy, I suppose, I wound up writing stories in a composition book where all the characters were the kids in my class and me, and in these stories, we would all have adventures together on the moon. One day, my teacher caught me writing in my composition book and thinking I was up to something, she took it away from me. As she read through it, I saw a strange expression come over her face and then she gave it back to me, saying, “I want you to read this to the class at the end of the day.” When the time came, I was absolutely filled with dread. She told everyone that I had written a story and then she called me up to read it. Convinced that they would all make fun of me again, I held the book up so I couldn’t see their faces and began to read. When I was finished, there was dead silence. Slowly, I lowered the book, waiting for the laughter to begin. And then somebody said, “That’s it? There isn’t any more?” And my teacher said, “Well, maybe if we clap our hands, he’ll write something more tomorrow.” And from that day on, I knew that I would be a writer.

As for the Time Wars, what I wanted to do was to write the sort of stories I had loved to read as a boy, the sort of adventure stories that Raphael Sabatini wrote, or Rudyard Kipling. And I had this idea of taking classic works of literature and using them as a setting to write science fiction adventure stories that were also historical fiction. I had always been interested in the idea of time travel as a fictional device, but most of the stories I had read about time travel were, at least in my opinion, seriously flawed. For one thing, writing time travel stories isn’t easy. You have to really think it through. You have to keep things consistent within the framework of the story. And most of all, you have to deal with something called “the grandfather paradox,” which is something most writers who deal with time travel either neatly sidestep or ignore. Basically, what “the grandfather paradox” poses is this fascinating riddle: suppose you could travel through time and meet your grandfather, before your father was born, and then you killed him. This would mean that your father could never have been born, which means that you could never have been born, so how could you have existed in the first place to go back in time to kill your grandfather? I decided that I would take “the grandfather paradox” head on and “solve” it -- at least in terms of the framework of my stories. To do this, I had to figure out the “rules” of time travel, in much the same way as Isaac Asimov figured out the “rules” of robotics. I did a lot of reading, and I made lots and lots of notes. It took about a year of research and working out the framework for the fictional Dr. Mensinger’s “Theories of Temporal Relativity.” And the payoff was that I received a number of letters from college students who wanted to know where they could read more about the work of “Dr. Mensinger.” They thought that he was real, someone I had read for research, and I took that as a compliment. It’s also a compliment that all these years later, people still want to read my Time Wars novels and ask if there is any chance they might be done as graphic novels or maybe even movies. Well, there has been some interest, although it’s hard to say if anything will come of it. These things tend to be long shots. The Time Wars novels have been out of print for many years. There was an attempt to bring them back one time, but it did not work out too well. Now, I am in the process of re-issuing them myself, through Amazon.com, where they will be available as both trade paperbacks and Kindle editions. As I write this, the fifth novel in the series, THE NAUTILUS SANCTION, is in production and should be available shortly. And I plan to bring back the entire series over the next couple of years or so. It’s hard to believe that it’s been over 20 years since I wrote the last Time Wars novel, but I am about to start work on another one. Hopefully, I can do it well enough to please the fans of the previous books. Well, I guess we’ll see....

The First Breath of the Last Gasp of Civilization

Often, when people find out that my wife is married to a writer, they assume she must be wealthy and wonder why she bothers to work. Well, quite aside from the implied sexism in such a question (as if a woman whose husband is wealthy should not want to do anything productive with her life), the fact is that writers are not all rich. Very few of us are. (The ones you hear about the most might be well off, because they're bestselling authors and that is why you hear about them.)Most of us have to work in addition to writing. Many writers teach. I used to. But for the past 15 years, I've worked in retail and I've noticed something about people and how things seem to have changed in the way they behave toward one another.

There was a time when people were generally civil. They had, for the most part, anyway, good manners. They said things like "Please" and "Thank you." They were patient and considerate. But a lot of that seems to have gone by the boards. The expression, "Excuse me," for example, used to mean, "I beg your pardon." But nowadays, it seems to be a demand for attention, as in "Drop everything you're doing and take care of my needs immediately." And if at first it doesn't get the desired result, it is repeated, with increasing volume and insistence.

It's not just at my job where I've noticed this sort of thing. I see it in the grocery stores, in restaurants, in the post office, almost everywhere, in fact. There has been a dramatic increase, in recent years, in rudeness, impatience, and selfishness. And as a writer, part of what I do is observing people and I've been trying to figure out what is responsible for this.

Is it increased stress in society in general? Are people frustrated in their workplace, so that they have become hair trigger in taking their frustration out on others outside of their jobs? Is it that my generation, the so-called "baby boomers," have done a lousy job of parenting and not taught proper manners to their children or held them accountable? And, in extreme cases, is this resulting in violence, such as the sort of stories we've been seeing on the news of late? What has happened to simply being polite?

People "unfriend" those who disagree with them on social media. Or else they "flame" them (or whatever such personal attacks are called these days)or post inappropriate things about them on the net. They feel it is perfectly acceptable to "shame" people who are not the dress size they feel they should be, or who wear their skirts too short in their estimation, or believe differently than they do. And there seems to be this unprecedented sense of entitlement among so many people who think only of themselves and their own needs and give no thought to anybody else.

When I was growing up, we knew who our neighbors were and had relationships with them. Now, in so many cases, we not only do not know our neighbors, but often have no contact with them, unless it's to complain if they are making too much noise or not keeping up their lawns the way they should. People cut you off in traffic without even bothering to signal their intentions and often feel it's more important to reply to a text or cell phone message than to watch out for the bicyclist or pedestrian they might and often do run over. And each year, it just seems to get worse.

I don't have any great solutions to offer, but perhaps a small suggestion is in order. Here's a radical idea: start each day with an affirmation. "I am going to do my best to be polite today. I will work on developing some patience. And at least once, each day, I will try to think of someone other than myself." Corny? Maybe. But it's a small thing. What's it going to hurt to give it shot? If enough people do it, who knows, it just might make a difference.

Bringing Books Back To Life

One of the peculiar things about being a writer is that people often have a completely false perception of what a writer’s life is like. Because the writers who are in the public eye are generally incredibly successful, such as Steven King, J.K. Rowling, and George R.R. Martin, people often think that writers lead glamorous lives and make a lot of money. In fact, for the vast majority of writers, the complete reverse is true. Before Game of Thrones made him a household name, George R.R. Martin was once asked what it was like to be a full time writer. He replied that it was “precarious.” I cannot imagine a more accurate response. When people learn that I have published over 60 novels, they are usually surprised that I have a “regular” job. When they ask me why, I tell them that I like to eat.

For much of my adult life, I was a full time writer, which meant that my primary occupation was writing, but there were often secondary, often part time occupations to help pay the bills. At various times in my life, I have worked as a musician, a disc jockey, a broadcast engineer, a bookstore clerk, a bartender, an armed guard, a dishwasher, an instructor in a broadcasting school, a rock quarry laborer, a factory worker, a frame molder in a custom motorcycle shop, a hardware store clerk, a comic book grader, a tobacconist, and a college professor, among other occupations I have probably forgotten. I lived all over the country, sometimes literally out of a couple of motorcycle saddlebags. I would move somewhere, rent a place, accumulate a few possessions, stay awhile, then sell everything I owned, move somewhere else and repeat the cycle. I never had a steady job; I never had any health insurance; I never had a regular paycheck and I never had a 401K or even a savings account that had more than about a hundred bucks in it. I had a lot of interesting adventures, but when you depend primarily on writing for a living, your lifestyle is, indeed, “precarious.” Even if you are lucky enough to have an agent (which I currently do not), you never know for sure when your next check is coming. Once, after I delivered a novel under contract (ahead of time, I might add), one major New York publisher kept me waiting a whole year to get my check. (Meanwhile, my creditors, for some strange reason, expected to be paid within the customary 30 days.) Admittedly, that was a bit unusual, but waiting several months or more was not, and complaining about it did not do any good, plus it gained one the reputation of being “difficult”. Well, people often ask, what about royalties?

Here is a quick lesson in how royalties work: if you are lucky enough to sell a novel, you usually get an advance. If you are a highly successful, famous author, this could be quite substantial. If you are not, which is the case with most writers, this is usually more like several thousand dollars. Note that this is an advance against royalties. You do not make any more money until you earn out the advance. Then you get a percentage of the cover price, usually something like six per cent of the first 150,000 copies sold, if it’s a paperback, and eight per cent thereafter. This basically means that in order to make any royalties at all, you usually have to sell out the entire first print run of your novel. Given the fact that publishers usually do not ship the entire first print run, leaving some “in reserve,” and the fact that new novels come out every month, thereby driving previous months’ novels off the shelves (unless they’re by established authors or else get legs and are re-ordered), and the window for earning out your advance becomes fairly small. A lot of less experienced authors think it’s important to get as large an advance as they can, but this can work against you. If you fail to earn out your advance, the publisher isn’t very likely to offer you another one. Perhaps now you can start to appreciate the magic behind names like King, Rowling, and Martin.

Another thing that authors must contend with is their books going out of print. Unless a book becomes a bestseller and is frequently reprinted, its shelf life is relatively short. (Textbooks are the exception to this rule, where the mere fact of a minor annual revision can make the previous year’s edition obsolete and thereby force the hapless student to shell out money for the often ridiculously overpriced new edition. This become a windfall for college professors who write the texts for their own courses.) Again, unless one is a well-established author, the odds are against a book that goes out of print being reprinted or picked up by another publisher. So, unless you are a bestselling author, what often happens is your books go out of print and readers will only be able to find them in used bookstores (where, of course, the author does not make any additional royalties, because the book was already sold once). Eventually, the rights revert back to the author, who can theoretically re-sell the book, but that’s assuming anyone is interested. (You think?) So authors develop what’s known as a “backlist,” books that have gone out of print and are basically sitting on their shelves, awaiting a new life that likely never comes unless you’re lucky enough to have a book go through the roof and suddenly publishers become interested in your older work.

Except now there’s a new wrinkle:
What happened with the music industry and YouTube is now happening in a similar way with publishing. Once upon a time, if you were, say, Aerosmith or Motley Crue, you got your musical chops together and then went out to play in bars, becoming tighter musically and building an audience until you eventually became “discovered” and got a record contract. And then along comes YouTube and suddenly musicians can get their work out there and become well known without ever having a recording contract. In publishing, it began with the so-called “vanity presses.” Often, this was simply a way to take advantage of gullible people who wanted to be authors. You basically paid to have “x” number of copies of your book published and then you were on your own in trying to sell it. Once the members of your immediate family and a few close friends bought it, you were usually out of luck, because book stores had no interest in vanity publications. But a few writers did manage to become successful that way. One articulate “self-help” author paid to have his own book published and then went out on a tour of radio stations across the country, selling books out of the trunk of his car and eventually landing a major publishing contract. Stories like that are few and far between, however. But then e-books came along.

I recall when they first came out. No one took them very seriously. At the time, I did not know a single writer who thought that electronic publishing would ever amount to anything. People wanted to hold “real” books in their hands, gosh darn it! No one would want to read a book on a monitor screen. You can’t have bookshelves with e-books on them. How do you get an author to autograph an e-book? Etc., etc. Full disclosure: I said those very things myself, along with almost every single writer I knew. In fact, I can’t remember anyone who thought that e-books would ever amount to anything. (There may have been one or two, but they were probably computer geeks and I didn’t hang around with them.) Then a couple of things happened that completely changed the entire picture. E-book readers, such as Kindles and Nooks, became much better as the technology improved. And desktop publishing came along that suddenly made it possible to produce books without commissioning large print runs. It is now possible for a customer to order one copy of a book from Amazon.com and Amazon’s publishing arm, Createspace, can cost-effectively produce one physical copy of that book and send it to that customer. No investments for large print runs. No warehousing costs. No advances that need to be paid out or earned out. You sell one copy, the publisher gets their share and you get yours. And you can get that same book as either a trade paperback or an e-book. Or both.

But wait, you might ask, what about getting your book into the bookstores? What about advertising? Only major publishers can really do that. Well, perhaps. If you’re a well-established author. But the truth is that unless your book is a lead title for that publisher, it won’t get any significant advertising at all. They’ll just put it in their catalog and throw it out there, to sink or swim on its own. Some authors are highly skilled at promoting themselves. Truth is, I’m not one of them. I think most writers are not. I have never been good at promoting myself and I’ve always felt uncomfortable with the concept. But now there’s social media. And while I have yet to type my first text or tweet, I am now on Facebook, which gives me the ability to let people know when I have a book that’s coming out without having to hire a PR person or do radio station interviews or try to get on TV talk shows, which generally aren’t interested in authors anyway unless they are Big Names or celebrities writing “tell-all” memoirs.

The really cool thing is that now those books that all went out of print can be re-issued once again and even if they are not prominently displayed on bookstore shelves, readers can find them on Amazon.com or download them on their Kindle. I am currently in the process of re-issuing some books of mine that have been out of print for years, such as the Time Wars series, which has something of a cult following, and earlier novels that many of my readers have probably never even heard of. I don’t expect to make a great deal of money from these books, and I doubt that they will earn enough to let me quit my day job, but it will be nice to have those books out there once again, available to anyone who wants to read them, instead of just sitting on my shelves.

Will this put the mainstream publishing industry in New York out of business? Certainly not, no more than YouTube has put the recording industry out of business. But it is changing the game for writers, and it’s also opening up new options to bring books back to life. And that’s a good thing.

Hatchet Job, Part II

I had signed a contract to novelize FRIDAY THE 13TH, PART VI, without ever having seen any of the films. I knew absolutely nothing about them. Paramount had promised to express mail the scripts for Part VI and all the previous films, as well, so I would know what had gone on before.

And they also graciously agreed to supply me with the videos of the first 5 films. (Remember videos?) However, these had not arrived as yet and I needed to start thinking about how to approach the project. Fortunately, I knew just where to go.

I called Steve Rasnic Tem.

Steve, for those of you who might not be familiar with his work, is both a poet and a horror writer of considerable repute. His work has been widely published in dozens of anthologies and magazines, as well as novel form. I'd known Steve for some years and knew him to be a true connoisseur of horror. If there was something he didn't know about the field, then no one knew it.

"Steve? I just got a job to novelize the latest FRIDAY THE 13TH film and I don't really know anything about the series. What can you tell me about it?"

Silence.

"Steve?"

"Uh...yes. Well...."

He had seen the films. He had taken his kids to see them. (Steve's that kind of guy.) He gave me a brief synopsis of them on the phone. I began to feel apprehensive. The next day, the scripts arrived. They all read more or less like this:

ANGLE - JASON
Advancing menacingly. He begins to raise the axe.

ANGLE - AXE
Wet with blood. Lightning flashes.

CLOSE-UP - JENNIFER'S FACE
She screams.

CLOSE-UP - AXE
Descending...

They all went on more or less like this for about 120 pages or so. Wide margins. Lots of empty space. And I was supposed to transform that sort of thing into a novel with a length of at least 50,000 words.

In a week.

Somewhere in Heaven, Chico Marx was laughing his head off while Harpo tooted his squeeze bulb horn and stuck his tongue out. By the time my girlfriend came home, I had chain-smoked about 5 packs of cigarettes and developed a pronounced facial tic. (NOTE: this was back in the late 80s. There have been some changes in my life since then. That girlfriend and I parted amicably after about 5 years together and I eventually got married for the second time. I had a drug problem back in college, and I overcame it. I am also a recovering alcoholic with 20 years of sobriety under my belt. However, I had started smoking at the age of 10 and by the time I quit, some 15 years ago now, I was up to 4 packs a day. Of all the bad habits I had developed and managed to get rid of over the years, smoking was by far the most difficult to quit. And it was probably the most worthwhile thing I've ever done.)

The next day, the videos arrived. Okay, I thought, those were only scripts, after all. Maybe actually seeing the films would give me something more to work with. I warmed up the VCR (remember those?) and sat through all 5 of them in a row. By the time my girlfriend got home from work, I was sitting on the floor, slowly rocking back and forth and going, "Uhnnnh... uhnnnh...."

Okay, Siskel and Ebert aside, let's be charitable and say they worked as films. (For younger readers, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert were film critics whose very popular TV show ran for years. They have both since died, tragically... oh, boy....) After all, they made a ton of money at the box office and a lot of people enjoyed them. But as books? That was another story.

Writing them as books, I was faced with certain problems that seemed damn near insurmountable. For one thing, there was the main character. (Dare we call him the protagonist?) Jason Vorhees HAD no character. He was a hockey mask and a machete. Nothing more. He did not speak. He did not emote. We knew nothing about him as an individual. Only that his mother had been killed in the first film and he apparently was murdering the entire civilized world in revenge. He also had drowned as a child and, starting with the second film, he comes back as a murderous, hulking adult, with no explanation of how he happened either to escape from drowning or come back from the dead.

He also seemed to be invulnerable. You just couldn't kill the bastard. And they tried. Boy, did they ever try! He was hanged, shot repeatedly at point-blank range, axed, stabbed, attacked with a chainsaw, hit by a car, torn apart by a motor boat propeller, they did everything short of dropping a nuke on him, and I'm not sure that would've worked, either. He made the Terminator look like Woody Allen. Yet there was no explanation for WHY he was impossible to kill.

We didn't know a great deal about his victims, either. Most of them were teenagers, camping in the woods. More often than not, Jason got them immediately after they'd had sex. Or just as they were about to have sex. Or even WHILE they were having sex. Clearly, what we had here was a sort of Catholic morality play. You engage in premarital sex, you go to Hell. In various unpleasant ways. Steve Tem ventured the theory that impressionable young people seeing these films could grow up to become premature ejaculators. (I really don't know about Steve, sometimes....)

Question: how to transform a script like this into a reasonably decent novel? By now, you might not think so, but I do have standards and I was going to try my damnedest to make it a good novel. Without being allowed to add any subplots or otherwise "pad" the material. I gave it some hard thought, then I called Paramount.

I asked if it would be okay to flesh out the characters of Jason's victims. Make them more than simply victims, get into their personalities some more, reveal what they're thinking, what their backgrounds were, how they really felt about each other, in other words, make them more fully developed people the readers could identify with and care about.

Well, yeah, they guessed I could.

What about Jason? I asked. Could I explore his past a little? Make him a more realized character? Give him a history? A personality?

What did I mean personality? (The concept seemed rather new to them.)

Well, you know, I said, get into his head and write from his point of view. Show you what he's thinking.

This struck them as a really novel concept. They thought it would be "neat." (Yes, they really did say "neat.")

How about if I explained how he came to be the way he was? What forces and traumas drove him to insanity and to become a relentless killing machine? Could I come up with a rationale for why he doesn't die?

They seemed dubious, but allowed as to how that might be interesting. As long as I didn't stray from the concept.

Great. Now, at least, I had something to work with. I could give Jason a personality, make him something more than just a hockey mask and a machete. Or a spear gun. Or a knife. Or a cleaver. Or a chainsaw....

And I had about a week in which to do it.

Clearly, this was going to require a rather unusual mindset. I considered going to a sporting goods store and buying a hockey mask, so that I could wear it while I was writing and get into the proper frame of mind. Only my girlfriend said that if I did that, I could start looking for another girlfriend. Bad enough she had to deal with an eccentric writer every day. No way was she coming home to a guy wearing a hockey mask.

Okay. Scratch that idea. What else could I do to get into the proper mood?

Of course. Go out and get a bunch of Heavy Metal tapes. (Remember tapes?) Black Sabbath. Motley Crue. Billy Idol. All of that Satanic stuff that was supposed to rot your brain and subliminally convince you to commit suicide. Wait until my girlfriend left for work, because all she listened to was classical stuff and that yuppie wallpaper music they called "New Age," then sit down at my trusty Apple Mac, put the tapes into the stereo (remember stereos?) and really CRANK 'em. Crack the plaster on the walls.
Serial killer music. Screaming prose to screaming guitars.

For some reason, Billy Idol turned out to be perfect. "White Wedding." "Rebel Yell." "Flesh for Fantasy." His vocals and Steve Stevens' wailing guitar combined to create precisely the right atmosphere for butchering teenagers. I played Billy Idol almost exclusively while I worked. My girlfriend would come home to find the house shaking, the neighbors barricading their doors and windows, and me standing up behind my desk, lip drooping in a sneer while I punched the air and yelled, "FLESH! FLESH!" She locked me in the office and stopped talking to me. No problem. I didn't need food. I didn't need sleep. I was in Work Mode!

The trouble with the way I write is that I'm what you might call a "Method Writer." Like a method actor, I really get into my characters and sometimes my personality tends to get a little weird around the edges. About halfway through the project, my girlfriend came home to find that I had busted out and was waiting in the darkened lobby with a butcher knife. Moving stiff-legged, like Frankenstein's monster, I stalked her through the house for about 10 minutes until she hit me with a mop. (NOTE: after I wrote this and it was published in THE BLOOD REVIEW, a number of people asked me if this really happened. Okay, I exaggerated a bit for comedic effect. I am not a complete loony, but there was a kitchen knife involved. What really happened is that we were in the kitchen and I was washing dishes. I happened to pick up her kitchen knife to wash and, jokingly, I started making stabbing motions in the air and making those "whoosh-whoosh" sounds that are on the movie soundtrack. And my girlfriend, not altogether jokingly, picked up a large frying pan and brandished it with a threatening look. Since she was probably more dangerous with that frying pan than I was with the kitchen knife, I quickly put it back into the sink....)

After I came to, I complained that she wasn't being very supportive. She replied that if I did that again, I'd need support, all right. Like a truss. (NOTE: And I'm not sure after all these years, but I do believe that was a verbatim exchange.) I allowed as to how I was, perhaps, taking my work a bit too seriously. Living with Jason for 10 to 12 hours a day can get a bit intense. However, I decided to tone things down a little. One of my hobbies is pistol shooting and I had taught my girlfriend how to handle a gun. Big mistake. When we go to the range now, the cops line up to watch her. She can shoot the eyes out of a snake with my .44 Magnum and, unlike Jason, she pointedly reminded me, I WASN'T invulnerable. (NOTE: this is actually true. I did teach her how to shoot, and she became incredibly proficient at it. The cops really did line up to watch her at the range, marveling at how "a little girl like that" -- police officers not being the most enlightened sorts when it comes to gender equality -- could handle a .44 Magnum. My eyesight has grown worse over the years, so that I now wear trifocals, and my skills have suffered somewhat as a result, but I still enjoy target shooting. And I've taught a number of women to shoot over the years, as more and more of them have become less afraid of guns and more afraid of men. Not coincidentally, I find that women make much better students than men when it comes to shooting instruction. I suspect it's because, unlike men, they LISTEN.)

All right. Get the image. What kind of a kid was he? QUIET. Born on Friday the 13th, of course. At the stroke of midnight. He never cried when he was a baby. Ever. His mother worried about that. At night, she'd come into his room to check on him and there he'd be, lying in his crib, perfectly still, his eyes wide open and staring. Spooky eyes. As he got older, the other kids avoided him. They didn't quite know why. There was just something ... different about him.

No, wait. Not all the kids avoided him. The school bully decided to exert is authority and push him around a little. Jason simply looked at him. Heavy eye contact. That night, an ambulance came and took the bully away. For some reason no one could figure out, the bully stuck his hand in the garbage disposal and turned it on....

Jesus! Did I really write that? Low whistle. Okay, we've got something here, God knows what it is, but let's go with it.

As a kid, Jason never spoke. To anyone. Not ever. It worried his teachers. Most of them simply left him sitting in the back of the classroom and tried not to look at him. The school psychologist knew that Jason wasn't autistic. Autistic children don't really respond to their surroundings. Jason responded. He simply didn't speak. After several futile sessions with him, the school psychologist lost it. He grabbed the kid and shook him, shouting, "I KNOW you can talk, you little freak! You CAN, can't you?"

And Jason looked at him and spoke, for the first time in his life. He simply said, "Yes." They took the school psychologist away and put him in a rubber room. All of a sudden, he inexplicably went deaf and kept screaming, "WHAT? WHAT?" at the top of his lungs.

Billy Idol was singing "Eyes Without A Face." I was starting to feel a little creepy.
Okay, so far, we've got a kid that makes Pugsly Addams look like Beaver Cleaver. Onward. He's a little older now. At camp. We know from the first film that he went swimming in the lake alone. The counselors were all busy doing what camp counselors always do. Having sex, of course. So no one was watching little Jason and he drowned. His mother, driven insane by grief, becomes a savage killer and starts doing things like hiding under beds and pushing arrows up through people's throats.

At the end of the first film, the sole surviving camp counselor decapitates her, gets into a canoe and drifts out onto the lake, presumably because it's safe out there. Morning comes. She's in a fugue state. Suddenly, the hideously decomposed body of a small boy erupts out of the lake and pulls her in. Cut to her waking up in a hospital bed. It was all a dream about the boy. Or was it? Fade to Black.

In the next film, Jason comes back as an adult, wearing a pillow case over his head because he's got a case of psoriasis like you wouldn't believe. (The hockey mask comes later.) What happened in between? We're told he's been living in the woods for years, like an animal. But what's happened to his face to make him look the way he does? No explanation. Did he drown or didn't he? You got me. Hmmmm.....

Okay, let's try for some continuity. Suppose he DID drown. Suppose that what happened to the female counselor in the first film was NOT a hallucination. A decomposed Jason did rise up out of the lake and pull her in, only she got away. (Not for long, though. He gets her later.) Why? How? Get the image. There he is, a little boy, drowning. The water closes over his head as he sinks beneath the surface and slowly floats down to the lake bottom. To all intents and purposes, he's dead. His body starts to decompose.

Only somewhere, deep inside, some primal spark of life fights to survive. Fights the oxygen deprivation to the brain. Fights the damage to the tissues. How? His cells are capable of regeneration. He's a mutant. A freak of nature. Like his strange father, who was never sick a day in his life, Jason's body can repair itself. Like a starfish, when you tear off one of its legs, it can grown a new one. Only given damage that's serious enough, maybe the regeneration isn't perfect. The leg might grow back misshapen.

Time passes. His bloated body eventually starts to rise to the surface at about the same time the counselor floats out on the lake in her canoe. He comes to a sort of primitive consciousness, pulls her in, but he's still weak. She fights him off. He manages to reach the shore and drag himself up out of the lake, where his body convulses as he starts to vomit stagnant water from his regenerating lungs. He pukes up snails and maggots and little worms....

My girlfriend comes home and offers to take me out to dinner because I've been working so hard. Only for some peculiar reason, I've lost my appetite.

The book starts to come together. I use the exact dialog in the script, but I add what's called "interior dialog," what people are thinking, and I fill in some of the gaps that result from camera cutting sharply from one scene to another to keep the action moving. Only in a book, you can keep the action moving in other ways. I lengthen Jason's scenes by getting into his head and showing the reader his point of view. It's primitive. Disjointed. All that oxygen deprivation while he was on the bottom of the lake has damaged his brain. It's almost on the reptilian level. He hears voices. Specifically, his mother's voice. Urging him on to kill.

I find myself starting to get into this, enjoying it. My girlfriend seems to be getting edgy. She says there's a strange, manic glint in my eyes. (NOTE: she actually did say this.) I'm pulling all-nighters to meet the deadline. At night, she can hear me, cackling wildly in the office. She keeps the revolver on the nightstand, loaded with Winchester Silvertips.

Much to everyone's amazement, my own included, I managed to deliver the novel on time. I actually wrote it in a week. (It seemed much longer, somehow.) My agent even called and said, with some surprise, that it wasn't all that bad. She'd read it to her 5-year-old daughter as a bedtime story. (I don't know about my agent, sometimes....) (NOTE: I don't know if it was true, and I certainly hope it wasn't, but she actually DID say she did that.)

The upshot of the whole thing was that I was asked to write the novelizations for Parts I, II, and III, as well. I did them all in a week apiece. (That's the trouble with being a showoff. You do something once; they expect you to do it again.) I even got some fan mail from Jason's horde of admirers. One letter was written in crayon. Another was written in red ink. (At least, I HOPE it was red ink....)

They never asked me to write Parts IV and V. (And since then, of course, there have been more.) I guess the novels didn't do quite as well as they had hoped. Frankly, I wasn't too surprised. I didn't think the audience for those films actually did much reading. But not when people see my list of credits, they see that I've written four FRIDAY THE 13TH books. Out of all the novels I've written, those invariably are the ones that people ask about. I'm really not sure why. I'm usually afraid to ask.

Anyway, I'm much better now and writing other things. My fingers no longer twitch nervously whenever I see my girlfriend picking up a knife to cut some salad. I've stopped waking up in the middle of the night and screaming, "FLESH! FLESH!" But I don't watch hockey games. Every time Friday the 13th rolls around, I get really quiet for some reason.

And it's been quite a while since I've gone camping.

(FINAL NOTE: Now, over 20 years later, people STILL ask me about those books. Recently, a friend of mine, a co-worker who has moonlighted at one of those Halloween haunted attractions in the woods things, asked me if I would consider showing up there and signing autographs. I declined, politely. This same friend told me that all these years later, those novels have reached collector status and when I went online to check, I was astonished at what they were going for. And, ironically, I don't get a penny of any of those sales, because the job was "work for hire" and I never got a dime in royalties, just a flat fee upfront. And while it wasn't all that much, if you look at it this way, it really wasn't bad for a week's work. And while I never saw any of the other films in the series -- seeing the first 6 was quite enough -- I'm told they worked some of the stuff I wrote in as background into the films that followed. I never got anything for that, either. But it was an interesting experience. One I'm not sure I'd want to repeat, however....)

Hatchet Job (or) How To Survive Jason, Billy Idol, Manic Schizophrenia, Maintain A Relationship, And Novelize A Slasher Movie In One Week

(I wrote the original version of this at the request of the editors of THE BLOOD REVIEW, and it appeared in their Oct. 1989 issue. In response to a recent question, I am providing this updated version.)

It would have been more appropriate, somehow, had it started on a dark and stormy night, but truth rarely accommodates literary irony. It actually began on a warm, muggy, and frustrating afternoon in 1986, frustrating because I had found myself caught on the horns of a dilemma that frequently disembowels those who have the simultaneous luck and misfortune to be fulltime freelance writers. Namely, I was between checks.

For the benefit of those of you who have regular jobs and the regular paycheck that goes with it, perhaps I should explain. Writing for a living is a holy chore, often made unholy by the fact that the publishing industry, unlike any other I'm familiar with, prepays its obligations with about the same punctuality as Third World countries pay back their loans. (And I eventually became so tired of this dancing-on-the-razor's-edge existence that I went out and got a "real" job.)

It works something like this: say I've just completed a novel under contract. I express mail it to my agent in New York, who, with any luck, receives it sometime during the next week or so. My agent then gives it at least a cursory skim, to satisfy herself that since I submitted my last magnum opus, I haven't descended into the depravity of alcoholism or drug-dependency and submitted a manuscript that might cause her professional embarrassment. Such as 300 pages of gibberish, for instance.

Having satisfied herself that I'm still more or less in possession of my faculties, my agent then delivers the manuscript to my editor, who puts it on a pile of other manuscripts that have come in that week. (These days, I suppose, it isn't done in "hard copy" anymore, but all in computer files, although some editors may still prefer to print them out. Back then, I did all my writing on a manual typewriter. To those of you who are of the I-Phone generation, send a text to your grandparents and ask them what a typewriter was.) Eventually, the editor gets around to reading the manuscript and deciding whether it is "acceptable."

Every book contract has a clause in it about acceptability. This is how publishers protect themselves from writers who hand in shoddy work. If it is not acceptable, you either have to make it acceptable post haste or give back all the money. (These days, I understand it's rare for anyone except celebrities to get this kind of deal. It's far easier for publishers to make decisions based on a completed manuscript, rather than sample chapters and a proposal.) Let's say this particular editor is reasonably prompt and reads the manuscript within the next two weeks or so, finding it acceptable. He or she then puts in for the check.

This request then enters the maelstrom of corporate bureaucracy. It goes from one office to another, sometimes even from one state to another, given the fact that most publishers are now part of large, multinational conglomerates, and eventually, within a couple of months or so, if you're lucky, you get a check. Hastening this process is impossible and if you try, you get the reputation of being "difficult."

So you wait, patiently. Only your creditors don't. They, for some unfathomable reason, expect payment within the customary 30 days.

Anyway, there I was, having just delivered a novel ahead of schedule, getting ready to embark upon another one, waiting to see if some new projects I'd developed would sell, with nothing in my bank account and knowing that I wouldn't see a check for at least another 6 weeks or so. Every morning, I dutifully called my agent and whimpered pathetically. (She has since tragically passed away, at much too young an age, and since then, I haven't had much luck with agents.)

One day, she called me. "How'd you like to do a novelization for FRIDAY THE 13TH?" she asked.

This was no time to agonize over literary ideals or whether my Muse was up to the task to translating someone else's screenplay into a novel. No matter how tired or depressed I get, I have an infallible remedy for writer's block, which I unhesitatingly recommend to anyone. I keep a small bulletin board over my writing desk, to which I tack my unpaid bills. Anytime the Muse falters, I need only glance up and feel the icy grip of panic squeezing my intestines and, lo and behold, the creative juices miraculously start to flow.

"What's the deal?" I asked.

"They're not offering very much," my agent said, apologetically, "but I know you need the money. It's a screenplay novelization for FRIDAY THE 13TH, PART VI. The movie's due for release next month and they've got a music video tie-in with Alice Cooper singing the title song. It's going to be on MTV. They decided to try a tie-in with a paperback, as well. If it works out, they'll let you novelize the previous films, too. Only they want it really fast."

"How fast?"

"How fast can you deliver?"

A scene from an old Marx Brothers film leaped to mind. Harpo and Chico are interviewing for a job as bodyguards. The man asks them if they're tough. "Oh, we tough all right," Chico responds, confidently. "How tough?" the man asks. "How mucha you pay?" counters Chico, in his broken English. "You pay a little bit, we a little bit tough. You pay plenty, we plenty tough. You pay too much, we too much tough."

She mentioned a figure. As Chico might have said, they no pay too much...but I needed the money. I never could budget worth a damn. (I have since learned. You have to do that when you're part of the storied 1%, as most of you know full well.) They came to me because I had the reputation of being a fast writer, but the question was: how quickly could I do it to make it cost effective and not throw my writing schedule off for other projects? And if I could do it quickly enough and well enough, there was the nebulous promise of more work forthcoming, novelizing the previous films. Obviously, this wouldn't be as demanding as writing an original novel, but I needed a little more information. Next step, talk to the editor in charge of the project.

We had never met, but on the phone, Chris Schelling seemed like a very nice young man. (He has since also passed away, also tragically, also at much too young an age. There seems to be a rather ominous pattern here....) We discussed the project. He would be the editor on the novelizations, but Paramount Pictures actually would have the final word, since they held the copyright. I heard their conditions. No significant departures from the script. In other words, no introducing subplots to pad the book out. No going off into some other direction. Stick as closely as possible to what would be on the screen. Etc., etc.

Sounded reasonable to me. After all, if I had written a script, I wouldn't want someone else coming in and changing everything around in an adaptation.

"I know this whole thing is pretty short notice, but we'd like to get the book out around the same time as the movie. How fast do you think you can deliver?" Chris asked.

The screenplay was already written. All I'd have to do would be to put it into prose form. Hell, how hard could it be?

"A week," I said, feeling cocky.

"A WEEK?" came the incredulous response.

"Well, it depends on how soon you can get the check to me," I said. "I'm not going to start writing until I get the check." This was somewhat reckless, but what the hell? You pay plenty fast; I write plenty fast.

"But you can actually do it in a week?" Chris said. "I mean, I heard you were fast, but...." His voice trailed off in disbelief.

"A week from the day I get the check, give or take a couple of days for mailing, you'll have the manuscript," I said.

"Okay, I'll get the contract to your agent right away," Chris replied.

The contract arrived in record time. I signed it and the check followed with absolutely breathtaking speed. (Which goes to show you that when they WANT to....) I've never been paid so promptly, either before or since. My numerous creditors, for the moment, at least, would be appeased. Now all I had to do was write a screenplay novelization in one week. Piece of cake.

Yeah. Sure.

At this point, I should explain something. I had never actually SEEN any of the FRIDAY THE 13TH films. I knew absolutely nothing about them.

(To Be Continued in Part II....)

To Write, or Not to Write

As I have been gradually going about the business of getting some of my novels back into print on Amazon.com and Kindle, I’ve been thinking about the whole writing thing, not so much the process itself, about which volumes have been written, but about the lifestle. Unlike a lot of writers of my acquaintance, some extremely successful, who claim that writing is torture or a holy chore, I’ve always enjoyed writing, even if I’ve found some of the things that go along with the process (marketing, for example) occasionally annoying.

For most of my adult life, I’ve been a fulltime writer, which means I’ve often had to pick up various part-time jobs to help make ends meet and I’ve gone without a lot of things that many people who work at regular jobs seem to take for granted, such as health insurance and savings accounts and, most significantly, steady paychecks. (I once wrote an original novel based upon a popular television show and the publisher jerked me around about the check for a whole year. Meanwhile, for some strange reason, Visa expected their payment within the customary 30 days, to say nothing of such mundane things as rent and food.) Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on one’s point of view), I had a really low-buck lifestyle that enabled me to live in lots of different places and have lots of experiences I probably would never have had if I had a regular job. (I might write about some of those sometime. On the other hand … maybe not.) There were times in my life when I essentially lived out of a couple of motorcycle saddlebags and not much else. I’ve seen people that I went to school with attain bigtime corporate jobs, successfully run for office, achieve general officer rank in the military, and gain the sort of lifestyles that, by most any measure, would be regarded as highly successful. Me? Well, after years of struggling, working as a novelist, I’ve got a job mixing paint at Home Depot. And I’m totally okay with that.

I would never have been comfortable in any line of work where I had to wear a suit. I don’t even own one. In fact, I don’t even own a sport jacket, or a tie, or any pants that aren’t blue jeans. I would rather spend my disposable income (in the rare instances when I have any) on a new tattoo than on an expensive watch. I do not own a cell phone, or any kind of “pad” or portable music player (with ear buds or without). And while it would be nice to have a lot of money, the only thing it would buy me that I would truly find of value would be the freedom of not having to worry about not having it. (Well, and maybe a new Harley, although I’ll probably keep the one I have until one of us breaks down.)

Fifteen years ago, I got married (for the second time) and decided it would be nice to have a “normal” lifestyle for a change, along with some of the things that go with that, such as a house and health insurance and a 401K. That meant getting a job. Teaching seemed like a natural way to go, especially for a writer, and I had pursued a Master’s Degree at the ripe old age of 40 with that in mind, but while teaching seems to work well for a lot of writers, it did not work out so well for me. For one thing, I just don’t LOOK like a teacher. I am, at best, a really awkward fit for academia. I am not politically correct and I have a lot of rough edges. They looked at my publication record and thought they were getting someone in a tweed jacket with a pipe and ascot and, instead, they wound up getting a tattooed biker who looked like a bad accident between John Lennon and Richard Dreyfus (both of whom I’d occasionally been mistaken for when I was younger). And, worst of all, everything I said and did in my classrooms pretty much contradicted everything other professors said and did in their classrooms. And I did not write “lit-rah-ture.” I wrote mass market genre paperbacks. (One raises a disdainful eyebrow when one says that.) All of which did not auger well for a career in academia. I scrambled around every semester, trying to get part-time teaching jobs, often at several schools at the same time, driving back and forth to teach classes at different schools throughout the day, and what time I had left was eaten up by grading papers and preparing classes. (Writers, pay attention: if you think teaching is an easy job to help support your writing, think again. These people WORK. And if you think going through a publisher’s slush pile can be ennervating, try grading several hundred Freshman compositions every week.) Then, one day, I decided that I needed to quit at least one of the part-time teaching jobs I had and maybe pick up something that had nothing whatsoever to do with teaching or writing, maybe something I could do with my hands, just to clear the tension and the cobwebs out. Because it got to a point where I simply had no time for writing. (Or anything else resembling a life, for that matter.)

I wound up applying for a part-time job at Home Depot. I had worked in a mom-and-pop hardware store on Long Island as a kid and this was sort of like that, only bigger. I figured it would make a nice part-time gig to complement a part-time teaching job. But something funny happened. After I was there for about six weeks, the store manager told me he liked my work ethic and my attitude and anytime I wanted a full-time job, all I had to do was say the word and I could have it. And I thought, well, I’ve been teaching for about 8 years now in two different states and no one’s ever said anything like that to me before. And so I took him up on it and stopped teaching. I figured, well, now I will have time to write….

Only, strangely, I didn’t. Not because I couldn’t, or because I didn’t have the time (although a fulltime job does take up a lot of time); I just didn’t seem to feel like it. And days turned into weeks, weeks turned into months, months turned into years …. I’ve written a little here and there, but I haven’t publilshed a new novel in at least a decade now. I no longer have an agent, and frankly, I’m not sure how I would go about getting one now, or even if anyone would be interested, or even if I’d want one. I am not full of angst about not writing. I am simply…not writing.

Harlan Ellison once said that you could not stop a “real” writer from writing, that if you chopped off his hands, he would type out a story with his nose. (Or, presumably, her nose.) Well, that may be true for some writers, like my friend Harlan, but apparantly it’s not true for all. Because, in my experience, there are lots of writers who don’t write. And they are “real” writers, at least in my opinion. They have produced good work. Some of them just don’t do it very often. And some, like me, seem to go through bursts of prolificity…and then just stop. I suppose there are many different reasons for that, but I can only speak for mine. The easy answer is, “I just didn’t feel like it.” Now, most writers will tell you that if you wait for inspiration to strike, you will probably never get anything done. However, that isn’t what I mean. I’m not waiting to be inspired. I still have ideas. I get them all the time. Those people who ask where writers get their ideas don’t seem to understand that writers get ideas all the time. That’s the easy part. The tough part is sitting down and actually writing them.

Now don’t get me wrong, just because I said that I enjoyed writing doesn’t mean that it’s not difficult. I enjoy working out, too, and believe me, when you do it right, it’s hard. I guess what it comes down to is that I’ve simply been … content. After years of not knowing where my next paycheck was coming from (or, perhaps more importantly, when it might arrive) I’ve been enjoying getting a steady paycheck. Like many Americans these days, I might be living paycheck to paycheck (and without my wife’s help and support, I might well be back to living out of those motorcycle saddlebags), but it’s nice to know that paycheck will be there. It’s also nice to have medical insurance, and dental and vision insurance, and a 401K that should allow me to pay off our house when I retire in a few years. And it’s nice to have people to work with. Now, I’m not a big people person, mind you. I tend to be rather solitary, and my wife Deb is really all the company I need, but having a good bunch of folks to work with can be nice. I’ve never really had any of that before.

A lot of people seem to think that being a fulltime writer can be a great lifestyle. Well, it can be, I suppose, if you become really successful, like J.K. Rowling or Steven King or that guy who wrote Game of Thrones, but most of the time, as George R.R. Martin himself once said, “It can be precarious.” He knows; he’s been there. He’s paid the dues. There can be some pretty cool things about a writer’s lifestyle. You can work in your pajamas, if you like. You can work when you want, where you want. Set your own hours. You don’t have a boss breathing down your neck. You don’t have to punch a clock. You don’t have to be polite to people if you don’t feel like it. (And believe me, there have been times when I really haven’t felt like being polite.) But you spend long hours being and working by yourself; you usually don’t have any idea when (or if) you might get paid; you often cannot afford such things as insurance or a mortgage or a payment on a new car; you often cannot afford to take your significant person out to eat at a nice restaurant; and, perhaps most annoying, people think your life is glamorous. It’s really nice having a job. All of you who have one should be thankful.

But I’m starting to feel like writing once again. Could mean trouble….

Entering the E-book Universe

Apparantly, I am not all that great at steady blogging. My initial post was nearly four months ago and here we are, almost at the new year, and I'm only now getting around to my second. Most people who do this sort of thing seem to do it with much more regularity. I guess I'm just not very regular. (They have medications for that sort of thing.) In any event, since my first post, the first novel in my Time Wars series, THE IVANHOE GAMBIT, has been republished after a long period of being out of print and is now available on Amazon.com as both a trade paperback and a Kindle edition. Createspace did a rally nice job with it.

I finally got around to getting a Kindle, a Paperwhite, and while a part of me rebels a bit at the idea of e-books, since I do love to hold a physical book in my hand, another part of me sees all the advantages to this technology. For one thing, you don't need a lot of shelf space. I once helped the late Lyn Carter move, and it took four of us and several Rider truckloads just to move his library. Three of us wound up with various injuries. I was spared, thanks to my weightlifting, but I was still sore the next day. I also recall a time when I had to move several times in one year. I finally threw in the towel and called my friend Bobby, who had a used bookstore on Long Island, and told him to bring the truck, I was getting rid of all my damned books before I had to move them yet again. (He came right away, before I could change my mind, and purchased my entire library, among them many first editions, many inscribed to me by the authors. I shudder to think what they'd be worth now.) But e-books liberate you from all that. While you can't have an author autograph your e-book (at least, I don't think you can), you can store your entire library on a flash drive or in the cloud, and that saves a lot of wear and tear on the axles of moving trucks. (Not to mention one's back.) Plus, it has the virtue of saving a few trees, as well. I won't be giving up on books entirely, of course, but I think this e-book thing has a great deal going for it. I will even be able to store my own work, once I have it all digitized, and that is (slowly) progressing.

The second Time Wars novel, THE TIMEKEEPER CONSPIRARY, is now in production with Createspace and should be available on Amazon in about a month or so. Eventually, I hope to have the entire series reissued, and as I am going through the process, I am re-reading the books (strange to go back and read your own stuff after a bunch of years have passed) and realizing there was a lot more I could have done with the idea, so I have a feeling there are going to be some new Time Wars novels in the future. I will also be re-issuing some of my early work, as well.

As for reading, I've been enjoying a number of different books. I have been a fan of James Lee Burke's mysteries, especially his Dave Robicheaux novels, and I finally got caught up with George R.R. Martin's latest, DANCE WITH DRAGONS. Now I have to wait for the current season on HBO (which I do not have) to become available on DVD. I've also become a fan of Michael Connelly's books, and am looking forward to reading more. In my own genre, I'm reading William Gibson's PATTERN RECOGNITION and Norman Sprinrad's GREENHOUSE SUMMER. I know both authors, and while I haven't seen either of them in years (Bill, I think, is still living in Vancouver and Norman has expatriated to Paris), I've always enjoyed their work. I can also recommend John Dunning's Bookman mysteries, every one of which I've throughly enjoyed.

Perhaps it won't be so long before my next post, but I've learned not to make promises that I may not be able to keep. Til next time....