David C. Smith's Blog, page 4

Mad Shadows: The Weird Tales of Dorgo the Dowser

A book review by David C. Smith…

A passage early in the short story “Mad Shadows,” the first of the six included in this new collection by Joe Bonadonna, illustrates why I like these stories so much and why Dorgo the Dowser is a sword-and-sorcery character who deserves your time and attention.

The Dowser is investigating why the mad shadows of the title are up to no good in the city of Valdar, and he crosses paths with an acquaintance and sometimes-informant, a satyr named Praxus. We get this:

In his youth, Praxus Odetti had been Valdar’s most celebrated pugilist, equally proficient with hooves and fists; he retired undefeated from the arena shortly after I came to Valdar, but I did get to see his last few bouts. He lived in a run-down tenement, yet he was far from poor. In fact, under an assumed name, he owned a massive country estate and private club outside the city. The Hoof and Horn Club, it was called. This villa provided a home and medical care for aging and disabled centaurs, minotaurs, satyrs, and unicorns who had retired from racing and fighting in the Crimson Sand arena. Most of the money he earned from begging went to his fellow K’Tothians. I’d met him through a mutual friend who managed a few minotaur wrestlers.

Here is what we get: lives. Characters who have lived lives.

[image error]Here is what else we get: a voice, a trustworthy voice, the voice of authority that comes from an author through believable characters. As readers, we know that, from the first word, first sentence, first page of a story, we are in the company either of a writer whom we can trust or of a writer whom we cannot trust. That is the voice of authority. And it is present in the Dorgo stories.

Of course, these are fantasy stories, so we get the requisite funny names (although it must be noted that Joe B. is better than most of the rest of us at concocting fantastic-sounding names that have the lilt to them of verisimilitude). We get centaurs and satyrs, which is cool, and witches and sorcerers. And we get to everything else we want to have in such genre stories, including really weird stuff. You know how in the stories in the original Weird Tales magazine we got really weird twists? Here’s an example. I do not now remember the author or the title, but I believe there was a story in the old Weird Tales in which people were splattered to death, as though had fallen fifty stories to their deaths, when all they had done was miss a step on a stairwell. In their brains, they assumed that, by missing a step, they were falling into eternity, and so they wound up squashing themselves like bugs. You read that story and you say to yourself, Jesus Christ, really? Did the writer actually get away with that? The writer did, and it works. Before fantasy and horror became mainstreamed, corporate, and predictable, the better to serve the shareholders of profit centers, fantasy and horror stories really were weird (and, incredibly, written for adults).

I mention this because you will find twists of this type in the Dorgo stories. The mad shadows, for instance, appear in the city of Valdar to eat gold.  And it works. The weird elements in all of these stories succeed in the same way. They are not the corporate progeny born of a focus group or a meeting of the marketing department, but really oddball, imaginative things dreamed up by a writer who is doing his or her job. So some of this stuff is twisted, cruel, and peculiar.

Which is as it should be.

But for me, the most appealing aspect of the Dorgo stories is that we get characters who are as real as you want them to be, characters who have lived lives, characters with histories, characters who truly have something to share with us and who are not simply puppets going through the motions of being in a story for the sake of some mechanical contrivance. (Although Joe does introduce some weird puppets in one of these stories, too . . . and even they have stories to tell. I am not kidding.)

Full disclosure: I am a friend of Joe Bonadonna’s and have been for more than thirty years. At his request, I critiqued these short stories as he was writing them. If you write, you know that this is par for the course. Back in the day—the day being the early 1970s—friends of mine and I frequently circulated stories and poems by mail as a way of learning our trade and improving our skills. It was rather in the nature of how the so-called Lovecraft circle did the same thing during the Depression, circulating copies of short stories long before they appeared in print in Weird Tales. I recall that Mike Fantina, the poet, and Fred Adams and I did this a lot, along with Dick Tierney and Ted Rypel and Randall Larson and G. Sutton Breiding. A small group of us. And Joe and I discussed stories, too, through the mail back then. The members of this group of ours used to send carbon copies of stories back and forth. Occasionally photocopies, because photocopiers were becoming available at libraries and in some business offices, but just as often, we shared carbon copies. (Come to think of it, the technology available to us in the early 1970s was a lot closer to the technology available to writers in the 1930s than it was to anything we have today.)

So Joe Bonadonna started out writing sword-and-sorcery fiction back in the early 1970s when a number of his contemporaries, including me, were also breaking into the fanzines and publishing in the semi-prozines. Joe had worse luck that most of the rest of us did, in this sense: I believe he holds the record for the number of short stories accepted by a fanzine editor but then left unpublished when the fanzine went out of business, a common occurrence in those days.

Which is too bad, because it has delayed the introduction of Dorgo by at least a generation and a half to a readership that will get what Joe Bonadonna is doing. Like most of us, Joe absorbed the postwar popular culture in big gulps: the Burroughs boom, the Conan paperbacks with the Frank Frazetta covers, the Tolkein trilogy, Creepy and Eerie magazines, the endless parade of war movies and Westerns and film noir pictures from the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties that played constantly on local television stations, the hardboiled fiction of Hammett and Chandler and Cain. In addition, Joe grew up on the mean streets of the west side of Chicago, and that is no exaggeration: at a time when I, as a boy, was walking around the woods and open fields in Trumbull County with my dad’s old .22, eating blackberries off the bush and wading shoeless in the stream down by Indian Lookout, as we boys called it, Joe was getting practice with his fists alongside some of his mates on the streets and also becoming acquainted with informal invitations from some of Chicago’s boys in blue to cool his temper overnight in the lock-up. That he did not wind up running the numbers for the local rackets and eventually work his way further up the food chain of bad boys with real heat to them is our good fortune as well as his. Instead, he wrote stories and songs and played in a number of rock bands.

But the street stuff from his youth is a big part of what informs the Dorgo character and the Dorgo milieu. Joe is wise enough to understand that the scabby side of life is palatable to readers only when mixed in proper proportion with insight and humor, wisecracks and even the occasional touch of—dare we say it?—human tenderness. So Dorgo, very much a complete, layered character and as three-dimensional a one as you are going to find in fantasy fiction, is really Joey from the West Side by way of the language and images we all recognize from film noir, dark fantasy, John Ford Westerns, and classical mythology. It is adventure fiction or suspense fiction or mystery fiction—the Dorgo stories borrow tones and shades from all of these genres and subgenres—that is smart, clever, masculine . . . and wise to itself. Which is exactly what good genre fiction of this order should be.

You will find, then, as you read these stories, that you are in the hands of a writer who has lived a life and who has brought elements of that colorful life to these twisted nightmares, adventures, and back-alley Chandleresque investigations into the dark side. I feel sure that you’ll enjoy them. There is really nothing else quite like them out there, so far as I know. And I hope Joe will write more of them. Surely Dorgo, too, has lived far too much life to leave us only these six stories.

As he himself says, early in “Mad Shadows,” “My present occupation lay in discreet investigations, such as recovering stolen goods, runaway husbands, and missing heiresses. But I have a certain knack for running afoul of anyone having anything to do with witchcraft, necromancy, or any other form of magic.”

Good, I say.

And the Dowser part of his name?

“The special dowsing rod I use in my work had been a gift from a Yongarloo shaman.”

The special dowsing rod does nothing but get Dorgo into one scrape after another—but that’s exactly how I like my stories, and I suspect you will, too.

Enjoy.

Mad Shadows: The Weird Tales of Dorgo the Dowser

by Joe Bonadonna

iUniverse, 332 pages

29.95 hardcover, 19.95 paperback, 9.95 Kindle

Purchase from Amazon…

Purchase from iUniverse…

Back in Print

Today I signed a contract with Wildside Press to reprint a bunch of my out-of-print novels—the three volumes of The Fall of the First World, both of the David Trevisan books, and the five books of the adventure-fantasy series set in Attluma, the Oron books. I started the process of getting the rights back to these titles earlier this year, and once I’d achieved that, I took Ted C. (Teddy Waffles*) Rypel’s suggestion of querying Wildside about reprinting them. The result? Voila, as they say in France. Also in Cleveland, as well as in Chicago. Voila! they say in all of those places.

This is really good news. Well, for me it is. Wildside Press will publish these titles as print-on-demand (POD) volumes, available in both paperback and hardcover, and soon will offer them as e-books, as well. Wildside Books has been around since 1989. Founded and operated by John Gregory and Kim Betancourt, winner of awards as well as of gratitude and thanks on the part of readers everywhere, Wildside publishes the revived Weird Tales and lots of reprints (Leigh Brackett, Robert E. Howard, Clifford D. Simak, S. Fowler Wright . . . on and on the list goes), as well as original titles under a couple of different imprints.

One of my hopes is that we can publish under their original manuscript titles the books of mine whose titles were changed by the publishers. Most of my manuscript titles were better, or at least more evocative, than the titles under which the novels first saw light of day—Reign, Sorcery! for example, rather than Mosutha’s Magic, and Deathwolf rather than The Valley of Ogrum, and The West Is Dying rather than The Master of Evil. I suppose Magicians is a bit lame compared with The Fair Rules of Evil, but Magicians is how I have always thought of this story, and it’s the title of the screenplay based on the novel, and the book is divided into the stages of a magician’s spiritual and mystical progress. Besides, MAGICIANS as a title can be made into a logo with pentagrams replacing the A’s, which is a look I kind of like.

Anyhow, new editions are coming. I’ll finally be able to clean up the typos that crept into the original Zebra volumes, and I can finally add the division that marks Part III in Oron, and delete the tone-deaf spartan I used as an adjective in one of the books of The Fall of the First World, as well as modify the direct lifts I took from the Christian Gospels. (Lao Tze is closer to my own sensibilities, anyhow.) I’m looking forward to being back in print.

* Ted’s nom de petit déjuner. A couple of years back, when my daughter Lily was about 2 years old (or was “a small Lily kid,” as she would now say), Joe Bonadonna came by for breakfast one Sunday morning. “Uncle Joey’s coming for pancakes,” I told Lily, and she responded, full of delight, “Joey Pancakes!” The name stuck. Joe and Ted then decided that Ted needed to have a breakfast moniker—hence, Teddy Waffles. Fred Adams is Freddy Fritters. I myself am known in our Breakfast Club circle as the estimable Davey Scones, or Sconesy. The Old Fart Fantasy Writers Breakfast Club and Dyspeptic Association of Grouches meets only occasionally to gobble and digest scrambled eggs, scones, Mickey Mouse pancakes, and hot biscuits and to wash down the same with hearty horns of unleaded coffee, but when we do pull our chairs to the table, why, the harrumphing and declarations of “a pox on their house!” and the earth-shattering burps would shame a Cimmerian alehouse. We are still open for sausage patty, bagel, and English muffin members, so feel free to join in the harrumphing and grousing some Sunday morning. Typically we plant ourselves at the Café 14 in Palatine, Illinois, but it’s a movable feast. Only do not forget the Mickey Mouse pancakes, or Lily will call you a name that may not be so delightful…

Chaos Theory, Movie Rhythms . . . and the Fractal Geometry of Stories?

A couple of months ago, while cruising the Web, I came across a piece written by Canadian blogger Jay Stone called “Chaos Theory and the Rhythm of Movies” (http://communities.canada.com/shareit/blogs/stonereport/archive/2010/02.aspx). He referenced an article in the journal Psychological Science in which authors James Cutting, Jordan DeLong, and Christine Nothelfer of Cornell “used the sophisticated tools of modern perception research to deconstruct 70 years of film, shot by shot,” looking for a pattern called the 1/f fluctuation. “The 1/f fluctuation is a concept from chaos theory, and it means a pattern of attention that occurs naturally in the human mind,” Stone writes. “Indeed, it’s a rhythm that appears throughout nature, in music, in engineering, economics, and elsewhere.” The Cornell authors, by measuring “the duration of every shot in every scene of 150 of the most popular films released from 1935 to 2005,” established that modern movies, particularly those made since 1980, “were more likely to approach this natural pattern of human attention.” Action movies, in particular, “most closely approximate the 1/f pattern, followed by adventure, animation, comedy and drama.” Among the movies they studied that have nearly perfect 1/f rhythms are Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (1935), Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause (1955), and Wolfgang Petersen’s The Perfect Storm (1955).

I found this to be fascinating, but I was mystified by exactly what the “1/f fluctuation” is. I’m not a physicist; I’ve read one book on chaos theory and a few other titles that tried their best to explain Einstein’s universe to me, but I’m not about to be able to explain what the 1/f fluctuation has to do with the attention spans of movie audiences or engineers or economists. The paper itself, “Attention and the Evolution of Hollywood Films” (http://people.psych.cornell.edu/~jec7/pubs/cuttingetalpsychsci10.pdf) is sufficiently technical to have me feeling out of my depth as I read it trying to find a clear answer to my simple question.

A wonderful article on the PhysOrg website, however, clarified it for me (http://www.physorg.com/news185781475.html): Cutting and coauthors “found that the magnitude of the waves increased as their frequency decreased, a pattern known as pink noise, or 1/f fluctuation, which means that attention spans of the same lengths recurred at regular intervals. The same pattern has been found by Benoit Mandelbrot (the chaos theorist) in the annual flood levels of the Nile, and has been seen by others in air turbulence, and also in music.” Furthermore, “Cutting said the significant thing is that shots of similar lengths recur in a regular pattern through the film.”

Okay. Got it. Same lengths recurring at regular intervals. That sounds (ho ho) like a noise pattern to me, as well as Nile flooding and, interestingly, also hints at what many of us find to be appealing about some landscapes and naturescapes, as one of these articles points out. It is a kind of “sweet spot” that we all appreciate, as Stuart Fox says in an article on popsci.com: “Cutting doesn’t believe that this increasing conformity to the 1/f fluctuation resulted from a conscious decision on the part of the directors. Rather, he theorizes that films which fall into people’s viewing sweet spot better hold their attention, and thus seem more gripping, and make more money. Then the other directors naturally copy the pace of the more exciting, more profitable movies, and the 1/f fluctuation trend spreads. However, this formula seems a better predictor of box office than quality. For instance, Cutting found that the Star Wars prequels all conformed nearly perfectly to the 1/f fluctuation. Sure, all three of those movies made a ton of money, but man, did they suck” (http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-02/mathematician-cracks-box-office-gold-code).

It sounds to me as though what Cutting and his coauthors established was a formula for how successful montage is in films. If I recall my film theory correctly, montage (a term introduced and widely used by Russian filmmakers and film theorists in the 1920s) is how a movie’s separate shots are put together in a certain rhythm in order to gain maximum effect from an audience. The Odessa steps sequence in Battleship Potemkin is perhaps the best-known example. So what is going on appears to be a style of montage or film editing in modern movies that, through the random (chaos theory) repetition of sequences of shots of a certain length, matches our natural human heartbeat as well as our natural human attention span. A pulse beat, a rhythm.

None of these authors talks about language in this regard, or poetry. This is a mathematical model, so the discussion in the formal science papers had to do with sine waves and fractals. These are not the elements that I typically get involved with during my work day, although talk of fractals led to me another fine website (http://www.miqel.com/fractals_math_patterns/visual-math-natural-fractals.html) that contains this sentence: “Fractals are unpredictable in specific details yet deterministic when viewed as a total pattern—in many ways this reflects what we observe in the small details and total pattern of life in all its physical and mental varieties, too.”

Whoa. The first part of that sentence is as good a definition as any for what occurs during the process of editing a movie: “Shots are unpredictable in specific details yet deterministic when viewed as a total pattern”—that is, a sequence in a movie. You put the shots together into a sequence such as the Odessa steps slaughter or the chase through the marsh in The 39 Steps, and what do you have? Pulse beat racing and pure, undivided attention.

Back to language and poetry. Doesn’t it make sense that language itself, the popular rhythm of sounds, syllables, and words, would also lend itself to the attention-grabbing rule of the 1/f fluctuation? I wouldn’t know how to design such a study, but it makes sense to me that the meter and beat of great verse and appealing prose really must, in some way, approximate this fluctuation. Is it possible that at the root of some fiction that critics find intellectually unsatisfying but which audiences love is this 1/f fluctuation? Is this same pulse beat at work in comedy, in the timing of comics’ and great actors’ delivery? I really want to know. If I could figure this out, why, I would start writing my stories with this in mind; perhaps it would make my fiction more appealing to a wide, general audience!

This isn’t the whole story, of course. As Cutting himself noted in his paper, his favorite type of movies are film noirs, and few of them accommodate this 1/f fluctuation pattern. Still, they are satisfying. So it really does come down to attention span in the moment, the undistracted attention of an audience glued to the screen—and, perhaps, to the un-put-downableness of some stories? If this is part of the appeal of the Harry Potter books or the Twilight series, whatever their flaws, I’d like to determine this and bottle it and sell it at writers’ conventions. Little glass bottles of Honest Dave’s 1/f Storytelling Formula and Writers’ Block Cure: Guaranteed to Win You Lots of Sales and Audience Devotion.

Hmmm…. Wait a minute. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and 1/f! I’m onto something….

Hello to Siberian Alex!

What is the coolest thing that could ever happen to a person? Yes, that’s right! Finding out that a heavy-metal band in Siberia has written a song based on one of your short stories!

This has actually happened! Purely by chance, I came across a link on the Web that led me to an excellent heavy-metal band named Blacksword. Blacksword is Alex Avdeev (guitar), Serge Konev (singer), Ivan “the Viking” (bass and acoustic guitar), Artyom Omelenchuk (guitar), and Vyacheslav Aparin (drums). Alex in particular is a big fan of dark fantasy and sword-and-sorcery fiction, one result being that the Blacksword track “Sword Arm” is based on my novelette Engor’s Sword Arm, which Morgan Holmes published back in the mid 1990s.

Man, this makes me happy!

Go read the interview with Alex. He discusses the influence of American heavy metal on Blacksword, the state of metal in the world today, life in Siberia (cold), and the release of their upcoming CD (soon!), The Sword Accurst, which will be available from Echoes of Crom Records.

Echoes of Crom is the label begun by Howie Bentley, the mastermind behind the band Briton Rites, who is himself a big fan of dark fantasy and s&s, particularly Michael Moorcock, Clark Ashton Smith, and, I proudly note, The Sorcerer’s Shadow.

Folks, go to Blacksword’s site, listen to the tracks available there (including “Sword Arm”), and order their CD. This is the real stuff.

The Only Question Worth Answering

The only question worth answering is this one: How soon are we going to turn things over to women to run?

In fact, given the state of affairs of the past seven thousand years or so, the question actually is this: Shall we turn the world over to women this afternoon, or shall we give ourselves until sometime next week?

I have a couple of good reasons for bringing up this topic, and, frankly, I think that getting on with it is absolutely necessary. That is, if women actually would take us up on the deal. Women are pretty smart, and they may not accept any such offer. They have a pretty clear understanding of human behavior, mainly because they give birth to humans and raise these human children more or less by themselves. So they immediately gain that firsthand experience into human behavior, which by and large is not a pretty picture. You know, the whiny baby stuff, the me-first stuff. It can’t be easy turning such raw material into a halfway sensible, reasonably competent, socialized member of our species. I have known men in their sixties who are still pretty much in the diaper stage of human social interaction. Maybe you know them, too.

The other reason is that, no matter how you look at it, women are still pretty much regarded as second-class citizens in this world (where they even are citizens), and so they gain insight from that, as well. It’s my old rule: if you really want to know how things are going, don’t ask the manager or the boss: he or she will simply cover his or her ass and say everything is going fine. This is how it’s done in a kick-down, kiss-up hierarchy or bureaucracy. If you really want to know how things are going, ask the workers on the assembly line or the ones digging the ditch. And get ready for an earful. However, given the fact that most women are the ones basically working on the assembly line every day and therefore know the facts about how things have been run so far, maybe the world is more trouble than it is worth as far as many women are concerned.

Still, this line of thinking brings me to my first reason why women should be running things: they give birth to us. Therefore, they have dibs. The hand that rocks the cradle and so forth. If only we could have this situation take place in an environment that really nurtured and supported moms (rather than nurturing and supporting, say, pathologic Wall Street dickheads), we would be better in the long run.

Another good reason: Women are more intelligent than men. This is true, although I’d have to do some research to back it up. And maybe the studies aren’t there. Yet. Anecdotally, however, many of the brightest guys I know, and I mean doctors and surgeons and people like that, men who themselves are really bright, all sigh and nod and say that it is so.

Maybe it’s because women have two x chromosomes and we all start out as girls, or as protofemales, in the womb. Then some of us receive this huge dose of testosterone and, voila, we get a gimpy y chromosome instead of continuing with a second strong x chromosome. And it really is gimpy. Look at any biology book or go online and you’ll see that it’s so. I attended a lecture years ago by Ashley Montagu, the British biologist, who made this point and showed us slides corroborating the evidence. By gum, there is was, the odd y chromosome. So Mother Nature has already made up her mind. We evolved so that, as is the situation with all higher order animals, we have two sexes in order to get a lot more work done during the day. Division of labor. Dads evolved to help moms, though, not the other way around. It’s not a science fiction or fantasy story like the book of Genesis, where women come in second and are told that they’re here to help men. It’s science: logically, guys are here to assist the first sex, which would be women.

Science, in fact, is coming up with lots of reasons to revisit the assumptions most of us have about men and women. There’s a very important article in the current (May-June 2010) issue of Miller-McCune magazine titled “Make Birth Control, Not War” (available at http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture-society/make-birth-control-not-war-11399/). The authors, Thomas Hayden and Malcolm Potts, make the point that war is in our genes, that “humans—human males, really—are not peaceful animals,” but that birth control measures and family planning decisions could alleviate much of the testosterone-driven bloodshed that has defined our species for so long. Putting women in charge, in other words, to make the decisions about when to have children and how many to have, could be the key to our survival. These authors report that, like chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, humans lived “for the vast majority of evolutionary time . . . in male-dominated social groups in which the males are all blood-relatives and only females move between troops. The dominant males largely monopolize mating opportunities and take the best food and other resources. Younger males are left either to work their way up the in-group hierarchy or attempt surreptitious matings with females of their troop or others—high-stakes strategies that often end in a beating or worse. But, in a unique evolutionary innovation, these young males can also band together and launch attacks on isolated members of neighboring out-groups, ultimately eliminating their ‘enemies’ and securing territory, resources and females they require to survive and pass on their genes.” Sounds like the old neighborhood, right? And like the Iliad.

Passing on the genes is what it’s all about, as anyone knows who has kept up with current developments in the biological sciences. What’s good for the species is out; what the selfish gene desires for itself is in. “We are all descended,” Hayden and Potts continue, “ . . . from particularly successful rapists, murderers and brigands. Human males today bear the marks of this legacy in the behaviors and impulses that still spur us on to lethal conflict—including the widespread and devastating association between war and rape—even when other solutions are both available and preferable.”

At the same time, though, they point out, “there is no doubt that other apes, like people, can be empathetic.” This biological behavior is emphasized in long-term observations made by Ernst Fehr, a professor of macroeconomics and experimental economics at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. In the article “Ernst Fehr: How I found what’s wrong with economics,” in the May 4, 2010, issue of New Scientist (available at http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627581.300-ernst-fehr-how-i-found-whats-wrong-with-economics.html), writer Marc Buchanan states that, 20 years ago, “Fehr had a seemingly sensible idea—that a deep-seated human preference for fairness might play an important role in economics.” Fehr had an uphill battle against the received wisdom that economic activity in the real world, like all other activities, is basically a winner-takes-all battlefield where evolved chimpanzees with flags and shooting irons—us, in other words—fight each other over the biggest slices of the never-expanding pie. Such “hard-headed thinking,” however, “has turned out to be profoundly naïve” and, in fact, “played a fundamental role in the recent economic crisis . . . the worst financial crisis in nearly a century.” Fehr has been concentrating on the field of neuroeconomics, helping to establish that “our precious moral values may ultimately be biologically based.” The idea that people are strictly self-interested, Fehr says, “has been the dominant mindset for decades . . . . It’s a biased way of perceiving the world.” (Certainly it is the mindset of pathologic, pseudorational, selfish Ayn Rand-style “positivists,” with their positively self-deluded sense of entitlement as alpha-male and -female go-getters who cleverly leave the rest of us in the dust as they charge in, Achilles-like, to prove their social dominance.)

Interestingly, when it comes to testosterone, literally the bad boy of the sex hormones, Fehr and colleagues, in a recent paper in Nature, “showed that testosterone, despite its reputation as a promoter of aggressive behavior, actually made people more cooperative when playing economic games. They used female volunteers since previous studies have indicated that women are more likely than men to show behavioural changes if given very low doses of the hormone.” (Eisenegger C, Naef M, Snozzi R, Heinrichs M, Fehr E: Prejudice and truth about the effect of testosterone on human bargaining behavior, available at Eisenegger C, Naef M, Snozzi R, Heinrichs M, Fehr E: Prejudice and truth about the effect of testosterone on human bargaining behavior.) Naturally, however, as Hayden and Potts state, many people are resistant “to the idea that something as apparently complex and unique to humans as our social instincts could find a relatively simple basis in chemical changes in brain activity.”

Well, we had better get used to the idea that we humans fundamentally serve as responders to selfish genes and chemical changes in brain activity because that is where advances in scientific inquiry are taking us. And study results such as these make the argument for women running the world all the more self-evident. Midway through their article, Hayden and Potts list the factors that “interact in one way or another with the warlike biology of the human male, and each is influenced quite directly by population growth rate”:

- Environmental stress and/or resource limitation

- Extreme economic disparity within or between groups and lack of opportunities, especially for young men

- Subjugation of women and a culture of male dominance

- A high proportion of young males relative to older males

I was certainly familiar with the first two items in their catalogue: stressing local resources intuitively seems to lead to attacking the people over the next hill in order to take their stuff, and the age-old question of what to do with the young men has bedeviled every culture since we came down from the trees. For years I’ve been saying that, if we really want to help out in Afghanistan and other hot spots in the world, what you do is give all of the hormone-driven young men the following: a wife and a family; a steady job; and one night a week out with the boys so that they can bond with their peer group by playing poker or going down to the local to throw back a few. It is not complex. That we haven’t done so tells me that, ultimately, the characters who make the decisions that shape the world have more profits to make by keeping things stirred up than by keeping them sensibly within domestic limits. As a matter of fact, Hayden and Potts point out that the crafty Yasser Arafat, when he needed to score points with the United Nations following the attacks in 1972 by the terrorist group Black September on the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games, “flew eligible young female volunteers to Beirut and offered militant members of Black September $3,000, an apartment with a TV, long-term employment and $5,000 if they married and had a child. The offer was overwhelmingly accepted, and Black September as a terrorist movement collapsed almost overnight.” My point is made. Case closed. No mention of whether these formerly deadly young bucks got to spend one evening out a week with the boys, but that’s beside the point. Given the choice between being losers or winners, they went with being winners.

Female subjugation is a topic of endless discussion, of course. Suffice it to say that it is based, so far as I can tell, on fear of the feminine, most often, literally, fear of women. That’s what it comes down to, pure and simple. It is what is behind every fundamentalist religious sect and thought in the world. I know what I personally would like to do to jerks like the extremists who attack young Muslim girls on their way to school, but my reaction would be purely testosterone driven. I’d prefer to wait until next week when women are running the world and leave it to the mothers of these cretinous slobs, and the mothers of the hurt girls, to deliver whatever punishment the moms feel would be a fair and balanced response.

And speaking of fair and balanced, I am troubled by women who make themselves available to the alpha males of such conservative, testosterone-driven, He-Man Woman-Hater Clubs as Fox News as well as every other place of business or enterprise in America, if not the world. It makes sense, no doubt, biologically, as it has for thousands of years, to catch the eye of the alpha males, but as a matter of self-respect, I can’t help but recognize that these women are exactly what they appear to be: prizes available to the highest bidder in the chimpanzee troop. Conservative women are basically holes. They can tart themselves up as much as possible, they can bottle-blond themselves no end and undergo plastic surgery, but essentially all they are doing is what is required to be done in a conservative chimpanzee troop, which is to serve as highly visible pieces of candy. We all recognize that the owners of the shapely stems on Fox News are not equal partners. They are holes. Conservative women are holes. Of course, many so-called liberal males also regard women basically as holes. That’s a fact. But we need to try to get to a point where, selfishly-gened and sex-hormoned as we are, we all keep in mind most of the time that women got here first and that they are the mothers of our species. This will happen faster once we start, later today, letting women run things.

The fourth point in the Hayden and Potts article, about a high proportion of young males relative to older males leading to trouble, really makes sense. When you have a suitable number of dads, older brothers, uncles, and granddads around to guide the next generation of young men, you have at least a halfway decent chance of providing some decent guidance to these up-and-comers. It might be a code of conduct, it might be a direction for intellectual inquiry, it might simply be warning the young bucks to treat girls the way they want their sisters treated. Whatever. Trouble comes when you have too many young guys leading each other around in circles and causing trouble for themselves and others, whether because they broke into dad’s store of alcohol, or some religious nut gave them marching orders, or any of the million-and-one other ways young men have found since the Stone Age to get themselves thrown into buzz saws.

Any type of revealed religion is potentially poisonous, as far as I’m concerned. And fundamentalists, whether inspired by revealed or secular religion, are always trouble for the clear-thinking and the truth-seeking among us. They are all the same, these true believers. Same animal, different color of fur. But we can save that conversation for another blog.

Anyhow, Hayden and Potts conclude their essay by stating the obvious: if we made family planning available worldwide and let women take charge of their own wombs, we would be well on the way to having fewer hostilities and instead having more nights out with the boys that wouldn’t lead to mass destruction. We would all sleep better knowing that the four factors that contribute to war and rapine are being addressed sensibly. By women. For the good of our species and our genes.

A final point to follow up on where I started, many paragraphs back up there, and then I’ll save further ruminations, assertions, and rants for future blogs. Let’s be frank about this: Women are more inclusive and more tolerant than men. However, having said this, I must remind you that, bearing in mind many things I’ve provided in this essay, all generalizations essentially are false. Make a sweeping statement and immediately some clever person in the back raises a hand and gives you an example that disproves the statement. We all know this. I’m sure you have your own list of mothers from hell; bridezillas; dominatrices in business attire; subversive in-laws of the feminine gender; suburban blonds and similarly toxic, high-maintenance narcissists; shoe fetishists and Humvee drivers and other take-no-prisoners women consumers who are essentially slaves conditioned to respond to the marketplace; painfully embarrassing parvenus, social climbers, and divas; foolishly drunk girls gone wild; soiled doves; and further examples of womanhood whom no one, male or female, wants to see in positions of authority. Understood. Nevertheless, you know as well as I do that guys are exclusive and women are inclusive. It’s built-in, it’s hardwired, and it’s a good thing. Most guys want to beat up the neighboring troop of chimps in order to get to some of those hot chimp girls. But it serves us all better, I say, to allow the chimp girls to have some say in the matter in order to have as much variety and diversity as possible in the social make-up. That variety and diversity is where the innovators come from. It’s where the artists come from. And it’s where the next batch of cool moms, women scientists, and smart writers will come from.

Consider this a Mother’s Day blog in honor of women and moms. I will continue ranting about this because it is one of my favorite topics about which to rant. But to anticipate one possible objection: You want to ask, Dave, if them womens ran the world, could we still have mixed-martial arts contests and boxing matches and hunting and stuff? The answer is yes. Most women love sports, and they really understand and are attuned to the physicality of being alive. They may not get into blood sports; that’s my impression. Not most women, anyhow. But in a world run by women, we’d have at least as much vibrant activity on the playing field as we do now. However, women might also go for stuff that has a little more finesse, like your figure skating, as opposed to head-crunching cage matches. But there would be room for everyone. I don’t want to live in a world—and I don’t think many women do, either—where we wouldn’t have sports and athletics. Besides, I certainly wouldn’t want to live in a world in which my mom would not have been able to root for the Cleveland ball clubs. If you’re not going to let my mom root for the Browns every fall, well, then, why have a world at all?

Old Dogs and New Paradigms, Part 2

Every month or so, Jill Elaine Hughes, Joe Bonadonna, and I get together, out here in the northwest suburbs of Chicago, as writers around the kitchen table to talk shop. Jill’s star is definitely rising; she’s an accomplished and very well-regarded playwright and a novelist. She writes romance novels and erotica and is doing really well in that regard. The Jill Elaine Hughes website is still under construction, but check out the two now online that appear under her pen names—or noms de plume, or noms erotique, perhaps—Jamaica Layne and Jay Hughes: http://www.jamaicalayne.com and http://www.jayhughesbooks.com.)

Jill’s agent in Manhattan is energetic and very proactive, and she knows her business. Talking with Jill this past Sunday, then, gave me a good perspective about where genre fiction is these days. And pretty much it’s in the situation I surmised in my previous blog.

Eight-five percent of fiction readers in this country are now women, says Jill’s agent. Eighty-five percent. Women agents, women editors, women writers, women readers . . . chicks rule. It is pretty much completely upside-down, I suppose, from the situation—I don’t know, 50 years ago? 60?—when publishing in all of its aspects was run by men. Women weren’t entirely excluded—dames and other just-one-of-the-boys sassy types were more than welcome—but sexist it definitely was.

In terms of social progress, then, times are better now. In terms of lowered levels of literacy, however, things are not better. And publishing’s following the zero-sum mentality that has long been a hallmark of the music industry and Hollywood, the all-or-nothing mentality, is definitely not good, in my estimation. But whether good or not, it was inevitable that publishing would move in this direction. Whatever else American-style late capitalism is, it’s a juggernaut; it is a large mouth, an appetite that constantly wants to be fed; and the larger the chunks of food you can give it, the better the juggernaut likes it. Rock-star authors, huge opening weekends for movies, break-out tweener singers and performers—the devouring gullet adores them, loves ’em, swallows them whole, and in return, coughs up gold.

That all-or-nothing attitude, though, is the problem when it comes to what coyly used to be regarded as the midlist. Got a book that 50,000 readers might like? Well, too bad. We’re not interested because it’s not a big enough chunk of food for the juggernaut. So what do we do with the bite-sized morsels that appeal to the tastes of everyone other than those of the juggernaut?

It appears, to no one’s surprise, that the new Yellow Brick Road is e-publishing. Jill confirmed this as she and Joe and I sat around her kitchen table last Sunday. My daughter, Lily, and Jill’s son, Elliott, played in the other room, chasing each other around in circles, and we three adults drank root beer and ate carrot sticks, and it was made clear, as Jill’s canny agent told her, that within five years, publishing will mean electronic publishing. Paper won’t go away; books of cardboard and paper won’t even become antiques or nostalgia because, as implements or tools, they are pret’ near perfect in their design, in filling the need that they serve.

But America is all about technologic advances, and the arts in America proceed according to the latest technology. (God help us, this means that a tidal wave of contrived 3D movies is now heading toward us, without doubt mostly overgrown-adolescent fare spawned by the likes of James Cameron, just as, a decade or more ago, it seemed as though George Lucas and his remarkably awful, post-adolescent sense of storytelling and character development stole our sensibilities with his ghastly Star Wars prequels. We should all start planning right now to get in line for the 3D reissues of the Harry Potter pictures, let alone the 3D re-release of The Lord of the Rings. I am fairly certain, though, that no one, absolutely no one, will go back and try to reformat 7 Men from Now in Cameronian 3D, or The 300 Spartans, or Maniac Cop III, or any of the other peculiar cinematic fossils so dear to my heart. So my Saturday afternoons on the couch are safe from James Cameron.)

Jill’s agent also pointed out something else that is very interesting: that even the final two fiction genres pretty much dominated by men—horror and science fiction, the last holdouts, as it were—are now becoming secured by women writers. We are living through the greatest commercial expression of weirdness and horror in popular storytelling since the early 1930s, and this time, it’s “just us girls.” In one sense, I don’t mind: everyone should have her or his chance to get into print. In a second sense, I even like it, because I am really looking forward to introducing my three-and-half-year-old daughter to the delights of reading such girl-centric fiction when she gets to be older. (It’s hard to believe right now that anything will displace Pablo and Uniqua of The Backyardigans in her interest, but one of these days, surely, it will be resourceful young women who ride dragons or learn to become sorceresses or something or other.)

What has happened, simply, is this: that as technology and expression and the arts and business have become postmodern, genres and even methods of storytelling that were merely modern have been left behind or been allowed to manage the situation as best they can. I wrote sword-and-sorcery fiction; there is no home for that sort of fiction now in the commercial publishing business; so that fiction and its writers are now marginalized in the way that, say, gay and lesbian writers were in the 1940s, or that science fiction writers were in the 1950s. Right now, the modern type of sword-and-sorcery mentality that was more or less prevalent in the genre in the 1960s and 1970s has not had to move forward or develop very much; it has found a home in video games and in a resurgence of theatrical movies that—no surprise—take advantage of improved technology. So now we have the grunts of 300 and a remake of The Clash of the Titans, for example. We will probably see one or two of these sorts of movies every year from now on, at least for a while. If it can be done, it will be done, and technology makes these efforts acceptable, even enjoyable, compared with the lumpenprole embarrassments made in the 1980s, the awful beefcake-fests with Southern California bodybuilders pretending to be generic “barbarians” on a quest.

I still think that sword-and-sorcery is best on the page. Even though these stories are basically Westerns, they require a greater suspension of disbelief on the screen than Westerns do. Sword-and-sorcery stories are radio shows, or campfire stories, or yarns on the printed page: they work best when you fill in some of the story yourself, in your own imagination. Show it and you kill it. How many effing dragons have we seen flying around by now since the 1980s? Are any of them as good as the ones you imagine? They’re like the dinosaurs in the Jurassic Park movies, so technically perfect that you don’t have to do any work at all to appreciate them or meet them half way. They might as well be cocker spaniels. And they’re about as scary as cocker spaniels, too. We’re on to their tricks.

Joe and I have been talking lately about just what sword-and-sorcery stories are. He is about done reworking his Dorgo the Dowser stories from the 1970s. In a broad sense, they’re like film noir in a fantasy setting but featuring a character who is partly tough, partly good-hearted and honest. Dorgo is a strong character around whom good stories can be fashioned. Myself, I have been reworking my fantasy short stories from the 1970s and am almost half way through the lot of them. There are 18 in all; they’ll form a collection called Tales of Attluma or something similar. Tales of Attluma is how Morgan Holmes has referred to them, and that was the title under which the late, deeply lamented Steve Tompkins was reading them in preparation for writing his introduction. I deeply regret that the collection will not have an introduction by Steve; that’s how selfish I am. I was looking forward to his wit and insight and erudition. But the collection will still come out in one form or another. And, of course, I continue to poke along on Sometime Lofty Towers.

The point raised by Joe, and it is a point well made, is that the fantasy fiction that has been published since the commercial demise of sword-and-sorcery in the 1980s is all about world-building. And sword-and-sorcery isn’t about world building. Sword-and-sorcery is intimate. Go back to the very beginning, to Howard’s Conan stories, and you have intimate stories: one guy in a heap of trouble, either getting into it or trying to get out of it. The stories are not about some long-term fascination with exotic cultures and building fake worlds to impress middle-class suburban kids: they’re about dire peril and staying alive. The scale is intimate; life screws you; fight back. Even when the backdrop is something epic, the scale is still intimate and about characters, not about spelling out the minutiae of some Never-Never Land.

In a word: these old sword-and-sorcery stories, up through the 1980s, are modern. That’s what I wrote, and what Joe wrote, and what Robert E. Howard wrote, and what the rest of us wrote through the eighties. Not Tolkeinesque world-building and not dragon-riding and not empires. We wrote Old Testament stuff, Homeric stuff, The Song of Roland, and Njal’s Saga. Westerns. War stories. Intriguing, small-scale mysteries or thrillers. But with the added dimension or depth that sword-and-sorcery brings to its readers of what I always come back to calling the abyss, the breath of the eternal darkness, the silence from which we come and the silence to which we go, the existential frisson of meaninglessness and nothingness, that none of this matters although I am alive and, being alive, I will do everything I can to stay alive, despite the meaninglessness.

Howard’s fiction is Darwinian; I’m going to write a blog about that fact pretty soon. Basically his stuff is about the organism fighting to stay alive, hell or high water. That’s what sword-and-sorcery is about. That’s why this other stuff, going on and on with its world-building and BBC-style characters, is not sword-and-sorcery. I’ve written world-building, epic fantasy with BBC-style characters: The Fall of the First World. Sometimes I want to read about these characters who use their brains and their abilities to try to exist rationally in an irrational world. That’s most fiction. But sometimes we want to be reminded that, essentially, before all of that or underneath all of that, we exist on an animal level. We don’t have to like it; we may prefer to deny it; we may be disingenuous about it. But when a terrorist sets off a bomb in a subway, or some lowlife kills a child in gang warfare on the south side of Chicago, or a soldier has to go door to door to secure a neighborhood in Iraq or Afghanistan, we are standing side by side with the elemental thrill and awareness that is related to sword-and-sorcery fiction. There are monsters; they make no sense; life is a wound that throbs and is alive; we are the wound, and we will do whatever we can to stay alive for one more moment, and then one more, and then one more . . . or we will kill, kill it, lash out and fight back before life finally takes us.

That’s the intimacy of modern old-fashioned sword-and-sorcery. So what shall we do about it, those of us who write and want to read this sort of fiction? A couple of things, I’m convinced.

First, write sword-and-sorcery, not an imitation thereof. Don’t wimp out and do juvenile or domesticated writing. Go for the heart; go for the throat; write with blood. Push it to the limit. Scare yourself by how deeply you go.

Second, write as well as you can. The commercially available models of what is now acceptable or passable prose are not good enough. Go back and read writers from fifty years ago. Read for style, for grammar, for character development, for story. They were better at it than writers are now. And don’t create a commercial product; write a damned yarn. Agents tell you to write what you love and what you like to read, not what you think the market wants. Correct.

Third, let’s develop the genre. Joe wonders whether his Dorgo stories are sword-and-sorcery. They are, but they’re sword-and-sorcery-plus, in the sense that women detective stories are hard-boiled-plus. Those stories broke new ground and were initially a hard sell to agents and publishers. Now they’re mainstream.

Fourth, we need a venue, and e-publishing seems to be it. What the pulps were in the 1930s and the fanzines were in the 1970s, e-publishing is to the 2010s, the technology by which plebe fiction can be experimented with and made available. Let’s face it: do you really think that Tor, a big, mainstream commercial house, is going to want to publish Tales of Attluma? What’s in it for them?

I promise to do my part. I will finish revising those old fantasy stories so that anyone who wants to read them will have them available. There are at least six or seven of you. And I will finish Sometime Lofty Towers. Let’s see where those projects take me. Let me see if I can put my money where my mouth is, or be as good as my word. We already have four of the five Imaro novels available again from Charles Saunders via print-on-demand. So this little knot of us who began writing this material 40 years ago or more is still at it. I am thinking that e-publishing is how I should approach this. Let me know your thoughts.

And at some point, what was modern and new and then was forgotten or set aside will come back around full circle, and the best of it—the Imaro stories, maybe some of my short stories and possibly Sometime Lofty Towers, likely the Dorgo stories, any of the superb Kane stories of Karl Edward Wagner—will surprise readers with what was in there all along, good writing, strong characters, and a level of quality that makes it worth keeping them around and that makes them worthwhile to use as models for new writers to adapt.

Old Dogs and New Paradigms, Part 1

“Aha! I understand everything now!” —SpongeBob SquarePants

For the past year, I have been actively trying to land an agent to represent one or all three of the novel-length manuscripts I’ve completed in the past few years. I am not having much luck. Part of the problem may be me. Perhaps I’ve lost my edge. In the mid-1980s, I dropped out of writing fiction; despite a few forays into popular fiction since then, I’ve largely stayed out of it. So perhaps I am not up to speed.

But that’s not the whole story. Publishing has changed dramatically during the past twenty years, while I was effectively sitting on the sidelines or being Rip Van Winkle. The stories I’ve written in the past couple of years are what you’d expect to see from me: a thriller about a killer-novelist; a supernatural story about a sorcerer and his enemies. The best of them is atypical in that it is literary—Seasons of the Moon, a story about a boy coming of age in a rural community that worships women and lives in harmony with nature. I published it myself in 2005 through iUniverse and occasionally still see royalty checks for it. It is not a very commercial book, but it is deeply appreciated by those who’ve read it.

I warrant that if I had tried to attract an agent with one of my manuscripts, or an editor, four or five years ago, I would have managed to get into print again for the first time since 1991. I say this because, before the economy crashed, there was a boom in publishing throughout most of the aughts and, despite a general trend among publishers to shrink the midlist, there were, as author Victoria Strauss said in a blog in December 2008, far too many titles being released, with publishers tossing out books “like spaghetti, hoping that at least some will stick to the wall” (http://accrispin.blogspot.com/2008/12/victoria-strauss-publishings-week-of_07.html). So the manuscripts I’ve been pitching lately would likely have had an easier time finding someone to champion them back when the spaghetti-throwing was going on. Which is all it comes down to, an agent or an editor becoming your new best friend because she or he is excited about the chance to make money with your manuscript as well as push forward her or his career as well as yours.

As to the midlist. When my first novel was published in 1977, I became, although I was not then familiar with the term, a midlist writer. This is the midlist, as described on the website for Mid-List Press (http://www.midlist.org/about.cfm): “quality titles of general interest that are rarely bestsellers, but, in the words of noted media critic Ben H. Bagdikian, ‘nonetheless account for the most lasting works in both fiction and nonfiction. . . .’ In the past, publishers built their reputations on midlist books. In recent years, however, such factors as the enormous prices paid for high-profile ‘frontlist’ books and the growing domination of mass merchandisers have eaten away at the traditional support for the midlist. The most disturbing aspect of this decline has been a corresponding decline in writers’ access to publication and, hence, to their audiences.”

I like the fact that the authors of this web page include the word “quality” in their estimation of the midlist. By and large, I think it is true that these novels reflect a certain level of quality, or at least used to. Myself, I have always thought of the midlist as being the paperbacks that filled the racks at the old Gray’s Drugstore at the Liberty Plaza that I went to as a kid, the same kinds of books that were sold at train and bus stations. The midlist thus includes genre titles (Westerns, detective stories, thrillers, and science fiction, as well as, since the 1980s, fantasy and horror titles), along with the well-crafted books of litterateurs and excellent wordsmiths, such as, for example, the admirable Robert Stone. Perhaps quality is in the eye of the beholder, and perhaps it is a stretch to include Stone in the same broad midlist as science fiction and detective story writers, but who can say? Some of the pulp writers of the 1920s and 1930s are now in the Library of America. For God’s sake, H. P. Lovecraft is in the Library of America. The work of these writers, removed from the context of those times, now reveals qualities not so apparent back then. This aspect of gold hidden in the rough is particularly true of genre fiction, which, like jazz and the blues, draws readers to it rather than proactively going after an audience—a siren’s song, rather than a carnival barker’s pitch. Popular writing was technically or grammatically better in the 1920s and 1930s; as a society, we were more literate then than we are now. But the powerfully human tendency to ask, What next? and to keep us turning the pages predominates in this proletarian literature. Rather than being fine cuisine, it is steaks on the grill. Popular storytellers drive us along, or drive along and take us with them. This is what strong storytelling has done from the dawn of human self-exploration—gestes, poems, myths, tales of the ancestors and of culture heroes. (I heard Clive Barker on a radio interview ’long about 1989 or thereabouts say something to warm the hearts of all of us who appreciate the wonderful peculiarities and advantages of genre fiction: History, he said, is very kind to genre fiction. And it is. This is where the “lasting works” part of the Mid-List Press quotation comes in.)

So here I am, in my middle twenties, in the middle 1970s, writing for the midlist. My good fortune in becoming published occurred by a mixture of pluck and luck as well as timing. I thought then that the world generously welcomes talent and that there is always an extra chair at the table for someone good of heart, hard of work, and shining with talent. On some other world, perhaps. I was lucky, however, to have met people early on who steered me toward some book contracts that allowed me to write the kind of stuff I loved to write at that time. Perhaps I was really no more than a useful idiot, naïve and eager and easy to take advantage of. Still, I was hired to write sword-and-sorcery novels, a genre I like but, as it turns out, not a long-lived genre in publishing. Sword-and-sorcery had great success in the pulps in the 1930s and 1940s and moderate success during a paperback revival in the 1970s. It made publicly available for the first time some of the talented writers of the 1970s—Charles Saunders, Richard L. Tierney, and Karl Wagner, as well as myself. However, popular publication of this genre was soon superseded, by design as much as by exigency, by juvenile and young adult fantasy fiction and Tolkeinesque adventures. Sword-and-sorcery stories, which are basically Westerns, continued to exist in low-budget movies and, particularly, video games.

This is probably as it should be because publishing, beginning in the 1980s, became dominated by many bright and energetic women who championed peppy, adolescent fantasy novels geared to young readers and the young at heart. The exuberant, overwhelming presence of this juvenilia coincided with the rise of publishing conglomerates and rock-star authors. As agent Andy Ross said in a blog in August 2009:

“You read about these high profile deals in the newspaper: Sarah Palin (or Tina Fay [sic]), Dr. Phil, Stephen King. These deals are actually pretty simple affairs and mostly revolve around the concept of a lot of money changing hands. But the vast amount of publishing deals are something entirely different.

“Most of my projects are what is referred to in the trade as ‘midlist.’ The midlist books are the ones that aren’t lead titles. The midlist is most of the books that are getting published. The midlist appears to be what publishers are most shy about acquiring in bad economic times.

“Even though advances for the midlist are pretty modest (often less than $10,000), publishers see these books as a risk. Like every other business in America, publishing is having a hard time. The lead titles seem to be holding pretty well, but the midlist is struggling. There are other factors involved in the decline of the midlist as well. Concentration of retail bookselling in the hands of chain stores and mass merchants, the cult of celebrity, a reading public that has developed internet-inflicted ATD, irrational exuberance over all things media-driven. All of this works against good books with smaller audiences. . . .

“When you read about the big deals, the word ‘auction’ usually comes up. But with most midlist books, you might find only one publisher who really falls in love with the book. Or no publisher.” (http://andyrossagency.wordpress.com/2009/08/31/deconstructing-publisher-rejection-letters/#comment-273)

So what I’m trying to do is to find the one agent or the one editor or publisher who will fall in love with one of my manuscripts. This, I realize, is precisely the situation I was in during the 1970s. I lucked out then in that my timing was right for the sort of fiction I was crafting. Today, finding that one agent or editor or publisher is likely just as difficult as it was then, only I’m no longer writing fiction right for the times. I have no plans to write Jane Austen zombie novels, for example, or adolescent vampire stories. World-weary sorcerers filled with guilt, on the other hand . . . that I can do.

(The older I get, the more I want to infuse some sense of maturity into my fiction, or depth, or insight, whatever comes from years of living thoughtfully, and more than ever, after all of the time I have spent teaching English and doing editorial work, I want my use of the language to be as good and clean as I can make it. Genre stories for grown-ups, written as well as one can attempt it, are not the first thing that agents are requesting. I am aware of that, yet I continue to pitch my projects.)

I never wrote bestsellers, and likely I never will. My talent is not sufficiently facile. Most of the books I wrote sold a minimum of 50,000 copies, a perfectly respectable number, but to a reading public that is now largely gone. (I am still annoyed that Avon screwed up the promotion and distribution of The Fair Rules of Evil in 1989. This is a book that I think could have become a “profit center” for them, or a “franchise,” or whatever the kids call it these days. Doubleday, in fact, wanted to look at the manuscript, but the clever agent I had at the time claimed that he could do better than to show my story to the publisher that had first put Stephen King between hard covers. I’m still angry. I think that Fair Rules and its sequel, The Eyes of Night, would have been popular back then if they’d gotten decent distribution. But maybe they were both ahead of their time, like the fantasy trilogy I wrote in 1983, The Fall of the First World—completely forgotten now. Pinnacle published it and then went out of business. I am jinxed. Timing is everything, and I had my moment. Timing and the right connections, let’s say. Still, a young director in California wants to film Magicians, the script Joe Bonadonna and I wrote based on The Fair Rules of Evil, so who knows?)

So much for the old dogs part of this essay. As for the new paradigm? This is still an open question. I’ll continue to write, whether for five readers or 50,000 or 500,000, but what’s the best way for me to reach the audience for my stories? The old paradigm—commercial paperback publishing—clearly seems out of reach, and least so far in my attempts, largely because of that shrinking midlist and the emphasis on frontlist authors, celebrities, and juvenilia. Still, there are avenues to be explored. Ted Rypel, interestingly, has found a publisher in Germany that has not only translated and reprinted his Gonji novels but also has requested six new novels from him. Incredible: Ted is getting contracts for original sword-and-sorcery novels, which is how things used to be here in America; now the offer comes from Germany. Still, in America, Ted has just seen the first of the original Gonji titles released as an audiobook; the whole series will follow. Are these examples of a new paradigm? I have a friend in Germany who’s sold some of my short stories there. Perhaps Germany or Europe generally is more accommodating to stories or genres not seen as worth bothering with here in the States?

The publisher that a few years ago brought back Charles Saunders’ Imaro books pulled out after the first two, so now Charles is taking control of the matter and publishing the Imaro saga via Lulu. The third volume, like the first two a recasting of the books originally published by DAW in the 1980s, came out last year, and the fourth—the first new Imaro title in thirty years—has just been released. Charles will be bringing out the fifth and final Imaro title soon. Is self-publishing in this way the new paradigm? It’s not unlike the small press, the fanzines and the semi-pro zines, in which Charles and Ted and Joe Bonadonna and I first saw print. Joe, in fact, is now polishing the manuscripts for his planned collection of stories centering on Dorgo the Dowser. These yarns are a throwback to forties pulp fiction and also were ahead of their time when Joe started writing them in the 1970s—sword-and-sorcery modeled on noir detective fiction. The combination works; the stories are good. In the same way, I’m slowly but surely going through my old fantasy short stories from the 1970s—“Descales’ Skull,” “The Passing of the Sorcerer,” all eighteen of them—to put together in a collection. It’s not even worth trying to interest a commercial publisher in this project, so my only avenue probably is to publish it myself. Should I offer it by subscription, another old model that may be part of the new paradigm? Let me know if you’d buy a copy; if I get enough potential readers, I’ll go ahead and publish it.

What do we do, we writers who used to fill a niche for 50,000 readers but are now no longer regarded as worth the effort to put between paper covers? I ask myself this question: What does any artist do who is basically small potatoes? Small potatoes with oodles of talent and drive, of course, but . . . small potatoes. Well, that artist does local theater, or plays small blues clubs, or shows in small galleries. In other words, such artists pay their own way in hopes of reaching the limited audience that appreciates their work. For me, does this mean Lulu, or iUniverse? Web publishing or e-books? Self-made audio books?

I am still undecided. Still writing, but still undecided.

Note: I apologize to those of you who follow this blog regularly for being silent since early January. Tough winter. But I expect I’ll be posting more stuff at a reasonable pace for the foreseeable future. Thanks for your support. And I’ll start answering the comments on my blog postings, too! I will, I will!