Michael Montoure's Blog, page 10

Crypticon Post-Mortem

I gotta admit something; when I eagerly went to the first ever Crypticon here in Seattle back in 2009, I had a great time, but I didn’t honestly think there was ever going to be a second one. It seemed to me like the organizers had great intentions, but that they were biting off more than they could chew. They had a large space, wonderful guests, and a great vendor’s room, but the place felt a little deserted, so I felt they might have overestimated how much of a draw a horror convention was going to be here in the Pacific Northwest. Seemed like they’d spent a lot of money and effort on what looked like very little return, so I thought, well, at least they tried, and figured they would just go quietly into that good night.

Instead, I’m happy to say that I just attended their fourth convention, and instead of fading away, they are getting bigger and better every year.

The vendor’s room is still awesome and kind of overwhelming. I’m not big on autographs and I just flat out never know what to say to celebrities, so I just wandered through and kind of stared at , , , James O’Barr and others with a kind of helpless longing, wishing I knew how to tell these people how much their work has shaped my life, simultaneously worried that anything I could say would be too effusive and yet somehow never, ever enough to express what I feel.

Fortunately, since I was quite pleased to once again be asked to be a panelist this year, my tongue loosened in time for my panels.

My first panel — well, first one I actually made it to, traffic had made me completely miss my Friday panel — was Publishing Horror Magazines in the Internet World, with Eloise J. Knapp of Z Magazine, James Beach of Dark Discoveries, and K.L. Young and Rick Tillman from Strange Aeons.

I couldn’t be late for this panel, because I was moderating it. I’ve moderated convention panels before, but this time I think I finally learned the trick of it — don’t just research the panel topic ahead of time, but also thoroughly research the people who are going to be on the panel, so that you can ask them questions that are actually relevant to their projects and their experience. It went really well, once I got past the heart-stopping moment at the beginning of the panel when I opened my mouth to ask my first question and realized that my brain had suddenly gone absolutely blank. Fun!

Immediately after that panel was Zombies Can’t Run & Vampires Don’t Sparkle: The Psychology of Why We Argue Over What Fictional Things Can Or Can’t Do, with Derek M. Koch, Eloise J. Knapp again, Jake Stratton, Chris Saint, and Steve Holetz. This was a topic we had a lot of fun with, although we drifted pretty far away from the question of why we do this and concentrated more on what does count as “real” zombie/vampire fiction and what works and what doesn’t. (I need to remember to bring pen and paper to these things — I’m sure I can’t recall even half of the great movie recommendations my fellow panelists were making.)

I learned two things about Crypticon’s audience at this panel, and I picked up on these same things at the other panels I attended as well — these people love zombies (that was practically all we talked about, with vampires coming in a distant second), and they hate “Twilight.” I mean, seriously. I definitely made my own share of snide comments about it, although I was quick to point out that while the “sparkly vampire” thing is inherently ridiculous, the impulse on Stephenie Meyers’ part to come up with a totally new explanation for vampires avoiding sunlight was a good impulse for a writer to have, even if we don’t like the resulting idea.

I attended several panels as an audience member, as well, although the only one that really stands out in my mind was the Blysster Press panel. Blysster Press is a “not-for-profit publisher,” and I found the panel intriguing enough that it definitely warrants a post of its own, so watch for that later this week.

The last panel I was on was Female Heroes in Horror, with Timothy W. Long, Jessica Meigs, Melinda Reeves, John Skipp, Morgue Anne Morrighan, and Lorelei Shannon, at 9:00pm. (Panels at Crypticon run a little later than most cons I’m used to. You people are night owls.) This one was also a lot of fun, with a very lively and enthusiastic audience. Also, I think I speak for practically everyone on the panel when I say we were pretty damn geeked-out and excited to be sharing the stage with John Skipp, who turns out to be hilarious in person.

All the people I talked to at the con were incredibly friendly and welcoming, there were people in great costumes and makeup wandering the halls, and I have to say, some of them were almost ridiculously attractive. So there’s that, too. There was a great little short film festival that I wish I’d seen more of, a room set up as a classic video game arcade, Phoenix Jones was there for no readily apparent reason, there were apparently some great parties going on at night that I was way too tired to attend — basically, what I’m getting at, is that in just four short years, this has really turned into a can’t-miss event. If you can make it, you gotta come by next year. I’ll see you there.

Come Stalk Me At Crypticon!

If you’re a horror fan and you’re in the Seattle area, then you’re probably already planning on coming to CRYPTICON this next weekend, May 25th-27th, right? And if you’re a Seattle-area horror fan and you weren’t planning on going, what the hell are you waiting for?

The guest list includes Hellraiser‘s Doug Bradley, Phantasm‘s Don Coscarelli, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre‘s Marilyn Burns, and many, many more. But enough about those guys — the important thing is, I’m gonna be there, for your stalking convenience. Here’s my schedule, come by and see me!

Hollywood Laziness: Remakes, Re-imaginings, and Nothing Original

Friday, 5:00pm, Emerald Ballroom B
Publishing Horror Magazines in the Internet World

Saturday, 1:00pm, Emerald Ballroom B
Zombies Can’t Run & Vampires Don’t Sparkle: The Psychology of Why We Argue Over What Fictional Things Can Or Can’t Do

Saturday, 2:00pm, Emerald Ballroom B
Female Heroes in Horror 

Saturday, 9:00pm, Emerald Ballroom C

Revising Old Stories — Or Updating Them?

I’ve been getting Counting From Ten ready for a new edition — one to replace my dwindling stock of the original small-press edition, one that will be available both for the Kindle and via print-on-demand, so people will finally be able to order the damn thing via Amazon, instead of sending me money via PayPal and waiting for me to actually go to an actual Post Office.  Pretty much a win/win situation.

I’ve been going over the text of the book — and, annoyingly, re-typing several of the stories, since I mysteriously seem to lack electronic versions of them — and doing a little light line-editing.  Nothing serious.  Catching a couple of typos that made it into the original edition.  Tightening up the occasional word choice here and there, but mostly leaving it alone.

There are a couple of stories, though, where I’m seriously altering some of the details to bring the story up-to-date.

Mainly, it has to do with telephones. The book originally came out in 2004, and, well, things have changed since then.  Here’s a for-instance: in a story entitled “The Catalog,” the lead character makes calls from his land-line phone, and at one point, from a pay-phone. Right now, I honestly don’t even know where I would go to find a pay-phone if my life depended on it.

In short, there are random details that make the stories feel like they were written in another time.  Which, yeah, they were. But I had to ask myself — did I want to leave them that way?

Often, whenever someone goes back and changes something in their creative works before re-releasing them, it annoys me. I usually wish they had left well enough alone. (Case in point: Greedo shot first. End of discussion.)  I would rather that creators knew when to leave well enough alone, and let a story be the product of its time.

But on the other hand — every time I tripped across something that now felt anachronistic, it jarred me a bit. I stopped and noticed it. In other words, it took me out of the story a little.

In any kind of editing, from a massive overhaul to a simple line-edit, there’s really only one question that should be paramount in the editor’s mind: What’s the best thing to do to tell the story?

And I finally decided that, in most cases, it didn’t matter to the story whether it took place in 2004 or 2012 — and if the fact that a detail made the story feel like it wasn’t taking place in the present day was at all distracting from the story itself, then out it goes.  In the case of “The Catalog,” I gave the lead character a cell phone.

So that’s what’s going on with Counting From Ten — all the stories are getting pulled out, dusted off, squinted at in the sunlight, and sometimes getting a shiny new coat of paint before I put them back in the anthology.

What’s your take on updating stories vs. leaving them alone? What would you do?

You Hereby Are Granted Permission

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how to get permission to live the life you want.

You might have been thinking about this, too, if you’re a writer, or if you merely write but you’re waiting on someone else’s permission to actually call yourself a writer.  And you have been, haven’t you? Writers, real writers, are surely arcane mystical creatures who live lives very different from yours and mine, who subsist only on the rarefied air they breathe and on the sunlight that shines down in dusty shafts to illuminate their current manuscript as they effortlessly lay down word after elegant word onto the page.  That’s not you.  You have a day job, a messy kitchen, a thousand little distractions anchoring you down to the all too real world around you.  You may write, sure, and you may even suspect you might be good at it, but surely, you’re not a writer.

Even if that’s the first word that pops into your head when someone asks, “What do you do?”  Even if that’s what you secretly call yourself when you picture the life you want to be living. It’s not a word you can say out loud.

Say it out loud.  And, just maybe, live it out loud.

This is becoming a more concrete and less theoretical concern for me, lately. I lost my day job about a month ago.  I’d been working as a web developer, and I just last week had a fairly promising interview for another such position at a different company, and if they offer me the job, I know I should take it, I know I shouldn’t turn down a regular paycheck and health insurance, I know I’d be crazy to do that, especially in this economy and et cetera and et cetera and et cetera, but –

– My heart isn’t in it.  It’s not what I really want to be doing with my life. This is what I want to be doing, this, right here, laying down the words and getting my voice inside your head. Telling you stories that will leave you a little off-balance and leave you looking at the world a little differently.

I don’t honestly . . . have to have a day job. I don’t. If I could tighten my belt a little, I could probably go for a year without having to get another job.  That would be a nice long chunk of time to spend writing, editing, promoting. Getting my work out there.  But it would be a scary, uncertain, unusual thing to do.

I keep wanting to talk to friends, to family, get their advice, but — it all comes back to that same old problem I outlined above.  I don’t want advice.  I just want permission.

When we’re children, we think that once we’re adults, man, that’s gonna be amazing — no one will be able to tell us what to do! But sometimes, not having someone to tell you what to do is paralyzing. Terrifying.   I just want someone to tell me, “yes, it’s okay. You’re allowed. This is a chance you’re allowed to take.”

I don’t know for sure what I’m going to do, yet. I’ll let you know when I reach something like a decision. But for now, if you’re looking for a little bit of permission of your own, if you want to be able to really call yourself a writer, and you still feel like that’s not a label you have the authority to give to yourself, you’ve been waiting for a publisher or an editor or an agent or someone to come along and tell you that, yes, you are one of the special chosen ones — I want to do this much for you, at least:

I want you to print this out, cut out this certificate and hang it on your wall:

P O E T I C   L I C E N S E

This document hereby certifies that the undersigned,

________________________________________________________,

is a bona fide, fully-qualified, certified

W R I T E R

and is hereby entitled to time for solitude, time to daydream, time to research, and time to sit down and DO THE WORK until words appear in perfect order, characters speak clearly and distinctly in their own voices, and plots run smoothly like delicate clockwork.

This certificate permits the WRITER AND/OR AUTHOR to do as they see fit in order to make the words happen, and to ignore with impunity any criticisms from sneering naysayers who aren’t really doing anything that impressive with their own lives anyway.

There. Looks pretty good. And it’s just as legit as any other form of external validation you may have been looking for anway. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I’m going to put one of those on my refrigerator.

They Fight Crime!

Here's something clearly intended as just a fun little time-waster (they have those on the Internet now!) — a site that randomly generates pairings of slightly unlikely characters, like this one:

He's a shy amnesiac jungle king whom everyone believes is mad. She's a strong-willed thirtysomething barmaid from a secret island of warrior women. They fight crime!

– They Fight Crime!

For most people, I figure that site is good for a few minutes of laughs, and then that's it, time to move on with your day.  But if you're a writer, it might just spark some ideas.  Take the result I listed above — okay, the actual combination of those characters might seem a little ridiculous, but looking at each of them individually, I can't help but start to come up with ideas for scenes featuring them, maybe even whole stories if I let myself.

Go, visit the site, hit "reload" a few times.  See who jumps out at you.

Emerald City Dreamer: Getting Artwork For Your Indie Book Cover

If there's anything I like better than a compliment, it's a random, unexpected compliment.  That's just what I got yesterday when I fired up my Twitter client and saw this:

Started "Slices" by @montoure – Indy writers take note: Great covers matter. Shows professionalism, sells books! bit.ly/ySbFYy

— Steve Tannuzzo (@BostonProWriter) March 8, 2012

That definitely made my day.  I'm very pleased with how the cover for Slices turned out, but honestly, I'm a little self-conscious about it. I designed it myself, and the prevailing wisdom for self-published authors is Thou Shalt Not Design Thy Own Covers.  (But, like I said yesterday, there are no experts on how all this works, so I shouldn't let that worry me.)  So it was nice to hear someone else say that my cover shows "professionalism."

At some point, I should tell you about how I made that cover — but not today.  Today, I'm going to tell you about the process fellow Seattle writer Luna Lindsey went through to get her new cover designed, since she posted this not long after I received the above tweet, and I still had cover design on the brain:

By browsing [DeviantArt], I decided I wanted a photo manipulation style, and then I let my visualization processes stew for a while until I imagined my character in the pose I wanted, with props and background.  I made a terrible sketch in pencil just so I could remember the details, bookmarked the artists and images I liked [...]

I chose three artists based on these criteria:  1) I liked their art, 2) they seemed professional — i.e. they presented their gallery in a professional manner, they listed the fact that they took commissions, they had their own website, and they had a portfolio of previously commissioned work.

[...] What impressed me most about Ana was her professional attitude in her email replies.  She stated that she always produces a "sketch" or outline of the art before spending too many hours on it, so that if there were foundational corrections, it saves time and money.  That showed me that she'd given this lots of thought.  If you are commissioning cover art, I would strongly recommend you request this of the artist.  Given that this is a digital image, my "sketch" was full color and consisted of the basic model standing in front of the basic background.  Details such as her hair, props, touch-ups, color-finishing, etc. had not yet been done.  The feedback I gave at this level greatly improved the direction of the image, so I was able to get exactly what I had envisioned.

– Luna Lindsey: Emerald City Dreamer Cover Art.

Very cool, and definitely the route I intend to take when I need a cover for Still Life, the novel I'm revising. Her cover looks great, and you should go take a look at it.

No One Knows Anything About Publishing Anymore! Isn’t It Great?

For the past couple of years, as the publishing industry has been rocked by changes, and as writers have been figuring out how to get their writing into their readers’ hands in ways that don’t really involve the “publishing industry” at all, I’ve been watching a lot of people reacting to this rapid state of change in the best way they know how.

Namely, by freaking the fuck out.

Me, though? I’ve been feeling increasingly calm and relaxed and collected.  Why is that, I wondered?  Keeping my head while all about me are losing theirs is generally not considered one of my core competencies, so what gives?

I think I’ve finally figured it out.

I tend to suffer from analysis paralysis — I’ll over-think a problem so much that it prevents me from actually doing anything about it, especially if I think there are aspects to that problem that I don’t know about or haven’t considered.

One of the things that freaks me out, and keeps me in this paralyzed state, is the fear that I’m not an “expert.”  The thought that there are other people out there who know more than I do about the topic at hand makes me want to stop trying.  How can I possibly do better than the experts?

Well — right now, when it comes to publishing — there aren’t any experts any more.

With e-books and self-publishing and print-on-demand and other new and disruptive factors keeping the publishing world in it’s current state of aggressive churn, anyone who claims they know for sure how publishing will work five years from now, five months from now, or, hell, five days from now is either:

An astonishingly crazy-brilliant, practically omniscient prognosticator, or
Lying.

There’s no one out there for me to feel intimidated by.  I don’t have to worry that anyone else has a head start.  I don’t have to wonder if I’m listening to the right people, following the right advice, doing everything that’s expected of me.

I don’t have to sit back and wait for things to “settle down,” to figure out what the new “normal” is.  I don’t think we’re going to see a new “normal” any time soon — maybe not even in our lifetime.

There are people out there who have found success and happiness writing and publishing, either by going it old-school or by embracing change or by doing a little of both, and most of these people have been generous enough to tell us what’s worked — for them.  I may or may not be able to reproduce their results.  Who knows?  Nobody, that’s who.

I feel free to take whatever sounds to me like good advice, and forge my own path.  I’m just as much an expert as the next guy.

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

– Buckminster Fuller

Time to stop analyzing. Time to stop waiting for someone to come down out of the mountains with a set of stone tablets that clearly lays out that this is how we sell books now.  It’s not going to happen.

What we have now is not comfortable, it’s not certain, and it’s not safe.  But it is, finally, a level playing field.  And that’s why I suddenly find myself calm about all this.

No One Knows Anything About Publishing Anymore! Isn't It Great?

For the past couple of years, as the publishing industry has been rocked by changes, and as writers have been figuring out how to get their writing into their readers' hands in ways that don't really involve the "publishing industry" at all, I've been watching a lot of people reacting to this rapid state of change in the best way they know how.

Namely, by freaking the fuck out.

Me, though? I've been feeling increasingly calm and relaxed and collected.  Why is that, I wondered?  Keeping my head while all about me are losing theirs is generally not considered one of my core competencies, so what gives?

I think I've finally figured it out.

I tend to suffer from analysis paralysis — I'll over-think a problem so much that it prevents me from actually doing anything about it, especially if I think there are aspects to that problem that I don't know about or haven't considered.

One of the things that freaks me out, and keeps me in this paralyzed state, is the fear that I'm not an "expert."  The thought that there are other people out there who know more than I do about the topic at hand makes me want to stop trying.  How can I possibly do better than the experts?

Well — right now, when it comes to publishing — there aren't any experts any more.

With e-books and self-publishing and print-on-demand and other new and disruptive factors keeping the publishing world in it's current state of aggressive churn, anyone who claims they know for sure how publishing will work five years from now, five months from now, or, hell, five days from now is either:

An astonishingly crazy-brilliant, practically omniscient prognosticator, or
Lying.

There's no one out there for me to feel intimidated by.  I don't have to worry that anyone else has a head start.  I don't have to wonder if I'm listening to the right people, following the right advice, doing everything that's expected of me.

I don't have to sit back and wait for things to "settle down," to figure out what the new "normal" is.  I don't think we're going to see a new "normal" any time soon — maybe not even in our lifetime.

There are people out there who have found success and happiness writing and publishing, either by going it old-school or by embracing change or by doing a little of both, and most of these people have been generous enough to tell us what's worked — for them.  I may or may not be able to reproduce their results.  Who knows?  Nobody, that's who.

I feel free to take whatever sounds to me like good advice, and forge my own path.  I'm just as much an expert as the next guy.

"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."

– Buckminster Fuller

Time to stop analyzing. Time to stop waiting for someone to come down out of the mountains with a set of stone tablets that clearly lays out that this is how we sell books now.  It's not going to happen.

What we have now is not comfortable, it's not certain, and it's not safe.  But it is, finally, a level playing field.  And that's why I suddenly find myself calm about all this.

Making the Leap, Part Three: Queries Sent!

All right, so — as outlined in Tuesday's post, I set a goal for myself of reaching out to at least ten book bloggers on Wednesday.

Just following up to let you know, I made it!  I was up past my bedtime, but it got done.

The trick to this sort of thing, in my experience, is over-preparation.  I actually included seventeen book bloggers in the Excel file I put together yesterday, even though my eventual goal was just to contact "at least ten."

That way, when it came time to actually work my way through the list, as soon as I hit the point where I started to feel tired of doing it, I was able to tell myself, "Well, remember, you don't have to do all of these — you've done seven already, so just three more and you can stop, okay?"

So I was able to hit the goal I set and enjoy the slacker pleasure of getting to "quit early."

I mention all this because I figure any writers reading this are probably slackers, too.  We all are, or else we'd want real jobs. This turns out to be a pretty good way to trick yourself into being productive — give it a try.

Now to wait and see if any of these queries results in a request for a copy of the book.  Fingers crossed.  I'm going to need to keep repeating this process and looking for other reviewers, but this is a decent start.

(Remember, if you're interested in writing a review of Slices for your blog, or for Amazon or Goodreads or the like, just let me know, and I'll set you up with a free copy!)

Making the Leap, Part Two: Book Bloggers Found

Okay, I'm halfway done with the goal outlined in yesterday's post — I said I would contact at least ten book bloggers today about Slices.

I've gathered together my list.  I've actually ended up with seventeen of them, and that's just from doing a Google search and some fairly casual browsing — I'm sure I can find a lot more in future.

(Oddly enough, no one on Twitter recommended any book bloggers when I asked.  Really, Internet? I thought you people had an opinion about everything!)

In a burst of organizational enthusiasm, I put together all the relevent information in this Excel spreadsheet, which you're welcome to look at if you're curious, or if you're looking for a starting place for your own submissions.  (Don't just rely on my spreadsheet, though — visit the sites and actual read their guidelines, 'kay? 'Kay.)

You'll note that there's a column for "query date," which is currently blank, 'cause I haven't sent any of them out yet — I'll do that tonight when I get home.  (Yesterday's lunch hour was spent finding these blogs, and today's lunch hour was spent putting together this spreadsheet.)  This seems like a very good idea to me, to make sure I don't end up querying any of the same bloggers twice for the same book in future.

So why am I being so public about all this?  Three reasons.  First, if you're  a writer, I thought you might be interested in seeing my process to see if any of it would work for you.

Secondly, if you're a reader, you might like to see how the sausage is made.

Finally, this keeps me motivated.  If I say, "Hey, I'm gonna do a thing!" I don't want to have come back here tomorrow and post, "Oh, actually I didn't do a thing.  I spent all night looking a pictures of kittens on Tumblr instead. Sorry."

So come back here tomorrow, and I'll let you know how sending out the queries went.  Or I'll at least have some pictures of kittens.