Brian Keene's Blog, page 134

YOU’VE BEEN WARNED

So Edward Lee, @JackKetchum, @Bryan_D_Smith, @WrathJW, @jfgonzalez, @natesouthard, Ryan Harding, Shane McKenzie & I wrote a novel together.

— BrianKeene (@BrianKeene) August 10, 2013

That novel is called SIXTY-FIVE STIRRUP IRON ROAD. And I am about to turn it in to Deadite press editor @Jeff_Burk in exactly 5 minutes. — BrianKeene (@BrianKeene) August 10, 2013

And about 10 minutes after he receives it, I predict @Jeff_Burk‘s computer will burst into flame, then engulf the Deadite Press offices. — BrianKeene (@BrianKeene) August 10, 2013

By morning, the Deadite Press staff will stumble through the smoking cinders of Portland, Oregon muttering, “Damn, what a book!”

— BrianKeene (@BrianKeene) August 10, 2013

@BrianKeene god damn it. I just got a new computer!

— Jeff Burk (@Jeff_Burk) August 10, 2013

Two New Zombie Novels

I said in an interview a while back that the zombie sub-genre was going to eat itself into oblivion unless writers came up with new twists and went in new directions. Here are two recent novels that do just that. 

THE DISHONORED DEAD by Robert Swartwood — Available for Kindle and in Paperback.

In a not-so-distant future, the world has devolved and most of the population has become the animated dead. Those few that are living are called zombies. They are feared and must be hunted down and destroyed.

Conrad is one of the animated dead. A devoted husband, a loving father, he is the best zombie Hunter in the world. But when he hesitates one night in killing a living adult, his job is put in jeopardy. Instead of being outright dismissed, he is transferred to a program so secretive even the Government would deny its existence — and where Conrad soon learns a startling truth about how his own son might be in danger of becoming a zombie.

As living extremists become more emboldened and blow up a Hunter Headquarters, as a power-hungry Hunter becomes more enraged and will stop at nothing to gain absolute power, Conrad begins to question not just his profession, but his own existence. And before he knows it he is on a journey of self-discovery, remembering a past he was forced to forget, and soon finding himself not only a hunted man, but a man who must now save both his son and the entire world.

SOULLESS by Christopher Golden — Available for Kindle and in Paperback.

The dead . . . travel fast.

Times Square, New York City: The first ever mass séance is broadcasting live on the Sunrise morning show. If it works, all the spirits of the departed on the other side will have a brief window — just a few minutes — to send a final message to their grieving loved ones.

Clasping hands in an impenetrable grip, three mediums call to their spirit guides as the audience looks on in breathless anticipation. Then the mediums slump over, slack-jawed — catatonic. And in cemeteries surrounding Manhattan, fragments of old corpses dig themselves out of the ground . . .

The spirits have returned. The dead are walking. They will seek out those who loved them in life, those they left behind . . . but they are savage and they are hungry. They are no longer your mother or father, your brother or sister, your best friend or lover.

They are soulless.

The Last of THE LAST ZOMBIE

The final two trade paperbacks in The Last Zombie series are now available for pre-order.

THE LAST ZOMBIE: BEFORE THE AFTER - As the group continues their trek eastward, Ian desperately struggles to conceal his slowly worsening infection from the others. When a vicious blizzard halts their progress, the team takes shelter in an abandoned hotel. As the snow piles up outside and boredom sets in, stories are shared and secrets are revealed…and Ian’s vaccine starts wearing off.

THE LAST ZOMBIE: THE END - The explosive final chapter! In the aftermath of Before the After’s shocking cliffhanger, the team are imprisoned by a brutal despot, the last surviving member of pre-apocalypse Chicago’s notorious political machine. Warner faces torture, Planters is on the run, and time is running out for everyone-especially Ian, who is succumbing to the zombie virus raging through his veins!

And don’t forget — if you’re new to THE LAST ZOMBIE, you can purchase the first three trade paperbacks, as well as individual comic issues and digital editions, HERE. Critics have raved about this series. Pick it up and see why!

 

Works In Progress

I’m always working on a number of things at once. As of today, here’s where they stand.

SIXTY-FIVE STIRRUP IRON ROAD



This collaboration between myself, Edward Lee, Jack Ketchum, J.F. Gonzalez, Bryan Smith, Wrath James White, Nate Southard, Shane McKenzie, and Ryan Harding is now in the editing phase.

CITY OF THE DEAD: UNCUT



The Author’s Preferred Version of the manuscript is now in the editing phase.

THE LAST OF THE ALBATWITCHES



This new Levi novella is my main focus this week.

THE LOST LEVEL



Getting there, albeit slowly. This is a completely revised version (after I scrapped two earlier versions).

HOLE IN THE WORLD



Also getting there. Also slowly.

SUBURBAN GOTHIC



This Urban Gothic sequel is percolating on the back burner.

On Professionalism, Elitism, and Things More Important (Updated)

In which we talk about chasing dreams, walking away from dreams, what it means to be professional, what it means to be elitist, and things far more important than your goddamned writing. 

 

If you follow this Blog regularly, then you know that for the last two and a half months, I’ve been doing preliminary work on several projects for a big unnamed multimedia company. I’d dreamed of this gig since I was six-years old, and while I’d occasionally moonlighted with them before, I was now being offered the opportunity to write for them full-time.

This type of thing is a far more involved process than you might think. It doesn’t just involve sitting down with your laptop and typing ‘Corporate IP-Man crashes through the wall of the Council of Ten’s secret hideout’. Before you even get to that phase, there are meetings, and meetings about those meetings, and meetings to talk about that meeting, and then meetings that cancel all of the previous meetings, and then meetings to decide upon new meeting, and then more meetings.

I’ve been heavily engaged in that for the last two months, taking several trips to New York City and participating in weekly phone calls and email chains and research and pitch sessions. And as a result, my other work obligations began to suffer. There were novels and novellas to finish, manuscripts to critique, things to mail, Lifetimer Packages to finalize, and a metric fuck-ton of emails to answer, and while I was still making an effort to work on all of those things, the time I could devote to them shrank more and more with each passing week.

Worse, I could see a point coming where it would begin to impact time spent with my youngest son (whom I identify in public as ‘Turtle’ because he doesn’t need his real name out there among the crazies until he turns eighteen and then, like his older brother before him, can decide if he wants people to know who his Dad is or not). I have Turtle Monday through Thursday, which means I have Friday, Saturday and Sunday to write, go on dates with my girlfriend, do laundry, clean house, and all the other things grown-ups and writers do. But giant New York-based multimedia companies don’t work on that schedule, and those weekly phone calls and other things were happening while Turtle was here in the house. Now, he’s old enough that he can play by himself for an hour or two, and he’s also enough of a fan of the corporate characters that he thought it was neat to eavesdrop on conference calls about them. But it still felt, to me at least, that I was giving up precious time with him. I don’t know many divorced dads who have as much time with their children as I’ve had, and I’m very grateful to have a profession that allows that, and a wonderful co-parent who was agreeable to it. These last few years have been truly special. In just a few weeks, Turtle will start big boy school, which means this time comes to an end, and the time I have with him in the future will be even more precious.

Unfortunately, things didn’t work out with the big multimedia company. Last Wednesday, when it came time to become officially married, I made a professional decision not to move forward with it. The reasons why are unimportant, and it would be unprofessional of me to go into them publicly. Suffice to say, it wasn’t anybody’s fault in particular. They weren’t cruel and terrible people who wanted me to sign away my soul. If anything, I just looked at how my other professional and personal obligations had already been impacted, and calculated how they’d be impacted going forward, and then I calculated the dollar amount of that impact, and made the professional decision that everything would be impacted in a way that I wasn’t comfortable with if I continued. And so, I chose to not continue with something I’ve wanted to do since I was six-years old. And I’m totally okay with that, because I know I could have done it if I wanted to. And I still could, at a later date. It was an amicable enough decision on both sides. But right now, there are things that are more important, and they take precedence. The folks at the big multimedia company understood because they are professionals. And I made my decision because I am a professional.

So, that was on Wednesday. I got home Wednesday night, picked up Turtle Thursday morning, and a few hours into our day, his pre-school burned to the ground.

If you’re a parent, then you know as well as I do that special kind of fear that only parents live with. You get twinges of it every time your child climbs a tree unassisted, or rides their bike without training wheels for the first time, or gets their first high fever, or lets go of your hand while crossing the parking lot, or chases their ball toward the street, or walks up to you in the backyard clutching a live, thrashing, pissed off snake in each fist and saying, “Daddy, look what I found. Can we keep them?” Children seem to exist in a perpetual state of wonder and fearlessness about the world, and I sometimes think that we parents must exist in a perpetual state of caution and wariness, because we know that the world has teeth. Sometimes, the world likes to bare those teeth at you when you least expect it.

Copyright Tim Smith (all rights reserved)

According to officials, there were several explosions and the fire spread rapidly. 90% of the building was destroyed. They stopped it before the classroom was engulfed, but the heat and smoke rendered that unusable, as well. Had it not been summer… Had school been in session… Well, there are no words. I’m a writer, and there are no words. But there is a picture. See the table on the left side of the photo? That’s where Turtle sat each and every day.

So, if you tell me that I made the wrong decision, and that as a professional, I should have opted for a business arrangement that that would have been great for my career but that I suspected would impact my time with my kid, I’m gonna refer you back to that picture and invite you to shut the fuck up.

There are things that are more important.

Which brings me to this article by the HWA’s Lisa Morton, which appears on the Los Angeles chapter of the HWA’s Blog.

Go read it. Just Lisa’s article at the top. You can read Hal Bodner’s very good article about creating characters later. I want to talk about Lisa’s article on “Professionalism”. I’ll wait till you’re done.

Done? Okay, good. Because that’s a load of horseshit.

Don’t misunderstand. I don’t have an issue with Lisa, personally. The few times I’ve interacted with her socially, I’ve found her to be quite pleasant. Nor do I have an issue with her fiction (I’ve enjoyed what I’ve read of it). But I’ve got big problems with what was communicated in this article, and I’m not the only one. There’s a great discussion about it over on Laird Barron’s Facebook page. I don’t even have a problem with the HWA, per se, other than that, like any other organization or group entity, it is only as good as the people in charge. It’s sort of like the government. When you’ve got Lincoln or Kennedy in charge, you get advancements in human rights, and when you’ve got Bush or Obama in charge, you get the erosion of the Constitution. But I digress…

The HWA is only as good as the people guiding it, and public perception of the HWA is shaped and formed by the public’s perception of those same stewards. There have been great administrations (Dean Koontz, Charles Grant, Craig Shaw-Gardner, Richard Laymon) and not-so-great administrations (S.P. Somtow, for example). Since around 2005, the public perception of the HWA has been that it’s nothing more than a life-support system for the Bram Stoker Awards. It’s not uncommon to hear horror writers refer to it as the Hardly Writing Association rather than the Horror Writers Association (the sense being that the members focus more on the awards and spend more time talking about writing than they do actually writing). To his credit, current HWA President Rocky Wood has made great strides to right the ship again, and change the public’s perception. And, for the most part, he’s got a great team in place to help make that happen — folks like Linda Addison, Ellen Datlow, Joe McKinney, John Palisano, and Ron Breznay, all of whom are dedicated to seeing that vision come to fruition.

Which is what makes Lisa’s article all the more vexing. Imagine you’re striving to become a horror writer. You’ve made a few sales, and managed to stick with it while juggling family and day job obligations. You made a little extra money this year, maybe from a sale to an anthology, and you decide to join the HWA. Then you run across this condescending article written by the Vice-President of the HWA and published on an HWA-affiliated website, and it’s telling you that, despite all of your hard work, you’re not a professional. You’re a hobbyist. At that point, you might ask yourself, “Why the hell would I want to join this organization?” And you’d be absolutely right to do so.

As Laird Barron said in regards to it, “The distinction between pro and non pro writer is mainly useful if one wants to join a club with particular membership requirements, or when engaging in pissing contests.” Or, as Tim Waggoner said, “No one gets to define someone else. You only get to define you.”

A professional writer can be defined as “you make enough money to support yourself and your loved ones from writing that you don’t need to work a day job”, and while that works in the broadest, most general of terms, it doesn’t really hold up under scrutiny. I’m lucky enough to support myself and my loved ones off my writing. I haven’t had a day job in well over a decade. But does that make me more professional than James A. Moore, who moonlights as a barista? Or the legendary Ramsey Campbell, who, a few years ago, had to take up employment in a bookstore? Or Bev Vincent, who gets up a few hours early and writes before he goes to work? Or Michael Laimo, who manages to write two or three novels a year during his morning and evening commute from home to day job? Does that make them “hobbyists”?

In the article, Lisa states that she stumbled into a discussion group of professional writers, and bemoaned the fact that, in her opinion, they were hobbyists because they, quote “chatted about health and told jokes and moaned about personal problems…anything, in other words, but writing careers.” I’m lucky enough to have a pretty broad local social circle composed of writers, editors, and illustrators. When I have a barbecue in my backyard, and the music is playing, and burgers are grilling, and I’m standing around with Tom and Elizabeth Monteleone, Chet Williamson, J.F. Gonzalez, Robert Swartwood, Kelli Owen, Geoff Cooper, Mary SanGiovanni, Mike Hawthorne, etc.,  you know what we talk about? Our health. Our personal problems. We tell jokes. We talk about our kids. Sure, we talk about writing, too, because we’re writers, but our lives extend beyond that. Nobody wants to go to the foundry worker company picnic on their day off and sit there and talk about work. Fuck that noise. The last thing you want to talk about is work. But apparently, such a mindset marks one as unprofessional.

And then we come to the part of the article that really left me scratching my head — the ten questions you must answer yes to in order for Lisa Morton (and presumably the HWA) to consider you a professional. Complete with the disclaimer that, quote, “If you’ve already glanced at these questions and scoffed, you are a hobbyist.”

Well then, let’s see what I am, shall we?

1. Is your home/work place messy because that time you’d put into cleaning it is better spent writing?

No. I have two sons whom I’d prefer didn’t have to sleep in spiderwebs or eat cat hair in their spaghetti, so I clean the house every Sunday.

2. Do you routinely turn down evenings out with friends because you need to be home writing instead?

No. I do occasionally, if there’s a pressing deadline, but not “routinely”. Writing is primarily a solitary endeavor, but there’s a danger involved in living and existing inside your own head. A writer needs to get out and socialize, if only to experience real life and real people so that they can then imbue their stories and characters with more realism. But also because if you spend all your time alone, you’ll turn into a drooling, gibbering mushroom.

3. Do you turn off the television in order to write?

No. I always write with the television (or music) on in the background.

4. Would you rather receive useful criticism than praise?

Yes.

5. Do you plan vacations around writing opportunites (sic) (either research or networking potential)?

No. When I’m on vacation with my loved ones, the last thing I’m thinking about is “networking potential” I’m instead thinking about what an awesome day it was on the beach, and I wish we didn’t have to go back home tomorrow, and that seafood restaurant we ate at last night was really good. Now, in the course of these events, a story idea might present itself to me (in fact, that happens often) and I may, in fact, begin working on it after everyone else has gone to sleep, but the primary goal of a family vacation should be just that — family.

6. Would you rather be chatting about the business of writing with another writer than exchanging small talk with a good friend?

No. In fact, I often want to stab people like that in the eyes.

7. Have you ever taken a day job that paid less money because it would give you more time/energy/material to write?

Sort of. Until I began writing full time, I worked a dozen different jobs: foundry, stockroom, truck driver, telemarketer, daycare, janitor, data entry, etc. All of them were a means to an end — something to pay the bills until I could pay those same bills with what I earned as a writer.

8. Are you willing to give up the nice home you know you could have if you devoted that time you spend writing to a more lucrative career?

No. And in truth, I don’t really understand this question. What defines a “nice home”? Are we talking about material things like new kitchen cabinets and a perfectly landscaped lawn? Or are we talking about warmth and comfort and safety? I like to think I have a nice home. I enjoy it and my children do, too. I guess there are some who might look at it and say, “You live in a fucking cabin on top of a mountain. You have to burn firewood for heat! What are you, Darryl Dixon from Walking Dead?” But it works for me. It’s a nice home because it’s where the people I love gather — even if it doesn’t have vinyl siding.

9. Have you done all these things for at least five years?

No, because so far, I’ve only answered yes to one of your questions. But I have been writing full time for closing in on fifteen years. Does that qualify me as a professional, or am I still considered a hobbyist?

10. Are you willing to live knowing that you will likely never meet your ambitions, but you hold to those ambitions nonetheless?

Well sure, but that’s just human nature, isn’t it? Everyone has dreams. Everyone has things they strive for and aspire to. Earlier this week, I made a professional decision to walk away from mine, because it was the right thing to do for both my loved ones AND my career.

But I guess I’m just a hobbyist.

Here’s the thing, kids. A professional writer is not deemed so by how much they get paid per word, or how many words they produce, or how many awards they’ve won, or what position they hold in a writer’s organization, or how much networking they do at conventions. A professional writer does one thing — they treat their writing professionally. They produce. They edit. They constantly strive to get better. They sit their ass down in a chair and put their fingers on a keyboard and they type.

A professional writer spends more time writing than they do talking about writing.

Now, it’s almost 11am. I need to get a few thousand words done on this novella. Then I’m going to clean the house, play cards with my oldest son, call my girlfriend, and perhaps finish the evening off by reading a good book. My name is Brian Keene, and I am a hobbyist. So far, that’s worked pretty well for me. As always, your mileage may vary…

 

UPDATE: There are a lot of website, Blog, Facebook, Google+, and Twitter discussions on this now. I’m not going to link to all of them, because there are just so many. But I will link to John Scalzi’s post, because it sums up a lot of the others, but probably in a more polite tone than I used. I also want to link to a comment I left below, which is an addendum of sorts. Click here to read it. It addresses many of the things I see being brought up here and elsewhere.

On Professionalism, Elitism, and Things More Important

In which we talk about chasing dreams, walking away from dreams, what it means to be professional, what it means to be elitist, and things far more important than your goddamned writing. 

 

If you follow this Blog regularly, then you know that for the last two and a half months, I’ve been doing preliminary work on several projects for a big unnamed multimedia company. I’d dreamed of this gig since I was six-years old, and while I’d occasionally moonlighted with them before, I was now being offered the opportunity to write for them full-time.

This type of thing is a far more involved process than you might think. It doesn’t just involve sitting down with your laptop and typing ‘Corporate IP-Man crashes through the wall of the Council of Ten’s secret hideout’. Before you even get to that phase, there are meetings, and meetings about those meetings, and meetings to talk about that meeting, and then meetings that cancel all of the previous meetings, and then meetings to decide upon new meeting, and then more meetings.

I’ve been heavily engaged in that for the last two months, taking several trips to New York City and participating in weekly phone calls and email chains and research and pitch sessions. And as a result, my other work obligations began to suffer. There were novels and novellas to finish, manuscripts to critique, things to mail, Lifetimer Packages to finalize, and a metric fuck-ton of emails to answer, and while I was still making an effort to work on all of those things, the time I could devote to them shrank more and more with each passing week.

Worse, I could see a point coming where it would begin to impact time spent with my youngest son (whom I identify in public as ‘Turtle’ because he doesn’t need his real name out there among the crazies until he turns eighteen and then, like his older brother before him, can decide if he wants people to know who his Dad is or not). I have Turtle Monday through Thursday, which means I have Friday, Saturday and Sunday to write, go on dates with my girlfriend, do laundry, clean house, and all the other things grown-ups and writers do. But giant New York-based multimedia companies don’t work on that schedule, and those weekly phone calls and other things were happening while Turtle was here in the house. Now, he’s old enough that he can play by himself for an hour or two, and he’s also enough of a fan of the corporate characters that he thought it was neat to eavesdrop on conference calls about them. But it still felt, to me at least, that I was giving up precious time with him. I don’t know many divorced dads who have as much time with their children as I’ve had, and I’m very grateful to have a profession that allows that, and a wonderful co-parent who was agreeable to it. These last few years have been truly special. In just a few weeks, Turtle will start big boy school, which means this time comes to an end, and the time I have with him in the future will be even more precious.

Unfortunately, things didn’t work out with the big multimedia company. Last Wednesday, when it came time to become officially married, I made a professional decision not to move forward with it. The reasons why are unimportant, and it would be unprofessional of me to go into them publicly. Suffice to say, it wasn’t anybody’s fault in particular. They weren’t cruel and terrible people who wanted me to sign away my soul. If anything, I just looked at how my other professional and personal obligations had already been impacted, and calculated how they’d be impacted going forward, and then I calculated the dollar amount of that impact, and made the professional decision that everything would be impacted in a way that I wasn’t comfortable with if I continued. And so, I chose to not continue with something I’ve wanted to do since I was six-years old. And I’m totally okay with that, because I know I could have done it if I wanted to. And I still could, at a later date. It was an amicable enough decision on both sides. But right now, there are things that are more important, and they take precedence. The folks at the big multimedia company understood because they are professionals. And I made my decision because I am a professional.

So, that was on Wednesday. I got home Wednesday night, picked up Turtle Thursday morning, and a few hours into our day, his pre-school burned to the ground.

If you’re a parent, then you know as well as I do that special kind of fear that only parents live with. You get twinges of it every time your child climbs a tree unassisted, or rides their bike without training wheels for the first time, or gets their first high fever, or lets go of your hand while crossing the parking lot, or chases their ball toward the street, or walks up to you in the backyard clutching a live, thrashing, pissed off snake in each fist and saying, “Daddy, look what I found. Can we keep them?” Children seem to exist in a perpetual state of wonder and fearlessness about the world, and I sometimes think that we parents must exist in a perpetual state of caution and wariness, because we know that the world has teeth. Sometimes, the world likes to bare those teeth at you when you least expect it.

Copyright Tim Smith (all rights reserved)

According to officials, there were several explosions and the fire spread rapidly. 90% of the building was destroyed. They stopped it before the classroom was engulfed, but the heat and smoke rendered that unusable, as well. Had it not been summer… Had school been in session… Well, there are no words. I’m a writer, and there are no words. But there is a picture. See the table on the left side of the photo? That’s where Turtle sat each and every day.

So, if you tell me that I made the wrong decision, and that as a professional, I should have opted for a business arrangement that that would have been great for my career but that I suspected would impact my time with my kid, I’m gonna refer you back to that picture and invite you to shut the fuck up.

There are things that are more important.

Which brings me to this article by the HWA’s Lisa Morton, which appears on the Los Angeles chapter of the HWA’s Blog.

Go read it. Just Lisa’s article at the top. You can read Hal Bodner’s very good article about creating characters later. I want to talk about Lisa’s article on “Professionalism”. I’ll wait till you’re done.

Done? Okay, good. Because that’s a load of horseshit.

Don’t misunderstand. I don’t have an issue with Lisa, personally. The few times I’ve interacted with her socially, I’ve found her to be quite pleasant. Nor do I have an issue with her fiction (I’ve enjoyed what I’ve read of it). But I’ve got big problems with what was communicated in this article, and I’m not the only one. There’s a great discussion about it over on Laird Barron’s Facebook page. I don’t even have a problem with the HWA, per se, other than that, like any other organization or group entity, it is only as good as the people in charge. It’s sort of like the government. When you’ve got Lincoln or Kennedy in charge, you get advancements in human rights, and when you’ve got Bush or Obama in charge, you get the erosion of the Constitution. But I digress…

The HWA is only as good as the people guiding it, and public perception of the HWA is shaped and formed by the public’s perception of those same stewards. There have been great administrations (Dean Koontz, Charles Grant, Craig Shaw-Gardner, Richard Laymon) and not-so-great administrations (S.P. Somtow, for example). Since around 2005, the public perception of the HWA has been that it’s nothing more than a life-support system for the Bram Stoker Awards. It’s not uncommon to hear horror writers refer to it as the Hardly Writing Association rather than the Horror Writers Association (the sense being that the members focus more on the awards and spend more time talking about writing than they do actually writing). To his credit, current HWA President Rocky Wood has made great strides to right the ship again, and change the public’s perception. And, for the most part, he’s got a great team in place to help make that happen — folks like Linda Addison, Ellen Datlow, Joe McKinney, John Palisano, and Ron Breznay, all of whom are dedicated to seeing that vision come to fruition.

Which is what makes Lisa’s article all the more vexing. Imagine you’re striving to become a horror writer. You’ve made a few sales, and managed to stick with it while juggling family and day job obligations. You made a little extra money this year, maybe from a sale to an anthology, and you decide to join the HWA. Then you run across this condescending article written by the Vice-President of the HWA and published on an HWA-affiliated website, and it’s telling you that, despite all of your hard work, you’re not a professional. You’re a hobbyist. At that point, you might ask yourself, “Why the hell would I want to join this organization?” And you’d be absolutely right to do so.

As Laird Barron said in regards to it, “The distinction between pro and non pro writer is mainly useful if one wants to join a club with particular membership requirements, or when engaging in pissing contests.” Or, as Tim Waggoner said, “No one gets to define someone else. You only get to define you.”

A professional writer can be defined as “you make enough money to support yourself and your loved ones from writing that you don’t need to work a day job”, and while that works in the broadest, most general of terms, it doesn’t really hold up under scrutiny. I’m lucky enough to support myself and my loved ones off my writing. I haven’t had a day job in well over a decade. But does that make me more professional than James A. Moore, who moonlights as a barista? Or the legendary Ramsey Campbell, who, a few years ago, had to take up employment in a bookstore? Or Bev Vincent, who gets up a few hours early and writes before he goes to work? Or Michael Laimo, who manages to write two or three novels a year during his morning and evening commute from home to day job? Does that make them “hobbyists”?

In the article, Lisa states that she stumbled into a discussion group of professional writers, and bemoaned the fact that, in her opinion, they were hobbyists because they, quote “chatted about health and told jokes and moaned about personal problems…anything, in other words, but writing careers.” I’m lucky enough to have a pretty broad local social circle composed of writers, editors, and illustrators. When I have a barbecue in my backyard, and the music is playing, and burgers are grilling, and I’m standing around with Tom and Elizabeth Monteleone, Chet Williamson, J.F. Gonzalez, Robert Swartwood, Kelli Owen, Geoff Cooper, Mary SanGiovanni, Mike Hawthorne, etc.,  you know what we talk about? Our health. Our personal problems. We tell jokes. We talk about our kids. Sure, we talk about writing, too, because we’re writers, but our lives extend beyond that. Nobody wants to go to the foundry worker company picnic on their day off and sit there and talk about work. Fuck that noise. The last thing you want to talk about is work. But apparently, such a mindset marks one as unprofessional.

And then we come to the part of the article that really left me scratching my head — the ten questions you must answer yes to in order for Lisa Morton (and presumably the HWA) to consider you a professional. Complete with the disclaimer that, quote, “If you’ve already glanced at these questions and scoffed, you are a hobbyist.”

Well then, let’s see what I am, shall we?

1. Is your home/work place messy because that time you’d put into cleaning it is better spent writing?

No. I have two sons whom I’d prefer didn’t have to sleep in spiderwebs or eat cat hair in their spaghetti, so I clean the house every Sunday.

2. Do you routinely turn down evenings out with friends because you need to be home writing instead?

No. I do occasionally, if there’s a pressing deadline, but not “routinely”. Writing is primarily a solitary endeavor, but there’s a danger involved in living and existing inside your own head. A writer needs to get out and socialize, if only to experience real life and real people so that they can then imbue their stories and characters with more realism. But also because if you spend all your time alone, you’ll turn into a drooling, gibbering mushroom.

3. Do you turn off the television in order to write?

No. I always write with the television (or music) on in the background.

4. Would you rather receive useful criticism than praise?

Yes.

5. Do you plan vacations around writing opportunites (sic) (either research or networking potential)?

No. When I’m on vacation with my loved ones, the last thing I’m thinking about is “networking potential” I’m instead thinking about what an awesome day it was on the beach, and I wish we didn’t have to go back home tomorrow, and that seafood restaurant we ate at last night was really good. Now, in the course of these events, a story idea might present itself to me (in fact, that happens often) and I may, in fact, begin working on it after everyone else has gone to sleep, but the primary goal of a family vacation should be just that — family.

6. Would you rather be chatting about the business of writing with another writer than exchanging small talk with a good friend?

No. In fact, I often want to stab people like that in the eyes.

7. Have you ever taken a day job that paid less money because it would give you more time/energy/material to write?

Sort of. Until I began writing full time, I worked a dozen different jobs: foundry, stockroom, truck driver, telemarketer, daycare, janitor, data entry, etc. All of them were a means to an end — something to pay the bills until I could pay those same bills with what I earned as a writer.

8. Are you willing to give up the nice home you know you could have if you devoted that time you spend writing to a more lucrative career?

No. And in truth, I don’t really understand this question. What defines a “nice home”? Are we talking about material things like new kitchen cabinets and a perfectly landscaped lawn? Or are we talking about warmth and comfort and safety? I like to think I have a nice home. I enjoy it and my children do, too. I guess there are some who might look at it and say, “You live in a fucking cabin on top of a mountain. You have to burn firewood for heat! What are you, Darryl Dixon from Walking Dead?” But it works for me. It’s a nice home because it’s where the people I love gather — even if it doesn’t have vinyl siding.

9. Have you done all these things for at least five years?

No, because so far, I’ve only answered yes to one of your questions. But I have been writing full time for closing in on fifteen years. Does that qualify me as a professional, or am I still considered a hobbyist?

10. Are you willing to live knowing that you will likely never meet your ambitions, but you hold to those ambitions nonetheless?

Well sure, but that’s just human nature, isn’t it? Everyone has dreams. Everyone has things they strive for and aspire to. Earlier this week, I made a professional decision to walk away from mine, because it was the right thing to do for both my loved ones AND my career.

But I guess I’m just a hobbyist.

Here’s the thing, kids. A professional writer is not deemed so by how much they get paid per word, or how many words they produce, or how many awards they’ve won, or what position they hold in a writer’s organization, or how much networking they do at conventions. A professional writer does one thing — they treat their writing professionally. They produce. They edit. They constantly strive to get better. They sit their ass down in a chair and put their fingers on a keyboard and they type.

A professional writer spends more time writing than they do talking about writing.

Now, it’s almost 11am. I need to get a few thousand words done on this novella. Then I’m going to clean the house, play cards with my oldest son, call my girlfriend, and perhaps finish the evening off by reading a good book. My name is Brian Keene, and I am a hobbyist. So far, that’s worked pretty well for me. As always, your mileage may vary…

 

AND MORE TO COME…

Just a sampling of the authors for next year’s Scares That Care Charity Horror Convention. Look for more to be announced soon. Complete details HERE

Scares That Care Weekend Tickets On Sale

Back in June, I told you about next year’s Scares That Care Weekend in Williamsburg, VA. Tickets are on sale now. The cost for a weekend pass is $40.00 and single day passes are $25.00 each. Children 10 and under are free with a paid adult admission. Click here to purchase passes through Ticket Leap – You’ll receive an email within 48 hours of purchasing with your bar-coded E-tickets. The hotel is more than 50% sold out. To reserve your room, call 1-800-222-8733. Mention Group Code: STC to get the group discount. Or click here to book online. Be sure to click Add Special Rate Code. Then enter STC in the Group Code box to get the discounted rate.

Pinterest

For those of you who enjoy Pinterest, I’ve set up a little section for myself. Come say hi.

2013 Comix Connection Creator Cookout

Every year, Comix Connection (Central Pennsylvania’s pop-culture mecca) hosts an annual Creator Cookout, during which comic book creators and novelists talk, sign, and cook for fans while taking donations for the Central PA Food Bank.

This year’s Creator Cookout is on Saturday, August 24th at Comix Connection 6200 Carlisle Pike, Suite C, Mechanicsburg, PA 17050. Creators in attendance will include myself, Mike Hawthorne, J.F. Gonzalez, Mary SanGiovanni, Andrew Griffith, Dirk Shearer, Jess Eppley, Brandon Perlow, Karl Bollers, and possibly Rick Leonardi. All of us will be happy to sign stuff for you, chat with you, etc. As always, Mike Hawthorne will be manning the grill. Bring a donation of canned food for the Central PA food bank, and you’ll be entered into a prize drawing (one entry per each food item donated).