Curtis Edmonds's Blog, page 22

Donating “Rain on Your Wedding Day” Royalties to Boston Children’s Hospital

In response to the April 15 bombing at the Boston Marathon, I am donating ALL the royalties I have earned so far from RAIN ON YOUR WEDDING DAY to Boston Childrens Hospital, which is treating the youngest victims. As I write that, that’s a little under a hundred dollars.



I would like to bump that up a bit, so I’m including all royalties I earn today and tomorrow as well. (I would stretch that out, but I have a free promotion starting on Thursday with Kindle Direct Publishing that I can’t reschedule.) So if you haven’t bought a copy, and would like to help, well, you can.

Sales Figures

The first thing I have to tell you, even before I break this down into the nuts and bolts, is that I am NOT complaining about any of this. There are people – you’ve probably seen the articles on Salon – who have been going around lately complaining about their sales as an independent author, and that they haven’t yet been able to make enough money for a weekend trip to Atlantic City, much less a cushy retirement on Barbados. This is not that kind of piece. I can’t say that more stridently. I am perfectly happy and content with the sales that I have made so far. I am not going to be perfectly happy and content with this level of sales forever, mind you, but these are still early days and it’s a marathon and not a sprint.

The other thing to keep in mind is that I have spent an ungodly amount of money so far on editing and cover design and suchlike. I am nowhere near breaking even on this project – even if I did ten times the sales I’ve done so far, I wouldn’t be close.

Okay, here goes. I put my debut novel, RAIN ON YOUR WEDDING DAY, up on Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing on February 21, mostly by mistake. That is to say, I planned to launch it on March 1, but it turns out that you can’t set a KDP book up for pre-sale like you can for a regular ordinary book. So sales started in February, and have continued through today, like so:

Month
Total Sales and Borrows
Total Royalties


February 2013
9 sales, one borrow
$20.58


March 2013
18 sales, one borrow
$38.43


April 2013 (to date)
13 sales, one borrow
$28.42 (estimate)

Total (to date)
40 sales, three borrows
$87.43 (estimate)

This doesn’t include 8 paperback sales, which have netted me about $10 or so, so factor that in there, too. (I have yet to see a nickel of this money, mind you.)

What I’ve learned so far:

If you check your KDP numbers more than once a day, you are going to make yourself ill.
Enrolling in KDP, in and of itself, does very little for you. I have made most of these sales out of my personal network (hi, guys!) and a couple of sales to people that I’ve run across on Twitter. That’s been pretty much it. Going Amazon-exclusive hasn’t been all that helpful so far.
I do not think that using Twitter as novel-selling tool works all that well. I have been getting about thirty hits a day from my special book-specific Twitter account to my Amazon page, and I haven’t gotten that many sales out of it, if any. I am told that it works well, and I think it does work for some folks, but I am kind of turned off by it. (I have bought maybe three books in my whole life after reading a tweet about them, and none of them were self-published.)

So I’m doing the next thing on the list of things you’re supposed to do, and that is to do a KDP promotion. It’s advertised as being the best way to promote flagging sales, and why I wouldn’t call the sales I’ve gotten “flagging,” well, Lord knows I could use more.

So, from April 18 to April 22, RAIN ON YOUR WEDDING DAY will be FREE as a Kindle book.

I have put in to some of the sites that advertise free Kindle books to help get the word out, and I’ll come back and post next week about the numbers I get out of that whole experience. Should be fun.

It’s Pimento Cheese Time, Losers

I have two daughters, and one of them is stubborn. I mean, I guess, all kids are stubborn, but this one is, like, super-hyper-stubborn and won’t do a thing unless she wants to or is bribed sufficiently. Anyway, it is that great time of year where the kids don’t have to wear their heavy winter jackets, which is great because it’s so much harder to buckle them into their car seats when they’re in the jackets. They get to wear their spring jackets.

Except that the stubborn child won’t, for the sensible reason that her spring jacket doesn’t fit her anymore. (Genetics, shall we say, have not smiled on the stubborn child.) She insists on wearing the bulky winter jacket. Under normal circumstances, this means that we put up with a somewhat elevated level of whining. But these are not normal circumstances, or so my wife told me.

“Since I have that bridal shower to go to on Sunday,” she said, “why don’t I take the children to the outlet mall on Saturday? That’ll give you a little down time.”

I should have made a bit of mental calculus at this point. I could use that time to mulch. To build the shelves in the garage. To put together that little table for the paper recycling. To put my next mosaic project together. To promote my novel. But I did none of these things, because this Saturday is Masters Saturday, and I’m making pimento cheese, losers.

YOUR DELICIOUS PIMENTO CHEESE RECIPE

Start with the realization that pimento cheese is by-God unhealthy for you, and you shouldn’t eat it, ever, except during Masters weekend, when you have to watch golf anyway, but only one day because your wife’s cousin’s fiancée is doing her bridal shower on Masters Sunday, which sounds like a good idea except that you don’t have babysitting and have to entertain two energetic four-year-olds by yourself, and it’s hard to watch multiple hours of a golf tournament and do that.
Setting that aside. Yes. Pimento cheese is unhealthy. Sitting in front of a television set all afternoon is unhealthy. But if you limit your pimento cheese intake to one day a year, and your daytime TV-watching to the Masters and the NFL on fall Sundays and the occasional baseball game, you can handle it. I don’t recommend it, mind you, but it can be done.
You want to start with a bag of grated American cheese from the supermarket. Yes, of course, there are better cheeses out there. Of course there are. But don’t waste them on pimento cheese. Pimento cheese is prole food of the highest order, right up there with Beanie Weenies and Cool Ranch Doritos. Anyone who puts fancy cheese into pimento cheese is a fool and a poser and you can write that down in your datebook and sign my name to it. Use the cheapest cheese you can find.
Open the sad little plastic envelope and decant as much of that cheap, sorry cheese as you think you can stomach into a bowl. Then drain a little glass jar of pimentos and pour the pimentos right on top. (That’s how they come, the pimentos, in a little glass jar.)
Take an equivalent amount of Heinz india relish and pour that on top, too. If all you have is sweet pickle relish, that’s fine, just make sure it’s drained. If you have some jalapenos sitting around, put those in, too. Some places sell sweet pickled jalapenos, so you can use those instead of the relish if you chop them up a little.
Ideally, in a perfect world, you will have some Miracle Whip hanging around in your sad little condiment rack in your refrigerator. Put a good bit of that in, maybe like a cup or so, who knows? Pimento cheese isn’t really about measuring stuff. If you don’t have that, use Sandwich Spread. If you don’t have either, you can use mayo in a pinch, but don’t mess around with stuff like gourmet wasabi mayonnaise or anything like that. Be sensible.
If you don’t have Miracle Whip or a reasonable substitute, don’t go to the store, because you might miss Tiger Woods hitting the ball into the pine straw, and if there is anything better than watching a really good golfer hitting a really bad shot and landing it in an awkward location, I don’t know what it is. Schadenfreude isn’t the half of it. Anyway, you probably have other creamy salad dressings in your fridge. Use that. Start with ranch dressing and work your way down. You don’t want to overwhelm the pimentos or the cruddy cheese with a lot of blue cheese or peppercorn flavor. Use what you have but don’t overdo it.
Mix it all up with a wooden spoon. If your mixture is too thick – if it splinters an ordinary Ruffles chip – then put in a little more dressing. If it is too runny, put in MOAR CHEESE. You’re a grownup. You figure it out.
I went to a fancy-schmancy place in Decatur, Georgia once that served this awesome grilled pimento-cheese sandwich. If you have time, sure, go ahead. Give it a shot. It can’t be any worse than starving to death. But I think it works better as a dip, with strong reinforced ridged potato chips, and a cold Coke or sweet iced tea to drink.

Of course, you don’t have to watch The Masters this way. You can schlep to Augusta if you want to imperil your offspring’s chances of going to a decent college. You can go to Buffalo Wild Wings and eat tepid chicken parts in a sticky sauce with overpriced beer. You can watch it on your iPad while running on a treadmill, drinking a wheatgrass smoothie that will delay your inevitable death by twelve minutes. I am going to sit on my luxurious, super-model approved piece of leather furniture, with a big bowl of artery-clogging pimento cheese and greasy, factory-made potato chips and a sugary beverage, listening to Jim Nantz whispering about the sentimental glories of golfing achievement. And then I am going to miss the final round because I am schlepping my kids through the Philadelphia Zoo. You take life where it finds you.

UPDATE: I do NOT know the secret pimento cheese ingredient. I MUST KNOW. ESPN should be able to find this kind of thing out.

Mark Helprin: The Gates to the City

Every city has its gates, which need not be of stone. Nor need soldiers be upon them or watchers before them At first, when cities were jewels in a dark and mysterious world, they tended to be round and they had protective walls. To enter, one had to pass through gates, the reward for which was shelter from the overwhelming forests and seas, the merciless and taxing expanse of greens, whites and blues — wild and free — that stopped at the city walls.

In time, the ramparts became higher and the gates more massive, until they simply disappeared and were replaced by barriers, subtler than stone, that girded every city like a crown and held in its spirit. Some claim that the barriers do not exist, and disparage them. Although they themselves can penetrate the new walls with no effort, their spirits (which, also, they claim do not exist) cannot, and are left like orphans around the periphery.

To enter a city intact it is necessary to pass through one of the new gates. They are far more difficult to find than their solid predecessors, for they are tests, mechanisms, divides, and implementations of justice. There once was a map, now long gone, one of the ancient charts upon which colorful animals sleep or rage. Those who saw it said that in its illuminations were figures and symbols of the gates. The east gate was that of acceptance of responsibility, the south gate that of the desire to explore, the west gate that of devotion to beauty, and the north gate that of selfless love. But they were not believed. It was said that a city with entryways like these could not exist, because it would be too wonderful. Those who decide such things decided that whoever had seen the map had only imagined it, and the entire matter was forgotten, treated as if it were a dream and ignored. This, of course, freed it to live forever.

– Mark Helprin, Winter’s Tale

Do not expect me to explain here why I’m writing about Mark Helprin’s work. If you’ve read his three great novels, Winter’s Tale, A Soldier of the Great War, and Memoir from Antproof Case, or even his sharp, crisp editorials for the Wall Street Journal, you know why. If you haven’t, the hope is that you will, and soon. My goal here is to illustrate certain recurring themes in his novels, themes that are best explicated by the passage quoted above.

The East Gate: Acceptance of Responsibility

In A Soldier of the Great War, Helprin deals with (among many other things) the collapse of the WWI Italian front described by Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms. Guaraglia, a Roman harness-maker, deserts through no fault of his own after the conclusion of a doomed secret mission. He returns to his home and family in Rome, which is full of deserters and is full of soldiers trying to capture them. The deserters are hiding out in the catacombs, but Guaraglia knows he must protect his family, must continue to earn a living. In a desperate and painful act of sacrifice, he saws off his own leg so that he can pass as a wounded veteran. The ruse does not work, and he dies in prison with one prayer, “God protect my children.”

The narrator of Memoir from Antproof Case accepts the responsibility of protection as well, and understands that the first person you have to protect is yourself, which, as he says, “was my sole responsibility from an early age.” Moreover, after his parents die, he assumes the responsibility of protecting them, because they no longer have the capacity to protect themselves. After years of misdirected effort, he finally identifies the culprit in their murders, his elderly, wealthy employer. He confronts the tycoon in his room, resulting in a confession and a plea for forgiveness that cannot be answered.

In Helprin’s world, accepting responsibility is, well, a gateway, rather than a destination. Accepting responsibility means accepting and welcoming the ordeals that go along with that responsibility. Helprin characters are always undertaking ordeals, from the protagonist of the short story The Schreuderspitze, who climbs (or does he?) an immense Alpine peak with no training or experience, to the unlikely and positively hilarious catapult that’s built in Winter’s Tale to the gold robbery that provides the spine of Memoir from Antproof Case. And they’re not simple ordeals, either, but immensely complicated tests of character, perseverance, and planning.

The flip side of the gate is in the occasional characters that are totally, gleefully irresponsible. The old order scribe, Orfeo, from A Soldier of the Great War is the best example. Orfeo is similar to nothing in literature save Ignatius Reilly from A Confederacy of Dunces, except that Orfeo is small where Reilly is gargantuan. Orfeo is a humble, pathetic little man whose career has gone the way of the buggy whip, until the Great War places him in a Godlike position to dispense chaos and trouble by making nonsense of all the Italian military orders. Orfeo, the “fount of all chaos.” symbolizes every insane impulse from Higher Up that sends brave soldiers on the ordeals I talked about a second ago.

The South Gate: Desire to Explore

This is mostly covered by the nameless protagonist in Memoir from Antproof Case, who is an adventurer at heart in the body of a bank executive. (Antproof Case starts off with one of the best riffs on Melville ever; “Call me Oscar Progresso. Or, for that matter, call me anything you want, as Oscar Progresso is not my name.”) Antproof Case is a hilarious, picaresque journey through the life of a well-traveled rogue. It’s a novel that trips back and forth among New York, North Africa, Europe and Brazil with the same amazing speed that it lurches back and forth through the decades of the twentieth century. However, here, the spectacular travel and the offbeat humor and the long, meandering story are combined with writing of amazing insight. Here, Helprin tells us about horseback riding in the Rockies, switching from a traveler’s tale to a profound metaphor:

The way to cross fences was to cut the two upper wires and step the horses over the one that remained. Then you used six inches to a foot of the wire you carried (depending on the tension of the wire you cut) to mend the damage, and you went on. You did it as carefully as you could, out of respect and courtesy, and as the toll for crossing land not your own. We took a little lesson in how to do it properly, and the cuts we left behind were put back together with many more than the required twists, which is more or less what I wanted to do with my life and what I have not been able to do, but what I may do yet.

The West Gate: Devotion to Beauty

At this point, it is best to illustrate Helprin’s devotion to beauty by quoting an indefinably beautiful passage. You can find them anywhere you look, because no one transmits the shining beauty of language like Helprin. This is one I picked almost at random, from Winter’s Tale, about the great white horse Athansor and his journey, early in the book, from Brooklyn to Manhattan:

A thousand streets lay before him, silent but for the sound of the gemlike wind. Driven with snow, white, and empty, they were a maze for his delight as the newly arisen wind whistled across still untouched drifts and rills. He passed empty theaters, counting-houses, and forested wharves where the snow-lined spars looked like long black groves of pine. He passed dark factories and deserted parks, and rows of little houses where wood just fired filled the air with sweet reassurance. He passed the frightening common cellars full of ragpickers and men without limbs. The door of a market bar was flung open momentarily for a torrent of boiling water that splashed all over the street in a cloud of steam. He passed (and shied from) dead men lying in the round ragged coffins of their own frozen bodies… And he was seldom out of sight of the new bridges, which had married beautiful womanly Brooklyn to her rich uncle, Manhattan; had put the city’s hand out to the country; and were the end of the past because they spanned not only distance and deep water but dreams and time.

Here’s another one from Winter’s Tale, where Helprin finds beauty in words that aren’t even words:

“You see this oscillating slotted bar that’s rubbing up too close to the powl and ratchet of this here elliptic trammel? That, my friends, distorts the impact load on the second hobbing, up there, which is applied to that helical gear. But the trouble is, it isn’t. Without that little helical gear, the antiparallel linkage on the friction drive won’t disengage, and the wormwheeled pantograph can’t come into play. Clear so far?”

Of course, I could keep quoting passages like this forever. Helprin’s work is so consistently beautiful and amazingly precise that it’s a temptation just to let his work speak for itself. But “devotion to beauty” refers to much more than Helprin’s style; it’s the hallmark of his best characters. Alessandro Giuliani, the protagonist of A Soldier of the Great War is the best example. Growing up in a lovely garden (graced with the presence of the lovely Lia Bellati), he becomes a professor of aesthetics, and then must spend the rest of his life arguing with peons over whether aesthetics is necessary or useful, or so it seems.

After two and a half years on the front lines of the Great War in the 19th River Guard (Alessandro having enlisted in the Navy in the hopeful — but utterly wrong — assumption that he’d be safe from the infantry in the Navy), he is all but incarcerated in a naval base near Venice. He’s been away from beauty for what seems like two lifetimes, and is hungry for it, hungry to see Venice for just one hour before death. He steals an officer’s hat and dispatch bag and, disguised as a courier, heads into the city, knowing he could be shot as a deserter if discovered:

As he crossed the Grand Canal he greedily began to take in all things not military. His eye seized on every tendril on every plant, every curve or flute in iron or stone work, the most faded patches of color, women in clothes with sweeping lines, restaurant kitchens going full blast, and children, some of whom he picked up and kissed, for he had not seen a child in more than a year.

He knew Venice. A thousand places came back to him as he walked through the streets. Them he remembered that he was allowed to eat… Alessandro ate, and as he ate he sang and talked to himself. The waiter cleared his table and brought a plate of smoked salmon, a grilled filet mignon, and a portion of funghi porcini, along with another carafe of wine and a bottle of sparkling mineral water.

“Things still exist,” Alessandro said.

“Yes yes yes,” the waiter said.

There’s devotion to beauty for you.

The North Gate: Selfless Love

To keep your love alive, you must be willing to be obstinate, and irrational, and true, to fashion your entire life as a construct, a metaphor, a fiction, a device for the exercise of faith. Without this, you will live like a beast and have nothing but an aching heart. With it, your heart, although broken, will be full, and you will stay in the fight until the very last.

– Memoir from Antproof Case

There are two great love stories at the heart of the magical Winter’s Tale, a century-skipping tale of the rise and fall and rebirth of New York. (An eerily prophetic book it is, too.) There are several passionate love stories in Memoir from Antproof Case, as the narrator describes his life and passions. But for my money, the most beautiful is Alessandro Giuliani’s, as he searches Italy for the woman he thought he lost in battle. Alessandro falls blindly in love – literally – with a hospital nurse who he believes was killed in the bombing of a hospital. He finds that, miraculously, the nurse has survived but believes him to be dead. With the smallest of clues and the barest of hopes, he watches and waits for her by a fountain, where his infant son once sailed a boat playfully. He finds her, they are reunited, and married:

She wore a very simple wedding dress; we could afford nothing more. The ring was so thin that it looked like wire. She had no other jewelry, but her hair crowned her face, and through the front of the dress you could see the top of her chest, which was always so beautiful, especially when she blushed. Underneath the satin lace, it looked like a bed or roses.

Just to think about her makes me happy. When I die, no one will think about her ever again, which is why I’ve been holding on. On the other hand, if they’ve all gone somewhere, should I not be delighted to join them, even if it means nothing except to be extinguished? At least I’ll have the knowledge, as I slip into the dark, that I’m following, and that I have been loyal in my devotions.

I encourage you to develop a devotion for the works of Mark Helprin. I can guarantee that your loyalty will be repaid in full.



* Note: this piece originally appeared at Epinions.com.

Lord Voldemort Makes Some Basic Mistakes

Now that the Harry Potter series is over, it may be instructive to go back and see, exactly, how and why Lord Voldemort…

SPOILER ALERT: The following contains serious, massive spoilers for the book and the movie, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and maybe the other books if you haven’t read those. You have been warned. Read no farther!

As I was saying, to see exactly how and why Lord Voldemort failed to follow the simple rules set forth in the epochal “Top 100 Things I’d Do If I Ever Became an Evil Overlord” list. The following is inspired by that list (and hopefully doesn’t infringe on it in any way, or at least I hope not). This is the Top Things I’d Do If I Were Lord Voldemort.

I will stop calling myself “Lord Voldemort.” I will pick a name that is equally evil, of course, but less obvious, like “Lord Simon Cowell” or “Lord Scott Boras.”
When I pick a new name, it will not be an anagram of my real name. My enemies have the same access to the Internet Anagram Server that I do.
I will stop calling my loyal minions the “Death Eaters.” Instead, I will call them “The Funky Bunch.”
The next time I have a chance to kill Harry Potter, I will not use the killing spell that has backfired on me four different times. I will shoot him with a gun.
If one of my Horcruxes is kept in the vault of Gringotts, I will take special care not to torture any goblin who may have access to said vault.
If I have only one Horcrux left, and it is in my pet snake, I will not take that pet snake into battle with me. I will entrust the snake to the care of my local zoo or herpetological association during the course of the battle.
I will not insist that I alone be able to kill Harry Potter myself. If one of my Funky Bunch has the chance to kill him, I will allow him to do so. Then I will kill that person and take credit for killing Harry Potter anyway. It’s not like anyone would ever be able to contradict me.
If I announce that Harry Potter should give himself up, and come into the Forbidden Forest alone, unarmed, and he does so, I will not immediately kill him. I will wonder why he did something so foolish, and ask him so.
If I come up with a great idea like giving one of my Funky Bunch a silver hand that strangles them the second they betray me, I will insist that all of my Funky Bunch get the same silver hand and not just one person.
If I do manage to kill Harry Potter, I will check to see that he is dead myself, and not let one of my Funky Bunch do it if I have threatened the child of that person in the last few days. Then I will shoot Harry Potter with my gun, just in case.
If I acquire a wand that is rumored to have unstoppable killing power, I will try it out on one of my Funky Bunch first before using it on Harry Potter.
If I am interrogating a prisoner with vital information, and one of my Funky Bunch signals me that they have captured Harry Potter, I will pay attention to the signal instead of continuing to interrogate the prisoner. I am the Dark Lord, and I ought to be able to multitask.
I will not let Severus Snape become headmaster of Hogwarts just because he asks me to. Double agents cannot be trusted. Instead, I will send him out to kill Harry Potter and let one of my Funky Bunch take the job.
I will not leave my diadem Horcrux lying around the Room of Requirement where anyone can find it. I will donate it to the British Museum, and chances are that they’ll just store it in a vault somewhere, which is fine by me.
I will not have all my Horcruxes be completely obvious magical heirlooms. At least one of them will be something that you would never think would be a Horcrux, like Nelson’s Column, or Tony Blair’s hairpiece.

You know, it’s a wonder that Voldemort got through seven books, when you think about it.

The Shirtless Cowboy Principle

Right now, I am trying to find as many people as I can find to write reviews for RAIN ON YOUR WEDDING DAY, on the sound principle that more is better. What I am finding out is that a lot of the skills I developed in querying literary agents apply in asking for people to write reviews (follow guidelines, pay attention to what people are interested in, and be humble, friendly, and non-threatening). And that’s a very helpful realization – at least until I realized that, well, I wasn’t that good at querying, and that’s why I’m self-published. Erp.

Anyway, one of the rules I developed when I was querying was the “shirtless cowboy rule.” When you go to visit the pages of literary agents, lots of them have cover images of the books that they represent. My rule was that if an agent I was looking at had two or more books that featured cover art with shirtless cowboys, I wasn’t going to query that agent. And if I’m looking at a book blog, and the blogger has reviewed multiple books with shirtless cowboys on their covers, I am not going to send that blogger a review request. It’s that simple.

Now, let me be clear about this. I have nothing against people who buy, read, or write shirtless cowboy books. Not one thing. This is a free country. If you want to write steamy, Western romance novels that feature the glistening, tight abdominal muscles of cowboys, you go right ahead and do that. If that’s the kind of book that you want to review, well, God bless your heart. If that’s the kind of book that you really, really enjoy reading, I hope that you get a lot of them to read and that they’re well-written and that the heroine gets, well, lassoed. (If she’s into that.)

I have not one thing in this world negative to say about shirtless-cowboy books, the people who write them, the agents who represent them, the bloggers who write about them, and the readers who read them. I wish the genre a long and prosperous life. And I am hopeful that the people who write, agent, review, and read such things have no serious objections to me reading the things I like to read (eighteenth-century historical ficion, fact-based World War II stories, military sci-fi). We’re all writers and readers and reviewers together, right? Of course we are.

The point I am making (I have one, I promise) is that my book, RAIN ON YOUR WEDDING DAY, doesn’t have a shirtless cowboy. (There’s a very minor character who is a hunky landscaper, but he doesn’t have any dialogue or anything.) My main character is a sixtysomething hulking former NFL player with bad knees and severe emotional problems. He’s not anyone’s dream date, much less anyone’s romantic fantasy, and he couldn’t hog-tie a calf on a bet.

All I am really saying is that you have to know your audience. If I was writing a book about a shirtless cowboy, I would totally be seeking out agents who represent shirtless-cowboy books, and readers and reviewers who like such books. But I’m not, and I don’t. Similarly, if I’m looking at an agent’s blog, and it’s chock-full of vampires, dragons, and vampire dragons, I’m not going to burn any pixels sending a review request. It’s not a good use of my time or the reviewer’s.

It makes it a little harder, I suppose, writing a book that doesn’t have a clear and well-defined audience. But at this point, all I can do is hold on to the reins, spur my mighty stallion, and ride on into the sunset, sweat glistening off my mighty chest muscles, headed back to the hacienda where there’s a nondescript woman with regular features waiting for me.

Sometimes It’s Not Better To Ask Permission

Probably the best article written on the issue of whether or not you should quote lyrics in novels (let alone self-published novels, forsooth) was by Blake Morrison in The Guardian:

My editor, reasonably enough, was more cautious, and at the last minute someone from the publishing house helpfully secured the permissions on my behalf. I still have the invoices. For one line of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”: £500. For one line of Oasis’s “Wonderwall”: £535. For one line of “When I’m Sixty-four”: £735. For two lines of “I Shot the Sheriff” (words and music by Bob Marley, though in my head it was the Eric Clapton version): £1,000. Plus several more, of which only George Michael’s “Fastlove” came in under £200. Plus VAT. Total cost: £4,401.75. A typical advance for a literary novel by a first-time author would barely meet the cost.

Anyway, read the whole thing. That’s what I did, and I systematically went through my novel (RAIN ON YOUR WEDDING DAY, available on Amazon, and it would not kill you to read it and review it and I am going to stop before I start sounding desperate) and took out every reference to every pop song I could find. I even took out an adorable little conversational nugget where the characters quote the title of “Do, Re, Mi” from The Sound of Music because I didn’t want to run even the slightest risk of getting sued. (I am a lawyer by trade.)

The editing process wasn’t that awful, and I don’t think that taking the lyrics out of the novel hurt it any. But there was one lyric that I wanted to include in the novel–not actually within the text of the novel but as an epigram at the start of it. I had the perfect song to use. It was one of my all-time favorites. The lyrics commented perfectly on the ending of the novel, and its message. All I had to do was ask permission. It seemed easy enough.

I started the process last October. I went to the ASCAP database and did a search, and was able to find the song easily enough. The first problem was that there were two different people listed as being the rights-holders for the song. One was a large music publisher, and the other was a large record company. I figured that the music publisher would be the best bet. I sent an e-mail and a paper backup.

About a month later, I got a nice e-mail from someone at the music publisher, telling me that they no longer had the rights to the song. Well, all right. I sent another e-mail to the record company, again asking for permission. I heard back from them six weeks later, and they told me that they didn’t have the rights to the song any longer. However, they were able to tell me who had the rights to the song–a different music publisher. (I just checked the ASCAP database, and the entry still doesn’t reflect the current rights-holder.)

This music publisher had an online form to fill out. They wanted to know basic information about the book, some of which I could provide right away, and some that I couldn’t. The key piece of information that I didn’t have was the publication date.

I knew by this time that I was going to self-publish, and that meant that I could choose any publication date that I wanted. The site said that the process would take about six weeks. I had no idea at that time (this was mid-December) as to when the book would actually come out. At this point, I didn’t have a cover design or an e-book file. I had no idea how long it would take to get either one of these things.

So I guessed. I said that the book would be published on March 15, 2013. I figured I would have a response on the permission request by mid-February at the latest. I went ahead with the cover design, and then planned on hiring a freelancer to do the actual e-book design in February.

I didn’t get a response after six weeks. I sent a nice e-mail note to the publisher. I never heard back. I thought about an alternate epigram, and settled on a Bible verse. I told the freelancer who I hired to do the e-book design that it was a placeholder, and that I would hear any day now from the publisher to put the real lyrics into the book. Except I didn’t hear back.

I sent another e-mail to the publisher, explaining the situation, asking for a response, and providing a deadline. I never heard back. I got the files for the e-book and the paperback version in late February, and I was able to get them uploaded to Amazon without much in the way of problems. Once my deadline passed, I was reconciled to the idea that I wouldn’t get to use the lyrics in the novel. I approved all the files on Amazon and the book was ready for release. I had the official release date on March 1, and started the wonderful process of self-promotion.

So, five days later, I got a quote for the permission to use the lyrics.

I thought about it. I could have updated the paperback version; it wouldn’t have been that hard. I could have figured out how to edit the e-book files. But I didn’t want to spend the time to do it, and I didn’t want to run the risk of fouling up the formatting of the book for such a small change. It didn’t seem worth it at that point. (The cost of permission wouldn’t have been all that much–certainly within my budget.)

The clincher, for me, was that the permission would only be good for the first 10,000 copies. I haven’t sold a hundred copies yet, but I am hopeful that the book will do well and that it will sell quite a bit. What happens if I sell that many? Do I have to take out the lyrics?

I said no. Part of it was to save the money, but part of it was that it wasn’t as important to me to have those lyrics in my book. Part of it was that it didn’t feel like a lucky thing to do to take out the Bible verse that I used. Part of it was that I just didn’t feel like messing with the files.

The ironic thing, of course, is that if I had stuck to the release date that I had told the publisher, I would have gotten the permission in plenty of time.

My takeaway from all this:

1) The entire process is a pain and you’re better off not even messing with it.

2) Nobody will ever notice if you leave out a song lyric.

3) The people who handle permissions are nice enough people, and professional, but they work on their timeline, not yours.

4) It will take longer than you think. I made the initial ask in October; the entire process took five months.

5) I have a sneaking suspicion that the music publishing world doesn’t quite have a handle on e-books just yet.

It is better, in this instance, to ask permission rather than seek forgiveness. But it still isn’t easy. Avoid the whole issue if you can.

A Day for Celebration

The summer before last, my wife and I took a week off and drove around Central Texas. One of the major landmarks we stopped by was the Central Market in Austin, where we stocked up on snacks and bottled water and suchlike for the next leg of the trip. Right by the entrance, they had bottles of Dublin Dr Pepper – which, as all true Dr Pepper fans know, is made with pure cane sugar instead of high-fructose corn syrup. (Or at least it was; Dublin Bottling Works isn’t allowed to make Dr Pepper anymore, which is a crime and a shame and another story anyway.) I got a six-pack, and drank two bottles in Galveston. The last night we were there, I got a half-pint of Blue Bell Homemade Vanilla ice cream and made the best Dr Pepper float that there ever was. I brought three bottles back with me to New Jersey. I drank two of them at some point, but I left one in the pantry, unopened.

What I said I was going to do was to wait and drink the last bottle on the day that I got a literary agent.

It’s almost two years later, and I still don’t have an agent. I have a big stack of rejection e-mails, and an even longer list of people who didn’t even respond to my query letters. Chances are that I’m not ever going to have an agent, or a contract with a big publisher.

What I do have is a book, RAIN ON YOUR WEDDING DAY, that’s on Amazon and racking up a few sales. I have a Twitter account that’s twittering away the news about the novel, and I’m hopeful that a few people will check it out and do some nice reviews, and that I’ll be able to find and develop a readership. I might even be able to break even if I manage to get the word out effectively enough, and if people like the book well enough. (I can do something about the first part of this, but not the second.)

About all I can say for the querying process is that it helped to make RAIN ON YOUR WEDDING DAY a better book, and that at least it’s over with. I can concentrate on trying to figure out what works in terms of marketing, and whether I can self-promote it effectively without actually breaking out in hives.

But the most important psychological step I can make, at least this week, is giving myself at least a tiny break. My book is out. It’s a good book, and I worked hard on it to make it better. It’s going to get some good reviews, and hopefully a few blurbs. It’s going to make me a little bit of money, or I hope so. I’m going to have to wait a little bit longer for the book to be the success that I wanted it to be, but that’s all right. I have time. I can be patient. (I have two three-year-old girls in the house, you can bet that I can be patient.)

I have a nice chicken stew percolating in the kitchen, and I’m going to put it together with some egg noodles and have a nice dinner tonight. And I am going to drink that bottle of Dublin Dr Pepper, at long last.

The Blade, the Sharpness of It

For Trixie, it was the blade, the sharpness of it, the way that the light caught it, the sound that it made as it whistled through the wind, the wound that it made in the soft, yielding wood. It was the blade, again and again, relentless, separating softness from softness, cutting through the sinews of the wood to reveal the heart of what used to be a tree. That is what drew her, and we didn’t know.

We found out.

Curtis Edmonds, Rain on Your Wedding Day

http://bit.ly/RoYWD

Thor Slaymaster’s National Treasure

“No,” Thor Slaymaster said.

“It’s an important mission, Mr. Slaymaster. The President knows you’re the best person to handle it.”

Thor Slaymaster stayed silent. He knew if he did this long enough, the little man with the neatly parted hair, the horn-rimmed glasses, and the briefcase would go away, allowing Thor Slaymaster to recalibrate his air-defense system.

“Satellite imagery says the National Gallery is still intact. We know the Matisse was being stored in the sub-basement. We have the security codes. What we need now is someone to retrieve it, and you’re the best qualified person to do that.”

The State Department official was correct, but only because Washington, D.C. was the largest zombie population cluster in North America. Although the zombie outbreak had been largely confined to the Southeast, the hardiest zombie tribes had made their way to Washington and had settled there. Determined opposition had kept the zombies contained within the Beltway, but penetrating deep within Washington itself was a challenge for even the most determined zombie hunter.

“Look, Mr. Slaymaster. The President owes the French Premier a big favor after the incident with the Omega Box. Returning this painting to France is a matter of national honor. He has instructed me to give you whatever you need to accomplish this mission.”

Charlie stuck her head out from the ordnance room. “Does that include a new helicopter? Mil-spec?”

“I can have one here within the hour,” the State Department representative said.

“He’ll go,” Charlie said.

“Charlie,” Thor Slaymaster said. “This is not your decision.”

“If I have to hear you complain about your old helicopter one more time, you will have a different decision to make, one that you won’t like.”

Thor Slaymaster didn’t like being cornered by his girlfriend, the way that he didn’t like movies with subtitles or plain-cake donuts. But there are times when every man has to bow to the inevitable.

“Make sure you get them to fill up the fuel tank on the helicopter first,” Thor Slaymaster said. “You. Tell me about this painting.”

“It is called Pot of Geraniums,” the State Department representative said. “It shows a pink flower with a large green stem in, well, a pot.”

“This is a national treasure?” Thor Slaymaster asked.

“For the French.”

“Remind me never to go there.”

_____

The stretch of open grass between the National Gallery and the Air and Space Museum would have been a perfect place to land a new, mil-spec helicopter, if it wasn’t for the teeming hordes of zombies milling around.

“What do you think?” Charlie asked.

“I think this is a suicide mission,” Thor Slaymaster said.

“You like those.”

“You misunderstand,” Thor Slaymaster said. “I do not like suicide missions. Sometimes, they are necessary. This mission is about retrieving a picture of a flower in a pot. It is not necessary.”

“So, what’s the plan?” Charlie asked. “You want to try going through the roof?”

“Cause a distraction,” Thor Slaymaster said. “Pick the ugliest building you see and blast it.”

“Is that one ugly enough?” Richie the helicopter pilot asked, pointing towards a large pile of crumbling concrete just to the north.

“That’ll do.”

Most of the zombie horde around the Gallery moved towards the smoking rubble of the nearby Hoover Building, but there were still a few stragglers. Charlie fired her chain guns into the remaining zombies, clearing enough open space for a quick landing. From there, it was a straightforward march into the Gallery, interrupted by shotgun blasts and the dying moans of zombies.

Generations of thieves and looters had taken every scrap of artwork out of the Gallery long ago. Thor dashed through the Rotunda, taking care not to step on the few remaining shards of sculpture. A few zombies lingered in the corridors, and Thor dispatched them with his shotgun. He found a stairwell that looked clear of zombies, and jammed the door behind him shut, taking a moment to reload.

To Thor’s surprise, the sub-basement was well-lit. The room where the painting was supposed to be kept opened with a touch. The Matisse was there, sitting on an easel, in plain view.

Thor Slaymaster activated his wireless headset. “It’s a trap, Charlie,” he said.

“Isn’t it usually? Who is this time?”

“One way to find out,” Thor Slaymaster said.

Thor Slaymaster pulled a handgun out of a shoulder holster and took careful aim at the painting. He fired, and the painting toppled off its easel. He waited a long moment for a net to fall from the ceiling, or a cloud of toxic gas to be released, or an explosion. The explosion took a few seconds longer than he expected, and came from a different direction.

“God damn it, Slaymaster,” a very loud voice shouted. “You weren’t supposed to do that!”

Thor Slaymaster turned and found a very large, angry man in the remnants of an Air Force general’s uniform screaming at him.

“I was careful,” Thor Slaymaster said. “I made a tiny hole in the corner. Easy to fix.”

“You were supposed to return that to the god-damned French Ambassador! That was a priceless work of art! A national treasure! The President will be furious!”

“I did not vote for him,” Thor Slaymaster said.

The general’s red face clashed horribly with his ragged blue uniform. “We brought you down here to recruit you. To see if you had what it took to help us reclaim this city from the zombies.”

“This is how you recruit? No wonder the military is losing people.”

“But you’re a loose cannon, Thor Slaymaster. You’re a menace to everyone and everything around you.”

“I was designed that way,” Thor Slaymaster said. “What’s your excuse?”

“You listen to me, Slaymaster,” the general said.

“Why? You haven’t said anything interesting yet.”

“You think you’re tough? I have spent my whole career crawling down the tunnels and subways of this fair city, killing every zombie I saw, just to try to keep some semblance of a national security apparatus up and running. I don’t need you to come down here and tell me jack-squat, Slaymaster.”

“There is no national security, General. There is no nation. All we are is a collection of problems. And most of those problems accumulated right here, in this city, because people refused to face up to their responsibilities.”

“Fancy talk,” the general said, “coming from someone with no real responsibilities.”

Thor Slaymaster smiled a smile fierce enough to cause even a dedicated zombie-hunter to take a step back and reconsider his lifestyle choices. “I am responsible, General. I am responsible to my team. And right now, they are waiting for me. Do you have the real painting?”

The general reached into a nearby file drawer and extracted a hard, cylindrical plastic case. “Here it is. How did you know?”

“You would not have endangered the mission by leaving the real painting in a vulnerable location.”

“Just so,” the general said. He handed the painting to Thor. “You shouldn’t keep your team waiting.”

“Thank you, General. And… good luck, with the whole national-security thing.”

“Good luck to you, Thor Slaymaster, with the whole zombie-killing thing.”

Thor Slaymaster headed back up the stairwell and fired a small rocket into the jammed door at the top of the stairs. When the echoes faded, he reactivated his wireless headset and stepped over a pile of charred zombie corpses. “Coming up, Charlie. Hot LZ. Be ready for pickup.”

(This is another entry in another Chuck Wendig flash fiction contest. My novel, Rain on Your Wedding Day, comes out on March 1. It has, sadly, no Thor Slaymaster content.)