by john | Feb 6, 2015 | Business of publishing, Vampires, Writing
I use Selah Janel’s story in The Big Bad volume 1 as both a cautionary tale on everything NOT to do when submitting to an anthology, as well as a cautionary tale on the benefits of being friends with people in the industry, most notably editors or people who might one day become editors. When Selah and I became friends, I had no intentions of editing anything, much less a series of horror anthologies. But I did, and when it came time to start reading for The Big Bad, I got an email from Selah saying (basically) “I have a story, but I’m running a little late, and a little long. Can I have a couple weeks?” I said “Sure, send it along when it’s ready.” A month later I get another email with a story attached saying (basically) “Here is it, sorry it’s so late, hope you still like me, hope you can use it.”
It was almost exactly 1,000 words OVER the max allowed word count for the anthology. I almost round-filed it immediately, but she was my friend, and that guaranteed her at least one paragraph’s worth of leniency. You can see why I don’t have many friends – it only got her a paragraph. I read it, then waited patiently as Emily (my co-editor and partner in crime on these anthologies) read it. She emailed me and we agreed that the story had done almost every single thing wrong to get included. It was late, it was too long, it was another friggin’ vampire story. We wanted any excuse to hate it.
Sidebar – when you’re accepted into an anthology, after a few acceptances, you stop asking “Really?” and start asking “Where will you put my story?” There are three pieces of prime real estate in an anthology – the first story, which gets read by the most casual readers, the center story, which gets read by a lot of passersby who crack the book open randomly and pick a page, and the final story, which is the closer and wants to be a big finish.
Selah’s story was the closer for Big Bad Vol. 1. It was, quite frankly, one of the best damn vampire stories I’ve ever read. I looked for any excuse not to love it, and she didn’t give me one. I’ve told lots of people at lots of panels at lots of conventions that you can either follow all the rules or be so goddamn amazing that they don’t apply to you. Seals Janel is an amazing writer and I’d read her grocery list. Here’s her story behind the story for Big Bad 2. And no, she didn’t get the closer spot in BB2, we dropped her in the second spot from the beginning, because editors are evil. You see, if you download the free sample from Amazon for the ebook, you’ll get cut off before Selah’s story ends. And that’s going to guarantee a high conversion of samples to sales. 🙂
Plain and simple, I love vampires. There’s a lot of versatility there, a lot of things to explore. One of my favorite vampire movies is The Lost Boys, and admittedly my story in the first Big Bad, “Real Wild Childe” came out of one of the few beefs I have with the original movie: the horrifically lame female characters in cliché roles. While I admire Jami Gertz and Diane Wiest and they’re great in the film, Star and Lucy’s functions are to just kind of be there as love interest and Mom. It’s a shame, because a lot could have been done with those archetypes. The sequels never really bothered to correct the female role issue, either, so it became a mission to write a vampire story where the girls could keep up with the boys and then some. Admittedly, “Real Wild Childe” was also my chance to warp the vampire romance genre beyond recognition, but a lot of it was the chance to have fun with some renegade vampire characters while beefing up the female roles. In a lot of ways, I did a whole reversal with putting Rave at the mercy of all the women in his life, vampire and human.
When the second volume was announced, I was sure I was going to sequel that story. I was excited to keep exploring Rave and Sin’s twisted relationship, as well as Addington’s vampire problem as a whole. Unfortunately, it became evident very quickly that it would be way too much for an anthology story, and I already had the habit of antagonizing the great Hartness with my inflated word counts. I didn’t want to leave that world behind, though, so it occurred to me to go in the other direction and prequel it.
I mention in the original story that Rave and Asha’s sire is their mother, and she’s not a particularly motherly type. Amanda was the perfect character to explore not only the feminine role of mother, but also to mash that up against what a vampire was, and why a typical 1950’s housewife would even want to become one. My research led me on a winding road, and I found the perfect excuse for an underground, mother-centric vampire cult: fear of communism and all-out nuclear war. What if a protective instinct was so great, that you’d do anything to ensure your family line and the wellbeing of your kids, even if it meant killing and drinking blood?
That was a great start at developing the cult of The Family and the character of The Patriarch, but it still didn’t quite mesh up with the Amanda in the original story. What kind of a person would turn into a manipulative, jealous vampire who wanted to clamp down on her kids and rule over them throughout eternity? After all, most parents are more than willing to kick the birds out of the nest at some point, and Amanda had never come across as a loving maternal figure.
As I began writing, I slowly discovered a character who was burnt out, frustrated, and felt overlooked. Her insecurities about her own life fed her jealousy that landed on everyone: her husband’s employees, her friends and fellow cult members, even her own children. She was desperate to be noticed, true, but also desperate for something else. It all made me wonder, what would happen if a mother didn’t necessarily have children because of a great love for them, but because they complemented her idea of what life should be like? What if she looked upon them as accessories that she owned, accessories that weren’t supposed to ever get out of line or go against her thinking? What if that craving for power gave her confidence to try out her powers in increasingly controlling ways, all under the guise of it being in everyone’s best interest? And what would she do if her precious family/accessories dared to try to go against her?
And what would happen if she found out that they may possess the same sort of darkness she did?
Exploring her manipulative nature in “A Family Affair” fascinated me, and I slowly grew to view Amanda as less of a madwoman and more of a complex character. If the story in the first volume was me riffing off my love for the bad boy type vampire in The Lost Boys and an attempt to play with the idea of a human love interest, Amanda became my anti-Lucy in The Big Bad 2. She still loves her children, but for the wrong reasons, and she’s desperate to retain something of herself as she watches the world and her family start to plot on without her. Her evil is more internal, but she still sheds a considerable amount of blood and has no guilt doing it. She freely plays with her family’s minds, and forces them down a dark road that will have significant repercussions decades later. Amanda’s an intense character who will get her way at any cost. She’s dangerous to most of those around her. She’s also a lot of fun to write.
It was also interesting to explore Rave and Asha as humans, to really tinker with who they had been before they became runaway delinquents. Although they’re at the mercy of their mother’s actions, there are also hints that they weren’t innocent from the get go, that maybe they’re more like their mother than they’d ever care to admit. Character relationships and dynamics intrigue me, so it was interesting to put all of that against the workings of a vampire cult and the changing vibe of the 1950’s in general. It’s an odd combination, to be sure, but it’s a fun one, and one that I hope is worth reading.
by john | Feb 4, 2015 | Business of publishing, Writing
Not really. But it kinda has felt like that from the outside. Let’s get my view of the facts out of the way first before I go into my conflicted feelings about this whole SFWA v. self-published authors thing.
Starting March 1, self-published and small press authors who meet a certain earning threshold (I believe it’s $3,000 over a twelve-month period for one novel-length work, or some amount of cents per word equaling some dollar amount for short stories – I didn’t really pay attention to the short story criteria) will be eligible to join Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, the professional organization for people who do what I do.
Full disclosure, the Horror Writers Association is also the professional organization for people who do what I do, because nobody can really decide if I write horror or fantasy. But I don’t write romance, which is why I don’t need to worry about joining RWA, which I might anyway, because RWA is a solid organization with a bunch of shrewd businesspeople involved. But I digress.
This is kinda a huge deal. It feels like a much bigger deal than last September, when HWA changed their rules to a very similar structure to allow self-pub and small press authors into the fold. I jumped onto that opportunity, but I’m hesitant about joining SFWA, and I figured I’d use this little corner of the inter webs to explore why as much for me as for anyone.
Let’s start at the beginning, back in 2010 when I published The Chosen (now available on audiobook on iTunes, Audible or Amazon). I didn’t have any real idea what I was doing, I was just trying to get my words out there any way I could. So I researched SFWA, because I was writing fantasy, so I wanted to be able to draw on the knowledge of other people writing fantasy. I read the “Join SFWA” page and quickly realized that there was no method for me to do just that. Self-published authors were not allowed a seat at the table.
That stung. I was new to writing, and new to publishing (still relatively new to both, this being year 5 of my journey), and to be told that I wasn’t good enough to sit at the cool kids’ table (again) because I was following a different path to my readers didn’t feel good. And it has continued to not feel good for five years, through friendships with people on SFWA’s board, through conversations about how stupid the rule is with SFWA members and other excluded parties, and I’ll own my pettiness – this as created in me a sense of bitterness about SFWA.
See, the thing is I’m a joiner. I feel like being a part of the professional organization for your field is just what you do. I got a job designing theatrical lighting systems, I joined IES, the Illuminating Engineering Society. I started working with high schools on their lighting systems, I joined the North Carolina Theatre Conference, then the Southeastern Theatre Conference. I’ve sat on the board of directors of many regional professional societies because I’ve always felt like networking, camaraderie and having the back of your fellows in the field is what you do.
But now I was in a place where I was told that I wasn’t a professional enough writer to join the professional organization for writers in my genre. All because of the way I was publishing my work. That didn’t sit well with me. It certainly didn’t sit well with me once I started earning money as a writer, because I very quickly eclipsed the earnings requirements for membership, and then the ONLY thing keeping me out was a label. And that just felt wrong. I wasn’t excluded at conventions from drinking with writers because I didn’t have a SFWA card. I wasn’t excluded from guest status at a con because I wasn’t a SFWA member. I wasn’t excluded from anything, except membership and that label of “professional.”
So I became bitter. And fairly vocal about it. I may have mentioned more than once that $250 worth of short story sales to magazines could get you into SFWA, but ten grand worth of short story sales to readers wouldn’t get you in.
And I understand that organizational change often comes slowly. God knows I’ve spent enough years in non-profit management to know that. I’ve sat through more board retreats and long-range planning sessions than I care to count, so I know that it takes time to affect change. I also know it doesn’t take five years. And self-publishing had already shifted from being a fringe vanity press swindle to a viable career option before I started with this mess in 2010, so the whole “organizations change slowly” thing lost weight with me about two years ago.
So what do I do now? On the one hand, I want to stand outside the window holding up my sign saying “Screw you, I don’t need you now!” Because I don’t know that I do. I network pretty well on my own. I have con appearances, book deals, friends to blurb my stuff and pretty much everything I need to continue making my career.
On the other hand, I want to be part of the professional organization for my chosen career path. And I do, like a lot of authors, want the affirmation of being labeled a professional by my peers. Because a lot of times I hang with my friends and still feel like a fraud, like no matter what I’ve done, it’s not enough. That’s my issue, not theirs, and certainly no one has ever made me feel that way. But it’s there.
Will a SFWA card make that feeling go away? Do they even give out membership cards? Does HWA? If so, did I lose mine already? I don’t know the answers to any of those questions.
And why did I get my panties in a bunch about SFWA and not HWA? Why did I tweet out congratulatory messages to HWA when they finally pried their collective head out of their collective ass last year and let self-pub and small press authors in? Probably because I didn’t know I wasn’t eligible for HWA membership until I was already eligible. Because I thought I was a fantasy writer, not a horror writer, so I had been focusing on SFWA until somebody nominated me for a horror award, then I started thinking of myself as a horror and fantasy writer.
So I don’t know. Are there benefits to joining SFWA? Certainly. Are any of them useful to me? Probably. Should I just get my head out of my ass and fill out an application? Probably. Would I feel better about this whole issue if any of my emails to a SFWA president a few years ago asking about this issue had ever been answered? Yeah.
What do I want out of this mess? At this point, I think I want to be asked to join. I would like someone affiliated with SFWA to say “Hey, I think you should join SFWA. We’d like to have you, and think it could be good for you and for the organization.”
I don’t expect that to happen, but to be frank, even if I heard about SFWA reaching out to other major self-pub and small press authors to open up membership with open arms instead of begrudgingly, it would probably get the bug out of my butt.
So there are my thoughts on the SFWA self-pub thing, not that anybody asked me. I don’t know if I’ll join. Maybe. At this point it’s not even about the benefits of membership, it’s about whether or not the organization really wants me.
So that’s plenty of word-puking for the morning. I’mma go get a Pop-Tart and get some shit done. Y’all do the same. But stay away from my Pop-Tarts.
by john | Jan 29, 2015 | Book Spotlight, Writing
I promised y’all another edition of The Big Bad, and while it took all of 2014 and a little piece of 2015 to deliver, it’s coming now! The Big Bad II will release on February 24th from Dark Oak Press and Media, and here’s the awesome cover!
Volume 2 includes more stories of evil and monsters like:
Mercy’s Armistice – J. T. Glover
A Family Affair – Selah Janel
Old Nonna – Gail Z. Martin
Letters to Logroth – Jason Corner
Skippin’ Stones – S. H. Roddey
The Sea Witch – Kasidy Manisco
A Day in the Life – James R. Tuck
Overkill – Sara Taylor Woods
Voodooesque – Eden Royce
A Fitter Subject for Study – Sarah Joy Adams
Ghosts and Sands – Jay Requard
Teacher of the Year – Riley Miller
Feels Like Justice to Me – Edmund R. Schubert
Portrait of the Artist as a Psychopathic Man – Stuart Jaffe
The House on Cherry Hill – Emily Lavin Leverett
Sticks and Stones – Bobby Nash
Sweet Tooth – Nicole Givens Kurtz
Just Pretending – Linden Flynn
Phone Home – E. D. Guy
I Think of Snow – J. Matthew Saunders
Little Gods – Neal F. Litherland
Drawing Flame – Misty Massey
The Witch Hunter – M. B. Weston
The Cully – D. B. Jackson
You might notice that there is a name missing from that list – mine. I don’t have a story on this year’s anthology, sorry to say. With everything that went on in my life in late 2014, I couldn’t pull my crap together enough to write a good one, and anything I had working wasn’t of a quality to stand beside the stories we had, so I decided not to include a story. I also stepped away from a lot of the editing, leaving the lion’s share of the work to Emily Leverett, who stepped up and made the whole thing happen. We still have a book that we’re both proud of, with some incredible stories by new and established writers, and a couple of tie-ins to existing story or novel series that I can’t wait for y’all to read. This is an incredible collection, and I’m thrilled for y’all to get it in your hot little hands.
by john | Dec 24, 2014 | Business of publishing, Fiction, Writing
So I’ve been on the fence about KDP Select, the tool Amazon offers by which authors make their titles exclusive to Amazon for a period of 90 days and in exchange they get a few perks like being offered for free in the Kindle Unlimited program (think Netflix for books, or a library with a $10 membership fee), the ability to offer your book for free for a promotional time period (you get 5 days that ou can make your book free in each 90-day period) and the ability for Amazon Prime Members to borrow your book from the Kindle Online Lending Library (authors are paid a fee per borrow, and are paid a fee for every time the book is read past 10% in the Kindle Unlimited program).
I’ve had books in KDP Select before Kindle Unlimited (KU) came along, but nothing since the new program happened. When I was in KDP Select, I made one Bubba story free each week through the 90-day cycle, then repeated. So if you wanted to read every Bubba story for free, you could do that. My hope was that people would read the free story, then immediately run out and buy all the rest of them. I don’t know how often either of those things happened, but my sales were pretty steady while I was in the program. But after a while, and with everything that went on in 2014 (well-documented on other posts here and on Facebook), keeping up with the free days just became more than I could managed, and since I hadn’t seen any significant increase in sales I withdrew.
Now the tinfoil hat crowd would tell you that my sales immediately tanked, and I was being punished for leaving the program and Amazon’s mysterious algorithms were skewed to help authors in the program, etc. etc. While all that may be true, my sales didn’t immediately tank – they held steady at about the same level they were when I was in KDP Select. For several months. Then sales did indeed start to taper off, but I don’t think lack of participation in KDP Select had anything to do with it.
I wasn’t writing and publishing new material. Let’s take a look, shall we?
2010 – 2 Publications
2011 – 11 Publications
2012 – 17 Publications
2013 – 2 Publications (there were other things, but I wasn’t necessarily the one publishing them)
2014 – 5 Publications (not counting the 2 this week)
Notice anything about that? Yeah, when I was selling a bunch of books, I was writing a bunch of books. I published more than a book a month in 2012, and not even a book a quarter in the two years following. No wonder my sales declined – my productivity declined. Can’t blame Amazon’s math for that!
So now that I’m writing again, and writing a lot again, why did I enroll the two newest books (Elf Off the Shelf and Raising Hell) in KDP Select? There were a couple of reasons.
1) The Kindle Lending thing and Kindle Unlimited thing suck for novels, but they’re pretty good for short stories. You see, you get paid based on how many things are borrowed, and how much money is in the pool. Lately it’s been a little over a buck. That’s half what I would get from a $2.99 novel if it were sold normally, but it’s TRIPLE what I get from a $.99 short story over it selling normally.
Here’s the math, which most folks already know. If I price a book at $.99-$2.98, I get 35% royalty. If I price it at $2.99-9.99, I get 70%. If I go over $10, it drops back down to 35%. So whenever you buy a Bubba short story, I get $.34. If I get a little over a dollar on the borrows, then I get three times the normal money, and people can read my story for free.
So that’s one reason. The other reason is that I hadn’t tried the program since KU started, and I wanted to see what it was like.
I also wanted to offer Raising Hell for pre-order, and was under the mistaken impression that I had to be in KDP Select to do so. That appears to not be the case, so I was wrong. Oh well, the book is up and available for pre-order and will be released on January 20. I’m pretty excited about this new series, it takes me to a darker place, lets me write in a harder tone, and lets me play with uglier villains. I hope you like it. I was really trying to channel the old Garth Ennis run on Hellblazer, so I hope I did it justice.
Also, if you want more bloggy type things, let me know. I have a bajillion comments to moderate in the queue, but once I get through those I’ll start replying. Until then, you can always find me on Facebook or Twitter. Peace out.
by john | Oct 27, 2014 | Real Life, Writing
I know, this year has sucked donkey nuts for blogging. I’m a terrible blogger and a late-ass writer and nobody can find me to buy my shit, yadda yadda yadda.
The truth is, 2014 has sucked ass and I’m ready for it to be over.
As a lot of folks who have followed this blog for a while know, in 2012 I left a job of almost 18 years to write full time. Which worked out fairly well for about a year, then I went back to work.
Which also worked out fairly well for about a year, until it didn’t. Then I left that job at the end of January and started a new one right after Connooga, so the second week in March. And I thought it was going quite well and was just about ready to go into my boss’s office and talk about an end-of-my-first 90 days review and maybe salary bump.
When he fired my ass without any warning. So right before ConCarolinas I was fired, and I spent the next eight week trying to figure out how I was going to live. Because all my savings had been eaten up in that whole “write for a living” year. But I scrabbled through, sold off a bunch of unnecessary shit, dumped a large portion of my Magic card collection, collected on some back pay that had been floating out there, and got another job that started at the end of July.
So that was good. So far the new job is working out well. I enjoy the work, I enjoy the people, and we are beginning to see some results from my labors.
Then I went to DragonCon, knowing that while I was working the con, my mother was dying. I went to see her the day I left for Atlanta. I spent some time in her room, said my goodbyes, talked to the hospice nurse, and spent all weekend in Atlanta waiting for the phone call that she was gone and it was time to come home. She waited until Monday morning, and a part of me will always believe that she knew how important this con was to my career, and she held on for me. I was in the shower Monday morning when she died, and I felt it. I stood there, water running down over my face, and I felt something in my world shift. I got dressed and started packing, and by the time I got my suitcase half loaded, my sister was on the phone.
I expected it to be easier. My mother had dementia, or Alzheimer’s. or whatever. I don’t know the difference, but I know it’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen. I thought I had reconciled myself to her death, because in a way it felt like she was already gone. The part of her that was really my mother hadn’t been there since before last Christmas. Up until then she would have moments of lucidity, flashes of herself. But I didn’t see those at all after Christmas. And I didn’t react very well. I don’t deal well with things I can’t do anything about – helplessness is not a feeling I process well at all. And I knew there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about my mother’s decline, so I stopped going to visit. I couldn’t stand to see her like that, so I stopped seeing her.
So I expected to handle her passing with calm and grace. After all, I had intellectually processed everything and resigned myself to the fact that my mother had really been gone for years. She never really understood that I had written a novel, much less published six of them. The last publication of mine that she really understood was Red Dirt Boy, a collection of poetry I self-published in 2010. I gave her copies of all my novels, but she never read them. I don’t think she read any of the poetry either, but that never bothered me – I swear a lot in my poetry and she wouldn’t have approved. So I had rationalized all that to myself, and I would be able to handle her eventual physical death without any real impact.
I was wrong.
I have been wrong about a lot of things in my life, but I may have never been so classically, spectacularly wrong about anything before. Even right now, writing this, I don’t understand why it hurts so much. I don’t know if there was some part of me that expected her to make an amazing momentary recovery and we could have some Hallmark movie moment right there at the end where she told me she was proud of me and then slipped away peacefully. I don’t know if it’s guilt because I was working at a con while my siblings sat at her bedside. I don’t know what it is, but I miss my mom. And it hurts more than anything has hurt since I got dumped transcontinentally by the girl I thought I was going to marry.
That one worked out really well in the end, because I married Suzy, but it was pretty fucking gut-wrenching at the time.
So all that oversharing is to explain to you, my fans, why you don’t have In the Still of the Knight, which is Boof 5 of the Black Knight Chronicles, yet. It’s also why you don’t have The Big Bad: An Anthology of Evil vol. 2. It’s also why my editors for a couple of anthologies don’t have Bubba stories and why you haven’t seen very many this year, either.
Because 2014 has been pretty well fucked and it’s made it really hard to write. I’m getting better every day. The new job is stable so far, I’m slowly getting over losing my mom, and I’m back in the saddle writing. I had a meeting with Emily this past weekend to go over layout for BB2, and that should drop in the near future. So both books should be out by the end of the year, with Black Knight 6 hopefully making a summer release next year, because Book 5 flows pretty tightly into 6, so I need to just keep writing and making it all happen.
So I’m sorry that I haven’t been more productive. I appreciate you letting me know that you’re still out there. I appreciate you letting me know that you still want the books, and I promise that I’ll get them to you. I know there has been a little oversharing in this post, and that some of you, and some of my family don’t really approve of such a thing. Too bad. This is what you get with me – I live out loud. It’s the only way I know how to be.
So yeah, 2014 has sucked. I’ll be glad to see it go. But I’m still here. I’m glad you’re still here, too.
by john | Feb 17, 2014 | Writing
Otherworldly Lines
If you are not moved by Roy Batty’s final words at the end of “Blade Runner,” then you are the replicant—a poorly built one at that, lacking an emotions chip. Just in case you have forgotten those impassioned words, here they are:
“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.”
Wow! The ‘wow’ was this author’s uncontrollable reaction, not part of the famous quote itself.
“No, I am your father.” Hearing these five words for the first time felt like getting hit in the face with a bag of bricks. If you are lost, exit the cave right now—you have been in there way too long. This is Darth Vader’s revelation to Luke Skywalker in “The Empire Strikes Back.” It may not seem like a big deal nowadays, but back in 1980, it was as mind-blowing as it could get. Note: Many people seem to think that the line was, “Luke, I am your father,” but it’s not. See for yourself.
Coming off an extremely disappointing, “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” in 1979, expectations were low when “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan” released three years later. It has been 32 years since, and with all the subsequent “Star Trek” movies, many fans believe that “Star Trek II” outshines them all. This brief interaction has a lot to do with it:
Spock: “The needs of the many outweigh…”
Kirk: “The needs of the few.”
Spock: “Or the one.”
Goose bumps anyone? Here are some things you may not know about our favorite sequel.
This was just a very short list of breathtaking lines. Weirdmedia has 100 out-of-this-world quotes for you to feast on.
It’s What Got Us Here
Take a moment and think of all of the wonderful innovations used regularly. We have Netflix streaming, BetFair gaming, satellite radio, and GPS gadgets, just to name a few. These and many more life-changing inventions are here because of dreamers, constantly trying to reach for the stars.
What inspired these brilliant minds and did Science Fiction play a role? Were they fans of “Star Trek” or H. G. Wells? Asking these questions is not just important—it is our responsibility as well. The answers could provide us with a blueprint for ingenuity and set our children on similar paths. It could make the world a better place for generations to come. Check out the top ten most influential Science Fiction writers, provided by Listverse. I’m surprised that Gene Roddenberry was not on the list.
The Science Fiction genre offers a universe of poetry that sparks the imagination and enriches the soul. The importance of such beauty cannot be overstated. The inspiration it releases into the atmosphere on a daily basis allows us all to dream. And dreaming is the seed of discovery and creation.
This is a guest post by Michael Page. Michael is an avid sci-fi fan and film enthusiast. When not blogging about all things science fiction, he enjoys binging on the latest video games and eating chinese food.
