Monday I Will Open The Box

There’s a box with a manuscript in it sitting on my desk.  It’s the manuscript where each neatly printed page has been marred by The Fogel’s harsh scrawls.  In a sense, I have already opened it, because The Fogel sent me her notes on Chapter one by e-mail, and her comments strike like a hammer, over and over again.

My day job has been busy over the last few weeks, which is good because I needed time to decide what to do about the novel, one that has taken up so much of my life.

Go to my website, www.michaelmcpherson.ca and you’ll see my smiling face and the photos I took of the men I traveled with in Afghanistan.  Back then Reagan was president and the mujahideen were still described in the press as “freedom fighters.”

How things have changed.  I watched on TV as the twin towers went down, and as word came out that the terrorists were trained in Afghanistan and called themselves mujahideen, I knew the media would never again refer to them as freedom fighters.

Yet that is how I still feel about the men I traveled with, and I wonder how many of them are alive today.  They were generous to me.  I trusted them with my life.  They had hopes and fears, children and wives and grooming advice.  The commander said I should shave my wispy beard because I couldn’t grow a proper beard.  He was clean shaven himself.  We’re not talking Taliban fanatics here, at least not back then.

I can’t let them go.  I want the world to see them as human beings.  I want the world to understand what the Soviets did to that country.  It was the one thing I promised myself I could do for them, although the commander’s son would have preferred that I’d bought him new boots.  I missed the opportunity to do that, and it haunts me.

So Monday I have some time off from my day job, and I will open that box.  I will endure all of The Fogel’s comments.  I will rethink plot and story, characters and events.  I will struggle and rewrite.  Somehow, I will finish what I started.

It’s the least I can do.

Am I a Productive Member of Society?

The first thing I learned working on the TV show Nikita is that machine guns are loud.  Even when they’re firing blanks, they’re really, really loud.  I know that sounds obvious, but it’s amazing when an actor standing only a corpse-length away points an AK-47 just over your head and empties a 30-round clip.  Your clothes vibrate against your body with the shock-waves from the concussions.  Your heart feels like it’s skipping beats.

Oddly, while working on that show I felt like a productive member of society, making my strange contribution.  After all I got up with the alarm, worked like crazy for 14 or 15 hours, way to much of it running to set and back with mags of film or carrying diddy bags that weighted about a hundred pounds.

Yet, when I took time off between seasons to write, I often wondered if I was a productive member of society.  Perhaps it was because no one gave me a pay at the end of the week to prove that my presence was valued.

But one day after work on Nikita I met some friends for a Friday night drink.  I regaled them with tales of how stressful our work on the show had been that day–three cameras in a gravel pit with not enough crew.  Explosions and machine guns.  I had to involuntarily upgrade to focus puller for one of the cameras and got caught on film when the operator abruptly panned the camera left to follow a departing truck.  The A.D.s had failed to warn me the truck would pull away.

The expression on my face in the rushes ended up being the source great amusement on the camera truck over the next week.

When I finished my tale a friend put down her wine glass and mentioned off hand that her day had been a bit hectic too.  I knew she worked at a shelter for battered women, so I asked what had happened.

Her manner was understated, but her words told a different story–a story of a woman repeatedly beaten and raped, of escorting her to court to testify, of a screaming ex-husband threatening his ex and my friend with brutal murder.  Tears and fright and a police escort out of the courtroom.  My friend picked up her wine glass for a sip after this shocking story and I put down my beer.

The shelter was run by the Salvation Army.  My friend was paid minimum wage, and I was pulling in a couple of grand a week.  It made no sense.  She was a productive member of society, contributing to the overall good.  I was making the filler between car commercials.

The second thing I learned on Nikita is that receiving a pay check at the end of the week didn’t necessarily mean that I was a productive member of society, contributing to the overall good.

My stories won’t save the world, but maybe somewhere someone will use them to fill a few hours and go somewhere better.

Although before I get all snooty about Nikita: when I was at a youth hostel in Romania a few years later (1998), I walked into a room full of Romanians glued to a tiny television set.  They were watching an episode of Nikita where the climax took place in a gravel pit–lots of explosions and machine guns.  For an hour they were transported away from the economic disaster that was post-Soviet Romania.

Who am I to judge?

You Don’t Need A Kindle To Buy E-books

Amazon’s Kindle e-readers may cost you some bucks, but the Kindle reader software is free to download onto your computer.  So you can start reading e-books without buying the Kindle, dipping your toe into the e-reading water at no cost.

I  had trouble finding the link for the free download, but it’s here.  I got there through Kindle, e-books, Kindle Support.  The great thing is you can get it for your Mac, PC, Blackberry, i-phone or any smart phone with Google’s Android operating system.

Besides the obvious advantage that you can immediately purchase and read my short stories Railroaded or Burning Moose, it also means you can buy any book you want to read  on your computer or mobile device.

But free stuff is why I prefer the Kindle over the Sony e-reader.  Amazon has put up a bunch of content for your reading pleasure that won’t cost you a dime.  Never got around to reading the original Sherlock Holmes short stories?  Now you can.

Worried about losing your book if your computer crashes?  No problem.  Once you buy it, the book goes onto your bookshelf in your Amazon account so that you can recover it for free.

So download that free Kindle software.  Save some trees.  Buy my short stories.  Make me rich!  Actually, at 99 cents per story, it’s more like contributing to a cup of coffee.  But thanks!

H/t to Kim for pointing out that I’d never explained how to buy my stuff.  I’m going to make a new menu item for this tip.

Millions of Nooks Means More E-books

The game is changing so fast.

Barnes and Noble came out with their colour (that’s color for Americans) version of the Nook last week, and it’ll sell for $10 less than last year’s nook.  I’m betting graphic novel  and children’s book authors are going to be happy.

Now this isn’t a tablet like the ipad.  It’s a dedicated e-reader even though it has some extra bling like very fast web browsing.

What’s really amazing is that Barnes and Noble have already sold a million of the old version of the Nook and expect to sell a million of this version.

By New Year’s there are going to be literally millions of people with e-readers looking for content.  What an opportunity!

The downside is I haven’t found a way to sell through B&N yet, but I’m looking.  As traditional book retailers get more and more like Amazon, I’m willing to bet they open their distribution up too.

Must edit faster.  Must write faster.

I’m Brilliant According to Spam

For you fellow bloggers this will be no surprise, but it was a new one for me: the evil of spam is everywhere.  I thought it just came in e-mail, but the comments I’ve received on this blog have surprised me.

They usually begin by telling me how brilliant I am or how fascinating my blog is to read.  Funny thing, they never say anything about what I’ve actually written.  But the catch becomes obvious when they  link to a lame or shocking web site.

I spare you guys this nuisance by marking them as spam, but if one day you find your comment wasn’t posted–well, perhaps you were too flattering and I didn’t realize you meant it.  Thanks anyway.

The Year I Turned Down a Publishing Contract

I was offered a contract for my first novel back in 1993 and refused to sign, effectively killing that sale.  Crazy?  No.

I was following all the rules back then and submitting to one publisher at a time with thoughtful query letters and sample chapters.  It took a year to slog through five New York publishers at that rate, so I checked out my heavy copy of the 1993 Writers Marketplace and discovered Northwest Publishing of Salt Lake City, Utah.

I know, I know.  Utah is not the center of the publishing industry, but as a newbie I decided I had to start somewhere small and earn the acceptance of the big publishers and big agents.

So when I got a message from Northwest to call them because they’d like to offer me a contract, I just about jumped out of my work boots and ran for the nearest phone.

Sure enough, after asking me what I did for a living, the gentleman from Utah said, “Well Mike, we’re impressed with your novel and we’re going to offer you a contract.”

Stratospheric!  I’d done it!  I could forget the construction industry, where I was working while waiting for the film industry to take off.  My friends from university who had complained that I was wasting my degree would have to eat their words.  I had made it.

Then the gentleman from Utah proved he possessed the ethics of a great white shark.  Actually, a shark is more ethical because it never pretends to be anything other than a shark.

“So Mike,” he said, still all chummy and familiar.  “Every year millions of novels are submitted for publication but only a very few make it to print.”

I was falling and I had no parachute.  I know a sales pitch when I hear one.  Even before he got to price I knew I’d been stung by a vanity press.  Price tag to get published: $9000.  This, according to the shark from Utah, was only one quarter of the publishing cost.  They were graciously going to cover the other three quarters.  Yeah, right!

I turned them down, even as I prepared for a long stay in the film industry.

I actually don’t have a problem with self-publishing, or indie-publishing as one writer I know calls it, as long as the publisher/printer makes it clear that they’re not a traditional publisher, not even close.  If a writer wants to make a go of it on their own in the indie scene–or just wants a nicely package book that they can hand out to their friends and family–then a self-publisher can be a great service.

But unfortunately most of them are sharks, using euphoria to make you vulnerable and compliant.

Northwest Publishing was even worse.  I assumed that if I’d said yes I’d at least get those vanity copies, those boxes of books that I’d have to sell door to door.  Thanks to SFWA, I later found out just how lucky I was that I’d said no to the contract.  Near the end Northwest was still taking authors’ money but stopped even printing the books.  They had gone from unethical business practices to just plain thievery.

The good news out of this sordid little tale is that the owner got a long prison sentence.  The bad news is that there are smarter sharks out there, ones that know they can get away with unethical behavior as long as they’re careful with the wording of their contracts so that they’re not actually criminal.

Perhaps I should start a list.  Here’s one I’ve been warned about by several authors.

Record Sales Numbers

I’ve been carrying out an internet experiment over the last month.  I put two short stories up for sale on Amazon for Kindle downloads and waited to see how many random purchases might occur.  The results were pretty much what you’d expect: none.

Oh, the Amazon sales report says that I’ve sold two copies of each, but that’s just me testing out two different platforms to see how the formatting carries through.  Somehow that has netted me $1.40 US hard cash in royalties.  Yippee!  That only cost me $4.00 to acquire.

Since I’ve never sold anything before I guess I can call this a record for sales of my shorts, at least the electronic version.  I have no idea what Storyteller Magazine’s sales figures were like back when these stories were first published.

The lesson I take from this is that the internet is very crowded, and if you’re just standing back in a corner waiting to be discovered–well, you’d have a better chance of being noticed in a football stadium at the Super Bowl with two minutes left in a tie game and a field goal in the offing.

So now to part two of the plan: e-pub the rest of the Sioux Rock Falls short stories, add some new ones that have never been published and package it into an anthology.  Then I’ll put that up for sale and the true test begins: marketing.

Now I wouldn’t risk an anthology if we were talking about traditional publishing.  An author once warned me that the big book chains have programs that check the sales of your previous book before ordering your most recent.  So if you only sold five per store at the chain last time, they’ll only order five per store this time, and unless they get repeated requests they won’t reorder.  Bummer.  An author can’t break out unless, like Yann Martel, you win the Mann Booker prize for your second novel.

The problem with anthologies is they don’t sell well–see my previous post about short stories for my theory as to why–so by putting out an anthology you risk killing the sales of your NEXT book.

But e-publishing gets around that.  No sales record at the big chains to worry about.

So let’s see if I can set a new sales record!

I Challenge Alice Munro

People don’t tend to read short stories anymore, perhaps because literary short stories are so mind-numbly dull.  Yeah, I said it:  mind-numbly dull!  They wander with little plot and they’re excruciatingly introspective.  Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether they’ve ended or the printers have misplaced a page.

While science fiction and mystery shorts are tightly plotted and dynamic, their magazine and anthology sales have also slumped in the last decade.  My theory is that young adults are not venturing into short stories, not just because of video games, but because they remember all the yawn-inducing shorts they were forced to read in high school.  The whole short story format has been tainted by literature.

Now I don’t deny that Alice Munro’s Floating Bridge is a master work, clearly deeper in thought and displaying greater literary skill than anything I’ve ever written.

But here’s a challenge: after a long day of work put two readers on opposite ends of a couch.  Give one of the them Floating Bridge to read and give the other my short coming-of-age story Railroaded.  Now let’s sit back and see who squirms in their seat, fighting to keep awake and read to the end to prove they’re literate.  Who reads with interest?  Now I’m not talking about two people who’ve worked a cushy eight hours and had a nice dinner.  I’m talking about film industry hours–people who’ve just worked 16 grueling hours in harsh weather.  That’s the real test.

In fact, maybe I’ll carry out this experiment.  I’ve got a lot of friends still in the film industry.  Hey Alice!  You up for it?

My Dirty Little Secret

I wrote a vampire novel.  There’s nothing like it to let your creativity flow.  You’re unencumbered by reality and free to concentrate on characters.  Unlike any other kind of fiction, the vampire novel immediately brings up all of the fundamental moral problems that face mortal humans.

What would you do to live forever?  Would you become a serial killer?

How will you face the end of your life: fighting or surrendering?

Do you believe in heaven and hell, reincarnation, a greater universe than what we see?  Are you secular, agnostic or atheist?  What would you do if incontrovertible proof of an alternate reality walked up and said, “I vant to suck your blood.”  Preferably stated with a Romanian accent.

Oh yeah, and since Bram Stoker, vampires have always been about sex.  What’s not to like?

But a writer with a vampire novel is invariably branded as a loser chasing a tired cliché–unless they get the wild success of Stephen King, Anne Rice or Stephenie Meyer.  Each of these writers produced wildly different flavors for that same soup–all tasty and all unique.

So what’s a writer to do with a vampire novel?

I’ve been warned by many pros over the years that your first novel is your brand, and forever after you must write in that field.  One agent compared it to a retail store: if you arrive one day for coffee and donuts but the next day the store is a sit-down gourmet restaurant–well the coffee crowd won’t be coming back, and the gourmet crowd probably won’t ever go because they thought it was a donut shop.

So my dilemma?  I’ve got my literary novel, In a Country Burning, about a lost young man caught up in Afghanistan’s war against Soviet occupation.  I even traveled with the mujahideen in Afghanistan in 1988 to research it–truly putting my life on the line for this novel.

But it’s my first, and despite endless rewrites, tweaks and effort, The Fogel has slammed it, stating that I need to look at the fundamental plot.  Not just an edit but a sit down and do-this-all-over from scratch deal.

But my vampire novel has a strong plot and unique story.  It’s tight, probably because I wrote it for fun–probably because I didn’t risk my life for it.

So do I send it to The Fogel?  Do I break all conventions and open up my store with a vampire novel and hope that the literary crowd will read In a Country Burning, my true passion, when it finally comes together?

Will my brand be forever tainted?

Or am I the brand.  This blog is about breaking all the traditional publishing rules.

Am I a Closet Luddite?

I think of myself as a tech using guy, but with technology changing so fast we’re always tested.  I hope I will never catch myself using expressions like “new-fangled.”  I’m determined to march through middle age without saying, “Back in my day we didn’t need…”  Refer to latest gadget here.

So I was surprised by my gut reaction to this link sent to me by The Fogel. She describes it as a toy for reviewing my novel, and her point is that there are some words I use with monotonous frequency.

This toy is designed to search your text, find those overused words and put them up in fun graphic displays.  The more you use a word, the bigger its size.

But Hemingway, Fitzgerald,  and all the greats didn’t have this toy.  I can’t imagine Margaret Atwood needing it.

Then I remembered my creative writing teacher at University of Toronto.  He told us that he prefers to write with an IBM typewriter, the way Hemmingway did back in the thirties.  I had to repress a derisive snort.  Hemingway used a typewriter because it was the word processor of his day.  I’m sure he had contemporaries who preferred to write long hand, and I bet they had all kinds of excuses like: the pen flows with my thoughts; the typewriter is too jarring and loud.

Hemmingway was using the modern tech gadget of his day. Writing a play with a quill won’t make me William Shakespeare.

So I will put my novel through this toy, because I want to use all the tools at my disposal to make it effortless for the readers.

But I admit I’m worried about the word brown.