Michael Andre McPherson

Beyond the Slushpile

Tag archive: writing

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I am now a Canadian Publisher

There are lot’s of ways to get an ISBN number for self-published books or e-books, but I chose to go all the way and become a Canadian publisher.  Since I’m already co-owner of a small media company this turned out to be amazingly easy.

I simply went to the Public Archives of Canada and clicked on join CISS and filled out the form with my company information.  Now when I e-publish I can enter the ISBN with Amazon Kindle.

Why the big deal? Cause all kinds of tracking can operate with an ISBN.  The draw back?  As a publisher I’m now required to provide copies of all my publications to Collections Canada.  I know this is a good thing, having my words stored somewhere forever.  What can I say?  I just don’t like paperwork.  Weird for a writer.

Now to think of a title for my anthology of shorts, all those bridge painting stories that were published by Storyteller Magazine between 2000 and 2006 when they folded.  How about Tales from the North?  Too Rudyard Kipling?

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Rebecca Senese Seizes the Day

Rebecca Senese and I shared a strange place in the history of Storyteller Magazine before we even met. I’d finally snagged the cover of Storyteller in the winter 2006 edition after many attempts, so my mother proudly purchased a subscription for every member of the family, including my aunt.

Unfortunately, I had decided that for my story White Metal I’d let construction workers speak like construction workers.  The F-bomb fell more than a few times, and Storyteller chose to stick it right in one of the teaser lines.  My aunt, horrified by the profanity, refused to even read her nephew’s story and instead carried on to read the next story in the issue, Brother’s Under the Skin by Rebecca Senese.

It was like pouring gasoline on fire.  My aunt, the very committed Catholic anti-abortion activist, read a story about parents who clone their murdered son and try to relive his childhood through the clone.  Boom!

Terry Tyo, the owner of Storyteller, got a nasty phone call demanding that he cancel my aunt’s subscription and never send her a copy of his sick magazine again.  Terry was gun shy of controversial stories for months.  Between us, Rebecca and I had rocked Storyteller’s world.

Now Rebecca is out to rock your world.  She read my first post about planning to e-publish all my out of print short stories, but she ran where I walked.  I’m still trying to pull together the other stories, get them up with Smashwords for the Sony and Nook, and put together my anthology.  But in the last two months, while I was off in another world, Rebecca’s done it.

I’d better hurry.  A year ago I was in the middle of the e-book revolution, now I’m playing catch up.  So watch here for more announcements and e-publishing.  First my Storyteller stories, then my contest winners, then my novel and then…write till I die.  I finally have a market, however humble.  It’s there for the bold.

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So Two Guys Walk Into Afghanistan…

The trouble with this is that one of them doesn’t have a compelling enough reason to walk into Afghanistan.  Author Michael Blair pointed this out to me when he was critiquing my novel, In a Country Burning,  three years ago at the Bloody Words Mystery Convention.  He also suggested I “pump it up a notch” for the first chapter and also speculated that I was too close to this novel and should just give it up and write something new.

Bummer.  I hate it when people are right, and I often wish I’d paid attention to all three of his comments.  I did pump up the first chapter quite a bit, and comments from Fogel and other readers now describe it with words like “relentless, dizzying and confusing.”  Oh well, I can pump it down.

But the motivations: Jackson is a lousy freelance journalist with not much of a career until he gets approached by the CIA, not to spy but just to come in for interviews every time he returns from Afghanistan to tell them what he’s seen.  It’s illegal for the CIA to use American journalists for intelligence gathering, but Jackson is a Canadian.  In return the CIA co-ordinate with the mujahideen parties to ensure Jackson gets to all the right places in Afghanistan at the right time to ensure he gets the stories he needs to be a successful freelance journalist.

The problem for Jackson is that he has stepped on a slippery slope.  He finds himself passing on CIA advice to the muj, and soon pushing them into CIA agenda assaults.  He is no longer a journalist but is now a combatant.

Okay, now for the protagonist: Thomas Sutton.  His motivation is much weaker.  He was a paramedic in the Rochester Fire Department, a committed Christian, and engaged to be married when all that fell apart.  He made a surprise visit to his fiance and caught her in bed with another man, a no good loser who’d gone to the same high school.

Sutton is later accused of negligent homicide in the loser’s death.  After escaping a guilty verdict, Sutton decides he is guilty and goes to the most dangerous country in the world at the time, Soviet-occupied Afghanistan, seeking God’s punishment for his crime.

Susan summed up the biggest problem with this motivation: whine, whine, whine.  Get a gun.  Shoot yourself and we’re all done.  Get it over with and save us the time.

Which brings me back to Michael Blair.  He said, “Look, he needs a better reason to go to Afghanistan.  I mean, come on!  You didn’t go there just to research this novel.”

Uhm, actually I did.  To which Blair replied without skipping a beat, “You’re crazier than I thought.”

Maybe that’s why I have trouble finding a suitable motivation for Sutton: I didn’t need much motivation myself to seek out adventure.

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Want to Write a Novel With Me?

I like writing because it’s a solitary task.  I’m the complete dictator of an entire world when I sit in front of my keyboard.  I decide who lives and who dies, who get’s laid and who joins the priesthood.

Of course this dictatorship ends when I present my work to others to read, whether an editor, a writers group or friends.  Then I have to listen to opinions, weigh reputations and compromise.

So Fogel, my editor, has serious concerns about my novel, In a Country Burning, and I have some big decisions to make.  Because it’s my first novel, written and rewritten dozens of times over twenty years–yes, you heard me–twenty years, I’ve lost all perspective.

So I thought, why not make it a public effort?  I’ll tell you where I am in the novel and the problems I’m having.  People are welcome to e-mail suggestions.

Just remember: I’m still the dictator in the end.  All opinions are just that: opinions.  If you send me a suggestion, you’re sending it for free and will receive no compensation.  If I use one of your suggestions it doesn’t mean you own part of my novel.  I retained all rights, copyrights  and ownership.  This is my baby.

So: these two guys walk into Afghanistan in 1983…

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A Monster Ate My Life

I’ve turned into one of those bloggers.  You know the kind: they start up, blog excitedly every day for a few weeks, then slip to twice a week, once a week, and stop all together.   I guess they thought a massive following would be instantaneous, or was deserved.

Believe it or not, I’m not one of those bloggers.  But a monster did eat my life.  I’d tell you all about it, but I learned from a wise man in the film industry that I don’t have to.

His name is Frank Polyak.  I was his camera trainee back in the early 90s on a show called Top Cops.  After I’d upgraded to Second Assistant Camera, he called to see if I could come out on Forever Knight.  I couldn’t make it and babbled my excuses.  He called me again a different night and I joined them for some fun film making.  He called me over to the camera during a break in shooting and said, “You know when I called you last time and you couldn’t make it?  Well, I don’t give a damn about your girlfriend or your promises or anything like that.  When people call you and you’re busy, you should just tell them you’re not available.  Excuses are boring and it’s none of our business as to why you’re not available.”

So here it is: I’m not available until January 7th.  This blog will be idle until then.

But I’m not one of those bloggers who fades away.  I like my writing too much.

Okay, if your dying of curiosity here it is: MY DOG ATE MY BLOG!

Happy New Year!

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I Saw the Future — Yesterday

I chose physics as my major in university because it was my best subject in high school thanks to an excellent teacher, it seemed like an interesting field of study and I wanted to be a science fiction author and I thought it would help.

But by the time I graduated with a specialist in geophysics, I had stopped reading SF and was more interested in geo-politics than geophysics.

I think what turned me off SF was that as the moon launches faded and the baby boomers realized that they weren’t going to go to space, SF went distant, very distant.  Novels like Dune took us eons into the future and our planet had nothing to do with it anymore.  I loved Dune, but I missed the immediacy of Heinlein and the sense that this was all going to happen and very soon.

So I watched with fascination yesterday as history imitated fiction.  Elon Musk is the real life version of Heinlein’s D.D. Harriman, the fictional entrepreneur who started a rocket program to get people cheaply into orbit, not just to make money, but because he believed it was humanity’s destiny to go forth from this planet and explore.

Yesterday Musk’s company, SpaceX, became the first private company to launch a space capsule into orbit and return it safely to Earth, a feat previously accomplished only by countries, not companies.  Better yet, SpaceX intends to human rate their Dragon capsule.  Musk’s stated intention is to provide cheap access to space for anyone.

He’s the absolute opposite of the evil Hollywood capitalist.  He took the billion he made from Paypal to start a company to build electric cars and sunk everything else into SpaceX.  He wants to do things to make life better for humans, and he wants to make money doing it.  What a great combination!

So maybe I will write some sci-fi again one day, but my characters will be riding to space on SpaceX’s Falcon rockets, and they won’t be traveling through worm holes, or black holes.  I suspect I’ll be accused of having little imagination, but what I really see is the future.  I saw it yesterday.

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The Politics of Writers Groups

Writers are human beings, so unfortunately when three or more are gathered together they will break into at least two factions.  I know this because I belonged to a writers group for a few years.

It was an exciting time.  Most of the group were younger than me and eager, and all of them were good writers.  We shared successes and failures, brutally honest critiques, and we even encouraged one another to compete in the same short story contests.  We became friends, attended weddings, and went on road trips to parties and conferences.

Then one day the fun ended.  I was pulled aside by one member and gently informed that a clique had decided that another member should be evicted from the group.  He wasn’t writing enough.  Someone didn’t like his critiques.  His worst crime seemed to be that he nodded off to sleep a couple of times during an excessively long critique (not of his story.)

This left me in a quandary.  I had nearly fallen asleep a couple of times myself during that critique, but apparently I had been better at hiding it.  Would I be the next writer forced to walk the plank?

I suggested a better solution would be to limit the length of critiques to five minutes.  Only a few weeks before, one member had a valid complaint about one technical point in my story, but she went on about it for twenty minutes.  I had it solved in my head in two minutes, but the rules of our group were that I had to keep my mouth shut until she was done.  Surely a time limit would solve everything.

Nope.  Unlimited critique lengths were required.

Now I could have polled the other members of the group and put it to a vote.  I could have approached one or another member, using backroom politics to get my way, sort of what I saw going on already.  Instead I resigned from the group.  If I want politics I’ll pick up a paper.

It’s been years, but I miss my writers group.  We bonded over a common cause, shared the same dreams, and they understood me better than many of my university friends.  Most of us are still friends, of course, but its not the same as meeting once a month, bracing yourself for the round of criticism that will be unleashed on you in the politest manner.  I even miss the dreaded “but”  as in, “This was a great story, but…”

So I have to ask myself: would I join another writers group?  I think there is always more to learn, but I’ve never been much of a group person.  Even traveling I developed a preference early in my adulthood of venturing to very strange places by myself.  I’m not a loner, but I’m not a team player.  I like running, but not runners groups.  I like writing, and for a time I liked my writers group.

Perhaps that’s it.  Start a writers group with an expiration date, say one year.  Just enough time to get to know one another but not enough time for factions to develop.

After all, we’re only human.

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Failed Communication Leads to Correct Decision

Life is full of surprises, like discovering that someone you were communicating with was having a totally different conversation.

When Fogel stated in her crit of In a Country Burning that there were, “Too many shoulders in this novel,” I took the comment as metaphorical.  I thought she meant that there were too many characters.  This lead to a decision to cut four characters, which also cuts the length of the novel quite a bit.

Here’s the big surprise.  It turns out that Fogel literally meant “too many shoulders.”  Too many people were patted on the shoulder, too many people shouldered their back packs, too many shrugged their shoulders.  She was trying to get me to use other body parts occasionally in my descriptions, which is good advice.

Yet now that we’ve cleared that up, I have no intention of putting the love interest and her family back into the novel.  It works without them.  It’s shorter.  It’s better.

So I’m sorry Rachel, Clare, Hugh and the collateral damage, Richard.  You guys will have to find a different novel, maybe in a sequel.

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Are Male Readers from Mars and Female Readers from Venus?

My novel, In a Country Burning, is about redemption, about accepting fate and even a little romance, but mostly it’s about war.

It’s about the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan and highlights two of the ten years of bloodshed and genocide that took place during that occupation.  Let’s not even get into the disaster the Soviets left behind for the rest of the world to clean up.

So I have to ask myself: will women read this book if I manage to squeeze in a little romance?  I’ve been told women read a lot more than men.  Any expert in the publishing industry will tell you that women are an important audience if you want to sell.

But Fogel says, “there are too many shoulders in this novel.”  She means that I’ve got too many characters, all vying for attention and all fighting to make it into the final scene.  So as I rewrite, it occurs to me that I could ditch the love interest and her family and go straight for the war story.

But will women read a war story?  How many girls snuggled up on the couch with their guys to watch Band of Brothers?  I’m guessing not many.  There will still be one woman in the book and even a heavy bit of amorous action, but for the most part it becomes a novel about men at war.

Which is what it always was about.  I made a desperate and painstaking stab at making it more like The English Patient, but I’m afraid it’s actually closer to The Hunt for Red October, but without all the cool technology.

So sales be damned.  This novel needs to be shorter, sharper and more focused.  Will it sell better?  Well, if I don’t rein it in it won’t even make it to market.

So to all the female readers: I’m sorry.  I don’t think it was going to work for you anyway.  To all the men: put down the remote or the game controller and start reading again for heaven’s sake!  I’m writing for you here.

By the way: if anyone feels slighted because they don’t like being squashed into a stereotype, well then read my book when it comes out.  It’ll be available to both Martians and Venusians.

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Looking Outside the Box for the Juicy Gossip

I opened that hideous box last Monday, the one containing my perfect manuscript now covered with Fogel’s scrawls.  There’s a lot of work to do on my novel, no doubt, but the comments that concern me the most are the ones I got by e-mail before I received the box.

One of Fogel’s main complaints is that I don’t have a clear picture in my own head of my characters.

What!  I’ve written and re-written this novel more than ten times.  These characters are like very close friends.  I thought I had a clear picture of them in my head, thank you very much.

But when I calmed down and thought about it, I had each character in a specific box of time and place.

So I started thinking about my real friends in real life.  I know where they went to high school.  I know where their parents dragged them to church each Sunday (and which religion) until adulthood.  I know which ones still go to church.  I can recall career successes and failures, drunken nights on the town or weekends camping.

Life’s big and stuff happens.  I think of my dad today because it’s Remembrance Day, a paratrooper at too young an age, scarred for the rest of his life not just by the war but also because he lost his mom to TB near Christmas of 1945–before he even had a chance for that well-earned moment of peace, to feel safe back home.  What if I didn’t know that about him?  Would I describe him just as a old man, recently deceased?  There’s so much more there.

As for my friends, I know what they had hoped to become and how that turned out for them.  I know whom they slept with and whether it was a good idea.  Sure, I don’t know these intimate details for everyone I’ve met.  I’m just talking about close friends, because I’d better know my characters at least that well.

So I began asking questions and had to spend two days answering them, and it took a lot of research.  I not only had to fill out biographies for them, but their parents and grandparents, brothers and sisters.  Who got along in the family and who hated each others’ guts with the intensity that only sibling rivalry can inspire?  Who was a disappointment to their father/mother/son/daughter?  What caused friction in the family?  Who went to war and who dodged the draft? Who refuses to go to mass at Christmas despite his mother’s pleas? Who got a good job and who had the bad habit?

You get the idea.  I need to know what they smell like after a hot day of work.  I need their biographies from birth to death, even beyond the time frame of my novel.

So damn if Fogel isn’t right again, because as I fill in these details, many of which will never appear in the novel, my characters, their motivations, their likes and dislikes become clearer with each new tidbit of juicy gossip.

Many of you writers already knew this.  I thought I did.

But now I’m trying to think outside that box.