How Many Novels?

After spending many years writing short stories I was always trying to learn to write novels. And it took me some time to construct a novel that I was able to sell. It was a long, strange struggle for me.

Since the sale of that novel (THE FLOCK), I have written very few short stories. Part of this is due to the fact that there are so few markets for short stories these days. Even when I was actively writing them, the markets were not so many and the competition extremely fierce for open slots. These days the anthologies and the magazines that I used to try to crack are mainly gone. Now there is the self-publishing world of crap and muck and I refuse to take part in that hideous and noxious game.

Two days ago I finished my latest novel, THE NEW ECOLOGY OF DEATH. It's based on a story that I wrote when I was a very young man

and which failed to sell in text form. I did, however, sell it in comic script format to Stephen R Bissette's legendary comic book anthology, TABOO. The story was a song of praise and admiration for the zombie mythos created by George A. Romero and to a specific B-class horror movie that influenced me as a kid: "Fiend Without a Face". I combined images conjured by those two influences and came up with THE NEW ECOLOGY OF DEATH. In a way, I was writing zombie yarns long before the current wave of zombie fiction. I just hadn't sold any of it until "The New Ecology of Death" saw print in TABOO.

And now I have completed transforming those ideas from that story into a novel. Someone recently asked me how many novels I've sold. I had to admit that I didn't know. For some reason--compared to most other writers I encounter--I don't actually have the ego of a writer. Just about every other writer I have known walk about thumping their chests and going on and on about their work. It's probably why I can't stand the company of other writers and stopped attending science-fiction conventions. But I was actually flummoxed. I hadn't sat down to count the novels I'd sold, just as I long ago stopped counting the number of short stories I have sold.

So. How many is it? I've sold THE FLOCK, THE CLAN (sequel to THE FLOCK), THE COALITION Series (three novellas making up one novel), HISSMELINA (my favorite of my novels, but my poorest selling), THE LIVING END, WITHERING, and THE NEW ECOLOGY OF DEATH. So...seven novels. That's not bad, I reckon.

A few years back I even optioned the movie rights to my first novel to Warner Brothers via Don Murphy and John Wells. I'm still waiting to hear that it has received the green light to make its way to the screen. But one of my old writer friends told me that even if that day never comes, I at least got farther in that direction than he did, and he'd sold more than thirty novels.

And how many short stories have I sold? I honestly cannot say. When I was younger I would keep a tally of my sales to various small press magazines, slick professional mags, and anthologies. But then I actually got tired of that. I stopped counting. All I can say with any degree of confidence is that I've sold somewhere between sixty-something and seventy-something stories. What can I say?

(I'd like to post images for the covers of THE NEW ECOLOGY OF DEATH and THE CLAN, but neither of those has seen print yet. They're coming...I just don't have the images for them.)

"AT LAST! A ZOMBIE NOVEL WITH BRAINS AS WELL AS GUTS!" THE LIVING END.

"Often the monster is just a misunderstood anti-hero. But sometimes it's murdering, blood-thirsty asshole!" WITHERING.