Blowing Smoke

Here's one more reason I can't stand most writers:

A few years back...well, hell...more than a few. Maybe twenty years ago (you have to cut me some slack now that I'm over 50), I knew this guy who was a wannabe writer. Just like me. We'll call him Wannabe W.

Anyway, this guy was really gung-ho. He had him a system down, a plan of action, and he figured that if he followed this plan and stuck to it, then there was no way he was gonna lose! I mean, he was countin' his millions and wondering what it was gonna be like to pal around with Stephen King and Tom Clancy and see who was gonna be a billionaire first--him or Clancy. Yeah. He was an insufferable prick.

One thing that this guy was big into was sucking up to whomever, for any outside chance that it would get his foot in the door at any publishing house you could name. If some editor was Jewish, he'd crow about how great Israel was. If some editor was black, he would act like he'd walked side by fucking side with Dr. King. If an editor was Italian, he'd talk about "the neighborhood"! Nobody sucked anal sphincter like this guy.

Around this time there was this moderately famous writer who had hit it big with the shtick of protecting abused children. Or, rather, making a lot of money claiming that he was writing these books that were selling well for purely the sunniest of motives. So I read a few of this guy's books. They were okay. Not great, but good, old-fashioned pulp. Then, after having read a number of these, they began to strike me as really creepy. As if he was actually getting a kick out of describing the monstrosities committed against helpless children. It hit me in the middle of a particularly nasty short story by this guy that he was just one more level of exploitation. He was making his bundle off of the abuse of children, despite what he claimed to intend.

So, I told this Wannabe W what I thought of that guy.

Now, then. I certainly wasn't going to be able to help W's career. Not no way, no how. And he knew this. However, what I didn't know was that he'd been sucking up to the self-proclaimed child's rights crusader. So Wannabe W lit into me about how the crusader I was crackin' on was a saint--the truest of the true. And how dare I say such things about him? How dare I?

A few weeks later I'm at a writer's convention with another writer pal. (We'll call him Wannabe R.) Genre conventions do have one thing going for them. Hotel parties and open bars. You might think that fantasy, horror, and science-fiction fans are geeky (and you'd be right), but man do those bastards know how to party. Thinking of a few cold beers (I'm a bit of a prude when it comes to alcohol), I agree. "What's the party? Who's givin' it?" I ask him.

"It's Wannabe W's party."

Oh, joy, I think. But it's probably free beer and maybe some decent conversation if I can find the right person to talk to. "Okay," I say. "Let's go."

We head down the way and walk a hall to Wannabe W's room. R knocks on the door lightly and it opens as someone admits us. As the door swings wide a massive load of pure cigarette smoke oozes out, all white, stinking like the depths of Satan's lungs. I just stand there for a second in disbelief. I'm a non-smoker. Not only that, but I quite literally cannot stand the stench of cigarette smoke. It makes me want to puke, to put it mildly. In addition, I have about the same intellectual respect for a cigarette smoker as I do for religionists: zero.


Well, it's a party and I think there's an outside chance I can tolerate the smoke. At least long enough to drink a few beers and have a conversation or two. So I step inside. As the door begins to shut behind me, I realize that I've made a mistake. I can't breathe! The smoke is so thick that I'm having a hard time drawing a breath! There's no way I'm going to be able to tolerate this shit, and I'm just about to turn tail when my eyes are drawn to the far end of the room:

On that side of the room are Wannabe W and his wife. They're talking to another writer. But on the bed at their knees is their infant son. He's lying there, gasping for air. His mouth is wide open and his eyes are bugging out and his arms are waving in the air.

This defender of children's rights. What a fucking load!

Yeah, I could have said something. I could maybe have even called the cops. I don't fucking know. What I did end up doing was turning my back and walking the fuck out of that room. "I'm outta here, R," I told the other wannabe. "I can't take this smoke!" (Nor the stench of selfishness.)

I glanced back just as the door was closing. Through the pale tendrils of poison and carcinogens I could see that baby lying there, his mouth wide, his eyes bugged out, his arms waving in the air.

Fuck!

Sometimes I fucking hate writers.



Man, did I ever get a kick out of this video!! I mean, think about it: Who wants their photo taken as they shake hands with a mass murderer?

A Fistful of Writers and a Few Prima donnas

A few years back I managed to sell a story I had been sending to various editors for almost eighteen years. Yep, you read it right: eighteen years. I’d always thought it was a good story, and finally a couple of professional editors agreed with me and so it was published (“Visitation” in CHILDREN OF CTHULHU, Del Rey Books).

Now, I have to say that I lost count of the number of rejections that story had received over the years. Dozens, yes. Not a hundred—at least I don’t think so—but it’s possible. I kept sending it out, and editors kept rejecting it. It was obvious that I disagreed with them, because I kept packing it back up and finding a new market somewhere else. (You truly had best develop a thick skin in this game.)

Through it all, despite the rejections, I never let any editor who had rejected it know that I thought that they were wrong to have done so. If anything, I perhaps let the odd editor here and there know that I appreciated the time they’d spent with my story. Because that’s what editors do. They are devoting some of their time on this mudball to reading your story, and by Jove they may very well have much better things to do. So the least one can do, if anything at all, is thank them for that time.

Some time after “Visitation” saw print, it occurred to me that the premise of the story (that being that Poe had returned to this mortal coil) could make a decent basis for an anthology. So I whipped up a proposal and started looking for a way to sell such an anthology. No matter that I had never sold an anthology, and no matter that I didn’t have the foggiest idea how to go about it. I came up with a title (Evermore), and a nice pitch (starting with a quote from a Lovecraft poem), and began sending it out.

No one bit.

After a year or so of this, I thought that perhaps I would have better luck if a professional editor worked with me to sell it. So I wrote to John Pelan and asked him. He thought it was a good idea, but he didn’t have the time, and put me in touch with Peter Crowther. Crowther also liked the idea and we began to send it out. A few publishers rejected it, but one thought the idea had promise and wanted to sit on it for a bit. A bit turned into months, and months into...well...a couple of years.

As already stated, I’m pretty patient and damned well tenacious when it comes to selling a project. But one small-time publisher sitting on an anthology pitch for two years was too much even for me. I asked John to pull the anthology from said publisher and Crowther and I amicably parted ways. The anthology pitch for Evermore returned to my office where it sat again for some time, as I had pretty much run out of publishers to whom to pitch.

Then, one day I was exchanging emails with my old pal, Stephen Mark Rainey, and I asked him if he’d like to hang his name on the anthology with me and we could try to sell it. He agreed. Mark sent the pitch out to a house with which he had a relationship and we waited. No dice.

Then, it occurred to me that I had not yet tried Arkham House. Yes, it seems so darned obvious, but for some reason that option had escaped me. I had once submitted a novel there, and it was rejected. But I had written to the editor at Arkham to thank him for the time he’d taken to review the manuscript. Since I had their name and his address, I sent the pitch for Evermore to them.

Arkham House accepted it. Hoorah!

Budgets were discussed and contracts were signed. Mark and I set about searching for stories. The word went out that we had a deal and a new anthology and the tales began to come in.

Ah, yes, I read a number of very fine stories, and these we accepted. In addition, I wasted my time reading a lot of very bad stories, and these we rejected.

Back to the subject of manners.

Some writers assumed that I would accept their work based on the fact that I had known them for a long time. That I would pay them money for our friendship in accordance with some kind of professional nepotism, if you will. These writers were wrong. I rejected the stories of some long-time acquaintances. Most took the rejection with good nature and thanked me for my time. But a few were upset to the point of complaining that I was unfair in some manner. Oy.

Then there were the cases of the prima donnas. There were a couple of these in the stew, whose work I examined and found wanting. These, too, Mark and I rejected for good reason, to be met with reactions that I can only term petulant. How dare we reject their excellent tales? (Keep in mind that on at least one of these stories, I had been sorely tempted to let the author know they’d penned a 9,000-word sleeping pill. But out of good manners, I held my tongue.)

My own reaction to these unfortunate instances of very bad form was to remain silent. Well, yes, I’ve got a little list, but that’s beside the point. The main thing was to be professional.

In the end, though, these writer-folk did not understand that the world does not owe them a sale, and that Mark and I do not engage in any kind of favoritism. I don’t care how long I’ve known you, nor what your present reputation among other anthologists might be. All I care about is that if you send me a lousy story, I’m going to reject it.

Currently, I have a line on selling another anthology to a much higher end market with far deeper pockets. As with my first anthology editing experience, I’ll be searching for excellent stories by writers who know how to spin a good yarn. I won’t care how long I’ve known the author, and I won’t care how special they think they are. All I’ll care about is that they deliver the goods.

But I’ve got a certain list.

(Look for Evermore, co-edited by James Robert Smith and Stephen Mark Rainey to appear very soon--hopefully by October--from Arkham House Books.)

Egos and the Moral Superiority of the Downtrodden

Some years ago, a pal of mine spent part of a day with a certain best-selling author. They were on a panel together signing autographs and talking to various fans and other interested parties about writing. After a while, my friend had to leave, because he couldn’t bear to hear anymore of the rants of this best-selling author. And what was it that she was ranting about?

Stephen King.

She was frustrated to the point of mania that Stephen King’s books outsold hers by a very wide and healthy margin. No matter the fact that the two authors generally don’t write in the same styles or even within similar genres. It was merely the fact that he left her, economically speaking, eating his dust that drove her completely bats.

Which got me to dwelling, again, on the egos of writers. Despite what any writer tells you, almost all of them have pretty hefty egos that are easily bruised. Some of them will talk a good fight and lay claim to a thick skin, but that’s rarely true. Just the fact that a writer thinks his stuff is good enough for everyone to read is evidence enough of a pretty large ego at work. (Mea culpa.)

Some years ago I had a friend who was a writer and sometime editor. He did what he could to sell a story here and there, getting into some really impressive anthologies on occasion. And he was managing to edit on a very small scale, hoping to do more in that line.

Along the way, he decided to write an article about a certain sub-culture with which he had become familiar. So he wrote a piece suggesting to other writers how one might go about creating characters who lived within this certain sub-culture. I read it. It was a pretty good article, and quite innocuous.

However, a couple of other writers read it and they were not pleased. Apparently, they considered themselves a part of this certain sub-culture and felt that the article by my friend was something akin to blasphemy. They put their little heads together and decided to punish my friend for his heresy. They were determined to declare a fatwah upon him and to implement a jihad against his lonely self.

Both of these writers--who I am sure considered themselves a part of some downtrodden minority--had followings of a sort. (Also known as “fans”.) In this particular case, they had fans that number in at least the low thousands. They sent out a few choice emails pointing out my friend’s transgression-of-an-article. The army was quickly mobilized.

Ignorant of either his crime or the conspiracy afoot, my pal went to his email box to download the morning’s messages. Surprise! It was filled beyond capacity with hundreds of emails. But not just any email! It was hate mail! Nasty-grams from near and far, berating him for daring to write such nonsense. Forget the fact that most of the letters were delivered from folk who had never read his article. That didn’t matter. They’d been spurred to action by two of their glorious leaders, and so: attack!

This pair of writers, who I know consider themselves champions of a certain kind of justice, showed themselves to be no better than the nastiest of the nasty. This one event showed me of what stuff they are made. I flush that stuff.

My friend has since vanished from the writing scene. I haven’t heard from him in years. I’ve tried to locate him, but have been unable to find where he’s gone. He’s no longer a part of the writing community, as far as I’ve been able to tell. If it was the aim of the two fan-favorites to drive him out of the little genre ghetto, then they by and large succeeded. While all of that bothers me to no end, I have always felt somewhat advantaged to have witnessed this vicious act, for it allowed me to realize that there generally is no moral superiority among the downtrodden. Quite often, they are as mean and as cruel and as hateful as any from whom they claim persecution.