Publishing Deportment

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I don’t know if anybody reads this blog for publishing advice (editors are easily edited out, I know!).  But still, here goes.  It pays, in many ways, to research your targeted publisher.  And no matter which publisher you decide to approach, do it professionally.  “Friending” an editor on social media and then asking her/him to consider your book on said media is not professional.  Many publishers don’t allow any kind of business to take place through social media.  Be smart about it—go to a publisher’s website and follow their instructions.  Or email an editor.  At their work email.  Again, many publishers do not allow business to be conducted through private emails.  I may be an outlier editor for trying to build a social platform, but if you want to talk business, please use my work address.

More books are being published now than ever before.  Even small presses are closing submission windows because too many people keep trying to get published.  As someone who’s published a few books, I would urge you to ask yourself: why do I want to publish this?  Is it just because you wrote it?  Then look for a press that publishes that kind of thing.  Be prepared to face some frustration, but homework is never easy.  Is it because you think publishing a book will lead to fame?  Adjust your frame of reference.  The vast majority of authors are, and remain, obscure.  It is possible to make some money in publishing, but most of the time it’s not very much.  If it’s money you’re after, you need to get an agent.  It might seem as difficult to get an agent as it is to get published.  That should tell you something about the possibility of making money from books.

I’m no publishing guru.  Editing’s my day job.  One thing I’ve learned, however, is that publishers like to see that you’ve taken their guidelines seriously.  A quick social media introduction isn’t the same thing as an email that shows someone at least looked you up at work.  And most publishers have descriptions of what they want to receive on their websites.  This applies both to fiction and non.  I get it.  I remember being a kid in high school dreading all that homework—all those books I’d have to haul home day after day.  But that’s the tried and true way to learn something new.  And if you want to get published you do need to learn how to do it.  And just like in high school, deportment counts.

Learning to Write

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If you’re not famous as a writer, nobody asks you for advice on improving their game.  Part of that is simply having a writer’s outlook.  We all have our own ideas about how it’s done.  I admire the work of Stephen King.  He’s a gifted storyteller and his books often deal with the kinds of things I think about.  I had his book On Writing on my reading list for years.  What finally got me to read it was finding it in a local independent bookstore and wanting to support said venue.  I found it both helpful and a little scary to read.  This is part memoir and part instruction manual by someone who isn’t full of ego, despite his success.  Egoism isn’t uncommon among writers, but King realizes that many people have talent, but not all know how to bring it to any kind of success, no matter how modest.

I really enjoyed reading the memoir parts.  Indeed, I wish I could’ve read them when I was, say, in college.  My own trajectory as a writer might’ve turned out differently.  His instructive sections are also helpful, but the part about finding an agent is hopelessly out of date.  The internet has made doing so both easier and more difficult.  Too many people now flood agents’ offices with pitches that you practically need an agent to get you an agent.  I know this from experience.  Nevertheless, King’s advice generally feels quite solid.  And it’s encouraging to hear of the commonalities we share in our upbringing.  Writers often begin in less-than-ideal situations.  If we can struggle out of them, some can find success in writing while others manage to do it on the side (this isn’t my day job).  But write we do.

As with most of King’s books that I’ve read, this one went fairly quickly.  Not every book that I read makes me feel eager for reading time, but King always does.  In part, at least with On Writing, it’s because I can’t help but wonder if I’m doing this right.  During the course of reading his book, two more rejection letters came for my fiction projects.  Any writer knows that you have to deal with lots and lots of these.  King started earlier, but, like me, he kept his rejection slips.  Eventually I ditched mine because they’re too discouraging.  And I still submit to what has become, since this book was written, a very, very crowded fiction market place.  Still, this is an encouraging book, offering advice from someone who knows what he’s doing.  It’s a shame I waited so long to read it.

Another Level

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Jack Finney is probably best remembered as the person who came up with the idea for The Invasion of the Body Snatchers.  His book, The Body Snatchers, was the inspiration behind the two movies based on it, as well as various knockoffs.  The Third Level is a collection of short stories he wrote.  I’ve been trying to introduce more short stories into my literary diet, and this one was recommended by Stephen King in Danse Macabre.  Specifically, he mentioned it as being more like what The Twilight Zone should’ve been than much of what Rod Serling wrote.  Now, I’m an unapologetic Rod Serling fan.  This is based on memories from childhood when I watched the show and, let’s be honest here, wished he could be my father.  I already had a taste for the unusual and sometimes macabre, and so I was curious what King thought might do Serling better.

The Third Level was labeled as science fiction, but sci-fi and horror share more than a boundary or two and at least four of the stories have nothing sciency about them.  As a collection it’s good in the same sense as a mature reading of Ray Bradbury is good.  I would’ve liked this—probably loved it—as a kid.  I was reading, however, for The Twilight Zone.  There are some good twist endings here, but not all the stories have them.  A couple of them are pretty straightforward whimsical romances.  Many of them feel very much like they were written in the forties and fifties.  A couple of the stories, late in the collection, I really liked.  They were a bit more Zonish than some of the others.

One of the problems in writing a brief post on a collection—and no collection is uniformly great—is that it’s difficult to give a sense of the whole.  So instead I’ll just focus for a minute on the last story, “Contents of the Dead Man’s Pockets.”  This one shows the power of Finney’s descriptive writing and it caused physical reactions I seldom get when reading.  It involves a man climbing out on an eleventh-story ledge to reclaim an important bit of paper that blew out the window.  More than once I almost had to put the book down.  Fear of falling is deeply embedded in the human psyche and Finney is able to probe it for more pages than I was comfortable reading.  Well done, sir.  Overall, the collection is good to have read.  It won’t change my mind about the Zone, however.  It reached me a little too late to do that.

Oblong Box

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When Borders was closing—a sad day in the annals of American readers—things were marked down.  On one venture to a remaining store somewhere in New Jersey, where the checkout line snaked like one of those around a Times Square theater before the doors open, I picked up Edgar Allan Poe Complete Tales and Poems.  Poe has, of course, been in the public domain for many decades so anybody can publish his works.  I did attempt to sit down and read through this behemoth that contains 73 short stories, but stumbled at “Hans Pfaall,” the first.  This story is really a novelette, in today’s measure, coming in at nearly 19,000 words.  (It took Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque to get me through it.)  So I’ve been content to dip into it now and again to read one of Poe’s stories.  In print. When the mood hits.

I read “The Oblong Box” in preparation for watching the movie.  I had never encountered this story before, and I prefer to read the base before attempting the latter adaptations (particularly by AIP).  The problem with reading Poe from this remove—in the light of his reputation—is that even the title tells us the box is a coffin.  How it is to be used in Poe’s tale may be unknown at first.  Here Poe divides his characteristic obsessiveness between the narrator and Mr. Wyatt, his temperamental artist friend who is newly married.  Wyatt, the owner of said oblong box, takes it on a voyage by boat from Charleston to New York.  The narrator obsesses over what might be in the box, being kept in a cramped stateroom rather than in the hold.  A storm leads to a shipwreck and rather than be rescued, Wyatt binds himself to the box and leaps into the ocean.  I won’t put the reveal here, but you get the idea. Today the title gives away Poe’s original twist.

There are still many of Poe’s stories that I haven’t read.  I’ve had enough of a head start, however, that I may eventually make it through those he published.  I’m aware that some of them may be funny, and some are tales of ratiocination.  Some may be completely unexpected.  Like many writers, Poe’s reputation is based on certain of his most well-known tales.  But also like most writers, his interest ranged fairly widely.  And he had that sense of “what if” that tends to drive those of us who write in a similar vein.  But these days we know that if we see an oblong box we’ll already have a pretty good idea of what’s inside.

Photo by Tom Oates, 2013; This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license. Attribution: Nabokov at English Wikipedia

Gray Matter

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It seems to me that I was living in Boston the last time I read Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.  That was long enough ago to have forgotten almost everything except the central premise that everyone knows.  Recently, I had been reading some analysts who consider it a kind of horror story.  Wilde was a great and notable wit, not typically cited as a horror writer.  More recently I’d seen the novel classified as dark academia.  Since there are no students, and there’s no school in the novel, that genre seems forced.  In any case, it is a classic and I was curious about what I had forgotten.  The dialogue regarding morals stands out rather boldly, with traditional Christian values being the gold standard.  In his own life Wilde was known to flaunt these things, but in his story they stand mostly unchallenged.

At the same time, it is a book about seeking redemption.  Toward the end, Dorian regrets the lifetime of evil he’s led.  He wants to turn over a new leaf.  Corrupted from an early age by Lord Henry Wotton, he learned to live a cynical and self-centered life.  He shut out the feelings and needs of others for his own pursuit of pleasure.  As an old man still appearing young, he comes to have his regrets.  Although Wilde didn’t really live long enough to reach this stage in his own, he seems to have understood psychology well enough.  He even tried to have a half-year Catholic retreat.  Length of life often trails regrets in its train.  Of course, for Gray it is too little, too late.  He has made his mark on the world, but it hasn’t been for good.  His final act is a stab at redemption, but the novel gives no hint whether he achieved it or not.

Whether intentional or no, the novel considers the fact that we all wear masks.  And we do so for much of the time.  And there is a bit of horror involved in discovering that we aren’t who we pretend to be.  The real Dorian Gray was locked away in an attic room while his life of dissipation  led to the ruin of many.  The witty dialogue maybe makes this a comedy horror.  At times it seems to get in the way of the mood of the story, but it never stopped the novel from making a similar impression to the nearly contemporary Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.  Late Victorians knew something that we, as a society, seem to have forgotten.  The attics of some prominent individuals surely have portraits that belie their appearance on the ubiquitous screen.

Still Sleepy

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One thing I quickly learned when beginning work on Sleepy Hollow as American Myth was that the story hadn’t really been studied too much by those with academic training.  There are some exceptions, of course.  Another thing I swiftly picked up is that many people who wanted to write on the legend chose the method of publishing the public domain story with a variety of annotations, essays, and other additions, to make a salable book.  Often these are self-published and not always immediately obvious to the researcher as to whether they contain anything important or not.  I had not run across Christopher Rondina’s Legends of Sleepy Hollow: The Lost History of the Headless Horseman until well after my manuscript was submitted.  I found it in the bibliography of a ghost-hunter version of Sleepy Hollow that wasn’t even published by the time I was going into production.  (It doesn’t even have an ISBN.)

I do have to say that Rondina’s variety of this composite genre isn’t bad.  He includes Washington Irving’s story and expands it with an introduction, and brief chapters considering any historical background that there may be.  He also adds a chapter on modern media of the story that includes one television adaption that I failed to find for my book.  Interestingly, after I’d written the manuscript I discovered Joe Nazare’s similarly annotated version, also with a number of the media I’d analyzed in it.  I’d actually corresponded with Nazare earlier, having discovered his website.  Not wanting to discuss what my book was about until after I sent it in (others have more time to write, perhaps, than I do) I didn’t mention our common interest and didn’t discover his annotated version until it was too late to include as a conversation partner.

Self-publication has perhaps become inevitable since standard publishing is difficult to break into.  And the internet gives anyone the ability to self-publish without too much effort.  It does, however, make doing research a bit more difficult.  I determined early on that I could not review every annotated version of Irving’s story.  I selected a few of the most promising and moved on.  Both Rondina and Nazare had interesting things to say about the tale, and it’s a pity that they weren’t discoverable until after the fact, at least to me.  I like to give credit where credit is due, but any ideas that seem similar to these two sources in my book will have to stand as examples of convergent thinking on the part of fans of the “Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”  I know there are many other fans out there and I hope they find the resources they need to understand the story just a bit better.

More Time

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Speaking of time… Time is one of those things that flummoxes me.  A time change, crossing time zones, trying to figure things out on a base-6 system (metric time anyone?).  Confusing.  One thing about time is that we live in it, and so reflecting on it seems a reasonable thing to do.  Brett Bowden does just that in Now Is Not the Time: Inside Our Obsession with the Present.  As an historian, Bowden is experienced at looking back and this brief book is a reflection on why we’re so fixated on now being the most important time ever.  Given recent events, his seems to be a comforting message when looking at the long term of human history, and even longer term of our humble planet’s history.  The present is a blip and the future, at least as far as we know, hasn’t been decided yet.

One of the topics Bowden addresses here is the human propensity to claim and name.  We like to name things and when we do, it implies ownership.  Who but an owner gets to decide on a name?  This leads him to reflect on Eurocentrism, as in the naming of objects, such as Mount Everest, that are very far away and in somebody else’s territory.  We name craters on the moon (which we can’t really just pop over to) and even stars and galaxies.  We’re terribly acquisitive rascals, aren’t we?  We do the same with time—dividing it into eras.  Bowden’s discussion of the Anthropocene debate is quite interesting.  It seems we need a name for the time when people really began changing the planet on a global scale, but geological time ought to hush us up, if we stop and think about it.

As Bowden notes, psychologists and life coaches often encourage us to be in the present.  I think what they mean is that we shouldn’t worry unduly about the future.  That’s good advice.   Something Brett reminded me of is that some cultures, such as those of the Bible writers, view people as moving into the future backward.  It’s like riding on a train facing away from the direction of motion.  We can see the past and we can interpret it.  The future, however, we can’t perceive quite so clearly.  As someone who has studied the history of religions, I tend to agree that looking back is often a source of comfort.  It’s also a source of horror—many bad things have happened, many of them intentionally orchestrated by our species.  But it does serve to ground us in the now.  Even if it’s no more important than what went before or than whatever it may be that will come.

Paranormal Religion

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I remember well what it was like to be an evangelical.  Measuring everything by what I thought the Bible said, fearing those things that seemed to come from outside.  Being very concerned with salvation and its opposite.  At the same time, I was fascinated by the paranormal.  As I child I was teased for these interests and subsequently buried them.  Then I had a slow, protracted, and continuing waking from dogmatic slumber.  So it is natural that I would want to read R. Alan Streett’s Exploring the Paranormal: Miracles, Magic, and the Mysterious.  I didn’t know how he would approach the subject, and I didn’t know where on the evangelical spectrum he fell.  Still, I’m always interested to see how others handle what we all know—strange stuff happens and there is no real explanation for it.  Scientific method may one day be able to address some of it, but at the moment it generally falls outside the bounds.

Streett’s book is somewhat autobiographical, from his non-religious childhood, believing in parapsychology, through seminary and having an evangelical awakening, to the point that he stopped supposing such things were demonic, and on to where he stands at the moment—thinking that most such things can be explained by brain science and alternative states of consciousness.  There are a number of interesting situations and concepts described in this book; I learned quite a bit when he discussed different brain states.  I understand his theological rejection of potential realities behind the phenomena he discusses (mostly mediumship, but also reincarnation and faith healing) but don’t always agree with the conclusions.  There is much in the world that theology can’t explain.

Something that is perhaps overt between the covers, is that the paranormal is something that happens to evangelical, liberal, Muslim, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist, atheist, agnostic, and none alike.  What differs is the interpretation, based on various faith traditions and their tolerance for that which is outside.  Evangelicalism is a worldview, perhaps more so than it is a theological position.  Non-divine miracles, or whatever you want to call paranormal occurrences, don’t fit comfortably into that worldview.  Other interpreters, also raised in Christian traditions (Catholicism, for example, is quite open to mystical happenings that can fall into the paranormal category), might approach the question in a different way.  Dialogue is important, however, and trying to make sense of this world we live in, in my humble opinion, has to reach outside the reductionistic view that brains alone account for human experience.  Streett’s account offers a reasonable perspective on the issue from an evangelical outlook.

Vlad Fest

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I may or may not have read at least part of this book before.  When I found it at a used book sale somewhere, it looked familiar.  Having read it, I’m not sure if it was the same one as before.  There are certain parts that I would’ve thought a high schooler would have remembered.  I recognize the names of the authors, Raymond T. McNally and Radu Florescu.  You see, one of my senior term papers in high school was on vampires.  Unable to afford books, my research was done in the school library and this book is old enough to have been in the collection.  While the subtitle, A True History of Dracula and Vampire Legends, may seem to indicate a book primarily about vampires, In Search of Dracula is mainly about Vlad Tepes, or Vlad the Impaler.  I can’t imagine myself wading through all the Romanian history in high school.

You see, I remember reading a book on the history of vampires.  The strongest memory is of reading it in our church sanctuary.  Lest you get the wrong idea, I was very involved in our youth group.  We occasionally had chaperoned sleepovers at the church and I had already had a leadership role, serving on church committees and district and conference-level events.  Nobody had a problem with me sitting in the sanctuary.  On one of the sleepovers, I awoke early (as I have always tended to do), and I went to the sanctuary to read the book by the dawn’s early light streaming through the stained-glass window.  I have kept a look out for the book, and I thought this might have been it.

I’m pretty sure it wasn’t.  While this history does have a good summary of vampire customs and even movies, it takes a stout stomach to read the material about Vlad III’s reign.  Although he is a Romanian hero, he was a cruel man and his infamy was well established during his own lifetime.  I’m pretty sure that he would’ve been diagnosed with a mental disorder, had psychology existed then.  This book does trace his history and surveys various places associated with him.  One thing that might’ve been helpful would have been more maps.  The authors are clearly well versed in Transylvanian geography, but the average reader may not be able to find some of the many place names on the one map they include.  Otherwise, this is quite an informative book, mostly about Vlad, but with useful chapters on Bram Stoker and the vampire in the media up to the early seventies.

Thinking about Vampires

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Any book on vampires has to be limited.  I first read Matthew Beresford’s From Demons to Dracula: The Creation of the Modern Vampire Myth back in 2009.  It has lots of information, but it was long enough ago that much of what I’d learned had grown fusty with age.  I began re-reading it as Halloween approached, and am glad I did.  The thing about vampires, however, is that you do have to compare sources.  Like many explorations of the vampire, Beresford’s notes that there are ancient analogues, but nothing precisely like we think of vampires today.  From my own perspective, I tend to think that our modern vampires, like our demons, come from movies.  Starting with F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, but more clearly from Tod Browning’s Dracula, our idea of what vampires are have been mediated by the silver screen.

This book ranges widely across time, region, and genre.  It discusses early reports that clearly considered vampires an actual threat, as well as movies made purely for entertainment.  One thing that I noticed this time around is that the author, being British, seems not to have noticed the tremendous influence Dark Shadows had on the popularity of vampires prior to Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire.  I suspect that soap operas were not widely known internationally, and even if they were, they were likely not taken too seriously.  Dark Shadows was different, however, and it made vampires chic in a way they simply weren’t before the early seventies.  At least in the United States, Barnabas Collins helped define the vampire.

Beresford makes the point that there is no single defining characteristic that applies to all vampires.  Early European vampires didn’t necessarily drink blood—they were revenants (they’d returned from the dead) but they weren’t always after blood.  In the nineteenth century bloodlust became the defining feature of vampires.  There are historical points on which to quibble with the argument here, but overall this book is a good overview of how ideas like vampires have been around for quite some time.  As someone who specialized in ancient literature for a good part of my life, I would not have called the various ancient analogues pointed out “vampires.”  Beresford is making the case that they lay the groundwork for what later became vampires.  And Vlad Tepes of Wallachia played his part as well.  As did the ancient Greeks.  It seems to me there’s more rich ground to explore here and this book provides a very good starting place.

International Horror

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As someone who has written a couple pieces on Jewish horror for Horror Homeroom, I have developed a natural interest in international horror.  I was one of those who scrambled hard to find The Golem (2018) when it came out, but was able to see it only in 2020.  When I learned about New Israeli Horror, by Olga Gershenson, I knew I had to read it.  The subtitle, Local Cinema, Global Genre, pretty much captures how she approaches the subject.  It also helped me understand a bit better the way filmmaking works.  I once, rather naively, asked a film scholar how many movies had been made.  He responded, “It’s impossible to know.”  Even experts in cinema can’t see every movie, and those of us who watch horror can’t see every horror film.  (I wouldn’t want to.)  I hadn’t realized, however, until reading this book, that in places like Israel it often comes down to state funding.

I’ve written quite a lot about Euro-horror over the past few years.  Often cooperative ventures, these are horror films that aren’t part of the Hollywood system, and they are frequently quite good.  Those of us who enjoy movies may not often think of who pays for them.  It’s kind of like book publishing—someone’s got to pay for all this, and hopes to make their money back in the process.  In Israel many movies are funded by official agencies.  And such agencies tend not to like horror.  New Israeli horror, by Gershenson’s reckoning, began only about 2010.  One of the reasons I’ve turned to writing about horror is that its history isn’t so long as, say, ancient West Asian studies, which reaches back thousands of years.  Reading about something not even two decades old, but still history, is fun.

I learned a tremendous amount from this book.  Of the films discussed I’ve only seen one, the aforementioned Golem.  Before writing Holy Horror, I paid no attention to where films were produced.  I’d seen some international movies, sometimes obvious because of subtitles, but my usual fare is homegrown.  I gather that I’ve been missing a lot by not seeing more Israeli horror.  When you add Jewish horror (Jewish-themed horror, in my way of seeing things) to the mix, there’s a new angle to take on religion and horror.  Many of the films Gershenson reads are about Israel’s army and critique of the militarism that has become part of life in Israel.  I confess to not keeping up on politics because to me it tends to be scarier than horror.  But I can see, from this book, that I’ve been missing some interesting cinema.

Won’t Tell

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This one is pretty darn close to too tense to read before bed.  I don’t remember how I found out about Ivar Leon Menger’s What Mother Won’t Tell Me.  That’s usually a pretty good sign that I found it in a bookstore.  Those are still places to linger while trying to find something a bit different.  This one is a page turner, but also one that I’m not quite sure how to classify.  It may be horror but the “monsters” are all humans.  I almost don’t want to describe the plot because it is so exquisitely suspenseful.  When I’m reading to get sleepy, I often find myself trying to grasp pieces of a story that are floating away like dandelion fluff, unable to put them back together.  Then I know it’s time to close my eyes and re-read a paragraph or two tomorrow.  That never happened with this one.

I think I can say this much without giving it away: Juno lives on an isolated island in a lake with her parents and younger brother.  The parents warn them of the murderous strangers who are seeking them—the father was a states’ witness against a powerful criminal family—so the children must never be seen on the island.  If anyone happens to come, they must hide and remain quiet until they leave.  They have to practice drills in case this ever happens.  It gets pretty creepy, from nearly the first page.  I would also advise against reading the back cover copy, since it will give some of it away.  I tend not to read the copy until after I read a book—you just never know what they might let slip.

This is a story about perseverance and discovery.  Discovery that is full of tension.  It’s a reminder of how precarious childhood is.  There are plenty of twists in the story and chapters generally end with information that creates a tension that the next chapter will only partially resolve.  The end result is a story that pulls you along and is pretty chilling.  I’m not sure if I’d call this horror or not.  If there’s a good case for a thriller being a separate genre, this could be useful as evidence.  Even if it’s not horror, it is likely to appeal to many who read in that genre.  There’s nothing speculative about it.  Perhaps that’s why the story scares in the way that it does—this could happen.  What happens?  Like mother, I won’t tell you either.

Personal Publishing

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I recently joined the Greater Lehigh Valley Writers Group.  I haven’t really met any other members yet, although I know one from another local community.  By my reckoning, this is the fourth writers’ group I’ve joined and I do hope it leads to some friendships.  I like talking about writing.  I read Blurred Lines by Scott Christian because he’s a person I recently met and he kindly gave me a copy.  A collection of poems and stories, it’s a small book but a deeply personal one.  I guess that’s one reason that I like talking about writing with other people—it is deeply revealing.  There are those who write as a job, and there are those who write because they must.  This book falls into the latter category.  Some of us are compelled to write down what we experience, whether it be in poetry, fiction, or fact.

Self-publishing can be a way of expressing what the publishing industry suppresses.  I once told a group that it’s a little disturbing how much power publishers have in determining what people can read.  I write “can” intentionally.  Only the biggest in the industry have the financial wherewithal to get books into bookstores (where readers congregate like bees on a warm day in October) where they’ll be laid out on tables and priced to move.  Like many others, I began my writing in academia.  It took some time before I realized that academic prices are a deterrent to readers.  Breaking out of that mold is also difficult.  At the same time, publishers have resources to devote to marketing that an individual seldom has time for, or the reach to accomplish.  So it goes.

Another review of Nightmares with the Bible has appeared (this one in Catholic Biblical Quarterly).  While not glowing, it does recommend reading the book, despite the fact that the publisher has no interest in paperbacking the series and it takes a great deal of motivation for even me to spend that much for a book.  Yes, I can understand self-publishing.  It is a writer’s chance to get their voice heard.  Even some famous authors—Mark Twain comes to mind—had to get their start by paying to have their books published.  Some of us write because we can do no other.  We have thoughts and feelings to share.  And I keep joining local writers groups looking for the rare person who will talk to a stranger about that most intimate act we call writing.  Reading such a book is a very personal thing to do.

A Second Post?

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A second post in one day?  Not really.  As much as I’d love to post more, work drains me.  But I also realize I post early and some people may miss my musings because they’re so early.

Enough prologue.  This is simply a public service announcement.  McFarland is offering 40% off when you order two horror books, through the end of October.  Now that Holy Horror’s price is reasonable, you can really make a killing.  To take advantage of this limited-time sale, use the code HALLOWEEN2024 at checkout.

McFarland prices their books reasonably for an academically inclined small press.  And they have a great selection of horror-themed titles.  Check it out!  Back to your regularly scheduled programming.  (I’ll post again in the early morning, as usual.)

Short Story

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I often reflect on how little I know.  No matter how much I read there is more to be read.  Works worthy of time but sacrificed to circumstance.  I was recently reading a short story by Poe that I’d never read before.  As others have noted, Poe was a prolific author of a great deal of forms—poems, a novel, letters, a scientific treatise, literary criticism, and, of course, his stories.  I came to know his stories through cheap collections available in my small town, mostly not along the lines of those Poe himself selected.  Indeed, editions of his own chosen works, such as Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, before the advent of internet-based publishing, were difficult to come by.  Original editions cost many thousands of dollars.  Poe isn’t alone in this category—short stories are an unusual genre.

I know from personal experience that finding a publisher for a collection of such stories is nearly as difficult as finding a publisher for poetry.  Publishers are looking for money, of course, and like Poe, all writers produce stories that interest some but not others.  The novel is safer, and even today’s amazing writers have to find success as novelists before publishers will offer volumes of their short stories.  Tis a pity, really.  I have many volumes of short stories on my shelves, including some of Poe’s, but for some reason publishers tend to cram such volumes so full that they become unwieldy.  Intimidating almost.  It leads to that feeling of existential dread that I felt approaching War and Peace—would I indeed survive to finish it?  (I did, but that is such a Poe-like question I had to employ it.)

The short story is an important literary form that is singularly difficult to publish.  I have managed to find homes for about thirty such pieces, but many more have failed to move even just  the internet critics.  Those that have been published have brought no income at all.  In Poe’s day, an author attempting to make a living could not afford to give away their life’s blood.  Indeed, Poe’s older contemporary Washington Irving struggled with pirated copies of his works being sold overseas (he spent a great deal of time in Europe).  Like Poe, Irving excelled in the short story, or sketch.  We’re often at the mercy of editors who select the stories for us, making them available.  I suspect there’s much that we miss by not stepping outside their personal tastes regarding what to include.  Or, just as importantly, exclude.  Some day, perhaps, I will have read all of Poe’s short stories.  Until then, I’ll find them when necessary.