Shooting Yourself in the Head for Fun and Profit: A Writer's Survival Guide

Plagiarism

Deadlines

A Guide to Binge Writing

Dealing with Rejection

On Self-Publishing

How to Survive Writing Short Fiction

Part Three: Your Writing Allies

On Collaborations

Finding, Creating, and Maintaining a Writers’ Workshop Group

The Care and Feeding of First Readers

An Introduction to Literary Agents

How I Got My Agent

Part Four: This Town Is Big Enough for the Thousands of Us

Conventions: An Introduction

What Should You Look for in a Convention?

How to Network at a Convention

A Short List of Conventions

Going the Extra Mile: Coordinating Convention Writing Workshops

Part Five: Helping Your Book Make an Impact

Book Signings and Basic Book Promotion Steps

How Books Get Into Libraries

Book Advertisements

Manuscript Tracking Tools

Signature Sheets

On Crowd-Funding

Tuckerization

Part Six: Master Wordsmiths

On Author Interviews

It’s All Part of the Fun: An Interview with Clive Barker

Art and the Artist: Another Interview with Clive Barker

William Peter Blatty

Shirley Jackson

An Interview with Ursula K. Le Guin

Meeting Chuck Palahniuk

Part Seven: Welcome to the Genre Jungle

Horror

Tripping the Dark Fantastic

Urban Fantasy’s Long Shadow

Paranormal Romance

Romance’s Alpha Male Monster

Parting Shots: Urban Fantasy Plot Creation

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Post Mortem Press and to my first readers, Gary A. Braunbeck and Trista Robichaud. My thanks to them all and to everyone who has picked up this book.

Shooting Yourself in the Head

for Fun and Profit

You say a book should start out with a bang? Okay, I can do that.

When my father was in medical school, he did a rotation in the emergency room of a hospital in rural South Carolina. That’s a part of the country where many folks’ final words are Hey, y’all, watch this! He saw some seriously weird stuff during his time there, and heard about even more. One of his stories in particular has stuck in my head.

A guy showed up one night with a bullet wound in the middle of his forehead. It was a small-caliber, soft lead slug that hit and spread out across the bone in a nickel-sized circle without breaking his skull. He had a nasty powder burn, so he’d been shot at very close range. One of the docs cut the bloody lump of the bullet out, cleaned and bandaged the wound, and sent him home with a prescription for antibiotics and painkillers.

Several months later, he showed up at the ER with the same kind of gunshot wound.

And again, a few months after that.

And again and again.

It turned out that this guy had been going into crowded honkytonks and dive bars and getting people to bet on whether he could shoot himself square in the head and walk away from it. Figuring they wouldn’t have to owe any money to a dead man, people ponied up hundreds of dollars.

Once the pot was big enough, this guy would go out into the parking lot with the crowd of blood-lusty drunks in tow, pull out his pistol loaded with underpowered, soft ammo, and shoot himself point-blank in the forehead.

My father guesses that the first time, the guy was drunk, suicidal and desperate. When his ploy worked, he turned it into a regular bar bet moneymaking scheme. After his fifth or sixth trip to the ER, his forehead was thickly scarred, and the bone was starting to build up in response to the repeated bullet impacts. The doctors figured that he’d probably destroyed most of the pain nerves in his forehead (though of course the impact gave the guy a killer headache).

None of the hospital staff could convince this guy to stop shooting himself in the head. It wasn’t just the money; this was apparently the only thing this guy was really good at. He liked the charge of cheating death. And he loved the expressions of horror, amazement, and frustrated anger he got from onlookers who’d paid their hard-earned cash to see a parking lot suicide.

I would hope that nobody reading this would be thick-skulled enough to try such a hugely dangerous stunt … or thick-skulled enough to succeed.

But. His story reminds me a whole lot of what it’s often like to try to make a living writing fiction.

First off, if you’ve ever spent quality time facing down a blank page, especially a blank page you have to fill with publishable words on deadline, you know writing isn’t merely difficult but sometimes downright painful. On the days when the words just won’t flow, writing may seem like you’re trying to juice a hunk of granite. With the time ticking away, you can close your eyes and feel the barrel pressed right against your raw forehead.

Second, this fiction writing business can look completely crazy to spouses, relatives, and other bystanders. Spread your mind’s darkest imaginations wide open to anyone who wants to look? Bleed out your heart and soul for six cents a word? Yes, that’s exactly what we do.

The good news is, you don’t have to kill yourself to make it as a writer, for whatever values of making it you have rattling around in your own skull. While every writer has to find his or her own unique way through the jungle of publishing, you can learn something from the people who slogged through the vines and briars before you. I’ve sold a handful of professional novels and a couple of bushel baskets of stories and poems, and along the way I’ve written a fair number of essays on the craft of writing. You’ll find those pieces here, and I hope you find them helpful.

Part One

Finding Your Writing Target

Advice to Beginning

Fiction Writers

Everyone who sets out to become a writer wants to be seen as a real writer, not a wanna-be or never-gonna-be. It’s basic human nature to crave acceptance, status and respect. And even the crustiest, most jaded authors – despite their protestations to the contrary – are human beings who are warmed by praise and stung by criticism just like everyone else.

Group hug, anyone? Sure, let’s all have a big, fuzzy group hug. You’re going to need it. Respect can be very hard to come by in the writing world.

Have you written seven epic manuscripts but not sold anything yet? Average Midlist Author will snort and roll his eyes behind your back when you declare yourself to be a writer in his presence.

Excited because you just sold your first novel? Snarky Big-Name World Fantasy Award Winner won’t give you the time of day.

Have you made a long, award-winning career selling dozens of horror and dark fantasy books? Professor Condescendor at the Great North American English Department will pat you on your head and tell you it’s too bad you don’t do any serious work.

And if you’ve made a solid literary and commercial career writing dark works of staggering intelligence, subtle lyricism and heartbreaking genius, Random Reader will be quick to write a negative Amazon review of your latest opus: "This book was teh BORING! There was no action in it at ALL!"

And if you manage to write bestselling works that magically combine high art, genuine chills and compelling storytelling, if you have Professor Condescendor and Random Reader and Big-Name Award Winner all clamoring for your next publication …

… you’ll go visit Uncle Insurance Salesman, who’ll yawn when you describe your latest book tour and ask, So when are you gonna quit playing around with that writing crap and get yourself a REAL job?

The moment you set out to become a writer, no matter how good you are, you’re going to meet people who’ll put you in touch with your inner Rodney Dangerfield at almost every turn.

So you just can’t win, can you? You might as well just write what you want and pay to publish the result on Kindle and not worry about what anyone else thinks, right?

Whoa. Not so fast.

You might not always be able to win at the writing game, but there’s a right way and a wrong way to play it. And if you play well, you’ll (probably) earn the respect of the people who might matter a whole lot to the progress of your writing career.

Because when you get down to bare boards, you want that career, don’t you? Writing makes a fine hobby, but hobbyists just don’t get the kind of respect pros do. And the beauty of making money at writing is that it enables you to spend your time writing instead of fixing leaky toilets or taking customer support calls.

The most straightforward way of gaining respect in the genre of your choice is to write and sell a lot of excellent work in that genre.

Straightforward, sure … but not very darned easy. Writing well is hard enough without considering that the average paying publisher might accept less than 3% of the manuscripts submitted to them.

It can take years for talented beginners laboring in anonymity to land first story or novel sales, particularly if they have decided to limit their submissions to high-profile pro markets.

So what’s a newbie to do? Fortunately, there are several para-writing activities you can engage in. These can improve your skills, positively raise your profile and therefore your respect in the field. A better profile will likely increase the chances of getting published.

1. Go to Clarion, Odyssey or the Borderlands Boot Camp. These workshops are often described as boot camp for writers. Borderlands Press’ workshop is held in Towson, MD over a long weekend. Odyssey is held for six weeks every summer in Manchester, NH. There are three of the six-week Clarion workshops in San Diego, Seattle, and Australia. You’ll have to compete to get in, pay to stay in, and it’s an intense experience that galvanizes some writers and traumatizes others.

At Clarion, you’ll work with established pros and other up-and-comers; the networking contacts you make can be invaluable. If you graduate, you may find that a Clarion credit is enough to lift your submissions out of the slushpile and onto the editor’s desk for closer consideration. This golden period only lasts for a year or so after you graduate, but many graduates have made publishing hay from it.

2. Get an MFA in writing. Pursuing a graduate degree of any kind can be quite expensive, and an MFA takes time and work. On the plus side, it gives you a socially acceptable way to spend a few years focusing on your writing. On the downside, MFA programs are rarely receptive to science fiction, fantasy, romance, and horror, so you’ll have to bleach your genre roots and learn to put up with a lot of tedious (and potentially discouraging) lit snobbery from your instructors and classmates.

Writing practice aside, an MFA gets you an academic credential – one that some people may be impressed with – but not much else. However, having an MFA is a prerequisite to getting a job as a creative writing instructor at most big universities, and becoming a writing professor is a pretty good gig if you can get it. Academia is not for everyone, and MFA programs crank out many more graduates than there are waiting positions, but a professorship is more suited to a writer’s creative life than most 9-to-5 jobs.

2a. Or, go to Seton Hill. Seton Hill University in Greensburg, PA, runs a unique low-residency MFA in Writing Popular Fiction. The goal of the program is to have you graduate with a publishable novel manuscript in your hands. Nalo Hopkinson and Mary Sangiovanni are just a couple of Seton Hill program graduates who professionally sold their manuscripts. Can you get published without going to school? Absolutely. But if you want to get an MFA degree and you want to work with pros who’ve actually sold a lot of work in your genre of choice, you should check out the program.

Disclaimer: I work in Seton Hill’s program as an adjunct faculty member. But here’s the thing: I wouldn’t work for them unless I believed in the program. And I don’t get a finder’s fee for new students. I’m simply proud of what I and the other faculty are accomplishing there.

3. Become an editor at a paying publication. If you’re buying fiction and poetry, you get instant credibility – as long as you make good decisions.

Fortunately, you don’t need to shell out the money to start your own publication. There are hundreds of established presses and magazines out there, and the vast majority of them are understaffed; they will gladly accept competent volunteers for proofreading and slush-reading.

You’ll get to see the submissions process from the other side of the transom, and the experience can be tremendously educational. Hard work and good taste will help you rise in the volunteer ranks until you’re a recognized editor. But beware: you may find yourself with so much work on your hands that you no longer have the time or energy to write.

4. Don’t ignore the small presses. Yes, the small presses are small. Many don’t pay well, if at all. But there are good, respected small press magazines that will get you a bit of pay and a bit more recognition in the genre. No, they can’t compete with top-paying markets in terms of exposure. But competition for the best markets is fierce. The writers I’ve known who’ve penned stories or novels, sent them out only to the biggest markets and given up on the manuscripts when they weren’t accepted by those top choices have all ultimately given up on writing.

5. But by all means, submit to the top markets. A single sale to one of the top markets will instantly raise your profile in the genre and give you much more credibility as a writer. So, if you think your work’s solid, give it a shot; just don’t fall into a depressed I’m-no-good-I-should-just-quit funk if you miss your target.

6. Don’t give up. Did you read #5? I repeat: don’t give up. Getting established as a writer will take a while. How long a while? Probably years. How many years? Get a pair of six-sided dice. Roll ‘em. That’s as likely a forecast as any. Ultimately, it will probably take longer than you expect. But this business rewards persistence.

7. Write nonfiction. Editors at paying magazines are deluged with fiction and poetry submissions, but nonfiction submissions are sometimes just a trickle. So, your odds of placing a book or movie review can be pretty good. An article credit doesn’t count the same as a fiction credit … but it still gets you a bit of pay and gets your name on the Table of Contents.

8. Follow the Golden Rule. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Or, phrased a bit less Biblically: The best way to get respect is to give it. Or, even more simply: don’t be a jerk.

Yes, we all know certain big-name writers who are famously caustic, combative, or just plain unpleasant. Some people unfortunately find a great deal of entertainment in watching established authors snark at the expense of lesser writers. Consequently, some beginners mistakenly believe that they, too, can get noticed and get published if they’re nasty as possible.

This tends to backfire in a bad way. One talented writer I know who kicked up a lot of dust and got himself banned from forum after forum eventually felt he’d damaged his career so much he needed to legally change his name. No one ever succeeded as a writer because they acted like a huge jerk; the huge jerks in the field have succeeded because they write like angels.

So, go forth and write like an angel and work like the devil is chasing you. And remember that everyone in this business is only human.

The Old School

Drunkards, deadbeats and bummers!"

This was how Harvard president Charles W. Eliot described reporters as he rejected Joseph Pulitzer’s offer to endow a journalism school at that university.

Eliot’s disdainful comment reflects a common stereotype that writers are alcoholics, but there’s a lot of truth to that image. The creative urge often comes from a troubled or depressed mind that the possessor tries to numb with alcohol. Other writers, when faced with a deadline and writer’s block, turn to alcohol or drugs to silence their internal critic and encourage the words to flow. Some writers find that alcohol has become such a crutch that they are afraid to try to write without it.

And while reporters are more consistently paid than many of their freelancing, fiction-writing brethren, most are not by any means well paid, and steady newspaper jobs have evaporated over the past decade. Newspaper journalism has long been thought of as a young person’s profession because single people in their early-to-mid 20s are better able to deal with the long hours, low pay, and crushing deadlines that come with the job. Most reporters either switch to editing or burn out and leave the profession entirely after they get into their 30s. Of the die-hards who stick to their keyboards into their 40s and 50s, a fair number of them will be recovering or functional alcoholics.

And then there’s the issue of lifestyle. Some hard-nosed, old-school newspaper reporters seem to style themselves as the writer’s equivalent of detectives or private investigators, and the PI’s legendary hard drinking becomes part of their style. And gonzo journalist