author of The Mermaid’s Tale, and other works
Hey, that’s me at the bottom!
Welcome to Wild Hunt Press’s Duel of the Monsters, Volume 2. Chris Nigro, the publisher of Wild Hunt invited me to contribute.
The rules were:
I mean sure, it’s easy to be a billionaire when you inherit a billion dollar fortune.
But let’s do a little experiment. Let’s ask ourselves if Donald Trump had not been born into fame and fortune, if he hadn’t been a millionaire by the age of two and a half, if he had been required to make his own way in life, without the gigantic advantages. Would he have been another Jeff Bezos or William Gates? Or would he have been just a regular guy?
Let’s assume that this alternate Trump, born to the middle class, had the same personality and personal qualities? Donald Trump is barely literate, a poor reader, almost no impulse control, full of manic impulses, lazy, loses interest, perpetually narcissistic and selfish, engaged in self aggrandizement, unwilling or unable to learn from mistakes, This isn’t an attack. It’s not flattering, but these are all traits that he has exhibited, and are the benchmarks of his erratic business career.
Just a quick update on the writing front.
Last Saturday, I did a World Building Workshop for the Manitoba Writers Guild. Thousands of words of sample world building, tons of reference materials, books, youtube videos, TV-tropes, etc. We got a half dozen attendees, and it went really well, a hard core, pedal to the metal introduction to an interesting area of writing.
This Weekend, I’m doing panels at Keycon. This year, due to the Coronaclypse, Keycon is an online convention. I’m not sure about my panels. So far, I think I’m on, or going to be on….
By the way, go see Keycon’s Website at …. http://www.keycon.org/38/#sched They’d love to have you drop by. Membership is free!
One of the nice things about doing convention panels is the chance to meet and kick back with other writers, talk about writing and share the space. Less pressure, more engagement. And if you’ve got someone on a panel with you, that guarantees there will be at least one other person attending. 😉
Apart from that, following up on the book covers for Aliens and Elves and Axis of Andes. I’ve submitted a raft of short stories to Analog, Asimov’s and Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine.
And I’m working on a query letter and synopsis for my next stab to searching for an Agent. Last year, I sent out 30 queries for one book, and 10 for second. No joy in mudville. This year, I’m going to try and break 100 and 50.
And geez, I need to sign up for When Words Collide, and maybe try and get on some panels. Get ready for the World Fantasy Convention in Montreal in August. Oh and there’s more workshops for the Manitoba Writers Guild. Apart from that, I still have to work on learning marketing and promotions, there’s books to edit and release.
I dunno. Shouldn’t being a writer involve actually writing something. All this other stuff is starting to feel like work. 😉
Never say die. So what have I got lined up for 2021? Four, maybe six new Ebooks, a hardcore quest to find an Agent and break through with a Traditional publisher, more contest, awards submissions, workshops, panels, convention appearances, and a major effort at marketing and promotion. So, let me tell you about what I’ve got in the pipeline:
Lexx Unauthorized: Series Four, Little Blue Marble – the final volume of the chronicles of the LEXX television series, the end of the series, the fall of Salter Street Films, and the decline of Canadian production in a new era of corporate profiteering. LEXX was a unique creation, a Canadian produced, written and starring Space Opera from Halifax, Nova Scotia by an upstart B-movie and regional television programming company. The show had amazing visuals and a sense of surrealism, as much influenced by Jodorowski and Barberella as by Star Trek and Star Wars. Back when the show was in production, I was invited by the creator, Paul Donovan, to write a book. I jumped on that, spending three years and thousands of dollars on the project, travelling across the country repeatedly interviewing everyone in sight. It was a labour of love. Ultimately the book deal fell through back then. Frustrated, I just wrote the book anyway, the way I wanted to… without any consideration of actual publication or publishers demands. Years later, after a flood, a marital breakdown, three major moves, two hard drive crashes, a career change I rediscovered the original manuscript on an unmarked floppy disk. I figured that the traditional publishing marketplace has zero interest in a book about an obscure cult TV series over a decade old. So I decided to upload it as a series of ebooks, one for each series. It’s a huge work – all four volumes together come close to 400,000 words. This is the end of the series, the final volume. I’m happy with it.
A few years ago, I did a novel length piece of work called The New Doctor.
Basically, what happened was back in 1991, there was a local actor named David Burton. He was a semi-big deal in a small town, he had a radio show, a column, did theatre. Anyway, he was trying to get the local dealership to give him a car, for promotional purpose. To help persuade them, he embellished his resume a little bit. Doctor Who was off the air, he figured what harm was there in attaching his name to a defunct children’s show. So he claimed that he was going to be ‘The New Doctor Who.’ It looked good, and when it failed to materialize, he could just say the project fell through, as these things often did.
Unfortunately, Doctor Who was kind of a cult thing, with legions of crazed fans, so he got a lot more attention than he intended. So much so, that he had to make up a more detailed story. A mysterious company, a hush hush pilot project called ‘Monsters of Ness’; shooting at caves, in a small town, a warehouse; even a location shoot in Austria; a red phone booth instead of the blue Tardis; twin girls called Heart and Diamond as companions. None of it was ever verified, and people did try. Eventually, the whole thing faded away.
Okay, that’s the ‘true part’ of the story. The consensus is that it was all a hoax, and personally, I don’t fault Burton at all. He told an innocent little white lie to polish up his resume, and it kind of exploded on him. If anything, I’m sympathetic.
So, I got the idea, what if Burton’s story was true.
I’m losing track of how many ebooks I have out. I think ten. Might be twelve. Whatever the number, will probably be more before the year is out.
Anyway, recently, a facebook friend asked me if a paperback version of one of my ebooks was available.
I said no.
That lead into a discussion of why I hadn’t bothered. Basically, at this point for me, it’s cost benefit analysis. Something like half or two thirds the market is ebooks, up to 95% for some writers. So how much time and effort do I want to put into doing a paperback version, when I could put that time and effort into something more useful to me… like doing another ebook, writing a novel or more short stories, looking for an agent, yadda yadda.
And to be really honest, doing a paperback seems like a lot of work for little practical return. Suppose I do a paperback. Online sales of the paperback are likely to be marginal. Like I said, maybe 95% of online sales are ebooks, and 5% paperbacks. Once the paperback is done, what do I do with it? I’m not going to get distribution through Barnes & Noble or Chapters, sorry. That just doesn’t happen.
First up, let me shout out to BigJack Films, a youthful youtuber who seems utterly fascinated by all things King Kong. He seems barely out of his teens, if at all, with a bad haircut and a reedy voice, which suggests that puberty was cruel. But he’s prolific as hell, and his videos ring with a level or research and genuine enthusiasm that can’t be faked.
And he’s got a lot of fascinating King Kong-iana. The skinny on abortive Kong projects, including the 1960’s Hammer films attempt which failed, but somehow resulted in Jim Danforth’s ‘King Kong’s Volkswagon commercial’, commentary on Universal Studios exhibitions, and surveys of giant apes generally.
He’s so comprehensive in his approach, that he even catalogues and reviews King Kong fan films.
Who even knew there was such a thing?
I’m interested in fan films, and I see them as relevant works in their own right. Fan films are seldom, if ever perfect, and quite often, many of them are flat out terrible. But every single one of them is made with love, and that counts for a lot. So I was very intrigued by his reviews.
Generally, King Kong fan films fall neatly into two categories.
This was going to be about my third horror collection, What Devours Also Hungers. The others are Giant Monsters Sing Sad Songs, and There Are No Doors in Dark Places. They’re collections of old and new stories, and with each collection, I try to explore a different subtle flavour of horror.
Giant Monsters is melancholy horror, the sadness of monsters and victims, the absence of happy endings.
Doors in Dark Places dwells in fatalism, the relentlessness and inescapability of terror.
What Devours Also Hungers is about restlessness. It’s about evil that doesn’t stand still but reaches out. It’s hungry and aggressive, even relentless. It’s the evil of predators, expansive and robust.
Or maybe I’m pulling your leg.
What Devours is fifteen short stories. When I write these blog posts to promote these things, I try talk about some of the more interesting or significant ones. Where they came from, how they came about, why I wrote them. Sometimes it’s personal, sometime’s it’s a writing exercise, it’s about structural challenges and the writing journey. Sometimes it’s fun stuff, or some interesting bit about the story’s history.
If you’ve read the Doors in Dark Places blog post, I’m very personal there, and I talk about the personal energy, the personal darkness and fears, that can animate and drive stories.
But sometimes, hey, a story is just a story. You get an idea, spin it, and it runs off on it’s own. There’s no deep psychological root, no personal trauma. It’s just telling a good story.
I’m going to talk about my collection of short stories: There Are No Doors in Dark Places. It’s part of my trilogy of horror along with Giant Monsters Sing Sad Songs, and What Devours Always Hungers.
Honestly, I’m not sure what I’m doing with this blog. Seriously, angry rants about Covid-19 and black lives matter, or biographical sketches, philosophical questions, thinking out loud as to what I’d do with Doctor Who or Robin, or really obscure reviews, it’s whatever seems to occur to me at the moment.
I’m sure that there are other writers out there with blogs that are just laser focused on the exigencies of writing, or the cutting edges of techno-pop culture, or whatever the hell. There’s blogs full of deep insightful book reviews, sophisticated discussions of the going’s on of the book industry, or a niche about comics.
Me? Who the hell knows?
I just write about… Whatever.
I’m I don’t really have much of anyone reading this stuff. That’s kind of liberating. I write, compulsively. If it was a successful blog, readership and everything, regular followers, I would probably need to be more focused, more narrow. I’d have to get my shit together. But here, I just write whatever.
Some people talk or think in terms of their writing careers.
For me, writing is not so much a career, but more a personality disorder.
That’s obviously not Atlantis on the book cover. If anything that’s Anti-Atlantis, with it’s central sea in there, surrounded by land and ringed by mountains. That’s an almost complete inversion of Plato’s idea of an Island nation out in the Atlantic.
The picture is Greenland of course. But not the Greenland we know, it’s Greenland without the ice. This is a topographic radar map of Greenland’s elevations. It plays a little trick on us – blue is the colour designated for sea level elevation, so everything on the radar map that’s coloured in blue is at sea level elevation or lower. The green parts are just above sea level. The reddish brown represents mountain country.
It actually gives you a decent idea of what Greenland was like, or would have been like without all that ice. Not a perfect idea, there’s a thing called ‘Isostatic Rebound.’ Basically, most of Greenland is under two miles of ice. That two miles of ice is compressing the bedrock. Take it away, and Greenland will probably lift. But I suspect that mostly, that lift won’t dramatically change what we see I think it’s a fascinating map. It’s filled with possibility, potential. It’s so much better than most homegrown fantasy maps.
That’s the explanation for the Map that isn’t Atlantis, on a book titled Fall of Atlantis.
In a sense, like The Dawn of Cthulhu, this is a book about world building. It’s speculative fiction of the plainest, barest kind, taking ideas like ‘What would Greenland be like without the Ice?’ Or ‘What’s a plausible pathway for the Romans to get to the New World?‘ And just spinning them out and extrapolating. No plot, no characters, but fiction all the same.