Category: The Writing Life

Paying It Forward

Warning: This will be a long post veering back and forth over multiple subjects that I see as related, but you may not.

There is a tradition among science fiction writers of “paying it forward.” The idea is that you can’t pay back the people who helped you, so you pay it forward instead, by helping others. I’ve heard it said that the phrase was popularized by Jerry Pournelle after he asked Robert Heinlein how he and Larry Niven could pay Heinlein back for the extremely helpful letter he wrote them critiquing The Mote in God’s Eye (at least, I think it was Mote). Supposedly Heinlein told him, “You can’t pay me back; pay it forward instead.”

This is trotted out, then, as why established SF/F writers should help beginners — to “”pay forward” the help they received when they were beginners. It’s supposed to be something special about the SF/fantasy field.

I have a few problems with this concept.

First off, SF fandom claiming this idea as uniquely its own is, shall we say, not firmly grounded in reality. Older writers helping younger writers along is a tradition much older than science fiction, and it crops up in every genre. It’s absolutely normal practice for writers in every field to teach writing, since actually making a living writing is rare, and it’s commonplace for those teachers to recognize and mentor the most promising students.

I talk to writers in other genres — I used to be a member of Novelists Inc., which is mostly romance writers, and I was briefly a member of Mystery Writers of America — and there’s plenty of mentoring going on in all of them. Romance Writers of America seems to exist almost entirely to mentor beginners. So this attitude that SF has something special in “paying it forward” is, to me, self-congratulatory puffery.

Another issue I have with the concept is that many beginning writers seem to feel it’s necessary, that it just isn’t possible to become a writer without mentoring. You need contacts in the industry, they say. If you don’t have writers to vouch for you, or personal contacts with editors or agents, you can’t break in. If you aren’t involved in fandom, if you don’t have editors providing detailed feedback, you’re screwed. You need to have supportive elders paying it forward. They feel that they are owed support by the established writers in the field, because after all, they were helped by the previous generation, right?

And that brings me to the long, ranting part of the post. The very short version is that I don’t feel I have anything to repay.

I sold my first novel, The Overman and the Basilisk, to Lester del Rey at Del Rey Books in May of 1979. He retitled it The Lure of the Basilisk, and retitled me Lawrence Watt-Evans. I didn’t actually meet Lester until 1982.

I didn’t meet my first self-proclaimed, non-gafiated SF fan until March, 1980, when the recently-formed Blue Grass Science Fiction Association (BGSFA, pronounced Bugs-Fah; later renamed LexFA, the
Lexington Fantasy Association) saw a “local boy makes good” piece about me in the Lexington Herald-Leader and invited me to a meeting.

The first published fiction writer I ever met was Harry Stubbs, a.k.a. Hal Clement. I think I was eight. He came to the house to talk to my father about NEACT business. NEACT was the New England Association of Chemistry Teachers; Harry and my dad were both active members.

So was Isaac Asimov, and that connection allowed my parents to contact him to talk at our church when I was a teenager. At the time I was actively avoiding all church activities — at the age of eight I had rebelled against the staggeringly boring sermons of Rev. Holmes and refused to attend any services. (I wasn’t the only one; the parish committee fired Holmes not long after, replacing him with David Weissbard.) Even Asimov wasn’t enough to lure me back to church, but I did wander over to the Common afterwards and got a look at him as he was preparing to leave. I’ll count that as the second.

The third published fiction writer I ever met was me. If you don’t want to count that, then it was Stephen Leigh, at Rivercon V, my first convention, in July 1980, five months after my first novel was published. Phyllis Ann Karr was next, then Roger Zelazny, and after that I lose track; that convention had a pretty good guest list.

So much for writers nurturing the next generation in my case.

As for help from editors, the first editor I ever met was probably Carol Amick, who worked for the town weekly, the Bedford Minuteman, and went on to become its editor. We never spoke; when I say “met,” I mean she was pointed out to me when we were in the same room.

The second was a man whose name I’ve forgotten, the editor of the Bedford Patriot, the short-lived right-wing rival to the Minuteman. When I was seventeen I decided that their writing was so bad they
might even consider hiring a high-school kid; I was right, and they bought three or four feature articles from me.

My first contact with a fiction editor was a rejection slip from Ed Ferman at F&SF in 1972. It was the standard form letter, no note. I went on to collect an assortment of rejections — seventy-one before I sold anything — from a variety of editors. All of those rejections were form letters except for a handful from Moshe Feder, who was then an editorial assistant to Ted White at Fantastic and Amazing, and a couple from Hank Davis, who was Ed Ferman’s assistant at F&SF. Those came along in 1974 and 1975; Hank was sending them because Moshe had urged him to. They were short typed notes, never more than two paragraphs, explaining why my stories were being rejected and offering encouragement to try again. In one case it was because the story was deemed too much like Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser; at that time I had never heard of Fafhrd and the Mouser, so that one turned out to be very useful, because I went out and found the relevant books and read them. I love those stories, but I don’t really see the resemblance other than it being sword & sorcery about a pair of adventurers.

I sold a short-short to The American Atheist in August, 1975. The entirety of my contact with them after submission was a note in May of 1975 telling me they were buying it, and a packet in August containing my contributor’s copy and my check.

The third editor to ever send me something other than a form rejection or a form acceptance and a check was Lester del Rey, when he bought my first novel with a three-page, single-spaced revision letter.

So much for detailed editorial feedback being necessary to a writer’s development, or editors only buying from people they know.

Another standard way to break in is supposed to be through writing workshops. I first heard of writing workshops in 1980, after my first novel was published. I signed up for one anyway, thinking it might be educational, and was severely disappointed — I had more professional publishing credentials than anyone else there, including the instructor. The only ones I’ve attended since then, it was as an instructor.

As far as other formal training goes, I have never taken any sort of course in creative writing, or fiction writing, or whatever. The only English courses I ever took were required ones.

Family support? My parents actively tried to discourage me from writing from 1962 until 1971. Late in 1971 my father seems to have decided that if I hadn’t given up yet, maybe I could pick up a little extra money writing articles; it was his idea to try the local papers. That was the full extent of his support. When The Lure of the Basilisk was published, a couple of months before he died, he read it and informed me that it wasn’t really very good. My mother liked it better.

I never heard what two of my sisters thought of it. Jody considered it too bloody, and stopped reading my work midway through my second novel, The Seven Altars of Dûsarra (originally The City of Seven Temples; Lester changed it), when my hero lopped off an enemy’s head. She never read anything else I wrote after that, up until she died in 1986.

My sister Ruth said that for the first couple of chapters she kept thinking, “I could have written this. This sounds just like any Evans.” Then somewhere around Chapter Three it took off, and since then she’s been a fan.

I don’t believe my brother’s ever read any of my work. If he has, he’s never mentioned it.

My wife Julie was supportive of my writing up to a point; she thought it was a cool thing to do, she did read and enjoy it, and she had no idea how difficult it was to succeed as a writer. However, she also made it clear that she didn’t intend to support me forever if it didn’t work out, and in fact by March of 1979 she was clearly fed up. I quit writing and started a mail-order collectibles business. When Lester bought the novel, though, I went back to writing with Julie’s blessing.

Right up until that first novel was published, my in-laws kept asking when I was going to get a real job.

So much for writing education or an enthusiastically supportive family being necessary.

Oh, yes — agents, another supposed necessity. I knew nothing about agents when I sold my first novel. When Judy-Lynn del Rey rejected The Chromosomal Code three years and four novels later, saying it was publishable but not right for Del Rey, that was the first time I gave any thought to getting an agent. I asked Lester for advice, since he was a writer himself and had dealt with scads of agents.

He didn’t offer any advice; instead I got a letter from a guy named Russell Galen who told me that he was Lester’s agent, Lester had suggested he contact me, and that he’d like to see a sample of my work because he might be interested in representing me.

He was interested, and sold The Chromosomal Code to Avon.

Russ has been my agent ever since, pretty much. (There was a brief interruption when he left Scott Meredith and I didn’t immediately follow.)

This is why I don’t have much useful advice for people looking for agents; my experience really doesn’t serve as a model for anyone else.

To sum up: My experience doesn’t fit any of the standard advice. I had no contacts, no training, no support; I just wrote, and sent what I wrote to editors. That worked well enough to sell my first articles when I was seventeen, my first story when I was twenty-one, and my first novel when I was twenty-four.

I didn’t talk about writing. I didn’t read about writing. I didn’t workshop my writing. I didn’t know any writers, editors, or agents.

I just wrote.

That worked for me.

And I didn’t receive any help that I felt I should repay.

If I sometimes seem impatient with needy beginners, well, that’s why.

On the other hand, I do try to help out promising beginners. I have advice pages on the web; I’ve read stories for friends (and if you have to ask, you aren’t a good enough friend); I’ve taught workshops without pay. (I’ve also taught and critiqued for money, though that’s not relevant here.)

But I’m not paying anything forward. And you don’t need help.

Goodbye to the Gallery

When I sold my first novel back in 1979, I didn’t know much of anything about how publishing worked. I’d never met another published writer, unless you count being introduced to Isaac Asimov and Hal Clement as a kid, when they were talking with my father about teaching chemistry. I’d never heard of cover proofs. When I got a cover proof for The Lure of the Basilisk in the mail it was a complete surprise. I didn’t know what to make of it. It was a vaguely surreal experience, seeing my name on something resembling a book cover, and a representation of my character — neat, very neat, but very strange. That silly armor Darrell Sweet had given him didn’t make any sense. I couldn’t decide whether I liked the cover or not.

I studied that cover proof intently, and showed it to everyone I could, and then wondered, "Now what am I supposed to do with it?"

I didn’t know any other writers to ask. I didn’t have an agent. I suppose I could have asked my editor, Lester del Rey, but he was Lester del Rey, not a mere mortal I could pester with trivia.

So I did what seemed to me the obvious and logical thing to do — I framed it and hung it in my office. (Or maybe back then I called it my study; I don’t remember.)

To this day, that still seems like the obvious and logical thing to do, but I have never yet seen another writer’s home where cover proofs were framed and hung on the wall.

In September of 1980 the house was struck by lightning and my study was burned out, destroying that cover proof, but in November I got a cover proof for The Seven Altars of Dûsarra and framed that and hung it on the office wall. The cover proof for The Cyborg and the Sorcerers followed suit, and then The Sword of Bheleu, and so on.

We moved to Gaithersburg in 1986, and the cover gallery went with us and was hung on the wall of my new office. It got moved around a couple of times as I rearranged furniture, added new bookcases, and added more cover proofs, so that it didn’t fit where I’d had it before. Eventually I gave up on keeping it in my office, and moved it to the basement den, where the proofs were hung along the top of the walls — they started above the row of IKEA bookcases along the south wall, then turned a corner onto the soffit covering the main air conditioning duct, and ran the length of that. As I kept publishing, they rounded the corner onto the north wall, above the antique secretary and across the top of the door to the storeroom where I kept my comic books. They reached the corner and continued onto the east wall in the late 1990s — by this time it had become something of a ritual, framing each proof in an identical cheap metal frame (black with gold trim), backed with black construction paper. They ran over the top of the window, and were approaching the sliding door to the patio, where there wasn’t room for them to continue — I estimated there was room for one more, two if I squeezed a bit. I’d taken to buying the matching frames in bulk, and had half a dozen left, but I didn’t know where I’d be putting them.

This was just mass-market paperbacks; when I started I didn’t think I’d ever be published in any other format, and when hardcovers and trade paperback editions did come along I didn’t include those proofs in the gallery. Some dustjacket proofs did get framed and hung in the stairwell, some other proofs got hung behind the big TV, but the main gallery was just the mass-market editions.

For one thing, I didn’t always get proofs of other editions. Small presses like Wildside and FoxAcre didn’t always produce proofs, let alone send any of them to me. Even Tor didn’t always send proofs, at least not without nudging. Proofs had always been primarily a marketing tool, and by the 21st century more and more of that was being done electronically, with JPEGs, rather than actual paper or cardstock proofs.

Still, I’d maintained a complete (except for that destroyed first one) set of framed mass-market proofs in that basement gallery.

Then we moved to Takoma Park.

Here my office is in the basement — the study on the first floor is Julie’s, as it’s too small for my purposes. I have lots of room, and have been gradually getting it arranged to my liking. I put in seventeen IKEA bookcases and a big new desk, a map cabinet, and so on. Much of the stuff from the old den is also here in the basement — the elliptical trainer, the projection TV, etc.

Obviously, this is where the cover gallery would go. The idea of putting it on the soffits around the ductwork, like the west side of the old gallery, also seemed pretty obvious, as there are many such surfaces to work with here — the basement ceiling is divided into five separate sections by these things. There must be at least a hundred feet of soffit.

Julie thought it might look a little tacky, though I’m not sure why she thought so or why that would be a real concern, but she declared it to be my business, not hers — the basement, and the gallery, were both mine to do with as I pleased.

So a couple of weeks back, when I’d gotten more urgent stuff (like getting books sorted and onto shelves) done, I decided it was time to put the cover proofs up. I picked up the first one on the stack, which happened to be the Avon edition of Denner’s Wreck, and held it up to the soffit above the elliptical to see how it would look there.

It didn’t fit.

That possibility had never occurred to me, but sure enough, all these soffits are 7.5" high, and the frames are 8".

So that wasn’t going to work. I’d need to find somewhere else.

Well, most of the walls here are covered with bookcases, and there wasn’t enough space above them for the proofs. I didn’t have a lot of options, not with forty or more of these things to fit. Really, the only place that made sense was the wall right at the foot of the stairs, where I hadn’t put any bookcases because it would have been too crowded.

That wall had gotten a bit scuffed up, what with movers and workmen and so forth going through there to get up or down the stairs, or in or out of the utility room, so I didn’t tackle hanging the cover gallery immediately; I wanted to clean the wall, first.

Then we got snowbound for several days, and Julie got bored and cleaned the wall — not at my suggestion, but just because she was tired of seeing the smudges whenever she came down the stairs.

So yesterday I got out the framed proofs, and a tape measure and spirit level and hammer and picture-hook nails. I figured out how they’d be arranged, what the spacing would need to be — I could fit fifty-six, and I don’t have that many yet. I used a pencil to mark where two of them, the two at the top corners, would go. Then I stepped back, and imagined what the finished gallery would look like.

I didn’t like it.

In fact, I realized that no matter where I put it, it wouldn’t look good. There are simply too many of the damned things, and they’re too varied, to look good in a collection like that. The last time they’d been on a single wall, rather than a long line on several walls, there were only maybe a dozen and they’d mostly been Darrell Sweet covers from Del Rey; now they’re everything from Spider-Man fighting the Green Goblin to the pseudo-Celtic Ethshar reprints Wildside did. They’d just look like clutter.

Fewer and fewer publishers bother to send out cover proofs now, anyway.

So I decided that it’s time to say goodbye to the cover gallery. I won’t be putting them back up, on that wall or anywhere else. Instead I’m taking them out of their frames, and filing them away — I may put together an album, rather than hanging them in a gallery.

And Kiri wants the frames for her drawings, which means they may well be turning up at SF convention art shows. That’s probably a better use for them than hanging them here in the basement.

But there’s a certain wistfulness at the end of a thirty-year tradition.

Twenty Years After

I recently completed the first draft of Realms of Light, a sequel to Nightside City, which was originally published by Del Rey Books in 1989.

I’d started Realms of Light shortly after Nightside City was accepted; I was very enthusiastic about Nightside City, which I thought was the best thing I’d written up to that time. Unfortunately, the market was significantly less enthusiastic. I was already typecast as a fantasy author at that point, and my science fiction novels had not sold well. Del Rey was not at all interested in a sequel to a novel that hadn’t done all that well, so I shelved Realms of Light.

Except I kept pulling it back out every couple of years and looking it over and adding a paragraph here, a few pages there. And finally, in 2008, having established that it was possible to make a modest amount of money by serializing novels on the web, I decided to go ahead and write it as a serial, to be published by a small press, FoxAcre Press, which had picked up the reprint rights to Nightside City a few years back. And now it’s complete, though it still needs to be revised and edited.

So it took me twenty years to write it.

Twenty. Years.

A lot of things changed in those twenty years. Jumping back into a setting I’d created in 1986 and hadn’t seriously worked in since 1989 was a challenge.

It was not, though, that I didn’t remember it; I did. It’s that the real world had changed in ways that make some of my 24th-century setting look curiously dated.

That paragraph suggests two separate topics – did I really remember it as well as I thought? And how was it outdated?

How well I remembered it – well, let me put it this way: I didn’t bother to actually re-read Nightside City, nor the notes I used when I wrote the first novel. I remembered Epimetheus about as well as I remember, say, Boston. I did check a few details here and there, such as making sure I had the full name of the New York right, but mostly I worked from memory. Did I get it all right? I don’t really know; that’s one of the things I’ll be looking at when I write the second draft. I thought I remembered it all. I know the floor plan of Carlisle Hsing’s old office on Juarez Street, I know what the Trap looks like, I know the geophysical structure of Epimetheus.

I did catch a couple of errors when I checked myself against the original novel; I’d misremembered part of the Nakada family tree, for example. Mostly, though, it was still in my head. After all, I’d lived on Epimetheus, in Nightside City, for a few months back in 1987. (I finished writing Nightside City in November, 1987.) It was as familiar to me as other places I’d lived in, such as Pittsburgh.

I probably got some stuff wrong, but then, I’d probably make a few wrong turns trying to get around Pittsburgh after all this time. And some stuff may not be so much wrong as just different; anything that wasn’t in the first novel I was free to change, so if the version I remember isn’t exactly what I’d thought up back in the ‘80s, who cares? Who’ll ever know? I mean, a lot of it was never written down in the first place.

But then we get to the outdated stuff.

Nightside City was inspired by the cyberpunk movement. The actual style owes more to Ross Macdonald, but there are a lot of cyberpunk elements, and cyberpunk reflected the 1980s.

It’s set in a society dominated by Asians – or rather, people descended from Asians. The wealthiest families all have Japanese names, while the managerial class is a mix of Japanese, Chinese, and Indian; the white people in the novel are generally working class or worse. The cyberpunks often extrapolated a Japanese-dominated future, because in the 1980s that looked plausible – we didn’t know the economic bubble was going to burst. If I were writing it now the future would probably still be dominated by Asians, but the Japanese would be much less prominent, and I might mix in some other ethnicities. I couldn’t really change that for the sequel, though; the Nakada clan is central to the story.

Some of the computer stuff hasn’t aged all that well. In 1987 the invention of the World Wide Web was still a few years in the future, and my guesses about the future shape of the networked world – well, I did better than some authors, but some of it looks slightly quaint now. All that jacking in, and using hardwired connections rather than wireless, feels a bit off, too.

I did correctly anticipate a few things, though, even if I got the names wrong. The word “malware” didn’t exist in 1987, so far as I know, but I could see that there was going to be a need for a word like that, and coined “gritware.”

Mostly, I think it still works. I’ve had to abandon stories because the real world made them obsolete, and I never considered abandoning Realms of Light; the flaws were pretty minor, and could be explained away as the result of stuff happening in the next three centuries that we don’t expect now.

And picking it up again after twenty years should have been hard, but it wasn’t. This story’s been in my head all along. It’s changed over time – the present version is not what I’d have written in 1989 if Del Rey had asked for a sequel – but most of the changes are plot-related; it’s basically the same setting, basically the same characters.

But you know one thing I did forget? If you’re a donor and got to read the first draft, you may have noticed the dedication to Ed Bryant, who I credit with giving me the clue I needed to make the plot work.

He did. I remember that. But I don’t remember what it was. I remember him talking about a movie I haven’t seen, and that up until then I hadn’t had a viable plot for a sequel, and after listening to him it fell into place and I had a set-up and an ending. (The middle came later.)

But I don’t remember what it was he said that made it all work.

Sometimes writing fiction is a very weird business.

The Evolution of a Text

Huh. It’s mid-April, and this is my first post of the year. Other things have been keeping me much too busy. In fact, the only reason I’m posting this now is that I’m sufficiently stressed out over other affairs that I wanted to do something unimportant, so it won’t matter if I screw it up.

Warning: This is a long post.

Back in February I was invited to write a guest blog entry for a blog devoted to writing advice, which I did, with this result.

However, it took me several tries to get there, and I thought it might be amusing to look at just how it developed. I knew I wanted to write about how would-be writers tend to forget that writing professionally is first and foremost a business, rather than a purely artistic endeavor, so I started out with this:

Why We Write:
Art vs. Commerce

I had never met another writer before I sold my first novel. I had never attended a workshop or taken a creative writing class. I didn’t subscribe to any writers’ magazines or read any books about writing, and back then there weren’t any websites or blogs or newsgroups. I’d never been to a convention of any sort. Everything I knew about the writing business came from reading submission guidelines and Writer’s Market – I believe it was the 1974 edition – or from implications in various story introductions and essays. Oh, or from personal rejections from editors.

(For those of you too young to know about Writer’s Market, it was just what it sounds like, a fat annual hardcover volume listing markets that would consider submissions from freelancers. By the time each volume saw print, many of the listings were out of date. By the time the next edition came out, it seemed as if most of the listings were out of date.)

Perhaps as a result of this isolation, I never had any doubt about what I was doing, or what I wanted out of my writing – I wanted to sell stories that people would enjoy reading.

In May it will be thirty years since my first novel sale, and in that thirty years I’ve met hundreds of writers, attended dozens of workshops, taught writing classes in many forms, and while I still know why I write, I honestly don’t know about a lot of you other folks.

Then I stopped. This wasn’t so much advice as autobiography, which was not what I had been asked for. So I started over, trying to compress the stuff about my own background. I got further this time…

Why We Write:
Art vs. Commerce

I’ve been a professional writer for thirty years, and in that time I’ve met hundreds of would-be writers, in person and online, at conventions and workshops, in classes and contests. Many of them, probably most of them, seem to me to have wrong ideas about the business of writing. A lot of these seem to derive, at some remove, from not being clear about their own reasons for writing.

So let me ask all you would-be writers out there – why do you write? Do you write for love, or for money? Is it art, or commerce?

Do you know?

It does matter.

I sometimes do novel critiques for money, and there’s an assumption built into those that the author whose work I’m assessing is looking to publish it professionally through a regular commercial publisher. When I write up my reports, what I’m doing is giving my best estimate of what needs to be done in order to meet that goal. (Often, this boils down to, “Write a different novel and do a better job of it.”)

I’ve also taught writing classes, and again, there’s an assumption that I’m teaching my students how to produce stories they can sell to commercial publishers. After all, that’s what I do. It’s my known area of expertise, and the reason people are willing to pay me for this stuff.

Every so often, though, I get a critique client or a writing student who has some other goal entirely. I always find this disconcerting. It usually isn’t apparent until I say something like, “No one’s ever going to buy this the way you’ve done it,” only to be answered with, “I’m not trying to sell it.”

Honestly, I don’t understand this. If you aren’t trying to sell it, what do you expect me to teach you?

In one case, many years ago, I was teaching a workshop and had a student bring in a story that was, in my professional opinion, ready to be published. Not only that, but it fit the theme of an open anthology that a friend of mine was editing. I said as much. I said I couldn’t critique it because there wasn’t anything wrong with it. I gave the author the name and address of the anthology editor and told her to send it in, and get ready for her first sale. I did everything but address the envelope for her.

She never sent it. I checked with the anthology editor later, and no such story had ever arrived, nor had the author’s name shown up on any submissions. I even checked with some magazine editors, just in case she’d decided to go that route, rather than the anthology. Nothing.

Eventually I ran into one of her former classmates from the workshop and asked if he knew anything about it. He said that he’d seen her at various workshops over a period of years, and about half her stories were deemed ready to submit to pro markets, but as far as anyone knew she had never actually submitted one, and had no intention of ever submitting one. She liked writing them and hearing people praise them, but wasn’t interested in actually getting anything published.

Now, I have nothing against writing for fun, and sharing your stories with friends. There’s plenty of that on the web, and before we had the web there were fanzines. It’s what most fanfic is all about, too. No, the part I don’t understand is paying hundreds of dollars to attend writing workshops when you aren’t interested in what the workshops are designed to teach, i.e., how to get professionally published. What did she get out of it that was worth the cost?

And I stopped again. I’d gone off on a tangent that might be interesting, but once again, it wasn’t really the advice I wanted to give. I backed up to where I thought I went off the rails and tried again:

Why We Write:
Art vs. Commerce

I’ve been a professional writer for thirty years, and in that time I’ve met hundreds of would-be writers, in person and online, at conventions and workshops, in classes and contests. Many of them, probably most of them, seem to me to have wrong ideas about the business of writing. A lot of these seem to derive, at some remove, from not being clear about their own reasons for writing.

So let me ask all you would-be writers out there – why do you write? Do you write for love, or for money? Is it art, or commerce?

Do you know?

It does matter.

If you’re writing for love, and trying to create art, that’s fine – but then don’t be surprised if you can’t sell it. Publishers are not in business to promote the arts; they’re in business to make money. Yes, they’re happy if they can do both, but money comes first. Money lets them stay in business.

Writers (and many readers) often gripe about seeing “crap” get published and make money – I’ve heard plenty of complaints about the works of Dan Brown or Clive Cussler or Terry Goodkind. They’ll also bemoan how neglected more talented authors are. The fact is, though, that Brown and Cussler and Goodkind sell hundreds of thousands of books and bring in big piles of money, and publishers are in business to make money.

There are those who claim that they sell zillions of books because the publishers put huge amounts of promotion behind them, but that’s reversing cause and effect. Publishers put most of that money into these books and authors only after they’d demonstrated that they’ll sell. Once you know you have a product customers want, it’s worth advertising it; if you have something where you don’t know whether there’s a market, putting money into it is a gamble. It’s much easier to get a snowball effect when the snowball’s already rolling. If publishers really knew how to turn any piece of crap into a bestseller, they’d do it all the time.

Okay, that was better, but still not going quite where I wanted. I tried again.

Why We Write:
Art vs. Commerce

I’ve been a professional writer for thirty years, and in that time I’ve met hundreds of would-be writers, in person and online, at conventions and workshops, in classes and contests. Many of them, probably most of them, seem to me to have wrong ideas about the business of writing. A lot of these seem to derive, at some remove, from not being clear about their own reasons for writing.
So let me ask all you would-be writers out there – why do you write? Do you write for love, or for money? Is it art, or commerce?

Do you know?

It does matter.

If you’re writing for love, and trying to create art, that’s fine – but then don’t be surprised if you can’t sell it. Publishers are not in business to promote the arts; they’re in business to make money. Yes, they’re happy if they can do both, but money comes first. Money lets them stay in business.
This often leads to a basic disconnect between writer and publisher. The writer assumes that his job is to write the absolute best story he can, but what the publisher wants is a story that he can sell.

These aren’t necessarily the same thing. Pretty much every writer can point to bestsellers that he thinks are crap, but which sell just fine, and then there are those wonderful, brilliant writers whose work doesn’t sell. In fact, the term “a writer’s writer” is often code for “a good writer whose work doesn’t sell worth a damn.”

The fact is, the reading public doesn’t make their buying decisions based on what writers consider quality. Readers buy stuff they expect to find entertaining, and superb writing is fairly low on the list of elements that entertain your typical book-buyer. If the truth be told, there are several features that writers, especially beginning writers, worry about that most readers don’t care about, especially in genre fiction.

Originality, for example. Would-be writers are often obsessed with finding a story idea that no one’s used before. This is especially acute in the science fiction field, but it turns up in mysteries and fantasy and probably other genres I don’t know as well. I’ve been asked hundreds of times, “Has anyone ever used this idea?”

The answer is pretty much always “Yes, but it doesn’t matter.” Brilliant new ideas just aren’t that important. A favorite old story retold well is likely to be received with more enthusiasm than something completely new. How many versions of the Arthurian cycle have been successful? How many reworkings of the Iliad, or the story of Belisarius, or the Orpheus story, have there been? Oh, it’s nice if you come up with some stunning new approach, but it’s not necessary.

Accuracy is another one – but it’s a tricky one. There are things that you absolutely must get right, but what they are depends on your particular audience. If you’re writing a hardboiled detective story and your hero pulls out a gun, you better know what kind of a gun it is, how many rounds it holds, and just what a bullet from it will do. If you say it’s a .38 Police Positive, you better know that that’s a revolver, not an automatic, that it has no safety, that it holds six bullets, and so on.

But you don’t need to know the law, or real police procedures, or what the requirements for a P.I. license are, because readers generally don’t know that stuff.

If you’re writing romance, you don’t need to get the guns right.

If you’re writing science fiction, you don’t need to know much science. What’s important to the story is what your gadgets do, not how they work. Over-explaining will just slow down the story. Unless it’s important to the plot, you don’t need to explain how your starships can travel faster than light; they just do, by authorial fiat.

The only things you need to get right are the ones that will throw the reader out of the story if you get them wrong.

And style – I’ve seen beginning writers rework sentences over and over, trying to make every one into a perfect little gem. Readers don’t care; they just want the story.

That’s the essential thing – the story. Readers want characters they care about, going through experiences that matter. You can have the most brilliantly original idea ever, and if it isn’t part of a good story no one will care. You can have every detail of your setting 100% accurate, and if nothing interesting happens there no one will care. You can have elegant, perfectly-phrased sentences, but if they don’t tell the reader something he wants to know, no one will care.

Those bestselling authors who write “crap” are telling stories that readers care about.

Originality? Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Mists of Avalon retells a story that’s been around for centuries.

Accuracy? Dan Brown’s history and theology are nonsense, but The Da Vinci Code sold a zillion copies.

Style? Pick your own example; there are plenty.

But these people are telling stories that catch readers’ interest, that touch something below the conscious level. On a technical level their work may be lousy, but it doesn’t matter.

And then on the other side, I’ve seen unpublished work that was beautifully executed but that’s never going to sell for one reason or another. I’ve argued with writers who won’t compromise their artistic vision.

That was almost right, but it wasn’t really “Art vs. Commerce” anymore. Also, I wasn’t happy with the tone — it seemed too negative. And I wasn’t coming up to a tidy ending. So I retitled and revised it, and here’s what I actually sent in:

Worrying About the Wrong Things

I’ve been a professional writer for thirty years, and in that time I’ve met hundreds of would-be writers, in person and online, at conventions and workshops, in classes and contests. Many of them, probably most of them, seem to me to have misguided notions of what matters in the business of writing. They think that if they can just master all the techniques, and turn out a good enough story, they can sell it.

It doesn’t work like that. It’s not technique that matters.

If you’re writing for love, and trying to create art, that’s fine, go ahead and focus on technique – but then don’t be surprised if you can’t sell it. Publishers are not in business to promote the arts; they’re in business to make money. Yes, they’re happy if they can do both, but money comes first. Money lets them stay in business.

This often leads to a basic disconnect between writer and publisher. The writer assumes that his job is to write the absolute best story he can, but what the publisher wants is a story that he can sell.

These aren’t necessarily the same thing. Pretty much every writer can point to bestsellers that he thinks are crap, but which sell just fine, and then there are those wonderful, brilliant writers whose work doesn’t sell. The term “a writer’s writer” is often code for “a good writer whose work doesn’t sell worth a damn.”

The fact is, the reading public doesn’t make their buying decisions based on what writers consider quality. Readers buy stuff they expect to find entertaining, and superb writing is fairly low on the list of elements that entertain your typical book-buyer. If the truth be told, there are several features that writers, especially beginning writers, worry about that most readers don’t care about, especially in genre fiction.

Sometimes would-be writers worry about stuff because it’s what they learned in English class.

Sometimes they worry about stuff because it’s what workshops focus on.

Sometimes they worry about stuff because it’s cited in “how to” books.

Sometimes they worry about stuff because it’s what they care about.

It’s fine to care about all these things, and to do your best to get it right, but technical quality is not what will make your story sell. There are several things that writing workshops and rabid fans focus on that just aren’t that important in the real world.

Originality, for example. Would-be writers are often obsessed with finding a story idea that no one’s used before. This is especially acute in the science fiction field, but it turns up in mysteries and fantasy and probably other genres I don’t know as well. I’ve been asked hundreds of times, “Has anyone ever used this idea?”

The answer is pretty much always “Yes, but it doesn’t matter.” Brilliant new ideas just aren’t that important. A favorite old story retold well is likely to be received with more enthusiasm than something completely new. How many versions of the Arthurian cycle have been successful? How many reworkings of the Iliad, or the story of Belisarius, or the Orpheus story, have there been? Oh, it’s nice if you come up with some stunning new approach, but it’s not necessary. Your story may be as old as humanity itself; what matters is how well you tell it.

Related to this is the notion that one must avoid any sort of cliché. Writing workshops will often convince beginners to avoid phrases like “white as snow” because they’re clichés.

It doesn’t matter whether they’re clichés What matters is whether they communicate with the reader. “White as snow” works because most people have seen snow, and they know just how purely white it is. It still conjures up a definite image.

“Black as pitch,” on the other hand – how many modern Americans have ever seen pitch? How many even know what pitch is?

It’s not whether it’s a cliché that matters; it’s whether it still conveys what the writer wants to convey.

Accuracy is another issue that writers get hung up on – but it’s a tricky one. There are things that you absolutely must get right, but what they are depends on your particular audience. If you’re writing a hardboiled detective story and your hero pulls out a gun, you better know what kind of a gun it is, how many rounds it holds, and just what a bullet from it will do. If you say it’s a .38 Police Positive, you better know that that’s a revolver, not an automatic, that it has no safety, that it holds six bullets, and so on. Get that wrong, and you’ll knock a lot of readers right out of the story.

But you don’t need to know the law, or real police procedures, or what the requirements for a P.I. license are, because readers generally don’t know that stuff.

If you’re writing romance, rather than mystery, you don’t need to get the guns right. Romance readers generally don’t care.

If you’re writing science fiction, you don’t need to know much science. What’s important to the story is what your gadgets do, not how they work. Over-explaining will just slow down the story. Unless it’s important to the plot, you don’t need to explain how your starships can travel faster than light; they just do, by authorial fiat.

The only things you need to get right are the ones that will throw the reader out of the story if you get them wrong.

And then there’s style – I’ve seen beginning writers rework sentences over and over, trying to make every one into a perfect little gem. Readers don’t care; they just want the story.

That’s the essential thing – the story. Readers want characters they care about, going through experiences that matter. You can have the most brilliantly original idea ever, and if it isn’t part of a good story no one will care. You can have every detail of your setting 100% accurate, and if nothing interesting happens there no one will care. You can have elegant, perfectly-phrased sentences, but if they don’t tell the reader something he wants to know, no one will care.

Those bestselling authors who write “crap” are telling stories that readers care about.

Originality? Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Mists of Avalon retells a story that’s been around for centuries.

Accuracy? Dan Brown’s history and theology are nonsense, but The Da Vinci Code sold a zillion copies.

Style? Pick your own example; there are plenty.

But these people are telling stories that catch readers’ interest, that touch something below the conscious level. On a technical level their work may be lousy, but it doesn’t matter. They connect with the reader.

That’s what matters, and that’s what will sell a story, where originality, accuracy, and brilliant prose won’t. You can be hackneyed and inaccurate and sloppy, and it won’t matter, so long as you don’t commit the one unpardonable error, the one thing that really counts.

The one thing you must never be is boring.

If you care to do a side-by-side comparison, you’ll see that Victoria then edited it a little – with permission, and with me approving all the changes – to produce the final version.

Which still isn’t exactly what I’d wanted to say in the first place, but it was close enough, and I wasn’t willing to put in any more work on something I wasn’t getting paid for. So there it is.

Many Revisions

I’ve been revising things lately.

My new editor at Tor got back to me about A Young Man Without Magic a couple of weeks ago, with suggestions for revisions he wanted. I’ve now completed those, and the book’s accepted and tentatively scheduled for November 2009.

With that done, I’m working on the sequel, Above His Proper Station. The first draft is finished, so I’ve been revising. I’m up to Chapter Five in the second draft.

FoxAcre Press is going to be reprinting two old science fiction novels I wrote for Avon back in the 1980s, and you wouldn’t think I’d be doing any revisions on reprints, but in fact the publisher suggested a few changes, so I’ve revised Among the Powers (formerly entitled Denner’s Wreck), and just today I revised Shining Steel.

I’m serializing Realms of Light (the sequel to Nightside City), and readers have caught a couple of mistakes in the first two chapters, so I corrected those. I don’t suppose that really counts as “revisions,” though.

While waiting to hear back about A Young Man Without Magic I finished the first draft of an unsold (and probably unsellable) science-fantasy novel called Vika’s Avenger, and I started revising that before deciding it was a waste of time.

So — lots of revising. Not a lot of writing from scratch.

Waiting for the Other Shoe…

No, I don’t mean the election, despite the date — if I decide I need to say something about that I’ll probably put it in my LiveJournal. This is about what I’m doing while I wait for word from my editor.

I delivered A Young Man Without Magic to Brian Thomsen, my editor at Tor, in September. Then I worked on the sequel for awhile; I was pretty confident that Brian would be pleased with it, since he’d recommended I write the series in the first place (as opposed to the more traditional fantasy, The Dragon’s Price, which I’d come up with at roughly the same time). Brian was the guy who talked Tor into a two-book deal for the series. He’d read the proposal, which included a hundred pages of the novel. He knew what he was getting. So I was working on the sequel.

Then on September 22, Brian dropped dead of a heart attack. Which sucked in many, many ways, as Brian was a very good guy, but one of the minor results was that it meant I got a new editor.

And the new editor, while by all accounts a nice guy and a good editor, had not read the proposal. He had not read the books that were my inspiration. He had never discussed anything with me. I have no idea at all what he’s going to think of the novel. My agent assumes it’ll all be fine, because after all I’m an established professional with a thirty-year track record, but my agent hasn’t read the novel yet and hasn’t really worked with the new editor much.

I’m not so sure. A Young Man Without Magic is not my usual stuff.

So I found myself unable to concentrate on the sequel. What if he wants major revisions on the first book that would affect the plot of the second?

So I’ve put aside Above His Proper Station until such time as I hear back from Ye Editor. Which I had hoped would be by now, but so far, not a word.

Instead I’m working on other stuff. Of which I have a surfeit; I have literally hundreds of unfinished stories lying around. I added a few pages to The Dragon’s Price. I finished a chapter of Realms of Light, the sequel to Nightside City that I plan to write as an online serial in the not-too-distant future.

Mostly, though, I decided I should finish Vika’s Avenger, a science-fantasy story I’ve had lying around for a couple of years. It was the closest to being complete of anything handy. Wrapping it up will decrease the backlog a little. It’s a sort of detective story. Sort of. But it’s set in a half-deserted city on another planet, thousands of years in the future.

So I’ve been working on that lately, and it’s been coming along, until a couple of nights ago when I ran into massive plot problems because my planned ending isn’t turning out the way I wanted it to. The characters have refused to cooperate, and they’re right to do so — my original plan really didn’t make as much sense as I thought.

Drat.

But once I get past this next scene, it’s all just wrap-up, and I’ll have a complete first draft, probably 75,000-80,000 words. Now, if I can just figure out how to make it happen…

A Story for Another Time

So what am I working on these days, and why?

Return with me now on the wings of memory to those dim, forgotten days of the 1990s, when I had but recently left my original home in the ferocious world of publishing, Del Rey Books, to take refuge at Tor. (The previous post explains much of why I made that move.)

When I first arrived at Tor it was with a Big Fat Fantasy novel called Touched By the Gods, which I had planned out originally with the idea of selling it to Del Rey, and which Del Rey had summarily rejected, not because there was anything wrong with the idea, but because I wanted a larger advance than they were willing to pay. To the best of my knowledge the people who decided against buying it hadn’t even read the proposal; they were focused entirely on the money.

The fine folks at Tor had no such qualms — at least, not immediately, though they have, since then, whittled down my advances, little by little. Which is annoying but not unforgivable, since in fact I’ve never yet earned out an advance the size of the one I got for Touched By the Gods. They bought the book, and published it, and that was good, but it left me (and them) with the obvious question, “Okay, now what?”

My intention at Del Rey had been to write another Ethshar novel next, and while bringing the series to Tor was definitely in my plans, and obviously we later managed it briefly, it was too soon. I needed another novel to establish myself first.

I had this idea I’d been mulling over, compiled from several sources, that I thought would do, so I wrote that. The title was Dragon Weather.

That worked just fine. I thought it was a very successful novel, both artistically and financially. It was not, however, especially original as far as the plot went — as many people (including me) pointed out, I’d swiped a lot of the story from Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo.

I was hardly the first to swipe from Dumas. Alfred Bester had swiped a lot of the exact same stuff I did for The Stars My Destination, and Steven Brust lifted much of the plot of The Three Musketeers and its sequels for his series that began with The Phoenix Guards. Hey, why not? These are great stories, long since out of copyright and become part of the general culture; some stories (King Arthur, Robin Hood, etc.) get recycled over and over and over.

Anyway, I wrote Dragon Weather and its two sequels, alternating with two Ethshar novels, and when those were done I wrote the Annals of the Chosen, which was a sort of deconstruction of the whole “plucky band of heroes defeats the Dark Lord” idea.

Usually I like to have at least two projects going at once, to keep myself fresh; that was why I alternated SF and fantasy back in the 1980s, and why I alternated Ethshar and the Obsidian Chronicles at Tor. The Annals of the Chosen didn’t alternate with anything, though, because Tor balked — they prefer, for sound marketing reasons, to have each series appear without interruption. I came up with side-projects, such as online serials and The Turtle Moves!, to break up the workload on the Annals of the Chosen, but it was a slog.

For one thing, I’d discovered that the Annals weren’t fun to write. The setting turned out to not be a congenial one for me to work in. I don’t really know why; it just wasn’t. When I’d thought it up it sounded like fun, but it wasn’t. That meant the whole series took much longer to write than it should have, because I faced each day’s work with dread rather than anticipation, and was all too eager to knock off rather than writing just one more page.

So when I finished The Summer Palace, and once again was faced with the “What next?” question, I was determined to write something that was fun to write. Ethshar is fun, but Tor wouldn’t take any more Ethshar stories. So, I asked myself, what else had been fun to write?

Dragon Weather. Dragon Weather had been a joy to write. I loved working on it.

I wasn’t about to go back and extend the series, though; as far as I was concerned, that story was finished. Yeah, I’ve had readers ask for a sequel, but I believe in the adage “Always leave ’em wanting more.” I’d plotted a prequel, Lord Dragon, about how Enziet became what we see in Dragon Weather, but prequels are very tricky, as you need to be extremely careful not to contradict anything in the already-written stories, and it would be a pretty downbeat story, so I didn’t think it was the fun I was looking for. No, I wanted something new.

So what had made Dragon Weather fun?

Well, the slightly old-fashioned style was a kick to write. Having stolen a tried-and-true plot had eliminated a lot of my usual worries, even if I did eventually diverge drastically from Dumas’ original storyline. It was a swashbuckler, and I like swashbucklers.

So maybe I should write another swashbuckler. Maybe I could even swipe a plot from some other classic swashbuckler.

I was mulling that over, but hadn’t really settled on anything, when someone gave me a DVD of the Leslie Howard/Merle Oberon version of The Scarlet Pimpernel.

There was a plot worth swiping!

But the thing is, there’s so much implied background to the story. You need to know the basics of the French Revolution to understand what’s going on, because the narrative never bothers to explain them.

And speaking of the French Revolution, that was background for The Count of Monte Cristo, too, though much less so. And it’s also the background for Sabatini’s Scaramouche, and for the Horatio Hornblower stories (another oft-imitated series I was tempted to swipe). In fact, most of the classic swashbucklers, unsurprisingly, draw on major events in European history.

I don’t want to write historicals. Too much research. Besides, I’m a fantasy writer; I want to use wizards and dragons and magic. But maybe, I thought, I could come up with a setting where I could fit all these classic plots and make them my own. I could put them all into a single series, that could run forever without running out of material. In fact, I could take some of the other plots and projects I had lying around unfinished, and tie them in, too.

What were key events in European history that I wanted to use, and what could I dump? Well, you need the fall of Rome, and the French Revolution, and the expansion of the British Empire, and the Age of Exploration, but you don’t need all that medieval stuff — that’s already been done to death in fantasy. You don’t need Scandinavia at all, or Greece, or Christianity. Oh, sure, they’re hugely important in European history, but I don’t need them for the stories I want to tell.

And I came up with the Good Parts Version of Europe and European history, which, when I was done, really didn’t look much like Europe at all. My Old Empire had its capital in Paris (now called Lume), not in Rome, and was ruled by wizards; it fell in six months, rather than over a period of centuries. The Iberian peninsula is gone entirely; if I need Spain or Portugal later I’ll improvise something. The English Channel became a stony desert inhabited by dragons. The moon is gone. No religious wars as such; the near-universal religion involves a god and goddess and ancestor worship, though there are lots of odd cults kicking around.

The French Revolution is now the Fall of the Sorcerers, when the magicians who rule the Walasian Empire are overthrown.

And I have dozens of stories I want to tell set in the Bound Lands, as my Western Europe analogue is called. I’m not going to follow chronological order for the entire thing, but I’m starting with the Fall of the Sorcerers, and I do want to keep that in chronological order, which means I can’t start with The Scarlet Pimpernel, since that begins with the Terror in full swing. Before I get to that I need to cover the Fall of the Bastille (now the destruction of the Pensioners’ Quarter), and a lot of other stuff. In fact, even the destruction of the Pensioners’ Quarter wound up in the second volume, Above His Proper Station.

Where did I start? Well, A Young Man Without Magic is dedicated to Rafael Sabatini; that’s a clue.

I’m not slavishly following any of the plots I’m swiping; they all twist and mutate as I play with them, and Walasia is very definitely not France. (And if you’ve read Scaramouche, you know there’s a really central plot point that, if I used it, would have people saying I was swiping Star Wars. So I dropped that entirely, and that changes the whole story.)

The feel of the series, though, is still modeled on swashbucklers — Dumas, Sabatini, Orczy, and a thousand obscure pulp authors.

So that’s what I’m doing. I hope readers will have as much fun reading these as I’m having writing them.

Everything but the Kitchen Sink

I’ve just delivered A Young Man Without Magic to my agent, so before I get busy with something else let me write my promised account of how the “Worlds of Shadow” series came about.

When I started writing for publication my ambitions were relatively modest; I just wanted to tell entertaining stories and make money doing so. While the cliché at the time was that every fantasy writer was imitating Tolkien, my primary models in fantasy were Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber Jr., Michael Moorcock, and L. Sprague de Camp. I wasn’t trying to write epics; I thought of myself as writing sword & sorcery.

I made the mistake of saying that once in front of Lester del Rey, who informed me in no uncertain terms that my work was not sword & sorcery, because Del Rey Books did not publish sword & sorcery.

Could’ve fooled me.

Lester and Judy-Lynn del Rey had very definite ideas of what Del Rey wanted from their authors. Sometimes this caused a lot of friction with their authors; Tim Powers left Del Rey and went to Ace because what he wanted to write wasn’t what Lester wanted him to write, Phyllis Eisenstein went into a multi-year stretch of writer’s block after Lester got nasty about her plans for a sequel to Sorcerer’s Son, and Lester and Stephen Donaldson were constantly feuding, to the point Judy-Lynn hired an assistant editor whose primary function at Del Rey was to keep between them and prevent Lester from driving cash-cow Donaldson to another publisher.

Back then I generally got along with them just fine, though; the stuff I wanted to write was more or less what they wanted to publish.

However, Judy-Lynn started telling me somewhere around 1982 that I really ought to write a Big Fat Fantasy (her term, and the first place I heard it), something that had bestseller potential. So I started thinking about that, off and on.

Those were busy years, though; I was writing more than a novel a year, our daughter was born in 1983, we’d bought a small farm I was running and an unfinished house I finished, and I didn’t have a whole lot of time to devote to a big project. I got as far as plotting a novel called The Gates of Faerie, which I still haven’t written and probably never will; I had a proposal almost ready to submit in the autumn of 1985 when Judy-Lynn had a stroke and went into a coma. She died early in 1986.

That took the wind out of my sails on The Gates of Faerie. It had been targeted at Judy-Lynn, and she was gone. I never finished writing up the sample chapter for the proposal. Bits from the story have turned up in various works since, but the original project died with Judy-Lynn.

The idea of writing a Big Fat Fantasy, though, lingered. It would have to be aimed at Lester, and his tastes were a little different.

And then one day I was reading Locus, being annoyed that they never seemed to review my work, and I read a review of a Barbara Hambly novel (I forget which) that called it “another war against the dark,” and then went on to be a very favorable review indeed.

“They want a war against the dark, I’ll give them a war against the dark,” I said. “That can be my Big Fat fantasy.”

In fact, I told myself, if they want clichés, I’ll give them clichés. I’ll put every over-worked trope I can think of into a single story, but I’ll make them all new by treating them realistically, instead of the ways they’ve usually been treated.

I started collecting clichés — exiled princes, space pirates, elves, zombies, galactic empires, slave auctions, dark lords — and assembling them into a single story, which I called (of course) The War Against the Dark.

It was pretty dark and nasty. In the real world pirates are vicious thugs, people who try to overthrow tyrants mostly die without accomplishing anything, slavery is brutal and unromantic, and that’s how I was going to treat all this stuff. There would be humor, but it would be black humor. The idea was to present all these old clichés and show just how absurd they were.

Meanwhile, things at Del Rey were getting weird. With Judy-Lynn gone there was no one who could get Lester to meet deadlines, delegate duties, or prioritize his workload. Getting a proposal accepted could take as much as two years, as I discovered with The Spell of the Black Dagger. I wrote every word of Taking Flight while waiting for Lester to get around to reading a twenty-page (double-spaced) proposal for The Spell of the Black Dagger.

Lester was absolute ruler of fantasy at Del Rey; Judy-Lynn had run the SF program and everything else other than fantasy. The War Against the Dark had originally been planned as a fantasy, with the SF elements downplayed, but after the absurd delay on Dagger my agent and I decided to shift the emphasis, play up the cross-genre nature, and sell it to Owen Lock, who had Judy-Lynn’s old job as publisher and SF editor, because Owen could be expected to reply in a couple of months, instead of years.

Sure enough, Owen looked over the proposal promptly, and he and my agent started negotiating — and things got weird again. We’d set a minimum advance we wanted, and Owen had said he wouldn’t pay it, so it looked as if we were going to pick up our marbles, leave Del Rey, and talk to Bantam. (Given what happened to Bantam’s SF/fantasy line a couple of years later, I’m really glad that didn’t happen.) Owen didn’t want that, and broke the impasse in a creative (and in retrospect, downright stupid) way.

He offered three times what we’d asked if I would turn the project from one Big Fat Book into a trilogy.

That is, he wouldn’t pay X for one novel, but he would pay 3X for three. This would mean my very first (and so far, last) six-figure advance, and in theory it would mean Del Rey would have to put some push behind the book. It might well be the break-out project Judy-Lynn had talked about back in 1982.

When my agent told me that on the phone I was kind of stunned. That much money? But turn it into a trilogy? How? It was supposed to be one Big Fat Book.

So I started thinking about it, and concluded it could be done, so I agreed, and we signed the contracts.

What I did was to split the original story in half, as Out of This World and In the Empire of Shadow. I’d intended to have an epilogue, maybe 3,000-5,000 words, that would wrap up loose ends, and that wound up as the basis for The Reign of the Brown Magician, though obviously I added a lot more plot and stuff. I started writing.

I’m really not sure just how carefully Owen Lock had read the proposal; it was only well after the deal was made that he seemed to realize the story could be treated as fantasy, rather than SF. (Pretty dark fantasy, at that.)

While I was writing, Del Rey was changing. Lester was eased out, and then died. Owen Lock moved up the corporate ladder out of editorial. There was a shake-up of the editorial department, and my favorite editor in the entire world, who I’d been working with for years, Deborah Hogan, left the company. (Lester had been the acquiring editor, but Deborah was my line editor, doing the detail work, since about 1985.) Deborah was there long enough to accept Out of This World, but she was gone well before the second book was finished; in fact, there was no longer anyone at Del Rey who had read the original proposal and understood just how dark the series was meant to be.

So the first book was packaged as something relatively light, with a bright cover and a quote on the back about whether a flying car looks more like a Buick or an Oldsmobile. Horribly misleading. I think that the people responsible thought the other two volumes would cheer things up and lead to a traditional happy ending.

And while it was published as a hardcover, it was not the lead hardcover — Owen Lock, a huge fan of alternate history, had instead decided to put the entire promotional budget for the month behind the first volume of Harry Turtledove’s WorldWar series.

Sales, to be blunt, sucked. And I got hate mail from readers who had expected a light fluffy read and instead got grief and pain and despair.

So the second volume was published in trade paperback, instead of hardcover, and sold even worse, because who’s going to buy the middle book of a trilogy in a format the first volume was never in?

The third volume was then delayed so long that the contracts had to be amended, and eventually appeared only in mass-market paperback.

By that time I had left Del Rey and gone to Tor. Judy-Lynn and Lester and Deborah were all gone; there was no one at Del Rey I cared about, and no one at Del Rey who cared about me. I think the guy who “edited” In the Empire of Shadow was already gone, as well — in fact, I don’t even remember who edited The Reign of the Brown Magician. Probably the same guy, but I’m not sure. He was a nice guy, but in my opinion a lousy editor, which is why I’m not naming him.

And my sales hadn’t been good enough to keep Del Rey collectively interested in keeping me around — not at the price they’d paid per volume for the “Three Worlds” trilogy (as it was then known), anyway. When we asked the same price for Touched by the Gods, they didn’t negotiate, they just said no.

So I left, and got that advance from Tor, instead.

I’m much happier at Tor than I ever was at Del Rey after Judy-Lynn’s death.

Anyway, I think “Worlds of Shadow” is a good story, and I’m very proud of it, but when Wildside reprinted it, I made sure they packaged it dark, almost like horror, because that’s what it is. Del Rey mishandled it horribly, in my opinion. They never really looked at it to see what it was they’d bought.

If it had been marketed differently, I still think it might’ve been a hit.

Sorcerer’s Bane

[This is another book in the “Fall of the Sorcerers” set — in fact, I think it comes before Mareet Saruis’ story, a.k.a. The Golden Wyvern. I’d originally thought Sorcerer’s Bane was the second book in the series, but now I think it’s first.]

The coachman called to his team, and the vehicle rolled to a stop on the wet cobbles, almost directly in front of a young man in a green frock coat. “Alzur!” the driver called as he set the brake. “This is Alzur!”

The door banged open, and a head thrust out. “Indeed it is,” the new arrival said, looking around the square. “It hasn’t changed a bit, has it?”

The man in the green coat hurried toward him. “Anrel!” he called. “You’ve made it!”

“Hello, Fal,” the passenger said, clambering down. “You haven’t changed, either, I see.”

“Ah, so it might appear to the casual glance,” Fal said, clapping his friend on the back, “but I think that when we have a chance to talk a little you’ll see just how different I have become. When you left I was a child, Anrel, and I like to think I am rather more than that now.” He glanced around. “This way, I think – I believe the rain could start again any second, and I would rather not be halfway up the hill when that happens.”

“I am entirely at your disposal,” Anrel said, “once you let me retrieve my baggage.” He turned to the driver, who had untied the canvas and was heaving a leather-bound traveling case to the cobbles.

“Of course!” Fal said, hurrying to snatch up the first bag.

The coachman handed the next directly to Anrel, who nodded, and passed the man a coin in exchange.

“Is this everything?” Fal asked, hefting the traveling case.

“Indeed it is,” Anrel said. “I am, after all, only a poor student, not a mighty sorcerer like yourself.”

Fal punched him lightly on the shoulder. “Sorcerer, pfah! I am a man like yourself, Anrel. Are we not all the children of the Father and the Mother, and heirs of the Old Empire?” He began marching across the square, toward a pair of small tables set beneath a broad sky-blue awning.

“Some of us are the more favored heirs, Fal, while others are but despised cousins,” Anrel said, following his companion. “Your magic gives you a status most of us can never aspire to.”

Fal glanced back over his shoulder. “I think you may misjudge the situation, my friend. What our fathers dared not dream of, our sons may take for granted.”

“You have certainly achieved what your father did not,” Anrel said.

“Pfah!” Fal waved his free hand in dismissal.

A moment later the two of them had taken seats beneath the blue awning, setting Anrel’s luggage to one side. A woman in a white apron hurried from the door to their table side and said breathlessly, “Lord Fal! How can I serve you?”

Fal looked questioningly at his companion.

“I dined at the Kuriel way-station,” Anrel said. “Just a little wine to wash the road-dust from my throat would be fine.”

“A bottle of Lithrayn red, then,” Fal said. “And a plate of sausages, and some of those lovely seed-cakes from…” He stopped, frowning. He had turned to point to a nearby shop, but now he broke off in mid-sentence and asked, “Is the bakery closed?”

The woman followed his gaze and said, “Hadn’t you heard? Lord Balutar caught the baker’s son stealing from his herb garden, and has sentenced him to death. The whole family is up there now, pleading for his life.”