1. Make an extra deposit (or ten) in the Love Bank with that Special Someone to make up for those late night writing sessions!
2. Write Something Else!
3. Workshop/critique with your peers!
4. Set up some book signings!
5. Organize a reading at a local library!
6. Pick up a good book that you haven’t had time for!
7. Shop for some new writing music!
8. Research new markets for your work!
9. Catch up on industry news!
10. Write Something Else!

– Lincoln Crisler

I’d like to relate a little back and forth I’ve been having with a fellow member of our little group here, Sean Grigsby, regarding the use of tense. Several of my more recent stories have been written in present tense, much to the chagrin of young Sean, who doesn’t feel present tense is proper for a work of fiction.

Here’s the interesting part: What Sean didn’t like about a couple of my present tense stories were exactly the things I did like about them. Here was my explanation, specifically regarding a short called ‘Muscle Memory’, a comedy about bodyswitching that begins with a guy waking up to discover he now inhabits his wife’s body, and he’s not alone. The dog and cat have switched, his next door neighbors have as well. There’s a scene where our main character, Billy, is trying to breastfeed his young son while his neighbor, Tucker, now inhabiting the body of his wife, can’t stop staring at the bare-breasted spectacle…

What I like about present tense is its immediacy, the sense of urgency it implies. I guess we’ll just have to disagree here because I feel it’s perfect for this story. The plight of the characters, to me, feels more urgent and helps put the reader right there at the table with them, staring at the guy’s tits and sharing in their bewilderment. After awhile, past tense just gets too damn old. Every story that I wrote in past tense began to sound and read and feel the same to me. You need to experiment sometimes, see what else is possible.

The point of this amiable exchange would be, there is no right way, just as there is no wrong way. There are certain rules to be followed in writing, but rules were made to be broken, too. Personally, I think it would be wrong not to experiment from time to time. Try a different tense, or bang something out in 1st person. You never know what might happen. It’s like when you go to your wife’s closet and try on her lacy dainties, you know, just to see how they feel. Or, uh… so I’m told. By Kevin Wallis.

- Steve Lowe

Nobody likes the feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when you open a letter or email informing you that the story you worked on day and night for the last month is not what the editor is “looking for”. Or worse yet, you receive the all-too-common form letter or simple “it just didn’t work for me.”

Many would speculate that it is some conspiracy of the Postal Service or Internet to keep business churning by paying off editors to turn away anyone who’s last name doesn’t begin with a ‘K’. Maybe the editor was a complete idiot who didn’t realize your genius at first glance. Maybe it was crap. (That’s where editing comes into play). The human factor in getting your story published is a big one. The editor could have marital problems one morning, spill boiling coffee on herself on the way to the office where she is bombarded by stacks of stories – in between which is your gem. Let’s hope her mood improves before she reaches your neck of the pile.

Blankety-blank happens. The only antidote for rejection is perserverance. Like selling a car, getting a part in a play, or anything else; the more you send a story out, the higher the chance it will have in getting published. *** I want to note that you damn well better make sure it is in tip-top shape before sending it out. (See last week’s blog.)

And in keeping with that old saying about misery, here’s some examples to hopefully keep you going.

1. Stephen King’s manuscript for Carrie was rejected twelve times.

2. Ray Bradbury was continuously rejected until he began to sell one story a year. Then two. And it doubled every year after that.

3. Theodore Geisel – His first book was rejected 28 TIMES before being published by Random House. The book was “And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street”. You may know him better as Dr. Seuss.

I myself have recently received the quickest rejection in my own experience, although I don’t believe the Guiness people would be willing to call it a world record. But who knows. I sent the story in on Friday evening and received the rejection at 7:25 Saturday morning. And you know what I did? I sent it right back out.

Rejection blows and it’s part of the game of writing. Get used to it. I want to give you  several groups of three words that I would like you to memorize, keep in your heart and put on a sticky note below your shower head. Pick whatever one works best for you

Don’t Give Up

Keep Moving Forward

Send It Again

Who’s Dr. Seuss?

- Sean Grigsby

One of my Seven Deadly Pens partners was curious about some of the specifics of publishing a collection of short stories. Since I’ve already had two published, I had a fair amount of information to share. Here it is for your own edification, should you be curious as well.

Did you approach a publisher with a completed manuscript & table of contents?
Yes.

Did they reject any of the stories or how you had them put together?
A couple of stories got rejected for Despairs & Delights because they were a little too extreme for the editor. Those made it into Magick & Misery, though, which was released through a different publisher.

Did you self publish?
Hells no. See here and here.

What about rights? I would assume many of the stories in a collection were previously published, so did you have any issues with what could go into the collection? Are there rights covering this sort of thing? (I assume there are…) Would anthology rights apply here? What rights would apply to a collected work?
It is assumed that a collection will include a lot of reprints, so that shouldn’t be an issue. What you do need to make sure of is that you’re not violating any agreements with other publishers/editors. If you signed a contract giving print rights to a specific story to Dark Recesses for a year, for example, you need to either wait that whole year before publishing it elsewhere or else ask DR for permission to use it sooner. Anthology rights are rights a magazine purchases in order to include work they’ve published in the magazine in a ‘Best Of’ anthology at a later date. The rights that apply to the collection? It’s your work, and you have the right to publish it, unless you’ve signed a contract giving those rights away either temporarily or permanently.

I have enough stuff right now that would come together to make a 60,000-word collection. Would that be long enough?
Absolutely. Neither of mine are that long.

Did you buy a number of your own copies at a discount to resell?
Yes. As a matter of fact, I can sell signed copies direct from my website for cover price or below and still make a buck or two per copy.

You do that through your website and keep the money, or do you have a deal with your publisher to split any of that revenue?
If I buy them, I don’t get royalties on those copies, of course, but I keep any revenue from their sales, which, depending on the circumstances, can amount to more per copy than I’d see if someone bought the book through Amazon, for example.

– Lincoln Crisler

We’ve all heard it before. Endless amounts of YouTube videos, articles, and books on writing have preached the sanctity of putting away that first draft and come back to it when you’ve grown up. And you know something? They’re right. But how many of us follow this credo? I’ll be the first to cross that line drawn in the sand and say with complete shame that I have no patience. Without giving anything away, I recently finished a story that opens with a woman in a lifeboat, digging through a purse. I never said whose purse it was. I then did the old flashbackaroo and, after a series of harrowing events, lead back to where the story began.

I went through that story backwards, forwards, and even did the Charleston on top of it. Happy with what I had, I sent that baby to the publisher whose deadline was Halloween. I have taken a break from writing between Saturday night and today. I figured I deserved a little “down time” for such a good job and decided to use the time to read “Self-Editing For Fiction Writers”. In the middle of a paragraph, it hits me. The purse! The damn PURSE!!! I never explained how the purse got into the lifeboat with her. I tried to think back and convince myself that I hadn’t made the main character do anything that would rule out the possibility that she did it all with a purse around her shoulder. Nope. Try again. Maybe the other female character had hers with her. It wasn’t like I said whose purse it was. Right? We’ll see.

The point I’m trying to make to both myself and you is that you NEED to set aside your recent work and come back to it with fresh eyes. Odds are you missed something whether it’s an info dump, a clear case of telling, or a damned Coach bag. One thing I’m going to try, and suggest the same to you, is to start work on a new story as soon as you are done with your latest. The new story will give you time to let the old one simmer and also get your mind away from it. Even better, it motivates you to keep writing. Because, are we really writers if we don’t write?

– Sean Grigsby

• Kevin Wallis has a story, “Her Father’s Teeth,” in the latest issue of Twisted Dreams Magazine!
• Sean Grigsby’s “Upon a Midnight Clear” is featured in the new Living Dead Press antho, Christmas is Dead!

Steve Lowe has a story in the newly-released Dead Bait anthology from Severed Press!

A husband hell-bent on revenge hunts a Wereshark…A Russian mail order bride with a fishy secret…Crabs with a collective consciousness…A vampire who transforms into a Candiru…Zombie piranha…Bait that will have you crawling out of your skin and more. Drawing on horror, humor with a helping of dark fantasy and a touch of deviance, these 19 contemporary stories pay homage to the monsters that lurk in the murky waters of our imaginations. If you thought it was safe to go back in the water…Think Again!

If you’re one of the three people a month who still visits this site in the two years or so since it became the mirror site for my website, you might be a bit shocked. Unless of course you’re just a web-crawling spiderbot computer program: then you wouldn’t be shocked, because web-crawling spiderbots don’t have feelings. Unless of course you’re a web-crawling spiderbot in a Lincoln Crisler story.

Anyhow, we’re a group of writers that have decided to join forces and use our powers to defeat the forces of evil. By, “defeat the forces of evil” we mean, “workshop and critique each others fiction, share market tips and pimp each other out.”

There are seven of us. A few of us have worked with/critiqued/stalked each other on the Internet in various combinations, but not all of us know each other. Even I myself don’t know all of them all that well, and I’m the guy that got bored and said “hey, I want to start a writer’s group!” Plus, no one joined the group knowing who the other players were going to be. That’s half the fun, if you ask me.

Join us on our wild little unpredictable ride. Learn something, teach us something, click some of our links and PLEASE, if you like what you see, tell someone else. We know (from personal experience!) that you’ll be fooling around on Facebook, Twitter and MySpace when you should be working/writing/sleeping/etc., anyhow.

Thanks!