Of course, a lot of the stuff I read in those small press 'zines was... well, far from great. To be perfectly honest, some of the stuff was plain unvarnished bad. But I learned a lot reading those bad stories, too. The lessons they taught were easier to grasp. In fact, I learned how not to write a bad story long before I learned how to write a good one.
Okay. I'd missed my chance to get into TZ, but I figured I had to be good enough to crack one of the small press markets. I made a deal with myself. I'd give it six months. If I couldn't get a story published in a small press magazine in that time, I'd bust my pencils, give up writing, and start thinking about going to grad school (which is what most everyone in my family thought that I should do).
With the help of Bob Morrish's TZ article and Janet Fox's market 'zine, Scavenger's Newsletter, I made a hit list of potential markets. With the death of Twilight Zone, I put The Horror Show at the top of my list. Over the next several months, I submitted four stories to Dave Silva. His rejects were always kind and cordial and he always asked to see another story, but I never could crack him.[4]
I didn't let Dave's rejections stop me. I sent stories to a little magazine called 2 AM, and I received rejection slips from them. Ditto for another mag called Eldritch Tales. Other rejects came from Space and Time, Starwind, and Thin Ice. I was tempted to lose faith. In truth, it would have been easy, but I tried my best to avoid crying in my beer. My modus operandi was to reread the rejected tale as soon as I finished reading the rejection slip, maybe revise it a little if I thought that was necessary, then force myself to get that sucker back in the mail ASAP. That way I didn't dwell on the rejection. I put it behind me, and I focused my thoughts on my story's possibilities with the next best market on my hit list... and on writing a new story to send to the market that had rejected me.
Soon I had several manuscripts making the rounds. Three months into my six-month plan, I scored. I cracked one of the markets on my list, selling a story to Noctulpa. The week after that I sold another one to a college kid named Rich Chizmar who had just started a new magazine called Cemetery Dance. For the princely sum of $17.50, Rich bought a story called "Save the Last Dance for Me" for Cemetery Dance #2.
Both markets paid on publication. That meant I had to wait. The next issue of Noctulpa wasn't published until the following January. The second issue of CD came out in June '89, about three months after Rich accepted the piece.
"Dance" got the lead slot in the issue, and I got my $17.50. I think that was enough to buy a pizza and a sixpack—maybe I rented a video, too— but the money didn't matter.
Finally, I'd sold a short story.
That was what mattered.
My first year writing, that $17.50 check from Rich Chizmar was my total income. Second year, I was up to $809.90. Third year total was $1,511.08.
Sometimes I'd look at those numbers and think that I was nuts. I'd come home from my day job knowing that I'd have to spend the entire evening working on a story if I was going to beat the editor's deadline. I'd look at that computer with the scorched side sitting there on the kitchen table and wonder if I'd ever get anywhere publishing fiction in small markets, or if I was just a guy with a minor leaguer's quotient of talent who was chasing after an unrealistic dream. I'd think about friends of mine who were starting to get somewhere on more traditional career paths—the ones who were buying houses and new cars—and I'd wonder if maybe I should just cash in my chips and send in those grad school applications after all.
But most of the time I didn't feel that way. I felt like putting an investment in the bank that would pay off later. I knew it would take time to earn my chops. So I kept at it. I read new anthologies and magazines (new novels, too). I studied the careers of writers who'd made a name for themselves in my chosen genre, and I read biographies of pulpsmiths like Max Brand and Edgar Rice Burroughs. I ate up books of interviews with contemporary novelists (Stan Water's Dark Dreamers: Conversations with the Masters Horror was especially helpful). I learned a lot about the business of writing from these sources, and also through the pages of magazines like Publisher's Weekly and Locus.
Most of all, I wrote more stories. I typed "The End." I printed out manuscripts on my dot-matrix printer in a big, fat Apple font—because they were unreadable if I used Times Roman—and put the manuscripts in the mail.[5] Sometimes they'd come back with rejection slips. But with greater frequency they'd come back with an acceptance letter and a contract... which meant (somewhere down the road) a check.
But some nights, working late on a story, I worried about my computer. After all, those checks I was getting for my stories were rarely very large, and I didn't want to pony up for another power board. Subtract the cost of printer ribbons, paper, envelopes and postage, magazines and books, and my profit margin was slim enough (hell, some years it was nonexistent). A new computer seemed like a pie in the sky dream. It was something I tried not to think about.
Once in awhile the Mac would hiccup. Or freeze. Sometimes it'd eat a file,[6] or refuse to load up a disc. When that happened. I'd stare at that little screen and wonder if maybe this writing thing was the biggest mistake of my life.
Sometimes I'd turn off the machine and call it a night.
Sometimes I'd turn off the machine, click it back on, and reboot.
Then I'd get back to typing.
I had a start, but I knew that was all I had.
My first pro sale, the editor called me while I was taking a bath. My first wife was so excited that she dragged the phone down the hall and handed it to me while I was still in the tub. "Norm, it's Charlie Grant!"
I managed a hello. I guess I sloshed around a little bit, which gave away my location. Charlie had a good laugh, and so did I. He accepted "Wrong Side of the Road" for Final Shadows and seemed surprised to find that I wasn't a grizzled World War II veteran like the character in my story. I took that as a compliment, and I hung up the phone dripping wet and extremely happy. Grant's Shadows anthologies had been textbooks to me, and cracking the last volume was a special moment.
A few days later I received a letter of acceptance from Joe Lansdale for Dark at Heart. That made two solid anthology sales in one week. I kept writing, kept sending stuff out. I attended my first World Fantasy Convention in 1991, where I met several of the writers and editors I'd been working with face-to-face for the first time and made some new connections. Pretty soon I cracked a Marty Greenberg anthology, and sold a story to the slick revival of Amazing Stories. One of my stories ended up in Ellen Datlow's Year's Best compendium, and another made the cut for the Stephen Jones/Ramsey Campbell version, Best New Horror.
I was developing a reputation as a new writer worth watching. I was still green, but I was learning what it took to be a pro. I started thinking more about writing a novel, and about finding an agent to handle my work.
Things were looking up. I was getting somewhere.
But I wasn't where I wanted to be.
I knew I still had a long way to go.
The Mac with the scorched side died about the time I was finishing my first novel. It was 1993, and the machine had lasted six years. During that time, I served my apprenticeship as a writer. I wrote more than fifty stories and was paid for most of them. I wrote and sold my first novel and my first short story collection. I published in magazines laid out in dotmatrix font in a college computer lab, and hardcovers typeset in big publishing houses in New York. At first I was paid beer money, then grocery money, then enough money to pay my rent.
That little workhorse of a machine served me well. On it, I wrote most of the stories you're about to read. The first eight tales in this book comprise the original contents of my first short story collection, Mr. Fox and Other Feral Tales. Roadkill Press, a small imprint out of Colorado, published the book. The project was done mostly for fun; the publishers were friends. We never expected the book to do much. To tell the truth, we all figured we'd be happy if we managed to sell out the 500-copy print-run. It was a great surprise for all of us
when Mr. Fox and Other Feral Tales won a Bram Stoker Award and gained attention as a World Fantasy Award nominee.
These days I've seen copies of the original edition go for $400.00 on the collector's market. That's almost as much as I was paid to write the thing. The high price of that original volume is one reason I wanted to do another edition of this book... but it's not the only one. As I read the stories from Mr. Fox (and the dozen or so other early tales included in this book), I couldn't help but remember the days when I wrote them. Ten years have passed since I last looked at most of them. Since then I've written five novels, and sold one of those to the movies. I've followed Mr. Fox with two more story collections. I've worked in comics. I'm proud to say that I've pretty much sold every word of fiction I've written since that first published story in Cemetery Dance, and I've won a few awards while doing it.
I don't say that to brag, just to let you know that I've come down the road a piece. So it should come as no surprise that more than a few of the stories you'll find in this book seem rough around the edges to me today. I was learning my craft when I wrote them. They creak a little bit, and their engines sputter, but they speak honestly of the writer I was when I first slipped them into envelopes and mailed them to prospective publishers. That's why I resisted the temptation to revise them. Doing that would have been a cheat. I wanted that writer, and his stories, to come through for you on the page.
I hadn't been in touch with that guy in quite a few years. Meeting up with him was a bit of a revelation. As I leafed through old small press magazines and files of correspondence with editors and publishers, I became reacquainted with the guy who wrote the stories you're about to read. Any talent I had back then was raw talent. Any knowledge of the writing game I possessed was raw, too. But what I lacked in polish I made up for with determination and hunger, and those were the qualities that saw me through.
I couldn't have done it without them. Of course, I didn't realize that then. But it was determination and hunger that allowed me to put my faith in a blank piece of paper when there was no good reason for me to believe that I could do anything with it. That little revelation came back to me time and time again as I read these early stories, and with it came some pretty fine memories.
I remembered the excitement of pulling my first acceptance letter out of the mailbox, and cashing my first check from a professional publisher. I remembered what it was like to type "The End" to a story that I thought really did the job, and sell it to an anthology, and see that anthology in a bookstore several months later with my story set in hard black type. And I remembered what it was like to have my fiction praised by writers like Stephen King and Peter Straub and Joe Lansdale, and to have writers I'd grown up reading—Robert Bloch, George Clayton Johnson—treat me like I was a member of a very special club.
If you're one of the lucky ones, you'll get a few moments like that in your career. They're moments you've worked hard for. You never forget them, and they come with a kind of payoff that dollars can't provide. But there are other moments you don't forget, either—moments that aren't nearly so sweet—and the memories of those moments waited for me in these stories, too.
Like having my words confined to 8 1/2" x 11" manuscript, and wondering if they'd ever make it between the pages of a magazine or a book. Like typing a cover letter that ended with the words: "I am an unpublished writer, but I hope that won't prevent you from considering the enclosed manuscript." Or the feeling I'd get when I pulled that manuscript out of my SASE on its return trip, and I'd find a rejection slip attached, and I'd try to work up the courage to send that story out again when I was sorely tempted to toss it (and my scorched Mac) in the trash and call it a day.
Those are the kind of moments that stop a lot of writers before they ever get started. As I read these stories, I remembered what it was like to fight my way through them, to force myself to be bullheaded enough to muscle through the negatives until the positives came within reach. If you're an aspiring writer, you've probably already learned that that isn't an easy thing to do. It's a personal battle, and there are probably as many ways to go nose-to-nose with it as there are writers sitting in front of keyboards.
For me, facing that battle took the determination and hunger I've already spoken about... and maybe something else. Maybe it required a special kind of energy you only get when you're starting out... an energy fueled by that very hunger... an energy I'm better off not trying too hard to define. Whatever it was, finding that energy again in these early stories was a real gift. It charged me up in a way I wasn't expecting. As I assembled the stories for this long overdue volume and began to work on the introductory essays, I felt like I did when I was starting out—like someone had slapped a couple of Everready's in my backside and thrown a switch.
That's when things got interesting... and that's when I began to think that maybe I had more than a collection of short stories on my hands. The subtitle of this edition of Mr. Fox is: A Collection/A Recollection/A Writer's Handbook. There are stories here, and there are memories, but for me that last part of the subtitle has become the real focus of this book.
If you're a fan of my work with no writing aspirations of your own, I'll try not to bore you. In fact, I think you'll find a lot of the material within these pages of interest. But if you're a writer who's trying to build a career in today's market, I've tried to write this book with you in mind. If you're looking for nuts and bolts advice on submitting your work, you'll find it here. If you want some tips on dealing with editors and publishers, or on finding an agent, look no further. If you want to know the upsides and downsides of working in the small press and the mainstream press, I'll be glad to tell you what I think. And I'll make one promise before we go any further—I'll be honest with you... sometimes brutally so. What I've learned, I've learned by doing, and I'll do my best to communicate that knowledge here—straight-up and unvarnished—both the positives and the negatives.
But I'm after something more than just a nuts and bolts game plan. I'm looking beyond an "insert tab A into slot B" and you'll become an amazingly popular writer(!) kind of book. There are other things I want to talk about with you. They're the things most books for aspiring writers don't mention, the things that don't have anything to do with writer/editor etiquette, or proper manuscript format, or the mental acumen you'll need to develop in order to survive in the freelance fiction marketplace. In truth, they're the kind of things that don't have much to do with your brain at all. They live in your heart, or down deep in your gut. And ultimately they're the things that make the words you get down on the page worth reading.
And maybe that's a good place for us to begin. Maybe you're on the other side of this page, staring down at black print, wondering what you'll have to do to get your own words between hard covers. Maybe that's your dream. Maybe some days it seems like the best idea you ever had, and some days it seems like the worst. Maybe working up the courage to put all your faith in a blank piece of paper and what you can do with it seems about as easy as surviving a long night locked in a cage with a pack of hungry timber wolves. Hell, maybe it seems ten times tougher than that... like the toughest damn thing you have ever set out to do in your life.
I'm here to tell you—there isn't a writer sucking wind who didn't start off feeling just that way.
I was one of them before the stories in this book first hit the printed page.
These tales and I made the trip together.
The tales will tell you their stories.
I'll tell you mine.
Little Bookshop of Horrors
Dan Simmons once said that Little Bookshop of Horrors was like a clubhouse for writers. That's more than true, for Doug and Tomi Lewis' bookstore was certainly a haven for Denver, Colorado's sizeable creative population.
I first wandered into the store sometime in the early nineties. My first wife was from Boulder, which was about a half-hour drive from Little Bookshop's Arvada location. I'd read about the store in Ed Bryant's Locus column, and I
decided to drive over to Little Bookshop to pick up some of the chapbooks published under the Lewises' Roadkill Press imprint.
Pulling into the parking lot, the place sure didn't look like much. Just a hole-in-the-wall store in a hole-in-the-wall mini-mall. But inside, the story was different.
Because inside Little Bookshop were treasures. Up front, the limited edition of King's first Gunslinger novel stood in a glass case by the cash register. Donald Grant books were arranged by author on the wall, along with every Dark Harvest and Mark V. Ziesing hardcover you'd want. Several rows of bookcases bisected the store, all filled with new science fiction, horror, and fantasy paperbacks. In the back was a used section jammed with budget books and more than a few guilty pleasures, including all those Zebra Press novels with the black spines.[7] But the real hotspot was directly across from the front counter. There you'd find the new arrivals section, which was always packed with novels, anthologies, and even small press magazines.
Now, remember... this was the early nineties. There was no Amazon. No eBay. No internet bookstores like Matt Schwartz's Shocklines. You didn't find specialty horror stuff easily. And you sure didn't find it all in one place.
Mr. Fox and Other Feral Tales Page 2
