Camp Hill book signing

Yesterday's book signing at Borders Express at the Capital City Mall in Camp Hill was a special one for a number of reasons. Partly because it's my first "hometown" signing -- I've been all over the country, up and down that long lonely road of faith with Death Troopers and No Doors, No Windows, but this is the first time I've done one in my own backyard. Rob Thomas (not of Matchbox 20, but the trooper known as TK-1495) turned up along with the rest of the Garrison Carita of the 501st. The moment was extra-good because they managed to pull it all together almost literally at the eleventh hour, via a desperate email that I sent out on Friday afternoon. As always, the 501st were great with the crowd and had people freaking out, taking pictures and having fun. All the photos that I've posted here are courtesy of them, specifically Lisa -- what's your last name, Lisa?

On a friend/professional level, I got to hang out with the man behind the phenomena of Hint Fiction and his lovely wife (he also brought a publishing contract and a check, but that's another story).

My brother Dan and his wife Terri and their kids also turned up, and the 501st gave a chance to play Boondock Saints with their blasters.

Other celebrities in attendance included legendary singer/songwriter John Austin and his wife Erin Echo. Also putting in appearance were Chuck Saltern, former bassist for the punk-pop band Weston and his wife Becky and their beautiful little girl Georgia, and Lisa Zimmerman Vonhauser, one of the original architects of Round House -- arguably the scariest piece of architecture in New Hampshire.

Journalist and photographer Karen Reichley and her husband, Guitar Hero overlord Mark "Asplosions" Reichley came out to say hi and brought their son Nate -- in full Darth Vader gear.
As you can see, we were able to keep the 501st occupied for a while with copies of the book.
But eventually the unthinkable happened -- we actually sold out of Death Troopers! This was the first time on the tour that anything like that has ever happened. The store manager, Jim Munchel, and his loyal aide de camp Chris Carlin ran out to not one but two other nearby bookstores to buy up their inventory. But it was too late...the troopers got impatient and took me down.
Like I said, a lot of fun all the way around...but a bittersweet moment as well, since just last week it was announced that Jim's store is going to be closing after Christmas, along with about 200 other Borders Express and Waldenbooks stores. This store in particular has been very, very good to me over the past few years, and the fact that it's going away is a tough reminder of how tight things are, especially in publishing.

But -- the good new is that people like these guys keep turning out for events like they did yesterday. And that's not just a good thing...that's the best.

Thanks, guys.

Truly.

When Do I Need an Agent?

Note: This is a re-posting of an entry from a couple years ago. People have asked me about this again, so I'm putting it here again.

Recently I got a question that I've heard before, which is, when is it time to find an agent?

There's plenty of information about this online already. There are whole blogs by agents where they answer exactly this kind of question. My reply, based solely on my experience and writers I've talked to, is that you need an agent when you start writing the type of thing that requires an agent to sell. That ought to be a no-brainer -- it's not. George V. Higgins once said that there is no substitute for knowing what you're doing. As usual, he's right.

If you're writing short stories or poetry and submitting them to magazines, you probably don't need an agent, certainly not to begin with and maybe not for a long time. I have an agent, and I still don't use her for magazine submissions. It's an unnecessary step, unless the periodical in question requires an agent as a go-between, and most of them (everything from Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine to Prairie Schooner to The New Yorker) do not. There's a slush pile and a spot waiting for you there. Your job is to find your way to the top, and you're probably going to be doing that all on your own.

One of my favorite writers, the wonderful Tom Drury, told me that he sold several stories to The New Yorker and afterwards he had agents approaching him. Not coincidentally, this happened right around the time he needed an agent for his first book, The End of Vandalism. If you unfold this happy anecdote, it becomes an excellent illustration of how the process works, or ought to. First, Drury's top priority was obviously the quality of his writing -- he was repeatedly producing good stories. Second, he was selling them to The New Yorker, so he obviously knew his market. The last part of the puzzle, the agent, fell into place almost on its own. His toughest decision was which one he would choose.

If you're a writer than you need to concentrate first and foremost on your writing, a point emphasized by bestselling mystery writer Janet Evanovich in her peppy and readable How I Write. In other words make it as good as it can be. Make sure everything is spelled correctly (this may seem like a no-brainer -- it's not). Edit and polish, hone and hew, put it aside and look at it again in six weeks or six months with fresh eyes. Find a writers' group or a reader whose opinion you can trust. Take their criticism as objectively as possible. When you think you're ready...

Send it out? No. Find an agent? No.

Study your market. If you're going to submit a story to a magazine, read the magazine first (this may seem like a no-brainer-- it's not). Read several issues. Check out the Literary Marketplace. Go online to the magazine's website and read the writers' guidelines for submission.

Then, send it out. Get rejected. Try again. Get rejected. Try again. Get a personal note back from one of the readers. Keep reading. Keep writing. Keep revising. I once covered my entire dorm room door in college with rejection letters. Took me about a semester.

So, have we all got the drill? Write, get knocked on your butt, get back up again. And repeat.

I've heard more than one would-be writer express genuine concern that they might run afoul of some less-than-honest agent that might steal their work, their money or both. My response, and I don't mean to sound harsh, is: "What makes you so sure you've got something worth stealing?" When you're starting out, getting ripped off should not even be on your mind. First, be good enough to worry about getting ripped off.

Once you find your way onto that playing field, you still shouldn't lose much sleep over it. I'm not saying there aren't untrustworthy agents out there -- there's plenty of scam artists working every occupation on the planet -- but if you do your research online or in the LMP, you won't have to worry about it. Most agents work on commission. If you don't get paid, they don't get paid. Be wary of an agency or management service that asks for money upfront. Find out who their other clients are. Don't be afraid to ask questions about what your money is supposed to get you.

Choosing an agent is an important part of the process but it's equally important to know when you have to make that choice. We all have a finite amount of energy every day to accomplish what needs to be done. Don't waste time and energy worrying about an agent when you're in the part of your life and career where every ounce of attention must be paid to maximizing your potential.

You probably will need an agent if you're trying to get a book published. Most publishers won't read work that isn't submitted through an agenty. The LMP will steer you toward the agency that represents the type of work you're writing. Many of these agents will read a synopsis with sample pages and ask for more if they're interested. My personal experience is that the more of the finished product you have in hand while querying agents, the better off you are.

Take a page from Tom Drury's book. Be the best writer you can be. When it's finally time, you'll have your pick of agents.

Unshelved

Heard of the online comic strip Unshelved? Librarian and all around awesome guy Gregory Fisher clued me in on it. (Click on the above image for a better view.)

Per Greg:

"It's all about the misadventures of the librarians at a small library in Mallsville. One feature they do every Sunday is the booktalk. Its a full color panel sometimes done by the Unshelved team and sometimes done by guest cartoonists. Last Sunday, the teen librarian (and Unshelved anti-hero) Dewey book talked Death Troopers to a pair of young adults."

Rock on! I freakin' love this. Thanks, Greg, bringing this to my attention!

Death Troopers on MTV!

Well, sort of.

As a Halloween treat, MTV.com ran a free chapter of Death Troopers here. It's one of my favorites: "Lung Windows."

Headed to Michigan

I'm working the midnight shift tonight and when I get home I'm climbing in the back of the big blue van and heading to Michigan for a couple of book signings over the long weekend. I'm particularly excited to get back there because my mom still lives there and I'll have a chance to say hi to some old friends. On Sunday I'm driving north to Petoskey to do an event at Horizon Books. Northern Michigan is particularly awesome this time of year. If you've never driven north in fall, all I can say is there's something instinctively gratifying about defying the natural, southern-fleeing order of things.

Also, I'm bringing my comic collection back to Pennsylvania -- two big oblong acid-free boxes of bagged comics that have lived at my mom's house for the past twenty-five years. Being forty years old and a homeowner, I've finally decided to move them out. Maybe I'll even complete my run of John Byrne X-Men by re-acquiring up issues 121-122.


I actually owned both of these once before (I even had Terry Austin autograph them for me at a Detroit convention) but sold them to buy Christmas presents back in 1986. Sigh.

Anyhow, on Monday, I'm doing an event at the Portage District Library, where, after my freshman year of college, I once pretended to shelve books while actually hiding the back and reading everything I could get my hands on. I had a big crush on another girl who worked there and spent the summer writing unfathomably wretched prose.

Has my writing gotten any better since then? Drop by one of these events and judge for yourself. I'll be the one staggering around in a cloud of delirious nostalgia.

Your Halloween Treat

If you haven't already done so, you absolutely must read Norman Partridge's masterful Dark Harvest for Halloween. Don't think about it, don't wonder why, just click the dang link and hook yourself up with a copy. Trust me.

Why? Because it's what you want. People ask me how you write horror: this is the Strunk and White of how it's done -- fast, compulsive, scary and utterly brilliant storytelling, just in time for the season. Ostensibly the tale of a 1963 town whose young male citizens go gunning after a mythic figure called the October Boy -- aka Sawtooth Jack -- Dark Harvest is nothing less than a balls-out high-octane reinvention of the American horror novel on a candy-corn methamphetamine cocktail of pure narrative genius.

Call it Ray Bradbury on steroids, call it Big Daddy Roth-style hot rod Halloween horror...your tongue will go numb searching for comparisons, 'cuz, friends -- there ain't any for what Partridge does in this fast pumpkin-carving switchblade of a book. I gave my last copy away to a friend out in LA, and a week later, he was trying to explain how much he liked it. I just smiled, because I know how it is. You reach a point in life where you think you've seen it all, where that initial childlike top-of-the-rollercoaster feeling of awe and amazement doesn't work anymore. Except here it does. Because here, along with everything else, Partridge does the incredible, anticipating reader expectation and managing to beat you to the punch every step of the way.

As a writer, I wish I had just an ounce or two of whatever Norm was putting in his coffee when he wrote Dark Harvest. As a reader, I'm just damn glad he did.

Trooper Trailer Winner!

I loved this contest.

When Erich at Del Rey first told me they were going to have a contest for people to create their own Death Trooper trailers, my initial fear was that nobody would do it.

I shouldn't have worried.

The results were all over the map. Some were scary. Some were funny. Some were flat-out amazing. The only thing they had in common was that they were all ridiculously entertaining. Throughout the book tour, people were always asking about the trailers and telling me how much they enjoyed them.

And now we have a winner.

Congratulations to all who entered -- I'd love to give all of you a full film crew and an unlimited budget to make all your Death Troopers into full fledged feature films.

And if you haven't checked out the trailers themselves, what are you waitin' for?