STET

The copyedited manuscript for Eat the Dark showed up on my doorstep this morning -- "Special delivery," as my 5-year-old announced, kicking the oversized envelope from Random House across the entryway floor. I peeled it open with a combination of excitement and apprehension. It's always fun to see those additional pages inserted along with the manuscript -- the copyright page, the mystifying plethora of pages at the beginning with nothing but the word blank handwritten on them. This is the stage where I add the dedication and acknowledgment. It's become a superstition of mine not to dedicate a book until it reaches this point. Now I can start the thoroughly pleasurable task of thanking and crediting all of those who helped this book find its way into existence -- pure excitement.

And apprehension? You bet. Granted, the editorial department has been going over various incarnations of this tale with me for almost a year now, but as I look at the copy-editor's tiny, careful handwriting in the margins with questions like "So the door is made of metal, not glass?" and "how many cops were in the elevator, four or five?" I start to get all sweaty-palmed. My heart beats a little faster. It occurs to me that somewhere in the last hundred pages I might've committed some subtle but catastrophic technical misstep--the literary equivalent of a neurosurgeon nicking an arteriole--and as a result the satisfying resolution of my story depends solely on somehow shoe-horning my way through a logistical gaffe that every last one of us managed to overlook -- until now.

Irrational, yes. But still.

Chasing the Dead created a few moments of anxiety because of the way every chapter started with a time. The action was almost literally planned to the minute, and the owner of that tiny, careful handwriting had voiced some very valid questions about how certain events could have taken the time I said they did. At least this time around I was savvy enough to give myself a little wiggle room.

Lest my anxiety be mistaken for bitching, let me say right here and now that I salute the copy-editor, that patient and gimlet-eyed investigator of details, that dispassionate cataloger of dates and times, weights and measures, lengths and widths. Not only do I salute this person as I do anybody who performs a very specialized and critical task that I couldn't imagine myself performing except disasterously (imagine a clumsy and nearsighted child coloring a balloon with very sharp colored pencils, and there you have your allegory), but I salute them because they are the last in the long line of people that my story the best it can be. Afterward there will be cover art and blurbs and signings and reviews, but the copy editor is the final set of purely objective eyes to adjust the minute points of the text itself before it finds its way onstage. They work with the very smallest sets of screwdrivers.

And this is why we love them.

Of course, I'm only a third of the way through the manuscript. For all I know there's a timebomb waiting for me on page 298, as small and lethal as an anuerysm waiting to burst, spelled out in that small, careful handwriting with a polite little question mark at the end. Stay tuned.

A Good Day to be Dead

Chasing the Dead continues its long, rich love affair with Publishers Weekly this week with a wonderful, starred review of the Chasing audiobook. You already know how I feel about Renee's work here, but let me reiterate, folks, this is something really, really special. You know how it feels when your friend drives you halfway across town to a specific restaurant because they have the best cheese steak in the universe? Well, this is that cheese steak, with a side of curly fries and a thick chocolate shake. Renee's already a superstar in the world of audio, and I continue to thank my lucky stars (not to mention my green clovers, rainbows and blue diamonds) that fate paired my little campfire story (thanks, NYT!) with such tremendous ability.

Meanwhile, over at Maximum Horrors, Eric Compton gives Chasing the Dead the best review it has ever received, anywhere. Eric's generosity toward the book is mind-bogglingly gracious; I almost want to break off little pieces of it, Charlie Bucket-style, to last me through those long bleak nights where it's just me, the laptop and the voice inside my head. Thanks, Eric...and thanks for the MySpace heads-up. I'm a compulsive self-Googler (and yes, soon it will make me blind and grow hair on my palms) but I hadn't come across that one yet.

Chasing the Dead in the New York Times Book Review

Terrence Rafferty reviews Chasing the Dead in today's New York Times Book Review, and although the review itself isn't exactly glowing, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't happy just to be in the Times. It certainly gives me hope for my next book, Eat the Dark, wherein the forces of evil, however supernatural, do have a greater basis in the darker human emotions.

People have asked in the past, "Do you read your reviews?" The answer is yes, of course, every one of them, from the Times to every reader who takes the time to post a review on Amazon or write me an email. I thrill to the good ones and try not to obsess over the bad, but take what I can from all of them, keeping in mind that ours is an innately subjective medium. I don't write and publish as a means of walling myself off from the world but exactly the opposite; this whole enterprise is supposed to be a live connection, and I'll always do what I can to keep it that way.

I hope you will too.

Jim Harrison interview

The Times just ran this excellent profile of Jim Harrison. Here we have all the requisite references to dogs, wine, his days in Hollywood, his sort-of tempered unhealthy habits, some nice things to say about Returning to Earth and a fantastic cockeyed picture of the man himself with truly wild goatee.

When Do I Need an Agent?

This past weekend, 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.

Literary Intoxication

I know that some writers’ voices come bursting forth fully formed--two who immediately come to mind are Haruki Murakami and Peter Straub. Murakami once remarked in a New Yorker interview that he discovered he was a writer while watching a baseball game and seeing the batter hit the ball. Straub says it was like opening his mouth and discovering he could sing.

These guys, though, must be exceptions. Most of us learned the craft the way children and parrots learn profanity--through imitation. Our early work was heavily influenced by the writers we read most passionately, and a good bit of the process consisted of somehow cleansing their style from our system or at least diluting to acceptable levels.

That’s not to say that you ever become immune to such influences. In fact there are times, especially when a writer is neck-deep in a long project, when such powerful styles can be a tonic. One of the side effects of developing your own style is that style itself often becomes transparent from the writer’s point of view, or ought to (although I wonder about writers like Chuck Palahniuk, whose self-consciousness seems about as transparent as barbed wire).

The fact is that reading a writer whose style contrasts vividly with yours can make a project fresh. Tom Robbins once said he reads writers that make him want to write. This makes perfect sense to me. The bracing brevity of Hemingway or Carver, the stark imagery of Joy Williams, the big hearted appetites of Jim Harrison: taking a long hit of any one of these can add a jolt of much needed energy to a scene that was otherwise going nowhere, forcing you to see it from a different angle. When I slaving away as a ghostwriter for hire, shotglasses of Tim Willocks’ Bloodstained Kings kept me from losing my mind completely, partly because that novel’s wonderfully cobbled together feel of philosophy and bloodshed made me realize if Willocks could pull it off, then I could pull it off.

It’s also kind of fun to see if you can identify other writers’ influences. I’m pretty sure Kem Nunn was dipping into Cormac McCarthy while he was finishing The Dogs of Winter and the result is weird and terrific, as if Robert Stone took William Faulkner surfing. My favorite parts of William Gibson novels are the ones that sound like Elmore Leonard wrote them, but they’re filtered through Gibson’s not-really-futuristic perspective.

So along with all the other tools of the trade, build yourself a literary liquor locker. Stock it well and carefully, with writers whose work you know will give you a boost or tweak or a bounce when you need it most. And like any normal liquor cabinet, be aware of how often you’re hitting it. The last thing you want is for the book police to pull you over and find yourself blowing a .30 for reading too much Raymond Chandler before you write that hot tub love scene.

And I'm only on page 47...

I'm signing at the New York Comic Con

If you ever wanted to meet Stephen King, Kevin Smith, Stan Lee and me, there's only one place on earth you'll meet us under one roof -- the New York Comic Con. I'll be at the Del Rey booth on Saturday, February 24th signing copies of Chasing the Dead. Drop by and say howdy.

Do it because you love it

How do you get a novel published? How much is work? How much is dedication? How much is timing? How much is sheer dumb luck?

As long as I can remember, I’ve been a writer. Not wanted to be a writer, not hoped to be a writer, not aspired to be a writer: I just wrote. I filled notebooks. One summer I wrote a short story every day, just to see if I could do it. Most of them were sheer crap but it turned out to be the most fun I ever had. When I got older and started writing novels, it was still fun, but it was also confusing and eventually frustrating, because I lacked focus. I had a lot of ideas but no unifying idea.

Finally about a year out of college, when George W. Bush’s dad was still in office, I banged out a fast, urgent first-person novel about a boy who gets kidnapped by a girl claiming to be his real sister. It took me about two weeks. I sent it to a YA novel contest run by Delacorte. It was rejected with a note that said, “Interesting but too chaotic for us.” Encouraged enough to continue, I switched the novel from first person to third person, added a hundred pages and started hunting for representation.

I didn’t know anybody in publishing. I didn’t know anybody outside of Ypsilanti, Michigan. My agent-hunting method was idiotically simple. I picked up a copy of the Literary Marketplace and started querying everybody that looked like they might be interested in my story. I got half a dozen replies, one from a woman who called me collect and then put me on hold while she had a coughing fit. I politely waited for her to come back and tell me that she’d need money up front to read my manuscript. I had just enough common sense to politely decline her offer. There were others, most of which wanted to see sample chapters.

The agent who would eventually come to represent me was a woman named Claire Smith at Harold Ober Associates. She asked to see the entire manuscript, which at the time was called The Ballad of Ovid Badfly, which I suppose only goes to show that I hadn’t completely exterminated the urge toward authorial self-sabotage. Claire gave me some minor notes and sold it in hardcover to Putnam. The year was 1992. I figured I was on my way to a career in writing.

Ballad, which was finally released as Next of Kin in 1994, underperformed horribly despite my attempts to do readings and panels and events. I got royalty statements reading: “Amount unearned by author.” I kept working in bookstores, writing fiction, but nothing panned out. I wrote a travel guide and some screenplays, I wrote short stories and poetry, I was a freelance editorial consultant and ghostwrote portions of Jesse “The Body” Ventura’s autobiography I Ain’t Got Time to Bleed, but I couldn’t get arrested in New York. My agent stuck with me—Claire had retired, and it was Phyllis Westberg now same agency—and I kept trying, trying, trying, all the while growing steadily more desperate.

In the pit of my despair, a lot of other things happened, none of them having to do with writing, at least not directly. My wife got pregnant and very sick, and it became obvious that I wasn’t going to be able to support my family working in bookstores and trying to write Buffy tie-ins. I swallowed my pride, which wasn’t difficult at that point—it was a very small meal indeed—and went back to school to learn how to be an x-ray tech. I’d known some x-ray techs in the past, and they seemed like cool people, and job security was good. All I had to do was commute to school every day for two years while raising a new baby and—hey, surprise—we were pregnant a second time. For the first time in my life, I stopped pushing myself to write. I simply couldn’t afford to make it a priority.

That’s when I wrote Chasing the Dead.

I wrote it at night, in between classes, whenever I could sneak an hour. I didn’t write it with the intent of publication; I wrote it because it was a fun, scary story, the kind I liked to read. I sent it to Phyllis. She liked it and suggested a few minor changes, and started shopping it around. It got rejected a few places. I forgot about it.

Then, something like a year and a half later, after I’d moved into a new house, I got an email from her saying that I had to call her RIGHT AWAY. She had an offer for a two-book deal from Ballantine, for Chasing and another book that I hadn’t even written yet.

There are no second acts in American life.

Except when there are.

I signed all the contracts and met my new editor, a wonderful, intelligent fellow named Keith Clayton. I walked around feeling like the luckiest man alive. When the time came, I went to work on the new book. Keith gave me lots of notes and we did several major revisions. The finished product landed on his desk in July. Meanwhile, ARCs for Chasing were handed out by the shovelful at the San Diego Comic Con that summer. The hardcover came out at the tail-end of September. PW gave it a starred review. More good things happened. German rights sold. Audio rights sold. Book club rights sold. Coop money got spent. The book was going to be on the front tables of every chain store in the country. The audiobook won an award.

None of which had anything to do with any effort on my part.

What did I do? Everything I could think of. I started a blog page and set up some signings around my work schedule at the hospital, I called all the local newspapers and did interviews with everybody who’d talk to me. I flew back to Michigan and gave a talk at a library. But that’s pretty much all I did.

What did Ballantine do? Everything else. At the end of October, Keith told me that Chasing was going to be one of Target’s breakout books for the holiday season. Free copies were given out at the Ain’t-It-Cool Butt-Numb-A-Thon. Meanwhile I started my next novel. I’d already discussed it at length with Phyllis and Keith, both of whom had signed off on the idea, so away I went. I don’t have a contract for this one—all I have is the book itself. I hope to be done next month.

What does all of this mean?

You’ll notice throughout this whole piece I never once used the word “talent.” Not because I don’t have any, but because millions of people do. In the words of Stephen King, it’s as common as table salt and mongrel dogs. Millions of people with more writing talent than you or I wake up every morning and tell themselves they could write a book and grow up and get jobs and raise families and grow old and never write a book.

So it’s not talent.

What about timing? Was Chasing sold because of a sudden uptick in horror fiction? I doubt it. The horror market has never seen the equal of its ‘80s boom, and it’s unlikely to anytime in the near future. I suppose it could be argued that the manuscript landed on Keith’s desk on a day he happened to be in the mood to buy, but I know him, and I really doubt it.

Nope, not timing.

What about hard work and determination?

Ah.

It didn’t feel like I was working hard when I wrote the book, but that was probably because writing almost never feels like work to me, despite the fact that it consumes thousands of hours of my life. Harlan Ellison once wrote about a story about guy who, if they locked him up naked in a dungeon, would write stories with his tongue on the inside of his cheek. That guy is me.

What about the hard work and determination of my agent and the folks at Ballantine? Definitely. They worked hard for the book because they believed in the book, and I’m eternally grateful.

But what it comes down to in the end is, you keep writing. And you keep writing. And you keep writing. Sometimes it is hard. Sometimes the only thing harder is not writing. People ask me how I did it. I say the same thing over and over. I am nothing special. All I am is a guy that kept at it because he loves it, and that’s always been more than enough. Everything else—as wonderful as it is—is gravy.

Chip Kid

Dipping into our common myth pool, my four-year-old sponantenously generated what reminded me very much of the cover of one of my favorite books from the past.

While you may not find this as cool as I do, you have to admit, it is sort of wonderful. I'm already looking forward to the day when he'll be doing dustjackets for his old man's fiction.

Next week, Lisey's Story.

Chasing the Dead Audiobook Wins 2006 Listen-Up Award!

Talk about timely! The audiobook for Chasing the Dead that I was telling you about yesterday, narrated by the lovely and extremely talented Renee Raudman (seen above), just won a 2006 Listen-Up Award from Publishers Weekly!

Happiness, definition of.

Obviously, I'm pretty much over the moon about this. It's the first award for any book I've ever written, and sharing it with somebody as exceptional as Renee Raudman and Tantor Audio just makes it that much more exciting.

What a great way to kick off 2007.

Barely Indiana

By now, everybody's heard that the Lucas/Spielberg/Ford axis is on track for Indiana Jones IV with a summer '08 release date. I wish I could care more about this. The fact that the damn thing's been simmering for so long, waiting for Harrison Ford to get desperate enough for a hit, just makes you want to drop your expectations that extra notch. And at that point, none of these guys needs to buy another yacht, so honestly, why go through the inevitable letdown?

Or, to take a more positive approach, the question becomes, what--or who--could make Indy IV as entertaining, fresh and surprising as the very first movie?

Raiders had a crackerjack screenplay by Lawrence Kasdan, back when he was at the top of his game. So for Indy IV, bring in top-shelf screenwriter/novelist William (The Departed) Monahan. Kennedy-Marshall already has the guy writing Jurassic Park 4. Why not give him a crack at the franchise?

Get Guillermo Del Toro as director. Sure, thanks to 15 years of dicking around, Harrison Ford's way too old to play Indy against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War, but Del Toro could bring an awesome amalgam of history, adventure and politics into play. If we just replace Ford with --

Matt Damon.

Think about it. Harrison Ford was 37 when he shot Raiders, just a year older than Damon is now. And our boy Matt isn't going to be doing Bourne movies forever. He's definitely got the chops, both action and acting, plus the sense of humor, to revitalize the franchise.

Forget the second two flicks. Raiders inspired a whole generation of creative types. If billionaire boys' club isn't willing to take a few chances and recapture some that initial "holy shit" factor from 1981, then seriously...why bother?

Listen to This

Random House sent me a box of the audio version of Chasing the Dead today. I was ripping that box open like the last Christmas present of the year.

Months ago, I'd been in touch with Renee Raudman, the excellent actress who performed the book. We had exchanged emails about characters from the story that she liked -- she particularly enjoyed voicing the Engineer -- and the peculiar and rather wonderful business of reading other people's fiction for a living. Besides Chasing, Renee's done the audio for titles by Jennifer Cruise and Chuck Palahniuk. She won an "Earphones" award from AudioFile , and she's got an impressive TV resume. All that aside, I couldn't wait to hear her interpretation of my book.

It's fantastic.

There's an intimacy to listening that's just completely different from reading. I love the way Renee's voice draws the listener in -- it's quiet but strong, and inflection that she draws to the lines, including the ones I don't remember writing, transforms the story into something new and collaborative. Generally I don't like to go back and read my own stuff (I can't usually do it without a few drinks in me first) but the act of listening circumvents that self-conscious, lip-nibbling awkwardness. The audio experience opens the paragraphs up, erasing the breaks and stops, so that the story flows out whole...not the way it looked on the page, but maybe the way it sounded in my head when I first started writing it down.

Spontaneous is one word for it. Gripping is another. This isn't praise for the book; it's praise for Renee Raudman, and the way she makes it her own.

Philly

New Year's Day in Philadelphia and it's raining in Fishtown. Your wife has gone to Ikea. You and the boy borrow your sister-in-law's car and drive into center city, headed to Borders on Broad Street, maybe blow some gift card money. You promise the boy something...he likes Cars, Captain Underpants, SpongeBob.

The parade's been cancelled but Broad Street is still shut down, wet cardboard signs tied to the meters, no parking. The side-streets are all parked up too. The boy sits in his car seat watching as the windows fog up and you grow steadily more frustrated looking for a spot. Finally you park on the corner of Spruce and 11th and you and the boy walk hand-in-hand past empty champagne bottles and broken plastic Happy New Year hats. The boy looks silently at the mangled bicycles chained to broken parking meters and the trash in the gutters. It's a long walk to Broad Street and when you get there, you're both wet and cold.

The sign on the door of Borders says, "Closed New Year's Day."

You take the boy's hand and walk next door to the Marathon Grill. It smells good in there. You sit down and order him a bowl of chicken noodle soup and a bottle of ginger ale, and a cup of coffee for yourself. The coffee is good. The soup arrives and you open the little packets of crackers for him.

"Are you having fun in Philadelphia?" you ask the boy. He nods and dips his crackers in his soup.

"What's your favorite part?"

And he says, "Right now."