Tom Stoppard and Me

Like Henry Carr in 'Travesties' I have become obsessed with pants. I own cotton, PVC, polyester, black, red, gray, pinstripe, tight, flared, bagged and piped. I am the pant king. I cannot simply buy a pair of plain black pants (or if I do I feel the need to supplement them with something else a little flared). But it's alright; I'm writing again.

I'm not sure what it was that started me back on the road. I know that the continuing want to write came from Hewligan liking a horror piece I wrote, but the actual need to write a new story, the snowflake that has become the literary avalanche, seems to noticeably absent in the causal history. This disturbs me slightly, partially because I am writing a thesis on causal histories but mostly because I want to have that trigger in readiness when the next dry spell comes.

Like the connoisseur of pants that I have become I am becoming a connoisseur of short horror fiction. It costs about the same, truth be told. New Zealand is a little dry on speculative fiction, and the magazines that pay you for work are a little hard to come by. Which are two excuses I've trotted out before. Time and a little effort, though, do produce dividends. Who would have thought that cliches had a use?

Moving from inaction to action has its costs; I want to talk about writing and be asked what I've written recently, mainly because I want to glory in the fact that I am producing material. But its all a little embarrassing, so far; without a publication credit all I am is an amateur, and a publication credit means being paid. Amateurs submit work for free (unless, of course, you are a pro doing a little charity) no matter how good your form is, no pay means no kudos. The market looks down on those who work for free...

And so do I, slightly. At least, this seems true for parts of my life. We don't live in the Victorian age of publishing (although I think we could; the technology is certainly there) where vanity press was respectable; people expect a writer to be found in a bookstore, if if not on the shelves, through some kind of mail-order deal. It is one of the last industries where money seems to be important for the transaction of material; very few people wish to download or read their fiction online.

Hurrah to that, I say. Hurrah and poppycock.

I have a mission to be published properly by the end of next year. I want to have fiction published, I want to be well on the way to writing a book (something I'm working on but delaying currently due to a short fiction need at the moment) and I want to start garnering some accolades. But this isn't all. I have grand plans for my work; I want to keep a pretty tight leash on my copyright so that after a few years (ten at the max, I am currently thinking) I can release each work into the wild and see how they fare without me (or my inevitable agent). What better way to understand that market than to work with it now?

As many of you know, the Neo-Catholic Manifesto is heading towards hardcopy, and the hardcopy will, with great ease, turn into a PDF. That will, to say the least, being an interesting distribution. Victorian vanity press, as I understand it, was the average writer releasing their work on a limited scale and then hoping that a big name publisher would want to buy the rights for it. It meant that a book often proved its market place and then went global (to use the current vernacular). The Internet, that disparate set of servers and mailing lists, has the same potential.

Take a few old stories, fix up some of the blatant errors, mix in a few images created by a talented friend and then shove them with a website online. Add a little commentary to the fiction, explain why you wrote them, and more importantly when, and don't hope for the best. Hope is the last thing you want to engage in. Instead, find a few boards, or newsgroups, or websites that deal with your kind of fiction and send out, politely, links. Get people to come and see you. Have the stories available as PDFs (perhaps even make them the only way to view the stories (although PDF security isn't...)).

This serves too obvious purposes; if you get readers (and the quality of work on the 'net is so poor that you are bound to get some devoted fans early on, probably demanding work off you) then you can point them towards the more professional credits you achieve. The publishers could come to love you, especially if you get the readers to buy issues explicitly because of your content. It also has the reverse benefit; people who find you in print could well search you out online, and then find more fiction to read. I don't know about you, but if I read a story I like I want to read more, and if someone is basically giving it away...

David Bowie claims that the recording industry is dying. I do not know whether the current model of fiction publishing is on the way out, but I do know that we don't have to put all our eggs in one basket.

-- HORansome