A Few Words About Open Road Media

   I'd like to say a few words in praise of Open Road Media.  Open Road's been around for a few years now, making a lot of backlist titles available as ebooks, and the range of work offered is wonderful.  You can check out the goodies at:
               http://www.openroadmedia.com/ebooks.aspx
   You'll find Walter Lord's books on the Titanic and thrillers by Jack Higgins.  Science fiction classics by Theodore Sturgeon and political science works by James MacGregor Burns.  Modern classic war novels by James Jones and contemporary horror by Robert McCammon.  Literary biographies by Fred Kaplan and Erich Fromm's books on psychology.  Suspense novels by Ruth Rendell and short stories by Stanley Elkin.  Work by Octavia Butler, William Goldman, Fay Weldon, William Manchester, Barbara Pym, and more. 
  Working with Otto Penzler's MysteriousPress.com, they've brought us excellent suspense novels by Brian Garfield, James M. Cain, Donald Westlake, and others.
   Open Road offers a selection as varied as that of the best traditional publishers, and that isn't surprising because the CEO and co-founder of Open Road, Jane Friedman, was president and CEO of HarperCollins for a decade and before that she was a VP at Random House.
   The people at the helm of Open Road know publishing as well as the technology of creating ebooks, and they do a NICE job of preparing ebooks.  Open Road has recently issued a large portion of Irwin Shaw's backlist; it had been more than twenty years since I'd read Shaw's Rich Man, Poor Man or Beggarman, Thief and I revisited them once the pre-orders showed up on my Kindle.  If there were any typos, I didn't notice them, and the same is true of the other Open Road titles I've read.
   Open Road has published ebooks of backlist titles that hadn't been available in bookstores for years, among them Irwin Shaw's Voices of a Summer Day, Budd Schulberg's The Four Seasons of Success (under the title Writers in America), and Malcolm Lowry's October Ferry to Gabriola.  Open Road does backlist right, and the company deserves our congratulations, our thanks, and a share of our ebook dollars.  Here's hoping they stick around for a long time to come.

   (And if anyone from Open Road happens to read this, please consider the following writers if possible: Don Robertson, Stanley Ellin, Thomas Williams, Jon Hassler, Charles Beaumont, Gerald Kersh, Tabitha King, Walter Tevis, Evan Hunter, Jack Finney, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Jorge Luis Borges, Roger Zelazny, and Joseph Epstein.)

*****

And a brief commercial.  Have put a few of my ebooks back up on Smashwords, from which they'll make their way back to Sony, Barnes & Noble, Diesel, and Apple's iBooks store some time fairly soon.  Give 'em a look when you get a chance (but if you've not read Sturgeon, or Shaw, or Goldman or some of the others mentioned above, make sure you grab their books first).

Writing Rules; Ray Bradbury Coming to the US Kindle Store

     I don't know about you, but I'm a sucker for books and articles on writing if they're done by people whose work I've read and admired.
     Sometimes the articles don't seem all that useful.  Since they're by people whose work I admire, I assume that I'm just too dense to see what they're getting at.  This does wonders for the ego.
     Sometimes the articles seem to be echoes of each other.  For a perfect example of that, see the Writer's Handbook from 1982.  This one contained an article by John D. MacDonald called "Creative Trust," and another by Stephen King called "Imagery and the Third Eye."  Both deal with the use of the telling visual detail to paint a bigger picture in the reader's mind.  They approach the subject from slightly different angles, and both are well worth reading.
     The articles that tend to be the most fun, though not necessarily the most useful, are the ones that deal with rules for writing.  You can probably find a lot of rules-for-writing articles without much digging, and if you browse through some of them you can probably think of books you love that break one or more of those rules.  My impression is that the more specific and rigid the rules the easier it is to think of exceptions.
     Over the years, I've found that my favorite sets of rules for writing come from (in no order of importance) Robert Heinlein, Stephen King, Natalie Goldberg, Elmore Leonard, Ray Bradbury, and one more player to be named shortly.
     Heinlein had five: 1) You must write.  2) You must finish what you write.  3) You must refrain from rewriting except to editorial order.  4) You must put it on the market. 5) You must keep it on the market until sold.
    At first glance that third rule might seem to imply that you'd be sending out a lot of first-draft material.  Not necessarily; if it isn't right after the first draft's done, revisions would fall under rule 2.  Heinlein was working in a time when there were plenty of magazine markets, and the rates might be a penny a word and sometimes less.  Once you thought a piece was ready, it wasn't cost-effective to go over it again unless an editor said he'd take it if you made a few changes.
    You'll note that Heinlein's rules aren't genre-specific.
     You can find King's in an article called "Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully, in Ten Minutes."  Here are some of them:  3) Be self-critical.  4) Remove every extraneous word.  5) Never look at a reference book while doing a first draft.  12) If it's bad, kill it.
     Bradbury listed three rules in his essay "Zen in the Art of Writing:" 1) Work.  2) Relaxation.  3) Don't think.
     Elmore Leonard drew up a list of ten in a New York Times piece called "Easy on the Hooptedoodle."  Among his rules were: 3) Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue.  4) Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said."  At the end of the essay, Leonard mentioned a rule that encompassed all the others: "If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it."  This is reminiscent of Simenon striking out or rewriting sections of his novels if they seemed too literary.
     And finally, Natalie Goldberg's, from her book WRITING DOWN THE BONES: 1) Keep your hand moving.  2) Lose control.  3) Be specific.  4) Don't think.  5) Don't worry about spelling, punctuation, & grammar.  6) You are free to write the worst junk in America.  7) Go for the jugular.

     You've noticed that many of these rules echo each other.
     "You must write.  You must finish what you write." = "Work." = "Keep your hand moving."
     "Never look at a reference book while doing a first draft" is kin to "Don't worry about spelling, punctuation, & grammar" and, a bit farther removed, to "Don't think."
     "Lose control," "You are free to write junk," and "Don't worry about spelling, etc.," are all suggested by that single word "Relaxation."
     Quite a few of the rules you'll find in some of the books and articles are aimed at silencing the internal editor.  The internal editor is the guy inside you who tells you that you can't write that because your parents would hate you if they ever read it; he's the guy who wants you to look up all those obscure facts in the reference books while you're writing your first draft so that you lose the heat and the flow of what you were trying to put on paper; he's the guy who tells you at the end of every sentence that you're wasting your time and that you never had anything to say anyway so there's no point in filling any more pages with your drivel.  Once you've got a draft you can start worrying about cleaning it up, but the internal editor will try to make sure you never get a draft written in the first place.
     Once the draft is written you can start fixing what's wrong, and you can safely assume that something will be wrong.  (King's "Be self-critical;" elaborating on this, he commented that only God gets it right the first time.)

     But in all those articles and books, there's only one absolute, I think.  It comes at the end of a volume of poetry by Nicanor Parra, POEMS AND ANTIPOEMS.  It's the last line of his poem "Young Poets:"
     "You have to improve the blank page."
     And if you haven't improved the blank page, see King's rule 12.

####

   Ray Bradbury's work will be coming to the US Kindle store in April.  Not all of it yet, but a good start.  FAHRENHEIT 451 had already been issued, but the rest of his work remained unavailable in digital formats for some time.  This past summer much of his work appeared as ebooks in the Amazon UK store, and now more Bradbury titles will be released in Amazon's US Kindle store.  Among them are DANDELION WINE, SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES, NOW AND FOREVER, and GREEN SHADOWS, WHITE WHALE.  No announcements yet for THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES, THE ILLUSTRATED MAN, THE OCTOBER COUNTRY, and several other major titles, but I don't imagine they'll be too long in coming.  Have your ebook readers ready.



#####

Sources:

Elmore Leonard's "Easy on the Hooptedoodle:"
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/16/arts/writers-writing-easy-adverbs-exclamation-points-especially-hooptedoodle.html

Stephen King's "Imagery and the Third Eye:"
http://www.wordplayer.com/pros/pr13.King.Stephen.html

King's "Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully in Ten Minutes:"
https://www.facebook.com/notes/stephen-king-writer/stephen-king-everything-you-need-to-know-about-writing-successfully-in-ten-minut/276873771406

Robert Heinlein's Rules:
http://www.sfwriter.com/ow05.htm

Ray Bradbury's ZEN IN THE ART OF WRITING:
http://www.amazon.com/Zen-Art-Writing-Essays-Creativity/dp/1877741094

Natalie Goldberg's WRITING DOWN THE BONES:
http://www.amazon.com/Writing-Down-Bones-Freeing-Shambhala/dp/1590307941

John D. MacDonald's essay "Creative Trust" appeared in the January 1974 issue of The Writer.

Theodore Sturgeon's Complete Short Fiction To Be Issued as Ebooks

   If you haven't bought an ebook reader, this alone is reason to take the plunge.  For fifteen years, North Atlantic Books has been releasing a set of books that presented all the short stories, in chronological order, of the wondrous Theodore Sturgeon; the first appeared in 1994 and the last appeared in 2010.  It's a beautiful set, containing Sturgeon's fiction with appreciations by other writers and end notes by series editor Paul Williams.  In April, all 13 volumes will be released as ebooks.

  Don't recognize Sturgeon's name?  He was one of the finest writers of short fiction ever to grace the science fiction field; if you've not read stories like "The Man Who Lost the Sea," "Thunder and Roses," "A Saucer of Loneliness," or "Slow Sculpture" you're cheating yourself.  If you're a fan of the original Star Trek series, you've probably seen the two episodes Sturgeon wrote for the show ("Shore Leave" during the first season, and the second season opener "Amok Time").  Sturgeon wrote novels too: the magnificent More Than Human is chief among them, but The Dreaming Jewels and the chilling Some of Your Blood are also not to be missed.

   In his book The Four Seasons of Success, Budd Schulberg likened the body of work a writer produces to a mountain range -- not every peak is Everest; that's the case with Sturgeon as well.  But there isn't a single volume in the North Atlantic set that doesn't contain at least one story that is all by itself worth the price of the book.  Every volume contains classic short works from a writer who was fine enough to stand with the best in or out of the genre.  And while you'll find these books categorized as science fiction, not every story in them is sf.  You'll find fantasies, westerns, horror stories, and mainstream works as well.

  It's tempting to describe plots, but that kind of information is easily found in reviews and on more web pages than anyone can count, and plot isn't the most important part of a story anyway; it's not negligible by any means, but fiction is about people, and there are few writers whose people are as achingly real as Sturgeon's.  He could break your heart with a line; he could reduce you to tears (of joy or sorrow) and it seemed to be so effortless for him to do it.  Don't believe it?  Check out "The Graveyard Reader," "Bright Segment," "Hurricane Trio," "The Girl Who Knew What They Meant," or "A Saucer of Loneliness," among numerous others.  Read the sequence in "The Widget, the Wadget, and Boff" in which a man  looks at a gun in a pawn shop window, considers what he regards as its design flaws, and comes to a realization of his own wish for death.  The writing is dazzling, but it's not dazzling because of flash and tricks -- it's because you're in the company of a writer who knows his craft and who knows and cares for the characters about whom he writes.  Samuel Delany once described Sturgeon as the American short story writer; in his obituary of Sturgeon, Harlan Ellison said that Sturgeon could squeeze your heart until your whole life ached.  He could indeed.  And there are few writers who could do that nearly so well and so often as Sturgeon.

  In the mountain range of any writer's work, not every peak is Everest, and that's true of Sturgeon's work as well.  But taken as a whole, these thirteen volumes of Sturgeon's complete short stories offer one of the great mountain ranges in American fiction.



Find them at:  Theodore Sturgeon-Complete Short Fiction
                                                               *****

  And a brief commercial: This Saturday, Sunday, & Monday, my collection A Souvenir from the War, and Other Stories will be available free in Amazon's Kindle store.  It's a mixed bag, containing short fantasy, horror, and mainstream stories.  Grab it while the price is right.

Gerald Kersh Reprints Coming This Fall

   Looking back, I'm not sure why Gerald Kersh's books weren't all over the paperback racks here in the US during the sixties.  But I can remember seeing only Men Without Bones, and later Nightshade & Damnations.  Another collection, On an Odd Note, had appeared in the late fifties.  All three were collections of Kersh's fantastic tales.  Of his many novels, I can recall seeing only Night and the City and The Secret Masters in paperback on the shelves of second-hand dealers.  It's strange that Kersh's own books weren't all over the racks because his short stories were featured so often in books that were widely available.  Kersh's stories were regularly found in Judith Merril's Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy anthologies, in the numerous anthologies that appeared under Alfred Hitchcock's byline, and in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. 

   The first time I noticed Kersh was in a 1966 science fiction paperback called Star of Stars edited by Frederik Pohl; the book was a selection of the best stories from Pohl's Star Science Fiction anthologies and Kersh was represented there with one of his finest, "Whatever Happened to Corporal Cuckoo?," the story of a soldier made immortal centuries ago and what his immortality did to him.  By the time that book appeared, Men Without Bones and On an Odd Note had vanished from the mass market racks; what Kersh I found was in the Merril and Hitchcock anthologies.  In 1968, Fawcett brought out Nightshade & Damnations, a collection of eleven of Kersh's best stories, selected and with an introduction by Harlan Ellison.  Within a few years after that Kersh went out of print in the US and stayed that way for a long time.  Finding Kersh titles here meant a lot of digging in used book shops or ordering them from overseas.  Later, the internet and Amazon made them easier to find; a number of his titles are fairly pricey these days, but at least you can find them.  Two of his novels and a short story collection (Prelude to a Certain Midnight, The Secret Masters, and Men Without Bones) are available in paperback here from Black Mask and Men Without Bones is also available for the Kindle.  Small presses such as Crippen & Landru and Ash-Tree Press have issued short story collections, and most recently Centipede Press published London Stories and a new edition of Night and the City, but it's been quite some time since there was a large reissue of Kersh's work.

   That may change this fall.  According to the listing pulled up in Amazon's advanced search function, Faber Finds will reissue several of Kersh's books in trade paperback starting in September -- no word yet on ebook editions, but many Faber Finds titles have appeared both in print and ebook formats.  Listed for release are Sgt Nelson of the Guard, The Horrible Dummy and Other Stories, and The Best of Gerald Kersh; Amazon UK also shows The Song of the Flea, and The Thousand Deaths of Mr Small.  Another novel, The Implacable Hunter, may also be scheduled.  If we're lucky, Faber will reprint even more of Kersh's backlist -- there's a lot of wonderful material there that's been unjustly neglected for too many years.

   Kersh was a terrific writer, inventive and engaging, equally at home with fantastic stories and with tales of soldiers or street hustlers and his rediscovery by a wider audience is long overdue.  Don't take my word for it -- take it from Harlan Ellison's introduction to Nightshade & Damnations, "Kersh, The Demon Prince":

   "By the excellence of what he has done, Gerald Kersh infuriates and spurs other writers to try and beat him at his own game.
   "Perhaps one day, one of us will realize that it is impossible to beat a Demon Prince.  The sonofabitch uses magic.  No mortal can write this well."

Late to the Party

I'm not always late to the party.  For instance, when Robert B. Parker started hitting the best-seller lists with his Spenser novels I was already a fan.  I'd followed Roger Zelazny since his first two books appeared as Ace paperbacks, well before he began the Amber series.  Before Jorge Luis Borges was being commonly mentioned here in the US as a likely Nobel Prize recipient (and it's a crime that he never got it), I was following some of his work (which was featured in Judith Merril's collections of the year's best sf and fantasy, and in Terry Carr's New Worlds of Fantasy anthologies).  Not always late.

But when I'm late, I'm really late.  Watched my first episode of Doctor Who last month on Netflix; this year marks 50 years since the first episode.  (And if you're even later to the party than I am, the series is delightful and you should give it a look.)  Didn't check out Stephen King until 'Salem's Lot was out in paperback and The Shining and Night Shift were on the hardcover racks.  Didn't pick up a John D. MacDonald book until the mid-1970s.  Didn't read William Goldman until Marathon Man came out in paperback and Spider Robinson's rave review of The Princess Bride ran in Galaxy magazine.  Am only now starting on Neil Gaiman's work.

And then there's Jonathan Carroll.
 
He's been around a while, and when his first novel, The Land of Laughs, appeared in paperback I picked up a copy and before I got around to reading it, Voice of Our Shadow, his second, had also been issued in softcover.  Read them both, but for some reason, they didn't make a big impression at the time.  I'll assume that I zipped through the books too quickly to appreciate them.  Maybe I wasn't exactly late to the party, but when I got there, I stuck around a few minutes and motored before I knew what a terrific party it was.

The Wikipedia page devoted to Carroll mentions a comment from a reviewer who says if Carroll were a Latin-American writer with three names, his books would be described as magical-realist.  True enough, but probably not all that important here. 

What's important is his characters -- funny, quirky, damaged, frightening, witty, always engaging, always interesting, and wonderfully human.  The people who inhabit the pages of Jonathan Carroll's fantasy novels are as achingly real as those you'll find in the work of Theodore Sturgeon or Don Robertson, and by me that's high praise.

You want to know how good Carroll is?  After revisiting his work when Open Road reissued a number of his titles as ebooks several months ago, I visited Carroll's web site and read every blog entry (the archive goes back to July 2004), and it was time well spent in the company of a writer with a gift for character, a terrific eye for detail, and a ready supply of quotes from other writers as well.

If you want a nice introduction to his work grab a copy of his short story collection, The Woman Who Married a Cloud.  Or The Land of Laughs.  Or The Voice of Our Shadow.  Or The Ghost in Love.  Or...well, pick one -- I don't think you'll be disappointed.  And don't forget to check out his blog too.



Find links to Jonathan Carroll's books and blog (and more) at:
www.jonathancarroll.com

And More Backlist Coming...

Open Road Media continues to release good backlist titles as ebooks.  Coming this month are several titles by British novelist Barbara Pym, among them Jane and Prudence, No Fond Return of Love, and A Glass of Blessings.  Also scheduled for January are a number of titles by James M. Cain; while he's best known for Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice, and Mildred Pierce, his later work is well worth checking out -- The Institute, The Magician's Wife, and Rainbow's End are among the Cain titles due in January.  And this month will see three of William Goldman's best novels: Marathon Man (for my money the finest thriller of the 70s, and if you know this one only from the movie be advised the book is a LOT better), Boys and Girls Together, and The Temple of Gold (his first novel); Goldman is known today mainly as a screenwriter, and his best known book is the delightful The Princess Bride, but before he began spending most of his time on scripts he was primarily a novelist, and the Open Road releases coming this month are three of his best.  I've written about Goldman in this space before and you can find that post here.

Not long ago, I noted that the entire Travis McGee series by John D. MacDonald would be released as ebooks this month; even more of MacDonald's backlist will be coming to the Amazon Kindle store in June.  34 titles, among them The Damned, Murder in the Wind, The End of the Night, April Evil, The Deceivers, Cancel All Our Vows, and Cry Hard, Cry Fast.  When these are released, most of MacDonald's backlist will be available as ebooks; still not scheduled are MacDonald classics like The Executioners (aka Cape Fear), A Flash of Green, and End of the Tiger -- with any luck by the end of 2013 they'll all be available.

UPDATE, Jan 6 -- End of the Tiger, one of MacDonald's short story collections, is now listed in the Kindle store as a June release; this one's worth grabbing for the title story alone.

Impending bankruptcy has never looked so good...


A brief commercial: for the next few months my own ebooks will be available exclusively in the Amazon Kindle store; right now they're not available at Smashwords, B&N, or Sony, but they may be back there this summer.  The Kindle editions are sold without DRM so you should be able to read them on other devices as well.

I'll be running a free promotion on one of those titles this weekend, Jan 5-6.  For these two days The Other Iron River, and Other Stories will be free at the Kindle store; the collection includes three stories: "Acts of Faith," "Ghost Writer," and "The Other Iron River."  You get zombies, a ghost story, and in the title piece, a time travel story that I like to think catches a little of the Jack Finney/Twilight Zone feel.  Grab it while the price is right, and I hope you'll enjoy it.

And bests to all.

So Long, Fictionwise and EReader

On December 4, Fictionwise and EReader will no longer be offering ebooks for purchase, and customers will no longer be able to access their bookshelves after December 21.  They'll be missed.

Fictionwise and EReader (simply FW for the rest of this post) got all my ebook business from the time I started purchasing ebooks in 2000 until 2010, a bit after the sites were acquired by Barnes & Noble and fewer selections were made available in multiple formats or secure ereader/mobipocket.  Even though I didn't purchase from them nearly as frequently after that, I still checked their new release listings religiously every Monday.  I can recall few real problems with purchases from FW (2 or 3 in 10 years, and I bought a lot of ebooks there) and never had a problem that wasn't fixed quickly.  It was a pleasure to do business with FW, and I hope every member of their staff that wants to keep working in the ebook world either has another gig lined up or finds one quickly.  My best wishes to their whole crew.

And about those bookshelves going away after December 21: there's an option out there to move your purchases to a B&N Nook library account if you like, so even after FW closes down, you'll still have access to your books.

One more thing: the ereader format.  Some people didn't care for it.  I don't recall that it handled illustrations particularly well, for instance.  But that format had the most wonderfully customer-friendly DRM you could want.  If you wanted to read your book on more than one device, fine.  If you wanted to read it on 173 different devices, fine.  If you wanted to put it on your friend's PC so he could read it, you could do that too even though you shouldn't.  The DRM wouldn't stop you.  But before you could open that ebook on any PC or handheld device, you had to enter the ebook's unlock code.  The unlock code for each ebook was the name and account number on the credit card that you used to purchase it.  Neat, simple, easy for the customer.  And how many people were going to "share" their ebooks and the unlock codes on the internet if it meant giving their credit card number to thousands of strangers?  It was a DRM method that assumed that the customer was honest -- nice attitude for a company to take; if there had to be DRM, this was a nice way to handle it.

Bests again to the gang at FW.


 UPDATE: It's being reported in posts at MobileRead and KindleBoards that B&N isn't importing all the titles from Fictionwise/EReader bookshelves.  So if you're a Fictionwise/EReader customer with a large bookshelf, make sure you download your titles and the software you use to read them on your PC & handheld devices.