Funemployment 7: Meet the new Boss, Same as the Old Boss Edition
The rumors you’ve heard are true, should you be one of few people who follows me around Facebook and Tumblr, I’ve been hired back into high tech. It seems like a good gig so far, and much less insane than the place I was employed for the two years or so before.
So this is a good thing. I figured I’d use this space to wrap up what I’d accomplished on my writing and other projects in the 5 months that I was unemployed. Did I achieve my lofty goals of completing a bunch of stories and a novel and all kinds of other things?
Nope, well, I did some of it, but not all. I spent the majority of my writing time researching and preparing a business plan to open a book and record store in the town where I live. I’ve gone down the process as far as speaking with lenders, getting a lease proposal from the landlord where I want to put the store, establishing a vendor relationship with book and record distributors, point of sale vendors, and others. I’ve started talking to people about managing the place for me so I can continue to work in the job I just landed. All of that stuff takes a ton of time to do right, and with the help I received from the Small Business Development Counsel on New Hampshire and the Regional Economic Development Center I think I could make a successful go of it.
All of that said, it’s sort of moot now that I am working again. I think it’s unrealistic to open a retail location with a specific philosophy and model and then not be there to ensure that my vision for the place is carried out, to become the epicenter of a scene for local writers and readers to interact, to be a place where I could try and create a workable retail way forward for self published and very small press writers that gave them a willing place to hand sell their books.
The store isn’t dead, I am still prepping for another meeting with the Regional Economic Development Center, working on projections, and thinking about how I could balance my time to do both.
The other stuff I did get done was to complete a couple of stories, Anna F, a horror story that I started a few years ago and finally had time to work on the way I needed. I finished a story that I started last summer called Jobber, probably the last superhero story I’ll ever write.
I’ll let that sentence sit there for a while.
I made the little tiny bit of a name for myself in the podcast fiction and amateur science fiction community with a series of stories called Union Dues.
There’s a book collecting 10 of those stories released by ENC press as Escape Clause: A Union Dues novel, there’s a shitload of them produced as podcasts at Escape Pod, you can even find a sort-of-related story called Mighty in an anthology called Live Free or Sci Fi. Mighty is also available in the Kindle store for you digital readers.
I started writing superhero fiction when there wasn’t any, not really, and the audience for these was people like me who were literary and liked comic books. I tried to capture the feel of a comic book in prose, the idea being that if you had a favorite artist, for me it was John Byrne and John Romita, then you’d see these stories in your head in the style of your favorite artists. And if you didn’t have a favorite or didn’t read comics, you at least had seen a comic book at some point in your life so the imagery in the stories wouldn’t be incomprehensible.
The phrase I sort of tossed around for this was graphic novel in prose, which I realize is sort of stupid, but thinking of them this way helped me describe what I was trying to do with these stories. In the years since 2005 when I sold Iron Bars and the Glass Jaw to Steve Eley over at Escape Pod to now, the superhero universe has expanded to fill pretty much all of the cracks and crevices and light and dark spots in all manner of entertainment media. There really isn’t any room left for the ideas and stories that I wanted to explore with these characters. Others with larger budgets, more time, more access to existing intellectual property, and other business-stuff, can jam this stuff onto TV, films, books, even more comics, etc… And the fan community eats it up, they are consumers of SF/F/SH media the same way dermestid beetles are consumers of carrion. It’s great that the audience for this stuff is so vast, it’s a great way for good writers to create compelling stories about how we as people interrelate, and use superpowers or superheroism as a lens through which to probe why we are the way we are and maybe show how we could be better.
Or, they could make Guardians of the Galaxy 3 and Justice League 2 and Thor 4 and Captain America 5 and the audience will go and buy the tickets and shirts and games and coffee mugs and talk endlessly about spoilers and where Groot made them laugh or how badly Superman’s CGI face covered up a full beard because Henry Cavill is playing all three members of ZZ Top in a new biopic and Justice League 2 needs massive reshoots because the story elements didn’t test well with the audience and the studio is worried that their 200 million dollar investment isn’t going to pay back ten times their investment...
... And Take Team Shikaragaki With You
I’m sorry. I’m ranting. I don’t mean to be ranting.
Back to the cusp of the reason I’ve come to this decision, and some of it involves the audience for these stories and some of it involves the podcast market and some of it involves me just wanting to write other stuff but feeling obligated to try and grind out another Union Dues story. And grind away I did this five months, and I got the story that would sort of tie up the Team stories to the regular Union stories to about 75% of a workable first draft.
Then I lost interest in it, all of it, and wrote other stuff. I lost interest because the saturated market was already exploring the ideas and concepts I wanted to consider in my stories, and they could do it faster and better and didn’t have the same long turnover times getting things out to the audience. And, as such, everything I wrote felt derivative of these other creations that could get to market before I could even get a first draft finished.
I will probably never finish that story. I look at it and see all of the work it needs just to be readable and get to a logical endpoint and the effort isn’t worth the payoff. So I’m not going to bother. The few of you who were waiting for this release, sorry. Just imagine I wrote a story where the Union collapsed under the weight of its own hubris and the Team Shikaragaki kids were going to be the ones who carried on the torch in some other revolutionary style and you’ve pretty much got the idea I was going for.
Why was I even working on this story in the first place? Because I have a volume of Team Shikaragaki stories ready to hit the Kindle store and Lulu… well, almost. I have Jobber out at a contest at the moment, and when that doesn’t win, I’ll be adding it to the volume as a special extra or something. Some of the gang at Escape Artists suggested that a rerelease of the Team Stories might be a good idea in advance of the book, which I thought was a good idea too, I mean, it if helps encourage people to download or buy it, then yes. Also, as much as i like the way Clonepod worked the stories, the audio is rough, almost too rough in the Kitty story, and they would definitely benefit from a more professional narration. The fans would dig it, and it might draw in some new people. So I submitted them after a pleasant back and forth with the editor.
Their reply was very nice, and I was appreciative of their time reviewing my work. Where this project didn’t succeed was in this couple of sentences from the last communication I had with them,
“However the stories also have decidedly aged in places, and I feel our modern audience would be put off by the way some elements are approached or treated…”
Modern audience? Aged in places? I wrote these stories less than 10 years ago. We haven’t had a seismic shift in how people react to fiction in that time. I am still contemporary, the ideas that they are concerned with -- that I edited out of their reply -- are integral to the development of key ideas and the character to whom they apply. This isn’t the first time I’ve run into it, the other was with submitting Anna F, a horror story, passed over because it was needlessly cruel. It’s a horror story. To remove these elements or change them to not “put off” whatever modern audience has evolved in the last 7 years is just so anathema.
The modern audience is also the one that made Ready Player One a bestseller.
So, I’m hanging up my hat with this stuff and short of the occasional contest or interesting anthology that comes down the pipeline, I’ll be working on stories that don’t havea market; short stories grounded in reality with no SF/F elements, some fun juvi SF I started when Ian was 6 years old that I might finish, the rest of the stories in the rock and roll book, I’ll probably finish Park Place (an actual novel) but that’s where it is. I’ll leave podcast science fiction to the current crop of people writing for it until they too get out-evolved.
I’ll be working to get the Team Shikaragaki volume ready for prime time over the next few months. Hopefully some of you dinosaurs will still be around to read it. Hey, also, if you’ve bought anything from the kindle store and read it, like it or hate it, can you please remember to leave a rating there, or a review?
