Dear gang –

Jeez, it’s been a while. SORRY! I’m a bad, bad blogger.

And here to prove it… I’M BACK, with a lightweight installment featuring no business whatsoever, but some thoughts I’m kinda itchy to share.

Last weekend, I let a cold deck my ass out in bed for four days straight, on a chicken soup and orange juice diet. And when that happens (maybe once or twice a year), it's catch-up time for all the motion pictures I've been missing.

The result was roughly 37 hours of relaxed and studious viewing, muddied only slightly by being sick and such. And what I saw was the following, in the following order:

ICHI THE KILLER (Takashi Miike)
THE INKEEPERS (Ti West)
THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO (David Fincher)
DEADWOOD SEASON 2 (multiple directors)
DEADWOOD SEASON 3 (ditto)
THE DESCENDENTS (Alexander Payne)
DAUGHTERS OF DARKNESS (Harry Kumel)
A DANGEROUS METHOD (David Cronenberg)
MELANCHOLIA (Lars van Trier)

As with all such marathons, I feel like a lot was learned.

Let’s start with DEADWOOD, since it plays most directly into the long-vs-short discussion already in progress, and has the most revelations. (At roughly 24 hours of viewing time, it most certainly fucking should!)

I’d already watched Season One, which was to me an inarguable masterpiece of epic storytelling, warranting every second it commanded onscreen. The stunning ensemble cast, towered over by magnificent human monster Al Swearengen, yanked my allegiance at every turn. And the writing!, the writing! – grand Shakespearian gutter talk of Biblical proportions – took my breath away with its savage sweep of hard lessons learned, weaving myth out of history.

So yeah, I was dying to see where it went, and frightened to see how it died.

And though I direly hate to say it, I gotta admit that by the time I hit the home stretch on that third season, had I been an HBO executive, I would have pulled the plug, too.

“WHY?” you may ask, in both enraged and beseeching tones.

1) Because the historical narrative had worked its way to the last exciting climax it actually had to offer.

2) Because it fumbled the ball so hard at the end that there was no reason to believe it was going to get better.

When David Milch – the certified genius who created and spearheaded the series – turned his attention elsewhere (namely, JOHN OF CINCINNATI), he left all those incredible ingredients (great cast, great crew, great setup, great incredibly expensive set) in the hands of people who either weren’t sure what to do with what they had, or were just not up to the task.

Much like Season Two of TWIN PEAKS, when David Lynch went off to make WILD AT HEART, the result was much heartbreaking floundering. (James Hurley’s road trip, anyone?)

But unlike TWIN PEAKS – which utterly rallied at the end, and delivered a climax so astounding that those of us who hung in were rewarded with one of the most terrifying hours ever broadcast on television – DEADWOOD frittered away its last hours as if it had all the time in the world, killing its legitimate tension at every turn by half-assedly checking in with all its subplots before getting around to a punchline that never really came.

My point is, the show had run its course. It had nowhere else to go that would match the grandeur of its inception. Even the guy who cared most about it was on to something else.

Tragically too long by more than half is my final heartbroken verdict. Not because the material wasn’t there. But because it choked in the final clinch, and pissed away all its steam.

Which brings me to MELANCHOLIA, a meditation on depression’s practical application to the end of the world or something, brought to you by both one of our finest and most infuriating filmmakers.

Ever since he terrorized otherworldly imp goddess Bjork so completely on the set of DANCER IN THE DARK that she tried to eat her own costume, and climb the fence of the compound, in order to escape his sadistic machinations (or so the story goes), my stance on Lars van Trier has been, “I’ll watch your movie if I get to punch you in the face first. Just so we’re even. You emotionally abusive bullying prick.”

Which is to say, I admire his brilliance, but am utterly tired of being beaten up by his films. He’s one of those guys that make me think he doesn’t give two shits about us: he just pushes our buttons because he can. And, as such, was fully prepared to never watch anything he ever made, ever again.

But too many smart people I respect were telling me that I needed to see this thing. That it was beautiful, and important, and profoundly different, and maybe the best film of the year.

So I capped off my marathon with it. Watched an hour and ten minutes of barely-sufferable glacial slowness, which tried my patience to the snapping point. Until – when our main character couldn’t even summon the will to lift her leg into the bathtub – I said, “ENOUGH! You have wasted all the time you’re gonna get.” And turned the fucker off.

But I was haunted by the notion that people thought it was surpassing brilliance. So I did something I never, ever do. I fast-forwarded to the closing credits, then bumped one chapter back. And watched the end.

And though the buildup to the end struck me as insufferable, I stayed for the last shot.

Which was so deeply profound and astonishing that I had to take a break, and reconfigure.

Over the following hour, I went to Rotten Tomatoes, and read every review both pro and con. In the process, I heard about some of the key points I’d missed (a suicide, a kid’s device for gauging the proximity of doom, and Kirsten Dunst nekkid in the moonlike light of a new world).

At which point I went back, watched the stuff that I missed, and was forced to admit that the film is in fact some sort of haunting masterpiece. One with which I philosophically disagree with like crazy. But which, for the first time in a long time – since BREAKING THE WAVES – made me want to hug rather than punch Lars van Trier.

This is a movie that’s not for me, in that it somewhat self-righteously endorses a depressive worldview I do not share, wherein you’d have to be an idiot to harbor the slightest shred of optimism. Kind of a statement of principle, like MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON for depressives who wish we would all just die.

Slicing away hypocrisy is one thing – I’m a huge fan – but patently dismissing enthusiastic engagement with life always rubs me the wrong way, much as such dispositional cheerfulness (like mine) clearly annoys the shit out of many smart, honestly unhappy people (like van Trier).

Which brings me to ICHI THE KILLER: a staggeringly sadistic yet shockingly innocent film that I’d put off watching for years and years: largely because word was it was just one stylistic ugliness on top of another -- an exercise in ferocious gross-out one-upmanship – and the older I get, the more I feel like maybe I’ve suffered enough.

But honestly, I’d always been itchy for ICHI, for precisely that reason. I’m a hardcore completist. I need to see the best of the worst, and the worst of the best. And I absolutely love Takashi Miike, from SUKIYAKI WESTERN DJANGO to AUDITION to the astonishing VISITOR Q (the Japanese equivalent of John Waters circa DESPERATE LIVING or PINK FLAMINGOS, in both shamelessly vile transgression and unseemly adorableness).

Miike is important like van Trier is important. Love him or not, he’s the real deal: an unflinching filmmaker in utter command of his tools, with crazed technique that breaks ground every time it turns around.  And utter devotion to fucking you up, every single chance he gets.

David Fincher is another of our directorial greats, whose adaptation of FIGHT CLUB ranks as one of the most subversive big-budget virtuoso masterworks ever to emerge from the Hollywood system. So I was more than a little curious to see what he’d do with this DRAGON TATTOO business that seems to be all the rage.

Having not read the book, I found Fincher’s THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO to be a solid and exquisitely mounted thriller, the only truly standout sections involving the rape and payback scenes. But I gotta be honest: I carved the word “Rapist” on a rapist 25 years ago, in my novel THE CLEANUP, so this wasn’t revelatory news to me.

On the other hand, ICHI THE KILLER never ceased to stun and amaze me with its angles of attack, its oddball character insights, its daring directorial flourishes and palpable excitation. The movie is utterly insane, but so alive it’s almost ecstatic, even as it delivers scene after scene of the most horrifyingly unexpected mayhem imaginable.

Compared to ICHI, Fincher’s film felt positively stodgy, like a creepy college professor with human leather patches on his elbows. And maybe that’s not a fair comparison. But when it comes to movies about guys who get boners every time they hurt someone, as far as I’m concerned, the choice is clear.

ICHI THE KILLER was the first thing I watched. And as far as I’m concerned, it was far and away the best. The only one I watched twice. And actually can’t wait to watch again.

As for the rest…

THE INKEEPERS was a slight-yet-likable piece of spookeria by up-and-coming indie horror phenomenon Ti West. I can’t wait to see his HOUSE OF THE DEVIL, which made his mark, and which I hear is great. But this was a slim 20 minutes of story at most, very loosely packed into an hour-anna-half, cruising mostly on the charm of lead actress Sara Paxton and moody Steadicam moves through the haunted hotel, like a no-budget THE SHINING made by Kubrick’s stoned teenage nephew.

THE DESCENDENTS is a very nice film about kind-hearted people making the best of a tragically fucked-up family situation. I enjoyed it, found its Hawaiian soundtrack a treat (though woefully short of slide guitar, the yodeling was great), and cannot for the life of me justify its Oscar nominations.

DAUGHTERS OF DARKNESS is another of those films I’ve been needing to see for years. Now I have. I’ve got a weakness for cult faux-hippie horror from the 60s and 70s, and was pleased by its atmospheric blend of Euro-eroticism and fang-free vampirism. Didn’t love it, but I liked it a lot, and appreciate its place in the canon.

Same goes for David Cronenberg’s A DANGEROUS METHOD, a fascinating yet intensely restrained look at the moment of fracture between Sigmund “It’s All About the Sexual Drive” Freud and Carl “This Is Waaaay Bigger Than That” Jung. As always, at such historic junctures, there’s a woman at the heart of it whose immeasurable impact has been completely ignored. God bless playwright Christopher Hampton, non-fiction chronicler John Kerr, and matured maverick genius Cronenberg for attempting to rectify this typically dumb injustice.

So, in summation, what did I learn (aside from everything I already said)?

I REALLY, REALLY LOVE MOTION PICTURES. Am completely smitten by how many ways this most elastic and expensive of art forms can be played. Even the least of them represent such hard work, by so many people, most of them unsung.

I am honored to be joining their ranks. And hope to be at least half as good as the best of them, some day soon.

P.S. – THE CABIN IN THE WOODS is fucking genius, and one of those rare films I hit in the theater twice. My official blurb: “I couldn’t have been happier if someone blew me in the theater, and danced all the way home.” SCREAM, SHMEAM: horror film has never been so spectacularly deconstructed. And AVENGERS, SHMAVENGERS: I have never loved Joss Whedon more. (I could write a whole essay on this one, and probably should.)

While we’re at it, I just caught the remake of FRIGHT NIGHT. And as the guy who co-wrote the novelization of the original, I gotta say, “That was fun!” One of the best remakes ever of a disposable pop classic. I grinned, throughout, from ear to ear. Just like a vampirized Imogen Poots.

Dear gang –

As some guy who thought being a pimp was cool once said, “It ain’t easy bein’ a pimp”. Poor ol’ Willy Loman had a similar predicament in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, currently raking it in on Broadway. Except, you know, without the ho’s.

My point being: sales is tough. It’s a dirty job for hungry people who haven’t figured out an easier way to live. But it’s also a series of techniques for survivors; and can, in fact, somehow weirdly become a noble occupation, even an art form. Depending on how you approach it. What you’re selling. How well you’re selling it. And why.

Now I’m not gonna pretend that I’m a world-class salesman. I am, at most, a passionate enthusiast who loves to share great things he loves with as many people as possible. Which is to say, people who might love it, too.

I make my job both easier and harder by only selling things I’m passionately excited about. Most sales people should be so lucky. And most of them aren’t.

But you can only sell what you can actually sell. And if people don’t buy it, you’re either a) not a very good salesperson, b) unclear about how to best sell it, or c) trying to sell something that people just aren’t all that interested in.

This is, of course, where sales and marketing teams come in: experts at targeting demographics, charting trends, crunching numbers, weighing risks, and making decisions based on probability charts.

There’s an art and science to all this, without a doubt. The science is in the market research. The art is in vision: how you see what you’re selling, who might like it, why, and how to successfully convey that vision to your hoped-for consumer/audience.

These are the tricks I am hoping to learn.

Minus the bullshit. Just as much as I can.

Because if there’s one thing we know about advertising, marketing, and so forth, it’s that it’s roughly one trillion percent bullshit. We are constantly wading through one false claim or hilariously grotesque overstatement after another, every time someone hypes us. Which is roughly every time we turn around.

This is where smart, thoughtful friends come in.

We all know the old saw about opinions and assholes. How everybody’s got one. And it’s true. You could go all hardass, like the classic Harlan Ellison quote, and say, “No, you have a right to an informed opinion,” thereby making all the stupid shit look as jarringly, painfully stupid as it actually is.

But also making a lot of things that aren’t stupid at all – but merely differences of perception and experience – get tarred with the same dismissive brush.

For me, a potentially more helpful truth is:

We like what we like, for whatever reasons: be it our DNA, upbringing, souls, past lives, God, the Devil, Cthulu, Nothingness, or whatever we think is happening.

We are who we are, and we like what we like, and we don’t what we don’t. It’s as simple and complicated as that. Attracted to some things. Repelled by others. It’s all extremely personal.

Speaking as a person who loves some things and doesn’t much care for others, I’m always gratified when someone steers something I’m liable to love straight down my alley. Hits my sweet spot. Says, “Oh, yeah, you are gonna love this.” And isn’t lying.

That, to me, is successful sales.

So let me say this, from one opinionated asshole with a soul to another:

The whole point of this blog – and of everything I’m doing, on my own and with all the wonderful people I work with – is to connect with all the rest of you guys and gals who might resonate with it, surf the same crazy waves we’re surfing.

The amazing thing about social networks – the whole reason Facebook has us call each other “Friends” – is because it’s really good to have friends. Both like-minded and otherwise.

A friend who both knows you and cares about you will know what you like, whether they like it or not. And if they see something that makes them go, “Oh, Joe or Lucy would love that!”, they send it off.

That’s sales, the old-fashioned new-fangled way.

Word of mouth, be it virtual or otherwise.

So that’s my meditation on the subject for tonight. Hope it wasn’t too esoteric. Believe me, more nuts and bolts than you might care to swallow, coming up!

Speaking of which, and in conclusion: It may be hard to be a pimp, but it’s way harder to be a ho.

That said, I believe it is possible to be both the seller and the sold, without falling into either of those previous categories.

This is the mission. This is the goal. And the incentive for every creative, hard-scrabbling Willy Loman among us not to kill his fucking self, while we’re at it.

Cuz that, as we all know, is an American tragedy big and sad enough to rattle the whole wide world.

Yer pal in the trenches,

Skipp

Dear gang –

Apologies for absentia! I’ve had a lot going on, not the least of which has been the sudden deluge of last-minute entries to my latest anthology PSYCHOS: ENCOUNTERS WITH SERIAL KILLERS AND THE CRIMINALLY INSANE. Published by Black Dog and Leventhal. Due out this September. And for which the iron door slammed shut today.

Why do so many fine writers wait till the very last minute to submit their stories? Sometimes, it’s because they’ve been rigorously honing them to pinpoint precision. Sometimes, it’s because they looked at the calendar and went, “FUCK!” Then fired that thing they’d been thinking about straight into their word processor like a cannon.

I know both feelings, believe me. And whatever works works for me!

All I can say is: I have more powerful stories than I can possibly buy, even for a book that will measure 640 pages. I might squeeze in 38 stories, max. I have easily twice that amount of serious shit to choose from. Believe me. I could publish two books – maybe three – and not begin to exhaust the quality being ladled upon me daily.

So what does this say about modern writers, and the state of the contemporary short story?

In my opinion, it says some pretty good things. Particularly with regard to psychological probity: a factor that only seems to deepen, the more recent the fiction is.

This may be surprising to a lot of people who think we’re just getting stupider and stupider. There are evidence trails to suggest that. But my evidence trail does not.

I find that these writers are getting – if not smarter and smarter than previous generations – at the very least honester and honester. Their characters are admitting more, exposing more, getting more frank about both their confessions and their emotional reactions, or lack thereof. More clear in their depictions.

Does this mean better writing?

In many ways, I think it does.

The more I read, the more impressed I am by how much remains unexplored. Or would, were it not for these cunning explorers.

It gives me hope about modern literature.

For lovers of books, this is a beautiful thing.

My thanks to all the brilliant people who have sent me stories. I’d buy them all if I could. (The brilliant ones, that is!)

But for this book, the iron door has slammed down. If you didn’t slide in under it, I’m sorry.

Astonishing Table of Contents, soon!

Yer pal in the trenches,

Skipp

Dear gang –

There’s nothing like an exciting challenge. And nothing like putting a theory to the test.

So I’ll tell you about my big exciting publishing challenge for 2012. And then suggest one or two for you!

When I was offered the job of Editor-in-chief at Ravenous Shadows, they told me that they wanted to publish 40 books a year. I said, “Well, then they’re gonna have to be short, punchy books, cuz I’m not wading through 40 big blobby bastards. I don’t have time.

“And there will have to actually be 40 good books, cuz I don’t wanna publish crap just to pad out the line. No restaurant could survive serving half-baked dishes, and we wouldn’t, either. People have to be able to count on us to deliver tight, cool, wildly-entertaining books, They gotta feel like they’re always gonna get their money’s worth.”

Fortunately, they agreed to my preposterous terms. So I took the job. And the experiment began.

As such, my challenge is this: to find – or otherwise provoke – 40 great short books for publication. Work with the writers to get said books into tip-top fighting shape. And then find ways to make these books popular, so that they might prosper. Make money. Go out and multiply their enthusiastic readership.

This is, of course, absolutely insane. But by no means impossible.

And this is where you come in.

First, lemme address the writers in the room. Cuz I’m guessing there are a bunch of you, wondering what the fuck we’re up to here, and if there’s anything in it for you. Good. That’s what we’re wondering, too.

So your challenge is this, should you choose to accept it:

WRITE ME A GREAT, SHORT BOOK. I’m talking 30-60,000 words. The essential ingredients are horror, crime, mystery, suspense, and/or any of the other things that qualify a story as a thriller.

That said: what I’m really looking for are exciting, provocative, tightly-focused, plot-driven, character-intensive, shockingly original cliché-hammering tales with ass-kicking endings that make people sit up and take notice.

I’m looking for skillful, insightful writing. Singular, idiosyncratic voices. A genuine will to entertain. And a whole lot of giving-a-shit.

Which is to say, deeply caring about the story you’re telling, the subject matter you’ve engaged, and the people you’ve chosen to go through it with you.

Including not just your characters, but the potential audience for them.

In other words, I’m looking for books that people might feel passionate about. Not just sort-of like, shrug off as a passable time-killer, or curse as a useless time-waster, but actually love. Or at least really like a lot.

I know how many genuinely talented people are out there, looking for a break, or a chance to do something special that just can’t be ballooned into 300 pages plus. I know the strictures of mainstream publishing all too well. The idea too daring. The voice or angle too offbeat. The big-budget door too narrow for anyone but current bestsellers (or something just like them) to fit through.

And again, the Procrustean bed: wherein – if you’re somehow too long – they will hack your arms and legs off till you fit; but if you’re (more likely) too short, they will stretch said limbs till the bones pop out of their sockets.

Can we all agree that Procrustes was an asshole?

THANK YOU!

The bad news is, our advances are teensy. The good news is, our royalties are triple what the big boys pay. So the more you sell, the more you might actually make money.

The other good news is, these books don’t take forever to write. At least they don’t have to. A writer on a roll, with a clear idea of where they’re going, could burn one down in three weeks to three months. Factor in up to a month of tough editing (as needed), and that’s a pretty quick turnaround for a book that’s really good.

Of course, if you nail it the first time around, that would speed shit up considerably.

Ideally, the books I’m looking for have roughly as much story as a feature film. And should be read in roughly the time it would take to watch said feature film. A story you can inhale in a couple of hours is a wonderful thing for a reader. I would like us to give them that thing.

And just to be clear, here at the end of my pitch:

I want your A-game. I want the best you can do. No half-assed trunk novels that nobody else wanted, but you’d love to find an easy home for. I’ve got an eagle eye for slop, and have been known to stop three sentences in. As I mentioned before: I ain’t got time to waste.

But the good ones... ahhh, the good ones… are the ones I want to see.

I am, above just about all else, an enthusiast. Constantly searching for new things to love. Eager to share them, and tell the world about ‘em. Get me excited, and I’ll go to the wall. I really love this stuff. Any chance I have to share that love, I take.

Write me a great book, and I will push it like crazy. Do everything I can to get it seen, and known. Put it in the company of other great books. Encourage the tide to swell.

Bottom line: I am looking for books that make me so wildly enthusiastic that I can’t help but want to tell the world.

Write me that fucker.

And let’s go to town.

Having made that as utterly clear as I can, let us now move on to the readers.

HEY, READERS! Here’s your part of the challenge!

What I urge you to do is: take a look at the first four Ravenous Shadows titles. Compare and contrast them with what you’re currently reading. Let me know how they stack up.

If you like and/or love them, say so on Amazon, or B&N, or any blogs or social networking sites you frequent that might care about such things.

Weigh in – not just on these books – but on the whole notion of long vs. short, If I’m making sense, TELL THE WORLD! If I’m not, TELL THE WORLD I’M AN ASSHOLE! All sincere response is welcome.

I personally feel that this is one of the great debates of the Great Publishing Transition. Ebooks and POD have transformed the landscape, and things are gonna change all over.

This is a potential shift in the brainscape I feel so strongly about that I’m taking a full year off from writing new books myself, in order to push this notion 40 times harder.

It seems like a more-than-worthwhile trade.

In conclusion, and believe me: I’m not trying to kill big books. The best big books are magnificent achievements, and probably changed my life as much as yours.

All I’m saying is, there are a whole lot of stories that would benefit greatly by being a whole lot shorter. And I would love to prove that, in the pop culture Entertainoscape – where genre tropes get to transcend their tiny niches, and explode into substantially larger niches – this just might be the way to go.

What we all really want are the best books possible. And an avalanche of readers both old and new, excited about what books can do.

That’s the challenge. LEMME KNOW WHAT YOU THINK!

Yer pal in the trenches,
Skipp

Dear gang –

Yesterday, the Horror Writers Association (HWA) announced their nominees for the Bram Stoker Award.  And amongst those selected for Superior Achievement in an Anthology (Editing), you’ll find Demons: Encounters With the Devil and His Minions, Fallen Angels, and the Possessed. Edited by yours truly.

Does this make me happy? Why, yes, it does!

The biggest happy-making ingredient, for me, is that it’s testimony to how great these stories are. How lucky I was to get them and then weave them – like the spun gold they are – into a gamut-spanning showcase for everything astounding about the field.

These are 37 great fucking stories, flat-out. (Well, maybe except for mine. But we were eight pages short, and out of money. We had no other choice!)

Which means that, basically, my job was to a) find already-existing greatness, and b) instigate brand-new greatness. In other words, the “Good Taste” Award for Excellence in Recognizing Excellence.

So here are the true nominees, from Demons:

CHERUB – Adam-Troy Castro
THE DEVIL – Guy de Maupassant
THE BOOK – Margaret Irwin
THE MONKEY’S PAW – W.W. Jacobs
THE HOUND – H.P. Lovecraft
THE BLACK CAT – Edgar Allen Poe
THE DEVIL AND DANIEL WEBSTER – Stephen Vincent Benet
NELLTHU – Anthony Boucher
THE HOWLING MAN – Charles Beaumont
THE EXORCIST (excerpt) – William Peter Blatty
HELL – Richard Christian Matheson
EMPATHY – John Skipp
VISITATION – David J. Schow
BEST FRIENDS – Robert R. McCammon
INTO WHOSE HANDS – Karl Edward Wagner
PILGRIMS TO THE CATHEDRAL – Mark Arnold
THE BESPELLED – Kim Harrison
NON QUIS, SED QUID – Maggie Stiefvater
DEMON GIRL – Athena Villaverde
HE WAITS – K.H. Koehler
HAPPY HOUR – Laura Lee Bahr
STAYING THE NIGHT – Amelia Beamer
DAISIES AND DEMONS – Mercedes M. Yardley
AND LOVE SHALL HAVE NO DOMINION – Livia Llewellyn
MOM – Bentley Little
20th LEVEL CHAOTIC EVIL ROGUE SEEKS WHOLE WIDE WORLD TO CONQUER – Weston Ochse
CONSUELA HATES A VACUUM – Cody Goodfellow
OUR BLOOD IN ITS BLIND CIRCUIT – J. David Osborne
EMPTY CHURCH – James Steele
ANGELOLOGY (excerpt) –Danielle Trussoni
THE CODA OF SOLOMON – Nick Mamatas
THE LAW OF RESONANCE – Zak Jarvis
STUPID FUCKING REASON TO SELL YOUR SOUL – Carlton Mellick III
HALT AND CATCH FIRE – Violet LeVoit
SCARS IN PROGRESS – Brian Hodge
THE UNICORN HUNTER – Alethea Kontis
OTHER PEOPLE – Neil Gaiman

The coolest thing, for me, is the chance to provoke so much fresh ass-kicking original fiction (well over half the book is new), then juxtapose it with time-honored classics: some well remembered, some tragically forgotten.

And show, very clearly, that some of the best short fiction ever written is being written right now. By masters in the making. By the legends to come.

Insofar as I’m concerned, these authors have already won the best award I can possibly give them: the “I Love Your Story!” Award. It’s the award that every reader gives to every story they excitedly hand to a friend, going, “Omigod, you have to read this!”

The most coveted award on Earth.

THANKS, HWA! For honoring these writers: some new, some old, some so old they’re 100 years dead. I think it’s a sweet and wonderful thing, and totally hope we win.

CONGRATS TO ALL NOMINEES, IN ALL CATEGORIES! It’s nice to be noticed, ain’t it?

And to all you dreamers who remain unnoticed – or at least un-nominated -- just remember:

Every time someone authentically loves your story, you already won the one that counts.

Yer pal in the trenches,
Skipp

Dear gang --

Over the course of the last several days -- days spent laying out Parts IV, V, and VI of my now seemingly-endless series -- I came to a sudden realization: I was starting to bore the shit out of myself.

In the immortal words of Jack Torrance, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”

So here it is, St. Valentine’s Day; and as I type this, I’m watching some grinning guy bring a hilarious flotilla of red balloons and roses to someone he’s clearly excited about. Meanwhile, who am I excitedly spending time with? Nobody. Not a goddam soul.

My best dog, Scooby Hamilton, and I are gonna go run with in about thirty minutes, and thank God for that. She is as delightful a canine companion as a human being could hope for. I love that girl to bits.

But Jesus Christ. When it comes right down to it, I am one stupid, lonely motherfucker, working so hard and so constantly that I hardly ever get out of the house, much less spend time cultivating the kind of close interpersonal relationships that might get me smooched every once in a while.

And I realize, these may be the last of my prime smooching years. Am I really going to throw them all away, just to make sure more craz-ass books get added to your TBR pile?

SO FUCK IT. I’m not gonna write any more this week. I’m gonna go out and kiss somebody. Maybe several people, till one of them stops slapping me and kisses me back.

And then I’m gonna start spending a chunk of every week being extremely nice to that person, from now on.  I think that’s probably a good idea.

I realize it’s probably too late for today. But it’s not even noon yet. So ya never know. Some people have New Year’s resolutions. I just made myself a Valentine’s Day one.

Ladies? The line starts here.

Yer freshly-reinvigorated, love-tastic pal,

Skipp

P.S. – Happy Valentine’s Day, everybody! HOPE YOU GET SOME! And that it’s good.

Dear gang –

These entry’s gonna veer off the literary path for a bit, to examine things from a cinematic angle. (These days, when not I’m not editing books, I’m making movies: my other full-time job.)

Fiction and film are two incredibly different disciplines, but what they share in common is the telling of a story, one moment at a time. Books do it word by word. Movies do it frame by frame.

But how they stack up, play off each other, and move forward draws on many of the same types of strategies. Only the form has changed.

Now, when writing/directing/producing – actually setting up and pulling off a film shoot – you need to prepare like crazy, well in advance.  It starts with the writing: figuring out exactly what needs to happen, and why. Nailing the moments on paper (or its digital equivalent).

Producing means making sure all the necessary elements are there on the day of the shoot, from cast to crew to location to makeup to the money to pay them for being there.

But directing… ahhh. Directing is conducting the orchestra, weaving all the pieces together, staging the scenes and then capturing them in ways that will play. And hopefully knock people out, when they see it complete.

On the day of the shoot – no matter what scene you’re doing – the absolutely essential thing is to get all the coverage you’ll need. You’re on a location you probably paid for. You’ve got all your people here. If you don’t get it right, you’re gonna have to come back, pay everyone again, and pick up what you missed.

This is a powerful incentive to plan your ass off. Think of the moments you need, from every powerful, workable angle. And be real clear about the shots you don’t need.  So that you don’t waste time on useless shit.

The point is to nail it. So that people go “Ahhh…” or “WOOO!” with satisfaction, instead of “Ohhh…” or “GAHHH!” with disappointment.

So let’s say we’re in the editing bay with my friend Andrew Kasch, extraordinary editor of Rose: The Bizarro Zombie Musical, and even more extraordinary co-director on Stay At Home Dad and every other motion picture project I’ve got going right now.

Andrew really knows how to cut, take what we’ve shot and assemble it in the best, smartest, most effective way. He’s a genius at making things flow.

So we’ve got all the footage before us, have watched every take of every moment of every scene. If we directed it right, we have a ridiculous amount of great material to choose from.

Way more than we can possibly use.

There will be a lot of shots that we will totally fall in love with. Often several, of the exact same moment. There are some actors, for example, who will want to give you lots of options: play all the possibilities, explore the moment, see what falls out of their character. If they’re great, you will be grateful they did so.

But you can only pick one.

A lot of times, the take you love the most won’t be the one that makes it. No matter how great it is, its primary job is to play well with others (the moments and scenes that surround it). If it doesn’t, it’s gotta go.

You pick the one that works best, in the service of the story.

And you have to be that scrupulous, every speck of the way. Keeping the entire story in mind. Making sure you never lose sight of the big picture, while attenuating every moment-by-moment toward the greater good.

And that’s exactly what editing books should be like.

Unfortunately, most book editors don’t have time for that shit. At major companies, in particular, being an editor is now largely an administrative function. It’s acquisitions and contract negotiations, making the sales force happy. They don’t have time for anything else.

I totally get this, and empathize like crazy with all the talented editors out there who WISH they could take the time to work with their authors, but instead are left praying that their authors are smart and savvy enough to edit themselves.

And then make do with whatever they get from the writers they work with. Cuz that’s as good as it’s gonna get.

The fact is, EDITING TAKES TIME, and a ridiculous amount of concentrated effort. Which is why I hope and pray, whenever somebody sends me something, that it’s so flawlessly executed that I go “YAY!” Arrange for the contact to be sent. And just sit back, gratefully basking in the warm glow of satisfaction.

With short stories, that happens a lot. With books, not quite as much. There are so many places for them to derail, if only for a moment. And yet – as in the shorts – every single moment counts.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, raises two of my primary arguments in favor of the short, tight novel.

1) Fewer places to go wrong; and

2) Conversely, a greater percentage of opportunity to get all those moments right.

I gotta tell ya: editing film has made me even more excruciatingly aware of wasted, side-tracking verbiage in otherwise-entertaining prose.  And that’s saying a lot. Cuz it has always made me crazy.

So I guess my point for the evening is:

WRITERS, HONE IT DOWN!

There are hundreds of ways you can handle a sequence. And thousands of ways to phrase it. It only cost Stephen King $25 in paper and typewriter ribbon to write The Shining, all alone in his room, while Kubrick had to spend $25 million and enlist an army. So clearly, that’s a much easier burden to bear.

The flipside is – as a novelist, whether long or short – you have to do all the things that a filmmaker does, all by yourself. You’re the director, the writer, the producer, all of the stars, all of the locations, the camera and lights and special effects and every other single thing that happens.

And you are also the editor of yourself, who needs to know when shit is going on too long. Who needs to design your story and your beat-for-beat scenes in a way that rocks the audience big time, and gets your dream across.

What you don’t nail, someone’s going to have to help you with. That’s why I’m an editor. And I’m fine with that, if the rest is sufficiently great. Going the extra mile is what it’s all about.

Just know that you can’t play the same scene – not even twice – without it sucking. Get it right once, and that’s all you need. You can try it a dozen different ways, and probably should.

But in the end, you gotta pick the one that kills. And leave it at that.

That’s how you get rid of the flab. And hone your diamond to a thing that cuts glass.

Hope this is helpful! ON TO PUBLISHING, TOMORROW!

Yer pal in the trenches,

Skipp

Dear gang –

Yesterday, I started a line of inquiry that’s just getting warmed up. So let’s head straight into Round Two, shall we?

In speaking with a number of publishing professionals – writers, editors, and actual publishers, some of whom have been in the business for 20-40 years – I was repeatedly told that the move to larger books was market-driven. That starting in the 60s, mounting in the 70s, and utterly taking over by the 80s, the audience demanded longer, more complex narratives from its pop entertainment.

Books like The Exorcist, Jaws, The Other, and Salem’s Lot provided a sea change, the beginnings of the blockbuster formula for breakout titles with mass popular appeal. Despite equally formidable sellers at substantially shorter length – Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives, for example – the die was cast.

And by die, I mean: that’s when short books begin to die.

Dean Koontz, one of the first guys to leap headfirst onto this fresh formula bandwagon, wrote an instructional book for Writer’s Digest just before launching into his own career stratosphere. It was called How To Write Best Selling Fiction, and subtitled Discover the Keys to Success in Today’s Market For Novels.

I read it just after finishing my first novel, The Light at the End (with Craig Spector), in 1984, while waiting for the book to sell. I found it an incredibly smart and clear analysis of what was going on. And though I haven’t read it in 28 years, I still distinctly remember much of its advice.

He encouraged, for starters, a sizable cast of complex, believable characters who represented a wide swath of the setting’s community. He recommended a brisk pace, steadily punctuated by memorable moments of suspense or violence that pushed the story forward unrelentingly. And he advocated fiercely for a mainstream transcendence of genre’s insular limitations, which he felt had kept him trapped in the marginal hinterlands of sf and suspense for far long enough.

I agreed with almost everything he said, felt very much validated by it. These were all things that I had tried to do. And when Light sold a million copies, hitting the New York Times bestseller list the week that it came out, in January of ’86. I was like, “Yep. That’s how you do it.”

All that being said, How To Write Best Selling Fiction remains the only Dean Koontz book I ever really loved.

Because – much as I hate to say it – Koontz was the first bestselling author I ever read who stuffed his books with redundancies so thick and heavily-padded they made my eyes wince, then wander.

Maybe not every time -- fact is, I made it through very few of them; and the books that I hear are his very best I have never gotten around to at all – but all I can go from is my experience. And my experience was this:

If, say, I met Father McClosky (probably not his real fictional name) having a crisis of faith in Chapter 3 – and he hadn’t resolved it by then– then I was pretty sure I knew his situation when Chapter 5 rolled around. So when said chapter opened with, “Father McClosky felt his faith was in crisis,” I was, like, “Wow. You already said that.”

And by the twelfth time it came around, I skimmed every Father McClosky chapter until he actually did something different.

And I found myself going, “Wow, again. If you trimmed the shit out of this, I might really like it. But as it is, you’re just making my head hurt.”

Because I was painfully aware of the air hose, uselessly conflating the narrative solely in the service of page count. Trying to make it look as big on the shelves as, say, The Shining: a masterpiece that needed no padding whatsoever, because it actually filled every single page to the brim.

And I went, “Uh-oh. This is where form exceeds function, and formula turns to pabulum. At least for me.”

Of course, I know there are a lot of devout Koontz lovers out there who will quite rightfully take umbrage at my characterization of his popular narrative style. “I love Koontz! GO FUCK YOURSELF!” they might possibly say. And in their honor, I will do so, just as soon as I’m done yapping.

But here’s my point: from that point forward, how big a book was became more important than how good it was.

And we have been suffering from this ever since.

The chief trickle-down impact of this (it being the Reagan era and all) was that all books – whether they would ever be bestsellers or not – had to attempt to conform to that formula. Somehow blow themselves up to Macy’s Day Parade inflatitude, just to warrant a place on the fucking book shelf. Their spine had to be of a certain width, whether the content matched it or not.

But that was then.

And this is now.

Now, bookshelves are disappearing. We’re down to Barnes and Noble, the slew of truly-noble indie stores that have survived, and Amazon.com. Giant publishers still have giant clout, but the Hollywood model they’ve chosen to emulate only has room for so many. The money is tight. The competition is fierce.

Meanwhile, there are stories that are dying to be told.

And people who would love to read the best ones.

But don’t have fucking time to waste.

MORE TOMORROW!

Yer pal,

Skipp

Dear gang --

Okay, let’s jump right in with a subject that’s weighed heavily on my mind for years: one of the main reasons, in fact, why this year I’ve officially made the leap from full-time novelist to full-time editor.

So let me spell out my arguments, in easy-to-manage bite-sized chunks. They’ll be easier to talk about that way!

1) I think most genre novels are too long by half. And that it’s a serious problem. One that – if properly addressed – could help excite tons of new readers. And seriously improve the quality of most books, as well.

But unaddressed – as it is now – it keeps much of the genres marginalized, by knocking the overall quality way down.

Here’s why:

2) I think, in most cases, their length is artificially inflated to meet a marketplace expectation that books should be 300-some pages long.

The problem is, most of them don’t have 300 great pages in ‘em. And so they’re forced to pad themselves out with all kinds of narrative and linguistic filler. (More on these in a moment.)

3) In my opinion, the tighter a book is, the better it’s likely to be. And I’m not just talking word-count here. I’m talking quality of word choice and idea.

As my friend Cody Goodfellow – one of the finest writers I know – has said, “Every word that makes it to the page needs to kill and drink the blood of every other weaker word.”

I know that’s hilariously Darwinian and ruthless. But that’s what great communication is all about.

And it’s sure as shit the soul of editing.

Let the best word win. The most apt phraseology. The thing that gets to the point, nails it hardest, and then moves on.

4) I’m not saying that all books need be sleek velocity rockets, stripped down to their most action-packed and exciting moments, relentlessly propelling the reader just as fast as their eyes and minds can go. Though that has a certain allure, and might make me want to buy it.

I am all in favor of such rocket-powered books – particularly if they’re aimed at something thoughtfully amazing – but not all writers and stories are built that way.

Nor should they be.

Some books need to take their time. Seem to meander, picking up stray details that pay off poetically in the prose, or add up in the macro-gestalt of the story. In other words, pay off.

Which is to say, they may seem to meander. But they’re just weaving a web, into which you will step, helplessly entangled before you even know what happened. That’s another great approach, requiring another remarkable skill set.

Point being: whether your story moves fast or slow – or best of all, cagily and seamlessly bounces between ‘em – you still need to maintain a gripping forward momentum.

Otherwise, why bother making it all the way to the end?

Which brings us to padding, filler, and useless fat: the psychic speed bumps that completely interrupt velocity, before we even get to the rocket.

5) So let me quickly spell out these sworn enemies of concision, which fuck up every book they touch. And – as the industry standard – routinely and daily fuck up tons of potentially far better books.

REDUNDANCY. In other words, telling us shit we already know, over and over, as if our attention span is so fruitfly-short that we won’t remember what happened three chapters ago if you don’t spell it all out again.

This is a form of velocity-killing flab I find so frequently that it qualifies as the Number One Killer of stories that might otherwise be good. The second it happens, I start to skim. Which is the death of the book, for me.

When I start skimming, I’m no longer reading. I am no longer gripped, from word to word. I feel like somebody is wasting my time, dragging it out instead of simply delivering.

That’s precisely where I put down the book. And move on to something else.

THE AIRHOSE UP THE ASS. That’s when you take a neat, simple, resonant premise – something that, stripped down to its essential ingredients and moving parts, could thrill you from beginning to end – and fluff it up with convoluted side-plots, red herrings, and characters that spend more time filling up space than actually propelling the story.

This is not an argument against layered storytelling. Layered storytelling is the best. I want a story to hit me from several directions at once, most of them unexpected. In fact, I demand it.

What I don’t want is a bunch of extraneous shit between me and the story you’re actually trying to tell.

Which is to say: the story you’re actually trying to tell is the only one I’m interested in. Side-tracking narrative threads might be interesting in their own right. But if they’re that interesting, maybe they should be their own stories.

And if they’re not, they don’t belong in any story. They’re like the personal asides a rambling, babbling drunk spills at a bar, which you put up with as long as you can stand, but ultimately either walk away from or flat-out tell him to cut to the chase.

It’s hugely important to know the difference between something that actually adds to the story, and something that digresses so mightily that you can’t even remember what the fucking story was.

Which might help explain – in combination – why so many authors need to remind you of the same shit, over and over.

Are we seeing a pattern here? I KNOW I AM!

More in my next installment, where I suggest some alternatives to these problems. And suggest why these alternatives might possibly work.

Until then, I look forward to your thoughts. And hope I have good answers at the ready.

Again: THANKS FOR STOPPING BY!

Yer pal in the literary trenches,

Skipp