Some Day My Print Will Come

This question’s for all the writers out there. What version do you want your book, your baby, to wind up in, electronic or print?

Hint: it’s okay to answer “both.” For a lot of writers, publication is the ultimate goal, with the medium secondary. My first full-length novel (over 50,000 words) was released as an ebook. And yeah, I did the happy dance and ate chocolate and called all my friends. I’d been published before with stories in magazines, but this was a freakin’ BOOK. A lifelong goal finally struck off the bucket list.

Happy as I was, though, I still missed the thrill of finally, after years of subs and rejections, holding a finished, physical book in my hands. Somehow, even though I had my ARCs and I could see the sales mounting up in my author’s account, without a print-and-paper book to hold it didn’t seem quite real.

I love books. I like to sit up in bed with a book in my hand and read until I’m tired enough to sleep. I keep reading material next to the couch for those hideously long commercial breaks that are the bane of cable TV. I love to wander through a bookstore and check out the covers and flip through the pages. Barnes and Noble (and Borders, in its day) were even nice enough to put chairs out so I could skim whole novels before deciding whether or not to buy them. Try doing that on Amazon.

I’ve already blogged about the downside of that in my “Clutter” posts. I’ve got books stacked all over the house. Some people compulsively buy shoes and handbags. I go in for paperbacks. Back when I had disposable income I thought nothing of dropping $30-$50 a shot at the Waldenbooks in the mall. They’re all crammed into the book room, waiting for me to get back to them for the third or fourth or fifth time.

Electronic may be nice. It would certainly cut out the clutter, and you can’t beat a file for portability. I could have saved myself a lot of time and effort and heavy lifting during my last move if I’d had my library on Kindle.

I wouldn’t know. I don’t own a Kindle or Nook, and I’m in no hurry to get one. Maybe it’s because I grew up in one of the last non-electronic generations, but I still look for the physical comfort of a book in my hands when I want to read. If I ever move again I might change my mind, but I don’t think so. (I can always hire hunky young guys to lift the boxes for me.)

Besides, I’ve heard Amazon can delete files from your Kindle, even if they’ve been bought and paid for. What the hell? I paid for it! It’s mine now! Try taking one of my paperbacks away and see if you make it to the door. Not to mention I’ve lived through a computer crash. Paper doesn’t crash, and Amazon can’t delete it behind your back. Granted, computer files don’t go up in a house fire. I’ll just have to take precautions.

And what’s more impressive—a library with floor-to-ceiling shelves of books stretching back to your childhood, or a Kindle on a coffee table? I don’t think anyone’s ever looked at a Kindle and exclaimed, “Wow, you’ve read all those?”

What brought this on was Harper Voyager’s open call for manuscripts, no agents needed. I had a book I hope matches what they’re looking for, and if I get off my butt before October 14 I might just have another. Here’s the drawback, though: the deal ebook only. There may be a chance of print further down the line, but Harper’s not making any guarantees.

I don’t know if that’s good enough. I happen to like the book I sent, and the book I may also send, if not to Harper then to somewhere else. Both are lengthy enough to justify print, even if it’s just POD. I want my print copies. I want that tangible proof that I’m writer enough that somebody paid me in order to read my stuff.

So what do I do if Harper makes an offer? I’m already thinking that over. I still harbor dreams of seeing my books on the shelf in a bookstore, before bookstores go down the tubes. If Harper can’t promise me print to go with the electronic, or doesn’t want to let me keep my print rights so I can commission my own, I might have to turn them down. I can always go the self-publishing route.

That first book? Eventually it did go to print, and you betcha dupa I got a copy. I’m building a library in a shelf in my bedroom of my scanty output in print. Every now and then I pick one up, riffle through it, and grin like an idiot. Somehow a file on the laptop just doesn’t have the same impact.

Though ask me again if I ever have to pack up 40-odd years worth of book collecting and move them from one location to another. As long as I can get paper backup, I might give Kindle a chance.

Clutter, Part 2

Last week I rambled on about the various books, magazines, comic books, spiral notebooks, tablets, and diverse and sundry paper products I keep stored in my closets, on flat surfaces, and in one entire room of my mobile home. This week we reveal my other clutter collection, all the crap stuffed in my head.

I’ve been a voracious reader my whole life, which is how I accumulated all that clutter in the house to begin with. When I’m not reading, I’m watching TV. I don’t watch as much as I used to, but with 80+ channels available and a public library full of DVDs right up the street from me, I know I’m sure to find something. I don’t get out much.

The trouble is, far too much of what I crammed in there during my younger years stuck. My head is the equivalent of my book room. Book plots, movie plots, favorite lines, anecdotes about authors, and the words to more TV show theme songs than is probably healthy are sitting on the shelves in my brain, waiting for some neuron to trigger them. It’s scary.

Rattling off the names of the Seven Dwarfs is just the tip of the iceberg. I can recite Green Lantern’s oath. I know who Vivian Vance is. I remember the street address of the house I lived in when I was six. I can sing the theme song from Gilligan’s Island—opening and closing credits. Did you know the theme song from M*A*S*H has words? I know what they are. I know a verse to “La Bamba” that didn’t get onto Ritchie Valens’ recording. (“Para ser un gringo, se necessita una botella de cerveza y una gringita. Y arriba y arriba … ”) Thanks to a job at a second-run movie theater in the 1970s, I can still recite whole scenes from Jaws. I can name up to a dozen of Clint Eastwood’s movies, some of which I’ve actually seen. If pressed, I can also come up with a dozen synonyms for “ass,” including a couple in foreign languages.

What good is all this esoteric knowledge? Not much. Unless you’re going on Jeopardy or plan to be a writer, trivia is just that—trivial. A lot of the things rattling around in my head fall into the “worthless” category.

As my hero, Stephen King, once put it: “My head is full of shit.” God bless you, Stevie. At least I’m not alone.

Knowing lots of useless stuff does come in handy when you’re a writer. Anything at all can joggle a factoid, which in turn can trigger a character trait or a plot idea. Thanks to the Internet, I don’t even have to remember it all any more. I just have to know where to look it up. As long as I don’t get distracted and start reading up on stuff and shoving even more worthless knowledge into my head, it works out.

There are downsides to knowing all this crap, of course. Things get crowded out. For instance, I have no memory whatsoever of my high school graduation. I wasn’t drunk or high or anything like that. Apparently it just didn’t make that big of an impression on me. Not like, say, the theme song from Gilligan’s Island did. Sadly, my brain doesn’t pick and choose what it wants to remember. I just shake the box and see what drops out.

Since every good storage system should have a backup, I write things down, or keep research materials at hand. This leads to more clutter in the material world. I can’t get a bigger head. Maybe a bigger house?

With any luck, my trivial pursuits will help me accumulate more bits of printed paper, in particular little green slips with pictures of presidents on them. If not, I suppose I could try out for Jeopardy.

(For the record: that verse to “La Bamba” translates as: “To be a gringo, you need a bottle of beer and a girl.” I learned it in high school Spanish class. There was a verse that translated as, “To get to Heaven you need a really long ladder,” but I don’t remember the Spanish. I once heard a version of “Louie, Louie” where you could actually understand the words, but I don’t remember them now. There may be hope for me yet.)

Clutter

I have a problem with clutter. I’m not at the Hoarders stage yet, and I’d rather not end up there. But I can be a bit of a pack rat, especially where reading material is concerned. I imagine most if not all writers have the same problem. There’s nothing worse than knowing you read something somewhere in some magazine and trying to find it again. Between that and what I suspect is an inborn reverence for the written and the printed word, I rarely throw anything out if it’s bound between covers or on a glossy page. God help me if a fire ever breaks out in the house.

Part of the problem stems from a move I made about five years ago. I went from renting a semi-detached house with two floors and an attic to owning a mobile home. The house and all its extra room let my packrattitude run wild. I could go on book binges and then stash them in the attic and tell myself I didn’t have a problem because they weren’t visible.

That’s fine for a house. Trailers come with a whole other set of criteria. Space, for one. For a time I considered buying a double wide just so I’d have an extra room for the books. I kid you not.

Fortunately the trailer’s owner liked to do crafts. Since it was just her and her husband, they converted the second bedroom into a work room and the second bathroom into storage space. When I looked in the storage room, it was floor to ceiling shelves. It was like she knew she’d be selling her home to a book hoarder some day. That front bedroom would make the perfect writing room, too, with all my reference material only steps away. I agreed to buy it on the spot.

Long story short, I got my collection crammed in there. I have no idea how. Imagine thirty years of accumulated paperbacks, hardbacks, magazines and sketch pads crammed into a space the size of the average bathroom. That’s an apartment-sized bathroom, by the way. Those shelves, which the owner worried how she was going to get rid of, served me perfectly. There are books stacked on shelving from floor to ceiling and boxes piled up on the floor. I have a narrow little walkway so I can get in. It really does look like a scene from Hoarders in there. If the whole house looked like that, I could probably call the producers and get myself on TV.

The other day I bit the bullet and went rooting through the boxes, some of which I haven’t touched since I moved in five years ago. There are tons of writing magazines, SF mags from back in the ‘80s, and fanzines from my con-going days. Most of it I’ll probably never look at again. Why the hell am I keeping this stuff?

One thing’s for sure: if I ever find myself housebound, I’ll never run out of reading material.

Scarily, that’s not all of it. Remember, I’m a writer.

In my bedroom closet are piles of spiral notebooks, tablets and file folders with every manuscript I’ve sold, drafted or abandoned over at least the past twenty years. I know I have stuff from the ‘80s in there because the files are marked. This is in addition to the stuff in the filing cabinet, piled on the desk in the writing room, and sitting on the hard drives of my desktop computer (the indestructible Troglodyte-1000 from 1990) and my more current laptop. Oh, and then there’s the pile of notebooks on the end table next to the bed. Those are the works in progress. That file changes every seven-eight months as old stories peter out and new ideas emerge. There are never fewer than four spiral notebooks stacked on that table at any one time.

In addition, there are the books and magazines on the coffee table in the living room (so I can read during commercial breaks), the miscellaneous papers on the dining room table (I don’t eat there; I each on the couch), and the stack of bills on the nightstand. Oh, and the wire book rack in the bedroom where I keep the books I intend to read next. In my house, a flat surface without some form of printed material on it is rare indeed. I shudder to think how many forests have had to die so I can clutter up my house with their corpses. Acreage the size of the state of Oregon comes to mind, with maybe parts of Washington thrown in.

Life would be so much easier, and the house less crammed, if I’d just throw in the towel and buy a Kindle. All those books in the book room could be replaced by an object the size of one paperback. A whole library reduced to portability, and a lot easier to dust. But where’s the fun in that?

Someday I’ll screw up my courage and actually go through those boxes and those closets and winnow out some of the crap. I’m not looking forward to that. Maybe I’ll wait until it reaches the point where I need a storage locker. Until then, I’ll just shut the door.