Ancient history -- WHC 2007
In 2007 I attended World Horror Con with thehollowbox, and for all of the sessions we made it to, I kept pretty extensive notes. I'd gone with the intention of doing a bit of an experiment -- a news-style writeup of the sessions, similar to conference writeups I've done for Gamasutra. There was nothing like this available for spec fic conventions, as far as I knew, and that was a shame, considering the amount of wisdom and expertise doled out at these things.
I did actually get interest from a couple of publications for the piece, and made the mistake of committing initially to one that had expressed interest first. They made some comments, requested a rewrite, then went on a hiatus that lasted months longer than they'd claimed, severely dating the material. And then when they came back online, they weren't answering my emails. So what would have been a pretty interesting thing at the time wound up collecting dust. Given the current discussion on WHC 2008, I figured it might be a good time to just kick it out for free, since I think a lot of this material -- particularly the Grand Master panels and the Joe Landsdale interview -- is extremely interesting and ought to be available for common consumption.
I do believe that there is a great deal of lost wisdom from undocumented conventions. One of the old-fashioned tendencies of the "World" conventions especially is a distinctly poor attitude toward the press. WHC only offered a press pass if you had a TV network and a camera; this behavior toward potential press coverage is very self-defeating (and unprofessional, if one considers the bar of professional conferences in other industries), and both creates and is potentially created by the generally casual tone taken with convention reports. Social reports are great, and it's true that a majority of convention attendees are likely there for the social aspects, but it does mean that a lot of knowledge goes unrecorded. So I thought I'd try my hand at a different style, and here it is.
World Horror Convention 2007 Report
Erin Hoffman
World Horror Con 2007, held in Toronto this year, packed a heavy luminary punch in a low population setting. It was nearly impossible to cross the small convention area without stumbling across three or more grand masters of the craft. The event's great strengths were in its program participants, though the small scale venue in the heart of Toronto had much to offer on the social side, too, with a terrific con suite provided by the folk from Ad Astra and a friendly membership that suited the openness of the city and the wild variety of discussion available.
I should say by way of disclaimer that while I have great interest the use of horror in fiction and in the work of particular horror authors such as Gary Braunbeck and Brian Keene, I write and read primarily fantasy and science fiction. Despite this, particularly with genre-breaking writing masters such as Joe Lansdale and David Morrell in attendance, there was more than enough fodder for my hungry brain at WHC.
The convention was held at the Marriott Toronto Downtown Eaton Centre, and the late-March weather, often unpredictable, was stunning, crisp and bright. At just under 500 attendees, WHC had enough of a con presence to ensure you saw a few badges cruising downtown, while still leaving enough breathing room for personal comfort. None of the sessions suffered from poor space or overcrowding, and all in all, the place ran like a well-oiled machine, but felt like a smaller town community picnic, and the locals’ enthusiasm for hosting such an international event was contagious.
These sessions, provided in chronological order, were some of the highlights. A full conference schedule remains online at http://www.whc2007.org/. I also attended and enjoyed “What Exactly is Horror?”, “What Do You Mean 'Edit'? How Hard Can it Be to Put Together a 'Year's Best' Anthology”, “Young Blood: New Writers to Look Out For”, but this article can only be so long.
Horror Writers Association Presents: What Are Agents and Editors Looking For, and Never Want to See Again?
Editors Don D'Auria, Ellen Datlow, Liz Gorinsky, George Mann, and agents Josha Bilmes and Dorothy Lumley on Thursday morning discussed common mistakes in query letters and their preferences for what to receive.
Joshua Bilmes wanted queries to have more than “my name is”: agents “want to know about you,” he said, and are interested in the personalities of those they'd represent. Lacking a prior introduction (such as a personal meeting at a convention), something in the query letter should let the agent know that you're an interesting person to work with. Bilmes pointed out that most query letters devote four paragraphs to their book and nearly none to themselves as individuals. But “don't be cute,” he said, and Liz Gorinsky agreed, advising authors to do their research.
“It's easier to go wrong in the submission package than it is to go right,” she said, and recommended keeping things short and testing the query letter on three unbiased outside observers. Dorothy Lumley recommended that query letters “just be straightforward”. “You need to have a sense of business,” she added.
“One thing I don't really want to see is that it took you ten years to write this novel,” Don Doria of Leisure Books said. Editors want to know that they're buying an investment, buying into a career or purpose. “It's not worth it to me to buy one book.”
In the case of multiple-book series, the panel agreed that the individual submission should stand on its own, but if an author has plans for continuing books, one paragraph synopsizing the remainder of the series is appropriate, outlining which characters would be returning and major plot points. Liz Gorinsky emphasized that the storyline cannot require the remainder of the series to feel complete.
The agents and editors as a whole preferred that synopses summarize the book from beginning to end; Don Doria said that he often received submissions that present the first three chapters and synopsize the remainder, where he would prefer to see a complete synopsis.
George Mann of Solaris wanted a handle (a three-sentence pitch), then a paragraph, then the full synopsis. “I want to see the full story from start to end.” He emphasized the expression of author competency through the query letter and handle; “I want to know that you know your book well enough to tell me what it is in a page,” he said.
The panel also agreed that they tended to respond better to physical submissions as opposed to email, which is easier to misplace or dismiss.
Short Shrift:Can You Make a Living Writing Short Fiction?
Moderator Gemma Files joined Lucy A. Snyder, L. H. Maynard, Tony Richards, and M. P. N. Sims for a discussion on the life of short fiction in genre writing on Friday afternoon.
Lucy Snyder started off the panel with a series of projected statistics. With no pets, no kids, no health concerns, and shared rent, she postulated that a person could live on $600/month - or, in word count parlance, 20 short stories a month. The poverty level, at $817/month, would break down to 1800 salable words of fiction produced per day. These dizzying and depressing statistics, which provided a clear answer to the panel title, briefly silenced the room.
Panelists agreed that professional short story writers who did not write novels relied on other writing income sources, usually nonfiction, to support themselves. “Can you make a living writing? Yes. Can you make a living writing only short stories? I think not,” Gemma Files said.
The panelists also discussed why short fiction has become a niche market. “I think it has to do with fewer people reading in general, and dedicated readers generally want to read novels,” Snyder said. “A short story takes longer to read even though it's shorter.”
However, the panelists agreed that its very density is part of short fiction’s value. “You do it because you love it, you do it because it keeps you going... It lets you experiment, it lets you find your voice. It gives you a chance to learn what you're good at,” Jeff Maynard said.
“So you can't make a living off of short fiction, but you can base a career off of it,” Sims later added. All offered the observation that authors with a background in solid short fiction seemed less likely to become “one hit wonders” when they moved on to novels.
The panel also discussed how the Internet is changing short fiction. Lucy Snyder cited a rise in prevalence of online magazines as an incentive for fiction to be shorter in length due to screen-reading fatigue. Files added a prediction: “The other trend that I see coming out of the 'Net is the return to serialized fiction.” An intriguing idea, considering that lower-tech challenges for serialized fiction, namely unavailability of early stories, are not an issue on the Internet.
How to Build a Better Monster
The monster panel, moderated by Monica S. Kuebler of Rue Morgue Magazine and Burning Effigy Press, was one of the panels I enjoyed the most and also one that least adhered to my expectations for it. I'm a sucker for (as Niven would put it) “critters”, so the panel's name was one that caught my eye, but Kuebler's moderation kept information flowing at a swift pace, and despite the panel's film focus (I'd been hoping for a literature bend) a great deal of what was discussed applied broadly to horror, fiction, and human nature.
Writer and film maker Gregory Lamberson, special effects artist Michael McCarty, pop-culture academic Kendall R. Philips, and award-winning visual artist and WHC Guest of Honor John Picacio weighed in on monsters and their makeup.
Monica started off by asking the panelists for their picks for most effective film monster. Michael McCarty chose Jaws, and discussed the element of the unknown in horror. “There's more a fear of something you can't see than something you see a lot of,” he said, and the panelists discussed the serendipity of Jaws being largely an unseen menace, even though this emerged from budget and not original intent.
Greg Lamberson's pick was Alien. He said that the filmmakers were up against sharp challenges: “ ' How can we do things that haven't been done before? ' ” he paraphrased, and noted that the filmmakers had to make a monster for an audience that had become accustomed to monster parodies. He also noted that the alien was used poorly when it dominated the screen, as opposed to when it was left in the shadows of the viewers’ imagination and perception.
John Picacio's choice was The Invisible Man. “Sometimes the thing...that you're most familiar with, that you don't know has this horrific underbelly that you're just now aware of... is the most frightening.” He cited the closeness of the Invisible Man, its presence in the neighborhood of its victims, and the victims' response to it, as uniquely compelling.
Kendall R. Phillips said that he preferred the unexpected - movies like Dracula and Halloween that took expected tropes and veered away from them.
“Great art has to respond to its own time. The great archetypes work from generation to generation,” Picacio said, adding that artists working with archetypes must find the core universal elements within archetypes and clothe them in the trappings of their time to communicate with new audiences.
“There's a reason why Dracula came from Eastern Europe,” Philips agreed, citing the xenophobia of the time and the regions it influenced.
Greg Lamberson said that there was a certain moratorium on images that applied especially to monsters; a given monster could not be remade too soon after someone else had used the image, and a given image can't be scary twice in the same generation. “Every generation needs their new scary monsters,” he said.
The panel also discussed taking elements of monsters from nature, when creating them; McCarty offered anecdotes on his recent work with Stephen King's The Mist and how the creation team sourced sea creatures for the tentacle-like parts of the monsters that inhabited the mist world. He noted that translating monsters from text to screen often involved worldbuilding and environment consideration, factors that led his team to alter some of King's descriptions to create monsters that could be frightening and convincing living in a visually realized perpetual mist.
When asked about the future, the panelists agreed that a distinct trend toward “human monsters” had taken hold in fiction. “We've got enough monsters in the news,” Picacio offered, and Lamberson said “I think the current trend is toward human monsters,” and especially torturers and their victims. McCarty believed that video games played a role in the escalation of violence in film as filmmakers try to one-up the interactive experience by offering more intense visuals.
World Horror Convention 2007 Grand Master: Joe R. Lansdale
Thomas Monteleone interviewed Joe Lansdale, voted WHC Grand Master this past February, in one of the convention's great highlights on Friday afternoon. Known for the “Texas weird” influence of his East Texas upbringing, as well as his dozens of acclaimed novels and short stories, Lansdale is one of a handful of genre writers hailed by the mainstream. In 2004 his short story “Bubba Ho Tep” was transcribed for the silver screen by Don Coscarelli, and his work spans a variety of media, from theatre to film to comic books and more. Monteleone He began the interview with questions about Lansdale's youth. “I think I learned more in my Journalism classes than my English classes, about writing,” Lansdale said, adding that he'd known he wanted to be a writer at age 9.
Of his childhood, he described his school days and the differing standards of the time. “They'd make sure that your sideburns didn't go below the earlobe.” In high school he'd been asked to resign as vice president of the student body because his hair was too long.
Lansdale also talked about his family. “My father was not a belligerent man, but he was old school.” He told a story about his father having beaten the crap out of the school principal for striking his son, and another, familiar to fans, of a puppy Lansdale'd had that had been digging in a neighbor's flower bed. The neighbor came out, saw the dog, and hit it on the back of the head with a lead pipe, then threw it in the nearby creek. When his father found out about it, “Dad said 'You stay here' and of course I didn't,” Lansdale said, and watched his father knock on the neighbor's door, then hit him in the nose as soon as the man emerged. He spun him by his ankles to flatten the rest of the flowers, then threw him in the creek. The puppy, which Lansdale's father rescued, still survived downstream. Lansdale said he remembered his father crushing aspirin into the dog's water. This from-life story became “Mad Dog Summer,” which in turn became the Edgar Award-winning book The Bottoms.
“My dad used to be a carnival boxer and wrestler, I should probably mention,” he said after these stories, to laughter. His father was born in 1909, when Wyatt Earp and Annie Oakley were still alive, and grew up in the Great Depression. “There was no law as we know it now,” he said.
In college Lansdale's hairstyle woes continued. As a student he attained the help of the ACLU in suing his college, which had rejected him because his hair was too long. He won, and attended, studying journalism.
Lansdale's mother, unlike his father, had an 11th grade education, and loved reading. His father saw flats of his first novel, and his mother read them to him. “He was just as proud as he could be,” Lansdale said. See Lansdale's website for details on his beginnings with martial arts, and instruction from his father that grew into a lifetime passion and the development of his own martial arts technique, called Shen Chuan.
Lansdale was no stranger to fighting. “When I was young - I was irritable,” he said. “We lived in a rough area - I didn't start trouble, but I was too quick to fight.”
But Lansdale's ideological shit disturbing was not limited to haircuts. “I was also for civil rights, so I was out of step for my time,” he said. He opposed the Vietnam war, and, though he was in college, dropped out specifically to get drafted, drawing #28. He then scored too high on the Army's IQ test, and they wanted to send him to officer training school. “I said 'you missed the point', and refused.” They offered him Conscientious Objector status, which he also refused, on the grounds that he did not oppose all war, just this one. “I'd've fought in World War II, I told them,” he said. The recruiter told him he should go to Canada, but he also refused, and forced them to arrest him. They sent him home, told him to pack his things for an eighteen month prison stay, then sent him to a psychologist, who, perhaps conveniently, found him unfit. “'You know, we got a feelin' you might shoot somebody you ain't supposed to,' ” Lansdale recalled, laughing softly. He said that in all of this he was fortunate in his timing, for the war was by that time winding down, and already highly unpopular.
He made his first sale in 1973, a nonfiction piece, and for some years after sold articles to True West. Lansdale's first fiction sale was around 1978, “then in 1981 I started selling full time and have been doing it ever since.” He said he'd written between three and four hundred short stories, and said that he'd been inspired by the work and success of David Morrell, listing also as his influences Edgar Rice Burroughs (as his largest), Jack London, Mark Twain, and Rudyard Kipling. He said that as a child he'd slept with the Iliad under his pillow because he'd read that Alexander the Great had done so.
Lansdale also read H. G. Welles and George Orwell, and spoke of the differences between genre fiction of that age and this. “There was a time when you could read every science fiction author there was,” he said. In college he read Flannery O'Connor and Hemingway.
Media also played a great part in his early influences. “I watched all these crazy science fiction and horror films,” he said. “You'd watch anything” back then, since SF and horror were so rare. “People don't have love and appreciation for this stuff because it's too easy to get,” he said of modern comics and science fiction.
“Comic books were the most major influence in my entire life,” he said. “They show you that you can blend genres, because they did.” Lansdale's defiance for genre confinements remains a defining aspect of his work. When pressed by Monteleone to choose one genre, he refused and answered, “The Lansdale genre -- it's the only one I know.” But he did show a preference for short fiction, though he maintained he would get tired of doing any one thing exclusively: “If I had my druthers I'd write nothing but short stories... weird short stories, probably.”
“There's nothing weirder than Texas weird,” he said of his life's influences, recalling that he'd moved to Berkeley once and then moved back. He told a story about a blind groundskeeper hired by the church next door, a bizarre personal incident that became the foundation for “Mister Weed-Eater”, and another story about a woman in his neighborhood who became the inspiration for “The Phone Woman”.
Currently he has a new novel, Leather Maiden, coming out with Knopf, and Ridley Scott is working on an interpretation of his The Big Blow. He has another seven or eight options floating around and awaiting exercise as well. An audience member asked about Bubba Nosferatu, and he said it was “out of his hands”.
Monteleone closed by asking Lansdale how he'd changed over time, as his writing has been attributed to a wide variety of genres and subgenres. “I haven't really changed that much,” Lansdale said, “people just started calling what I was writing something else.”
Masters of the Craft
Of the many convention highlights, the grandmaster panel held just before noon on Saturday was undoubtedly, for myself and others, the event's zenith. Hosted by David Morrell, himself a master, the panel included Joe Lansdale, F. Paul Wilson, illustrator Gahan Wilson, Ramsey Campbell, and Robert J. Sawyer.
“Although I write thrillers, my heart is deeply embedded in the horror community,” Morrell began, and said that in all the years he'd been attending conventions he'd never seen a panel so distinguished.
“That just means we're old,” Lansdale quipped, and Morrell asked each of the panelists to give their own introduction. Lansdale rattled off his accomplishments, including “thirty-something awards,” and said, “and I'm just kickin' ass in Italy.”
Gahan Wilson introduced himself as “the other Wilson”, and Ramsey Campbell called the rest of the panelists whippersnappers, saying that he'd made his first sale in 1961.
Morrell began the discussion by asking the panelists for their thoughts on developing a career. He noted the “amazing falloff” in fiction for a first appearance; many first novelists never publish again, and many who publish a second will not publish a third. “How do you attain this longevity?” he asked.
“The trick of success, in my opinion, is you...have to have a mad conviction that you're going to succeed. Any sensible examination of your chances to succeed in any of the arts is absolutely hopeless,” Gahan Wilson said, emphasizing “persistence.” “Don't do it unless you're nuts,” he said.
Sawyer said that he'd faced considerable opposition in choosing his career path, but his unwavering position in response came down to his realization that he had only one life to live, and writing was what he loved to do.
F. Paul Wilson said “I never thought I could make a living as a writer.” He went to med school, sent stories in premed to Analog “and anybody who had an address,” he laughed. It took him five years to sell his first story. “And then I developed this obsessive compulsive disorder called writing.” By 1990, he was making more writing than he was as a doctor. “I do think writers should stay in touch with real people instead of writers and editors,” he said, and noted that he still practices medicine one and a half days a week. “Luck is a big part of it,” he said, of success.
“It never occurred to me that I'd fail, I never even thought of it, because I had no other choice,” Lansdale said. “I did anything I had to do to make money,” he said, in terms of paying the bills before his writing would pay for them. “It's not luck in the broader sense of it,” he said, responding to F. Paul Wilson -- “A lot of people can't take defeat.” Of writing, “It's not a romantic profession,” he said, with the loneliness of the craft's practice and the almost sociopathic impersonality of the submission and rejection process. He launched into an anecdote on his earliest engagements with that process, saying that in the beginning he sent any story to any market. Then one day he landed a copy of Writer's Market -- “and I thought - 'oh! They specialize!' ” he said, to much laughter. Lansdale also emphasized the support he received from his family. “No wife, no career, I've always said.”
The panelists agreed that another key element to a long term writing career and the longevity Morrell mentioned was remaining true to the drive and vision that powers a person internally; remaining true to oneself. “You have to write what you want to read,” F. Paul Wilson said, and Lansdale added that each of the panelists had created their own genres. “It's better to be a first rate version of yourself than a second rate version of someone else,” Morrell said, an original adage from his writing instruction books and classes.
The discussion then moved to the internal workings of individuals as craftspeople, and the writing life. “It's a constant little parasite,” Lansdale said, of the drive to write. “You never get to rest like other people.”
In describing internal drives and personal themes, Lansdale related an anecdote about Theodore Sturgeon having faced writer's block as a result of depression and anxiety in the face of McCarthyism. A cohort of his gave him a scene -- a woman stepping off of a train -- and instructed Sturgeon to “just write the story,” and his concerns would manifest through the fiction. This turned out to be true, and once Sturgeon began writing, he didn't stop again. Lansdale said that he finds the same to be true of his work; his concerns - he noted the the Iraq war and racism as examples -- come through in his writing.
In terms of following one's own inner drive Morrell noted also that another element of the panelists' distinction in the larger writing world was that they didn't think of themselves as solely writing genre fiction. Working toward solid craft and writing for oneself in that way, he said, gave a writer a degree of immunity to fluctuations in the popularity levels of genre itself. Noted many times throughout the conference was the current low popularity of horror as a whole. Morrell said that, despite this lull, many readers who would recoil at the suggestion of reading horror were nonetheless Stephen King fans, because they did not think of him as a writer of horror but rather as a writer of fiction that they enjoyed.
However, he said, attention to the history of the medium or genre in which one works is of paramount importance. He said that he had a great “pet peeve” in “how uneducated many writers are in the history of horror.” This drew immediate agreement from the panelists.
Lansdale said he was bothered by people who haven't read anything written more than two years ago and think of themselves as horror aficionados. This launched the panel into a discussion of what they considered necessary reading in genre fiction, and a long stream of names, a few of which were contributed by the audience and rapidly taken up by the panelists: C. M. Kornbluth, Henry Kuttner, Cordwainer Smith, and Theodore Sturgeon populated a majority of the first round. The panelists noted with remorse that “there are people writing in the field who don't even know who these authors are.” The impromptu pantheon listing continued with Jack Finney, Robert Nathan, Charles Beaumont, Robert Aickman, Sax Rohmer, Fritz Leiber, Thomas Tryon, and others, in a rapid exchange that unfortunately streamed ahead of my note-taking speed.
Altogether despite the occasional hiccup in administration the 2007 World Horror Convention was agreed to be a success, with an array of stellar guests, a friendly atmosphere, and a unique and beautiful urban location. I'm pleased to have attended and to have the opportunity to attempt to preserve some of the wisdom dispensed there. Any who might be interested in my notes from sessions mentioned above but not annotated are welcome to contact me via email.
I did actually get interest from a couple of publications for the piece, and made the mistake of committing initially to one that had expressed interest first. They made some comments, requested a rewrite, then went on a hiatus that lasted months longer than they'd claimed, severely dating the material. And then when they came back online, they weren't answering my emails. So what would have been a pretty interesting thing at the time wound up collecting dust. Given the current discussion on WHC 2008, I figured it might be a good time to just kick it out for free, since I think a lot of this material -- particularly the Grand Master panels and the Joe Landsdale interview -- is extremely interesting and ought to be available for common consumption.
I do believe that there is a great deal of lost wisdom from undocumented conventions. One of the old-fashioned tendencies of the "World" conventions especially is a distinctly poor attitude toward the press. WHC only offered a press pass if you had a TV network and a camera; this behavior toward potential press coverage is very self-defeating (and unprofessional, if one considers the bar of professional conferences in other industries), and both creates and is potentially created by the generally casual tone taken with convention reports. Social reports are great, and it's true that a majority of convention attendees are likely there for the social aspects, but it does mean that a lot of knowledge goes unrecorded. So I thought I'd try my hand at a different style, and here it is.
World Horror Convention 2007 Report
Erin Hoffman
World Horror Con 2007, held in Toronto this year, packed a heavy luminary punch in a low population setting. It was nearly impossible to cross the small convention area without stumbling across three or more grand masters of the craft. The event's great strengths were in its program participants, though the small scale venue in the heart of Toronto had much to offer on the social side, too, with a terrific con suite provided by the folk from Ad Astra and a friendly membership that suited the openness of the city and the wild variety of discussion available.
I should say by way of disclaimer that while I have great interest the use of horror in fiction and in the work of particular horror authors such as Gary Braunbeck and Brian Keene, I write and read primarily fantasy and science fiction. Despite this, particularly with genre-breaking writing masters such as Joe Lansdale and David Morrell in attendance, there was more than enough fodder for my hungry brain at WHC.
The convention was held at the Marriott Toronto Downtown Eaton Centre, and the late-March weather, often unpredictable, was stunning, crisp and bright. At just under 500 attendees, WHC had enough of a con presence to ensure you saw a few badges cruising downtown, while still leaving enough breathing room for personal comfort. None of the sessions suffered from poor space or overcrowding, and all in all, the place ran like a well-oiled machine, but felt like a smaller town community picnic, and the locals’ enthusiasm for hosting such an international event was contagious.
These sessions, provided in chronological order, were some of the highlights. A full conference schedule remains online at http://www.whc2007.org/. I also attended and enjoyed “What Exactly is Horror?”, “What Do You Mean 'Edit'? How Hard Can it Be to Put Together a 'Year's Best' Anthology”, “Young Blood: New Writers to Look Out For”, but this article can only be so long.
Horror Writers Association Presents: What Are Agents and Editors Looking For, and Never Want to See Again?
Editors Don D'Auria, Ellen Datlow, Liz Gorinsky, George Mann, and agents Josha Bilmes and Dorothy Lumley on Thursday morning discussed common mistakes in query letters and their preferences for what to receive.
Joshua Bilmes wanted queries to have more than “my name is”: agents “want to know about you,” he said, and are interested in the personalities of those they'd represent. Lacking a prior introduction (such as a personal meeting at a convention), something in the query letter should let the agent know that you're an interesting person to work with. Bilmes pointed out that most query letters devote four paragraphs to their book and nearly none to themselves as individuals. But “don't be cute,” he said, and Liz Gorinsky agreed, advising authors to do their research.
“It's easier to go wrong in the submission package than it is to go right,” she said, and recommended keeping things short and testing the query letter on three unbiased outside observers. Dorothy Lumley recommended that query letters “just be straightforward”. “You need to have a sense of business,” she added.
“One thing I don't really want to see is that it took you ten years to write this novel,” Don Doria of Leisure Books said. Editors want to know that they're buying an investment, buying into a career or purpose. “It's not worth it to me to buy one book.”
In the case of multiple-book series, the panel agreed that the individual submission should stand on its own, but if an author has plans for continuing books, one paragraph synopsizing the remainder of the series is appropriate, outlining which characters would be returning and major plot points. Liz Gorinsky emphasized that the storyline cannot require the remainder of the series to feel complete.
The agents and editors as a whole preferred that synopses summarize the book from beginning to end; Don Doria said that he often received submissions that present the first three chapters and synopsize the remainder, where he would prefer to see a complete synopsis.
George Mann of Solaris wanted a handle (a three-sentence pitch), then a paragraph, then the full synopsis. “I want to see the full story from start to end.” He emphasized the expression of author competency through the query letter and handle; “I want to know that you know your book well enough to tell me what it is in a page,” he said.
The panel also agreed that they tended to respond better to physical submissions as opposed to email, which is easier to misplace or dismiss.
Short Shrift:Can You Make a Living Writing Short Fiction?
Moderator Gemma Files joined Lucy A. Snyder, L. H. Maynard, Tony Richards, and M. P. N. Sims for a discussion on the life of short fiction in genre writing on Friday afternoon.
Lucy Snyder started off the panel with a series of projected statistics. With no pets, no kids, no health concerns, and shared rent, she postulated that a person could live on $600/month - or, in word count parlance, 20 short stories a month. The poverty level, at $817/month, would break down to 1800 salable words of fiction produced per day. These dizzying and depressing statistics, which provided a clear answer to the panel title, briefly silenced the room.
Panelists agreed that professional short story writers who did not write novels relied on other writing income sources, usually nonfiction, to support themselves. “Can you make a living writing? Yes. Can you make a living writing only short stories? I think not,” Gemma Files said.
The panelists also discussed why short fiction has become a niche market. “I think it has to do with fewer people reading in general, and dedicated readers generally want to read novels,” Snyder said. “A short story takes longer to read even though it's shorter.”
However, the panelists agreed that its very density is part of short fiction’s value. “You do it because you love it, you do it because it keeps you going... It lets you experiment, it lets you find your voice. It gives you a chance to learn what you're good at,” Jeff Maynard said.
“So you can't make a living off of short fiction, but you can base a career off of it,” Sims later added. All offered the observation that authors with a background in solid short fiction seemed less likely to become “one hit wonders” when they moved on to novels.
The panel also discussed how the Internet is changing short fiction. Lucy Snyder cited a rise in prevalence of online magazines as an incentive for fiction to be shorter in length due to screen-reading fatigue. Files added a prediction: “The other trend that I see coming out of the 'Net is the return to serialized fiction.” An intriguing idea, considering that lower-tech challenges for serialized fiction, namely unavailability of early stories, are not an issue on the Internet.
How to Build a Better Monster
The monster panel, moderated by Monica S. Kuebler of Rue Morgue Magazine and Burning Effigy Press, was one of the panels I enjoyed the most and also one that least adhered to my expectations for it. I'm a sucker for (as Niven would put it) “critters”, so the panel's name was one that caught my eye, but Kuebler's moderation kept information flowing at a swift pace, and despite the panel's film focus (I'd been hoping for a literature bend) a great deal of what was discussed applied broadly to horror, fiction, and human nature.
Writer and film maker Gregory Lamberson, special effects artist Michael McCarty, pop-culture academic Kendall R. Philips, and award-winning visual artist and WHC Guest of Honor John Picacio weighed in on monsters and their makeup.
Monica started off by asking the panelists for their picks for most effective film monster. Michael McCarty chose Jaws, and discussed the element of the unknown in horror. “There's more a fear of something you can't see than something you see a lot of,” he said, and the panelists discussed the serendipity of Jaws being largely an unseen menace, even though this emerged from budget and not original intent.
Greg Lamberson's pick was Alien. He said that the filmmakers were up against sharp challenges: “ ' How can we do things that haven't been done before? ' ” he paraphrased, and noted that the filmmakers had to make a monster for an audience that had become accustomed to monster parodies. He also noted that the alien was used poorly when it dominated the screen, as opposed to when it was left in the shadows of the viewers’ imagination and perception.
John Picacio's choice was The Invisible Man. “Sometimes the thing...that you're most familiar with, that you don't know has this horrific underbelly that you're just now aware of... is the most frightening.” He cited the closeness of the Invisible Man, its presence in the neighborhood of its victims, and the victims' response to it, as uniquely compelling.
Kendall R. Phillips said that he preferred the unexpected - movies like Dracula and Halloween that took expected tropes and veered away from them.
“Great art has to respond to its own time. The great archetypes work from generation to generation,” Picacio said, adding that artists working with archetypes must find the core universal elements within archetypes and clothe them in the trappings of their time to communicate with new audiences.
“There's a reason why Dracula came from Eastern Europe,” Philips agreed, citing the xenophobia of the time and the regions it influenced.
Greg Lamberson said that there was a certain moratorium on images that applied especially to monsters; a given monster could not be remade too soon after someone else had used the image, and a given image can't be scary twice in the same generation. “Every generation needs their new scary monsters,” he said.
The panel also discussed taking elements of monsters from nature, when creating them; McCarty offered anecdotes on his recent work with Stephen King's The Mist and how the creation team sourced sea creatures for the tentacle-like parts of the monsters that inhabited the mist world. He noted that translating monsters from text to screen often involved worldbuilding and environment consideration, factors that led his team to alter some of King's descriptions to create monsters that could be frightening and convincing living in a visually realized perpetual mist.
When asked about the future, the panelists agreed that a distinct trend toward “human monsters” had taken hold in fiction. “We've got enough monsters in the news,” Picacio offered, and Lamberson said “I think the current trend is toward human monsters,” and especially torturers and their victims. McCarty believed that video games played a role in the escalation of violence in film as filmmakers try to one-up the interactive experience by offering more intense visuals.
World Horror Convention 2007 Grand Master: Joe R. Lansdale
Thomas Monteleone interviewed Joe Lansdale, voted WHC Grand Master this past February, in one of the convention's great highlights on Friday afternoon. Known for the “Texas weird” influence of his East Texas upbringing, as well as his dozens of acclaimed novels and short stories, Lansdale is one of a handful of genre writers hailed by the mainstream. In 2004 his short story “Bubba Ho Tep” was transcribed for the silver screen by Don Coscarelli, and his work spans a variety of media, from theatre to film to comic books and more. Monteleone He began the interview with questions about Lansdale's youth. “I think I learned more in my Journalism classes than my English classes, about writing,” Lansdale said, adding that he'd known he wanted to be a writer at age 9.
Of his childhood, he described his school days and the differing standards of the time. “They'd make sure that your sideburns didn't go below the earlobe.” In high school he'd been asked to resign as vice president of the student body because his hair was too long.
Lansdale also talked about his family. “My father was not a belligerent man, but he was old school.” He told a story about his father having beaten the crap out of the school principal for striking his son, and another, familiar to fans, of a puppy Lansdale'd had that had been digging in a neighbor's flower bed. The neighbor came out, saw the dog, and hit it on the back of the head with a lead pipe, then threw it in the nearby creek. When his father found out about it, “Dad said 'You stay here' and of course I didn't,” Lansdale said, and watched his father knock on the neighbor's door, then hit him in the nose as soon as the man emerged. He spun him by his ankles to flatten the rest of the flowers, then threw him in the creek. The puppy, which Lansdale's father rescued, still survived downstream. Lansdale said he remembered his father crushing aspirin into the dog's water. This from-life story became “Mad Dog Summer,” which in turn became the Edgar Award-winning book The Bottoms.
“My dad used to be a carnival boxer and wrestler, I should probably mention,” he said after these stories, to laughter. His father was born in 1909, when Wyatt Earp and Annie Oakley were still alive, and grew up in the Great Depression. “There was no law as we know it now,” he said.
In college Lansdale's hairstyle woes continued. As a student he attained the help of the ACLU in suing his college, which had rejected him because his hair was too long. He won, and attended, studying journalism.
Lansdale's mother, unlike his father, had an 11th grade education, and loved reading. His father saw flats of his first novel, and his mother read them to him. “He was just as proud as he could be,” Lansdale said. See Lansdale's website for details on his beginnings with martial arts, and instruction from his father that grew into a lifetime passion and the development of his own martial arts technique, called Shen Chuan.
Lansdale was no stranger to fighting. “When I was young - I was irritable,” he said. “We lived in a rough area - I didn't start trouble, but I was too quick to fight.”
But Lansdale's ideological shit disturbing was not limited to haircuts. “I was also for civil rights, so I was out of step for my time,” he said. He opposed the Vietnam war, and, though he was in college, dropped out specifically to get drafted, drawing #28. He then scored too high on the Army's IQ test, and they wanted to send him to officer training school. “I said 'you missed the point', and refused.” They offered him Conscientious Objector status, which he also refused, on the grounds that he did not oppose all war, just this one. “I'd've fought in World War II, I told them,” he said. The recruiter told him he should go to Canada, but he also refused, and forced them to arrest him. They sent him home, told him to pack his things for an eighteen month prison stay, then sent him to a psychologist, who, perhaps conveniently, found him unfit. “'You know, we got a feelin' you might shoot somebody you ain't supposed to,' ” Lansdale recalled, laughing softly. He said that in all of this he was fortunate in his timing, for the war was by that time winding down, and already highly unpopular.
He made his first sale in 1973, a nonfiction piece, and for some years after sold articles to True West. Lansdale's first fiction sale was around 1978, “then in 1981 I started selling full time and have been doing it ever since.” He said he'd written between three and four hundred short stories, and said that he'd been inspired by the work and success of David Morrell, listing also as his influences Edgar Rice Burroughs (as his largest), Jack London, Mark Twain, and Rudyard Kipling. He said that as a child he'd slept with the Iliad under his pillow because he'd read that Alexander the Great had done so.
Lansdale also read H. G. Welles and George Orwell, and spoke of the differences between genre fiction of that age and this. “There was a time when you could read every science fiction author there was,” he said. In college he read Flannery O'Connor and Hemingway.
Media also played a great part in his early influences. “I watched all these crazy science fiction and horror films,” he said. “You'd watch anything” back then, since SF and horror were so rare. “People don't have love and appreciation for this stuff because it's too easy to get,” he said of modern comics and science fiction.
“Comic books were the most major influence in my entire life,” he said. “They show you that you can blend genres, because they did.” Lansdale's defiance for genre confinements remains a defining aspect of his work. When pressed by Monteleone to choose one genre, he refused and answered, “The Lansdale genre -- it's the only one I know.” But he did show a preference for short fiction, though he maintained he would get tired of doing any one thing exclusively: “If I had my druthers I'd write nothing but short stories... weird short stories, probably.”
“There's nothing weirder than Texas weird,” he said of his life's influences, recalling that he'd moved to Berkeley once and then moved back. He told a story about a blind groundskeeper hired by the church next door, a bizarre personal incident that became the foundation for “Mister Weed-Eater”, and another story about a woman in his neighborhood who became the inspiration for “The Phone Woman”.
Currently he has a new novel, Leather Maiden, coming out with Knopf, and Ridley Scott is working on an interpretation of his The Big Blow. He has another seven or eight options floating around and awaiting exercise as well. An audience member asked about Bubba Nosferatu, and he said it was “out of his hands”.
Monteleone closed by asking Lansdale how he'd changed over time, as his writing has been attributed to a wide variety of genres and subgenres. “I haven't really changed that much,” Lansdale said, “people just started calling what I was writing something else.”
Masters of the Craft
Of the many convention highlights, the grandmaster panel held just before noon on Saturday was undoubtedly, for myself and others, the event's zenith. Hosted by David Morrell, himself a master, the panel included Joe Lansdale, F. Paul Wilson, illustrator Gahan Wilson, Ramsey Campbell, and Robert J. Sawyer.
“Although I write thrillers, my heart is deeply embedded in the horror community,” Morrell began, and said that in all the years he'd been attending conventions he'd never seen a panel so distinguished.
“That just means we're old,” Lansdale quipped, and Morrell asked each of the panelists to give their own introduction. Lansdale rattled off his accomplishments, including “thirty-something awards,” and said, “and I'm just kickin' ass in Italy.”
Gahan Wilson introduced himself as “the other Wilson”, and Ramsey Campbell called the rest of the panelists whippersnappers, saying that he'd made his first sale in 1961.
Morrell began the discussion by asking the panelists for their thoughts on developing a career. He noted the “amazing falloff” in fiction for a first appearance; many first novelists never publish again, and many who publish a second will not publish a third. “How do you attain this longevity?” he asked.
“The trick of success, in my opinion, is you...have to have a mad conviction that you're going to succeed. Any sensible examination of your chances to succeed in any of the arts is absolutely hopeless,” Gahan Wilson said, emphasizing “persistence.” “Don't do it unless you're nuts,” he said.
Sawyer said that he'd faced considerable opposition in choosing his career path, but his unwavering position in response came down to his realization that he had only one life to live, and writing was what he loved to do.
F. Paul Wilson said “I never thought I could make a living as a writer.” He went to med school, sent stories in premed to Analog “and anybody who had an address,” he laughed. It took him five years to sell his first story. “And then I developed this obsessive compulsive disorder called writing.” By 1990, he was making more writing than he was as a doctor. “I do think writers should stay in touch with real people instead of writers and editors,” he said, and noted that he still practices medicine one and a half days a week. “Luck is a big part of it,” he said, of success.
“It never occurred to me that I'd fail, I never even thought of it, because I had no other choice,” Lansdale said. “I did anything I had to do to make money,” he said, in terms of paying the bills before his writing would pay for them. “It's not luck in the broader sense of it,” he said, responding to F. Paul Wilson -- “A lot of people can't take defeat.” Of writing, “It's not a romantic profession,” he said, with the loneliness of the craft's practice and the almost sociopathic impersonality of the submission and rejection process. He launched into an anecdote on his earliest engagements with that process, saying that in the beginning he sent any story to any market. Then one day he landed a copy of Writer's Market -- “and I thought - 'oh! They specialize!' ” he said, to much laughter. Lansdale also emphasized the support he received from his family. “No wife, no career, I've always said.”
The panelists agreed that another key element to a long term writing career and the longevity Morrell mentioned was remaining true to the drive and vision that powers a person internally; remaining true to oneself. “You have to write what you want to read,” F. Paul Wilson said, and Lansdale added that each of the panelists had created their own genres. “It's better to be a first rate version of yourself than a second rate version of someone else,” Morrell said, an original adage from his writing instruction books and classes.
The discussion then moved to the internal workings of individuals as craftspeople, and the writing life. “It's a constant little parasite,” Lansdale said, of the drive to write. “You never get to rest like other people.”
In describing internal drives and personal themes, Lansdale related an anecdote about Theodore Sturgeon having faced writer's block as a result of depression and anxiety in the face of McCarthyism. A cohort of his gave him a scene -- a woman stepping off of a train -- and instructed Sturgeon to “just write the story,” and his concerns would manifest through the fiction. This turned out to be true, and once Sturgeon began writing, he didn't stop again. Lansdale said that he finds the same to be true of his work; his concerns - he noted the the Iraq war and racism as examples -- come through in his writing.
In terms of following one's own inner drive Morrell noted also that another element of the panelists' distinction in the larger writing world was that they didn't think of themselves as solely writing genre fiction. Working toward solid craft and writing for oneself in that way, he said, gave a writer a degree of immunity to fluctuations in the popularity levels of genre itself. Noted many times throughout the conference was the current low popularity of horror as a whole. Morrell said that, despite this lull, many readers who would recoil at the suggestion of reading horror were nonetheless Stephen King fans, because they did not think of him as a writer of horror but rather as a writer of fiction that they enjoyed.
However, he said, attention to the history of the medium or genre in which one works is of paramount importance. He said that he had a great “pet peeve” in “how uneducated many writers are in the history of horror.” This drew immediate agreement from the panelists.
Lansdale said he was bothered by people who haven't read anything written more than two years ago and think of themselves as horror aficionados. This launched the panel into a discussion of what they considered necessary reading in genre fiction, and a long stream of names, a few of which were contributed by the audience and rapidly taken up by the panelists: C. M. Kornbluth, Henry Kuttner, Cordwainer Smith, and Theodore Sturgeon populated a majority of the first round. The panelists noted with remorse that “there are people writing in the field who don't even know who these authors are.” The impromptu pantheon listing continued with Jack Finney, Robert Nathan, Charles Beaumont, Robert Aickman, Sax Rohmer, Fritz Leiber, Thomas Tryon, and others, in a rapid exchange that unfortunately streamed ahead of my note-taking speed.
Altogether despite the occasional hiccup in administration the 2007 World Horror Convention was agreed to be a success, with an array of stellar guests, a friendly atmosphere, and a unique and beautiful urban location. I'm pleased to have attended and to have the opportunity to attempt to preserve some of the wisdom dispensed there. Any who might be interested in my notes from sessions mentioned above but not annotated are welcome to contact me via email.