Payback Is A Bitch
Finally (he moaned) the tiredness has set in and I'm toddling off to
bed at just a shade past 3:47 A.M. Jesus. But before I go,
I thought I would leave you with this very lengthy essay contained
below, the memory of which still makes me gnash my teeth to this day. Enjoy.
Why You Should Read This: It's a cautionary tale about young writers and how people can take advantages of their high hopes by being complete and utter swine. Plus, I know not too many people update the old LJ on the weekends, so you probably are looking for something new to read that you can sink your teeth into. While there are no boobies or lustful waxings concerning certain celebrities behind the cut, it'll provide for some entertainment. If you want to see the original site in question, go here and prepare to be horrified.
Have at it.
About halfway through writing my novel Nightfall, I hooked up with a literary agent who we will refer to in this document as “Donkey Ass.” Legally, I don’t think I can refer to him by his true name as it would be slander, so we’ll just use this appellation that reflects his initials and attitude just perfectly, okay?
I met Donkey Ass through AOL, where he was running a chat room dedicated to the idea of finding ten writers who had publishable-quality material to offer the world. Being desirous of finding publication and possibly making a few bucks to boot, I jumped on board. The critics say that hindsight is 20/20, and I’m very sorry to report that this was one of those cases. They also say that a fool and his money is soon parted, which is another A-1 assessment of this situation. A long time ago, I also said that anyone who gets into the writing business for money would be well-advised to spend their cash on a shrink instead, and after this situation, that saying was truer than ever.
Here’s what happened: having corresponded with Donkey Ass via IM’s and e-mail, and having found him to be receptive to the idea of reading my work, I boxed up the half-completed Nightfall, two screenplays called Passion & Warfare and Love & Rockets, and three short stories (“The Job,” “The Penitents,” and “So Sad To Say”) for prompt shipping to Greenville, North Carolina, whereupon they would be immediately read. . . and hopefully accepted. I had no illusions about the publishing industry; I knew that without an agent, my chances of getting published were the same as a Beatles reunion tour, and this guy seemed to be enthusiastic about reviewing my stuff.
About two weeks later, I got a message from Donkey Ass telling me to hurry up and finish Nightfall so he could decided whether he would rep it or not. . . oh, and by the way, he loved it! I finished the novel in the first part of April 1999, sent it off, and went up to Chico for a lovely weekend with a girl who I had planned on marrying at the time I originally wrote this essay. You’d think the stars were in my favor, wouldn’t you?
Well, they were. For a while. Donkey Ass raved about Nightfall, how good it was, how this was going to be the important first step in my eventually sure-to-be career as a best-selling author. He said that when my third novel came out, people would definitely be going back to check out the first one, and it would have a great shelf life. He knew that Nightfall was going to be one for the ages, and who cared if nobody gave it a second thought at first. . .
My smile faltered a little bit at the edges. Well. . . okay, I knew that I wasn’t going to take the world by storm with my first novel -- something it took me years to get out of the habit of thinking -- and I was more realistic now, yes, but damn, man, where was the enthusiasm? No pro sportsman worth his salt has ever gone into a contest thinking, “Yeah, I’ll get chewed like hell the first couple rounds, but just you see, I’ll bounce back.” None who have done that and won, at any rate. Authors are no different; we think that everything we write (at least, at that moment) is great and people won’t be able to help themselves from buying it. If you start thinking that everything you write is crap, you’ve gone a long way toward psyching yourself out of the business before the word go. Some may call it ego, but in this business, it’s called survival instinct.
Well, whatever. He agreed to represent Nightfall, sent me a contract which I dutifully inked and sent back, and we were in business together. To cover the fees associated with copying, sending mail and the like, I sent fifty bucks to cover those charges. I initially balked at this part of the contract, because it seemed pretty lame to send money to a guy who hadn’t done anything for me yet and besides, I am a New England Yankee when it comes to money. However, I realized that if I didn’t send him this money, I would end up spending the money to do mailings and the like anyway, only it would be my dumb ass that would be sending them out to publishers instead of Donkey Ass, and if that was the way it was going to be, I might as well just stick a fork in my ear now.
I mailed off the money, waited a couple weeks for confirmation, then asked who the first person our “hit list” was going to be.
“Where would you like to get published?” he asked, via IM’s.
“Vintage!” I responded immediately. “Or Penguin. I love their stuff.”
“Well, we might have a problem with that because. . .” and Donkey Ass launched into a diatribe about how Vintage and Penguin were currently being bought out by German companies and were now run by Krauts who really didn’t have an interest in American things. He then pointed out that the company was likely to be in a turmoil as various Aryan-type people were shipped in to replace the hard-working literary citizens that had turned Penguin and Vintage into the powerhouses that they were, and nothing was likely to be read for a while. He finished it up by saying it was pretty cheesy that now Germans were going to dictate the direction of American culture in the publishing world, and. . .
. . . and, having grown up with my parents, I know a good hippie rant when I hear one and decided to cut it off at the knees. I quickly changed the subject by suggesting Doubleday, because they were big and did everything in-house, which cuts down on expenditures. Donkey Ass said their load of backreading that needed to be done was about a year long for submitted material; could I try again?
At this point, I began to feel a bit funny. Unless my mommy (or Writer’s Market) had mislead me horribly during my formative years, I knew that agents were supposed to suggest directions for their clients that will benefit them, thereby giving them a bigger slice of the pie. Also, agents were supposed to know more about the business than their clients. Me Money Man Tarzan, you Creative Jane and all that. I quickly suggested half a dozen more places such as Viking, Simon & Schuster, and Dell, to be rebuffed with a lengthy technical explanation each time.
Now I was beginning to have a familiar bad feeling in my gut, the same one I used to get in college trigonometry class every time the professor opened his mouth. So far, all Donkey Ass had done was to say that none of these places were going to be an option for us, which wasn’t so bad because I had been living with that reality on my own for about eight years. It wasn’t until you began considering the fact that he hadn’t suggested any companies in response that things began to look peculiar.
Here’s the way the model is supposed to work: when I suggest House A, you come back by saying that House A isn’t really that great of a deal. . . but if you’re really looking for what House A can offer, House B will match that and then some. I know I’m smart; that’s what you pay me fifteen percent for. Bet you didn’t think of that, did you Mister Smart Author Guy? Me Tarzan, you Jane. Get back there and write some more, and leave the business side to the professionals.
“Well,” I said finally (via IM), “what would you suggest we do? What’s a good direction for us?”
After all the lengthy wordiness was pared out, Donkey Ass’ idea was that we should go with a small house. Jesus wept. Yeah, sure, the publishing industry is filled with stories about plucky little houses and their equally plucky authors. . . but I had considered this idea a few years ago and turned it down. No money, no exposure, no pluck. Okay, so I’m a greedy capitalist bastard. But the thing was, the idea is to go into a bookstore and see your book on the shelf, and see it with a real cover, not something in the “Local Author” bin that looks like it was made by a talented high school student with a pirated copy of Adobe Page Maker. I mean, Christ, if I was really that hard-up to see print, I could always plunk down the cash and pay to have it published myself, right? Sure, I could do that. I can always also plunge a barbecue fork into my own leg, but it doesn’t mean I’m going to.
Shortly thereafter, however, Donkey Ass changed his tune. It was imperative, he said, that we get with a large house, and as quickly as possible, so that we could start getting the word out on this great new talent in the making. Besides, as it turned out, he medical bills to pay. Now, when I say medical bills, I don’t mean the kind where your dumb butt got drunk, tripped, and fell in the shower requiring some stitches; these were apparently of the variety where you begin toting up your life’s possessions and start figuring how much you can get for great-grandma’s ornate vase that was a possession of Napoleon. Whatever his reason, I didn’t really mind because now it meant that things were going to happen quickly. . .
. . . but they didn’t of, course. Here’s one of the reasons; these medical problems were enough to keep Donkey Ass virtually bed-ridden, a prisoner in his own apartment. He was in the habit of getting nasty cysts in some extremely uncomfortable places -- I’ll let your own imagination decide where they were concentrated -- and sometimes, said cysts would pop like a party favor, spewing out all kinds of gross body fluids and requiring him to go to the hospital. The total of ducats owed to the Medical Gods would go up, and Donkey Ass would begin to panic some more. Not to mention tell me about it, at length.
Now, I am not a completely heartless meanie, and I understand that this sort of situation is enough to make even the stoutest of hearts tremble when it comes kabaloom time. Having had a couple of staph infections myself, I know exactly what that sort of scene is all about. However, there were three things about this situation that really irked me. First, I felt as if I had been lied to, or at the very least, given a very rosy and optimistic -- yet completely untrue -- picture of my agent’s capabilities. He had never told me that he was suffering from some sort of bizarre leprosy. Never even alluded to it, in fact, until after the contract was signed. From some of the letters and e-mails I got from him later on, I got the picture of a guy lying a dirty bed drenched in festering bodily discharges, moaning in pain and hardly able to see across the dimly-lit room. . . more of the scene from a particularly gruesome low-rent episode of ER than of somebody you want to have being your co-pilot for your career.
Now, this in itself would not be considered the end of the road; after all, with the gods of technology smiling upon us, the only real reason you have to leave your house is to get groceries, and even that can be delivered by calling or pointing and clicking. I figured all that was really necessary in that situation was somebody to come over and get the mail, then drop it off in the post box for Donkey Ass. You don’t have to actually be in New York to make your presence felt there, I reasoned. Just drop a nice postcard to your favorite editor who you’re chummy with, and all is good, right?
Wrong. Donkey Ass didn’t have any favorite editors. In fact, he had no editors. When it came to contacts in the publishing industry, Donkey Ass was just as much out in the cold as I was, as true a case of the blind leading the blind as I’ve ever heard of. I found this out when he started talking -- via e-mail -- about how we needed to make new contacts within the publishing industry. I responded by saying, jokingly, “What’s wrong with the old contacts?” and he told me that sorry Charlie, ha-ha, we were on our own. He didn’t know anybody. No young brash editor’s phone number in his Rolodex, no college drinking buddy who had climbed the ivory tower of publishing, no ex-lover who still gave him the time of day, someone that would take a chance and read something he sent her based on the merit of their bed sessions in their early thirties. Nobody. Essentially, we were no better off than when I had been a college student armed with a copy of Writer’s Market, saving beer money to send off manuscripts.
Possibility three was that Donkey Ass was lying. Always a possibility, I guess.
At this point, I hit the roof. Nicely, and with a great deal of tact, but I still hit the roof. For what eventually happened, I take some of the blame because I should have researched Donkey Ass a bit more before signing on with him. Ditto with the contract we agreed upon, which we’ll see more of shortly. However, when somebody conveniently forgets to mention that they feel like they’re at death’s door every day and have a profound difficulty leaving the house, not to mention that they do not have the materials needed to do the job as a professional should, all fingers do not point at the author alone.
And you should never roll your eyes to the heavens and say, “Jesus Christ, can things get any worse?” Because as if all of this wasn’t bad enough, God Himself came into play. Donkey Ass lived in North Carolina, and right after this eye-opening conversation, the Southeast Coast was besieged by Hurricane Andrew, one the biggest and baddest storms to come down the pike in about fifty years. His area, along with roughly another thousand square miles or so, was dunked under about eight feet of water. The book store that Donkey Ass ran, specializing in rare and unusual books, was a total loss minus one carload of boxes that he and a friend managed to save. There was no power, no clean water, no immediate disaster relief aid in the offing and certainly no joy in Mudville, because the Mighty Casey had just gotten bonked between the eyes with a Nolan Ryan fastball courtesy of Mother Nature.
I must admit, I was a little stupefied. I couldn’t have come up with a more depressing scenario if I tried, and what was worse, there was still about nine more months to run on the contract. The contract was a pretty simple model; one year, which had to be renewed by both parties in writing within a month of contract expiration, agent gets fifteen percent of everything, agrees to sell “the work” on the author’s behalf. There were, however, a few more codicils to the contract, but we’ll get back to that in a little while; for now, let’s look at what happened next.
Donkey Ass and I had agreed on one thing before the whole The Perfect Storm shindig; the cost of sending manuscripts en masse through the mail was a little prohibitive. At roughly seven to eight bucks a pop, the fifty dollars I had sent him for those mailing missions would be gone before you could say “Empty Rolodexes really suck, eh?” We had to think of a way to get our message out without breaking our piggy banks in the process, and although I wanted to shoot some swine at this point, it wasn’t my pocketbook I wanted to kill. So, if you can guess upon the method we used and how I deduced why it wouldn’t work, you’re definitely a brighter bulb than Donkey Ass was.
You guessed it: the Internet. At first I was not harsh on this idea, because if truth be told, I had used this method myself as a way of sharing my writing with the world (and maybe attracting a publisher). I had run three web sites, all of which were stocked to the brim with essays, short stories and an on-line novel, and they had received generally positive feedback from the drug-addled, sleep-deprived and just plain weird people who stumbled across my own little corner of Internet Hell. However, while the feedback was good, there was the fact that in two and a half years, only roughly five hundred individual users had made it to the front door of Optical Illusions or The Black Hole of Hatred (don’t ask). Of those, roughly one of out of every eighteen or so viewers stopped long enough to leave a comment in the guest book. This averages out to one positive comment from the masses every 50.7 days, rounded up. This is not a very winning group of statistics to bank a career on, is it? That, in a nutshell, is the Internet -- and writing -- for you. Lots to say, and virtually no audience.
Incidentally, here’s a brief side note to the above scenario: in mid-February or so while dealing with Donkey Ass, I received an e-mail from a genuine literary agent by the name of Stephanie Lee, someone who was registered with all the proper guilds and everything. She loved the material she had read on the sites, and was hoping she could represent me. . . but gosh darn it, she saw that I already had an agent. Ah well; she wished me the best, and my own reaction upon reading that piece of mail is perhaps better imagined than described (hint: think of a lot of cursing!). Irony, as we all know, is not without a sense of humor. . . not to mention a sadistic streak that would do even Joseph Mengele proud.
The web site was an idea that may have worked, had it not come down to pride vs. practicality. First, however, a brief explanation of how the site actually worked is in order. Donkey Ass would send out query letters to various publishers, explaining that he was repping (so-and-so), who had written a brilliant piece called (insert title here). This author was available to be signed to a (hopefully) long-term and (pray to God for this one) lucrative career would be launched. Sincerely yours, Donkey Ass. Said publisher would then be given a password and login name, whereupon they would point and click to Donkey Ass’ web site, feed in the info, download the first seventy or so pages into their hard drive, print it out, and then spend the evening captivated in the world the author had created. In the morning, they would call or write to Donkey Ass, demanding they not be teased with an incomplete story, whereupon he would give them a code to unlock the rest of the story, they would read it, fall in love with it, and sign the grinning author immediately. End credits roll, and the end.
So why wouldn’t this plan work? Two or three weeks after Hurricane Andrew passed through, I got a letter in the mail from Donkey Ass. It was written in his usual halting style, full of “. . .” between words and sentences, but it wasn’t his writing style that made me grip my head; hell, I was used to that. No, what made me hiccup in fear was the bright, multi-colored banner heading across the top of the head, proudly flying THE BOOK POTATO LITERARY AGENCY AND RARE AND USED BOOK STORE in eye-straining neon four-point color. There was even a clip art picture of a spud reading a novel, kicking back against a stack of books. This was his professional letterhead; I knew this because he had his address, name, phone, fax and e-mail listed amid all the screaming decoration on really nice paper. One does not spend the time and money necessary to draw something like this up unless you plan on proudly sending it to business associates and the like. Oy, vey.
Among all the other tips that various and editors have put into self-help books on how to get published, one of the first things that is always said is to not screw around with cutesy fonts and letterheads when it comes to a business letter being sent to your would-be publisher. This thing broke all those rules, plus a few others of decorum and taste in the bargain. A hand-written and neatly printed cover letter probably would have been more effective.
After I got done having a fit over the gaudiness masquerading as professionalism, I read Donkey Ass’ letter. I immediately had another fit. In addition to the web site idea, he was proposing that each author should draw up their own bio (a good idea) and prospective cover design for the novel (a very bad idea). The others had already done this, he explained, and this would enable us to have the maximum amount of control over the finished product when it hit the market. Having your book’s jacket turn out like you’d always dreamed, he reasoned, was a wonderful way to get authors to forget the fact that they were earning peanuts if they were lucky. . . okay, that last part was my own insertion. It’s still sort of true, though.
I didn’t want to do it, period. The last thing a publishing house wants is for some author, especially a first-time one, to pitch ideas on what his cover should look like. How dare they! They should be happy that they’re even appearing on a bookshelf at all, not to mention the fact that most authors know exactly jack squat about design and consequently, their idea of what makes a good-looking cover is usually. . .
. . .well, judging from what the other authors had done on the Donkey Ass propaganda site, what an author thinks is great is usually fairly dumb. One was a vampire novel that had a very shaky-looking blue ankh done against a white background. It was not scary in the least. The other two were science fiction novels, both apparently featuring a race of alien cats whose head fur was swept up and to the right like an angry 1950’s juvenile delinquent duck’s ass haircut, bounding through two different off-world landscapes. Both landscapes were sand and rock-filled and thoroughly lame. I found the image of the space cats to be fairly frightening, but I don’t think that was the author’s intention. The last cover idea, which appeared months later, was a confederate flag backdrop with a jogging/smiling S.S. soldier in the foreground. I freely admit, that was the best of them all, including my own eventual contribution. The way I see is it is if I truly had a talent for graphic design, I would not have been an author.
This might seem a little mean, but I don’t think it would be a complete story unless I discussed the other authors that appeared in the Donkey Ass Stable. There was very little I could find out about the author of the space cat chronicles; all I found was that she was fat, had glasses, had apparently written several of these cat books, lived out in the boonies, and had five cats herself. What a shock. The second author, the person who wrote the vampire novel, also moonlighted as the webmaster of the Donkey Ass propaganda site. I found out later on that he had medical bills to pay as well. . . except that his bills were apparently enough to eat Donkey Ass’ bills whole and still have room for lunch. The third author, the S.S. guy, looked like a pissed-off accountant and had grown up as a rock-solid Republican in a town where apparently liberals were equated with the saviors of humanity. His book was a recounting of his misspent youth, growing up among the Moonies and Space Cat -- er, the liberals.
As for the quality of the proffered novels, I couldn’t really tell you. Only one of the links to a chunk of manuscript worked, and no, it was not to mine. Although I really wanted to see what S.S. Boy was up to and the idea of space cats with awful haircuts on crack had a weird sort of appeal to it, I was stuck with the vampires. It sucked, abysmally. I wondered if perhaps I was being a little harsh on the quality of the book, and so I showed the first few pages to a couple friends, saying it was something new I was working on. I figured if anything, it would bias the novel in a positive direction; after all, do you really want to tell your friend that the new thing they are working on stinks on ice? Apparently, my friends truly do believe in the painful truth, because they told me I should garbage can the story and write a sequel to Nightfall instead, which tells you all you need to know about that story. Yeech. They then proceeded to call this new effort “juvenile,” “poorly-written” and “embarrassing.”
Note to self: do not ask friends’ opinions of new novel. Yeech.
Incidentally, I also don’t think that it would be a complete story if I didn’t mention the fact that even though I sent messages on at least five occasions saying that only one set of links worked, they were never fixed. According to Donkey Ass and the webmaster, this was not a problem; the publishers would not be going to this general information page showing all the authors based on the URL and the password we provided them. They would be going to a separate private page. However, it took four months before this page was working, and I still found it extremely fishy that on the main page for casual browsers, only the links of the Donkey Ass Webmater, AKA He Of The Not-So-Scary Blue Ankh, worked.
Despite my misgivings -- which I told him about -- Donkey Ass insisted that this was the way to go. I had no problems writing the bio, but the cover. . . well, I eventually got it done, and was reasonably proud of myself. I wasn’t going to be winning any design awards any time soon, but then again, there was no malformed felines pouncing on equally misshapen Egyptian symbols, either. I had a black and white photo of downtown Portland, Oregon, which I had lowered the light on until it was dark grays and blacks only, with points of light, then did the title in red and silver lettering. Simple stuff, kids.
Donkey Ass put up the mock cover with a great deal of enthusiasm, and told me that it would be only a matter of time before Nightfall found a home. I felt good about that. He had been inspired, he said, by the total loss of his store; he now realized that if he was going to get anywhere in life, he’d better get selling, and pronto. I felt even better about that. Although I felt badly about the loss of his store, truth be told I was secretly stoked. After all, so far we’d had The Big Nothing happen on the book front -- we hadn’t even gotten any rejection letters or anything -- and I was wondering how the literary world was going to treat the fruits of our labors.
At the same time, he asked me about the song lyrics I had included in the novel. Each section began with a couple lines from a Pink Floyd song, and he asked if we could contact Roger Waters of Pink Floyd so we could use them in the final product. I said sure, go ahead, thinking to myself that the probability of him getting back to us promptly was very low, but it would give Donkey Ass something else to focus his attention on that was book-related. Who knows? Maybe we’d even strike it lucky and Roger would recognize a fellow artistic soul (myself, not Donkey Ass). I wasn’t counting on this, but then again, it was an agreeable little daydream.
Things came crashing down in January. Donkey Ass wanted to know about the photo I had used to build the basis of the Nightfall cover, and I told him I had gotten it online. He wanted to know who it was, had I gotten permission to use it, etc. I said I didn’t remember where I had gotten it -- because I had followed about 50 links to get to that picture -- and had failed miserably trying to track it down, I hadn’t gotten permission to use it, and that we should just take the cover down. No worries. Donkey Ass, in a manner truly befitting his name, balked. He wouldn’t do it; he told me he wasn’t going to submit things to publishers if they were “flying under the banner of plagiarism,” and a whole lot of other crap that made my head reel and wish for a drink.
“Take it down,” I said. “Garbage can the cover, and just don’t put one up.”
“No,” he said.
“Take it down and let’s move on.”
“No.”
This went on for several weeks. And then, the final bomb was dropped, whereupon I went apeshit, nearly slaughtered my roommate, and wished heartily I was in North Carolina so I could have the pleasure of burying Donkey Ass alive in the muck he now lived in. There were, however, a few precursors to Hiroshima. In March, it turned out that for the past four months -- at least, but part of me believes it was for much longer than that -- Donkey Ass had not submitted any query letters containing the magic keys to unlock my novel to any publishers. The reason why? He was waiting for confirmation from Roger Waters that it was okay to use the song lyrics I had prefaced each section with before sending query letters.
Um, yeah. I know. The thing is, until something is put into print and sold for money, you have artistic freedom to use whatever references you like. Quote all the “na-na-na-na’s” from “Hey Jude” if you like, and hope your publisher’s legal department and promotional people are behind you, or it’ll be out. But when you write, it’s not a question for the agent to answer. And the agent if they are worth anything as a professional knows that the publisher takes care of that messy side of things; his job is just to make the sale.
“Take them down!” I screamed via IM’s. “Just cut them out of the manuscript, use white-out if you have to, but get rid of them and just submit the goddamn book!”
“No,” Donkey Ass said.
Believe it or not, this was not what made me hit the ceiling and nearly my roommate. His rationale for this refusal, in case you’re interested, was that by cutting out the lyrics to the songs that were contained in the beginning section of the book, we would be robbing the novel of its overall effect and therefore cheapening the experience. It was essential that those song lyrics remain in the book, and if meant waiting. . . at that point I hit the roof again, but my roommate was still safe. I hadn’t reached meltdown. However, I was rapidly getting there.
It occurred to me, for the first time, that perhaps Donkey Ass had not only lost some perspective of exactly what his role was supposed to be in this process, he might have never really understood what it was in the first place. He seemed to think that he had some right to call the shots when it came to the content of the novel and how it was presented, even if this meant overriding my decisions. He was forgetting three very elementary facts in this case; first, despite what the wording of the contract said, when you got right down to brass tacks Donkey Ass actually worked for me. I was the one who called the shots, and he was supposed to carry them out to the best of his ability unless they were completely unreasonable. Telling somebody to send query letters to a publishing house seemed like a very reasonable request to me. It seemed also like something I shouldn’t really have told him to do, either, if you catch my drift.
Two, final artistic and content decisions are made solely by the author, not the agent. Me Creative Tarzan, you Bean-Counter Jane. And three. . . well, if you wanted to be perfectly blunt about it, my job was over. In fact, the moment we had signed the contract, I had already fulfilled my end of the bargain. As the author, I was expected to produce a book. I had done so. The task of Donkey Ass was to find a place where we could get it into print. This had not happened. In fact, the S.S. Nightfall was still sitting in dry-dock, waiting for its launching.
Since finishing Nightfall, I had written an author’s biography, produced a book jacket cover concept, queried faithfully about the status of my book, done research to try to find where good publishing houses were and was currently writing a follow-up novel. Since agreeing to represent Nightfall, Donkey Ass had. . . sent a letter to Roger Waters and gotten his apparently equally-crippled friend to design a faulty web site. After nine months of representation, I had nothing to show for it, not even one lousy letter of rejection. The way I figured it, I could have gotten at least three of those on my own by now. A letter of rejection would have, strangely enough, cheered me up; at least it would have shown that Donkey Ass was doing something besides bleeding, wailing and moaning the fates. Plus, I was still out that fifty bucks I had originally sent. You tell me who had fulfilled their end of the bargain better, huh?
I wasn’t completely out of patience yet, however; I tried one last time to appeal to reason. “What do we do,” I asked, “if it turns out that we don’t hear from Roger Waters for five years?”
“Then we wait on the book for five years,” Donkey Ass responded immediately.
I did a slow burn in front of my computer. Even the noise of the heater was seeming to irritate me. “And what if he says no when we do hear from him?”
“Then we try again with another book.”
Game over.
I signed off with all due haste and began to scream and drink. Half of me wanted to jump right back online and tell Donkey Ass that his worthless butt was fired, along with the sincere wish that I hoped his boils multiplied like New York City sewer rats and that he would die of cancer in a part of the world where painkillers did not exist. However, I knew this was just pure rage talking, and I forced myself to calm down. Act in haste, repent at leisure, and I wanted to think calmly about this. I spent the weekend talking with my then-fiancée about the matter, and she recommended that I write a very polite but firm letter informing him that as it was apparent we had differing ideas on the practices of business of the publishing world, we should equitably go our separate ways and dissolve the contract.
That sounded like a good idea, much better than any Donkey Ass had floated in the last nine months. On Sunday evening, I composed a very polite and professional letter, copied and pasted it into e-mail, and sent it out. On Monday afternoon, I received a response back consisting of four words: “Going into surgery tomorrow.” Like I really cared at this point? I hoped he didn’t die, but that was about the extent of the emotional attachment I had in this matter. Remember, business is business. I wrote back with a shorter but still polite letter, adding at the end I was having an attorney look into the matter and due to possible breach of contract issues, it would really better for us to terminate things politely. He could even keep the fifty bucks; let’s just not drag the lawyers into things.
That got a response. On Tuesday morning, I checked my e-mail and found an eleven-page letter in my mailbox. I copied and pasted the contents to a text file, saved it to a disk and went to work. Once there, I printed it out, read it. . .
. . .and irrationally, my first thought was that I should go home and kill my roommate. I quickly scratched that, resolving instead to fly to North Carolina immediately and kill Donkey Ass. After that would follow killing anybody who got within sword’s reach of me for the next ten years.
Oh, yeah. Things got worse, too. Just read on.
Once I calmed down, I read it over again. The same reaction ensued. Noticing I was not doing any typing but was fuming a mile a minute, one of my co-workers asked me what was going on. I took him outside so I could have a cigarette, and explained the situation as he’d stated in the letter as follows:
Donkey Ass was not going quietly into the night. In between calling me such titles as “whiny,” “ignorant,” “immature,” “sniveling,” “snot-nosed,” and “puling,” he said that he was doing everything possible to fulfill the contract -- and more! -- and that the current round of difficulties was, in fact, all my fault. If I was more mature, I’d be able to see that and would grovel at his feet for the apology he so richly deserved. Truth be told, he was very surprised at this recent outburst; if I was so unhappy with the way things were going, he felt, I should do the mature thing and just let the contract expire instead of making a big stink about it. Where was this hostility coming from? Weren’t we friends? He had made a commitment to the project, and he was going to see it through. . . with or without my cooperation. In fact, now that he thought about it, he could recall doing a little bit of editing on the book himself, checking for spelling and punctuation. . . well, didn’t that mean that he owned this version of Nightfall? He certainly thought so. He also hadn’t gotten paid for any of his editing work, which the going rate as such was about seventy-five bucks an hour. Maybe he should just bill me for the time he’d spent on the manuscript. In fact, he was very tempted to simply sell this version to a publisher and tell me to go stuff myself, because after all, his hard work was clearly unappreciated. He wasn’t sure how I saw things, but he knew that getting published was a long and painful process, and obviously I was lashing out because my spoiled mindset believed that I was going to hit print right away and the riches were going to roll in. I was pitching a temper tantrum at the wrong person; if anyone was to blame, it was myself.
“He said that?” my co-worker said wonderingly. “Jesus, he’s got balls.”
Personally, I was thinking about a scene from the movie Animal House. In my mind’s eye, Dean Wormer was in the process of telling Flounder that “fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son.” I wanted to amend this somewhat and tell Donkey Ass that incompetent, stubborn and stupid was no way to go through life, and adding “criminal” on top of that was asking for trouble.
“So basically,” my co-worker continued, “he’s saying he owns your book because he told you to put commas instead of dashes in a few places, right? Like, if a record producer tells a band to put a few drum rolls in various places on an album, your agent is saying that by this alliteration, the producer would then own the album, right?”
“That’s what he’s saying.”
“No jury in the world would buy that load of horseshit.”
Yes, things had gotten that bad. Court? Lawyers? Lawsuits? Questions of legal ownership? I was ready for battle. However, my legal advisors, a pair of probation officers who had passed the bar exam and looked over my contract, advised that I not do anything and just let the contract run out.
As I recall, at first I screamed upon hearing this advice. Later, I realized they were right and backed off. It galled me terribly, but they were good advisors and they saved me a potentially enormous and expensive headache.
There were three catches to the contract, two of which worked in his favor. The first major stumbling block was that in the case of a dispute, both the parties agreed that arbitration would be carried out by a third party located in Greenville, North Carolina, and parties would be subject to the ruling as such handed down by this body. Also, the loser had to pay all fees associated with this event. Local boy vs. outsider. Somehow, I had overlooked this codicil to the contract, and the reality of what it meant was like a bucket of cold water being dumped in my lap.
The slam-dunk case I had been looking at suddenly evaporated. In fact, it could very easily go the other way, depending on how low Donkey Ass was willing to stoop in order to get himself off the hook. Any of the inflammatory and threatening comments made in his recent e-mail could be very well explained away by describing copious use of pain medication and stress; aw, come on, he didn’t really mean it. He was just loaded. His failure to send any queries to publishers could, with the appropriate doe-eyed looks, appear to be a simple case of an honest businessman wanting to make sure all of his ducks were in a row before jumping in with the team and charging into the Big Wind. Web site jacked up? Hey, come on, that’s not my fault. I can only do so much from my bed of pain here; it’s the webmaster’s responsibility to get on that particular dog. The only real technicality I could nail him on was the fact that according to the contract, quarterly itemization and progress reports were supposed to be supplied by Donkey Ass, and he hadn’t done so. One sure thing alone does not a case make.
Also, unfortunately there was the specter of the local folks to contend with. Here is our plaintiff, Jesse Cairns. He lives in California, and the last time we checked, a major hurricane did not come through California and reduce its inhabitants to boiling and drinking goat pee to stay alive. This Californian has a job, whereas our poor local boy has lost everything that he owns. This Californian seems to be in perfect health, while our local boy. . . just look at him! Wracked in agony! Chastised by this ungrateful wretch who should be happy that anybody at all wants to read his stories. Fancies himself a writer, does he? Whatever! And since we don’t know jack-all about the rules that those fancy New York City publishing boys go by, we think that Mr. Cairns should reimburse our local hero for all the fine editing work he did on what surely must be a God-awful book. If it didn’t need editing in the first place, it would be good, right? Bailiff, take this Californian out of our sight, and make sure he pays cash in the lobby before you take him out back and beat him with a rubber hose. Then, bathe him in goat pee. Californian.
You might laugh, but the two lawyers I talked to said that this scenario was not that far removed from reality, minus the goat pee. They use sheep urine there. Plus, even if I did prove my case and win -- they said they knew I was right, but then again, they knew me, and a North Carolina jury might not -- the fact remained that I would have to take vacation time from work, pay for flying out to North Carolina, pay for a hotel room, food, expenses. . . and the fact was, you could not get blood from a turnip. I might indeed -- and remotely -- win, but the possibility of seeing any of that reimbursement money was very low indeed.
There was another thing to consider as well; according to the contract, if I got somebody else to sign Nightfall to a company before our term of service was up, Donkey Ass still got his fifteen percent. Even more insidious, if he was able to find a decent offer and then, within three months after we parted ways, I found somebody to sign it, Donkey Ass still received his fifteen percent. I’ve never heard of a more Faustian publishing deal that, and my lawyers cautioned that provoking Donkey Ass might fire him up enough to seriously start shopping the book. . . just to screw me over later down the line.
“Your best bet,” they told me, “is to sit tight, say nothing, and hope that the S.O.B. dies a painful fucking death.”
The clause in the contract that worked in my favor seemed minor, but upon closer inspection, it turned out to be fairly earth-shaking. Donkey Ass had, by the words of the contract, agreed to represent “the work,” which was later referred to in the same line as Nightfall. However, it also meant by this wording that he had no other representative powers. He got the first look at things, but if he didn’t act within sixty days, they were all mine. Therefore, the scripts and short stories I had sent him had long ago defaulted to me, so at least I wasn’t totally impotent.
So I had some sort of a victory in the sense that he didn’t own my soul or my other works, only Nightfall. . . but it was a hollow one. As much as I hated to admit it, Donkey Ass had won. He’d gotten fifty dollars and stolen a year out of the life of Nightfall, and all he’d had to do was nothing. What had I gotten? A lousy web site whose links didn’t even work -- hey, I could do that on my own.
In closing, what did we learn, kids? Well, we learned that meeting an agent on-line is not usually the safest way to do it. We learned that just because somebody says they are an agent, you shouldn’t take them at face value. Investigate them, and spend the time needed to determine if they are legit. Remember, anybody who can print a business card can be an agent; there’s no bar exam involved. We also learned that if things start going south, or you start feeling funny about stuff, by all means, talk to somebody.
And finally, always read the fine print on a contract. Remember how TLC sold ten million copies of CrazySexyCool and declared Chapter 11? It can happen in the publishing world, too.
A lot of people say that if you want to want to be a writer, you need to read a lot. Let this be a lesson: don’t stop doing this when it comes to contract time.
Otherwise, look out for the goat pee baths.
Why You Should Read This: It's a cautionary tale about young writers and how people can take advantages of their high hopes by being complete and utter swine. Plus, I know not too many people update the old LJ on the weekends, so you probably are looking for something new to read that you can sink your teeth into. While there are no boobies or lustful waxings concerning certain celebrities behind the cut, it'll provide for some entertainment. If you want to see the original site in question, go here and prepare to be horrified.
Have at it.
About halfway through writing my novel Nightfall, I hooked up with a literary agent who we will refer to in this document as “Donkey Ass.” Legally, I don’t think I can refer to him by his true name as it would be slander, so we’ll just use this appellation that reflects his initials and attitude just perfectly, okay?
I met Donkey Ass through AOL, where he was running a chat room dedicated to the idea of finding ten writers who had publishable-quality material to offer the world. Being desirous of finding publication and possibly making a few bucks to boot, I jumped on board. The critics say that hindsight is 20/20, and I’m very sorry to report that this was one of those cases. They also say that a fool and his money is soon parted, which is another A-1 assessment of this situation. A long time ago, I also said that anyone who gets into the writing business for money would be well-advised to spend their cash on a shrink instead, and after this situation, that saying was truer than ever.
Here’s what happened: having corresponded with Donkey Ass via IM’s and e-mail, and having found him to be receptive to the idea of reading my work, I boxed up the half-completed Nightfall, two screenplays called Passion & Warfare and Love & Rockets, and three short stories (“The Job,” “The Penitents,” and “So Sad To Say”) for prompt shipping to Greenville, North Carolina, whereupon they would be immediately read. . . and hopefully accepted. I had no illusions about the publishing industry; I knew that without an agent, my chances of getting published were the same as a Beatles reunion tour, and this guy seemed to be enthusiastic about reviewing my stuff.
About two weeks later, I got a message from Donkey Ass telling me to hurry up and finish Nightfall so he could decided whether he would rep it or not. . . oh, and by the way, he loved it! I finished the novel in the first part of April 1999, sent it off, and went up to Chico for a lovely weekend with a girl who I had planned on marrying at the time I originally wrote this essay. You’d think the stars were in my favor, wouldn’t you?
Well, they were. For a while. Donkey Ass raved about Nightfall, how good it was, how this was going to be the important first step in my eventually sure-to-be career as a best-selling author. He said that when my third novel came out, people would definitely be going back to check out the first one, and it would have a great shelf life. He knew that Nightfall was going to be one for the ages, and who cared if nobody gave it a second thought at first. . .
My smile faltered a little bit at the edges. Well. . . okay, I knew that I wasn’t going to take the world by storm with my first novel -- something it took me years to get out of the habit of thinking -- and I was more realistic now, yes, but damn, man, where was the enthusiasm? No pro sportsman worth his salt has ever gone into a contest thinking, “Yeah, I’ll get chewed like hell the first couple rounds, but just you see, I’ll bounce back.” None who have done that and won, at any rate. Authors are no different; we think that everything we write (at least, at that moment) is great and people won’t be able to help themselves from buying it. If you start thinking that everything you write is crap, you’ve gone a long way toward psyching yourself out of the business before the word go. Some may call it ego, but in this business, it’s called survival instinct.
Well, whatever. He agreed to represent Nightfall, sent me a contract which I dutifully inked and sent back, and we were in business together. To cover the fees associated with copying, sending mail and the like, I sent fifty bucks to cover those charges. I initially balked at this part of the contract, because it seemed pretty lame to send money to a guy who hadn’t done anything for me yet and besides, I am a New England Yankee when it comes to money. However, I realized that if I didn’t send him this money, I would end up spending the money to do mailings and the like anyway, only it would be my dumb ass that would be sending them out to publishers instead of Donkey Ass, and if that was the way it was going to be, I might as well just stick a fork in my ear now.
I mailed off the money, waited a couple weeks for confirmation, then asked who the first person our “hit list” was going to be.
“Where would you like to get published?” he asked, via IM’s.
“Vintage!” I responded immediately. “Or Penguin. I love their stuff.”
“Well, we might have a problem with that because. . .” and Donkey Ass launched into a diatribe about how Vintage and Penguin were currently being bought out by German companies and were now run by Krauts who really didn’t have an interest in American things. He then pointed out that the company was likely to be in a turmoil as various Aryan-type people were shipped in to replace the hard-working literary citizens that had turned Penguin and Vintage into the powerhouses that they were, and nothing was likely to be read for a while. He finished it up by saying it was pretty cheesy that now Germans were going to dictate the direction of American culture in the publishing world, and. . .
. . . and, having grown up with my parents, I know a good hippie rant when I hear one and decided to cut it off at the knees. I quickly changed the subject by suggesting Doubleday, because they were big and did everything in-house, which cuts down on expenditures. Donkey Ass said their load of backreading that needed to be done was about a year long for submitted material; could I try again?
At this point, I began to feel a bit funny. Unless my mommy (or Writer’s Market) had mislead me horribly during my formative years, I knew that agents were supposed to suggest directions for their clients that will benefit them, thereby giving them a bigger slice of the pie. Also, agents were supposed to know more about the business than their clients. Me Money Man Tarzan, you Creative Jane and all that. I quickly suggested half a dozen more places such as Viking, Simon & Schuster, and Dell, to be rebuffed with a lengthy technical explanation each time.
Now I was beginning to have a familiar bad feeling in my gut, the same one I used to get in college trigonometry class every time the professor opened his mouth. So far, all Donkey Ass had done was to say that none of these places were going to be an option for us, which wasn’t so bad because I had been living with that reality on my own for about eight years. It wasn’t until you began considering the fact that he hadn’t suggested any companies in response that things began to look peculiar.
Here’s the way the model is supposed to work: when I suggest House A, you come back by saying that House A isn’t really that great of a deal. . . but if you’re really looking for what House A can offer, House B will match that and then some. I know I’m smart; that’s what you pay me fifteen percent for. Bet you didn’t think of that, did you Mister Smart Author Guy? Me Tarzan, you Jane. Get back there and write some more, and leave the business side to the professionals.
“Well,” I said finally (via IM), “what would you suggest we do? What’s a good direction for us?”
After all the lengthy wordiness was pared out, Donkey Ass’ idea was that we should go with a small house. Jesus wept. Yeah, sure, the publishing industry is filled with stories about plucky little houses and their equally plucky authors. . . but I had considered this idea a few years ago and turned it down. No money, no exposure, no pluck. Okay, so I’m a greedy capitalist bastard. But the thing was, the idea is to go into a bookstore and see your book on the shelf, and see it with a real cover, not something in the “Local Author” bin that looks like it was made by a talented high school student with a pirated copy of Adobe Page Maker. I mean, Christ, if I was really that hard-up to see print, I could always plunk down the cash and pay to have it published myself, right? Sure, I could do that. I can always also plunge a barbecue fork into my own leg, but it doesn’t mean I’m going to.
Shortly thereafter, however, Donkey Ass changed his tune. It was imperative, he said, that we get with a large house, and as quickly as possible, so that we could start getting the word out on this great new talent in the making. Besides, as it turned out, he medical bills to pay. Now, when I say medical bills, I don’t mean the kind where your dumb butt got drunk, tripped, and fell in the shower requiring some stitches; these were apparently of the variety where you begin toting up your life’s possessions and start figuring how much you can get for great-grandma’s ornate vase that was a possession of Napoleon. Whatever his reason, I didn’t really mind because now it meant that things were going to happen quickly. . .
. . . but they didn’t of, course. Here’s one of the reasons; these medical problems were enough to keep Donkey Ass virtually bed-ridden, a prisoner in his own apartment. He was in the habit of getting nasty cysts in some extremely uncomfortable places -- I’ll let your own imagination decide where they were concentrated -- and sometimes, said cysts would pop like a party favor, spewing out all kinds of gross body fluids and requiring him to go to the hospital. The total of ducats owed to the Medical Gods would go up, and Donkey Ass would begin to panic some more. Not to mention tell me about it, at length.
Now, I am not a completely heartless meanie, and I understand that this sort of situation is enough to make even the stoutest of hearts tremble when it comes kabaloom time. Having had a couple of staph infections myself, I know exactly what that sort of scene is all about. However, there were three things about this situation that really irked me. First, I felt as if I had been lied to, or at the very least, given a very rosy and optimistic -- yet completely untrue -- picture of my agent’s capabilities. He had never told me that he was suffering from some sort of bizarre leprosy. Never even alluded to it, in fact, until after the contract was signed. From some of the letters and e-mails I got from him later on, I got the picture of a guy lying a dirty bed drenched in festering bodily discharges, moaning in pain and hardly able to see across the dimly-lit room. . . more of the scene from a particularly gruesome low-rent episode of ER than of somebody you want to have being your co-pilot for your career.
Now, this in itself would not be considered the end of the road; after all, with the gods of technology smiling upon us, the only real reason you have to leave your house is to get groceries, and even that can be delivered by calling or pointing and clicking. I figured all that was really necessary in that situation was somebody to come over and get the mail, then drop it off in the post box for Donkey Ass. You don’t have to actually be in New York to make your presence felt there, I reasoned. Just drop a nice postcard to your favorite editor who you’re chummy with, and all is good, right?
Wrong. Donkey Ass didn’t have any favorite editors. In fact, he had no editors. When it came to contacts in the publishing industry, Donkey Ass was just as much out in the cold as I was, as true a case of the blind leading the blind as I’ve ever heard of. I found this out when he started talking -- via e-mail -- about how we needed to make new contacts within the publishing industry. I responded by saying, jokingly, “What’s wrong with the old contacts?” and he told me that sorry Charlie, ha-ha, we were on our own. He didn’t know anybody. No young brash editor’s phone number in his Rolodex, no college drinking buddy who had climbed the ivory tower of publishing, no ex-lover who still gave him the time of day, someone that would take a chance and read something he sent her based on the merit of their bed sessions in their early thirties. Nobody. Essentially, we were no better off than when I had been a college student armed with a copy of Writer’s Market, saving beer money to send off manuscripts.
Possibility three was that Donkey Ass was lying. Always a possibility, I guess.
At this point, I hit the roof. Nicely, and with a great deal of tact, but I still hit the roof. For what eventually happened, I take some of the blame because I should have researched Donkey Ass a bit more before signing on with him. Ditto with the contract we agreed upon, which we’ll see more of shortly. However, when somebody conveniently forgets to mention that they feel like they’re at death’s door every day and have a profound difficulty leaving the house, not to mention that they do not have the materials needed to do the job as a professional should, all fingers do not point at the author alone.
And you should never roll your eyes to the heavens and say, “Jesus Christ, can things get any worse?” Because as if all of this wasn’t bad enough, God Himself came into play. Donkey Ass lived in North Carolina, and right after this eye-opening conversation, the Southeast Coast was besieged by Hurricane Andrew, one the biggest and baddest storms to come down the pike in about fifty years. His area, along with roughly another thousand square miles or so, was dunked under about eight feet of water. The book store that Donkey Ass ran, specializing in rare and unusual books, was a total loss minus one carload of boxes that he and a friend managed to save. There was no power, no clean water, no immediate disaster relief aid in the offing and certainly no joy in Mudville, because the Mighty Casey had just gotten bonked between the eyes with a Nolan Ryan fastball courtesy of Mother Nature.
I must admit, I was a little stupefied. I couldn’t have come up with a more depressing scenario if I tried, and what was worse, there was still about nine more months to run on the contract. The contract was a pretty simple model; one year, which had to be renewed by both parties in writing within a month of contract expiration, agent gets fifteen percent of everything, agrees to sell “the work” on the author’s behalf. There were, however, a few more codicils to the contract, but we’ll get back to that in a little while; for now, let’s look at what happened next.
Donkey Ass and I had agreed on one thing before the whole The Perfect Storm shindig; the cost of sending manuscripts en masse through the mail was a little prohibitive. At roughly seven to eight bucks a pop, the fifty dollars I had sent him for those mailing missions would be gone before you could say “Empty Rolodexes really suck, eh?” We had to think of a way to get our message out without breaking our piggy banks in the process, and although I wanted to shoot some swine at this point, it wasn’t my pocketbook I wanted to kill. So, if you can guess upon the method we used and how I deduced why it wouldn’t work, you’re definitely a brighter bulb than Donkey Ass was.
You guessed it: the Internet. At first I was not harsh on this idea, because if truth be told, I had used this method myself as a way of sharing my writing with the world (and maybe attracting a publisher). I had run three web sites, all of which were stocked to the brim with essays, short stories and an on-line novel, and they had received generally positive feedback from the drug-addled, sleep-deprived and just plain weird people who stumbled across my own little corner of Internet Hell. However, while the feedback was good, there was the fact that in two and a half years, only roughly five hundred individual users had made it to the front door of Optical Illusions or The Black Hole of Hatred (don’t ask). Of those, roughly one of out of every eighteen or so viewers stopped long enough to leave a comment in the guest book. This averages out to one positive comment from the masses every 50.7 days, rounded up. This is not a very winning group of statistics to bank a career on, is it? That, in a nutshell, is the Internet -- and writing -- for you. Lots to say, and virtually no audience.
Incidentally, here’s a brief side note to the above scenario: in mid-February or so while dealing with Donkey Ass, I received an e-mail from a genuine literary agent by the name of Stephanie Lee, someone who was registered with all the proper guilds and everything. She loved the material she had read on the sites, and was hoping she could represent me. . . but gosh darn it, she saw that I already had an agent. Ah well; she wished me the best, and my own reaction upon reading that piece of mail is perhaps better imagined than described (hint: think of a lot of cursing!). Irony, as we all know, is not without a sense of humor. . . not to mention a sadistic streak that would do even Joseph Mengele proud.
The web site was an idea that may have worked, had it not come down to pride vs. practicality. First, however, a brief explanation of how the site actually worked is in order. Donkey Ass would send out query letters to various publishers, explaining that he was repping (so-and-so), who had written a brilliant piece called (insert title here). This author was available to be signed to a (hopefully) long-term and (pray to God for this one) lucrative career would be launched. Sincerely yours, Donkey Ass. Said publisher would then be given a password and login name, whereupon they would point and click to Donkey Ass’ web site, feed in the info, download the first seventy or so pages into their hard drive, print it out, and then spend the evening captivated in the world the author had created. In the morning, they would call or write to Donkey Ass, demanding they not be teased with an incomplete story, whereupon he would give them a code to unlock the rest of the story, they would read it, fall in love with it, and sign the grinning author immediately. End credits roll, and the end.
So why wouldn’t this plan work? Two or three weeks after Hurricane Andrew passed through, I got a letter in the mail from Donkey Ass. It was written in his usual halting style, full of “. . .” between words and sentences, but it wasn’t his writing style that made me grip my head; hell, I was used to that. No, what made me hiccup in fear was the bright, multi-colored banner heading across the top of the head, proudly flying THE BOOK POTATO LITERARY AGENCY AND RARE AND USED BOOK STORE in eye-straining neon four-point color. There was even a clip art picture of a spud reading a novel, kicking back against a stack of books. This was his professional letterhead; I knew this because he had his address, name, phone, fax and e-mail listed amid all the screaming decoration on really nice paper. One does not spend the time and money necessary to draw something like this up unless you plan on proudly sending it to business associates and the like. Oy, vey.
Among all the other tips that various and editors have put into self-help books on how to get published, one of the first things that is always said is to not screw around with cutesy fonts and letterheads when it comes to a business letter being sent to your would-be publisher. This thing broke all those rules, plus a few others of decorum and taste in the bargain. A hand-written and neatly printed cover letter probably would have been more effective.
After I got done having a fit over the gaudiness masquerading as professionalism, I read Donkey Ass’ letter. I immediately had another fit. In addition to the web site idea, he was proposing that each author should draw up their own bio (a good idea) and prospective cover design for the novel (a very bad idea). The others had already done this, he explained, and this would enable us to have the maximum amount of control over the finished product when it hit the market. Having your book’s jacket turn out like you’d always dreamed, he reasoned, was a wonderful way to get authors to forget the fact that they were earning peanuts if they were lucky. . . okay, that last part was my own insertion. It’s still sort of true, though.
I didn’t want to do it, period. The last thing a publishing house wants is for some author, especially a first-time one, to pitch ideas on what his cover should look like. How dare they! They should be happy that they’re even appearing on a bookshelf at all, not to mention the fact that most authors know exactly jack squat about design and consequently, their idea of what makes a good-looking cover is usually. . .
. . .well, judging from what the other authors had done on the Donkey Ass propaganda site, what an author thinks is great is usually fairly dumb. One was a vampire novel that had a very shaky-looking blue ankh done against a white background. It was not scary in the least. The other two were science fiction novels, both apparently featuring a race of alien cats whose head fur was swept up and to the right like an angry 1950’s juvenile delinquent duck’s ass haircut, bounding through two different off-world landscapes. Both landscapes were sand and rock-filled and thoroughly lame. I found the image of the space cats to be fairly frightening, but I don’t think that was the author’s intention. The last cover idea, which appeared months later, was a confederate flag backdrop with a jogging/smiling S.S. soldier in the foreground. I freely admit, that was the best of them all, including my own eventual contribution. The way I see is it is if I truly had a talent for graphic design, I would not have been an author.
This might seem a little mean, but I don’t think it would be a complete story unless I discussed the other authors that appeared in the Donkey Ass Stable. There was very little I could find out about the author of the space cat chronicles; all I found was that she was fat, had glasses, had apparently written several of these cat books, lived out in the boonies, and had five cats herself. What a shock. The second author, the person who wrote the vampire novel, also moonlighted as the webmaster of the Donkey Ass propaganda site. I found out later on that he had medical bills to pay as well. . . except that his bills were apparently enough to eat Donkey Ass’ bills whole and still have room for lunch. The third author, the S.S. guy, looked like a pissed-off accountant and had grown up as a rock-solid Republican in a town where apparently liberals were equated with the saviors of humanity. His book was a recounting of his misspent youth, growing up among the Moonies and Space Cat -- er, the liberals.
As for the quality of the proffered novels, I couldn’t really tell you. Only one of the links to a chunk of manuscript worked, and no, it was not to mine. Although I really wanted to see what S.S. Boy was up to and the idea of space cats with awful haircuts on crack had a weird sort of appeal to it, I was stuck with the vampires. It sucked, abysmally. I wondered if perhaps I was being a little harsh on the quality of the book, and so I showed the first few pages to a couple friends, saying it was something new I was working on. I figured if anything, it would bias the novel in a positive direction; after all, do you really want to tell your friend that the new thing they are working on stinks on ice? Apparently, my friends truly do believe in the painful truth, because they told me I should garbage can the story and write a sequel to Nightfall instead, which tells you all you need to know about that story. Yeech. They then proceeded to call this new effort “juvenile,” “poorly-written” and “embarrassing.”
Note to self: do not ask friends’ opinions of new novel. Yeech.
Incidentally, I also don’t think that it would be a complete story if I didn’t mention the fact that even though I sent messages on at least five occasions saying that only one set of links worked, they were never fixed. According to Donkey Ass and the webmaster, this was not a problem; the publishers would not be going to this general information page showing all the authors based on the URL and the password we provided them. They would be going to a separate private page. However, it took four months before this page was working, and I still found it extremely fishy that on the main page for casual browsers, only the links of the Donkey Ass Webmater, AKA He Of The Not-So-Scary Blue Ankh, worked.
Despite my misgivings -- which I told him about -- Donkey Ass insisted that this was the way to go. I had no problems writing the bio, but the cover. . . well, I eventually got it done, and was reasonably proud of myself. I wasn’t going to be winning any design awards any time soon, but then again, there was no malformed felines pouncing on equally misshapen Egyptian symbols, either. I had a black and white photo of downtown Portland, Oregon, which I had lowered the light on until it was dark grays and blacks only, with points of light, then did the title in red and silver lettering. Simple stuff, kids.
Donkey Ass put up the mock cover with a great deal of enthusiasm, and told me that it would be only a matter of time before Nightfall found a home. I felt good about that. He had been inspired, he said, by the total loss of his store; he now realized that if he was going to get anywhere in life, he’d better get selling, and pronto. I felt even better about that. Although I felt badly about the loss of his store, truth be told I was secretly stoked. After all, so far we’d had The Big Nothing happen on the book front -- we hadn’t even gotten any rejection letters or anything -- and I was wondering how the literary world was going to treat the fruits of our labors.
At the same time, he asked me about the song lyrics I had included in the novel. Each section began with a couple lines from a Pink Floyd song, and he asked if we could contact Roger Waters of Pink Floyd so we could use them in the final product. I said sure, go ahead, thinking to myself that the probability of him getting back to us promptly was very low, but it would give Donkey Ass something else to focus his attention on that was book-related. Who knows? Maybe we’d even strike it lucky and Roger would recognize a fellow artistic soul (myself, not Donkey Ass). I wasn’t counting on this, but then again, it was an agreeable little daydream.
Things came crashing down in January. Donkey Ass wanted to know about the photo I had used to build the basis of the Nightfall cover, and I told him I had gotten it online. He wanted to know who it was, had I gotten permission to use it, etc. I said I didn’t remember where I had gotten it -- because I had followed about 50 links to get to that picture -- and had failed miserably trying to track it down, I hadn’t gotten permission to use it, and that we should just take the cover down. No worries. Donkey Ass, in a manner truly befitting his name, balked. He wouldn’t do it; he told me he wasn’t going to submit things to publishers if they were “flying under the banner of plagiarism,” and a whole lot of other crap that made my head reel and wish for a drink.
“Take it down,” I said. “Garbage can the cover, and just don’t put one up.”
“No,” he said.
“Take it down and let’s move on.”
“No.”
This went on for several weeks. And then, the final bomb was dropped, whereupon I went apeshit, nearly slaughtered my roommate, and wished heartily I was in North Carolina so I could have the pleasure of burying Donkey Ass alive in the muck he now lived in. There were, however, a few precursors to Hiroshima. In March, it turned out that for the past four months -- at least, but part of me believes it was for much longer than that -- Donkey Ass had not submitted any query letters containing the magic keys to unlock my novel to any publishers. The reason why? He was waiting for confirmation from Roger Waters that it was okay to use the song lyrics I had prefaced each section with before sending query letters.
Um, yeah. I know. The thing is, until something is put into print and sold for money, you have artistic freedom to use whatever references you like. Quote all the “na-na-na-na’s” from “Hey Jude” if you like, and hope your publisher’s legal department and promotional people are behind you, or it’ll be out. But when you write, it’s not a question for the agent to answer. And the agent if they are worth anything as a professional knows that the publisher takes care of that messy side of things; his job is just to make the sale.
“Take them down!” I screamed via IM’s. “Just cut them out of the manuscript, use white-out if you have to, but get rid of them and just submit the goddamn book!”
“No,” Donkey Ass said.
Believe it or not, this was not what made me hit the ceiling and nearly my roommate. His rationale for this refusal, in case you’re interested, was that by cutting out the lyrics to the songs that were contained in the beginning section of the book, we would be robbing the novel of its overall effect and therefore cheapening the experience. It was essential that those song lyrics remain in the book, and if meant waiting. . . at that point I hit the roof again, but my roommate was still safe. I hadn’t reached meltdown. However, I was rapidly getting there.
It occurred to me, for the first time, that perhaps Donkey Ass had not only lost some perspective of exactly what his role was supposed to be in this process, he might have never really understood what it was in the first place. He seemed to think that he had some right to call the shots when it came to the content of the novel and how it was presented, even if this meant overriding my decisions. He was forgetting three very elementary facts in this case; first, despite what the wording of the contract said, when you got right down to brass tacks Donkey Ass actually worked for me. I was the one who called the shots, and he was supposed to carry them out to the best of his ability unless they were completely unreasonable. Telling somebody to send query letters to a publishing house seemed like a very reasonable request to me. It seemed also like something I shouldn’t really have told him to do, either, if you catch my drift.
Two, final artistic and content decisions are made solely by the author, not the agent. Me Creative Tarzan, you Bean-Counter Jane. And three. . . well, if you wanted to be perfectly blunt about it, my job was over. In fact, the moment we had signed the contract, I had already fulfilled my end of the bargain. As the author, I was expected to produce a book. I had done so. The task of Donkey Ass was to find a place where we could get it into print. This had not happened. In fact, the S.S. Nightfall was still sitting in dry-dock, waiting for its launching.
Since finishing Nightfall, I had written an author’s biography, produced a book jacket cover concept, queried faithfully about the status of my book, done research to try to find where good publishing houses were and was currently writing a follow-up novel. Since agreeing to represent Nightfall, Donkey Ass had. . . sent a letter to Roger Waters and gotten his apparently equally-crippled friend to design a faulty web site. After nine months of representation, I had nothing to show for it, not even one lousy letter of rejection. The way I figured it, I could have gotten at least three of those on my own by now. A letter of rejection would have, strangely enough, cheered me up; at least it would have shown that Donkey Ass was doing something besides bleeding, wailing and moaning the fates. Plus, I was still out that fifty bucks I had originally sent. You tell me who had fulfilled their end of the bargain better, huh?
I wasn’t completely out of patience yet, however; I tried one last time to appeal to reason. “What do we do,” I asked, “if it turns out that we don’t hear from Roger Waters for five years?”
“Then we wait on the book for five years,” Donkey Ass responded immediately.
I did a slow burn in front of my computer. Even the noise of the heater was seeming to irritate me. “And what if he says no when we do hear from him?”
“Then we try again with another book.”
Game over.
I signed off with all due haste and began to scream and drink. Half of me wanted to jump right back online and tell Donkey Ass that his worthless butt was fired, along with the sincere wish that I hoped his boils multiplied like New York City sewer rats and that he would die of cancer in a part of the world where painkillers did not exist. However, I knew this was just pure rage talking, and I forced myself to calm down. Act in haste, repent at leisure, and I wanted to think calmly about this. I spent the weekend talking with my then-fiancée about the matter, and she recommended that I write a very polite but firm letter informing him that as it was apparent we had differing ideas on the practices of business of the publishing world, we should equitably go our separate ways and dissolve the contract.
That sounded like a good idea, much better than any Donkey Ass had floated in the last nine months. On Sunday evening, I composed a very polite and professional letter, copied and pasted it into e-mail, and sent it out. On Monday afternoon, I received a response back consisting of four words: “Going into surgery tomorrow.” Like I really cared at this point? I hoped he didn’t die, but that was about the extent of the emotional attachment I had in this matter. Remember, business is business. I wrote back with a shorter but still polite letter, adding at the end I was having an attorney look into the matter and due to possible breach of contract issues, it would really better for us to terminate things politely. He could even keep the fifty bucks; let’s just not drag the lawyers into things.
That got a response. On Tuesday morning, I checked my e-mail and found an eleven-page letter in my mailbox. I copied and pasted the contents to a text file, saved it to a disk and went to work. Once there, I printed it out, read it. . .
. . .and irrationally, my first thought was that I should go home and kill my roommate. I quickly scratched that, resolving instead to fly to North Carolina immediately and kill Donkey Ass. After that would follow killing anybody who got within sword’s reach of me for the next ten years.
Oh, yeah. Things got worse, too. Just read on.
Once I calmed down, I read it over again. The same reaction ensued. Noticing I was not doing any typing but was fuming a mile a minute, one of my co-workers asked me what was going on. I took him outside so I could have a cigarette, and explained the situation as he’d stated in the letter as follows:
Donkey Ass was not going quietly into the night. In between calling me such titles as “whiny,” “ignorant,” “immature,” “sniveling,” “snot-nosed,” and “puling,” he said that he was doing everything possible to fulfill the contract -- and more! -- and that the current round of difficulties was, in fact, all my fault. If I was more mature, I’d be able to see that and would grovel at his feet for the apology he so richly deserved. Truth be told, he was very surprised at this recent outburst; if I was so unhappy with the way things were going, he felt, I should do the mature thing and just let the contract expire instead of making a big stink about it. Where was this hostility coming from? Weren’t we friends? He had made a commitment to the project, and he was going to see it through. . . with or without my cooperation. In fact, now that he thought about it, he could recall doing a little bit of editing on the book himself, checking for spelling and punctuation. . . well, didn’t that mean that he owned this version of Nightfall? He certainly thought so. He also hadn’t gotten paid for any of his editing work, which the going rate as such was about seventy-five bucks an hour. Maybe he should just bill me for the time he’d spent on the manuscript. In fact, he was very tempted to simply sell this version to a publisher and tell me to go stuff myself, because after all, his hard work was clearly unappreciated. He wasn’t sure how I saw things, but he knew that getting published was a long and painful process, and obviously I was lashing out because my spoiled mindset believed that I was going to hit print right away and the riches were going to roll in. I was pitching a temper tantrum at the wrong person; if anyone was to blame, it was myself.
“He said that?” my co-worker said wonderingly. “Jesus, he’s got balls.”
Personally, I was thinking about a scene from the movie Animal House. In my mind’s eye, Dean Wormer was in the process of telling Flounder that “fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son.” I wanted to amend this somewhat and tell Donkey Ass that incompetent, stubborn and stupid was no way to go through life, and adding “criminal” on top of that was asking for trouble.
“So basically,” my co-worker continued, “he’s saying he owns your book because he told you to put commas instead of dashes in a few places, right? Like, if a record producer tells a band to put a few drum rolls in various places on an album, your agent is saying that by this alliteration, the producer would then own the album, right?”
“That’s what he’s saying.”
“No jury in the world would buy that load of horseshit.”
Yes, things had gotten that bad. Court? Lawyers? Lawsuits? Questions of legal ownership? I was ready for battle. However, my legal advisors, a pair of probation officers who had passed the bar exam and looked over my contract, advised that I not do anything and just let the contract run out.
As I recall, at first I screamed upon hearing this advice. Later, I realized they were right and backed off. It galled me terribly, but they were good advisors and they saved me a potentially enormous and expensive headache.
There were three catches to the contract, two of which worked in his favor. The first major stumbling block was that in the case of a dispute, both the parties agreed that arbitration would be carried out by a third party located in Greenville, North Carolina, and parties would be subject to the ruling as such handed down by this body. Also, the loser had to pay all fees associated with this event. Local boy vs. outsider. Somehow, I had overlooked this codicil to the contract, and the reality of what it meant was like a bucket of cold water being dumped in my lap.
The slam-dunk case I had been looking at suddenly evaporated. In fact, it could very easily go the other way, depending on how low Donkey Ass was willing to stoop in order to get himself off the hook. Any of the inflammatory and threatening comments made in his recent e-mail could be very well explained away by describing copious use of pain medication and stress; aw, come on, he didn’t really mean it. He was just loaded. His failure to send any queries to publishers could, with the appropriate doe-eyed looks, appear to be a simple case of an honest businessman wanting to make sure all of his ducks were in a row before jumping in with the team and charging into the Big Wind. Web site jacked up? Hey, come on, that’s not my fault. I can only do so much from my bed of pain here; it’s the webmaster’s responsibility to get on that particular dog. The only real technicality I could nail him on was the fact that according to the contract, quarterly itemization and progress reports were supposed to be supplied by Donkey Ass, and he hadn’t done so. One sure thing alone does not a case make.
Also, unfortunately there was the specter of the local folks to contend with. Here is our plaintiff, Jesse Cairns. He lives in California, and the last time we checked, a major hurricane did not come through California and reduce its inhabitants to boiling and drinking goat pee to stay alive. This Californian has a job, whereas our poor local boy has lost everything that he owns. This Californian seems to be in perfect health, while our local boy. . . just look at him! Wracked in agony! Chastised by this ungrateful wretch who should be happy that anybody at all wants to read his stories. Fancies himself a writer, does he? Whatever! And since we don’t know jack-all about the rules that those fancy New York City publishing boys go by, we think that Mr. Cairns should reimburse our local hero for all the fine editing work he did on what surely must be a God-awful book. If it didn’t need editing in the first place, it would be good, right? Bailiff, take this Californian out of our sight, and make sure he pays cash in the lobby before you take him out back and beat him with a rubber hose. Then, bathe him in goat pee. Californian.
You might laugh, but the two lawyers I talked to said that this scenario was not that far removed from reality, minus the goat pee. They use sheep urine there. Plus, even if I did prove my case and win -- they said they knew I was right, but then again, they knew me, and a North Carolina jury might not -- the fact remained that I would have to take vacation time from work, pay for flying out to North Carolina, pay for a hotel room, food, expenses. . . and the fact was, you could not get blood from a turnip. I might indeed -- and remotely -- win, but the possibility of seeing any of that reimbursement money was very low indeed.
There was another thing to consider as well; according to the contract, if I got somebody else to sign Nightfall to a company before our term of service was up, Donkey Ass still got his fifteen percent. Even more insidious, if he was able to find a decent offer and then, within three months after we parted ways, I found somebody to sign it, Donkey Ass still received his fifteen percent. I’ve never heard of a more Faustian publishing deal that, and my lawyers cautioned that provoking Donkey Ass might fire him up enough to seriously start shopping the book. . . just to screw me over later down the line.
“Your best bet,” they told me, “is to sit tight, say nothing, and hope that the S.O.B. dies a painful fucking death.”
The clause in the contract that worked in my favor seemed minor, but upon closer inspection, it turned out to be fairly earth-shaking. Donkey Ass had, by the words of the contract, agreed to represent “the work,” which was later referred to in the same line as Nightfall. However, it also meant by this wording that he had no other representative powers. He got the first look at things, but if he didn’t act within sixty days, they were all mine. Therefore, the scripts and short stories I had sent him had long ago defaulted to me, so at least I wasn’t totally impotent.
So I had some sort of a victory in the sense that he didn’t own my soul or my other works, only Nightfall. . . but it was a hollow one. As much as I hated to admit it, Donkey Ass had won. He’d gotten fifty dollars and stolen a year out of the life of Nightfall, and all he’d had to do was nothing. What had I gotten? A lousy web site whose links didn’t even work -- hey, I could do that on my own.
In closing, what did we learn, kids? Well, we learned that meeting an agent on-line is not usually the safest way to do it. We learned that just because somebody says they are an agent, you shouldn’t take them at face value. Investigate them, and spend the time needed to determine if they are legit. Remember, anybody who can print a business card can be an agent; there’s no bar exam involved. We also learned that if things start going south, or you start feeling funny about stuff, by all means, talk to somebody.
And finally, always read the fine print on a contract. Remember how TLC sold ten million copies of CrazySexyCool and declared Chapter 11? It can happen in the publishing world, too.
A lot of people say that if you want to want to be a writer, you need to read a lot. Let this be a lesson: don’t stop doing this when it comes to contract time.
Otherwise, look out for the goat pee baths.