Voodoo Childe, I Have Slightly Returned (Pt. 2)
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 Webmaster, 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.
TO BE CONCLUDED!