Ficlets

1. Quick! Tell us a little bit about yourself and Fairy Tales for Writers.

I’m a New Yorker who’s been living in Spain for the past 8 years, where I make my living as a full-time author, anthologist, and translator. I made my first professional writing sale when I was still in high school (to Marion Zimmer Bradley for her Sword & Sorceress series) and in the intervening 18 years I’ve published over 80 books (writing in both English and Spanish) in all sorts of genres: fiction, essays, graphic novels, children’s books, even a cookbook. So I’ve seen both the good and the bad in the publishing world, both my own experiences and those of colleagues and friends.

I’ve been writing poetry for years – publishing in periodicals like the Christian Science Monitor, the Saturday Evening Post, The Lyric, and even Physics Today, and in anthologies like The Random House Treasury of Light Verse, Chicken Soup for the Horse-Lover’s Soul 2, or Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman: Book of Dreams – but Fairy Tales for Writers is my first book of my own poems.

Basically, the book recasts traditional fairy tales with writers as the heroes and heroines; instead of dragons to be slain, the quests undertaken are the struggles and joys of the writing life.

2. Speaking as a writer, it was amusing (and a little terrifying) to see how many real-life writer and editor challenges fit so well into the fairy tale rubric. What is it about the writing life that makes it so compatible to being recast as a fairy tale – and when you were putting together these poems, did it amuse (and terrify!) you to see how easily it fit the rubric?

So many fairy tales are about coming of age, which is a process that we, as writers, regardless of our actual age, must constantly go through as well. There are so many rites of passage in the writer’s life, from the solitary struggles of putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) and the whole submissions process to the interactions with a writer’s group or a mentor or editor.

And even an acceptance is not an ending, the “happily ever after” of the fairy tale, but merely a new stage of the process with its own rites of passage to be dealt with: revision letters, public readings, reacting to reviews of your work, thinking what to say when someone asks for an autograph, answering the eternal question of “what are you working on next?”...

I personally find the archetypes of fairy tales to be very resonant, so it felt natural to me to view the writing process through that lens, and then to show those parallels to others in these poems.

For instance, my friend Justine Larbalestier once compared a synopsis for a novel to an advertisement for perfume, which I think is a great metaphor: it’s something that evokes the novel, but is not the novel itself. In Rapunzel, the metonymy of her beautiful hair is very like the process of submitting a synopsis with a query: it is the vehicle which (literally) draws the prince to her, but in the end is left behind when the prince and she escape. In the writer’s happy ending, the synopsis is left behind if the editor buys the book; it’s the novel that is published.

So sometimes, these are cautionary stories – a writer who gives up her voice for love or little red riding hood being seduced by the wolf as he points out the flowery language of a contract (“it’s all so complicated, this seems to be the real thing. how exciting it is to be published!”) that turns out to be a vanity press scam – but there are also stories about the triumphs of the writing life, from the quiet joys of completing a draft to the rags-to-riches fame of J. K. Rowling – I mean, Cinderella.

3. One of the nice things about fairy tales is that they stop – you get to say “and they lived happily ever after.” In the real world, of course, things don’t stop; people (and writers, who are often people) have to keep going on with their lives and careers and so on. So: In the real world of writing, are there actual “happy endings” for writers? Or is that unrealistic?

What I find so interesting in writing (or reading) fairy tale retellings is exploring what happens after the “happily ever after” moment. But that’s a separate issue.

I do think there is a difference between the writing and the publishing process, and unfortunately, the publishing process is a voracious beast that is never satisfied. It is very difficult, say, to write a single excellent book in today’s marketplace; the way the industry works, everything is always focused on continuing to exploit a successful author/genre/trend with more of the same. But when promoting “the new Author X” book, what the industry is touting is not so much the books newness but its sameness to the older books, that comfortable familiarity of knowing what it will be like (if the author is performing as the current state of the industry wishes). Hence so many endless series or sequels or imitations in so many genres.

There are a lot of reasons why people choose to write, and whether one is writing a story or a poem as a gift for a friend or in hopes of appearing on Oprah, those personal choices are, I think, always valid. The goals may be more or less realistic, or more or less attainable, and those goals more than anything will determine one’s happiness as a writer.

I know writers (both new and established) who are ecstatic to have a story accepted at a magazine that only pays in copies, and I know New York Times bestsellers who are always discontent because they think they should be selling even more, or getting some special treatment they think other authors (from their own or a rival publisher) are getting.

My writing life is filled with constant frustrations with the DETAILS of various publishing projects (whether this is the stress of an upcoming deadline, a cancelled contract, a negative review, etc.) but I think, in the overall picture, I am living that happily ever after as a writer in that I manage to do something I love and support myself enough at it.

One of the reasons I left New York was to not let myself get as caught up in the stress of the industry, to step aside, as it were, from the rat race of chasing the bestseller. The truth is that so many things can go wrong – even when you do everything right. And that sometimes luck – like in fairy tales – plays a part in how things turn out.

The hard part, I find, is dealing with the constant ups and downs, and how quickly things can turn from one to the other. Two years ago, I had two book contracts canceled per month between January and June; this year, I’ve published eleven books so far in that same January-June period. I often think that just hanging in there and continuing to write is a kind of happy ending in itself.

I’ve had books which have won an award or have gotten 50 or more reviews in major venues yet which barely sell, and others where despite incompetence somewhere along the line (the data entry person misspells your name or the title) a book has exceeded even my own expectations in sales or acclaim or what-have-you. So much depends on what measuring stick you use to chart your “success”.

But the key to happiness, I think, is to accept that at a certain point things are out of your hand.

4. Share a piece of advice you’ve been given about writing.

When you’re writing, keep in mind that the story doesn’t care if you’ve been published or not, it just wants to be the best story it can be.

It’s so easy to get distracted by all the business of being a writer, and sometimes the industry does make us put the cart before the horse as it were (like writing an outline before you write a novel), but at the end of the day the most important thing, of course, is the writing itself, and trying to stay as true to that as possible.

5. You are not only a writer but an editor and a publisher. Tell us how each of these personas affects the other. Are you tougher on yourself as a writer because you’ve been a publisher? When other writers complain about their editors and publishers, whose side are you on?

I’ve also been a bookseller and a foreign rights agent, so I’ve seen publishing from all along the process of making books. But I still always think of myself as a writer, even when I also happen to be involved in some other aspect of the field.

But I am also a reader. I generally read 150-200 novels a year, not to mention the poetry, graphic novels, essays/memoirs/other works of non-fiction, magazines, etc.

I love books, and I am interested in and fascinated by the entire process of making books. Which is one reason I’ve dabbled in so many different aspects of the industry. I love going to the trade bookfairs like Frankfurt, BookExpo, or Bologna (for children’s books) not just to sell my own books (which is always lovely) but to be around so many people who are still passionate about books and writing, even as it is a business.

Publishing in so many different genres, markets, countries, etc. has given me a wealth of experience to draw on. I have for years now been doing a lot of my own publicity and marketing to supplement the efforts of my publishers, because each publisher is primarily interested in promoting their own titles, whereas I’m interested in promoting all of me, not just an individual title or few. So, even as a writer, I’ve had to do a lot of jobs/tasks that would normally seem to be the publisher’s responsibility.

It may seem less surprising, then, that I’ve recently started a small press, A Midsummer Night’s Press, although actually the press has its roots fifteen years earlier when I was an undergraduate and had access to a printing press in the basement of my dormitory. So I learned to cast type by hand and printed broadsides of poems by Jane Yolen, Nancy Willard, Joe Haldeman, and others—authors I had met since I had begun publishing my own stories a few years earlier. The press is still publishing poetry, although now using a commercial printer and electronic graphic design instead of the earlier hand-printed works.

There is a lot of freedom to having your own press, and especially one that isn’t necessarily confined to the restrictions of a commercial publishing house (or even the traditional bookstore outlets for poetry). One thing I’ve learned over the years is that it’s very hard to get commercial publishers to do things differently than how they normally do things. This doesn’t mean that the ideas are inherently good or bad, they’re just not viable with that kind of house. For instance, lets say you have a book about horses that you think would do well not just in regular bookstores but also in tack and saddle shops. If you’re publishing with a commercial publisher who doesn’t normally sell to such shops, however, it’s almost impossible to get them to change how they do business. On the other hand, a smaller or independent press may find the investment of time and energy to cultivate those non-traditional outlets a welcome and profitable endeavor (especially if it can be amortized with other similar titles).

So while I continue to do projects with many other publishers, both commercial and independent, the press exists to publish a certain kind of book that works best outside the traditional book venues—or, at the least, to not depend exclusively on those venues for its survival.

For instance, the next title from A Midsummer Night’s Press is The Good-Neighbor Policy: A Double-Cross in Double Dactyl by Charles Ardai, who just won an Edgar Award earlier this year for Best Mystery Short Story. In addition to being a mystery novelist (Songs of Innocence), Ardai is also the editor of the Hard Case Crime imprint of noir novels. The book that I’m publishing is a curious hybrid, in that it’s a murder mystery told in light verse, something that wouldn’t ordinarily appeal to most traditional mystery publishers or poetry publishers. A Midsummer Night’s Press is able to promote the book to both mystery and poetry markets.

6. You also have an amazingly varied output as a writer: poems, science fiction, children’s books and gay-themed adult fiction are some of the areas in which you’ve been published. Why do you choose to publish in so many fields? Is it a desire or a necessity, or a little of both?

I think the diversity of my output has more to do with the fact that my interests as a reader are likewise very varied, so I wind up writing in a lot of the different genres or modes that I like to read in.

Since I happen to support myself entirely on my writing-related income, it does help to have a number of different primary writing areas, though, so if one genre or field is flat (or I’m simply not selling any new projects in that area right now) I can still fall back on the other genres/fields to find enough work.

Or maybe I just have publishing ADD. ;-)

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Visit A Midsummer’s Night Press here, and read excerpts from Fairy Tales for Writers here and here.