The Nightman (It Doesn't Work That Way)

Write a story first. Seek a market later. This is the way I did things before I wised up to the wild and wicked ways of the short fiction market.

Strike that. Writing a story that you are hot to write is still the way to go. I never failed to sell a story that I was simply inspired to pen. I certainly can't say that about the stories I wrote for specific markets.

But wait. That said, once you start to stray into the land of 25k words, as The Nightman does, you have severely limited the number of markets for it, no matter how good it might be. In fact, if you stray above 8k words, the word hole availability starts to evaporate.

I went into The Nightman with my eyes wide shut. Every single detail of the thing came to me in a rush, fairly much in the way it was written. Oh, it did have some editor bait. The part where our hero suddenly up and saves the woman in the mini plantation certainly could hae been cut as could what the gnome went on and on saying. Those things were there so that the editor could justify his existence, should he feel the absolute compulsion to do so. Just give them something to whack. Anything to distract them from wanting to stomp on my jokes or action scenes.

Other than that, it was pretty much what I dreamed up. Having finished the work, I knew I was toast as far as finding a market. Wow. A fantasy novella. Talk about no known market. Actually, there was all of one print market and a couple of internet things. I don't really believe in the internet things, despite the fact that I am doing this. As for the particular print market in question, they don't seem to like anything I do and all of their novella pieces seem to be via invite only. I have a real job and no time for workshops, conventions or other in person suckage. I have to do these things cold and over the transom and that is something of a major problem.

But I did alright before. I've been published numerous times. But things have changed a bit in short fiction land. I came in just as the trend became micro fiction or under 8k words. I find it rather hard to do anything all that compelling in that form. I say this despite the fact that I was making sales in it. It was all writing that somehow calls attention to itself. Often it's all hook, no plot, no character development and little scene description.

Having sent Nightman out, I got three rejects. Now three rejects is NOTHING. That's not even a good start. Give up after 30. Again, the problem wasn't the number of rejects, but rather the time to turn them around. The three rejects took a year. Given that the best I could get for it was $1200 dollars, a year seems like a long sale time. Also, most of my submits go out on my paper with my postage, making the spec costs close to $10 a crack. How much money do you want to spend and how much time would you wait to sell a $1200 item? And if you were in the business of selling $1200 items, would you give a potential buyer three months to make up his mind? Exclusively?

Enough. The game is for the birds. In reject one, the guy was nice enough to tell me he didn't read the thing. I don't know what he did with it? Weigh it? He was actually very fast--and my only chance at making a $1200 sale. The internet people, the ones who bothered to get back to me (Nightman is technically still out with a few), took their gosh darn time. Response two essentially said that he only liked stories told in the first person. Response three said that he only published fantasy wherein the main character is out to obtain something. That's it. There was also a response from a market that I send to just because the are so very rude. She said she got through the part where he bashed in the zombie thing and then got bored. All in all, not much to show for a year's wait.

The moral of our story is don't write novellas. As for the short fiction market, it doesn't really exist. You can't make it exist again. You have a handful of digests just barely hanging on and a slew of lit mags. And there is no money in it.

All of that wouldn't be so bad, if t wasn't for the time it takes to just get a 'no'. I am still peddling my last short story. When it sells, I'm done.

(Speaking of which, I have to send it out again.)

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Newsweek Not Through Mutating

I was waiting for the other shoe to drop on this. Point blank: Newsweek is becoming a website. That's probably where a lot of magazines will eventually land. I personally like it when a magazine and its website have two different sets of content, but I do understand the economics.

The economics with Newsweek have been running one way. The guy who bought it is willing to print it, but he is not really up for staffing it. Hence Newsweek's staff is heading elsewhere. Those members who aren't essentially talking heads on cable news, that is.

You see, being a talking head on cable news actually pays pretty damn well. A lot better than being a journalist. Your qualification is, of course, working for some half baked think zine like National Review or Mother Jones or whatnot. (Newsweek now firmly joining the ranks of whatnot.) With a good talking head gig, you can almost forgo income from other sources. Heck, you can give your print commentary away. That very much suits the George Wills of this world. The problem with being a talking head is that it is a major time suck. You might be able to pull off being a commentator, but not an actual reporter.

To fill the reporter hole that the exodus of reporters has left from Newsweek, it has teamed up with the Daily Beast--a place that still has reporters. This way Newsweek gets the best of both worlds--a bunch of TV types who can phone in their commentary for a pittance and shovelware news from the Beast. It essentially makes Newsweek the Beast's print blog with a sprinkle of people from TV Land. Is that a winning formula? I don't know. Is it a dismal end to what once had been a fairly vital magazine? I don't suppose Newsweek could be any worse then it already is. We will see.

***

Speaking of dead, the other shoe dropped on the Cubs. It seems the guy who really couldn't afford the one billion dollars he didn't quite pay to buy the baseball team can also not afford the 300 million it will take to fix the ballpark they play at. Instead, he wants me to pay for it.

Well, maybe not me in particular, but people like me. He needs sixty dollars from everyone in Chicago to tuck point his aging beer garden. (As this blog mentioned at the time of the sale, repair costs to the ballpark were a well known line item.) In return, we don't actually get to see a game. No, that's for the rich people who can afford 100 clams a ticket to see what usually is a LAST PLACE TEAM. What we get instead is his promise that he won't move the LAST PLACE TEAM from the ballpark. The ballpark, by the way, is the only actual drawing card for the fans of said LAST PLACE TEAM, so the threat is pretty darn hollow. I say fix the bricks, disband the team. You would make much more money if you just opened it up as a private park already.

I really shouldn't pick on the guy. (As vulgar as his proposal is.) What's happening here has already hit pro soccer and will eventually hit all of baseball. The sky is not the limit. The players make too much. You have priced out the fans. The tax dodge that businesses use to purchase tickets has finite utility. Everybody is going to get a haircut. It's too bad it's starting with the Cubs.

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I reserve the right to turn The Nightman into a novel. There's an additional 17k words of this that I haven't presented because: (a) it sucks; (b) it doesn't stand up very well as a short story and (c) it went in another direction...because it sucks.