The Long Awaited Book Release

Well, my short story collection is officially in print, on demand at a print house called lulu.com. After hobnobbing all weekend at Confusion telling as many people I could about it, I have a few answers to the questions I've gotten about the whole effort. Here's some of it in case you're interested.

Q:Good lord, Freon, I didn't even know you were a writer! How long have you been doing this sort of thing?
A:Gosh, I think I started writing for real in the beginning of 1999... I'd just left work as an IT correspondent at the Big Unnamed Mortgage Company down the road and had some time to coast as well as a laptop computer. I started writing STORMSONG about then, over a cup of coffee at Dave and Buster's.

Q:So STORMSONG was the first story?
A:Yes. It was completed in two months, and then it went looking for a print market in mid-1999 at the usual stops - Analog, Asimov, DNA and a few others. While it was away I worked on RIPPER and the other shorts. Concurrently, I was developing THE ICE TRAIN and GIANNI BUBONIC on the now-defunct content site called themestream.com. By the time I got six or seven rejections for STORMSONG I had quite a collection and wasn't sure how to market them given STORMSONG's performance.

Q:STORMSONG was not ready?
A:No. It was too long. I do not think there's a market anymore for mid-length action SF. One of the last was OMNI magazine, and after Datlow took it online there was not much more except the remaining four or five print markets. Needless to say RIPPER didn't fit their format at all! I'd have to be Asimov himself to stake out that much space in a magazine. Ripper would take up two issues!

Q:Why not rewrite the stories to find the market?
A:I have heard from many that this is the way to go, if you want to see yourself in print before you die. I have a lot of respect for that attitude and would have if not for the simple fact that these characters belong in a continuum, and development of the characters depended on how much time I spent on each. There's ways to do it of course, but the stories lose their relationship with each other. So I have a fully developed cast, and longer stories than the popular SF markets are interested in. But I was willing to gamble that the popular SF markets don't know everything. A lot of fans I've talked to (even last month at CONFUSION) said that this length and depth is right up their alley. Novella length, and not absolutely stand-alone fictions.

Q:So self-publishing became an option.
A:I wouldn't say it became an option until after I got some indication that the stories were ready. I have long been one of the supporters of DIY publishing; I've pubbed the Pinatariders' Propaganda Rag in past years, edited and produced TANSTAAFL, and I'm not really a stranger to the Xerox copier. But there is definitely a difference between self-publishing because you've got a novel and self-publishing because you have a novel that is ready for the readership, and which you will not regret doing. There are a lot of regrettable novels out there - not all are just self-pubbed. Some are mass-market and they still suck. I got my indication when I got acceptance nearly simultaneously for two stories I'd written during 2001, called THE JAM and RADIANT SOULS.

Q:THE JAM went to Writershood.com as a tribute to the Sept. 11th victims.
A:Yes. It ran in October 2001, with a full page of charities links and a dedication to Danny Lewin, whom I'd researched earlier in the year for material for THE JAM. A good friend of mine worked for Danny at Akamai Technologies in Boston, and I found out the connection when he posted about the aftermath on the Stilyagi list. THE JAM went to the market almost untouched from its first draft; Scott Humphries ran it essentially unchanged.

Q:And RADIANT SOULS?
A:RADIANT SOULS was actually dictated to my PC with ViaVoice. I massaged the transcript and it went to LOST WORLDS in its second draft. It was my first print acceptance.

Q:This proved the stories' worth...
A:Yes it did. In an industry where people count on about a hundred twenty rejections per piece of work, I was looking at possibly seeing print in the next decade. But I was unwilling to shorten the work just to get into print. They were developed enough, and they were quite polished by the time I found lulu as an avenue.

Q:And so now they are available.
A:Yes. Part 1 is in print at lulu.com right now as we speak. This is a polished work, and if I get enough copies in this run I will go get that ISBN number and we can really start calling it ready for the big time.

Q:Are congratulations in order? I mean there's less fanfare here than a mass-market release.
A:It's give-and-take on that. I've told people that I appreciate their congratulations, and I take it to mean that my hard work isn't going without appreciation. It was a lot of hard work.

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