"Over clouds my mind will fly, forever now I can't think why.
My body tries to leave my soul.
Or is it me, I just don't know.
Mem'ries rising from the past, the future's shadow overcast.
Something's clutching at my head, through the darkness I'll be led."
--- Iron Maiden, "Purgatory", from the album KILLERS
"...there is a difference between being convinced and being stubborn. I'm not certain what the difference is, but I do know that if you butt your head against a stone wall long enough, at some point you realize the wall is stone and that your head is flesh and blood."
--- Maya Angelou
MANY Apologies! Been a while since I last posted and this summer has mostly been an extended exercise in dissatisfaction and misplaced effort. It is time I shared what little news I have.
Back in late-winter/early-spring this year, I turned over the manuscript for NOCTURNES IN PURGATORY over to my Publisher/Editor at By Light Unseen Media. The novel is the latest chapter in the continuing Borrego Bay/Moon-Chosen saga featuring my character Montgomery Quinn, The Adversary. It's a dark crime epic with "real world" cache and features some of my most complex vampire societal concepts. I have already expressed how much I felt the concept has grown and my feelings that I may have actually done the concept justice.
No word back as yet. I find myself getting impatient and a little irritable. It would certainly be nice to hear something, even if it is a rejection, soon.
But I will force myself to work through my edgy restlessness.
On other fronts, my time has been split in reviewing and resculpting a couple of older projects. I mentioned those initial efforts in a previous post, one a dark science fantasy/horror epic and the other a science fiction thriller/tech-noir adventure, so no point in going over that again. The titles & outlines for the individual books in the series, overarching plot synopsis, and major character sketches are complete. I've written a few new pages for each, here and there, and re-editted & cleaned up material I'd already drafted for those manuscripts. What little there is of those stories looks pretty good.
I know I've mentioned before I've been hesitant to devote a lot of time to them because they aren't the most commercial of ideas to throw before an audience. But, honestly, they're not THAT far out. Still, what with the already archly-conservative book publishing industry having become almost reactionary in its assessment of untried concepts, driven mostly by bottom-line marketability and the need to pigeon-hole novels into easily defined categories, I didn't want to spend buckets of time producing a product no one wanted to sell. Book sales are at an all-time low, folks, and even with eReaders like NOOKS and KINDLES, sales of "mid-list" books (books by authors who aren't Stephen King, Clive Barker, Peter Straub, Charlaine Harris or Laurell K. Hamilton) aren't generating enough to support the antiquated, elephantine, some would say "labyrinthian" current business model of the publishing industry. And as for Small Press works, wow, what can I say? Small press authors continue to stubbornly create product and make sales, making small inroads into the greater publishing industry body, but...
Fandom doesn't really count for an author unless they, the fans, vote with their wallets.
The publishing houses want the tried and true. They want more of the same. They want what they already know sells to a built-in audience. They want "brand recognition". Therefore, they have become extremely averse to risk-taking, even when the risk is relatively minor.
It's scary.
But I disagree with them. I think there's an audience out there for new ideas, for these kinds of works. Many people I know are tired of, not to mention bored with, the same old-same old in their entertainment. The thrill is gone.
And, I think, as a result, they're buying fewer books.
But, I am shamefaced to admit, I'm kind of hedging my bets -- I outlined and started a new QUINN adventure. Even though my Moon-Chosen series is a bit of a dark hybrid, it can still be easily categorized by marketing hacks. Quinn is slowly (VERY slowly) becoming a "brand". Yet, even though agents and supposed industry "insiders" proclaim that vampires are supposedly "passe", there's currently a flood of books on the market devoted to their adventures and misadventures -- the majority of them are female-centric occult romances, but more of them lately are tougher stuff. So SOMEBODY is buying those books. Might as well be mine.
And I think there's the possibility they'll buy more books than those, if the opportunity presents itself, and if these newer stories are exciting and inventive quality work.
But it sure would be nice if the Powers-That-Be worked just a little bit faster... and the industry embraced a new, more fluid paradigm.
Just my thoughts on the whole magilla while I wait, and wait, and obstinately scribe on fractured stone...
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