Amazing Stories is gone, despite repeated efforts to revive it. Interesting science-fiction magazines such as Vertex are gone, and, of course, the horror mags like Creepy and Eerie. Those wonderful periodicals are long gone. Every now and then someone will try to revive one of these magazines; as I write this, Weird Tales is staggering through such a revival. Mostly, they fail. It’s like those plays in blank verse, the ones that open and then close in what seems to be no more than the wink of an eye. When it’s gone, you can’t bring it back. What’s lost has a way of staying lost.
I’ve continued to write short stories over the years, partly because the ideas still come from time to time—beautifully compressed ideas 14
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that cry out for three thousand words, maybe nine thousand, fifteen thousand at the very most—and partly because it’s the way I affirm, at least to myself, the fact that I haven’t sold out, no matter what the more unkind critics may think. Short stories are still piecework, the equivalent of those one-of-a-kind items you can buy in an artisan’s shop. If, that is, you are willing to be patient and wait while it’s made by hand in the back room.
But there’s no reason for stories to be marketed by the same old just-like-Father-did-it methods, simply because the stories themselves are created that way, nor is there any reason to assume (as so many stod-gies in the critical press seem to have done) that the way in which a piece of fiction is sold must in some way contaminate or cheapen the product itself.
I’m speaking here of “Riding the Bullet,” which has surely been my oddest experience of selling my wares in the marketplace, and a story which illustrates the main points I’m trying to make: that what’s lost cannot be easily retrieved, that once things go past a certain point, extinction is probably inevitable, but that a fresh perspective on one aspect of creative writing—the commercial aspect—can sometimes refresh the whole.
“Bullet” was composed after On Writing, and while I was still recuperating from an accident which left me in a state of nearly constant physical misery. Writing took me away from the worst of that pain; it was (and continues to be) the best pain-killer in my limited arsenal. The story I wanted to tell was simplicity itself; little more than a campfire ghost-story, really. It was The Hitchhiker Who Got Picked Up By A Dead Man.
While I was writing away at my story in the unreal world of my imagination, a dot-com bubble was growing in the equally unreal world of e-commerce. One aspect of this was the so-called electronic book, which, according to some, would spell the end of books as we’d always known them, objects of glue and binding, pages you turned by hand (and which sometimes fell out, if the glue was weak or the binding old). In early 2000, there was great interest in an essay by Arthur C. Clarke, which had been published only in cyberspace.
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It was extremely short, though (like kissing your sister is what I thought when I first read it). My story, when it was done, was quite long. Susan Moldow, my editor at Scribner (as an X-Files fan, I call her Agent Moldow . . . you work it out), called one day prompted by Ralph Vicinanza and asked if I had anything I’d like to try in the electronic marketplace. I sent her “Bullet,” and the three of us—
Susan, Scribner, and I—made a little bit of publishing history. Several hundred thousand people downloaded the story, and I ended up making an embarrassing amount of money. (Except that’s a fucking lie, I wasn’t embarrassed a bit.) Even the audio rights went for over a hundred thousand dollars, a comically huge price.
Am I bragging here? Boasting my narrow whiteboy ass off? In a way I am. But I’m also here to tell you that “Riding the Bullet” made me absolutely crazy. Usually, if I’m in one of those fancy-schamncy airport lounges, I’m ignored by the rest of the clientele; they’re busy babbling into phones or making deals at the bar. Which is fine with me.
Every now and then one of them will drop by and ask me to sign a cocktail napkin for the wife. The wife, these handsomely suited, briefcase-toting fellows usually want me to know, has read all my books. They, on the other hand, have read none. They want me to know that, too. Just too busy. Read The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People, read Who Moved My Cheese? , read The Prayer of Jabez, and that’s pretty much it. Gotta hurry, gotta rush-rush, I got a heart attack due in about four years, and I want to be sure that I’m there to meet it with my 401(k) all in order when it shows up.
After “Bullet” was published as an e-book (cover, Scribner colophon, and all), that changed. I was mobbed in the airport lounges.
I was even mobbed in the Boston Amtrak lounge. I was buttonholed on the street. For a little while there, I was turning down the chance to appear on a giddy three talk-shows a day (I was holding out for Springer, but Jerry never called). I even got on the cover of Time, and The New York Times pontificated at some length over the perceived success of “Riding the Bullet” and the perceived failure of its cyber-successor, The Plant. Dear God, I was on the front page of The Wall Street Journal. I had inadvertently become a mogul.
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And what was driving me crazy? What made it all seem so pointless? Why, that nobody cared about the story. Hell, nobody even asked about the story, and do you know what? It’s a pretty good story, if I do say so myself. Simple but fun. Gets the job done. If it got you to turn off the TV, as far as I’m concerned, it (or any of the stories in the collection which follows) is a total success.
But in the wake of “Bullet,” all the guys in ties wanted to know was, “How’s it doing? How’s it selling?” How to tell them I didn’t give a flying fuck how it was doing in the marketplace, that what I cared about was how it was doing in the reader’s heart? Was it succeeding there? Failing? Getting through to the nerve-endings? Causing that little frisson which is the spooky story’s raison d’être? I gradually realized that I was seeing another example of creative ebb, another step by another art on the road that may indeed end in extinction. There is something weirdly decadent about appearing on the cover of a major magazine simply because you used an alternate route into the marketplace. There is something weirder about realizing that all those readers might have been a lot more interested in the novelty of the electronic package than they were in what was inside the package. Do I want to know how many of the readers who downloaded
“Riding the Bullet” actually read “Riding the Bullet”? I do not. I think I might be extremely disappointed.
E-publishing may or may not be the wave of the future; about that I care not a fiddler’s fart, believe me. For me, going that route was simply another way of trying to keep myself fully involved in the process of writing stories. And then getting them to as many people as possible.
This book will probably end up on the best-seller lists for awhile; I’ve been very lucky that way. But if you see it there, you might ask yourself how many other books of short stories end up on the bestseller lists in the course of any given year, and how long publishers can be expected to publish books of a type that doesn’t interest readers very much. Yet for me, there are few pleasures so excellent as sitting in my favorite chair on a cold night with a hot cup of tea, listening to the wind outside and reading a good story which I can complete in a single sitting.
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Writing them is not so pleasurable. I can only think of two in the current collection—the title story and “L.T.’s Theory of Pets”—
which were written without an amount of effort far greater than the relatively slight result. And yet I think I have succeeded in keeping my craft new, at least to myself, mostly because I refuse to let a year go by without writing at least one or two of them. Not for money, not even precisely for love, but as a kind of dues-paying. Because if you want to write short stories, you have to do more than think about writing short stories. It is not like riding a bicycle but more like working out in the gym: your choice is use it or lose it.