1n 1998, the last book of my YA series Extreme Zone rolled off the presses. Fun fact: the teenage models who appeared on the covers of these books were paid more for their images than I received for writing the contents. Such is publishing.
Later that same year my sci-fi mystery series, News from the Edge was put on hold to wait on the progress of the News from the Edge television series then in development for NBC. Somewhere along the line, the name of the series changed to The Chronicle the sex of the main character was reversed, and the series was moved from NBC to the (then) SciFi Channel. Another fun fact: my contract specified I was to receive $5,000 "for each broadcast episode," which sounds nice. Even one season (which is all there was) was a 22 episode run. Yeah, but SciFi was not a broadcast network. My actual pay was $0 per episode. This is also publishing.
Around the same time, I had a falling out with the publisher of the fantasy series that started with Devil's Tower. Despite good sales and nominations for two major awards, the series was abruptly halted. No reason provided. And yeah, that's publishing.
Suddenly, I went from having so many contracts stacked on my desk that I had thundered through 28 books in just five years... to nothing. No contracts. No interest.
I didn't actually stop writing at that point. There were still editors out there who knew I could string words together, and who needed books in a hurry. So I became a ghostwriter. I wrote a novel whose ludicrous opening page was the only contribution by the former military leader whose name appeared on the cover. I did a lot–and I mean a lot–of a popular YA series featuring a pair of pert and perky sisters. I even created a new YA series and cranked out eight books (all on eight week deadlines) that appeared under the byline of a big name writer. I didn't get my name on so much as a thank you page for any of these works.
By then, I had achieved a simmering low boil of frustration leading to burnout. A career that had looked promising one moment, had become an endless, thankless grind for pay so low that I could have topped it doing night shifts at Burger Doodle. I put down my metaphorical pen, brushed off a moth-eaten jacket, and went back to beg for an office job.
It took me a long time to get my "Once upon a time" back...
Some years later, I begged my way into a sci-fi convention, mostly so I could rub elbows with friends who had been much more successful in the game. Since conventions are always generous about defining the word "writer" I was handed a free pass, and even got an hour on the schedule for a "reading." Thing was, I didn't really have anything with me to read. The only thing in my pocket was a decrepit Palm Pilot (remember those?) with a few scraps and left overs from stories I never finished.
To my surprise, the room was nearly packed when it came time for my reading. Stunned, I stumbled to the stage, apologized for being unprepared, and began to trot out these old bits and pieces. It was only about fifteen minutes into this awkward program that I realized the truth–no one was there to hear me. They were all just getting a good seat in advance of the NYT bestselling author due in the room next.
Glowing red with embarrassment, I stumbled on. I read a few pages from a short story in which a man waits on the borders of the afterlife on the one night a year when the dead are permitted to visit. I read a few pages from a sci fi dystopia in which humans are both the farmers and the farmed. And a read a section of a work where that peculiar species, the 19th century amateur naturalist, faces off with miniature knights in the rainforests of an imaginary British colony.
99.9% of the audience spent the time looking at their watches. Fortunately for me, there was one guy who was paying attention. That guy turned out to be John O'Neil, one of the founders of New Epoch Press and Black Gate Magazine. John was kind enough to not only come up to speak to me afterwards, but also to encourage me to finish some of these fragments. Eventually, one of them became the sci-fi story Leather Doll which appeared in Black Gate in 2004. The other story, the one with the 19th century naturalist, appeared as a series of novelettes spread over three issues of the magazine. It was an extraordinary number of pages to hand to a mid-list author on the wane, and I was hugely grateful to John and the rest of the Black Gate team for giving me that room.
In the process of going from short story to serialized novel, What would eventually become The Naturalist would grow to 100,000 words, get chopped back to around 60,000 and then spread out again to a comfortable length somewhere in the middle. The end result was something I was pretty happy with – an action-adventure novel set in 19th century Central America where the main character fights off the enemy without ever really wielding any weapon but his wits.
Even so, my long neglected agent took one look at the manuscript and said "what is this?" Historical action-adventural travel story with a pro-nature slant and some unusual ants. "There is no such genre," she replied.
So the book sat into a drawer until a couple of friends decided to start their own small publishing start-up for "freaking awesome books at great prices." And so, The Naturalist finally appeared, all in one nifty volume.
It's out there right now in Super Cheap E-Book Form and also in Extra Keen Trade Paperback with a cover produced by the talented Marella Sands.
If you can spare a dime few bucks, buying a copy would be nice. If you happened to read the version in Black Gate dropping off a review would also be great.
Now that I'm back at the keyboard, I'm remembering how much I loved this fiction thing before the publishing industry tried to beat it out of me. I think I'll do it again.