What isn’t real?
Plenty.
I should mention that The Fort is entirely a figment of my imagination. Its location is based on an area I’ve visited, but there is no amusement park in the vicinity. The Fort seems like a pretty neat place, to me. If it existed, I would sure want to go there. But it doesn’t. Only in Body Rides.
I finished writing Body Rides on September 27, 1995.
Mike Bailey, my editor at Headline, wrote, “Just finished Body Rides wow! It’s a trip and a half but we’ve doubtless already talked so you’ll know I think it’s great and your readers will just adore it.”
Headline published Body Rides in February, 1996. It was the main selection of the World Book Club and the Mystery and Thriller Book Club. The book club editions numbered 42,000 copies nearly doubling the amount they printed of Quake or Island.
BITE
On October 17, 1995, I sat down at my computer. Here are some of the notes I made: I’m now done with Body Rides and it has been accepted. Have also written my vampire story for Poppy Brite’s anthology. Now is the time to come up with an idea for a new novel.
How about something truly noir-ish?
I toyed earlier with the idea of a guy being approached by a beautiful gal to help her with a dead vampire. In earlier version, she was an old girlfriend. This could be like a companion piece to The Stake.
She comes to him. Tells him that she needs his help. Then she leads him to the scene of the crime a dead man with a stake through his chest. She confesses that she did it.
Says that he was a vampire. But the cops won’t believe that. They’ll try to nail her for murder. So she asks his help in getting rid of the body.
As in notes for other novels, such as Body Rides, I refer to an earlier version of the idea.
Here is what happened.
In my previous attempt, I began the story with the girl asking her former boyfriend for a favor, then taking him to her house and showing him the body of a man she has been killed. He is dead on the floor with a stake in his chest. She tells her old friend that the guy is a vampire, that she needs help in disposing of the body, etc.
As I wrote the first chapter, however, I realized that the story seemed to lie there, dead as a carp.
It had no zip, no “forward narrative thrust.”
I decided not to continue writing it, and went on to look for a better idea.
This sort of thing happens with some frequency.
Many times, I embark on a new novel, then quit. Why? Most often, it is because the story doesn’t seem to be going anyplace. I have a certain standard inside my head. It isn’t well defined, but I get a sense of when things are going well and when they aren’t. If a story does have a problem, I’d rather quit sooner than later.
But I save everything.
Because, just as I’ve quit certain projects, I have eventually returned to many of them and brought them (in one form or another) to completion.
If you’re a writer, be sure to keep track of your older stuff, the notes and chapters of unfinished novels, the manuscripts that you completed but which never sold everything.
You may find uses for them.
More often than not, when I start considering ideas for my next novel, I think about some of my earlier attempts. “What about giving that one another try?”
Usually, when a story doesn’t seem to be working, there is a very specific reason for it.
The reason isn’t always easy to recognize, especially during the first try. By the time you take another look at the idea, months or years later, the problem and solution may be obvious to you.
In the case of Bite, I decided to give it another whirl because I really liked the basic idea. I needed a way to give it some energy and forward movement, but I still wasn’t sure how.
That’s why I made extensive notes about possible ways to go with the plot.
Eventually, as I made the notes, I discovered the specific problem with my earlier version: at the beginning, the “vampire” was already dead on the floor with a stake in its chest.
The easy fix?
This time, write it so the vampire hasn’t already been dispatched. The girl won’t ask her old boyfriend for help in disposing of the body she’ll ask him to kill the vampire for her.
And that made all the difference.
Suddenly, Bite was off and running.
In fact, it ran away with itself. By the time I’d finished making my notes on October 17, I’d written seven pages (single spaced) and developed a very involved plot. As I wrote the book following my general ideas for the plot one thing led to another. I followed where they led. Eventually, it became obvious that I couldn’t do Bite the way I’d planned.
If I followed my notes and allowed the story to develop in the full way that seemed appropriate, it would be over a thousand pages long.
I wasn’t ready for that, and neither was my publisher.
(For one thing, I had a deadline that wouldn’t allow me to spend so much extra time on a novel.)
As a result, I had to choose between developing the story properly or following my intended plot to the end of the line. I couldn’t do both.
I chose to dump the second half of the plot.
Under the circumstances, that involved little more than not continuing the story after my main characters disposed of the vampire’s body.
I don’t think I’ll tell, here, what I had planned for the second half of the book. Because maybe someday I’ll want to use that plot. Maybe I won’t. But it’s never a good idea to shut off options by giving away a story that might come in handy someday.
A few little asides about Bite.
Ann asked me to name the vampire Elliot. I don’t know why.
I’d already given him another name, but she wanted Elliot. So I changed the vampire’s name. It’s easy to do with a computer.
Perhaps to reward me for letting her choose the vampire’s name, she suggested a weekend trip in which we followed the exact route that my characters take in Bite. The trip allowed me to take extensive notes about details of the areas. The notes came in very handy. The book would’ve been quite different if we hadn’t taken that trip.
My outlaw biker would’ve looked quite different if I hadn’t known Del Howison. I needed to come up with something unusual about the character’s physical appearance, and decided to give him long, flowing white hair like Del. I then named the character Snow White.
Del and his wife, Sue, are the owners of wonderful shop of horrors (including books) called Dark Delicacies. The resemblance between Snow White and Del stops with the hair. Del is a terrific, friendly guy. To the best of my knowledge, he’s not a homosexual pederast or a murderer.
Two months into the writing of Bite, I took time off to prepare my first Headline short fiction collection, Fiends.
I spent about one month on Fiends, then returned to Bite and finished it on May 1, 1996.
It was published hardbound in September, 1996. The book club later combined it with Fiends and published a 14,000 edition of the double-book.
FIENDS
Though small presses are usually eager to publish collections of short fiction, most major publishing companies have a strong aversion to collections.
Apparently, the things don’t sell as well as novels.
For years, Headline resisted the idea of publishing a collection by me. They even rejected my Stoker-nominated collection, A Good, Secret Place.
Eventually, however, Bob Tanner convinced them to do one so long as it would be anchored by a novella.
I anchored it with a piece of fiction called “Fiends.”
I’d started writing “Fiends” at my parents’ house in Tiburon, California during Christmas vacation, 1971. I finished that version of the book in the summer of 1972, but it came in at a meager 50,000 words. Despite its brevity, I sent it out to a few agents under the title, Dark Road.
And had some interesting responses. In a letter dated November 10, 1972, agent
Julian Bach wrote to me, “The story certainly moves, and there is a lot of tension in it. I suspect you will find an interested agent and that he or she will find a publisher. Our vote finally went not to take it on. We found it just too sadistic in subject matter but good luck with it elsewhere.”
On March 12, 1973, agent Max Gartenberg wrote, “It’s a gripping enough story. The problem for me was that the characters seem flat, without dimensions, and therefore hard to get caught up with. Good luck with it elsewhere.”
Soon afterward, I wrote a couple of new versions of the book. One, called He’s Out There in the Night, was written entirely in the first person, from the girl Marty’s point of view.
(A precursor of After Midnight) Another was in the third person, about 60,000 words, and called Ravished.
I believe that, in 1975, I did a major rewrite of Ravished and sent it to agent Dick Curtis.
But nothing came of my efforts.
I finally put all the drafts into a box. It must’ve been quite a large box, because at present count I seem to have seven different versions of Dark Road, He’s Out There in the Night, and Ravished. In all, I probably spent more than four years writing and rewriting the thing though it’s difficult to know exactly when I did what, because in those days I didn’t date my material very well.
Having put the book behind me, I went on to other things.
When moving all my stuff in preparation for the demolition of our old garage, I took another look at some of my old, nearly-forgotten material. And I reread a few of the unpublished novels.
I liked Ravished. Parts of it seemed clumsy and slow and silly. A few parts were outdated.
Also, at 275 manuscript pages, it was too short to be a novel (by current standards) and too long to be a novella.
When I needed a good-sized piece of fiction to anchor my Headline story collection, I realized that Ravished might be perfect. If I could fix it.
I read the manuscript again, this time trimming it drastically eliminating every word, sentence, paragraph and page that didn’t seem right.
Then I typed the revised version into my computer, fixing it more as I went along. I kept working on the story until it seemed as good as my current stuff.
During the revisions, I reduced the manuscript from 275 pages to 170 pages which seemed like a good, solid length for the lead story of my collection.
I changed the title from Ravished to “Fiends,” which would also become the title of the collection.
With 170 pages of original material, I felt fine about filling the rest of the collection with reprints. Besides, Fiends was to be published in the United Kingdom, where very few of my short stories had ever been published.
I began the selection process by printing up all my short stories. I found that I had enough of them to fill at least three volumes.
For Fiends, I eliminated the five stories that Headline had published along with Out Are the Lights in 1993. I chose to use only a few of the stories that had appeared in A Good, Secret Place.
I separated my stories into piles. One pile would be for material I would include in Fiends. Into the other pile would go all the tales I intended to save for future collections.
The decisions weren’t easy. Stories made a lot of trips back and forth from pile to pile.
For Fiends, I tried to come up with a mixture of new stuff and old. A mixture of serious and rather humorous stories. Also, I was careful not to load it down with more than its share of my best (or best-known) stories. I didn’t want it to be a “best of” volume, just a good sampling.
After I’d finally decided which stories to use, I needed to figure out some sort of order to put them in. I certainly didn’t want them arranged in chronological or alphabetical order. I decided to arrange them by content, so that there would be a lot of variety: a scary story here, a darkly humorous story there, a long one, a short one, a new one, an old one, and so on.
Though I made major revisions in Ravished to come up with “Fiends,” I did not change the other stories to any significant extent. (If you start really revising, where do you stop?) I corrected a few spelling errors, changed a punctuation mark here or there, and made a few minor fixes (very few) to clear up the meaning of a confusing sentence.
It took me a few weeks, working part-time while I was writing Bite, to transform Ravished into “Fiends” and to prepare the accompanying short stories. I mailed the manuscript to Bob Tanner on January 5, 1996.
I decided not to tell anyone, including my agent and editor, that the anchoring novella was actually a revision of a novel that I’d written more than twenty years earlier.
For one thing, I figured that a previous knowledge of the situation might create a pre-conception about its merits. For another, I wanted to see whether anyone would notice a difference in quality.
Could “Fiends” stand on its own two feet?
It did.
For me, the publication of Fiends had special meaning. It wasn’t just a collection of short fiction; it also marked the resurrection of Dark Road, He’s Out There in the Night, and Ravished, a novel that I’d spent a long time writing and revising back in the days before the sale of my first novel… in the days when I was an aspiring writer, and pretty much of a failure.
To have the story published was like recovering several lost years of my life. Those years hadn’t been a waste of time, after all. I hadn’t thrown them away writing worthless crap; I’d spent them on a novel that would be published more than twenty years later.
At some point after the deal had been made for Headline to publish Fiends, I was talking to Dean Koontz on the phone. He mentioned that a small press publisher had asked him to write an introduction for a special limited edition of my novella, “Wilds” (which would eventually not be brought out by that publisher). I said to Dean, “Hey, if you feel like writing an introduction, how about doing it for Fiends, instead?”
He agreed to that, and wrote a splendid introduction for my story collection. While much of the introduction was tongue-in-cheek, he wrote a lovely little piece about my daughter, Kelly. For me, what Dean wrote about Kelly was the highlight of the introduction.
Headline published Fiends in 1997, and Book Club Associates printed 14,000 copies of it as a double-book with Bite.
AFTER MIDNIGHT
I finished writing Bite on May 1, 1996. On May 6, I once again embarked on the third book of the Beast House series.
Once again, I experienced a false start. On June 9, however, I came up with an entirely new concept for the The Cellar III. I called my new version, The Midnight Tour. I worked on it until September 4, then stopped again, this time 180 pages into the manuscript.
Why did I stop?
Because I was informed that, due to scheduling problems, the book club intended to postpone publication of Bite and print it as a double-book with my next novel.
My “next novel” would have been The Midnight Tour. And I didn’t want the third book of the Beast House trilogy to be brought out by the book club as a double-book with Bite.
So I decided to stop working on The Midnight Tour and write a book specifically designed to accompany Bite.
The result was After Midnight.
When I made my first notes for After Midnight, the story was about a teenaged boy who sees a mysterious young woman in his back yard in the middle of the night.
I wasn’t completely happy with that.
I thought, “What if I turn it around?”
What if a young woman, late at night, looks outside and watches a mysterious young man come wandering into the yard?
This seemed like a much better idea.
But there was a hitch.
The nature of the story required for it to be told in the first person viewpoint. If I made the main character a female, I would need to write the novel as if it had been written by her.
A woman.
I’d already written a couple of novels, Savage and Island, entirely in the first person viewpoints.
> But the viewpoint characters had been guys.
This would have to be gal.
Could I do it in a convincing way?
After giving the situation a little thought, I realized that I’d been writing large portions of many novels, over the years, in which I depicted female characters: how they acted, how they talked, how they thought and felt about what was going on. Those books had worked out just fine.
So why should I let a little word like “I” get in the way? (In fact, it’s my policy to let almost nothing “get in my way” if I think there’s a good story to tell.)
If I went ahead and wrote the book from a woman’s viewpoint, however, I figured that I would be opening myself up for criticism along the lines of, “How dare you, a male, presume to have the slightest clue about what goes on inside the mind and body and heart of a female?”
Again, I’d been making such presumptions for years though never in such a straight-forward way. Every time I write about any character, male or female, I’m using my imagination. I’m no more a mad scientist or serial killer than I am a woman.
Besides, I could point to the examples of Stephen King (Dolores Claiborne) and Charles Portis (True Grit) Both authors were males who wrote novels in the first person from a female’s viewpoint.
If they can do it, why can’t I?
No good reason.
As with Savage, I began by experimenting with the character’s voice. I came up with this:
Hello.
I’m Alice.
I’ve never written a book before, but figured I might as well start by saying who I am.
Alice.
That’s not my real name. I’d have to be an idiot to tell you my real name, wouldn’t I?
Identify myself, then go on to write a book that tells more than anyone should ever know about my private life and adventures and passions and crimes.
Just call me Alice.
Sounds like ‘alias,’ doesn’t it?