Tuesday, March 17, 2009
A Find
Livia was at her parents' house today and came across a couple of boxes of our books that we had given them over the years. We're always glad to get extra copies of our books, especially since the fire, so with her parents' permission she brought them home. When I started looking through them, I realized they included a couple of small press magazines from the Eighties that have a couple of my never-reprinted short stories in them: a mystery called "Play by the Rules" that was in an issue of SKULLDUGGERY, and one of my rare science-fiction stories, "Season of Storms", from an issue of a magazine called JUST PULP. After the fire, I considered these "lost stories" and didn't figure I'd ever see copies of them again. Don't know what I'll do with them, mind you, but I'm glad to have them. I think that leaves just a couple of my published stories that I don't have copies of in one form or another. (Not counting the two confession stories and all the men's magazine stories. I don't have any of those, and some of the men's magazine stories I've never seen copies of. I just cashed the checks.)
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10 comments:
Thank God with computers, we'll always have at least the version that resides on the hard drive if no where else. Great to find these.
Cool. that must have been a real thrill. Excellent.
Patti ... Don't rely on your hard drive. Make backup copies to a flash drive or CD. I lost some stuff once by accidentally dragging some documents to trash and emptying it. Spent hundreds of dollars for a computer salvager to try to recover my lost material. Only partially successful. Lesson learned. Now, i back up everything to flash drive. You may already do this, but always always back up to another source. Cheers ...
Some of the men's magazines I've written for never sent contributor copies and there have been periods of my life where I've lived in places (very conservative places) where no copies were available on local newsstands. So, like you, I have gaps in my files.
Every so often I cruise the web sites of used magazine sellers and locate my "missing" stories. I've not yet purchased any of the magazines (some are going for $30+), but I print out a copy of each magazine cover and update my records.
Occasionally editors changed my titles; last week I discovered that I had written a story titled "F**king Hell" and I can't match that title up with anything in my files. Now I'm tempted to buy that magazine just to determine which differently-titled manuscript it matches up to.
Michael,
That's a great story. Like you, I never got contributor's copies of some of my stories. Some of them were sold to a company that published numerous different magazines, and a story might wind up in any of them, under a different title and a different pseudonym. They paid on acceptance, so there was no publication info on the checks. So I have no idea what happened to some of those stories.
Dugent (CAVALIER, DUDE, GENT, and NUGGET) was my favorite men's magazine publisher to write for, even though they paid on publication. They were prompt in responding and paying, always used my titles and pseudonyms, always sent contributor's copies, and when they occasionally reprinted one of my stories in an annual, they always paid me a reprint fee for it. And the editor, John Fox, was a really nice guy.
Dugent was really good to me, too. Alas, the company no longer exists and the publisher that bought some of the titles is nowhere near as writer-friendly. (Translated into English for the non-writers among us: Despite my being a regular contributor to various Dugent titles, the new publisher didn't purchase anything from me and, after several rejected submissions, I gave up trying.)
The market as a whole has changed during the past several years, and the ease of finding sexual material on the World Wide Web is probably to blame for most of the change. Back in the day it was possible to sell a mystery to GENT or a similar men's magazine and then later deftly edit out much of the sexual content and resell the story elsewhere.
Many of the men's magazines still publishing fiction of any kind seem to require much greater sexual content. Editing it out in an attempt to resell the story later would result in a manuscript containing nothing but conjunctions.
A few weeks ago I received a couple of rejections from a men's magazine I've been contributing to since 1993. The stories were rejected because they had "too much story and not enough sex." The stories were exactly the kind of things I'd been selling them for 15 years.
Sigh.
Time to find new markets.
Yeah, most of the stories I sold to Dugent were crime or mystery yarns with a sex scene thrown in. I never tried to resell any of them as actual mysteries, though. I had a series about a guy who wrote and directed porn films who also solved murders. Might be difficult to revise those. They were fun to write, though.
There are so many mysteries out there about store owners who solve crimes on the side. I've enjoyed reading some but have reached a point where florists and dogwalkers and tea shoppe owners no longer appeal. I need mysteries about more esoteric lines of work. Like a series about a director of porn who solves crimes on the side.... Maybe if you expanded the crime part of the story you could recycle men's mag bits as new paperbacks. Maybe pitch it to Hard Case Files. It certainly would be different.
Hard Case has already done a book set in the porn industry, Christa Faust's MONEY SHOT (which I highly recommend, by the way; great book), but there might be room for another one. I'll have to mull that over.
James, I think that's a great idea. Sleazy protagonists appeal to me, even though I know you wouldn't make him a scumbag like we see in early Willeford.
And Michael, thanks for your comments, very interesting!
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