Check Out An Award-Winning Horror Story by HFC Member Kelli D. Meyer!

HFC Member Kelli D. Meyer has added her award-winning horror story, "Terrible Twos", to her blog/website at www.kellidmeyer.com, and she invites you to stop by and take a look. "Terrible Twos" is a super-creepy story about zombies, toddlers, and a mother's love, with twists you won't see coming. And while you're there, don't forget to subscribe; Kelli posts new stories on a regular basis, and that way you won't miss one!

When is your story not your story?

by Kelli D. Meyer

When you can't post it on your own web site, that's when.

I am extremely annoyed by an "accepted fact" in the modern world of publishing. It's a fact that publishers won't buy your work as unpublished if it's already appeared online in any form, including on your own blog. It doesn't matter whether ten people read it or ten thousand. Once it's been online, they'll only buy it as a reprint, if they'll buy it at all.

In my opinion, this is a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Publishers have made this decision to protect themselves from buying a story that's already been read by a large percentage of its potential audience. It's a decision that makes sense in some very specific cases. If you're Dean Koontz or Stephen King, and you post a novel on your web site for a year or so, the number of people who will buy that novel when it comes out in hardback may diminish. (Although even this is debatable.) In those cases, the publisher might be justified in paying a lower -- a.k.a. reprint -- rate for the work.

But what if you're not Koontz or King? What if you're me, or a member of my writing group, or just about any unknown writer in the world? How many people are really going to seek out and read stories we post on our own blogs or web sites? Enough to damage the story's money-earning potential if it's published? I don't think so.

So the result of this ridiculous rule is that writers have to leave their best stories hidden in file folders in order to have any hope of getting them published. Meanwhile, they're trying to establish a following, a readership, without sharing their best work.

My suggestion to publishers, should any of you out there be interested, is to change the "no reprints" rule to exclude publishing or posting on the authors' own web sites or blogs. Let authors show their stories off. Let readers discover new authors. Once they do, they'll spend more money on your books and magazines. Everybody wins.

Saying "No" Nicely

Rejection hurts. There's just no way around it. There's also no way around the fact that if you're a writer – and you're brave enough to send your writing out for publication – you're going to get rejections. So following that logic to its obvious conclusion: if you write, you're going to get hurt.

I thought I was ready for this. I knew I was going to get rejection letters. I'd steeled myself. I'd psyched myself up. I was indestructible.

Then I got my very first rejection, and it was… MEAN!

No, I'm not just whining. And it's not just my opinion. I've asked friends, family, fellow writers and uninvolved strangers, and the consensus is that the unnamed agent who wrote this rejection was having a really bad day and wanted to share it.

What did he say? To protect the guilty, I've decided not to share the entire text of the e-mail, but I will give you the key phrases:

"…the writing quality and character development are decent…"

"…the plot line and supernatural aspects of the work come off as sloppy and at times, silly…"

Ouch!

Decent? Sloppy? Silly? Could he possibly have chosen more demeaning, inflammatory words?

Needless to say, I was wishing heartily for one of those impersonal form rejections. If this was what you got when agents took the time to get personal, I'd just pass, thank you very much.

Then, within a couple of weeks, my respect for agents was restored when I received the world's nicest rejection. This time I will share names, because Andrea Somberg deserves praise and recognition for this one. Ms. Somberg managed to say "no, thank you" to my manuscript in a way that was kind, helpful and left me with an uninjured ego. Here is an excerpt from her e-mail:

"…there's some good, smooth prose in these pages, as well as a good narrative pace. Great tension throughout! It's with regret, then, that I must admit that I didn't fall in love with these chapters as much as I had hoped. Perhaps part of the problem is that Anne and Philip felt overly familiar to me. I couldn't help but feel they lacked that extra spark, that extra development that would mark them as particularly compelling, unique protagonists - which is so important in order to convince editors that this book would stand out from the crowd. Kelli, in spite of these chapters' strengths, I'd better pass. I suspect that, based on my above reservations, I just wouldn't be the best advocate for the project…"

Wow. Now *that's* the kind of rejection you don't mind receiving. Not only was she as complimentary as someone turning you down can be, she also gave me some solid critique information to work with. Ms. Somberg, if you ever happen to read this, thank you.

As for that other agent, and any others who may be tempted to relieve their stress at the expense of a hopeful writer, I have a quote for you. In the immortal words of Thumper in Bambi:

"If you can't say something nice… don't say nothing at all."

Family ties

With the completion of Split, our Humble Fiction Café anthology, I found myself faced with a difficult task: letting my family read it. Not that my family – namely my mother, grandmother, and grandfather – aren’t supportive of my writing. They think I hung the moon, and I can’t imagine them thinking anything I wrote is less than brilliant.

Well, almost anything.

The problem is that for one of my stories, “Fade to Gray”, the story that ended up being the very first one in the book (no chance of hiding it), I borrowed liberally from my own family and life experiences for two of the characters and part of the plot. And these are not admirable characters, nor a cheerful plot.

In actual fact, the mother in the story, the “villain,” is neither my mother nor my grandmother. Thank heavens. She does, however, have some not-so-nice characteristics taken from each of them. And my grandfather, a recovered alcoholic, could possibly be seen in the father who is, you guessed it, another villain.

Now, I love, and I mean absolutely adore, my three “parents”. They did a fine, if somewhat unconventional, job of raising me, and we remain almost pathologically close to this day. Which is why I never let them read “Fade to Gray.” I didn’t want to hurt their feelings. And, to be honest, I just didn’t want to open up that can of worms. Why ask for trouble?

However, this is one of the best stories I’ve ever written, and I wasn’t willing to pull it from the book. If I wanted them to see the book (and I did), I’d have to let them read the story. So a couple of weeks after the book came out (I’d told them nothing about the book project because I wasn’t sure I could actually let them read it), I faced the music and showed them the story. It wasn’t pretty. My mother cried. My grandmother and grandfather had a huge fight, each convinced the other had ruined my life. It was traumatic for all concerned.

And yet we survived it. They all seem to have forgiven me, although my grandmother now refuses to touch things in my house without asking first because the mother in the story is – to put it mildly – meddlesome, and my mother keeps looking at me sideways and saying, “you better never,” because the daughter in the story ends up killing herself. My grandfather is maintaining absolute silence on the subject, although he has praised the book in general.

All of which is a long-winded way of musing about whether or not you should borrow from your own life for your writing. All the books say “write about what you know,” but I think there should be a disclaimer saying “don’t write about WHO you know… unless you’re willing to face the music.” I think any time we borrow from real-life people and situations to create our fiction – unless we’re sickeningly sweet about it – we are taking the risk of hurting people. And we have to weigh that risk against the emotional power it gives our writing. Is it worth it?

I think every writer has to answer that for herself. Are you using real-life people and situations because they’re vital to the story, or are you just taking jabs at people? Is the story compelling enough, and are you compelled enough to write it, to make it worth the damage it might do? Is this story important enough to you that you’re willing to live with the consequences?

At the end of the day, I don’t regret the story. It’s good, even if I do say so myself, and I’m proud of it. But I do wish I could have done it without hurting the people I love.

-- Kelli D. Meyer