"Some stories do have a life of their own. Some stories have ways of wanting to be told. And getting in the way of them is a good way to invite a nasty wipeout that totals them beyond repair.
Because a story doesn’t really care about the well being of your business.
It cares about being told."
As this comic book resurrection launched, I picked Charlie Huston to participate in my deceptively simple feature: Five Easy Questions. In the spirit of Jack Nicholson’s mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality interviews with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web publishing.
Disclaimer: While I can't imagine why children would read The Publishing Spot, this edition is not for children, as a few of these links reference adult material...
Jason Boog:
Your books crisscross more genres than most people will read in a lifetime. How can you do something that unusual and still build a dedicated fan base? How did you write like that without alienating fans of each respective genre?
Charlie Huston:
Truthfully, I don’t know that I haven’t alienated my audience. My crossing genres and mediums is a very new thing and the jury is very much out as to whether it will work.
My first two books, Caught Stealing and its sequel, Six Bad Things, were crime thrillers that published between May 2004 and July 2005, and didn’t exactly sell sales records. My first horror-noir, Already Dead, just came out in December 2005, and my first foray into superhero comics, Moon Knight, won’t be out till next month.
As of now there’s just no way of knowing whether my work in horror has turned off my very modest crime following. Common wisdom suggests that readers who come in for the horror, and like the books, are more likely to take a chance on the crime than the crime readers are to drift into horror.
Likewise, I expect that I might get more crossover from comics readers into horror and or crime than fans of any of my novels picking up a comic book if they are not already fans of the form. All my work is pretty brutal and vulgar, so I don’t think it’s likely that a Caught Stealing fan would cross me off his or her list just because I come out with a book about vampires, but there’s a very good chance they won’t be buying it.
My intention is to continue writing in both genres as well as comics. I think the point at which you really risk losing your audience is by making an abrupt switch in genre or style while entirely leaving behind the work that brought you to the table in the first place. That’s not my plan.
Jason Boog:
In your opinion, who are the fiction writers that use the Internet most effectively? What writing sites do you like to read? Why?
Charlie Huston:
No opinion. I’ve done no research in this area. But I do like to look at WarrenEllis.com. Mr. Ellis is a talented writer who is best known for his work in comic books.
He’s perverse and odd and posts entertaining flotsam and jetsam on his adult oriented site. He maintains a large Internet community through several venues and I think a writer looking to permeate the web could do worse than to try (no doubt unsuccessfully) to emulate his efforts.
Jason Boog:
You wrote in your bio: "There is an interlude after that, a couple years while [my] novel sat in a drawer, but the story of my brief "career" as a writer is very light on blood, sweat and tears." What's your advice for the fledgling writer stuck with a pile of material that doesn't sell? What can they do to maintain enough hope and realism to survive that "interlude" period?
Charlie Huston:
Bang your head against the wall. Scream. Get drunk. Bitch to your friends. Throw your manuscript in the garbage. Go dig it out. Eat too many cookies. Get drunk some more. And then get back in the saddle and keep writing. They don’t like what you write? F*** them. Write more.
Write more of the same or write something else. Write so f***ing much they’ll choke on it. They don’t believe in you? F*** them. Believe in yourself. No one’s gonna throw you any pity parties for being an unpublished writer. So throw your own pity party if it makes you fell better.
Get bombed and throw up in the morning. And then get the hell back to work. Words don’t write themselves. Want to maintain hope? Write something that gives you hope.
» From Fan Fiction to Published Fiction from ThePublishingSpot
I've been reading James Bow all afternoon, a Canadian journalist, genre-bending novelist, and fan-fiction-loving blogger. Last February, he pondered different strategies for promoting his new novel in a long post about the new ways writers can us... [Read More]
Tracked on: March 12, 2006 8:36 PM | Permalink to Trackback