Apex Book Company

I had two interesting encounters a couple of weeks ago. One was with my friend Steve, who is a good writer and a great small press publisher of, among other things, my anthology Spicy Slipstream Stories (co-edited with Jay Lake). Steve was happy as he landed a good agent who was encouraging him to finish a book for the lucrative young adult market. Steve asked me, “So what’s your next big project?” and I was actually surprised to find myself saying, “I think I’ll only do little projects from now on.”

Later I received a fun care package from Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire, the legendary writer of Lovecraftian short stories. He sent me copies of his fanzine Idiot Chaos (about his observations of all things Lovecraft and some things Barbara Streisand), his collection Sesqua Valley & Other Haunts, and even a 2002 edition of Seattle’s alternative weekly newspaper The Stranger, which featured Hopfrog on the cover. Great presents and Hopfrog is a great presence in the Lovecraftian community.

I began thinking about my own career. Sometimes I am very interested in the idea of finding that groove—a series of novels all with the same setting (please kill me if I ever say “universe” in this context), or featuring some iconic main character. Some gimmick with which I could poop out three novels a year and live happily ever after in my big burlap sack full of money. But then there is that impulse toward the underground—Hopfrog is probably one of the happiest fellows I’ve ever come across. He loves Lovecraft and doesn’t seem to fret at all about commercial success or writing novels or anything but pleasing himself and his coterie of fans.

Me, I wander. I read a lot, and love both the most commercial of pulp fiction and the oddest obscure stuff. After a long weekend of reading classic nineteenth-century ghost stories, I get all het up about writing a few of my own and maybe placing them in the small zines that still feature such stories. Then I might come across an excellent crime novel and decide, “Yes, mysteries. I love crime novels, I should write a big crime novel.” But then I’ll get the idea to find the crime underground and spend a ton of money on UK imports like The Savage Kick magazine and collections by Tony O’Neill. That’ll lead to a fascination with drug and confessional novels, and I’ll gobble up Bukowski and Dan Fante, the latter of whom will remind me of Samuel R. Delany’s autobiographical adventures in New York’s pre-AIDS gay scene, which will lead back to both my earliest interest—science fiction—and hardcore experimental fiction. And utterly compelling/revolting pornography. Somewhere in there I’ll be reminded of the ethnic experience in fiction, pick up a little Dagoberto Gilb and then remember I should write more stories about Greeks and Greek-Americans.

Then there’s editing the fiction of others. I’m not a bad editor, I don’t think. Clarkesworld, which I worked on for two years, was recently nominated for the Hugo award. With Ellen Datlow I’m doing Haunted Legends, my first book published by a multinational conglomerate. Nothing beats editing stories by the likes of Kit Reed, whom I grew up reading. Then there’s my day job, producing a new line of Japanese science fiction in translation for a publisher out here in California. That’s great too. Except…then I think I should really just buckle down and write. Editing and procrastination always feel very similar to me.

Writing fiction is exhausting. It wasn’t until very recently—literally, a few weeks ago—that I realized why I so prefer writing short stories to novels. (And my novels are short!) I’m pulled in all directions. When I see short story collections in stores or flip through a literary journal I am always a bit envious, even when the publisher is smaller than my publisher or the journal obviously a homebrew job that pays in all the indie cred you can eat (which is none by the way). Horror, yes. But no zombies, no vampires, no nothing you might have heard of. When I do sit down to write my classic ghost story, it comes out as a punk rock bildungsroman (look it up). Porno, of course…but only the sort of porn that won’t turn the reader on. Abu Gharib isn’t sexy? Now you tell me.

Science fiction? Certainly! I spent a day writing a story specifically for Nature just to show that I could do something on the hard side of SF. What do you mean you don’t read Nature? Well, don’t feel bad. Back when I lived between Harvard and MIT I met a number of scientists and engineers who read Nature every week, and none of them seemed to know that the back-of-book “Futures” section features short stories either.

Experimental fiction, absolutely. A few years ago I even attended a workshop sponsored by the influential publisher, FC2. Loved it. Didn’t quite fit in, because I knew how to submit short stories, because I’ve published and received payment for my work. Often. Very suspicious, that. But I love the stuff and often walk away from experimental fiction thinking, “Why do I write all this commercial crap? I need to be exploding language and making cut-ups!” I wrote a story based on the magic alphabet of the Five Percent Nation, and then with my friend Davis did one based on a collage of emails from my days as a term paper artist. I placed them both. Got paid too. (Told you I was a suspicious character.) Ooh, a sudden fiction contest for the local college’s literary journal? Where did I put that 450-word thing that was supposed to be for Weird Tales? That might work if I take out the plot….

More mainstream literary fiction, of course. A year ago I ran across a call for submission on Craigslist—”an international journal of arts, literature, and ideas” wanted submissions. I pulled the two skiffy-sounding words from a chapter of an as-yet-unpublished novel (“Too short,” I’ve been told) and sent it in as a short story. Sold! See, I can be lllllitrrary too. Now where did I put that story about the chthonic opponents of Theseus translated to modern Greektown Chicago for that horror anthology based on Nick Cave songs?

Lovecraft, you know it. And he’s in the canon now, so why not mash him up with Raymond Carver, type up the story in a single morning and give a reading that afternoon after a frantic editing session on the train from Berkeley to San Francisco? And then after polite applause from the crowd and few “Woots!” from my friend the master of ceremonies for the event—the guy who is supposed to hype the proceedings a bit—turns to me and says, “Well, that was written for a small audience, wasn’t it?” And actually the story will be appearing in a fairly prominent anthology of Lovecraftian fiction along with stories by Joyce Carol Oates and Michael Chabon, but I still wonder why I never get solicitations from niche publishers like Chaosium. Was it too much Carver, or not enough tentacles?

Anyway, if I tried to pull this shit with novels, I’d have either starved to death or shot myself in the head long ago.

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So I stay up all night, writing and reading, hunting for the perfect métier and never finding it for more than a month or three. No commercial groove like the one Steve is so close to (and I wish him luck), no self-confident cult following like Wilum (and I wish him everything good). For me it’s just a pile of books—spines up and pages held open by the desktop or even the floor. It’s a habit from childhood; my great-grandmother would tell me that my books looked like I’d been eating a bunch of bananas and throwing the peels over my shoulder.

You Might Sleep… but I can’t. You Might Sleep… is the name of my collection of short stories. Sorry, this is a commercial message. I even asked Jason what I should write about for this essay and he said, “You have a book out. Start with that.” But as I am perverse, I’ll end with it instead. There are two kinds of short story collections: the debut by an anointed MFA grad, acquired so that the publisher can have access to what is sure to be a lyrical first novel. And the minor work by a major author—sell enough novels and you’ll be allowed the vacation of a story collection. You Might Sleep… is neither of these two kinds. It’s an exception, another thing for me to toss down the cracks between genres and modes of fiction.

Mainstream, yes. Two of the stories appeared in the now-defunct men’s magazine Razor, and one—”Joey Ramone Saves The World”—was the only fiction ever published by the German music magazine Spex, and then on the occasion of the magazine’s 25th anniversary. See, all the Ramones worth interviewing were already dead, and for some reason my story of three alternative universes and transdimensional Joey Ramone avatars was considered mainstream.

Lovecraft? Uh-huh. Though mixed with the sort of “punk publishing” memoir of riots and head injuries popular in the Lower East Side in the mid-1990s. Horror too, or at least stuff that had been published in horror zines. Experimental fiction? I guess so. I mean, one publisher rejected the collection a few years ago with a letter that fumed that the manuscript I submitted didn’t actually contain enough stories. Stories in the form of blog entries, or interviews, or even ones with two plots at once, well, those ain’t stories. On the plus side of rejection, You Might Sleep… also features a new novella called “Seventh Son of a Seventh Son.” That one got me a rejection letter written on a check for $100, as the publisher who was considering it felt bad that I wrote the first few thousand words just for him.

Crime, a smidge. A story that appeared in the “postmodern pulp” issue of the anti-pulp literary journal Mississippi Review. Lots of murder occurs. The President of the United States—two different Presidents, actually—die in two different stories. Car accidents are crimes, right? If they’re purposeful, I mean.

It all started out purposeful. I got a kick out of selling non-sexy stories to so-called “erotica” zines, and slipping some science fiction or fantasy in a mainstream journal, or stealing the voices of the Beats or dirty realists or drunken confessionalists and hiding them in tales of supernatural horror. But now I’m just tired of almost all of it, except for the hunt for the perfect corner or bank of literature on which to set up my tent. My glorious career as a writer is just me thrashing around in the sheets, trying to get some rest. They say that writers have to write. I sure don’t. I’d love to stop, to publish something like “Flowers for Algernon” that would be endlessly reprinted in textbooks, or a perennial backlist seller like Geek Love. (Once, in a workshop on career goals I mentioned that novel and the workshop leader said, “Ooh, is that anything like Eat, Pray, Love?” What can you say to that except what I did: “Yes! Yes, it is. If you liked Eat, Pray, Love you’ll loooove Geek Love.”)

Anyway, if you like, uhm, nothing (or is it everything!) you’ll looove You Might Sleep….

I hope you check it out. If enough of you do, I can stop writing and get some sleep.

You can learn more about Nick Mamatas (and read some of the stories from You Might Sleep…) at his web site.