A History of My Writing in Nauseating Detail Part Two or

What the Hell Have I Gotten Myself Into


(1990-1998)

By Steve Lazarowitz

Between 1990 and 1995, I'd managed precious little writing. Three short stories, only two of which actually ended up written, are all I have to show for the first half of the nineties. Before you email me to tell me what a slacker I am, I can assure you that my lack of output had little to do with laziness.

In 1989 I lost my job at Crazy Eddie, the chain of retail electronic stores referred to in part one of this series. About a year later, for reasons too complex to explain here, I separated from my first wife. I ended up working at a local computer store, and met a cashier, whom I quite liked. The problem is she had a two year old child, which meant I would soon have an instant family. Just add water.

If the truth be told, I met the cashier first and separated from the wife after. I make no excuses for this, but in the interest of fairness I wanted to set the record straight.

So I was in a new job and a new relationship, trying to cope with the fact that I was suddenly a parent. I was working six days a week, opening till closing (which at the time was eleven hours on five of those days, and five hours on the sixth). It was a lot to digest. I didn't have a huge amount of energy for much but adjusting to my new situation. Things took a long time to settle down. When the dust cleared, it was 1995 and I had written two stories and had thought of the idea for a third.

Actually, I'm pretty sure the story idea predates my second marriage, but I bring it up here because I didn't think of it when writing part one. It never had a title. For years, I called it the library computer story, which I believed to have a great plot. The problem was I didn't have any great writing skill, and no matter how many times I tried to start it, after a page or two it would get shelved again. George Lucas said he waited to produce the fourth Star Wars movie until the special effects technology caught up with the vision of what he felt the movie should be (or at least I remember someone saying he said that. I don't know if it's true). What I do know is, I felt that way about the library computer story. I wasn't good enough to write it, until the fairly recent past. For twenty years it banged around in my brain. When I finally put it on paper, it exceeded my expectations.

The story is now called The Demon's Truth. If you'd like to read it, you're out of luck, because I haven't done anything with it. It's sitting on my hard drive, along with four or five of my favorite stories, and about forty stories that I think are damned good, waiting for me to put together a new anthology, or for divine courage to possess me so I might submit it to a larger market. I'm sure one of the lower paying markets would take it in a second, but I don't want to sell this story for ten dollars. It's too valuable to me.

Does that make me seem greedy? Perhaps I am. I'm trying to earn a living writing, and I'm not going to make it selling stories at ten dollars a pop. If a professional publishing house isn't interested, then I'm quite content to allow it to take up space on my hard drive. Don't bother pointing out to me that I've already said I haven't submitted it to larger markets. I know that. Don't send me an email telling me I'm not making sense; I know that too. But since I haven't submitted it and won't, for all practical purposes, give it away for nothing, it will remain on my hard drive. If you're exasperated by this, just think how I feel.

After the library computer story, I had the two story ideas I did write: Blight's Plight and The Tree. Both of these I later rewrote, Blight's Plight under a different name. For years, the two lonely stories from the first half of the 90s could be found in the top drawer of my mostly misused filing cabinet.

If I had to pick a specific date when my writing career began in earnest, I would have to say June 14, 1995„the day Roger Zelazny died. I didn't hear about it right away. I was out of the loop. Still working too many hours. Still denying the dream. Still believing I could be happy being someone I wasn't.

The fact is I didn't hear the bad news until the end of the summer, and it hurt me in ways I probably will never be able to express. Roger Zelazny, the closest person I had to a hero, had passed away. Where the hell had I been? What had I been doing that day? How come I hadn't heard? Would there never be another Amber novel? (The answer to the latter question is no. There would be another Amber novel, though Roger Zelazny, of course, would not write it. There would also be two other novels started by Zelazny that would be released posthumously, which was both very good and very bad. I enjoyed them both, but they weren't quite Zelazny, even though Jane Linskold, who'd finished them, did an excellent job.)

When I learned of Zelazny's death, I sank into a depression. I kept wishing I'd taken the time to send him a fan letter. I wished I'd seen him at a convention at some point. I'd have given quite a lot to be able to put words together like he did, and for years, I think that was the problem. If I couldn't write as well as Zelazny, why should I bother writing at all?

Time passes and the world changes. After I found out about Zelazny, I started thinking what might have happened if he'd never started writing. I wondered if he'd been like me, insecure about his ability, scared to take that next stepƒyet he had; I hadn't. At around that time, my marriage was going through a transition too. My wife had been going through a tough time since her mother's death, and she withdrew from me. For more than a year I tried to find a way to bridge the gap between us, and then I tried to give her space. Which left me plenty of free time that had to be filled somehow.

On September 3, 1995, I started writing again. My first project was one mentioned in A History of My Writing in Nauseating Detail Part One. I rewrote the novel I'd started in high school, and called it A Leaf in the Wind.

Perhaps I should have done a web search before I chose the name, because apparently, a lot of people have used it. I used it too. This new version of Leaf, for the first time, wasn't handwritten. It was typed into my trusty computer using Lotus Ami Pro, my favorite word processing program at the time.

It took me about three and a half months to finish Leaf , which topped out at 90,000 words (30,000 words shorter than the current incarnation, but still impressive for a newbie).

On December 14 1995, I started Consigned to Darkness. The idea had been floating around in my head forever, but I finally sat down and wrote it, which is certainly the first step in getting published. Thinking about it got me little by way of results.

It took me a bit under three months to complete Darkness, which was a mere 79,000 words, and it was the first book I had to plot without outside help. Actually, I don't plot that much at all, I tend to write by the seat of my pants, though in this case, I'd told the story to friends so many times, it was already firmly etched in my head when I started writing. To this day, I do most prewriting in my head.

On March 8, 1996, I started the third book of the trilogy. In keeping with the original theme, I didn't check to see how many books were called The Price of Freedom before I named it and, just recently, renamed the book Iorana's Ransom. In the Double Dragon version of Leaf, it still says The Price of Freedom at the back of the book. That's what I get for not doing my research.

I would say that the first draft of Consigned to Darkness began the modern era of my writing. While Leaf had been loosely based on a role-playing game I'd played in high school, Consigned to Darkness was completely original. I used the same characters and settings, but the plot was mine. This allowed me to take my work to a new level. Also, after rewriting Leaf, I had a bit of experience behind me and so, didn't make all the same mistakes in the sequel. Just most of them. When I look back now on that original draft of Darkness I cringe, but I can still see in it the seeds of my current style.

I should point out that I wrote Leaf, Darkness and the beginning of Freedom while still working all sorts of ridiculous hours at the computer store. I honestly can't say why I couldn't finish the third book of the trilogy at that time, but I couldn't. Perhaps after two and a half novels back to back, I needed to recharge my batteries, or maybe I just had writer's block. I can't remember.

Whatever the case, I thought about writing quite a bit during the next year, even if I didn't write anything new. That ended in 1997, when I first decided I wanted to get my work published.

That's not entirely true. I'd always known I wanted to be published, but it wasn't until that year that I decided I was good enough to be published. I was wrong. I still had a long way to go. Fortunately, I didn't know just how long, so I put on my thinking cap and found myself thinking this way (and before you comment, I now know this was terribly naive, but hey, what the hell did I know about writing back then?) No one wants to buy a book from a newbie like me, so what I really need to do is sell some short stories and get my name out there, then I can submit A Leaf in the Wind to the big publishing companies once I have some writing credits. The fact that it's just as hard to sell a short story as a novel never registered with me, which is a good thing.

On June 15, 1997, I started A Creative Edge, an improved version of the aforementioned Blight's Plight. It was the first story I wrote that summer. The second story was a rewrite of The Tree. Unfortunately, I'd lost the original and never found it again. I had to rewrite the entire story from memory, and it didn't come out quite the same. One of the main differences is that in the new version, the tree became a point of view character, but then, I always wanted to write a story with a vegetable protagonist.

Twelve stories appeared in twelve weeks. Where did they come from? Not a clue. Well I have some clues, but it was a lot of ideas in rapid succession. I hadn't planned on going into the detail of those twelve stories, but I fear I must, only because they formed the foundation of my early work, the golden age of Steve. In reality, those early stories were like dinosaurs. Huge monstrosities that had all the urgency and self-importance of a new writer that didn't know what the hell he was doing. That most of them are still enjoyable I attribute more to luck than anything I did intentionally. A couple of them have been rewritten so that they too could be enjoyable. Hey...I didn't want them to feel left out.

Here's a list of those first stories.

A Creative Edge
The Tree
So Many Differences_As Luck Would Have It
Music to My Ears
Brimstone and Nitro
Virtual Confusion
A Breath of Fresh Air
Worlds Apart
The Gift
Born of Darkness
The Fate of Ambrose Colony

Twelve weeks, twelve stories, each with a story behind it. I won't go into detail. Not here, not now, but a couple of footnotes are necessary.

Music to My Ears, a dark story of obsession, was inspired by an episode of the television series Fragglerock, which I saw for the first time at the Museum of Television and Radio in New York City.

Brimstone and Nitro is the first (and only) story I've written based on an artist's work. He actually asked me to write it and the concept, at first, was largely his, though I changed it a bit...well a lot. Stanley Pratt was his name and he loved the story. I wonder what happened to him.

A Breath of Fresh Air was written about my friend Andre, who spent so much time on his computer he never left his room. Claustrophobia sets in just thinking about it. Now, years later, I'm not much different than he was. Hard to believe, but true. Then again, I don't live alone.

Worlds Apart has been so completely rewritten, I wrote eight pages before I used a single line from the original draft. The new version is so much different, I named it Worlds Apart V2 (version 2).

The Gift was written based on a vision, the only story to date that can claim that distinction. Well, it might have been a hallucination, but you get the idea. I have no idea where it came from, but it did and I'm glad, 'cause I really love that story.

So there I was, a writing machine, spurred on by visions of fame and fortune. I received, of course, neither. I did manage to accrue an impressive number of rejection slips, which places me exactly where most new writers find themselves bewildered by the fact that these wonderful stories didn't make enough of an impression to get me anything more than a form letter rejection.

Actually that's not quite true. From certain magazines, I did get form letter rejections. Asimov's Science Fiction and Analog, for example. My first three rejection slips from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction were form letters as well. My next three were typed up on stationary, but all said the exact same thing, word for word. They were form letters without the form. But then it changed. Gordon Van Gelder, the editor of Fantasy and SF, started sending me personal notes about each story. This one didn't quite grab me. There are a lot of good ideas here, but the pace of the story seems to move too fast for them. That kind of thing. This change in rejection slips was enough for me to hold onto. It showed progress. Someone took my work seriously enough to tell me what was wrong with it, at least. It was an improvement. Still, I didn't write them or submit them as fast after that and when I'd racked up about seventy-five rejection slips without much progress, I began to get dejected.

That was when several different things happened, pretty much in short order. I had no idea how those early events would later shape my career, nor did I care. All I knew was, if I didn't have some kind of success at some point, I was going to throw in the towel. It's all very nice that some people can believe enough in their work to accept large numbers of rejections with no positive feedback at all, but I wasn't one of them.

One problem I had was that my early work was too long. By writing a longer story, I limited the amount of markets that would look at it, which is a huge problem. If you can only submit a story to five markets, once you get five rejection slips, you're done for. Every magazine has an upper word limit, and I was writing higher than most of them, most of the time. Stories like A Breath of Fresh Air had more options, but then, I never considered that one of my best. This eventually left me with ten or fifteen unpublishable stories sitting on my hard drive, driving me crazy. I wrote stories I loved that I thought other people would love too, yet I couldn't do anything but show them to my friends and family, who frankly, were getting pretty tired of it.

Clearly, I needed a new idea. That occurred one day when I was working at computer store. A friend of mine who worked at the store was friends with the webmaster of a webpage called Dragonsclaw. Dragonsclaw was a fantasy role-playing game site, sponsored by a larger company, but the webmaster had complete creative control of the content. My coworker, who shall remain nameless, suggested I get in touch with Dragonsclaw and see if they would be interested in posting some of my work.

I didn't care for the idea. I still had dreams of selling those stories. I found myself thinking this way...what if I could offer the site a continuing serial that would keep my name out there and keep people coming back to Dragonsclaw to see what happened next. I was picturing a sword-and-sorcery version of Flash Gordon. I had always loved the idea of a serial and had always wanted to try my hand at one. So I emailed Brenden McAdams, the Dragonsclaw Webmaster and sent him the vaguest proposal it has ever been my pleasure to write. It wasn't even a proposal really, more like a query letter to see if he'd be interested.

Brenden liked the idea, but wanted to see a sample of my writing, none of which I had at work. So I sat down and in about half an hour typed the first installment of Alaric Swifthand. While it has since been edited, the first chapter has changed relatively little from the day I typed it. I hadn't plotted it, it was just supposed to be a sample, which is all I was asked for. It ended with those three little words that would cause so much pain in the months to come...'to be continued'.

I received an email back from Brenden, wanting to know what happened next and, in the ballsiest move I ever made, I sent him an email telling him if he wanted to find out, he could post it on the page, and I'd send him the next issue in two weeks. You can't imagine my surprise when that actually transpired.

There it was, for all to see, my very first publicly displayed work...well not counting the short story I'd published in the high school science fiction magazine, and a bit of work I'd done on the ezine esrevnI. In retrospect, I handled the entire thing wrong. I should have never told him to put up a chapter of a serial without an outline or at least a proposal. I had no idea where the story was going and it would soon cause me problems.

Still a gig was a gig and this was my first. We decided on six chapters to start, to see if it developed any kind of following. I had to write a serial, completely unplotted, that had to end in six parts...which is what I did. The only problem was, I set up a murder mystery with no possible solution. Worse yet, I didn't have a clue how I was going to solve it, not even after I sent in part five. It was a problem all right.

I wrote a tentative part six and handed it over to my good friend and proofreader Mark, who told me he hated it. Well, he didn't say that; he was far more tactful. I believe he said it didn't work for him. Mark had never said that about any of my work before, and so I knew I had to take it seriously. I showed it to a couple of other people, because I really liked it, but again, no one else did. I was in a bind. Deadline approaching, and I had nothing. Not a clue. So I sat down and wrote again, using the premise I'd already used, but changing a key element at the end and suddenly, everyone was aboard. Mark liked it, Joyce liked it, my parrot liked it-well she liked it any time I paid attention to her. I used to read to my parrot occasionally, and she always liked it. Juanita wasn't much of a critic, and thus made a wonderful audience.

So I sent it in and guess what? Brendan liked it too. And that was it. I had written a six-part serial, it had been publicly displayed and someone actually read it. In fact, I had received fan mail for it from complete strangers, one of whom lived in Australia. Someone on the opposite side of the world had read my work and loved it. Suddenly I had world-wide readership. If they found a fourth, they could have a bridge tournament.

When I received that first fan letter, I was certain it was one of my friends putting me on. I kept calling people and saying, 'haha, very funny'. That was until I got the second fan letter. And when it was over, I didn't get one or two fan letters, but a whole lot more, asking me if I'd be kind enough to continue the series.

Well, let's see. I can continue writing a series for free, and give it away. Was that something I really wanted to do? YES! My work was finally being appreciated, at least by a few people.

So Alaric continued and book two was born. I also asked Brenden about writing an ed/op column, which I would use as a forum to say pretty much anything I wanted. By this point I was one of the reasons people were returning to the site, so Brenden immediately agreed. I named the column View from the Parapet and it was the first of many columns to come. If you're interested (and why wouldn't you be) all the old issues of Parapet are archived in the article section of my webpage.

That's about all we have time for, since I'm almost as tired of talking about myself as you are of reading about me. But stay tuned for the next exciting episode of A History of My Writing in Nauseating Detail, where you'll find out more answers to questions you didn't want to ask in the first place.

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