I still hear tales of authors in the old days whose work never sold impressively, but were published religiously because their words were deemed by the houses to be important to future readers and gave an author’s work deserved time and effort on their part to eventually build an audience. I don’t have to tell you that those days are, for the most part, long gone and any author’s importance to a publisher is measured strictly in units sold. The exception would be authors with exalted reputations whom a house wants to list as an author of theirs for reasons of status. Like movie studios, publishers seem only interested in books they believe will be blockbusters that will rapidly swell their quarterly numbers for stockholders. We can decry it as a shame, but we all need to understand that the world we write in is about numbers. The good old days, if they ever truly ever existed, are gone, baby gone.

By the way, it isn’t just numbers sold, but also the numbers of returns that publishers tend to go by. If you sell 50,000 copies of a first book, but they figured it would be a hunko seller so they printed 250,000 units because that was what “they” decided to print, you have failed them the worst way imaginable. And chances are that they will make you feel like a child who has disappointed his father––picture a New England Episcopal minister’s son who marries a snake-handling, poison-sipping toothless Holy roller from the mountains of West Tennessee.

Unless you are somehow able to sell a substantial number of books on your own, or if a book builds from word of mouth, the publishers won’t advertise, and if they do they will plant one ad in one spot and wonder why the advertising failed to move books. I was in advertising for many years and I can tell you that (according to some vague research we believed in) any ad has to be seen nine times to make an impression on an individual––and that’s a person who’s open to the product the ad is about. Print ads are a prohibitively expensive way to sell books, and unless you are a major best-selling author you will be lucky to get even one ad anywhere. Best-selling authors need ads only to hold their market share, so you can’t blame the publishers for putting their money where they are most likely to see results on their bottom lines. You can’t blame a business for wishing to make money because that is how everything is measured. It’s disheartening for an author to put a year of their life into a book, work to make sure it’s as good as they can make it and then watch the publisher ship it out to see what happens to it on the shelves. Even if a book wins a major prize, and gets great reviews, unless it hits their expectations, they watch it disappear after a few weeks and that’s it. It isn’t that they don’t care or believe in the book, it’s just a fact of business.

I have a great editor and a publisher I’ve been with since I started writing fiction and I know they care about me personally and want to see my career take off for all concerned. Okay, there’s some enlightened self-interest there, but such makes the world go around. I don’t mind. I am loyal to them, and they have been loyal to me. Each time I write a book I know they are watching and working hard and praying it will break out and I’ll sell enough books to make their sales team smile. I know when I fall below expectations, and I have, they are as disappointed as I am, but perhaps for a shorter time than I spend frustrated about it.

This business is hard, but I think no harder than most others. I see authors as cottage industry manufacturers working alone who make a product for a company that will refine and distribute it the best they know how. Some of us see the publishing company we’ve been with as our extended family, but unfortunately it’s not unconditional love, or life-long commitment. No matter how big your numbers are today, you are only as valuable to a publishing company as your sales sheets say you are. When you are selling big and making the lists, they dote on and pamper you, but when those sales slip, they will go to the next thing. This is true in most businesses. It’s as disheartening as discovering that the person you loved and thought you’d stay with forever has a change of heart, and falls for another, but it’s the reality.

The life of an author is hard. We work alone, are paid by the job, don’t receive insurance benefits from the company, work long hours, have no job security whatsoever, probably have little or no 401 Ks building up, and, if we are lucky manage to make a boom-to-bust living at it. But we do it for our own personal reasons, and if we complain, we know we’re wasting time we could be using to write, and that nobody outside our family really cares.

Recently a student asked me what advice I’d give an aspiring author. I said what I always say, “The writing life has its rewards for sure. Making a living doing what you love is as good as it gets. Despite highs and lows, creating stories from thin air and living with a book as you create and improve it is almost orgasmic. Seeing your books on bookstore shelves is a rush for sure, and hearing from truly appreciative readers is truly a great feeling. But… don’t become a writer if you think you will get rich from doing so. Don’t write for a living if you have a thin skin or can’t take rejection. Don’t become a writer, especially of commercial fiction, if you can’t take direction from editors and hack at your wonderful novel with a meat cleaver when it is necessary. And, if you are lucky enough to sell a book to a publisher, treat the first and each subsequent advance as though it is the last money you’ll ever see from your publisher …because it just might be.”

By John Gilstrap

Language and violence are sensitive topics for fans and critics alike. My first book, Nathan’s Run, which I never considered to be a young adult book but nonetheless won the Alex Award from the American Library Association because of its relevance to teenage readers (the Nathan of the title is 12 years old), was banned by several school systems because of its language and violence. Apparently, there are 109 objectionable words in the book—an incensed mother actually counted. Maybe it was 409. Anyway, the book was banned from school libraries. (Memo to file: If you want to sell a lot of books, get it on a banned list somewhere.)

The whole book-banning thing is a soapbox of its own which likely will be the subject of a future rant, but for this blog entry, I want to focus on violence. As a society, we’re a little weird about it. There’s a whole subgenre of suspense fiction that celebrates vampires, the eroticization of oral exsanguinations, but if you kill a puppy or a kitty cat on the page, you’ll never sell a book in this town again. A few years ago, I was writing a very loose adaptation of Norman McLean’s Young Men and Fire for Warner Brothers, a never-produced flick about smoke jumpers—those wonderfully insane men and women who parachute into forest fires. The producers told me in no uncertain terms as I wrote the script that I should feel free to kill as many firefighters as I needed to serve the story, but that I could under no circumstances show a suffering, dying or dead animal. If I showed an animal in jeopardy, I had to later include a scene where we see that Yogi and Bambi made it out safely. Hey, the rules are the rules, and I signed the contract, so who am I to argue? But still.

In the world of the novels I create, no one tells me what I can and can’t do, and I have to say that the violence thing is something I struggle with. Not to keep flogging my fire service background, but I’ve seen violence up close. Torn, punctured flesh and broken bones are all ugly as hell. The screaming is unnerving, and injured people invariably smell awful. They make wee-wee and doo-doo on themselves, and if they’ve been dead for more than a couple of hours, they’re really unpleasant to be around.

As an author whose job it is to bring readers into the word of my characters, isn’t it my responsibility to make violence and its aftermath as squirmy as it is in real life? Shouldn’t violent actions have terrible consequences on the page as they do in the mean streets and combat zones? Clearly, I think the answer is yes, but truthfully, only to a point. A very fine line separates verisimilitude from a discomfiting violence-as-pornography. Like other forms of pornography, I suppose, it’s hard for me to define, but I know it when I see it.

A couple of weeks ago, John Ramsey Miller posted brilliantly on the importance of keeping scenes real in the reader’s mind. Along those lines, I become infuriated when I’m reading a story and a protagonist takes a bullet in the shoulder (or the thigh or the knee . . .) and keeps going. It’s not possible. The human body just doesn’t have a lot of free space in it. Every joint is a fragile structure. If you shatter a part of the scaffold that gives us structure, it doesn’t matter how tough you are; you’re going to fall down. You’re sure as hell not going to have one more fist fight with the bad guy just because you’re angry. Again, the anatomy and physiology of traumatic injury can be the subject of yet another future blog entry.

So here’s the tacit deal I make with my readers: Even when I take you to unpleasant places, trust me that I don’t do it for prurient reasons, and that I’ll never make you want to throw up because of what you’ve read.

Shake on it?

by John Gilstrap

Write what you know. Good God, how many times have we heard that over the years? As if Jack Ryan was Tom Clancy’s pseudonym, or Lincoln Rhyme Jeffery Deaver’s. For way too many years, that write-what-you-know counsel was a real problem for me. I grew up in suburban DC, a middle class white kid with no respectable non-academic. What the hell was I supposed to write about that was, you know, interesting?

As I got a little older, I came to realize what my writing instructors really meant with that cryptic advice: you have to be convincing. Unless you’ve loved, you’ll never be able to write about it convincingly. Until you’ve had a child and you’ve surrendered that part of your soul to another human being, I don’t think you can write parental angst in a way that will convince parents who are living it. It’s not about relaying events that you know; it’s about conveying emotions that you’ve experienced.

For me empathy came early, when I joined the fire service at age 22. A recent college grad with spare time on my hands, I couldn’t think of a more engaging, exciting way to spend my time—especially since I didn’t have a girlfriend at the time. (I would claim that I never hit on an ambulance patient in her weakest moment while I was there making her feel better, but that would be less than true. Hey, I was 22 and I was a pig. What can I say? I was also thin and had hair. Everybody changes with time.)

The first time I met Jason Bryant, he was sitting Indian-style in the dusty driveway of his home in that part of the Washington ’burbs that hadn’t yet shed its rural past. My most vivid memory from that summer night in 1981 is the sound of pure anguish, the guttural wail that poured from Jason’s mom, whose cigarette had triggered the fireball that consumed her little boy. He’d been siphoning gas to feed the slightly-used trail bike that had been his birthday present. Clearly afraid to touch him, she squatted at his side wailing, “I’m sorry, baby, I’m sorry.” Over and over again.

When she saw me approaching with my ambulance crew, she ran to meet us, grabbing the sleeve of my uniform and pulling me along, the story of the cigarette and the fire spilling out of her as if confessing to a crime.

Jason himself was surprisingly stoic. Fully conscious, he sat with his arms out to his sides, his elbows bent. His scorched flesh hung like rotted draperies from his arms, his chest, his belly and his back. Where the meat below had not been charred black, it had been cooked to a lifeless mottled red and blue. He’d been wearing only a pair of shorts when the fireball erupted. What was exposed was consumed.

His hair was gone, incinerated to a curly mat of carbon. And the stench. Oh, my God, the stench.

“You’re okay now, baby,” Mrs. Bryant said. “The ambulance is here. They’re going to make you better.” She looked straight into my brain. “You can make him better, right?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said; but my hesitation betrayed the lie. The truth was that I was only a kid myself and I was terrified by the horror of Jason’s injury. At that particular moment, I was as concerned about not vomiting up my dinner as I was about caring for her child. I lied because it seemed easiest. And then I went to work.

Actually, there was precious little to do. Those were the days before mobile intensive care units and medevac helicopters—when your only viable option with a critical patient was to load him into the ambulance and run like hell to the hospital. We called it “scoop and swoop.”

The only time Jason screamed was when I grabbed him under the arms, across his chest, and lifted him onto the ambulance cot. Raw agony from a teenager sounds a lot like raw agony from any other wounded animal.

A half hour later, we were done with him. We handed Jason off to the hospital staff, where for the next year or more he would endure daily tortures of a breed that only burn victims can adequately describe. Suffice to say that it involves the routine scouring of raw flesh and the stretching of fused, contracted tissue.

I went back to the firehouse, took a long shower and threw my uniform into the trash. I spent the rest of the shift in a pair of borrowed coveralls.

Two years later, we were called back to the Bryant home. We parked our ambulance among the police cars in the yard. A much older Mrs. Bryant met us at the front door, and her eyes zeroed in on me. “You were here for Jason’s accident,” she said.

I nodded, embarrassed to be recognized. The dispatcher had made it clear what we were here for, and frankly, I didn’t know what to say. As Mrs. Bryant led us through the house toward the bedrooms, I noted the pictorial shrine to a Jason I had never met: a normal, healthy, athletic teenager whose flesh was whole and flexible. I looked away.

Mrs. Bryant took us as far as the back hall, and stopped abruptly. “He’s in there,” she said, pointing. The police were finishing up the last of their pictures. In Virginia, suicide is considered a form of homicide and it is investigated accordingly.

“We can take it from here,” I said. From where I stood, I could see a revolver in a plastic evidence bag and a trace of blood spatter on the wall.

“Thank you for your kindness,” Mrs. Bryant said, gently squeezing my arm.
I gaped back at her, not trusting my voice. “He just couldn’t take it anymore,” she explained. “He used to be such a happy boy.”

I first met Jason Bryant on his sixteenth birthday. On his eighteenth, I zipped him into a body bag.