The fallout from the very public feud between first-time writer Mandy DeGeit and Anthony Giangregorio of Undead Press (first covered here yesterday) continues today, with professional writers weighing in on the controversy. Neil Gaiman tweeted DeGeit’s original post, bringing thousands of readers to her blog, and now Adam-Troy Castro, Alyn Day, Richard Salter, Nick Mamatas and others have written about their own experiences.

Here’s Adam-Troy Castro, from his blog:

There’s recently been a flurry of posts about Undead Press, a small publishing house that a) doesn’t pay, b) allegedly humiliates its authors by inserting gratuitous rape scenes into their stories, without asking those authors if they want those rape scenes to be there, and c) has apparently published and continues to advertise a sequel to George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, showing an absolute lack of respect for copyright or concern for the legal consequences… what I really want to address is that Dawn of the Dead sequel, an act of supreme arrogance… What Giangregorio has done is specifically, and deliberately, hijack the name of a better work and superior work to his sequel; he is specifically saying, “This is a sequel to Dawn of the Dead.” Which he has no right to do.

Alyn Day, another Undead Press contributor, relates how her story was also rewritten and retitled without permission.

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So there’s been a lot of recent attention to Mandy DeGeit’s frankly horrifying report of how her first piece of published fiction, “She Makes Me Smile,” was rather callously butchered by an amateur publisher, Undead Press.

The changes DeGeit describes include introducing an embarrassing error in the title (changing it to “She Make’s Me Smile”… what?) to re-writing whole sections, and altering several characters and plot points — all without informing her.

However the worst offense (in my professional opinion) was in how Undead Press treated DeGeit after she protested the changes.  Here’s an excerpt from the response she received from the publisher:

wow, i truly cant believe that e,mail. you go girl. this one one hell of a story about dealing with unstable writers… lets see. on the contract, it clearly says publisher has the right to EDIT work. you signed it. are you saying you are a dishonest and immoral person and will now try to deny you signed the contract? well i have a copy right here

and as for the story. the editor had a hard time with it, it was very rough and he did alot to make it readable. despite what you think, your writing has a long way to go before its worthy of being printed professionally. we did what we had to do to make the story printable. you should be thankful, not complaining. ah, the ungrateful writer, gotta love it. the contract also says any disagreements you have about the contract must be filed legally in Massachusetts and when you lose, you must pay all court costs.

so, we are done here. any more correspondences from you must be from your lawyer.

I’ve been a small press publisher and editor for over ten years and, if it’s reproduced accurately, that may just be the most thoroughly unprofessional piece of correspondence I’ve ever seen.

I want to be clear. Editors make mistakes. Lord knows I’ve made plenty. And there are certainly times when you need to change a story, often over the objections of the author. Judith Berman once called me “the most intrusive editor I’ve ever worked with,” and it was probably deserved. We worked on multiple revisions of her story “Awakening” before it appeared in Black Gate 10 and was nominated for a Nebula Award.

But I hope I’ve always been straightforward with my writers about changes I wanted, and why I wanted them. And far, far more important than that, I hope I’ve always treated my authors with dignity and respect. Because when you screw up (and you will), you’ll also need their understanding and forgiveness.

Any company that treats its writers the way Mandy DeGeit describes being treated does not deserve to survive.

After reading through the various responses to my post two weeks ago, some of which were insightful and intelligent, others perhaps a little less so, I found myself concluding that I had probably gone a little too far in the process of defending historical authenticity against Daniel Abraham’s charge that it is not an effective defense against charges of insufficient strong women, excessive white people, or a surfeit of sexual violence.

Upon further reflection, I don’t think it is correct to conclude that a work of fantasy will necessarily be improved by additional historical authenticity. Would The Chronicles of Narnia be improved by religious schism or removing the historically ludicrous notion of four siblings ruling simultaneously? No, I can’t honestly say it would. Would Abraham’s own The Long Price Quartet be improved by making the imperial Asian culture utilize a historically authentic kanji/hànzì system of writing that would likely be all but unintelligible to the various warlike Caucasian societies surrounding it? No, I don’t think so.

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Back in 2004, a friend and I decided to become role-playing game publishers, possibly for the wrong reasons – we wanted publish our stuff rather than wanting to be publishers. Given that, we still went forward in as professional a manner as possible.

While we established Sword’s Edge Publishing as a business, I’m afraid I ran it as hobbyist. I made decisions based on my interests and enthusiasms. I should have been looking to build the brand and increase SEP’s audience. In the end, when I lost interest, SEP went to sleep.

It has only recently returned to bring forth some new games, and then quickly returned to its slumber. This last year, from April 2011 (when it released Sword Noir) to January 2012 (when it released the adventure Suffer the Witch), SEP did things a little different than it had before.

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Daniel Abraham attacks the idea of historical authenticity in fantasy:

The idea that the race, gender, or sexual roles of a given work of secondary world, quasi-medieval fantasy were dictated by history doesn’t work on any level. First, history has an almost unimaginably rich set of examples to pull from. Second, there are a wide variety of secondary world faux-medieval fantasies that don’t reach for historical accuracy and which would be served poorly by the attempt. And third, even in the works where the standard is applied, it’s only applied to specific, cherry-picked facets of the fantasy culture and the real world.

This is a fascinating assertion. We need less authenticity in fantasy? Let’s begin by looking at Abraham’s three initial assertions. First, history does not have “an almost unimaginably rich set of examples to pull from”. In fact, those of us who study history either professionally or on an armchair basis tend to be impressed by the way in which the historical patterns tend to repeat themselves. For example, the economic notions of the Mongol ruler Gaikhatu Khan, whose issuance of paper currency in 1294 promised reduced poverty, lower prices, and income equality, eerily prefigured both the General Theory of John Maynard Keynes as well as most of the Federal Reserve statements since 2008. Granted, neither Bernanke nor Geithner met with the unfortunate fate of the Khan’s chief financial officer, but as they say, history rhymes rather than repeats.

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Amazing isn't it? Is originality dead, or is someone in Hollywood smarter than we give them credit for?

I had a question proposed to me in my Saturday blog here on Black Gate concerning the multiple covers of Howard Andrew Jones’s The Desert of Souls. I’ll repost the question here.

I see a lot of photo-manipulation covers and hybrid photo/3D/digital painted covers, and I feel that a lot of them actually look pretty cheap and nasty. If I was Howard Andrew Jones, for example, I would be very happy with the first The Desert of Souls cover (100% digitally painted, stirring, full of life and movement, etc) and very unhappy with the second cover (a mish-mash of photo elements and, I don’t know? 3D elements? What’s going on with those faces? It almost looks like a romance novel cover.) What do you think about this trend?

I’m going to break this down into two different answers. The first will deal with The Desert of Souls, and the second on the current state of science fiction/fantasy covers in general.

The question immediately reminded me of Hollywood and their great marketing machine. In 1990 Paramount Studios released Hunt for the Red October. The movie cost roughly $30 million to make and grossed $200 million worldwide, which is to say it was an enormous success. The movie poster featured a shadowy submarine, Sean Connery’s face, all in black and red, and the title in white lettering.

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I was around eight years old when a neighborhood friend showed up at my door with a small red box.

The box had a dragon on the cover, crouched over a pile of fantastic treasures. A warrior faced off against the toothy beast, with a magical glowing sword in mid-swing.

That box was of course the Dungeons and Dragons Basic Set (D&D). I can feel my inner geek dripping from my fingers as I type this, but I can honestly say the game changed my life forever.

Many people of my generation were introduced to D&D through this starter set. If you are a few years older you would have encountered similar sets of rules, just with different cover art.

This game captured my imagination in a way that the video games of the 80s didn’t. My friends and I played every day that summer, nurturing an imagination that I am thankful for to this day. I continued to play D&D all the way through high school and after. But around the year 2000 everything changed for me.

Wizards of the Coast had purchased TSR (the original publishers of D&D) and they were planning to release a new edition. When it hit the shelves I was struck immediately by the change — not just in rules, but overall aesthetic.

I’ve never been a big video game player so the over-the-top video game-inspired art was alien to me. The rules made characters more like super heroes than adventurers trying to survive in dank dungeons. Recognizing that I was no longer the target audience for D&D, I largely left the game behind in favor of other role-playing games.

That is until 2006.

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Whistle for your post owl, conjure your djinn, geas an itinerant minstrel or passer-by into delivering your parcel: genre publisher Angry Robot is accepting unagented manuscripts for the next two weeks. And they’re interested in classic fantasy only.

What we’re not looking for:

Anything other than classic fantasy – swords, magic, kingdoms, castles. You might describe it as high fantasy, epic, magical, low, classic, medieval, or whatever. If you’ve written an urban fantasy or supernatural modern day chiller, that’s great, but not what we’re wanting this time around. … If it has castles, kingdoms, magic, swords, dragons, you’re on the right track.

The mystical portal will remain unlocked from April 16-30. Alas, this doesn’t help me but maybe it helps you. Just be sure to remember your old chum Jackson when you’re writing the Acknowledgments page.

I’m in the middle of another book, this one my fourth, and the first in a series of four. But writers are always in the middle of a book, always writing the next book, always revising the current one. And, worst of all, always reviewing and revising and dwelling endlessly on the books of the past.

One of the great things about the Arts is that you create specific works that are pretty much a time capsule of who you were and what you were capable of doing at one discrete point in your life. Each book is a little piece of you that you leave behind in the time stream, and every time you open it you get to re-live and remember what it was like to write that book. It’s a little bit like having a conversation with a younger self.

I don’t mean to sound pretentious when I say things like that. I think too much about what it means to be a writer, how we go about coming up with worlds and gods and believable characters, and then translate those ideas into words in such a way that a reader can experience them as well. Let’s be honest, words are probably the crudest, clumsiest, most difficult to wield of all the creative arts. We depend so much on the imagination of the reader. A writer doesn’t even get to read the book to the writer, and instead has to depend on the reader’s ability to pace the sentences correctly, read the dialogue with the right tonality… everything. It’s troublesome, when you really think about it. This is why I encourage you to go to readings when you get a chance, if only to hear the words in the writer’s voice.

Anyway. One of the books I’ve written is The Horns of Ruin, which was published by the fine folks at Pyr Books in 2010. I’ve been thinking about it a lot recently because what I was trying to do when I started that book is similar to what I’m trying to do with the current work. But at some point I changed my plan and went in a different direction.

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Over the past year, and as I prepare for the release of my second book, The Straits of Galahesh, I’ve been interviewed a number of times. I’m often asked about the process of writing and how I cut my teeth as a writer. I went fairly “workshop heavy,” and I thought this would make for an interesting discussion for those who are just getting into writing.

I started workshopping not with a local group (I was traveling too much for that), but with an online community—Critters, to be specific. After a few months with Critters I moved on to the Online Writing Workshop, which worked very well for me for years. In terms of instructor-led workshops, I’ve been to Viable Paradise, Writers of the Future, Orson Scott Card’s Literary Bootcamp, and Clarion. I took a bit of a break after Clarion, but then attended Starry Heaven I and II in Flagstaff, AZ, a peer-to-peer workshop run by S.K. Castle that was modeled off of Charlie Finlay’s Blue Heaven. I enjoyed those so much I started Wellspring, another Blue Heaven offspring. I ran the first last summer in Lake Geneva, WI, and I’m running the second this coming summer, just before WorldCon in Chicago.

If it wasn’t obvious from that list, I strongly recommend workshopping. If you come with the right attitude and the right expectations, it will take your writing much farther than you could have brought it on your own. The greatest strength of workshopping, in my opinion, is the wealth of knowledge that others will bring to the table, things your own set of experiences and knowledge haven’t led you to.

Strangely, when you workshop you’ll find that you’ll gain insight from what other writers find in your work, but you’ll soon learn that you get as much benefit or more from critiquing work that others have also critiqued. You won’t be working with your own material, where you will inevitably have blind spots. You’ll be working as a first reader, as will the other writers, and it’s in comparing how well (or not) you found issues in the writing that you’ll learn. And so, pay close attention to what others have said about work you’ve also critiqued. See what you missed and then start taking notes. Identify your blind spots and then create stories that expose those weaknesses. Actively work to strengthen those muscles, and soon you’ll find them becoming strengths, or at least not liabilities. What I said about experimenting earlier? This is why you experiment. To become stronger in your craft with targeted exercises.

In these early days, enter with an open mind and an open heart. Learn from the other writers. Try not to get defensive. Absorb. And for the love of all that is good, experiment. You may want to write a particular type of fiction—for me it was epic fantasy—by try other things on for size. It will only help you as you progress.

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