Writing Popular Fiction

by Dean Koontz

  There is really no way either the new or established writer can refuse to allow the publisher to change the title. It may be irksome to see your title replaced by that of some

  Writing Popular Fiction stranger; as often as not, however, the new title will be an improvement over your own.

  7. Will I see proofs of the manuscript, prior to publication? If it is a hardcover novel, yes, always. If it is a paperback original, you will rarely if ever see galley proofs before the book is published. The paperback scheduling system is too frantic to give the author this courtesy.

  A word of warning: If you sell a hardcover novel and receive a set of galleys to correct, change as little-beyond the printer's errors-as you can. Often, when you see the work set up in print, you find errors in phrasing you'd like to correct, things that weren't obvious on the typewritten page. These are your own words you're correcting, not the printer's mistakes, and such changes are known as "author's alterations." This is a good rule of thumb regarding author's alterations: Once you've made changes that require the resetting of twenty-five lines of type, any additional resetting will be charged to you, against future royalties-and at the rate of three or four dollars a line.

  8. Do editors buy books from sample chapters and outlines? Yes, but only from writers who are well established, whose work is known to the editor, and whose reliability is also proven. A new writer, until he has four or five novel sales behind him, cannot get book contracts from portions and outlines.

  9. What is a portion and outline like? My agent sold my first mainstream novel, Hanging On, to M. Evans on the basis of a hundred pages and a three-page outline. This might seem like a huge "sample," but then the book is projected to run at least five hundred manuscript pages and perhaps considerably more. Another book of mine, a suspense novel, was sold to a hardcover house on the basis of one half-page of single-spaced plot summation in a letter I wrote to the editor after I corrected the galleys of the first novel I wrote for that house.

  For the most part, however, if an editor will buy from you on the strength of sample and outline, he will require a first chapter about fifteen pages long and a four- or five-page outline of what follows. This was the sort of package I sent Robert Hoskins, at Lancer Books, when I sold him the science fiction novel The Haunted Earth:

  Chapter One

  Count Slavek, having proposed a toast to his new lady friend's great beauty, tossed off the glassful of red wine. Then, smiling so broadly that he revealed his two, gleaming fangs, he said, "Before long, my dear, we shall drink other toasts together, though none of wine."

  Mrs. Renee Cuyler, dressed alluringly in a thigh-high skirt and a blouse slashed almost to her navel, smiled at the Count's thinly veiled promise of inhuman ecstasy and sipped her wine, which she, more decorously, had not swallowed in one thirsty gulp.

  The Count put his glass down and walked to her, his cape flowing out behind like dark wings, and he touched her lightly, along her slim neck. A small sigh (from both of them) punctuated the caress.

  "Pure Hokum," Jessie Blake whispered.

  He had to whisper, for he was sitting in the closet, watching the Count and Mrs. Cuyler through a fisheye lens which he had installed in the door some hours earlier. Neither the Count nor Mrs. Cuyler knew he was in there, and they would both be acutely disturbed when they learned that he was watching. That would just have to be. The important thing was not to let them know they were observed until the crucial, incriminating moment had arrived. So Jessie whispered to himself.

  He had bribed the hotel desk clerk into admitting him to the expensive Blue Suite three hours before either Count Slavek or Renee Cuyler arrived for their none-too-private assignation. He had chosen, as his observation post, a stool in the only closet which looked out on the main drawing room of the Suite. Though he knew events would rapidly progress to the bedroom, he suspected that Count Slavek, in his excitement, would choose to chew on Renee Cuyler's neck right here, in the drawing room, before moving to other stimulating but decidedly more mundane, sensual activities. Vampires were notoriously over-eager, especially when, as in the Count's case, they had not made a convert in some weeks.

  Mrs. Cuyler put down her own wine as the Count's hand pressed more insistently at her neck.

  "Now?" she asked.

  "Yes," he responded, rather throatily.

  Jessie Blake, private investigator, got off his stool and put his hand on the inside knob of the closet door. Still bent over to peer through the tiny fisheye lens, he made ready to confront the Count the moment that toothy sonofabitch made a single, legal error.

  The Count gazed into Renee Cuyler's eyes in a manner intended to convey more than mortal longing.

  To Jessie, who was getting a crick in his back, Slavek looked more as if he had suddenly gotten stomach cramps.

  The woman hooked her fingers in the lapels of her already daring blouse and opened it wider, giving the Count a better approach to her jugular and incidentally revealing two full, round, brown-nippled breasts.

  "You look ravishing," the Count said.

  "Then ravish me," Mrs. Cuyler breathed.

  What tripe! Jessie thought. At this crucial moment he couldn't even risk a whisper.

  "Of course," the Count said apologetically, "there are certain formalities we must perform, certain…"

  "I understand," the woman said.

  His voice losing none of its slick, warm charm, the Count said, "I am obligated, by the Kolchak-Bliss Decision of the United Nations Supreme Court for International Law, to inform you both of your rights and of your alternatives."

  "I understand."

  The Count licked his lips. In a sensually guttural voice, clearly too excited to take much more time with the legal formalities, he said, "At this time, you need not submit to the consummation of our pending relationship, and you may either leave or request the services of a licensed advisor on spiritual matters."

  "I understand," she said. She pulled her blouse open even wider, giving the Count a good view of the normal pleasures that awaited him once the greater joy of the bite had passed.

  "Do you wish to leave?" he asked.

  "No."

  "Do you wish the services of a spiritual counselor?"

  "No, darling," she said.

  For a moment, the Count seemed to have forgotten what came next in the litany engendered by the Kolchak-Bliss Decision, but then he went on, speaking quickly and softly so as not to break the mood: "Do you understand the nature of the proposal I've made?"

  "Yes."

  "Do you understand that I wish to initiate you into the world of the undead?" the Count asked.

  "I do."

  "Do you understand that your new life of damnation is eternal?"

  "Yes, darling, yes," she said. "I want you to-to bite me. Now!"

  "Be patient, dearest," Slavek said. "Now, do you realize that there is no return from the life of the undead?"

  "I understand, for Christ's sake!" Mrs. Cuyler moaned.

  "Don't use that name!" the Count roared.

  In the closet, Jessie Blake shook his head, saddened by this spectacle. Maybe he wouldn't even have to interfere, if things kept going like this. Another five minutes of questions-and-answers would bleed away most of the romantic element the Count had spent the

  Writing Popular Fiction

  early evening hours in building up. U.N. law certainly had made things tough for the likes of Slavek.

  "I'm sorry," Renee Cuyler told her would-be lover/ master.

  The Count composed himself and, still with his fingertips resting on the pulse at her neck, he said, "You understand that my culture encourages a certain male chauvinism which you must accept as intimate terms of our blood contract?"

  "Yes," she said.

  "And you still wish to continue?"

  "Of course!"

  Jessie shook his head again. Mr. Cuyler was going to have his hands full restraining this wife of his, even if Blake did pull her out of the fire this time. Obviously,
she had a vampire fixation, a need to be dominated and used in a physical as well as a sexual sense.

  The Count hesitated an the brink of beginning the second and shorter section of the Kolchak-Bliss litany, the part dealing with the woman's alternatives, and having hesitated he was lost. He tilted Renee's pretty head, sweeping back her long, dark hair. Baring his fangs in an unholy grin, he went, rather gracelessly, for her jugular.

  Delighted that his estimation of Slavek had proven sound, Jessie twisted the doorknob and threw open the closet door, stepping into the drawing room with more than a little flair.

  Count Slavek jerked at the noise, whirled away from the woman and, hissing through his pointed teeth like a broken steam valve, back-stepped with his arms out to his sides and his cape drawn up like giant wings ready for flight.

  Jessie brandished his credentials and said, "Jessie Blake, private investigator. I'm working for Mr. Roger Cuyler and have been assigned to protect his wife from the influence of certain supernatural persons who have designs upon both her body and soul."

  "Designs?" Slavek asked, incredulous.

  Jessie turned to the woman. "If you'd be so kind as to close your blouse, Mrs. Cuyler, we can get out of this dump and-"

  "Designs?" Count Slavek insisted, moving forward. "This woman is no innocent victim! She's about the hottest little number I've seen in-"

  "Are you contesting my intervention?" Jessie asked.

  He was six feet tall and weighed a hundred and eighty-five pounds, all of it bone and muscle. And though he couldn't harm a supernatural person without resorting to the accepted charms and spells, silver bullets, and wooden stakes, he could sure as hell generate a stalemate out of which no one could gain anything.

  Still, the Count said, "Of course, I contest! You have somehow secreted yourself in a privately rented hotel suite, against all the laws of individual-"

  "And you," Jessie said, "were in the process of biting a victim to whom you had not recited the entire pertinent information which the Kolchak-Bliss Decision obligates you to state in easily understood language."

  Mrs. Cuyler began to cry.

  Blake, undaunted, continued: "A mindscan, which you would have to undergo if I lodged this charge with the authorities, would prove my allegations and make you vulnerable to a number of unpleasant punishments."

  "Damn you!" Slavek growled.

  "No histrionics, please," Blake said.

  The Count took a threatening step in the detective's direction. "If I were to make two converts here, then there would be no one to report me, would there? I'm sure Renee would help me to convert you." He grinned, his black eyes adance with light.

  Blake removed a crucifix from his jacket and held it in one fist, where, with a human antagonist, he might have carried a fully loaded narcotic pin gun. "I'm not unprepared," he said.

  Slavek appeared to shrivel a bit and looked guiltily away from the crucifix. He said, "I was Jewish before I was a vampire. There's no reason for that device to thwart me."

  "Yet it does," Blake said, smiling down at the plastic Christ-on-a-Cross which was in four different shades of glow-brite orange. His pin gun was the best model, an expensive piece of equipment. But he did not believe in toting around a hand-crafted crucifix when any old hunk of junk would do. He said, "Studies have been done which show that you people fear this on only a psychological level. Physically, it has no effect. Yet, because you get your power from the mythos of vampirism, and because the cross plays such a strong part in that mythos, you really would die if you came into contact with this-if a spirit can be said to die."

  As the detective spoke, Slavek began a strange transformation. His cape appeared to mold closer to his body and to alter, by slow degrees, into a taut brown membrane. The Count's features changed, too, growing darker and less human. Already, he had begun to shrink, his clothes miraculously shrinking with him and dissolving into him as he strove to attain the form of a bat.

  "That'll do you no good," Jessie said. "Even if you escape out the window, or somesuch, we know who you are. We can have you subpoenaed in twenty-four hours. Besides, Brutus can trail you wherever you go."

  The Count hesitated in his metamorphosis. "Brutus?"

  Blake motioned towards the closet where a powerful hound, four and a half feet high at the shoulders, strode out of the closet. Its head was massive, its snout long and crammed with sharp teeth. Its eyes were an unsettling shade of red with tiny, black pupils.

  "A hell hound?" Slavek asked.

  "Of course," Brutus said.

  Mrs. Cuyler seemed shocked to hear a deep, masculine voice coming from the beast, but neither Count Slavek nor Jessie found it odd.

  "Brutus can follow you into any little netherworld cul-de-sac you may intend to flee to," Blake said.

  The Count nodded reluctantly and reversed his transformation, became more human again. "You work together, man and spirit?"

  "Quite effectively," Brutus said.

  He held his burly head low between his shoulders, as if he were prepared to leap after the Count if he should make the slightest move towards escape.

  "An unbeatable combination," Slavek said, admiringly. He sighed and walked to the sofa, sat down, crossed his legs, folded his pale hands in his lap, and said, "What do you want of me?"

  "You've got to hear my client's ultimatum, and then you can leave."

  "I'm listening," Slavek said.

  He had begun to buff his nails on the hem of his cape.

  Mrs. Cuyler, bewildered, still stood in the center of the room, crying, her small hands fisted at her sides as if the tears would soon turn to screams of rage.

  Jessie said, "You've been caught in an illegally executed bite, and you will remain susceptible to prosecution for seven years. Unless you want Mr. Roger Cuyler-my client and this lady's husband-to initiate that prosecution, you will henceforth have nothing whatsoever to do with Mrs. Cuyler. You will neither contact her in person, by telephone, by vidphone, or by messenger. Neither will you employ supernatural methods of communication where this lady is concerned."

  Slavek looked longingly at the leggy young woman and finally nodded. "I accept these conditions, naturally."

  "Be off, then," Jessie said.

  At the door of the suite, Slavek turned back to them and said, "I think it was much better when we kept to ourselves, when you people didn't even know, for sure, that we existed."

  "Progress," Blake said, with a shrug.

  "I mean," Slavek said, "there's much less risk of a stake through the heart nowadays-now that we understand each other-but the romanticism is gone. Blake, they've taken away the thrill!"

  "Take it up with city hall," Brutus said. He wasn't in the best of moods today.

  "It's seven years now since my kind of people entered real commerce with your kind-and things get worse every day. I don't think we'll ever like it the way it is now." Slavek had taken on the brooding tone that so many middle-European bloodsuckers adopted when in a musing mood.

  "The maseni have learned to live with their supernatural brothers-and vice versa," Blake reminded Slavek.

  "But they're different," the Count insisted. "They're alien to begin with. It was a natural thing for them to establish contact with their supernatural world. But they forced this on Earth; it isn't a natural condition here."

  "I hope not," Blake said. "If relations between the flesh and the spirit worlds, here on Earth, become as easy as they are on the maseni home world, I'll be out of a job."

  "You exploit other people's problems," Slavek said.

  "Solve other people's problems," Blake corrected.

  Grimacing to express his distaste, Count Slavek left the suite in a swirl of black cloth.

  At the same moment, Renee Cuyler's tears changed abruptly into anger, as he had expected they would. The woman ran at him, screaming, clawing with her well-minicured nails, kicking, biting, slapping.

  Jessie pushed her away and, when he could not settle her with words, settled her with three
narcotics pins in the abdomen. She slumped down on the thick carpet and went to sleep. She snored.

  "Jesus, what a bore!" Brutus growled. He had no compunctions about using the Lord's name in vain or otherwise, though Blake had never heard him use it otherwise. He padded to the sofa, jumped onto it, curled up with his big, hairy paws hanging over the edge of the cushions. "It's one infidelity case after another, these days," he complained.

  "Boring but safe," Blake said. He went to the vidphone, punched out the number of their office and waited for Helena to answer it.

  "Hell Hound Investigations," she said, almost five minutes later.

  "You're a poor excuse for a secretary," Blake said.

  She blinked her long-lashed, blue eyes, pushed a strand of honey yellow hair away from her face. "Yeah, but I'm stacked," she said.

  He could see her swelling bosom in the vidphone screen, and he could not argue with her. He said, "Okay," and he sat down, a bit overwhelmed by mammary memories. "We've got Renee Cuyler safe and sound. I want you to call her husband and send him over here." He gave her the address of the hotel, and the suite number.

  "Congratulations," she said, smiling. She had ripe lips and very white teeth. She should have made commercials for unnatural sex acts, Blake thought. "Oh," she said, "You've received four calls this morning from a potential client."

  "Who?"

  "Galiotor Fil," she said.

  "A maseni?"

  "With that name, what else?" she asked.

  "What's he want?"

  "He'll only talk to you."

  Blake thought a moment. "Ill be back in the office in an hour and a half, if you get to Roger Cuyler right away. If this Galiotor Fil can be there, I'll talk to him."

  "Right, chief," she said.

  He winced and didn't have a chance to reply before she snapped off, her perfect face and better bosom fading from the screen.

  "Looks like you got your wish-for something interesting to happen," Blake told the hell hound.

  Brutus climbed off the couch and shook his head, his ears slapping against his skull, and he said, "Did I hear right? A maseni for a customer?"