Grave Markings: 20th Anniversary Edition

by Arnzen, Michael A.

  And when the rare writer raises his nose, or talks ill behind my back, or says things like “He’s too young to be any good” or “Biker stuff…pah!”, I know that he is not really jealous of me. What he is truly jealous of is my stroke of good luck. It’s kind of like sitting at that metaphorical roulette table and watching someone hit the number right next to yours: you’re happy for them, but you curse the Fates for not moving that little ball one notch over. But you can’t blame the player who won. If anything, blame the house.

  All I’m saying is that you have to remember that having a good story to tell, writing that story the best damned way you know how, and professionally submitting a quality tale to a publisher are all pro forma—simply the way things are, before the fact. But you still gotta take that risk—put your money on the table—and stay in the game. This is why every writer’s advice is to persist, to keep writing for the sake of writing, to keep submitting for the sake of selling, and to keep on keeping on. I share my experience with you to simply let you know that—sometimes—that number you bet on hits. And the wheel keeps spinning. Always. It might have 38 million numbers on it, but chances are that the ball will land on every number sooner or later. You just gotta be there with something of value when it does.

  THE GARGOYLE ON MY GABLES:

  ON WINNING THE BRAM STOKER AWARD

  You may have read my article, “Luck of the Draw,” which discussed how I sold my first novel, Grave Markings. If not, allow me to summarize it for you: although I wrote the best book I could write at the time, I was extremely lucky to have sold it.

  Well, as chance would have it, my lucky streak seems to have continued. Since that article was published, Grave Markings has garnered two awards in the horror genre: the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a First Novel (from the Horror Writers Association), and the International Horror Critics’ Guild Award for Best First Novel (from the World Horror Convention). Talk about luck! I’m very proud and I’m extremely honored, and I’m not quite sure that it’s really sunken in yet.

  I’ve been invited to write this article for Genre Writer’s News to reflect on “the road to winning the Stoker,” but to be honest with you I can’t help but think of these awards as a sort of free dessert that came after a very fulfilling meal. I didn’t write my novel with the intention of making myself an award-winner, and I didn’t really promote myself like a politician to try to gather up votes in the horror community. Neither did my publisher.1 I simply published a book, and enough people enjoyed it to bless me with an award. What can I say except “thanks” to the readers and writers who inspired me?

  I suppose I can talk a little bit about how these awards have affected me.

  I’m very honored by these awards, and I never dreamed I would have a haunted house and a gargoyle sitting on my bookshelf, staring at me every day while I write. Writing can be a lonely business, and there’s no greater inspiration than these award statues to urge me to continue what I’m doing, these totems and touchstones that other writers I admire also have in their offices and living rooms. I love them, and I’m very proud. They reassure me when I feel that my writing is dragging, they comfort me when I feel a case of writer’s block walling up around me, and they remind me that readers are all that count in the long run. Your readers are all you should write for, period, and that includes yourself.

  But winning awards for your writing can be pretty damned daunting, too. I suppose a lot of people think that once your book wins awards you get a lot of respect. Well, maybe, but I think you learn to respect your field rather than the other way around. You begin to take the genre a little more seriously because the genre community suddenly seems to be taking you very seriously. Your writing slows down, becomes more careful, more thoughtful, more purposeful. You realize that you suddenly have a higher standard to live up to, even if your standards were already high. The award urges you to produce more of the same, but the pressure is on to not repeat yourself, to not assume you’ve tapped into some mythic formula, to go ahead and break the very rules you obeyed oh-so-well. It shakes you up a bit. It makes you pause and reflect: What did I do that “worked”?

  And the fact of the matter is, I did nothing special that any other published writer hasn’t also done. Winning an award is a combination of so many factors that it would be impossible to capture them all in a bottle to pour over my next manuscript. If you’re reading this article for advice on how to become an award-winning author, I’m afraid to say that I really don’t have any wisdom for you. I can just repeat what I (and many others) have said before: Put yourself in situations with a high potential for luck to happen. Read everything you can, both in and out of the genre.2 Keep writing, writing, writing, and sending your stuff out regularly, forgetting about its destiny once you drop it in the mailbox. Be professional. Do research. Go for the big markets once in a while. Try to make some money at this labor of love. Sometimes it feels like playing the lottery, but the pay-off can be more rewarding than currency when your number hits. Be patient and disciplined. Surround yourself with your art. Stay in touch with others who live for the written word. Don’t forget to grow along the way. Love it or give up.

  And, hey, give yourself an award every once in a while. Celebrate the big sales with champagne or ice cream or a day off. Share your accomplishments with others. Chances are that you aren’t writing in a vacuum. Kiss your significant other, and thank them for their support.

  If books are like babies, then awards are like your kid’s report card, lined with A+’s. That’s how I feel about it: like a proud parent. And like a parent, I can’t really put my finger on what I did right in bringing up baby. I just did it. And I doubt I did it alone.

  Enough advice.

  So let me tell you about the changes in my career since winning the awards three months ago, since I’m guessing that you’re probably interested in what happens afterward. Maybe it’ll surprise you, and maybe not. But if you’re dreaming about winning an award for your writing someday, maybe what follows will flesh out your fantasy with a little realism and a little hope.

  I got an agent. They didn’t come to my doorstep the day after I won the Stoker, though. I had already approached them (after some research) shortly before the final nominations were being counted. Again: you gotta put yourself in these sorts of situations. You gotta stay active; an award doesn’t suddenly give you the right to become a passive lump. It doesn’t turn you into some instant celebrity. And while having an award-winning author dropped into an agent’s lap certainly gives that agent some leverage in the marketplace, it doesn’t guarantee that the “waiting game” that all writers must play will be won. New York publishing takes a lot of time, and agents aren’t magicians who can speed it up all that much. My second book is still playing the “waiting game” as I write this. One company that rejected my second novel asked my agent to see the outline for my third. Wish me luck. Sure, my chances of selling my next book—and selling it for a higher advance—have vastly improved. But the key word is “chance”: sure, I’ve moved to a table where the stakes are a little higher, and I feel much more confident sitting there, but I’m still just playing poker. And I’m playing with the same set of cards as you.

  I got a few requests and invitations from publishers. I’ve heard about a few anthologies that I might not otherwise have heard of. I’m ecstatic about these new markets and the potential to reach wider audiences, and I’m working even harder than ever to do so. But these are not instant or guaranteed sales. They are just open doors that I might previously have had to slide my manuscripts under. Now I get to walk inside and hand them directly to the source. But the stories still need to be good, and they can still be rejected, and that door can always swing back in my face. There is no carte blanche in publishing, unless your books make enough money to support an entire house.

  When rejections come, it doesn’t bother me very much. Never has, really
, but now I have just a little more faith in my writing ability when I get those form letters saying “no.” As much as I feel lucky, I also remember how hard I’ve worked for the past eight years or more. I remember how much effort it took to even sell my early stuff to the small press, and I remember the joy of receiving my first paycheck for writing. And it’s hard to forget the fact that I’ve studied writing and literature in college ever since the beginning, as I inch my way closer to a PhD. But more than anything else, I recall the emotional charge I had when I first wrote a story that just “felt right”—where everything seemed to “click” and the ending seemed to write itself. It’s the sort of charge that—once experienced—is never forgotten, and I suspect all writers who’ve felt it constantly seek to feel it again while they’re writing. That story was called “An Eye for an Eye” and it is an excerpt from Grave Markings and it was published in pro magazines and reprinted in both The Year’s Best Horror Stories and my short story collection, Needles and Sins. Knowing that that story has received so much success tells me something that keeps me honest: that you feel good writing when it magically happens, and so do your readers. And that feeling always seems like something generated by a power higher than yourself, no matter how much you like to think you’re in control of it all. It really is that mystical: no matter how “good” you are at your craft, no matter how “talented” you are in your way with words, this charge comes out of nowhere while you’re writing and knocks you on your ass. If you haven’t felt the sort of charge I’m talking about, keep writing until it happens. It’ll surprise you. And you’ll want more. I live for that feeling. It’s more inspiring than any award. And I suspect that the awards I’ve received have a lot to do with that charge, too, if my readers were lucky enough to share it with me. I hope so—it’s a kick.

  When acceptances come now, I’m still a little surprised and happy at my luck, no matter how big or small the market. But the problem is, now everyone else thinks it’s no big deal. When I recently sold a poem to Grue magazine, I was ecstatic to finally sell to an outfit I’d always admired but never really tried out of fear I wasn’t as good as those I read within its pages. But the wind is kind of knocked out of my sails/sales when I share the good news, and people go, “Oh, isn’t that nice. How’s the next book coming along?” Hey, little things count, too. Sometimes more than the “big” things, in the long run. Because it all adds up to one “big” thing over time: your career and identity as a writer. I honestly don’t think I would have written a book like Grave Markings if I hadn’t written a lot of poetry and short stories. I didn’t spit out an award-winning book, even though it might have felt that way at the time. Those “little things” helped make me what I am now. And still do, from time to time.

  There’s a certain irony in having both the Stoker (a heavy statue of a haunted house)3 and the Horror Critics’ Guild Award (a statue of a golden gargoyle)4 side by side on the bookshelf that towers beside my writing desk. If you look at the details on the Stoker, you’ll be impressed with all the little monsters peeking out of windows and crawling out of the chimneys—I see something new every time I look at it. If you look closely at the gargoyle, you’ll see that the silver plate that reads “Best First Novel” at its base actually dangles from a heavy chain that seems to pull the creature’s head down with its weight. But side-by-side I notice that the Stoker statue has gargoyles on its gables. How big these awards are and how small they are in the grand scheme of things is all a matter of perspective. Grave Markings is one gargoyle on the communal house that is the horror genre. It contributes to the genre, while it depends on the genre as well. I think this is true of all genre books, but I think reaching that balance is what truly makes a book worth winning awards: a mutual dependence and independence from the tradition and community that a writer works within.

  If there’s a “road” to winning the Stoker, a writer needs to drive in both lanes, in opposite directions, at the same time. There should be goals on the horizon, but plenty of room for accidents and detours along the way. The trick, I think, is to just keep driving, focusing on the present.

  I hate to end on a cliché, but clichés are clichés because they’re true: writing is its own reward.

  NOTES:

  1 Indeed, it is sweetly ironic that the winners of the Bram Stoker Award for novels this year—Nancy Holder for Dead in the Water (Novel) and myself for Grave Markings (First Novel)—were pretty much the only books that our mutual publisher (Dell/Abyss) did not promote by sending letters to the HWA membership offering free reading copies in hopes of garnering votes. They made this offer for their other horror books that were on the ballot, but somehow forgot about promoting us. Other publishers promoted our competition, as well. One writer told me that I should feel vindicated. I do, but for other reasons.

  2 You can start by reading the most recent award winners in your favorite genre. If you can find the secret of my success in Grave Markings, please drop me a note to let me in on it.

  3 Apparently, the Stoker statue is actually supposed to emulate Poe’s “House of Usher”—and Harlan Ellison has argued that it should be called the “Usher” instead of the Stoker. The statue is signed by the brilliant artist who created it, S. Kirk, with the date 1988 inscribed in its base. Since 1988 is the year I began publishing professionally, I think this is very cool.

  4 Although not officially termed “The Gargoyle,” that’s what I’ve been calling it. This is the first year that the International Horror Critics’ Guild Award has been given, and it is awarded by the majority of the voting members of the World Horror Convention. Nancy Collins apparently gave birth to the idea for these awards, as an alternative to the Stokers—granted by real readers rather than the potentially incestuous community of writers. What an honor to win both! If you look closely at mine, you’ll see a fine crack along its left wing: I dropped the puppy and gave it a broken wing while carrying it around the convention hotel. How symbolic!

  Corky’s

  Collection

  of Tattoo Tales

  The following stories were all written prior to the publication of Grave Markings, which was first drafted and sold to Dell Books in 1991 and didn’t see print until (after two major revisions) it hit the stands in November 1994.

  I had already started publishing stories and poems in the small genre press for a few years, when I fell into writing for biker magazines as a happy accident. It all started with the story here called “Marked,” which I originally wrote in hopes of publishing in a magazine that horror writer Barry Hoffman was starting up devoted entirely to censorship, called Gauntlet: Exploring the Limits of Free Expression. He rejected it because it had too many Hitchcockean twists and turns, and I saw that as a strength, not a weakness, so I went on the hunt for another place to try to publish it. And found Outlaw Biker. Seemed quite literally to be the perfect market! They bought it for their “Tattoo Revue” line of skin art magazines, and the world opened up to me. I found a real rich vein of creative possibilities in tattoos, and, like Corky in Grave Markings, started writing stories exclusively about tattooing for biker magazines. “An Eye For An Eye” (Chapter 4 of this novel) reprints perhaps the most famous of them. After working on these I couldn’t stop and fell into a story idea that wouldn’t fit in a short length, and Grave Markings was born.

  Some of the stories I wrote then are lost forever. But in what follows, you can read those that survived in my archives, which I retyped and, to maintain historical flavor, only superficially corrected for this special section of the book. “Marked” and “Copycats” were published in Outlaw Biker Tattoo Review. The remainder, which I sent to other biker mags but never heard back from, appear here for the very first time, warts and all. These are like those demo tracks you get on re-released, remastered albums, and I trust you’ll approach them as such.

  MARKED

  “I used to be an artist,” she said as she fille
d the strange contraption with ink.

  I nodded, flexing my forearm, wanting to get the whole thing over with. My butt was already falling asleep on the portable stool she’d taken off her Harley. My pits were soaked with sweat. I wanted to get the whole job over and done with before anyone saw us, unlikely as it was, here in the abandoned part of town.

  “But now all I got left is this,” she continued, gesturing at the motorcycle with the electric needle. The tattoo machine was wired to her cycle, plugged into an adapter in the cigarette lighter on its front panel. She flicked a switch, and the inker hummed to life. It was louder than I expected, sounding more like a dentist’s drill than anything else. Resting her wrist on my arm, she lowered the mini-jackhammer to my skin. I winced, expecting pain, but it just tickled, kinda like when a bug crawls under your shirt.

  After a few seconds, though, my eyes watered and I squirmed in my seat, beginning to regret the whole affair. Luckily, she resumed the conversation, taking my mind off the slow burn of the inker.

  “This is gonna be worth a helluva lot more than what you’re paying for it,” she said, her tongue searching the corner of her beautiful mouth as she worked. “My work is rare these days. Ever since…” She lifted the needle off my arm. “Well, you’re lucky, that’s all. You got a cigarette?”

  “Yeah.” I dug one out of my breast pocket.

  “Light it, would ya? My hands are full.” She went back to work on my right arm as I lit the smoke with the other.