No matter what your reaction, if you know anyone who might be interested in what we’re doing here, please consider spreading the word. We’d certainly appreciate any readers you could send our way. You might just introduce someone to a book he or she will love, and every reader knows there’s no better feeling.
(If you talk about this on your blog or in a news article, be sure to email webmaster@ cemeterydance.com so your link can be added to the website.)
Some people are confident this experiment is doomed, but that doesn’t make them right, so let’s give it a try and see what happens. Worse-case scenario, I’ve committed some form of career suicide. Best-case scenario, a lot of readers who didn’t know my work will soon—and hopefully some of them will come back for more.
Now go read a new book and tell a friend about it…because without readers sharing their favorites with other readers, we’re all in trouble.
Best wishes,
Brian James Freeman
P.S. Please feel free to pass this file or the download link (www.DownloadTheDarkness. com) to anyone you like. And please drop me a line with your thoughts: author@ brianjamesfreeman.com.
A CONVERSATION WITH BRIAN JAMES FREEMAN by Norman Prentiss
O
ver the past few years, Brian has quietly amassed an impressive collection of short stories—consistently among the most memorable works in each anthology he appears in. Who can forget “Answering the Call” in Borderlands 5? Or in Shivers II, “Marking the Passage of Time,” which in a mere four pages manages to deliver a devastating emotional punch. His prose style is direct and efficient, while still managing to convey the atmosphere and intensity necessary for the best horror stories. And as proven by his bold debut novel Black Fire (published under the James Kidman pseudonym), he’s also not afraid to experiment with structure and point of view—I still remember the “I can’t believe he pulled that off ” admiration I experienced when racing through that novel’s surprising final pages.
He’s back with a new name, Brian James Freeman (more about that later), and a new book, The Painted Darkness. I got an early look at The Painted Darkness, and it’s just as smart and engrossing and original as I’ve come to expect from him, whatever name he writes under. The good news is that the book will be available in an affordable trade edition from Cemetery Dance.
CD: What was the inspiration behind The Painted Darkness? BJF : About five years ago, my wife and I bought a fixer-upper that was heated by a boiler very much like the one in the story. Our boiler was actually older than the house, though. The house was built in 1941 but they installed a coal boiler built in 1904. Someone suggested the builder had probably used a boiler from another building that had burned down or been condemned around the time our house was built. Comforting thought, right? That in itself could inspire a story.
Somewhere along the way the boiler in our house had been converted from coal to oil, and it required a regular maintenance schedule to fill and drain the tank, but the consequences for forgetting the maintenance was not nearly as dire as I suggest in the story. We were told the unit would probably just shut down.
So the boiler was one element that inspired the story, but just as important was the drain in the middle of our basement. I’ve never seen eyes looking up at me from that drain, but I’ve certainly wondered what might be living down there. These two thoughts started getting intertwined and before too long I had the story of an artist in a farmhouse facing down a monster from his past.
I don’t recall how The Painted Darkness ended up being set in the old farmhouse, but a large part of Henry’s childhood is pulled from my own experiences as a child who spent a lot of time imagining things that weren’t there in the woods.
CD: It’s an unusual size for a horror story— way too long for short story magazines or anthologies, but too short for the stand-alone books we typically see from a mass-market publisher. Did you ever consider making the story shorter, or expanding it into a novel?
BJF: I was supposed to be working on a novel when I started The Painted Darkness, but I knew it wasn’t going to be that long. I had thought it was going to be around 10,000 words, which is still too long for a magazine or anthology and much too short for anyone outside the small press to consider publishing in general. I probably should have stopped right there, but the story really gripped me and it seemed like Henry’s tale just had to be written.
As sometimes happens, the story grew as I went, ending up at around 25,000 words. That’s still much too short for the bigger publishers, but it made the book a solid novella and novellas have done quite well in the small press, especially in the horror genre.
Cemetery Dance’s own Novella Series has had many acclaimed titles and several other publishers have copied that line in their own ways over the years. The genre just seems to do well at the novella length. Long enough to suck the reader in, but not so long as to lose all of the tension, as often happens with a novel.
I had thoughts about whether The Painted Darkness could somehow be a novel, but the important parts of the story were told in that 25,000 words. Anything I could add would probably just be padding for the sake of padding, and that would only hurt the story.
CD: You’ve written novels (Black Fire, from Leisure and CD Publications, under the James Kidman pseudonym), a novella (Blue November Storms from CD), and numerous short stories (in Borderlands 5 and CD’s Shivers series, to name a few). Which is your favorite story form to write in?
BJF: Easily the short stories, although novellas are growing on me. I spend far too much time on each novel and the form doesn’t come easily to me. I think I was meant to write short stories and maybe novellas, which doesn’t bode well for my agent!
CD: There’s a lot of interior art in the book— which is appropriate, considering the story’s main character is an artist. How did you choose the illustrator? How did you select what scenes needed an image?
BJF: When it came time to discuss the interior artwork, I knew I really wanted a handful of B&W pieces at key moments. That just felt right given the content of the book.
Rich Chizmar agreed and Jill Bauman came to mind immediately when we discussed who would be a good fit. I’ve worked with many talented artists over the years, but she drew some fantastic illustrations for my previous novella, Blue November Storms, and I knew she’d bring the right approach to this book. Her artwork perfectly captured the mood of the scenes, which she selected when she read the manuscript, and she turned in even more art than we expected. She just did a wonderful job.
CD: Will all of Jill Bauman’s art be included in the trade edition of the book?
BJF: Jill’s artwork is definitely going to be in all three editions. You can see some samples on the Cemetery Dance website if you go to the The Painted Darkness product page.
CD: You handle a lot of the publicity and production elements for Cemetery Dance publications, and also for your own Lonely Road Books. How does your work in specialty publishing impact your writing career?
BJF: Working on the publicity side of things really reminds me every day of how hard it can be to break through all of the noise out there in the marketplace. Cemetery Dance has a very dedicated following, which certainly helps, but we’re always looking for new ways to reach horror lovers and collectors who haven’t found us yet.
Actually, I never realized how much I would love the production side of book publishing. Other than actually writing, it’s easily my favorite part of the business and I get to play a big role in just about every book you see from Cemetery Dance these days.
Whether I’m kicking around ideas with one of our designers for the look of a new book, or I’m discussing the artwork plans with the artist, or I’m revising the sales copy with the author, I’m working with some of the most incredibly creative people in the genre. A ton of work goes into taking a manuscript and producing a beautiful Limited Edition and I think most readers assume that it’s all templates and there’s no real heavy lifting in the process, b
ut some of our designers are extraordinarily creative and really make our books shine. Working with them is always a lot of fun.
Being the Managing Editor of Cemetery Dance magazine is a lot like working on the book production, only with even more contributors to juggle. Luckily, everyone involved is really dedicated to making every issue of the magazine the best it can be, so that makes the job a lot easier.
CD:What else are you doing to help promote the new book?
BJF: The first step was to finally revamp my website, which was long overdue. I’m blessed in that I’m married to a very talented designer. Kate came up with a beautiful new design for the website, I refreshed all of the content, and we launched it late last year. You can see the new look at www.brianjamesfreeman.com.
Probably the biggest change to the site is my byline. I started publishing short fiction in 1994 and little did I know there was already a Brian Freeman who wrote some books in the 1980s about Native Americans. And then in the late 1990s came another Brian Freeman who contributed to computer books. And then there’s also a mystery author with our name who started writing a few years ago.
Thanks to the Internet, it’s easy these days to see that someone is already using a name and add your middle initial or go with a pen name, but back when I started writing, it took a bit more research. Plus I was barely in high school and just selling stories for the fun of it. I had no idea about the marketing and brand building and everything else that goes into modern publishing. Had I know then what I know now, I would have added my middle initial to my byline right away because I’ve since realized that it isn’t cool to step on someone else’s byline. If someone else got there first, you just come up with something a little different. It’s not a big deal, but it’s good publishing etiquette.
So as of now, I’m officially using Brian James Freeman for all of my writing. This will prevent confusion and make it easy on the readers who are looking for my work and not one of the other creative people with the same name. There will still be a few works published that were already rolling before I made this decision, but most everything else can be updated to reflect the new byline.
CD: If people haven’t read any of your previous works, what might be an easy way to sample your writing?
BJF: Well, downloading this eBook was a good place to start! The next stop I’d recommend is the new eStore on my website where you can download some very cool eBooks containing my short fiction.
CD: Any new projects in the works? What might we expect to see next from Brian James Freeman?
BJF: My agent is shopping around my new novel and I’ve been writing some short stories that should be seeing print this year. Coming up pretty soon should be “The Last Beautiful Day” in Shivers VI and “Among Us” in Allen K’s Inhuman, and I also have something pretty cool in the next Book-of-the-Month Club Stephen King Desktop Calendar. Check out my website at http://www.brianjamesfreeman. com for news and announcements.
NORMAN PRENTISS is Associate Editor of Cemetery Dance magazine. His Bram Stoker award winning fiction has appeared in Tales from the Gorezone, Damned Nation, Postscripts, and the Shivers anthology series, and at the Horror Drive-In website. His first book, Invisible Fences, is available as part of the Cemetery Dance Novella Series.
ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION:
BESTSELLING AUTHORS SHARE THEIR THOUGHTS ON EBOOKS AND THE FUTURE OF PUBLISHING
O
kay, we’ll be the first to admit we only
went around the table once, asking these bestselling authors a single question:
“What does the future hold for eBooks and the publishing business?” But calling it a Roundtable Discussion sounded much cooler than calling it “one question with a bunch of great authors” so here we are. And without further ado, here are their responses to that question, organized in alphabetical order:
Scott Adams*:
When you’re an author, people like to tell you when they have read your books. The number of times that happens, including email, for a particular book, generally tracks with the sales volume of the book, at least for the books for which I have sales numbers. In other words, the Dilbert book with the highest sales was The Dilbert Principle, and more people have commented to me about that book than any other Dilbert book. And so on down the line. The interesting thing is that I get more comments on God’s Debris, both in person and by email, than I get for all of the Dilbert books ever written. That’s what makes me suspect that God’s Debris could be the most widely read ebook of all time, not counting books authored by The Lord Almighty.
William Peter Blatty:
Nothing short of a Fahrenheit 451 could ever drive me to give up the tactile and auditory pleasures of turning a page. It’s just—well, cozy, and always in the background are recollections of reading by a crackling fire on a rainy day.
Ray Bradbury:
They don’t smell good. Books have two smells—a new book smell is very good, but an old book smell is even better. It smells like ancient Egyptian dust. That’s why I think the book is important.
Douglas Clegg:
The publishing business will figure out how to implant chips in the optic nerve so we can read books downloaded (by injection) directly into the eye. These optic chips will retail for $200 and each blink will turn the page.
This will lead to a new branch of the medical profession—bibliophthalmology, the science of a condition called “Book Eye.”
Eventually, when the future energy crisis hits, we’ll realize that print actually is a greener resource than the eBook. But that’s for the next generation to discover.
Lori Foster:
Ebooks are the wave of the future! Students will substitute downloaded books for weighty paper volumes, as will editors and agents who are often required to take their work home with them. The convenience of being able to set out on a vacation with ten books—all loaded into a single device VS an extra suitcase to hold your reading material—is as valuable as the “green” perspective of saving trees from the printing presses. The popularity of ebooks will continue to grow as newer generations adapt more easily to reading from a device, even as some of us continue to savor the “reading experience” of turning the pages in a bound book.
Seth Godin:
eBooks ARE the publishing business. Publishing is not about chopping down trees, it’s about selection, curation, investment and promotion.
Hand someone at Knopf a book and you can honestly say, “hey, you’re good at making this, perhaps the best in the world.”
Can you say the same thing about something that appears on a Kindle or an iPad? Not sure you can.
The future of this industry belongs to organizations that coordinate tribes of similarly minded people, connected electronically.
Jane Green:
As an author, I see ebooks as being a good thing, hopefully bringing in new readers who might not otherwise look at my work. Additionally, with the advent of social networking and the increasing attachment we have to all things electronic, it allows people to quickly and easily download my books, with a speed and ease that would not be afforded had a visit to the bookstore been necessary.
As a reader, I have to also add that nothing will replace books for me. I use my kindle for travel, and as a welcome addition, but if it’s a book I love, or want to keep, I will always buy the hardback.
Lesley Kagen:
I love the smell of book pages, the crack of the binding. Hanging out in bookstores, bullshitting with other readers. I’m going to miss all of that like I miss Ramblers and the Andy Devine Show and Ike. Yet time...it gallops. Relentlessly and without regard for who is left bereft beneath its hooves. Saddle up, kids.
Stephen King**:
E-publishing may or may not be the wave of the future; about that I care not a fiddler’s fart, believe me. For me, going that route was simply another way of trying to keep myself fully involved in the process of writing stories. And then getting them to as many people as possible.
J
A Konrath:
Ebooks will replace print. I guarantee it. Then, once print is gone, ebooks will run for office on third party tickets and win the majority of seats in Congress. By 2024, an ebook will be elected President of the United States, and will make it mandatory that all cute women between the ages of 18 and 35 wear bikinis 24/7.
We can’t fight this future, so we might as well just accept it. Gayle Lynds:
Speaking as a former advocate of the quill pen as the most desirable writing instrument, I am bowled over by the fast growth of ebooks. For us authors, the main difference between ebooks and books is format, which means we’re still going to write stories and hope readers enjoy them whether on paper or on screen. At the same time, the skyrocketing sales of ebooks is a clarion call to the industry that there’s an exciting new game in town. I’m hoping this ultimately means more readers. The world would be a better place.
Carolyn Parkhurst:
Clearly, the growing popularity of eBooks is going to change things, but I think we’ll all adapt, in the same way that we all survived the change from records to CDs to mp3s. But there are some things that we lose, as readers, when we move away from reading actual, paper books: the ability to flip back a few pages quickly to remind yourself who a character is; the pleasure of selecting a book from a crowded bookstore table because you like the cover art; the surreptitious glances we cast at other people riding on the subway or waiting for an airplane to see what they’re all reading. It’s always been a quick way to make a connection with someone—”Oh, how are you liking that? I loved his last one.” Ever since my first novel was published, I’ve been hoping that someday I’ll see someone reading one of my books in public. Now, it’s possible that I’ll walk past someone reading my book and never even know it.
Anne Perry:
I am not up on ebooks, but I realise it is a technical advance that has got to happen and if it makes people think and is a useful way of communicating ideas then I guess I am in favour of it; however I do not see it totally replacing the conventional book!
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