A week ago, I told you I’d reread a unpublished novel manuscript of mine—one I’d stopped marketing years ago after multiple rejections, including one which had it sitting with a certain editor who shall not be named for four years before a decision was made—and saw enough good and true in it that I decided I’d try to revise it up to my 2014 standards.

Having come to that conclusion, the first thing I had to do was digitize the book. Sadly, though every other short story or novel I’d ever attempted, whether completed or not, published or not, existed in electronic form, this one didn’t. Even though I searched through all my files in every format, I never found it. (Was the universe trying to tell me something?) So I spent three days OCR-ing the 378-page manuscript, which turned out to contain nearly 94,000 words.

Then, on Thanksgiving, I sat down and started revising the first chapter, which I continued doing Friday, and yesterday as well. But as I moved forward, attempting to collaborate with last century’s me, I soon realized …

No. (more…)

Friday, I finished a new story—my sixth of the year, so yay, me!—and sent it off to market.

Yesterday, I reread the full manuscript of a novel of mine—one that three major publishers sat on for a combined nine years—in order to decide whether it was worth revisiting.

And today, having come to the conclusion that, yes, there is enough good and true and real in for me not to abandon it, I’ll begin the work of bringing it up to my 2014 standards. (Or trying to anyway.)

What do I mean by that?

I’ll let Kenneth Koch explain.

While in the basement looking for an electronic file of the piece so I won’t have to re-key in every word before beginning revisions, I came across my copy of one of my favorite poems, a poem which, among other things, will show why I’ve vacillated for so long about whether or not I should try marketing this work again.

It’s Koch’s “The Art of Poetry,” which to me rings true about all writing, not just poetry, and you can read the whole thing over at the Poetry Foundation site. I urge you to do just that, but the relevant section explaining my hesitation is this: (more…)

My comics career from the ’70s through the early ’80s may have been brief, but it was varied. Which means that as Back Issue magazine has peered into the past, I’ve ended up getting mentioned multiple times—for my creation of the Scarecrow, for my contribution to Madame Xanadu, and also for many of my back-up stories.

The December 2004 issue, which just popped up digitally via email, covers a couple of assignments I never figured anyone would care enough about to write up—my Mighty Marvel Fun Books. (more…)

Back when I worked for Marvel Comics in the ’70s, the Dreaded Deadline Doom was (to steal a phrase Stan Lee often used in comics) wreaking havoc. Late writers and artists were resulting in thousands of dollars in penalty fees from the printer. And it was no fun for readers either, who wanted their comics on time. The only ones who benefited were beginning writers like me, who thanks to Marvel’s attempts to prevent those delays from messing up publishing schedules got to write fill-ins and back-ups.

That’s how I got to script issues of Master of Kung Fu and Omega the Unknown, as well as countless shorter stories, such as John Romita, Jr.’s first published piece.

But not every story I pitched or plotted made it to the page. Amazingly, there were a few, approved by editors, which were never turned in by the artists, creating their own Dreaded Deadline Doom. You wouldn’t think a new artist would blow a chance to get published by Marvel, but several did.

One pitch, however, meant for a fill-in issue of Marvel Team-Up, never made it to an artist, for it was presumably rejected. I have no memory of the circumstances, and only know that it was submitted on August 14, 1978 because that’s the date written on it.

As it’s the only Marvel method plot in existence for any of my published comics (none of my DC Comics full scripts survive either), I thought it worth sharing here to give some idea of how I worked back then, when I was 23 and still trying to figure out how to write comics. (And just in case it’s not obvious—the images below that I grabbed to break up the text here were not a part of my original proposal.)

And so …

Spider-Man’s Lonely Hearts Club Fans!

SPLASH: Spidey is swinging by the main branch of the New York City Post Office. His patrol is interrupted by a cry for help coming out of an upper window of the building.

THE STORY CONTINUES: Spidey-sense tingling, Spidey swings in the window. From inside we see a costumed goon with a futuristic gun on either side of the window. Spidey, still holding onto the webbing, does a split-kick, knocking each thug back off his feet. Spidey sees no sign of the person he’d heard cry for help just seconds before, and he thinks this odd. Spidey disarms the crooks with webbing and a tug. He grabs an empty mail sack and then, flipping over so that his feet are holding him to the ceiling directly above the two crooks’ heads. he grabs them by the scruff of their necks and stuffs them in the sack as they protest:

“Wait, Spider-Man, you don’t understand— ”

“I only understand that something wacky’s going on here!” says Spidey, as he holds the sack out the upper story window and begins questioning the crooks. Suddenly, from behind Spidey, a dry, cracked, withered, and shaking voice says:

“Stop that right now, y’hear, you young whippersnapper!” (more…)

While pulling together the files for an upcoming paperback edition of These Words Are Haunted, which is currently only available as an extremely expensive hardcover, it occurred to me I’ve written enough stories which are in one way or another homages that I could assemble a collection of them.

Here are the stories and the related authors.

Raymond Carver: “What We Still Talk About”

Charles L. Grant: “I Wish I Knew Where I Was Going”

Edgar Allan Poe: “The Trembling Living Wire”

Saki: “A Most Extraordinary Man”

William Shakespeare: “A Plague on Both Your Houses”

John Steinbeck: “Tell Me Like You Done Before”

Thornton Wilder: “Live People Don’t Understand”

In addition to those, there’s also a Shel Silverstein-inspired piece which should be out sometime soon, and could also be included.

As I think about the concept, some questions are—

Do I include “My Life is Good,” starring Randy Newman? Should a songwriter count? I think yes, but I’m not sure whether readers would agree.

How about “Goobers,” for which the inspiration wasn’t an individual author, but EC Comics as a whole? And “Fifth Dimension,” which was a tribute to Rod Serling? (As for “Stealing Alice,” I probably wouldn’t include it, even though the Alice of the title is Alice in Wonderland, because it was written so early in my career that I have no interest in seeing it in print again.)

Separate from the content questions, there’s also—do I seek a small-press publisher for this? Or put it out on my own as an ebook?

Hmmm …

Lots to think about. If you have any thoughts, please let me know.

Way back in 2008, I shared with you some Scarecrow artwork which had never been seen in U.S., since it had been created specifically for Marvel’s mid-70s’ British reprint books. But it turns out there was another piece I didn’t know about. Or rather, according to the artist, I’d known about it but had forgotten.

Andrew John Standish uploaded this post to Facebook yesterday, created by penciller Howard Bender and inker Duffy Vohland.

This originally appeared in Super Spider-Man and the Titans #216 (cover-dated March 30, 1977). As to why I have no memory of this, I imagine it’s because there was no actual Scarecrow story published in that issue, only the poster, so I never received a contributor copy.

Howard was surprised I didn’t remember it, though, because he tells me that he and Duffy showed it to me before it was published.

To which I say—hey, that was 37 years ago!

Thanks for digging this up, Andrew!

If you picked up today’s Washington Post this morning and turned to the Style section, you’d have seen a familiar name—mine!

Ron Charles, editor of the Post’s Book World, had asked me to review Ray Bradbury Unbound, the second installment in Jonathan R. Eller’s projected three-volume biography. (The first volume, Becoming Ray Bradbury, was reviewed by Michael Dirda.)

The book was not all what I expected, for it was filled with heartbreak and disappointment, and sprinkled with such phrases as “missed opportunities,” “creative dead ends,” “never materialized,” “another deeply disappointing experience,” and “marked an ultimately irreversible decline.” Perhaps a reviewer who’s not also a writer struggling to get stories written in the face of life’s endless distractions would have reacted differently.

You can read my review online at the Washington Post here. And if you do track down Eller’s book—which is certainly worth doing—please let me know how you felt about this second stage in Bradbury’s career.

Back in May, I told you about the upcoming publication of a new Spanish-language printing of editor James Lowder’s anthology The Book of All Flesh, titled El libro de los zombies. It was to contain my short story “Live People Don’t Understand,” which would appear under the title “Los vivos no lo comprenden.”

Well, that book’s now out, and can be ordered here. (At least I think it can—my Spanish is nearly non-existent.)

If you like the story of mine that appears there, thank translators José Luis Viruete and Gustavo A. Díaz—because they’re likely more responsible for your enjoyment than I am!

Jaym Gates has announced the Table of Contents for her upcoming anthology Genius Loci—and I’m on it!

There are a bunch of very happy people out there today. And their names and story titles are …

Santa Cruz–Andy Duncan
And the Trees Were Happy—Scott Edelman
Blackthorn—B. Morris Allen
Ouroboros in Orbit—Jason Batt
Reef—Kathleen Miller
Scab Land—Wendy Wagner
The Forgetting Field—Caroline Ratajski
The Town the Forest Ate—Haralambi Markov
Imperator Noster—Sonya Taaffe
The Other Shore—Rebecca Campbell
The South China Sea—Z.M. Quynh
Iron Feliks—Anatoly Belilovsky
Forest For the Trees—Steven S. Long
Drowning Again—Ken Scholes and Katie McCord
The Grudge—Thoraiya Dyer
Twilight State—Gemma Files
Coaltown—Heather Clitheroe
In the Water, Underneath—Damien Angelica Walters
Afterparty—Chaz Brenchly
The Gramadevi’s Lament—Sunil Patel
Blue & Grey and Black & Green—Alethea Kontis
Heartbeat—Laura Anne Gilman
Long Way Down—Seanan McGuire
The Snow Train—Ken Liu
The City–Vivienne Pustell
The Crooked Smile Killers—James Lowder
Threadbare Magician—Cat Rambo
Serenity Eternal–Steven Silver
Beer and Pennies—Rich Dansky
The Sleck–Keris MacDonald
The Transplant Specialist–Sarah Goslee

So what’s the theme of Genius Loci? Here’s how Jaym explained it in her original call for submissions: (more…)

In today’s Washington Post, Michael Dirda recommended a grab bag of books from horror and specialty presses—and one of them was The Monkey’s Other Paw, a recent anthology which contained a story of mine.

Here what he had to say.

“The Monkey’s Other Paw” (paperback, $13.95), edited by Luis Ortiz for Nonstop Press, offers stories in which 13 contemporary writers re-imagine or pay tribute to the work of various classic horror authors. Don Webb’s “The Doom That Came to Devil’s Reef” opens quietly: “Among Lovecraft’s papers at Brown University was a large manila envelope containing . . .” and then reveals what may be the true origins of “The Shadow Over Innsmouth.” Scott Edelman’s “A Most Extraordinary Man” neatly imagines a sequel to Saki’s most famous and witty shocker, “The Open Window.” Set against the loneliness of New York City, and in homage to Dylan Thomas’s “The Followers,” Paul Di Filippo’s “Ghostless” focuses on a spectral matchmaking service for ghosts and mortals.

Nice to be name-checked—and positively—by a Pulitzer Prize winner!