The Mail I Get

Hey, Did You Know That if Fanfiction Went Away, There Would Be No More Gays or Lesbians? What would we watch late at night on Cinemax?

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I got a long email the other day. It turns out it’s from the same blogger who thinks I’m a sad little man who longs to write fanfiction.  She writes, in part:

I am a fanfiction writer, a slash fanfiction writer at that, I am not as illustrious or ambitious or zealous as some but I am glad to be one. I am as proud to be a slash fanfiction writer as I am to a lesbian and let me tell you it is very much the same feeling.

[…]At fifteen I bumped into my very first piece of fanfiction and it was like a bolt of lightening and then a few weeks later when I read my first piece of slash- its was very much like the first time I ever consider that I might be gay. It’s that monumental feeling of freedom, of knowledge; you finally know why the world seems a little off.

[…]My point is that fanfiction to you and (I’ll be presumptuous and say) I get the impression writing is too, nothing more than a hobby or a job and there’s nothing wrong with that. But you have to understand that for a lot of fans this writing helps shape who they are.

[…]Do you hate gay people Mr. Goldberg? I don’t think that you do, even if you just objected to slash fanfiction, I still would not think that. But what is the difference between what you do and a father who tells his 15 year old son it’s not okay to be gay? If there is one I can’t see it and you can hide behind all the copyright laws that you wish, but I assure you it will be no different then how the church hides behind over-zealously translated bible script.

Why is it that the people who write & publish fanfic feel that if I oppose what they are doing I must be either homophobic or have no passion for writing myself?

I love writing and am passionate about it.  I’m extremely fortunate that it’s also how I make my living and support my family, too. But believe it or not, loving to write…and making money doing it…aren’t mutually exclusive. 

But now by opposing fanfiction, I’m not just a passionless hack who writes only for the money…I am also preventing people from discovering their sexuality.

Call me crazy, but I think there are lots of ways you can discover and explore your sexuality without taking  characters you didn’t create or own, writing stories about them, and publishing them on the web without the author’s permission. It’s one thing to write fanfic for yourself to fantastize about or as a writing exercise, it’s another when you publish and/or post the stories on the web without the original authors’ consent. 

I believe it’s theoretically possible that women will still discover that they are lesbians without writing and publishing/posting stories about Buffy and Xena exploring the joys of sapphic love together…and that men might continue to discover their gay selves without writing and publishing/posting stories about Harry Potter giving Ron blowjobs…

A Sweet Guy

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I got this email a couple of weeks ago and My brother Tod got one very much like it from the same guy:

Take
your slanders about me off your blog now, Goldberg.  You thought it was cool
and you could destroy someone with your filth.  Take it off, I beg you.  I don’t
really know what I’m capable of, but this force is getting beyond the inertia
phase, and if you don’t silently retract this shit against me, I might
have to spend a lot of time and money convincing you that this was not a right
transaction.  I don’t know you and don’t want to.  Just take all
reference to me off your blog or I might get the idea to buy some people to make your life difficult.  You had
a good laugh at my expense in cyberspace and you think you can just get away
with it without any consequences but that’s not how it works.  If I have
to come to where you live and beat the shit out of you or hire others to do so,
well, then, what did you expect?  Get this stuff about me off your internet
sites or pay the price.  I’m really fed up with your idiocy and am
convinced that you need to be taught a lesson, asshole.

I didn’t respond to this one. Instead, I called a friend at the LAPD, we filed a police report, and got a restraining order against the guy who, as it turns out, still lives at home with his mother.

Writing for The Snake Guy

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From my mailbox this week:

Dear Mr. Goldberg,

I have written a story that would make a great movie. The actor XYZ has read it and he thinks it’s really good. He would love to see it as a screenplay, but here is the problem: I have never done that before and have no experiences in turning a script into a screenplay. Can you please help me with this? You can take the credits for the screenplay, if it is made into a movie. It would mean so much to me. I hope to hear from you soon.

I declined her kind offer and suggested that it probably isn’t a good idea to be pitching movies when you admittedly have no skill as a screenwriter and no experience in movie making.  The actor she mentioned, by the way, is nobody I’ve ever heard of. So I looked him up. His major roles recently include "Short Order Cook," "Instructor," "Snake Guy," and "Trucker #1" in several movies that I also have never heard of. I can see why she’d be excited by his interest in her movie idea.

Go After The Scammers

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I received this email from Phillip R. Dolan, who got the rights to his manuscript and his money back from PublishAmerica. Rather than paraphrase his email, I am reposting it in its entirety:

Some scam publishers can be stopped. Publish
America’s contract has an arbitration clause to prevent authors from suing them.
To me, it seems to be a mistake because lawsuits are expensive and time
consuming. Arbitration under their contract requires that the American
Arbitration Association rules be followed. Those rules are user friendly and
inexpensive, especially when the prevailing party is reimbursed for all fees and
expenses. Even attorney fees if one uses an attorney. Anyone with a high school
education can handle an arbitration if they are so inclined.

Anyway, I filed for arbitration against PA and won. It took
eight months and I did it without an attorney. My contract was rescinded (not
just terminated) to the date it was signed and I received damages and expenses.
I thought this would be but the first of many arbitrations and that PA might be
driven out of business. It cost them quite a bit.

To help other authors complete arbitrations I posted how I
had done it, including my mistakes, at Arbitration And How To Do It (PublishAmerica, Publish
America)

http://p208.ezboard.com/bedandsootswritersguild

I had a forensic accountant examine PA’s sales records and
posted that info. I had an intellectual property attorney analyze the whole
thing and I posted excerpts of that. Together it is a blueprint of how to know
when PA breaches the contract and how to make them pay for it and get author’s
rights returned.

In about six months there have been 4,691 views just of the
accountant’s report so I know a lot of people have looked at the arbitration
material. But not one author, other than me, has filed
for arbitration. Two other anti-scam sites even offered to pay all the costs
attendant to arbitration. Not one PA author took them up on it.

I think that any author who feels they were scammed by
PublishAmerica and refuses to take any action other than complaining is right
where they should be.

Phillip R. Dolan

I Wrote a Book and it’s Up for the Nobel Prize in Literature

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I’m not a book critic, but even so every-so-often I get hit up by authors or publishers who’d like to send me a review copy of a new crime novel. I received a solicitation today from an author, and his pitch included the following publicity material (the names have been deleted to protect the innocent):

[The Book] has been blurbed by Famous Author #1, Famous Author #2, Famous Author #3 and Famous Author #4.  It’s up for the 2006 Edgar Award for Best First Novel – Famous Author #1 seems to believe it’s a shoo-in to win.

First off, the 2006 Edgars were announced last year and his book wasn’t one of them. He’s actually referring to the 2007 Edgars for books published in 2006. Fine. But it appears that he’s implying that his book has been nominated for an Edgar…which it hasn’t. At least not yet. The nominations won’t be announced until February.

So what he’s bragging about is that his book has been submitted for Edgar consideration. That’s hardly an achievement. Anybody with a crime novel published in 2006 could submit their book for consideration…and probably did. We’re talking about hundreds of submissions.

I  explained this to him as politely as I could and, to reinforce my point, I included the list of about 100 other authors who were "up for an Edgar" in the same category as him. I suggested that he drop the frivolous Edgar reference from his pitch.  What I didn’t say was that bragging that he was "up for an Edgar"  made him look ridiculous. He replied:

thanks for catching that about the Edgars, wasn’t trying to be squirrely — i’d best change it to "it’s in submission for the Edgars."

I cringed from head-to-toe in embarrassment for the guy. I probably should have dropped it there, but I wrote him back and told him that submitting your book for Edgar consideration isn’t an achievement, either. Any author with some postage stamps and a book out in 2006 could do that. What I didn’t tell him was that bragging about sending his book to the Edgar committee would make him look even more ridiculous than what he’d already written.

He may be a great writer but he has a lot to learn about self-promotion.

UPDATE  (Jan 19, 2007) He wasn’t nominated.  So much for being a shoo-in.

The Airleaf Morons

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Today, I picked up a letter sent to me in care of Mysteries To Die For, a bookstore in Thousand Oaks, California. The letter was from Airleaf Publishing, the vanity press company formerly known as Bookman Marketing, and they were offering to "sell MY GUN HAS BULLETS to a national audience!"  for the low, low price of $3000.

I wrote about these parasites back in November… when this same "opportunity" to flush your money down a toilet cost a whopping $7000. Since then, it appears that they’ve become a shade less greedy but monumentally more stupid.

The incompetence represented by this letter is so extreme, I almost don’t know where to begin. Let’s start with them sending this pitch to a successful, published author who has castigated them publicly for their business practices before.

And where do these idiots send their letter? They send it to me in care of a bookstore that’s already selling my books.

The folks at Airleaf Publishing are obviously trolling the catalogs at  iUniverse and other competing vanity presses,
figuring if the aspiring authors could be suckered once, they could be
suckered again.

But the dimwit who is doing the trolling apparently
doesn’t know when he’s picking books that are part of either Mystery Writers of America Presents or Authors
Guild’s Back-in-Print programs (both of which reprint
previously published books through iUniverse as a free service for their members).

The dimwit doesn’t realize that when he picks books from the MWA Presents or Back-In-Print authors,  he’s
dealing with experienced professionals who haven’t paid to be published and who know
better than to be suckered by an insanely pricey vanity press come-on.

The Airleaf Publishing corporate policy must be to hire people who are "mentally challenged" or born with only a brain stem…and to hope whoever gets their letters are just as stupid and have high credit lines on their Visa cards.

Will Agents Consider Tie-Ins?

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This question was buried as a comment on an old post:

How receptive are literary agents to getting media tie-in novel
queries? Is there a reason they aren’t listed in the genres that the
agent will accept, or are tie-ins considered just part of the ‘fiction’
genre?

To answer this question, you have to understand what a tie-in is:  it’s a piece of fiction using characters licensed from a rights-holder like a movie studio, a literary estate, a gaming company, etc.

Usually the way a tie-in novel comes about is that the rights-holder will approach publishers with a property or publishers will approach the rights-holder. Several publishers, for instance, sought the rights to do "Monk" novels and Penguin/Putnam eventually won out.  Only after the rights are licensed to a publisher do editors seek out authors to write the books. That’s when an agent might enter the mix.

So it wouldn’t make any sense for you to query a literary agent with an idea for a tie-in novel…or the manuscript itself… unless you are the person who holds the rights to those characters.  Otherwise, what you’re asking an agent to do is sell your fanfic…and no agent will do that. That’s   why tie-ins are not among the genres  that agents are willing to consider for submissions.

If what you’d like to do is write for an existing line of tie-in novels (like, say, the STAR TREK series),  querying an agent isn’t the way to go. Agents simply aren’t looking for new clients to take to the editors of tie-ins…for one thing, there isn’t enough commission money in it to make it worthwhile. If an agent is going to suggest someone for tie-in assignment, it will be one of their current clients.

So, in general, you need to already be on a editor’s radar to get an assignment for a tie-in… it’s the editors you need to reach, not agents.

Who Do You Know

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I got this email today from a reader of my MONK books.  I’ve changed the names, but otherwise I haven’t edited it:

I can’t help but recognize your name. Of course Goldberg is rather common in L.A.  Do you recognize the last name of Sandstrom?  Howard or Betty or Steve?  They lived on Sherbourne in B.H. Then, after Papa Bob died Grandma moved to a "blue" apartment at (I think Rodeo and Olympic), after that on Palm Drive near "little" Santa Monica and Doheny.  Steve was my father.  Grandma also mentioned a Joe Swanson and Mike Berger several times.  I brought lox and bagels to Esther Berger (his mom) when she was in a nursing  home in Reseda, but never had any reason to meet Mike.  Grandma was just getting up in years and I lived in the Valley at the time.  I am estranged from my used-to-be immediate family so when a name rings a bell I so try to connect.  I know so little about my father.  I have no idea how well Mike knew him. 

I wrote back and said that I don’t know any Sandstroms…or any of the other people she’s talking about even though I, like them, am one of the millions who live in Southern California.

Inhuman

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I’ve never written a biography, but I must get two or three emails a month from complete strangers who want me to write a book about their lives. Here’s one I got today (I took out the name of the person and the company she mentions):

I am 70 years old and I have been told that my autobiography should be written.I won an inhuman case against XYZ COMPANY.As you know that it is not the money you win, but I have been in therapy for many years. I have Newspaper clipping of the Inhuman treatment I received.I do hope you can help me, or know someone that can.

If you’re interested in writing about this woman and her inhuman case, let me know and I’ll put you in touch with her.

Fantastic!

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Many thanks to William Simon who sent me this link to Gene Barry singing the theme to BURKE’S LAW… accompanied by a slide show of scenes of Gene in action taken from his short-lived 70s show THE ADVENTURER. It’s wonderful. Here are some of my favorite lyrics:

"Hey lover, lets make the scene
I’ve got a crazy high-fi in my limousine"
Birds of a feather
should wing it together
If we are forsaking love
We’re breaking Burke’s Law…"