My Alien Abduction Story was on Native Lands

August 8, 2013 Bob Greenberger 1 Comment

By Robert T. Jeschonek

Confession time: I’m still scared that they’re coming for me.

By “they,” I mean aliens…the kind who creep into your bedroom at night and whisk you away to their ship for tests or just outright torture. The thought of it terrifies me: that I might be lying there, helpless yet conscious, as they take me away.

I’ll bet it scares you, too. Because it’s something that might just happen to any of us on any given night. If eyewitness reports are to be believed, it happens all the time.

Not to mention, we’ve seen it happen again and again on TV and in the movies. The alien abduction scene has been recreated so many times, it’s become ingrained in our collective consciousness. When it’s done right, there’s nothing scarier.

For me, the best and scariest version was in the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Just thinking about the scene in which the aliens keep trying to get into the locked farmhouse so they can snatch the little boy inside sends shivers up my spine. No, really.

Long before that, there was the story of Barney and Betty Hill, who claimed to have been abducted while driving in rural New Hampshire in 1961. This story also made a huge impression on me. Decades later, in fact, when I was driving in rural New Hampshire myself one night, I thought I was doomed to repeat their experience. Rolling around a bend in the road, I saw the edge of an illuminated disk hanging above the darkened forest. White-knuckling the wheel, paralyzed with fear, I let the car drift the rest of the way around the bend…

…At which point, I saw that the edge of the disk was actually the upper edge of a hot air balloon sporting a Burger King ad. Out in the middle of nowhere, I kid you not.

So much for my big Close Encounter. But finding out that my flying saucer was just a big advertising balloon didn’t take away the fear. It’s still with me to this day…lucky for you.

Because my fear of abduction inspired “Chariots of the Godless,” my story for ReDeus: Native Lands. While brainstorming ideas for a story for Native Lands, I thought about things that are part of the quintessential American cultural landscape. Alien abduction quickly came to mind. The fascination with extraterrestrial encounters, from the Roswell incident to the Allagash Waterway abductions, is deeply ingrained in the fabric of our national imagination.

Would alien abductions still happen in post-Return America, in a country ruled by omni-powerful gods and roamed by mystically-attuned divine entities? Better yet, could the gods and divine entities themselves ever be the victims of abductions?

I loved the idea right off the bat. The thought of one of these godly powerhouses spirited away by alien beings, subjected to the same kind of terrified helplessness and violation as human abductees, seemed like new ground to cover. It felt fresh, like something I hadn’t seen before.

“Chariots of the Godless” took off from there. Along the way, it became an action-oriented tale, a race against time as the aliens carry off captive gods for mysterious, perhaps sinister, purposes. It also became an unlikely love story, as a relationship grows between human abduction expert Dr. Nessus and the justice goddess Mayet. Nessus and Mayet could not be more alien to each other, both in temperament and in terms of the worlds they come from…but they move past their fears and find strength in the very differences that fuel their alienation.

Maybe this will be our truest salvation when the aliens come to call: recognizing that our fears of abduction relate most directly to our fear of the unexpected, of the stranger who sneaks into our lives uninvited and changes us in some deep way. For the truth is, our fear is often misplaced; strange changes are not always bad and can lead us down unexplored roads we might never have dared travel if left to our own devices.

Though I, for one, will continue to watch for glowing disks hovering over the treeline when I drive through the woods at night. And if I glimpse strange lights outside my bedroom windows, I will hold my breath and pull the covers up just a little bit higher.

ReDeus: Native Lands is now available in digital and print formats.

Uncategorized

He would sell it, baby!

August 7, 2013 Paul Kupperberg Leave a comment

W.W.S.L.D.?

What Would Stan Lee Do?

He would sell it, baby!

If we learned nothing else from Stan the Man at the dawn of the Marvel Age of Comics, it’s that there’s no such thing as too much promotion. Stan, a natural born hail-fellow-well-met type, used his personal bombast to elevate Marvel Comics from a second-rate publisher of whatever was popular at the moment to the premiere brand in the business. And in the process, raised himself from an unknown writer/editor on the brink of quitting his job out of embarrassment over what he did for a living to becoming the only name in the industry anyone outside of the industry recognizes.

Stan may or may not have known from the get-go (probably not) that he had a tiger by the tail with The Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, and the rest of the Mighty Marvel line-up, and he likely reasoned he had nothing to lose by becoming Marvel’s (and his own biggest boaster), but however he got there, Stan recognized early on that the only way to insure Marvel’s success was to promote the bejeesus out of it, True Believers!

Excelsior!

I invoke Stan because I of late find myself in a position similar to his in the early days of Marvel. As a member of the publishing hub called Crazy 8 Press (along with fellow writers Russ Colchamiro, Peter David, Michael Jan Friedman, Robert Greenberger, Glen Hauman, Aaron Rosenberg, and Howard Weinstein), I find myself in a pack of underdogs facing mighty tough competition in the world of publishing. Stan was competing with the Cadillac of Comics Publishing, DC Comics and its stable of superstars, not to mention Archie Comics, Harvey Comics, Dell, and a handful other publishers, each with their own line-ups of established and popular characters. Against Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Archie, Richie Rich, Caspar the Friendly Ghost, and the rest, who the hell were Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Spider-Man, and Iron Man?

Crazy 8 Press is (for the purposes of the analogy) Marvel. The rest of the book publishing world is DC Comics, which not only commanded the newsstands and spinner racks, but also controlled the means of distribution; in those years, Marvel Comics nee Timely Comics nee Atlas Comics was distributed by Independent News…a company owned by DC (then known as National Periodical Publications, or NPP). Independent distributed Marvel, but limited them to something like eight or twelve titles a month.

So Stan and Marvel had nothing but obstacles in their way. They could only publish a limited number of titles and that which they did publish was up against newsstands filled with brands infinitely more recognizable than their own.

So Stan began making noise. He did this by talking directly to the readers who did discover them and, unlike stodgy DC or the publishers who didn’t bother addressing their readers at all, he invited his fans in made them a part of the excitement. The Marvel Bullpen page was nothing but one big house ad, but instead of just promoting a specific issue of a given title, it promoted the Marvel brand; on top of that, Stan’s Soapbox served to promote Stan Lee as he promoted his fellow creators and the brand. Stan “The Man” Lee, Jack “King” Kirby, “Sturdy” Steve Ditko, “Dashing” Don Heck, Gil “Sugar Lips” Kane (you hadda know Gil)…Marvel didn’t have a staff who labored in obscurity like the majority of other companies. Stan invited his readers inside the Hallowed Halls of Marvel (actually a narrow and cramped alleyway of desks and drawing boards in those early days), made them his friend, and, more importantly, enlisted them as his allies in the quest to Mine Theirs Marvel. And it worked. In a relatively few short years, especially once freed from the restrictions of Independent News, Marvel Comics was eating DC’s lunch…and continued to do so, more or less consistently, ever since.

Love him or leave him, no one can deny that Stan Lee was, is, and remains the Hype-Master General of comic books!

I spent this weekend just past in Baltimore at Shore Leave 35, a Star Trek themed convention that, while small, is about the most author/creator-friendly environment I’ve ever encountered in a convention setting. I was there with the Crazy 8 crew, celebrating the imprint’s second anniversary and the release of, among other things, my mystery novel, The Same Old Story, and the third volume of the ReDeus anthology series, Native Lands (co-created with Greenberger and Rosenberg).

In addition to signings and panels, we also met to discuss what lies ahead for Crazy 8; we’ve got the books to sell (more than two dozen titles published thus far) with more (many more!) on the way…but the major item on our agenda was finding better ways to promote and sell our wares. I’m not talking about channels of distribution–all our titles are available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble as paperbacks or for the Kindle or the Nook, likewise from our Print On Demand publisher CreateSpace, which you can link to directly from the Crazy 8 website, and even direct from the authors themselves.

No, what we mostly talked about was how to make the world aware of what we’re up to. We all have Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, and other forms of social media that we work, but the big question was: How do we cut through the chatter of the hundreds of millions of other users to make ourselves heard? And, more importantly, how do we do it on the near-zero budget of a small, creator owned independent imprint? For now, the answer is (to quote an old Robert Klein routine), “Volume!”

And by volume, I mean persistence, and by persistence I mean, incessant tweeting, endless postings on Facebook, and constant begging of those who follow us to re-tweet and share our postings. By persistence, I mean working our eight individual voices so that we’re talking together and talking to our fans and readers. By persistence, I mean making pains in the ass of ourselves and hoping you’ll forgive our persistence and recognize that we’re doing it not because we like being pains in the ass but because we’re trying to accomplish something here, something that the big publishing houses who once did this for novelists at our level are no longer interested in or able to do.

We’re just doing what Stan Lee would do, but instead of confining it to a Bullpen Page or Stan’s Soapbox, we’ve got to reach a much more scattered audience faced with more distractions than just whether to read Marvel or DC or Dell or Archie. Re-tweet us. Share our posts on your Facebook page. Do whatever it is people do on Tumblr and the rest of the social media sites. Support us if you like something that any of us have written in the past. Support us if you believe in the future and viability of small, independent presses. Support us if you are currently or hope to one day be part of something like Crazy 8 Press yourself. The paradigm is shifting and we’re just trying to shift with it, but we can’t do it without your help and support, and I don’t just mean by buying our books (although that’s not such a bad idea, either).

In the end, we all believe we’ve got the goods, that what we’re hyping is, like Stan’s Marvel Comics of yore, the real deal, written by professional authors with I don’t know how many scores of years of professional experience, credits, and awards between us.

So, if I or any of my fellow Crazy 8 authors start to get on your nerves, please forgive us. We’re just doing What Stan Lee Would Do…hoping to grab you by your imagination, and inviting you to come along for what he hoped will be the creative ride of your life.

Excelsior, True Believers!

New Releases, ReDeus

Steven H. Wilson Listens to his Perosnal Trinity About Native Lands

August 5, 2013 Bob Greenberger 1 Comment

By Steven H. Wilson

So you’ve heard of three-part deities, right? The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost in the Christian tradition, the Triple Goddess Hecate in Greek Myth and the Wiccan traditions? Well, Crazy 8 has a triple deity of its own, personified by Bob, Paul and Aaron. This trinity edits ReDeus, reads our stories, and transmits to us via the divine email words of wisdom. You’re never sure which of the three is speaking, but the results are always awe-inspiring, enlightening, and delightfully snarky.

It was in one of these divine communiqués that a couple of throwaway lines in my story “Axel’s Flight” were transformed, as Io was transformed into the sacred cow, into a story of their own. Clever deities, these, even if you don’t know which is which. Ovid couldn’t have described a more wondrous metamorphosis.

The passage thus selected was:

“The gods had curtailed a good deal of Hollywood’s output over the last decade, offended by the CGI special effects which made their miraculous powers seem commonplace. Only swift action by a consortium of gods of arts from various pantheons had prevented the outright destruction of the likes of Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, and such films were rarely seen now by mere mortals.”

Not sure what about it grabbed the three-headed spirit of editorship. Perhaps, like Ganymede, it had really interesting thighs. Whatever it was, one, two or all of the heads said unto me: “Oh, and this would make a great story for Native Lands!”

When the god(s) speak, you don’t ignore them. Especially when they’re offering you money, a shot at a Hugo Award, and the privilege of sitting next to them on the autograph lines at several cons. Well… they’re offering one of those three.

And so I developed “Chinigchinix Nixes Pix,” a tale of a young(ish) screenwriter who’s working on a Summer blockbuster about the Angel of Death. If the title baffles you, it’s because it’s written in slanguage, otherwise known as Variety-speak–something akin to mystic runes. Our narrator, we’ll call him N, takes a meeting one day and discovers that Chinigchinix, or Quaoar as he’s more commonly called, the patron divinity of the Tongva people who once inhabited the hills of LA, has taken over the American film industry. He’s shelved all projects that don’t have the potential to glorify the gods (yes, even the romantic comedy based on Windows for Dummies that was to star Brad Pitt.) But he likes our hero’s story, Call Me Sam. He likes it so much, in fact, that he’s going to help with the re-write. That means he needs to spend a lot of time with our beleaguered protagonist, and that means they’re moving in together.

Hilarity ensues.

I set out to write a short, punchy tale about censorship, writing by committee, and the clash of cultures between humans and gods. It was to be a brief adventure in the style of Douglas Adams. As each volume of the Hitchhiker trilogy (all five of them) was short, so my little visit to La La Land would be a quick in-and-out, don’t-worry-if-it-offends-you-because-it’s-going-away-soon, not-long-on-the-plot jaunt. Did I mention it was short? I kept it under 10,000 words. If you know me, you know that’s not easy for me to do.

And yea, verily, the god(s) said, “It sucks. Make it longer.”

Gods. What can you do, right?

So I added fifty percent more words. (I discovered a box of them in the pantry, behind the Quaker Oats. They were past their expiration date, but I figured “What the hell? Who’ll know?” I poured them in, stirred, and now “Chinigchinix” is a lot longer. If the language is a little moldy and archaic in spots, that’s why.)

When it was done, I asked the Trinity how I was to deliver it unto them. They told me to put it on the altar in the back yard and burn it. (You have an altar in your back yard too, right? They told me it wasn’t just me.) So I threw the pages on the grill–er, the stone stained with the blood of countless sacrifices to Bob, Aaron and Paul–and touched the sacred Bic unto them. The wind did carry the smoke and ashes unto the heavens, where dwell the Three, and Chinigchinix is nixing pix in Native Lands, volume three of ReDeus.

Right guys?

I said am I right? You got the sacred ashes, right?

Bob? Aaron? Paul?

ReDeus: Native Lands, truly containing this story, is now available in print and digital formats.

News

Plans for 2014 and Beyond Discussed at Shore Leave

August 3, 2013 Bob Greenberger 1 Comment

At today’s Crazy 8 Press panel at Shore Leave 35, the seven members met the public together for the first time. Moderated by first among equals Michael Jan Friedman, the panel announced several new releases for the remainder of 2013 and beyond.

In addition to the three books which debuted at the convention, later this month Friedman’s first novel, The Hammer and the Horn will be back in print for the first time in thirty years. Also this month, David’s eagerly anticipated sequel to Tigerheart, Fearless, will be out in print and digital.

Coming this fall will be Hey Kids, Comics!, an anthology of essays assembled by Robert J. Kelly and includes contributions from Greenberger and Kupperberg.

Friedman’s other novels in The Vidar Saga — The Seeker and the Sword, The Fortress and the Fire, and The Glove of Maiden’s Hair – will arrive on a roughly monthly schedule with all-new covers by Brazilian artist Caio Cacau.

Additionally, Friedman announced he is writing an original novel, I am the Salamander, which will become a Kickstarter project later this summer. The superheroic tale will be written by Friedman with cover by Brazilian artist Caio Cacau.

Rosenberg will reteam with Steven Savile for October’s Haunted Summer while his third book in the DuckBob series, Three Small Coinkydinks, will close out 2013.

Coming in 2014 will be at least one additional ReDeus book along with a sequel to Colchamiro’s Finders Keepers.

Additionally, Peter David announced that he has regained the publishing rights to his three Sir Apropos of Nothing novels and will be bringing them back to print via Crazy 8 Press. He also promised a fourth volume to be written within the coming year.

New Releases

The Hammer and the Horn Back in Print!

August 2, 2013 Michael Jan Friedman Leave a comment

Well, this is a moment for me. Pardon me while I absorb it.

Okay, done.

Twenty-eight years and two months ago, I stood there in the science fiction section of a Barnes and Noble bookstore in Forest Hills and beamed at The Hammer and The Horn–all five copies of it. The cover was painted by Rowena Morrill, a most talented and acclaimed artist for whom I have the greatest personal admiration. But it wasn’t quite right. The antagonist on the cover was too small, too apelike, too spectacularly dressed. The hero was smiling when he shouldn’t have been. And there was orange in the background. A ton of orange.

Quite frankly, it bugged me. Not just then, but for the last twenty-eight years.

And it wasn’t until now that Caio Cacau, a crazy-talented Brazilian artist you’re going to be seeing a lot of, has come forth and un-bugged me. The cover he lovingly rendered for this re-release of The Hammer and The Horn is full-on, take-no-prisoners dynamic. The hero doesn’t look like he’s having fun–and why should he? He’s fighting for his life. His adversaries are big and brutish-looking, as they should be. And, perhaps best of all…orange? Not so much.

The universe is once again in balance. And Caio is busy working on another spectacular cover for me, embellishing a most unusual tale of a most unusual hero–but that’s a story for a different day.

New Releases

The Same Old Story, or Straight Up Truths From Downright Lies

August 2, 2013 Paul Kupperberg Leave a comment

While channel surfing last night I came across a showing of The Singing Detective, a 2003 theatrical remake of Dennis Potter’s powerful 1986 BBC Television miniseries of the same name. The original series starred Michael Gambon as “Philip Marlowe,” a hospitalized writer suffering from psoriatic anthropathy, a painfully crippling arthritic skin condition suffered, not by coincidence, by Potter himself. Confined to bed, unable to move without agony, and totally dependent on an apathetic hospital staff, “Marlowe” fills his days mentally rewriting his old book, “The Singing Detective,” with his healthy self cast in the lead role. “Marlowe’s” days are filled with pain, the humiliation of dependency, and bitter anger in a surreal blend of reality and fever-induced hallucinations in which the players are constantly breaking out into lavish production numbers of 1940s popular songs.

The remake, updated and Americanized, featured Robert Downey Jr. in the leading role (and renamed Danny Dark), and while Potter supplied the screenplay, it lacks the power of the BBC original. Part of that is its length: a sparse 106 minutes versus the 415 minutes of the six-parter; another is Downey’s performance. The self-assured snarkiness that makes him so appealing in roles like Sherlock Holmes and Tony Stark comes across here as his being just another asshole, albeit one suffering from a debilitating disease. But, despite its flaws, The Singing Detective does retain its core theme:

The writer’s need to bring his reality in line with his fiction.

As I wrote recently elsewhere, I used to believe writing fiction was the art of telling lies. It’s only of late that I realized it’s the art of telling the truth with lies. Downey’s Danny Dark makes frequent references to his cheap or crappy detective fiction, belittling the form as he crawls through it seeking out the truths he’s written into it about his past. “Danny” needs to keep rewriting “The Singing Detective” until he can strip away the lies in which he’s disguised the truth and find, if not a cure for his disease, a release from the snare of the past that causes him as much pain and suffering as does his physical condition.

The Singing Detective isn’t a “mystery,” at least not in the sense of an Agatha Christie whodunit. Like any work of fiction, it’s a mystery about a person. No one would ever call F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby a mystery novel, yet what else is it but Nick Carraway’s following clues to unravel the truth about the mysterious Jay Gatsby/James Gatz?

I love mysteries. I read lots of them, schlock and otherwise. But the best are the ones where the mystery goes deeper than finding out who the killer is or where they stashed the loot. James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Ross MacDonald, John D. MacDonald, Robert B. Parker, Bill Pronzini, Lawrence Block, Jim Thompson, Andrew Vachss…their protagonists don’t just solve the mystery and walk away to be reset, Miss Marple-like, to the status quo for their next appearance. Their characters carry the scars of their lives and their cases and the people they’ve effected along the way. They’re not stories about crimes; they’re tales of human souls caught in life changing, often deadly situations.

All I had in mind when I started writing The Same Old Story was a plot, a whodunit set in the comic book business of the early 1950s. My idea was loosely based on two separate but true incidents from that world: artist Joe Maneely’s 1958 accidental death falling between the cars of a New Jersey bound commuter train, and a scheme perpetrated by at least one comic book editor to defraud the publisher for which he worked. But as I got into it, the “how” and the “what” of the crime seemed less and less the key to the story than did the “who” and the “why”…not as in “whodunit,” but as in “who are they and why did they do it?”

That may sound a lot like I’m belaboring of the obvious, but I don’t think so. I love Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe novels. Archie Goodwin and Wolfe are old, familiar, and comfortable friends, but they are aloof from the people and the stories in which they become involved. What I know of their backgrounds is interesting but, in the end, superficial. Whatever happens in one novel is forgotten in the next; whatever torments they encounter (and seldom suffer themselves) have no bearing on how they will behave in the novel that follows. Lawrence Block’s Matthew Scudder, on the other hand, is a tormented and tortured man about whom the author has constructed a thirty-seven year/eighteen book life arc unlike just about anything else in the genre. Wolfe collects his fee and moves on to the next case. Scudder doesn’t care about the money; he’s out to save souls and hopefully, in the process, find a little bit of salvation for his own sins.

My Max Wiser is closer to the latter than the former. He’s a character with a history and he carries it with him wherever he goes. He’s a writer who believes so much in what he writes that, like Potter’s “Philip Marlowe/Danny Dark” the line between what he’s living and what he’s writing becomes blurred. Does life imitate art, or is art imitating life?

Yes, I was an English lit major and therefore suffer greatly from pretention, so pardon my deconstructive ramblings. And, no, I’m not in any way trying to equate myself with these literary giants, just attempting to point to how their works have served as inspirational jumping off points to my own (very) humble attempts at playing in their beautifully tended field. So maybe mine is just The Same Old Story of murder, theft, love, and deceit…but I hope it’s one I’ve managed to tell as truthfully as my lies will let me.

Crazy Good Stories