Here’s the way the conversation usually goes:

Them: “Oh, you’re a writer? Are you famous?”

Me: “If you have to ask, I think you’ve answered your own question.”

Them: “Well, what do you write?”

Me: “All sorts of things. Novels, kids books, comic books.”

Them: “Really? Where do you get your ideas?

Depending on who’s asking, I have a variety of answers, ranging from the snarky, “I subscribe to an idea service; every month they send me two dozen ideas and I pay them for the ones I use,” to the truthful (but not very helpful), “It’s my job.”

The actual writing is only a part of a writer’s job. While I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s the easy part, it’s still only a part of the process, because before you write you have to have something to write about. Fortunately, having been at my job for a goodly number of years, I’ve gotten pretty good at the whole “getting ideas” thing which come, to me at least, in two distinct flavors: the complete, ready-to-write idea and the broad concept.

The complete, ready-to-write kind are, as you would imagine, the best kind. Those are the ideas which come–pop!–into your head, fully developed, with a beginning, middle, and end already in place. Sometimes, it just feels like all you’re doing is copying something you’ve already read or seen. These are, needless to say, the kind of ideas that don’t come near as often as you wish they would. I can only think of a handful of instances where this has happened to me, one time being in the early 1980s when, in search of an idea for a sword and sorcery concept for a DC Comics series, I came up with–pop!—Arion, Lord of Atlantis, about a sorcerer in the Atlantean end days.

That’s not to say Arion came completely out of nowhere. Knowing the editor of the Warlord comic was looking for a back-up feature to replace one that was spinning off into its own title, I had been noodling with S&S ideas for a while. As a result, Atlantis, sorcery, and a soupcon of Larry Niven’s classic The Magic Goes Away had been percolating in the back of my mind for a while, but I hadn’t really made any sort of effort to turn those ingredients into a concrete idea. Well, not consciously at any rate. So, when the big picture idea came to me–pop!–while I was in the process of doing something totally unrelated to writing or sorcery, it felt like I had given birth without having to go through the messy process of labor.

The broad concepts, what’s sometimes called the germ of an idea, is much more common and can come from anywhere and anything. In just the last week, some random lines from different movies I was watching jumped out at me as being perfect story titles. What stories they would title weren’t clear at the moment of impact, but pretty soon one of them joined forces with a little project that I’ve been working at sporadically over the last few months, that of using pieces of sculpture and paintings created by my late grandmother as the inspiration for short stories (the first few of which can be linked to here). The other will, eventually, find a home somewhere.

Another broad concept came to me listening to an interview with Ben Bradlee, newspaperman and friend of President Kennedy, on CSPAN. Bradlee spoke of a conversation he’d once had with JFK about this post-presidency and, without even thinking about it, I grabbed a pen and paper and jotted down the quote. That, in turn, became the beginnings of a short story that will, I hope, turn into a Crazy 8 anthology sometime in the near future.

I’ve found ideas lurking in conversations, in newspaper and magazine articles, in other people’s stories, and in looking out at inspiring views. I’ve had these ideas while actually searching for them for in the course of an assignment, and I’ve had them without any place in which to use them. I’ve been awakened from a sound sleep with them, and I’ve had them drifting off to sleep. Not all of them are gems, though, but the really good ideas are the ones you don’t forget, even if you get them when you’re half a sleep or don’t get a chance to write them down. The ones that slip away probably weren’t worth remembering in the first place.

Where do I get my ideas? I guess the truth is I get them anywhere and everywhere.

Where do get yours?

Normally I wake up at 6:30. Today, I woke a little after 4:00. Why? Maybe I’d had too much coffee the day before. Maybe I hadn’t gotten enough exercise.

Or maybe I had a character issue I had to resolve.

I’m not sure about the coffee or the amount of exercise (I ran for twenty minutes, though I sometimes do twice that many). But the character issue? That I’m sure about. The character’s name is Uncle Mike. He’s a major player in the book I’m working on, for which I’ll shortly be initiating a Kickstarter campaign. It’s called I Am The Salamander and it’s one of the coolest stories I’ve ever written. But this one character…this one furshlugginer character…he didn’t like where I was going with him.

And he and I, we had to have a talk about it. A talk that couldn’t wait till morning, apparently. So we talked. We hashed things out. And he won, as characters always do. All’s well again in his world. In mine, I had to get up at 4:00. Uncle Mike is sleeping the sleep of the just. I’m writing this blog, watching the sun come up, knowing what kind of day follows a mercilessly abbreviated night.

Ah, the life of a writer.

Writers get ideas all the time. Put a dozen writers in a room show them an object or give them a line and you will get, easily, two dozen different ideas for stories. It’s exciting when a new idea forms, especially one fully realized and you can’t wait to write it and share the story with the world.

Crazy 8 Press exists because the membership believes our stories are worth sharing. After all, conventional publishing wisdom may not see the commercial prospects to some of our books because they’re following outdated and limited models. The digital realm unleashes the possibilities and we celebrate them here.

This summer, I was all set to devote my free time to completing my first C8 novel, selecting between two semi-completed works. I picked the one furthest along and re-read it only to discover something: the spark was missing. In looking over the story, I saw some flaws, knew some fixes I wanted to make and it was all technical stuff.

What was missing was the spark, the inner flame that drove me to complete the work. While ideas continue to flow and I still enjoy writing fiction, this was not the summer for it. Instead, it seems my attention was constantly being diverted as I hunted for a teaching position and the sustained period of free time I guess I needed for resuming fiction was missing.

I wasn’t idle, of course, helping edit and unleash the third ReDeus anthology and did my writing for ComicMix and Westfield Comics along with an essay for Sequart and an article for Back Issue! As a result, I don’t think it’s what some call Writer’s Block. Instead, it feels more like a change of emphasis from fiction to non-fiction. Short term that’s fine and I look forward to the day I wake up and feel the burning desire to tell a story.

In fact, this morning I woke up and realized this was the third time I dreamed a scenario with recurring characters, set a year apart. A single mother and her toddler daughter in a world where they fly giant birds rather than use cars. The remainder of the details is fuzzy but three times over a few months is significant. There just may be a story brewing in the subconscious and I am curious to see what shape it takes.

I spent yesterday, August 24 as a prisoner in the Trumbull, Connecticut Marriott Hotel! I arrived around 9 a.m. and couldn’t escape until almost 7 p.m., when I made a break for the parking lot and, with another freshly sprung inmate, went to ground miles away at the King and I Thai restaurant in Fairfield, cleverly hidden under platters of spicy larb, nam sod, mooh prig sod, massaman curry, and a couple of bottles of icy cold Singha beer.

When I say “prisoner,” of course I mean “guest” at the 2013 Connecticut ComiCONN, my third year at this great hometown comic book convention run by the indefatigable Mitchell A. Hallock. Mitch has been kind enough these three years to provide me with table space from which to meet and greet fans and friends, peddle a few books, and, this year, spread the word about Crazy 8 Press.

Sharing the table with me this year was Crazy 8 mastermind Michael Jan Friedman, author of Crazy 8’s Fight the Gods, Aztlan: The Last Sun, and Aztlan: The Courts of Heaven (not to mention about a zillion Star Trek novels and comics, every single copy ever printed of which I believe he must have signed yesterday).

Crazy 8 Press was on if not the lips, then the wrists of everyone at Connecticut ComiCONN (we sponsored the show’s admissions wristbands), but Mike made sure that everyone who stopped by our table knew all there was to know about our creator owned publishing endeavor. Whether they stopped by specifically to meet their favorite Star Trek author/comic book writer or were just browsing as they made the rounds of the tables of the guests and dealers, Mike pointed to a Crazy 8 title and made sure they knew who we were and what we were about:

A group of writers with a combined dozens of titles and who knows how many decades of publishing experience between us, working together to publish our books, our way in an environment where the big publishing houses aren’t interested in putting out books that won’t sell hundreds of thousands of copies. Mike pointed out the Crazy 8 titles we were both selling, letting people know that these — as well as the titles by the Crazy 8 authors not present — were books we wrote because they were the stories we wanted and/or had to tell, not because they fit the idea of what some publisher thought might fill a slot in their carefully plotted out sales projections. Anyone who expressed even the slightest interest walked away with Mike’s contagious enthusiasm ringing in their heads and the Crazy 8 website address in hand. And sometimes even a Crazy 8 book in their backpacks.

I was a tad bit more reserved in my approach when the day began, but before very long I’d caught Mike’s enthusiasm and was on my feet giving my variation on his spiel to fans and passersby as well. I think I even managed to infect a couple of writers whose names you would probably recognize with the creator owned small press bug as well. We’ll see if that yields some creative dividends for them and Crazy 8 Press in the not-too-distant future…

But that’s what made me a prisoner in the Trumbull, Connecticut Marriott Hotel. And happy to be locked up for the duration at that…

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!