Gut Instinct.

by Louis Bertrand Shalako

c2010

All Rights Reserved


‘The Paranoid Cat and other tales’ is my fourth release and it’s kind of scary just how quick it went together. Seriously, folks, this is just too easy. What is wrong with this picture? But these tales were written more recently, rather than ‘over many years.’

I could upload this thing in a heartbeat, and that has its dangers. One more run-through, right? What the hell, it's worth it. The book will be out in three or four days.

No one can tell you how to write, what to write, or what you should write. No one can tell you what it is permissible to write, or what you should not write. Recently I read an interview of a prominent fantasy writer, David Farland. Peter Orullian did the interview. According to David, people like fantasy for its moral elements.

Another interesting thing he said was, ‘I don’t want to tell someone how to kill someone.”

Bearing in mind that a lot of fantasy deals with swords, lances, bows, laser beams, doomsday spells and curses, there is plenty of ‘instruction’ in fantasy. So it is just plain bullshit. There are some things which should not be published, I agree with that. It is self-evident and we all know what it is. Especially insofar as Mr. Farland also advocates certain types of censorship although he doesn’t want to be put in charge of it. Neither do I, which is why I have to have some form of self-checking routine when making editorial and publishing judgment calls.

Someone with a lot of guns and power is always slavering at the jaws to put a crimp in the freedom of expression we all enjoy, and there is some level of intimidation by interest groups as well. But in the end, the ‘moral majority’ turns out to be fifteen crackpots writing vile and anonymous letters in a church basement somewhere. (Handy Hint: Use your spell-checker.)

Recently on the news there was a report of broken glass put at the bottom of a slide, and police are investigating. There is some ‘instruction’ there; if one is a problem individual, prone to devising new ways to hurt people. That’s mainstream TV for you, by the way.

I have always believed that I would not be too good as a fantasy writer, because I simply don’t believe in the supernatural. It would be dishonest for me to attempt to write it, and in the end I would fool nobody but myself. Right?

Wrong. Due to my policy of ‘inversion,’ the next time I attempt to write any sort of fantasy, I intend to approach this literary problem from a point of view of pure and abject cynicism. I can’t really explain why, exactly…just call it ‘gut instinct.’

Holy fuck! You know what? That would be a pretty good title for a book or a story or something.

Excerpt. Thirty Years Gone.

by Louis Bertrand Shalako

c2010

All Rights Reserved









God, I love my job. Here is an excerpt from, 'The Paranoid Cat.' This is from the short story, 'Thirty Years Gone.'

‘Much of the city has simply been abandoned to the wilderness, although any property with a decent sized open area is inevitably farmed. What used to be wide, open thoroughfares have become little better than footpaths through an amazing variety of trees, underbrush and small garden plots on what were once front yards. Once the tarmac cracked, people tore it up and grew crops. The bulk of all houses in the city are moldering ruins, as no one needs the housing. Soon enough the windows were broken, the roofing shingles and plywood began to rot, the doors were all kicked in by vandals and looters, and then whole areas were burned out by drunks and fools…’

Almost daily, Trevor was troubled by the thought that each and every street in this city was like that, and that each and every city in the land was like this, and the situation was the same, all over the world. That one was a hard one to take, sometimes, for Trevor.

The young people, of course, had grown up within existing conditions.

It was perfectly normal, and totally accepted by them.

But he knew what things were like before. They didn’t. In that sense their ignorance encouraged their indifference.

New Things.

by Louis Bertrand Shalako

c2010

All Rights Reserved


I wrote for years before I got serious. But having done that, I began to do things a little differently.

I even started to read differently. One day my mom phoned up and said she would be in town. She was wondering if I might like to read a few old Dick Francis novels.

“No. I want to read all of them,” I replied.

So my mom dug around and came up with a plastic shopping bag with about twenty-two paperbacks. My grandfather was a great Dick Francis fan, and she inherited the lot.

This by no means includes his entire output, but it was a pretty good cross-section.

What I did was to open up the books and check the date and the publisher, and then I lined them all up in chronological order. They were on the shelf right over my bed, equipped with a double four-foot fluorescent fixture. There were four different publishers represented, and maybe four or more titles per imprint. I started at the earliest one, and read them over the course of the next few weeks. (I know a fair bit about steeple-chasing now.)

In the first few books, which were not bad books or hard to read in any way, Dick Francis developed as a writer. Not only that, but he developed in print. He got paid to develop his work. And then something funny happened. The development stopped. The development stopped for all of the classic reasons.

As any self-help marketing guru will tell you, ‘Find something that works for you and then just keep doing it, over and over again.”

Dick Francis found an audience, and he learned how to serve the needs of that audience. Quite frankly, if he wanted to go off and experiment, maybe he could find a publisher for it somewhere. After all the man could write and he could meet a deadline. He had a marketable skill. Whether he was writing for a certain genre, audience or subset makes no difference.

Dick Francis’ audience had certain expectations. They knew what they were getting when they laid down their hard-earned cash for a Dick Francis novel. And Dick Francis liked rebuilding old buildings—that’s in there too. Who can blame him for wanting to make a living?

When I set out to write science fiction, I went to the library and started taking out books. I read them, too. While I enjoy writing science fiction, it is a little early to say if I have found, ‘something that works for me.’

I sure hope the pulp and paper industry will forgive me if I continue to try new things.

Soaring.

by Louis Bertrand Shalako

c2010

All Rights Reserved



We're holding onto novels like 'TIme-Storm,' for the time being.



My computer doesn’t know the proper spelling of certain words, but I think Microsoft’s spelling and grammar checker will eventually supersede ‘Chicago Style.’

Like flying at night, you have to learn to trust your instruments. I Google words to check spellings when the computer and I disagree.

I have three novels in reserve, two sci-fi, one fantasy. I have a collection of poetry, and probably enough material for two collections of short stories. I want to get more stories published before putting them out. I love foreign language credits. Someone spends eight or ten hours doing it, and that beats selling a story in English for $5.00 or $10.00. I plan to do a first draft of another novel this winter. Provisional title, ‘A Work In Progress.’ Lots of satirical humour in that one.

This afternoon I was re-writing a 15,000 word story, and also kind of dreaming about putting together a collection of short stories. It is a lot of fun, after all; I have the material just lying around. There is some logic in having another title out in time for Christmas. Theoretically, this is my vacation after ten months of hard work.

Right now I have 460+ friends on facebook, some of whom are guys like Mike Resnick, Robert J. Sawyer, Vicki Delany, Douglas B. Smith, and people with anywhere from one to sixty or seventy books. You learn very quickly that there are about fifty million pretty good writers in the English language. I aspire to compete with the best of them. Should I engage in a race for the bottom with the worst of them? I’m better than that. Some of them have awards coming out the wazoo. Resnick has the record in sci-fi. I’m too shy to talk to some of them guys! (So I just listen.)

E-book sales are exploding, with amazing new figures published every month. Probably one in five books sold this year will be an e-book. That trend will continue. It is a tough business, but I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else right now. My goal is to put out sixty books and a few hundred short stories before I die. (A man has to have a goal, right? — ed. )

Ultimately, it is not really about money. It is about the books, and getting them into the hands of the readers no matter what it takes. Interestingly enough, the e-book readers like Kindle and Kobo are wonderful for the elderly, or for people with arthritis, or Parkinson’s disease, because you don’t have to turn pages and you can magnify the text with the touch of a button. With the new ‘e-ink,’ batteries maintain their charge for a very long time according to published reports.

Hopefully, this is the year of the e-book reader for Christmas. Wouldn’t mind one of them myself.

Anyhow, I will go to my grave feeling a lot better, knowing that I did my best.

Learning to Fly.

by Louis Bertrand Shalako

c2010

All Rights Reserved


The first novel took seven years to complete, the second one, written mostly to prove the first one wasn’t a fluke, took almost exactly three years. The third one is hard to say, but arguably years. I ‘completed’ the first draft in the winter of 2008. You really do lose track of the re-writes. I always have lots of projects going on. I had to publish some books just to get them out of my hair! Some kind of closure.

Book Covers: The painting on the front of ‘Heaven’ is my own work. It is pretty bad, cost $40 for materials, and took about a week. ‘Core,’ that’s my own photo, something I did in school back in 1992. I got a free shot from ‘morguefile’ and used it for the third book. Basically, you must alter the photo, and cannot use it as a ‘stand-alone,’ and while you do not have to give attribution, you cannot claim authorship, ownership, or copyright the original image. Anyone can use the image on a coffee cup, a t-shirt or whatever. All they have to do is download and alter it.

ISBN numbers are easy enough once you sign up and learn to navigate the system. They’re free in Canada. Don’t pay for what you don’t have to.

Formatting for e-books has a steep learning curve, but then Windows 7 has a steep learning curve. My novels have all been through multiple crashes and file formats. What this means is that you make it a .txt file, then convert to .doc file, and then totally reformat the entire book from scratch. It is good training, but it is frustrating to upload your file and have it rejected once or twice. I plan on having all my books in Smashwords’ Premium Catalogue, and then they market them to people like Sony and the Apple Store. I haven’t gotten into Barnes & Noble, and Borders, but they want an American credit card or an American bank account. Why they wouldn’t accept a Canadian bank or Visa is unknown.

Notes:

This process was a little nerve-wracking because I don’t have a cell phone, or a laptop, or a Kindle, Kobo, Galaxy Pad, or an I-Pad, and I don’t have a Blackberry or any other form of PDA. How the heck do I check my product formatting? Answer: they have previewer features on your upload page, and you can also download free Kindle for PC. I also have ‘mobipocket’ e-book creator and reader, free downloads. I’m always afraid of my machine crashing, so I burn safety discs. She’s crashed twice so far. I’ve been on the internet a year and a half, and quite frankly, I’ve learned an amazing amount of stuff.

I’ve been published in English, Dutch, Estonian, Greek, and Spanish so far. I’ve never been published in Canada, but then I'm not counting college newspapers, a brief stint in journalism, or the fifty-odd stories, letters and poems that have appeared in the last twenty-something years.