Brittany and her friends were laughing, but with his last breath he thought that he could detect some compassion in her voice. Maybe not enough to buy him a used copy of The Shining, but at least Carrie or one of the short story collections.
OUR NOVEL
Upon my recent diagnosis with Carson’s Syndrome, I realized that it was time to talk about the creation of Wilson Is Not Toast, which has the dubious distinction of being mentioned in every book on the oddball novels of the early twenty first century. Wilson is Not Toast did very well, even being a Mystery Club Book of the Month and having translations into twenty languages and adaptations for the WWW, film, TV and other media. If you are at all a mystery reader, you probably have a copy at home. What makes WINT so interesting is that it had eleven co-authors. Jointly written books seldom do well, but the author list for WINT has several other peculiarities. Firstly all of the authors had had only publishing credit before the publication of WINT, in a regionally distributed short story collection, which was aptly described as “dreadful vanity publishing at its worst.” Secondly despite the huge success of the book only three of the writers went on to publish anything thereafter and their minor attempts were frankly published because of their connection with the successful Wilson Is Not Toast. I was the best published of the three.
I am Moses Gubb, and I on from my success with WINT into a writing “career” of seven mystery short stories and cookbook of recipes by mystery/thriller writers Sleuth Stew. I am very grateful to the editors of Has-Beens on Parade for this opportunity to share these reminiscences from my early career. I know that many people would be offended at being solicited by such a fanzine, but I am not in total denial on my lack of writing success, and I feel that my work in WINT is one of the most satisfying of my life.
First let me tell you a little about myself. Not that I was born and so forth, you probably have a good idea about that, no I want to explain the late twentieth century to you. Everyone wanted to be a writer, because a good deal of effort in the craft seemed to have been removed. My mother had told me with horror that in her first job she had a manual typewriter. It was one of those tales of “how bad it was” that ranked up there with the idea of a TV without remote control. There were all kinds of software in those days that helped you write. They formatted the text, they prompted you with both words and plot, and they even encouraged you if you stopped writing due to some from of block. I remember when the first time my computer got the (as it was then called) World Wide Web. It was as much of a breakthrough then as doing away with keyboards had been a few years before.
My job1 or as we said then, my job, was a manager of a video store in Austin, Texas. It was the “cool” video store next to New Atlantis, which was a used bookstore, and a bar called the Decline of West. It didn’t pay for shit, but it did bring in a steady group of artistic people. Austin was sort of a writers’ colony in those days. You couldn’t spit without hitting a published author. I know because I spit a lot, mainly just at the people walking by into Violet Crown Videos. My girlfriend worked for me and made even less. We considered ourselves to be as cool as our videos. But we had one tragic secret. Unlike our clientele, we hadn’t achieved in any art form. Now we were smart enough to see writers don’t have any money, or they wouldn’t have grumbled so at the dollar a day late fee on their DVD’s (I’m guessing that the readership of HBOP is historically savvy enough to pick up on most of my quaint terms. If they ain’t that’s too bad because I’m not being paid for this). But everyone was working on something. Neal, the stock boy, was working on a screenplay, Susan on her novel and Tagi on an opera. Belinda, my girlfriend, had done some painting that we used to fix a whole in the roof of our garage. I had learned to play “Stairway to Heaven” on the guitar, and even worked in a band that got to play at a couple of parties, until some drunk guy threw our drummer into the river. But we began to get the wannabe spirit.
How tough could writing be? After all, New Atlantis was filled with it, clearly most of it turned out by people less smart than us, if not in fact less talented. I asked Mary Denning, a founder of the Contrarians, a school of Austin writers, what her secret was. “Persistence.” She said. I figured I could try that awhile, at least until it got boring. Picking what to write was the next hurdle. I asked all the writers that came in, what sold, and they all said mysteries. So I got some mystery writing software, and I took off. My first novel was entitled The Woman with Three Breasts. I thought my grand climax was stunning, “She gazed horrified at one of three breasts. It was made of wax.” It took me months to write and despite my sending it to three or four publishers I couldn’t sell it. Therefore, I decided to try my hand at short fiction. That way I wouldn’t spend so long at creating the thing.
Meantime Belinda was trying a more social approach she had joined a group of people that wanted to write mysteries called People Who Want to Write Mysteries (PWWtWM) or as they affectionately called it, “Pootem,” The group brought famous people in the field of mystery writing to Austin—agents and publishers and such—which would surely snap up some of the locally produced delicacies. So we both attended and shelled out money for workshops. We watched other people being published left and right. In fact at out first workshop the woman who had set to the left of me and the man who had sat to the right of me, both sold a mystery novel in a month.
Was there some cosmic conspiracy against us?
I wrote many short stories in those days,” The Dairy Queen Murders,” “The Jell-O Slayer,” “The Pork and Bean Menace.” But none of them sold. One was even returned to me with a thin pencil scrawl “It’s the food guy again.” I would show them. I tired writing about drinks.
About this time Horace Greenslau came on the scene. Horace appeared in the form of unsolicited e-mail (or as we called in those halcyon days “Spam.”) Horace presented him self to the brethren and cistern of Pootem as a wily old publisher with many tricks up his ink stained sleeves. He pointed out two facts. Fact number one: the second sale is easier to make than the first, so if you want to be a published author, the best thing you can be is already published. Fact number two: you don’t have to pay dead guys anything but respect. His emails to Pootem just talked about these ideas, he said he just kept thinking about them.
So one day I sent a note to this list saying why not put them together? You could put a book that was half stuff by dead guys that you didn’t have to pay any money to, and half by living guys that were first time writers.
What a great idea! Wrote Greenslau.
It became his project at once. He had spots for eleven writers, to mixed with eleven classics of detection. It would be called Mystery Classics. He had some has-been guy, D. B. Bowen, author of The Cellophane Fawn Trilogy, on hand to write an intro for five hindered smackers. He would mention the twenty tales one by one and thus give illusion that the new guys ranked up there with Chandler, Borges, Doyle, and so forth. The classics were great from literary to hard-boiled, impressionistic to great logic tales. There was only one rub.
Money.
He didn’t want to do it as a vanity press, no that was evil. He simply needed each of his writers to buy—say—two hundred copies. They could easily sell them to libraries, specialty shops, their friends and relatives. What proud momma wouldn’t buy a book that listed her baby son after Agatha Christie? He would sell the rest.