Dogsland Is Your City: A Guest Post By J.M. McDermott

Dogsland Is Your City

I'd like to thank Matthew Quinn for letting me stop by and borrow his blog for a day. It's very nice of him. As the creator, and mayor of Dogsland, I will be sure to find a place of honor for him among the rabble. The city has dogs in it, but it's not really about dogs. The word "Dogsland" is what the narrator uses to describe the city that she would prefer not to name directly. It is the wolves' name for the city of men, and their dogs. Dogs mark the ground, hold the territory, and the wolves do not understand why the dogs desire the crowded city streets with all those bellicose monkeys ruining everything.The narrator is a Walker of a goddess, wears the skin of the wolf when she is not tending to the souls of her goddess' faithful.

What place of honor shall Matthew hold? The nobility are corrupt. They throw parties indifferent to the suffering of the poor, gathering their wealth up from the drug warrens and smugglers and thieves. The guard are little more than the king's own street gang, breaking noses and pushing people around wherever they like, for no one has any rights. The working men toil in thankless jobs until the criminal underground decides their shop is in the way of progress and the worker is taken care of. Holy men and women separate themselves from the very people they pretend to serve. Everyone is bribed. Everyone is corrupted. One would think these miserable folks would be the subject of holy purgation, if anyone was. But, none of these folks are. There is no place of honor there. There is only money, and blood.

The narrator comes to Dogsland, with her husband, on the hunt for something far worse than all of these ruined men and women. There was a body in the woods, lying dead, polluting the ground where he fell with his very blood and bone. Jona, the Lord of Joni, is dead. He has demon blood in his veins, and the narrator is able, by the power of her goddess, to gather up the memories. She sees into his life with her wise, harsh wolf eyes and finds two other demon children. The first, Rachel Nolander, is deeply scarred by the demon stain and hides her disfigurement under the clothes of a foreign, folk religion. The other, Salvatore, is an immortal, who has lived far longer than his memory can sustain, and he is locked in a pattern of seduction, betrayal, and forgetfulness while he steals and steals and steals all night. The narrator, and her husband, must find these two demon children. The demon children must be killed.

There is another thing found in the memories of Jona. That is compassion.

This trilogy was deeply inspired by my time living in Central Texas, in a particularly religious area. I was amazed at how harsh people treated gay and lesbian individuals, sometimes. It wasn't everyone, naturally, that was homophobic, but it was definitely in the air. I wondered what it must be like, then, to live and work in a place where so many people considered you a blight on the ground that ought to be locked away for the crime of existing. In this, I also considered that the very people who required this message of compassion were the ones least likely to ever pick up a book featuring a homosexual character. As a fantasist, I am able to rely on alternative metaphors. In this case, I have made the demon children just as naturally toxic as the verbiage would have you believe from some of these pulpits and pundits. I have made them literally a blight upon the earth. But, this is not what makes them monsters. In fact, I don't consider my poor, doomed creations monsters.

The city is far, far worse.

But, then, there merits another important moral and ethical question. When the city creates a system of intolerance and desperation that makes these demon children behave as they do, what is to be done with them? Do they deserve what happens? Do they deserve mercy?

The narrator would tell me, forcefully, that they do not deserve mercy. Her hands would shake if she said it. She would be uncertain, deep below where her faith doesn't touch her.

In the first book of the trilogy, the demon children discover they are not alone in the city. In the second book, Rachel and Jona fall in love, and their flame burns to the end of its time. In the third, everything falls apart.

Of course, only the first and second books are available at this time. Purchasing the prior two titles is how to argue, forcefully, that there ought to be a third and final chapter.

I have thought about this, about the place of honor in the city for our host, Matthew Quinn. I think the most honorable place in the city is aboard a ship, in the harbor, waiting for the wind to come and carry his caravel into the long horizons of the wider world. It is better than being in Dogsland when all the unraveling occurs.

Those of you interested in the first two books of the "Dogsland" trilogy and other material from McDermott should visit here.

Guest Blogs A-Comin'

During the next couple of weeks, I anticipate having a couple of guest bloggers.  One of them will be James R. Tuck, he of Blood and Bullets, while the other will be J.M. McDermott, author of Never Knew Another and When We Were Executioners, the first two books in the "Dogsland Trilogy."

(I've read and reviewed Blood and Bullets here already.  I haven't read McDermott's books, although the subject matter--innocent half-demons being hunted by religious zealots--reminds me a lot of my stalled early novel Seventeen Sons some of my college friends and members of my Kennesaw writing group might remember.  Once I'm done with this mass of library books I've got out, maybe I'll give his books a look.)

Both of them will write about the writing craft.  Not sure what exactly--I've given them very loose guidelines in hopes I can get the most interesting comments possible.

So stay tuned...

I May Go Kindle...

Jeff Baker, a member of my Lawrenceville writing group, has self-published a story he'd written for an anthology to raise money for earthquake relief in Japan on Amazon.com for Kindle.  He set it to be free for five days, to build up buzz and end up on the "People Who Bought This Also Bought..." lists and ended up moving 400 units.  Then he started charging $0.99.  As of a day or two ago, he'd sold 15 units and made just over $5, since Amazon gives 35% royalties for $0.99 material.  Hopefully this figure has increased since then.

Although he has defended his decision in terms of retaining rights and the story never going out of print, he said the real purpose of this exercise is not to make money.  Instead, it's to pave the way for him to Kindle-publish a young-adult fantasy novel he is working on now by generating an online fan-base.  I've critiqued the first two chapters and although YA is not my cup of tea, it's a good story.  He does not think he can get a good deal from traditional publishers and wants to hop on the train to the future, so to speak.

I admit I'm somewhat prejudiced against self-publishing because it smacks to me of someone taking their ball and going home because their stuff wasn't good enough.  However, this might be somewhat outdated--thanks to E-publishing and E-readers like the Kindle and Nook, the publishing industry has greatly changed.  And the industry's reluctance to take on new writers or invest much in promoting them (so they fail and then are judged not good, never mind that biggies like Stephen King and Dean Koontz get promoted like hell by their publishers) likely means some really good voices are going unheard.

I don't plan on Kindling Battle for the Wastelands and its planned sequels except at extreme need--say, due to major Values Dissonance between prospective publishers and I leading to them wanting unacceptable changes to the characters.

(I wanted to introduce some moral grayness to the world by making the hero rather racist and the villain as someone who has brought peace through conquest a la Aegon the Conqueror from George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, judges his minions on merit rather than ethnicity, and who married a non-white woman to unite his homeland.  However, in some people's moral universes, being a "bigot" is the primary if not the only sin.  Given how many cultural institutions tends to be more socially left-wing, they might assume the book is an endorsement of racism rather than giving the hero a flaw and the villain a virtue.  Plus I have no problems with heroes killing villains.)

However, just because I don't want to take overmuch risk with my soon-to-be-finished first original novel doesn't mean I'm not inclined to give it a try. 

In 2005-2006, I wrote a short story called "Nicor" about a teenage Dane on his first Viking raid who encounters the titular water-monster.  Although it's an action-packed monster story with bloodshed aplenty, there's substance to it as well--it's about disillusionment with war and even a coming of age. 

One of the earlier drafts, although it escaped the slush pile at The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and was rejected by none other than the editor himself, wasn't all that good, and so I sent it to various other places, improving it at every rejection.  Although now it's the best it's ever been, I am rapidly running out of markets to submit it.

(I did manage to sell it to the fantasy magazine Flashing Swords and was even paid $0.01 per word for it, but the magazine went under before the story could run.)

It is currently under consideration by Beneath Ceaseless Skies and according to Ralan.com, there's a new professional-level publication called Buzzy Mag (whose web-site was active yesterday but is down now due to server-switching).  However, at present, that's about it.  The number of semi-professional publications that would pay, say, $0.01 per word has dwindled with the economy.  I could send it to a web-site or print publication for free or for a token payment, but these are smaller publications that don't have the same kind of prestige a larger publication will. 

Given the choice between publication by someone else with no prestige and a small payment (sending "I am the Wendigo" to Chimaera Serials got me $20 and the status of a published writer, but I doubt it impressed many editors) and the possibility of making a few dollars a month for years with no prestige, it might make more financial sense to go with option #2 in the long run.  Plus I can build up my Amazon.com author page, which exists only because of "Coil Gun."

However, J.M McDermott, also from the Lawrenceville writing group, has advised I hold onto my assets and wait for new publishers to appear.  He has published some short fiction for Kindle, but the monetary returns have not been stellar.  He has sold several books (including a new one entitled When We Were Executioners that just became available) and many short stories, so I am very inclined to take him seriously.

So here's the plan, all this rambling aside.  If I cannot sell "Nicor" to Beneath Ceaseless Skies, I will seriously consider commissioning some good cover art (one of my beefs with self-published books is they tend to have really awful illustrations) and putting it on Kindle.  Commissioning cover art will be a big cost that will take awhile to pay off, especially if the returns are low ($5-20 per month), but it might be a good long-term investment, since people do judge books by their covers.  If I cannot sell it to Buzzy Mag and no new well-paying markets appear, I'll definitely dip my toe in the Kindle water.  It's a good enough story that I'm not ruining my reputation by putting crap out there, but my options for it are rather limited at this moment.

Jeff says with my blog and it's 39,000 hits, I've got a substantial built-in fan-base.  So what say you?  If I put "Nicor" out on Kindle, would you be interested in reading it?