As much as I’d like to pretend writing is just me, a bottle of rye, a typewriter and my inner demons, the fact is, I owe a lot of people.
Not in the sense of owing them money–though there are plenty of people scattered across this world to whom I do owe vast sums, and lordy let’s pray they never find me. The one advantage of being trapped in this hotel room, blogging for my corporate masters, is that I am at least insulated from the various lawsuits and debts plaguing me.
No, I meant in the sense of them having contributed somehow to my writing. A lot of people fall into this category, from my parents to some teachers to acquaintances who have unwittingly been models for characters, usually in an unflattering sense. So I though, since I have nothing but time and blog posts to burn here, I might as well acknowledge some of them here. Since I will clearly never be cutting them checks in appreciation. Hollow praise is all they’ll ever get.
Today I’m thinking of Lili Saintcrow. Back a few years, I originally sold The Electric Church to a web publisher called Another Chapter, now defunct. The idea was serial fiction: People would subscribe to a story and every week AC would deliver a nifty PDF of the next chapter to their mailbox, with the ideal story being endless, like a soap opera, except in various genres. Doomed to failure, of course, as no one wants to wait a week for the next chapter and then have to read it on their computer screen or take the trouble to print it out themselves, but hell, a sale is a sale. Lili was involved with the site and was assigned as my editor on TEC.
And thank goodness, because Lili is a great editor. Sadly for you, she no longer does freelance editing, as she has her own kick-ass publishing career to tend to. She took the raw materials of TEC and really kicked my ass–forcing me to make sense, to write well, to be inventive, all those things writers get lazy about. In the end she made TEC a much better book, and even had a big hand in helping me sell the book to my publisher after Another Chapter went out of business.
In short, Lili rocks. And she can write, so you should check out some of her books, and you can thank me later.
And also too, if you get in touch with her, please tell her to get the word out that I am trapped in here, okay?