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A guest post by Scott Eder.

When asked to write a post for The Fictorians on the “stranger than fiction” theme, I paused before accepting. Off the top of my head, I couldn’t think of an incident in recent memory that would qualify, but I love The Fictorians blog and figured I’d come up with something. Instead, something came up with me.

Fake Aladdin had to go, or at least shut his mouth. Hell, he was the reason we were stuck in the first place. I knew the downtown hotels were packed during DragonCon, but geez. I can handle a crowded elevator, but this?

I’d grabbed an elevator up from the nineteenth floor thinking it would top out, and I’d be set for the ride back down to the lobby. Claiming a spot on any of the vertically moving conveyances provided a challenge, so I grabbed one when I could. Easy peasy.

Freakin’ Aladdin slid aboard on the twentieth floor in a flash of purple silk, baggy pants, and goofy grin, trailing a crew of Agribah rejects—a sleepy-eyed, barely dressed ninja with iridescent lip gloss, a Tom-Baker era Dr. Who trailing a long scarf, and his companion, a red shirt wearing Starfleet officer. The red shirt should have been my clue to exit, but I wasn’t attuned to the signs.

In my opinion, the elevator was full. We had a little room to move without intruding upon our neighbor’s personal space. A few of us had forgone costumes, but the majority represented the universe of sci-fi/fantasy fandom. Pressed against the elevator’s glass wall behind me, another Whovian, this one bearing a striking resemblance to David Tennant, and his Rose Tyler matched well. Orcs, knights, Star Wars, and Game of Thrones characters stood shoulder to shoulder, passing flasks and laughing. So what if the temperature started to climb? We wouldn’t be on here long enough for it to become a problem. No worries.

We stopped on eighteen. The doors slid open. Aladdin beckoned to the folks waiting outside, and in a loud voice invited them to join us. Smiling, those waiting shrugged and pushed inside.

We stopped on seventeen. The doors slid open. Aladdin beckoned to the folks waiting outside, and in a loud voice invited them to join us. With a shrug, more people joined the “fun.” We were full before, but now we were packed. The mass of humanity crushed the short, lithe ninja against my side. Her diminutive world had narrowed to elbows and armpits. Poor thing. I wanted to throttle the street rat for being too affable, but the press of the other characters locked my arms at my sides.

The heat rose, and so did the stink.

We stopped on sixteen. The doors slid open. Aladdin beckoned to the folks waiting outside, and in a loud voice invited them to join us. Those waiting eyed the dense crowd, and backed away. Thank goodness.

Fifteen, fourteen, thirteen, the same thing. At every stop, Aladdin did his thing. Nobody took him up on his offer again until the eighth floor. The doors opened on a pair of voluptuous young girls with flowing hair and too-tight corsets jacking up (and almost out) their ample breasts. The guys near the doors sucked in their guts. The ladies squeezed in, and the doors closed.

We dropped four feet, and the doors burst open then quickly closed again as we jerked to a stop. Dead on the vine.

Freakin’ Aladdin.

Ten minutes. Twenty minutes. Voices grew louder. Tempers flared. Sweat streaked down my face. Bodies crushed against me. The poor little ninja against my chest wilted, having trouble catching her breath. The woman near the doors mashed the emergency call button again and again and again. No response. Security guards lined the balcony of the eighth floor. A few talked through handsets, while others took pictures with their cell phones. Other guests followed the situation as we became the hit of the moment.

Thirty minutes. Bodies shifted an inch so the ninja could breathe. Grumbles. Accusations. Damn, it was hot.

The doors popped open, letting in a cool, fresh breeze, and a grim-faced hotel representative poked in his head. He said that the elevator would not budge even after several restarts. They were going to have to lift us out by hand.

Really? By hand? I thought this crap only happened in the movies. Damn.

One by one, a crew of the hotel staff unceremoniously hauled us out on our butts. Nice. What a great way to start the Con.

Guest Writer Bio:
Since he was a kid, Scott wanted to be an author. Through the years, fantastic tales of nobility and strife, honor, and chaos dominated his thoughts. After twenty years mired in the corporate machine, he broke free to bring those stories to life. Scott lives with his wife and two children on the west coast of Florida. Check out Knight of Flame on Scott’s website.

The Thin Line Between Memoir and Realistic Fiction

September 10, 2014

Kristin Luna

Kristin Luna Marketing Publishing 4 Comments

“When it comes to the past, everyone writes fiction.” – Stephen King, Joyland

In the summer, my brother and I would walk to our small town library. Sometimes, we’d cross paths with a man walking his mountain lion on the sidewalk. One time, the mountain lion bit my arm, and I needed fourteen stitches.

It’s crazy, but it’s actually mostly true. I was afraid for my life when I saw the mountain lion, but it never actually bit my arm. But it’s plausible, and who’s to say I’m wrong? It’s my memory, after all.

I technically could sell this story as a memoir. But when someone starts digging into my history and finds that, although there was a man in my hometown that had a pet mountain lion, there are no hospital records of me getting stitches.

This sort of thing is nothing new to the literary world. The most recent case of James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces brought this to the public’s attention. Frey’s gritty, gripping tale of addiction was marketed as a memoir, although years earlier, Frey had tried to sell it as contemporary realistic fiction. When no publishers picked it up, he pitched it as a memoir. When Clifford Irving received a three-quarter million advance for The Autobiography of Howard Hughes, he delivered. Only, Hughes proved he had never met Irving, and Irving spent 17 months in jail for his lie. Misha Defonseca wrote a harrowing tale of her childhood during the Holocaust, only to be disproven by a genealogist who found that Defonseca was Catholic. “Ever since I can remember, I felt Jewish,” said Defonseca. “There are times when I find it difficult to differentiate between reality and my inner world.”

These transgressions were surely career-killers, amiright?

Well, not exactly. James Frey became a household name. His book Bright Shiny Morning, released after the scandal, was a bestseller. His lie only seemed to make him more popular.

I can understand how a reader would feel betrayed. I felt a twinge of it. But here’s the thing. I don’t expect most memoirists to tell the truth. I expect embellishment, because our memories are dirty liars. A Million Little Pieces is still one of my favorite books, even after The Smoking Gun revealed factual inaccuracies. Because a good story entertains or reveals some truth. And if it’s a really good story, it does both.

While I don’t care if a memoir’s facts are proven false, many people do. Like, say, publishers. Readers. Higher ups in the publishing world. While A Million Little Pieces sold even more copies after the scandal, you can bet that no one wants to publish another “memoir” by Frey, unless it’s about how he lied.

Remember the story I wrote at the beginning of this post? Here’s an interesting experiment. What is the first thing that you remember about it? I doubt that the first thing you remembered was that part of the story wasn’t true. And that is the power of story. A story doesn’t necessarily tell the truth, it just reveals it.

A Hangman’s Tale

September 8, 2014

fictorians

Guest Posts Publishing Starting a Career The Writing Life 1 Comment

A guest post by Karen Dudley.

In 1999, I was nominated for the Crime Writers of Canada (CWC) Arthur Ellis Award for Best First Novel for my book Hoot to Kill. The award is named after the pseudonym for Canada’s first official hangman, who served in the job between 1912 and 1935 (several of his successors also adopted the pseudonym). The Arthur Ellis award itself is a stylized wooden statue of a hanged man. The arms and legs jerk around when a string is pulled.

I had never been nominated for an award before (Hoot to Kill was, after all, my first novel), so I flew out to Toronto for the awards ceremony. There were drinks and dinner, and I met a number of other crime fiction writers, which was fun. And then came time for the awards ceremony. The Master of Ceremonies that year was Peter Robinson, one of Canada’s foremost crime fiction writers and a truly great storyteller. And he had a fantastic story for us that evening.

The Arthur Ellis award statues, he informed us, were not made in Canada, but rather were manufactured somewhere in the United States and then shipped up here. That year the statues had been duly assembled, boxed up, and shipped off, but somewhere between there and here, they had been lost. As the date for the awards ceremony drew closer, the CWC committee started frantically digging around to find out what had happened to them.

It turned out that Purolator had, in fact, brought the box into Canada, but they’d accidentally delivered it to the wrong house. Under ordinary circumstances, not a big deal. Unfortunately, these were not ordinary circumstances. The house that Purolator delivered them to belonged to a man whose business partnership had recently dissolved due to some rather shady business dealings. These dealings were so shady, in fact, that the man had been receiving death threats. Imagine his reaction then when he opened up the box that had been left on his doorstep and found it filled with ominous little statues of hanged men!

The police had seized the box of awards and Peter Robinson and the other members of the CWC awards committee had to do some very fast talking to get the statues released in time for the awards ceremony. As Peter remarked that night, if any of us had written that in a manuscript, our editors would have taken it out as being too unrealistic.

I’m no longer writing crime fiction. I moved into the fantasy genre a few years back. And although my first historical fantasy, Food for the Gods, was nominated for five different awards, I have to say, none of these awards ceremonies could boast the same stranger-than-fiction story as the Arthur Ellis awards of 1999.

Guest Writer Bio:
Karen Dudley wrote wildlife biology books and environmental mystery novels before she had an epiphany… she wanted to write historical fantasy. So she did. Food for the Gods and its sequel, Kraken Bake, are quirky sort of books, a bit like Xena meets Iron Chef. Food for the Gods was nominated for several awards, including a High Plains Book Award in the Culinary Division. Karen lives in Winnipeg with her husband, daughter, and the requisite authorial cats. You can read more about Karen and her books at www.karendudley.com.

When Purple Unicorns Become More – One Horn To Rule Them All

September 3, 2014

Nancy

Doing Good in the World Guest Posts Nancy Greene Networking Publishing Superstars Writing Seminars The Writing Life No Comments

Over the years the Fictorians site has existed we’ve talked a lot about Superstars Writing Seminar. This group wouldn’t exist without Superstars. It’s hard to explain how special this conference and the people who attend it are. But maybe, Lisa Mangum’s post below might give you some idea.

Lisa has loved and worked with books ever since elementary school, when she volunteered at the school library during recess. Her first paying job was shelving books at the Sandy Library. She worked for five years at Waldenbooks while she attended the University of Utah, graduating with honors with a degree in English.

An avid reader of all genres, Lisa crossed over to the publishing side of the industry in 1997. She’s currently the Managing Editor at Shadow Mountain. Lisa loves movies, sunsets, spending time with her family, trips to Disneyland, and vanilla ice cream topped with fresh raspberries. She lives in Utah, with her husband, Tracy. She is the author of the Hourglass Door trilogy and After Hello.

So, Lisa – When is a Purple Unicorn more than just a silly mythical creature?

***

I’ve been working in the publishing industry since 1997, and I’ve seen a lot of books cross my desk. I’ve even written a few books of my own. But I haven’t ever really edited an anthology quite like ONE HORN TO RULE THEM ALL. I mean—purple unicorns? Really?

Yes, really.

The genesis of the collection came about from the Superstars Writing Seminar. I was attending for the first time, and I was both impressed and amused by the fact that a purple unicorn was the example used to illustrate how to be a professional author. The idea was that if an editor asks you for a story about a purple unicorn, you better deliver a story about a purple unicorn.

As the conversation continued, I made a comment on the Superstars Facebook page about how now I kinda wanted to write a purple unicorn story. Enough people agreed with me and responded with title suggestions and more pictures of unicorns than I imagined existed. (Though, hello, Internet, so perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised.)

The idea stuck with me, though, long after the seminar ended, and one day I emailed Kevin J. Anderson (cofounder of Superstars) and said, “This might be the stupidest idea ever—or the most brilliant.”

Together we hammered out a plan that would result in a collection of twenty stories about purple unicorns. I said I would donate my time to edit the anthology (including reviewing all the stories and editing them) if WordFire Press would publish it, and all sales of the book would benefit a scholarship fund for someone to attend next year’s Superstars.

I’ll be honest. It’s not like I had a lot of time to edit a 100K-word anthology in July. I had a novella of my own to finish writing, plus a Con to attend, plus helping my husband shoot his short film, not to mention all the work that comes with my full-time job as Managing Editor of Shadow Mountain Publishing. And yet…

I wanted to work on the project. I had such an amazing time at the Superstars seminar, and it was such a rich and fulfilling weekend that I wanted other people to enjoy the same thing. Plus, I had made dear friends with the other Superstars attendees, and I wanted to read the stories they would write.

So, as an editor, I asked for unicorn stories. And, as professionals, the Superstar authors delivered.

And oh, the stories they wrote! Some were funny, some were sad. I read stories about detectives and mobsters and fairies and moms and zookeepers and veterans. I traveled to distant planets, to Fairyland, to a Comic-Con.

It has been a joy and a privilege to work on this anthology. The stories are amazing, and best of all, with each book sold, we get that much closer to bringing even more aspiring authors into the Superstars Tribe as we help each other make the leap from amateur to professional.

Being a writer can be a crazy career choice. Publishing can be heartless. It’s a crazy world out there, kids. Best find yourself a Tribe—and bring a unicorn with you if at all possible.

***

Thank you, Lisa. Purple Unicorns are everywhere.

She picked some amazing stories for the anthology. Kevin J. Anderson and the entire WordFire gang will be at Salt Lake ComicCon starting on September 4. Stop by the WordFire Booth to say “hi” and maybe help us fund the Superstars scholarship. If you buy a copy of One Horn To Rule Them All at the Wordfire booth I bet you can get several of the authors to autograph it. The book sells for $14.95 in paperback and $4.99 in E-reader formats:

If you (like me) aren’t able to attend the Salt Lake ComicCon this time, you can find Purple Unicorns here:

Kobo: http://store.kobobooks.com/en-US/ebook/one-horn-to-rule-them-all

(Kobo like Shadow Mountain is a Superstars Sponsor so if we can send love/ sales its way, that would be wonderful).

Amazon: One Horn

Barnes & Noble: One Horn To Rule Them All.