LETHAL JOURNEY
Historical Fiction

Noir 1892 Thriller

Article: (Special to Publishing Industry News.) Copyright @ 2011 by John T. Cullen. All Rights Reserved.

Why So Vehement? My passion for self-publishing (especially digital) dates to the earliest days of the World Wide Web, when it became easy and inexpensive to reach readers—for the first time in history. One day in early 1996, when Brian Callahan (about 20 years my junior) and I happened to work at a computer systems development company in San Diego, he stopped by to introduce himself. Coffee in hand, he told me he was an aspiring short story writer. He had heard from fellow workers that I was working on a novel (The Generals of October), and wondered if I had any tips for submitting short stories to magazines. I was encouraging about being a writer, but realistic about the difficulties. I mentioned the following true story in that conversation, because I had only heard it myself a year or two earlier.

The Immortal Dumpster Story. Let me tell you the Dumpster Story, which has profoundly affected my thinking in regard to the Manhattan publishing cartel, gate keepers, and general sanctimonious propaganda to embellish the corporate bottom line. Like the vast majority of authors, I have worked at a great many jobs in my life—college intern newspaper reporter, army sergeant, technical writer in the aerospace and computer systems development industry, hauler of trash and furniture, mortgage sales person, and so on.

During my days as a mortgage salesman, in the early 1990s, I used to call on mortgage brokers to snag deals in the real estate business. One such broker was a youngish woman who liked to talk about writing, and since I was more passionate about writing than about sales, I would linger in her shady little run-down office over coffee, to chat a while. One day, a friend of hers was in her office to assist her, a middle-aged woman who had been in the property management business for many years. She was not a writer, but she had a sympathetic story to tell.

Her company, sometime during the 1980s, had bought a large apartment complex with the intention of converting it to condominiums. Under the terms of the leases, the first sale of a condo could not happen until the last rental tenant was out. Already, cleaning and remodeling teams were at work, gutting the rest of the complex to get ready for the big conversion. Huge dumpsters started filling with dirt, garbage, and drywall debris along the back of the buildings. There happened to be one little old man with a bad beer habit, who lived in a small end unit, where he typed night and day (nobody knew what). The entire corporate machinery ground to a halt while everyone waited for this little old man to either move or die.

After a few months, lo and behold, he opened his last beer can, lit his last cigarette, and collapsed dead over his typewriter. As soon as personnel in hygienic gloves, from the County of San Diego, hauled his body away in a rubber bag, cleaners and construction crews went to work. He had no family, and no heirs, and his meager possessions were tossed out the window to land in one of those huge dumpsters below.

My acquaintance, the property management lady, happened to be walking around the back of the building, and noticed an average sized, sealed cardboard box sitting in a dumpster, amid his torn clothes, worn shoes, and a rumpled suit or two. Curious, she fished it out and opened it.

There, neatly filed in stack after stack of paper, was this man's entire lifetime of writing, from childhood into old age. The material included rejection slips from Big Six publishers, including a few with encouraging notes to 'try us again,' which most of us better scribblers got now and then. There were letters from the offices of the late Scott Meredith, a for-pay literary agent who offered expensive reading services, and she read several of the critiques with their notes of encouragement.

This little old man is one of the patron saints of 'unpublished' writers. He has no monument. Nobody ever really read anything he wrote, though he spent most of life passionately typing away, for essentially no pay. He probably endured his share of schoolyard-bully ridicule from supposed adults who were in thrall to the myth that, unless some 22-year-old faceless 'slush' reader in New York City 'approves,' you are 'no good.' Your writing is 'crap,' and you may sink so low as to pay a vanity press to publish it. The point of all that I say here, and of the entire PIN magazine, is that writers must have access to their readership. Whether the readers buy the writing is an entirely different matter. Also, the point is not to lambaste individual editors or book sellers or whatever—they were simply players in the only game in town. We all were. Luckily, now that game is over. All that a writer can ask is not to be muzzled or destroyed by faceless commercial interests that are only out for their own bottom line, as demonstrated by the tragedy of the Dumpster Story.

Coffe Break, with Horror Stories of the Print Age. During my conversation, I regaled Brian with statistics about how hard it was to 'get published' (Passive Voice) in the many print magazines including literary quarteries. I told him of people I knew, who operated a little print magazine that appeared quarterly in card-stock, grayscale covers stapled together. They published a dozen or so stories per issue, and were listed in writers' resources. They received thousands of submissions from around the world, often from already-'published' authors desperate to find new venues. Authors were used to sending a story out dozens of times, and receiving a daily stream of 'rejections.' The people I am thinking of told me they actually held on to the best submissions for a year or more, as a reserve in case they ran dry some quarter. Think of the authors who were subjected to this rat race, usually for pay in contributor's copies, or for a fraction of a penny per word. I gave up on that decades ago, and devoted my attention to the novel instead. My theory was that there were fewer people with the stamina and vision to complete a novel, much less a good one; but the competition was at least as stiff, measuring the number of submissions against the six publishers left standing to consider them. During my conversation with Brian, I also remembered something

Clocktower Books, World's Sixth Digital Publisher. For many years, I wrote novels and submitted them to the Big Six. I learned that, if you are a superior talent, they often hung on to your manuscript rather than instantly send a form 'rejection'. I faced a number of situations where a Big Six imprint would sit on my submission for as long as (in one case) two and a half years. I had one or two comparatively good agents in those years, who got personal notes from big name editors—lots of nibbles, but no bites. I gradually lost my appetite for getting my nose bloodied, and tended to submit fewer and fewer times. I gave up on magazines entirely, and wrote very little short fiction. A different vision hovered in my periphery, which was based on my instinctive sense that there must be other, better channels.

I was vaguely aware, as I now promulgate with this weely magazine, that many of the great writers touted on college and high school syllabi had to publish their own work. I had experimented with self-publishing from an early age. I managed the high school literary magazine, and during our high school years I was invited along as some politically more active classmates secretly commandeered a ditto machine, in the basement of a grammar school shut down for the night, to print pamphlets for some senior year rebellion. In college, I became discouraged by 'rejection slips' for my poetry. I started my writing life as a poet, and actually did 'get published' a few times (for no pay). I was offended by people who offered to publish my poetry on condition that I change this word or that line (and I said NO). Then, someone suggested a penny press. One of my English professors told a story that a famous author (James Joyce comes to mind, but i'm not sure) actually would print broadsheets of his poetry, and leave them with sympathetic booksellers to sell for a penny. With one or two friends, we obtained a little funding (about $25, as I recall) for ink and paper from the Student Union at the University of Connecticut, and printed off maybe 50 copies of Penny Poetry. I think that's what we called it. We left them with the owner of the local private bookstore (who was also an English professor at the university). Last I heard, we had a jar full of pennies, and one of my friends bought himself lunch with them.

While an undergraduate, I was asked to be editor of a small upstart literary magazine that folded after one or two issues. By the time the first issue went to press, I had been fired because some talentless political barracuda managed to weasel his way into power with whoever the dean was who had been ordained the magazine's corporate patron. That left me seething with a desire to keep control of my own path to publishing.

During my days in the U.S. Army, stationed in West Germany, I actually did publish a volume of my own poetry, which I printed on a copier. I bought a round needle and other binding supplies from a German bookbinding shop, and published twelve copies (which I registered with the Library of Congess Copyright Office around 1980, as I recall). That further whetted my appetite for self-publishing. It is a feeling of power you never want to give up, once you have tasted it.

It would take another forty years for me to bounce around amid the wheels of the bus of monopoly publishing, but I was ready when the digital opportunity arose for me in 1996. I heard the immortal dumpster story around 1993, so I was philosophically and pragmatically ready when Brian walked into my office with his coffee cup in hand. As Brian started to leave, I said "Wait!" and he turned around. I did recall one other thing. In a conversation long a go, with a sympathetic English professor, I asked how one can get through the myriad submissions of others and 'get published.' The good prof told me: "Your poems have genuine power and thrust. The best way I know of is usually to start your own magazine, and publish your material with that of friends. That is the best way I know to get started." So on that fateful day in early 1996, I told Brian, who was far more technologically savvy than I was: "Wait a minute. Would you be interested in joining me to start a literary magazine online?" Brian was just then intrigued with HTML and the possibilities of starting his own website. This was still practically unheard of at the time. A simple JPEG image might take 45 minutes to download, and the World Wide Web was still largely a text-only medium. Brian and I became fast friends and collaborators in Web ventures. In spring 1996, Brian and I launched the first of two early websites, each with essentially one image to start with, first Neon Blue Fiction (suspense) in April 1996, and then on the weekend of 4 July 1996 The Haunted Village (SF/DF/H fiction). Later that year, we created an umbrella publishing house for our web ventures, initially called Clocktower Fiction, and soon after, Clocktower Books. In 1998, we also launched one of the longest-running SF/DF/H magazines on line. This started as Outside: Speculative & Dark Fiction, but on legal death threats from a print magazine for backpackers, we soon changed it to Deep Outside SFFH and later I took it over as Far Sector SFFH (last issue January 2007). Clocktower Fiction was cited in a 1998 article in the early on-line incarnation of Encyclopedia Britannica. We received fan mail from around the world, including Red China. We were written up in a McClatchy editorial, and in a few small venues. Since the mid-1990s, e-commerce has arrived and flourished. The print cartel in New York City is in its death rattle as digital reading platforms rapidly capture the public's imagination—offering far cheaper pricing and faster delivery than the Gutenberg technology of 1453 or so could ever imagine.

Dumpster Story: Last Thoughts. For me, and I hope for you, it's not about being bitter or angry at what the Big Six have done over the years. Their day is slipping away into eternal dusk. Writers today need not think about how to 'get published' or survive decades of 'rejection' by 'gate keepers.' That phony dance is over, the cards lie on the floor, the vestal gorgons walk to the sea, and the lights are being turned out. Writers today need only concentrate on writing the best possible story, poem, or article they can. We are limited only by our talent, our willingness to work hard, and our persistence and vision.

As to the myriad destroyed lives of the old order, with its slash and burn approach to writers' lives in service of their fossil, bottleneck industry—we will never know if that little old man, with dreams so powerful that he sundered the ship of his life on their shoals, was another Thomas Wolfe or Dorothy Parker, or just a guy with champagne dreams and soda water lunches. Nobody ever read his life's work, except a real estate woman who fished it from a dumpster after his death, and then let it go again, like in that ceremony of releasing balloons when a loved one has tragically died. The gate keeping gargoyles had seen to it that he would never have a chance to be read by the public. They had quite successfully managed to guard the tiny pipeline of their commercial gambles in publishing. And he had wasted his life, as many would see it, being a passive player in a game so terribly rigged against him that it must go down in history as a crime against humanity. This is the dumpster story that best illustrates why digital self-publishers should feel a vast sense of relief that the Kafkaesque mammon is today dying the death of Grendel, choking and sputtering and thrashing in its inky blood. Next Week: Vanity Versus Self.

Sator Enigma: Ancient Roman Mystery Solved

The so-called Sator Square (also Sator Rebus, Puzzle) refers to a mysterious ancient text found on walls throughout ruins of the Roman Empire. Archeologists have found exemplars in such diverse ancient Roman locations as a government hall (aula) in Cirencester, Britannia; twice in Pompeii, pre-dating the city's volcanic destruction by Mt. Vesuvius in 79 CE; and in the distant frontier fortress of Dura Europos on Rome's Mesopotamian border with Parthia. Something about this strange, cryptic writing must have been so important that the Romans would post it in their government halls, public squares, and top military headquarters.

It is one of the most perfect palindromes ever created. A simple palindrome is a text that reads the same, backwards or forwards; e.g., "Madam I'm Adam" and ".madA m'I madaM". The Sator Square is a perfect four-way palindrome that reads the same left-right, right-left, up-down, and down-up. Nobody had a clue how to translate it, despite thousands of hours of research, hundreds of learned books and articles, and at least one Ph.D. thesis in Classics at Yale University.

John T. Cullen solved the puzzle in the summer of 2007, almost coincidentally, while continuing eight years of scholarly research for his nonfiction/Ancient History virtual tour guide A Walk in Ancient Rome, Revised 2nd Edition (Clocktower Books, Summer 2011). He had been aware of this baffling cryptogram from long ago, which has since become an object of superstitious reverence in certain Christian and Neo-Pagan settings. Suddenly, while taking a break from his Rome research, he looked at the Sator Square in a new way—and was able, within a few weeks, to both translate it and plausibly explain it.

Ironically, at the annual convention of International Thriller Writers, of which he is an Active Member, in New York City in July 2009, he was the only author present who had actually deciphered and explained a cryptic, ancient epigram of world importance—and lived to tell about it.