Hark to the Sign in the Moonlight

Implausible as it might seem, I can be a bit sneaky on occasions!  Like when it comes to news; I've been sitting on this particular piece for over a year now, even though it was a subject I was craving to discuss.  But I can also be sly when it comes to getting my books out in cool formats.  Today's case in point occurred somewhere around last Christmas, when, due to a contract mix-up, it turned out that my story The Shark in the Heart had been included in an audiobook adaptation of the Sharkpunk anthology though I'd omitted to sign over the relevant rights.  Editor Jonathan Green was immensely nice about the confusion (as he tends to be nice about everything, unless you're unlucky enough to find yourself up against him in a live version of Just a Minute at a convention, in which case he's a git) and offered to have my story removed.  But I'd already heard the recording of The Shark in the Heart by then, and it was a terrific take on the story, so that was the last thing I wanted to happen.  Instead, spying an opportunity, I asked if he would mind making introductions to the team who'd produced the audiobook version, studio Circle of Spears?

My goal, of course, was to talk them into producing an audiobook of my own short story collection The Sign in the Moonlight, which had been a cherished dream basically from the moment I started putting the anthology together.  And fortunately they didn't need a lot of persuading; in fact, they were flat-out enthusiastic.  The results, somewhat over a year later, are everything I could have hoped for, and something I suspect only a smaller, independent production house could have concocted.  For a start, Sam Burns and Tracey Norman split the male and female narrators up between them, which is a brilliant touch; but more than that, their deep roots in drama mean that these are more than mere narrations.  They've gone the extra mile to build on the characters I wrote, and to capture the period atmosphere that's crucial to so much of the collection.  Stories such as The Burning Room and The War of the Rats really do have the air of historical diary accounts read aloud; The Desert Cold really does have the sinister overtones of a criminal's confession; let your mind drift a little and it really is possible to believe that the teller of The Facts in the Case of Algernon Whisper's Karma is recounting from the distant past.  Sam and Tracey have found the bloody hearts of these stories and ripped them out for anyone to hear, and the result is something as special, in its own way, as the beautifully illustrated original or its lavish hardback cousin.

Anyway, no need to take my word for what a fine job Circle of Spears have done!  You can grab a digital copy here, or a physical copy here.  And full details of the collection, including the story listing, can be found on my website here.

The Sign in the Moonlight: The Desert Cold & The War of the Rats

I suppose the main thing I have to say about The Desert Cold is that it was my first ever professional sale, almost seven years ago now, and to the then fairly new web-zine Flash Fiction Online.  Needless to say, I was still finding my way in those days, perhaps a little blindly, and this slender tale came together by a long and awkward route: it began as a vignette, more of a scene-setting exercise that a story, that would become the core of the first two thirds of the finished piece.  Strangely, though, I think that benefited it, ultimately; it still basically ended up being a mood piece, but one with a nasty little sting in its tail.

As for the The War of the Rats, the one new story in the collection and the longest, it came directly out of the research for my recently finished novel To End All Wars, and my frustration at the fact that there was so much I wanted to say about its subject, the First World War, that I knew I wasn't going to be able to find a place for.  Principally, I didn't have an outlet within the novel for all the anger and revulsion I felt at reading so many stories of lives cut short and disfigured, or for the sheer grotesqueness of much of what I'd come across.  It was ideal fare for a horror story, but not so much so for a science-fiction novel set largely away from the trenches.

So all of that got poured into The War of the Rats, a novelette that dived deeply into the most hellish aspects of WW1 and found there, to my surprise, a love story of sorts.  I think the responsibility for that came from one particular book that I was reading at the time, the memoirs of a soldier named Harold Chapin, released as One Man's War.  Which, thinking about it, also led to one of my greatest fears in writing both novel and novelette, which was that I'd inadvertently end up trivialising the whole subject.  The conclusion I came to was accepting how to an extent that's unavoidable; the more you research, the more the awfulness of the First World War defies imagination, and any work intended as entertainment is going to be trivial by comparison.  All I can say is, I did my best.  And on the plus side, I can guarantee that nothing I wrote is more repellent than the reality - which given how repellent things get is saying something.  It's certainly fair to say that The War of the Rats is the closest the collection comes to pure, unadulterated horror.

On that note, here's an extract:

A rat.  A rat!  The word chimed in my mind.  It was all the sense I could make of the situation.  There is a rat, my hysterical thoughts protested uselessly, crawling up my leg.  Yet behind that immediate, enormous fear - so huge that it seemed to eclipse even the possibility of sensible thought - there lay another, deeper terror.  I just couldn't, wouldn't admit it to myself.

The motion stopped.  The whiskers gave a slow, exploratory twitch.  I knew what it had found; what it had been seeking all along.  Oh god ... I'd have given anything for the strength to just kick my leg.  Here was that profoundest fear, which I'd been unable even to acknowledge until then.  For he was at my bandage.  Sniffing.  Nuzzling. 

I've seen the way they get at dead men, Emily.  A wound to them is nothing but an entrance to somewhere warm and safe, or else a place to eat.  That was the terror I could hardly let myself think of.  Whenever I'd seen rats scurrying about the dead I'd gone profoundly cold, averted my eyes and clammed up for a while, sinking into a sort of stupor.  I'd always counted myself lucky it had gone unnoticed.

Now there was no hiding.  No stupor would protect me.  I heard his teeth before I felt anything, a tender chatter interspersed with pauses that seemed almost thoughtful.  As he continued to work, however, I could feel the pressure of his head, as when a dog pushes for attention.  He toiled with steady determination.  He knew what he was looking for, and knew that with patience he'd have it.

Adventures in Copyright Infringement, Part 2

[For the first part of this post, see here.]

One of my resolutions when I quit my day job at the end of last year was to start fighting my corner a little harder.

In part one of this post, for those too busy piloting jumbo jets or wrestling tigers to go back and read it, I talked about how I'd stumbled upon one of my stories on a web magazine I'd never sent it to, had asked the editor in question to take it down and, when they tried but failed miserably to do so and didn't reply to my e-mail explaining that this was what had happened, decided to give up on the whole sorry business and just live my goddamn life.

Six months later I realised that this wasn't fighting my corner.

To put that arbitrary-seeming decision in perspective, I found myself in a position where the copyright of that particular story was suddenly significant again, and - I'm being honest here - where I was itching to see if there was anything I could actually do about someone ripping off my work.  And, being now a full time writer, I had both the time and the motivation to see the thing through to its bitter, bloody end.

All of that put together made me think that rather than get in touch with the editor yet again, (this would, after all, be my fifth e-mail), I'd go down the more dramatic route of a DMCA Takedown Notice.  After all, it was pretty clear that they didn't entirely understand either copyright or how to take pages off their own website.  But - and still being really honest, and maybe just a little bit like a five year old with an atom bomb - I also really wanted to see what would happen if I sent a DMCA Takedown Notice.

What I'm saying is, I possibly didn't think through all the ramifications of what I was doing.

At any rate, things got off to a disappointing start.  The company I'd pegged as being  the web host in question wrote back to say it wasn't them at all and pointed me elsewhere.  The company they'd identified didn't have a dedicated e-mail address for such things like the first one had so I had to contact their sales team instead, and was already feeling disillusioned with the whole endeavor.  But they did get back to me too, albeit not so quickly, and promised to look into the matter.

After that nothing happened for a few days, and the matter slipped my mind, mostly because by then I'd gone away on holiday.  It was perhaps a week from when I'd last heard anything that I got a somewhat panicked and accusatory e-mail from the editor, asking why on earth I'd raised a DMCA Takedown Notice against him and told his hosting company he'd failed to respond to multiple requests to take my work down when the matter had been settled months ago?  Now the hosting company had taken not only the website in question offline but all of his other websites too.  My behaviour, he suggested, was akin to opening a door with a hand grenade.

At this point I felt horribly guilty.  In so much as I'd considered it, I'd assumed the hosting company would just delete the offending content (I'd given them the precise URL) and maybe do a bit of minor wrist slapping.  What had actually happened was far beyond anything I'd intended.

On the other hand, I quickly reasoned, I had asked four times for my story to be taken down.  I wrote back explaining this, copying the hosting company in, and said that so for as I was concerned there'd been no malicious intent and that as long as my content vanished from the site that was the matter settled.  The editor wrote again, still grumbling, and then almost immediately after sent a somewhat more apologetic e-mail in which he admitted that the story had indeed been left up and that he'd finally checked and confirmed I wasn't the one who'd sent it to him in the first place.  He contacted the web designer who managed his site, managed to get the change made within the twenty-four hour slot his host allowed him, and that - thankfully! - was the end of the matter.

But it could have gone a lot worse.  And if I had it all to do again I'd certainly have done things differently.  That said, then, my conclusions are a) that DMCA Takedown Notices do indeed seem to work, and are taken very seriously indeed, at least by legitimate web hosting providers, and that b) this means that, like any other potentially dangerous thing that can wreak havoc in someone's life, they should be used with care.

Put it this way ... if I ever go down that route again it will be because I think someone's maliciously abusing my copyright, and not because it's a wet Tuesday and I can't be bothered to write another e-mail.

Adventures in Copyright Infringement, Part 1

There aren't many careers these days where people can rob you so casually, so effortlessly or so unapologetically as fiction writing.

To put that in perspective, the first pirated e-book copy of my first novel Giant Thief went live on the evening of the day it was released.  (I know this because I got an e-mail from the the Google alert I'd set up while I was drinking celebratory champers with Lee and Marco from Angry Robot.  Cheers, pirates.)  Now I'm not going to get into the piracy debate here, partly because it's not what I want to talk about and partly because if you happen to be pro-piracy and ever find yourself in a position where your livelihood depends on people having the decency to not steal your work then I'm confident you'll come round to my way of thinking pretty quickly.  No, this post and it's sequel - because, be warned, this is a long story I'm about to tell here! - is about one particular incident, and I'm telling it for educational purposes only.

The lesson is: writers are not powerless to defend their work.  And also, if you're a writer then yes you have powers but use those powers carefully, and for good rather than evil, lest the whole thing explode in your face.

Late last year I stumbled across one of my stories on the internet.  It was one I'd sold to a good market a few years before - actually, I don't know why I'm being coy here, it was The Desert Cold in Flash Fiction Online - and the place I'd found it was certainly not the one I'd sold it to.  Oddly, it was accompanied by the bio I'd used back then, which was some years out of date, and more worryingly the webpage attributed copyright to the site rather than me and had buttons encouraging readers to share my story through a variety of online routes.

I wrote a polite e-mail to the publisher asking that they either take the story down or pay me appropriate for using it.  The publisher wrote back and said that it was okay because another page on their site gave the contradictory information that copyright remained with the author and that when I'd submitted my story I'd chosen to waive the option of payment.

I wrote back and explained that I hadn't submitted my story and explained how and where it had originally been published, explained too that the bio was desperately out of date, explained that the copyright notices were at best contradictory and stated that (having checked their pay rates and found them to be a princely sum of $3 a story) I'd rather have my copyright not being infringed than be paid.

When I week and a half later I hadn't had an answer, I wrote again.  The publisher wrote back apologizing and said that they'd removed my story.  I checked and all they'd done was take the link off their home page, leaving the page with my work on untouched.  I wrote back explaining this.

This time I didn't get an answer, and just couldn't be bothered at the time to press any further.  I'd written four e-mails, I  dislike writing e-mails at the best of times, and writing e-mails to people who are pirating my work and claiming my copyright and don't understand piracy, copyright or how to take things off their own website is just a whole lot of a slog when you have better things to do.

I mention this only as partial justification for what I did next ... which we'll cover in part 2, when the kid gloves come off, doors are opened with hand grenades and lessons are learned, not all of them for the better.