{"id":2866,"date":"2016-01-04T11:53:44","date_gmt":"2016-01-04T19:53:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/?p=2866"},"modified":"2016-01-10T09:40:50","modified_gmt":"2016-01-10T17:40:50","slug":"miskatonic-manuscript-qa-part-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/?p=2866","title":{"rendered":"Miskatonic Manuscript, Q&A part 4"},"content":{"rendered":"

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(This is the fourth part of a week-long Q&A with Vin about his new novel, “The Miskatonic Manuscript,” continuing the adventures of rare books sleuths Matthew Hunter and Chantal Stevens, this time carrying them far beyond peaceful Providence, Rhode Island. The Q&A series begins here.<\/a>)<\/em><\/p>\n

Q: Is there a real \u201cBooks on Benefit\u201d? Why is the series set in Rhode Island?<\/strong><\/p>\n

A: Providence is a relatively bookish town, along with Cambridge (pick your Cambridge) and Berkeley, and a couple of places in between. So a few used bookstores actually survive there, even in this Internet age. I published the weekly Providence Eagle<\/em> from 1980 to 1985, so I knew enough about the town to set the stories there, I can mostly get the geography right. And of course Edgar Allen Poe passed through a few times; H.P. Lovecraft was from Providence, there\u2019s some historical resonance to work with.<\/p>\n

No, there\u2019s no actual \u201cBooks on Benefit,\u201d that I know of. I don\u2019t think there could be, in that area within a few blocks of the Rhode Island School of Design, just down the hill from Brown. It\u2019s the oldest part of town, the first settled, so the hillside streets were laid out in the colonial era, they\u2019re very narrow. There\u2019d be trouble over where customers would park, unless you tore down one of the adjacent old houses to pave a parking lot, which would arouse the ire of the historical preservation folk — only the university itself seems to be able to get away with that kind of thing.<\/p>\n

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The neighborhood is real, though. The old houses are real, with old trees and sandwich shops for the college crowd. New England is beautiful in the fall, in December you get snow and the Christmas lights; if the readers and the market give me any encouragement to continue the series there\u2019s still material there to be mined . . . though of course I have no interest in a series where they\u2019re all the same except you substitute a blonde suspect with a knife for a redhead suspect with a gun, in Perry Mason and his descendants. If the rides don\u2019t get more challenging as you go along, why bother?<\/p>\n

Q: Your characters don\u2019t seem to have strong Rhode Island accents …
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A: I try to keep the terminology pretty accurate -\u2013 folks in Southern New England are more likely to order a \u201chot oven grinder\u201d than a \u201csub sandwich,\u201d a term I think first encountered at a Blimpie\u2019s in New York. New Englanders refer to \u201csoda\u201d where folks further west say \u201csoda pop\u201d or just \u201cpop\u201d; in New England it\u2019s always a \u201cpaper bag,\u201d never a \u201cpaper sack,\u201d since sacks have to be made of woven fabric. People have made studies; they contend they can pinpoint your age within a decade and your home town within a couple hundred miles depending on whether you say \u201csofa\u201d or \u201ccouch\u201d or \u201cdivan,\u201d whether it\u2019s a \u201cgramophone\u201d or a \u201crecord-player\u201d or a \u201cstereo\u201d \u2013- I suppose now we\u2019d have to add a Walkman or an IPad — whether it\u2019s a \u201cwater cooler\u201d or a \u201cbubbler.\u201d<\/p>\n

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I\u2019m not quite that analytic. I play it by ear. And yes, I made a decision early on not to spell out dialogue among the main characters with phonetic indications of the local accent. Don Bousquet illustrated a paperback by Mark Patinkin, years ago, called the \u201cRhode Island Dictionary,\u201d that\u2019s a lot of fun. But I think readers would just give up, it would be too much constant work sounding things out, if two acquaintances running into each other on the street said \u201cHawaiiya?\u201d \u201cGoodinyou?\u201d \u201cHanginintheah.\u201d \u201cScone-on?\u201d \u201cNah\u2019much.\u201d \u201cMeeneitha,\u201d \u201cAvvagoodwon,\u201d \u201cTawktyasoon.\u201d I did try to give the charter boat captain a little different sound, and I didn\u2019t want Marquita Solana to sound like a New England college lass. But I also didn\u2019t want everyone to sound like they were trying out for a part on \u201cMurder, She Wrote<\/em>.\u201d A little regional dialect goes a long way.<\/p>\n

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Q: The marketing for these books seems a little like a guerrilla campaign; why do they seem to stay under the radar where the mainstream press and distributors are concerned?<\/strong><\/p>\n

A: Not entirely by choice. Your remaining big boxes like Barnes & Noble just take whatever mix of books they get sent from \u201ccorporate,\u201d which works from the lists of the big New York houses owned by the German conglomerates. Even if a customer walked in and asked for one of my books the clerk there would look it up on a computer that only lists books they have in the central warehouse or books they can order from one or two bulk wholesalers — that customer would be told my books are \u201cout of print\u201d or never existed. We\u2019ve dealt with this for years.<\/p>\n

And the mainstream reviewers are even more hopeless. They used to have the rationale that if they reviewed a book from a small publisher, their readers would get frustrated because they\u2019d walk into Border\u2019s or Barnes & Noble looking for that book and it wouldn\u2019t be available. Of course, nowadays when anyone can find hardcover copies of our books online in 30 seconds or order them as instantaneous six-dollar downloads from Amazon, that rationale is out the window. But they still want you to jump through all these hoops; send them specially bound review copies in white wraps with information about how many thousands of dollars you\u2019re going to spend on ads in The New York Times<\/em>, do all this at least a hundred days before publication.<\/p>\n

We tried that with The Black Arrow<\/em><\/a> in 2005; printed the special whitebound review copies, mailed out a hundred review copies a hundred days in advance to Publisher’s Weekly,<\/em> Library Journal,<\/em> all the big dailies, jumped through all their hoops. No result, nada, no mainstream reviews, good bad or mixed.<\/p>\n

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They\u2019re swamped, I understand that. More books are getting published \u2013 especially by small outfits \u2013 at the same time ad revenues are down. Traditional newspaper and magazine page counts and staffs are being slashed. When you\u2019re up to your waist in new books and you\u2019re clearing them away with shovels, how do you know which ones are worth a look? So basically they just rely on the same old politically correct New York editors at Putnam\u2019s or HarperCollins, all these obstacles are set up to repel anything that\u2019s not \u201cpre-sold\u201d — \u201cY is for Yesman\u201d or some other sixteenth sequel with 80-year-old Richard Sharpe taking his riflemen off to fight the Crimean War.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s before you figure in the fact that what I write is a little, uh . . . different. They\u2019ve always got to worry about the boss storming into their office, shouting \u201cWe gave this thing a positive review and the drug dealers are the GOOD GUYS?! The heroes are STONED ON MAGIC MUSHROOMS? The courts and the police are the VILLAINS?! Are you NUTS?!\u201d<\/p>\n

I had a friend who was hired by Dino De Laurentiis to write a screenplay based on a comic book to which Dino had bought the rights, \u201cSubmariner<\/em>.\u201d After they\u2019d been at it a couple of weeks, Dino came storming in \u2013- Dino always stormed — and asked the two writers why it was taking them so long to cobble together a story. They explained it was a little harder when the title character is a bad guy. \u201cSubmariner is . . . BAD guy?\u201d Dino asks. \u201cWell, uh . . . yeah.\u201d The big guy pulled the plug shortly thereafter.<\/p>\n

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We keep trying — we send out a hundred free review copies to Harper’s and the New York Review of Books and The New York Times, the usual list of suspects — but people who want anything new and different that doesn\u2019t just reinforce the statist party line are going to have to set up some Internet forums to pass the word around, that\u2019s all there is to it. Writing and producing an attractive small-press book takes a year\u2019s worth of time and energy and many thousands of dollars, it\u2019s an expensive hobby no matter how gratifying it is to have a few hundred readers say \u201cI can\u2019t wait for the next one!\u201d We don\u2019t ask for donations, but if you want these books to continue it does call for a little of people\u2019s time. Post a review, or go find someone else\u2019s review online and post some comments. (You may want to be cautious about visiting a site called \u201csci-fifanatic\u201d -\u2013 I don\u2019t know anything about it but our virus software detects “threats,\u201d there. But there are plenty of others, including this site.)<\/p>\n

If you like the books, mention them to friends, give one as a gift, ask reviewers and booksellers why they\u2019re ignoring Psychedelic Fiction in general — and Matthew and Chantal, in particular. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

Q: \u201cAutograph\u201d is a noun; the adjective is \u201cautographed.\u201d Yet your characters keep referring to \u201cautograph manuscripts.\u201d What\u2019s the distinction?<\/strong><\/p>\n

A: \u201cAutographed\u201d is a very imprecise term, so booksellers don\u2019t use it much. You might open a copy of an old book and find a letter from the author folded in there; that can be a great find. A letter like that will usually be described either as a TLS -\u2013 a \u201cTyped Letter Signed\u201d \u2013 or an ALS, an \u201cAutograph Letter Signed.\u201d The layman might describe them both as \u201cautographed,\u201d meaning the author signed his or her name. But the word \u201cautograph\u201d to a bookseller means the author wrote the whole thing out, longhand, holding a pen or pencil in his or her hand. An \u201cautograph manuscript\u201d has the same meaning \u2013- the author didn\u2019t merely sign the thing after typing it, which to a layman might make it \u201cautographed\u201d; instead it means he or she wrote the whole thing out, longhand.<\/p>\n

Any of this stuff adds value. But -\u2013 while in the old days collectors seemed to prefer just a naked signature — the consensus today seems to be that the more writing the author did, longhand, the better. That makes sense, when you think about it.<\/p>\n

If you find a letter inside a book, all written out in the recognizable handwriting of Charles Dickens, that reads \u201cTo my Dear Mistress Fanny — Even though our three children can never be acknowledged as mine under the law, I hope the proceeds from this book will help to support them when I\u2019m gone, and that they\u2019ll be raised in the Cthulhian Church as we\u2019ve agreed,\u201d that would be wonderful. On the other hand, if the letter were typed and appeared to be signed by Dickens at the bottom, suspicions might arise. You might want to have an expert take a good look to see if there\u2019s been some funny business, there. You might also want to ask when the typewriter came into common use in England.<\/p>\n

Q: That\u2019s all the questions I had, for now. Anything else you want to add?<\/strong><\/p>\n

A: No. I think you\u2019ve mentioned that readers are welcome to participate. I\u2019ll be interested to see if there\u2019s anything they\u2019d like to ask, about what\u2019s in the books or how they\u2019re written. I assume that offer is good for a couple of weeks into January; after that I may get busy, you know . . . writing something.<\/p>\n

Part one of this four part Q&A is here<\/a>; part two is here<\/a>; and part three is here<\/a>. We still welcome reader feedback, comments and questions below. As always, thanks for reading!<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(This is the fourth part of a week-long Q&A with Vin about his new novel, “The Miskatonic Manuscript,” continuing the adventures of rare books sleuths Matthew Hunter and Chantal Stevens, this time carrying them far beyond peaceful Providence, Rhode Island. The Q&A series begins here.) Q: Is there a real \u201cBooks on Benefit\u201d? Why is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[65,53,13,54,55,26,22,66,64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2866","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bibliomystery","category-books","category-drug-war","category-entheogens","category-fiction","category-literacy","category-media","category-psychedelic-fiction","category-science-fiction"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pWqFl-Ke","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2866","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2866"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2866\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2914,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2866\/revisions\/2914"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2866"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2866"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2866"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}