letting the wind blow you
Mood:
Contemplative
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December 1, 2005
I got into this entire writing gig in a distinctive way. I was in the summer between my junior and senior year at Michigan State University. My girlfriend (now my wife) had graduated and taken a job about 150 miles away and was living with her parents. My roommate had taken an internship with the PASS Network in Detroit. I was living alone, working fulltime as a mailroom clerk at the Animal Health Diagnostic Laboratories, and basically spending most of my time by myself. I read a lot, watched a lot of TV, played a lot of video games, and cruised the bookstores in East Lansing.
I tripped across a book of essays about the work of Stephen King. At the front was a long essay by King called "The Making of a Brand Name." It was his story about how he got published. About how he had unpublished novels and how he occasionally got short stories published that paid $40 or so, and how they all seemed to go toward the kids' antibiotics or if he was lucky, the phone bill. It was 1972 when Carrie was published with an advance of $2500. Several months later the paperback rights sold for $400,000.
Two things hit me and hit me hard. Sure, the money did. Wow! said I. Write books and get rich. The second, more important thing, was the concept that the way to become a writer was to write something and submit it. So I wrote something, a SF short story called "When Red Eyes Blue," about a planet that has been at war for generations with a neighboring planet. Pretty much unknown to the survivors on the planet, they are genetically engineered warriors who were created by the initiators of the war to fight the war for them. Alas, the original people in the planet were wiped out and the only remaining people were those genetically engineered warriors and their descendants. They had red eyes. There was a prophecy that the war would be over when their eyes turned from red to blue. And when this happens, nobody knows what the hell to do, because, after all, war is not only the thing they were created for, but the only thing they've ever known.
When I write it out like that, I think that was a pretty great idea coming from anybody, especially a 21-year-old. But it's hard for me to see that as a short story even now. A novel, yes. But there's an awful lot of material there for a short story. Anyway, I wrote it and immediately went on to something else and started submitting things. I started my first novel the next year.
I was completely intent on only writing novels and fiction.
A few years later a lovely lady, Lucy Guidot, handed me a short book on genetics she had been asked to write a review for by the editor of the journal, Applied Cytogenetics, or perhaps then it was even called Karyogram. Lucy said, "Here, you want to be a writer, write a review of this." So I did. The editor was Barbara Kaplan, and she liked the review, and I talked to her and she was looking for a book review editor. I volunteered and although it was non-paying, I reviewed books, created a segment called "Abstracts in Review," and did that for two years. Now, quite a few years later, the publication is called The Journal of the Association of Genetic Technologists and I'm the editor and I do get paid for the privilege. I sure as hell didn't set out to be a technical editor after I read King's essay.
Somewhere in there I sent off a piece of fiction to a publication called The Armchair Detective. I didn't know anything about the publication, but the editor, Kate Stine, wrote me a nice letter saying that they didn't publish fiction, just nonfiction about crime fiction. At the time I had been reading and corresponding with Michigan author Tom Kakonis. So I wrote an essay about Tom's books called "Gleeps, Shadows, Frogs and Eggs," which were names of his villains. They published it and paid me a whopping $35 or so about a year later. It wasn't the first nonfiction I had published. That was "Blue Heaven" to TRAVERSE magazine (for $50). But I spoke with Kate and told her I was a book review editor, did they need reviewers? She said yes, put me in touch with her book review editor and thus began my book reviewing career, which I do now for The Oakland Press her in Michigan, and although the pay's not fantastic, it's fun, the books are free, and I do actually get an okay amount of money for it. When I read that King essay I didn't plan on becoming a book reviewer.
(Several years later, Kate called me up out of the blue. Armchair had disappeared into publishing oblivion years ago, but she had bought Mystery Scene Magazine and she needed somebody to quickly interview Michael Seidman and write a profile. Would I do it? I said, sure, and that led to me interviewing and profiling 8 or 9 small publishers for MSM until one blew up in my face a year or so ago and I no longer do these for Kate. That's okay. She's a classy lady and MSM is a wonderful fan publication, but they don't pay terribly well and I have to be careful of where my time goes. Still, Kate is one of my publishing angels, as is the late Barbara Kaplan, Lucy Guidot, and the lovely Ann Stanton, who published some of my earliest nonfiction, providing me with not much money, but several usable clips, a very valuable commodity early in a nonfiction writing career).
A few years later my boss, Dan Van Dyke, and one of the senior technologists, Ann Wiktor, suggested I write an article about clinical genetics for ADVANCE for Medical Laboratory Professionals as a sort of way to promote the hospital's labwork. I thought, okay, I'll pitch it, and I did, and they picked it up. That turned into a regular gig, eventually became a monthly columm (originally called Genetics Jargon, but which will in January 2006 change names to Molecular Moments, expanding the vision a bit). As annoying as I sometimes find ADVANCE for MLP to be, I finished an article for them yesterday, and they laid a foundation that later became a career as a nonfiction writer specializing in health, medicine and biotechnology.
When I read that Stephen King essay, I never planned on writing nonfiction magazine articles.
And now I do all that for a living. I write novels, book reviews, magazine articles, newspaper articles, and edit technical and general publications. The opportunities presented themselves and I took them. What will come my way in the future? I don't know. But I try to stay open-minded, have confidence in my overall abilities, and go where the wind blows me.
Best,
Mark Terry
I got into this entire writing gig in a distinctive way. I was in the summer between my junior and senior year at Michigan State University. My girlfriend (now my wife) had graduated and taken a job about 150 miles away and was living with her parents. My roommate had taken an internship with the PASS Network in Detroit. I was living alone, working fulltime as a mailroom clerk at the Animal Health Diagnostic Laboratories, and basically spending most of my time by myself. I read a lot, watched a lot of TV, played a lot of video games, and cruised the bookstores in East Lansing.
I tripped across a book of essays about the work of Stephen King. At the front was a long essay by King called "The Making of a Brand Name." It was his story about how he got published. About how he had unpublished novels and how he occasionally got short stories published that paid $40 or so, and how they all seemed to go toward the kids' antibiotics or if he was lucky, the phone bill. It was 1972 when Carrie was published with an advance of $2500. Several months later the paperback rights sold for $400,000.
Two things hit me and hit me hard. Sure, the money did. Wow! said I. Write books and get rich. The second, more important thing, was the concept that the way to become a writer was to write something and submit it. So I wrote something, a SF short story called "When Red Eyes Blue," about a planet that has been at war for generations with a neighboring planet. Pretty much unknown to the survivors on the planet, they are genetically engineered warriors who were created by the initiators of the war to fight the war for them. Alas, the original people in the planet were wiped out and the only remaining people were those genetically engineered warriors and their descendants. They had red eyes. There was a prophecy that the war would be over when their eyes turned from red to blue. And when this happens, nobody knows what the hell to do, because, after all, war is not only the thing they were created for, but the only thing they've ever known.
When I write it out like that, I think that was a pretty great idea coming from anybody, especially a 21-year-old. But it's hard for me to see that as a short story even now. A novel, yes. But there's an awful lot of material there for a short story. Anyway, I wrote it and immediately went on to something else and started submitting things. I started my first novel the next year.
I was completely intent on only writing novels and fiction.
A few years later a lovely lady, Lucy Guidot, handed me a short book on genetics she had been asked to write a review for by the editor of the journal, Applied Cytogenetics, or perhaps then it was even called Karyogram. Lucy said, "Here, you want to be a writer, write a review of this." So I did. The editor was Barbara Kaplan, and she liked the review, and I talked to her and she was looking for a book review editor. I volunteered and although it was non-paying, I reviewed books, created a segment called "Abstracts in Review," and did that for two years. Now, quite a few years later, the publication is called The Journal of the Association of Genetic Technologists and I'm the editor and I do get paid for the privilege. I sure as hell didn't set out to be a technical editor after I read King's essay.
Somewhere in there I sent off a piece of fiction to a publication called The Armchair Detective. I didn't know anything about the publication, but the editor, Kate Stine, wrote me a nice letter saying that they didn't publish fiction, just nonfiction about crime fiction. At the time I had been reading and corresponding with Michigan author Tom Kakonis. So I wrote an essay about Tom's books called "Gleeps, Shadows, Frogs and Eggs," which were names of his villains. They published it and paid me a whopping $35 or so about a year later. It wasn't the first nonfiction I had published. That was "Blue Heaven" to TRAVERSE magazine (for $50). But I spoke with Kate and told her I was a book review editor, did they need reviewers? She said yes, put me in touch with her book review editor and thus began my book reviewing career, which I do now for The Oakland Press her in Michigan, and although the pay's not fantastic, it's fun, the books are free, and I do actually get an okay amount of money for it. When I read that King essay I didn't plan on becoming a book reviewer.
(Several years later, Kate called me up out of the blue. Armchair had disappeared into publishing oblivion years ago, but she had bought Mystery Scene Magazine and she needed somebody to quickly interview Michael Seidman and write a profile. Would I do it? I said, sure, and that led to me interviewing and profiling 8 or 9 small publishers for MSM until one blew up in my face a year or so ago and I no longer do these for Kate. That's okay. She's a classy lady and MSM is a wonderful fan publication, but they don't pay terribly well and I have to be careful of where my time goes. Still, Kate is one of my publishing angels, as is the late Barbara Kaplan, Lucy Guidot, and the lovely Ann Stanton, who published some of my earliest nonfiction, providing me with not much money, but several usable clips, a very valuable commodity early in a nonfiction writing career).
A few years later my boss, Dan Van Dyke, and one of the senior technologists, Ann Wiktor, suggested I write an article about clinical genetics for ADVANCE for Medical Laboratory Professionals as a sort of way to promote the hospital's labwork. I thought, okay, I'll pitch it, and I did, and they picked it up. That turned into a regular gig, eventually became a monthly columm (originally called Genetics Jargon, but which will in January 2006 change names to Molecular Moments, expanding the vision a bit). As annoying as I sometimes find ADVANCE for MLP to be, I finished an article for them yesterday, and they laid a foundation that later became a career as a nonfiction writer specializing in health, medicine and biotechnology.
When I read that Stephen King essay, I never planned on writing nonfiction magazine articles.
And now I do all that for a living. I write novels, book reviews, magazine articles, newspaper articles, and edit technical and general publications. The opportunities presented themselves and I took them. What will come my way in the future? I don't know. But I try to stay open-minded, have confidence in my overall abilities, and go where the wind blows me.
Best,
Mark Terry
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