A Writer's Tale

It was published hardbound in September, 1996. The book club later combined it with Fiends and published a 14,000 edition of the double-book.

FIENDS

Though small presses are usually eager to publish collections of short fiction, most major publishing companies have a strong aversion to collections.

Apparently, the things don’t sell as well as novels.

For years, Headline resisted the idea of publishing a collection by me. They even rejected my Stoker-nominated collection, A Good, Secret Place.

Eventually, however, Bob Tanner convinced them to do one so long as it would be anchored by a novella.

I anchored it with a piece of fiction called “Fiends.”

I’d started writing “Fiends” at my parents’ house in Tiburon, California during Christmas vacation, 1971. I finished that version of the book in the summer of 1972, but it came in at a meager 50,000 words. Despite its brevity, I sent it out to a few agents under the title, Dark Road.

And had some interesting responses. In a letter dated November 10, 1972, agent Julian Bach wrote to me, “The story certainly moves, and there is a lot of tension in it. I suspect you will find an interested agent and that he or she will find a publisher. Our vote finally went not to take it on. We found it just too sadistic in subject matter but good luck with it elsewhere.”

On March 12, 1973, agent Max Gartenberg wrote, “It’s a gripping enough story. The problem for me was that the characters seem flat, without dimensions, and therefore hard to get caught up with. Good luck with it elsewhere.”

Soon afterward, I wrote a couple of new versions of the book. One, called He’s Out There in the Night, was written entirely in the first person, from the girl Marty’s point of view.

(A precursor of After Midnight) Another was in the third person, about 60,000 words, and called Ravished.

I believe that, in 1975, I did a major rewrite of Ravished and sent it to agent Dick Curtis.

But nothing came of my efforts.

I finally put all the drafts into a box. It must’ve been quite a large box, because at present count I seem to have seven different versions of Dark Road, He’s Out There in the Night, and Ravished. In all, I probably spent more than four years writing and rewriting the thing though it’s difficult to know exactly when I did what, because in those days I didn’t date my material very well.

Having put the book behind me, I went on to other things.

When moving all my stuff in preparation for the demolition of our old garage, I took another look at some of my old, nearly-forgotten material. And I reread a few of the unpublished novels.

I liked Ravished. Parts of it seemed clumsy and slow and silly. A few parts were outdated.

Also, at 275 manuscript pages, it was too short to be a novel (by current standards) and too long to be a novella.

When I needed a good-sized piece of fiction to anchor my Headline story collection, I realized that Ravished might be perfect. If I could fix it.

I read the manuscript again, this time trimming it drastically eliminating every word, sentence, paragraph and page that didn’t seem right.

Then I typed the revised version into my computer, fixing it more as I went along. I kept working on the story until it seemed as good as my current stuff.

During the revisions, I reduced the manuscript from 275 pages to 170 pages which seemed like a good, solid length for the lead story of my collection.

I changed the title from Ravished to “Fiends,” which would also become the title of the collection.

With 170 pages of original material, I felt fine about filling the rest of the collection with reprints. Besides, Fiends was to be published in the United Kingdom, where very few of my short stories had ever been published.

I began the selection process by printing up all my short stories. I found that I had enough of them to fill at least three volumes.

For Fiends, I eliminated the five stories that Headline had published along with Out Are the Lights in 1993. I chose to use only a few of the stories that had appeared in A Good, Secret Place.

I separated my stories into piles. One pile would be for material I would include in Fiends. Into the other pile would go all the tales I intended to save for future collections.

The decisions weren’t easy. Stories made a lot of trips back and forth from pile to pile.

For Fiends, I tried to come up with a mixture of new stuff and old. A mixture of serious and rather humorous stories. Also, I was careful not to load it down with more than its share of my best (or best-known) stories. I didn’t want it to be a “best of” volume, just a good sampling.