Frequently Asked Questions

What's the difference between a magazine, e-zine, anthology, collection and novel? Where does Christmas Trees and Monkeys fall in here?

OK, let's take the last part first. CT&M is a story collection. Technically, I guess you could call it a book, but it's a book of stories, a collection of stories. A novel is a book as well, but contains one long story. Margaret's Ark, and the almost-finished Solomon's Grave, are novels. Each deals with one storyline all the way through. Steven King's Misery is a novel, Skeleton Crew is a collection. In general, a collection contains stories by BY THE SAME AUTHOR. Important point. Reason: a collection of short stories written by a number of DIFFERENT authors is called an anthology. An anthology can contain stories that have a similar theme or not, but the work is by varying authors and usually put together by a third party, called an editor. The editor solicits stories from writers, picks the best ones of the bunch, pays (hopefully) for the right to print the story in the anthology, and works with the publisher to put the antho out. These are sometimes published regularly (like Tom & Elizabeth Monteleone's Borderlands or Lone Wolf's Extremes series), sometimes just once and that's it (like Poddities). Now, if these stories are put together not as a book, but a magazine, then you have - you guessed it - a magazine, not an anthology. Magazines come out fairly regularly, and may or may not contain fiction, articles, reviews, editorials, etc. The New Yorker, Cemetery Dance, that kind of thing. E-zines are magazines (the e stands for electronic), except they are not printed but rather formatted as an Internet web site. The biggest difference to the reader is that e-zines are generally free to read (they make $ on advertising), whereas magazines are a pay-to-read situation.

What's the difference between a short story and a novel? How come you've sold so many short stories but not a novel yet?

Overall, a writer of fiction deals with two forms of work: short story and novel. A short story can be as short as 500 words (called, appropriately enough, a "short short", or a more recent term is "flash fiction"), or a short story can be as long as 40,000 words - half a novel in length. These are also called novellas or novelettes, depending on the length. They hover at the border between short story and novel. The average short story, though, is about 3,000 - 4,000 words. The average novel ranges anywhere from 80,000 words to 120,000 words, give or take a few thousand.

As you can see from the above description, writing a short story is a much faster process than a novel. On average I can complete a short story anywhere from a week to a month, depending on my motivation. The novel Solomon's Grave, however, took about nine months to finish. And this is the fastest I've ever written one. Partly because I've cut my hours at work to 4 days/week and devote one day to writing now. So, first part is that it takes a long time, and as such volume is not your friend. Secondly, there are, in general, many more short fiction markets than novel markets, but no less writers for each. Supply and demand comes into play, and when you add the obvious financial risk of publishing a book (advances, marketing, printing) -- it's a much more selective market. Makes for a good product in the end, but it raises a lot of walls. Personally, looking back at my very first novel (One Night at Good Shepherd, RIP), I can see that I had to go through a growth period, much like I did with short stories. And again lately, devoting my writing to Christian fiction, trying to use my talents to glorify God and at the same time scare the crap out of the reader, well, that took a whole new learning curve.

What's up with that, by the way? Christian fiction?

What is Christian fiction? Or to make it more of a head-scratcher, what I write now is Christian Horror. Exsqueeze me? Let's take it one point at a time...

In the publishing world, there are many genres (categories) of books. Horror, Science Fiction, Mystery, Contemporary (for lack of a better word - the regular, Updikean, normal-things-happening-to-normal-people stories), Romance. This has been the case for hundreds of years, in varying forms, though distinct genres of fiction as labels on books is more common in this past century. Now and then, mostly then (in the early part of the 20th century - a time when someone speaking of Christ or God didn't elicit the avalance of "You can't say that!" reactions) a mainstream book will address biblical or spiritual issues, . Today, God is pretty much non-existent in mainstream literature, unless you look hard. But there are a gazillion Christians in the country, many of whom want to read a good book, get scared or have a thrill, but not be forced to put up with constant sex scenes, vulgar language (personally I think true to life language is important in literature, but some folks are very sensitive to this, and what did James say about what comes out of our mouth...), concepts or messages contrary to biblical principles, in order to accomplish it. Thus was born the Christian fiction market.

Take the description of the publishing world I gave above, then copy/paste. The Christian market (known in the business as "CBA" after the acronym of the dominating publisher's organization: the Christian Booksellers Association, though CBA is more and more being used informally as a reference to the market itself), is a mirror image of the secular (non-religious) market, with just as many genres (suspense, romance, historical, contemporary). The difference is, they conform more to the above needs of the Christian community. Rarely will you read any graphic sex, or encounter many swears. An important point, and the main twist when compared to the secular world, is that there needs be a spiritual message or biblical/Christian concept relayed by the events or story itself. Though this doesn't necessarily have to be the main thrust of the story, it should be there (and usually IS dominant in the story). Violence, though it should not be unnecessarily graphic, is cool - consider the Old Testament, which is one of he most violent books ever written <g>. The CBA world tends to lump the horror and science-fiction genres together with Clancy-esque thrillers and call the whole group Suspense. At this point in its young history, the industry has a small but growing cadre of writers. Some of the major players in the suspense field are Ted Dekker, Bill Myers and Alton Gansky. Terri Blackstock jumps between mystery and contemporary and romance. The list is growing.

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