How Sidney Williams escaped midlist oblivion

Sidney Williams:

I covered the police beat, and was in and out of the police stations and sheriff departments of central Louisiana and went out to a lot of crime scenes. I was exposed to both the newspaper side of things and the law enforcement perspective.

[In "Midnight Eyes"], there’s a lot about how news is covered. There’s an ethical reporter, and a less than ethical editor, so you have the ways that news can damage a law enforcement investigation. And then there’s the police work. There are several true cases probably that had seeds of ideas, but it’s not based on any one case or anything.

I actually wrote this several years after I had stopped being a reporter and doing any police coverage. I was working as a librarian, so I had really easy access to all kinds of reference materials. I read homicide textbooks and serial killer treatises and just all kinds of things that were easy to get because I could place the interlibrary loan orders myself. [It was] kind of a perfect storm, you know, of my history observing these things and then plenty of reference material, and ideas just kind of gelled.

What happened was, I think David Niall Wilson had started Crossroad Press and was looking for authors who were at the point of getting their rights back. He sent me an email, and I kind of conversed regularly with him on Twitter.

He’s a friend of friends. Wayne Allen Sallee from Chicago is a really good friend of mine, and Elizabeth Massie is a friend of Wayne’s and of mine, and there are several people—there’s a strong concentration of writers, particularly horror writers, in Chicago. I never went to one but Beth used to have a little noncon, so a lot of friends of mine used to go there, and David would go to that. I never met David and we never really crossed paths other than online, but when he was getting Crossroad cranked up he contacted me.

I had thought about doing some ebook stuff but just hadn’t really gotten off my ass and done it. I emailed my second editor at Pinnacle, who told me who to contact to get my rights back. Essentially what they send are letters that tell you that these books are released to you. It was really more formal than I thought it would be: “When Darkness Falls” was, I think, called “Sidney Williams’ novel number five” with them, so I got back a letter that said “Sidney Williams’ novel number five is released to you.”

I wrote on a Commodore 64 in those days. That was the one where you put the big square floppy disk in and you loaded the word processing program and you wrote, and then you saved what you wrote, you flipped the disk over and loaded the spellcheck. I probably still have the disk around somewhere. It was a trade paperback book that the program came in, with a sleeve in the back that for the disk.

I used a daisy wheel printer so it took forever to print anything. I turned the manuscripts in on paper, and they were sent back to me on paper with the editorial marks.

It’s almost completely digital now. I work almost exclusively on a computer. Once in a while something gets printed out, but there’s very little paper involved these days.

“The Beetle” by Richard Marsh, which is late 1800s or early 1900s. I had come across it somewhere on the web, read about it and found it on Project Gutenberg and read it on my iPod. And some John Silence stories by Algernon Blackwood.

There was a program called iPodLibrary—this would have been 2004-2005—that you could use to take an electronic document and convert it into a format that would work in the Notes feature on a third generation iPod—you know, the spinwheel version. And so I had several books from Project Gutenberg that I converted that way and read.

I didn’t mind it! You know, it was monochromatic, not unlike how a Kindle looks now, just smaller. But it was kind of exciting, doing something different, I guess, so there was a little bit of novelty. I read several things that way and then I kind of put it aside.

I read another book called “The Green Mummy” by Fergus Hume, a Victorian novel. It was fun. But it didn’t save your place well, so you had to keep track of which chunk of it you had read and where to pick up again.

The main appeal was you were getting things off the web that were free but that you didn’t want to sit at a computer or sit at a desk and read.

That’s reminding me that when I worked at the library, I read part of Edgar Rice Burrough’s “The Monster Men”. I would have it on screen at the reference desk, and when it was quiet I would read a little of it. I finished that book on paper, not on screen. But even back in the mid-90s probably I was interested in all of the things that were on Project Gutenberg, you know, that you might not be able to get a paper copy of readily. Some of those Edgar Rice Burroughs works were as early as 1915, so it was fun to at least get access to some of them.

[laughing] There are certainly probably some romance novels on my Kindle. And you know there are so many free ones [out there] that are of the erotica realm or the bondage realm—I read probably half of one of those. I got my Kindle in September, and in December I visited Inkmesh and saw something that was holiday themed. I probably read about half of it. There was nothing wrong with the book, but, so many books, so little time.

But there are countless directions that guilty pleasures can go. Coming out of grad school and the MFA program, you could say probably any popular fiction from the grad school standpoint would be embarrassing.

I like cover art a lot. I miss record albums because you had such beautiful big artistic opportunities for covers. I am kind of fanatical about my mp3s. I try to get all the cover art right on my iPod, or my iPhone now, and I still like covers, I like seeing them on Amazon or Barnes & Noble, wherever.

As far as covers with Crossroad, its been fun to have a second edition of my books out and kind of see new directions with them.

It’s challenging to get cover art. David Dodd did “Blood Hunter” and I thought he did a great job. I can remember being on the phone with—you know you didn’t get a lot of input on covers in the old days, and I remember being on the phone with my editor talking about what the cover should be. My original idea was of a moss-covered arm or claw reaching across the cover, but instead we got a swamp scene and a young girl looking through the trees on the original cover. I thought David Dodd did a great job of capturing the setting for the story without giving much away.

Neil Jackson did the new “Gnelfs” cover, and I really like that. The original “Gnelfs” cover is very 80s/90s, and I thought Jackson kind of captured the mood and the flavor of the story without giving too much away or spoiling letting your imagination form the monsters in that one.

You know when you download a book, it usually defaults to the first chapter, and I go in on my Kindle and reset it so that the cover is the first page until I start reading it, because I like even the monochromatic covers.

My first thought is that I’d like to have a TARDIS app. It would be cool if you had that, where it would make your mobile device bigger on the inside than the outside, and also it would let you travel back and forth through time and space. [laughing] And you could keep a sandwich inside. That’s the shoot the moon option, I guess.

On a more serious note, if I had an unlimited budget, I would pour it into consolidating everything into one device, which we’re moving toward with iPads and color Nooks and color Kindles on the horizon. The usage patterns are seeming to indicate that tablets are where we’re really going to go and we’re going to get more and more lower cost tablet options. So just really developing something that’s the Swiss Army Knife of devices is where I would pour the R&D.

People have always loaned books to friends. I think if your pal reads a book and loves it and wants to turn you on to that author, that’s fine whether it’s paper or digital. Often I’ve loaned books to friends who’ve become bigger fans of a writer than I am. They’ve gone on to buy more books by the author. That’s great. You just can’t love an author and post his book to a server for 133,000 of your best friends to enjoy.

It’s important to respect intellectual property rights. It’s important to have parameters and options like Overdrive than allow borrowing of books in reasonable fashion with some compensation to the author. Longer term solutions are needed on the technology front, solutions that allow reasonable sharing but not piracy. Ultimately you need checks in place as well either for people who truly don’t understand what they’re doing is wrong or for the super villains out there.

I kind of flip back and forth. There’s a book called “Biblioholism”, and I think I said on a blog somewhere that’s the one book I don’t own. I have a lot of dead tree or paper books, and I flip back and forth between that and the Kindle.

What I’ve started doing is I keep a change jar where I save coins, and when I have a pretty full jar I will dump that into a Coinstar and get an Amazon certificate. That’s how I budget for ebooks now.

And I am trying to skew more toward, if there’s an ebook version I go ahead and get it for the Kindle, instead of getting a paper book that will take up space.

I love Raymond Chandler and Ross MacDonald on the mystery front. In terms of literary fiction, I like Raymond Carver and Haruki Murikami, especially “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle”. I also like William Faulkner. I also love Ray Bradbury, Philp K. Dick and Jorge Luis Borges, really a must-read. I’m a real eclectic. I like many, many things. That’s where ebooks come in handy.

Sidney Williams is currently working on a literary thriller as well as a fantasy novel, and he’s re-editing his vampire novel “Night Brothers” for the forthcoming ebook edition.

“Midnight Eyes” is available on the Kindle Store and in multiple formats from Crossroad Press.

Visit Sidney Williams at sidisalive.com