On Writing – Page 12 – The Jake of All Trades

Defoe, a literary Detective Tale

While I don’t don a smoking jacket and puff a pipe while I tell you this, I do have a certain feeling of gratification on my findings in this literary mystery.

In the third issue of LampLight, JF Gonzalez talked in his “Shadows in the Attic” article called about a story by Daniel Defoe “The Ghost in All The Rooms.” As someone who usually takes JFG’s recommendations to heart, I went looking for this story.

And looking, and looking.

After much searching I found several collections that purported to be a ‘complete’ collection of Defoe’s work, and yet… nothing.

The Googles were not helping either, as they returned nothing on the matter.I collected as many editions of Defoe’s works I could find, reading through the table of contents of dozens of PDF files from Gutenberg, Google Books, even a site that had the complete collection online.

Finally, I found out that it was in two anthologies, The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories and The Anthology of Ghost Stories both edited by Richard Dalby. Naturally, both are out of print, but The Anthology of Ghost Stories was on Amazon, so I grabbed a used copy and awaited for the final clue to show up.

I had two opinions at this point: either Dalby renamed one of Defoe’s work to “The Ghost In All The Rooms,” or it was an excerpt from a larger work (which didn’t have the phrase “the ghost in all the rooms” in it).

I suppose there was a third option, that this piece was not by Defoe at all, and perhaps had been mistakenly attributed somewhere in the centuries since his death, but that seemed a bit too out there. I didn’t think this detective story would be that dramatic.

A few days later, the book arrived, the packaging ripped off, I made a brief stop at the TOC before heading to page 191 to see the story, “The Ghost in All the Rooms.” After reading, I went back to the Googles to see what I could find out.

The answer was option 2. “The Ghost In All The Room” is an excerpt from his multi-year investigation on ghosts entitled The History and Reality of Apparitions. Indeed, it is pulled straight from the text- the text not offering any break or pause to segregate it. I am not sure if Dalby himself made the split and title, or if this was a traditional excerpt from the longer work. Should I find out, I’ll update.

For those of you familiar, Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe. He also wrote a sequel to it, and a history of pirates. It is worthy of note that in this case, while “The Ghost in All the Rooms” is a ghost story, for Defoe it was non-fiction. This is an account of the supernatural, or at the very least, presented as such.

The more you know…

eBook Oath

Would you pay $15 for a mass market paperback simply because it was released at the same time as the hardback?

I would not.

Like a hardcover, paperback, or trade paper edition, an ebook should have a fixed price range, based on the fact that it is an ebook, NOT on when it came out. The value of an ebook is not the value of a paper book.

No, “convenience” does not add value, it is a marketing word.

There are a lot of features a paper book will always have over an ebook. I can lend out my paper book. I can use it to prop up a table. I can sell my paper book. I can buy a paper book used.

No amount of convenience will make an ebook worth more than a paper book. Having it stored on a cloud service is not enough to make an electronic file with the text of Dune worth $15.

So here is my ebook oath, from me, a reader, a consumer, to you, the writer out there:

I promise to not pirate your work. Period.

I promise that if you are selling a DRMed text file for $10 or more, I will not buy it.

I promise to support you if your books are reasonably priced.

I promise to tell my friends about your reasonably priced books.

I promise to tell them to avoid your over priced books.

I promise to strip off any DRM on any books I buy. I will not be subject to Amazon or Barnes and Noble on whether I can read something I have paid for.

I promise that there is more to read in this life that I could ever hope to read, but I am going to try.

Didn’t I Write that?

Just as a warning, this post contains spoilers.

In college I started a series of short stories with mythological characters put into a more modern setting. It was a fun project. One of the stories involved the myth of Admetus. You see he found out he was going to die and that didn’t go well with his weekend plans. So, naturally, he doesn’t want to do it. Well, the gods say, if you can get someone else to take your place, you can go that concert instead (you know, just like shift swapping). So he asks his parents, they say no, retirement is too cool. He asks everyone and they are all too busy.

But then his wife says she’ll do it. Which throws a wrench into the whole affair, because she’s the reason he wants to keep on living.

The modern story I began writing was a bit more dramatic. In it, the wife is dying. She has heart failure. The doctors are frantically looking for a donor, but she is getting worse. Then the husband finds out he is a perfect match. He gets a gun, goes into the hospital and blows his brains out.

Then I saw it on an Ally McBeal episode.

My second published story was called “Angel Watch Over Me,” and was found in Sinisteria Magazine. It was a small press magazine, and this was the first print issue. A brief synopsis: A girl is sitting on her bed while her parents are fighting. An angel shows up. They talk for a moment. There are gunshots from downstairs. The angel gets up and goes to kill the abusive father.

Now watch this:

In my heart, I’d like to think that Seth Green somehow had that issue of Sinisteria and thought the story rocked. Then, one day, while dreaming up funny skits with his toys, he thought “if that were the tooth fairy, that would be HIGHlarious.”

Just like that.

But that probably wasn’t the case. Ally McBeal writers didn’t steal my notebooks at night. There isn’t a snitch amongst my friends who posts my best ideas for other artists to take.

Other examples? Sure. I had started a project where I was re-writing the end of Wuthering Heights, but with zombies; a space carrier based future where my main characters were fighter pilots; a tale of a radio signal that scrambles people’s minds and turns them violent. I wanted to make an opera using Tupac songs.

And it isn’t just me. Similarities between stories exist throughout. Brian Keene’s The Rising and 28 Days later; Hunger Games and Battle Royal; Avatar and Dances with Mecha; all of these things were created independently, yet share some other connection.

That connection is, of course, us. We, as humans, do not live in a vacuum. This world, this life, is absorbed by us every day. On top of that, we are, as a species, creating more art, publishing more art, spreading more art, than ever before.

This is why you cannot copyright an idea. You cannot own an idea. You can only own the specific implementation of that idea.

Will I give up on my implementations? Some I have. Others I have postponed. Even with the similarities, these ideas are still mine. And with time, I expect to bring all them out. Some will be altered now that time has passed, but some will be as I originally envisioned.

And yes, I just admitted to watching Ally McBeal.