Aftershock & Others (8 page)

To paraphrase one of my favorite authors: “It was the worst of times, it was the best of times.”

Early in February I broke off from
The Ingraham
to write “The Lord’s Work.” Greenberg and Gorman wanted a vampire story for their upcoming
Dracula: Prince of Darkness
anthology and I couldn’t resist returning to my “Midnight Mass” scenario. That story had starred a priest amid a vampire takeover, so I figured I’d look at the same situation from the point of view of a nun named Carole who goes a little nuts and becomes a sort of terrorist against the vampires. To fulfill the promise of the anthology’s title, I dropped Dracula into one scene in such a way that I could pluck him out later and no one would miss him. “The Lord’s Work” later became part of the
Midnight Mass
novel.

Later in the month I edited the
Freak Show
galleys during a tour of Ireland to gather info for
Virgin
(which I’ll get to later).

In April I finished the first draft of
The Ingraham
and was extremely pleased. I put it aside to let it ferment before starting a revision, and went to work on another vampire story.

Richard Chizmar of
Cemetery Dance
was putting together an anthology called
Shivers
. I’d had such a good time with Sister Carole in “The Lord’s Work” that I wanted to revisit her and explore what in particular had pushed her over the edge. Audio was part of the deal so I skewed much of the creepiness toward the auditory. “Good Friday” was the result, but the anthology never happened. I took back the story and stored it away. I felt it was special and decided to wait for the right spot.

(Since both are part of
Midnight Mass,
I see no point in reprinting them here.)

In April Jove published the
Reprisal
paperback (with a cover even worse than
Reborn
’s). A month later NEL released the first edition of
Nightworld
in En gland. So…the entire Adversary Cycle was in print overseas but not at home.

Susan Allison decided to pass on
Sibs
.

I know most of you who’ve read
Sibs
are thinking,
What?
But the pass had nothing to do with
Sibs,
and a lot to do with
Reborn
: A poor sell-through had returns pouring in. I blame the cover. I know that sounds self-serving, but truthfully I would not buy—I doubt I’d even pick up—a book with that cover. If you don’t own a copy I’m sure you can find an image online. Take a look and see if you don’t agree.

I sold
Sibs
to Tor for a fraction of my usual advance.

I sensed my career entering the doldrums. Big returns on one title mean a lower advance order on the next, virtually guaranteeing lower sales, which mean a lower advance order on the title after that. And so it goes. You get the picture: a downward spiral.

The Ingraham
would change all that, but not until the fall. At the moment, relief was on the way from an entirely unexpected quarter.

On July 10 I got a call from Bob Siegal, an executive for USA Network, saying they were launching the SciFi Channel soon. Marty Greenberg had given him my name (the SciFi Channel was Manhattan-based and they were looking for a writer in the northeast) and could I design a world 150 years in the future? His plan was to insert daily newscasts from that future between the regular programs. I said I’d be delighted.

Then he said he needed it all completed and set to go in six weeks.

I was revising
The Ingraham
then, trying to get it ready for the upcoming Frankfurt Book Fair, and knew I couldn’t deliver. Matt Costello and I had shot the bull a few times at various NECons (a small annual Rhode Island convention for writers and readers) and I’d been impressed with how bright and quick and versatile he was. I’d also gathered that he had a work ethic similar to mine (which is, simply, sit down and do it). Plus he lived only an hour outside the city. So I gave his name to Bob Siegal.

Matt called me back and asked if I was
sure
I didn’t want it. I reconsidered and suggested we split the work. We worked our butts off—meetings, conference calls, faxing and modeming files back and forth (this was cutting edge in 1992). We delivered a future scenario detailing the sociopolitical-economic-technological status of the entire globe and near space for the year 2142 that, quite frankly, blew them away.

Faster Than Light Newsfeed
was born.

The channel handed our “bible”—crammed with story arcs—to a fellow named Russ Firestone who adapted thirty-to-sixty-second spots that would play one per day, five days a week and repeat on weekends. We laid out the arcs in narrative form and in a flow sheet that showed what was happening when and where throughout the year on a month-by-month and week-by-week basis. Every so often we’d get calls to provide fillers for the feeds.

On September 24 an
FTL Newsfeed
—our scenario, our characters, our format—launched the SciFi Channel. Matt and I watched from the launch party at Madison Square Garden.

I was having fun, but this wasn’t doing anything for my prose career. The near-simultaneous release of
Reprisal
and
Freak Show,
the two ugliest paperbacks of the year, both with my name emblazoned across their covers, didn’t improve my outlook.

A bright spot was the Borderlands Press limited edition of
Freak Show,
a beautiful example of book craft. Phil Parks did a brilliant sideshow poster for the cover, plus the interior art. For this edition I went back and wrote Phil into my backstory as an artist who was hanging around, sketching the freaks. Phil’s artwork was given the look of pages torn from a sketchpad. This integration of art and story makes the hardcover unique.

In October Baen Books published
The LaNague Chronicles,
an omnibus of the three core novels of my LaNague Federation future history, with all the segments divided into chronological order. One thick book.

It was about then that I handed in the final manuscript of
The Ingraham
just in time for the Frankfurt Book Fair. But with a twist: The name on the title page was “Colin Andrews.” I instructed my agent to sell it under that name.

You’re asking the same question he did: Why?

Well, as you’ve seen, my career as a horror writer was looking a little shaky. Though
The Ingraham
was a departure from my usual fare, with my name attached the reaction would be, “Oh, another Wilson horror novel. How did the last one sell?” I wanted
The Ingraham
to arrive without baggage and be judged on its own merits.

The choice of “Colin Andrews” was simple: I was sick of my books being shelved where no one with a bad back ever sees them. This way I’d be closer to eye level.

It worked.

On October 9, just before the opening of the fair, Milan publisher Sperling & Kupfer made a fifty-million-lire preemptive bid for Italian rights to
The Ingraham
. After picking myself off the floor and doing the currency conversion, I realized I wasn’t Trump rich, but it was still the largest foreign rights advance of my career to that time.

And that was only the beginning. The Sperling & Kupfer deal started a buzz at the fair that had other foreign publishers lining up for the hot novel by this new author, Colin Andrews. By the time the fair was over it had been sold into twenty-four languages.

I knew none of this. I was visiting friends in Florida and not checking my voice mail (and only gearheads were using e-mail back then). When I finally did check I found repeated messages from my agent asking me to call him right away. He told me about Frankfurt and how the buzz from the fair had set US publishers to salivating for
The Ingraham
. Putnam had just dropped out of the bidding after William Morrow and Random House both offered $750,000. (On a side note, Susan Allison, my editor at Putnam for a decade, read a few chapters and thought the style seemed awfully familiar. She was the first to suss out Colin Andrews’s secret identity.) My agent wanted to know what I wanted to do.

When I awoke the next morning in the coronary care unit—

Only kidding. Naturally I was in shock—delighted, joyous shock—but when I recovered I told my agent to let them fight it out. The bidding stopped with both companies tied at $900,000. I had to choose. I chose Morrow. A week later they threw a little party for me. They knew who I was by then and said they wanted to publish the book under my name so they could have a real live author to send around and promote it.

I know you’ve heard that old saying: Man makes plans and God laughs. If that’s true, God must have been cracking up.

An eventful year that would send ripples through my career for the rest of the decade.

About the time of the 1992 Frankfurt Fair, I began a novel called
Virgin
—like
The Ingraham,
a genre hop, except no such genre existed.

My career is a paradigm of genre hopping. I started in SF, hopped to horror, then into medical thrillers, now I was hopping into…what? It’s not deliberate: I simply write the next book. In this case the next book was what could only be called a religious thriller.

After reading Tom Monteleone’s inventive
Blood of the Lamb
(about a man cloned from the blood of Jesus Christ), I got to wondering about what would happen if someone discovered the body of the Virgin Mary. By tradition, she was assumed body and soul into heaven. But it’s also been suggested the Assumption was a cover to prevent people from digging up her remains for religious relics.

I couldn’t get it out of my head. And once I decided who had been saddled with the responsibility for guarding those remains, I had to write it.

When I finished it in March I found myself in a quandary. My new novel had nothing in common with the book Morrow was planning to put on the best-seller list under my byline. (Stop laughing, God.) People who bought and liked
The Ingraham
(by now Morrow had decided to call it
The Select
) were going to be flummoxed by
Virgin
.

The solution: Go the pseudonym route again.

But I couldn’t use Colin Andrews because many of the foreign publishers were using that on their editions. (Oh, what a web we weave…) Then it hit me: My wife, Mary, raised in a strict Irish Catholic household, had been my source for all things Virgin Mary during the writing of the book. Why not sell it under her maiden name?

And so
Virgin
went out under the byline of Mary Elizabeth Murphy. The dedication read:
To my husband, without whom this book would not have been possible
. Somehow it managed to pick up a great blurb (“A bold thriller with a message for us all.”) from F. Paul Wilson. Hey, I figured I’d get only one chance in my life to blurb my own novel and dedicate it to myself, so I took it.

Susan Allison bought it and released it as a paperback original. Borderlands Press recently published it as a limited-edition hardcover under my name.

None of this was occurring in a vacuum. Matt Costello and I were still feeding
FTL Newsfeed
’s jones for new material. To speed things along we joined an Internet service called GEnie which allowed us to send word-processing files back and forth attached to email via 2400-baud modems. We were
wired,
dood.

But of the two of us, Matt was the more wired. He’d designed and scripted an interactive CD-ROM called
The Seventh Guest
. It sold a zillion copies and suddenly everyone in the interactive field wanted Matt. He couldn’t handle the queries so he called me and said something to the effect of: We work so well together on
FTL,
why not partner up on this interactive stuff? Ever ready to try something new, I said yes. I didn’t know a damn thing about interactive media, but I knew storytelling; I was sure I could learn the rest.

The rest of the year seemed spent on the road or in the air. To London to promote the
Nightworld
paperback and hardcover of
Sister Night
(NEL’s title for
Sibs
). To Frankfurt for a reception where I met many of my foreign publishers. To Paris to meet with my French agent and my two French publishers. To Minnesota for the World Fantasy Convention, and to the White House for my twenty-fifth Georgetown reunion. (Yes, Bill Clinton was a classmate.)

At the World Fantasy Convention Marty Greenberg talked me into doing what I’d sworn I’d never do again: edit an anthology. He called it
Diagnosis: Terminal
. It would be all short medical thrillers and he’d do all the contact work. I’d simply have to read and choose. I said yes.

In November Headline published the first world edition of
The Ingraham
in En gland. They called it
The Foundation
. The byline was strange: “F. Paul Wilson writing as COLIN ANDREWS.” (Go figure.)

Of all the year’s trips, the one that was going to have the most far-reaching effect on my writing life came toward the end of the year. Just a short hop into Manhattan where, in the cocktail lounge of the Righa Royale, Matt Costello and I pitched our concept for an interactive CD-ROM called
DNA Wars
to Linda Rich of Media Vision.

See, back then there were video games and interactive CD-ROMs. Space Invaders and Tetris were video games played on game consoles, like PlayStation. Interactive CD-ROMs were games too, but more cerebral and with better graphics—like
The Seventh Guest
and
Myst
—and played on computers. Nowadays they’re all called video games.

In 1993 interactive media was
hot,
it was the future, and everyone in publishing and software development wanted in. Alliances were being formed willy-nilly, crazy amounts of money were being thrown about.

As designer and scripter of
The Seventh Guest,
Matt was considered a go-to guy for interactivity. He pulled me aboard and we rode the interactive ground-swell. The most fascinating years of my writing career lay just ahead.