Debut Author Interviews

Greg R. Fishbone is the author of The Penguins of Doom, a middle-grade fantasy humor novel in epistolary format (Blooming Tree Press, Summer 2007)

• Greg R. Fishbone on...Dream Editors
• Greg R. Fishbone on...Writing Process
• Greg R. Fishbone on...First Novels
• Greg R. Fishbone on...Family Appreciation
• Greg R. Fishbone on...Completion
• Greg R. Fishbone on...Critique Groups
• Greg R. Fishbone on...The Call
• Greg R. Fishbone on...Audience
• Greg R. Fishbone on...Other Careers
• Greg R. Fishbone on...After-Sale Revisions
• Greg R. Fishbone on...Agents
• Greg R. Fishbone on...Prior Research
• Greg R. Fishbone on...Promotion
• Greg R. Fishbone on...Ideas
• Greg R. Fishbone on...Training
• Greg R. Fishbone on...Setting
• Greg R. Fishbone on...Query Letters
• Greg R. Fishbone on...Influential Books
• Greg R. Fishbone on...Ideal Reader
• Greg R. Fishbone on...Character and Self
• Greg R. Fishbone on...Outlines
• Greg R. Fishbone on...Favorite Bookstore

How did you choose your editor and was he or she the “dream editor” you wanted?

I had a dream editor in mind for THE PENGUINS OF DOOM. I did my research. I saw her speak at a writing conference where she described her background, tastes, and preferences—and I took copious notes. Then I read some of the books she’d edited just to confirm that mine would fit in perfectly with the rest of them. It was like fate!

I won’t tell you the editor’s name, but I do have to say that her rejection letters are exquisite.

It was another editor, a couple years later, who pulled my book out of the slush pile and made her entire publishing house fall in love with it. So really, you just never know.

What is your writing process?

I like to write in coffee shops. It’s a bohemian cliche, writing the Great American Episolary Adventure Novel in a coffee shop, but a hot mug of java really does spark the creative process—even if it’s decaf! Once I have my coffee in place, and maybe a sesame bagel with cream cheese, I insert my earbuds, crank up the “book soundtrack” on my laptop, and get to work.

Before writing anything new, I always go over the old stuff to get my mind back into the story. Some people write an entire draft before they start revising, but I revise as I go. I revise from the first chapter every time I sit down at the computer, until I reach the end of the story, and then I revise some more. Then, after I send the book off to my agent, I find a whole bunch of tweaks and changes I wish I’d made. Basically, the revising process starts when the first paragraph is typed and never, ever ends.

Was this the first full-length novel you wrote, or rather the first that you sold?

It’s kind of funny… My earliest writings were short pieces and longer stories that went on and on like the energizer bunny. My first novel-length story with a real ending was a superhero spoof about a garbageman who becomes the absolute and uncontested ruler of the world.

I spent the next ten years trying to turn that story into a publishable book. If only I’d realized sooner that the story’s main problem was its lack of penguins…

Now that you’re under contract, does your family better appreciate your writing?

When I was growing up, my father tried to discourage me from my writing. He said I could do anything in the world, so why was I wasting my time with all those useless stories?

I was discouraged for a while, until I spoke to my grandfather about it.

“Absolutely you should be a writer,” he told me. “It’s what you enjoy and what you’re good at. In fact, I wish your father had taken more of an interest in books when he was your age. I told him that he could do anything in the world, so why was he wasting his time with all those useless electrical circuits?”

So if my dad could grow up to be an electronics engineer, I knew I could write silly stories for a living.

How did you know you were “done” with your book and ready to submit it?

My books are never done, ever, ever, ever. THE PENGUINS OF DOOM was written and rewritten over a period of years, accepted for publication, edited, edited again, extensively copyedited, and it’s still not done. Just today I came up with an idea that absolutely has to be put into the book. It’s the curse of being a perfectionist.

I’ve had to learn how to submit books knowing that they’re not yet done, and that I’ll probably think up a dozen small changes five minutes after I’ve closed the mailbox flap. That’s just the way it is.

Do you belong to a writing group?

Until I read Carrie’s answer, it hadn’t really hit me how lucky I am to live in a concentrated area of critique groups.

I belong to a great group here in Massachusetts. They help me polish up a lot of the rough edges in my writing and provide a sounding board for half-baked ideas. I think an effective critique group should have the following:

* A person who excels at cutting unnecessary words, transforming awkward phrases, and turning weak passive sentences into strong active ones.
* A person who has an instinctive sense of emotional resonance, who can tell you if a character’s actions and motivations seem forced or inauthentic.
* A person with a good memory for continuity issues, who can remind you that your character who was blonde in Chapter 2 seems to have inexplicably turned into a brunette in Chapter 12.
* A person who knows the market and can let you know if a similar book has been recently published or if your book is unlikely to appeal to editors and/or readers.
* A person with a sense for dramatic structure and pacing, who can tell you if your second chapter should actually be your first chapter and whether or not the middle of the book drags too much.

You may yourself be one or more of the above people, but I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t benefit in at least one of these areas, even if it’s just for a “second opinion” on your already well-informed thoughts. Of course, your critique group will only be effective if you’ve developed the ability to listen to them and apply their comments.

What happened when you received ‘The Call’ that your book would be published?

I received “the call” at 70 miles per hour between Boston and Philadelphia during a thunderstorm at night. Normally I wouldn’t have answered the phone while driving, but I make an exception when a publisher’s name comes up in the caller ID. While I was talking, I pulled the car off I-84 and into the first driveway I could find—the parking lot of a pizzeria.

The first person to know that I was being published was my wife, sitting next to me and hearing my end of the conversation that went something like this: “Sure… That’s great… Yes, I’d love to have the book published by Blooming Tree. Merchandising rights? Well, that sounds good. Hey, what about little penguin dolls filled with jellybeans? They could be kinda like beanie babies but refillable! Yeah, okay, I’ll think of something else…”

The next people to know were the staff and patrons of the pizzeria, when I went in to make an announcement. Hey, I had to tell SOMEBODY. Then I called my parents, and Dori’s parents, and my friends, and Dori’s friends, and then the phone ran out of batteries.

Who is the target audience for your book?

Everyone! Let me elaborate…

Everyone who likes penguins will love THE PENGUINS OF DOOM—and everyone likes penguins, right? Also everyone who likes to laugh will enjoy this book, and it will appeal especially to everyone who enjoys music, hates homework, and wants to develop magical powers.

The book is meant for readers from age 9 up to… Well, I gave a copy to my wife’s grandfather for his 90th birthday and he raved about it, so I’d have to say ages 9 to 90 at least. Or for those who someday plan to be between age 9 and 90 which is, again, everybody.

What career would you pursue if you weren’t a writer?

I’d be President of the United States. Much less criticism and responsibility.

How much revision did you do AFTER you sold your book to your publisher?

I added 15,000 words to a 25,000-word book in my first revision. Then I cut 15,000 words in my second revision. Then I wrote a new ending. Then I wrote a new opening.

No, I wouldn’t say that’s a wholly unreasonable amount of revision. :D

Is an agent useful or necessary for a first-time author?

I sold my first book without an agent. It can be done. I just had to research the publishing market to determine which publishers best matched my book, and which imprints of that publisher, and which editors of that imprint. Then I had to research submission guidelines to know who wanted a query letter, who preferred to receive the first three chapters, who wanted all queries by email after 9/11/01, who would blacklist you forever if you sent an unsolicited email, and who only looked at unagented submissions during certain months of the year. I read each year’s CWIM, joined SCBWI, attended conferences, subscribed to newsletters, and used industry websites to track editors as they moved from house to house and from Assistant Editor to Associate Editor to Senior Editor status. I made a database and learned to juggle multiple submissions. For me, the entire process took about seven years.

I also handled the contract without an agent. It helps that I’m an attorney, since I had access to a law library with books of standard forms and the latest case law on the topic of subsidiary rights and copyright reversion. It took an afternoon of research, a stack of photocopies, a day to scour over the contract, and a couple months of back-and-forth negotiations.

Then I rushed to sign up with an agent, because there’s no way I’m doing all that again by myself. I wouldn’t have time to write or to promote THE PENGUINS OF DOOM if I also had to try selling a second and third book on my own! My agent also provides marketing advice and editorial review to make the book proposals as good as they can be before an editor sees them.

How much research and/or meditation about your subject did you do before you began your first draft?

I think it’s cool that Kelly’s book started as prose and turned into poety, while Sarah’s book started as poetry and turned into prose. THE PENGUINS OF DOOM started as a song that turned into a comic book that turned into a comic strip that turned into prose that turned into a role-playing game and back into prose. Really!

So let’s see, the question is about research… Septina’s father is a garbageman, so I subscribed to a sanitation workers’ listserv and learned a whole lot about the tips, tricks, and machinery involved. I also had to research the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the CB lingo that truckers use, some rock start biographies, and a whole bunch of other very random facts. I don’t think I used even a tenth of it made it into the book.

Oh, and there’s skateboarding in the story, so I ended up playing a lot of Tony Hawk’s Underground on the PS2. Yeah, that’s right, I’m calling it RESEARCH!

What is your plan to get the word out to the public about your book?

I’ve got sort of a “throw a bunch of stuff against a wall to see what sticks” sort of approach, but I won’t have time to try even half of the wacky things I originally came up with.

There’s a part in THE PENGUINS OF DOOM when the main character, Septina Nash, is replaced by a robot double. So I was going to build a robot, a SeptinaBot, that would chat to people and tell them about the book. I got an old AI program core and tinkered with it until it believed that it was a robot sent back in time from the future, captured by the CIA, and made to do middle school math problems. But can you believe it, the stupid thing crashed on me and lost all its specialized programming?!!!

I, um, also have a website. And a blog. And I started a group of first-time 2k7 authors who can all promote each other’s books.

Where did you get the idea for your book?

I wrote a crazy story in 1995 about superhero kids, mad scientists, and a garbageman who becomes the absolute and uncontested ruler of the world. It wasn’t a very good story. You wouldn’t want to read it—not unless it were completely rewritten, and maybe even not then.

A couple years later, a friend said to me, “Hey, a bunch of us are taking the old stories we’ve written, projecting them twenty years into the future, and writing about what happens next. Want to join us?”

When I thought about it, the whole story fell into place. Twenty years after “In Sal We Trust”, Sal the Garbageman has seven children. The last three are triplets. The last of the triplets has purple hair. The middle triplet vanishes mysteriously, a mad scientist shows up, there are three mysterious penguins named Spots, Stripes, and Solids, and you’ll just have to read THE PENGUINS OF DOOM to find out the rest. :D

What writing training have you had?

I think the most intensive training I’ve received has come from the process of submitting manuscripts and having them come back with “positive rejections” — editorial letters that don’t lead to a book contract but do contain helpful hints about the need for more backstory, punchier humor, more character development, or whatever else a particular editor thought a particular story might need. I’m so grateful to all the editors who didn’t publish my book because it wasn’t ready yet, because now it is!

Where is your novel set, and why there?

THE PENGUINS OF DOOM is set in Conwell, Massachusetts—which is based on my hometown but is named after the iconic Conwell Hall building on the main campus of Temple University in Philadelphia, where I went to graduate school. One of my professors used to set exam questions in the fictional city of Conwell, and I always thought I’d like to set a book there as well if I ever had the chance.

O.W. Holmes Middle School is based on the junior high school I attended when I was the same age as Septina and Quinn. The apartment building they live in is based on one that was on my paper route, where I had to climb up and down five sets of stairs each morning to drop copies of the Boston Globe on every welcome mat.

Describe the query letter that got you published.

I’d done some web design work for Blooming Tree Press, so my first query was tacked onto the bottom of an email about migrating to a new ISP. Something like, “…and the new server infrastructure will allow double-throughput and increased bandwidth. By the way, I’ve got this funny middle grade novel—shall I send it to you?” I imagine they received that about as well as the movie star who gets a screenplay handed to her by a taxi driver on the way from the airport, so I wouldn’t recommend this approach to anyone else.

The note I attached to the manuscript probably said something like, “Here’s the manuscript I told you about, which you said I should consult the submissions guidelines about before sending in. I printed it out in a weird handwriting font intermixed with doodles because that’s how the main character would have written it.” I don’t recommend this approach to anyone else either because it just landed me in the slush pile.

One day, a couple months later, I was chatting with a friend who asked about my writing and whether I had anything submitted anywhere. I told her that I had something out to Blooming Tree Press. By coincidence, she’d just taken an editorial job there and was able to snag my manuscript out of the pile and show it to all the right people.

So I guess the message that really got the book sold was an IM something like “I have gr8 bk at BTP”. If anyone else is looking for a fresh and proven approach to publishers they should just “go4it!”

What books had an impact on you when you were growing up?

Too many.

Some that stick in my mind are the Wrinkle in Time books by Madeleine L’Engle for introducing one mind-blowing idea after another, the Hitchhiker books by Douglas Adams for keeping me in laughter for years, every Ellen Raskin book I could get my hands on, Isaac Asimov’s books about robots and Foundation, short story collections by Frederic Brown, and Piers Anthony’s Xanth books, which I read until I hit the 11th or 12th of them and had to stop for the sake of my sanity (possibly a book or two late).

There’s also a book series I won’t mention by name, which I read about six of in fourth grade before wondering…why? It was the first time I’d ever stopped in the middle of a book and thought, “I could do better than this!”

If you had an ideal reader, who would that be and why?

I’m still floored by the idea of anyone at all reading my stuff especially people I don’t know and haven’t met.

My ideal reader is smart, has a wicked sense of humor, and enjoys sharing. He or she reaches the end of a book and immediately thinks of two or three friends who also absolutely positively must read it right away. And these friends will do so because they know the ideal reader has such great taste in books.

Is your main character like yourself?

Not at all! That’s why this book was so much fun to write. Septina is a “style over substance” kind of person while I’m more “substance over style” like Quinn. And I’m more intellectual, like Quinn. And I’m a bit more of a realist, again, like Quinn. But there are many ways in which I’m not like Quinn, either.

Here’s one thing I have in common with Septina: I liked to draw doodles in the margins of my school papers like she does. Mine were mostly tank battles, spaceship battles, and geometric shape battles. When I was Septina’s age, my science teacher told my parents that she worried about me because, in her personal experience, the type of doodles I did could only have been drawn by somebody tripping out on LSD. What personal experience she had with tripping out on LSD, I didn’t even want to know.

Do you outline before writing?

I like to start with a book opening, a few key scenes, and an intended ending. The challenge is to get from the Point A that came to me in a dream to the Point B in my head and from there to a Point C that wraps things up. If I end up at Point Z instead, I just fake like that’s what I meant to do all along.

But I do recognize that some books absolutely can not be written without an outline because they have plots like a puzzlebox: HOLES by Louis Sachar, THE WESTING GAME by Ellen Raskin, THE TIME TRAVELER’S WIFE by Audrey Niffenegger, the collected works of Agatha Christie, and many others. I don’t know for sure whether these authors used outlines but I have my suspicions.

I needed an outline for THE PENGUINS OF DOOM because it wasn’t written chronologically. So I will use an outline if I have to but I try not to have to.

Do you have a favorite bookstore?

I can’t pick just one favorite bookstore. They’re such amazing places, it’s hard to visit any bookstore without finding a book you’ve wanted for a long time, and one that someone has strongly recommended, and another that you had no idea about at all. And these days I can find books written by friends and 2k7ers as well.