“A Contract for Meyerowitz” • post-mortem

In hindsight, I’m amazed I ever managed to sell this one.

There are so many things wrong with “A Contract for Meyerowitz” that it just should not have sold, period. The fact that it did merely proves that for every rule, there is an exception. This should not be interpreted as proof that the rule is invalid!

It simply proves that from time to time, even professional editors experience moments of weakness.

I wrote the original story in 1983. Between December of 1983 and June of 1985, I shopped it around to…

Well, that’s hard to say. I mailed it out twelve times, total, but two of the magazines turned out to be out of business by the time my manuscript arrived there; not an uncommon occurrence in those days when the hardcover Writer’s Market in your local library was the only game in town. Another “market” turned out to be a honey trap run being by a so-called literary agent, apparently as a racket to find writers willing and able to pay cash for the services of a “professional story doctor.”

[Sidebar: Remember, any so-called editor, agent, or publisher who tells you your story isn’t marketable as-is, but would be salable with a little help from a professional story doctor—and they just happen to know one who would be perfect for you—is not in fact an actual editor, agent, or publisher, but rather a parasitic organism, cunningly disguised as a human, that feeds on writers. Such creatures when encountered should be treated with the same regard you would accord any other leech, tick, tapeworm, or similar bloodsucking parasite.] 

In total, then, it went out to nine viable markets, and came back with six no-comment form rejections, two form rejections that included a note to the effect that the story was too much of an inside joke, and one longer note saying it was both too much of an inside joke and the character of Smith was dangerously close to being an offensive gay stereotype.

[Rebutal: No, he wasn’t; he was a friend. Smith as originally written was patterned very closely after the speech patterns and mannerisms of a theater director I’d worked with many times. The offensive gay stereotype here was the producer we’d both worked with on the last show we did together. Said producer was the sort of over-the-top flamboyant flaming drama queen you’d get if you were to direct Richard Dreyfuss in a remake of The Goodbye Girl, and he was offensive every time he got the opportunity to be so. I got really tired of telling him to back off, get out of my personal space, and stop trying to fondle my thighs.]

Nonetheless, by the summer of 1985 I was ready to give up on “A Contract for Meyerowitz,” so I stopped shopping it around and filed it.

§

Three years later, when I’d made it up to selling pretty much every story I finished writing, I pulled the manuscript out of the filing cabinet, gave it another look, decided it was salvageable, and gave it a quick rewrite. The main thing I did was in the rewrite was tighten it up by about 500 words. 

In the rewrite I lost one bit of detail I should have kept. In the original manuscript I’d identified the pistol very specifically as being a Beretta Jetfire in .25 ACP. In hindsight, this was a key character-revealing detail. In the early 1980s Beretta was best known in the U.S. as the maker of tiny and underpowered popguns, more useful as threats than as actual weapons. Of the .25 ACP in particular Jeff Cooper once said, “If you shoot someone with it, and they find out about it, they are apt to become highly emotional.”

In 1985, of course, Beretta landed the contract to replace the Army’s venerable .45 caliber Colt 1911A1 with a high-capacity 9mm, and as a result Beretta is best known now as the maker of large, clunky, and awkward underpowered popguns. But this is a topic for another time.

The second thing I did in the rewrite was tone Smith’s ambiguous sexuality way down. I thought he was just fine as he was, but since that aspect of his character seemed to make editors nervous, it had to go. It does not behoove one to argue with editors, even when one is absolutely convinced one is right. All that arguing does is irritate the editor, and an irritated editor is not one who is likely to buy your story.

The third and most important thing to vanish in the rewrite was a diatribe Karl threw in at the end comparing Frank Edwards’ Flying Saucers: Serious Business to Frank Herbert’s Dune, and expanding on the thesis of the nine-book series Meyerowitz is being offered. That passage was pure dead weight and the story is better for its absence.

§

Once I finished the rewrite, I began to shop it around again, and in short order collected one, “Too much like a Ron Goulart story I just bought,” one “Too much like a Phil Jennings story I just bought,” (GRRRRR!), two “This is funny but just not serious enough for [now-defunct magazine, and serves ‘em right],” and an acceptance from, of all places, Science Fiction Review. which published it a year later, in the August 1990 issue.

So nearly 35 years later, what are the things I see as being wrong with this story?

1. Narrative flow. It begins with a really nice noir opening, and then immediately jumps into a long and winding flashback that ends up consuming the first third of the story. “The Long and Winding Flashback” is one of those things that was done to death back in the 1940s and has been held in low regard ever since. According to the experts, this is the second-most-clichéd way to begin a story. The most-clichéd way, I’m told, is to begin with a character regaining consciousness and struggling to remember who he is, where he is, and how he got there.
   
   
2. Unnatural language. Karl and Eddie are forever addressing each other by their first names. When you’re having a conversation with a close friend, and there’s only the two of you in the room, do you feel it necessary to use your friend’s name in every other sentence? If I were to write this story now, I would be much more economical with dialog, use far fewer Italics and semi-colons, and wage a war of extermination against said-bookisms. (Example of a said-bookism: “It’s sunny out,” he said brightly.) Unless there is some possibility for confusion about who is speaking, it’s usually unnecessary to use the *.said construction, and the adverb modifying ‘said’ pushes it from merely unnecessary to downright ugly.
   
   
3. The Plot! This is the big, insoluble one. What is this story about? It’s another “unsuccessful sci-fi writer invokes otherworldly aid to become a successful sci-fi writer” story! This is a field that was worked to exhaustion back in the 1940s and turned into a dust-bowl in the 1950s, and there is not enough manure in the world to make it fertile and green again. 
   
   At least, this is what I’ve been told. Given that I was not around to read the science fiction of the 1940s when it was new, I think I can be forgiven for not knowing what the old guys had seen and gotten tired of seeing long before I was born.
   
   
4. The World (big). The entire plot turns on the naïve assumption that releasing a book means people will pay attention to it. I suppose the nutjob who wrote all those Reptiloid Conspiracy books felt the same way. For one of the shadowy masters who has been running our planet ever since the Dark Ages, Smith sure ain’t much. If I were to write this story now, I could have Smith utterly crush Meyerowitz’s heart and soul with just a few well-chosen words about how the publishing business really works. Or perhaps he could accept the conspiracy book, live up to the terms of the contract, give the book nationwide saturation coverage—and still utterly destroy Meyerowitz’s message and reputation, simply by giving the book the wrong cover art treatment and promoting it with jacket quotes from people on the GRAI list. 
   
   You know, people “Generally Recognized As Idiots.” You know who I mean.
   
   If I were to write this story now, though, Smith wouldn’t be a man working in book publishing at all. They’d be a female-presenting TikTok influencer.
   
   
5. The World (small). Re-reading this story now, this really is a period piece. It takes place in a world without the Internet, without cell phones, and without e-books, just for starters. Most surprisingly, this story takes place in a world where Karl can smoke. Indoors! In Minneapolis! If this was a movie, the MPA would make me put a content warning on it, because a character is smoking a cigarette.
   
   You can have all the raw sex and brutal violence you want, but good Lord, don’t have a character smoke on camera.
   
   
6. Finally, the whole story really is too much of an inside joke, and as such, I violated the cardinal rule of insider jokedom. The entire point of being in a group is to look down on the people who are not in the group. Certainly, it is not to laugh at yourself.
   
   When you’re working in a genre, you must remember that the people who already write, publish and read in the genre tend to be defensive and have remarkably thin skins. If you write something that however obliquely makes fun of the conceits of the genre, you’re toast.
   
   It took a mystery writer, Sharon McCrumb, to write Bimbos of the Death Sun. It took a playwright, Neil Simon, to write The Cheap Detective. I am told that many true-blue Trekkies hate Galaxy Quest, because they feel it makes them look like idiots.
   
   If you work inside a genre, never, ever, make fun of the genre. If you work outside of the genre, then by all means, level the guns, load with flaming shot, and fire away. But don’t expect to publish it inside the genre you’re taking pot-shots at. 

In the ultimate hindsight, I should have amped-up the noir and suspense aspect of this one, played it with a straight face, and tried to publish it as a mystery. I bet Hitchcock’s would have loved it. 

__________________

In science fiction circles Bruce Bethke is best known either for his 1980 short story, “Cyberpunk,” his Philip K. Dick Award-winning novel, Headcrash, or as the editor and publisher of Stupefying Stories. What very few people inside the SF/F fiction bubble have known until recently is that he spent most of his career in software R&D, doing things that were fascinating to do but almost impossible to explain. What even fewer people have known is that he actually got his start in the music industry, as a composer, performer, and a member of the design team that developed MIDI, among other things, and he has an enormous repertoire of stories that begin, “This one time, this band I was in…” all of which are far too raunchy to tell in any medium his children or grandchildren might someday read.

Yes, he still has his 50-year-old cherry red Gibson SG with P-90 pickups, as well as his original 1971 ARP 2600, and he fully intends to get back to doing music, one of these days…

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