Besides doing other work for the Marvel line (which was always edited by another of Byron’s editors on staff, either Steven A. I do a draft in two days, give it to John, he takes it, rewrites it from the ground up, gives it back to me, I rewrite it from the ground up, we both take a final look at it, and the end result is “An Evening in the Bronx with Venom,” and that’s how I broke into writing media tie-in writing.īeing an editor also helped me with my other early sales, mostly because the job put me in touch with people in a position to hire me to write stuff. At this stage, it’s too late to even hire another writer, and I offer to write the Venom story. John left Byron in late 1994, and I took over the project solo, but he and I worked together on those first two books. Now for this project, I started out as the assistant, working for John Gregory Betancourt (guru of Wildside Press, among other things). In desperation, we ask the editor in question what he wanted to see in a Venom story. It’s now past the eleventh hour, and we need a Venom story because a) the character’s on the cover and b) Venom was by far Spidey’s most popular villain in 1994. The person at Marvel doing the approving was an assistant editor in the Spider-Man office, and he rejected six different Venom proposals that we sent in by six different authors. I should explain that the process for every media tie-in work is as follows: the writer comes up with a story first, and that story outline has to be approved by both the editor at the publishing company who has the rights to the property and (more importantly) by the people who own the property, in this case Marvel Comics.
We had stories featuring three of those four foes, but we did not have a Venom story.
The project kicked off in the fall of 1994 with a Spider-Man novel ( The Venom Factor, first of an eventual trilogy by Diane Duane) and a Spider-Man anthology ( The Ultimate Spider-Man, which predated Marvel’s “Ultimate” line by six years).įor the latter, we had the cover done before any of the stories even came in (it was kind of a rush project), which featured Spider-Man and four of his foes.
Dr marlow anesidora series#
One of the projects I worked on for Byron was a series of novels and short story anthologies featuring Marvel superheroes. However, in the interests of answering Alana’s question, here’s how I broke in: as an editor.įrom September 1993 to May 1998 I was on the editorial staff at Byron Preiss Visual Publications and Byron Preiss Multimedia Company, and then I went freelance, continuing to work for Byron on and off between May 1998 and April 1999. You ask any ten writers how they broke in, you’ll get a dozen answers. There’s no “right” way to do it, there’s certainly not one way to do it. I’m running it again seven years later, as it still applies…įirst of all, there’s no good way to answer the question of how you break into writing, whether it’s writing tie-ins, writing mysteries, writing newspaper/web site articles, or whatever.
After I mentioned my Stargate SG-1 novel Kali’s Wrath on Twitter, Alana Dill asked me how I wound up “in a position to be paid essentially 4 writing fanfic.” I couldn’t answer that in a tweet, so I replied on my blog. This is a piece I wrote on my LiveJournal in April 2015.
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