This was my story in the new Heroes in Hell book: Lawyers in Hell. It was commissioned for the German webzine “Zauberspeigel” and published there August 11th:
»With Enemies Like These,«
a story in Lawyers in Hell
With a basic idea of the world, I needed characters. The first was easy. One of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s quotes was personally important to me: “If a man neglect to enforce his rights he cannot complain if, after a while, the law follows his example.” So I had one character. The basic plot was one I had wanted to use for some time, and it’s a classic: two enemies forced to work together for mutual survival.
I wanted to do a little more with that plot, though. I wanted to use an opponent who was a “mirror image” of the protagonist. And so I found William Dunlop Simpson. Both were US Civil War veterans, Holmes for the Union, Simpson for the Confederacy.
Both were lawyers. Holmes became a US Supreme Court Justice. Simpson a South Carolina State Supreme Court Justice.
I had two characters and a basic plot device so I needed a setting. As I said, I wasn’t very familiar with the Heroes in Hell series so I didn’t feel comfortable working in the main settings. So I asked if I could maybe have my characters “fall into” another Hell, the Norse Niflehel with which I had some familiarity through an interest in the Asatru religion. Janet approved the idea and from that point on the story just wrote itself.
With epublishing still in its relative infancy the problem is perhaps small now but it will grow as more people “discover” it. How do we prevent the Kindle store (for instance) looking like my first reader inbox? How does the average reader sort out what they want to read from the deluge of slush.
It may be different for authors who already have published works in the double digits, who are “known” names with an established readership, but for a beginner who only has the words on the page/screen to differentiate him or her from the flood of others who have different arrangements of words on their pages/screens–some barely literate (if that), some entertaining reads, and a precious few that are “wow”?
No answers here, just questions.
*”Slush” is a term for unsolicited submissions sent to publishers and agents. Most editors of my acquaintance say that it is almost universally bad and a lot of time is spent trying to find the handful of publishable stories in the lot. This matches my own short experience as a slush reader.