AN INTERVIEW WITH AUTHOR, MS. RU EMERSON
By Phil Howell (petricles@aol.com), interviewer,
and Catherine Wilson (cmwilson@wildestdreams.c om), interviewer and photographer. All photos on this page courtesy of Catherine Wilson.
Transcribed by Bret Rudnick (brudnick@head-cfa.har vard.edu)
Content © 1997 held by author
WHOOSH! edition © 1997 held by Whoosh!
6485 words




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Ru Emerson


When Kym Taborn, editor of WHOOSH, decided to put together a 'press corps' for the Xena Convention, I had the idea that an interview with the principle author of the Boulevard Books "Xena, Warrior Princess" series would add a nice touch to WHOOSH's coverage of the convention. Kym gave me the job and I set out to track down Ms. Ru Emerson and invite her to 'do' an interview during the convention. Well, Ms. Emerson was gracious enough to say yes and here is our interview.

This interview took place late, late Saturday, January 11, 1997 in the lobby of the Burbank Airport Hilton.




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Phil interviewing Ru


PHIL HOWELL:
Here we have Ms. Ru Emerson, author of the first three "Xena, Warrior Princess" novels; "The Empty Throne", "The Huntress and the Sphinx", and the upcoming "The Thief of Hermes". First off, I would like to say congratulations on "The Empty Throne" making it into the recent issue of Locus.

RU EMERSON:
That was the neatest thing. I had not made Locus except for the collaboration with Misty Lackey ("Fortress of Frost and Fire"). And now with just my own name, boy what a high.

HOWELL:
Will it be good for your career as a Science Fiction/ Fantasy writer?

EMERSON:
It will probably do some rather nice things. My agent was beaming like a pumpkin. I could just see the light coming through the phone all the way from New York. The really neat thing is that it was "XENA" that did it for me. The fans have been so wonderful. I've never really run up against such a great bunch of people. They were already talking about trade paperback "A" list at Ace at some time in the near future. But this pretty much guarantees the next step up the ladder which I think it will be fun. And a little scary - like OK, what do we do now?

HOWELL:
How were you chosen to be the first author in the Xena, Warrior Princess series?

EMERSON:
Well, it was rather funny. My editor at Berkeley, who has edited the 14 books that I've done for them, is the senior vice president in charge of marketing now. She also knows me very well and my agent is Richard Curtis. She called Richard and said "We have these books in the office." Richard said "Fine," and my name had not quite come up. I think somebody else had been mentioned. But then they said "Well, look, who do you know that's fast and good" and "If you want somebody who can write fast, who can capture the tone of dialogue between characters on paper the way it should sound on film and you want someone who can write a hell of a mean fight scene, that's Ru Emerson." I replied, "Oh, that sounds wonderful! Yeah, I'll take it!"

HOWELL:
How many books are planned in the series besides the three you have done so far?

EMERSON:
Besides the three that I have, there's one being written under a pseudonym. This one was supposedly the first of the Young Adult books. But the publisher decided it was so dark they couldn't market it as a young adult book so it will be out after my third book under a pseudonym. I have no clue what it's about or how it's written or anything else about it, just that it's there. My understanding is that in March, Boulevard is going to be taking a look at the numbers, which obviously are pretty good, and they'll decide then if there will be more books and who's going to write them. It started out originally that I got one book. But the editor and my agent let me know that if it was OK I was going to get two more. I'm already on the editor at Boulevard's short list and on my agent's short list for doing more of them so I hope I get to.

HOWELL:
I hope so as well. Did they provide you with any type of author's guidelines, either Berkeley, Boulevard, or MCA?

EMERSON:
Berkley did not. MCA sent me their script writer's bible which was very handy. MCA also provided three videotapes and twelve scripts. Then later on, they sent me three more tapes. The bible itself was basically a resource to me because at that time I hadn't seen enough of the episodes to know them by title. It had a thumbnail sketch of each of the episodes in there. Basically the only rule they had was don't worry about the Greek mythology so much and don't worry about "thees" and "thous" because ancient Greeks talked to each other in colloquialisms just like we do, and it was important that the characters show heart. That was the center of the whole thing. So that was it. There were really no important restrictions at all.

HOWELL:
You were allowed to develop the characters as you saw fit?

EMERSON:
There is more or less an unwritten law when you do an immediate tie-in that you don't fiddle too much with the main characters. The fans consider that cheating. Considering what I got away with in the first book with Draco, at that point I figured it was like ambrosia that I could do pretty much anything I wanted as long as I put the characters back where I got them. So I pretty much ran with that. I wrote to MCA, I e-mailed them as soon as I sent them the papers and said if this bothers you, I said "I can give the warlord a different name and a different description and we'll go at it that way," but they had no problem. I loved my goofy little cook. He was one of those rare little characters ...Xena was walking down to the kitchen and I suddenly realized that she needed someone to get her in to see Draco and he was born right then and he just happened to me. I don't feel like I was responsible for him at all. He just happened.

HOWELL:
When you write do you come up with a storyline in advance or do you just work off a loose idea and let the characters grow? It sounds like you let the characters develop themselves?

EMERSON:
A lot of times I do. To me, character is the driving force of all of my writing. I will come up with a loose plot idea on my own and then sit down and figure out who the characters are, where they came from, and I might go down to what color underwear they wear and what they eat for breakfast before I start writing. With the Xena books I had a little more of an outline on each of them, but things will come in mid-book, half-way through, three-quarters of the way through in characterization that surprise the heck out of me. I just had no clue these people were going to be in there. So it's more character building, but I always do start out with a beginning, a middle, and an end, at least, and sometimes more than that in the way of structure.

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Ru at the interview


HOWELL:
"The Empty Throne" is a Xena centered novel whereas "The Huntress and the Sphinx" is a Gabrielle centered novel. Why?

EMERSON:
I concentrated more on Gabrielle in the second one because I felt like I'd short-changed her in the first one. The problem was when I got the first book I was done with it in December of last year. So at that point I had not even seen BEWARE OF GREEKS BEARING GIFTS (#12). I was not even aware that she'd had a costume change. I had the script, but the script doesn't show you these things. So I really thought that I had short-changed her a lot. Also in the second book Xena was not talking to me much. My editor at Boulevard said "You know you really should not have been keeping this big secret. What's the problem between Atalanta and Xena?" I said, "Barry, I asked them and they both looked at me and said 'It's none of your business honey'." I got on with it at that point. I tried. Xena was keeping her own counsel in that one.

HOWELL:
Xena is such an interesting character. A good novel totally devoted to her own internal dialogue would be very interesting. Possible?

EMERSON:
There's a little more of both of them, they stir it up more in the third book. So you get a little more inside Xena's head and I think a little more inside Gabrielle's head. I'm feeling more at this point if I get a fourth book that I would like to do more with getting inside Xena. The first book I was trying to avoid getting too far inside her head and then have people who really watch every episode, get back to me and say, "Xena would never say that."

HOWELL:
They can't argue with you.

EMERSON:
It's true, but they do. I got a very angry letter from a woman all the way from England, a self-described spinster when I did "Beauty and the Beast" who sent three pages of very expensive air-mail telling me "Vincent would not have said that," and why "Catherine would NEVER have thought that!" If I do get the fourth book, which I would like to set in Egypt, then I think we would be doing a lot more...I think it will be more Xena.

---

Phil


HOWELL:
There's been a lot of Xena fan fiction written lately.

EMERSON:
I understand there has been.

HOWELL:
What would be your guidance for someone who was writing fan fiction and wanted to try marketing it?

EMERSON:
Well, my first advice to anybody who wants to write professionally is: write a lot and read everything you can. Then, write a lot more. Especially for something like this and especially for a publisher as big as Berkeley or any of its subsidiaries. The winnowing out process is going to be hellish and harsh. If you've got two typos on the first page, if you've got three grammar errors in the first chapter, if it's not set up exactly right, if your printer is an old nine-pin, you're going to get it kicked back and you'll never know why. Hone it as well as you can, get as much feedback on it as you can. If you think it's good enough, then write to Boulevard and ask them if they are accepting submissions and ask them for guidelines. Send a self-addressed stamped envelope. They will let you know if they're taking anything. A lot of their stuff is agent-only. But this might not be, I just don't know. But it's certainly as good a place to start as anything.

I understand from several people I've talked to that the fan fiction, some of it, is quite good.

HOWELL:
Yes, some of it is good. When STAR TREK came back in 1971 as a syndicated re-run its popularity took off. Gene Roddenberry at that time released the scripts and the first STAR TREK books were actually a re-write of the original scripts. Has anybody ever mentioned anything to you about MCA doing that with Xena?

EMERSON:
When I wrote "The Beauty and the Beast" it was based on three scripts with a little bit of stuff tying it together. Those did not do well because most of the fans I met wanted to do their own fan fiction. With regards to Xena, no, they haven't mentioned anything to me, but then the writer is the last one to know. I personally think that would be a big hit with this series. But, I haven't heard any thing specific. And yes, I would love a chance to do something like that.

HOWELL:
May I ask a pointed question?

EMERSON:
Okaayyyy.

HOWELL:
Why is Argo a male horse in "The Huntress and the Sphinx"?

EMERSON:
The main reason is because when I started working on the first book, I got MCA on the phone and I said "Look, this is important, I just can't say 'the' horse. The horse is an integral part of the show, and also I don't work that way. There is this ongoing character of a horse then obviously it is 'he' or 'she', and it is mare or stallion or gelding or whatever and I gotta know this. It's a stallion, right?" They said "Oh, yeah, it's a male."

HOWELL:
Argo started out on the TV series as a male horse.

EMERSON:
That's it, and if you ask Rob Field about this he will go absolutely incandescent because he spent weeks writing e-mail to New Zealand, "Will you get it straight, it's a mare, d*mm*t!" I didn't know, and when I found out when the book first came out I got a couple pieces of e-mail, immediately phoned my editor at Boulevard and I said "I will send you pages, can you hold the printer long enough for me to get these to you?" But, I haven't gone through and read "The Huntress and the Sphinx" yet. I'm hoping he caught them all. Because that was really embarrassing. Now we know if you want an answer to a question on the show you go to the fans.

HOWELL:
To change the subject, are you working on anything other than Xena right now?

EMERSON:
Right now with the three Xena books out the door and the waiting period, I'm working on a collaboration with A. C. Crispin. It will be my first published science fiction and the seventh book in her "Starbridge" series. I'm writing them, oh, about twenty years more advanced than we are. They're very proud. They look rather like cheetahs but they're probably very Italian Renaissance-- think Borgia, think Medici.

HOWELL:
I wanted to ask a couple of questions concerning collaborations and about how difficult they can be, how there can lie many pitfalls for the writers. What about that?

EMERSON:
There are. You really have to have the ground rules straight from the start. Now when I wrote the collaboration with Mercedes Lackey it was a piece of cake because she had done a lot of things. She picked me for "A Bard's Tale: The Fortress of Frost and Fire". They sent me all the information on the world then she sent me an outline. I wrote the first draft, she went through it, found two things which did not match with the world and we sent it in. She set up the whole premise and wrote the outline, I wrote the first draft, then we cleaned it up together.

The one I'm working on now with Ann Crispin, we haven't quite...it took us awhile to figure out exactly what we wanted. The problem was that I had read all of the "Starbridge" books. But Ann, of course, invented the world, so it's hard to really be up on everything. She kept saying "No, I want this to be YOUR book, I don't want to mess with it," but this was a collaboration. So now that we've got that straight we're working very well together. But they all vary.

HOWELL:
No set pattern?

EMERSON:
No set patterns. Somebody told me about that the "Executioner" books, which are written by two people. The first person would write the first half of the book, put the guy into such a fix that he couldn't even blink, then hand it to the other writer to get him out.

HOWELL:
How much does a story take over your life?

EMERSON:
It kind of depends on what the story is. With the Xena books, I was fairly well immersed. But I still had a pretty good grip on reality. The last book of my "Night Bridge" series that I wrote had me in pretty much of a hammerlock. But that was partly trying to tie together all the loose ends from five previous books and get the whole series tied up so that I could leave it behind. The third book of my first trilogy was really a gut-wrencher and I found out later that I put more of my personal bits in it than I would ever have done if I'd known I was doing that. Ordinarily by the time I get down to the last third of a book Doug just figures on cooking his own soup for dinner and tapping me on the shoulder occasionally and saying "Hi, have you eaten lately?"

HOWELL:
Were you ever a member of a writers group or a writers workshop?

EMERSON:
I never did that, no. I was entirely too shy about myself. I was working in Century City as a legal secretary to an associate lawyer so twenty hour days were not uncommon. I'd go home to Venice Beach, eat dinner, go run on the beach, go back in the house, close the door to the office, turn on the IBM Selectric and start writing. I said "I will come out of this room and announce that's what I'm doing when I sell a book." I did that. I wrote the first trilogy, sent it out, got it back, set it aside, started something new. It was actually my fifth book that finally sold and I was up in Oregon by then. My editor went back and bought that first trilogy.

I had no idea there were conventions, I'd never been to one. My first, NorWest Con, was a genuine eye-opening experience. I had no idea any of that existed. I didn't know about fandom, I didn't know any of that. I'd never even heard of Locus magazine until my editor wrote to me and said "You ought to buy this." That's probably not the best way to get yourself published. I was very bloody-minded and I was also very shy. I knew if anybody looked at my stuff and turned me down to my face it would be like acting. That's when I was twenty and I was going to become an actor. If somebody'd say "Well, that's not very good is it", I'd think "Oh, that's right, I can't do this, let's junk the typewriter," and go back to work.

HOWELL:
Holly Lisle once said: "If you go home at night, and you hate yourself and you never want to write again, a writer's group is not for you."

EMERSON:
That's it. I only joined a writer's group when there came a time...there was a local one set up in Dallas, Oregon, which is population ten thousand, and at that point I thought "Well, I've got eight books now, if I don't come join this group then they're going to think that I'm an insufferable snob." They were nice people. I brought in a couple of things I was working on. There's this story that's in "Sisters in Fantasy" Volume Two now. So I took it to the writers group and I read it and I said "OK, anybody have any ideas?" And what I got back was "AAAAAHHHHHH! You're a writer, we can't criticize you!" No, no, no, no, this isn't working. Basically I just ran out of time after awhile but even then I would take things and I'd be very nervous. I only read murder mysteries when I'm writing fantasy.

HOWELL:
How did you get hooked up with A.C.Crispin?

EMERSON:
It was again my lovely editor at Berkeley. She's the one who edited the "Starbridge" series. When Ann came in with that, my editor had been trying to find a book to get me known as a science-fiction writer. You know how the business is, they know I'm a fantasy writer therefore that's all I can write. So she's been trying to get me some kind of a book to get me into writing science-fiction so that she can buy my one space opera and this seemed to her to be appropriate occasion for it. That was basically how that came about. The other is that Ann and I have known each other for a long time and we just kind of talked about it, it would be kind of fun to do something.

HOWELL:
Are collaborations usually put together by the publisher or are they sometimes put together by the authors?

EMERSON:
It depends. When Misty did the "Bard's Tale" series, they said "OK, who do you want to work with" and she said "Duh duh duh" and they said "Hey, cool with us." Ann Crispin has picked all of her own writers. She did the first one alone. Then she picked three novices, people that hadn't been published before. The people that Ann worked with, it just didn't work out well, having somebody who had never professionally written a book before and dealt with publishers and editors and deadlines. So they were all way past deadline and this time when they bought the book they said "Fine, we will buy more books because the series is very popular but you must work with someone who's turned out some books and has a track record." So that was how that came about. I guess she had me on the short list for one anyway.

CATHERINE WILSON:
Did you start writing when you were a child?

EMERSON:
Yes. I used to hide notebooks between the mattress and the bedsprings and my mother would never know that I wrote. I started reading at about age three. I literally can't remember when I couldn't read. I started writing my own things when I was about eight.

I think I was about twelve when the TV series WAGON TRAIN came on. I just dated myself wonderfully. Yes, lovely black and white stuff, it was STAR TREK with sagebrush. It really was, you had an ensemble cast, you had a captain and the navigator and the whole bit and it was very, very people-oriented. I used to write my own stories for that, originally. Then I wrote short stories in High School for the paper, a bunch of Hitchcock-type short shorts with really warped endings. I went off to college and I got really caught up in opera and acting and dance. I thought, "OK, one of these three and this writing thing's cool but I can't find anything I really want to write." At that point in time I had not...I think I'd heard of science fiction, but I'm not really sure.

My parents were 50's parents who were born in the 20's and science fiction was "that junk." It was pulp paperback. My mother was embarrassed to be caught reading a paperback Ellery Queen murder mystery. You'd catch her reading a "Perry Mason" in paperback and she was embarrassed. Not because it was Perry Mason but because it was a paperback. I didn't do anything with it for at least ten years after college.

Then I found my Doug and we went on a vacation, we went back to my old high school. I walk in, and it's the middle of the summer, walk into one of my old classrooms and here's my old English teacher and my journalism instructor. He looked up and I said "You won't remember me," and he said "No, you're Ru Emerson, and you wrote all those good short stories for the paper and what are you writing now?" I kind of went "Huh?"

In the same month, coincidentally, I had gone into the library and found a lovely paperback sitting on the shelf called "Moon of Three Rings" by Andre Norton. I took it home and I went back the next day and I said "Hi, this is really good, has he written anything else?" After the librarian picked herself up off the floor and said "Well, there's about seventy of them over here, yes SHE has." It took about another year, year and a half, and all of a sudden I was borrowing a friend's typewriter.

WILSON:
Is that what grabbed you?

EMERSON:
What really grabbed me was I had read Tolkien years earlier, and I'm a history junkie. I'm not formally educated in history but I'm a history junkie, I will read any and all. I started with Plantagenet England and just went anywhere from there that looked good. The idea that you could create your own entire history of a people and just build it from scratch was just the most wonderful thing I had ever heard of because nobody else does that. And it was just a whole new vista to me. The scales came off the eyes, "Wow I didn't know you could do that."

I started reading Ann McAffrey's "Dragons", Andre Norton's "Witchworld", and suddenly I realized that while it might not be terribly easy, it could be more accessible. That was when I came up with my own first created world and it just snowballed right from there.

WILSON:
Are you online?

EMERSON:
Yes, I'm on AOL.

WILSON:
How important is that in terms of communicating?

EMERSON:
It's really been important since I moved to Oregon because I live seven miles out of town, west of a very small logging and milling town of ten thousand. Now it's gotten a lot looser especially since we became a bedroom community a couple years ago. But when I first moved up there and went to vote they had to pull the Democrat's registration book out from under the table, and boy did they look embarrassed. So it's been very nice the past three years that I've had it, to be able to send and get mail instantly. Sometimes I'll get snowed in up there for a week, and that's handy. But especially since I started doing the Xena books it's been absolutely wonderful at three o'clock in the morning to get on there and send e-mail or a note to somebody "Hey, I need to know such-and-such". At one point it was, "What was that dessert that she had in WARRIOR...PRINCESS (#15), did they have a name for that?" Somebody got back to me twelve hours later with all the stuff I needed!

WILSON:
Are you on any of the mailing lists?

EMERSON:
No, I'm not. You see, what happens is I go to Lucia Correa and Lucia kind of filters things for me. So I don't get something that's going to leave me thinking "Ahh!" She asks the question and tells whoever it is to get directly in touch with me. It works a lot easier for me.

WILSON:
Did the publishers give you a particular target audience for the Xena novels? Did they say this age group, this gender?

EMERSON:
No, not really. They just said "adult books". I think maybe the woman who's writing the young adult books got a few more guidelines than I did. She didn't really say. At one point I heard from her, she wanted to know what the horse's name was, and I said "Sweetie, do you need me to send you scripts, tapes, I got all this stuff from them." She said "I got it, I'm just not sure I want to plow through it." I got back to her and said "Reality check. If you don't go through it they will crucify you. And you will deserve it."

HOWELL:
Obviously its more difficult to write fan-oriented novelizations?

EMERSON:
It is, it really is. My own writing, people can pick a bone with me of "Why did you do this" and "Arg, I can't believe you killed that person" and "What kind of a sicko are you, you killed the baby!" All of which I've gotten, but they can't really get to me and say "So-and-so would never say or do this, how come you did that?" It's that, if you're serious about writing about a show it's not just you don't want to get that kind of mail, you want people to read it and feel good about it the way they feel about watching the show. Maybe not the same kind of good or the same degree of good, but "Yeah, this is the same stuff." That's what you want. So it was very important to me to get it right.

WILSON:
How much do you write before you rewrite?

EMERSON:
Usually I try to write at least three and a half chapters before I go back and do any cleaning up on the early stuff. Usually at that point I changed something secondary that I have to go back and fix the initial part of it. Generally by the time I get down to the last three or four chapters it doesn't need rewrite at all before it goes in. I'll go as far as the first half and do a full cleanup on that and then from that point on it's blessed. The first one I spec'ed with about a three page outline. I knew basically where things were going and I got about, oh, about a third of the way through, I started doing a chapter...just a thumbnail of the start of each chapter - OK, this chapter they're going to have to accomplish this. By this chapter, they're going to have to accomplish this.

The one I'm working on right now with Ann Crispin is a little more tight than that in that in order to get it as tight as it needed to be I've actually got the old squares marked off on a piece of paper and I've plotted it out by chapter. The fifth and sixth of the "Night Threads" book I not only plotted out by chapter and about ten pages of more detailed outline, but at the front of each chapter when I went into WordStar and opened a chapter up I would put about thirty lines of what had to happen at the very head of the chapter. I'd write whatever part that was, go up and delete the sentence, then write the next part, delete the sentence, by chapter. If it gets very very complex like the fifth or sixth book of a series or the third book of a trilogy, yeah, I get it to that point because at that point the characters want's to grab me and run.

WILSON:
How far do you run with it? Do you ever go back and change parts?

EMERSON:
I did with "The Sword and the Lion", a "Roberta Cray" pseudonym. I had one boy, a ten year-old boy, and in the original book that I wrote back in 1986, he was just determined he was going to come in and take over. I said "No, you're not, the main character is this younger woman who's been chosen by the goddess as a warrior to be a part of a bond with your father who is actually a seasoned fighting veteran." This is a protective situation where he's older, his reflexes aren't as fast. She's his daughter, they're going to protect each other, like the Spartan pairs. The boy just kept trying to get his nose in there. I said "Gem, butt out, you're a minor character. You're a very minor character." Well he kept insisting and I finally just decided to go with that. He turned out to be extremely important. I'm glad I let him go where he went.

WILSON:
Do you sometimes feel like you're channeling characters?

EMERSON:
I've never really gotten quite that far. I'm very pragmatic. But occasionally I do feel kind of like some part of my brain needs to be re-hardwired. Especially after I finish a project like that one, because a couple of the characters caught me by surprise.

WILSON:
What do you do when a character in a plot needs to do a particular thing and you begin to know that character and you realize that they don't want to do that?

EMERSON:
In that case I either do something with the plot or I have to go back and put a glitch in the character. I have a classic example of that - "Night Threads" Book Four. Jennifer, who is my one heroine, and is more like me than anybody else I've ever done. She's very pragmatic, she's very straightforward, and very athletic, but she's got this kind of temper that will get her in trouble because she will rush to the aid of anybody that she is very fond of, and she will only consider the problems later, or if somebody p*sses her off, then she is going to flatten them, and only later she'll think "Gee, that was really stupid."

She was in a situation where it was almost a classic girl baby -sitter going into the basement after five other baby-sitters have been hacked to pieces and she hears a funny noise and the lights just went out. Well I knew d*mn well that Jennifer would never do anything like that, this was just completely off the wall. No way. But if it were a situation where she knew that somebody had a contract out on her husband and if she had just been told that the person who had put the contract out on him had just been captured down in the dining room trying to off him, her first reaction would be "Let me out, I'm going to go cream that son of a b*tch!" And she does. And she's out of there! But it was a case where I went at that situation from five different angles, because I knew there was nothing I could do to Jennifer that would make her stupid. So I had to fix the situation so it would be something within her character to do that. It would be logical. I very seldom let the plot dictate to me.

WILSON:
Good.

EMERSON:
It's more a case of if this is a serious conflict between the characters and the plot, then the plot is going to get reworked.

WILSON:
Do you have an agent that you always go to?

EMERSON:
I do. I had an agent early on who was not a good one. Actually he was a good one, he was just not the agent I should have had because he didn't understand that I was willing to go and work very hard and do three novels a year if that was what it took. I type very fast, I think reasonably fast, and I can work fast. I tried to get him to do a couple of things for me and he said he had and he hadn't. Which basically set me back two years at least in my career. So now I've got Richard Curtis who is extremely good.

As to how to get one, it's getting tougher, there's so many of them out there that will charge you money to read manuscripts, which is not a good idea. I think that "Writer's Digest" has put a list of agents in the back of their guides to publishers. The best thing to do is go through that list to see who they publish that is similar enough to what YOU do. Or if there's a pattern there of the kind of thing that yes, I would like to write this, or yes, I think this person would like me. Find out which ones will take open submissions without charging you an arm and a leg to read a manuscript and then send them a letter and ask them if they will take on new clients.

The other really good way to do it, I found that worked for me anyway, my third book, which I did unagented, the third one I went to the guy and I said "OK, they're willing to talk contract at this point on this third book, do you want to represent me for this one and then we can see how we get on?" Most agents are willing to do that. It's getting incredibly hard to find one. I've been telling people if you can find enough open markets for what you do, sell it first without an agent. As long as you're dealing with a big New York publisher and they don't try to tap you for four books, which most of them won't, then generally they're not going to try to screw you over because it comes back on them. Either you'll get an agent and your agent will take you away and you'll sell a bestseller somewhere else, or it will get around that these people are really playing dirty.

When I was working with Writer's Digest Guild as an instructor I used to tell my students do not go to XYZ publisher in Chicago. You don't want to be with the guys that say "Well, we'll publish your book if you do half these promo appearances for free" and things like this. These are the guys that will write you a horrible contract. You'll be years trying to get the manuscript back because they won't publish it. Also if you send it out yourself you can go to all of the publishers that say "simultaneous submissions permitted." You can get it out there a lot faster because your agent can only send it to one person at a time unless he's trying to send it through auction.

It'll still take two months, at least. What I did with the first one I tried to sell was I made myself an "A" list and a "B" list. The "A" list was people like Ace, Daw, Bantam, Dell, the really good ones. I figured if the book is good enough it will sell to these people. If it's not, I need to rewrite it. Then I had the secondary list. Well, after several tries, the fifth book that I wrote, finally I sent it to Ace and everybody and I got it back, with some letters, and then I sent it to my second list which included Charter House. At Charter House the editor actually got it because it was a smaller house with a smaller slush pile. She got it on her desk and sent me a nice letter saying "Hi, we're not buying this any more but I liked it so much I handed it over to Ginger Buchanan over at Ace." She bought it. So it works.

WILSON:
Thank you very much.

HOWELL:
Thank you for a wonderful interview, Ru Emerson!

EMERSON:
It was very interesting, thank you. You should know better than to get a writer talking.



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Ru Emerson



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