From the Indie Side (2 page)

There will soon come a day when indie authors
will be held in that same regard. One of the defining moments of my
writing career was the day I sat in a boardroom at one of the
mightiest publishers in the world and had to weigh the decision
whether to sign my work over to a major publisher. When asked how
awesome it would feel to tell people that I was now with such an
august house as this, I realized I would need to be compensated for
giving up the right to say that I was
self
-published. I
admitted that such an honor would cost the publisher dearly.

Perhaps I was getting ahead of myself, but I
truly believed that this was true. And I believe it will become
more and more true for future writers. There is no shame in
producing your own material, in breaking the rules, in writing
along the edge of convention and between the boundaries of genre.
There is nothing but honor there.

I don’t begrudge how anyone publishes, but
for me, the advantages of being independent far outweigh the
disadvantages. I own my work. I write what I want. I have a direct
relationship with my readers. My work is a passion and not a job. I
pour my heart and soul into what I write, and I don’t expect
compensation. I expect nothing. I write because that’s who I
am.

When I read indie fiction, this authenticity
oozes from the page. I encounter styles and genres that I didn’t
know existed. I hear voices that are alien to me. And when I come
across a new talent that lifts my imagination, there’s the thrill
of discovery I used to get from hearing local bands that rocked out
small venues, the excitement of seeing a film at an art house that
no one else was talking about. These were
my
people.
I
discovered them. And I couldn’t wait to share this
discovery with others.

You are about to sample some unique and
talented voices for yourself. So sit back and enjoy the ride. When
it’s over, just think about how many other adventures await, how
many unknown authors are out there, fully independent, bending the
rules while creating something extraordinary and new. There are
more every day, proud to be indie, and just waiting to be
discovered. Maybe by you.

Hugh Howey

January 2014

He has had
the coat
for many years. It is long and made of wool and is the color of
rust, with a faint herringbone pattern and smooth wooden buttons.
It doesn’t quite match his winter cap, but he doesn’t mind. The
earflaps keep his sagging ears warm, and the sheepskin lining hides
his thinning hair and pale, spotted scalp. He wears ancient gloves,
the leather softened by time, and grips a gnarled wooden cane in
one trembling hand.

He moves slowly, drawing stares as he makes
his way down the street. The crowds bustle around him in cargo
shorts and flip-flops and T-shirts. He pays them no mind. He is not
interested in their darkening suntans, their glistening skin, the
beads of perspiration on their necks. He doesn’t notice that people
watch him.

The warm spell of the last few weeks has not
broken. The old man plods on, oblivious to the heat. Sweat trickles
down his brow and collects in his unruly white eyebrows. It seeps
into the deep creases of his tired face, as if sweat has carved
those grooves over the decades. His breath comes in slow shudders.
His body is curved like a comma, his shoulders high and round, his
head tucked low. He can barely lift his eyes to see more than a few
steps ahead.

It takes him nearly two hours to hobble to
the bookstore. A streetcar runs along the avenue between the shop
and the old man’s home, a small studio apartment in a retirement
community, but he has never trusted public transportation more than
his own two feet, no matter how much they ache. He barely notices
the pain anymore.

The bookstore is older than he is, a stack of
bricks that will soon be empty. It has been marked for destruction
in just a few weeks. A notice, posted by the city, identifies the
building as structurally unsound—an unreinforced masonry building
that may be unsafe during earthquakes. The old man hasn’t felt an
earthquake in these parts in—well, in his entire life. The building
predates the war, was in fact heavily damaged by shelling, and
clumsily repaired. Over the years its walls have begun to lean,
just like the old man himself.

To bid farewell to the bookshop’s grand
legacy, its current owner—the great-grandson of the shop’s
founder—has scheduled a week-long parade of author readings.
Celebrated writers from all over the world have come to the old
man’s little borough to read from classic novels, or their own new
releases. In the gaps between these high-profile appearances on the
schedule, the owner has scheduled open-mic readings, inviting the
public to come and enjoy the opportunity to read their unpublished
works in the historic shop before it disappears forever.

The old man clutches his cane in one hand and
a sheaf of pages in the other. The papers are yellowed and old,
grown thin with age. They crackle, tied into a bundle with twine.
He has brought only a few pages—a dozen, no more—and has not given
any thought to whether his voice will permit him to read even that
much. He has nobody to talk to anymore, and has never made a habit
of talking to himself, so his voice is sometimes quiet for weeks on
end.

At the shop, a slim young woman spies him
struggling with the door and rushes to help him.

“Oh, let me assist you,” she says.

“Thank you,” he says, and his voice is not so
haggard. It sounds like rocks in a tumbler, but it is clear enough,
and even a little sonorous.

She notices the papers in his hand. “Are you
here for the readings?”

He nods. He cannot see her face—it pains him
to lift his neck so high, and he feels a bit like an old lech, for
this puts his eyes level with her breasts. She does not seem to
notice, however, and he follows her pointed finger toward the back
of the shop.

It has been hollowed out for the event, the
shelves pushed to the wall to make room for fifty or sixty aluminum
folding chairs. A velvet rope separates the gallery from the rest
of the shop, and a felt signboard reports that the Heisel reading
has just ended, and that the open readings will commence at four
o’clock.

He pauses beside the sign and pushes the cuff
of his coat away from his wrist. The bulky watch beneath reads
3:44.

The young woman appears at his side again. He
does so wish he could see her face.

“May I help you to a seat?” she asks him.

He allows her the kindness, and she seats him
in the front row—near the aisle, he suspects, so that he will be
easy to attend to if he should suddenly die. Sudden expiration is a
necessary consideration these days, and he takes care to always
wear clean shorts, just in case.

She holds his elbow as he lowers himself into
the chair with a long sigh, then crouches delicately at his
knees.

“Can I bring you some water?” she asks
him.

He knows what he must look like to her. He
can feel the thin line of sweat over his ribs, the dampness of the
loose skin beneath his jaw and chin, behind his ears. His eyebrows
are wet, and some of the sweat has sponged out of the wiry white
hair onto the bridge of his glasses. A single drop slides down the
glass, and he almost crosses his eyes focusing on it.

“Water,” he says, “would be very kind.”

She goes and returns a moment later with a
paper cup, and pats his hand.

“Can I take your coat?” she asks him. “It’s
very warm out.”

“But cool in here,” he says. “No, thank you.
I’ll keep it.”

“If you need a thing—” she begins.

He nods. “Thank you.”

He settles into the chair, shifting this way
and that until he is reasonably comfortable, and waits. He puts the
water cup, untouched, on the seat beside him, then tucks his chin
to his chest and closes his eyes.

* *
*

His name is Jonathan Froestt.

In the fall of 1958, after sending away
hundreds of copies of a short story in a plain yellow envelope, and
receiving hundreds of polite—and a few quite rude—rejection
letters, he sold his first and only short story to a pulp magazine
called
Fantastic Wonderful Tales
. The story was entitled
“The Forgotten Winter Lands.” The magazine’s editor, a patient old
fellow by the name of Abraham Gendry, had accepted the story
“despite its rudimentary properties,” as he wrote.

“Your tale is both fantastic and wonderful,”
Gendry had written, “though your writing, sadly, is neither. It’s
nothing a little editing won’t fix.”

Gendry had enclosed a check for ten dollars,
which Froestt never cashed. The story was published in the
magazine’s September issue. It had been heavily edited by Gendry
himself.

The story was about a military sniper named
John Frost. (“Clever disguise,” Gendry wrote.) In the tale, Frost
is sent into the dusky hills high above a German village with his
spotter, a soldier named Jankel. Frost and Jankel find a cliff
dense with foliage. There’s a clear line of sight to the village
church, a narrow building with a tall bell tower that overlooks a
plaza. Frost burrows into the bushes, and Jankel climbs a tree to
serve as lookout.

They’ve been assigned to take down a German
general. For days they watch the church. Intelligence suggests that
the general and his men are holed up deep inside the structure,
perhaps in a subbasement. Frost doesn’t know what the general has
done, and he doesn’t ask.

Days pass, and nobody emerges from the
church. Frost and Jankel take shifts on the cliff’s edge, sip water
from their canteens, and munch ration bars, and otherwise speak
very little. On the fourth day, Jankel’s shift at the scope
ends.

“I don’t think they’re here,” he grumbles to
Frost, who scoots into place with the rifle.

“You know our orders,” Frost says. “We
wait.”

And so they wait. But they are tired, and
Jankel falls asleep in the tree. Frost concentrates on the church,
employing his sniper’s training to slow his heart rate, his
breathing, to dim the world around him. He does not hear Jankel’s
light snores. He doesn’t feel the rain that has begun to fall. He
doesn’t feel the tiny hunger pangs in his belly. For him, there is
only the church, and nothing else in the entire world.

When Jankel awakes, Frost lies still in the
bushes. Hours pass before Jankel realizes that Frost hasn’t
stirred, even a little, for some time. He hisses at Frost, who
doesn’t answer. He climbs out of the tree and crawls to Frost’s
position, and grabs his partner by the ankle.

Frost’s boot is freezing cold, to Jankel’s
surprise. He grips both of Frost’s feet and yanks him, inch by
inch, out of the bushes. Jankel discovers, to his horror, that
Frost is frozen solid. The rifle is locked in his blue fingers.

In the story, this is an unusual development
because it is not winter. The story takes place in the peak of
summer, when it is hot enough in the German countryside that both
soldiers sweat while sitting still in the shade.

In Froestt’s original draft of “The Forgotten
Winter Lands,” Jankel abandons Frost on the hillside and returns to
base. Gendry, whose brother had served in the war, found this
unrealistic, and modified the story. In the published story, Jankel
drags Frost back to base, dodging German patrols and moving by
night. It takes two days—two days of hauling a heavy, icy corpse
across sweltering hills—but Jankel succeeds. Frost is declared dead
by a field doctor—who in both drafts seems rather unsurprised to
find that Frost has become an icicle—and his body is parked on a
gurney in the morgue tent while it waits for extraction with other
casualties.

But Frost thaws out, and when he does, he
reanimates, startling a nurse and raving about a beautiful white
snowbound world where men can be gods. “You have to let me go
back!” he yells at the medical staff. “They need me there!”

He is quarantined and interviewed by several
army doctors, and tells each the same story in almost identical
words: he quieted his body, as any good sniper does, and eventually
fell into a sort of fugue. The world blurred out around him, and
then so did the world he saw through the scope. He felt calm and
relaxed, and then, in his mind’s eye, he saw a red door. It opened,
and he went through it, and when he emerged on the other side, he
was in a white world of ice and snow and sun. He called it the land
of winter, the doctors reported, and described sparkling ice
castles that were no taller than his belly. These structures were
inhabited by very small, very human-like beings that Frost called
the Snowlings.

“Patient reports that these Snowling
creatures received him as a god, and petitioned him for help,” one
doctor reported. “Patient is clearly delusional, and I recommend a
medical discharge for psychiatric reasons.”