Book of Dreams: the Missing Stories
Mariane Desautels
>
> Here's something that should be in an FAQ somewhere, but isn't. Have all the
> stories that were left out of Sandman: Book of Dreams been published
> elsewhere yet?
Some have. I've read two on the net.
> Which were those stories? And why the heck were they left
> out?
Info at http://www.sff.net/people/karawynn/delirium.htp
Mariane
lucy...@geocities.com
stories that were left out of Sandman: Book of Dreams been published
out?
Lucy Anne
lucy...@yahoo.com
--
When money talks I hate to listen/
but lately it's been screaming in my ear.
- Ben Folds
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jin...@hotmail.com
desautel...@videotron.ca wrote:
> lucy...@geocities.com wrote:
> >
> > Here's something that should be in an FAQ somewhere, but isn't. Have all the
> > stories that were left out of Sandman: Book of Dreams been published
> > elsewhere yet?
>
>
> > out?
>
I've read the two, and explainations were given at the sites. They are both
wonderful, and speaking of "Book Of Dreams" Luna, you left it at my house.
Jinx213
who had Luna over for ice cream today
Luna Vudu
>and speaking of "Book Of Dreams" Luna, you left it at my house.
oops.
foolishly, luna
"Oh, pretty boy, can't you show me nothing but surrender?"
eami...@longwood.lwc.edu
> lucy...@geocities.com wrote:
> > Here's something that should be in an FAQ somewhere, but isn't. Have all the
> > stories that were left out of Sandman: Book of Dreams been published
> > elsewhere yet?
> Some have. I've read two on the net.
There's also Jane Yolen's Godmother Death, which was rewritten a bit (she took
out an ankh reference) and it's in one of those Terri Windling/Ellen Daltow
adult fairy tale collections...the third or fourth one, I believe. I don't
recall the title of it off the top of my head. There was five, wasn't there?
So this accounts for three.
Eden
lucy...@geocities.com
jin...@hotmail.com wrote:
> In article <35FC8C...@POLLUTIONvideotron.ca>,
> > lucy...@geocities.com wrote:
> > > Have all the
> > > stories that were left out of Sandman: Book of Dreams been published
> > > elsewhere yet?
> >
> > Some have. I've read two on the net.
If they are the same two stories I read, they are definitely worth taking a
look at! (runs into the other room to grab S:BoD) The dedication for the book
is to Harlan Ellison, Jane Yolen, Martha Soukup, and Charles DeLint. Now I
know that the Soukup story was left out; it was reprinted in another
anthology with some slight changes; it still works, IMHO. (Forgive me if
you're reading this, Martha, but I have forgotten both the title of the story
and the anthology - please help!). I'm trying to find out if the other
authors in the dedication had their stories printed elsewhere, too.
Lucy Anne
lucy...@yahoo.com
--
When money talks I hate to listen/
but lately it's been screaming in my ear.
- Ben Folds
-----== Posted via Deja News, The Leader in Internet Discussion ==-----
lucy...@geocities.com
> Now I
> know that the Soukup story was left out; it was reprinted in another
> anthology with some slight changes; it still works,
And I finally got my copy of where it was back...
The anthology is called _Starlight 1_, and it's edited by P.N. Hayden.
(_Starlight_ 2 is due out in October, BTW)
The missing S:BoD story is called _Waking Beauty_ by Martha Soukop. In the
About the Authors section it mentions it was withdrawn when DC insisted on a
work-for-hire contract, which probably answers the "why are the stories
missing?" question.
It's worth looking for.
-lucy anne (who is having formating problems with her computer - sorry)
---
Martha Soukup
> > Now I
> > know that the Soukup story was left out; it was reprinted in another
> > anthology with some slight changes; it still works,
>
> And I finally got my copy of where it was back...
>
> The anthology is called _Starlight 1_, and it's edited by P.N. Hayden.
>
> (_Starlight_ 2 is due out in October, BTW)
>
> The missing S:BoD story is called _Waking Beauty_ by Martha Soukop. In the
> About the Authors section it mentions it was withdrawn when DC insisted on a
> work-for-hire contract, which probably answers the "why are the stories
> missing?" question.
>
> It's worth looking for.
>
> -lucy anne (who is having formating problems with her computer - sorry)
The three other authors Neil mentions in the apology in the book also
refused to sign the work-made-for-hire contract. It was sprung on all of
us; Neil did his best to get the original deal back, but DC wouldn't. So
we walked. Jane's story, "Godmother Death", was also published. Can't
say offhand about de Lint's and Ellison's.
(I have a story in _Starlight 2_, too, by the way--)
Martha
Monkysquat
>From: sou...@genie.com (Martha Soukup)
>Date: 9/30/98 12:31 AM Eastern Daylight Time
>Message-id: <soukup-2909...@ppp-asfm04--188.sirius.net>
This has piqued my curiosity. A feat in itself considering my progressing
state of jadedness(is this even a word?). I won't pretend to know anything
about publishing and or its various contracts because I know precious little.
Martha could you please explain the ins and outs of this deal and why it was
such a bad thing? I'm only partway thru the afore mentioned book of dreams
but I had noticed that some of the names used in the early solicitations were
absent in the final product.
Ivory (damned multiple personalities)
Martha Soukup
monky...@aol.com (Monkysquat) wrote:
> >
> >The three other authors Neil mentions in the apology in the book also
> >refused to sign the work-made-for-hire contract. It was sprung on all of
> >us; Neil did his best to get the original deal back, but DC wouldn't. So
> >we walked. Jane's story, "Godmother Death", was also published. Can't
> >say offhand about de Lint's and Ellison's.
> >
> >(I have a story in _Starlight 2_, too, by the way--)
> >
> > Martha
>
> This has piqued my curiosity. A feat in itself considering my progressing
> state of jadedness(is this even a word?). I won't pretend to know anything
> about publishing and or its various contracts because I know precious little.
> Martha could you please explain the ins and outs of this deal and why it was
> such a bad thing? I'm only partway thru the afore mentioned book of dreams
> but I had noticed that some of the names used in the early solicitations were
> absent in the final product.
>
> Ivory (damned multiple personalities)
Any writer owns copyright to anything he or she writes, ethically and by
the law of the land. What is normally sold in the publishing world is
publication rights. For an original short story, a writer expects to sell
First North American Serial Rights, if it's to a magazine, or just First
North American Rights to an anthology, or non-exclusive publication rights
to a reprint.
A contract may add extra fillips to this: it's not uncommon for an author
to agree not to publish a story anywhere else for two years after the
story sees print, say (usually with exceptions made for single-author
collections or best-of-the-year anthologies). A magazine editor may buy a
non-exclusive option to reprint the story in a future anthology made from
the anthology, or to use it in foreign editions of the magazine; a book
editor may buy non-exclusive rights to use the story in foreign editions
of the anthology.
Comic books, by contrast, are traditionally work-made-for-hire (WMFH).
The author is paid a lump sum for all rights to the script, and possibly
to the characters and other innovations in the story. The writer may or
may not be paid a royalty if the work sells well. (The writer of a
regularly-sold story may or may not be paid a royalty, too. Details can
always be messed with in contracts.)
A solicitation letter was sent out over Neil's signature (but he didn't
write it--or, his co-editor didn't use the letter Neil wrote) based on
Neil's agreement with the book publisher and DC: we were invited to submit
stories for the Sandman anthology. We were granted the right to use
DC-owned characters in the story. The stories would remain ours.
But DC changed the rules midstream. When we finally got publisher word
about the stories Neil had accepted (it'd been maybe a year since he read
and decided to buy mine), we got a letter from Neil's co-editor attached
to a contract from DC. The letter said we had to sign the contract as a
sort of release so we could get a contract from the book publisher, and a
lot of writers just signed it without particularly reading it.
I read it. It was a WMFH contract. Imagine my surprise.
Now, you have to understand this little but significant detail about WMFH
work: legally, WMFH is contracted for _before_ it is written. The buyer
and writer agree to what's to be written. The writer agrees to write it,
the buyer agrees to pay for it. (If it's not satisfactory when it's
turned in, the buyer may pay a kill fee instead of the whole contracted
fee.)
Regular freelance work, not for hire, is written on spec: speculatively.
The writer writes it at her own risk, and shops it around to people who
can take or leave it. In return for this she _owns_ it.
So here's this contract, and it says I have _agreed to write_ a story
called "Waking Beauty" for the Sandman anthology. And that when I write
it (which I did, a year before), it'll be the full property of DC Comics.
They'll pay me some royalties if the book earns out. They'll pay me some
utterly unspecified fees if the story is exploited in various ways, like
being turned into a television episode or something. They'll let me have
it reprinted in a best-of or my own collection, and they feel darn
generous for that, but otherwise, it's theirs, they own it, that's it.
They own the characters in the story, they own everything.
I couldn't believe this!
1) I was in possession of a solicitation letter over Neil's signature that
solicited a story, without promising to buy it, and said nothing about
WMFH. (Not Neil's fault--that was his understanding.)
2) I had written the story on spec, no guarantee they'd buy it. (Other
stories had been rejected.)
3) I hardly used any DC-owned characters: the book's title dude appeared
in a half-page cameo, but the rest of it was totally my kind of story,
which is what Neil said he wanted from me anyway, just one that touched on
the themes and the kind of fantasy he'd done in Sandman. I couldn't
imagine anyone from DC wanting to exploit my original characters, but it
didn't mean I wanted to give them away.
4) The payment was ten cents a word, which is, alas, rather good for a
prose anthology, but no kind of compensation at all for WMFH. When you
sell your baby instead of just renting its services, you get more
compensation. By comparison, at the time, DC was paying new writers
~$2000 for a Vertigo comic-book script. My story would have sold for
about $350. (I turned around and sold the story, minus the Sandman
character's walk-on, for the same ten cents a word, First NA rights only.)
5) I would have perjured myself to sign the contract! I would have been
declaring, contractually, that I'd agreed to produce a WMFH, and then
written it, when in fact of course the story had been written long since,
on spec. And I don't like lying in a contract. I sort of refuse to do
it.
There you go. More Than You Needed To Know.
I tried to strike a compromise with DC, with Neil's backing: sell them the
DC version of the story, retain rights to a version of the story rewritten
(and it took almost no rewriting) to eliminate DC-owned characters or
settings. But they said their lawyers wouldn't go for it (which could
just mean, We don't want to). They did at least pay me a kill fee. Petty
cash for them, but for a short-story writer, money.
Martha
Mute
>There you go. More Than You Needed To Know.
Hardly. Well, not much more than I already knew, but not an
excessive explication of a) work-for-hire, or b) your specific
circumstances in this instance. Do you happen to know of other writers
who signed without reading and were significantly upset about it
afterwards?
Mute.
Martha Soukup
> sou...@genie.com (Martha Soukup) wrote:
>
> >There you go. More Than You Needed To Know.
>
> Hardly. Well, not much more than I already knew, but not an
> excessive explication of a) work-for-hire, or b) your specific
> circumstances in this instance. Do you happen to know of other writers
> who signed without reading and were significantly upset about it
> afterwards?
I know of writers who signed misunderstanding what they were signing and
were eeyoreish about it afterward, but as most of them had written stories
so DC-involved there was nothing else they could do with the stories when
DC changed the rules on them, they took a c'est la vie attitude.
I thought more of the writers should've been upset. Writers are used to
getting squat for short fiction, but getting squat =/= you should just
give all rights to a rich corporation.
Martha