Bill Schafer has asked me to sound off once a month in this space, and it’ll be my pleasure to oblige. I’ll give you a little bit of everything in this column—tales of the publishing business, advice for those of you trying to carve out writing careers (the kind dispensed in Mr. Fox and Other Feral Tales), reviews of books and movies, and other good stuff. Whatever we talk about, it’s my hope that Harvesting the Darkness will provide you with a moment’s diversion, and maybe even some material for cerebral chewing once that moment has passed.

This time out, I’ve got a tale from the writer’s side of the fence. So mind the barbed-wire, climb on over, and let’s get down to it.

2006 was a very good one for me as a writer. I’d had a dry spell between novels, and that changed last Halloween when a new book appeared under my byline. Dark Harvest was a tale of horror’s favorite holiday, taking place on the night itself in a small town choked with shadows.

It was a short book. Weighed in at 39,000 words, which is closer to an old-fashioned Gold Medal crime novel than one of those bestselling bricks you can use for a doorstop. But that was okay with me. Dark Harvest was a book with my name on the cover and no one else’s; it had chapters; it had your requisite beginning, middle, and end. It was—wonder of wonders—a novel.

Like I said, it had been a long time since I’d written one of those. The truth is I’d gotten gun shy about so much as trying to write one. Oh, I could still manage to turn out novellas and short stories, but somewhere along the line the idea of tackling writing’s big monster just plain froze me up.

Which was strange. I’d written five novels, and I’d had it pretty good. Hey, I couldn’t even complain about the work-for-hire novel I wrote. The Crow: Wicked Prayer made the jump to the movie screen… or the DVD box, anyway. Either way, I banked a nice check as a result.

But when it came to following up that book, I figured I had all my chips on the table—literally. I was determined that novel #6 move me to that elusive “next level” as a writer. I started thinking less about the stories I wanted to tell, more about ways I could mold my writing to make the market pay off like a rigged slot machine. The way I saw it, my next book had to be bulletproof. It had to light a fire under my agent, make publishers scramble for their checkbooks, leave critics stuttering as they searched for complimentary adjectives they’d never employed.

Strange as it might sound, I wanted that end result tucked safely in my pocket before I wrote a single word, and I had the crazy idea that I could accomplish that if I came up with the right big-ticket concept. That led to some bad habits. I’d talk myself out of good ideas before I so much as typed a title page. Or I’d write fifty pages and an outline for my agent and get a lukewarm response. Or he’d tell me those fifty pages weren’t quite what he was thinking of and ask me to try another fifty some other way. Add to that the general industry scuttlebutt every writer deals with—i.e. I’d hear that a certain kind of book wasn’t selling, and (of course) it would be exactly the kind of book I was trying to write.

Several hunks o’ book ended up in my filing cabinet that way. I wasted a good chunk of time. A couple years, actually. It got to the point where I didn’t know what to do… so I didn’t do much of anything. I didn’t think of it so much as writer’s block—after all, I could still manage those short stories and novellas. I thought of it as novelist’s inertia. When it came to those suckers, I felt like Captain America (or maybe the Frankenstein monster) frozen in a block of polar ice. I figured I had it in me to bust out and roll the way I had before, but man… I just couldn’t move an inch.

But I kept doing the shorter stuff. One opportunity that came my way was writing a 10,000 word piece for Rich Chizmar at Cemetery Dance. Rich was starting a novella series, and he told me he’d hold open a slot for me. I figured I’d do something hard-edged, the kind of stuff I’d written when I was first starting out. I’d set the tale in 1963, in a small town where things went completely wild on Halloween every year as the locals hunted down a walking nightmare called the October Boy. I’d toss in some bad J.D.’s in a street rod, burn rubber down a black road straight into Twilight Zone noir country.

The story took off. Pretty soon that 10,000 words turned into 20,000. The end was not in sight. I emailed Rich. He said keep writing, and I did. And why wouldn’t I? Hey, for the first time in a long time, I was actually having fun working on a longer project. And man—was that something different.

By the time I typed “The End,” I knew I’d busted out of the block of ice. I’d written a novel. And I knew something else, too—I’d never felt as good typing those two words at the end of a manuscript as I did with Dark Harvest. It was the Norm Partridge novel I was happiest with, and that was no surprise. After all, I’d written it for me.

Readers liked the book. Critical reaction was great—Publishers Weekly chose Dark Harvest as one of the Best Books of 2006. I just signed a deal with Paul Stevens at Tor to reprint Dark Harvest in trade and mass market, and I’m talking to some young guns about a movie option.

In other words: things are good.

The old prizefighters had a saying: Dance with the girl who brung you. That meant when you got the big fight, you didn’t try to do things differently. You didn’t change your style or your trainer. Nope. You stuck with the stuff that got you there in the first place. You climbed between the ropes and did it your way.

I think I finally learned that.

From here on out, I’ll be dancing with the right girl.