John T. Cullen has been online since early 1996, joining the early Web pioneers in publishing exciting stories in several fields. On these pages, in March 2010, we begin to gather as much of the old work that has not been lost by time, computer crashes, upgrades, fatigue, and neglect over the years.

Past web endeavors with founding years (as best able to recollect) include Neon Blue Fiction (1996), The Haunted Village (1996), Clocktower Fiction (1997), SharpWriter.Com, Clocktower Books (1998).

As to the web magazine, it began as Outside: Speculative & Dark Fiction (April 15, 1998), quickly morphed to Deep Outside SFFH (late 1998 to late 2001), and finally Far Sector SFFH (late 2001 to January 2007). Most of the art work on the first two versions was done by Brian Callahan (Sighco.com), who was my business partner until his departure for other green pastures in 2001. After that, much artwork came from A. L. Sirois and some from myself.

Brief Aside. It is worth noting a few points, to send all self-ordained gatekeepers of 'quality' packing. Many of us saw, early on, that the Internet was a unique new publishing opportunity. This is not because we are unintelligent, or purveyors of schlock, or the unclean that has not been blessed by the high priests and their acolytes in academe, and so forth. Quite the opposite, as should eventually dawn on the dimmest of bulbs. Many of us have multiple degrees, often quite relevant. My three are a BA in English (Univ of Connecticut, 1972), a BBA in Computer Information Systems (National University, 1984), and an MS in Business Administration (Boston University, 1981). Many of us have years of professional experience in writing, editing, journalism, book editing, and various other disciplines. In other words, some of us, at least, bring the highest professional standards to the work we create online. I remember seeing a survey in The Los Angeles Times (remember them?) around the early 2000s. Most of the respondents (authors, editors, etc in the print industry) tended to think the Internet and digital publishing had no future. One or two still vocally railed against the idea that one would sell print books on line through retailers like Amazon. Stories of such shortsightedness and lack of vision abound. They are not worth mentioning in detail, because they are all dreck that has already run over by the wheels of progress. You can imagine similar outrage among the monks of the scriptorium when Gutenberg used moveable type to grind out Bibles, or the loathing among publishers (which lasted for decades, and still echoes even today) when Betty and Ian Ballantyne revived the Liberty Book (softcover, in WW2 rationing) and created the paperback, which was anathema to the shamans and their acolytes of the publishers in boards. In my years doing this, I have enjoyed both moments of joy and accomplishment, as well as times of unbelievable frustration with the backwardians (as opposed to the futurians). End Aside.

I launched my personal website, johntcullen.com, in 2000, but did not do much with it until later in the decade. I juggled up to 24 websites at various times, but in recent years have pared it down to a minimum. By 2010, I am down to two websites (johntcullen.com and clocktowerbooks.com), while maintaining two museum sites (the-haunted-village.com and neonbluefiction.com, both currently redirecting to clocktowerbooks.com).

In the long term, reality and the free market place will determine the outcome of the current death and birth struggles. Only a few years ago, in a survey of publishing and writing professionals by The Los Angeles Times (remember them?), there were still several people who loathed and condemned the new practice of selling print works online via Amazon.com and other retail sites. There remains to this day a vast horde of [censored] who keep insisting that everything online should be free, including tens of thousands of hours of hard work and sacrifice by dedicated and talented writers and musicians. If many of these artists online do not meet the standards of their'onors, the [censored], then we may well recall that most of the print industry's output ends up being remaindered for failure to sell. But again, discussions like this are pointless. The free market will prevail, as it always does. It's all about the end user, the reader in this case. Give them a good tool and a decent story, and they'll turn the page on this entire industry, faster than any so-called gate keepers can keep up with. In the end, the only thing we artists and intellectuals can control is how well we do our work, and how lovingly we apply ourselves to it. Very few of us will be remembered, print or digital, but that cannot ultimately be what matters. The age-old joys of story telling, and story hearing or reading, remain as fresh as they were around the Paleolithic campfire.

1995 While working at a San Diego software firm, a group of us were amazed one day to download a single image (of one page from an ancient Byzantine codex) on our Mozilla browser, which took about an hour or more. Memory is a bit hazy by now, but I'll try to retell the story sequentially as best possible.

1996 By the following April, Brian Callahan and I had created our first website (Neon Blue Fiction), which consisted of a splash page and a content page, without a single image at first. This was to be our (my, as it turned out) venue to publish mystery and suspense thrillers. Initially, all I had were a novel, the eponymous Neon Blue, and a few short stories.

1996 By July 5, 1996, Brian Callahan and I added our second website (The Haunted Village), which again consisted of a splash page and a content page. Somewhere during this time, Brian, the artistic and technical genius, excitedly announced that he had figured out how to post images. He created some of the most beautiful artwork I have seen online to this date. This was to be our (my, as it turned out) venue to publish science fiction, dark fantasy, and horror. We had my SF novel Heartbreaker (since retitled This Shoal of Space) and some short stories.

1996-1997 From the first, Brian and I would meet for coffee at a very cosmopolitan-looking java house in San Diego, where we would discuss our dreams. We dared to imagine that a world of commerce would one day appear on the Web, but we were eager not to waste time waiting, so we began to give away texts for free. Given slow download speeds, our early setup was to offer text downloads upon demand, after the reader had read some sample chapters. It was a pleasant experience. I received thanks and praise from every continent except Antarctica (a market I was never able to crack, given that the people at McMurdo were busy, and the penguins don't read much). Somewhere in that time frame, we became (I believe) the first people in history to offer free downloads of entire novels in weekly serial chapters. When people began to write that they'd read the first x chapters and couldn't wait to read the rest, I began emailing the entire novels (Neon Blue and Heartbreaker) as text files.

1997 As part of that effort, Brian created a publishing website (an 'umbrella' for all our activities) titled Clocktower Fiction. The clocktower part comes from a motif in an unplublished novel of mine. Like all early Web adapters, we wrangled with metaphors. Were we 'fiction' or 'books' or 'press' or what? In the end, we decided that 'book' would be a neutral enough term to span both the print and digital worlds, so Clocktower Fiction morphed into its present form as Clocktower Books. Brian left off in mid-design, but this website reflects the excellent beginning of what he had in mind.

1998 I pursued strategies in hope of gaining professional recognition for web-based authors of sf/f/h. With that in mind, and consulting the background chatter online from others thinking about these sorts of issues, we started a web magazine (never say 'zine' or other essentially derogatory terms). Initially, on April 15, 1998, we launched Outside: Speculative & Dark Fiction, just in time to make it into the 1999 Writer's Market along with the big SF/F pulp magazines. That, indeed occurred, and it was a source of professional pride to put our mark on history in that 1999 issue. Shortly before we launched, Bob Guccione's wife died, and he shut down her magazine, Omni. That magazine was publishing one sf/f/h short story a month, and paying the highest rates in the industry by far. Its fiction editor, Ellen Datlow, was the most sought after magazine editor in the genres. When Omni was no more, Ellen went online with a paying magazine called Event Horizon, which was a beautifully designed vehicle for fiction and nonfiction related to the genres and sciences. Unfortunately, amid the sea of metaphors, the wars of print versus digital, and the realities of the new economy, the magazine apparently never broke even and was abandoned. During its existence, we traded links with Ellen Datlow. We received a nice EH logo that we proudly posted. Also one night, I received a breathless email from Ellen, wanting to know 'what's up with that?' because we had not yet responded with our reciprocal link. We responded immediately after that, but she soon moved on to, apparently, the NY genre anthologies industry. There were many late-night emails among myself and various other Web experimenters. I remember corresponding in an exchange of ideas with John O'Neill of The SF Site and Matt Hayes of the resource site Spicy Green Iguana.

1998 One day in the fall of 1998, I had an email from friend and fellow author A. L. Sirois, with a link he suggested I look at. It turned out that the Encyclopedia Britannica online had published an article about Clocktower Fiction, extolling us as Web pioneers in the field of genre magazines. It was a nice accolade, and stayed live for some years. Little shots of praise like that came at us from various directions, which was nice, even if with that and five bucks you could buy a latte, to paraphrase an expression from the age of dime coffees long gone.

1998 From the first, we followed all the SFWA rules (publish at least 3x yearly, in North America, in English, pay at least 3 cents a word, and have a subscriber base of at least 2,000 paying customers). It soon became apparent that SFWA was not going to offer credit for professional publication to our authors. Our published authors included not only talented newcomers (the early Tim Pratt, for one) but also established authors like Melanie Tem, Andrew Vachss, and the late Pat York.

1998-2008 During this period, I published my first personal website, SharpWriter.Com (SWC) as I styled it. This was to be my own personal writer's desktop, complete with dictionaries, thesauri, grammar & usage, and other online resources. It became a major portal, and was listed in 1999 by Writer's Digest as one of the top 101 Author Resource Websites. I continued revising it for about ten years. During all this time, I thought I was supporting my one, total, ultimate goal, which was to promote my own fiction and nonfiction writing. As the Web developed its own sordid underbelly, a running sewer of thieves, hackers, spewers of viruses and other malware, phishers, and every sort of criminal opportunist and predator, I noticed that the pleasant thank-yous and words of praise had vanished. Even a few years ago (2007-8), when I tried to revisit old times, I was giving away something like 1.5 million words or more of utterly free fiction and nonfiction, and over 120,000 visitors came in a year; but not a single person ever wrote to thank me, or to offer a word of praise. I think it represents the change when the Internet became a place to be afraid. People, with good reason, trust nothing they find. I should know—my computer was disabled by a virus (again) yesterday. Anyway, I pulled it all down, and have more recently (2009) turned almost exclusively to digital aggregators like Fictionwise.com, with initially small but solid success that promises to grow.

1999-2001 During this general period, I was informed by inside sources that SFWA was undergoing a war between the Futurians and the Backwardians. The former wanted to embrace digital publishing, while the latter hated the future (strange for SF authors), loathed digital publishing, and were prepared to wreck the universe rather than permit their 1930s publishing model to be trumped. A ludicrous serious of events took place, that I may document at some point, until I totally gave up on SFWA in particular, and the print industry as a whole; for reasons that are actually quite interesting and logical to set forth; but not at this moment.

1999-2001 Brian and I stepped into the world of digital publishing early, signing a contract around mid-1999 with Nuvomedia to produce titles for their Rocket e-Book. Our rep was Chris Kahn, who is a nice guy and, as with so many solid people, his name continues to surface in the general publishing world. At the same time, we signed with LightningSource (under its earlier name, which I forget just now) to produce both Print On Demand and Digital titles. balanced, focused, and disciplined. No matter how hard we worked, or how generously we gave (for free) of our time and services, little of it was appreciated, and I concluded within a year or so that my calling in life was to be a writer, not a publisher, editor, retailer, or other functionary in the publishing industry. I realized I simply want to write good stories and publish them without going through all sorts of gate keeping denizens. Brian left in late 2001 and turned it all over to me. I have continued to run Clocktower Books as a small press, with half a dozen or so authors left, most of whom I brought into the picture originally. Clocktower Books was always, and remains, a bona fide small press in every sense, with some titles being picked up by the large book retail chains. My thriller Lethal Journey, a noir period novel set in 1892 and based on the true crime/ghost story of Kate Morgan at the Hotel del Coronado here in the San Diego area, actually made the 2009 Fall List at Publishers Weekly.

2001-2010 I spent seven years in the trenches of print on demand, learning the industry from the ground up (which is not to say there is not a lot more to learn). I learned how to do illustrations, maps, and covers. I learned how to prepare not only a polished, exciting text, but also the packaged end product that the customer will buy, in exclusion of most other books. This is really the Holy Grail of publishing, which really makes the acolytes of academia and gate keeping all the more irrelevant. Once you know how, and digital and POD publishing have opened all these new possibilities, you can bypass all the gate keepers. You just have to be at least as good as the people in the surviving six publishers of the conglomerated New York City cartel, all but one of which are foreign-owned to boot. The more you understand, the better armed you are to have a hope. Because in the end, your properly packaged product, whether POD or digital, can stand shoulder to shoulder with anything produced by the cartel of six big publishers who are all that is left of the NY publishing industry. It's an industry owned and operated by six publishers, maybe two wholesalers (Ingram and Baker & Taylor), two retail chains (Barnes & Noble and Borders, the latter of which has been on the ropes for two years at this writing, and may not live much longer), perhaps 30 literary agents who do most of the book deals, and maybe 50 authors who are the only ones able to make a decent living. That's why it's virtually impossible to break into the 'traditional' industry. It's a mile-high pie slice small enough to put on a saucer. The other 150,000 or more talented authors used to waste their lives writing, and die unpublished. This no longer needs to be the case, as the old industry melts on its saucer. I am still working on a deal or two on the print side, but have been focusing my attentions on the digital side. I'm quite satisfied with that.

If I can offer any advice, it is to learn the industry from the ground up, all aspects of it, including retail, wholesale, book production (yes, print; and digital), the editorial functions in a publishing house, the meaning of being a publisher (investor), and so on. Publishing is a business. Most people taking a stab at it, unfortunately, are not prepared. Even if they have the requisite backgrond in writing, editing, cover design, text flow, and so forth, it's almost guaranteed they know absolutely nothing about the business itself. Without that, they are doomed, barring a miracle, and we cannot count on miracles anywhere in life. The most important step for many authors who want to successfully self-publish is to grow up, lay aside all their frustration from years of rejection, and take charge of their business. When you are a writer, you are a self-employed business person. Avoid the many sharks and middlemen (and middlewomen) who pollute the waters with their uncanny ability to find hapless author victims and savage them before the victim sees it coming. Again, learn the business from the ground up. To do that, you have to plunge in and take your knocks. It can be done cheaply. Pay nobody to do anything you can do yourself, which in my book means everything except self-editing.

More than 99% of society, including English professors, critics, authors, and the like, know absolutely nothing about the business. The academics especially, who often live in an echo chamber of fatuous verbosity, keep promoting their artificial division of publishing into "commercial" and "literary." It's frequently just a way to distil noise from meaning, so that the emperor is richly draped in nothing. Take a look at any general survey course on great writers, in a typical high school or college Literature course, and you'll find 95% of the authors were rousing commercial successes in their day. There is no such thing as a separation of commercial and literary. Both the (what Pound called) Literachoor industry and the publishing industry generate oceans of hype to keep pushing their product. In the end, it is hordes of excited readers who somehow often manage to discover what has lasting human value. Some of it is sentimental, some of it is melodramatic, much of it is lost on the next generation. But, since ancient times, writers like Shakespeare, Marlowe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and scores of other authors who will live into the ages have been roundly celebrated by popular audiences. To be sure, it remains for the academics and critics, perhaps, to keep alive an Emily Dickinson or a Gerard Manley Hopkins, so there is a place for everyone under the big umbrella. Even for those who join James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, and a host of other survey course favorites in seeking alternative means into print. Even if it earns them the wooden clucking of gate keepers and other divinely ordained nonsensemenschen.

The publishing business is not so complicated. Too long has it been veiled in that fog of academic hallowedness, of editorial self-importance, so that no writing can ever be worth anything unless its author starved in a garret, sharing his cheese with fat little mice, and has been dead at least a century. Once the mice leave off, the academics and fustian yodelers take over. As a guy I knew once put it, they're all over it like a cheap suit. The sacred rubric of selling books is actually like selling shoes, or sunglasses, or a pound of butter. You put something out there, it looks nice, and people buy it. If it lives up to its promise, people will come back looking for more. That's the Holy Grail: return business. With POD and digital, any author with something to say—and the means to say it professionally and artistically—has access to some kind of reader base, however small or large. The fustians will call it sacrilege. The rest of will will call it common sense and good business. Shakespeare and Dickens would certainly agree.

Added Notes 1. In January 2009, I received an enthusiastic fan letter from Ray Bradbury, praising my dark seasonal fantasy The Christmas Clock.

Added Notes 2. While researching my Rome book over a period of years, I happened upon an old friend, the Sator Rebus or Sator Square. That occurred during the summer of 2007. I had been aware of this great mystery of Classical antiquity for over 30 years. Every scholar of Classics, Archeology, History, and what-not has tackled this inscription without a clue. Dr. Rose Mary Sheldon of Virginia Military Institute, Professor and Chair of History, is not only an expert on ancient cryptography, but she published an exhaustive bibliography in Cryptologia, then a crypto journal at West Point Military Academy, since moved on to a larger umbrella organization. I sent her a paper I'd written, and I received a nice note back in Jan 2008. I thought that was it. Two weeks later, I had a call from a production company in Toronto, Canada, for the History Channel. They were doing a many-part series on the history of Christianity, told in terms of mysteries and the keys that unlock them. They had decided to include the Sator Rebus as a mystery, but nobody had ever offered a plausible key. Then I came along, just at the right moment. After some discussions, in Feb 2009 Associated Producers flew me to Yale University, in New Haven, which possesses among its many collections an exemplar. Their exemplar is a small (about 1' x 1') marble or similar stone, taken from a headquarters room of the important 2nd Century Roman fortress of Dura Europos, located in today's Syria. Current expectation is that the series, with my interview, will air in the fall of 2010. I have also published an article at Fictionwise, titled The Sator Enigma: Ancient Roman Mystery, Solved At Last?. It's remarkable how well this dovetails with my Rome Walks Series (also at Fictionwise, in tandem with my upcoming publication of A Walk in Ancient Rome, Revised Second Edition. (The first edition, bungled by Byron Preiss of iBooks, was released without final corrections or my approval, in a great hurry to cash in on the HBO/BBC Rome series, with predictably counter-productive results).