Reinvention

# THE END #

2010-09-17T10:56:00.001-04:00

Reinvention is over.

Kind of.

My official site, Defiled Curator, has gone live, and all blog posts from here on out will be contained there. Past content will remain here, with some posts exported to the new page.

It's a bit disheveled at the moment, as pages and content are still being shuffled about, but things should smooth over within a few days as I get the hang of Wordpress publishing.

Hope to see you there.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Testing, Testing

2010-09-13T13:02:00.002-04:00

I just picked up this handy dandy blogging app for my iPad called BlogPress. So far I've synched up my four different blogs, and now I'm about to test this baby.

Overheard conversation from Professional Writing (where I am hiding in the back of the room) - "I just want to shoot those Jersey Shore douchebags in the face with a potato gun." For once, that wasn't a professor quote (as opposed to all of the fun things I've already quoted for Facebook).

I am in love with this class.

Edit: He just called us a bunch of fuckers. I have found Nirvana in the middle of rural Pennsylvania.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Oooh, a Revelation

2010-08-21T21:04:00.004-04:00

Over the past few months, while working on my novel manuscript and slogging my way (slowly as it may be) through my review copy pile, I've come to a very strange conclusion about myself, writing, and what I enjoy most about being a tiny cog in the publishing machine.

I enjoy my position as a reviewer/interviewer far more than I do as an author.

Most days, when I work on the novel, I'm forced to admit to myself that I do not know how to write a book at all. I've cut the story up into chapters and then into scenes and plugged them into Scrivener for easy labeling, tracking and editing. Some days, when I go through each individual section, I shake my head and wonder why I'm doing this at all. Other days, I come across something I've written and think to myself, "Damn, that's actually pretty good," but those are few and far between. I think one of my biggest issues is that I work predominantly in a vacuum. I don't reach out for beta readers the way I used to, and the people closest to me that read what I've written don't usually have the expertise to offer much beyond a congratulation before asking me when the book will be out. Because of this, I have no way of gauging the novel's worth or worthlessness, and combining this with my newness to long fiction results in a lot of anxiety.

As a reviewer, though, I get to shine a critical eye on other people's works, something that comes far more naturally to me. Sometimes my inability to shut off my critic/editor/whatever becomes annoying or painful, depending on how far into overdrive it goes. Most of the time, though, it leads me to push myself beyond what I believe my brain is capable of understanding. Lately, as I've read, I've found myself taking in more, expanding my vocabulary, absorbing concepts that normally would have been beyond my comprehension. I am growing, and eventually I may be able to take a look at myself and feel something akin to pride.

One of the greatest things a reviewer can ever experience is author praise and camaraderie. It's a feedback loop of great rewards. How many of us, during our school years, were forced to read biographies of long-dead authors tucked haphazardly into the margins of our textbooks and noticed that, with great frequency, writers and other academics wrote letters back and forth to one another, personal missives full of mundane details that somehow managed over time to transmute themselves into something special?

I was always rather spellbound by those. X author wrote to Y author, and Y author wrote back, every line bottled up and saved for posterity. Those communiques always seemed as authentic, if not more so, than the published works of the artists involved. It was like having a front-row seat to the scene in The Wizard of Oz when the curtain pulled back and the little man at the controls was revealed. I loved it.

I have experienced that now, in small doses. Once in a while an author will email me to let me know they've read my review of their work, or they've read my review of someone else's and they want me to look over theirs, and it feels surreal. Being told by the source of a work you've enjoyed greatly that yes, you got the point is a sensation akin to finding out that you aced that final exam you were so sure you failed spectacularly. I still have a hard time coming to terms with the fact that people intentionally seek me out for my opinion, but it keeps happening and it feels amazing every time. It's validation; it's proof that I'm growing; it's a reason to keep doing what I do.

It's a feeling just as exhilarating, if not more so, than seeing my own byline in print.

For the Love or: Give Me Your Work for Free, Clueless Newbie

2010-07-25T12:54:00.008-04:00

Something has been bothering me for a while now, and I think it’s time to get it off my chest. I know that this isn’t going to win me any new buddies in small press (I’ll probably upset at least one or two people, perhaps to the point of hate mail, but whatever), but it really, really needs to be said. The longer we go without anyone pointing out the gigantic elephant in the room, the worse off all of us will be.

What the hell is going on with these “for the love” anthologies?

I recently stumbled across submission guidelines for an anthology (and publisher) that shall remain nameless, and I was blown away by the implied arrogance in the listing. Are we going to pay you? No. Are we going to give you a contributor’s copy? No. It’s flash fiction; what were you expecting, money for your work?

They actually said that. You can't expect us to pay you because it's only flash fiction. Give it to us for free in exchange for having your name in our precious Table of Contents.

Fuck you. No, seriously. Fuck you.

I’ve been in several anthologies, with more slated for publication in the coming months. Each and every one of them paid a penny a word or more, plus a contributor’s copy. Seeing as how my short work tends to hover around the two-thousand word mark, that’s twenty bucks a sale plus a copy.

That’s beer money.

I don’t really care about the checks; they’re token payments. They’re a safeguard against crap writing. If an editor is willing to pay money for the work they publish, there’s a better chance for me that my Table of Contents neighbors are going to be worth their salt. One of the things I love about anthologies is that it’s somewhat of a shared experience. I enjoy seeing my name appear alongside people I either know personally (and whose work I enjoy) or have the utmost professional respect for. Taking cash out of the editor/writer/publication equation all but guarantees stories that normally wouldn’t make the cut (because nobody is willing to pay for them) are included because everyone who refuses to give their work away for free declines to submit.

I’m not going to submit to those places, and neither should anyone else who has any confidence in their abilities.

What really irritates me to no end about the “for the love” attitude is that my time isn’t worth compensation. Writing a competent story takes more than a few minutes; it can be downright difficult. I have, at times, agonized for weeks over whether or not a scene works or if certain words or phrases need to be replaced. When I’ve finally completed a story, when it’s passed multiple rounds of my own paranoid scrutiny, why would I just fling it out into the ether for free?

What this editor (and several others, as I’ve encountered this sentiment in multiple places) is saying is, “Your work isn’t worth paying for. I’m not going to give you a damn thing but, because you’re so desperate for people to see you as a ‘published author,’ you’re going to give me the fruit of your labors without any compensation whatsoever, and I’m going to profit off it.” They won’t come out and say that directly, though, as they’re too busy trying to look like a legitimate publisher in order to reel in new writers who are naive enough or inexperienced enough (usually both) to fall for it.

Hell, these worthless excuses for publishers are probably banking on selling extra copies to the very ‘authors’ they’ve ripped off. They need at least one copy laying around to impress Grandma and Pap-Pap with, right?

I’m not at all against anthologies that donate their proceeds to worthwhile charities. In fact, I’m all for it and am more than willing to waive my token fee if it means someone in the world (who isn’t a greedy editor) is going to benefit from it. Nor am I opposed to donating fiction, especially flash fiction, to nonpaying horror websites. I’ve given fiction to 69 Flavors of Paranoia, Flashes in the Dark, The New Flesh, MicroHorror and others. I routinely post my microfiction exercises over at Ficly under a Creative Commons license, and I’m fine with that.

You know why that doesn’t bother me? Nobody’s making money off my back and then flipping me off afterwards, expecting me to pay to see my own work in print. Seriously. That’s absolutely crazy, and seeing as how many fly-by-night nonpaying (and poorly edited, might I add) books show up in my Facebook feed or mentioned on forums I frequent it’s not going to end anytime soon. It won’t end until people value their own work enough to refuse to give it away to someone more than willing to hoard the profits for themselves.

Well, Now.

2010-04-25T15:46:00.000-04:00

Tuesday night, after one hell of a rough shift at work, I came home to find an email waiting for me. It was from the publisher I’d submitted Teahouse to.

In the Teahouse will be published by Library of the Living Dead Press.

Yeah, I about had a heart attack. There are roughly a thousand things I could say right now but none of them seem to make any sense at the moment. I’ll just stick with this short notification for the blog and perhaps expand on things a bit once things feel a bit more real. Suffice it to say, though, that I’m back in the research loop, digging up little things here and there to add a bit more spit and polish to the final draft.

In the meantime, school will be letting out in about two weeks, at which point I’ll be dedicating my entire summer to writing or writing-related projects. I’ve got edits and additions to make for Teahouse, the back half of Ghostbox to finally write, edits to work on for Kody Boye’s Amorous Things and my chapter contributions to Collaboration With the Dead to scribble out. All this and I’ve begun research on novel number three, which is as of yet unnamed and deals with ghosts in Vietnam.

This summer is going to rock.

Let the Nervousness Commence, Part Deux

2010-04-19T13:56:00.005-04:00

Remember the post I made a few months ago about submitting Teahouse?

Something happened with the communication between myself and the publisher, and the manuscript was never read. No big deal, really. He got back to my “Hey, have you gotten around to reading my submission?” email within a day and I resent the file.

Now I have to sit and agonize all over again, though.

I don’t get this way with short stories. I write them, read them over, revise and send them out, often forgetting about them after I’ve recorded them over on Duotrope. If they’re accepted, great. If they’re not, they go out again. I can do this over and over and over and never feel even the slightest pang of anxiety. I know my stuff when it comes to short fiction, and for the most part I’m unshakably confident about my abilities.

With novels? Forget it. I’m riddled with self-doubt and nervousness from the moment I write the first sentence to the time I feel I’m finally ready to send it out into the world. I have zero confidence overall with a novel, even if there are paragraphs here and there (sometimes even whole chapters, believe it or not) that I feel are completely solid.

I can write short stories just fine.
I can whip out flash like nobody’s business.
I can edit the hell out of anything you put in front of me.
I can read, formulate an opinion for and review other writers’ novels with absolutely no trouble.
I can conduct interviews with authors, editors and publishers without a single issue or dull moment.

I cannot write novels without reducing myself to a twitching, nervous wreck.

I used to think that I only needed a bit more experience in writing long fiction before the feeling would fade away, but it hasn’t diminished much at all. Between Teahouse, Rain and now Ghostbox, I still feel like I have absolutely no clue what I’m doing. As a reviewer, I’m handed books all the time. As I read them (and the ones I read simply for pleasure), I notice how each author handles scope, pacing, subplots and all the other things that go into long-form fiction. None of them in any way resemble what I end up throwing down on paper. Compared to most other writers, my own novel-writing efforts feel very sparse, like short stories that have dragged on too long. My own work feels like it lacks the layers characteristic to novels. They feel like they’re nothing but details dictated to the reader in a dull monotone broadcast by a broken, rusting piece of antique machinery.

I do go back to my older work, long after it’s been finished, and reread with a fresh eye. Occasionally I find myself even enjoying it from a detached standpoint, but I always wind up asking myself, “Is this really the way it should have been?” I often find myself wanting to write it differently but completely unable to do so.

I think one of my biggest problems, at least with Teahouse, is that it takes place (in part, at least) at the junction between two cultures, and I’m terrified I’m going to be incorrect with some facts or that my intent is going to be misconstrued. I remember during the beta reader phase when one critiquer told me that involving Japanese characters made me look like an anime fanatic. I wanted to slam my face off my desk. They also, I believe, told me I’d ripped key plot points off a well-known Japanese film, which it only had the most passing of similarities to. A common event (and I mean common - this is the kind of thing that you read about in papers or see on the news frequently) occurs in both stories. Oh, I was furious. I almost changed the entire backstory. That’s how paranoid I became. It’s a good thing I decided against it, but still, what if this happens all over again if/when the book is published? Is it good enough to withstand that kind of nonsense? I don’t know.

I’ve been driving my author buddies, and even some of my non-writer confidantes, nuts with this lately. They shush me and tell me I’m crazy, or that my long fiction is just fine, but I still feel like scrapping it and starting all over most of the time. Every time I update Rain I want to just tank it and forget the project was ever conceived. A little voice inside me constantly pipes up and lets me know it’s probably better to just conclude the story at its logical end and be done with it sans drama, so my little Facebook novel still exists.

I don’t know. I doubt this feeling will ever go away, no matter how many times I finish a novel manuscript. I suppose it’s just one of those weird personality defects that you can never rid yourself of. I will forever be the paranoid novel-writer, no matter how much my skills improve.

I suppose there are worse things I could be, like the horrible writer who doesn’t realize they’re horrible. I think that would be more humiliating in the long run.

Some Updates on the Writerly Front

2010-04-11T16:38:00.000-04:00

A lot has been going on behind the scenes lately, though I haven’t had much time to update any of the blogs. Being a college student is both amazing and horribly time-consuming, and this semester’s been one of the hardest of my life so far. Hopefully I’ll be able to keep my head above water for the next month until classes are over, but at least one course is beating me into the ground and another’s been threatening to do so for a while. Only the final grades will tell, I suppose.

I’m still around, still writing here and there and reading when I can. I am woefully behind on other writers’ review copies. My most sincere apologies to anyone offended by my tardiness. Only a few more weeks and I will be tearing through copies from dawn until dusk until I get caught up.

Jason S. Hornsby, author of Every Sigh, the End, recently contacted me with an advance copy of his new novel, Eleven Twenty-Three. I’d been waiting to read this, so being offered a review copy ahead of time was a huge, huge treat for me. I tore through it and, honestly, I think I enjoyed this one even more. The review went up a few days ago, and if all goes well (and I hope it does), I may be on the cover as a blurb. I’ve never been approached for a blurb before, let alone by someone whose work I’ve already enjoyed, so needless to say if this goes through I’ll be incredibly stoked.

Derek Goodman’s new short story collection, Machina, featured a blurb for his novel The Apocalypse Shift written by yours truly. It’s credited to HorrorNews.net, the site I wrote the review for, but knowing my opinion meant enough to transition into an official recommendation warms my little heart.

I managed to snag an eleventh hour position on the roster of a collaborative project. It’s a novel detailing the zombie apocalypse, and I’m thrilled to have been given the opportunity to participate. Some of the other writers are editors of mine, so I’ll be in great company. I’m writing chapters #6 and #25. More details as they emerge.

My buddy (and spiritual baby brother - really, he’s just that awesome) Kody Boye’s asked me to edit his short story collection Amorous Things. This is my first big editing job, and I’m excited as all get out. He’s got a bit of work left to do before he turns it over, so I should be taking up the mantle of editor just as the semester lets out. I am so excited to be a part of this. Kody’s a great guy and an awesome writer, and being asked to edit for him is a great honor. He recently turned eighteen and I had tons of fun sending him presents and dirty cards full of penis-shaped confetti. When he shows up at the Horror Realm convention this year, Pittsburgh’s going to become exponentially cooler, at least for a few days.

My own novels in progress, Rain and Ghostbox, have been put on hold so I can focus on schoolwork. I’ve outlined the next six or seven chapters of Ghostbox, though, and I’m incredibly eager to find the time to write it all out. Seriously, this story is going to rock. I’m still in love with it after all these months, which is rare, considering how I’m the first in line to bash my own ideas. I can’t wait to finish this and start polishing the hell out of it. It’s the best thing I’ve ever written. Once I’m done I’m going to have to find a way to top myself, which isn’t going to be easy. As far as Rain goes, I’m still on the fence with that one. I have days where I think there’s something fun and salvageable in it somewhere, and I have days when I want to tank every chapter. They alternate, and so I can never truly decide how I feel about it. I know I probably won’t ever try this little experiment again, though. Once is enough.

I’ve been addicted to electronic cigarettes since Eric bought me a set for Christmas. I’ve since moved on to something way bigger and more powerful, and I’m fully immersed in the world of custom e-juices and mods. Smoking was never this much fun, and it never tasted like chocolate and coconuts.

I bought an iPad by convincing myself I needed it to “work.” I haven’t found the time to read review copies on the go or do much word processing beyond taking notes in class yet, but hoo boy is playing mahjongg solitaire and checking my email fun as hell now.

I need to go do that now. If I don’t check my email every half hour on my iPad, I start twitching. It’s about time to refresh.

"Wings" Appearing in Best New Zombie Tales

2010-02-15T00:07:00.000-05:00

My short story “Wings,” which appeared in the most recent issue of The Nocturnal Lyric, has found a second home in Best New Zombie Tales, an upcoming print anthology from Books of the Dead Press. This is a collection made up entirely of reprints, showcasing some of the best zombie shorts to have come out over the last few years. I’m really looking forward to it.

The best part of this, aside from having impressed two editors with the story, is that “Wings” beat out over two hundred other stories to find a place in the Table of Contents. It trumped two hundred other stories, all or which (if the authors were following guidelines) were previously accepted by at least one other editor.

The editor’s email response to my submission was one of the kindest and coolest I’ve ever received, as well. There’s nothing like enthusiastic praise from an editor to put a smile on my face.

Wow. I am kind of shocked right now. What a pleasant cap to a somewhat stressful weekend. Best pick-me-up ever.

"In My Office" in Freehand Issue #3

2010-02-04T16:56:00.005-05:00

Back when I worked nights, I’d often come up with writing exercise ideas to keep myself entertained and my literary muscles flexed. Most of them were the oft-mentioned “1000 Word” exercises, where I picked a topic and rambled for a thousand words, hoping to make a complete piece of flash out of whatever I managed to type up. Some were successful, some not so much.

Occasionally, I’d ask other people for ideas instead of aggregating my own poor, sleep deprived brain for content. Sometimes I suffer bouts of creative deficiency, when everything I manage to think up sounds lame as hell or it’s already been done to death. On one of these evenings, I told Eric to give me an idea and he wound up asking me to write him a piece of detective fiction. He was in the middle of a course on detective fiction at the University of Pittsburgh, and so he was interested in seeing if I could write something similar.

I have no experience with detective fiction. None. I like Japanese “women’s crime fiction” (Kirino, Miyabe, Nonami, et al), but I’ve never been into the fedora-wearing private dick type thing. I know there’s a trove of great fiction hiding in the genre, and I fully intend to get around to reading it someday, but I haven’t yet.

What resulted in this request was a short piece called “In My Office,” which, while being nothing like any detective fiction I’ve heard of (in my very limited experience), is about as close as I think I’ll ever come to writing the “sitting in the dismal office smoking and waiting for a mystery” cliche story. It was fun, though I’m not sure just how good I am at it.

Anyway, it’s making an appearance in Freehand, a literary zine run by a woman I know from a message board I’ve been frequenting. There’s a website and a print version, which looks so close to the zines I used to read in the 90s that the nostalgia almost gives me vertigo. Cool. Very cool.

Read it, comment on it, let me know what you think. I had fun writing it, and I hope you have fun reading it. My only regret is that I didn't get to use the phrase "I was sweating bullets."

I'm Going to Be a Very Busy Girl

2010-01-24T14:05:00.005-05:00

In addition to writing book reviews and interviews for Horror News, Randi Harlan of Dark Markets has picked me up to work on her site in a similar capacity. This will work out well, enabling me to write reviews for one site when the other's already covered the novel already, as well as double my available space without spamming either site with too much content. They're also two very different sites, and sometimes things will be suited for one over the other. All in all, I'm looking forward to holding onto both of my staff positions for a very long time.

In addition to site work, I'm now back in college full time, writing chapters for my serial novel Rain on Mondays and Fridays, hammering out the back half of Ghostbox when time allows and searching for a job that gives me as many hours as possible while still accommodating my school schedule.

I've noticed recently that my personality is such that I have to feel like I'm doing something worthwhile, or have done something to give myself a sense of accomplishment, or I'll slowly start to feel like crap. I've always seen myself as being something of a slacker, but people can sometimes be wrong about themselves, I suppose.

As far as keeping on top of everything, I've got a pretty big challenge ahead of me. I feel rather optimistic about it all, though. 2010 should be a pretty awesome year.

A Bit of Frustration

2009-12-30T14:56:00.000-05:00

Before I start this mini rant, let me first thank the editors I’ve worked with this year. Library of the Living Dead’s Victorya, Tim Long and Mark Johnson have all been exceptional to work with, as have Jessy Marie Roberts of Pill Hill Press and Lori Titus of Flashes in the Dark. The editorial staff at 69 Flavors of Paranoia, MicroHorror and The New Flesh have also been great to work with, and despite the fact that their markets don’t pay (I still enjoy submitting to nonpaying sites once in a while, if only for fun and networking purposes) I’m glad to have found homes for some of my shorts with them.

That said, something has been bothering me for a while that I need to get off my chest.

I checked my Duotrope Submissions Tracker earlier today and found that not only are several of my submissions dating from August still waiting for responses, but that most of the markets I submitted to are either dead, unresponsive of have been pulled from the listings by their editors. Normally, this would not be a problem, except there’s one tiny detail here that everybody involved (with the exception of myself) seems to have overlooked.

I haven’t heard one word from any of them. Not one.

The details for each publication are a bit different. Some are completely dead, their websites having already reverted back to their hosting company. Some have put up notices that they are no longer taking submissions. Some are actively seeking submissions for their next issue. Still, not a one has gotten back to me. Seeing as I submit almost entirely electronically these days, how hard is it for an editor (especially one whose publication is no more and is, therefore, not engaged in any upcoming projects that may dominate their time) to respond with a one-line reply letting me know it’s time for me to shop my work around elsewhere? I’m not the type of writer who is bothered by form rejections (though I always appreciate any kind of personalized communication), so even an obviously mass-mailed notification would suffice.

I don’t care about receiving a “we’re not buying it” response. It doesn’t bother me at all. I just want to know if and when I should move on.

Non-communication is pretty much the only thing about the submissions process that upsets me. I understand rejections, long turnaround times, dropped projects and anything else that might come up between a writer and a publisher. Things happen. People have personal lives and full-time work that often gets in the way. It’s completely understandable, though unfortunate, if things should happen to go wrong or take longer than anticipated. I can deal with that, and I am very patient when necessary.

What I don’t understand or accept is the idea of leaving a writer entirely clueless with the intention of never contacting them at all. If your publication has gone under, let those hopeful contributors know. If you’re experiencing an exceptionally long delay, let them know. If you’re not using their manuscript and are still in business, for crying out loud, let them know. Being left in the dark when a publisher folds is annoying and frustrating, but not being given even so much as a form rejection by a publisher that’s still active is a full-on slap to the face.

Not contacting a submitter while staying in business and moving forward with publication as usual is tantamount to saying “You’re not even worth a few words from me,” and that kind of insult doesn’t go over on me very well. It’s unprofessional as all hell, for one, and it shows a lot of negative character on the part of the editor. Who in their right mind would want to work, even just for one story, with someone that rude?

Not me, for starters.

I suppose the lesson learned, if any, from these experiences is “Contributor beware.” From here on I’ll have to be much more diligent during the research phase of the submissions process, only contributing to publications I’m already familiar with or have heard positive word of mouth on from other writers. Having a network of friends in the business should help weed these publications out a bit better. I’ll continue to be thankful for all of the exceptional editors I’ve been fortunate enough to work with and do my best to avoid the unexceptional ones floating about out there.

"Beneath the Earth, the Pool" Appearing in Letters From the Dead

2009-12-30T14:31:00.000-05:00

It looks as if my short story “Beneath the Earth, the Pool” will be in the upcoming anthology Letters from the Dead, published by Library of the Living Dead Press. It’s a short piece about the transcontinental friendship of two longtime pen pals (one American, one German) during the outbreak of an apocalyptic virus.

I’m very excited to be a part of this anthology. Like all other Library titles, this is going to be filled with a wide range of interesting shorts, this time tied together through the context of the Reaper Virus. It will be a lot of fun to read the rest of the stories and see how they all fit within the same universe.

"Reanimated Marital Advice" appearing in The Moron's Guide to the Inevitable Zombocalypse

2009-12-11T12:30:00.001-05:00

I received an email from Tim Long, editor of Library of the Living Dead’s The Moron’s Guide to the Inevitable Zombocalypse (and author of Among the Living and The Zombie-Wilson Diaries) last night. My short story “Reanimated Marital Advice,” will be included in the collection.

This is my second acceptance for a Library anthology (along with Baconology, edited by Victorya), and I’m very excited. Both this small press publisher and 2009 in general have been very kind to me.

Christmas is Coming Early!

2009-12-01T23:26:00.003-05:00

I don’t think there’s going to be any fancy wrapping paper or shiny gold bows involved, but there may as well be.

I was lucky enough to see David Dunwoody read during a panel at Horror Realm this year, and I’ve been meaning to pick up his novel Empire for a while now. He’s recently been included in an aquatic-themed anthology called Dead Bait, which I’ve had on my Amazon wish list since a day or two after it came out. Seriously, anyone who knows about my obsession with fish and all things water could see me freaking out over this book from a mile away. Just the cover was enough to make me grin.

Look at this. Just look at it. Is that not the most awesome book a horror-writing fish lover could own?

I received an email today telling me I was a winner in his November mailing list raffle, which means I’m about to find signed copies of Necrotic Tissue (an awesome horror magazine that’s often mentioned over on The Funky Werepig, one of the most informative and hilarious podcasts I’ve ever had the pleasure of listening to) and Dead Bait in my PO box.

It is kind of like Christmas, and just in time for semester break. I’m going to be tearing through books until the first day of Spring classes.

I really lucked out. Awesome, awesome stuff.

"Singles Line" Appearing in Flashes in the Dark

2009-12-01T00:52:00.000-05:00

My short, 900-word flash piece “Singles Line” will be appearing on Flashes in the Dark. It goes live mid-December, and I hope I made it in time to participate in the “Worst of Love” competition, which was what I wrote it for. Life (and NaNo) got in the way most of the month, so it was cutting very close to the deadline when I submitted it.

David Mitchell’s first novel, the wonderfully odd Ghostwritten, has a chapter towards the end of the book that consists entirely in dialogue. It was a difficult book for me to read, and I put it down and picked it back up several times over the course of a few months, but once I got to that chapter I was hooked. It deals with a late-night radio shock-jock and a listener who calls in on the same night every year for a series of years, never giving away their identity but revealing much about the nature of the world.

When I read the chapter, I was struck by Mitchell’s technique. Up until that point, I don’t believe I’d read anything that was comprised entirely of dialogue before, and I was amazed at the amount of story that could be told just through the speech of a few people. I was determined to try it myself.

The first story I wrote employing this technique was The Anything Goes Call-In Show, which is still up over on Ficly, a neat little open source flash-writing site that I’ve mentioned on the blog before. One of the hardest things about using this technique is that you have to create a scenario in which it is plausible for the characters to only be talking, without any descriptors, and still get enough information across. For a horror writer, the easiest way is to put them on the phone or other mass-communication technology, and then throw in a nasty twist along the way.

I’m not going to talk about “Singles Line” much yet, because it’s available on the site yet, but suffice it to say that I loved writing it and look forward to seeing the reactions of readers. I hope they find it just as interesting and creepy as I did while writing it.

Gizmos and Gadgets

2009-12-01T00:36:00.000-05:00

I am horrible with lists. HORRIBLE. I’m not even sure if that’s the right word to describe it, but I can’t think of anything stronger at the moment and I’m running on coffee vapors, staying up to finish the first draft of a paper on Poe, alcoholism and alternate theories of his death.

I found one thing today that I think may be able to save me from myself in regards to my absentmindedness, my need for better multitasking abilities and my general slovenliness. It’s called Anxiety, and it’s a tiny OS X Leopard widget that manages tasks. You can add multiple calendars (just a fancy way of saying “category”) to add extra layers of organization, which I desperately need, and assign levels of importance to each task. The widget exports to both Mail and iCal, which is nice, and keeps copies of completed tasks.

I’m liking it so far. Right now I’ve got calendars for School, Home, Writing (general things like blogging, interviews, reviews, etc) and Submissions, and each one is color coded and separated by a drop-down menu. Very nice. When exporting to iCal, it’s easy to add deadline dates as well, which helps me keep track of which things I need to get done first and which I can give my usual “Eh, I’ll do it later, right after I read these blogs and post on this forum” treatment.

The best part of all is that it’s free.

I’m always looking for new Mac apps to make my life better, and this one is a tiny little gem. Here’s hoping I stick with it and give it a real chance to increase my productivity.

I Need a Beer

2009-11-27T20:20:00.001-05:00

Made the official NaNo deadline of 50k today. Seems the Office of Letters and Light’s word count validator is twelve hundred words off of my OpenOffice program, meaning I had to fly through another section of the story before I could be declared a winner.

Anyway, the story’s about halfway done, and I’m not setting it down. I will be taking a few days to get caught up on book reviews, author interviews, the Flashes in the Dark entry I’ve been putting off and a few other things. I’m still debating on submitting to my campus literary journal.

It feels good to have gotten this much of the project done. I’d been holding back on it for months so that I could use it as my NaNo plot, and it turned out a bit better than I’d been planning.

Now, off to write another thousand or two words for Rain, which updates tonight. The typing never ends.

"Contaminant" Appearing in 69 Flavors of Paranoia

2009-11-23T20:04:00.000-05:00

My nautical zombie flash, “Contaminant,” has been accepted by 69 Flavors of Paranoia for their Vol. #3 lineup.

This was an interesting piece for me to write, and pretty much kick-started my interest in both water-themed and zombie shorts. I’m looking forward to being part of 69FoP again.

Daft Punk and Coffee By the Gallon

2009-11-23T18:33:00.002-05:00

One more week, and it will all be over.

This has been both the most experimental and most stressful NaNo project I’ve taken on to date. Not only have I been writing with a full college course load to juggle, but I bit off more than I could chew with my term paper project and I’m starting the new Rain chapters while trying to get everything else done.

Suffice it to say that all novel-reading, reviewing and interviewing ended up on a short-term hiatus this month, though as December looms I think things will phase back in without any issues.

I’m pleasantly surprised, though, with how the novel has turned out so far. Not only have I been experimenting with perspective (a rotating third-person instead of my usual first), but this is the first novel I’ve worked on where the pacing hasn’t really been at a breakneck speed. Nothing needs to be squeezed into and resolved in fifty thousand words, and so I’ve been letting the story unspool at its own pace. This has proven to be both slightly worrisome (I occasionally wonder if perhaps I’m not letting the story drag on a bit too much) and somewhat liberating, though I still see myself entirely as a novice, learning as I go.

Hopefully there will be something workable in this draft when it’s all said and done. Some days, I look at the previous chapters I’ve printed out for quick reference (I need to invest in my own printer one of these days) and wonder what in God’s name I’m writing this for, and other days I sit down and rifle through the pages and I’m somewhat pleased with the turnout. I suppose I’m just one of those shifting, never satisfied types. Sometimes it’s almost passable, and a few chapters really stand out, and other times the whole thing is garbage and I really ought to stop embarrassing myself with this charade. I think these are common reactions to one’s own work, though, since I see other, more well-known writers say the same things sometimes. At least I’m in good company, I think.

Approximately twelve thousand more words until I can slow down and give each project equal weight. I have to say, I’m looking forward to that, even though I want to finish Ghostbox’s initial draft as soon as possible.

I suppose that’s what semester break is for.

Conference

2009-11-11T11:56:00.002-05:00

I got the go-ahead from Jacob Kier, owner of Permuted Press (and sponsor of this year’s Horror Realm flash contest) to reprint “Conference,“ my second-place winner. I’ve linked before to the video of the super-cool James Melzer (author of Escape and Invasion) reading it at the flash winners’ panel (I’m still laughing about making him drop the f-bomb on camera), but I held off on posting the text in case rights had been transferred or Permuted had plans to do anything with it. Seeing as I recently found that they’re not, and the rights are entirely mine, I said to myself Hey, Jessica, why not put it up on the blog? You haven’t posted any original fiction in a long time, and people are probably sick of reading your long-ass complaints about writing.

I was just asked today about whether or not Jonathan Coulton's song "Re: Your Brains" had any influence on the story, and the answer honestly is no. I hadn't been thinking about it at all at the time I wrote the story (I was actually pretty harried and hungover while banging it out that Saturday morning), but it's so appropriate I can't help but link it.

So, here’s the flash that won me copies of Derek Gunn’s The Estuary and Jason S. Hornsby’s Every Sigh, the End. Enjoy.

_______________________

There were so few of us left at this point.

Christine and I stayed in the office, in the server room, while the rest of them had run off looking for shelter elsewhere.

We barricaded ourselves inside after checking to make sure our maintenance department had been on the ball with the whole backup generator issue. After the last hurricane blackout, corporate came down pretty hard on ineptitude involving mechanical subjects.

We broke and raided every vending machine, dragged every freezer chest up to the top floor. When we were convinced we'd be able to stay hidden for as long as possible, we shut ourselves up with nothing but cables and blinking boxes to keep us company. She had her laptop and I had mine.

We scanned the Internet, peeling the wrappers off HoHos and Twinkies. It didn't look like we would be able to leave the building for quite some time. Whole cities were crawling with the newly dead and the not-so-newly dead, and nobody knew quite what to make of it, aside from the fact that it was terrifying as all fuck.

I checked my company email. Nothing. I still had no word from anyone. I sighed. “What about you?”

Christine shook her head. “Nobody's responding. I know they took their laptops with them, but...”

I clicked on an application and the familiar, comforting Skype startup screen faded into view. “I'm going to try getting a hold of my family. God knows if they're all right. I left my cell back in my office. Stupid, stupid.”

“Good idea.”

I hovered over my friends list. Who should I try first? My mother? My sister? Who was more likely to be at their computer at this moment?

Before I could decide, a call came in. Amanda, the little window announced to me. Our receptionist, one of the group who'd made a run for a nearby medical center.

It was a video call.

I accepted it and the tiny window expanded.

Amanda's face was raw and bloody, a chunk torn out of her cheek running diagonally beneath her nose and across her mouth. Part of her lip was gone, and several teeth had been torn from their moorings. Her mouth looked partially chewed, and her hair had been torn out in chunks. Her eyes had a glazed look to them, as if there was nothing of value left behind them, as if she were entirely animatronic.

Her ruined lips moved, and her voice came out in a low, garbled moan. “Meeting. Five minutes. Mandatory. Come downstairs.”

_______________________

Learning Experience, Take Three

2009-11-09T18:16:00.002-05:00

I passed the fifteen thousand word mark a few minutes ago and realized that I haven’t even hit the second act yet. This manuscript is going to be a lot longer than fifty-thousand words, and I think I’ll be okay with that.

I’ve been feeling a bit of anxiety the past few days. I know that this project is going to go far beyond the end of November, and between that and the fact that I’m only plotting one or two chapters in advance I'm finding it a bit unnerving. My first attempt at a novel-length piece of fiction yielded a fifty-thousand word manuscript, but it was only halfway completed. After NaNo was over, I said I’d finish it, but I never did.

With the first attempt down, and with last year’s experience, I feel a bit more like I’m able to handle this. Even though I still feel exceptionally vulnerable as a writer, Ghostbox will be completed, warts and all. This baby’s going to be born even if it takes me months. I’m having a bit of fun trying out new things, and so far it’s been working rather well.

I’ve gotten the hang of the third-person narrative and switching focus back and forth between three characters. I’m slowly but surely letting myself relax and immerse myself in the characters’ viewpoints of the world without worrying that I’m adding too much material or holding back where I should be letting loose. It’s a nice feeling, being able to let a story unravel the way it needs to, without worrying about whether or not it’s making enough headway plot-wise. Still, there’s a tiny voice living in the back of my brain that’s a bit irritated that things didn’t leap out at the gate and take off running.

This isn’t that kind of story, though, and after the horrible anxiety I went through doing line edits of Teahouse, not knowing where to pad the story and what kind of additional material I needed, I think going this route and adding possibly too much in the first draft may be a good thing for me.

Each story I write I find myself falling head over heels for one character above all others, and it’s usually not the character with the most focus in the work. The first year it was Kitty, the blonde, Mexico-born succubus who played the role of the narrator’s best friend. Last year it was another blonde woman, the self-destructive, self-loathing alcoholic Lucy, the narrator’s closest friend from college. This year it’s Darren, the pot-smoking, computer-obsessed IT worker in love with UrbEx, Geocaching and dead malls. At least this year the character that’s stolen my heart is one of the mains, though the focus still revolves mostly around Sam, the poor security guard stuck in the mall as it puts up its last fight in the shadow of the wrecking ball.

Every long project I work on has its own playlist, and this year’s has been harder to come up with than most. I use this to set my mood while writing and to get in touch with aspects of the characters’ personalities as the story unfolds. This year, unfortunately, the playlist has been revolving almost entirely around Darren. Sam and her boss Morrow haven’t given me much to work with yet in terms of music. In fact, I’ve only nailed down five tracks so far.

Smooth Criminal - Alien Ant Farm

Dr. Greenthumb - Cypress HIll

Land of Confusion - Disturbed

Mindfields - The Prodigy

Here Come the Demons - Rehab

Most of these (in fact, all but one, and it’s the only Sam track I have so far) are either remakes of 80s/90s tunes or straight out of those decades themselves. The novel is set in the present day but most, if not all, of the characters have their own nostalgia attached to the setting, which saw its heyday in decades past. At least two of them spent their most formative years during the height of the mall rat years, bringing their own unique and sometimes conflicting perspectives into the story with them. Last year’s playlist was devoted to downbeat songs involving suicide and regret, and this year’s focuses mostly on wistful memories of the past. Interesting.

NaNoWriMo #3 and a Whole Lot of Firsts

2009-11-02T08:34:00.000-05:00

Well, November is now upon me and I’m a whopping 5050 words into the project. I’m doing things a bit differently this year in terms of style and characterization, and with the other projects I’m working on I’m having a much different experience than I have in the past.

One of the biggest things I’ve done is ditch my typical first person narrative. I’ve been writing in that style for so long that I’ve really let any third person skills I once had atrophy. A few publishers I’ve submitted to recently have a preference for third, which forced me to go back to it for at least a few thousand words at a time, and because of that I started to realize just how much I was limiting myself as far as story scope is concerned. I like first person because it allows for a more personal style of narrative, almost like two people huddled together, one talking and one listening, across a dimly lit table from each other. It’s intimate, and it allows me to get into one person’s head so deeply it’s as if I’ve become the character for the duration of the story.

Unfortunately, it also seriously limits what I can do with the story. I’m stuck in the head of one person for the entire story, and anything that’s not spoken directly to them or happens outside of their scope of vision is off limits. Any extra information in the story has to be inserted in the form of dialogue, which can be a real pain.

This year I’m writing entirely in third person, somewhere between limited and omnicient, and it’s working very well so far. I say it’s not entirely omnicient because I don’t intend on getting into the thoughts and feelings of each character, but for the main cast it certainly works that way. Think Gibson’s Spook Country, where the chapters alternate between a set of main characters who eventually come together towards the end. That’s the kind of effect I’m going for.

I also have more male characters than ever before in this project, and some of them are very important to the plot. When writing first person, I almost always choose female narrators, mostly because they’re easy for me to identify with and they match my perspective somewhat. I do this also because I’m a bit concerned about not portraying male characters accurately, and I always worry that I’m doing wrong by them somehow. With the acceptance of my story “Porn and the First-Person Shooter,” which was written in third limited and featured a male main, I’ve started to relax somewhat, but there’s always that tiny part of me that’s waiting for someone to email me or run into me at a con and call me a misandrist bitch. Hey, it’s happened to male writers for decades.

I’ve also been a bit too busy and/or lazy to outline the key plot points in advance. So far all I have are notes for the first three chapters I scrawled on a bar napkin on Halloween evening. I have a notebook with character notes, some rough mall outlines (which stores were on what floor while the place was still in business) and minor plot ideas, but no outline. This worries me a bit because I did this the first year and wound up with the first half of something that was much larger (and more directionless) than I’d anticipated. Adding Rain to the mix, which also has no outline, is making me a bit nervous.

I’m doing well, though, all things considered. I’ve been at a hundred percent of my word goal each day, but I’m not racing ahead like my butt is on fire like I did last year. I guess, seeing as I’m a lot more busy this time around, I’m just not into the whole “throw yourself into your work and get it done as quickly as possible” thing this time.

I also don’t have a playlist yet. This is the first year that I haven’t worked alongside a soundtrack, and it feels a bit strange. I’ve been randomizing the songs on my iPod and listening to things from my misc. folder instead.

Chapter One is finished, and I’m making headway into Chapter Two. We’ll see how it goes from there, I guess.

A Few Rejections and a Big Old Slab of Bacon

2009-10-29T22:36:00.001-04:00

Fall must be a very busy time for editors. Of the ten or so submissions I’ve sent out in the last few months, a few have come back. I received rejections from Pill Hill Press (for their Bitter End nautical anthology) and Every Day Fiction (for a flash piece about a book burner). Pill Hill was a disappointment, as I’m a big fan of theirs (and have been accepted by them before), but you can’t always bat a thousand, even with familiar publishers. They’ve got another anthology, Love Kills, that I’m thinking of submitting to soon, so I may have another chance with them in the future.

Last night, while working on a few things in front of my laptop, my email application lit up. I’ve tried to unsubscribe myself from every irrelevant mailing list I receive so that I don’t have to wade through tons of junk just to get to important emails, though that’s only been marginally successful so far. I still find I have emails waiting for me, hoping they’ll be about a submission, only to find they’re advertisements or other stuff I could care less about.

I wasn’t expecting much, but when I checked my inbox I found it was from Victorya, editor of Library of Horror’s upcoming Baconology anthology. Yes, it’s a collection of horror stories involving bacon as a main element. It’s a real book, and it’s coming out.

And I’m going to be in it.

This is one of the submissions I’d been anxiously waiting on a response for. Up until last night, I’d never been in a Library publication and it was something I really wanted to get involved in. Now I have that opportunity, as my story, “Porn and the First-Person Shooter,” will be appearing in Baconology.

I’ve been jittery and excited since I read the email. Really, really looking forward to this. I can’t even imagine what the cover art is going to be.

So, for the year so far that makes two anthologies, at least two small press print publications, an internet serial novel, several appearances on fiction sites and two placements in flash contests. I still have a few submissions still floating around, for another two anthologies and a few more magazines.

I feel so lucky right now.

Another Awesome Interview

2009-10-28T13:07:00.004-04:00

I recently had the opportunity to interview Wayne Simmons, author of the amazing, punch-to-the-gut horror novel Drop Dead Gorgeous. You can read it here.

A Confession

2009-10-27T08:12:00.002-04:00

Due to my twice-weekly Rain updates, my revision and submission of Teahouse and my full course load at school this semester, I have done little to no work on Ghostbox. There, I admit it.

I’d been planning, most of the summer, to outline the plot on notecards, keep a small notebook nearby for ideas and generally have my thoughts together by the time NaNo rolled around. Last year I worked off of the Ten Key Scenes notecard plotting plan (found in James Smith’s book The Writer’s Little Helper), and this year I’d been hoping to expand that setup to include non-critical scenes to set tone, establish character back story and slip in a little foreshadowing here and there.

I’ve done none of that.

With the exception of the notes I took on the day I went to photograph some dying malls in the area (which didn’t go as well as planned - I didn’t have a decent camera at the time and one of the malls turned out to be thriving), I haven’t done any plotting. I’ve got three or so characters, two settings and some general notes, but nothing I can start the story out with.

I’ve got four days to rectify this, on top of reading, doing classwork and posting reviews and interviews on the book blog.

My first year, I worked off of a very scant idea, and it worked somewhat well - until I got to the 50k word mark, NaNo ended, and I found myself with the first half of a very bizarre story. I never went back to finish it, and I’m hoping this year to be able to do a 75k - 100k full manuscript by the time I’m done, whether it’s in November or December. I need to be able to do this while also juggling an Internet serial novel, short fiction submissions and whatever else I need to compose for my grades.

I need to either cut back on sleep or find a better way to manage my time.

I Wish There Were More Hours in a Day

2009-10-25T13:26:00.000-04:00

I sat down and compiled a list of writing-related tasks I need to get done ASAP and, when I was finished, I think my brain leaked out of my ear just a little bit.

Finish edits/insertion of new material for Teahouse, format and check for errors. Send off as soon as humanly possible.

Begin plotting out the rest of Rain.

Plot Ghostbox for November so the story isn’t all over the place and full of garbled nonsense.

Review John Dies at the End.

Review Drop Dead Gorgeous and post the interview with Wayne Simmons.

Start reading Among the Living and compile questions for Timothy Long interview.

Finish reading The Rage Plague and finalize DL Snell interview.

Read a friend’s film script that I’ve had for several months so far.

Write my entry for The Worst of Love flash contest.

I don’t even know how I’m going to manage getting all of this done, but I’m going to make a valiant attempt. I think I might have to cut back on sleep and invest in a caffeine I.V. drip.

Let the Nervousness Commence

2009-10-24T18:52:00.000-04:00

The publisher I queried last month got back to me this morning.

They want to see Teahouse.

Now I just have to go over the whole thing to make sure it’s exactly what I want it to be, make some last minute alterations and possibly add some material. This is the first novel-length work I’ve ever completed, and no matter how much work I do to it it’s going to feel strange. I’ve got nothing else in my history to compare it to and, thusly, no benchmarks with which to gauge its quality.

I’m not going to go into details about the publisher or the response I got, but it was very positive and really made my morning. If things work out I’ll more than likely detail the whole thing here.

Crossing my fingers and launching OpenOffice as I write this. It’s going to be a long night.

Summer Chiller Prize!

2009-10-23T19:36:00.001-04:00

For coming in third place, I received a ten dollar gift certificate to Amazon.com! Not too shabby, I must say. Had this been a typical sale and not a contest, I would have netted approximately ten cents a word, which is quite a bit for short fiction.

I spent a while pouring over my wish list, which is probably close to ten pages by now. In the end, I picked up a copy of In Ghostly Japan, a collection of classic Japanese folk tales compiled by Lafcadio Hearn. I’ve been meaning to pick this up for a while, but never got around to it.

Flashes in the Dark’s next contest, “The Worst of Love,” is taking submissions until November 30th. The guidelines are -

“What we’re looking for: Dark stories that tell us what happens when love goes awry. This could be romantic love, or love between family or friends. Throw in a paranormal twist to this premise, and we want to see your story!

Rules: The usual word count: 1,000 words. Reprints are acceptable as long as they fit the aforementioned theme. Be edgy, be original, and bring your “A” game.

Please, nothing bordering on fanfic. If your characters sound or act like Edward and Bella, Bill and Sookie, or Lestat, please edit your story before submitting. Not that we don’t love these characters, but we want the originality in your work to shine through.

Vampires, Werewolves, and all manner of creatures are welcome.

There will be PRIZES for three winners, which are to be announced later.

Please remember to put “THE WORST OF LOVE” contest clearly in your header or email.“

Yeah, I’ll definitely be entering this one as well.

Editor's Choice?!

2009-10-19T21:54:00.000-04:00

I noticed today while updating Rain that its page on Textnovel now has an Editor’s Choice ribbon on display.

Very interesting.

Flashes in the Dark Summer Chiller Contest - I Came in Third Place!

2009-10-16T11:31:00.002-04:00

And there’s prizes involved! I’m starting to like this flash competition thing.

Second place went to Graeme Reynolds’ By The Light of the Moon.

First prize went to the always awesome Angel Zapata with his story Surrogate Fruit.

I came in third with In the Shadow of Blossoms.

Honorable mentions went to Jody MacArthur for Creepy Crawly and Shane McKenzie for Heat.

Very cool stuff. I'm excited to see what the prizes are.

Book Reviews and Interviews!

2009-10-11T11:36:00.000-04:00

Recently I got a chance to either meet in person with or post on several horror fiction boards alongside some very talented and seriously cool people. I managed to snag some books at Horror Realm a few weeks ago, and some of the authors were kind enough to agree to some Q&A afterwards.

Derek J. Goodman, author of The Apocalypse, is my first review/interview combo, and the whole thing went up on the book blog this morning. You can read it here.

Angel Zapata, Private Eye

2009-10-08T22:31:00.003-04:00

Angel sat in his office, the only illumination in the room coming from the green-shaded lamp sitting on his desk. It was dark outside, nearly midnight, and the rain was coming down in icy sheets that threatened to go on until morning. It had been raining for hours and was showing no signs of stopping or slowing down.

On nights like this, in the grimy old city, the only people who’d brave the cold and damp were the downtrodden, the hopeless, the victims. Only they, and perhaps the shifty-eyed dirtbags they needed protection from, would leave the comfort of their homes or offices to make their way through the darkened streets.

Angel sighed and reached into a desk drawer for a bottle of whiskey. It was going to be a slow night. He could tell. The world outside, save for the pattering of rain on the sidewalk, was eerily quiet.

Suddenly he heard footsteps outside his office door. They were soft and quick. A woman’s shoes, it seemed.

The door burst open and a dame walked in. Her hair was soaking wet, her makeup running, and she had a horrified look on her face. As she spotted him sitting at his desk, she walked across the room to stand in front of him. “You... You’re Angel Zapata, right?”

“That I am, madam.”

“I need your help. Please. There’s nobody else I can go to.”

“What do you need help with, lady? Husband straying? Been framed for something? Someone been viciously murdered?”

She shook her head. “No, nothing like that.”

“Well, what is it, then?”

“I need you to catch a thief.”

“What kind of thief are we talking about?”

“A plaigarist.”

“The worst kind. Damn dirty scumbags, all of them. You got a name for me?”

“Ridyard,” she said. “Richard Ridyard.”

“Give a bit of time, lady, and I’ll find the dirtball thief for you. Don’t you worry about anything.” As she thanked him and turned to leave, Angel Zapata, private detective, reached into his drawer for his gun and a cigar.

He reached again for the bottle, as well. It was going to be a long night.

______

That was actually a lot of fun to write. I should do old-timey detective stories more often!

Anyway, here’s what’s been going on recently. Apparently the horror community has a bit of an issue with plagiarism. It’s not so much a problem of people stealing off of each other but one man ripping off a ton of people and passing their work as his all over the small-press and horror e-zine community.

His byline is Richard Ridyard, though that very well may not be his legal name.

Angel Zapata is a real person, an awesome guy and a great writer. We’ve been published by a few small presses together, which is why this whole thing hit so close to home for me.

Angel realized a few days ago that one of his pieces had been ripped off (you can read details of the whole sordid affair here) and did what any enraged writer would do - He tracked the jackass’s shady dealings all over the Internet and exposed every one of them, contacting every editor, publisher and author involved that he could find. There are quite a few, unfortunately.

Would you believe this Ridyard character ripped off little-knowns and STEPHEN KING as well?

He pulled a fast one on a lot of publishers, including ones who’ve been kind enough to accept my work. He hit Flashes in the Dark, MicroHorror and quite a few others, all good people who provide outlets for new and under published writers. He tried (and occasionally succeeded) snowing other publishers I know from horror fiction message boards.

I’m probably the last horror writer to blog about this. Honestly, it feels like the rest of the Internet is way ahead of me on this, but I really felt the need to both do my part in spreading the word (to the few people who may not have caught wind of this yet) and to voice my opinion and frustrations.

Most of us make very little money doing what we do. We write for a variety of reasons, but mostly we write because it’s something we can’t ignore. It’s a passion, a driving force, an obsession. We do it often because to not write would make us feel miserable and incomplete. We don’t do it for wealth or fame, but because it’s in our blood and we can’t not do it.

Imagine the complete pain and anger you would feel if you were to discover someone took a piece of your work, stripped your name from it and claimed it as their own. Imagine if this person were so good at doing what they did that they managed to impress publishers with it. Imagine going to a website or print publication you respected and enjoyed reading and seeing your own work there with a different byline.

Just the thought of it makes me a little nauseous.

I’m glad this didn’t go unnoticed. Thank you, Angel, for shining your angry spotlight on this very disgusting act of theft. You’ve saved a lot of writers and publishers quite a bit of misery. It was a lot of work you went through to so thoroughly root out the thief, and we appreciate everything you’ve done for us.

You can read Angel’s follow-up here as well.

I Know All There is To Know About the Waiting Game...

2009-10-07T00:02:00.004-04:00

God, is it ever killing me.

According to Duotrope, I'm waiting on responses for eleven submissions. Of those, one is for a podcast, four are for print anthologies, one is a contest entry and the other five are for various online and print magazines. I'm also waiting to hear back about my novel query, which I expect will take quite some time.

I think the anthology submissions are killing me the most. I love the idea of being part of a print collection, one piece of a badass group. I can certainly handle rejection, but just the thought of being included in other print collections sends me running as soon as my computer makes its new message notification blip. I keep hoping for word to arrive, but it's mostly been junk mail and things that I could care less about, which somehow makes the waiting seem both longer and much worse than it normally would.

Today I did something I should have done a long time ago. I got rid of most of those mass mailings, unsubscribing as soon as they hit my inbox. I feel bad for all of the nonprofit organizations that send me messages, but seeing as how I'm unemployed and just scraping by it's not like they're going to be able to wring donations out of my sappy, bleeding heart at the moment. The rest of the mailings, for bookstores I don't normally buy from or clothing shops I rarely frequent, were never much more than a distraction anyway, and I don't need to be getting my hopes up over crap like that.

And now the waiting game goes on, only with fewer false alarms.

One good thing about this, though, is that I checked my overall performance on Duotrope while tallying up my submissions. I've got a higher than average acceptance rate going at the moment, almost at fifty percent. Not too shabby.

Twisted Legends Releasing Early!

2009-10-04T20:08:00.006-04:00

Twisted Legends: Urbanized and Unauthorized, published by Pill Hill Press, is printing early. Originally slated to come out next year, it appears the anthology will be available both from the publisher and online book retailers towards the end of this month. My short story, "Forward Forward Forward," will be included along with thirty others. The lineup of authors is great and the scope of stories (all dealing with well-known urban legends) is vast. I'm fairly certain there's something in here for every horror fan.

I'm really impressed with the cover art, too.

National Novel Writing Month Looms Ahead Again

2009-10-04T15:52:00.004-04:00

I'm not sure if I'm going to bother writing another anti-NaNo rebuttal this year. I did last year and the year before that and I think all of the things I felt I needed to say have already been said. Between now and the end of November there is always the chance that someone will say something to set me off, but for now I really have no intention of rehashing things that I've already commented upon.

That said, there is less than a month left until the thirty-day writing exercise begins anew. I managed to get some research done yesterday in the form of a photo-snapping project at a local dying mall. Originally I'd intended to visit two or more of them, but one of the others seems to now be in fine form and the last one is in the process of being demolished and rebuilt. Still, the photos from the site we managed to visit are rather interesting. Next step in the research phase will be combing through old news articles and scouring the Internet for shopping mall maps and schematics.

In addition to photos, I managed to sketch out a few rough character and setting bios yesterday, which caught me quite by surprise. I didn't expect these aspects of the story to gel the way they did. One moment I was walking down a nearly abandoned mall corridor and the next I was running into the still-open (yet extremely depressing) KMart frantic for a notebook. By the time the evening was over I'd filled five pages of notes on at least three characters and two settings. Not too shabby.

Tomorrow evening there will be the first pre-November meeting down in Oakland. I'm still not sure if I'm going to be able to make the drive down and back, but I'm dying to meet the other participants. Hopefully there will be some familiar faces in the crowd.

Kody Boye's An Amorous Thing - Cover Artist Needed

2009-10-03T08:59:00.005-04:00

I had the pleasure of meeting Kody Boye at this year's Horror Realm convention, and what an amazing guy he is. When I made my first few fiction sales at the age of eighteen, I thought I was some hot new thing, despite not making many connections and fizzling out in the few years afterwards. This guy is something completely different. He's only seventeen and the dude writes like a madman. I've never seen someone this young churn out as much as he has. He's a prolific whirlwind.

I'm glad I'm in his good graces now, because I'll probably be able to mooch off of him later when he's really famous.

His novel Sunrise is about to hit its second printing through The Library of the Living Dead Press, and his new love-themed short story collection, An Amorous Thing, will be out next year through Lame Goat Press. He's got a ton of free fiction floating around online as well, and I urge anyone with an interest in all things horror to check him out.

Right now, though, Kody's looking for a cover artist for Amorous Thing. I'm giving him some of my blog space to pimp out his search, because he's just that damn awesome.

________________________________________________

An Amorous Thing--to be published by Lame Goat Press in 2010--is a collection of dark fiction revolving around the theme of affection. Whether that be a killer's desire to slice your face open or a lover's will for you to be happy, all revolve around the twisted, oftentimes morbid theme of love. We do crazy things when we care about people--love them, hate them, kill them. Each act is done with love and with purpose.

So, to celebrate the release of this collection, I am holding a cover art contest. Simply enough, people will send covers (front covers for now, but if you get selected, we'll ask for a full front/back/spine) to the head of staff at Lame Goat. From there, he will forward them to me, and I, along with Chris, will review the submissions to see which piece of art would be best suited for the theme. Now, to view full, detailed specifications, you can head on over to his blog and check out there, or just look below the majority of the post for the general guidelines.

What are the prizes if you happen to create the best and most striking cover?

From Lame Goat...

$25.00

A signed copy of An Amorous Thing upon release

Due to the fact that Lame Goat is fairly new, they can't go a long way with contributions to the people who work with them. As of now, they can't pay for anthology submissions and they pay standard for stuff like this (i.e, my collection.) BUT, because I don't want people to go away empty-handed, and because I want to spur some more interest on, I am going to be collecting prizes and putting them into the pool.

So... the grand prize winner of the twenty-five dollars and a signed copy of the collection will also get these items from me:

Movies:

Leprechaun - Back to Tha Hood

Night of 1000 Cats

Books:

One Door Away From Heaven - Dean Koontz, Hardcover (missing dust jacket)

Bitten - Kelly Armstrong, Paperback

Stolen - Kelly Armstrong, Paperback

Touch the Dark - Karen Chance, Paperback

Born in Death - Nora Roberts writing as J.D Rob, Paperback

The Green Mile - Stephen King, Paperback (slight wear)

Dark Hollow - John Connolly, Paperback (wear)

The Bone Collector - Jeffrey Deaver, Paperback (wear)

Fear not, my friends! This is only the beginning of the prize pool that I want to assemble for the lucky winner of the contest. I'm hoping to assemble some more stuff for you all--more books, movies, and, hopefully, some CDs, though I'd prefer to shy away from them if only because I don't know the music tastes of those I will be buying for. Obviously, the majority of this stuff is used, but does it matter? I know to some it may, but as I've shown, I'm not giving a product away without listing its condition.

Anyway, if you're interested in designing a cover and possibly winning the above, please check out Chris Jacobsmeyer's blog post about the contest. I will continue to update everyone on the status of the prize pool and everything else that is going on with this.

Thank you,

~ Kody

CONTEST INFORMATION:

Lame Goat Press is seeking a cover artist for Kody Boye's upcoming collection: An Amorous Thing, to be published sometime in 2010. The chosen artist will receive $25 and a contributor's copy for his/her efforts, along with additional prizes provided by the author himself. Deadline to submit is November 15th, 2009.

Per Mr. Boye, this is what he'd like to see:

Cover with a skeleton in the ground, surrounded by various items that symbolize the various stories in the collection.

A white bell with gold/bronze accents, with a butterfly on the side of it

An origami swan

A diary

A fish skeleton or bowl

A dog tag, broken in half

A piece of lavender (flower or otherwise)

A stuffed giraffe

A paintbrush

Something symbolizing a cat

Mainly, though, I want something that stands out. The minor details might make the cover a little overloaded, so the skeleton in the ground would be a good idea. But, again, it's an idea--if you have a better one, I'd love to hear it. I think something in red would be nice though.

The theme of the anthology revolves around affection, whether it be through horrific or loving means. What this means to you will be what inspires your cover piece. A skeleton is not required, nor are any of the other optional pieces that could be added. We want to see what YOU, the artist, think of the prompt. We want to see YOUR unique version. The idea is provided for a basis of the author's original idea, but is open to interpretation in other ways.

Back-cover Synopsis:

People love.

It’s the way of the world. Hug your neighbor, kiss your lover, hold a hand or bear a child—every action comes with a consequence, and every consequence bears a reaction. In a world where people live, die, and give birth to the cycle of madness, affection is required to live a sane life.

Or so they say.

Take a trip to a cemetery, then fall in love with a bell; ride your bicycle down the street, then have your face cut open by a beautiful woman; fall in love with a monster and play the benevolent god to creatures that cannot understand you. These are amorous things, these acts of violence, and they wouldn’t be committed if they didn’t care about you.

Welcome to a world of madness.

Welcome to a world of affection—a world of amorous things.

Send all queries and subs to Christopher Jacobsmeyer at cjacobsmeyer@msn.com for consideration.

GENERAL PROMOTION:

I am also looking for people interested in helping with general promotion. This would involve:

-- Allowing me to guest blog about one of the stories in your blog (writers/magazines only.) Nine more spots are needed.

-- People interested in reviewing/blurbing the collection (again, blurbing for writers/magazines only.)

-- People willing to promote the collection through links, banners, blog posts, etcetera.

-- Interviews/interviewers are especially needed.

If you are interested in helping, please send an email to kodyboye@q.com.

It's Strange...

2009-09-25T21:34:00.000-04:00

For the longest time, I’ve held onto the strange belief that writers ahead (or above, take your pick) of me don’t have the problems that I do. I’ve always, for some odd reason, assumed that people with entire books to their names don’t worry about their work the way I do.

After meeting and/or listening to (or reading the posts online of) writers with books and publishing contracts, I’ve come to realize that writing neurosis is fairly universal. Everyone worries about their work, how it’s received, and what the critics say.

I guess most writers suffer from the same self-doubt and fear of rejection and/or criticism as I do, and that’s a comforting thought. We’re all in the same boat.

I’m not so different from anybody else, and that makes me feel so much better.

I Can't Believe I Did It

2009-09-24T16:22:00.000-04:00

I went ahead and queried a publisher for In the Teahouse.

Now comes the part where I scramble around nervously going over the manuscript with a fine-toothed comb, adding chapters, moving things around and generally agonizing over whether my work is honestly any good or not.

I’ve had conflicting emotions about this story since I first sent it off to beta readers. Some liked it, some didn’t and some never even got back to me. After a few comments I was forced to do some real soul-searching on the subject matter and a few of the characters and I came to the conclusion of “Hell with it, it’s my novel and I’m telling the story I want to tell.”

Now I’m to the point where I’m not sure if this is all I can do with it, but I’m not getting anywhere by letting it sit on my hard drive while I mope about it.

I don’t think I will be receiving a response for some time, seeing as the publisher is an indie horror press and is currently quite busy, so I now have this manuscript and its very final polishing to keep me busy.

I hope I don’t freak out and decide to tear it apart and rebuild it before then.

Horror Realm, or: I Came in Second!?

2009-09-22T20:43:00.002-04:00

In case I haven’t mentioned it recently, I went to Horror Realm over the weekend. We’ve got a great zombie-themed convention going every fall here in Pittsburgh, and this is the first year it’s been held outside the Monroeville area. The whole thing went down at the Crown Plaza hotel beside the South Hills Village Mall and it was damn cool.

Two years ago, during the first convention (while it was still called ZombieFest), I wrote my first zombie-themed story after listening to Kim Paffenroth, Gary Braunbeck and Edward Holsclaw read their work at an author panel. As someone who, until then, focused mainly on vampire and ghost stories, I was struck by the sheer versatility of the zombie story. Before that point, I had a very narrow view of the subgenre, and seeing several very different (and altogether amazing) takes on it blew me away. That night, I wrote Wings, which will published in volume #69 of The Nocturnal Lyric a few months from now.

Last year the convention was held in the Monroeville Mall proper, with author tables set up amongst a lot of standard weekend foot traffic, and I didn’t get to sit in on any panels. I met Gary Braunbeck again and got him to sign my copy of October Dreams, one of the best Halloween-themed anthologies I’ve ever read. It’s one of my little treasures.

This year I got to sit in on two panels on Friday, and they were awesome. I was in the audience during readings by Jonathan Maberry, James Melzer, Rob Fox, Dave Dunwoody, Kim Paffenroth and Steven North. I got back to the con late on Saturday, unfortunately, and missed the panels for the day.

One of the reasons I was late is because I was stuck at Eric’s writing my entry for the Permuted Press Apocalyptic Flash Fiction contest. I got a bit drunk Friday night, woke up at seven Saturday morning, walked the Waterworks Mall and got breakfast to slough off the morning-after booze fog and came back to the house without an idea in my head. After a few minutes, I came up with the concept of beached orcas coming back from the dead and eating the people that were attempting to rescue (and then, when they failed, dispose of) them. It was an awesome story. I really, really love it. It’s called Blackfish, and I plan on submitting it somewhere soon.

However, despite its awesomeness, it didn’t seem to fit the guidelines of the contest. It takes place at the very cusp of a zombie outbreak, not afterward, and once I’d bounced the idea off Eric and got an “I like this a lot, but...” response I decided to go back to the drawing board. This time I wrote a story called Conference, about a woman barricaded in her office building.

Eric dropped me off at the con and took off for a friend of ours’ bachelor party and I wandered the hotel by myself for a while. When I turned my story in to the Permuted guys I was told that I was the twelfth entry so far. Seeing as how many excellent novelists and short story writers were in attendance, I didn’t think my chances were that great.

A friend of mine and a few other women she works with that I’ve met once or twice before showed up and we continued to wander a bit before heading over to the mall to search for Umbrella Corp. patches they need for a zombie home movie they’re making at work. Once that was over, they took off and, after running through the Dealer’s Room at the con and picking up a few more books, I decided to head home. I was tired and feeling a bit worn out and for some reason I seemed to have caught a bad case of the “shy and awkward” and was just wandering here and there not getting much accomplished.

Sunday came and went and I didn’t go back to the convention. It’s an hour’s drive and I had little money left to spend, was low on gas and I had a ton of stuff to do around the house. I debated driving down to make the last day’s author panels but by the time I had most of my work at home done I would have missed almost everything and it would only be an hour or so before the convention ended.

I wondered a few times Sunday and Monday about the outcome of the contest. I figured I’d hear about it over on the Permuted forums at some point this week, and to be honest I never really thought I’d had much of a shot at winning, seeing as who the other entrants more than likely were. Still, I was really curious about the stories and wanted to hear more about the whole thing, and so I kept my eyes peeled. In fact, I was thinking about it on the drive home from classes today while listening to The Funky Werepig’s post-Horror Realm podcast.

When I came home from my walk this evening, I had a message over on the forums from Jacob Kier, owner of Permuted.

I came in second, and my prize is a pick of two Permuted titles. These are some seriously slick books, trade paperbacks with amazing covers. I bought three titles over the weekend already, so I’m going to have a whole stack of Permuted books to tear through this Autumn season.

I came in second and I wasn’t there to acknowledge it because I’m a dork who had too much stuff to do at home to make the trip back down. I’d really love to smack myself right about now. In fact, I still may do it.

I was a bit shocked to find out that there was actually a panel for the contest winners. The judges were there to talk about the entries and James Melzer, author of The Zombie Chronicles (who also has a badass podcast called Unleashed that I like to listen to while I’m on the road and in the gym) read the three stories that placed and an honorable mention. He has an awesome radio voice and he did an excellent job with all of them. I was thrilled to hear him read my story to the audience.

If there’s a moral to this story, I suppose it would be “Don’t be a shy dork and don’t cut out early.” Next year I’m going to have to spring for a room at the hotel so that I don’t have any lame excuses.

Horror Realm Flash Fiction Contest from James Melzer on Vimeo.

"You May Have Already Won!" Appearing in 69 Flavors of Paranoia

2009-09-21T14:35:00.001-04:00

“You May Have Already Won!” has been accepted by online horror publisher 69 Flavors of Paranoia. I got the email this morning when I woke up, and I’m really thrilled. This wasn’t an easy story to place, and I honestly thought it would be one for the “Maybe in a thousand years I’ll have a collection and I can shove it in there” file.

I’m really happy I was able to get it to an editor who liked it enough to put their name on it. Rycke, the editor who went over my piece, was kind enough to do a few edits that really brought it up a notch. I’m going over the proof in bits and pieces today, and the subtle edits are looking great.

Oooh, I Got Some Shiny New Business Cards

2009-09-09T16:47:00.004-04:00

The things that amuse and fulfill me. Seriously.

Even the smallest, most insignificant things make me happy.

I decided it would be prudent to open a Post Office box rather than list my home address on a card I intend to hand out to different people, so this afternoon was spent picking a Post Office, printing the forms, rifling through files for secondary identification papers and running back and forth to the local PO to turn in the forms and pick up my keys. I also dropped off the contracts for my anthology sale, which still feels rather nice.

Anyway, the legwork's all done and I'm now the owner of an empty box down at the local PO. There's a certain nostalgia and romance I always end up feeling when I walk into a Post Office, much like what I experience when I stay in hotels, so I'll be looking forward to more of that in the future.

The cards should be here in time for next weekend's Horror Realm convention, which is perfect. I should have planned this out long ago, but the idea of business cards as a necessity didn't strike me until very recently.

First Anthology Sale!

2009-09-03T11:33:00.000-04:00

I’ve been published both online and in small press magazines before, but never a book. Next year, that will have changed. My short story “Forward Forward Forward” is appearing in Pill Hill Press’s collection Twisted Legends: Urbanized and Unauthorized.

I can’t wait for my contributor copy!

Rain Goes Public

2009-08-28T17:38:00.005-04:00

For a long time I shied away from writing long form fiction. When I say a long time, I mean a dozen years or more, off and on. I wrote short stories and submitted them to publishers, and once in a while I received acceptance and occasionally monetary compensation. To this day I still have manuscripts floating about, and when one comes back with a no it goes right back out again to someone else. It’s a revolving door of email attachments, hardcopy mailings, small press magazines and genre websites. It’s fun, and it makes me very happy to be able to participate, even when I’m being rejected.

Sometimes I think I take rejection a bit too much in stride, or that I may be harboring some sick, private enjoyment of it, but that’s not really a subject I want to discuss in this post. What I want to talk about is Rain.

I think I still have a bit of faith in traditional publishing. I have plans to query agents and attack the publishing houses. I still picture a hardback with my name on the spine just under an impressive publisher’s logo. Perhaps someday I may even have my name on an orange-gilded spine with a flightless bird beneath it. I don’t think so, but it’s not out of the realm of possibility. Nothing really is.

This isn't something I think would even catch the eye of an agent or editor for even a moment, but that doesn't mean it's something that doesn't deserve exposure.

What I’ve noticed in recent months and years is that it’s not entirely necessary to rely on agents and publishers, not if you’re writing for the craft and hell of it. If you’re writing to make yourself happy, to cut out the middleman, to reach out and be able not only to touch your readers but to clasp hands with them, you don’t need any of this. You just need to put your work out there and let the public decide on what merit it has and in what quantity.

I don’t think I ever would have decided to do this if I hadn’t seen so many others attempting it before, putting their own personal spin on it.

Cliff Burns got sick of traditional publishing, burned his bridges and forged his own way. He’s one hell of a spitfire and an excellent writer to boot. He’s released whole novels along with short story reprints on his site. If you don’t mind someone with extremely strong opinions on pretty much everything, or if that’s the kind of writing you long for, I urge you to check him out. Seriously, he’s great.

Dan Holloway, author of self-published novel Songs from the Other Side of the Wall and founding member of the Year Zero Writers Collective, is currently releasing his The Man Who Painted Agnieszka’s Shoes as an Internet novel. Chapters are released incrementally on Facebook. It’s an amazing story, layers and layers of narrative on top of each other, unfolding in front of readers with an ease and spot-on eye for pop culture that makes it seem as if it were actually happening, as if these characters actually had breath and life and were appearing on legitimate news sources. It feels real, and it’s fascinating, and I’m glad to have the opportunity to watch it unfold.

Everyone already knows about my love for Machine Man. I’m not wasting any more space or time explaining it or pimping it out. People are going to start thinking I’ve got a crush on Max Barry (Okay, so I do.) Read it. Read it now, and you can thank me later.

What about all those other people writing novels with their cellphones? Japan’s got tons of them, written by young people and retirees alike. They’re huge. They’ve gained their authors print deals and news coverage all the way across the world. Amazing.

These examples and many others have convinced me to put Rain out, to give it in its raw, experimental form and see what becomes of it. I almost feel like I’m putting it in a bottle and tossing it into the ocean in the middle of a tropical storm, unsure of what to expect in return, worried it might not even reach anybody. It’s a strange feeling.

Rain is, among a few other unpublished novel length pieces, a training wheels exercise. I don’t learn something and become comfortable with it until I’ve gone through the motions several times, breaking things down into components and memorizing their functions before connecting all the pieces. I don’t really know how to write a novel, even though I’ve read at least a dozen books on the subject. And I won’t, not until I’ve flailed about in the muck of my own first attempts and witnessed for myself their strengths and weaknesses, their successes and failures.

I decided to make Facebook Rain’s primary home because it will gain more exposure there, as I have a built-in network of like-minded people already in place. I’ll be blogging about the process offsite as well, here on Blogger.

Oh, Those Erotic Primates

2009-08-18T16:04:00.003-04:00

Alcoholics. Drug addicts. Misogynists. Misandrists. Misanthropes. Sexual fetishists.

Writers have been subject to stereotypes for a long, long time, and with good reason. Within every caricature is a small grain of truth that applies to enough people in a group for the stereotype to catch hold and remain in the collective consciousness. Some of the most common (and, unfortunately, most accurate) conceptions about the so-called “creative types” are the notions of substance and spousal abuse, the tendency to drink to excess to awaken the muse and the unsociable nature that drives a person to abuse their loved ones.

There are a great many writers who defy stereotypes and refuse to be denigrated by drink or violence and cannot be classified by any method, and are possibly the actual majority of people in the field. However, it is much more entertaining to delve into the lives of people who, often tragically, fit the mold of the writer out of control.

How many writers’ love of drink and mistreatment of their wives (or, occasionally, husbands) have become almost as well-known as their bodies of work? Poe, Hemingway, Mailer, Capote, Carver, just to name a few off the top of my head, were legendary both in their prose and reputations as drinkers, brawlers, abusers or a combination of the three.

Now we can add William Golding to the list.

Booze? Check. Parental issues? Check. Bizarre outlook on human sexuality? Wow. Double, possibly triple, check.

Golding, who died sixteen years ago, kept journals and other papers over the years, including a memoir intended for his wife titled Men and Women Now, that shed some light on the author and his very personal life, including his early adulthood. In the memoir he attempts to unveil, and possibly explain, the ‘monstrous side’ of his character by detailing to his wife how he tried to rape a young girl while on holiday during his first year at Oxford.

He describes a fourteen-year-old girl as being “depraved by nature” and “already sexy as an ape.” What? Seriously? I can possibly understand “depraved by nature“ as a misogynist’s attempt to justify his arousal by and intention of assaulting a young girl, but the ape comment I just cannot wrap my brain around.

Could a Briton possibly enlighten me to this turn of phrase? Is this slang that didn’t make its way across the Atlantic, or was Golding more demented than even his memoirs are hinting at? I cannot think up a scenario where primates would arouse me, and I assume most people would come to the same conclusion. I really, really hope they do. I’m willing to brush it off as some sort of regional slang, seeing as we have tons of odd phrases here in the States that no doubt leave people elsewhere scratching their heads.

In addition to his bizarre sexual escapades, which include consensual sex with the same girl only two years later (including the line "Should I have all that rammed up my guts?,” which leads me to speculate that Golding was actually a character in someone else’s novel this whole time), Golding comes out and admits, going into great detail, that he pitted boys in his charge against each other while teaching at a public school.

I’ve heard of novelists doing extensive research, but I think that might take the cake for me. He actually created a similar Lord of the Flies scenario in a controlled setting before writing the novel. Holy shit.

I’m not even sure why I’m writing this blog post, to be completely honest. How many times have we as a global community been subjected to posthumous information about a public figure that illustrates, in thick black lines no amount of correction fluid can hide, just how morally reprehensible they were in life?

Perhaps it is because I have such vivid memories of Golding and Lord of the Flies that I felt compelled to write about it. In other articles, such as this one from The Times of India, it is mentioned that Golding’s work was required reading for British schoolchildren. However, I’d like it to be noted that, in addition to being a textbook in his native country, Golding’s work (with an emphasis on Lord of the Flies) was and still is widely circulated in American public schools. I cannot vouch for all schools, or even any outside of my district, but when I was in school in the 1990s we alternated between studying British works and American ones. In ninth grade we focused mostly on Shakespeare, and in eleventh it was mostly 20th century novels. It was during this year that I read Golding, as well as Huxley and Orwell. I wrote my term paper on Orwell, something I remember to this day.

My teacher that year hated me. She seriously did, and I gave her more than a few reasons to feel that way. I never shut up. I never took anything seriously. I never stopped looking over at my best friend Jen and snickering or doodling during lectures. I was hyperactive to an almost insane degree, uncontrollably self-interested and intent on blocking out the rest of the world. I didn’t like school, didn’t like reading things that were forced upon me (though I read nonstop, starting in early childhood and continuing to this day), didn’t like studying subjects that seemed pointless to me, didn’t like a whole lot of other people.

I was not, in any possible way, an ideal student. Hell, I wasn’t even tolerable most of the time.

Something grabbed hold of me in Golding’s work, though. In between pushing up imaginary glasses and loudly mimicking Piggy’s voice and mannerisms (we were forced to watch the 1960 edition of the film during class), saying “MY SPECS!” and “MY AUNTIE OWNS A CANDY STORE” when my poor teacher only wanted to show the film and get on with it, I found a piece of work that was truly both chilling and enjoyable. I didn’t mind the worksheets and quizzes on character archetypes or Simon’s symbolism of Jesus Christ. In my own obnoxious way, I was paying attention, at least on some level. I came out of that class reviled by my teacher but passionately in love with dystopian novels, something I appreciate to this day.

I suppose that is why, when I read about Golding this morning, I felt compelled to say something on the subject. I was flooded with memories of sitting in that stupid chair, behind that stupid desk, back in 1995 and finding something I loved where I least expected it. In amongst the jokes and high school rivalries and the pranks I pulled on my friends, I fell in love with a novel, at least for a short while. I really ought to go back and reread it to see if it holds up to the test of time, though I have a sneaking suspicion that it does.

To find out the author of said novel was as dark, creepy and subversive as his classic antagonist is no big deal, really. Authors tend to have their demons. I think what really surprised me about all of this is that he would reveal, so many years after the fact, his depraved youthful exploits to his wife. I wonder if she ever read the memoir or the journals and if so what her response to them were. I’m hoping that may be touched upon when these papers are published.

In the meantime, I think I might nix the idea of transcribing my journals. I’ll keep them in my nearly illegible handwriting, thank you.

Machine Man in Print - Confirmed!

2009-08-14T01:16:00.000-04:00

Just received the good news today from Max Barry’s mailing list. Machine Man’s print edition is confirmed! It’s got kinks that need worked out, including a rewrite to smooth out the halting, pulled-out-of-nowhere feel of the daily chapters (which I like, by the way), but it’s coming.

Don’t know what I’m talking about? I raved about the crazy Internet serial a few months ago on my book review blog, New Reads and Old Standbys.

Do any of these keywords appeal to you?

Humor, satire, sarcasm, romance, love triangle, transhumanism, geeky, amputation, fetish, experiment, accident, prosthetics.

Do they? If so, check it out now. Give in and get your daily dose of Barry.

I’m going to keep bugging you until you do.

The Rogue on The New Flesh

2009-08-12T09:51:00.000-04:00

My flash fiction story, The Rogue, has been accepted and published on The New Flesh, a new horror flash ezine.

The 2010 Novel and Short Story Writer's Market is Out!

2009-08-10T16:54:00.002-04:00

I love these books, though having to plunk down cash on a new edition (and tossing out the previous year’s, with all its highlighted listings and margin-scrawled notes) is a bit disheartening. I know the market, especially in the small press and online sectors, is unstable and outfits come and go like tumbleweed in a sandstorm sometimes, but damn do these books date themselves so quickly. Not that it’s anyone’s fault, really. That’s just the way small publishing is.

In addition to the market listings, Writer’s Digest includes in each volume a number of essays that change yearly on topics like new genres, blogging, critique groups and the like. Every year I say I’m going to read all of the articles alongside scouring the market listings, and every year I fail to do so.

Well, I’m saying it again this year. I’m reading those articles. In fact, I’ve read several of them already.

This year, Writer’s Digest has included a free subscription to their online publication, Writer's Market. It’s a genre-only subscription, rather than for the entire site, so certain things will be inaccessible depending on which Guide you’ve purchased. Upgrades are, of course, available.

Nice marketing tactic.

I suppose as punishment for getting this book for $20 instead of the MSRP of $30 (Amazon’s good for a few things, discounting preorders being one of them), the site will not accept my registration. I used to have a membership there, and when I slowed down on submissions to concentrate on novel drafting and then lost my job, I wound up being forced to cancel my monthly subscription. My email address is already in their database, and renewals are apparently not eligible for this “free” service.

Again, nice marketing tactic, WDB. They put out some great books on craft from time to time but, at the moment, I’m a little irritated.

I’m not letting this serial number go to waste. First email request gets it.

As for me, I’m going to stick to using Duotrope in tandem with the book I already own. I’m not ponying up any more cash when I’m so close to a cardboard box under a bridge. Maybe some other time.

Ficly

2009-08-03T16:13:00.001-04:00

I've been trying my hand at shorter works of fiction lately, and I have to say it seems to be rather catching.

Instead of working on material I can submit to publishers, I've become a bit addicted to Ficly, a little site for little stories.

Ficly reminds me quite a bit of open source software. In 1024 characters (roughly 190 - 200 words) or less, an author writes a piece of flash fiction and publishes it on the site. This story can be as rough or as polished as the author wants, as professional or draft-form, as highbrow or juvenile. There are no guidelines save for the arbitrary character limit and the use of non-proprietary characters (which is often broken). Readers can rate these stories on a scale from one to five or leave comments without rating it at all.

Here’s the interesting part. Other users can come along and write a prequel or sequel to any story on the site. One of my own stories, “The Anything-Goes Call In Show,” was recently continued by someone other than myself. It didn’t keep the dialogue-only style of the original, but it certainly was interesting. There’s something both surreal and highly entertaining about seeing someone else continue something you yourself started.

The only drawback to this site is that I feel compelled to do my best there, and a lot of work that I could have submitted to actual publications for real money (or real contributor’s copies) are now online and considered published and, thus, ineligible for submission. The above referenced story is something I’ve come to be incredibly proud of over the last few weeks, and there’s no way for me to find it a publisher now. It’s a small price to pay, though, for the fun and community that is Ficly.

I’m sure I can come up with other work to shop around, though the temptation of immediate readership and critique over on Ficly will always be there.

Home Movies on Flashes in the Dark

2009-07-27T10:35:00.001-04:00

My flash fiction story, Home Movies, has been accepted and published by Flashes in the Dark.

The Prodigy's "The Way it Is"

2009-07-22T13:18:00.004-04:00

Seeing as how I just wrote an essay on this very tune (or, at least, its origin) a few weeks ago, and am also a huge Prodigy fan, I figured this was worth passing along. I’m surprised it took so long for me to find this track on my iPod playlist.

No matter how many times I hear this song, no matter what twisted incarnation it’s in, I’m always taken straight back to my little girl days of glossy black records on my little red record player.

Enjoy.

The Writer and the Movie - A Love Story

2009-07-21T13:53:00.008-04:00

One of the things I've noticed, after reading many different authors' memoirs on the craft of writing and the effects of childhood experiences, is that most, if not all, were influenced in one way or another by film.

When I say film, I'm not talking about the standard musicals, romances and Disney children's movies of the mid twentieth century. No, everyone saw those, and while they had their squeaky-clean moments of whimsical charm they did little to flesh out the imaginations of young, impressionable writers-to-be.

Every author, especially those easily classified into the speculative genres (science fiction, fantasy, horror and their derivative subcategories) seem in one way or another to have been captivated, usually at a very young age, by the grit, gore and sleaze of the “B movie,” the “exploitation flick,” the “grind house picture.”

Call them what you will, as they go by many names and often defy outright categorization, but these were the films that ran at cheap theaters, drive ins and screens dedicated to second runs and small-budget shockers. Stephen King, in his book On Writing, sums up the youthful obsession well when he says “Never mind sweet; never mind uplifting; never mind Snow White and the Seven Goddam Dwarfs. At thirteen I wanted monsters that ate whole cities, radioactive corpses that came out of the ocean and ate surfers, and girls in black bras who looked like trailer trash.”

Now, that's what I'm talking about.

By the time my own coming of age was taking place, most of the drive ins and all of the studio-specific theaters had faded into obscurity. I've often complained that perhaps, despite my fondness for all things new and battery-powered and cutting-edge, I was born a few decades late. I missed the rise of the horror film, in all of its shocking black and white glory, I missed the birth of Technicolor, the ritual of necking at the drive in, the heyday of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine.

What I did have, by the time I'd blossomed into a hardcore lover of all things gross, creepy and subversive, was the neighborhood video store.

Back in the days before DVD, before Netflix, before Redbox and Blockbuster and the concept of streaming video, there was the neighborhood video store. Every small town had one, and, for the lover of horror films at least, they were head and shoulders above the chain stores like Blockbuster and their clones.

The independently-owned stores were the best. They had at least one VHS copy of pretty much every vampire, ghost or monster movie that came out each year, plus (if you were lucky) older movies and skin flicks. During my teenage years, I would rent a movie at least once every two or three days, usually for ninety-nine cents and always something my parents would have preferred I didn't have any interest in. So long as you were careful not to try renting anything X or NC-17 rated, you could get away with going above your approved age group. I saw a lot of stuff I wasn't (at least in the eyes of the law) ready to see, several of which I still look back and remember fondly to this day.

I remember watching To Sleep With a Vampire, a romance/horror hybrid starring 80s straight-to-video heartthrob Scott Valentine and Charlie Spradling, about a suicidal stripper and a really hot vampire getting it on before one of them has to die. The sheer amount of bare flesh and cheesy, though not completely uninspiring, dialogue involved was mind bending.

I rented Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs enough times to memorize the entire script, and the number of f-bombs dropped would eventually find it banned from our house once my mother's patience for it wore thin. Along with the film itself, I fell madly in love with the music, and one day I walked out of our house and all the way across town to National Record Mart to buy the soundtrack. Once there, the sky opened up and dumped gallon upon gallon of cold rainwater onto the city, and I was forced to call the lone taxi service from a grocery store pay phone and schedule a ride home. Neither the stores themselves nor the taxi company exist anymore.

When I was seventeen and my brother only thirteen, I came home with a copy of Natural Born Killers secreted away in my backpack. He begged me to let him watch the movie with me, and seeing as our parents were gone for the evening I didn't mind breaking the rules a bit to accommodate him. I sat there with my mouth agape as a scene of oral sex atop a car turned into a murder, followed by more deaths than we could count, and the entire world went crazy for two homicidal redneck lovers. Again, I had to own the soundtrack. It was my first exposure to Leonard Cohen, and I still remember some of the lyrics to his song “The Future” - “Give me crack and anal sex/Take the only tree that's left/And stuff it up the hole/In your culture.”

I got quite the education from the video store. My brother probably did as well, just by associating with me. Most of the screwed up things that happened to him as a kid, as far as I can tell, originated with me. One of these days I may have to issue him an apology.

Sometimes my friends and I rented older movies. I remember seeing Blacula for the first time and, afterward, running the plot through in my mind as if written on paper and thinking “Hey, this actually kind of works.” We sometimes rented 70s and 80s splatter classics, and by the time I actually went out and purchased the damn thing I'd seen Halloween more times than I could count. I saw Halloween II, several of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, a handful of Friday the 13ths. I saw lesser-known movies I forget the names to, graduating to the VHS-only, blood-filled, low-budget junk food movies of the late 80s and early 90s.

I barely remember anything except Harvey Keitel’s exposed genitals from The Bad Lieutenant, a movie my friend Christine and I picked up and dragged over to our friend Kristie’s house one weekend.

My friend Chas and I saw all of the Leprechaun movies one summer, sitting in his basement. We also rented a movie about hookers and murder called Zipperface, probably that same year. I'm fairly certain, looking back on it now, that we were trying to root out and expose the worst films we could find, just for a laugh.

My friend Lydia and I, once we were legal adults, marched triumphantly into the video store and into the back corner, eyeballing the pornos with hysterical, lecherous eyes. It would take us years from that point to reach adulthood in any terms not federally mandated. We flipped each case over, read the synopsis, burst out with nervous laughter and moved on to the next one. At one point in our ritual, some poor guy a few years older than us edged into the section, probably wanting to get his dirty movie and get the hell out without much trouble. Being the jerk I was, and already a fan of irritating and making uncomfortable people I barely or don't even know, I slowly turned my head, raised an eyebrow and asked him, “You got any recommendations?” while sweeping my hand across the section.

It's always the same. I only act like a jackass when my girlfriends are around. Corner me alone and you get a stuttering, yellow-bellied wreck of a girl unable to even put together a witty reply. Lydia and I went back to my house that night with a completely unremarkable soft core video about poker players and roulette wheels, though we watched it from beginning to end without much use of the fast-forward button. That guy had some crappy taste in porn.

This went on even after I left my hometown for college. In my new town, there were two video stores to belong to, and I weaseled my way into both despite one of them being strictly for year-round residents. I believe I had to pay an extra twenty-five dollars for the membership, seeing as how so many university students took off with the tapes, never to return.

Somewhere along the line, I was reacquainted with Vincent Price, his amazing voice and inimitable sense of style and humor. To this day, The Abominable Doctor Phibes is one of my favorites of all time, and I’m not ashamed to admit it.

My life has pretty much gone the same ever since, though the small video stores have faded from the landscape one after the other over the years. Now, instead of browsing shelf after shelf of empty cases with lurid cover art, I read synopses online and put them into a queue. I wait, sometimes for days, sometimes for months, depending on the film's position on the list, before I can sit down and enjoy it. It's not the same, and it never will be, but progression comes whether you want it or not, and all you can do is accept it and keep going.

I'll never ask for porno recommendations again, though. Once was enough.

A Bottle of Port on MicroHorror.com

2009-07-14T13:35:00.001-04:00

My flash fiction story, A Bottle of Port, has been accepted and published by MicroHorror.

Will Write for Chocolate

2009-07-13T15:16:00.006-04:00

Let me come out and admit this transgression of mine upfront. I can’t really hide it much longer. I am not a webcomics kind of person. I know, I know, I’ll turn my nerd badge in at the nearest precinct station. Feel free to tell me what a jerk I am - most people I know have already done it once or twice before.

Webcomics seem to be one of the most polarizing concepts to have ever hit the Internet. I have friends who swear by and will waste unknown amounts of time defending this webcomic or that one, praising an artist for coming up with quirky new strips and lambasting the ones who aren’t funny or don’t produce at proper speeds. I’ve actually seen people I know get into real arguments over which strips they read and which ones they think are garbage, insulting friends with dissimilar tastes. It all seems rather strange to me.

I’ve read a few, and despite some being funny (Achewood, Sinfest, Penny Arcade, Perry Bible Fellowship and a few others) I’ve never really found myself hustling over to a website moments after waking to see if an update has been posted yet. On discussion forums I find myself not even checking out the threads dedicated to webcomics because I will always be undoubtedly the farthest behind in terms of being up to date.

I’m perennially behind on most things, be they books or movies, but for webcomics I sometimes feel like it’s for the best that I don’t try so hard. I can barely even remember characters’ names. That’s how bad I am with them.

One comic I do find myself going back to on a semiregular basis is Will Write for Chocolate, a weekly strip written and drawn by Debbi Ridpath Ohi that deals with the lives and careers of a motley group of various writers living under the same roof. You’ve got your nonfiction freelancer, your poet, your childrens’ book writer, each character bringing something different to the strip.

There’s a lot of chocolate, too, which is never a bad thing.

The reason why I like this comic despite my usual ambivalence to the form is rather obvious. Like stand up comedy, comic strips appeal strongest to audience members who can find something in the material to identify with. Will Write for Chocolate deals completely in the humor (and often agony) of writing, touching on topics like rejection, self-doubt, short attention spans, the distracting power of the Internet and the often confusing pain that comes along with starting a new project. It deals in something I already have a vested interest in, instead of trying to entice me with jokes I only half understand.

Ridpath Ohi also does magazine-style single panel comics unrelated to Will Write for Chocolate, which she posts on her sister site Inkygirl. One in the ever changing rotation deals with a hungry literary type trying to decide on a restaurant, weeding them out by recalling misspellings and grammatical errors on their menus. This is funny to me because I have done that several times myself.

I’m glad I’m not the only one.

Dealing With Criticism

2009-07-10T09:07:00.011-04:00

Most people who write, assuming they share their manuscripts with non-family members and/or people in a position of power over them (agents, editors, publishers, etc) have tasted rejection to one degree or another. Some neophytes handle it well, resending manuscripts that have been rejected to another publisher in the hopes of a better fit, or taking well-intended advice and working on yet another draft. It took me quite a while for the sting of rejection to fade into a simpler, gentler sense of overall disappointment, but it was worth it, as now I no longer have to wait for responses with my breath held, fear the dominant emotion when I pull the return envelope from my mailbox.

You win some, you lose some, and anything more than just the word “no” scribbled on a piece of notepaper as a response is going to teach you something. That’s how I see it.

Some of us don’t have the same perspective. Some of us take it personally and feel insulted or humiliated. Some of us fire back poorly thought-out rebuttals or slander those who’ve rejected us on social networking sites. These are all very bad reactions, but considering our newness and lack of critical success most recipients, if they even pay attention to our ramblings, are apt to simply roll their eyes at us and forget we even exist.

When it’s an established author, things are a bit different. The stakes are higher, reputations are tarnished and business ties can be broken. Bad press for a well-known author can be very, very damaging.

When I read a less than stellar book review, as a reader, I tend to not pay too much attention to it. Either something in the review catches my eye and, despite the poor marks in some areas, I’ll pick the book up or I’ll find myself nodding in agreement, not interested in the novel at all. I rarely think of the authors involved. I’m sure it’s far from accurate, but my imagined response to a bad review for an author is about as dramatic as a middle fingered wave at the page before slam-dunking it into the garbage. Over and done with. They’re published authors. They’ve got agents, contracts, royalties. They don’t care about what the reviews say, right?

I have a feeling my initial impression of how the higher echelons deal with criticism was further off than I thought.

Alice Hoffman is a writer with thirty years of experience in publishing. She’s incredibly well known. You would think that she’d be the prime candidate for playing it cool in the face of criticism, right? Not really. Seems last month, after the Boston Globe’s reviewer Roberta Silman gave her a somewhat lackluster (though not entirely negative) review, Hoffman took her vengeance to Twitter.

Twenty-seven irate tweets in response to a review that was, in some places, complimentary. Silman even explains that one of Hoffman’s previous works is one of her favorite books, an accomplishment I’m sure is not easy considering the sheer amount reviewers/writers (Silman is a fiction writer as well) read in their lifetimes.

I’m starting to believe that anxiety is the great equalizer. We’ve all got it, from beginners to professionals, and we’ll never be able to shake it completely. How we deal with it is the most important thing. I follow, as closely as my short temper will allow, a two-fold strategy to criticism. First, never take it to heart or assume the person criticizing is making an intimate attack. Second, never respond with anything but a gracious thank you, and only in the case of manuscript critiques or peer review. Don’t succumb to the childish urge to retaliate. It’s a decent strategy, and I think I’ve done rather well with it. If I ever get to the big leagues I’ll have many opportunities to test my technique there, though I suspect it’s a rather universal idea, well suited to most situations.

What to do, then, if you’re an author and you’ve been given low marks by not one but multiple reviewers? What if you can’t bite your tongue or shrug it off? What then? What did mystery novelist Brad Meltzer do last year when ARCs of his latest, The Book of Lies, were heavily panned?

He didn’t write twenty-seven irate Tweets.

Despite the astounding amount of bad press, most of which he has collected for me right here, I still want to take a peek at his novel, just to see what kind of prose this author could have come up with.

And this, I think, is the whole point.

My Debt to Michael Jackson

2009-06-29T15:44:00.005-04:00

Most children of the 80s have been reeling these past few days. I’m no exception.

The Gloved One was not only a modern-day mythological figure to us, he was a constant fixture in our lives. Before the allegations of child molestation, before Bubbles the Chimp, before the skin-bleaching and gobs of cosmetic surgery there was Michael Jackson, Legend and Childhood Hero.

For some of us, the Legend stopped at pop culture icon. My boyfriend, in particular, saw him as this. He dressed up as him one Halloween at least two decades ago, in the legendary black and white Billie Jean getup. I still haven’t seen the photographic evidence of this. I imagine it’s rather hilarious.

I remember Michael Jackson for these reasons and a few more. I owe him for more than just infectious songs, slick dance moves and bizarrely entertaining arcade games. He was a huge part of making me who I am today.

My habit of scaring myself silly goes back years and years. I suppose the origin of this came about in my fourth year, with the first album I ever owned. It was Thriller, and my parents bought it for me. I played it constantly on a little red portable record player I carried everywhere I went throughout the house. I played with the record player mostly in my bedroom, listening to books on mini album starring She-Ra, He-Man or Gremlins characters, but if I had to go downstairs for long periods of time I’d unplug it and cart it along with me. My little red record player predated the iPod nearly twenty years, but it served the same purpose and I loved it with all the ridiculous intensity that I reserve for my digital music today. It was, in a way, a lifeline that has changed form and tweaked function over the years but has never left me.

Thriller was my first glimpse of adult musical taste. I was a hyperactive child, very impressionable, and I had a habit that continues to this day of remembering things and refusing to let them leave the chambers of recent memory. I replay things I hear, over and over, tormenting myself with them until they take on a life of their own.

That album played in my brain long after I would lift the needle, and one song in particular gripped me so hard that I couldn’t get rid of it even when I wanted it to. It was a hip, catchy tune that to most people was simply a cute song with a cute video that played off of the then still somewhat new zombie motif. What it did to my poor, spongelike pre-kindergarten brain is something in itself out of a horror movie.

It grabbed me, invaded like a vengeful ghost and took residence inside my mind, refusing to leave or give me any peace. Even when I unplugged the player and went to bed, even when I left it downstairs and out of sight in an attempt to alleviate the terror, it played on in my head, filling me with nightmares that jolted me awake in the middle of the night, unable to get a grip on myself. I was just a child, new to nightmares and unsure how to handle being so afraid. I just let myself become even more scared by constantly thinking about what it was that frightened me. It’s a habit I continue even now, and over the years have become even somewhat proud of.

I have to say, now that I’ve thought about it, that Jackson was really just the matchmaker between fear and I. Fear came not in his voice, but in a voice that over the years I grew to adore, a voice that belonged to a man I would consider to be one of the greatest assets to horror as a genre we may ever see.

It wasn’t the melody to “Thriller” that scared me, nor was much in it the lyrics. It was there in Vincent Price’s ridiculously terrifying soliloquy, a so-called “rap” that featured references to rotting corpses, tombs, hellhounds and ghouls. It was capped by a laugh that, every single time I heard it, dropped my internal temperature several degrees.

My fear of this man’s voice grew to the point where I would come running, down the stairs or through several rooms if necessary, to lift the record player’s needle before the track could even come on. I would stand there with my hand hovering over it as “The Girl is Mine” finished playing, yanking the needle up and going back to whatever it was I’d been doing. I just couldn’t handle it any longer. It scared me too much, stayed with me too long, invaded my sleep.

Eventually, as I grew older, I began to crave that feeling of terror. I needed it. It motivated me somehow, and I sought it out. I found it for a while in DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince’s “Nightmare on My Street,” a song about and featuring Freddy Krueger, a horror movie legend that my parents diligently strove to keep me away from. It was frightening enough, and freaked me out so long as it was on B94’s top eight countdown, but once it was gone its memory didn’t haunt me the way “Thriller” did.

So I returned to the album of my early childhood and fell in love with it, and to this day I listen to its title track once in a while to remind myself of my early frights. Having long ago become enamored with the films of Vincent Price, the soliloquy no longer fills me with cold fear. Instead, it feels humorously comforting, like listening to your grandfather tell a ghost story in front of a fire at a family cookout. It feels warmly familiar, comfortable.

I don’t think I would have gone on to become a person who enjoys being scared, and through that desire a horror writer, without having been jolted by this song on a daily basis. I would have, I believe, gone on to become either someone who writes overly serious literary works or sappy garbage, if I wrote at all, and where is the fun in that?

And now both of the men who introduced me to such delicious fear are gone. While the world mourns Jackson’s passing, all I can think about is that goofy song and the lifelong influence it’s had on me and how grateful I am that it had such a profound impact.

Thank you, Michael Jackson, for the amazing album that was Thriller, and for all of the nightmares it bestowed on my preadolescent brain.

The Responses Come Rolling In...

2009-06-25T12:02:00.001-04:00

I ended up with several beta readers for Teahouse, and one common theme throughout the novel (amongst several others that I’m not touching upon until revisions are underway) was that the story seemed to be a rip off of one or more rather well-known J-horror films. While it’s true that I wrote this as more of a nod to Kurosawa Kiyoshi and Shimizu Takashi, I think I may have overdone it.

In the end, the need for a Asian characters and locations isn’t as necessary as I once thought it was. In fact, now that I can look at the manuscript with a bit of critical distance, it feels to me like the teahouse was merely a set piece, and I’m not too pleased with that. I do feel that, even done with the best intentions, the story as it is written now is only going to come off as Japanophilic nonsense, and possibly even somewhat plagiaristic.

So, back to the drawing board. Where to go now?

Some of the characters will be easy to change or replace, either by renaming them and changing passages about their features or backgrounds, while some may have to go entirely. The story as it is now is rather elastic, and I think it will survive all of the cutting and rearranging, though I’m still not certain what direction I want to take it in just yet.

I think what this story actually needs is a bit of definite location. A bit of local flavor, perhaps. I don’t know just yet.

It’s a bit disappointing to find out that the story you started off with isn’t the badass piece of amazing literature it felt like in your head, but it was also somewhat expected.

The Odd Things We Need

2009-06-24T13:38:00.002-04:00

I’ve always been an incense burner, or at least since my adolescent years. I fell in love with the stuff early on and it never let me go. During my teens, I had a rather large collection of it. There was incense for relaxing, incense burned for specific scents (coconut and other fruity concoctions) and incense I needed while I read or wrote.

Burning incense while writing was always a big deal for me. It helped set the mood, and I often found myself more able, or at least more eager, to cultivate new ideas while sitting inside a light, perfumed cloud.

There was one incense I loved more than the others, one I bought from a head shop in my hometown that sold handmade jewelry, tie-dyed clothes, Spiritual Sky oils and (according to the older kids who always seemed way cooler than I) pot. Once the head shop changed ownership and the merchandise was rotated, I could no longer find it there, and over the years I forgot the name of it. All I could remember was that it came in either a purple or dark blue box, in small quantities, and it smelled unlike anything else I had ever had. I burned it as much as I could while I had it, and once it was gone it seemed to be gone forever.

Every time I found a place that sold incense, I’d look for it, but the only thing that came in a blue box like that was Satya Sai Baba Nag Champa, a wonderfully-scented (and possibly the most well-known here in the States) stick that I enjoy to this day but isn’t, sadly, the incense of my teenaged memories.

I found it, recently, while browsing an online incense shop. There are photos for each listing, and I carefully scrolled through, trying to find a match to that old rectangular box of memory. And there it was.

It’s from Padmini, and it’s called Spiritual Guide.

I have a stick burning right now, and all the old memories are coming back. The trashy horror novels with half-naked vampires on the covers, my obsession with Dell Abyss titles, the notebooks I’d scribble obsessively in and carry around on my person as if escorting a precious artifact from one danger-filled location to another. I was such a dork, and it was such a wonderful (if strange and occasionally painful) time.

I’m going to be working my ash-dusted wooden burner overtime today, just to overload myself on nostalgia. Perhaps I’ll write 3500 words of bloodsucking narrative today in celebration, as well.

I Wish I Hadn't Paid for Eighty-Eights and Heartbreak

2009-06-02T10:57:00.001-04:00

"Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed. I am not a fan of books. I would never want a book's autograph." - Kanye West

I really don’t think he’s the right person to be speaking out against self-absorption. All the same, I’m glad now that I bought most of his albums used.

"Wings" to be Featured in Nocturnal Lyric #69

2009-05-15T08:44:00.000-04:00

In late 2007 and early 2008 I went on a short story submissions bender. In reality, I should probably be submitting my work like this all of the time, but I get lazy or I focus on longer projects and the submissions inevitably begin to taper off shortly after the initial round’s rejections come filtering back in. Poor work habits, I know.

Two of my manuscripts never made their way back and while organizing a new manuscript tracking method this morning I decided to contact both publishers to see what might have happened. One is a website called East of the Web, and I believe I’ve contacted them before about my manuscript. I can’t be certain, because my original tracking software declared mutiny on me and destroyed all of my data (and refuses to read the backup), but I do believe I’ve queried them within the past half year to find out what has happened to my submission. Today I contacted them again and let them know that I consider their silence a rejection sans notification and will be submitting my piece elsewhere.

The other publisher is a small press horror magazine called The Nocturnal Lyric. They were my first publication credit, printing a story I wrote called “Last Hope” back when I was eighteen. I still have my contributor’s copy on my shelf. They really have a special place in my big, gooey, dorky heart.

My story “Wings” has been on their desk since March of 2009, right as their reading deadline was looming. I wasn’t even sure when I mailed it if I was going to make the cutoff or not, and today I decided to contact Susan Moon, the editor, to find out the fate of my story. When I went to their website, I discovered that they no longer send out rejection or acceptance letters, or at least haven’t for the recent handful of issues, and that “Wings” would be in their upcoming issue.

It’s been up for three months and I never thought to check. This notification was dated February 19th, the day before my last day of work for my old employer. What a strange weekend that whole time period was.

I’m looking forward to seeing myself in real ink and paper print again. It’s a place I haven’t been in a while.

Four out of Five Critics Agree...

2009-05-05T20:55:00.000-04:00

Chapter One sucks. Almost all of them have commented on the yawn-inducing nature of my characters and their long, boring conversation over dinner. I feel really dorky, because despite the fact of being warned repeatedly about this exact issue during my research phase, I still ended up screwing up my intro.

When I wrote the rough draft of Teahouse, I produced it in chronological order. This was the first 3,500 or so words I wrote, and I was setting the scene, pacing and backstory not only for readers but for myself. I knew pretty much where I wanted to go with the chapters and how I wanted to get to the story’s conclusion, but a lot of the tiny details were foggy even to me.

I wrote Chapter One while I was still ironing everything out, and I fell prey to the beginners’ mistakes of bogging down the narrative with superfluous details and unnecessary conversation.

This past week has been very brutal but I really have appreciated every word. Ten years ago I may have been one of those novice writers with an exterior and self-esteem the consistency of a Cadbury Creme Egg center. I might not have been able to withstand pages upon pages of strangers picking and tearing away at my work, but I think I’ve grown quite a bit since I started writing fiction again a few years ago. I can see this for what it actually is, information that is crucial to not only the refinement of my novel but also to my growth as a writer. It might be a bit discouraging to find out that other people don’t enjoy the same things in my work that I did while writing and revising it, but it will help me understand what will work in my failures’ places.

Tomorrow is the last day to receive critiques. After that, I will be replying to each one in person and sending the entire draft to each interested reviewer. I’m hoping they’ll be able to help me find weak points and black spaces that could benefit from extra chapter insertions.

And I’ll be rewriting the first chapter entirely.

Teahouse Queued on Critters!

2009-04-29T15:51:00.000-04:00

My first chapter of In The Teahouse, “A Night of Celebration,” is in this week’s queue over at Critters. It’s a RFDR (Request For Dedicated Readers), meaning that anyone who reads and comments on the chapter sample can obtain the whole rough draft and correspond with me directly.

Well. I’m a teensy bit nervous right now.

I have a natural tendency towards anxiety. I worry about the stupidest things, from having my picture taken to whether or not I’m properly taking care of my pets. Suffice it to say that my writing undergoes pretty much the same treatment, though so far I haven’t woken from any particularly nasty dreams involving critiques. That will probably happen tonight, with my luck. I have enough neuroses to qualify as a Woody Allen character, or perhaps someone from Seinfeld. Still, I try to keep my head as level as I possibly can.

I asked for people’s input because I honestly want to improve upon a story I’m already rather fond of. I enjoyed writing it, but it could be so much better. As it is now I get the feeling that it’s rather standard fare, and I’d like to make sure it rises up enough in quality that some agent out there feels it has moneymaking qualities, because otherwise it’s going to be something that people only see when they ask me about that unpublished book I once wrote.

I’m not going to leak the chapter here, but I don’t think it will hurt to repro the note I tacked on at the end. This rather adequately sums up how I feel about the draft right now and where I need improvements the most.

---

Author notes: In the Teahouse is a horror novel dealing with tea, ghosts
and compulsive suicide. This is the cleaned up first draft, and there
will be edits done later on to add chapters between the chapters that
exist now. I am asking any interested reviewers to pay particularly
close attention to both the Japanese element of the story (factual
inaccuracies, places where additional information may be beneficial,
etc.) and places where the plot itself may be lacking. I have already
found a few that I am not entirely happy with, but I feel that outside
opinions at this time may be a great help to me.

Right now the draft stands at 50,500 words, though with edits it should
end up at around 80,000. "A Night of Celebration" is the first of fourteen
chapters, not including a very short epilogue.

Thank you in advance.

---

Eagerly awaiting the first of the emails. Manuscripts just went out now, so between right this moment and next Wednesday I should have at least a small amount of feedback to work with.

More Haiku

2009-04-28T13:11:00.000-04:00

Mowing the tall grass
A thousand dandelions
The sea of gold, gone

I’ve been writing a haiku a day or more since I decided to take up the task, but most of them aren’t really all that good. In the coming weeks I should revisit my earlier efforts and clean them up a bit. I picked up a copy of The Haiku Handbook at Barnes yesterday and have been toting it around with me ever since.

It’s odd that I should find an interest in poetry after years of not really caring for it at all. When I was younger I wrote a ton of free verse, from late high school throughout college, but after a few years I stopped. I had been trying to break into short fiction publishing and didn’t really do anything with any of the poems. I’m not even sure if I still have the old poetry notebooks anymore.

I guess we really do return to the things we’ve left behind as we age.

Room to Write - "Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid"

2009-04-19T16:22:00.003-04:00

"Make a list of the things you fear. Pick one and describe it in concrete and specific detail."

This one was a bit difficult for me, because my most prominent fear is more abstract than most. I'm not afraid of physically tangible things like snakes, rats or spiders. I'm wary of heights but not necessarily afraid of them, and I can climb a ladder or stand on a bridge without falling to pieces. What really scares me is more of a concept, and it was really hard to pin down exactly how it affects me without becoming redundant.

---

I am afraid of failure. Not all kinds of failure, mind you, but the kind of failure that is the end result of some misguided or underwhelming effort. As a child, do you remember being told that you could accomplish anything so long as you put forth your best effort? Do you remember fantasizing about growing up to become the President or developing the cure to a deadly disease? I do.

I was going to be a ballerina, a belly dancer and an astronaut. Just because they told me I could be anything if I wanted.

But that really isn't true. No, not even close. The people who succeed and achieve brilliance are, to be completely frank and unnecessarily blunt, anomalies. These are people who were in the right place, had made the right social contacts and possessed a set of adequate skills at the perfect moment in time. Perhaps they made monumental effort to get to where they made it to, but effort alone isn't going to reward you with everything you've ever wanted. In fact, it may result in nothing.

Every time I go to a shopping mall this concept is hammered home. Every time I see a table full of Twilight books at Barnes or a rack of Twilight shirts at the front of a Hot Topic I'm reminded of this. I'm not going to derail this exercise by spending more time than necessary explaining in depth my issues with Stephenie Meyer, but let me say that there are a great many truly brilliant and altogether under-read authors who are passed up by young readers in order to salivate over her latest book. If you buy into the concept of effort and good faith yielding rewards, this is a cold slap in the face by an arrogant, sparkly marble hand.

This is what frightens me. This is what causes me to second-guess myself or, even worse, to lose interest in achieving. Simply knowing that putting forth time, effort and hope could very well (and, statistically, probably) do nothing but bring my faults to the public fore is terrifying.

What if I write a novel and every agent rejects me? What if every publishing house blows me off? What if I'm exposed to my peers as a fraud and a wannabe? What if people find out I really don't know what I'm doing and am usually just winging it? What if I manage to successfully navigate the world of publishing (which is really an achievement in and of itself) and then nobody reads me?

I think I would prefer an epic chorus of negative reviews to the silence of being ignored.

I'm really getting way ahead of myself here, though, because to be either mocked or ignored you have to put yourself in front of people, and this fear is keeping me frozen behind a thick, dark curtain. Nobody knows I'm here. My friends are barely, if at all, aware of my ambition. I'm terrified and unsure if I should put myself in the vulnerable position of writer-in-public, but yet at the very same time I know what happens to me when I try to leave this urge behind me. I grow depressed. I grow fat. I lose the will to do anything but wallow in self-pity and bitterness.

I become someone who isn't me. That is much, much more frightening than being mocked for being a crappy writer.

How unbelievably hilarious it is that I suffer from the dual fears of stagnation and progress? It seems that no matter which path I take ( and it's obvious at this point that I've already chosen one over the other) there's going to be something waiting just out of view to frighten me. If it won't come during my waking hours it's sure to find me in my sleep. I have frequent nightmares, always with failure as the core theme. When my fish are sick I have dreams that feature closeups of tanks full of still-living, half-decomposed occupants, jaws and heads with gaping holes, gills struggling to function, fins barely mobile. This is what you've done to them, I tell myself, because you didn't take care of them when you could have. After waking I invariably do a water change or swap out filters and start testing ammonia levels, because I realize, at least for a while, that inaction is far worse than failure after effort.

There is no choice for me. I have to do what I have to do, but the end result of this doing is a horrible blank in the future. There is no guarantee, no safety net, no consolation prize. I suppose I could very well pull the adult version of the taking-my-ball-and-going-home stunt and publish my work myself, but even then I'd be subject to the same pass-fail standards of success that are prevalent everywhere else. And I'd have to deal with the added stress of trying to convince the rest of the publishing world to deal with me on terms they're not often willing to deal on.

I will soldier on, and hope for the best, because the shudder-in-my-chest fear that falls upon me when I think of being mocked and torn apart is nothing compared to the wake-up-screaming fear I feel during the nights when I have horrible dreams full of guilt for not trying.

Haiku on Eating Dandelion Heads

2009-04-18T12:18:00.001-04:00

Gail Sher starts out her book, One Continuous Mistake, describing how writing saved her life. In the beginning, she says, she started out writing one haiku a day. She would write her daily five-seven-five and then return to haiku of days past to polish and revise.

That has me thinking. Seventeen syllables? Sure, I can do that. But can I do it well? I’ve always been interested in haiku, and when I was younger I’d often try to come up with the most insulting, crass and grotesque ones I could. I’m sure that was perverting the entire purpose of it, but it was a lot of fun.

Now that I’m an adult, I think I’d like to try my hand at writing meaningful haiku, especially about the mundane things I do. It makes them seem a bit more interesting, twisted into this attractive format. There are more rules (aesthetic in nature) than just the syllables and format, but for the moment I’d like to keep it simple. I’ll work up to it.

Hana tempura
Lawn as beautiful garden
Weeds taste wonderful

He Was That Guy

2009-04-17T17:10:00.000-04:00

When I was downsized out of the company, I left without saying goodbye to most of my coworkers. I called a few that I was close with when I got home, but while I was still there everyone else was getting ready for a staff meeting and setting up for an outdoor barbecue (in February, I’m really not sure what that was all about) and I was so giddy at having been let go of the one last thing that was really anchoring me in misery that I pretty much forgot about everyone else. I waved halfheartedly as I carted my boxes of stuff out to my car and then drove off, not really concerned about anything.

I kind of had this picture in my head of everyone showing up and going about their daily routines indefinitely, as if I’d never existed, the only thing different in the office being me not slouched at my desk. I imagined my departure being clean and precise and the hole I’d left behind me being stitched up rather quickly and painlessly.

Perhaps the company did get over me quickly. I’m not sure either way and I can’t say I even care to know. I talked to a couple of old coworkers this morning though and as far as other people’s lives are concerned there’s at least one person I used to know who doesn’t exist anywhere in the world anymore.

He was That Guy, you know the one. There’s actually more than one of Those Guys and you always know (or are buddies with) at least one of them. I’ve known several, actually. This one was thirty-five and exclusively dated women at least ten years younger. He was divorced and played in some kind of garage band and acted like he was a rock star. It seemed he had a new live-in girlfriend every couple of months and he’d brag about it to me (and the rest of the office) like I was supposed to be impressed by him. He’d tell me to come to one of his shows. When he talked he had that kind of fake casual air about him that guys who are pretending they care about things less than they actually do have. He was kind of obnoxious, though in an unusually humorous way. He wasn’t the kind of guy I’d find myself wanting to date but at the same time he wasn’t what I would consider a horrible person. Despite the fact that he annoyed the hell out of everyone else, for various reasons (calling off, working slowly and lying about napping, having an excuse for everything, not accepting criticism or disciplinary actions on the part of management), we were always cool with each other. There were nights when I honestly enjoyed talking to him, even if only for a few minutes. I used to send him ridiculous text messages about mudkips and Pokemans back before he had my number in his cell phone. I spent an hour once doing that, and he couldn’t figure out who I was or what I wanted. It was the highlight of my night that night.

His issues at work started, or seemed to start, shortly after his brother (or half-brother, I can’t remember) died overseas last year. He was younger and was in the military. After he came back from bereavement leave my coworker had a bit more of an attitude than he used to. The calling off and excuses for poor performance became more frequent. He’d have loud arguments with both of my supervisors and would storm out and go home to cool off and come in the next day like nothing had happened. It was a vicious cycle, and he was constantly on the brink of being fired, but for one reason or another it never came to pass, not while I was still there. We either didn’t have an extra person to be trained on his route or whatever he was doing that day wasn’t fire-worthy. But he was always in the crosshairs.

According to the old coworkers I spoke with this morning, management eventually had enough of him, and when he was disciplined for the last time there was a huge blowout in the office. I’m rather relieved I wasn’t there to witness it. He was fired, but not without threatening a few people, and I guess the building was on lockdown for a few days afterwards. This is all hearsay, keep in mind.

At some point after he left the company his girlfriend moved out. I don’t know the details of all of this, only the end result, so I can’t state any facts or even do much speculating beyond this point.

I know most of my writing, from the short stories to the novels, indulges rather heavily in self-sacrifice and self-destruction as both theme and plot device. I’ve had all manner of characters end their lives in all manner of bizarre and/or disturbing ways. There’s something about the mental image and the drama it lends to plotting that has me a bit addicted, and it bothers me once in a while when I think about it too much. But as long as it keeps fitting so well into the projects I’m working on I’ll continue to do it.

In real life the idea of somebody you know tying a noose around their neck and hanging themselves carries not a single vestige of the drama, mystique or romance of fictional suicide. Not one bit. Instead it has me feeling very nauseated. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since I heard the news this morning. As soon as his name was brought up I started to laugh, thinking he’d gotten into trouble or had done something outrageous and pissed the bosses off again. For a moment, when I heard his name, I thought perhaps he’d been fired. He certainly would have deserved it. It wasn’t until they actually said “killed himself” that I stopped chuckling. It was one of those moments where your thought processes just stop mid-task and you stand there, dazed, as they rewind and replay the information that’s just been presented. Your mind actually has to verify that what you’ve just heard really is what you’ve just heard. It’s a very out there kind of feeling.

I kind of wish I’d stuck around that last day at work, just to see everyone come in for their routes and say proper goodbyes, instead of flying out of there like a self-obsessed snob.

He left behind at least two children of his own and another child he was raising for a relative. I’m not sure what became of them. I’ve been searching for his obituary all day and still haven’t managed to find it.

I still have a hard time accepting the fact that a person who appeared to enjoy arguing that much, while at the same time playing everything off like he just didn’t care, killed himself. People really must be layered like onions, leaving only the tough skin visible. I’d never have imagined he would react in this way. How well do we know the people we are only friendly, but not very close, with? Sometimes I think most of the details I have about people are nothing but my assumptions of them. Reality doesn’t always measure up perfectly.

Room to Write - "Inside Out" and Write Brain Workbook - "Circle Game"

2009-04-17T15:43:00.002-04:00

Room to Write’s prompt for exercise “Inside Out” - Describe a place impossible to enter; the center of an erupting volcano, the fifth dimension. Turn the experience inside out. Let your imagination float and anchor it to what is feasible.

See if you can guess what it is I’m describing.

---

It is dark like night, and understandably cold. I stand atop a crisp, flat expanse of land, dusky green but for the lines of silver shot through at precise, deliberate angles.

In the air I smell faint traces of ozone or other remnants of explosive reaction. There is a sense of active travel here, though not by human feet. It is the travel of tiny particles, through the ground and through the air, and a dry wind blows across my face from somewhere far away, bringing with it a volley of dust to fill my lungs and drop me to my knees, coughing.

I hear clicks and whirrs, piercing beeps and low, insectile buzzing. All the while, softly, as if halfway imagined, I hear a tap-tap-tapping, somewhere in the direction of the sky. Though it is a familiar sound, I cannot exactly place it, and the rhythm finds its way like a persistent worm into my ear and wraps itself around my brain.

So familiar, yet so alien. Almost as if a dream given life.

I hear voices, too, without a doubt human, though they are layered on top of one another like leaves in a wet pile. They stick together, become one lump, and then break apart at odd intervals. Some sing jingles, some scream, some are intertwined with instruments that shift and blend and distort. I am at a loss.

There is nothing here for me to lift, nothing to taste. It is all smooth, dark expanse interspersed with silver lines and ridged square bumps here and there. Occasionally small, round nodes stick up from the ground in geometric patterns like the avant garde artwork of an alien civilization. Still, something strikes me as familiar. Something I have seen before lurks here just below the surface, something so commonplace that it would make sense to forget it as thoroughly as I have. Something I may have seen or experienced a thousand times, ingrained into myself so that it only lurks now in the farthest recesses of my mind.

I turn my face heavenward, towards the rhythmic tapping, and realize. But it is impossible...

---

I picked up a neat new writing prompts book called The Write-Brain Workbook by Bonnie Neubauer. It’s a neat book, exceptionally creative, complete with full-color graphics and odd backgrounds for each page. It’s a bit like a more complex Mad Libs coupled with prompts taken from fiction workshops. The book is designed so that you can write directly on the page, but being the anal-retentive book archivist that I am I’ve been typing mine up. I’m still undecided on whether or not I’m going to go from the beginning to the end in order or if I’m going to bounce around in my typical fashion, but I have done the very first exercise. It’s called “Circle Game”

I had to pick one word each out of three sets of four-word options, and then use them in an exercise. My choices were exorcist, garage and keepsake. I had to start the exercise off with the line Sometimes I feel just like a gerbil, running around and around on his wheel!

---

Sometimes I feel just like a gerbil, running around and around on his wheel!

It took a few weeks for me to convince anyone to hire the exorcist. I'd found his advertisement in the back of one of those funny comics magazines, the ones that make fun of movies and tv shows. Like Mad or Cracked, only a little cheaper. The ad was a tiny black and white square, not much bigger than a postage stamp, and it had a headline in large block letters.

EDWIN MORVACK, EXORCIST, SPIRT DOCTOR AND SPECTRAL MEDIUM.

Whatever that meant. I wasn't sure. But ever since things started rearranging themselves in the garage when we left for the day, I knew an exorcist was something we could benefit from. I wasn't much concerned with the rest of the things he claimed he could do, so long as he could put an end to the poltergeisting.

I called off sick from work, which wasn't really so much of a lie as it was a slight exaggeration. The goings-on had really done a number to my stomach, and even though relief was right around the corner I couldn't help but feel the white-hot jolts to my stomach. Please let this be over soon, I thought to myself as I picked up the phone and dialed the number at the bottom of the tiny ad.

There was a hiss and crackle as my phone connected to another somewhere out there in the universe. It ended abruptly as someone picked up, blissful silence followed by a soft, dry voice that sounded like it was crawling out from below me somewhere deep in the earth.

“Yes?” My ears had to strain to hear it completely.

“Um, yes, is-is-is this Edwin Morvack?”

“Yes, it is.” I could swear the voice was smiling, faintly.

“Um, well, yes, I found your ad in a magazine and I thought that you could help me.” There was no immediate reply, so I soldiered on, in rapid and horribly nervous fashion. “Okay, well, I have a poltergeist in my garage. Well, I'm fairly sure it's a poltergeist. It destroyed an heirloom mirror my great-grandmother bought when she'd first been married, and then tore the legs off a vanity dresser that belonged to my grandmother. It's shuffled some other stuff around, here and there, but I haven't found anything else broken yet. I hear it start moving as soon as I leave the house but by the time I get back it's long gone.”

“I see.”

I waited. There was no other reply. “Well, um, yes, I was wondering if that was something your 'exorcist' expertise might cover. I'm really not well-versed in all of this spirit and ghost stuff, so I'm not sure I called the right person, but there aren't a whole lot of alternatives, you know?” I chucked self-consciously. “Is this something you think you might be - “

“I will be there in an hour,” the soft voice said. It felt like the smile had broken into a grin, but there was no evidence. The actual sound of it hadn't changed at all. And then, suddenly, my ear was full of the symphonic hissing that had preempted the call.

He'd be here, in an hour?

I hadn't told him where I lived.

---

I really need to make more time for writing exercises. I feel very accomplished when I finish one, and that sense of having done something worthwhile with my time can carry me throughout an entire day.

Exercises aside, I’d like to be spending more time as well on novel writing. Teahouse’s rough draft is completed and the first chapter (and request for beta readers for the entire work) will be released to Critters on April 29th. I’m hoping to receive some helpful feedback that way, though I’ve already identified several points in the novel where I need to add chapters to flesh out the characters. I’d like to expand the word count by thirty to fifty percent, if possible.

Rain has been a bit slower to progress, but it’s still somewhat of a back burner project and really always has been. I’m up to twenty-two shorter chapters with that one and will be resuming work on it in the next couple of weeks, after I’ve drawn up some ideas for additional Teahouse material. Two of my biggest personality flaws are my inability to remain organized and the flip-flop way I handle almost everything in my life. I flit back and forth from thing to thing like some sort of crazed bumblebee, and it takes me forever to get anything done. I’d really like to work on that a bit, maybe force myself to become more structured. I’d like to be able to actually see progress instead of having it come agonizingly slowly because I can’t pay attention to one solitary thing for more than two days straight.

Fried Flowers

2009-04-16T16:12:00.002-04:00

For years I’ve been a bit obsessed with the idea of edible flowers, with an emphasis on dandelions. I’ve loved them since I started yanking them out of the ground and flinging them at people as a child. There’s something admirable in their tenacity, their refusal to budge when the whole world is against them.

They’re the noblest of weeds, for sure.

Personally, I don’t really consider them a weed. They’re too attractive, too full of nutrients, too useful. Only someone obsessed with homogenizing their suburban lawn should ever call them a weed, and even then it would be a label borne of ignorance.

They are delicious. I finally found out for myself today.

An egg. A cup of milk. A cup of flour. That’s really all you need, aside from a pot and a half inch of olive oil on medium heat. I suppose you could use some salt and pepper or some kind of tempura broth if you felt like being fancy with your cooking, but this time I kept it bare bones. I picked the nicest flower heads I could find and gently shook off any tiny ants that were nestled inside, brought them in and rinsed them and then trimmed off the stalks. I fried them gently in batches of six to ten heads at a time, turning them over when they became golden brown.

The taste is very gentle, not bitter at all. It reminds me of the vegetable tempura from Sushi Tomo, actually. I think next time I make this recipe I’ll have to break out the tempura batter and panko crumbs I have stashed away in my cupboard.

I really hope I can convince someone else to eat these with me, because I don’t think I should scarf them all down myself. Still, it’s tempting.

1000+ Words "The Long Finger"

2009-04-15T22:10:00.001-04:00

I wanted to do a short writing exercise on the concept of missing limbs after reading Max Barry’s “Machine Man.” Inspiration comes at the oddest times, and from the oddest places. I have a lot of fun with these exercises (and all writing exercises, really) because of their “no pressure” nature, and in the end I usually turn out something that is not only fun to create but isn’t hard on the eyes, either. If only the stuff I work on seriously was this easy, I may not be so stressed out all the time.

The Long Finger

It all begins the day I lose my finger.

I don't have that many memories about the accident, to be honest. I can remember the drive to work that leads up to it, the unscheduled stop at a fast-food place for a breakfast sandwich and the stop light I got stuck sitting at. I was in the lead, with several cars behind me. I can also remember a glimpse out of the corner of my eye at a box truck with Erotic Party Services painted in soft pastels on it gliding down the steep downtown hill towards the same light, from my left. I can remember pulling out into the intersection when the light turned green, but that's where it becomes fuzzy, as if someone is standing above it all with a bright halogen lamp, erasing details in a blinding white glare.

My memories return a few days later. My mother is there, dark bluish bags under her eyes, half-asleep in one of those uncomfortable hospital chairs that keep your back ramrod-straight. I immediately wish I am still asleep, because my roommate is cursing loudly and uncontrollably from behind the curtain that separates us. Later on my mother will tell me that the poor girl was in a crash not unlike mine, only involving a motorcycle and a Beetle (the new kind, not vintage) full of drunk college students, and she has some kind of neurological damage that causes her to drop the f-bomb loudly without realizing she's doing so.

I expect the worst, but most of the damage consists of scrapes along my face and torso. My car is gone. I'd just finished paying it off a few months prior and was so happy to have the title in my mini safe. Now, it is worthless.

It takes a few hours for me to realize there is something wrong. Nobody has pointed it out to me, not my mother, not the nurse who's checked my vitals several times. My doctor, I am sure, would have told me by now but he or she has not been in to see me just yet. Phantom sensations can cloud your perception, I am told, and this is why it has gone unnoticed by me for so long.

I am missing the pinky on my right hand. It is completely gone, sheared off where it meets the hand. Almost as if it never existed. I turn my hand over and over, examining from multiple angles, hoping I'm wrong, but knowing I'm not. The bandaging is wrapped tightly, and I can tell there is nothing there, despite feeling like there is.

I look at my mother, slightly irritated.

She sighs and looks away. She is afraid and unsure what to say to me.

* * *

My options are limited, and time narrows it down more. My doctor, a young eastern European woman with a faint accent and a neatly-upswept bun, tells me that I can live without a finger, wear a prosthesis or attempt a transplant. If I choose the latter, she tells me, I need to do so quickly. There is a viable finger available, but it needs to be transplanted now.

I am the impatient type. I am also the don't-second-guess-yourself type. I go with the transplant.

* * *

It is a success. I now have a new finger. It is slightly thinner than the others, and just a smidge longer. It is obviously a woman's finger. I wonder if they cross genders for limb and digit transplants. Looking at my own tiny girlish hands, I wonder what it would be like to have a thick, hairy pinkie sticking out at the end of my hand.

The days go by and I get to use the digit more and more. I am told not to strain it, or lift heavy objects. Just exercise it a bit, the doctor tells me. Her name is Doctor Elishka. I think she may be Russian. That could also be her first name. I'm not sure, and I never ask.

After a few weeks, everything besides my finger is healed completely. My face is unmarred, and the various cuts and scrapes on my body have faded. All that is left now is to learn to use my new digit. I call it my “long finger.”

This long finger is not so easily integrated with the rest of my hand. I find it difficult to control, stubborn, unwilling to move at my command. It is frustrating, because I've been under the impression that once it heals it will move as fluidly as the rest of my body, almost without notice.

This is not so.

I spend several hours a day grappling with my new finger, bending it to my will, forcing it to discontinue its habit of sticking out from my hand at an embarrassing angle. After a few days it seems sufficiently tamed, and I take it to the task of touching things and lifting small items. Everything seems to be working well enough.

A few weeks later, at breakfast, I idly scratch my eyelid with my long finger. It's not itchy, but I do it anyway. It's an old habit of mine, scratching my face gently while I'm daydreaming.

A few minutes later my eyelid begins to itch something fierce.

I wash my hands and try to stay away from the eyelid, but I end up rubbing until it's red and puffy. I spend the night trying to fall asleep only to be distracted by the soreness and persistent itching. By morning it has subsided enough to ignore for long stretches. I force myself not to touch it again.

The following day I am sitting idly at the kitchen table again. I have finished my morning tea and, on a whim, decide to test the strength of my new finger. This is the first time I will have picked up and held something with that finger alone.

I loop my new pinky through the handle of my light china teacup. It is a cheap imitation of a piece of formal tableware, and I am not too concerned about dropping it. It does not drop from my finger though, as my new digit is surprisingly strong. It is just like any other finger, I suppose, only it once did not belong to me. I have difficulties wrapping my head around this concept.

I watch in silence as the first crack on the handle forms, and then another, followed by several more. In the span of a few moments it appears as if a thousand tiny rivers have suddenly formed on the china's surface before it all crumbles apart. The cup lands on the carpeted floor below, intact save for the handle that has disintegrated into nothing.

Later on that same day, after showering, I am leaning in close to the mirror over the bathroom sink. I am scouring my face for blemishes and checking on my eyelid. All redness and swelling is gone from my eye, and it doesn't seem like I have anything on my face. As I wipe the steam that continues to form from the mirror's glass, I notice something odd. I pause, my hand still on the mirror.

Cracks. Tiny cracks. Radiating from the right side of my hand.

I pull away as the mirror spiderwebs into dozens of growing fractures, and I am halfway out of the room when the first glass piece falls from the mount on the wall. I run into the garage for a cardboard box, and as I put the pieces in and sweep up what is left with a hand broom I begin to wonder.

Call me superstitious, call me foolish and irrational, but now I feel I need to check.

I look all over my house and belongings to see if anything else is amiss. What else has this finger touched recently?

Several keys on the right hand side of my laptop keyboard are visibly warped.

The right-hand side of my car's steering wheel cover, the one with the flower petals embroidered on it, is unraveling and shredding in several small places.

The very end of my toothbrush appears to be melting, as is the very end of my hairbrush.

It seems to be too much to be coincidence, but too little to be panic-worthy. I begin a small series of tests to confirm the impossible. I run my hand over several things, waiting to see what happens.

I grab a coffee cup and, once again, it falls apart. I move on to flatware, and several pieces lose their luster and appear as if being held under a flame as I run my long finger over them.

I rest my hand on the front door and a small, barely noticeable scorch mark appears. It could almost be mistaken for a natural darkness in the wood if viewed by someone else.

I go out on the porch and run one final test. A few years before I quit smoking, I made several ashtrays in a pottery workshop I attended once a week. I still have one, and it sits outside atop my patio table. It is grey and black and has a flat, glossy surface. It is the largest ashtray I made in the class.

I extend my long finger and draw two perpendicular lines across the ashtray. For a moment, there is nothing, and then it shivers, extending tiny cracks along my imaginary lines, finally falling apart into four dusty pieces.

I go in the house and wrap my hand in a thick bandage. I am shaking, nervous, excited. Mostly I am afraid, afraid of where this finger may have come from and what I will find when I ask. I am also afraid Doctor Elishka will refuse to tell me anything, or that I will have to have the finger removed. Not being able to touch something without damaging it is frightening. It makes me feel isolated. I am now worried about my ability to return to work or live a normal life. Many things flash through my mind, few of them positive.

I sit at my kitchen table, my phone in my awkward left hand, and dial the hospital.

It's Been a While

2009-03-02T11:52:00.000-05:00

In all honesty, writing took a backseat to the rest of my life for a while. It was a combination of outside events and internal turbulence that did it, I think.

On the outside, reading for pleasure has given way to film watching. 2008 was the Year of the Fifty Book Challenge, and I ended the year with sixty-one new reads. This year I’m challenging myself to see more than one hundred films, on DVD specifically, and I’m up to twenty-four so far. I’ll finish the twenty-fifth today or tomorrow. I’ve been breaking my movies down to forty-minute chunks to watch while I’m running on the elliptical every day.

I should be writing every day for hours at a time, seeing how I lost my job two weeks ago. Six years at Waste Management and I’m lost in a “restructuring.” For some people this could have been a catastrophic loss, but I’ve hated the job since day one and have been dragging my ass ever since. Finally I have a reason to leave this county and head south to Pittsburgh, where I spend most of my weekend time. Good riddance to a horrible, unhealthy and incompatible job and environment.

One of the things I’ve been doing lately is reading long articles about David Foster Wallace, both in The New Yorker and Rolling Stone. Here is someone who accomplished things I only dream of doing, and it wasn’t good enough for him. He suffered from the same self-doubt and work-related criticism that I do and he had a brain full of knowledge on subjects I’m barely even aware exist. If he couldn’t make it, what kind of person am I to even dream of doing so? He studied at Amherst and Harvard, while I drank my way out of a state college and spent my twenties working nights on a landfill. If he had such difficulty and misery, what makes me think I can do any better, or even come close?

On the other hand, there are people like Stephenie Meyer whose work flies off the shelves and into the hands of children and adults at a rate so quickly you’d swear there were deals made with Satan going on. If a woman who never read a vampire book or watched a vampire movie can write a bestselling vampire series then there’s still a chance for me, right? Despite reading the first three books and being shocked at how emotionally and socially stunted the main characters are, I have to admit they are popular. But is popular even what I want?

I think, right now, all I want to do is be read. And in order to do that, I have to go beyond the rough draft and into a place where I am very, very uncomfortable. I’m going to have to revise and continue working, though I have no idea what I should be doing. Proofreading is no problem, but adding and subtracting entire chapters and characters is something so alien and painful to imagine to me that I put it off as long as I can, much like I did exercise when I was depressed. I don’t think I need to explain what that ended up doing to me.

I’m not even sure what the meaning of this passage is. I suppose in part I want to let anyone who reads this blog know that I’m still alive, but at the same time I want to go deeper into explaining myself and my motivations for things. I want other people to know just how much I doubt myself every day, and I want to find out if other people do the same. When I pick up most books I see the finished product for what it is, a book, and as I flip through it I never stop to wonder how much work the author put into it or how many revisions it went through. I suppose I only ever think of someone suffering self-doubt and hatred of their own material when that writer is me. And I can barely even refer to myself as a writer at this stage, seeing as I’ve only ever produced a few short stories and novel rough drafts.

Episode Two of The Universe of Tristan Johnson!

2009-01-19T15:41:00.002-05:00

The voice actress who read my story was really good, I think, especially for an nonpaying gig. I was pleasantly surprised by it.

Here’s the episode, including the Q&A interview following the story:

http://www.tristanpej.com/?p=96

I think I sound nervous and rather, um, manly, but Eric has been arguing with me for the last half hour and claims that I do not sound at all like I have a penis.

"Hello" Appearing on The Universe of Tristan Johnson!

2009-01-14T13:58:00.001-05:00

My short story “Hello” will be appearing in audio format on an upcoming episode of the brand new podcast The Universe of Tristan Johnson.

Tristan Johnson is a fellow novice writer who has participated in NaNo with me both of the years I’ve been involved and is also a Youtube vlogger and Blogspotter as well. His website for the show is The Universe of Tristan Johnson and he is, according to comments he’s made to me, always looking for new material. Anyone interested in politics, religion, current events or fiction writing should do themselves a favor and check him out.

We still need to meet up on Skype to do the post-reading interview section (I’m not reading my own story as he’s found real female voice talent to do that for him. Good choice.) and then hopefully the new episode will be up within the next couple of weeks.

I’ve never recorded an interview or had my work published as an “audio story” before, so needless to say I am quite excited.

The Usual Difficulties

2008-12-30T03:07:00.000-05:00

A new project, a new set of problems, it seems.

While Eric is reading my (very) rough draft, I’ve been mulling over a new long-fiction concept. At first I was supposed to be writing a winter-themed short story for a friend’s upcoming podcast, but once I realized that this was something much too long for an audio format I resigned myself to having come up with yet another novel idea.

I’m still not all that great with novels.

While some people can apparently come up with a legion of characters, a main plot and a half dozen subplots with ease, I struggle to keep one story line coherent. I’m always afraid that I’m going to end up sounding ridiculous or implausible with my plots and dialogue. I’m beginning to come to the point where I don’t care about the end result and plow forward with a feverish determination, but I still have enough self-doubt that it’s holding me back.

I want to get started on this immediately. One of my biggest fears is the loss of interest in a project, and time and time again I’ve been on fire for an idea only to stop caring after a few short weeks. Now I immediately begin to panic when I don’t set upon a project at the first thought of it, worried that I’ll somehow lose the passion somewhere along the way. I’m fairly certain this line of thinking was responsible for my eighteen-day draft of Teahouse, especially the last two days of it. All I could do was type, screaming silently in my head, “Get it out! Finish it! Don’t stop until you see The End!” I was so worried that I’d quit caring, even that close to the end, that I had to push the story out despite the fact that I could have spent a bit more time working on the details.

Thanks to my “motivation issues,” I now have two hundred pages of plot with no trace of subplot, character details or emotion. Nice.

Here I am now, with another semi-formed story, feeling the urge to push my way through this yet terrified of screwing it up or leaving it half-finished. I suppose I could go back to something I really have left sitting unfinished, but all I can think about right now is this story.

On a related note, Eric is reading my draft of Teahouse now. I told him, jokingly, that he should change his away message to “Reading my girlfriend’s first novel. Don’t bother me.” I didn’t think he’d actually do it, but he did. Something that small and insignificant made me feel giddy.

Here’s hoping the book stands up to some criticism. I’m very nervous waiting for his reaction to it.

Rejection Done Right

2008-12-19T08:46:00.002-05:00

Nothing hurts the ego more than being blown off or insulted, and a lot of writers are comprised of more sensitive stuff than others, so sending work out into the great wide world can be potentially painful for some. I know, I’ve been there. As a very young writer, in my late teens and early twenties, I found it very difficult to separate my professional self from my private self and see literary rejection for what it really is, someone letting you know that your work isn’t a good fit for their publication or just any of their upcoming issues.

Sometimes it really stung.

Getting back into the swing of things, I’ve noticed that rejection doesn’t faze me much, if at all, this time around. I’ve received a number of them in the last two years, from one-line “no thank you” type replies to well thought out critiques.

Don’t get me wrong, a “yes” regardless of how it’s phrased will always be more preferable than a polite “no,” but rejection is a part of the life and will never go away. Better to get used to it than it wear you down, no?

That said, I’ve received several decent rejection slips recently. It’s always a disappointment to find out you don’t fit in, but they were written well enough that I’d like to share them here.

The Abacot Journal recently responded to a submission of my short story, Cryptic Coloration.

Dear Jessica,

Thank you for your submission to The Abacot Journal’s fifth issue. While I loved the uplifting and unexpected ending to your story, unfortunately, it was not chosen from the wide range of fabulous stories we received. Good luck in your writing, have a wonderful new year, and please consider submitting to us again.   

Alexandra J. Ash

 Editor, The Abacot Journal 

The Harrow, a publication I’ve been featured in before, weighed in on my submission of My Neighbor’s Apartment not only with a gentle “no” but also some words of both critique and encouragement.

Dear Jessica,

Thanks for submitting 'My Neighbor's Apartment' to The Harrow. We're going to pass.  While it's a well-written piece, and provides ample atmosphere, I ultimately found that this is all the story does.  While it's certainly a point of interest that the protagonist's neighbor has a vacant apartment beside their apartment, the mystery of such a thing is not quite enough to engage the reader. There needs to be some sort of conflict - internal or external - that is provided to draw the protagonist to the place on the basis of her own decisions. The curiosity of our narrator simply isn't enough... but perhaps there is a strong reason why she is so curious. (And if that curiosity is born out of a rather banal existence of reading spam email - the dullness of the character's predicament needs to be highlighted strongly in the piece - a violent or otherwise awful death as a result of her investigations, for example, displaying that both fates are equally dreadful.)  Regardless, I think if you can provide such a thing here, the rest of the story may write itself, and the piece will be stronger for it, overall.  Do try us again.  

Regards,

Michael R. Colangelo

I now have quite a bit to think over. Accusing me of only providing atmosphere isn’t anything new – I do it to myself all the time. In fact, this is one of my major weaknesses. I’d rather focus on character, setting and atmosphere instead of plot, and that provides for a very lopsided story. Apparently only Murakami Haruki has license to get away with those kinds of shenanigans.

One of the things I enjoy most with rejections are the encouragements for resubmission. Not only are they show at least some interest in you as a writer but they are also proving to the more sensitive types that “No, you don’t really suck as a human being. Your story just didn’t work, and it’s not universal, it’s just this one time. Keep showing us your stuff.” It’s hard to convince either yourself or other writers this very important fact. Usually it has to come from the publisher.

Unfortunately, I won’t be having any time left over to rewrite My Neighbor’s Apartment for quite some time. I’m still trying to proof In the Teahouse before Christmas so I can have a copy of the rough draft printed at Staples for Eric. I had a few run off (at twenty bucks apiece!) to pass around for reading/editing purposes but it appears my initial proofing glossed over several glaring mistakes.

After that, I agreed to write a winter-themed short story for a friend’s upcoming podcast. So far the plan includes him reading the story and then the two of us recording some kind of dialogue discussing the piece and writing in general. I’m excited but the business of the season has prevented me from my usual brainstorming sessions. I’ve only got bits and pieces of ideas so far. And two very large holidays are looming in the horizon.

Busy, busy.

New Blog!

2008-11-30T07:27:00.000-05:00

Actually, it’s a bit of a companion blog to this one. I’ve been meaning to write more about things I’ve read recently, and this seemed as good a place as any. I’ve kept a running tally of books read over at LibraryThing all year, but I find I encourage myself to write more and dig deeper when I’m blogging and not when I’ve just finished reading a book.

Please, feel free to leave comments or reading suggestions of your own. Over the next few days I hope to expand my list of books read and leave reviews or comments for most of them.

The blog can be found at http://alookatabook.blogspot.com/.

The Purple Bar and Beyond

2008-11-26T14:14:00.000-05:00

Oh, it’s finally over! I verified my rough draft’s length and got the certificate and purple bar to show for it. I suppose I should be proud of what I’ve gotten done so far, but all I can think about is digging into the draft and revising it. I promised myself I’d give it time to cool down so I could go over it with a more analytical eye, though, so in the meantime (meaning the next month or so – I’d like to start on this early in the new year) I have other projects to focus on.

The Woman Without, last year’s NaNo project and my first attempt at a full-length novel, is still only halfway complete. I had a hard time staying focused with it, most likely because I was winging it plot-wise the whole time. This year I used ten “key scene” note cards for Teahouse and that ended up working out well. I’d like to go back and summarize my first story so far into single ideas for each chapter and give the story the note card treatment as well. Hopefully I’ll be able to salvage the novel that way.

A friend of mine is starting his own writing-related podcast this month, and for his debut episode he asked if he could read one of my short stories and then record a discussion between us to play afterwards. I’ve never been too fond of hearing my own voice (it’s a bit unusual, and certainly lower than most) but seeing as I’m a huge fan of podcasting in general I’d have to be somewhat crazy to pass up that kind of opportunity. Rather than giving him something unpublished that I’ve had on my hard drive for a while (most of my newer stuff has been sent out within the last few months) I think I’m going to write something especially for the show. The idea I have now is a hybrid of science fiction and horror, a style I’ve never successfully tackled before. We’ll see how it works out, I suppose. If I fail I have the entire month to come up with something new.

I have other things to keep me busy, as well. I recently rejoined the Critters online critique group after lapsing a few years ago. This time around I’m having a lot of fun reading other people’s stories, rather than finding them burdensome. I’m still having difficulties crafting critiques that feel satisfactory to me, but the more I write them the easier they are becoming. To be honest, one of the stories I read today makes me regretful I don’t own a publication that could buy it. It’s that good. I’m not sure when or if I’m going to submit my own material. I haven’t gotten past the “force your writing upon your loved ones” stage yet, though I’m seriously considering it. If I’m going to entertain thoughts of querying agents then I’m going to have to become a bit more realistic about opening myself up to criticism.

I’ve been thinking about starting another blog, as well, not for writing but for reviewing. This year I’ve so far read fifty-five books, and I’d like to read at least five more, if not ten. Many of these are books I read when I was younger (Poppy Z. Brite, L.J. Smith, Christopher Pike, etc) that I come back to out of a sense of fond remembrance or out of curiosity. Sometimes I want to see if the stories I enjoyed hold up to the test of time and changing tastes. Some do, some don’t. I think it might be fun to keep a permanent record of all of the books I read and how I feel about them when I’m finished with them. I know it would take some time to get caught up to where I am now (should I decide to review everything I’ve read so far, which I’m not sure I’ll do) but I think it could be fun.

Fifty-Two Thousand Words, Two Hundred Pages

2008-11-19T16:46:00.001-05:00

Well, the rough draft of In The Teahouse is finished. I came home from work yesterday with a fire lit under me and wrote about seven thousand words, finishing up with an hour left before bedtime. I spent this afternoon getting the formatting down, exporting the pieces into one .doc file using an awesome piece of writing software , Scrivener, that I've been using for a year or two now. I've never compiled so many pieces into one document before, though.

My first novel-length rough draft. This is a milestone, right?

Now comes the hard part, something that I’m simultaneously looking forward to and dreading - editing. Now, editing other people’s work comes easy for me. People ask me all the time to go over things they’ve written: papers, correspondence, memos, etc. No big deal. But now the tables are turning and I feel like I’m giving a lump of my own flesh out to people to hack apart and put under a microscope.

This almost feels more invasive than my yearly exam. Almost.

I need this, though. I know I need it, and I want it, but I hope the people I choose to read this end up helping. Nothing could be worse than giving out two hundred pages of direct imagination-to-paper daydreaming and getting nothing but one-word or one-sentence replies in return.

The way I see it, I’ve received rejection slips before, even the cruel form letters that editors use when they’re flooded but always end up seeming more like a personal insult than a convenience. If I can get through those, I suppose I can get through this. It’s what I need to make the second draft plumper and smoother, and unless I plan on putting this in a manuscript box and hiding it in my closet (which I don’t) it’s going to be touched on by other people’s eyes at one point or another.

Might as well be now.

In the mean time, I’m going to pick up some books on revision and plotting and go from there.

I am so glad to be able to read other people’s fiction again, too. As soon as I started this project I was hit with cravings for at least ten different books. Putting them off was agony.

In Response to NaNo's Detractors

2008-11-15T14:32:00.003-05:00

... with emphasis on Jeff DeRego’s 6-minute explanation recently aired on The Writing Show, specifically.

This is the second year I’ve participated in this “event” and also the second year I’ve written about the anti-NaNo sentiment that crops up every November. Perhaps this year I should have simply avoided the negative press and gone about my business, but when I found a short file on my iPod under The Writing Show’s folder titled “I’m No Fan O’ NaNoWriMo” I gave it a listen despite the feeling of irritation that immediately made its presence known.

I think the point that most people who disapprove of the concept either don’t understand or refuse to acknowledge is this - NaNo is, above anything else, a social activity, something meant to be fun and lighthearted and silly. Where are all these people who are writing drivel and taking it seriously? I see children and adults who have a natural love of books trying their hand in an enjoyable and harmless activity, something to do just to say they’ve done it and then move on. How many of these people take their unedited “manuscripts” and make an attempt at shopping them around to various editors and publishers? Not many, I’d assume. So what if they have icons on their journals that proclaim them to be “authors”? I doubt that many of them fail to see how tongue-in-cheek it all is. Let them be ridiculous and have their fun. If they go so far as to take their finished piece to a self-publishing company, let them. They have to front the initial cost for the book anyway, so if they do end up failing terribly they won’t make a reattempt.

For the few of us who take this somewhat seriously, please, don’t assume that we don’t know the difference between a rough and a final draft. I spend most of my time reading as many books as I can and writing short fiction. It’s all I’ve ever sold. However, during this one month of the year, I put down other people’s work and I use these thirty days as an extended writing exercise. If I succeed, I have a full rough draft that I can set aside and come back to revise in a month’s time, and if I fail I’ve only wasted thirty days of my life. It’s enjoyable for me and it gives me the opportunity to turn off any automatic editor I have in the back of my mind. I’ve created some decent material this way, in amongst all the crap I will have to excise when I go back through and tighten up the story. I’ve already made checklists of things I want to do in the second draft, aspects of the story I’d like to explore and things that need to be cut. I know that I haven’t written a salable novel quite yet and I’m more than willing to do the rest of the work necessary, which is why I find myself slightly insulted when people claim that NaNo serves no purpose.

There are some points well made in this podcast, and in the arguments of others. I’m sure there are people out there who fail to make the fifty thousand word count and give up, but these are also the people I suspect would give up at the first non-reassuring rejection slip they receive. I’m sure there are also a few people who consider themselves to be master wordsmiths at the end of the month, as well. It no doubt happens. How many of them are actually going to go on and become published, though?

I’m sure a lot of garbage is generated during November, but that’s not the point. The point is that people who love other people’s fiction are coming together to have fun, BS a bit and write little bits of fluff that may or may not have a future in a better, much more polished form. That’s all it is, not some soul-crushing machine bent on distorting people’s views of the publishing industry, or a network of brain-dead “wannabes” looking to steal your jobs or publishing contracts with barely readable verbal vomit.

Those of us who value hard work and dedication will continue writing and those of us who don’t will return to our normal lives come December first. Don’t worry about it so much.

Thirty Thousand and Ninety

2008-11-12T16:49:00.001-05:00

... and I still haven’t reached that sense of accomplishment yet. I suppose it will only show itself once I’ve finished the entire rough draft.

Part of me wants to stop and cheer at the progress I’ve made and perhaps sit back and bask a while but a much larger part keeps getting in the way. It’s not impressed and doesn’t want to slow down.

“You realize,” it says, “that you still have a bunch of action to write, including at least one more death, and still haven’t come close to the climax or denouement, right? That’s when you relax, and not a moment sooner.”

Party pooper.

I think part of my anxiety is how much I value this story and how much I want it to be told in complete form, regardless how rough it is. I loved last year’s story, but once I hit 50k I left it alone. It’s still unfinished today, which is something I’m really not proud of. I think writing an entire rough draft means more to me than the actual word count. Having a manuscript with a cover page and a final page with a THE END near the bottom is really my goal here, not the 50k. Until I get there I don’t think I’m going to be able to relax.

I bought a nice binder at Staples today and pulled my three-hole punch out of retirement. I have all my completed chapters within reach now, so I won’t need to worry about mixing up facts, dates, characters, etc anymore. That’s kind of a relief.

On the bright side, I’ve estimated that I have close to 100 pages of a rough draft in bound and readable form now, should anyone want to step up to the test audience plate any time soon.

Twenty-Four Thousand and Twenty-Nine

2008-11-09T20:30:00.000-05:00

I’m almost at the halfway mark, and I’m on track as far as the outline goes. Not too shabby.

I’m beginning to wonder how the second half of the novel will play out, especially in the pacing department. Every time I start to second guess myself, or criticize myself for what I’ve written so far, I stop and remind myself that this is just the rough draft and that any and all mistakes I make are going to be smoothed out or outright eliminated during editing. I could double the word count if I needed to, add characters and scenes if they end up being necessary.

I don’t think they will be, though. I think I’m worrying over what’s going to amount to being a lot of easily correctible small stuff.

Tomorrow I return to my job and the real world and leave full time novel writing behind. I’m a bit antsy over that, and I may end up taking my laptop with me to work on In the Teahouse on my lunch break. I haven’t decided yet.

I’m exhausted. I think I’ve done nearly five thousand words this afternoon. Goodnight, book.

December Resolution

2008-11-07T09:28:00.001-05:00

No more first person narratives.

I’m finally coming to the realization that I might need to change some things up. First thing to go is writing in the first person for everything. The next thing is going to be a relaxation of plot and motion. I have to make my characters go, go, go constantly with little description. I’m rereading one of my favorite novels right now, Drawing Blood by Poppy Z. Brite, and I’m amazed at the amount of detail and commentary she can write about a short car ride. It goes on for several pages, and by the time the car breaks down we know everyone’s age, hair color, eye color, temperament, profession and feelings towards their current locale. And it all feels natural.

That’s what’s lacking in my stories, especially the longer works. I have to have them chatting all the time, and most of the dialogue is one character talking and the other saying different variations of “what did you just say?”

It’s all very depressing, and aside from attending seminars or classes (which isn’t possible at the moment) the only way I’m going to be able to remedy this is through a mix of reading (fiction and writers’ books) and determination. Hence the resolutions.

I’m not touching or changing the project I’m working on now. Whatever happens, happens. I’ve got the first five chapters finished and printed and by God if Eric wants my shitty first draft as a Christmas present he’s going to get it. As soon as November is over I’m going to print two copies, have them bound at a print shop and save one for his gift. The other is going to rest for a month or two while I work on other stuff and will be marked up for revision in the spring.

That’s when I can worry about adding, subtracting and rearranging, which this manuscript is desperately going to need.

17465/50000

Portrait of the Writer as a Morbid Young Girl

2008-11-06T12:48:00.002-05:00

I swear, everything I’ve ever written involves someone killing themselves or dying in a very tragic, over-the-top fashion. Even when I was younger I was penning either tearjerkers or straight horror.

Case in point: “Letting Go,” a short story I wrote in the ninth grade for this odd project we had going in class. The teacher gave you a blank hardback book, like an artist’s sketchbook that was white instead of black, and you designed a “novel” out of it. Cover, illustrations, text, the works. Most of my illustrations were stolen from teen girls’ magazines, with captions underneath them quoting my own text. Much like a real magazine story, right?

Oh, this is painful to even look at.

I don’t know why, but mine was published by a “Technicolor Publishers” out of Brussels, Belgium. The “copyright” is 1994, so it was either the second semester of ninth grade or it was the first semester of tenth. Either way, I was sixteen(ish) when the project was assigned. I was apparently in the throes of a hardcore ellipsis addiction, too.I must have been taking periods and shooting them straight into my arm, three at a time, every hour on the hour. I’m amazed I was able to break the habit and live to see adulthood.

The dedication cracks me up.

I would like to dedicate this book to all the people out there that hadn’t had a book dedicated to them before. This one’s for you!

What an unoriginal smartass, right?

The actual story is even better.

Sometimes I wonder if a human being can ever forgive themselves after they have done something so terrible that it could hurt someone... to death.

I wandered aimlessly for hours, with nothing but a pair of short shorts and a halter top on. I was freezing cold, but that didn’t matter. I needed to find Jami’s grave. I owed her that.

Jami had been my best friend, up until the night before she died. She had laughing brown eyes and pale blond-red hair, and skin so white and smooth that it seemed transparent. We’d never had a fight until that final day, when I spoke out the words that terminated our friendship - and Jami’s life.

It all started with Mike. At least, that’s what everyone else called him. Jami and I called him Michcael, and to us he wasn’t just another guy in out high school. He was our best friend, and maybe more if I hadn’t gone and ruined our triangle. I’d be lying to myself, Jami and the rest of the world if I say that I wasn’t in love with him.

Jami was too, I knew that, but neither of us spoke about it. It was as if the topic of our feelings was off limits to us. We talked about him as a friend, but never more than that. But deep in our hearts, we both knew the truth. We just never chose to acknowledge it.

I think it was the first day of ninth grade that I first started to noticed Michael... and Jami. They were always together, but it didn’t bother me... at first. In the beginning, we were all in a group, a tiny group, that only the three of us could belong. We hung out together, went everywhere together, and even ended up in many of the same classes together. But, very slowly and subtly, I ended up the odd man out. They started to go places, do special things that should have included me, by themselves. I couldn’t help but feel slightly jealous.

By the end of freshman year, getting into the summer, I was almost never with both of them at once. I hung out with Jami every day, she was my best friend, after all. I first started to notice that she was holding back on telling me things, keeping way too many secrets for a best friend. When I asked her what was wrong, she would get angry and snap, “It’s none of your business... forget it!” We started to drift away from each other, and she came closer to Michael. It irritated me. I felt so helpless standing there, watching m best friend and the guy I loved come crashing together only to leave me out in the cold.

One day, around the thirteenth of June, I was up in my bedroom, reading the latest copy of Cosmopolitan. There was a funny article on page 201 called How to Fix a Droopy Sex Life, and I was sitting on my bed having a good laugh over it. I remember wishing that Jami was there to share it too, but she was probably out with Michael.

A knock on the front door upstairs snapped my attention back to the real world. I nimbly jumped off of my bed and thundered up the stairs, throwing the door open while I gasped desperately for air.

I threw open the door and said, trying to catch my breath, “Yes?”

“Andi?” It was Jami... and Michael. They had such happy smiles on their faces that I instantly got jealous. Overwhelmingly jealous.

I felt left out even though I was standing right there. The feeling, how common it may be, is unexplainable.

“What do you guys want?” I hoped I didn’t sound too upset or anything. I didn’t want to start a fight.

“What’s your problem, Andi?” Michael asked me. I guess I did sound a little bit ticked off. “We just came over to say hi.”

“Oh.” Now I felt really stupid. I motioned towards the house. “Want to come in and get a drink or something?”

“I will.” Jami wiped off her forehead. She looked as if she had been running. “I need a drink so bad.”

“I’ll stay out here,” Michael said.

Once we were inside, things started to go downhill. Jami knew me too well for too long to let my mood swing go by unnoticed. “Andi, what’s wrong with you? Are you mad at me... or Michael?”

“You know very well what’s wrong.” My fingers were trembling. I felt so stupid but so angry at the same time. Oh, how I wish now that I could take back the words, all of them, that I said that day. I just wish I could erase the whole day.

“No, I don’t.” She didn’t get it. “Does it have something to do with us?”

“It depends on what you call ‘us’.”

“I don’t get it.” Wow, I was right.

“Oh, too bad. Poor baby Jami. Why don’t you go talk to Michael about it?”

“That’s low, Andi. You know how much I like him.”

“You never told me how you felt. You never talk me to me at all anymore.”

“You’ve been such a skank that I can’t. I don’t understand why, either.”

“Go away, Jami.”

“Andi-”

“Go away.”

“But-”

“I don’t want to talk to you.”

“I’m sorry.”

“If you were really sorry you wouldn’t have stolen him.”

“I didn’t steal him - he was never yours.”

I glared at her with anger burning in my eyes. “He wasn’t yours either.”

“Why can’t we all just be friends?”

“Because I don’t want to be your friend anymore - or Michael’s.”

“We’ve known each other for years, Andi. You can’t just let it go all of a sudden.” She sounded desperate.

I didn’t know what I was saying. It just came out so fast. “Oh, yes I can. You hurt me, Jami.”

“Fine, have it that way,” she said as she left the house. She never even got her drink.

I sat and read magazines and watched movies all day long. The sun started to come down when the phone in my bedroom started to ring. I thought maybe it was Jami. I’d thought long and hard about how I’d treated her and decided that no guy would ever come between us. If she wanted to go out with Michael, that was find with me. I was sure that there was a way that we could all be friends. “Hello?” I said cautiously into the phone. Maybe she didn’t want to be friends.

“Andi?”

“Yes?” It didn’t sound like Jami. In fact, it sounded a lot like her mother.

There was a lot of sniffling on the other end of the phone. It sounded as if she had been crying. “Jami - Jami... Andi...” She sighed. “Jami is dead.”

It couldn’t be true! I knew it had to be a prank all. “No...”

My voice was choked as the tears slid down. Jami’s mother would never lie to me. As soon as I could talk again, I said, “How? Why?”

“She and Mike were swimming at the little cove about five miles from here when the tide came in. Jami caught her foot under a rock and drowned. Oh, God, my daughter, my poor baby...” Her voice faded as she started to sob. “Why Jami, why my little girl?” I felt my throat closing in on me. “She was so young, too young for what happened. Why Jami? Anyone but my little firl!” I closed my eyes, but that helped very little. Explosions like firecrackers danced behind my eyelids.

Suddenly images came to me, still-motion pictures of her in pigtails, of her in her too-big overalls, giggling. I saw her when she had hardly any teeth and a pocketful of quarters, grinning because the tooth fairy had arrived. Then I saw her as she was eight hours ago, her face mixed with anger and sorrow. The tears welled up in my eyes. I could still hear Jami’s mom talking, but I couldn’t bear it. The phone dropped out of my hand and into its cradle, cutting off her bother’s anguished cries.

Six months later, after the pain had dulled to a faint throbbing inside me and the tears had dried up, I walked into the graveyard with a bouquet of roses in my hands. Finally, after two hours of searching, I found her tiny headstone. It was smooth and black with Jami’s picture embedded in the lacquer. I felt the old familiar tears search their way up to my eyes, and they fell in such a torrent that I could hardly even see. “Jami,” I whispered, “I’m so sorry.” I dropped the flowers down on her grave. Her picture seemed to be smiling at me, as if our fight had never happened. But I knew better. It had occurred, and the guilt could very well rot me inside out forever. “I’m so, so sorry,” I whispered again. Then I turned and walked towards the graveyard gates. I could swear on the way out I heard these words float on the breeze as I left -

It’s okay, it’s okay...

There you go. Fifteen hundred words of vintage Jessica. Bonus points for for the irony-free usage of the word "skank."

Thirteen Thousand Nine Hundred and Sixty

2008-11-05T21:28:00.000-05:00

I’m starting to suspect my plotting may be off a bit. Two deaths and two very shaken survivors and I’m only slightly above the twenty-five percent mark. I still have quite a bit of conflict to lay down but I’m beginning to worry that a reader might be overwhelmed with the amount of deaths within such a small cast. I’m halfway tempted to introduce a bunch of throwaway characters and additional plot but I’d really rather not.

I think I’m going to keep the story going the way it was outlined and worry about any plot holes or overwhelming parts once I get to rewriting. I really shouldn’t start second guessing myself at this point but it comes almost automatically anymore.

I finally bought my own (used) copy of the book every writer and wannabe writer seems to own, bird by bird, and I’m starting to get the impression that all writers end up having the same fiction writing-related neuroses that I have, especially with getting started and/or entire rough drafts. Everybody seems to be susceptible to worry and self-doubt, which has been leading me to believe that it’s not such a big deal after all. We’re all just too melodramatic for our own good, that’s all.

So, that’s it. Sticking to the 10-scene outline, and if I need to I’ll add, delete or rearrange later. The same theory applies to fact-checking. There’s going to be some IT-related stuff that I’m going to have to consult Eric about sooner or later, especially in regards to cell phone graphics capabilities and whether or not movable in-game graphics can be done in watercolors.

Four chapters, twenty-seven percent completion, five days. Not too shabby. And it’s readable, which is a serious bonus for high-speed rough drafts.

Eight Thousand Two Hundred and Seventy-Nine

2008-11-03T18:43:00.000-05:00

Funerals are hard.

I cheat with a lot of the stuff I write. Despite it being fiction, a lot of small details are pulled from my own memories. Background characters, locations and situations all have a tendency to have already been experienced by me at some point in my life. These things are universal, though, and can be applied to almost any story with minimal tweaking.

I’m writing a funeral today, and I’m amazed at how angry my narrator is. I don’t recall ever being angry at a funeral. As a child, the infrequent ones had me puzzled, and as an adult the ones close to me had me heartbroken, but I don’t think I ever found myself angry at the deceased. It feels odd to be writing this scene in this way.

I told Eric earlier today that this doesn’t feel different to me than my everyday life. Last year, taking on this challenge left me feeling disoriented and extremely stressed. I had to brainstorm like crazy and force the plot in places. This year, though, I just look at my light outline and go from there and the story flows almost as if on its own. It’s unusual to be writing something this long without feeling much stress.

Point of No Return - Written!

2008-11-02T18:50:00.001-05:00

The point of no return, in a piece of fiction, is the exact moment when a protagonist can no longer shrug, say “hell with it,” turn around and go home. Something happens to change their life forever, and they cannot ignore it and continue with their life the way it was before. For some, there is no home left to go back to. For others, they’re forced to take action against a threat they were previously unaware of. There are a thousand different plot ideas that can put a character in motion.

Mine is the death of someone who had absolutely no reason to die, someone very close to our protagonist. Now we’ll have to find out why this happened and how Angela is going to deal with it.

Word Count: 5298/50000

Three Thousand Six Hundred and Twenty-One

2008-11-01T18:13:00.002-04:00

That’s the number of words I’ve hammered out since midnight. Chapter One’s rough draft is done. Since I’m using the very opening of the novel as my “excerpt” on the site, I may as well recreate it here.

I don’t think any of this would have happened if Maddie hadn’t wanted to show off. It was her night, though, so I kept my mouth shut and went along with it.

She’d just “discovered” tea, the kind that’s not pulverized and shoved into a teabag and stapled closed, and in celebration of her new job she decided to drag us all along with her to a proper teahouse. “It’s Japanese,” she said, “and kind of expensive, but these things only happen once in a lifetime so who cares, right?”

Once in a lifetime.

I found a lot out about my characters that I didn’t already know while writing this initial chapter. For instance, Maddie’s newfound love of tea, and her interest in the teahouse, is the responsibility o f a coworker named Kiyoko. The fact that she goes by Maddie and not Madeline surprised me as well. She didn’t strike me as a Maddie right off the bat. Amanda is not a medical researcher like I’d thought - she’s a librarian, and though she’s quiet and seemingly somewhat meek she’s got some strong opinions. The narrator worries about Lucy, who’s way more of a bitter underachiever than I’d imagined her to be. Lucy, however, just doesn’t give a shit. Maintain the status quo and have fun outside the office, that’s her strategy.

Interesting. Very interesting.

The Writer's Little Helper - "The Nugget"

2008-10-27T14:05:00.000-04:00

In forty words or so, write down what your novel is about.

In the Teahouse
Horror/Dark Fantasy

A young woman watches as her friends commit suicide for unknown reasons, suspicious of a teahouse they had been celebrating in shortly before. She must find out why her friends are dying or face the spontaneous urge of self-destruction herself.

Forty words exactly. Not too bad.

NaNo Just Ahead...

2008-10-27T14:04:00.002-04:00

Less than a week to go before the start of NaNo. On one hand, I feel quite lucky that I have a coherent plot already mapped out (loosely) on notecards using James V. Smith's "Ten Key Scenes" technique. I can tell where the story's going to go without feeling the need to have a death grip on my characters, so I'm free to let them do whatever they like within reason.

But that brings me to my main problem. I don't know my characters. I know that there are four female friends comprising the cluster of mains and there are a few male supporting characters, but aside from their professions and (in the case of only a few) their physical details, that's it. No names, hobbies, tics, quirks, weaknesses, backgrounds, nothing. The sections of the Mole I'm using to organize details for the characters is blank in most areas. I'm beginning to become somewhat nervous, though I generally come through in the clutch so I'm more worried about putting myself through unnecessary stress than I am about failing.

There are a lot of things I'd like to have right now that I haven't produced yet. Mostly I'd like names, a little background, some character-specific playlists to add to my iPod like I did last year. I'd really like to know my main character, since she'll be telling the story. She's in every scene, for crying out loud.

Last year I used small bribes to make my deadlines on time, some of which I failed to meet. This year, I think I'm just going to go with one main bribe. If I finish NaNo in time, with a complete story, I'm buying a brand new Zojirushi lunchbox set. Otherwise, nothing. Who knows whether or not I'll be able to stick to this plan. I have a terrible habit of deviating from things at the last moment, the way I did with my 50 Book Challenge itinerary. Once I hit 50 back in September, I petered out and went back to writing my own fiction.

And that brings me to my final point of bitchery. Other people's fiction. This year I'm going to find the time during November to read. I'm going to read voraciously. I'm going to read every YA title I've wanted to read from the 1960s forward, including L'Engle, Bradbury and Dahl. I'm going to finish my Francesca Lia Block books. I'm going to read Poppy Z. Brite's short fiction. I'm going to even, believe it or not, read Breaking Dawn. I'm not putting the rest of my life on hold this year. Considering the fact that I'm taking the first week off work and immersing myself completely, this shouldn't be too hard of a task to accomplish.

Brush Pen Evaluation

2008-10-26T14:45:00.003-04:00

Forgive me for not including handwriting photos at the moment. I’ve used two separate digital cameras and I’m still unable to capture decent handwriting samples. Regardless, I’m going ahead with this review and hopefully by next weekend I’ll have pictures included for each pen mentioned. Also, the photos of the pens themselves I rather blatantly lifted from Jetpens’ own website. If this is not allowed, please email me and let me know and I’ll take them down immediately. Now, on to the reviews.

First of all, let me make clear that I’m not using these pens for their intended purposes. I’m no artist and I am as Caucasian as they come, and these pens are really meant for Asian fonts, calligraphy and artwork. They’re great pens and I’ll continue using them as long as I have a reliable source for them, but I just don’t feel my giant, loopy Anglo handwriting is doing them much justice, especially in the aesthetics department. I really wish I knew enough Kanji to take full advantage of these, but until then making my journals and writing notebooks legible is going to be their main purpose.

Zebra Disposable Brush Sign Pen, Fine Nib. This is my standard journaling pen, the one I’ve been using for the last couple of years. Before that I had some fountain pens, which I still occasionally use, but the dark, thick lines of this pen just couldn’t be beat.

Zebra Disposable Brush Sign Pen. Super Fine Nib. Companion pen to my original Zebra, this one has a much finer line and a stiffer feeling nib. Not my cup of tea, really. My handwriting looks a bit childish and hesitant with this pen, as if I’m unsure of what I’m writing. It looks rushed and awkward in my journal, and I’ve resigned it for use at work when I need to jot down notes and I’m hiding my better pens from my coworkers. As an artists’ pen, though, this would make a great tool.

Pentel GFKP. This is an artists’ brush and I have no business owning something like this. I found this on eBay a few months ago and, knowing Shinkawa Yoji uses this same pen for his Metal Gear Solid artwork, I bought it simply so I could brag to Eric that I have one. He was thoroughly unimpressed. Rather than having a stiff, felt-tipped style nib, non-disposable brush pens use synthetic bristles to mimic traditional brush instruments. I’m still having a hard time controlling my handwriting with this, as it’s more difficult to master than a disposable. I have a Sailor Profit that is very similar in style to this and, despite not having used it in a while, I remember encountering the same difficulties with that pen as well.

Kuretake Fudegokochi Brush Pen, Super Fine Nib. Both samples Jetpens sent me to try are thinner than what I am used to using. They’re similar in thickness to the Zebra Super Fine, but neither leave me with the feeling that my handwriting looks bad using them. This one leaves my handwriting looking very thin and loopy, though still legible. The nib stays firm a very long time, regardless of how much writing is done with it. This is probably why my handwriting looks so decent with it despite the overall thinness. I like this pen quite a bit.

Kuretake Disposable Pocket Brush Sign Pen, Extra Fine Nib. Now this is a nice pen. Of the two given to me, I’d have to say I like this one slightly better. The pen itself is very classy, with a matching dark teal barrel and cap, complete with sparkly little “stars” embedded in the plastic. The gold embossing is a nice touch, as well. The nib itself is almost perfect, though still thinner than what I’m used to. The lines are just slightly thicker than the Fudegokochi and darker as well. It’s the perfect journaling pen and I’d imagine as an artists’ pen it also works very well. After using this I’m starting to think that perhaps my trusty Zebra makes my handwriting a bit too thick. I may need to make the switch to these pretty little blue pens sometime soon.

Much thanks to Jetpens for giving me this opportunity. I really like this company, not only for giving me the chance to review their pens but also for stocking the things I’ve needed for the last year or two. Their site is great, their prices reasonable and their shipping really quick. I’ll be a customer for a long time.

Jetpens Rocks

2008-10-21T13:46:00.003-04:00

I like to use Japanese brush pens for journaling. They’re the only thing I’ve found that make my notoriously ornate handwriting even semi-legible, and the jet black ink stays bold on the pages of my Moleskine while my normal fountain pen inks tend to fade. I collect pens the way some people collect coins or stamps, and I like my pens to be refillable and durable (and too expensive for my budget now, sadly), but for lined journal paper I really can’t find anything better than disposable brush pens.

For a while I was buying disposable Zebra-brand fude pens on eBay off of a seller in Hong Kong or Taiwan, but the last time I needed to order them I found that they’d closed their seller account and I couldn’t find anyone else who had them in stock. A friend of mine, whose love for gel and roller pens more than equals my fountain pen obsession, introduced me to Jetpens (http://www.jetpens.com) and we’ve been making combined orders ever since.

Jetpens sells all manner of Japanese writing instruments and stationery, from expensive fountain pens to disposables to pencil cases. They even have my Zebras, in three different thicknesses (I prefer Fine, myself). I don’t need to scour the Internet looking for a seller halfway across the world anymore. They ship from the US and most times I’ve received my stuff in a day or two.

A week ago that same friend showed me a Facebook ad from Jetpens asking for reviewers to test new Uni-Ball Signos. I emailed and explained that I mostly use brush pens but I’d love to review anything for them as I’m a big fan of their site. They emailed back and told me they’d already given the pens for review away but they had some brush pens to give out. I now have two Kuretake brand pens waiting to be tested out and reviewed. I’m really excited. Not only do I get free stuff (and I love free stuff), but I also get to post photos of writing samples and compare all the different pens I have. And I get to promote a site I really love. I can’t forget that part.

Anyway, in the next few days expect to see a nice long post showing off my very frustrating handwriting and all the different pens I’ve been using lately, especially my brush pens.

1000+ Words "Techonology"

2008-10-15T16:12:00.000-04:00

This was another Eric-suggested exercise that exceeded expectations. “What about a ghost that can communicate only with technology? What if it can only appear as glitches in electronics?”

I took the idea and ran with it, though in a slightly skewed direction, and came up with a 1,800-word short I’m calling, simply, “Hello.” The ghost doesn’t show up as glitches, exactly. It does use electronic hardware as a way of getting their message across, though.

I wasn’t too thrilled when I started writing this. It really had the feel of a story that I’d end up abandoning halfway through. I used to write a lot of those. I’d come up with an idea, write out what I’d thought through (which was only about the first half of the story) and when it came time to flesh it out and finish it I’d balk. My idea would feel very stale to me, not worth spending time on, and I’d scrap it. Up until recently I’d probably write three or four of these half-stories for every one I’d actually finish.

Lately, though, I’ve been finishing more and more of my stories. In fact, most of what I start out writing simply for exercise ends up longer than I’d expected starting out. It’s a glad reversal, for me, and I feel like writing every day now. I no longer feel anxiety at having to come up with a new idea. Granted, not all my ideas end up panning out, but once I’ve committed to putting something onto paper I don’t feel a lack of inspiration anymore. In his book Writing Short Fiction, Damon Knight called the subconscious mind, the part of your brain that floats ideas up to the surface, Fred. Having a dialogue with Fred meant sending ideas or thoughts into the subconscious and accepting what was given back to you. The more you talk to Fred and use what he gives you, Knight explained, the more ideas you’ll end up receiving.

It seems like Fred’s been working overtime lately, and I really appreciate it.

1000+ Words "Baking"

2008-10-12T19:23:00.000-04:00

I asked Eric for story ideas today. Occasionally I’ll go to him for inspiration and he’ll come up with a theme for me that ends up working well. Since I made cupcakes this morning and took photos and posted them to my Livejournal, he suggested I try a writing exercise with a baking theme.

What I ended up two hours later is a 3,125-word short story titled (for the time being, at least) “The Scavenger Girls,” and it really only has a slight involvement in the flour and sugar arts. It’s another ghost story. I can’t stop writing them. It’s a horrible, possibly fatal, affliction at this point.

Always the ghost stories, and always the tragic suicides. I can’t divorce myself from them, and at this point I’m not even sure I want to anymore.

At this point, I’d like to write anywhere from three to five more shorts this month. After that I’ll become serious about NaNo and my “month-long writing exercise,” and when I fill my daily quota on that project I can stop and busy myself with edits for the stories I’ve written. I’ve written four this month so far and there are several from last year I think I could reread and make a bit better.

"My Neighbor's Apartment" Submitted!

2008-10-09T18:08:00.000-04:00

Instead of doing writing exercises today I opted to edit, polish and submit “My Neighbor’s Apartment” to a double-blind peer review journal I’ve had some success with in the past. I’ve read it, reread it, rewritten it in parts and have had other people give me their impressions and I have to say I’m really happy with it. I wish all short stories were this fun and painless.

“Wings” is still out at the Nocturnal Lyric. It’s been out since March and I’m still eagerly running to the mailbox every few days, looking for a self-addressed return envelope in my very obvious pen and handwriting. Every time I get one my heart jumps a little and I run back into the house to tear into it, almost afraid of the verdict.

It’s been a while since I received and acceptance letter or contract the old fashioned way.

I should send my stories out to another round of publishers, though I’m starting to doubt the quality of a few of them. Maybe I shouldn’t worry so much. Of everything I’ve written in the past twelve months, aside from the two novels in progress, I think I’ve enjoyed “Cryptic Coloration” and “Canned Aisle” the most. “Cryptic Coloration” was my first real foray into magical realism, a story of two very different women paired up on a business retreat together and the odd things that surround the hotel they’re in. “Canned Aisle” is one of my “ghost invades the mundane world and goes on its merry way” stories, something that seems to be becoming almost a hallmark of mine. That theme and the theme of the suicide jumper have shown up so many times that I’ve lost count at this point.

I really ought to take all my unpublished short works out in October, dust them off, rework them if necessary and send them to publishers before November comes around.

1000+ Words "Unoccupied Apartment"

2008-10-08T17:20:00.000-04:00

Write 1000 or more words describing an empty apartment and what can be found inside. I ended up with another somewhat pleasing short story, this one 2.640 words in length. This one is titled “My Neighbor’s Apartment.” I think I’m slipping in the story titling department as of late. My titles keep coming out bland.

There’s something about Autumn that turbocharges my fiction-writing initiative. Last year I wrote four or five short stories in October and November, and this year I’ve written three in a week. Granted, not all of them are going to see the light of day (what writer has a 100% publication rate?) but they’re fun to write and make for great exercises. Plus, each new story adds an entry to the body of my work as a whole, which makes me happy. I like to see my collection of stories grow, even if they haven’t been published and possibly never will. There’s a little fragmented piece of me in each and every one of them.

Despite NaNo season coming up in three weeks, I dusted off my old copy of Damon Knight’s book “Creating Short Fiction” today for a reread. It’s a great book, full of ideas, charts, writing samples, exercises, you name it. Despite being 27 years old, it’s still one of the best books on the subject I’ve found.

1000+ Words "Street at Night"

2008-10-07T16:36:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I assigned myself an off-the-cuff idea. Describe a street at night and what waits at the end of it. An hour later I had a rough 1,700-word short story that I edited and polished into a somewhat pleasing little piece I’m calling “Humidity at Night.” Since it has a very concrete beginning, middle and end I’m not going to reproduce it here. I just want to give an update so I can prove to anyone reading (and myself, really) that I’m not slacking off. I am still writing.

It’s just going way better at the moment than I’d expected, and I’m keeping more of it to myself than I thought I would.

I’m still not sold on the title “Humidity at Night,” though. It seems a little generic to me.

Funny Observation

2008-10-03T13:41:00.001-04:00

I did another Room to Write exercise today, “Rantings and Ravens,” but I ended up with a 1,200-word short story that really pleases me. I’m not putting it up here just yet, in the off chance I may be able to use it somewhere. For the time being I’ve named it “Curious Morning.”

I wrote it in the first person and kept the protagonist rather vague, not for any concrete reason but because it was intended to be nothing more than a short writing exercise. However, I had in my mind a picture of a woman while I wrote it, probably because I am a woman.

When Eric read it, he saw the protagonist as male. Funny how we inject a little piece of ourselves into the things we read (and write).

Room to Write - "No Experience Necessary"

2008-10-02T15:33:00.001-04:00

Today write about something you haven’t done… Don’t be concerned with accuracy or believability. Instead follow your feelings and your imagination.

---

Every year I say that this is the year I’m going to do it. I’m going to lose enough weight and get in decent enough shape and I’m going to take lessons, and once those lessons are done and I’m certified I’m going to take the money I don’t have and fly down to the Caribbean and dive.

I haven’t done it yet but I have grand plans, plans that include swimming with sharks, touching an orca, discovering an untouched plane or ship at the bottom of the ocean and witnessing skeletal ghosts with my own eyes. I’m going to see clusters of tiny barnacles with my own eyes, iridescent squid and miles of glowing jellyfish too. I’m going to witness a wobbegong hiding in the sand, a cookie-cutter shark taking ragged little chunks out of the hulls of boats.

I’m going to be there, connected to a portable metallic lung, while dolphins chase fish, while kelp dances, while manatees do whatever it is they do while they aren’t fleeing boat propellers. I’m going to touch the sides of giant tuna as they go by, grab onto the fin of a whale.

I’m going to touch a seal. It will even sit on my belly as we float on the surface.

Maybe I’ll discover something down there, artifacts worth money perhaps, or maybe personal effects that mean something to someone still living.

I haven’t gone diving yet, but I’ve had a subscription (a free one, but still) to a scuba magazine for two years now. I don’t always have time to read all the articles, but the pictures take my breath away. I’m taken by multicolored little fish, giant cetaceans, the sleek, dark divers beside them. The beaches are all beautiful, with shiny white or matte black edges meeting the water, the vegetation tall and well watered. The plants in magazines never go thirsty, never dry out.

I’ve never been diving, but I will. I’m not sure when or how, but I will.

And I know it will be nothing like my imagination.

Room to Write - "You're Such an Animal"

2008-10-01T09:31:00.002-04:00

“... write from the point of view of the animal with whom you identify most.”

Try to guess who this is. /sarcasm

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I love going to the bathroom in my neighbor’s yard. There’s something about wandering into someone else’s grass and dropping a deuce that appeals to me, though I’m not exactly sure what that is. I just like it. It’s the perfect way to start the morning.

Life is, for me, somewhat boring, and because of that I have to find my pleasures where I can. Entertainment is often watching a movie on the television with one of my housemates in a language I cannot understand, harassing people as they walk by my house or napping.

Napping. Oh, God do I love napping. I’ve made sleeping in odd places practically a competitive sport. I can sleep on linoleum, grass, pavement, hard carpeted stairs, anything. I can sleep inside a claustrophobic plastic prison with bars across the door, on my soft-foam bed (just like the ones they advertise on TV), on those stairs for hours upon hours. My favorite place to sleep, though, is in a carpeted corner, twisted up like a corpse, my legs thrown up on the wall like an afterthought. It looks like someone’s murdered me and tossed my body somewhere convenient. It never fails to freak the housemates out, especially the girly one who makes me watch those movies with her every day.

Another thing I do to pass the time is eating. Normally my food is bland and even the water I drink liberally does little to help me choke it down. Sometimes, though, people buy me cookies or give me chips. I love snack food. Once in a blue moon I’m caught by the urge to thieve food, just for the fun of it. I’ve stolen meat, cheese, cookies and even a whole salami sandwich once. American cheese tastes funny.

More than stealing, though, I love manipulating people into giving me what they’re eating. It’s so much more fun to wander around the house, following people as they make their lunches or dinners or snacks and harassing them until they cave. One of my most successful techniques is to sit at the top of the steps and stare at them until they cannot ignore me any longer. That usually yields some decent results.

Sometimes, though, I end up with food I don’t like. Those are the times I really wish I hadn’t begged, but usually I just throw the nasty stuff on the floor and someone takes care of it for me. It makes me feel like a celebrity. Some of the foods I’ve manipulated people into giving me that I don’t like are cucumbers, raw mushrooms, zucchini and dill pickles. If it’s green, cold and crisp I’m pretty sure I’m not going to like it at this point.

Just give me your Sun Chips instead.

Room to Write - "The 'D' Word"

2008-09-30T15:45:00.000-04:00

Today write about discipline... Or, you can follow one of your characters through the process of dealing with an aspect of discipline.

I think perhaps I did this one a little closer to spec.

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Today was the day that Natalie finally admitted to herself that she lacked discipline. It was that morning, while brewing coffee to take to work with her, that she could no longer ignore it or blow it off.

It was staring her right in the face. Her countertop was so cluttered she couldn’t get to the paper towels she needed to clean up the coffee overflow (she’d used two filters again, damnit) before it cascaded onto the floor.

Now she was going to be late. This was the second time this week, and she had an evaluation coming up.

As she scrambled to clear the way to the towels, she banged her knee on the bread drawer she often forgot to close. She howled and dropped to the floor, bumping her head against the overflowing garbage can. Bits of last night’s taco salad, which she never could finish, jumped out of the open bin and came to rest atop her head.

She did the first thing that came to her. Natalie let out a string of expletives. Then she started to cry.

This was it. No more. The days of being a slow were over. She’d organize everything, toss out what wasn’t needed, pare her belongings down to where she knew where everything was. She’d even make a cleaning schedule, and she’d stick to it.

She’d start it tomorrow, for sure.

Room to Write - "Eat It"

2008-09-30T15:40:00.000-04:00

Today write only through your sense of taste. Speculate on and imagine the taste of whatever surrounds you. Without necessarily writing about food, experience the world as flavors.

I’m not sure I went about this exactly as instructed.

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My flavor is bitter, spicy and smoky, permeated completely by the tea that flows through me. When I’m angry I become as bitter as an early spring crabapple, as hard and inedible as a cold, rough stone laying in someone’s driveway.

Full of happiness, I am as smooth, creamy and sweet as the finest chocolate ganache. I flow over the lips and tongue with little to no resistance, forming a brilliant symbiotic pleasure.

Those times are few and far between, however. For the most part I am lukewarm and full of quiet smoke, a fine Formosa oolong in a chipped cup. You can pour me full of sugar, but that only serves to mask my true nature.

Writing Exercises

2008-09-30T15:32:00.000-04:00

For quite some time I’ve been conjuring up my own writing exercise ideas, things that I call my “1000+ exercises” simply because I force myself to follow the idea to the one thousand word mark and beyond. Many of these have become short stories, some better than others, and it’s for this reason that I’ve generally kept the ideas to myself.

However, I’ve been reading some writers’ books lately (most notably Room to Write) and in them there are many suggestions for story fragments, character studies, essays and simple ideas that get the creative juices flowing but do not necessarily end up with the creation of a salable story.

From here on out, I think I will be typing these up and posting them on this blog. I think I would really enjoy throwing things out for people to read and even share their own ideas, so long as there is anyone still reading this blog. It lays dormant for long periods of time, and for that I apologize.

Today I’ve done two exercises, short ones, and I hope to have them up shortly.