Tuesday, April 28, 2015

On Editing - Nancy Kilpatrick - Biggest Aha! Moments in Writing

    As every publisher will tell you, "Anthologies don't sell."  They do, of course, but what is required to garner sales is "names", well-known and best-selling authors, with a following. Not only are such people necessary to sell to the public, but they are also crucial in terms of an editor selling the anthology idea to a publisher.
    When David Morrell and I co-edited TESSERCTS THIRTEEN (2009), it was a wide-open anthology--the only completely open antho I've edited.  Over 200 stories came in and we both read all of them, some several times.  That's a lot of work.  The rest of my edited anthologies have been only partially open.  Once the "names" are locked in, I try to include a few new writers who have written a knock-out tale.
    One thing I've learned over my 20 years of editing is that most new writers overwrite.  As Anton Chekov said, "The art of writing is the art of abbreviation."  The great thing about what is written down in print or ebook is that it can be reread, so there's no need to say it twice.  The other weakness I notice in new writers is overdescription.  Don't describe what's obvious, normal, commonplace and understood by all--that puts the reader to sleep.  Save the wordage for the tension of the plot, where it's needed most.
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Nancy Kilpatrick is an award-winning writer and editor.  As the latter, she's just handed in her 13th anthology, EXPIRATION DATE, to be release at WHC 2014.  Her newest published anthology DANSE MACABRE: CLOSE ENCOUNTERS WITH THE REAPER features stories by Tanith Lee, Brian Lumley, Tom Piccirilli Nancy Holder and others, and has won the Paris Book Festival's award for best Anthology of 2012.  For a list of most of her anthologies, check her (sadly in need of updating) website:  www.nancykilpatrick.com  And please join her on Facebook.

Strangle Your Inner Critic - John Everson - Biggest Aha! Moments in Writing

The biggest barrier to writing a novel is…yourself.

I learned that when I wrote my first novel, Covenant. I started writing the book sometime in 1994-95, but I didn’t end up with a first draft until 2000. And even then, it was only a 75,000-word novel.  Obviously, I wasn’t writing the book that whole time. For most of that five-year period, it sat in the figurative drawer, because after sweating over each paragraph for a few weeks, I would throw up my hands and throw out the baby. Until a few months went by, and I’d force myself to drag the jaundiced creature back to center stage again to tinker with. I can’t believe how long it took me to get to the halfway mark of that novel.

Fast forward a couple years to 2002. I still hadn’t sold Covenant, but it had been two years since I’d finished the first draft of that book, and since then I had only written short stories.  I decided to join this new thing I’d heard about -- National Novel Writing Month -- to kickstart a new novel. The goal of National Novel Writing Month (affectionately known as NaNoWriMo)  is to write a 50,000-word novel in the month of November. At the end of the month, you’d upload your manuscript to be verified that you’d hit the word count goal. The mantra of NaNoWriMo is to squelch your inner critic, and just bull ahead to tell the story you have in your head. Grammar and punctuation and foolish dialogue be damned. Fix ‘em in post.  You don’t have time to sweat the perfect sentence with that kind of deadline, or question why your idiotic heroine would walk into the basement without a weapon when she knows there’s probably a ghoul with a knife down there. Fix it in post.

You simply have to ignore all concerns and bang out 50,000 words in a month. That’s 12,500 words a week. Pretty ambitious for most writers who still have dayjobs.

I had to work a convention the first week of November that year for my dayjob, so I didn’t even have the full month to try to pull this off. But I decided during that business trip that I wanted to do a really stupid thing—I wanted to write a sequel to my first novel, the book I couldn’t sell!  I had a whole different kind of story I wanted to explore within the world of the first book, so I knew the second novel, while a sequel, had to be self-contained, in case Covenant never sold.

Somewhere on or around November 8, 2002, I wrote the first chapter of Sacrifice. I realized quickly that in order to meet the November 30th 11:59 p.m. deadline, I had to average more than 2,200 words per day for the next three weeks. The admonitions on the NaNoWriMo website were key to achieving that—edit later, write now.  I still find myself whispering that advice to myself today when I start slowing down on a project.

Squelching your inner critic is probably the hardest thing a writer can do. The inner critic is the voice in the back of your head that says everything you’ve just written… or wrote yesterday…or are about to write… is utter tripe. Your inner critic can make you stare at a blank screen for those few precious hours you have allocated for writing, or it can make you waste 45 minutes wrestling with a single sentence or paragraph that just doesn’t feel right. It’s a monster time-killer.

Your inner critic is your biggest enemy to rampant productivity. And rampant productivity is what NaNoWriMo is all about.

So back in November 2002, I dug in. I wrote before work. I wrote after work. I probably wrote at lunch sometimes. And during every session, every time the doubt crept up, I had to keep saying, “don’t worry if it’s crap— just get your 2,200 words down today.”

I didn’t have an outline when I started the book— this was a seat of the pants endeavor. I really only had a vague idea of where it all was going. But every couple days I took a few minutes to “backwards outline” what I’d done before, so I remembered the crazy things I was coming up with so I could tie it all together later. Because when you’re forcing that word count, you come up with all sorts of weird ideas and plot departures at 11:45 p.m. that you don’t even remember writing  the next morning.

In the end, I got 50,000 words of Sacrifice written (about 2/3 of what the final novel would become) in three weeks, working right up to the last minute. I uploaded my file on the final night of November, and it was validated by the NaNoWriMo website robots. I had written a novel (or at least 50,000 words of one) in a month. I have the t-shirt to prove it!

Amazingly, when I did buckle down and revisit what I’d written… I found it to be pretty good. I didn’t need to do nearly as much editing and rewriting as I did on Covenant. And the prose had (to me anyway) a charged energy about it. It reflected its writing situation.  I personally think the resulting novel is one of my best works.

So the next time you hear that inner critic whispering that what you’re working on sucks alligator eggs, swat him off your shoulder. Bull forward and tell the story as brash and proud and swaggering as you can. Don’t slow down to look behind you. Just bull ahead.

You can come back to polish the brass and tidy up the house later. But it’s pointless to polish and clean if you don’t have a roof on the place yet!



John Everson is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of eight novels of erotic horror and the macabre, including his latest, the Fountain of Youth thriller THE FAMILY TREE, as well as the Bram Stoker Award-nominated tour de force NIGHTWHERE, the Bram Stoker Award-winner COVENANT, its sequel SACRIFICE and the standalone novels THE 13TH, SIREN, THE PUMPKIN MAN, VIOLET EYES.

John shares a deep purple den in Naperville, Illinois with a cockatoo and cockatiel, a disparate collection of fake skulls, twisted skeletal fairies, Alan Clark illustrations and a large stuffed Eeyore. There's also a mounted Chinese fowling spider named Stoker, an ever-growing shelf of custom mix CDs and an acoustic guitar that he can't really play but that his son likes to hear him beat on anyway. Sometimes his wife is surprised to find him shuffling through more public areas of the house, but it's usually only to brew another cup of coffee. In order to avoid the onerous task of writing, he occasionally records pop-rock songs in a hidden home studio, experiments with the insatiable culinary joys of the jalapeno, designs book covers for a variety of small presses, loses hours in expanding an array of gardens and chases frequent excursions into the bizarre visual headspace of '70s euro-horror DVDs with a shot of Makers Mark and a tall glass of Newcastle.

Learn more about John on his site, www.johneverson.com, where you can sign up for a direct-from-the-author monthly e-newsletter with information on new books, contests and occasionally, free fiction.

Want to connect? Follow John on Twitter @johneverson, or find him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/johneverson

Be a Brave New Voice - Frank Hutton - Biggest Aha! Moments in Writing!

I wrote my first narrative fiction in 1969 during the 8th grade, a short tale of star-crossed lovers reunited in a deserted school lunchroom as nuclear Armageddon descends. A year later the piece ran in my high school’s prestigious annual literary magazine.

For a freshman to get published was quite the coup. How did I manage it?

By tapping into my anxieties, I reflected the anxiety of my times. Then by writing to purpose, I struck a chord with the editors.

‘Horror’ is the most elastic & inclusive of all literary genres and enjoys a long, meritorious history precisely because it so often successfully reflects the collective anxieties of the time. Never in the history of horror has the genre been more popular. Variations saturate the media delivery machine, from film to television, from hard copy to e-book, from Stephan King to Sharknado.

Yet for all its market penetration, horror’s grand literary tradition feels sadly diminished.

Perhaps that’s because too many contemporary horror writers work backwards. That is, they write to the hypothetical expectations of some theoretical audience instead of writing directly to their own purpose and trusting that readers will find resonance in the work as a result.

Of course, to do that you must actually have a purpose for writing and understand what it is. The biggest surprise to me as an editor of horror fiction is that when hundreds of submissions come in over the transom, the only apparent purpose of most is merely an ambition to be published.

That’s not near good enough. And why anyone would go to all the trouble to write a story without first having sufficient reason to do it is a mystery.

For your work to gain traction in a filled to bursting marketplace that only grows more crowded by the day, first you must be brave. Pursue only your own distinctive voice in the service of your proprietary purpose and see where that leads.

The world is awash in anxiety and fear. When you sit down to write, remember what it was that first drew you to horror. Not just the delicious taste of vicarious fright but the deep down, inchoate thing inside you that horror made restless and fed back to you through cold sweat nightmare.

Then hit the keyboard and go for it, because while the beginning of the 21st Century ain't exactly the Dark Ages, we now know that Mommy lied when she said there’re no monsters under the bed and the truth of that can be made to count for something, if you try.

Besides, for all the advice you’ll get about the various paths to getting published -- the dos & don’ts and whys and wherefores -- when you write first to please yourself, you’re assured of doing your very best work.

And there’s no better, more assured formula for success than excellence.




Frank J. Hutton is a writer, photographer and editor of horror stories, including the Stoker Award nominated anthology “Tattered Souls 2”, published by Cutting Block Press. A current collection of his images and essays can be found at http://frankjhutton.blogspot.com/

Two Big Moments - Lucy Snyder - Biggest Aha! Moments in Writing

My first really big "Ah-Ha!" moment happened at the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Workshop, which I attended when I was finishing up college. Before that workshop, I'd been writing short stories and had sold one, but I had no clear idea of why my other stories weren't selling. 

I'd taken a couple of creative writing courses in college, and the instruction there had focused largely on the quality of micro-writing and on things like dialog and theme and metaphor. All good stuff, but the fundamental mechanics of what makes a story a story -- namely the plot -- were treated as something that just sort of happens.

During the week that author Joe Haldeman was teaching our Clarion class, he started talking about the five-point plot as it relates to short fiction. As he explained it (and you'll see different explanations around the Internet) this type of plot starts with a character (point 1) who has a problem (2). He or she tries to solve the problem … and fails (3). He or she tries to solve the problem again, and fails or succeeds in a way that fits with his or her characterization and the themes of the story (4); for instance, if the story is a tragedy, the character will fail due to some tragic flaw in his or her character. In the wake of the protagonist's success or failure, the story comes to a conclusion (denouement) that will be satisfying to the reader (5).

This, of course, is not the only way to structure the plot of a short story. But nobody had ever before taken me around to a story, popped the hood, and showed me how it works. Seeing that type of story engine explained was an enormous "Ah-Ha!" moment! And I finally realized why my stories weren't selling -- my micro-writing might have been good, but the plots needed serious work. 

Later, I got a second and equally big "Ah-Ha!" from Gary A. Braunbeck. He made me realize that good plots aren't prefabricated obstacle courses you march your characters through as though they're contestants in some game show. Characters and their conflicts have to create and drive the plot. But to fully understand the lessons Gary taught me, I first had to understand what Joe taught me. 

Since then, I've made over 100 short fiction sales, and I recently received the Bram Stoker Award for my short story "Magdala Amygdala". So, these were definitely lessons worth learning. 

-Lucy
 
A little about the author:

Lucy A. Snyder is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of the novels Spellbent, Shotgun Sorceress, Switchblade Goddess, and the collections Sparks and Shadows, Chimeric Machines, and Installing Linux on a Dead Badger. Her writing has appeared in publications such as Strange Horizons, Weird Tales, Hellbound Hearts, Dark Faith, Chiaroscuro, GUD, and Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet. She currently lives in Worthington, Ohio with her husband and occasional co-author Gary A. Braunbeck. You can learn more about her at www.lucysnyder.com.
 
 

Great Ah-ha! Moments in Writing - Career Counseling - Joe McKinney - Biggest Aha! Moments in Writing

Great Ah-ha! Moments in Writing:  Career Counseling
By Joe McKinney


I’ll let you in on a little secret.  When I got started, I had no idea I was a writer.  None.  I wrote a novel called Dead City, about a young patrolman trying to get home to his family on the first night of the zombie apocalypse, because at the time I was a young patrolman dealing with the stress and anxiety that comes with being a new parent.  I kept wondering to myself why anybody in his or her right mind would trust me with a kid.  I mean, me.  I’ve got issues out the wazoo.  In what kind of universe am I qualified to raise a child?  Every time my wife and I went to the doctor’s office for a checkup, all I could think of was that famous opening quatrain from Philip Larkin:

They fuck you up, your mum and dad,
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

That was totally me.  I was so scared of being a dad.  I was so totally convinced that I was going to screw it all up.  That poor child in there, mewling in the nursery, she was going to have the world’s most conflicted, most frightened, most God help me I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing parent this side of wherever.

I was struggling.

But I’m a fixer.  I’m that guy who has to do something about his problems rather than just accept them.

So, what I did was write a novel about a young cop fighting zombies.

It seemed simple enough; and really, the book wasn’t written with any sort of market in mind.  I knew nothing of publishing, in fact.  I had only vague notions, and those were of the distorted kind I’d picked up from authors who like to write about authors, like Stephen King.

I honestly thought it worked like this:  You write a book.  It becomes a bestseller.  You quit your day job.  You wait around for adventure to come to you.

Really.  No joke.  That was what I thought the writing life was like.

But, back to the novel.

I wrote it, and a publisher bought it.  The book came out in mass-market paperback – with a horrible cover I might add.  But, despite all the marks against it, it did quite well.  I wrote a zombie novel when there were very few other zombie novels out there.  And I was in bookstores, before bookstores became dinosaurs.  What that meant was that I got read by readers hungry for what I had written.

I sold a bunch of copies.  Not a million, but a good amount.

And here’s the kicker, I kept selling.  My editor at Kensington admitted to me once that he expected my book to die on the vine within three months, and I was right there with him.  I wasn’t a writer, after all.  I was just some guy who used zombies as a metaphor for the fears of becoming a dad.

But let’s turn back the clock a bit.

I started as a short story writer.  The whole reason I wrote at all was to talk about individual moments that mattered to me.

And that meant short stories, mostly.

I’d write them, staple the pages together, and leave the manuscript at the corner of my desk until the next idea came along.  Nearly all those stories eventually got tossed in the trash because I didn’t think of myself as a writer.  Writing stories was just something I did because my mind was restless and needed an outlet.  And I hate Sudoku.

Yet I found myself with kind of a hit on my hands.  With Dead City continuing to sell, I suddenly found it easy to do something with those short stories I’d been trashing.  I could actually type them up, polish them, and ship them out to magazines and anthologies.  For a year after the publication of Dead City I went on a story-writing binge, sometimes turning out as many as three in a single week.

I sent them out to every market I could find, rarely researching the recipient beforehand…because everybody in this writing business of ours is respectable and has honorable intentions, right?

To be brief, I learned two lessons from this.

First, research your publisher before you agree to do anything with them.  There are good people out there…and then there are the creeps, and the dead beats, and the assholes, and the completely fucking clueless…and thanks to the Internet, every single one of them can put together an anthology or a magazine or a website or whatever.  You are the company you keep, my mom once told me, and after a year of recklessly publishing, I found myself in the company of some dubious bedfellows.

Research, people.  Know whose mule you’re hitching your wagon to.  When everything is said and done, a good name (you can put the word “brand” in here, if you want) is worth its weight in gold.  You have to be your own best advocate in this world, and that means learning the skills needed to understand the business side of writing and to navigate its (sometimes) rocky shores.

There are sirens out there that will guide you to your doom, so beware.

My second lesson is this:  The novel is king.

As I mentioned above, Dead City did better than my publisher expected.  It wasn’t the walkaway success The Walking Dead was, but I was suddenly money in the pocket, and publishers like that kind of thing.  After a year of sprinting through short stories I got an email from my editor at Kensington.  He wanted to know about a sequel.

I read the email and said, “What sequel?”  I’m not a writer.  I had the one story.  That was it.

Until I thought of the short stories I’d been cranking out.  Only then did I step back and say, “Gosh, maybe I am a writer.”

Yes, short stories are fun – but unless you’re Ray Bradbury, they don’t pay the bills.  I can’t stress this enough, and I really wish there had been somebody there to tell me, “Hey, don’t wait.  Writing is fun, and it can be a business too, if you work at it, and that means keeping the novels coming.”  Had I heard that, I would have been able to approach this writing gig with a little more direction and purpose.

I seem to have done okay, but really, it’s been a race to catch up on the time I lost that first year of my career as a professional writer.  So, my advice for managing your writing career consists of two things. First, know the business.  Learn it.  Take the time to discover the ins and outs of your trade.  And second, write books.  Always be looking toward that next novel, and make sure it’s better than anything you’ve ever written up to that point!



About this author:

 
Joe McKinney is the San Antonio-based author of several horror, crime and science fiction novels. His longer works include the four part Dead World series, made up of Dead City, Apocalypse of the Dead, Flesh Eaters and The Zombie King; the science fiction disaster tale, Quarantined, which was nominated for the Horror Writers Association’s Bram Stoker Award for superior achievement in a novel, 2009; and the crime novel, Dodging Bullets. His upcoming releases include the horror novels Lost Girl of the Lake, The Red Empire, The Charge and St. Rage. Joe has also worked as an editor, along with Michelle McCrary, on the zombie-themed anthology Dead Set, and with Mark Onspaugh on the abandoned building-themed anthology The Forsaken. His short stories and novellas have been published in more than thirty publications and anthologies.


In his day job, Joe McKinney is a sergeant with the San Antonio Police Department, where he helps to run the city’s 911 Dispatch Center. Before promoting to sergeant, Joe worked as a homicide detective and as a disaster mitigation specialist. Many of his stories, regardless of genre, feature a strong police procedural element based on his fifteen years of law enforcement experience.
A regular guest at regional writing conventions, Joe currently lives and works in a small town north of San Antonio with his wife and children.

Listen... - Jack Dann - Biggest Aha! Moments in Writing

Like a lot of writers, my first and biggest “Ah-Ha!” moment occurred on the day I opened the envelope that contained my first acceptance letter and contracts for my first professionally-sold, professionally-accepted, professionally paid-for and –published short story.  I stood there alone in the living room of my parents’ home (where I was still living at the time – don’t ask, it would only depress you), hands shaking as I re-read the acceptance letter from Alan Rodgers at Twilight Zone’s NIGHT CRY.  Needed to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating, that I hadn’t at last taken that swan dive off the deep end that lands one in the Twinkie Mobile on its way to the Cracker Factory.  I hadn’t.  After over one hundred submissions, I had made my first professional sale.  I realized then that I wasn’t deluding myself; I was good enough that somebody was willing to pay me to publish my work.  So I began jumping around there in my parents’ living room, hollering like an idiot and aching to tell someone my unbelievably spectacular, epoch-defining, life-changing news.
I was, of course, alone.  And I could not remember anyone’s phone numbers to save my life.  So I went out onto the front lawn and began hollering and dancing and singing and laughing and crying.  Yes, the police were summoned; yes, a sobriety test was administered; yes, I passed it and the police left after I assured them this would not be repeated.
The actual “Ah-Ha!” moment came when I went back into the house and sat at the kitchen table, still clutching the letter and contracts.  The epiphany was this:  being a professional writer was going to get me in trouble, and I would be spending a lot of time celebrating alone, and – you know what?  That was fine by me.  Ah-ha!  I was a writer.
And on the Newark, Ohio Police Department’s “People to Keep an Eye On’ list.  I probably still am.
The moral of this story – I like stories with morals, don’t you?  I think every story should have a moral, and the moral of this story is:  write the story you want and do not for one second consider how others may view you and it; don’t worry that it’s going to get you into trouble, or that your mother or father or dear old gramma is going to look at you sideways, wondering how it was that the gene pool managed to spring a leak and produce something the likes of you; write for the most important, demanding, and unforgiving audience you will ever confront:  yourself.


About this author:

JACK DANN is a multiple award winning author who has written or edited over seventy books, including the groundbreaking novels Junction,StarhikerThe Man Who MeltedThe Memory Cathedral-which is an international bestseller, the Civil War novel The Silent, and Bad Medicine, which has been compared to the works of Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson and called “the best road novel since the Easy Rider days.”
Dann’s work has been compared to Jorge Luis Borges, Roald Dahl, Lewis Carroll, Castaneda, Ray Bradbury, J. G. Ballard, Mark Twain, and Philip K. Dick. Philip K. Dick, author of the stories from which the films Blade Runner and Total Recall were made, wrote that “Junction is where Ursula Le Guin’s Lathe of Heaven and Tony Boucher’s ‘The Quest for Saint Aquin’ meet…and yet it’s an entirely new novel…. I may very well be basing some of my future work onJunction.” Best selling author Marion Zimmer Bradley called Starhiker “a superb book…it will not give up all its delights, all its perfections, on one reading.”

The Day My First Professional Sale Almost Got Me Arrested - Gary A. Braunbeck - Biggest Aha! Moments in Writing


Like a lot of writers, my first and biggest “Ah-Ha!” moment occurred on the day I opened the envelope that contained my first acceptance letter and contracts for my first professionally-sold, professionally-accepted, professionally paid-for and –published short story.  I stood there alone in the living room of my parents’ home (where I was still living at the time – don’t ask, it would only depress you), hands shaking as I re-read the acceptance letter from Alan Rodgers at Twilight Zone’s NIGHT CRY.  Needed to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating, that I hadn’t at last taken that swan dive off the deep end that lands one in the Twinkie Mobile on its way to the Cracker Factory.  I hadn’t.  After over one hundred submissions, I had made my first professional sale.  I realized then that I wasn’t deluding myself; I was good enough that somebody was willing to pay me to publish my work.  So I began jumping around there in my parents’ living room, hollering like an idiot and aching to tell someone my unbelievably spectacular, epoch-defining, life-changing news.
I was, of course, alone.  And I could not remember anyone’s phone numbers to save my life.  So I went out onto the front lawn and began hollering and dancing and singing and laughing and crying.  Yes, the police were summoned; yes, a sobriety test was administered; yes, I passed it and the police left after I assured them this would not be repeated.
The actual “Ah-Ha!” moment came when I went back into the house and sat at the kitchen table, still clutching the letter and contracts.  The epiphany was this:  being a professional writer was going to get me in trouble, and I would be spending a lot of time celebrating alone, and – you know what?  That was fine by me.  Ah-ha!  I was a writer.
And on the Newark, Ohio Police Department’s “People to Keep an Eye On’ list.  I probably still am.
The moral of this story – I like stories with morals, don’t you?  I think every story should have a moral, and the moral of this story is:  write the story you want and do not for one second consider how others may view you and it; don’t worry that it’s going to get you into trouble, or that your mother or father or dear old gramma is going to look at you sideways, wondering how it was that the gene pool managed to spring a leak and produce something the likes of you; write for the most important, demanding, and unforgiving audience you will ever confront:  yourself.

Hey, This Writing Thing Doesn't Have To Kill Me After All - Brian Hodge - Biggest Aha! Moments in Writing

Hey, This Writing Thing Doesn’t Have To Kill Me After All

by Brian Hodge

There was a time when I could conceive of a novel that I wouldn’t survive. I either wouldn’t be around to finish it, or around to see it published.

I know, this sounds insufferably drama-queeny. “Oooo, look at the tortured artist, doing what he loves, and the jagoff still isn’t happy!” Be that as it may, the one writer friend to whom I confided this understood it completely.

Early on, I wrote four novels for the heralded Abyss line of books, the brainchild of beloved editor Jeanne Cavelos, for Bantam Doubleday Dell. Each novel was grimmer than the one before. They had their moments of levity, of heart, of love and light, but still, they went to some very dark places.

And I didn’t know any other way to write them but live in those places for the duration.

The only thing I can compare this to is method acting, an approach in which the actor strives for complete personal and emotional identification with a role.

You’d think a role like Hannibal Lector might leave stains, but Anthony Hopkins turned it on and off at will. He’s not method.

Then there’s Daniel Day-Lewis, whose obsessive inhabitation of character is the stuff of legend. In preparing for The Last of the Mohicans, he spent six months living off the land; he learned how to make a canoe; back in civilization he carried his flintlock rifle everywhere, even to Christmas parties. He didn’t just play Hawkeye. He became Hawkeye.

And then … there’s Heath Ledger.

Conclusions vary on the contributing factors behind the prescription meds overdose that killed him. But two things aren’t much in dispute: that it was accidental, and that, after finishing work on The Dark Knight, he was having a rough time shaking off the effects of playing the Joker.

I understood that better than I would’ve liked.

Four novels: From Nightlife to Deathgrip to The Darker Saints to Prototype, the plunge got deeper each time. The vortex down pulled harder. The lines got blurry sometimes. I still squirm when recalling a confrontation I had with someone, no longer myself, but relating to the world with the paranoia of the worst character in Deathgrip.

Finishing a novel ended nothing. The recovery period after each one took progressively longer. Depression isn’t quite the word for it. It was more a feeling of disconnection with myself, being unmoored as to who and what I was, and even why. It was clinging toxic residues and a suspicion that maybe I’d be better off in a state of non-existence. My mate, Doli, later admitted to thinking, before the last of them, “I can’t go through this with him again.”

Prototype was the nadir. Writer Edward Lee called it the most depressing novel he’s ever read. One of my martial art instructors ranks it second, behind Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Jeanne Cavelos, at the time, called it unbearable. A long-time reader remarked on an online forum, “I can’t imagine what made him write something like that.”

In hindsight, I guess it was because I had to. I realize now that mentally, emotionally, and metaphorically, the thing was autobiographical: the odyssey of someone who doesn’t fit in the world.

But then, not long after finishing it, the strangest thing: calm.

A-ha moments, for me, are rarely moments per se. They’re more of a long, slow accrual of enough evidence to convince me that this is how it really is.

A dawning realization: I don’t have to do things this way any more.

Maybe I did once. Maybe the entire sequence of novels was something I had to go through in order to finally put something to rest, then move along. But a lifetime of that M.O.? No. Some things can’t be sustained.

So I wrote something very different, a crime novel, Wild Horses, and it was fun. Then another. By the time I got to the short novel World of Hurt, in which I did maybe the worst things to a character that I ever have and possibly ever will, it was confirmed: I could leave it all at the desk. Could turn it on when needed, turn it off when not, and walk away without carrying it everywhere else.

I’ve always felt that creators are best served by following their hearts and instincts, no matter where this leads. We forsake the opportunity to know ourselves better if we approach a threshold, then back away.

But, as Winston Churchill said, “If you’re going through hell, keep going.”

The view always looks better from the other side.


Information taken from Amazon about this author:

BRIAN HODGE, called "a writer of spectacularly unflinching gifts" by no less than Peter Straub, is the award-winning author of ten novels of horror and crime/noir. He's also written over 100 short stories, novelettes, and novellas, and four full-length collections. His most recent collection, 2011's Picking The Bones, became the first of his books to be honored with a Publishers Weekly starred review. His first collection, The Convulsion Factory, was ranked by critic Stanley Wiater among the 113 best books of modern horror.

He's recently finished the time-consuming task of porting over his earlier works for e-book editions, using it as an opportunity to do a fresh line-edit and polish on every novel and collected story.

He lives in Colorado, where more of everything is in the works. He also dabbles in music, sound design, and photography; loves everything about organic gardening except the thieving squirrels; and trains in Krav Maga and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, which are of no use at all against the squirrels.

Connect through his web site (www.brianhodge.net) or on Facebook (www.facebook.com/brianhodgewriter), and follow his blog, Warrior Poet (www.warriorpoetblog.com).
LISTEN TO YOUR AGENT!
by
JOE BUFF



    At the very start of my professional writing career back in 1998, my brand new literary agent gave me some advice I was very, very reluctant to follow.  He told me to abandon my aspirations to write military science fiction novels in favor of doing straight technothrillers.  I had just spent a couple years, off and on, writing and then self-editing a lovely military SF novel manuscript – I got to “THE END” in 240,000 words(!) and then winnowed it down to 165,000 then 115,000 then 95,000 and that was the version I had queried him about.  His reasoning was that the markets in both a) selling new-author manuscripts and b) copies sold once published, were much better for technothrillers.  But tossing out my opus and starting from scratch in a different genre was highly dismaying pour moi.  I almost didn’t do it, which would have cost me this terrific agent’s offer of representation – on the basis of the quality of my writing, but NOT on the basis of the story I’d written!
    It was only after some hurried but painful thinking and angst that I started to understand for myself, like an apprentice would learn new things by a process of observation and osmosis, what my agent’s point really was.
    For decades, I had totally loved reading all about the real world military, from history and strategy, to biography and technology, to novels.  My late dad was a Navy Seabee and my uncle had been a WWII merchant mariner.  Thus a Sailor’s blood ran in my veins and I had the deepest appreciation for maritime drama, real and fictional.  On the other hand, my idea of “good” SF dated back to the ‘50s and ‘60s, early (and highly commercial) Asimov and Crighton.  Reading some current SF magazines, I saw real quick that what I liked and had written was way far away from the latest, late ‘90s SF literary genre.  I attended a big SciFi con and did not much fit in atoll, while when I attended a U.S. Naval Institute conference I made many fast friends rather easily.
I did then obey my agent’s #1 advice, “Listen to your agent.”  Together we began to outline the background premise (i.e., universe creation) for the saga of my continuing character hero, a near-future U.S. Navy submarine commander, Captain Jeffrey Fuller.  These books did sell well enough for me to make a comfortable living as a full time writer.  My agent continues to represent me, very capably, today.




Writer of many books, this blurb is taken from Joe's personal website: Joe  grew up in New York City. His father was an enlisted man in the U.S. Navy before Joe was born, during the late 1940s and the Korean War, and his uncle was a merchant mariner on World War II convoys in the North Atlantic. From this childhood nurturing by family seafaring role models, Joe developed a lifelong interest in naval history and military affairs. Over the years, as a hobby, Joe read literally hundreds of fiction and non-fiction books on war and national defense. Then, once done with school and out in the real world, Joe spent twenty years as a Fellow of the Society of Actuaries and a Member of the American Academy of Actuaries -- he worked for several leading firms, mostly on the subject of investment risk control and strategic planning for insurance companies. (Joe is no longer involved in actuarial work, but his training from that as a Risk Analyst is directly relevant to his fiction and non-fiction writings today, about national defense, homeland security, and foreign relations.) At last, in his early forties, Joe's decades-old devotion to reading about naval warfare, biography, and history culminated in him deciding to try his hand at writing -- he had some ideas for stories and they just grew and grew inside him until something simply had to be done!!! He set about learning the writer's craft and the business of publishing as much as he could, every way he could. This quickly taught Joe that to break in professionally requires tremendous amounts of commitment and heart, and tons of time and effort and hard work too. He wrote several papers that were accepted by a professional military journal, about submarine technology and tactics and the future of undersea warfare. Joe quickly gained agent representation (John Talbot Agency), and now SEAS OF CRISIS is his sixth novel.

Kamikaze Plot Rescue - Lisa Mannetti - Biggest Aha! Moments in Writing


Ah–Ha Moments: Kamikaze Plot Rescue



It happens to every writer. All of a sudden your fabulous plot that’s been humming right along comes to a complete standstill.  You’re watching the whole thing--which you thought was soaring--suddenly hell-bent on self-destruction. What ifs (of wild, moderate or even leaden nature) don’t help. Sometimes even knowing the end doesn’t help.

Before you consign the manuscript to flames, trunks, swamps or oceans (real or cyber variety) there is a way out that really does work. Guaranteed. And discovering this little pocket miracle was definitely one of my own biggest ah-ha! moments.

The answer to moving the plot forward is not asking what happens next, the real answer is your characters—both heroes and villains, alike.  Ask them questions: What is your greatest fear? What is the thing you want the most in the world? What secret do you have you’re terrified will be found out and by whom? What do you hope will happen to you and what if it doesn’t?  What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done? What’s the worst thing you ever thought about doing?

You get the idea....You may have to do a bit of first person writing and then integrate it later, but your characters—their true natures, that is—always hold the key to the events that comprise your story. And your characters are top-notch when it comes to getting your plot moving ahead again.



About the Author:
 
Lisa Mannetti’s debut novel, The Gentling Box, garnered a Bram Stoker Award and she has since been twice-nominated for the award in both the short and long fiction categories: (“1925: A Fall River Halloween” and Dissolution). Her story, “Everybody Wins,” was made into a short film by director Paul Leyden starring Malin Ackerman and released under the title Bye-Bye Sally. Recent short stories include, “Corruption,” in Nightscapes Volume 1 (August 2013) and “The Hunger Artist” in Zippered Flesh II (February 2013).

She has also authored The New Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn (second edition to be published by Smart Rhino early 2014), two companion novellas in Deathwatch, (new edition Nightscape Press, December 2013), a macabre gag book, 51 Fiendish Ways to Leave your Lover, (Bad Moon Books, Feb 2010) as well as non-fiction books, and numerous articles and short stories in newspapers, magazines and anthologies. Forthcoming works include additional short stories and a novella about Houdini, The Box Jumper. She is currently working on a paranormal novel, Spy Glass Hill.
 

Lisa lives in New York.


Visit her author website: www.lisamannetti.com
Visit her virtual haunted house: www.thechanceryhouse.com

Researching a Period Piece - Lisa Mannetti - Biggest Aha! Moments in Writing


Ah-Ha Moment: Researching a Period Piece


There are lots of ways to conduct research for a historical piece and, as a writer, you need every single one of them in your bag of tricks. Did I just say tricks? Yes, I did. Part of crafting writing is knowing that you are creating what is tantamount to illusion...in the end, all writing comes down to verisimilitude. If it didn’t, it’d be the literary equivalent of a home movie (notice I didn’t say reality TV show because those are scripted, too). So every bit of what you write: setting, plot, dialogue is all geared toward creating the illusion that your story is real when, in fact, everyone knows it isn’t.

But how do you take that mantra and transport it back to the 10th century? Or the 19th century or whenever your story and your characters need to be alive and walking around and acting? Naturally you have to read books from the period and about the subject; check in with Google; and consult maps. It’s also a good idea to read fiction (even if it’s not related to your subject) that was written at the time and about the time you’ve chosen, and to watch films about the era or from the era (if you’re writing about early 20th century on). All very good—and very necessary--so you can soak up that atmosphere and convey it to your readers.

But what’s the most important thing to keep in mind when you’re researching and writing about the past? My ah-ha moment came when I realized it’s exactly the same as it is for any writing.  Cf. paragraph 1—Yep, good old verisimilitude. You want just enough “history” floating and weaving through your story to convey the time period—not to slavishly copy it.  Your characters will have the same feelings and desires and motives as folks upright and walking right now in 2013. In other words, you will actually be writing a modern story—that just happens to occur back in the good old days. 


About the Author:
 
Lisa Mannetti’s debut novel, The Gentling Box, garnered a Bram Stoker Award and she has since been twice-nominated for the award in both the short and long fiction categories: (“1925: A Fall River Halloween” and Dissolution). Her story, “Everybody Wins,” was made into a short film by director Paul Leyden starring Malin Ackerman and released under the title Bye-Bye Sally. Recent short stories include, “Corruption,” in Nightscapes Volume 1 (August 2013) and “The Hunger Artist” in Zippered Flesh II (February 2013).

She has also authored The New Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn (second edition to be published by Smart Rhino early 2014), two companion novellas in Deathwatch, (new edition Nightscape Press, December 2013), a macabre gag book, 51 Fiendish Ways to Leave your Lover, (Bad Moon Books, Feb 2010) as well as non-fiction books, and numerous articles and short stories in newspapers, magazines and anthologies. Forthcoming works include additional short stories and a novella about Houdini, The Box Jumper. She is currently working on a paranormal novel, Spy Glass Hill.
 

Lisa lives in New York.


Visit her author website: www.lisamannetti.com
Visit her virtual haunted house: www.thechanceryhouse.com