Tag Archives: writing

What scares me?

I started off thinking that I should write a post about why I write what I write.  As anyone who takes a look at my Amazon page can see, I write mostly horror.  My contribution to the anthology QUANTUM ZOO was NOT horror; it was science fiction, in that it was set in a far-off future where people don’t really live on Earth anymore, except for those needed to keep the planet running.  Earth is a sort of zoo-planet (hence the link to the zoo theme of the anthology) and without human interference strange and wonderful things happen.  (I’m considering releasing it separately for $0.99 but for now the only way to read it is to get QUANTUM ZOO!)  Also, two of the offerings in my collection DIE 6 are not horror:  one concerns the possibility of uploading a conscience into a computer network, and the other involved time travel.

But everything else is horror, or at least contains supernatural elements, even when the story itself isn’t horrific.  (SARAH’S PUPPY, THE MOMENT, and GHOST OF LOVE in the collection 14 DARK WINDOWS come to mind, as do BLOOD TIES and THE TOOTH FAIRY in DIE 6.)  And the forthcoming novella THE CAVE is horror also.  I also have another work tentatively titled THE INN (but that will change, I hope) and one called RECIPROCAL EVIL, both of which are a bit longer (38K and 45K respectively) and both are straight horror.  Not gross-out horror, or splatterpunk horror, but definitely horror.

So I started thinking about why I write in that genre, and what it says about me, and I realized that many of the things I write have a “damsel in distress.”  Why?  I don’t know.  I think I can’t imagine very much that is more frightening than a threat to a woman might be.  Why is it always a woman?  Why not a man?  Again, I don’t know.  I don’t think of a man being terrorized by a serial killer or something supernatural as being particularly terrifying, though when I read works by other authors, I see that it can be.

When I think back on the things that really frightened me in my life, to a point that I lost sleep after seeing or reading such things, I came up with two examples.  And no, it wasn’t Jason or Freddy chasing around pretty damsels, which perhaps one might think I would find frightening after reading some of my stuff.  It also wasn’t something like JURASSIC PARK, or GODZILLA or any of those types of horror films.  It wasn’t SALEM’S LOT or THE SHINING, and it wasn’t Richard Laymon’s or Ed Lee’s work.  I found them to be (mostly) pretty interesting stories that grabbed me and made me keep reading, but I didn’t stay awake at night thinking about them.

What scared me was HELTER SKELTER.  I think I read it in high school, in the late 1970’s, and it really affected me back then, so much so that I still think about it today.  The second thing that scared me was a movie called DRESSED TO KILL, which starred Michael Caine and Angie Dickinson and was directed by Brian DePalma.  I don’t know why it creeped me out so much, but it definitely did a number on me.  I had dreams (nightmares?) about it.  And the prosecutor’s account of the Manson Family crimes scared me to the point where I couldn’t fall asleep, certain that every sound in the house was some nutcases crawling around and preparing to kill my whole family.

I don’t know if I’d have the same reaction to that movie, or that book, today.  Maybe I’m too jaded, too grown-up now to really be afraid of anything I read or see.  I’ve seen films and read books that seem on the surface to be far scarier.  But none of them bother me.  My own stories don’t bother me either; I hope they’re entertaining but they don’t scare me any more than Bryan Smith’s works, or J.A. Konrath’s or Blake Crouch’s stories, or Tim Miller’s or Matt Shaw’s books, or John Everson’s tales do.

As I think about it, William Malmborg’s works have made me think and creeped me out, if not to the point where I lose sleep over them.  And one of the most frightening short stories I’ve read in a long time was J. Michael Major’s “A Letter To My Ex” which was published in a SPLATTERLANDS anthology.  Scary stuff.  All-too-human horror on both counts.  I think I’ve been influenced a lot by Malmborg’s books, especially in writing THE INN.

I have two topics to write about this week before the weekend release of THE CAVE:  first is sort of a continuation of this post, a bit more about why I write horror instead of SF or mystery or thriller novels, and second is about how my writing career (such as it is) is going and why I’m lowering all my prices to $0.99.  Probably I’ll write and post them on Wednesday and Thursday, right before I formally announce the release of THE CAVE.

Labels in fiction…

I was reading one of my favorite blogs, The Passive Voice, when I happened across an article by Ursula K. LeGuin (yes, the famous SF author of such classics as The Dispossessed) titled “Are they going to say this is fantasy?”

It discusses an author who wrote a book about post-Arthurian England, where everyone has lost their memories because of a sleeping dragon whose breath causes forgetfulness.  I haven’t read the book, but it sort of sounds like “fantasy” to me.  The author is not happy with that label, however.  Ms. LeGuin says that it appears the author takes the label as an insult, and Ms. LeGuin says that she finds his attitude about the label as an insult, as well.

My blog article isn’t about the mislabeling of books, or eschewing certain labels because they represent a literary ghetto or whatever.  I’m thinking more about labels themselves.  Are they a good thing?  Why do so many authors seem to despise any attempt to categorize their stories?  To fit them onto some overly broad (or overly narrow) shelf where there are other books that might be “like” them?

I can’t say I understand it completely.  I realize that everyone feels that their story is something unique.  Something personal.  Something that has meaning beyond the story.  Something that educates or informs beyond the devices used to convey that meaning.  And I admit that sometimes (not always) I have a bit of an agenda in writing a certain story; I’m trying to explore something I see in society in some manner through the characters in my story.  I may be trying to make a bit of a statement about how I see something in the world through the way my story unfolds.  Sometimes I do that.  But I never do it at the expense of the story I’m telling, at least in my view.

Mostly I just want to tell a good story.  Whether a reader is going to enjoy it, I don’t know.  I hope they do.  Some people have enjoyed my stories (at least they said they did) in the past.  But I have to admit that my main goal is to tell a story that keeps my readers (assuming I have any) interested until I finish.  Sort of like sitting around a campfire, except with more (and more interesting) words.

So as a writer, I don’t mind being labeled.  I like my stories; I find them interesting enough to think that others might enjoy them as well.  But I’m not thinking that they’re some sort of high art; that in a hundred years they’ll be placed on pedestals in the Book Museum or whatever.  So go right ahead and label them.  If I could label them myself, I would.  I actually do label them, in fact, by fitting them into categories on Amazon.  Am I labeling them correctly?  I don’t know.  I’m not real good at giving my own work a label.

As a reader, I appreciate labels.  I like recommendations, and labels, to me, seem to be the heart of recommendations.  “If you like ‘x’, you will probably like ‘y’.”    That statement, to me, is labeling two stories as appealing to the same group of readers, readers who like ‘z’ types of stories.  So I like it when someone tells me that something is post-apocalyptic or dystopian science fiction, because I have a certain expectation for those labels.  If someone says something is fantasy, I might steer away from it, because I am not a big fantasy reader (Eddings, Tolkein and Donaldson excepted).  But if someone says something is ‘urban fantasy’, I might check it out because I associate that label with Jim Butcher, Laura Resnick and Tim Pratt (among others).  If something is labeled ‘serial killer horror,’ I might give it a look because I’ve enjoyed stories by Thomas Harris and by William Malmborg and Jeffrey Deaver (three very different examples of authors with stories about serial killers).

As a writer, I’d love it if my readers could label my fiction.  So far, all of it is short.  But as I’ve said, I have a couple more things ready to go.  If I can finish up my editing work and get some covers done, I have two or three that could be released before the summer.  Would you like to label them?  I’d call all three horror thrillers, and two of them have very human criminals who create the horror.  The third is a bit more supernatural.

In any case, I don’t think labels say anything about a work beyond offering a sort of classification system which is useful to readers, especially power readers who plow through and love certain types of stories.  They don’t say anything about the depth of the story, the quality of the storytelling or the technical skill of the author, but they do provide a handle for readers looking for new authors to discover.  As discovery tools how can they hurt?  Labels may be the only thing that writers today have in their bag to help them get discovered, since most of us (99.9% or more) do not have access to those front tables at a bookstore.

*****

Works in Progress

And then there were four.

Most of what I’ve published so far is short fiction.  The longest is a three story series, coming in at about 24K words.  The stories are roughly 7K, 8K and 9K, and they’re all about the same story but told from different points.  The longest short story I’ve put out there so far is THE GHOST TRAIN, part of the DIE 6 collection.  It comes in at something over 10K words.

But I’ve been working on longer stories.  And I finished my fourth over the weekend.  This is not to say it’s ready to publish.  It isn’t.  None of the four are.  But the story is complete.

Here are the four:

  • THE CAVE – a horror story about five eighth graders who find a cave in a forest preserve and the cave is something more than just a hole in the ground…  (around 23K words)
  • THE NEVER ENDING NIGHT – when the sun fails to come up for several days in a row, a girl’s familiar street becomes a frightening place to be.  (Around 27K words)
  • DEATH BY APPOINTMENT – a who-dun-it featuring a young dentist as the sleuth.  (around 45K words)
  • COLLEGE EVIL – a college kid researches the nature of good and evil, and starts seeing assaults which are happening on his campus in a very graphic way.  How is that possible?  And they are getting more and more personal… (about 45K words)

Those are all just working titles, obviously.  I’m not great with my titles.  But 45K is short-novel length, right?  I’m thinking of combining THE CAVE and THE NEVER ENDING NIGHT into one novella-collection, then putting the other two out individually.

Look for them sometime after I get them edited…

*****

Why should any of this matter to me?

Lots of words being posted on the Amazon/Hachette dispute, and I have to admit, it makes for fascinating reading.  I spend a lot of time, time I probably shouldn’t spend, on Konrath’s blog, and The Passive Voice, and Hugh Howey’s blog, and a few others, reading articles about the feud between behemoths.  When one falls, will the ground shake so violently that writers will be injured or killed from the aftershock?

I don’t know.  But the more pertinent question might be, why should I care?  Does it matter to me?

The fact is that without the Kindle platform for self-publishing, it would be unlikely that I’d have published any works.  I wouldn’t have finished the story that was published in QUANTUM ZOO, I would have a collection called 14 DARK WINDOWS, I wouldn’t have the trio of “vampire” stories that I call DEAD OR ALIVE, NIGHT FAMILY, and RICK’S RULES.   I wouldn’t have written three brand new stories to go with three older, slightly longer stories that are currently being collected in an as-yet-untitled volume of about 37000 words.

I wouldn’t have bothered doing the rewriting I’m currently doing to what I affectionately call my “Dental Mystery”.  I wouldn’t have finished my “Chris” serial killer story, I wouldn’t be putting any work into my “Never Ending Night” story, and I wouldn’t have bothered even writing my “The Inn” story.  These are all longer works, north of 20K words, but not approaching 60K.  They’re all relatively short horror novels or novellas  (except my dental mystery) and I suspect that, without Kindle, none of the above are publishable.

So for me, does it matter what Amazon does with Hachette?  Does any of it matter?  Without Amazon, I’d be sitting on a zip drive full of old short stories.  And that would be about it.  I wasn’t going to go through the process of querying agents or publishers directly.  I thought about it more than once.  I spoke to the publisher of Echelon Press (a small press) and she pretty much told me to just submit it to their editorial process.  I don’t know if it would have made it through the process.  But doing the work of rewriting, without a guarantee of it coming to anything, didn’t seem appealing to me.

Anyone who reads my blog knows that I feel like I have a very full plate.  Maybe its no fuller than anyone else, but it seems to be so to me.  I have a fairly busy dental practice, a high school son in marching band, another junior high school son in typical middle school activities, including band, and a busy family life.  We travel as much as we can afford to travel, and we never seem to have time to do all the things that we want to do, let alone affording me the time to sit down and spend time writing.  I’m not one who can sit in front of a blank computer screen and start writing…I need to ruminate.  Takes me a while to get started.

No, going through the processes of traditional publishing was something I was unlikely to even attempt.

So what does it matter to me if Amazon, at some undetermined future time, decides to cut reimbursement rates from their current levels of 35% and 70%?  Would it bother me?  Yes, probably in an academic sense, but in a sense of it actually affecting me financially, probably not.  I have a profession that provides me with a decent living.  If my writing career takes off, great.  If it doesn’t, I’ll be sad, but not affected financially.  I don’t count on it.

Maybe that makes me different from a lot of self-published authors.  For many, writing IS their career.  For me, it’s still a sideline, and is likely to remain that.

So the answer is, no, none of it really truly matters to me as a writer.  As a reader, I want Amazon to succeed, because it increases the availability of books to me at affordable prices.

I’d like to make some sort of comments about the documentary I saw on CNBC last night, titled “AMAZON RISING”.  But I don’t know what to say.  They’re a retailer.  It’s not like they’re truly changing the world in any fundamental sense.  They’re just making buying things easier and more convenient.  They’re probably saving consumers some money today.  I’m more interested in Bezos’ space program than I am in his retail innovations.

Except Kindle.  That particular innovation has allowed me to put my stuff out there in front of readers.  All I can do at this point is try to increase my visibility, and hope people find my stories.

And then hope that they like the way I’ve written them and the way I’ve told them, and that they like the stories themselves.

*****

Lit Fic vs. Genre Fic

 

I like watching movies.  And I tend to like adventure movies, you know the type.  The big budget thrillers and sf/fantasy spectacles.  I enjoy the “smaller” movies, the ones that study characters, that use the sense of place as a major part of the story, the ones that explore relationships.  But on the big screen, and often on the little screen, the movies I’ll pay to watch and maybe even buy tend to be thrillers and sf/fantasy.  LORD OF THE RINGS, ENDERS GAME, THE HUNGER GAMES and CATCHING FIRE, and the HARRY POTTER movies are just a few examples of movies I’ve seen and enjoyed in the last several years.

Over the weekend I was watching the first lecture of one of “The Great Courses”, this one on analysis and critique while reading and writing, and how it can make “me” a more effective reader AND writer.  This first lecture sets the agenda for the 24 lecture series, and in it the professor talked a great deal about tone and about word choice.  She gave some examples of “good” writing versus “bad” writing versus “okay” writing.

“Okay” writing seemed to be technically solid but artistically bland.

I thought about that as I read the passages she presented in the lecture, and I agreed with her fully that her examples of “good” writing were far more artistic.  It was like looking at a photo of a weedy pond, then looking at Monet’s Water Lilies paintings.  Both showed sort of the same thing, but there was a richness to Monet’s work that certainly isn’t found in a simple photograph by an “untalented” photographer.

Then I thought about watching movies, specifically, the movies I like to watch.  To me, reading a lot of genre fiction, which is concerned primarily with telling a story, conveying the action that occurs to resolve the conflict, is a lot like watching some of these big budget movies.  They aren’t out to explore the relationships between characters to any great depth, certainly no deeper than needed for the story.  They aren’t concerned so much with exploring the issues that rise up in the story beyond what is needed to serve the story.

Or maybe they are.  Maybe it is simply that they emphasize the story above these other things, while those smaller “films” and literary fiction emphasize the relationships, the characters, the issues, in the absence of compelling story.  They find a way to make the “story’ about these items.  The conflict comes out of them, not out of some larger plot construction.

Does that make any sense?

As I thought about my fiction, I thought that no one is ever going to file my stuff under “Literary Fiction”.  Why is that?  I pay attention to my word choices.  I try to explore my characters’ motivations a little.  But writing like the examples given by the professor does not come naturally to me.  The metaphors and similes, the figurative language, the artistic flair that was evident in the writing in her examples, it just doesn’t flow off my pen (or my fingertips).

I write like I’m watching a movie.  Character A goes here, does this, has this expression on his face (mirroring his mood), Character B and C do this and that, then this happens, and so on and so on.  Like I’m watching and describing action on a screen.  It strikes me that a lot of genre fiction works this way.  I don’t know about romance, but SF/Fantasy, Horror, Mystery and Thrillers all seem to, at least to some degree.

I once wrote a piece about something Laura Lippman had written in one of her excellent mystery/thriller novels, something about how I could never have come up with the plot device that she did.  I know she responded to the article, but I don’t recall exactly what she said.  But I saw it as Ms. Lippman having a literary bent to her crime fiction.  I know a lot of authors have that.  Maybe it’s something that comes with time.

In the meantime, however, I think I’ll be content with “writing the movie”.

*****

About Me: 20 possibly interesting things…

I saw a post on author Randall Wood’s blog titled 25 Things About…Me and thought it might be fun to do something similar here.  So, without further ado:

  1. The first pop song (and the one that got me started on “that” kind of music) that I heard and really loved was Paul McCartney’s Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey off his solo album, RAM.  I was about 11 or 12.
  2. I wrote my first complete story as a seventh grader.  It was called “The Argonauts” and it was about a baseball team made up of all my friends that competed against other baseball teams from other cities.  My teacher said I should become a sportscaster.
  3. I started taking organ lessons at age 5.  My teacher was a man named Kay McAbee, a well-known show organist.  At that age, I was considered to be something of a prodigy.
  4. I joined grade school band in 6th grade as a mallets player.  In those days it meant I played glockenspiel and chimes for that band.  My band director was named Mr. Dan Kobe.
  5. In little league, I played second base.  My first game I went 2-2 at the plate and made like 4 errors in the field.  I never got another hit the whole season, and I only made like 3 errors in all of the rest of the games.  Turned out I was pretty good defensively and pretty horrid at batting.
  6. I published a magazine called “Rock” when in junior high.  We only made one copy and we passed it around to kids in our class.  We published at least 5 issues.  It was all about the stars of that day and age – bands like Uriah Heep, Deep Purple, Chicago, Elton John, and Led Zeppelin.
  7. I was ranked first in my class my freshmen year in high school, out of 600 plus students.  I ended up graduating in the top ten, but could never get back to first after a disastrous turn in my speech class, which I took during summer school.  (Bad idea for me.)
  8. I decided that I wasn’t going to be a bell player in high school band and took drum lessons.  I marched double tenors for two years and snare for two years.  I was section leader for a semester my senior year.  I was the only one who could play every instrument in the section.  Playing multiple instruments became a theme in my life.
  9. I knew that I wanted to be a dentist when I graduated high school and it was a major reason I went to Loyola University in Chicago.  I wavered in that goal between junior and senior years, when I thought I might like to go into graduate studies of chemistry.  But I went to dental school anyway and haven’t been unhappy with that decision.
  10. I played in rock bands all along.  Some of them were called TANGENT, EXODUS, TENTATIVE, and NITROUS ROXIDE.  While playing in bands in high school I realized that if I wanted any say in the song selection I better learn how to play guitar.  I started singing in TENTATIVE, and in NITROUS ROXIDE I was the primary lead singer.  Ever since then I’ve always done a portion of the lead vocals, up until now.  I can play guitar, keyboards and drums, and I can fill in on bass if needed.  Later I have played piano and keyboards on my friends’ CD projects:  The Exit Specialists.
  11. Favorite musician growing up:  Paul McCartney (and Wings).  Favorite band now:  The Beatles.  I didn’t stray too far.  Favorite musical era:  Late 70’s/early 80’s.  I loved the Cars, the Stray Cats, Crowded House, the BoDeans, New Order, the Cure, Erasure, Rockpile, Dave Edmunds, Nick Lowe…should I keep going?
  12. I saw a Chicago band called Mike Jordan and the Rockamatics over thirty times.  Maybe even forty times.  They were a tremendously fun club band back in the 80’s and into the 90’s.  They had roots going to John Prine’s backing band, The Famous Potatoes.  Other favorites that I saw more than twenty times:  The Elvis Brothers (from Champaign) and the Bad Examples.
  13. I was exposed to the writings of Isaac Asimov in eighth grade, and the writings of Stephen King in late high school, but I really got reading King in college.  Other favorites included Robert Heinlein, Dan Simmons, Orson Scott Card, David Brin, and F. Paul Wilson.
  14. I joined Prodigy (an online dial-up service) back in the late 1980’s or early 1990’s and was active in the Stephen King Club and another bulletin board called King-Horrible?  When Prodigy raised rates, we migrated to Delphi Internet Services.  We started out in a virtual corner of a forum called The Clubhouse, but we soon formed our own forum called The Book and Candle Pub.  There I helped run the place, moderating discussions, coordinating author visits, and doing a little of this and that.  I started writing seriously again at that point.  Some of the authors whose visits I helped coordinate included David Feintuch, Jack Chalker, Janet Young Brooks (aka Jill Churchill), Bill Pomidor, and Terry McGarry.
  15. I wrote my first novel-length work in the late 1990s’  It is a “dental mystery” and I’m currently rewriting it to bring it up to date and plan on publishing it when it’s ready.
  16. My favorite baseball team is the Cubs, and I also enjoy watching pro basketball.  Michael Jordan brought me into the NBA, but I have stayed with it and I love sports statistics.
  17. I love to ride, though I haven’t done it much in the last couple years.  My longest ride was on the Elroy-Sparta trail in Wisconsin.  We did a little over 50 miles on that day.  Most of my rides were more in the 25-30 mile range.
  18. I broke my ankle in late 2011, and still have the plate and pins fixing the fibula.  It has really affected my mobility.  That was the first surgery I’ve had.
  19. I used to dream of retiring from dentistry and opening a brick-and-mortar bookstore.  Now I don’t know what I want to do when I retire.  I still might try the bookstore thing, but probably will look at a specialty mystery/sf store, something more like that.
  20. My favorite vacation spot in the whole world is probably Arizona.  I’ve traveled to every part of the state except the southwest corner and have found so many cool things to see and do there.  From spring training baseball to Sedona, it’s my favorite state.  (I’m not so impressed with their politics.)  My second favorite is probably Disney World, and I’ve been there enough times to feel that I could write a sort of guidebook about it (under my real name) called DOING DISNEY!

And that’s about all of the semi-interesting facts about me.  At least the ones I’m willing to share!

*****

 

So which am I?

Lots of activity in the blogosphere about self publishers recently.  It seems Hugh Howey had someone do a study about numbers of self published titles in the Amazon best seller lists, and then did some data extrapolation to determine estimated sales numbers and estimated dollar figures for sales, and he found that self published titles were beginning to become the majority of ebooks sold.  Others jumped on his data, and reblogged it, making their own comments about it.

On top of it all is the old “tsunami of crap” argument resurfacing, that as more and more people self publish, more and more “bad” books surface.  Apparently by “bad books” they mean poorly edited, typo-laden works, mostly by self publishers.  Maybe they mean bad stories as well, but mostly they talk about the quality of the craft used to write these books.  In other words, the stuff that a good copy editor will find and presumably correct.

Well, I wonder where I fall.  Am I part of the tsunami or are my works professional?

Here was my hope.  Most of the short stories I’ve published have been through the wringer with readers.  Then I put them through my wringer again as well.  I read them and reread them, correcting turns of a phrase and adding in missing words and fixing typos that generally were something like using “fee” instead of “feel” (in other words, typos that the spell check didn’t find).

So I thought (and still think) I’m putting out a pretty good product, even though I haven’t had anyone “professionally” edit these works.  Am I the best judge of that?  Probably not.  The reader is the best judge.

But maybe the stories aren’t good enough.  Maybe I’m not a good enough storyteller.  Again, I can’t judge.  I think the stories are pretty good; they’re the stories I wanted to tell.  So who does judge?  Readers, I’d guess.

Yes, I made three of my covers.  But I had four of them done for me by a professional who happens to be a good friend, someone who has designed covers for small presses.  Two of them are a little rough, I know.  My latest, for DEAD OR ALIVE, looks pretty decent to me.

I started with these short stories because they’ve been through the wringer, and because my hope was that they’d generate some sales and some income which I could then use to pay professionals for editing and covers on my longer works.  It hasn’t happened yet, but I’ve only got the short stories, a 14 story collection, and a Disney guidebook (under my real name) out there so far.  I don’t do much promotion; I’m not on Facebook every day suggesting that people buy my stories.  I don’t tweet; I have been less than regular with updates to my blog.  I’ve hoped that somehow word will spread and a few will get sold here and there.  We’ll see.

So the question remains:  am I part of the “tsunami of crap”?  Who gets to say whether I am or not?

In my estimation, the only ones who get to make that judgement are readers.  So far they haven’t voted enough to let me know one way or another (all of my reviews are 5 star so far, but there aren’t many of them), but I intend on continuing to plug away until either something happens, or nothing at all happens.

Thanks if you’ve bought one of my stories.  Heck, thanks if you’re even here reading this.  I appreciate any recognition I get.

*****

The World of Silos – Hugh Howey’s WOOL saga

First, let me start off by saying that these books by Hugh Howey have been a great influence on me.  Not only do they tell a captivating story about a post-apocalyptic world where humanity has been exterminated except for a relative handful of people selected to be saved in “silos”, vertical cities dug into the ground somewhere in Georgia, but the story of the publication and Howey’s subsequent success grabbed me like not too many other stories recently.

Nitpickers can find all the problems with the writing and the story that they’d like to, but I read a story about a strong female character who fights to learn the truth that is withheld from the descendents of those original Silo inhabitants.  And I was inspired by the tale to read more independent fiction in the subgenre that WOOL and SHIFT and DUST reside in.

But even more, I was inspired to self publish by Howey’s story of success – something he wrote became popular simply because it was a story that grabbed others as it grabbed me, and he became a self-publishing success story.  What does it matter that he’s made millions from the product of his imagination?  That’s just a difference in degree from what other self-publishers, including myself, are doing.

And then, Mr. Howey opened his world to others, who could write fan fiction (basically) and publish it and perhaps make some money off of it.

So I thought I might try something.  It isn’t really coming together like I wanted it to.  My story doesn’t really want to play nice with the facts as they’re already established by the stories that exist.  Facts that I asked Mr. Howey about, and received a prompt reply with plenty of helpful information (hence, my post a few weeks back about Howey being a really nice guy).

Here are those facts.  The nanobots that are used to exterminate the human race – they aren’t sprayed or released on the day of the Convention, when everyone is hustled into the Silos (in the book SHIFT).  They are already in everyone, and everyone who goes into the silos has to be immunized against them.  They become active when they do because they are tiny computers and they have a “clock” in them.  There is no time frame for how long they remain viable in the environment.  Howey envisions many years, I think.  Maybe a hundred.  But he says that it isn’t specifically spelled out in any of the stories he wrote, nor is it spelled out in any of the stories that others wrote that he is aware of.  He said I could make it whatever time frame I wanted.

It didn’t work for my story, anyway.  I wanted to write about people who were living with the aftereffects of the nanobots’ activation and the death that it entails.  Trouble was, there was no way to have survivors.  Well, there is, actually, a way to have survivors, but those people weren’t the story I wanted to tell.

I may still tell the story I wanted to tell, if I can figure out how to make it work without the backdrop of Hugh Howey’s WOOL saga.  But for now, it won’t be a “Silo” story.

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Horror vs. Science Fiction (for me as a writer)

My collection, 14 DARK WINDOWS, contains a mix of horror stories and stories about people from everyday life.  All were written a while ago, and when I selected the stories for the collection (and to publish individually), I felt that these were the ones that held up best.

It wasn’t that I didn’t have any science fiction stories, but I didn’t feel they held up all that well.  Technology bypassed them.  Computers have gone so far past the imagined systems in my story, which is titled “An Artificial Yearning”.  The story was ABOUT computers (well, it was actually about people and isolation and some other things, but computers were integral to the plot), so to have them be so different from what I wrote back then made it lose credibility, even to me.  I can rewrite it, but so much would be changed, it might be a completely new story.

My other story of note was “No Time Like The Present”, and it was about a time travel paradox.  I submitted it to a few different publications and was told that it was sort of the same old thing as far as the plot went.  That doesn’t really mean much; I think it’s still a good story, but I don’t know.  I read it and think it reads okay.  But does it hold up over time?

Horror holds up over time.  A ghost story is a ghost story, a tale about demonic possession is still the same after ten years.  Maybe after a hundred years.  Look at Lovecraft – his stuff still inspires people today.  Dracula, the Frankenstein monster, shapeshifters, zombies – they’re all still out there scaring people today.  Yes, the “feel” of the writing is different (thanks, Mr. King!) but the old tales hold up.

I guess that’s why the horror stories worked.  I guess it’s why the stories about people worked, even after 10+ years.  It’s why my science fiction did not hold up nearly as well, even in my own eyes.

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Some wordage done today!

Hey, I actually feel like I got somewhere with my WIP, a horror novel or novella about an inn in the south.  I stood at something like 20,800 words before today.  Right this minute I am at about 24,150 words.  That’s 3,350 words today!

The story was flying off my fingers as I got past a part that was giving me trouble.  But I think I’m coming up to another part that is going to give me some trouble.  I know where “we” are in the story, and I know who’s going to win, but I have to figure out how it’s gonna happen.  And some of what I wrote will need some extensive editing and rewriting.  But some is pretty good.

Look for an excerpt here, once I finish up.

Take care!

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