Pay It Forward vs. Entitlement

Editor Kitteh is judging you. Judge, judge, judge.

If you read Secrets of a Snarky Writer or my blog on paying it forward, you know that I feel rather strongly that authors have to help each other. For the most part, out of all the jobs I've ever had, the writing world is by far the most helpful universe and is filled with folks more than happy to give you a little bump when it is needed.

Share this post, please? Why, sure. I'll share your post. Best of luck on future sales!

Retweet this post about my new release, please? No problem, friend. Retweeted. Have a great Tuesday.

Can I be on your blog for a day to reveal my cover/tell the world about my new release? Yup, yes you can. I'm happy to do so, just email me the stuff and tell me the date you want!

But then the water gets murky.

"Could you please write a blurb for the front of my book?"

Maybe.

If I have time to read your book and I enjoy it, I'm happy to provide an endorsement using my author name and brand to give you a bit of a bumpdraft. BUT, if the author you contact doesn't have the time or isn't allowed to do so for whatever reason, the response should never be,

"Well, you're a self-important jerkface!"

I've seen/heard/experienced this one a couple too many times not to make some kind of comment here, so bear with me. At the end of the day, yes, it is wonderful to help out other writers. Yes, we are the only ones who understand the unique hell of being in the middle of writing a book and feeling like we're a hack.

Yes, we're the only ones who understand what it is like to shove your baby book out of the nest with the hope it will fly like an eagle and not flop like dropped bologna.  

 

But we are NOT unique in being busy or having work of our own to do.

Every single job out there is shared by other people. You don't hear teachers saying, "Well, we teachers need to support each other!"

You know why? Because teachers aren't temperamental artists, stomping their feet and feeling like no one is listening. Yet writers behave this way ALL THE TIME. Like it is perfectly okay to do this, even if logic suggests it is so not okay.

If you're going to go out on a limb and ask someone for help/support, you have to understand that the other person could and might say no. They might explain why they said no. They might not. We're all grown up enough to be graceful and move on with business, right?

Wrong. Some folks attack the other person for that negative response, sometimes by simply telling them off in a message or email and others by publicly attacking the other person's work (via reviews or other possibly damaging acts.)

Seriously, this is a thing. Why are we doing this thing?

So here is my call to action — stop doing that.

When someone else succeeds, instead of doing mean girl backbiting, give them a little round of applause. When someone else says they are busy, nod and say, "Well thanks anyway, friend." When someone just says no, thank them for taking the time to respond.

If you're going to be in business, drop the entitled attitude and realize that, although sometimes it feels like it, the world does not revolve around you.

We all have to do it. We all have someone who is too busy/too important/unable to help out when we ask. The part that is memorable is when we bow out gracefully instead of staging a war.

Happy Writing!
xoxo
mama virg

Query Letter 101

The last time I wrote on this topic was in 2011, so I figured perhaps a refresher blog might be handy.

SO, you wrote then next big thing, huh?

That's awesome! You could let it just live on your hard drive forever, maybe preserve it in the Cloud where it will be safe for all time or at least until a gamma ray burst knocks out the grid, leaving the world in a post-apocalyptic hell in which no one has the time for reading since they're too busy trying to find their missing eyeballs because of the mutations and...

Author Fuel

No? You want to send it to agents and publishers? Are you sure? Because that means you can get rejected, even if Aunt Sally said it was the best thing she's ever read that wasn't written on a recipe card. It also means that if you do get published, some people are going to love it, sure, but others are going to call you a hack. You know all that? You still want to publish? You LIKE Ramon noodles?

Well, okay then. If you're sure.


Querying

Scary stuff. Okay, I'm lying. Writing a query letter is like riding a bike. The first time you do it, you're afraid you're going to scab your knees, hurtle over the handlebars and eat pavement, whatever. With time, you just sling your leg over the seat and away you go.

The first time I sent one, I actually looked up what is a query before I started writing. My earliest queries, even with tons of hours logged researching good ones, were terrible. Do I have it down now? Meh, I'm not too shabby. More importantly,  I'm not afraid of writing them anymore, and you shouldn't be either.

What is a query?

A query (also called a query letter, book solicitation, literary prostitution, or spam) or is a a one page introduction to your work and you written to a publisher or a literary agent (or Bob down in the mail room.)

Think of it as something like,"Hello, there. I'm Sam. I write books!"

(Author's Note: If you send those exact words out to an agent or publisher and they reject you, yeah, don't blame me. If they contract you for being so concise, please remit 5% of your royalties to me. kthxbai)

In one page, you have to present a compelling book blurb, include a catchy hook that will stick in their brain like flea on a dogs bum, recite your writing credentials (if you have any), explain why you think you are a good person to have written this book, and list the vital statistics of the manuscript.

No 7pg queries!

IN ONE PAGE.

No one is going to read a seven page query. To be realistic, they probably don't have the time even if they wanted to try. If you find someone willing to read seven pages of query letter, please correct me in the comment section below.  

(Author's Note: I posted this same offer in the original blog in 2011. No one commented that they'd found the magical acquisitions editor who would read that long of a query. I will add, now that I'm older and wiser, that if you do manage to find such an editor, you might not want to sign the contract they offer. My adopted dad likes to say that you don't take your car to a mechanic who is available immediately, you want the busy mechanic. His reason? The busy mechanic is busy because he does good work. Just sayin.)

But, wait, they want a synopsis, too?

They sure do. A synopsis is the one or two page condensed version of your book. Yes, it took you thousands of words to tell this story. Now you need to find a way to tell all of it, including the ending, in a couple pages. Good luck with that.

The bit about your book in the query letter is like the part of the iceberg sitting above the water. The editor/agent understands that most of the iceberg is hidden in the mysterious depths of the sea. However, if you want them to strap on some diving gear and plunge into freezing water to see the rest, the visible part in the query better be good. I often just use my planned blurb for the query.

Ask yourself these questions when deciding what to include in the query:

1. Does it capture the reader?
2. Does it sum up the basic premise and tone of your story in just a paragraph or two?
3. Do you read it and want to know more?

If it doesn't, edit it.

But I don't have any writing credentials!

Do you think anyone does when they start? That said, you probably don't want to do this:

Dear Editor,

I have never written anything before this manuscript, yet I sat down and wrote a bestseller!!! I know my book is not only going to become an international success, but it will also become a blockbuster movie within, I don't know, a week or two? Because of this, I created a line of action figures to go with the book. I used my own hair and I'm sending one with the query!!!

xoxo

Sam 

PS. I write books!!

We haz magic spoodles

Being overzealous won't win you any bonus points with an editor/agent. It will, however, give them something to talk about at the water cooler. 

If you don't have writing credentials, be honest. You don't have to list every book report you ever wrote in an attempt to look like you have background experience. You also don't have to lie.

(Author's Note: They will know, by the way. This industry looks big from the outside, but everyone seems to know everyone, so being labeled a joke or a liar? Won't serve you well.)

Try something more like this:

This story was inspired by my years as a fry cook--greasy, hot, unrewarding work, but it gave me a flexible schedule and enabled me to pursue my writing dreams.

You're not saying you're not published, but you've established your expertise regarding your topic. If you're honest, you will not irk the person reading the query. Showing them you know all about fry cooks when you've written a book about alien fry cooks who take over the world with magical spoodles... That is okay.

You mentioned vital statistics...?

I did. Yes, thanks for bringing that up. You need to include the meat and bones of what you are trying to get them to buy.

For example:  

Note to self: Write Alien Legal Assistant Fry Cook Story

Greasy Accountants--a 90k sexy, paranormal, legal suspense--includes elements of comedy as the aliens work their night jobs as fry cooks. That said, the story is a legal suspense with a strong murder mystery at it's core.

In that little passage, (please don't write a book about an alien legal assistant fry cook) we get the genre of the story, the word count and any crossover elements.

Can you give me an example?


Why sure! But I am making up another fake plot because I'm sick of the alien fry cook legal assistant one.

SAMPLE QUERY LETTER
16 August 2014

On the icy streets of Juno, evil has a name. Robert Badguy searched for women to slake his unholy thirsts, leaving a trail of bodies in his wake for more than a century. Hard-boiled detective, Janice Goodcop, is close to proving whodunit. When a handsome stranger tries to distract her from her mission, she refuses the temptation and redoubles her efforts to stop the killer. A blizzard blows into town and strands Janice in a dingy cabbage factory with Badguy, the very demon she seeks. Will Janice stop the bloody rampage, or will Badguy slake his thirst on the one woman who could have saved his soul?

Chilly Vampires is an 80k paranormal romance. These vampires don't sparkle, they chomp. A few steamy sex scenes heat up the cold Alaskan nights, but the romance is largely behind closed doors.

As the editor of my high school newspaper, I learned early on the value of comma placement. I went on to college to become the head of our monthly publication, The University Magazine. After college, I took the occasional creative writing courses at our community college, Community College. Now that the kids have grown up, I returned to my first love, writing. I hope you enjoy Chilly Vampires. Please find attached the manuscript, per your submission guidelines, as well as a two page synopsis.

Regards,
Ima Writer

That simple, but mine was all made up. Please don't make stuff up on your query letter. Well, other than plot and such.

Take your time.

If they don't like the query, they aren't going to read your synopsis. If they aren't intrigued enough to read the two page summary of your book, they're for sure not going to read the three hundred or so pages of the manuscript.

If you spend tons of time on anything, make it your query letter.
 PLEASE.
 Edit and edit and reedit.

Some links I think you might find handy besides mine:
Nathan Bransford's How to Write A Query Letter
Kristen Nelson's Blog (Includes sample query letters that landed agents)
Query Tracker (a great site for finding and keeping track of who you are sending these to)

Happy writing!

To Delete or Not to Delete, that is the question...

NaNoWriMo is in full swing. Writers are huddled over their laptops, scrabbling to hit their daily goals, which makes this post timely.

Don't Do Eeeet!!

There comes a day in every writer's world when everything they've ever written looks like a steaming pile of camel dung. When the writer gazes upon this monstrosity, this absolute insult to the English language and slap in the face of all literary genius, they must do the logical thing. Delete. Crumple and toss. Shred. Burn the words, eliminate them from existence, retire the writing cap and start a nice vegetable garden.

Instead, I'd like to offer a viable and word saving alternative.

Walk. Away.

No, don't walk, run. Close the word doc, step away from the laptop or desktop or Moleskin notebook and do your laundry. Go for a walk. Go watch a movie. Read a book.

Anything but deleting all that you've written.

Stephen King started writing Carrie, hated the girl and hated the story, tossed it in the garbage and his wife salvaged it and said, "Moar."

Well, not in those words, but I'm sure it was something like that.

Anyway, he talks about that in On Writing and mentions that his first great book, the one that changed the course of horror writing forever, started out as something he tossed in the garbage.

I can't begin to tell you how many of my stories I started writing, stopped and hated, closed...and went back to later and wrote.

Hating your work is okay.

Yesterday was one of those days for me. They happen. I have gotten to the point that I recognize when I'm wriggling in loathing and I don't write. I market, I blog, I make a meatloaf, whatever...but once I've gotten into that swing, I don't write.

When I DO mass deletions (sometimes they happen. Sometimes you really DID write garbage or that scene CAN'T go in the book...this is a reality.), I stick it in a word doc called :

(Title Of Book)_Deleted

Just in case because, sometimes, I need those words later. If I don't, swell! I deleted correctly and those words are garbage. Or maybe those words are a 'secret scene' that ends up a blog post someday. Or maybe those words will only live on the harddrive of my laptop until some autobiographer drives his hover car to my house in the year 2187 to research me. Who knows? But I don't ever just DELETE them. I might need them later.

Since we're mid NaNoWriMo and everyone is bent on hitting word count goals, I figured it was a good time to mention this. Some days, you shouldn't write. Some days the best contribution you can give literature is the deletion of words and others it's the ability to NOT write or delete. And that's okay.

There is always tomorrow.

Happy Writing! (not deleting!)

Agent/Editor Shop at the Musetracks blog!

As if the question ‘Wanna pitch to an agent or editor’ isn’t enough.

Hello! A huge thanks to all my wonderful hosts as I run all over cyberspace talking about Agent/Editor Shop at the Musetracks blog.

In this crazy world of easy access to information, it’s also easy to miss huge opportunities, or forget! Because I get so many comments that writers either forgot, or didn’t know Musetracks did pitch sessions, I asked a bunch of fellow writers, bloggers and readers to help me spread the word.

For those of you who don’t me, I’m Candi Wall, one of the authors who co-contribute to the Musetracks blog. Jennifer Bray-Weber, Marie-Claude Bourque, and Stacey Purcell are my super smart co-contributors and goodness knows where I’d be without them!

I’ve been hosting acquiring Agents at Musetracks for almost two years, and only recently, we decided to add editors as our guest. We’ve been lucky to have agents like Melissa Jeglinski, Jessica Alvarez, Mollie Glick, Becky Vinter, Kevan Lyon, Scott Eagan, Lois Winston, Jill Marsal, Michelle Grajkowski, Kimberley Cameron, Emmanuella Alspaugh (now Morgan), Laura Bradford, Jenny Bent, Sara Crowe, Weronika Janczuk and Stan Soper.

Our guest editors thus far have been Rhonda Penders w/ The Wild Rose Press, Jennifer Miller w/ Samhain Publishing, Debby Gilbert w/ Soul Mate Publishing, Beth Walker w/ Secret Cravings Publishing, and the editors at Books To Go Now have booked three dates in the future!

What we offer is a ‘Pitch Day’. I only take 30 pitches, and only the first thirty VIABLE pitches that come in on pitch day will be seen by the agent or editor. And I will warn you, I’m a stickler for following guidelines. If you don’t include exactly what is in the rules… I delete without prejudice. And I delete quite a few. (And yes, I receive plenty of hate mail.)

You can find us here:

Musetracks and there is a sidebar with Agent/Editor Shop dates and attending professionals

You can find the rules for pitching here:

Musetracks Agent/Editor Shop rules Please read them carefully!

I've also created a Yahoo group so writers can sign up to receive Agent/Editor Shop updates. I only send messages with agent/editor attendance updates, reminders of pitch dates, and any information about the contests we run on pitch day. Usually a giveaway or a chance to comment for the Top Pitch Slot. You can request to join here:

Editor/Agent Shop Newsletter Group

Easy as pie! We welcome every stage of writer and at Musetracks, we strive to help other writers, the way we were all helped when we first started out, and the way we are supported today.

Hope to see you all at a pitch day, and if not, feel free to pass the word along to others.

Happy reading and writing!

~Candi

A little about Candi:

Candi Wall is an author of contemporary romance, and YA.

Her début novel PRIMITIVE NIGHTS released from Samhain in Jan 2013, and STAY, the first in the Changing Tides series releases from Samhain on Aug 6^th 2013.

She’s a mother of four (21,17,12,9), a rescuer of six (4 dogs & 2 cats), proud auntie of too many to count, a soon-to-be grandmother and great-auntie, a retired Cub Scout leader of 16 years, an avid animal lover/protector and ex-animal control officer. Oh yeah, and wife. J

You can find her here:

www.candiwallbooks.com

Twitter | Facebook | Goodreads | Musetracks

A kiss is just a kiss?

Back in highschool, I was in the choir. Okay, busted, I was in a lot of things. I'm a bit of a joiner. No is not my favorite word. Anyway, in choir, we once sang a song made popular at the time by Cher's remake.

"If he loves you so
Its in his kiss!
(That's where it is!)"

Is it?

I kind of think so. Like so many little things in writing, this can translate to your story, too. There are literally hundreds of different kinds of kisses, some of which you've probably experienced, and in writing you can show a character's development using all interactions, even kisses.

Hundreds of kisses

Probably, you think I'm exaggerating since you're thinking of the two kisses they all kind of get lumped into when you're catagorizing. There's the platonic kiss (peck) you might bestow on a friend or family member. A quick smooch, no tongue, just a hey-how-ya-doin brushing of lips against skin. Then we have the romantic kiss...often including tongue, sometimes not, but always that little zing of electricity which makes us smile like goofy fools.

But those two big categories break down into tons of tiny ones. There's the first kiss, that almost shy invitation which may or may not be returned. There's the angry kiss, lips slanting and fighting for dominance. There's the goodbye kiss, tasting of tears and endings.

You can tell us the kiss was angry but have you shown it? In your lifetime, a kiss probably communicated more about your relationship to the person on the receiving end of it...just as their kiss tells you volumes.

Test Kisses

So, this is a real life story and shows how much publishing has taken over my brain, sadly. One drunken evening (yes, I have those, rarely) I was spending time with a guy that I'd previously dated. I proudly proclaimed that I was finally in a position mentally that I wouldn't react to him.

Fortunatly, the guy in question was wiser than I, and pointed out kissing, in general, is enjoyable.

So regardless of my emotional walls, chances were good I would find kissing pleasant. Can you, though, tell a lot about how a person feels about you from a kiss?

I really think you can. You can, even though my test was a very lame (Let's blame it on alcohol.) way to gauge the feelings involved, tell a lot about how you feel and the other person feels from just that tiny of an interaction. Are they hungry for your touch, a little breathless, hands shaking?

Probably not an indicator they don't care if they're reacting like that. Some part of them does...even if it's below the belt.

Do they 'feel' distant? Did they break from the kiss to chat about the weather?

Have you seen He's Just Not That Into You?

Building a Bridge

Nonverbal communication makes up 90% of human communcation, not verbal (according to various sources online and in some of my classes) meaning a lot is going on in just how we move, touch, and the expressions on our faces. Ditto for romance, whether on the page or in reality.

If someone is attracted to you, they touch you. I'm not talking about grinding into you like a dog in heat, although this might sometimes be the case, I'm talking about little things. Touching your arm to get your attention. Putting a hand behind your back to guide you. Even accidental touches, grazing your hand when passing something, can communicate more than any epic speech.

(the idea is supported by a study - Burgoon, J. K. (1991). Relational message interpretations of touch, conversational distance, and posture. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 15, 233-259.)

In real life, this means that if they're giving you closed body posture (arms folded together, leaning away, etc) chances are good we're back to He's Just Not That Into You territory. Are they touching you, leaning in, invading your personal space? Maybe they're telling you something more than about their vacation.

In your writing, you should show this build up, as it's part of the dance. Men shaking hands can be a sign of trust. A woman who laughs and touches your arm without noticing she's doing it may be signalling, even if she doesn't mean to, attraction.

Making that kiss all the more powerful.

So, is it in his kiss?

Well, if it's not, perhaps you might want to have a chat.

Happy Writing!

Chasing a dream...

You must've been a beautiful baby...

What is your dream?

Mine was to be a writer.  There were a lot of factors in that becoming my dream.  I've always written, finishing my first book--terrible book--at age nine and long daydreaming.  I fanfic'd Robin McKinley's world of Damar through high school and my idea of a fun Friday night when I was a teen?  Me and a friend had this notebook in which we started a story...each writing a chapter and then swapped notebooks and the other one picked up the story (bee-tee-dubs? This is an excellent learning tool.  Nothing will make your brain stretch more as a writer than trying to figure out where to go with a story that just took a dramatic veer away from where you planned...).

My apologies, kid from ET, for stealing your hair.

In later years of high school, I wrote a zine.  All the cool kids (my idea of cool kids were Denah and Ben and Carrie) were doing it...I later got in a heap of trouble for it but, again, stretching my writerly wings.  Poetry, I learned in this experiment, wasn't how I wanted to express myself.

Yeah for Etch-a-Sketch!

Still, I'm nothing if not a blockhead.  Even though books/writing/words were how I spent my fun time, I saw the Challenger explode one day when I was home finger painting.  If the very brave, very documented in my Scholastic readers, teacher was willing to reach for the stars, so would I.

Besides, no one REALLY became a writer.  It was like my artistic abilities...something that would never amount to much.

So, I entered the Air Force for about a minute and a half.  This was after my stint at Space Academy, so I was sure my career lay in the hands of Aerospace Engineering...I was going up.  I was going to touch the stars...

Or I would come home in a heap of failure, get excited to see my fiance and end up pregnant with our first child. You know, one of those was sure to happen.

Permtastic, baby.

My daughter became the center of my world.  I worked sometimes three jobs to keep things going and when my sons came along...I was sure of two things with absolute certainty:

1. These kids were my world.  I would do crazy shit to protect them.  I would give up everything without the slightest hesitation for them.  They meant everything.  No sacrifice would ever be too great to make for them.

High school hotness

2. I would be single for the remainder of my days because who in their right minds would want a relationship with a single mother of THREE kids, all of whom hung out on the spectrum.

It turns out, looking back, that nothing in life should ever be looked at with absolute certainty.

I've since learned these two things:

1. Children grow up.  They don't need you as constantly as they age, although they may never stop needing you.  You have to find your identity or risk falling apart when they leave.

2. I was single because I was terrified of loving someone and not being as focused on my kids.

This kid is gonna grow up and write smut.

Hard lessons.  Two strokes helped me realize that if I didn't chase my dreams, no one was going to do it for me.  There was a distinct chance I would raise my children, die, and leave my legacy as a parent but nothing as an individual.

Scary.  So, well, what the hell.  I was writing, as usual, and people liked the stories I was telling.  They believed in me (surprisingly, they believed in my art, too.  All the jobs I thought impossible were much more possible than the one I thought logical) until I started to wonder if I should, too.

I sent out my first manuscript.  My friend sent it out, too.  I collected a box of lovely rejections.  I got addicted to the thrill of it...Wow.  Something I wrote is sitting on a desk in NYC.  Sure, it might get rejected but how cool to have made it to NYC.  To be something someone far more classy than I read over coffee?

My Princess

Exhilarating even if I got rejected.

And then one day...someone didn't reject me.

My first book got published.  Then my second...

And now I don't get as many rejections.

They're still the center of my world...

The point of this summary of my life is...what do you want?  What do you want so bad, feel so good doing, that it is the last thing you think of when you close your eyes and the thing that makes you pop out of bed in the morning? Is it not what you thought?

If it's not, then why aren't you chasing THAT dream? Is it because it's not logical?

Why are you letting someone else tell you what is logical and what is not?

Go after your dreams.  I did.  And now I'm sitting here, home with my kids, doing what I love and I even get paid for it most of the time.

Happy Writing!!

I lied...and why you should know your muse.

I will NOT be over at the 1Night Stand blog today.  It got moved to Monday.  But the contest is still running to win a free copy of Taking Control over at Heather Long's blog (come talk chocolate and sex with us) and you've still got the fantastic blog over at Wendi Zwaduk's blog to comment on so...

Enjoy those and more blog hopping to come.

Till then, I figured I would talk about what I wrote yesterday.

I wrote complete crap.  It was almost four thousand words, all told, of total garbage.

I deleted the whole thing.

Yesterday the weight of the world seemed heavier than it should.  I've had a rough *cough sputter choke* August and not really allowed myself to deal with most of it emotionally.  I just chugged along, head down and shoulders tight, plowing through one problem after the next like I was a...

Plow.

None of it got me down.  I cried exactly once through all of it.  Once.  And it wasn't for any of the bad stuff.  It was when one of my crit partners read the first twelve chapters of The Were, The Witch and The Baby and said it was "magickal."  That broke me. That out of all the dogshit, something good came, broke me.

For a minute.  Then hunched shoulders again and back to plowing.

Tuesday was hard.  Wednesday...I think something shattered a little inside.  I spent the whole day just really wanting to sleep.  To go off and dream of things that had nothing to do with reality.

Nobody picked up on the fact that I was buried in a deep and overwhelming darkness yesterday.  Nobody, that is, but my crit partner.  She read my chaps from yesterday and asked if I was okay.

It showed in the work.  My voice wasn't there.  It was writing and it was passable but it was hollow and it was empty and...

I didn't realize it showed.  I thought I could do what I usually do and bury how I felt in the work.  In this case, for the very perceptive, it was screaming off the page.

(Note:  That the same crit partner said my voice is normally ebullient was a thrill.  Oh, flattery.  It will get you everywhere especially if you toss around words like ebullient.)

This morning, I deleted most of what I wrote yesterday.  Rereading it, I could see the hollow ring to the words and how it wasn't me.

The point of all this oversharing is two-fold.

First off, don't be afraid to delete.  I stole a picture off the fantastic Kelli Collin's facebook that said in large print, Editing.  In smaller print it said something like, "Making your contribution to literature."  The image?  A finger poised over the delete button.  Sometimes, everyone writes crap.  Shit happens.  *snerk*

Know your muse...Sometimes, she is screaming for a break.

Second, although writing can be crazy cathartic and cleanse your soul in a way nothing else can...sometimes it isn't.  Sometimes you are gonna have a day where you are just better off NOT writing.  Yesterday was one of those days for me.  I refused to take the day off (Take the day off. *snort* Who DOES that?) and because of it, I wasted my time.  I probably wasted my crit partner's time because I wrote crap.  Everyone would have still had that time if I just listened to my gut, put on my shoes and gathered my kids and went for a walk rather than working.  We could have had a picnic.  We could have done lots of soul cleansing stuff.

Instead, I sat, drowned in my darkness and tried to be a blockhead and work through it.

Some days, you can't.

Know your muse.  If she is screaming that she is done--that too much has happened and she is drowning--give her the day off.  

Happy Writing!

Horribly Normal and Terribly Ordinary

Just as magical as the words on the page, a book has the ability to transport a reader across time, space and reality into someplace more. Whether the author chooses to use that ability to make their audience believe in love, death or fear depends on the gift of the storyteller many used their cursed pens to move us to a place where the scary thing isn’t in the closet. It’s in your husband’s eye. It hides in the sweet little old lady at the post office. It lurks in the hearts of men, truly the scariest place of all. Two of the greats in the land of heebie jeebies have got to be Stephen King and Shirley Jackson, both capturing the imaginations of generations with the strange, the twisted, and the horrifyingly mundane.

Shirley Jackson writhed in depression, social inequality and saw first-hand how awful people can treat each other. Not surprisingly, thus neutered in real life, she struck out at the conformity that leashed her in her writing. It’s said the line between genius and madness is a thin one and Jackson danced the line with stories like “The Lottery.” Although she was banished from Canada, attacked by her peers and driven to alienation, no one can contend that her stories didn’t make them feel something. She scared them because she removed the mask they hid behind, called a monster a monster, and painted the entire horrible picture in a setting so comfortable that readers wanted it to have a happy ending.

Like real life, Jackson didn’t give you the ending. You had to figure that out for yourself.

Most gothic horror, true gothic, leaves that dangling carrot, covered in maggots, for the reader to find. Neil Gaiman, author of gothic merit himself, interviewed Stephen King throughout his lifetime and became a fan of the genre as a child when he cracked open Salem’s Lot. “(King) has elements of horror, but they exist almost as a condiment for something that’s partly a tightly researched historical novel, partly a love-story, and always a musing on the nature of time and the past. (Gaiman 27) “

Like Shirley Jackson, King’s work has often been mislabeled as the book version of junk food. King himself labeled his work, “The literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries.” But if the goal of the writer is to make the reader feel something, not just be entertained, King’s work is going to outlive him by as easily as Poe’s have survived the test of time. What makes it truly horrifying, and makes those trying to describe him start yanking out adverbs, is exactly what Gaiman noted. Both King and Jackson managed to tell a lovely story, riddled with all the tropes that we as human beings identify with. The summer is one we remember, having lived it. The characters are all familiar since we know people just like them. The tastes and smells are all comfortable as a pair of worn out socks but then the story twists, the familiar becomes strange and we are forced to look at ourselves and the possibility of evil in the mirror.

It’s that little bit of madness in the common that makes these stories impossible to put down. Who hasn’t sat in their home, blanket of night snuggled warm around us, smells all the same as any other night, and rolled over and looked at our lover, our child, our pet and wondered, just for a moment, what if? By playing off that what if, these authors make the tiny hairs on our arms raise, shivers kick in, and we let, for a second, that cloak of safety—that makes us think everything will have a happily ever after—slip and are forced to comprehend that bad things really do happen.

Worse, they could happen to you.

In Duma Key, Stephen King follows the mold that made him so utterly popular for so many years. He takes the normal, a contractor from Boston, and injures him in a work accident. Then he allows madness to seep into the gaping wound left behind. Slowly tearing the man from family, from reality, and placing him firmly into the world of the paranormal, the shift from what we expect to read to what actually happens is so subtle, the reader is left believing things that otherwise might seem impossible.

If not for the very mundane start to the story.

If someone told you they could paint pictures that changed reality, perhaps you would think them crazy. But when King presents it, relying on isolation, a secondary cast of believable characters and the very tastes and smells you’ve come to know, it becomes harder not to shiver in fear.

All storytellers must transport their readers to a place beyond words on paper. The gothic writer has to not only transport them off the page; they have to drive the reader out of their mind.

They make you fall in love only to lose the love to a demise worse than a mundane death.

They make you reminisce only to make you realize that the past is coming to get you.

But by triggering these primitive responses, by making us relive the days in caves where the darkness might actually have teeth and claws, maybe we remember what it is to feel really alive.

Works Cited

Gaiman, Neil. “The King and I.” Sunday Times Magazine 8 Apr 2012:27-32. Print.

Jackson, Shirley. “The Possibility of Evil.” 1965.

King, Stephen. Duma Key. New York: Scribner, 2008. Print.

King, Stephen. “Stephen King Quotes.” Goodreads. Goodreads,Inc., 17 June 2010. Web. 02 July 2012.