Category Archives: writing

Well, This Took an Interesting Turn

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I will return to Spooky Season posting soon, thought this is at least related.

My currently novel in progress, an attempt at an American folk horror with elements of cosmic horror has been quite a journey so far.

First, it’s being written sans outline. My original plan had been to outline each act, out of five acts, just before I started writing those parts. And I did sort of draft one for the first act, but when I reached act 2 rather than lose momentum I barreled on. Now, I am reaching the end of the 3rd act and have abandoned the pretense of outlining.

I do believe that years and years of outlining has sort of drilled into me an intuitive sense of plotting and structure that allows me to flow freely and yet maintain the form I am most comfortable with.

Second, this is the only novel sized project I have started where I did not have a clear ending in mind.

I am one of those who believe that endings are vitally important. So many great stories and films have been lost to a crappy or poorly executed ending. It is the place where theme, character, and plot all come together.

With this book I had a sense of the tone I wanted to end on but not the mechanics or the specifics that would build my ending.

Until last night.

As I lay in bed, groggy and about to slip off into sleep the ending came to me. Particulars with the characters and a visual of what the final scene would look like. It resonated perfectly with what I had wanted and what has been so far and what was yet to come.

Best of all — I remember it this morning.

I still have high hopes of a first draft finished before Dec 31st but unlike most of my other works there will be serious retooling in at least one follow-up draft.

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Spooky Season Starts

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For as long as I can remember horror movies have played a part in my life. Growing up in the mountains of Western North Carolina, (the devastation visited there by hurricane Helene is heartbreaking) as a child the drive-in was my first exposure to movies. My older brothers would promise my parents that they would be seeing something appropriate for their little brother and invariably break that oath and select a horror film. I have fragmentary memories of Hammer Horror and region drive-in movies that in all likelihood are far less well executed than I remember them.

I also clearly remember during the summers that bats lived nearby and often fluttered just beyond my window, casting shadows into my second story bedroom. A macabre scene that is impressed on my memory.

It is no surprise that horror cinema has always been fascinating and inviting to me. Ghost stories are by far my favorite sub-genre of horror with the slashers born in the wake of 1978’s Halloween my least loved.

I have written and published a few short stories in the genre and currently await the decision from a publisher on my first horror novel. It is no surprise that the ‘spooky season’ is something I enjoy.

This October, in addition to getting more work done on my folk-horror novel, I plan to watch more horror than usual, revisiting some I enjoy and exploring a few new ones.

It should be fun.

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A Writing Blindspot

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As a writer one of the things I strive to do is get emotionally in the head and heart space of the characters in my stories. Of course I am far from perfect in this. I maintain one of the hardest things for any human to do is truly see something from another point of view. It is difficult to ignore the years of joy and pain and experiences that formed your nature and try to imagine even a sliver of that which was felt by another, but I try.

That said one aspect of people I can never seem to connect with emotionally is antisemitism.

Intellectually I can construct the flawed and hatefully reason why someone might believe such idiotic things, but it is a mindset and a prejudice that is always alien to me.

Perhaps my distance from it stems from my own non-religious nature. While as a child I was exposed to Southern Baptist teachings in Sunday school they never took root in my mental garden. Even if they had I suspect my ever-questioning nature wouldn’t have place me in a position to hate Jews because they had ‘killed Jesus.’ Wasn’t that his purpose anyway? To die, albeit get better after that that, for our sins? That would just mean the people who killed him were all part of God’s plot and plan. It makes no sense.

Of course, there are the conspiracy theories that Jews run the world. Conspiracy theories are sanctuaries for those that need an explanation for the chaotic world we live in. They are poison to a healthy mind, and none stand up to the most casual scrutiny. I cannot emotionally connect with any conspiracy theory; they are more ludicrous than any religion.

Sadly, antisemitism is very real and my lack of ability to even fake feeling it has no bearing on the world, only a weakness in my fiction. Out there in the wider world it is alive and well and sadly thriving.

It may be strange, alien, and incomprehensible to me but that doesn’t mean I will not denounce it or that I will not fight it.

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Not Dead, Dying, or Seriously Ill

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This blog has been fallow since Sep 11 because my mind has been a wandering and not very blog productive. I am half-way through my folk/cosmic horror novel, but production of that project has now stalled.

I started this manuscript with just a bare idea of who the characters were and crude arc for their passage. This is the most I have ever ‘pantsed’ a book and overall the results so far have been surprisingly good. The voices of the point of view characters, three in all, came easily and strike me as distinct. (Whenever I turn to Sabrina the langue gets very salty. She’s got a moth on her.)

However, the motivation I gave the protagonist for traveling to the island commune feels too weak, too little to sustain her momentum until the hard plot kicks in. I need to find more personal motivations with more to lose that will drive her actions rather than having events influence them.

I have come ideas, and it feels like they are about to fall together into something I can use but there is an element or two missing still.

For the blog I could have been writing about the current and terrible political landscape but at this point it feels terribly repetitive. I did not watch the presidential candidate debate because it is almost inconceivable that Harris could have made a gaff that would have cost her my support and vote, and it is utterly inconceivable that Trump could do anything at all that would win any support from me at all.

I have been thoroughly enjoying on YouTube watching a pair of Canadian Gen Z’ers working through way through Star Trek the original series. Being an old fart who has seen these episodes countless time it’s quite a thrill watching someone get surprised that Korby is a freaking robot, that it was Kodos’ daughter that was murdering all those pesky witnesses, and that Finney wasn’t actually dead.

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The Shiny New Story Idea

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Before this bizarre American folk horror concept came along and highjacked my writing I had been working on a strange fusion of a ghost story and disaster movie for my next novel.

One subplot in that on-hold ghost story novel has been flashing around in my brain like a hyperactive child just dying to tell you about the cool thing that they just learned.

The sub-plot is insisting that there is nothing sub about it and that it should be a full novel all on its little lonesome.

I don’t think it is wrong.

Of course, I am just reaching the halfway point on my American Folk horror novel and that needs to be completed first.

Here is a truism. When writing a story, it is not uncommon at all as the author hits the middle, where things can become quite challenging to write, for another idea to thrust itself into prominence. It is a fool’s errand to chase the new idea then and there. The most important skill to learn as a writer or artist of any stripe is completing.

A finished manuscript can be edited and reworked. Half a manuscript is useless to everyone including the author.

Even if you put the manuscript away in the trunk and never go back to it, it’s better to finish than abandon.

I am going to make notes for this other ghost story, but it must wait its turn.

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A Third Done but What’s My Destination?

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So, my folk horror novel just passed 30,000 words and I am expecting the beast to land at a slim 90 thousand. At one third drafted what kind of mood am I am?

Well, a little befuddled to be honest. This novel is cruising but I can’t be certain that it is on the right course. I outlined the first act and that went fairly well, I partially outlined the second, which is just now wrapping up and I am pleased, intrigued but also uncertain.

I have a grasp of the core elements that the third and fourth acts require and only a vague notion of precisely where I want to end up.

It is that last elements that has me the most ‘lost at sea.’ My conception of the ending is far more hazy than any other novel I have written, much less the mechanic of how it all works out. My previous novel dealing with werewolves I had a very solid idea of the final state for the characters and only needed to path to get them there. Here I still need it to be revealed to me.

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How Many Legs Should a Dragon Have?

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In a recently and utterly low stakes online conversation the topic has been raised how many legs should a dragon have? This discussion has principally been initiated because G.R.R. Martin, author of the Game of Thrones novels, disputed the image used for the newest series which shows the beast with four legs and two wings.

Martin’s argument is based on evolution and that flying creatures evolved wings from their forelimbs leaving only the rear two to serve as legs. He’s right about that. On Earth all land animal life descended from a common ancestor which set the pentadactyl limb structure. Everything animal we know has the basic limb design, One Bone, Two Bones, Many Bones. IF dragons were evolved creatures from an ecology that mirrors Earth’s, then you would expect the same body form rules to apply.

In fact, the common ancestor is the reason why I have an issue with Cameron’s Avatar. Every land animal in that ecology has six limbs except for the big-eyed human analog. They are as out of place as a four-legged dragon.

But if they were evolved creatures they would not exist.

There is simply no way that a beast that large, that massive will evolve flight. Yes, there were some flying dinosaurs with absolutely enormous wingspans, but they remained light, fragile creatures not massive lizards with weights measures in tons. It is furthermore an impossibility for the ‘fire breathing’ to evolve as depicted. The energy consumption required to power such abilities is too staggering to contemplate.

With all that said, dragons exist in a setting where the laws of physics are upended by sorcery and magic. In a world where non-nuclear transmutation is possible, and the laws of thermodynamics are abandoned. In such a setting a genesis for a creature outside of biological evolution exits and along that path the arguments of two or four legs are reduced to the author’s preference.

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No Two Books

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A common discussion point among writers is if you are a ‘plotter,’ that is someone who outlines your novel before writing it, or a ‘pantser’ (from ‘by the seat of your pants’ a person who writes without an outline. What I have discovered for myself is that no two books are written the same way even for the same author.

I have written heavily plotted novels. The longest outline I have created I think was some 87 pages, that’s nearly 22,000 words or about 20 percent of the total book. My last completed novel, the fascist werewolf one, I write sans outline. Though after about the first 10,000 words I created a 1-page document with the major thematic events for each of the five acts.

The current novel, a folk horror that is sort of The Wicker Man meets The Dunwich Horror is flying between these two extremes. I have crafted detailed character studies for the major character, again I have the 1-page document about the five-act structure but this time I am outlining act by act.

I have written a fairly detailed outline for act 1 and that act has mostly conformed to the battle plan. Now with 16,000 words completed (but not edited) the first act is finished. It is time to write the outline for the second act informed by how the characters appeared to me in the first. Luckily, I started the writing process early on this one and I am currently about 10 days ahead of schedule so there is plenty of time to compose this next outline and still make my goal of a completed draft by year’s end.

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Narratives are Dangerous

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It has been proposed that what makes humans different from other animals is that we are rational and thinking beings. But we are not alone in that quality. Numerous animals, some not very closely related to us by the great sifting of evolution appear to rationally solve problems to achieve intended goals.

I think one of the very important ways that humans are unique is that we are narrative animals. We can’t be certain that other animals do not have stories that they pass to one another but the evidence for it is quite slim. It is what humans do, we endlessly craft stories to explain the world. At one time those stories imagined beings of cosmic powers and childish desires to explain the seasons, the weather, and why life at times is glorious and sometimes cruel.

The trouble is that we love stories so much that the inherent attraction they display draws us away from reality. Every con man is a storyteller, every politician is a storyteller, giving stories a far greater consequence than mere entertainment.

Seductive narratives blind us to reality. Once we have accepted a narrative as truth the actual truth becomes less important. Narratives from people we trust, the counter narratives our allies spin about our enemies, and the narrative we tell ourselves all bend and distort our ability to see what is actually there.

It is said that every villain is the hero of their own story and that is true, but it elides an important element, that the story they tell themselves where they are heroic is as fabricated as their heroism.

The NAZI’s vile, evil, and murderous campaign across Europe could not have existed without the false, defamatory and insidious story at the heart of antisemitism. The NAZIs could only see themselves as heroes in a story about an insidious global conspiracy. That is one reason why I despise stories that use deep and vast conspiracies as part of their world building. They are a powerful form of storytelling that makes a random, chaotic world comprehensible but always at the cost of some invented cabal that all too easily can been seen in the ‘real’ world. Neo-Nazis adopted a love for Carpenter’s They Livebecause they saw the vast conspiracy that Carpenter constructed as his satire on capitalism to actually be about their imagined global fight with their imagined foes. The trope of the vast hidden conspiracy used for aliens is all too easily repurposed for any outgroup.

This is the danger of narrative. Narratives can inspire killing. Everyone practices storytelling and every need to be aware of the power that they unwittingly possess.

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Chosen One Stories

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I have never been overly fond of ‘chosen one’ narratives. There is something in the core concept that some people are just ‘special’ and deserving of praise and riches because fate or the gods or something has selected them above all others that just rubs my skin wrong.

There is a vague memory lurking in my brain of some production of a Camelot myth that struck at just the right time to inspire a foundation element of my ethos and personality. Arthur proclaiming that Laws must bind high and low alike or they are not laws at all. To me this extends to narratives.

The chosen one myth is at its heart, to me, a perpetuation of the lie of nobility. That person is better than you by virtue of birth. You own that person you loyalty for no other reason that chance has deemed it so. Granted, in stories the heroes nearly always are virtuous and good people. Luke refuses to turn to the dark side even though it will cost him his life. Aragorn is a kind, just, and benevolent king. Harry Potter despite a childhood of horrid abuse is compassionate and only interested in what is right, immune to the seduction of sudden riches, fame, or sports induced glory. These characters are ‘good’ because the author has made them so, not for any other reason.

While I have never been a dedicated fan of the Dune novels, I deeply appreciate that in that series not only is the ‘chosen one’ the source of billions upon billions of deaths and the imposition of a tyrannical galactic theocratic dictatorship but that from the start the ‘chosen one’ myth is a lie fabricated to manipulate populations for the goals of an uncaring elite.

One reason I adore The Last Jedi is that the chosen one is flawed and scared and subject to human frailty, but most all because it ends with a nameless slave wielding the power that had been reserved to the ‘noble.’

I doubt I would ever write a ‘chosen one’ story but if I did you can be assured that it would be to subvert it.

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