by john | Feb 18, 2015 | Evolution of Evil, Guest Blogs, Writing
Monsters, Trailer Parks and Truck Stops
By Gail Z. Martin
People who aren’t from Pennsylvania picture two cities: Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. If you’re from PA, you know that the state’s whole center is farmland and nearly uninhabited forest (drive across I-80 sometime and you’ll see what I mean). Where I grew up, in the top corner near Lake Erie, not only do most people have a taxidermist on speed dial, but I’m pretty sure the car dealerships not only sell pickup trucks with gun racks as standard equipment, but I think the guns may be part of the package. Schools and businesses officially close for the first day of Deer Season. Most people I knew could field dress a deer with a pocket knife.
This matters because there’s urban horror and then there’s rural horror. They play off different kinds of fears. Urban horror plays off the anonymity of the big city, the strangers, the manmade caverns of concrete and the trackless tunnels underneath, dark alleys and seedy neighborhoods. Rural horror is a little more primal: wild animals, crazy loners holed up in caves or cabins, the brutal Darwinism of the elements and the fear of what you find in the vast, empty darkness, far away from street lights or cell phone signals.
My story for Big Bad 2 was inspired by getting lost in rural areas, and unexpected inspiration at a truck stop.
We’ve still got family in Northwestern PA, even though we’ve been in North Carolina for nearly 20 years. So we have worn a groove in I-77 and I-79 North over the years, heading nearly all the way up to the shores of Lake Erie. We’ve got the drive down to a science, and we trade off drivers every two hours at our favorite places to stop. One of those is a Flying J truck stop in Fort Chiswell, VA. It’s one of those restaurant/gas station/convenience store/gift shop kind of places, and one day, as I was getting a huge cup of coffee for the road, one of their t-shirts caught my eye.
“Mess with me, and you mess with the whole trailer park.” The guy depicted on the graphic looked like someone out of Cabin in the Woods, not the shell with the most gunpowder, if you know what I mean. But for some reason, that statement of backwoods solidarity got me thinking. What if the trailer park was full of monsters? Hmm.
Getting lost in a city can be scary if you end up a bad neighborhood. Getting lost in rural areas means you’re not in anybody’s neighborhood. Three 
situations made an impression on me. In one case, it was late at night, we were back home in what should have been our stomping grounds, and we missed a turn on a rural road. No problem, we had a pretty good idea of where we were, and we took the next left, expecting it to cut across. The blacktop road went from two lanes to one lane, then became a gravel road, then a dirt road. This was before GPS. I thought our odds were good of ending up in front of someone’s barn, facing a big German Shepherd and the business end of someone’s shotgun.
Now we probably would have been OK. We were on home territory, and that meant we could have played the “Do you know my parents, aunts, cousins, cousin’s sister-in-law’s aunt’s neighbor” verification-by-relative game. But it’s a scary thing bouncing down a road without street lights that isn’t on the map and where there are no signs to tell you which road you’re on if the mile markers aren’t enough for you to know. There’s a whole lot of dark emptiness out there.
Another time, we had to get off I-79 onto a detour in West Virginia because of road construction and we somehow lost the detour. This is a bad thing if you’re not from there, and we aren’t. See, there are what’s called “hollers”, or mountain valleys. There’s the front of the holler and the back of the holler. First rule: you don’t go into the holler if you don’t belong there. Second rule: you don’t come out of the back of the holler if you go in there and you don’t belong there. It was a ‘paddle faster, I hear banjos’ kind of moment.
Then there was the time I was taking my daughter back to Penn State, which is in the middle of the state and the middle of nowhere. We missed a turn (ok, maybe I shouldn’t navigate), and said ‘that’s OK, we’ve got GPS’. Yeah well. Instead of four-lane highway, we took a charming scenic detour through increasingly smaller hamlets on one-lane roads that were wavier than pan-fried bacon. I was fine with it—it was daylight, we had a full tank of gas, and it wasn’t like we were going to run into cow gangs from the wrong side of the tracks. There were even places where the cell phones kinda worked.
But my daughter, raised in Pittsburgh and Charlotte, got more and more nervous the farther we got from ‘civilization’. When I stopped for gas at a no-name station in a tiny one-traffic-light town and had to pay inside (horrors!) she actually locked the car doors until I came back. (Just because everyone in sight is wearing camo does not mean you’re in danger. Up there, they sell camo lingerie and camo baby onesies, just sayin’.) But her nervousness outside her comfort zone got my writer brain working on what makes us afraid.
Put it all together, and you get “Old Nonna,” my story for Big Bad 2.
About the Author:
Gail Z. Martin is the author of the new epic fantasy novel War of Shadows (Orbit Books) which is Book Three in the Ascendant Kingdoms Saga; Vendetta: A Deadly Curiosities Novel in her urban fantasy series set in Charleston, SC (Solaris Books); and Iron and Blood: The Jake Desmet Adventures a new Steampunk series (July 2015, Solaris Books) co-authored with Larry N. Martin. She is also author of Ice Forged and Reign of Ash in The Ascendant Kingdoms Saga, The Chronicles of The Necromancer series (The Summoner, The Blood King, Dark Haven, Dark Lady’s Chosen) from Solaris Books and The Fallen Kings Cycle (The Sworn, The Dread) from Orbit Books. Gail writes two series of ebook short stories: The Jonmarc Vahanian Adventures and the Deadly Curiosities Adventures and her work has appeared in 20 US/UK anthologies.
Find her at www.AscendantKingdoms.com, on Twitter @GailZMartin, on Facebook.com/WinterKingdoms, at DisquietingVisions.com blog and GhostInTheMachinePodcast.com, on Goodreads https://www.goodreads.com/GailZMartin and free excerpts on Wattpad http://wattpad.com/GailZMartin.
by john | Feb 17, 2015 | Guest Blogs, Writing
Welcome back Selah Janel to talk about Women in Horror Month! For more Selah, check out her website.
Although I grew up something of a scaredy-cat, admittedly I’ve always been drawn to the horror genre. I was the one always begging friends to tell me blow-by-blow details of the movies I wasn’t allowed to see, the one reading the descriptions of horror movies off boxes in video stores when my parents weren’t looking, the one who may or may not have run an underground library for R.L. Stine titles and urban legend collections out of my locker in Junior High. I think we take for granted that women seem to be designated as chainsaw fodder or final girl in the genre, when there are truthfully a lot of other roles if we keep an open mind and are open to a lot of different titles. I also don’t think it’s that unusual that women make awesome horror authors. I could give you the standard answer of how we’re emotional creatures and at the end of the day we always have to be aware while walking down the street, when we’re meeting someone new, when we have to walk away from a table and leave our drink unattended, when protecting our children, etc.
However, I think there’s another reason women of my particular generation are drawn to horror and happen to be good at it. It’s a little thing I like to call the 1980’s.
Stay with me here. Yes, the eighties were time when slasher films ruled and women’s roles tended to be reduced to victims for the most part, but that’s not what I’m talking about. To really get why my ilk are into the genre, you have to go to a whole other medium entirely: children’s cartoons.
Eighties nostalgia has gotten a lot of flak over the years. Yeah, a lot of the cartoons were made off toy lines and they weren’t always drawn very well. A lot of the Saturday morning installments didn’t even last all that long, if a whole season. What they were, however, is utterly, completely, cracked out.
Let’s just take a look at some of my early influences, eh? The first Care Bears movie features a book that could be considered a riff off the Necronomicon. Heck, the second movie contains shapeshifting demons and a variation on possession. Yes, the villains are either dealt with or reformed, but can you imagine that even existing in a theatre for four-year-olds these days? My Little Ponies had gateways to other dimensions and a dark ooze that nearly destroyed Ponyland. Rainbow Brite had her color drained on at least one occasion, a Lady Lovelylocks villain went into a deep coma-like sleep and nearly died. One of the Misfits in Jem nearly died from strange plant scratches. She-Ra was repeatedly kidnapped, drained of her powers, almost-tortured, and who knows what else. The Ewoks were forced into slavery on their cartoon at certain points, and one of the girl Ewoks learned quickly not to try to play magic to her advantage. Villains and sidekicks alike nearly had their souls sucked out in a few franchises and it was just another Saturday for all us little girls watching. For the puppet crowd, Jim Henson’s The Storyteller featured devils and heroine-beating trolls, and the Skeksis of The Dark Crystal haunted our nightmares for ages because of their soul-sucking abilities and we loved them for it. Disney regularly played cartoons from their vaults, including things like where Pluto dreams he’s been sent to hell and is tortured by a bunch of animated cat devils.
The Real Ghostbusters just plain existed. Seriously, this show was amazing for how bizarre it was until it was dumbed down for little kids. I still remember an episode where the ghostbusters got sent to another dimension where ghosts hunted people and their ghost counterparts chased them down like criminals. It was intense, mind-bending stuff. In short, beautiful.
The nineties tried, but by then everything was either taking existing franchises and turning the characters into children, or trying slightly different variations of the same ol’ same ol’. It was always strange to me that people got so freaked out about Tales from the Cryptkeeper, when things like that had been a part of my entire tender youth, and no one had complained because “they were just cartoons based on toys.”
My point is, those things were considered normal for little girls or for girls and boys alike. I admittedly question some of the gender divide, though, because I knew a lot of boys who collected She-Ra figures along with He-Man and quite a few little girls who could quote you episodes of The Real Ghost Busters. Along with all the sparkly, we regularly got our dose of freaky, otherworldly danger. In some cases, it was like Lovecraft was reincarnated as an animator. Whether this was people groping for a plot or just throwing something out there, who knows, but it gave us permission at a very young age to let our weird out and not be apologetic about it. It was okay to be villains who did whatever was necessary, to be heroes who were kind, yes, but still had to go to great lengths and nearly lose their souls to get their way. Adventures were better the more elaborate and the darker they became.
Yes, there were gender divides in the toy aisle, but in a lot of ways, girly cartoons were pretty subversive for their time, more so than a lot of the things I’ve seen these days. The plots were not always great, the art was eh, true, but the weird factor was amazing. I’ve talked to a lot of women in my age grouping who laugh and remember a lot of those episodes fondly, either because they loved them or because they were traumatized by them and now find it amusing. Some have even passed things like the original two Care Bears movies onto their own daughters. A lot of these girls graduated to appreciate Stephen King and Anne Rice alike, to not just want to be the chick who hangs out with vampires, but who had ambitions of maybe, someday, becoming the head vampire.
These days, yes, women write horror from a female standpoint at times, but I think we don’t take into consideration that that isn’t the only way we can write horror. Maybe, if we started letting our girls get a dose of weird early again, there wouldn’t be such a barrier for them to the genre. It would be just another day at the toy aisle, just another Saturday of cartoons. For those of us already grown up, yes, we definitely have different takes on the genre, and some of them will inevitably have to do with gender. However, we also have a huge universal appreciation for the dark and the bizarre. Why? Why not? After all, we were brought up that way.
by john | Feb 16, 2015 | Book Spotlight, Evolution of Evil, Writing
Am I Evil?
By Jay Requard
Believe it or not, I’m pissed off.
I’m pissed off because I failed Conjer, Emma, and whoever that vampire-fop that ended up beheaded at the end of the third act. I failed them all, and every bit of it has to do with the fact that I didn’t know if I could be what I needed to be. I didn’t know if I could be evil. I consider myself a Heroic Fantasy author, so you probably imagine the kind of cognitive dissonance that entailed.
The first story, The Chase, appeared in The Big Bad: An Anthology of Evil, which featured many great stories featuring truly messed-up things being done by really messed-up people. But that didn’t mean we did evil. I am one of those (psychos) that take the time to read the reviews that followed on Amazon, and beyond a lot of really nice reviews and some well-earned praise for some really talented authors, there was one review that struck me in the face with shame.
“They’re really light on evil,” is essentially what was said, when paraphrased to protect who said. I’ll leave it to you to go and guess which review I’m talking about.
“Light on evil.”
That’s not good enough. It’s not good enough for me, specifically, because I know that I failed. I tried to make Conjer a darker, moodier version of The Man with No Name, one of my favorite characters from the Sergio Leoni-classics. Yet that character isn’t inherently a villain, and villains are supposed to be the bread and butter of The Big Bad II.
So here comes The Big Bad II. I submitted Ghosts and Sands to Emily Leverett and John Hartness, having to fight my way again into the second anthology. I wasn’t invited, I wasn’t called to submit another story—I had to work. And I had to figure out “am I evil?”
To me, evil is someone walking into town knowing he is going to kill scores and smiles about it. To me, evil is killing someone who was trying to do a job they didn’t want to be doing in the first place. To me, evil is making victims pay for rescue and salvation. To me, evil is having a good time doing it.
These are things that happen every single day in the real world, performed by those high and low, lawful and criminal. They may seem mundane to readers, in the grand scheme of things, but that’s because the readers are evil too—they accept this deepening shithole around them while they turn to the next page.
Conjer came back, ready to unleash hell. He’s not the hero you need; he’s the curse you have to endure. And curses always find a way to claim you.
I hope I didn’t fail this time. You can be the judge and answer my question: Am I Evil?
by john | Feb 13, 2015 | Uncategorized
Nicole and I once sat on a panel together about “Writing the Other” in which I had to state that as a straight white man I had no idea what I was doing there. As a black woman, Nicole was wondering what I was doing there, too! We were great friends before, and even better friends since that panel, and it’s always an honor and privilege to share her words. Listen to what she has to say about Women in Horror.
13 Wonderfully Wicked Women in Horror Writers
Horror—long synonymous with famous and male authors like Poe, King, Baker, Kootz, and Carpenter, the fairer gender is often shoved into the darker parts of the proverbial popularity party. February serves to focus a bright light into the ether of ignorance in the form of awareness.
Welcome to reader enlightenment. It’s Women in Horror Month.
Coming out from the bleakness of those cold, frightening nights are women who pen painfully delicious horror.
So, in honor of Friday, the 13th, and Women in Horror, here are 13 female authors who are not only kick-butt writers, but also trendsetters and genre heavies. This is an eclectic grouping of my own choosing. These authors’ works are who I reach for when I crave dark, decadent horror.
If you enjoy the scare of horror, heck, if you get goose bumps from fine, tight writing, and high quality storytelling that sticks long after “The End,” you won’t go wrong sticking an icepick in these.
Ignoring them would be terrifying indeed.
- Mary Shelley-The mother of madness and the dark and stormy nights, her work, Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus was written in one night as a response to her husband’s and his friends’ dare of who could pen the scariest story.
- Octavia Butler-The shining pinnacle of diverse speculative fiction, her works like Kindred and Fledging take real world horror and science fiction and creates a literary concoction, readers return to consume again and again.
- Shirley Jackson-Renowned for her short story, “The Lottery,” Jackson’s storytelling took ordinary people and demonstrated the real terror behind human beings. Who needs monsters?
- Tananarive Due-Poetic. Polished. Perfect. Her works, My Soul To Keep and The Living Blood, demonstrated the real power of diverse horror and the results of mastery storytelling.
- V. C. Andrews– Taking a branch from Jackson’s tree, V.C. Andrews’ style of horror came not from things that go bump in the night, but things that drum in the hearts of men—or attics. Flowers in the Attic tore out the mother archetype of protector and caregiver. Instead she presented the real terror of greed, ambition, and perverted love.
- L. A. Banks- Vampires, demons, and humans clashed in Banks’ Vampire Huntress series of novels. They pushed the envelope of what vampires could do, but also propelled a powerful heroine that looked more like me than any I’d seen before. Some truly horrible events unfolded, but the heart and moral compass kept her grounded. John’s note – I loved L.A. Banks’ writing and was crushed to hear of her death just months after I discovered her fiction. I then had the opportunity to meet her sister at a function completely unrelated to writing and tell her how much she was missed.
- Anne Rice- Almost single-handled popularized vampires—again—and took readers down into the dark and depraved parts of those left with only a single strand of humanity left.
- Eden Royce- A talented author and editor, Royce delivers a fresh take on horror that stretches it beyond its stale confines by mashing and mixing with light hints of other genres. Her poem in The Grotesquerie, demonstrates my point.
- Nnedi Okorafor-With a sure hand and a creative mind the size of Antarctica, Nnedi’s novels push the boundaries of horror and fantasy beyond those of European influences and into more lush literature.
- Crystal Connor-A sensation in Seattle, Connor’s brand of horror is nothing short of large and enveloping, engrossing, and enigmatic. She writes with a sure hand, and one that demonstrates a confidence in her talent and in her storytelling. Her prose commands you—no dares you—not to be afraid.
- Poppy Z Brite- Readers love her balls to the wall, honest, violent, and sexy horror.
- Sumiko Saulsen-Saulsen’s inclusion here, like all the other entries before, is purely of my own volition. Her uses real world grit and grim to convey the complexities in horror-laden city life. Creative and colorful, Saulsen’s works are sure to reach a growing number of hungry readers, ready for something new.
- S. H. Roddey- Roddey’s brand of horror writing is akin to a battle in the ring against an opponent who continues to fool you before knocking you firmly on your behind. Short hits to the body ensures the reader is going down for the count—and loving every minute of it.
Want more women in horror? Mocha Memoirs Press author, Sumiko Saulsen, (http://www.sumikosaulson.com) offers a complete and exhaustive list of Women in Horror writers.
As for me, my horror, short story, “Sweet Tooth,” appears in The Big Bad, Volume Two, from Dark Oak Press, and my other horror story, “Reanimation,” appears in the upcoming anthology, Athena’s Daughters, Volume Two from Silence in the Library.
If you aren’t too frightened, Follow me on Twitter @nicolegkurtz, find me on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/nlkurtz), and groove with me on Google+ (mochamemoirspress). You can find my other works of horror at Other Worlds Pulp, my website, http://www.nicolegivenskurtz.com.
by john | Feb 12, 2015 | Literate Liquors
Wherein I talk about anthologies, and my cat jumps into a chicken box.
by john | Feb 11, 2015 | Uncategorized
So it’s been a tough week. My friend Bob died on Sunday, and Monday would have been my mothers 82nd birthday. Couple that with writing a horror story and the sequel to Raising Hell, and I’ve been in kind of a melancholy place this week. Which is a bummer, because some good things are happening. Tonight was a very entertaining writer’s meetup group with Gail Martin, Jay Requard, Darin Kennedy, Jaym Gates, Nicole Burns and a bunch of other folks, and I’ve started getting things lined up for Connooga. I’ve got my panel schedule, which I’ll unveil a little later, and we’re still hoping to find time to squeeze in a Big Bad 2 Launch Party at the convention, if we can get some guarantees that the print books will be on hand.
So just to go over my anthology schedule for the year, and also partly to put it all in one place where I can find it if I need to, here’s the list of anthologies I’ve committed to for 2015.
February release – Big Bad 2 – edits only, I don’t have a story in this one
Release TBD – Dreams of Steam V – this features a Great-Grandpappy Beauregard short story
Release TBD – Capes & Clockwork II – featuring another Great-Grandpappy Beauregard short story
Release Summer 2015 – Untitle corset anthology – Edits only, I don’t think I’m writing anything for this one, but maybe if I come up with something. I plan to edit this in March and have it released this summer.
Release Summer 2015 – Untitled horror anthology – I just got this invite a couple weeks ago, but I’m working on a ghost story for this one.
Release Late 2015 – Tales of the Weird Wild West – this will feature an original Bubba the Monster Hunter in the Wild West story
Release Early-Mid 2016 – Untitled Sci-Fi Wrestling Anthology – Co-editing with Jay Requard, this one I’m writing the through line/interludes and editing.
Release Mid 2016 – Big Bad 3 – No, we haven’t even started talking about this one yet. But you all know it’s coming.
So that’s got me committed to a minimum of six anthologies in 2015, plus a Bubba short story each month, plus a Harker novella each quarter, plus a Black Knight Chronicles novel, plus revisions on a dragon novel that I want to finish up. That’s two dozen releases this year. Yeah, I’m insane. But lets see how many we can manage. So far I’ve completed my portion of two Bubba stories, one anthology and one novella. I’m halfway through another short and another novella, so we’re making good progress. As long as I can keep the pipeline full I’ll stay busy, and that keeps me from getting maudlin. I’ve also got a story to write for Mama Tried, an outlaw country music-themed crime anthology that James Tuck is putting together. That gets us to 25 in a year. Not counting the re-release of White Lightnin’, Fair Play, or the collections of things that are coming out.
And we haven’t mentioned for a while the fact that sometime this spring we’re making Fair Play into a movie. So that’s a thing. I guess I’d better quit navel-gazing and get back to work.
by john | Feb 9, 2015 | Uncategorized
You might have heard about this little anthology I’ve got coming out that I co-created and co-edited with Emily Lavin Leverett, call The Big Bad II. All month I’ll be hosting guest blog posts from authors in the anthology talking about the Evolution of Evil – how they came up with their story for The Big Bad. This is Eden Royce’s take.
When asked to write about how I came up with the concept for my Big Bad II story, “Voodooesque”, I wondered what to write. I wanted to say, “It’s a true account of what I did last week! C’mon!”
But no, I don’t go out spellcasting…anymore. I’ve got a decent job and no criminal record and it’s gonna stay that way.
I’ve read a great deal about voodoo in short stories and novels, and have watched even more movies that use it. For the most part, authors and filmmakers tend to take one path when portraying conjure magic: It’s evil and must be destroyed. The same goes for the practitioners. Oh, and they’re usually old. Or ugly. Or both.
In these tales, voodoo is practiced in tiny hovels in the backwoods of “insert Podunk town name here”, Louisiana or on the dusty, impoverished streets of the Haitian mainland. Spells are directed at seemingly blameless people out of spite or for some nebulous reason only the truly evil mind could understand. And the practitioners are either hideous crones, or beautiful, yet demented women who dance partially clothed in the swamps at midnight, slashing the necks of flailing chickens.
I wanted to change that perception.
And with that, the confusion between conjure magics. What movies show as voodoo is usually not. Many people now know, unlike some of the writers of books and movies from the last century, voodoo, or Vodoun, is a religion practiced alongside Catholicism, which itself is ritual heavy. Yet the stereotype of it being steeped in evildoing and the love of destruction persists.
Hoodoo and other conjure magics are typically not as flagrant in their applications as the many iterations of Vodoun. Who wants to get caught sprinkling brink dust in someone’s yard? Ooooh, scary…
Authors and filmmakers understandably focus on the dark side of conjure magic. Blood and ritual is always alluring in horror circles. The unknown, the unusual can be most frightening—and fascinating. Conjure can be cool and/or creepy to someone unfamiliar with it, but what if it’s the norm?
My great aunt was a practioner of root, the Carolina’s term for hoodoo and conjure. Most of the time, people came to her for helpful spells, not things to hurt other people. (I’m not sure she would have done a negative spell.) My great aunt was scraping six feet tall and her frame filled most of a doorway. She drove a late model Cadillac and always told the best stories, punctuated by her table-slapping laugh. The ones I remember were hilarious—from people asking to win big in the local number-running racket to people that wanted to get their boss off their back.
My cousin went to her for a potion so she could marry before she was thirty. I’m not saying it was because of the spell, but she got married the week before she turned thirty. I was in the wedding, but I wish I asked for a spell to make her pick another bridesmaid’s dress. *Shudders*
Anyway, I wanted my story to reflect what I grew up with in regard to root. The side where women are strong and powerful, but with an elegance and grace under fire. Women who helped each other and worked their magic for the greater good, even if that meant breaking a few heads. Uh, I mean eggs. My Big Bad story is a world where these women are compensated well for their talents. Where workers of hoodoo, conjure, root—whatever term you want to use—were normal people who held jobs, paid taxes, and raised families. But cross them and you would find your death served to you on a silver platter. With a slice of pound cake.
I set the story back in time just a bit. I stepped back into turn of the twentieth century Charleston, where you showed manners to those you despised, and what others thought of you mattered. Here the racial dividing line was thick, but for the right reason, people were willing to step over it.
Where did the title come from? From my early attempts to explain root magic to people outside of the family:
Root is conjure magic.
What’s conjure?
Have you heard of hoodoo?
No. Is that like voodoo?
Not exactly, but it’s Voodooesque.
by john | Feb 6, 2015 | Business of publishing, Literate Liquors
This week on Literate Liquors I talk about SFWA’s new membership rules, and a couple of awesome Kickstarters that I’m backing.
Here’s the link to Queers destroy Science Fiction –
Here’s the link for Worlds of Wonder –
Here’s the whole podcast –
by john | Feb 6, 2015 | Business of publishing, Vampires, Writing
I use Selah Janel’s story in The Big Bad volume 1 as both a cautionary tale on everything NOT to do when submitting to an anthology, as well as a cautionary tale on the benefits of being friends with people in the industry, most notably editors or people who might one day become editors. When Selah and I became friends, I had no intentions of editing anything, much less a series of horror anthologies. But I did, and when it came time to start reading for The Big Bad, I got an email from Selah saying (basically) “I have a story, but I’m running a little late, and a little long. Can I have a couple weeks?” I said “Sure, send it along when it’s ready.” A month later I get another email with a story attached saying (basically) “Here is it, sorry it’s so late, hope you still like me, hope you can use it.”
It was almost exactly 1,000 words OVER the max allowed word count for the anthology. I almost round-filed it immediately, but she was my friend, and that guaranteed her at least one paragraph’s worth of leniency. You can see why I don’t have many friends – it only got her a paragraph. I read it, then waited patiently as Emily (my co-editor and partner in crime on these anthologies) read it. She emailed me and we agreed that the story had done almost every single thing wrong to get included. It was late, it was too long, it was another friggin’ vampire story. We wanted any excuse to hate it.
Sidebar – when you’re accepted into an anthology, after a few acceptances, you stop asking “Really?” and start asking “Where will you put my story?” There are three pieces of prime real estate in an anthology – the first story, which gets read by the most casual readers, the center story, which gets read by a lot of passersby who crack the book open randomly and pick a page, and the final story, which is the closer and wants to be a big finish.
Selah’s story was the closer for Big Bad Vol. 1. It was, quite frankly, one of the best damn vampire stories I’ve ever read. I looked for any excuse not to love it, and she didn’t give me one. I’ve told lots of people at lots of panels at lots of conventions that you can either follow all the rules or be so goddamn amazing that they don’t apply to you. Seals Janel is an amazing writer and I’d read her grocery list. Here’s her story behind the story for Big Bad 2. And no, she didn’t get the closer spot in BB2, we dropped her in the second spot from the beginning, because editors are evil. You see, if you download the free sample from Amazon for the ebook, you’ll get cut off before Selah’s story ends. And that’s going to guarantee a high conversion of samples to sales. 🙂
Plain and simple, I love vampires. There’s a lot of versatility there, a lot of things to explore. One of my favorite vampire movies is The Lost Boys, and admittedly my story in the first Big Bad, “Real Wild Childe” came out of one of the few beefs I have with the original movie: the horrifically lame female characters in cliché roles. While I admire Jami Gertz and Diane Wiest and they’re great in the film, Star and Lucy’s functions are to just kind of be there as love interest and Mom. It’s a shame, because a lot could have been done with those archetypes. The sequels never really bothered to correct the female role issue, either, so it became a mission to write a vampire story where the girls could keep up with the boys and then some. Admittedly, “Real Wild Childe” was also my chance to warp the vampire romance genre beyond recognition, but a lot of it was the chance to have fun with some renegade vampire characters while beefing up the female roles. In a lot of ways, I did a whole reversal with putting Rave at the mercy of all the women in his life, vampire and human.
When the second volume was announced, I was sure I was going to sequel that story. I was excited to keep exploring Rave and Sin’s twisted relationship, as well as Addington’s vampire problem as a whole. Unfortunately, it became evident very quickly that it would be way too much for an anthology story, and I already had the habit of antagonizing the great Hartness with my inflated word counts. I didn’t want to leave that world behind, though, so it occurred to me to go in the other direction and prequel it.
I mention in the original story that Rave and Asha’s sire is their mother, and she’s not a particularly motherly type. Amanda was the perfect character to explore not only the feminine role of mother, but also to mash that up against what a vampire was, and why a typical 1950’s housewife would even want to become one. My research led me on a winding road, and I found the perfect excuse for an underground, mother-centric vampire cult: fear of communism and all-out nuclear war. What if a protective instinct was so great, that you’d do anything to ensure your family line and the wellbeing of your kids, even if it meant killing and drinking blood?
That was a great start at developing the cult of The Family and the character of The Patriarch, but it still didn’t quite mesh up with the Amanda in the original story. What kind of a person would turn into a manipulative, jealous vampire who wanted to clamp down on her kids and rule over them throughout eternity? After all, most parents are more than willing to kick the birds out of the nest at some point, and Amanda had never come across as a loving maternal figure.
As I began writing, I slowly discovered a character who was burnt out, frustrated, and felt overlooked. Her insecurities about her own life fed her jealousy that landed on everyone: her husband’s employees, her friends and fellow cult members, even her own children. She was desperate to be noticed, true, but also desperate for something else. It all made me wonder, what would happen if a mother didn’t necessarily have children because of a great love for them, but because they complemented her idea of what life should be like? What if she looked upon them as accessories that she owned, accessories that weren’t supposed to ever get out of line or go against her thinking? What if that craving for power gave her confidence to try out her powers in increasingly controlling ways, all under the guise of it being in everyone’s best interest? And what would she do if her precious family/accessories dared to try to go against her?
And what would happen if she found out that they may possess the same sort of darkness she did?
Exploring her manipulative nature in “A Family Affair” fascinated me, and I slowly grew to view Amanda as less of a madwoman and more of a complex character. If the story in the first volume was me riffing off my love for the bad boy type vampire in The Lost Boys and an attempt to play with the idea of a human love interest, Amanda became my anti-Lucy in The Big Bad 2. She still loves her children, but for the wrong reasons, and she’s desperate to retain something of herself as she watches the world and her family start to plot on without her. Her evil is more internal, but she still sheds a considerable amount of blood and has no guilt doing it. She freely plays with her family’s minds, and forces them down a dark road that will have significant repercussions decades later. Amanda’s an intense character who will get her way at any cost. She’s dangerous to most of those around her. She’s also a lot of fun to write.
It was also interesting to explore Rave and Asha as humans, to really tinker with who they had been before they became runaway delinquents. Although they’re at the mercy of their mother’s actions, there are also hints that they weren’t innocent from the get go, that maybe they’re more like their mother than they’d ever care to admit. Character relationships and dynamics intrigue me, so it was interesting to put all of that against the workings of a vampire cult and the changing vibe of the 1950’s in general. It’s an odd combination, to be sure, but it’s a fun one, and one that I hope is worth reading.
by john | Feb 4, 2015 | Business of publishing, Writing
Not really. But it kinda has felt like that from the outside. Let’s get my view of the facts out of the way first before I go into my conflicted feelings about this whole SFWA v. self-published authors thing.
Starting March 1, self-published and small press authors who meet a certain earning threshold (I believe it’s $3,000 over a twelve-month period for one novel-length work, or some amount of cents per word equaling some dollar amount for short stories – I didn’t really pay attention to the short story criteria) will be eligible to join Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, the professional organization for people who do what I do.
Full disclosure, the Horror Writers Association is also the professional organization for people who do what I do, because nobody can really decide if I write horror or fantasy. But I don’t write romance, which is why I don’t need to worry about joining RWA, which I might anyway, because RWA is a solid organization with a bunch of shrewd businesspeople involved. But I digress.
This is kinda a huge deal. It feels like a much bigger deal than last September, when HWA changed their rules to a very similar structure to allow self-pub and small press authors into the fold. I jumped onto that opportunity, but I’m hesitant about joining SFWA, and I figured I’d use this little corner of the inter webs to explore why as much for me as for anyone.
Let’s start at the beginning, back in 2010 when I published The Chosen (now available on audiobook on iTunes, Audible or Amazon). I didn’t have any real idea what I was doing, I was just trying to get my words out there any way I could. So I researched SFWA, because I was writing fantasy, so I wanted to be able to draw on the knowledge of other people writing fantasy. I read the “Join SFWA” page and quickly realized that there was no method for me to do just that. Self-published authors were not allowed a seat at the table.
That stung. I was new to writing, and new to publishing (still relatively new to both, this being year 5 of my journey), and to be told that I wasn’t good enough to sit at the cool kids’ table (again) because I was following a different path to my readers didn’t feel good. And it has continued to not feel good for five years, through friendships with people on SFWA’s board, through conversations about how stupid the rule is with SFWA members and other excluded parties, and I’ll own my pettiness – this as created in me a sense of bitterness about SFWA.
See, the thing is I’m a joiner. I feel like being a part of the professional organization for your field is just what you do. I got a job designing theatrical lighting systems, I joined IES, the Illuminating Engineering Society. I started working with high schools on their lighting systems, I joined the North Carolina Theatre Conference, then the Southeastern Theatre Conference. I’ve sat on the board of directors of many regional professional societies because I’ve always felt like networking, camaraderie and having the back of your fellows in the field is what you do.
But now I was in a place where I was told that I wasn’t a professional enough writer to join the professional organization for writers in my genre. All because of the way I was publishing my work. That didn’t sit well with me. It certainly didn’t sit well with me once I started earning money as a writer, because I very quickly eclipsed the earnings requirements for membership, and then the ONLY thing keeping me out was a label. And that just felt wrong. I wasn’t excluded at conventions from drinking with writers because I didn’t have a SFWA card. I wasn’t excluded from guest status at a con because I wasn’t a SFWA member. I wasn’t excluded from anything, except membership and that label of “professional.”
So I became bitter. And fairly vocal about it. I may have mentioned more than once that $250 worth of short story sales to magazines could get you into SFWA, but ten grand worth of short story sales to readers wouldn’t get you in.
And I understand that organizational change often comes slowly. God knows I’ve spent enough years in non-profit management to know that. I’ve sat through more board retreats and long-range planning sessions than I care to count, so I know that it takes time to affect change. I also know it doesn’t take five years. And self-publishing had already shifted from being a fringe vanity press swindle to a viable career option before I started with this mess in 2010, so the whole “organizations change slowly” thing lost weight with me about two years ago.
So what do I do now? On the one hand, I want to stand outside the window holding up my sign saying “Screw you, I don’t need you now!” Because I don’t know that I do. I network pretty well on my own. I have con appearances, book deals, friends to blurb my stuff and pretty much everything I need to continue making my career.
On the other hand, I want to be part of the professional organization for my chosen career path. And I do, like a lot of authors, want the affirmation of being labeled a professional by my peers. Because a lot of times I hang with my friends and still feel like a fraud, like no matter what I’ve done, it’s not enough. That’s my issue, not theirs, and certainly no one has ever made me feel that way. But it’s there.
Will a SFWA card make that feeling go away? Do they even give out membership cards? Does HWA? If so, did I lose mine already? I don’t know the answers to any of those questions.
And why did I get my panties in a bunch about SFWA and not HWA? Why did I tweet out congratulatory messages to HWA when they finally pried their collective head out of their collective ass last year and let self-pub and small press authors in? Probably because I didn’t know I wasn’t eligible for HWA membership until I was already eligible. Because I thought I was a fantasy writer, not a horror writer, so I had been focusing on SFWA until somebody nominated me for a horror award, then I started thinking of myself as a horror and fantasy writer.
So I don’t know. Are there benefits to joining SFWA? Certainly. Are any of them useful to me? Probably. Should I just get my head out of my ass and fill out an application? Probably. Would I feel better about this whole issue if any of my emails to a SFWA president a few years ago asking about this issue had ever been answered? Yeah.
What do I want out of this mess? At this point, I think I want to be asked to join. I would like someone affiliated with SFWA to say “Hey, I think you should join SFWA. We’d like to have you, and think it could be good for you and for the organization.”
I don’t expect that to happen, but to be frank, even if I heard about SFWA reaching out to other major self-pub and small press authors to open up membership with open arms instead of begrudgingly, it would probably get the bug out of my butt.
So there are my thoughts on the SFWA self-pub thing, not that anybody asked me. I don’t know if I’ll join. Maybe. At this point it’s not even about the benefits of membership, it’s about whether or not the organization really wants me.
So that’s plenty of word-puking for the morning. I’mma go get a Pop-Tart and get some shit done. Y’all do the same. But stay away from my Pop-Tarts.
situations made an impression on me. In one case, it was late at night, we were back home in what should have been our stomping grounds, and we missed a turn on a rural road. No problem, we had a pretty good idea of where we were, and we took the next left, expecting it to cut across. The blacktop road went from two lanes to one lane, then became a gravel road, then a dirt road. This was before GPS. I thought our odds were good of ending up in front of someone’s barn, facing a big German Shepherd and the business end of someone’s shotgun.
