by john | May 19, 2017 | Book Spotlight, Evolution, Writing
I know, I missed a week or two. Sorry. I had conventions, then I had to get over conventions, then life…but anyway, there are a bunch of great Evolution posts coming in the next few weeks, featuring books by amazing writers, including this one, by Lauren Harris. I’ve read Unleash, and this is a helluva kickoff to a new Urban Fantasy series. You should definitely check it out!
If you know me, you know that nine times out of ten, I will gravitate toward characters with swords rather than guns, so UNLEASH was a fat raccoon in the kitchen cupboard–wholly unexpected.
It came at me while I was on my third version of my first novel. Frustrated by an inability to get it past the Revise & Resubmit stage with agents, I shelled out for a novel revision class. While I followed a writing prompt, the first seeds of UNLEASH took root.
I probably wouldn’t have written the book if not for the confluence of several events on October 31st, 2010.
I had come back from Japan mere weeks before and was depressed, isolated, and stuck in rural NC.
- I needed distance from my first book
- I was eager to implement the outlining tools I’d gathered while revising my first book.
- I wanted to prove to myself I could finish a second book.
- NaNoWriMo LITERALLY started the next day.
The moment I realized I needed to write another book, the scene from that exercise sprang to mind. I scrounged up some note cards and hammered out a rough outline of a book I was then calling HELLHOUND.
Okay, so, my outline was almost worthless. I had 24 hours to plot, worldbuild, and develop characters. You know this first draft was a dump. I mean, I ditched a second POV within a few chapters, requiring some structural gymnastics I was not yet skilled enough to accomplish.
Lots of stuff didn’t survive that first draft. There were demons, Celtic ancestor flashbacks, and the bad-guy was immortal. Helena was a fake college student and there was some weird, second-dimension demon gate stuff that I don’t really understand now. All these things were better left on the book-journey’s roadside, though I will forever regret losing the scene where Helena–a shapeshifter–gets arrested while trying to sneak back into her window. Naked.
…which is how I learned that women can’t get charged with indecent exposure in the state of North Carolina. My Sheriff’s Deputy brother sometimes worries about the questions I ask him.
I started writing this book in November of 2010 and finished it that February. That original novel went through an arduous attempt to change it from third to first person before I realized it was the novel equivalent of the money-sink renovation. It was cheaper to just bulldoze the lot and build from all new materials.
After multiple drafts of my first book, I was loathe to get dragged back into the rewrite spiral. So I shoved the manuscript in a drawer, where the ideas fermented and matured while I improved my craft and published novellas and short stories. Finally, I outlined and drafted a book that–though it kept the same main characters and basic plot trajectory–bore absolutely no resemblance to the story I had in 2011.
That book is UNLEASH. Sign up for my mailing list get an exclusive excerpt and a reminder when the book hits the shelves.
Already think you want it? (You do.) It’s available right now, so go grab it!
(Link: www.laurenbharris.com/unleash )
by john | Apr 21, 2017 | Evolution, Writing
Why I write what I write by Lillian Archer
A hearty thank you to John Hartness for hosting me on his blog. Now go buy one of his books:)
I am Lillian Archer, purveyor of fine historical fantasy books. I started my publishing career with an agent, went through the process of trying to sell a book to traditional press and small press, and ultimately decided to self-publish instead of pursuing the traditional route.
John requested this series of posts to discuss why an author writes what they write. That is a very personal question, and one I am happy to explore today.
I write because my day job is one where humanity and empathy are discouraged, where cost and dollar amounts are the only currency of worth, and where being a woman is a shiny, glittering glass ceiling few shatter.
I write to express my empathy, my compassion, my love of dreamers, and empowerment of marginalized persons. I write to remind myself that my day job is not sucking the humanity from my marrow bones. I write to entertain, and hope my words bring a wee bit of joy to someone else’s day.
My first novel, Prodigal Spell, is set in Colonial Britain and the Caribbean.
I like using historical backdrops for my writing, taking the accepted social norms and mores of the time period and exploring those strengths and weaknesses. My main character is a female witch trapped by the expectations of society and how she blows those social constructs out of the water. Literally. (I love writing scenes where things blow up, because that is always an opportunity for delightfully awful things to happen to characters. Don’t read my work if you don’t like explosions.) My current work in progress’ main character is a female spy during the Cold War.
My work is not an “-ism”, nor is it a moral commentary on historical events. I write to provide a different perspective, and hope that is an enjoyable experience for my readers. And, I write to express historically accurate pyrotechnic opportunities of the time period.
If you are interested in Prodigal Spell, or my work, here are the requisite links. I am also open to talking about traditional route vs self-publishing. Email, follow on twitter, or friend me on Facebook. I also share a group blog called The Million Words, and we chat about all sorts of writing topics over there. Come find me out in Internet Land!
Website and blog: https://www.lillianarcher.com
Twitter: @lilliansbooks
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100006923387669
Email- lily@lillianarcher.com
Prodigal Spell is available in ebook, print and audiobook on Amazon.
https://www.amazon.com/Prodigal-Spell-Nevis-Witches-Book-ebook/dp/B00KQ9LP7M/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1491140510&sr=8-1&keywords=prodigal+spell
Also available in ebook on the iTunes store if you search for Prodigal Spell. If you love kobo, here is your link:
https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/prodigal-spell
by john | Apr 14, 2017 | Evolution, Promos/Giveaways, Writing
My buddy and Falstaff Books author Darin Kennedy hooked me up with JD, and since we will both be at JordanCon next weekend, I thought this might be a very good time to feature him on this blog post. If you get a chance and you’re anywhere near Atlanta, come visit us!
Calamity Jane and a goddamn spaceman?
I was sitting on the steps of the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce after a party, waiting for the valet, when the ideas for two historical scifi books popped into my head. One of those became the novella Seeing the Elephant that ultimately grew into the novel Calamity. I remember bouncing ideas off my friends and it took a while for the story—as you read it—to take shape. But it was always about growth and coming of age in the West, in the aftermath of the Civil War, on the frontier of American civilization. At the time, I was deep into both HBO’s Deadwood and Fox’s Firefly and their influences are unmistakable in Calamity. If you don’t know what I mean, go watch the first few episodes of Deadwood, especially “Here Was a Man” and “The Trial of Jack McCall”—Robin Weigert’s was the first Calamity Jane I ever really knew—and the Firefly episodes “Out of Gas” and “Objects in Space”—hints of the scifi-west and the Green Man can be found there. I was so intrigued by Calamity Jane as a historical figure—an iconic woman in a man’s world—and as a transformative character. I fell in love with the potential of her right away.
I’ve had a number of readers comment about how well-written they think Jane is as a teenager and as a woman—especially when they know she was written by a man. I even had an agent express surprise on meeting me because she assumed I’d be a woman based on what she’d read of chapter one. Such amazing compliments! I like to tell people I was neither a teenage girl nor very successful with them when I was young, so I reckon I’m just as surprised as that agent was. But I think I was able to write her as well as I was not because I was tapping into anything uniquely female (my wife disagrees on this point) but because I was able to tap into Jane’s frustration, her feelings of abandonment and ostracization, her loneliness, and—of course—her anger. I was in a lonely and angry place when I wrote her—though I didn’t appreciate it at the time—and writing her always felt more like commiseration than pretending. I think to some degree, we’ve all been Martha wanting to become Jane. I sure was.
Of course, I wasn’t into westerns so the idea to combine western and scifi ended was as much the challenge as the story and the heroine. A fancy literary explanation might go: A lot of the appeal for this kind of mash-up comes from the fact that these are both fundamentally American and fundamentally modern genres. Westerns are the product of America colonization of the continent—and all the good and the bad that goes with ideas of frontier and Manifest Destiny and conquest in that history. Scifi, on the other hand, turns many of these themes around, looking forward while always metaphorically looking back. Where settlers drove out the natives in the 1800s, so will we—the beneficiaries of that conquest—face threats of extermination in the future. The settlers have become the first peoples in jeopardy and the idea of the Green Men and the Gray Men as Others who can menace the West in this way is an interesting one. And one that preys on our fears of annihilation.
But the more basic answer is that Jane and the Green Man insisted on these genres. A prospective agent once asked me to remove the Green Man from the story and I just couldn’t see how it would work. It suddenly wasn’t anything I wanted to read. The Green Man is Jane’s magic feather. He’s her Man with No Name. His alienness is so integral to her view of the world—even when he’s not around or when he’s the only scifi thing in the story—that the western part of the novel would’ve been diminished without the science fiction.
by john | Apr 7, 2017 | Book Spotlight, Evolution, Writing
I’ve been writing fiction since I was in sixth grade, when I wrote a short Silmarillion fanfic telling how the Valar created the halflings. (And now let us pause to appreciate the colossal nerdiness on display in that sentence.) Since then I’ve written dozens of short stories, but only one novel: Blood Family, published in September 2016. Part of what I had to do in the course of writing that book was to figure out how to write a novel—or, more precisely, how I write a novel.
For my short stories, the ideas seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere: a dream, a snatch of conversation, a phrase in an essay, a newspaper headline. When I sat down to write the novel that became Blood Family, I initially started with a similar approach. I knew I wanted my first novel to say something about family, because I’d tried many times before to write about what it was like growing up in a highly dysfunctional family with Southern Gothic tendencies. Unfortunately, none of those attempts came out right, perhaps because they were all personal essays. For my novel I decided to try using fiction to express what my childhood and adolescence had taught me about family.
I also wanted to debunk the popular notion that “every parent out there is just doing the best they can.” Oh, really? When Josef Fritzl held his daughter Elisabeth captive in a basement in Austria for 24 years, raping her the entire time and impregnating her with seven of his children, he was just doing the best he could? When Brice McMillan tied his 13-year-old son to a tree for 18 hours in the summertime in North Carolina, causing the boy to die of dehydration and heat stroke, he was just doing the best he could too? No. They weren’t. They could have done better. There are countless examples from history and the news—and a few from my own family—demonstrating that not every parent out there is just doing the best they can. I wanted to tell a story from the point of view of an adult who had grown up in a family where the adults did not always have the children’s best interests at heart.
If I’d been writing a short story, the conceptualization phase probably would have stopped there, but this was a novel, and I was on a different mission. Most of my short stories have been situated squarely in the mainstream literary realist tradition, with a few adventurous ones sliding sideways into what literary theorist Tzetvan Todorov would call “the fantastic,” which he positions between “the uncanny” (it looks like it might be supernatural, but it isn’t) and “the marvelous” (it’s definitely supernatural). In fantastic stories, the question of the supernatural is raised without being resolved one way or the other, and I liked that—but not for a good reason. I liked the fantastic because it allowed me to dabble in the shallows of the supernatural without diving in and committing to it. “To commit is to be in danger,” James Baldwin said, and I was afraid of that danger. I was afraid of writing openly supernatural stories that the literary elite might look down upon. So I equivocated, writing stories about eerie occurrences that might or might not have a rational explantion.
My novel constituted a decisive break with that practice because, frankly, I was tired of fucking around. I knew the only way I could sustain my enthusiasm and dedication through an entire novel was to write something I really cared about and enjoyed, and for me, that means stories of the other world: ghosts and demons and myths and legends and gods and monsters and magic; cults, covens, religions; spells that really work; portals that really go somewhere. And when I surveyed that rich vein of story ideas, it seemed to me that ghosts, and the unquiet dead in general, would be very useful in telling a story about a family whose parents have visited their sins upon their descendants. You see this kind of thing a lot in Gothic fiction: houses that are reputed to be haunted, for instance, symbolizing the influence of the past upon the present. In my novel, I decided to see what kind of mileage I could get out of making a haunted house actually be haunted, even as I sought to deploy the resonant themes, the psychologically rich characters, and the carefully crafted sentences of mainstream literary fiction.
In short, Blood Family represents the coupling of a theme you might expect to see in a mainstream literary novel (how unhealthy families mangle their descendants) with a story element from genre fiction (the unquiet dead). The entire novel flows from that dyad. I’ve used a similar dyadic structure to develop the basic idea for my next novel, which I’ve already begun working on. I believe this simple structure is a key that can unlock more novels than I could ever possibly write—but I’m going to do my damndest to get as many of them down as I can before I join the ranks of the unquiet dead myself.
Bio: Brent Winter is a writer and editor in Carrboro, North Carolina. Blood Family is his debut novel. To learn more about Blood Family, including where to buy it, visit Brent’s author site. He’s currently at work on a novel that, although not a sequel to Blood Family, is set in the same universe—one where downtown Atlanta hides a strange little neighborhood called D Street that you can’t find on your own; someone who’s already been there has to take you first.
by john | Mar 31, 2017 | Book Spotlight, Evolution, Writing
Natania Barron is a multi-talented amazing human. She’s a mom, a writer, an audiobook narrator, and a badass cover designer. She is responsible for the covers for Wothwood, Into the Mystic, 85 North, and a bunch of upcoming Falstaff Books releases. Go buy her shit!
Wothwood: Where did you come up with the idea?
It’s pretty corny, but the seeds of Wothwood were planted in a dream.
Generally speaking, I’m a pretty vivid dreamer. I tend to dream on an epic scale, and I’ve slayed a few dragons in my time.
This was different, though. In this dream, a son was mourning his father, a ruler of some kind. I was the son, and the connection I had to my father was intense. Unlike the cliched relationships of fantasy novels, this lord and his heir were deeply connected. That feeling was very real, the world cast in a blue twilight. I started a Pinterest board called “The Hand of the Father” and put it on the back burner for a while.
Even though I started out writing heroic fantasy, it had been a long time since I’d written one. But this idea, really this intensity from the dream, stayed with me.As the months passed, the world of Wothwood began to take shape. I was preoccupied with this concept of frontier fantasy — sort of the opposite of Tolkien where the world is moving on and feels very explored — where the edges of the world are still wild and being discovered. I wanted the land itself to have a character, and so the Wothwood itself came to be.
Next came the character of Braig, who was a take on the young man in my dream, the one that should be the hero, but isn’t. In the story, the prologue begins right after Braig’s father’s funeral. Braig is a complex character throughout the story, and has a rather villainous past n some ways, and while the relationship with his father didn’t end up in the novella directly, I wanted him to have that emotional connection in the background.
Aoda came next, and I wanted to tell a story from a woman with the cards stacked against her. As a medievalist, I have always been aware of how hard life was for many people in time without medicine and vaccinations. Aoda wears the scars of syphillis, and people judge her immediately because she’s so ugly.
Glannon started out as just a bit of a plot device in the prologue, but ended up being the third POV in Wothwood and essential to the eventual story. Unlike powerful characters in much of fantasy who spend their whole time trying to win power, Glannon starts off with the power, and thirsts for more while questioning everything around her.
Really, the emotion from the initial dream is something that I tried to wind into the story as a whole. I wanted character emotions to be as vivid as the backdrop to the wood itself.
You can (and should) pick up Wothwood by clicking on this link – it’ll ask you what kind of e-reader you want to use, and then it’ll take you to that store!
by john | Mar 24, 2017 | Evolution, Guest Blogs, Writing
Nicole Givens Kurtz is awesome on so many levels. She’s a mother, a writer, and a publisher, and an all-around cool person. She sent me an awesome essay – so I’m very happy to run this as the first Evolution post.
Weird Westerns are a sub-genre of speculative fiction. I was first introduced to this sub-genre when I lived in the Southwest and attended MilehiCon. While there, I met David B. Riley and his publishing company, Science Fiction Trails. He and Laura Givens were working on an anthology of weird westerns. Excited by the idea of creating a diverse populous in the old west, I went home and wrote a short story. I submitted “Justice” to them and it was accepted. The story appeared in Six Guns Straight from Hell.
It is from those stories in Six Guns that I fell in love with weird westerns. I was won over by the dynamics of steampunk, aliens, and of course, magic in the west. Will Smith’s turn in The Wild Wild West movie conjured up all the western episodes from my past. The fact of a black man in the west, saving it from destruction, stuck to me, despite its silliness. For once, the hero wore my color skin and he was doing it with guns and a dark, black hat—no white hat heroes here!
Recently two of my short stories have appeared in Wolfsinger Publication’s diverse weird western anthologies, Lost Trails Volumes I and II. Most of my southwest stories are weird. I write often about my time in the Four Corners area, but also focusing solely on people not commonly represented, Native Americans and African Americans.
My love affair with weird westerns extend beyond my stories.
I’m a huge fan of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower and anime favorite, Cowboy Bebop. Other weird westerns favorites include Trigun, Samurai 7, and Samurai Champloo. What I enjoy about each of these titles are the diverse casting, the way the west was interpreted, and the dynamics—desperation–between all of the characters.
I’m just as big a fan of original westerns as I am of the weird kind. My mother used to spend Saturday evenings watching Clint Eastwood movies. While some people love The Magnificent Seven, I enjoy The Outlaw Josey Wells and others. Still, Unforgiven, is perhaps the one I love the most. I always cry when Ned dies. Yes, there are subtle commentary about the black cowboy dying in the film, but it’s Morgan Freeman’s portrayal of Ned that really drives my emotional attachment to him. It’s also Eastwood’s grief-stricken agony that tugs on my heart strings when he orders the town people to ‘take care of Ned.’
And the threat that if they don’t, he will come back for them.
Look for my weird western stories in two upcoming anthologies. One if Baen’s Straight Outta Tombstone and the other is Lawless Land available from Falstaff. Both anthologies have some of the best writers in speculative fiction are contributing! Gail Martin, Misty Massey, and John Hartness to name a few. I’m lucky to discover weird westerns on this side of the Southwest. There are great rewards for those who haven’t contributed. So stop by and boost the signal with a great big YeeHAW!
If you’re weird too, you can find me online at @nicolegkurtz (Twitter), http://www.facebook.com/nicolegkurtz (Facebook) or at Other Worlds Pulp, http://www.nicolegivenskurtz.com
Nicole
