Posts Tagged ‘editing’

#FirstLineFriday

Posted: September 25, 2015 in Living and Life, Scary Stuff, short story, Writing
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It’s Friday again, so you know what that means! No, not Happy Hour (though that is something to celebrate too). Nope, it’s #FirstLineFriday! In case you’re unfamiliar with the rules, here’s the deal: on Fridays you write a post with the title like this post, and then you post the first one or two lines from a potential work, a work in progress, or a completed or published work. Then you ask your readers for their thoughts and critiques on what you’ve just posted.

This week’s entry comes from “Tigress Lizzy”, the short story I wrote that was published in the recently released anthology When The Lights Go Out. Check it out:

Lizzy Markham slouched her way into the Magic River High School art room, her spirits as damp as her school uniform was at the moment.

Not the most dramatic opening to a short story, but it gets much more interesting as you read on, believe me. But what are your thoughts? Anything you’d change? Let me know. And if you’d like to read “Tigress Lizzy” and the other terrifying stories in WTLGO, you can find it on Amazon and Smashwords. Trust me, you’re going to want to check it out.

Well, that’s all for now. This weekend, contrary to prior declarations, I think I’ll be taking it easy at home, maybe just hang around Wiesbaden and see what Oktoberfest craziness I can get up to. After all, this is my last weekend in Germany. Might as well go all out in the city I’ve come to think of as home, right?

Have a good weekend, my Followers of Fear!

“A Project in Western Ideals”: Finished

Posted: September 22, 2015 in Living and Life, Progress Report, short story, Writing
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You’re probably wondering what the title of this post means. Well, it’s the title of my latest short story, so you can stop wondering “Did this guy start doing some sort of study or documentary or something and not share it with us? That’s very unlike him.”

Anyway, “A Project in Western Ideals” is a short story I just finished at 9,123 words and follows a girl who is being slowly turned into a human Barbie doll by a woman who is more than she seems. The story’s title comes from a phrase that appears a lot in the story, and I felt that it fit the story so well, that I should use it for the title, especially since I didn’t like any of the titles I’d used before, like “Perfection” or “My Perfect Body”.

The story was inspired by a woman in Russia named Angelica Kenova, who is a human Barbie. I first heard about her prior to leaving the States for Germany, when I read an article about her. According to the article, her parents control almost every aspect of her life: they buy her clothes (most of which are kind of sexy and form-fitting); they control her diet and how much she exercises; they even accompany her on dates! And while the article didn’t give any hints about how Ms. Kenova felt personally about this lifestyle (for all I know she likes being her parents’ toy), I did get the impression her parents were the driving force behind how she became this:

 

Yeah, that’s an actual person, not a doll. I even have trouble telling the difference sometimes. And hearing about her story, I started wondering what sort of parents would help and encourage or possibly even force their daughter to go down this route despite the numerous health issues that doing so can cause. This led to “A Project in Western Ideals”, which explores a young woman going through this sort of transformation, and not through her own choice.

As far as my fiction goes, it’s not as dark anything I normally write (I let my protagonist share her deepest thoughts with the audience and she is pretty funny without intending to be), but it does deal with the health problems of trying to look like Barbie and how it’s ultimately creating a fake version of yourself (read this article to get an idea of how bad it is for you if you’re curious). I also think the main character is a lot of fun and I enjoyed writing her.

However, I do think that the climax and ending could use some work. As they stand now, they feel clunky to me and don’t match up to the beginning of the story. The beginning could have some stuff cut out from it too, and I’d like to explore the antagonist a bit more as well, get a bit more of the crazy that makes her do this to my protagonist.

Well, we’ll see what happens when I get to the second draft. And by the time I do, I’ll probably have had some ideas on how to better this story. And I definitely want to make this one better, because with a bit of work, I think it could be one of the highlights of Teenage Wasteland (speaking of which, I’ve got seven stories so far set for that collection at various stages of readiness for publication, including this one. With time, I think I could get a few more in and truly make it an extraordinary read).

In the meantime though, I said this was going to be the last short story I’d write before starting work on Laura Horn again. However since I’m about ten days from leaving Germany and heading back to Columbus, I think I’ll hold off on starting any big projects until I’m back in the States, writing or editing. Instead, I’ll edit a few short stories (none that need to be rewritten, that’s basically starting from the beginning again) and get to work on LH once I’m home and settled back in.

Well, Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement is in a few hours. I’m going to have the biggest meal I can in anticipation of the fast nd see you again before What’s Write For Me tomorrow afternoon (or tomorrow night if you’re me). You all have a wonderful day, my Followers of Fear. I know I am.

#FirstLineFriday

Posted: September 18, 2015 in Novel, Scary Stuff, Writing
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It’s Friday again, and you know what that means! It’s #FirstLineFriday!

On Fridays, bloggers write a post titled like this one, hashtag and everything, and post the first one or two lines of a potential project, work-in-progress, or a completed or published work and ask your readers to give you their feedback. It’s a lot of fun, believe me.

Today’s entry is what could start out a novel I had the idea for last weekend. I don’t intend to write it anytime soon, but it’s fun to play around and think about what could end up starting it or what could end up getting into the novel when I finally do decide to write it.

Anyway, enjoy:

On the first Monday of the fourth month of our sophomore year, my friends and I made a suicide pact. Since then, there have been several times where I wish we had all followed through, rather than chickening out and letting what happened next happen.

Thoughts? Errors? Ways to improve? Let me know in the comments below.

Well, that’s all for now. I’m going on a trip to Wewelsburg castle this weekend. The castle’s got a very interesting history, and I’m looking forward to exploring it (as well as taking lots of photos and writing a blog post about it when I get home).

Have a great weekend, my Followers of Fear! Until next time!

Slasher Remakes

Posted: September 13, 2015 in Living and Life, Reflections, Scary Stuff
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Hollywood is stuck in this phase where the studios are obsessed with sequels and prequels and spin-offs and franchises and remakes and reboots and re imaginings and a million other things. I have mixed feelings on this culture. On the one hand, I love the Marvel movies and a clever re imagining of a classic story or stories (like what Once Upon a Time has done with some of my favorite fairy tales when I was young) is a great thing. Plus who doesn’t love a good adaptation of a beloved novel or comic book or even video game into a movie or TV series?

On the other hand, seeing all these stories continued or retold constantly encourages filmmakers ane viewers to seek out familiar stories that are sure bets to be successful rather than new material that they don’t know will work out for them, when there is new material. And plenty of these sequels/prequels/reboots/whatever, when they come out, they are just awful and you wonder how the filmmakers could do this to beloved properties (see my review of the Poltergeist remake or watch these two dudes review the Smurfs movie if you need further proof).

The horror genre has been a big part in this, for better or for worse. Since the success of 2003’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake (as opposed to 2013’s remake of the film), there have been a slew of horror remakes, mainly slashers but quite a few others, and they have been showing up with increasing frequency). I’m focusing on the slashers though, because of the horror remakes the slashers are often the ones I see the most advertising for (an exception being Poltergeist, but we know how that turned out), they have some of the most iconic characters in the horror genre (Freddy, Jason, Leatherface, etc.), they’re notorious for putting out too many sequels of varying quality, even for horror, and they’re difficult to get right, because they rely on blood, guts, and gore to scare people rather than suspense and atmosphere.

And for God’s sake, there’s just been so many of them:

  • Texas Chainsaw Massacre and its prequel (the former was good, the latter awful)
  • Halloween and Halloween II (same deal as TCM in terms of quality)
  • My Bloody Valentine (lacks all that made the original so awesome)
  • Black Christmas (awful murder-porn)
  • Prom Night (awful and nonsensical)
  • Friday the 13th (of all the Michael Bay shit movies, this one is the shittiest)
  • Nightmare on Elm Street (I liked it, but others disagree with me)
  • Leprechaun (more of a re-imagining of average quality)
  • Texas Chainsaw 3D (I liked this too, but not everybody else did)
  • Evil Dead (fun and extremely bloody)
  • Scream (got rebooted as a TV series. Only saw one episode before leaving for Germany, but wasn’t impressed by what I saw)

On TV and in the movies at the same time. Like Kevin Bacon or Viola Davis.

And that’s just the ones that I know of that are out. And believe it or not, there are more on the way: Friday the 13th is getting a new movie as well as being re-imagined as a TV series for CW (haven’t heard anything on the movie, but what I’ve heard on the TV series sounds promising), Halloween is getting a new movie (also looks promising), Evil Dead is getting a TV series set years after the original films (excuse me while I skip it, because I’m not much of a fan of the franchise), and Texas Chainsaw Massacre is getting a prequel exploring Leatherface’s origins (I’m skeptical). There was also talk of a Hellraiser reboot, but there’s been no word in two years on that, so I’m going to say it’s been shelved.

So why are slashers being remade by the dozen? Like I said, they’re difficult to pull off, and they’re formulaic. Plus blood and gore is how they primarily scare you, and a lot of horror fans, including myself, find that distasteful. What makes them so appealing?

I think a lot of it has to do with the characters. Slashers have produced some of the most iconic characters in horror and in cinema: Norman Bates, Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers. Heck, Freddy Kreuger isso well-known that he’s made cameo appearances in movies parodying the 1980’s in one form or another. People love these characters as much as they’re scared of them, they love watching them in action and being terrified of them. They like to sit there and think, “What’s he going to do next? What’s he going to do next? What’s he going to do–AAAH!”

Studios are aware of that, as well as they are aware of how much people go back to see the old films (the better ones anyway) and see these beloved characters do what they do best. With huge fan followings like this, and how easy it is to make a horror movie under twenty million dollars with minimal special effects, they know people are going to come and see the films so they can see these beloved characters resurrected again and perhaps in a movie worthy of carrying the franchise’s name.

The problem with that is, these same studios may just be banking on the popularity of a franchise and its character or characters to draw in crowds. Take a look at Friday the 13th, or another horror movie that Michael Bay meddled in, Ouija (read my review here). Both of those sucked, but yet they still made money. I think the latter was because of very good marketing, but the former had the draw of the first Friday the 13th film in six years, and one not bogged down by sequels’ worth of mythologies. Problem was, they didn’t invest in a good story, like the first film did and most of the early films tried to do with varying success. Instead they gave it a passable story and then added in as much drugs, sex, nudity, swearing, and gratuitous death scenes as possible so that the audiences would stay interested.

The result was a waste of film that makes watching people defecate on public streets look more entertaining. And I’m very worried that these other films that are on the way will do the same thing. They’ll be made with just drawing in fans and their credit cards in mind and the results will be absolutely terrible. And no horror fan wants to see beloved characters treated that way.

Hoping for better films for all these guys, and more.

On the other hand, I like to imagine that some of these filmmakers are huge fans of the franchises and really are trying to give these characters the stories they should be in, stories that are worth investing seven dollars and two hours in. The Halloween movie supposedly has an interesting plot, and the one thing I’ve heard on the Friday the 13th sequel indicates it’ll take place in the 1980’s, when the series started and where most of the better films are set. Perhaps there is hope here.

Well, we’ll just have to wait and see…and pray that along with better sequels/franchises/whatever, we get some new material too (*cough* Hollywood, call me *cough*).

All for now, my Followers of Fear. I have to get ready for the High Holidays tonight, so I’ll be busy for a while, but I’ll write again when I can.

See you next year, and Shanah Tovah (that means “Have a good year” if you don’t speak Hebrew).

Twenty-Five Hundred Comments!!!

Posted: September 9, 2015 in Living and Life, Writing
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I’m pleased to announce that as of this morning I’ve passed another blogging milestone. I now have twenty-five hundred-plus comments on my blog. Thank you to Joleene Naylor whose comments on some of my most recent posts helped me get to this point this morning (check out her blog here by the way, because it is awesome).

I say this every time I reach a milestone, but I remember for the first year or so of this blog, I rarely got any views, maybe one or two every other day, if I was lucky. A comment was even rarer. At times I was tempted to shut down my blog. I had gotten into blogging to build an audience for my books, and yet I was finding it difficult to get anyone to read my work when it was free. What was the point?

But as time went on, I got better at blogging, I blogged more often, and more people started finding me.The number of people reading my posts grew, as well as the number of people subscribing, liking, and of course commenting on my blog. Do I have a ravenous fan base who is begging for my next book every second of the day? No, but I’m happy for the audience that I have and I think I’m getting there anyway.

Anyway, I’d like to thank everyone who has been helping me and supporting me this whole time. It means a lot to me and I can’t show my gratitude enough for how much you’ve helped me along these past four years. I hope that you continue to support me in the future as I work hard to become a great and terrifying (and possibly full-time) novelist.

Cheers!

#FirstLineFriday

Posted: September 4, 2015 in Novel, Writing
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It’s Friday again, so you know what that means! It’s #FirstLineFriday! Here are the rules if you don’t know them: on Fridays, you write a blog post titled #FirstLineFriday and write the rules down. You then post the first line or first two lines of a potential work, a work-in-progress, or a published story. Then you ask your readers to give their thoughts on the lines.

This week’s selection is from an idea for a novel I had earlier this week involving chimeras. I think it has potential:

Wes glanced up from the bed at Tommy, who was nervously grooming himself in the mirror. If tonight’s job goes well, Wes thought happily, I’m going to marry that man and we’re gonna hightail it out of this fucking city.

That probably wasn’t the beginning you thought it was going to be, was it? If so, good. I love defying expectations.

But what are your thoughts on this? Notice any errors I should fix? Does this seem like something you would read? Let me know in the comments below.

That’s all for now, my Followers of Fear. It’s almost the weekend, so the chances of me posting something this weekend are pretty high. Until then, have a good one!

“Stuck in the Horror House”: Finished!

Posted: August 30, 2015 in Novelette, Scary Stuff, Writing
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I’ve just finished a new story, “Stuck in the Horror House” (not to be confused with a previous short story of mine, “Hunt in the Slaughterhouse”). I’ve been working on this story for weeks, and at one point I had to go back and start rewriting it because I was dissatisfied with the way the story was progressing. But now I’m glad that the first draft is finished. And it’s a long first draft too, 12,607 words, making it a novelette. Boy, when I have a story to tell I just don’t care about word count these days, do I?

“Stuck in the Horror House” is a story inspired by an episode of Ghost Adventures. In one episode, the GA Crew investigates a factory that has been converted into a haunted attraction, and one of the hauntings there was purported to be an actual demon, summoned by an actor there dressing up as Satan and reading verses out of an actual Satanic Bible and attacking said actor whenever he had the chance. That story stuck around with me, and so I ended up adapting it into a story. In this case though, I made the story about a bunch of teenagers who sneak into a haunted attraction during the off-season and one of them does a summoning ritual on a lark, which leads to all sorts of trouble. The protagonist of the story is telling his story to a psychiatrist, leading to questions about whether or not he’s imagined everything or if there’s truly a demon afoot.

Now, as far as first drafts go…I’ve had better ones. Even in the writing I could see places where this story can be improved in future drafts. But, like Ernest Hemingway said, most first drafts are shit. A lot of writing is revision, and that’s when the story really starts to shine and entrance. The first draft is laying down the bare bones so that they can form something extraordinary later on.

In the meantime though, I’m excited for where this story could go in future drafts. I definitely feel like with subsequent drafts it could make for a very terrifying story. Maybe it’ll even go into Teenage Wasteland, seeing as most of the main characters are 18 or 19 years old. We’ll see what happens.

In the meantime, I’m taking a break to watch a scary movie I recently found online. I might even write a review of it later. I also would like to write a blog post or two for my other blog, From the Voice of Common Sense, and I think I’ll take the time to write an article for Self-Published Authors Helping Other Authors before starting another story and then working on editing Laura Horn.

Yeah, I’m busy. And that’s not even including work or searching for whatever comes after my internship is over. And the way I work, I doubt I’ll ever slow down. Until next time, my Followers of Fear. Have a great rest of your weekend!

#FirstLineFriday

Posted: August 28, 2015 in Novel, Writing
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It’s Friday, which means Shabbat, the weekend, enjoying what might be the last real week of summer while you still can…and oh, #FirstLineFriday! Here are the rules: on Friday you write a post with the title like I have above, and you post the first or first two lines of a potential story, a story-in-progress, or a published story. Then you invite people to give their thoughts on the story.

Last week I did the first two lines of the second novel in a trilogy I hope to write someday (I did the first actually a while back, if I remember correctly). Here’s the third book’s opening:

A girl who looked to be about sixteen, slim and lithe, dressed in jeans, a dark jean jacket and a glowing neon mask, stepped into the DJ booth twenty feet above a crowded dancefloor. The club’s patrons roared for New York’s hottest young DJ, unaware that in reality this girl had been considered middle aged when their grandparents were probably still in high school.

Thoughts? Grammatical errors? Sentences too long? Let me know in the comments below.

All for now. I hope to be around later in the weekend, so keep an eye out for me, my Followers of Fear. Not a literal eye though; as cool as eye patches are, I don’t want you to have to get one on my account.

Doubt: An Unusually Powerful Weapon

Posted: August 25, 2015 in Living and Life, Novel, Reflections, Scary Stuff, Writing
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Lately I’ve been reading Stephen King’s Revival on my Kindle, and I have to say, while a bit more on the science-fiction side and a bit less creepy than other King novels like The Shining, Misery, or IT, I find Revival to still be a very interesting read and I’m looking forward to seeing how it ends.

While I do believe Revival’s not as creepy as other King novels, there is one part of it that is very unsettling: early in the book a lot of time is spent on the question of whether God exists or not. I’m not going to say what any of the main characters decide one way or another in case you haven’t read this one and want to read it sometime soon, but the way they question their beliefs in God and some of the conclusions they come to, coupled with King’s ability to immerse us almost completely in the minds of the narrator, causes us as the reader to question our own faith in whatever god or gods we choose to believe in, if we do.

Doubt. In some ways, a little bit of doubt in our strongest-held beliefs can be one of the most anxiety-inducing things in the world. All we’ve known or believed is called completely into question, and the power of that can send us completely reeling, make us terrified of the possibilities if we come to the conclusion that our beliefs are as false as a three-dollar bill. Even worse is that this doubt is housed entirely within our own minds, so outside attempts to erase that doubt are not always very effective. It’s like standing on the very tip of a structure that until now you thought was completely solid, but suddenly you discover cracks there and that the structure is in danger of caving in on itself. Your friends, your family, your religious leader, and even your favorite YouTube stars (why not?) can put some wood beams under the stones and put sand in the cracks, but they’ll only last so long. Fixing the structure, or letting it fall to ruin, has to come from within.

This makes me think of the lengths people will go to silence doubt. Anyone doubts America’s exceptionalism in the world (which I admit is a philosophy I find silly, seeing as many nations have said the same things about themselves and have later lost power or disappeared from the face of the Earth), those in favor of the philosophy will shout out those who oppose it and say they are un-American or even trying to ruin the country. A parent thinks their kid doesn’t believe in the religion that will get them into heaven, they will surround them with prayer and texts and church music until those kids sing with joy of God. Someone suspects their partner is being unfaithful to them, they will go to any lengths to either prove or disprove this theory, sometimes to the point of paranoia. A member of a secret group or spy ring thinks another member might be disloyal, they make that member go through some sort of bizarre and often sadistic test to ensure loyalty to the cause (at least in espionage novels; I have no idea if this happens in real life, though I wouldn’t be too surprised if it did).

What doubt can do to you.

What doubt can do to you.

Doubt is powerful, its effects on us are powerful, and our efforts to eradicate doubt can border on the extreme sometimes. You can see why a writer like King would use it in the first part of a story. He knows how scary it is, the effect it can have on people. And over the years and through age, experience, and reading, I’ve come to the realization of how powerful doubt can be as well. I even have an idea for a novel where religious doubt plays a major role. I have a feeling it’s going to be quite the unsettling story, whenever I get around to writing it. I doubt it’ll be anytime soon though.

Yeah, I went there.

In any case, it’s pretty obvious that doubt might be as much a part of the horror writer’s toolbox as any of the other fear-inducing tools and devices we have on hand. In a way, it’s also much stranger, because unlike the other fear-inducers, you can’t fight it or flee it for survival. After all, doubt is a product of the human mind, it exists within you. And you can’t outrun your own mind, can you?

And that, my Followers of Fear, might be the scariest part of all.

Plenty of Reason to Hope

Posted: August 23, 2015 in Living and Life, Reflections, Writing
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Andy Weir. E.L. James. Christopher Paolini. What do these three names have in common? If you guessed successful novelists, you’re close. They’re all successful novelists who were originally self-published, their stories caught on, and they eventually began to catch on and one day they woke up with millions of people reading their books, movies in the works and great things in their future.

I’m not sure I’m going to get the millions of people and the movies in my lifetime, but just hearing the success stories of these authors gives me plenty of reason to hope that this could happen to me some day. Self-published writers are having success stories everyday. I even heard of a teen in England whose fanfiction about her and a bad boy version of one of the members of One Direction became a smash hit and got a publishing deal (yeah, I didn’t know that sort of thing was possible either until I heard of it). It’s quite incredible how people can become successes over time in a field that used to be despised by establishment writers.

How do these writers get their successes anyway? Well, it’s different for each one. Andy Weir published through his blog, and it attracted a bunch of readers who wanted to read The Martian in Kindle form. E.L. James published her Fifty Shades trilogy as an e-book and used the emerging field of e-readers as well as word of mouth among erotica fans to gain a following. Christopher Paolini toured around the United States, visiting schools and libraries and dressing up like a man from the Middle Ages to get books into the hands of kids and teens, until the son of author Carl Hiassen found Eragon, loved it, and brought it to his dad’s publisher’s attention. And, if that story about the 1D fanfiction is true, then I think she posted it on WattPad, which is kind of like the YouTube of writers (and which, along with Goodreads, I need to use more often).

One thing that these all have in common, the authors made it easy for interested readers to get their hands on their work. And their work was really good (though from what I hear Fifty Shades is very poorly written), which made people want to read more and keep coming back for more. Thus it sometimes snowballs until…success, I guess.

Now does this happen for all authors? Obviously not, or we’d all be reading books by people whose works may be anything from really good to just plain dreadful. But it could happen to any author who puts in the right amount of dedication to their writing and marketing and who has a little bit of luck on their side.

God knows I’m working hard on all of those when I’m not working or looking for jobs. I’ve had sales that have been very successful and gotten my books into the hands and Kindles of plenty of new readers. And I’m working on an audio book of Reborn City, which is probably my most popular novel right now, so that could open up a whole new field for me: those who like a good story on long car trips or while jogging. And I’ve got a story or two I think would do great as serials published on WattPad and on Kindle, though I’m not sure when I’ll get around to writing them.

And of course, I tell people. I let them know about the books I’ve got out and if they’re interested I give them my cards so that they know where to find them (I’ve already gotten two or three people at work to promise me they’ll get copies of at least one of my books as soon as possible). And I’m always looking for new ways to get readers interested, and usually they work.

So maybe someday I can be, if not the next Stephen King, then maybe the next Christopher Paolini or Andy Weir. Selling enough books to write full time, expanding my media so that more people are exposed to me and maybe find a new favorite author. Anything’s possible. I just got to keep writing, keep working hard, and above all never lose hope.

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