Disaster Report

My laptop...my window to the internet and my writing machine...went kerflooey. About a week earlier, my wife's computer crashed harder than Evel Knieval jumping canyons. So suddenly, our 21st century lives have screeched to a stop, and the only way I can even access the internet is to get down on the floor and use the children's computer at their little desk.

Yes, this officially sucks.

Anyways, my writing is on hold until the geniuses at Geek Squad can repair my laptop. So far they have settled for shaking their heads dolefully and shipping it off to parts unknown. Sigh. Yeah, it's that bad. Thank God for Dropbox.

I have downloaded a Robert E. Howard collection to my kindle, and I guess I'll just read that until my laptop returns. I was about eighty percent through the last story for that ghost story anthology. Hell, of a time to have to take a vacation.

Oh well, back to Conan.

Happy New Year!

So 2011 is one for the books, and 2012 beckons with all it's possibilities.

2011 was a frustrating year for me, writing wise. I only wrote and published one piece in 2011, which was The Mushroom Man....and that got pulled along with the rest of the Shades stories as I have started to approach the finish of the Shades anthology. So publication wise, 2011 was a bust.

That doesn't mean that nothing got done, though. Actually, I wrote a large portion of a novel titled Dead Stop, and have written four never before seen stories for the upcoming Shades anthology. I'm currently working on the fifth. And I even got about twenty thousand words written on Argiope. So words got written, it's just that the vast majority of them never saw publication.

Hopefully, 2012 will be different.

When I finish the last story, now titled "Legacy of  Flies", I will start the publication process. And that is going to be the defining experience of this year. I have a lot to learn when it comes to publishing. I have seen some good self published works, but I have also seen some very amateurish attempts as well. So I definitely want to see to it I fall in the former catagory. That means lots of work, but I guess I already knew that.

I want this to be right.

2012 will be a year of changes as well. I will continue with the way I run this blog now, only updating when I actually have something to say. It works better that way. I will still consider the possibility of starting over with a new blog as well. Something more focused on just writing. Nothing is set in stone yet, but it seems to me that a lot of the personal stuff in this blog could just as well be put on facebook.

So there it is in a nutshell. Things have been slower than I wanted, but it looks like they will be picking up this coming year. I have a few other projects in mind as well. Photography, cover art, etc, so things will be busy.

I hope all of you have a great New Years out there and find ways to stay busy as well.

Happy New Years :)

Sometimes You Have To Start With The Ghost

So December has been a bit of an exercise in despair writing wise.

I backed up my deadline to allow me to finish writing "The Dance of the Ancients", but I had also discovered that a story I intended to put in the anthology didn't really count as a ghost story. So there I sat, still a story short. I wracked my brains for a new story, but everything I came up with either seemed trite, forced, or to be blunt...it plain sucked.

It just wasn't working.

Then I remembered how I came up with the story for "A Long Cold Forever of a Night". I started with my ghost, or in that case the photo of the ghost on the cover of the anthology, then built my story around her. So I got out my photo editor, went to old photos from the dust bowl because I knew they would be in the public domain, and started making ghosts. I figured that since it worked once, it was worth trying again. And sure enough, after playing around a little while I finally struck paydirt.

The one in the picture above is the one that inspired a story.

He doesn't have a name yet, but he has a story...now I just have to write it. I still need to work out details such as names of people and places, and a few plot elements, but I already have the general arc of the story in mind. And since this story just hit me about an hour ago, I guess I'm going to count it as a Christmas present from my muse. The lazy little bimbo will now probably take a vacation for the rest of the year, knowing her.

But the important thing is I have story...

...I just have to write it.

The Wall

Seven ghost stories have been written, only one remains until I can pronounce the anthology complete and go into full editing and publishing mode.

So naturally my muse has jumped a bus to Cancun....

This is a problem I have started to notice, and wonder if its just coincidence...just me...or a problem that other writers run into. I'm going to call it the "Almost Finished Paralysis".

I get a project about eighty percent done, and then suddenly it gets difficult to impossible. I have a ninety thousand word novel at about seventy thousand words. I have another novel that should be about a hundred and twenty thousand words at about ninety thousand words. And now I have an eight story anthology at seven stories...and just like the two novels I suddenly find myself running into all kinds of resistance.

Do any of you other writers out there ever face this phenomenon? 

This is really irritating!

Life Outside of Writing

While I have been productive as of late, being a househusband and a Dad demand much of a my time and attention as well. Of course, it occurs to me that kiddos may be trainable....



Not bad, eh?

Of course with my luck, I'll get the girl trained all right and proper and some nosey jerk of a handsome prince will show up and cart her off to his castle. How is that fair? I do all the training and HE gets his floors scrubbed!

Oh well, I'm going to make a major push at writing over the upcoming weekend and we'll see how that works out. And while I'm at it, maybe I can teach the girl to do laundry :D

Waffles R Us

So, I'm going to waffle on my deadline.

I had set Dec 1st as the deadline to get stories in on the Shades series. As it turns out, I have written three in the past month and a half, and I'm working on a fourth one. With that kind of progress happening, I can back up the deadline.

Besides, I now have a real vision of the way I want the anthology to be, and I'm even starting to contemplate the forward for it. I want it to be nothing but ghost stories. Good ghost stories. So I'm going to to take the extra time to get that done. The bonus to that, is each non ghost story that gets bumped out of this anthology, counts as a head start on the final count of stories in the next non-ghost story anthology. So that's a win too.

Anyways. I'm working hard and making progress. So I'm happy.

Hammering the Keys.

I'm going to pull a marathon writing session this weekend. The idea is to try and finish the ghost story I'm currently working on, and maybe even the one I shelved earlier this week. I've just come up with a good ending to the current one, so that bodes well. Things always flow faster when I have a solid picture of the destination. The other one still is hazy on the ending part, which was slowing me down so I jumped to writing the current one.

But even if I finish them both, I suddenly face an unforeseen problem. Or at least unforeseen because I didn't stop and take strict account of what I had written.

I had forgotten that one of the ghost stories I had already intended to include in the Shades anthology wasn't really a ghost story. It was something else that happened to come across as a supernatural phenomenom to the main character until she figured it out at the end. So my ratio of 6 ghosts stories to 2 non ghost stories is actually 5-3. Even if I finish both of these this weekend, there will still be a black sheep, so to speak.

I'm going to have to think hard on this. I want to get something published soon. But on the other hand, I really wanted this anthology to be nothing but ghost stories. I'm even starting to conceptualize the foreward to it, on the basis that it will be all ghost stories. So at the moment my solution is to try and finish the stories I'm working on, and trying to go to the well one last time.

If I can finish the rough drafts to the two I have this weekend, that will give me three days until my self imposed deadline to try and come up with one more. But it has to be good. This anthology will have my name on it, so no filler crap posing as fiction. Oh well, I'll just work my tail off and see what I've got on Dec 1st.

I can do this.

Crunch Time

Alas, poor Muse. I knew him Horatio...

Okay, actually just the reverse is true. After my muse taking an unwelcome holiday for the summer and most of the fall, it has returned. It's been giving partial responses, but that still counts as inspiration.

And with a self imposed deadline approaching, those flickers of inspiration are good things.

I have nine days left, before I "put to bed" the final story selection of Shades. I have six ghost stories, two monster stories...and I'm hoping to replace one or both of those monster stories with ghost stories as well. I now have three idea for stories, that appeal.to me. But the deadline looms. And now I have the kids home all week for their Thanksgiving break as well.

So this is going to be tough.

But I'm going to plow ahead and stick to my deadline. I think I can do this, and if necessary can still go with what I've got...the 6-2 ratio. It's time to get something done.

I'm really thinking of writing a foreward and afterward to this collection as well. It will be some observations on ghost stories in general, and on what I was trying to do with the stories in this anthology. We shall see. For now, I need to just focus on writing while trying to also do what needs to be done to get through Thanksgiving.

Wish me luck :P

Ghosts and Novelettes

I've been downloading and reading a lot of ghost story anthologies for the dual purpose of researching the genre, and to get inspiration for my own work. What I've discovered so far, after going through a couple of collections, is that most ghost stories aren't really very scary.

Now a lot of that is due to presentation. It seems like a lot of ghost stories are told from this detached "just the facts ma'am" point of view, as if that adds some kind of authenticity to the story. Many of the older ones do this, especially the turn of the century ones from authors like Ambrose Bierce and Algernon Blackwell.  They are interesting reads, just not much in the way of suspense.

And most modern horror short stories aren't ghost stories at all. So that left a bit of a hole in my research effort.

I wonder if part of that is due to the ghost needing to be a character in the modern story. Short stories nowadays have to be five thousand words or less usually, which makes a big problem for the writer when it comes to character development.  A giant snake or mutant rat doesn't need much of a back story to be scary, since their very existence is supposed to be the scary part. But a ghost without a backstory just doesn't work very well...and back story eats into that precious word count.

This is one of the reasons that the Shades anthology will be indie when I publish it. Several of the stories are eight, ten, or even twelve thousand words long.. They need to be, for the ghost to have both character and impact AND for me to build a scene with suspense. So they are novelettes, which is a fancy word for the aforementioned seven-thousand to seventeen-thousand word story. I'm hoping the new indie market will see a resurgance of that form, since I think it allows the brief experience of the short story combined with the more in depth experience of the novella. Novelettes just fell out of fashion a long time ago because they took up too much space in pulp magazines.

Anyways, I'm still hunting for one more story for the Shades anthology. I've got "A Long, Cold Forever of a Night" out being read by proofreaders, then once I hear back from all of them I'll start the polishing work on it. Then it's back to hunting that one last story. Here's hoping I come up with something good soon.