Writer In Progress

I was talking about this last night to a couple of people, and it got me wondering...in shapeshifter books, do you prefer your love scenes with both persons in human form, one in shifted form, or both shifted (assuming they can both shift)? Or does the thought of shifted heroes/heroines engaged in sex make you kind of squidgy?

Edited to clarify: I'm not speaking about the dragons, although some of them do shift. I'm more looking ahead to the new series, which will have a shapeshifters in them. I'm just curious to see what line people draw in shapeshifter books.

Slowly, every so slowly, this book I'm so late on delivering is progressing. That is my good news for the week--that and the fact that I'm still sane (mostly). Yay!

I'm in the process of compiling a master list of online sites/blogs/forums that are interested in romance, and steampunk (not necessarily together). Once I have the master list compiled, it'll be passed on to Jodi, my publicist at NAL, who is coordinating a huge campaign for Steamed. More about that later (you guys who don't run a romance site or review books shouldn't feel left out--you'll benefit from the official PR, too).

Speaking of which, if you run such a site, drop me a line.

There's also a DO NOT SEND list for sites/blogs/individuals that have trashed my books or me, but the less spoke about them, the better, right? I totally agree. I'm also trying madly to get a couple of handcrafted items done in time for Christmas, although a look at the calendar has me flinching. Where do the days go, that's what I want to know! If anyone finds them, could you send me a couple of month's worth of the little buggers?

Feel free to post your own goodly news here. You may include your own DO NOT SEND list of people or things that are riding your nerves, if it makes you feel better.

Today's Dishy Guy is Akim.



Now, while he's all yummy and stuff, he has...oh, how shall I put it...he has VEINY ARMS.



I realize that he can't control his veins any more than the rest of us can, but still, I can't help but wonder--can you overlook the bulging veins to appreciate all of Akim's many fine qualities? Like his willingness to take shots stark naked while apparently dangling in some bondage situation?



'Tis something to puzzle over, hmm?

I don't know if other people's dogs watch tv, or even notice TV, but Hannah liked Spongebob (YUCK) and the Dog Whisperer. By liked I mean, if either show was on she would perk up her ears and turn her head toward the set, peering out through her cataracts. I know how the dog experts online hate Cesar Milan, they say he's too old school and possibly mean, but Hannah liked him.

And while it doesn't mean I like everything about him, I like him too. Because he reminds me of my dad. Which is pretty old school, come to think of it.

I probably have dozens of stories that start, "Once I was with my dad and there was this dog..."

More than once when we were out riding bikes in the county, some big farmdog came charging out barking and snarling, and Dad would not really holler, but call out, "Go lay down." And the dog did, every time. Once we were in the bike-a-thon when this happened. The other riders could hardly believe it when this big collie-shepard mix made a big u-turn in the driveway and went back to his house without a yap of protest, but I expected it. It never in life occurred to me that a dog would choose to not listen to my dad.

Anyway, we never had a dog when we were kids because we lived in an apartment. But the neighborhood had a dog, a black and white mongrel, possibly a terrier-border cross with a tablespoon of spaniel, named Barney. Dad made us a toy to play with Barney. He took a broken toy garden hose that the hoe blade had snapped off of and tied a string to the end, and on the end of the string he tied a leather triangle cut from the chimney of a pair of his worn out work boots. We could pull the leather bait around and Barney would chase it. It was tremendous fun for us and Barney. We called this game, "Fishing for Barney."

Cobie mostly ignores the TV, except for the time he tried to attack Charlie Manson through the glass, and once when I was watching "It's Me or the Dog," and Victoria had this thing called "Fox on a Stick." Fox on a Stick is a toy fox on a string tied to a pole. It looked quite a bit like Fishing for Barney.

Turns out these things are called flirt poles now, and are apparently sometimes used for training fighting dogs? but yahnah. Cobie's a lover, not a fighter.

So yesterday I made a Fishing for Cobie pole. I used the handle of a mop the former homeowners left behind, and a bit of rope, and the one leather glove remaining after Cobie carried off the other one and buried it, which I take to mean he likes it. And he had a blast chasing that glove in circles.

Now somebody can come along and tell me how dangerous this toy is, even though I took it easy because he is still just a pup. But until then I can feel pleased that I finally did something right--or at least not traumatic--for the poor doggy dude.

Michael Arnzen will be a guest lecturer at this summer’s Odyssey workshop. He has been publishing outrageous horror fiction, SF, poetry, literary criticism, instructional essays on writing, and offbeat humor since 1989. Across his career, Arnzen has won four Bram Stoker Awards, an International Horror Guild Award, and several "Year's Best Horror Story" accolades and reprints. His novels include Play Dead and Grave Markings. The best of his short stories and poems are collected in Proverbs for Monsters, which won the Bram Stoker Award in 2007. Always the experimentalist, his writing has appeared on Palm Pilots and postcards, short art films ("Exquisite Corpse") and creepy online animation. His novel Play Dead even inspired a deck of custom-designed playing cards.

When he's not writing, Arnzen teaches suspense and horror writing fulltime in the MFA degree program in Writing Popular Fiction at Seton Hill University, near Pittsburgh, PA. He holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Oregon, where he studied "the uncanny" in popular culture, as well as an M.A. in English from the University of Idaho, where he wrote his second novel. Arnzen sits on the editorial board for two literary journals associated with genre fiction (Paradoxa and Dissections) and has edited college literary magazines and more. He is presently working on a guidebook for authors, a book of literary criticism, and several horror titles.

Arnzen taught humor in fantasy at Odyssey in 2007 and students had a lot of laughs. Look for "Stripping Away the Mask"—his essay on crafting horrifying scenes in fiction—in the recently published book, The Writer's Workshop of Horror (Woodland Press, 2009).

Once you started writing seriously, how long did it take you to sell your first piece? What were you doing wrong in your writing in those early days?

I started taking my writing seriously when I was in college, I think, because whenever I wrote for my teachers, they started taking it seriously and that surprised me. I always just told stories and wrote poems because I enjoyed splashing around in the kiddie pool of language. But teachers were rewarding me with praise and healthy comments about how I could improve, and it made me sit up and take notice: hey, I thought, maybe I really can do this just like all those people I have been reading all these years!

But I think we make a mistake just calling ourselves "writers." What really happens -- though this is metaphorical -- is that we join the larger conversation that our genre is having with ideas. We start to talk back to books, through books. We join a "groupthink" tank called genre fiction. And so if I was doing anything wrong in the very early part of my career, it was thinking that writing was all about me. My sales took off once I started realizing that I wasn't just writing for myself: my audience's needs mattered just as much -- if not more -- than my own. And you have to earn it. You can't just walk up to a group at a cocktail party and start yapping; you sort of have to respond to someone first, or fill a silence. That's what getting started is sort of like in this business. It isn't so much that we have to take our writing seriously: it's that we have to take our reader seriously.

Why do you think your work began to sell?

I think editors have this intuition when they read manuscripts: they don't analyze stories as much as we think they do (on the first read anyway): they just listen to the author and trust their gut reactions to the author's voice: does it sound genuine? does it read like already published work? is this writer someone the average reader will really trust to tell a good story?

Most people would say it takes "talent" to produce writing that sounds that genuine, to have a voice that crafts stories instinctively into mature vistas that sweep readers off their feet. I think it takes a combination of good luck and hard work to produce that talent.

Studious research and making a lot of happy mistakes through trial and tribulation -- and having the stamina to keep stumbling forward -- is the key to success when you're getting started. Research is probably where most new writers fail, because it takes a lot of time. You have to research not only the background of your stories -- but the whole literary landscape. It takes a full immersion in the culture you hope to address as a writer to join the wider literary conversation of our world. You have to go to the library and read everything. Take college classes in literature if you can, or download a booklist and force yourself to read through all the classics. Rent every movie you can with your genre's markings on it, even if you can't stomach it, and force yourself to understand what it is that makes your genre what it is. Talk with as many writers as you can, through conventions and workshops like Odyssey. You have to absorb the "groupthink" I was talking about before, and this is the only way to really get the "deep structure" of storytelling, genre, and the marketplace. Once you do that, you pick up on literary strategies more naturally, and you adopt the voice of the writer -- a voice that is at once your own, and yet also an echo of the other wise voices you've listened to over the years.

What's the biggest weakness in your writing these days, and how do you cope with it?

I'm too prone to substitute fiction for facts. If I don't know something I'll make it up rather than research it. This is not so much laziness as it is a time-saver. I should know better. I cope with it by letting my manuscripts cool down for a few days after I write them. Then I scrutinize them, playing the role of "skeptical reader" and anything that sounds like b.s., I will mark and try to flesh out with more research to see if my b.s. holds water or not. What inevitably happens is that I get excited about what I discover during my research, which starts giving me more and more ideas I can put into my fiction, and it makes the revision process as much fun as the writing process was the first time.

Your CD, Audiovile, is an hour-long spoken-word performance of 16 short stories and poems set to dark and quirky music. Where did this idea come from? How do you encourage writers to express themselves in other ways besides with pen and paper?

Shortly after my book of flash fiction, 100 Jolts, came out, a few readers inquired about whether or not there was an audiobook version available. My publisher -- the great folks at Raw Dog Screaming Press -- had seen me read stories at conventions, and asked if I would be willing to narrate some of the short stories. I immediately realized that if I did that, I would want to avoid doing it the way most audiobooks are done, because I frankly feel they are sort of boring. So I jazzed the stories up with background music (relying on some old instruments my wife and I had gathered over the years). And the more I experimented with audio, the more the background music moved into the foreground. I started rehearsing the stories to the beat and using some of the lines like a chorus in a song. And something really unique came out of this process.

I won't say it's better than Led Zeppelin, but anyone who has listened to Audiovile has responded with enthusiasm over how quirky it is. The harshest critique I heard was from my dad, who grinningly said "It sounds like you're having too much fun."

But that's my goal! I could have bombed and made a complete idiot out of myself, and maybe some people think I'm nuts for doing something so over-the-top in the first place, but I think writers need to take these kinds of risks, and to push themselves into trying out different artistic forms. Writing is art, even when you're expressly doing it for professional pay, and you need to cultivate the artist inside of you. It might lead to finding a new or unique audience, too. You have to think of yourself as a genre entertainer to some degree, while also earning merit in the eyes of your audience. But experimenting with different arts -- even if they take the form of doodles in a notebook margin or poems you scratch out on cocktail napkins -- are all forms of expressed dreamwork and it will always pay back in your writing on some level. Creating Audiovile made me work my brain in ways I never had to before, and now I'm far more conscious of the cadence of my prose and the sound of my "voice" and the structure of my stories than I ever dreamed possible. And it renewed my love of performing at readings, which I always try to enjoy. I got into this business because it's fun for me, and Audiovile was a sheer creative burst of experiment that really renewed me. It took me a year of hard work to cobble together something of quality, but it was joy all the way. And it renewed my love for music, something that was waning in my life, along the way, making me a happier person.

With works like Rigormarole: Zombie Poems and Gorelets: Unpleasant Poems, how do you fuse horror and humor in only a few words?

This is a really difficult question. Part of it is just instinct. Horror and humor both have to feel spontaneous to work. But another part of it is really loading your language so that the assumptions and meanings and implications are all doing the work -- so that what's not on the page matters as much as what is there. I could go on and on about this, but your interview would wind up reading like a dissertation on death, the implosion of the universe, and everything.

Your e-mail newsletter “The Goreletter” actually won a Bram Stoker Award for Alternative Forms. What are your thoughts about having a Web presence? Do you feel it’s necessary for a writer to maintain a Web site and/or blog? Are there advantages and/or disadvantages?

It is necessary. It's like having a shelf in pubic to display your books -- only you're also displaying other things around those books too -- all of which serves to draw a reader's attention to your work. But I have to say: too many writers get sucked into this game of drawing attention, but never really having anything to say once the spotlight is really on them. You need to make your writing and storytelling central to your identity to be a writer, and if you're going to be using the web as a "platform" for your career, you have to provide writing on your website somehow -- whether in the shape of a free story, a giveaway book, whatever. I try to treat the web as a "sketchpad" and place to practice my creativity, since I would imagine that's what readers are really wanting from me, whether new to my work or old fans. I make "The Goreletter" the "takeaway" from my site because it helps me to think of my work on the web as generating an end product -- a newsletter that features the best of all those "sketches" I put in my blog and in my gallery and on twitter. Beyond that, your website is the doorway into your publishing history and your other books, so use it to display your titles (but don't be too arrogant about selling them).

As a guest lecturer at this summer's Odyssey Workshop, you'll be lecturing, workshopping, and meeting individually with students. What do you think is the most important advice you can give to developing writers?

I have two. The first is a mantra you should adopt: THERE ARE NO WASTED WORDS. Believe it. Everything you write makes you stronger. Even the garbage you wad up and toss in the trashcan.

The second bit of advice is at once quite simple, but more difficult to explain. But it is imperative, I think, to remember that writing needs to be genuinely creative. A genre allows you to take a certain degree of license -- a certain degree of freedom to experiment with things without fear of censorship or reader skepticism. In horror, it's license to get nasty. In fantasy, it's license to dream up settings or invent impossible forms of power called "magic." In science-fiction, that magic is called imaginary "technology." There's more to it than that, but those are just snappy examples. But my point is this: FLAUNT YOUR CREATIVE LICENSE. It's the only way to generate something truly original and unforgettable. Do not get too concerned with publishing or making the rest of the world happy with "correctness" when you're drafting. You can always edit it later. If you experiment and fail, well see advice #1 (there ARE no wasted words!). Even the most polished and perfect piece of genre writing will fail if it does not entertain, and if you do not let your genre freak flag fly you will never truly win over an audience. Try to write something no one else is doing in that genre; the sort of book you wish would be on the shelves, but isn't, and you'll be moving in the right direction. It takes courage to do new things like this, and it's risky, but your genre permits it. Readers pick up genre books because they want the writer to meet certain needs and one of those needs is originality of concept. You'll never be original if you don't take advantage of the freedom to experiment that your genre offers you!

What's next on the writing-related horizon? Are you starting any new projects?

A new novel is always in progress, but I'm never comfortable discussing work in progress until it's close to publication, because I hate to giveaway surprises. I've got my writing fingers in lots of pies right now, though: short stories will be out in anthologies in the year ahead -- like Darkness on the Edge (tales inspired by Bruce Springsteen songs!) from PS Publishing, or Armageddon Lightshow (stories about lightning!) from Bloodletting Books, or the wonderful He is Legend, a Richard Matheson Tribute Anthology which was just picked up for mass distribution by Tor Books. You'll likely see my non-fiction project, The Popular Uncanny, out before too long.

I hope interested readers will drop by my website, http://www.gorelets.com, to see whatever I'm up to lately.

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For more information about Odyssey, its graduates and instructors, please visit our website at http://www.odysseyworkshop.org.

This sounds a lot like fingerprinting the brain. But I think it must apply only as long as an author never suffers a brain injury or other radically transformative event like giving birth or...college?

What do you think?

Okay, I can understand if you want to commit suicide during the holidays, I really can. But--do consider the consequences.

I was driving on a Houston freeway this morning, in the fog. I'm used to the usual crazies and thought nothing could startle me. I was wrong. This motorcyclist changed lanes in front of me, came up from behind on my left and swerved so close past my front bumper I think he touched it while darting to the far right lane. What shook me up was his position on the bike. He was laying as far back as he could with arms outstretched behind him, steering with his legs and body only. If he had miscalculated only a fraction on that slippery surface there is no way in hell I could have prevented myself from killing him. I was on the verge of tears the rest of the way home. If I would have killed that fool, I would have been an emotional wreck for many years to come. Maybe he was just joy-riding, or perhaps he really does have a death wish. But at what cost? I don't believe he cares what he will do to others with his carelessness.

I've witnessed the aftermaths of several suicides. The wakes they leave behind are never pretty. And years later, what people remember most are How that person died, not how they lived.

It takes more courage to keep living than it does to disconnect with life. I was once part of a suicide hot-line where they taught us to tell callers, "Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem." Guess that's one way to think on it. I know a lot of people hang on just because of their pets...seriously. That doesn't get you outside the depression box, however. Lately, I've realized that depression is a bad habit. Bad habits, I've been told, can be broken by substituting with a good habit. Hard to do, I know, but worth a try. Self-pity is an ugly thing. And it's counter-productive too. Try removing it from the equation of your thinking. Get out of your routine, somehow.

I've signed up for Big Brothers & Sisters of America. There's lots of volunteer opportunities out there, and tons of other creative ideas and new adventures in this world. Don't give up on yourself. And please don't consider suicide. It ruins more lives than just your own, and that isn't kind. Be kind to yourself--it's good karma :)

December has already been a wild, hard month. One of those months that’s both good and bad and such a complicated blend of the two that you can’t decide if you can tolerate this shade of gray or if you’ll end up hating it.

Stupid Smarch weather.

Also? FUCK CANCER!

( Cut so I don't have to get mad at anyone who complains about one un-cut post... )

It's good news day again, so let's jump right into the goodish stuff.

The holiday trailer I made for NAL is now available here (my bit is in the fourth segment). I had far too much fun making it, so I hope you all enjoy it.

It's been wickedly cold here in the PNW (it was all of 14 out when I got up this morning), but sunny, and I'll take sunshine however I can get it. I'm also using a brand new SADD lamp that actually managed to clear up a headache I had been nursing for the last few hours. It's really amazing how a little light therapy can perk up your mood.

The snow you see in the picture is from last year, by the way. Thus far this winter we've been snow-free.

The Ben and Fran book is progressing nicely, although I had to go back in today and make Fran's life a little more hellish, since I felt she was having things far too easy. The Christmas tree was put up without the hub swearing once, although the traditional holiday bloodletting was accomplished via the saw used to cut off the base of the tree (it wouldn't be Christmas without blood on the tree, now would it?). And although I'm saddened that my beloved old girl isn't here to rub her face in the tree, as she used to do every year, I've brought out her furry winter coat and set it near the tree in memory of her.

We won't go into how odd a blue dog coat looks there.

So, how's your Tuesday going? What's all the good news going down?

May I present Tito to you all?



He looks a bit peeved in the picture above, but I assure you he's worth the time spent eyeballing his pictures.



For one thing, he's got green eyes. GREEN EYES!



He also looks good naked. Er...the parts that I've seen. Not that I've seen him in person, but the parts I've seen online. That is, I haven't seen his PARTS online, just pictures of some bits of his naked flesh. As in chest. Like above. That's it, naked chest. Ahem. Where was I?



Oh, he also has that intense stare down well. That's always bonus points in my bits. BOOKS, that's always bonus points in my books, I meant to say.

My, it's a little hot in here, isn't it? Think I'll go find a fan or something...

How is it possible to feel so horrible, yet in the midst of it to discover the next (or at least a) BIG HONKIN' IDEA?

Big Honkin Ideas, for me, are not really a fantabulous single idea, but the place where two fairly decent (and often unrelated) ideas collide and form a premise. To that end, when I get an idea I text it to my gmail where I find it in the morning and transfer it to an index card and then place it in the index card storage box I call the Nugget Bucket, thereby (I hope) encouraging collisions.

Except it hasn't really worked...until now.

This is so astounding, so simple, so high concept. Why has nobody written this yet?

When the BHI came, I almost forgot to loathe myself for a second, but I remembered just in time.

Podcast #32 is now available for download here.

Patricia Bray was a guest lecturer at Odyssey 2009, where she lectured about the uses of the sidekick in fiction. In this podcast, the second of two parts, Patricia explains how the sidekick's characteristics can balance those of the protagonist, or contrast with those of the protagonist. She discusses the requirements for a good sidekick, and describes how the sidekick's character arc can complement or contrast with the protagonist's character arc. She explains the difference between a sidekick/protagonist story and a story with multiple protagonists. She also lists some of the very useful purposes a sidekick can serve in a story, such as making your protagonist more believable, providing an embodiment of the protagonist's motivation, and serving as the external conscience of protagonist. She also reviews the various mistakes an author can make in creating a sidekick. Patricia discusses sidekicks in short stories as well as novels, and explains when you might want to use the sidekick's point of view. You can find part 1 of Patricia's discussion of sidekicks in Podcast #31.

Patricia Bray is the author of a dozen novels, including Devlin's Luck, which won the 2003 Compton Crook Award for the best first novel in the field of science fiction or fantasy. A multi-genre author whose career spans both Regency romance and epic fantasy, Patricia has had her books translated into Russian, German, Hebrew and Portuguese. She is a two-time co-chair of the Southern Tier Writer's conference, and her articles on the writer's craft have appeared in numerous publications, including Broadsheet, Nink, STARbytes, and RWA's Keys to Success: A Professional Writer's Career Handbook.

Patricia lives in upstate New York, where she combines her writing with a full-time career as an I/T professional, ensuring that she is never more than a few feet away from a keyboard. Her latest novel is The Final Sacrifice, the concluding volume in The Chronicles of Josan, which was released by Bantam Spectra in July 2008.

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For more information about Odyssey, its graduates and instructors, please visit our website at http://www.odysseyworkshop.org.