Shiny writer things!

Thing the first: A panel! On March 25, I’ll be participating in Storycrafting Sessions: Drafting, a free one-day virtual conference hosted by Weeknight Writers. I’ll be on the 5:30 p.m. EST panel, “Nailing the Ending: How To Write a Satisfying Story Conclusion.” There are some other great panels lined up as well, and did I mention registration is free?

Thing the second: A publication! Issue 6 of Weird Horror Magazine is out this month, and it includes my flash story “Dead Maiden Chic,” as well as some badass cover art, which Super Great insisted on showing off with the help of some friends:

Thing the third: A sale! My short story “The Girl Who Welcomed Death to Svalgearyen,” which was originally published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, will be appearing again in audio format thanks to the lovely folks at Cast of Wonders. Release date TBD. This story is close to my heart and, of all the stories I’ve written over the years, still one of my absolute favorites, so I’m happy to see it get more love.

Thing the fourth: All the novels! A few weeks ago I finished revisions on a fantasy novel that has now been tossed out to first readers so I can figure out what else needs tweaking. Tentatively titled Barren Water, it’s a bit of A Handmaid’s Tale blended with magic and an Old West-ish fantasy world. And now I’m outlining a horror/supernatural romance novel where an opera singer recovering from an onstage nervous breakdown takes a job housesitting an isolated beach home during the off season only to become entangled with a ghost and a cursed piano. This will be my first stab at a novel-length work set in the contemporary world rather than a secondary fantasy world, so all new challenges!

The 2022 Writerly Recap

Oh hey, it’s that thing I skipped doing last year: the naval-gazing yearly round up! Here’s the quick and dirty version since there’s way too much other stuff I need to get done:

Published in 2022

Sold in 2022

The three stories above, plus:


Written in 2022

  • First draft of a new fantasy novel, tentatively titled Barren Water
  • One new short story, “Reasons This Is Not a Horror Story”
  • Revised and started submitting a short story written the previous year, “The Pitch Pipe Forest”

Other Writerly Things I Did in 2022

  • Did online readings in January and December for the awesome folks at The Story Hour
  • Participated in a great online panel (Crossroad Blues: Exploring the Boundary Between Life and Death) as part of Weeknight Writers’ Storycrafting Sessions: Horror, a one-day virtual conference

On the To-Do List for 2023

  • Revise the new novel, then throw it out to folks for feedback
  • Revise “Reasons Not a Horror Story” (after getting some more critiques in a few weeks) and start submitting it
  • Write some new short stories
  • Possibly revisit my novel The Ashdowners. I received an invite to revise and resubmit from a small-press publisher, but I need to let it simmer a bit before deciding if it’s something I want to tackle.
  • Who knows!? Let’s see what happens.

Story Reading & Story Release!

Two quick bits of fun news!

First, this Wednesday, December 7, I’ll be returning to The Story Hour, a weekly livestream of speculative fiction short story readings where I’ll be reading alongside author Rebecca Gomez Farrell. You can watch live via Zoom or Facebook (7pm Pacific Time, 10 pm for my fellow East Coasters), so hope to see you there! The reading will also be available to watch on Facebook afterwards.

Second, I’m thrilled to say that my horror story “Unraveling” is now out in Vastarien, vol. 5, issue 2! You can buy a copy of in print or electronic format from Grimscribe Press.

The blog lives!

It’s been a hot minute (or year) since I’ve updated this thing.

(blows off the dust)

(coughs)

This is getting to be an unfortunate habit.

So what’s new?

On the fantasy end of the writer ‘verse, I’m very pleased to say that my story “A Conspiracy of Cartographers” is now up at GigaNotoSaurus! Opera composers! Magical maps! A title stolen from some Tom Stoppard dialogue!

A Conspiracy of Cartographers

And on the horror end of things, on October 8 I’ll be participating in Storycrafting Sessions: Horror, a free one-day virtual conference hosted by Weeknight Writers. I’ll be on the 2:30 p.m. EST panel, “Crossroad Blues: Exploring the Boundary Between Life and Death.”

Hopefully I will have more news and ramblings to come in the near future instead of disappearing again.

In the meantime, I should probably be writing.

Short update on equally short stories!

First, my story “Ceiling Snakes and Slithering Saints” is now up at Mysterion! Inspired in large part by these two images—a rattlesnake named Buzz and some trusses pulling away from a church ceiling:

Second, the Kickstarter for In Somnio: A Collection of Modern Gothic Horror is now live. Please consider supporting this awesome project and the awesome writers and artists involved in it! Oh, yeah, I might have a story in there too.

Miscellaneous Updatery

Oh, right, I have a blog. Hi, blog.

So what’s been happening since I’ve been gone?

For starters, two shiny short story sales!

My fantasy story “Ceiling Snakes and Slithering Saints” will be appearing in Mysterion later this month. Thrilled to be making my second appearance there.

And just announced, my story “Self Storage” is going to be included in the awesome-looking anthology In Somnio: A Collection of Modern Gothic Horror, forthcoming from Tenebrous Press.

And that back burner novel idea I babbled about in my last post way back in February? It has been officially moved to the front burner since then. As in I am about 20,000 words into the novel now. After doing some research and preliminary worldbuilding, I decided to try out the Snowflake Method, which I’d read/heard a lot about but had never given it a whirl. Now I am why-wasn’t-I-doing-this-before levels of in love with it. It was fun! And I have an outline! There’s a plot! And I didn’t break my brain developing it!

Speaking of, I should probably be writing, huh?

Writing Isn’t Always Writing

Like many writers, I have a daily word count tracker. This month so far, I’m at -1,174 words.

Yes, negative wordage. But that’s not a bad thing. 

It can be too easy to get hung up on the idea that you must be constantly cranking out new words, and that anything short of meeting a daily word count goal means you have failed as a writer in some way. But there’s more to writing than piling on new verbiage.

Sometimes stories get longer in revision, but sometimes they get shorter. Sometimes you realize you have sentences, paragraphs, or even whole scenes that aren’t carrying their weight. That was the case with a horror story I was revising earlier this month. I wrote it back in the summer/early fall, and after having set it aside for a while, I saw several spots that either weren’t moving the plot or the characters forward, or that were muddying the thematic waters. Oh, and there’s also the part where the original ending was kind of cliché and needed to be changed. So technically, new words were written, but at the end of the day, I cut more words than I wrote, bringing the story down from 6,800 words to 5,900.

Another story I worked on this month was in that nebulous 1,500-word zone, where it’s a bit too long to be flash fiction, but it’s also too short to feel like a fully fleshed out short story. I wrote the story several years ago and could never seem to get it out of that zone. But something prompted me to revisit it, and whatta ya know, this time I was able to knock it down to 1,000 words and turn it into a proper bit of flash fiction.

The other thing I’ve been working on is developing a novel idea that’s been simmering on the back burner. With short fiction, I often dive in with only a vague idea and write an exploratory draft to figure out what the hell the story wants to be. But with novel-length works, I do better when I have more of a clue what kind of waters I’m jumping into. So first there was some research I needed to do (and I’m sure there will be more), and today I started doing some worldbuilding—working out the magic system and the setting and all that fun stuff—and jotting down some preliminary ideas on how the story might unfold. And then I shall confront my nemesis: plotting.

So that’s been my February so far: writing that kind of isn’t writing even though it really is.

The 2020 Writerly Recap

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these end-of-the-year round up posts on here. In fact, it’s been . . .

*checks date of last writerly recap*

Ok, so maybe only 6 years. But after 2020, it sure as hell feels like 84.

Despite the steaming pile of donkey balls that has been 2020, I managed to stay productive on the writing front. In large part because I’m fortunate to be in a position where the pandemic hasn’t upended my life anywhere near as much as it has many other people’s lives. Not to say it hasn’t been stressful or depressing. (Being a singer during a pandemic suuuuuucks, especially when most of your singing had been with choirs.)

We all have different ways of dealing with these things, and my way is to keep busy. I did hit an emotionally difficult patch back in the early fall where everything felt So. Damn. Hard. The thing that eventually pulled me out of my funk? Cataloging my book collection. Because I am a nerd and organization is my super power and so that’s what made me feel better.

But enough about that. Here’s what happened on the writing front this year:

Published in 2020

Written in 2020

I finished my steampunk fantasy novel, The Ashdowners—woo hoo! And I started querying agents—less woo hoo. Soul crushing process is soul crushing! But for now, at least, the search continues.

I started a new play—a comedy that, in a departure from my usual stuff, is actually not fantastical in nature. I worked on it in fits and starts early in the year, but sadly haven’t touched it since June. I’ll get back to it . . . eventually. With the pandemic-inflicted challenges live theater is facing right now, I just haven’t been able to keep myself in the right head space for the project.

And finally, I wrote lots of new short fiction this year: one brand-spanking new flash fiction piece that I’ll start submitting soon, one formerly 5,000-word story pared down to flash length (the aforementioned “The Dragon Queen of the Suffix County Public Library”), and four new short stories (or technically, three short stories and a novelette). Of those four, one is out on submission, two need some revisions, and one is likely going to be trunked unless I have a sudden burst of inspiration for how to make it something more than competent-but-predictable.

2021 To-Do List

Continue the agent search for The Ashdowners.

Revise those two short stories that I said need revising.

Maybe get back to that play.

Tackle more of the short story ideas darting around my brain like over-caffeinated squirrels.

Keep flinging my finished stories at magazines.

Do some preliminary research for a novel idea I’ve had on the back burner, then start outlining and writing.

More than anything, though, I look forward to tossing 2020 out the nearest window.

Story up at Mysterion

I’m very happy to announce that my story “This Is the Way the Prayer Ends” is now up at Mysterion!

This story began life as a one-act play. I don’t remember the exact impetus for changing it to prose. It might have been me thinking about how the production costs to mount the play would likely be too prohibitive given its short length (short for a play, at least). It also might have been because I had recently tried the opposite approach—turning my short story “Ghost Writer to the Dead” into a play—and wanted to see what I could learn from going the other direction.

When I turned “Ghost Writer to the Dead” into a play, I couldn’t just strip the story down to the dialogue and call it a day. Stripping out a lot of the pretty prose was part of the process, yes, but doing that laid the dialogue bare and made me re-evaluate how well that dialogue was doing its job when separated from the narrative supports of a short story. I had to consider which story elements could or should be done differently to take advantage of the visual and aural elements of the theater. I had to consider which details were important to include in the scene description and stage directions while also leaving room for a director, cast, and crew to bring their own vision and interpretation to the script.

Going the opposite direction with “This is the Way the Prayer Ends” was a much different experience. Turning the script into prose was like working from a highly detailed outline—not something I do very often with short fiction. (Hi, my name is Barb, and I’m usually a pantser.) The bones were there; I just needed to flesh out the bits between the dialogue. Instead of leaving room for a play’s cast and crew to bring their respective takes to the table, I had to be the cast and crew. It was up to me to build the props and scenery with words instead of with wood and tools and paint. Lighting, sound effects, costumes—all up to me to detail on the page. It was up to me to make choices about how the characters spoke and moved, and how they felt and reacted at any given moment.

Both experiments were worthwhile, not only for the pieces that resulted, but because of the new perspective the process gave me on the two formats. It was a really hands-on way to discover which techniques work in both play and prose and where your approach as a writer needs to change.

Literary Juggling Acts

As both a writer and a reader, I used to be a one-story-at-a-time kind of person. But in the last few years, I’ve discovered something awesome: I know how to juggle!

For much of my writing life, I always felt like I had to finish my current project before I could move on to the next one, even if I was so stuck that my forehead was leaving dents in the metaphorical wall I kept slamming it against. But a few years ago, I realized that unless deadlines are involved, I don’t have to do that.

So I started juggling.

When I got stuck on my novel, instead of trying to force my way through one painful word at a time, I started working on a play. When I got stuck on that, I switched back to the novel. And when I became stuck on that, I switched again, back to the play or on to a short story. Rinse and repeat. I found that whenever I circled back to a project, I wasn’t stuck anymore. I knew how to move forward. It was like my subconscious had used the time to perform a banishing spell on whatever issue had me previously bogged down.

Of course, in a recent post I mentioned how I had to stop working on short stories for a while in order to finish a novel. Because that’s another thing I discovered about my process: knowing how to juggle doesn’t necessarily mean you should be juggling. At that point in time, I wasn’t feeling stuck on the novel—quite the opposite, I was super excited about it—so there was no need for me to keep jumping back to short stories. Yet I kept doing it anyway because short stories are shiny and fun and distracting.

So that’s the writing part of this post: juggling can be a great way to keep yourself moving forward instead of wallowing in writer’s blockian anguish. But it can also keep you from finishing a project if you’re not careful.

Now for my more recent discovery: juggling with reading material!

As with writing, I used to feel like I had to finish a book before I dared pick up another one. In college, though, that was impossible. When one half of your double major is English literature, you have to read a crap ton of books each semester. So college forced me to not only juggle, but to read faster than I cared to (I’m usually a slow reader). But when it came to reading on my own time, I was strictly a one-book-at-a-time kind of gal.

Until I tried some more juggling.

Back in September, someone recommended a writing book that I really wanted to dig into (Screenwriting Is Rewriting by Jack Epps, Jr.). I was in the middle of reading a novel (Star Daughter by my awesome friend Shveta Thakrar), which normally would have dissuaded me from starting something else, but 2020 is the year of tossing norms out the window, so what the hell, right? I think it helped that the books were in different formats. Star Daughter was a hardback I could read while curled up in a chair with my morning coffee, while the Epps was an ebook I could easily whip out while doing stuff like brushing my teeth or waiting in the lobby of the doctor’s office.

Then I got really crazy in October and tried reading three things at once.

I doubt I’m going to graduate to having four books going at once. But I’m liking the balance of having a fiction and nonfiction read going simultaneously. Now maybe slow-reading me will be able to get through a few more books per year than usual.

Because juggling.