May was definitely a crazy month.

I’ve been working on a new story that’s a little outside my comfort zone. It’s not exactly hard sci-fi, but it’s a little harder than what I normally write. It’s set in space, and it requires quite a bit of fact-checking in order to make sure the science is accurate or, when it’s not accurate, it’s at least believable.

I wrote the story, researching as I went, and ended up with a story of 8000 words. Then, during my first pass at revision, I realized I had left a plot hole. So now my revision has really become a decent-sized rewrite. And I’m writing this story with a specific market in mind, so there is a deadline!

I’m also working on a rewrite of the story that a publisher commented “the characters are too mean.” It’s a good story, so I’m going through and rewriting the characters so they aren’t quite so hateful.

AND, I have several other calls for submissions that I’d like to write stories for because the themes are really fun or interesting, but I seem to be losing ground on writing rather than gaining!

I blame the new house. Home ownership is a time-suck. Okay, maybe it’s a little bit me, too, because I am professional procrastinator…but I think it’s mostly the house.

I am just as behind on my reading as I am on my writing. I’m working through New Poets of Native Nations, edited by Heid Erdrich, and I’m really enjoying it. It’s taking longer to read though, because poems are meant to be savored instead of devoured.

One thing that I did accomplish last month was to finally watch a movie I had been dying to see: Life.

I never see movies in theaters because few of them are worth the money, hassle, and discomfort of the theater experience. Life would definitely fall into that category. WARNING! SPOILERS AHEAD!

First, it really echoed Alien way too much for my taste. It seemed like a bad prequel or something.

Second, the main plan (the firewalls) was excellent. Brutal, but excellent. However, people still made stupid decisions. AND, they KEPT making stupid decisions. Each time someone would make a huge sacrifice with a good decision, someone would undo it with a stupid decisions.

Third, though the alien did scary things (crushed a guy’s hand like it was dust, shoved itself down a guy’s throat), the alien itself wasn’t scary looking. I guess maybe that’s more plausible. Just because something looks scary doesn’t mean it’s dangerous, so if we did run into something dangerous “out there,” it would probably look harmless. Still, I prefer my monsters to look monstrous. Calvin was clear, so he was like some gossamer starfish or something, and that’s a little harder to take seriously, especially when he walked like a starfish (walking like a spider would have made him ten times scarier). When he wasn’t attacking someone, he looked like something out of the My Little Pony universe.

Another big problem that limited the scariness was that they named the damn thing Calvin. It was cute at first, but once the monster was supposed to be a threat, it was silly. You cannot deliver lines like, “Calvin’s trying to get in,” or “Where is Calvin now?” and have them induce the same level of fear as they would if it was, “IT’S trying to get in,” or “Where is IT now?”

All in all, I was very disappointed, especially for something I waited so long to see. I would have been more disappointed if I had jumped the gun and went and paid to see it in the theater.

***

That’s it for this month! Hopefully when you come back next month, I’ll have all my stuff caught up. Yeah, right. We both know that’s not going to happen.

Stay spooky!

April was definitely not a good month for goals. Too much life, too little writing.

I didn’t have a new short story in development, but I did work on revision of a story that was rejected with the comment: “the characters seem awfully mean-spirited.” Yikes! Not the intent, for sure. The story centers on several men in a neighborhood who are good friends and like to bust each other’s chops. One of the friends is dealing with the supernatural (of course), and his friends give him some (what I thought was) good-natured ribbing about it. Apparently that’s not how it came across, lol, so I’m trying to adjust their tone a bit. Nobody wants the reader to hate the (non-villain) characters!

Though I didn’t get new writing done, I did manage to get some reading done. I read The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 24. My favorites stories were:

“The Curtain,” by Thana Niveau; I think this one got me on a reptile-brain level because I have a love/hate relationship with water. Not only have I never learned to swim, but that whole “throw them in and they’ll automatically learn” myth? Nope, not true. I’m not sure what age I was when it happened, but I was younger than three. I fell out of one of those floaty-rings in the deep end of a busy Florida pool. Nobody saw me, and I had to walk across the bottom of the pool to the shallow end. Do you know how long that walk is for the stubby legs of a less-than-three-year-old? Been scared to death of being *in* water ever since, but I enjoy being near water (on dry land).

“Between Four Yews,” by Reggie Oliver; You’d almost think this one was written by Lovecraft himself. I love that there are authors keeping more than the just the mythos alive, but that are also keeping the voice/style alive.

“Celebrity Frankenstein,” by Stephen Volk; This was the story I enjoyed the most. It’s clever and a new take on the Frankenstein’s monster trope, and it is a pertinent and funny allegory for our current social media society and celebrities who are famous for the sake of being famous. I loved it.

*****

For my English class this semester, we read “Sweet Tooth,” by Ian McEwan. The novel is NOT my cup of tea at all, but I did enjoy learning about one of the topics of the novel: the CIA once sought out creative writing programs and authors. Their intent was not to tell writers what to write, but to make sure the “right” writers were published and promoted and got their stories out to the public. That was certainly interesting to learn. Below is a link to an article about the program:

https://www.thenation.com/article/cia-tricked-worlds-best-writers/

The CIA is supposedly still involved in this sort of thing, through a program called Operation Earnest Voice. Of course, now the program focuses on social media and “social media influencers.” This program is still in the realm of conspiracy theory (it’s unproven), but given the CIA’s past involvement with creative writing AND the current modern phenom of things like Russian troll farms on Facebook, I believe it’s plausible that the CIA is still working the propaganda machine on social media.

Hey! Maybe that’s where I will find my next new story?!

*****

Okay, I’m off to finalize edits and get to work on something new.

Until next month, Carpe corpus!

Surprise, surprise! Here we are, still at the same old website. I have waved the white flag and admitted (partial) defeat.

I feel like I tried out a thousand web hosts. I think it was really only eight or ten, but it felt like more. Do you know how sick I am of building test sites? Gah!

I really didn’t like any of them. Most of them are too expensive. All of them are boring. They offer hundreds of templates but all of them look exactly alike. And most hosts don’t offer enough customization to make your website stand out. The exception was Squarespace. They almost had too much customization and I was a little overwhelmed by it. I couldn’t justify the price, though. If I was more than just an unknown starving artist, then I would definitely go for Squarespace, but I just can’t justify the price right now.

Of course, cookie-cutter sites seem to be the thing right now. I Googled several famous authors to look at their websites for inspiration and I was shocked at what I found. If you blurred out the book covers so that you couldn’t read who was who, then you wouldn’t be able to tell the websites apart. Seriously, check out these sites:

http://www.neilgaiman.com/

https://www.deankoontz.com/

https://www.evanovich.com/

https://www.stephenking.com/

https://www.jamespatterson.com/landing-page/james-patterson-home/

The only thing that makes Neil Gaimen’s and James Patterson’s websites stand out is they’ve got big old pictures of themselves on the page. Take those out and the page is pretty generic.

I guess that’s the trend these days, and I get it: keep it clean, easy to read, easy to navigate, focus on the books. Perfectly understandable. BUT, I don’t see any reason why the site can’t reflect a little of the author’s personality, too. I don’t want to go all glitter-blinkie Geocities on you, but I do want you to know you’re at MY website when you visit here!

JK Rowling’s website is a great example of the kind of website I’d like to create: https://www.jkrowling.com/

To that end, I’m staying with WordPress. I’ve purchased their paid hosting and, as I have time, I’ll be seeing what I can work out here. I love my current theme, but it’s going to have to go. My biggest problem with it is the “stay updated via RSS feed” text and link at the top of the page; it doesn’t work, and you can’t edit it. On top of that, this theme is ancient and no longer supported. So I’ll have to find some other theme I can work with within the customization parameters allowed by WordPress.

Enough with the website drama! On to the good stuff.

I’ve got two book recommendations for you this month (besides my stuff, of course). If you are a reader who prefers books with a literary bent, I recommend There,There by Tommy Orange. Mr. Orange was a guest at our writers conference this year and he was amazing! His book focuses on the stories of several different Native American characters whose lives all converge in an epic event at the end of the book. If you love work by David Truer or Louise Erdrich, you’ll love There,There by Tommy Orange.

On the genre front, I read Wastelands 2: More Stories of the Apocalypse, edited by John Joseph Adams. This is a great collection and includes authors both well-known (like George R.R. Martin & Orson Scott Card) and lesser known. I love anthos that include authors you know are going to hit it out of the park AS WELL AS letting you discover some new favorite authors.

In no particular order, my favorite stories in this collection were:

“The Tamarisk Hunter,” by Paolo Bacigalupi;

“Deep Blood Kettle,” by Hugh Howey;

“Animal Husbandry,” by Seanan McGuire;

“Ellie,” by Jack McDevitt;

“Dreams in Dust,” by D. Thomas Minton;

“Monstro,” by Junot Diaz;

“Biographical Fragments from the Life of Julian Prince,” by Jake Kerr, and

my favorite: “When We Went to See the End of the World,” by Robert Silverberg.

Definitely a thick collection with a variety of stories, so I’m sure you’re going to find several you really love.

That’s it for this month! Don’t forget to head over to Amazon and buy these latest collections that include my stories:

 

You can also follow me on Facebook!

Until next month, stay spooky, my friends!

https://giphy.com/explore/the-most-interesting-man

The best-laid plans, and all that…

I didn’t expect to still be posting a blog here. I parked my website here a year ago, intending to move it somewhere else…eventually. So when the year anniversary of that “temporary” parking neared, I decided I’d better get on it and find a new website home.

As you can see, it hasn’t quite worked out! The first host I tried didn’t allow enough customization. The second host allowed a wonderful amount of customization, but the pricing was sketchy. The price that led me to sign up was not the price after I created a site; I literally had one window open that said one price and another price within their editor. And when I sent an email to their customer service, I got back an email saying:

“XXX web host pricing may vary depending on time, currency, geographical location and eligibility. Eligibility is a combination of individual factors which are being defined by XXX’s Team responsible for preparing and advertising our Premium offers, at their sole discretion. At this point, we’re unable to give you any further insights regarding the particular mechanisms behind the Premium pricing in your location.”

I don’t know much about how the web hosting business works, so I don’t understand a lot about their response. Why does pricing vary depending on “time”? Do I get a better deal if I sign up after midnight? And Eligibility? The two different prices were on the company’s own website, not a promo email, and neither was a “sale” price. So what do they mean by “eligibility”, and specifically, eligibility determined by team members? Do I need to friend one of them on Facebook and exchange funny cat videos to get better pricing? And then that last part, about not giving me any further insights, that just sounds like they’re telling me to bugger off. So I did.

So I’m still looking. I found another provider that I’m trying to test out, but we’ve almost swung to the other end of the customization scale, and this host almost allows too much customization. I haven’t used HTML or CSS in years, and I don’t remember much, so too much customization means I can really screw things up good. Plus, the host is definitely on the expensive side (for my taste; for someone who wants absolute customization power, I think the price is worth it).

So I’ll keep looking and building test sites, in between work, school, and writing. Hopefully, you’ll be visiting a redesigned new site by next month.

On the writing side of things, I’m excited to announce that my short story, “Indian Uprising,” will be appearing in the Third Flatiron anthology, Hidden Histories. More information will be coming soon!

See you next month!

We’re having a “snow day” (cold day?) here, so what better way to spend it than updating the blog?

North Dakota is famous for its cold weather, so imagine our surprise when pretty much everything shut down today (January 29^th, as I write this) because of extreme cold. When North Dakota and Minnesota shut down for extreme cold, you know it’s got to be like a scene from “The Day After Tomorrow.”

I’m using the day to do some editing and complain about the weather on Facebook.

I’m editing a new story I wrote in January for a deadline of the 31^st. Yes, I know I’m cutting it close, but I’ll make it. The really great news is that it will be the SECOND of two new stories getting sent out, and January is only just ending! Go me!

Of course, you know I like to write short stories, but they have always been my favorite form to read. They are like a snack, and mixed-author anthologies are like a buffet; you get to sample all kinds of different stories from different writers.

My first read of 2019 was the short story anthology, The Best American Short Stories 2018. The editor for this edition was Roxane Gay, which made me even more excited for it because I’m a big fan. I even had the opportunity to take a fiction workshop she gave a few years back.

My favorites in this anthology were, in no particular order:

“Suburbia!” by Amy Silverberg;

“Items Awaiting Protective Enclosure,” by Tea Obreht (this is dystopian, by the way, and my absolute favorite of the collection);

“The Art of Losing,” by Yoon Choi;

“Boys Go to Jupiter,” by Danielle Evans.

My second read of 2019 was Best New Zombie Tales, Volume 1, edited by James Roy Daley. It’s a great collection with a variety of interesting takes on zombie lore.

My favorites, in no particular order:

“Wings,” by Jessica Brown;

“The Man Who Breaks the Bad News,” by Kealan Patrick Burke;

“Paradise Denied,” by John French;

“Pegleg and Paddy Save the World,” by Jonathon Maberry;

“Groundwood,” by Bev Vincent.

Next up, I’ll be diving into some of the books by authors coming to the local writer’s conference and trying to read my way through my pile of “The Best New Horror” anthologies. I haven’t quite decided what story I’m going to work on next on the writing front, but I do plan on brainstorming a bit on a Halloween project and see where that goes.

Until next time!
Carpe Corpus,
Brenda