The NaNoWriMo Problem

By Marc Watson

I’d like to offer an opinion that likely flies in the face of a lot of the things you’ve read about the craft of writing: writing prompts and word goals can be harmful, and run the risk of being creatively abusive.

Writing goals and prompts can absolutely be an effective method of motivating a lapsed author back into a proper habit-formed writing routine. Check almost any social media group regarding writing and you’ll find an individual declaring their 3000-word a day goal was passed! Or maybe it wasn’t reached and the rest of the community heralds the accomplishment or consoles the failed attempt with upbeat sentiment and praise. Don’t get me wrong, sentiment and praise are incredibly useful and inspiring, but the machine of the writing goal itself can absolutely be harmful.

Writing is like parenting; if there was just one way to do it there would only be one book on how and we’d all walk away with a copy. However, just as a story or poem can be as individual as a snowflake, so to can the person who wrote it. One needs to find the method that works for them and roll with that. One needs to accept that a great story, one really worth telling, may take personal sacrifice and struggle that could very easily be uncomfortable for the author. It may take an ungodly amount of patience. This fact, particularly in new authors, seems to be lost at times.

But why do I say it can be harmful, or creatively abusive (which seems like shock-writing but hear me out)? Through my own experience, I’ve let a story simmer if I didn’t like where it was going. Maybe it meant I had to come back to it later. Once or twice I’ve abandoned perfect acceptable stories because at some point I realized I didn’t have the time or talent to really tell the story I wanted to tell. Could I have rushed it and put out something perfectly acceptable? Absolutely, but how happy would I have been?

A rushed story runs a very high risk of being undercooked. Maybe it will work! An undercooked steak can still be tasty, and some people like that meat bloody! I like to say that there’s an audience for every word ever written, but maybe you have an audience that wished for medium or well-done. Or maybe you’re making chicken, and now surprise! Everyone has salmonella.

If you want to put out the best work you possibly can, a creative endeavor you can be really proud of, what will rushing it, or pushing your creativity, or forcing your hand bring you? I’m certain it will bring you a story you can sell and print, but will it absolutely be the story you wanted to tell? You may get steak, but you run a much higher risk of chicken.

I’d like to address NaNoWriMo specifically, an internet-born writing prompt contest that runs through our circles every November. There are variations throughout the year, but let’s focus on this one.

The goal is 50,000 words in a month. Daunting, but absolutely possible. That’s only 1,667 words a day! Get to those keyboards and write that dream novel or book of poetry you’ve yearned to put out into the world!

…Unless you work full time, or are a single parent. Maybe you’re a member of a perfectly nuclear family, but the kids have soccer and your spouse goes away and you’re on your own for a day or two. Maybe you just don’t write well in the evenings, or mornings, or lunch breaks. Your rhythm may be interrupted by life. Suddenly the words from days you’ve missed pile into the ones you have available. But this is your dream and this is how you’ll do it!

…But now it’s the 15th of November and you’re only at 18,000 words. Do you celebrate this amazing accomplishment, or lament the fact that you’re so far behind? 18,000 words of anything is a joyous event, but will you appreciate it? 

I’ve created this perfectly reasonable scenario and ended up with an author who runs the risk of being disappointed or depressed or, worst of all, stifled with what many would consider success. How motivated is that author now? How likely are they to rush and push themselves to get to the finish line? I’m not saying they can’t or shouldn’t. It is absolutely possible to get there, to shake off the anchors and sprint. There are those that live for that pressure, and come out stronger for living through it. The creative fire cooks their food exactly how they like it, and how their audience likes it as well.

And yet, there are those that run the risk of getting run over by the expectation machine. Those that see the success of others and measure it against themselves regardless of how healthy or realistic that is. Never fool yourself into thinking that art doesn’t have its own culture of keeping up with the Joneses. Sure, maybe that author you like reached their goal, but do they live your life? Do they live in your brain and struggle with your struggles? No, and it can absolutely be harmful to put yourself up against them. Some do even if they fight it. And that’s where the harm comes in. That’s where creativity gets abused. That’s where the fire that cooked the previous author’s steak to perfection ended up burning your house down with you in it.

It is absolutely alright to not have a writing goal. Maybe you wrote 5000 words in a day. Astonishing! Maybe it was 500. Great! Maybe it was 50, or 5. Maybe it was none because the world doesn’t stop just because you want to write something. If you really have a story worth telling, do not be afraid to write it in your own time. It may take years. Or it may take weeks. Poll a room full of one hundred authors on how they make time to write and you’ll likely get one hundred different answers. It’s also just as likely that not one of them would work perfectly for you, because you are not them, and you shouldn’t try to be.

I’m not saying avoid writing prompts and challenges and NiNoWriMo. Try them if you like. Tweak them. See what sticks and what you can throw back. They are the loud and the easily celebrated. There is no contest for the author who took twenty years to finish their first novel, but their accomplishment is just as strong and valid as the one who took twenty days in a feat of finger flying fury. Neither of them is right, and that’s a truth lost on so many. Although I’d say I see it a lot more in new writers and young, fresh faces, I can’t say the veterans are totally immune either. As I said, each story is unique, and maybe the one you’re writing can’t be told by adhering to the styles that have previously brought you success. Maybe this one needs to simmer. Is it not somewhat foolhardy to assume every adventure into our creative selves will come out the same?

We all want success, regardless of what we see that success as. No one’s success is any more valid than another’s. The writing collective, the group hive-mind, is an inexhaustible resource for us all, but the sexy ideas aren’t always the right ones for you. Opening your mind to every possibility, even if it’s an uncomfortable one, is the surest way to get a story you can be proud of.

In the world of Ryuujin, heroes rise and fall, but there are always stories that slip through the cracks. The tales of the people who shape the years to come. Heroism and betrayal. Conversations between friends and enemies that will change the course of the world.

These are nine stories from a world that is historic, modern, and terrifyingly futuristic. A world where science and magic intertwine, and give birth to the unknown souls who become heroes, and the legends who fade away into history.

From the author of the renowned dark comedy Death Dresses Poorly, and from the world of his hit science-fantasy duology Catching Hell comes a collection of adventure, drama, joy, and terror as we look into the lives of the powerful, the meek, and the people who make the world turn over the course of centuries.

Writing with ADHD

By: Sarah Lampkin

Around the age of 14, my mom took me to a behavior therapist for the first time and that was when I was officially diagnosed with ADHD. After many fights and arguments over grades and studying, we finally had an answer as to why I couldn’t do things the same way as my older sister. It also explained my day dreaming.

Being a young teenage girl, daydreaming is a common occurrence and not something that would raise alarm. But my ability to be so completely lost in thought and in my own world happened far too often and during situations that got me into trouble. For instance, I was constantly lost while in school, as my brain believed my own world was more interesting. 

While using my sketch book as my outlet, I started to describe to my parents the stories behind my terribly drawn people…but I wouldn’t stop. There were times when I would start telling a story and no matter what my parents did to change the subject or stop me, I had no control over my own voice. 

That’s when a suggestion was made: Write your stories. 

I don’t remember who suggested it. I just know that I was never motivated to finish anything until I started writing. It became the perfect outlet for the ideas that were always in the forefront of my mind, distracting me from everything else. That’s when my life began to change for the better. I was finally learning how to live a healthy and productive life with ADHD without medication. 

With each new story, I was able to hyper focus on my writing. So, when the time came to go to school or work on homework, I was suddenly able to focus on the work at hand without getting easily distracted by everything else going on. Somehow, writing became the therapy I needed to be successful at everything in my life. Of course, I still struggle with some things, but not as much as I did before as a young teen or child. 

Writing was my life saver.

To Reap the Spirit (Dead Dreamer #3)

Publication Date: October 13th, 2020

Genre: New Adult/ Urban Fantasy

Sanguis daretur. Ignis invocavit.

The third installment in the haunting Dead Dreamer series.

Somehow Brenna Whit has survived to her junior year at Nephesburg College. Despite all odds, she’s fought against the Gatekeepers and lived. But the battle for the Fade has only just begun.

New pieces have been added to the board.

The Fade opens to the Veil.

And a Shade from the past returns.

With Brenna’s secret out, everyone is after her: dead and living alike. Those from across the sea have come and they’re determined to regain control of their broken faction.

Questions will be answers

Fires will be lit

Chaos will reign

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52344035-to-reap-the-spirit?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=GpvYiGEmzO&rank=1

Purchase Links

The Parliament House: https://www.parliamenthousepress.com/product-page/to-reap-the-spirit-by-sarah-lampkin

 Amazon:  https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08HCDDD33/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0

Barnes & Noble:  https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/to-reap-the-spirit-sarah-lampkin/1137586892?ean=9781953539670

Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/ww/en/ebook/to-reap-the-spirit

Blog Tour Organized By:

R&R Book Tours

How I Fell (Back) in Love with Vampires

By Nicole Givens Kurtz

I fell in love with vampires by reading Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot. It was on a bright, sunny day in Knoxville, Tennessee, and I had been banished from the house to go outside (like normal kids my dad would say). At 13, I didn’t like being hot and sticky, so I rode my bike during the early mornings. I attended high school on the other side of town, so my friends didn’t live in my neighborhood. It was the 1980s and cell phones were expensive fanny packs with a telephone receiver. No worries, I had my horror in a pile of mass market paperbacks and I was fine.

Prior to reading Salem’s Lot, I didn’t care much for vampires. They seemed silly, cartoonish, and a bit overdone. Then I read Dracula. It was okay, but I loved Shelley’s Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus, and felt more horrified by Dr. Frankenstein’s actions than Count Dracula. As it was, Dr. Frankenstein had a choice. Not so much with the count. As I read both of these classics, one thing was painfully obvious: They were very pale. White. European.

It can’t say if that is why I didn’t groove to vampire the way I had other paranormal creatures in horror, but I can tell that once someone recommended L.A.Banks’s Vampire Huntress series, I devoured all things vampires. Sure, there had been movies like A Vampire in Brooklyn and Black vampires in cameo spots in vampire films, always background dressing. Eddie Murphy and Angela Bassett’s movie was comedy, and that didn’t scratch my horror itch deeply enough.

But, Banks’ work did. Suddenly, vampires were Black. Hunters were black. And we weren’t in the 1800s or Europe. We were in Philly and in those urban parts that I recognized.

I was seen. Someone saw us. I was in love.

When L.A. Banks passed away, a void emerged. That’s not to say Black vampires weren’t being written. After all, Marvel in conjunction with Sony released Blade. The daywalker gave rise to the superhero movie, and while I love the original film, the sequels eroded his role and diminished him as both a vampire and a Black male, not to mention the erase of the Black doctor who saved him.

There were other vampire films, especially after Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire. Even the use of Aliyah as Queen of the Damned didn’t quite capture my interest and my horror-loving heart like L.A.Banks did. Perhaps it was the medium. Perhaps it was the writing. 

I’m going to go with the latter. 

And I stopped loving them. By the time big budget vampire films came along and sparkling vampires emerged, I was over them, like a boyfriend that betrayed me. At the mention of vampires, I got a bitter taste in my mouth.

All of the above films lacked the one thing Banks included in her vampire stories. Their Blackness, the characters’ connections to their neighborhoods and to being a Black person in America. That’s what I wanted to recreate with SLAY: Stories of the Vampire Noire.

But I wanted more than just the Black American experience, though that in and of itself is a varied, diverse stories from a diverse populace. I expanded the call for submissions for SLAY to include those stories from the African diaspora. We received many submissions, and the result is an anthology of 29 stories of vampires and hunters. 

These stories helped rekindle my love for vampires. These stories are rooted in African and African American diaspora experiences, legends, and myths. Some of the stories are subversive and glorious. 

There’s so much to love in those short stories. 

I was swept off my feet. 

And in doing so, I fell in love.

Again.

Black Cranes: Tales of Unquiet Women blog tour Sept 21st – Oct 12th  Part four of four.

By Lee Murray and Geneve Flynn

Black Cranes: Tales of Unquiet Women is an anthology of Southeast Asian horror which subverts expectations of Asian women and their place in society. It brings to light the furious and restless spirits which sometimes lie behind the smiling facade of quiet submissiveness and familial duty. 

Edited by award-winning author and editor Lee Murray, and published short story author and editor Geneve Flynn, the anthology was released by Omnium Gatherum on September 26th, 2020, and features esteemed authors of dark fiction such as Rena Mason, Angela Yuriko Smith, and Christina Sng. 

It has been called an “instant classic” by Nightmare Feed, and “one of the best anthologies of 2020” by Pseudopod.

This series of four blog posts introduces the editors and contributors, and reveals the inspiration behind the fourteen dark stories which feature in Black Cranes. In this post, we meet Rena Mason, Rin Chupeco, and Gabriela Lee.

Rena Mason, born in Nakhon Sawan, Thailand, is an American author of Thai-Chinese descent, and a three-time Bram Stoker Award® winning author of the The Evolutionist and “The Devil’s Throat”, as well as a 2014 Stage 32 /The Blood List Presents®: The Search for New Blood Screenwriting Contest quarter-finalist. She’s had nearly two dozen short stories, novelettes, and novellas published in various award-winning anthologies and magazines and writes a monthly column. Her dark speculative fiction often crosses and mashes genres and subgenres. 

She is a member of the Horror Writers Association, Mystery Writers of America, International Thriller Writers, The International Screenwriters’ Association, and the Public Safety Writers Association. 

An avid scuba diver, she enjoys traveling the world and incorporating the experiences into her stories. She currently resides in Reno, Nevada but can also often be found visiting her home in the Great Pacific Northwest. For more information visit her website: www.RenaMason.Ink or follow her at: Facebook: rena.mason 

Twitter: @RenaMason88 Stage 32: Rena Mason Instagram: rena.mason 

Rena’s story “The Ninth Tale” is a dark retelling of the legend of the nine-tailed fox, showing the proud and calculating side of woman. Set in historical China, the story follows Ju as she seeks out the final human heart that will help her to ascend to heaven, and is rich with beauty and betrayal. 

Here’s how “The Ninth Tale” came about:

RENA MASON: I don’t think it’s ever one thing that inspires me to write any story, and the same is true for “The Ninth Tale.” With the popular resurgence of a modernized huli jing, (Pinyin – húlijīng) or fox demon/spirit portrayed in anime and video games with a blending of cultures and added superpowers, many of the original stories get muddled and lost to younger generations. Because of my mainly Chinese heritage, I wanted to write a folktale-style story using the Chinese mythos versus the versions from other countries like the Japanese kitsune, or Korean kumiho. I also wanted to take a character traditionally seen and feared as a “powerful” woman, and set her in a time when women suffered from the sexist practice of foot binding; whether it was for sexual purposes or to keep them sedentary for work, or not, it was wrong. I’ve always been fascinated by the contrast between the reverence for, and fear of, women in Chinese mythos compared to the treatment of Chinese women by their male counterparts throughout history. I also grew up watching a lot of historical Chinese drama and martial arts movies, am a huge fan of Zhang Yimou (minus The Great Wall), and I wanted to write a story that had a similar visual vibe and feel, to the extent of using the importance of different colours to set the moods in scenes. 

Rin wrote obscure manuals for complicated computer programs, talked people out of their money at event shows, and did many other terrible things. They now write about ghosts and fantastic worlds but is still sometimes mistaken for a revenant. They are the author of The Girl from the Well, its sequel, The Suffering, The Bone Witch trilogy, The Never Tilting World duology, and the Wicked As You Wish series. A Chinese-Filipino who grew up with Filipino superstitions, Catholic guilt, and Buddhist traditions, yet somehow overcoming them all to become a nonbinary liberal atheist, they were born and raised in the Philippines and, or so the legend goes, still haunts that place to this very day. Find them at rinchupeco.com

Rin’s tale “Kapre: A Love Story” is set in rural Philippines, where monsters such as the kapre, tikbalang and aswang reside and feed at the edge of the forest. Kapre falls in love with a baby girl and follows her as she grows from a child to a woman, rising above his monstrosity.

Rin shares what inspired the writing of “Kapre: A Love Story”:

RIN CHUPECO: Myths and legends played an important part in my upbringing, and I grew up with more books than friends, enchanted by fairy tales of singing mountains and benevolent enchantresses. Ghost stories, however, were my first love; the more subversive and eerie the tale, the more I enjoyed it, and my own books wind up becoming an odd amalgamation of both.

Gabriela Lee was born and raised in Metro Manila, Philippines. She earned her MA in Literary Studies from the National University of Singapore (NUS), and currently teaches literature and creative writing at the University of the Philippines, Diliman, focusing on science fiction & fantasy and children’s literature. She has received the 2019 PBBY (Philippine Board on Books for Young People) Salanga Grand Prize for children’s literature, writing about her grandmother’s experiences as a child during the Second World War. Her fiction has appeared internationally in publications such as LONTAR: The Southeast Asian Journal of Speculative Fiction, Where the Stars Rise: Asian Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories, Heat: An Anthology of Southeast Asian Urban Writing, Kaleidoscope: Speculative Fiction for Young Adults, and The Dragon and the Stars. She has also been published in the Philippine Speculative Fiction anthologies, the Filipino Fiction for Young Adults series, and in Philippine literary journals such as Kritika Kultura and Likhaan Journal. Instructions on How to Disappear, published in 2016 by Visprint, Inc., is her first collection of short fiction.

“Rites of Passage” is set in the Philippines and tells of the tiyanak, a vampiric baby. Three separate stories of three different young women intertwine with the mythology of the tiyanak, examining the secret and bloody rites of sex, pregnancy and childbirth beneath the heavy eye of morality and religion. 

Gabriela shares the background to one of the darkest stories in Black Cranes:

GABRIELA LEE: “Rites of Passage” is a story rooted in the Philippine mythological creature called the tiyanak. According to legend, the tiyanak was a shapeshifter, a creature of the forest, a monster that took the form of a baby, except for its red eyes and skin, and its sharp teeth. It would mimic the cry of a child, leading hapless people into the forest to look for it. Once it was picked up by the man or woman who sought to comfort it, it would attack the person and consume them. Other people say that it was the abandoned foetus from abortions – one of the many reproductive rights denied to women in the Philippines. I wanted to write a story about the horrors of motherhood in the Philippines, without sounding moralistic or antagonistic, and using the device of the tiyanak seemed like an appropriate way of exploring the cycle of the experience without directly confronting it; telling it slant. 

Thanks for joining us for the final post in the blog tour for Black Cranes: Tales of Unquiet Women. If you’d like to read the stories covered in the tour, you can click on the link below.

BLACK CRANES: TALES OF UNQUIET WOMEN edited by Lee Murray and Geneve Flynn

RELEASE DATE: 26/09/20

GENRE: Horror

PUBLISHER: Omnium Gatherum

AVAILABLE HERE: https://omniumgatherumedia.com/black-cranes