Category: Blog Tour

Does Originality Exist?

Sam Mortimer

Possibly! I know there’s always room for innovation at least. In some respects, I think select writers go in extreme directions in attempts to make that happen. For instance, a writer might be as provocative, lewd, torturous, risky, or whatever they’ll need to do, in order to push the envelope or feel original. Conflict and drama, however, is in every story no matter how it’s presented or how far it’s pushed.

Folks are drawn to conflict, especially in fiction, in different ways. It’s our human nature. We deal with it every day. Even avoiding a conflict has a sense of, you guessed it, conflict. I don’t think there will ever be 100% originality insofar as conflict in storytelling goes. It’s all based on the same principle of, ‘Without drama there is no story.’  It’s with different inventions, story structures where I believe there are innovators.

This will probably seem dreamy, but I think if someone wants to attempt originality they should write a complete utopian story with zero conflict, and stop chanting the drama mantra. The real question is, would that be any fun? A real-life problem with that idea is wondering about the appeal. Who would relate to a perfect person in euphoric world? What would a utopian character want? Something new, different? I don’t know.

Don’t expect any wars in that world. The utopia wouldn’t ever be in danger of falling, meaning there wouldn’t be an epic battle to defend it. No scandals or machinations would bring it down. The utopia would remain, because there’d be no drama or interference within the plot and characters. What story could there without chanting the drama mantra? There would be continuous progress without hindrance in that utopian paradise. How many different ways are there to live an entirely peaceful existence? How does one make conflict a matter of nothingness? If there was no conflict, how many cures would be developed for human ailments? Would there even be need of cures?  There would be no problems, and no problems mean, no drama.

Then again, the idea of a utopia isn’t even original. Scratch that idea if you want true originality. Though, I do think if something is 100% original we might not relate to it at first. It’d probably have to come from a world based on laws of physics we’re not used to. There’d have to be new shapes, sounds, colors, tastes, and senses we’re not accustomed to, that are absolutely not of our world. We’d have to experience a whole new set of emotions to witness something purely original. If that happens, we might have a new way to present some drama, or a whole new understanding of it.

Until then, I don’t believe 100% originality exists in storytelling. I’m all for seeing innovative stories though, putting new twists and turns along the way. Think of your favorite vampire stories. I’m sure they’ve all had at least something different in them. Ultimately, it’s still vampires. Not an original concept whatsoever, but one can figure out fresh ways to present them.

Synopsis

Cash carries a disease; one that’s already killed a large majority of the population and something needs to be done. To stop the crisis from escalating, The Solution (a worldwide organization) is formed and rises to great power. They monitor people’s dreams and shape reality to fit their own wants and needs. In an effort to control existence itself, The Solution is searching for what they believe to be the ultimate tool; a person with the ability to master a deep connection with the mysterious, pervasive energy known only as The Ultimate Reality.

Watching her neighborhood decay, her friends and family perish, Elizabeth Reznik needs to find meaning in her life. She discovers her existence is more meaningful than she could ever have imagined. Operatives of The Solution seek her out, take her from her home and perform brutal experiments on her. Their conclusion? Elizabeth is the one they have been searching for; she is the key to gaining complete power.

The stratagem of The Solution is single minded – own the resources and you own the people. And the last resource available is free will. They will own your thoughts, they will orchestrate your dreams; they will dine on your fears. But there is always a cog in the machine… or in this case, a scream.

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Author Bio:

Sam Mortimer has worked the graveyard shift in law enforcement, attended film school, and has been writing strange stories since age eleven. He loves reading, music, and strives to meet the demands of his five cats.

Re-read the title, I’ll give you a second. Okay, raise your hands if you’ve ever heard those words of advice. One, two… so a few of you have. Do you believe it? Deep down when you write anything from a letter to a story, do you truly write what you know?

Whoa, don’t everybody answer at once.

Those words are advice I think we’ve all heard. I think they are true from a certain point of view. I read a lot of books in the horror genre and if authors are writing what they know, this place is seriously messed up. Demons, werewolves, and vampires are a few of the troupes used in horror, but do we know them? Can we go out and ask a thousand year old vampire how they feel about something as research for a book? No, so how can we write what we know?

Well, we can write about our fears.

When the dark descends and the storm blows in from the west, we feel something inside of us. See the man in the long black coat standing out in the street over there? I see him and he scares me. The world today is a scary place and this fear we internalize is what we can write about.

I know there’s a good chance I’ll never have to run from a zombie. But, the same death a zombie may bring can be brought from many other sources. Death is death and it is the biggest fear of all. Loss is another one of these feelings we feel when we read horror and it’s tied closely with death. Combined, they are a one-two punch to the gut when they catch you off-guard. There are some experiences in my life that greatly influence many of the events and situations I write about.

This is where writing what you know can be cathartic. When I sit behind the keyboard, I can be a doctor and heal myself. I can rip the scab off my feelings and then let the raw emotion bleed out onto the page. I’m writing what I know. I’m writing about the pain and the loss. I’m letting what I know mix with fiction to create a work of art.

In, The Calling, I write about a different kind of loss, but a loss we fear all the same. The book is a water-shed moment for the town of White Creek where it sees its innocence stripped away and its soul lay bare. The events act like a bandage being torn away and just like my own scabs over my emotions, the town of White Creek will bleed out.

I don’t personally know a werewolf or a demon, but I do personally know loss, pain, and regret. Sometimes, we don’t write what we know, but blend it with what we do know for a powerful combination. I give a voice to my pain and it fuels the horror I write. Won’t you come and share it with me? I know you want to…

Surrealism in Writing Horror

By R. Patrick Gates, Author of TunnelVision

Surrealism can be a very effective storytelling tool in the Horror genre. Horror, or Dark Fantasy (a much more accurate label, in my opinion, since Horror falls under the broader category of fantasy, meaning stories that are outside the realm of reality) is a natural for Surrealism. Horror stories are, if anything, surreal. From the very beginning, the very roots of horror with Shelley’s Frankenstein, Stoker’s Dracula, and Poe’s macabre stories, has the surreal making up a big part of every horror tale. For most writers of Dark Fantasy the challenge has been how to make the surreal seem real and believable. I’ve always seen the challenge as being sort of the opposite: how do I make the real seem surreal? It has occurred to me that if anything were ever to actually happen that was in any way similar to the plot of a horror story, it would certainly seem as if reality had suddenly become surreality, and that is one of the challenges that I believe a modern writer of Dark Fiction has to try to meet.

So how does one incorporate Surrealism into their work? Well, in the same way all of us learned to write, we should start with reading, in particular Edgar Allan Poe, whose work is, in my opinion, the epitome of what Surrealism in Dark Fantasy should be. Just his mastery of vocabulary and language alone allowed him to create a surrealistic aspect to his work that has been unrivaled. Through imagery, simile, and metaphor he creates mood and atmosphere perfect for a dark tale.

Using vocabulary and literary techniques is the more sophisticated method, but presenting a worldview seen through the eyes of an insane person is probably the easiest method of incorporating Surrealism into a Dark Fantasy novel.One of the inspirations for my surreal novel, TunnelVision (25^th anniversary edition now available from Bloodshot Books) was an article I had read about how schizophrenics perceive the world. Poe used this technique very effectively in many of his stories. Thomas Harris uses it in his novels, Red Dragon, and Silence of the Lambs—surrealistic reality seen through the eyes of serial killers. Using the mentally skewed narrator or character as P.O.V. can be a very effective way to incorporate surrealism in your work, and have quite a lot of fun while doing it because literally anything goes! Landscapes can be wildly and darkly Dali-esque and inanimate objects can speak and pontificate (personification in general can be a very big part of Surrealism). You can bring in music, movies, literary characters—anything you can imagine. It’s a chance for the writer to let their imagination run wild and rampant.

I recommend giving it a try—let go, explore and have fun with it—you can always reel it in a little on rewrite.

Thank God for rewrites.

Follow along the tour with these hashtags: #Tunnelvision  #BloodshotBooks #HookofaBook

Tunnelvision (25^th Anniversary Edition), Synopsis –

One fine day in the middle of the night,

Two dead boys got up to fight.

Back to back they faced each other,

Drew their swords and shot each other.

A deaf policeman heard the noise,

And came and killed the two dead boys.…

The empty airwaves of the mind…

Welcome to TunnelVision – the premium channel streaming from the imagination of R. Patrick Gates to you!

What happens when you lose sight of the forest for the trees?

TunnelVision!

Wilbur Clayton has a personal connection with Jesus – Murder! Abused for most of his life, Wilbur and Jesus are out to make amends and take revenge. With Grandma in his head and Jesus on the TunnelVision, Wilbur knows what must be done and who must be made to pay for the sins of the father…

The only thing standing in his way are a cop with a gift for details and deduction, and a young genius whose reenactments of his favorite books are about to become all too real.

TunnelVision – streaming seven days a week, 24 hours a day!

On the air and in your nightmares!

Wild West Research Gets Weird
Maynard Blackoak

One of the most enjoyable aspects of writing is researching a subject that holds my fascination.  While there are those who find the research dull and tedious, I enjoy the many hours of digging for those obscure facts that make a story fun to write.  As I wrote each story in Eerie Trails of the Wild Weird West, I did at least a little investigation of the real Wild West.

While I used actual characters of the old west in several of the stories, there were a few of which I had no prior knowledge.  One of them was Boone Helm, The Kentucky Cannibal.  Here was a ruthless outlaw who not only murdered, but also dined on some of friends and foes alike.  His last words were reportedly, “Neither a friend nor foe wasted”, verbiage I thought made for the perfect title of the story I wove around him.

Dangerous Dan Tucker was a lawman turned gun-for-fire.  The speed of his draw and accuracy were said to be among the best of his time.  Little else is known of him.  He simply disappeared from the annals of history without even a hint of his fate.  Reading the paragraph about him, I wondered, what if he had vanished without a trace because he became a vampire?  An undead creature of the night as a sharp shooter in the old west seemed like an appropriate fate to bestow on him.

In the story, Claire Simmons, I used an incident with the actual participants as a basis to weave a Wild West tale with modern twist.  As a child, I visited the ghost town of Ingalls, Oklahoma.  I was told of a gun battle between outlaws and U.S. marshals that had taken place there in the latter days of the old west.  Looking at the old structures remaining as a testimony of the events that transpired that fateful day, I was fascinated at the tale they had to tell.  In a collection revolving around the Wild West, I had to include a story about this little known gunfight.

Another story told around an actual character of the old west features the notorious outlaw, Dynamite Dan Clifton—the most killed man in the west.  He was so named because the price on his head was such thatmany had falsely claimed to have killed him in an attempt to collect the bounty.  It set my mind to wondering, suppose all those people had indeed killed him.  How could such a thing have come about?  Could he have possibly been an immortal?  If he was, why has no one heard anything regarding him in over a hundred years?  Did he die as history suggests or just disappear?

Perhaps my favorite story crafted around a real person from history, Cimarron Rose, revolves around a young woman who suffers terrible consequences of falling in love with an outlaw.  A tragic figure, Rose Dunn was a teenage girl in Oklahoma Territory who fell in with a band of outlaws.  After a deadly event, she found herself ostracized and abandoned by the gang she had once considered her family.  That is where the story involving her life takes a strange turn not told in any history book.

There are other stories in Eerie Trails of the Wild Weird West that use real people from the real Wild West.  Some you might know.  Some you might not.  Either way, I think you will find the strange ride through the old west a fascinating read.

Some time ago (before I was ever Jessica) I decided to give up writing. I’d been writing and writing and writing with no success. I’d tried a couple of grand ideas, started a literary magazine, published a novel that nobody but my immediate family and friends bought (whether they read it or not, I still don’t know) and had multiple other disappointing failures.

Looking back, I can concede that perhaps I wasn’t trying hard enough, or that rather; I wasn’t reaching the right audience. I’ve learned since then that you have to be singing in the right room, as it were, or else your songs will fall on deaf ears. To continue the musical metaphor, not everyone is a heavy metal fan, and if you’re playing heavy metal, you’re not going to have much success if your audience is full of disco fanatics.

Writing is unlike any other art when it comes to an audience. If you are a visual artist, you can show people your work and get instant gratification. It only takes them a moment to take it in, and react. Music is the same – if you are in a band, you can play in front of an audience and get that rush of elation as the audience cheers, claps and sings along. Writers face the challenge of getting people to invest time to read. I daresay that writers are the most unappreciated and taken for granted people at times. People will watch a TV show or a movie and never once think that someone wrote that. They’ll binge 18 hours on Netflix watching some series, but ask them to spend 10 minutes reading a short story and you’d think you’d asked them to move a body and then get an orange juice enema.

I’m sure you’ve felt like this. So what do you do when you feel like no one is listening? Me, I quit for a while. But before I did, I wrote an angry missive called The Last Story, which was, of course, intended to be my last story. It’s about a frustrated writer being held captive by persons unknown, with no one to talk to but himself. If you’re already picking up on the metaphor here, then kudos to you. He whiles away the hours, days, months and years by telling stories, all of which may or may not be heard by anyone but himself. His own private hell is a chamber of isolation where all of his stories are useless. Without an audience, without readers, what good is a storyteller?

The Last Story is, incidentally, the last story in Viscera, a collection of strange tales published by Sirens Call Publications and available now. Sometimes it feels like no one is listening, but I’ve learned that you never know, and that’s just the nature of being a writer. Your audience is mostly anonymous, and you can only hope that your stories are being heard; that your message in a bottle washed up on the right shore, and that somewhere, someone is reading your stories and loving them. For me, that might just be you. I hope so.

Viscera — Jessica B. Bell

Viscera is a collection of short stories full of all the things that make you squirm, cringe, and laugh when you know you shouldn’t. You’ll remember why you’re afraid of the dark and experience an abundance of weird creatures: witches, ancient gods, and all-too-human monsters – the scariest of all.

Indulge your twisted sense of humor with stories about unconventional werewolves and a woman with a frog fetish. Know what it’s like to arrive too late to save an unusual alien abductee, or giggle with sick delight as a woman serves up a special Hasenpfeffer dinner to her pig of a husband.

Settle in for bedtime stories fit for monsters.

Viscera will grab you by the gut and squeeze, making you cry for mercy—or laugh like a fiend!

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Jessica B. Bell is a Canadian writer of strange fiction. It is rumoured that she lives in a damp, dark basement, writing her twisted tales in her own blood on faded yellow parchment. Her stories have been published in various anthologies, the most recent of which is Voices. She also writes under the name Helena Hann-Basquiat, and has published two novels on the metafictional topic of Jessica B. Bell, titled Jessica and Singularity. A third and final novel is planned for 2017.

Find more of Jessica’s (and Helena’s) writing at whoisjessica.com