Category: Blog Tour

When Agents Reject

 

Sometimes life throws you a curveball. Or a half-dozen.

I’m in the process of querying agents for my latest WIP – The Dragon Eater. If you know any authors, you probably know what delicate and fragile creatures we are. Give is nine great reviews and one bad one, and we’ll grab onto that last one and take its words to heart as if it was the only one that mattered.

Most of us have a pernicious inner critic that lives inside of us, always ready to tell us how piss-poor we are. That our writing is boring and derivative. That we really have no business pursing this craft at all. So it doesn’t take much to entice these little destructive mosters out of their dens to do their best to bring us down.

Querying agents is a long, difficult process that’s like catnop to these critics. They parse every word an agent says when they reject our work, and use it to beat us over the head, to remind us that we really do suck.
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Hi, this is Arthur Herbert, author of the new psychological suspense novel The Cuts that Cure which was just released May 11th. It’s my debut, and I have to say, I feel a little like I’m releasing my kid out into the real world: nervous, yet excited. I really appreciate the opportunity to write a guest post and let y’all see a little bit of who I am.

I was told I could write about anything I want. In thinking about this, I’ve found that my day job as a surgeon has been endless fodder for stories around campfires (which I attend all the time) or at cocktail parties (which I try to keep to a minimum). I feel like I should also emphasize that while Cuts is fairly dark and sinister, I’m not like that as a person. So as a result, I thought it would be appropriate to pass along one of my lighter stories.

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Stitches and Sepsis – Guest Post

Liz Faraim

Many hours of research go into my writing. If someone looked at my internet search history without that context, they would probably be very concerned. Rest easy, all of those searches serve a purpose.

While writing Stitches and Sepsis I had to do a deep dive into the world of hospitals and wound care. I will try not to give too much away, but anything beyond this point might have some mild spoilers. You’ve been warned.

Okay, so in Stitches and Sepsis Vivian gets into yet another knock-down drag-out fight, and she sustains some series lacerations. Does she go to the hospital? Well, if you are familiar with how stubborn Vivian is, then you know she did not seek medical attention.

Sepsis soon follows. But what does that look like? Well, that is where my research started. I did extensive reading into how sepsis affects the entire body, as well as what septic shock looks like. Also, trust me, do not do an internet search for images of septic wounds (or do?).

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Writing Hope – J. Scott Coatsworth

 

The nice folks at Horror Tree asked me to write something author-focused, so I thought I’d take on the journey I’ve been traveling these last few years as an author.

 

There’s so much “darkness” out there. Covid19, Russian aggression, our US politics – it seems like everywhere you turn, things are bleak and dreary. Even our fiction is infected. A few years ago, a new Superman movie came out, and it sullied the Kryptonian’s cape and reputation in a misguided effort to be dark and edgy, missing entirely what makes the Man of Steel so appealing.

 

I see this in a lot of movies, books, and shows, trying to out-do one another in terms of trauma, damage, sleeze, gore, and violence. And everywhere there’s a miasma of darkness. I get it. There’s plot gold in conflict, in edginess, in the dark. But sometimes we all need to drink from the well of hope instead.

 

My own writing has followed this path, seeking to provide light instead of darkness. In the heart of the pandemic last year, when Italy was in the throes of its lockdown, the news showed a clip of Venice – an empty Venice, lacking the usual Carnival crowds. Venice is sinking, slowly dipping into the waters of its lagoon, and as sea levels rise, its days in this world are numbered. Dark, right?

 

But what if there was a way to turn that around? To flip a symbol of the horrors of climate change into a vision of hope for a new world? And so was born my story in “Fix the World” called “Rise.”

 

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The Called

 

Guest Blog: Research that went into The Called

 

Ugh…research. Why is it every story I decide to write requires more research then I ever think it will, even for a modern story.  Okay, sure there are vampires (or Immortals), witches, and magic, but still why should there be so much research.  I guess I can’t make anything easy.

 

For The Called, much like for The Calling there was a lot of leg work I needed to do for this story, luckily I had the rules already set up for my magical beings. Since this was a sequel all the basics were in place and many of the location were fleshed out, so I didn’t have to research that, of course I had to expand on it, but not build it all from scratch. Still, I had a bunch of research to conduct and even do a few interviews with people to ensure I would be representing members of their community in the right way.

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Writing: A Universal Form of Self Expression

By: Cathy Jackson

 

Some people are born knowing they want to be writers. Some discover the love of writing in their teens, sure they were meant to be writers. Others write later in life, finding the joy of putting pen-to-page. And still others stumble upon writing as a creative outlet for particular energies. I came to writing through the death of my momma.

 

Her not-so-sudden passing stunned me. She had been dealing with health issues for several years before I received the phone call of her passing. Her rapidly declining health bespoke time was running out, and there was only so long before she shed her mortal coil.

 

I will never forget the Thursday morning the call came. Our youngest son was still a toddler. He and I had taken his older siblings to school and, when we came home, laid down for a quick nap. My phone chimed, and I groggily picked it up. An aunt was on the other end of the line, telling me my momma was in the hospital. She wasn’t sure what was going on, but I needed to be where she was.
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Using Elements From Other Genres in Your Writing

By Stephen Zimmer

 

I have long maintained that it is of great value to authors of one genre to read and explore writers who write in other genre,s and examine their techniques.  It is one of the big reasons why I created the Imaginarum Convention as a creative writing-centered event for all genres, to bring together writers of various genres under one roof to learn from each other and share insights into their particular craft. 

The fantasy writer can gain great insights from the mystery writer, and vice versa, and it is the same for the writer of faith-based fiction and a horror writer, to use a couple of pairs as examples.  

I read often outside the genres that I write, and I love to listen to writers in genres that I am not published in talk about the details of their craft.  I believe, in the long run, that this pays great dividends in terms of developing my own craft in storytelling. 

For stories in the Rayden Valkyrie Tales and Ragnar Stormbringer Tales collections, I draw in elements of several genres to bring the particular stories to life and engage the reader.  

Darkness Enthroned is a Rayden Valkyrie adventure where she accompanies a group of warriors tracking an anomalous incursion by a group of riders from the Attun tribe.  The tracks of the riders end at an ancient burial mound of enormous proportions, and this story involves Rayden’s efforts to discover the nature of the mound and what happened to the riders.

The storyline brings in suspense, horror, mystery, and thriller elements, in addition to the core elements that define sword and sorcery, or heroic fantasy.  The elements do not change the overall classification into a cross-genre category, but they do make the storytelling far more effective and impacting for the reader. 

The Awakening is a Ragnar Stormbringer adventure that sees Ragnar sailing with another warrior who is very close to him, Thorsalla, to visit a homestead/settlement founded by her brother.  Upon their arrival, they find the settlement destroyed, along with some mysterious tracks, and Ragnar has to uncover what happened to the settlement and confront the forces behind it.  
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What We Need is Hope

 

Two years ago, an idea came to me for a new anthology. This was a year or so before Covid19 ravaged the world. Still, we were in the midst of a torrent of lies and deception, and the blows came daily, both from representatives of our own government and from Mother Nature herself.

 

Then Covid arrived, and everything changed.

 

I read a fascinating article about what happens to people when they can no longer project a positive future for themselves. We shut down. We lose our desire to keep going in the here and now – what’s the point if there is no future to look forward to?

 

This has a lot in common with depression or life after a traumatic event.

 

In effect, we all suffered a mass trauma, and we are trying to feel our way forward out of it bit by bit.

 

In this strange environment, this project took on a new urgency. I needed to have something to hope for. I was like Mulder from the x-files. I wanted to believe. I just needed someone to help me get there.

 

So I put out the call for writers to take a current problem and write a story about a future where that problem had been solved, and over the next few months I was astonished as story after story poured in. In the end, we received 65 tales, dealing with issues from climate change to policing issues to all-out war.

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