Category Archives: The Fictorians

You may hear authors reminisce from time to time about their awful earlier work. While I can agree that some of my oldest short stories are not as interesting or polished, I relish looking through them. Why? Because I can see how far I’ve come.

Growth in one’s craft is only sexy in movie montages. Definitely in Rocky III, amiright?

For everyone who isn’t Sylvester Stallone, growth looks like hard work, tears, inevitably a day of not showering here and there, and a hefty dose of self-loathing. Sometimes, it seems like you aren’t getting anywhere. You’re running in a constant hamster wheel, praying for something to break your plateau. You care too much to give up, even after seeing rejection after rejection.

When I hit one of these plateaus a few years ago, I spent time in serious reflection. I received a few rejections, and knew that my writing wasn’t quite up to par. I desperately wanted to improve and get better, but how? I had a BA in English with an emphasis in creative writing. I have read many books about the craft. But I needed someone to dive deep into my writing and give some personal advice.

I hired Joshua Essoe, a friend and freelance editor, to line and content edit my YA fantasy novel, The Bond. While it was a bit scary to have my book picked apart, I couldn’t believe how much I had learned from the first few edited pages alone. Joshua Essoe pointed out things I do stylistically that no one else had before. Those observations helped me make my story more compelling and clear, and streamline sentences by taking out unnecessary or implied text.

Paying a professional to edit my work has been some of the best money I’ve ever spent. Working on the second book in The Bond series, I can see how much my work has grown, and how much tighter and precise my prose are.

Let’s face it. Editing is not fun. But editing your book in order to make it better is worth it. Looking back at your previous works need not make you groan. Instead, it should be a celebration of just how far you’ve come.

Personal note: If you’re in the market for a professional, detailed freelance editor, I highly recommend Joshua Essoe. He’s edited books for many well-known people including fantasy author David Farland, and Dean Lorey, the writer and producer of the television show Arrested Development. http://www.joshuaessoe.com/

Writing Therapy

July 17, 2014

Jace Killan

Horror Jace Killan Reflection No Comments

When asked why I write, a favorite quote comes to mind from the movie Shadowlands. “I pray because I can’t help myself. I pray because I’m helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time—waking and sleeping.”

My answer for writing is much the same. I write because I can’t help myself. I write because I’m helpless. I write because the need flows out of me all of the time—waking and sleeping. I write to understand. I write to process. And in writing I find peace and clarity.

A couple years ago, just before I picked up writing again, I had lunch with a dear friend. She told me that she had been depressed and was struggling in her marriage. I gathered that she had been contemplating suicide. Around that time I had a phone conversation with her husband who indicated that he had also been depressed and had toyed with the idea of suicide. Perhaps this hit me so hard because just a year earlier, a good friend of mine had ended his life. The idea of two great people wanting to die weighed heavily on my mind. Of course I offered encouragement and support and plead with them to get some psychological help. I believe they did and to my knowledge they’re doing better, but the thought of taking one’s own life continued to demand attention in my mind until I dealt with it in writing.

It was the first thing I had written in several years, a piece of flash fiction. I’ve never told anyone the meaning of the story until now. The underlying thought that my discovery-writing mind concluded was this: who’s to say that after the fact, after the suicide is complete, that anything changes? I mean, if life does continue after this existence, who’s to say that the problems, the depression, and the trials of this world end with this life?

I’m sorry, this is probably too philosophical for a writing blog, but my point is that writing has taken a question, a conflict in my mind and processed it through my tapping fingers into text. Since writing, The Passing Therapist, I’ve processed many stressors the same way. I’ve started a couple blogs where I post my developed thoughts.

The best part of it all, even if no one reads what I have written, is that I am finding myself happier. Writing has become my sanctuary, my confession. Writing helps me realize that those things that I stress about are not as bad as they seem and easily dealt with when my mind is clear and resolved. The resolution comes after I have conquered the conflict through prose. Writing is my therapy. I write because the need flows out of me all of the time.

When You’ve Got Support

July 16, 2014

fictorians

Guest Posts Interacting With Fans Motivation Reading Reflection Self-Awareness The Writing Life No Comments

A guest post by Amanda McCarter.

Okay, folks, get ready for the cheese factor, because I’m going to lay it on you.

One of the things I love about being a writer is my mom. Yes, I’m going there. It’s an incredible feeling. She tells me she’s proud of me and that she loves my books and my stories. It does not get any better than that.

But that’s what moms are supposed to do, right?

They’re supposed to be partial and think everything you do is golden and amazing. Parents are supposed to support you and encourage your passion. It’s what they do.

I’ve got horror stories of watching friends and colleagues torn down by their parents and loved one because their writing is some time-wasting hobby that will never amount to anything. Every story is a struggle and a fight because someone is nagging them to give up their silly pastime or belittling them for doing it.

This is where I get to brag. My mother is not one of these people. She is absolutely tickled pink that her little girl is a writer. She reads all my books and bugs me about when the next one comes out. It’s fantastic.

And it means a lot to me. It’s special to me. My mother is my love of reading. I grew up with The Hobbit by Tolkien and The Harper Hall Trilogy by Anne McCaffrey as bedtime stories. Whenever my mother finished a book, she passed it on to my brother or me. I grew up with bookshelves in my bedroom stacked full of Mercedes Lackey and Peter David and Frank Herbert.

We would take family trips to Hastings where we could rent a movie and choose a book. Sure, we could have gone to the library, but there was something so personal about owning a book. I could read it over and over again and never worry about late fees or giving it back to someone else. It was mine.

My mother gave that to us.

So my mom isn’t just a supportive woman with a proud smile. She’s a reader. She’s well read. The classics, mysteries, science fiction, drama, fantasy, romance. You name it, she’s read it. When she says she enjoys a book, she means it.

Yes, I get a pass. I’m related. But it does mean something when it comes from her. When she says she likes my writing, in my mind, I’m right up there with Lackey and McCaffrey and the dozens of other authors she’s read. Am I as good? I’ve got a ways to go. But I’m good enough for her and that’s a tremendous amount of strength.

Because when you’ve got the support of someone who loves you and loves your field and what you do in it, it’s incredible. She doesn’t just like my books because I wrote them. She likes them because they’re books. Would she have found them if we weren’t related? No telling, but that’s not the point.

Writers are susceptible to a certain amount of depression, angst, and self-doubt. Is this good enough? Should I even bother? Why did I write that scene? Who am I kidding? This is all crap.

But then I talk to my mom and things are right with the world. I finish what I’m writing and work through it.

I feel incredibly fortunate to have this kind of support. I know not everyone gets it. And my mother’s enthusiasm has spread to other members of my family. Two of my aunts are very interested in my writing as well.

I guess my point is, those are the people whose opinions really matter. Friends, loved ones. Yes, it’s exciting when an editor says nice things or you get an impressive review. But nothing feels quite as warm and fuzzy as your mom telling you how proud she is of you.

For the record, my big brother thinks this writing business is cute.

Guest Writer Bio:
Amanda grew up reading the works of Mercedes Lackey, Anne McCaffrey, Frank Herbert, and dozens of other fantasy and science fiction writers. As time went on, it occurred to her to write her own fantastic stories of faraway places and distant lands. Encouraged by her mother and family to write, a one-time hobby became an obsession and a passion. An obsession she hopes to one day make full time. Currently, Amanda lives in Tulsa, OK with her boyfriend, one snake, two cats, and two dogs. When not dreaming of faraway places and distant lands, she spends her time knitting, reading, and playing video games.

Raindancers

July 15, 2014

Quincy J. Allen

Interacting With Fans Motivation Quincy Allen Reading Reflection Reviews Submissions No Comments

Everyday living for most people can be compared all-too-easily to what drought means for farmers, what the dry seasons meant to American Indians. It’s a barren time full of silence and waiting and subtle, fatalistic dread that nothing is going to happen, that life will wither and perhaps even die. And it’s that need for green, for life and living, which brings comfort and joy and the heights of emotional salvation when the rains finally come. One could make the argument that we read drama and fantasy and horror because we have an inherent, hard-wired need for emotional input—a need for rain.

That’s a writer’s job, at least some of the time. We must don the doe’s skull and bright feathers. We must clothe ourselves in tanned hides and wrap bone rattles about our wrists and ankles. We must dance, sprouting clouds of dust as we stomp our feet and we sweat upon the hard-baked clay of everyday life.

It’s our job.

One of the hardest things writers have to live with is the uncertainty that their dancing has brought rain, sprinkled or poured a little bit of life into a reader’s existence. The truth is that most writers, especially at the beginning of their careers, never find out if their dancing has borne precipitation. There is this gulf—a fundamental disconnect—between writer and reader, one that leaves writers with cracked lips and dusty throats.

I recently had two experiences—more milestones in my career—which gave me tangible evidence that my own dancing was not in vain. Last fall I submitted a short story called Family Heirloom to the magazine Steampunk Trials. It’s a steampunk take on the Underground Railroad where a white widow and a freed slave build an Underwater Railroad in Missouri.

Included in the acceptance email was a very simple accolade, and one I’ll never forget. The story had brought tears the editor to eyes. When I wrote that story, it was with the absolute intention of touching, playing upon the heartstrings of the reader. I intended to bring forth the emotions of suffering and sacrifice, highlight the resolve of an individual to carry on and enrich the lives of the next generation in spite of tragedy.

Because of that first editor’s response, I chose Family Heirloom as the lead in a short story collection of mine that came out this summer. It’s not a best-seller in no small part because it contains cross-genre short stories, which is really a double-whammy against people even looking at it, let alone buying it. And yet, in spite of its uphill battle to gain recognition, I recently received another bit of rain. One of the reviewers up on Amazon said the same thing as the editor: that the story had brought tears to his or her eyes, and that other stories in that volume also had profound emotional effects. A reader took the time to let me—and the world—know that there was rain to be found between those pages.

For a writer, there’s nothing better than that.

So, to all the writers who read this, I can say but one thing: keep dancing. And to every reader, for all the rain you have been given by authors, give them some back. Give them the rain they need in the form of emails and reviews and word-of-mouth praise for the rain that has sustained you.

Drought is a fact of life, but we all possess the means by which we can bring rain to those who need it.