Lovecraft, the APA & Horror: a Manifesto of the Greater Rocky Mountain Horror Writers APA

Writing is one of the most personally punishing of the professions we could choose. We learn in a vacuum, taught by other people who are also feeling their way along because those “in the know” haven’t a clue on how to tell us what they want without belittling our every effort.

So how do we “preserve” what we do if we cannot get published? When you are ready to look back on your Life’s Work, will it be with an eye to the next winter’s fire, hidden in an attic, or bequeathed to a reluctant relative?

Who will know what you wrote? And what if it’s not that it was “bad” – it was simply not in style when written?

The Same Thing Happened – to LOVECRAFT

I am not saying that we are the best judges of our work, or that an unsuspecting public deserves to be inundated with substandard creations. I am saying that – contrary to many editors’ professional opinions – we don’t have the magazines and pulp base that writers held up to us today had in their day with which to preserve at least some of their work.  “Trash” magazines, pulp magazines, anything with writing that is less than Stephen King, less than Bram Stoker Awardish simply do not survive. So to find a publication accepting of amateur work – let alone genre-busting work – is virtually impossible, effectively eliminating one source of what has been preached to us as traditional “dues paying.”

I am saying that the constant rise and fall of lesser magazines and so many publishing houses also means that there is nowhere for the average writer to find employment in the industry that teaches writers about writing, about editing, about the industry of writing. And this goes for writers of all levels of education. What used to be an entry-level job is now a “plum position” no matter how you slice it. And in many cases, it is becoming an industry once again famed for “who you know.”

I am saying that virtually every magazine out there today boasts that it is the best, and only accepts the best of the genre, that there is no room for midlist-type writers, for also-rans, no matter how fun or fair the story.

I am saying that if you get published on the internet, because of the nature of technology (and the subsequent ease in which you and everything about you can be libeled and slandered, edited, pirated, censored and/or deleted) your work may be altered without your permission or simply may never be found when the gods of S.E.O. change their linens, or the power goes out, and there is no print magazine to be discovered in a dusty old attic.

Talk about your tentacles… this is the one problem Lovecraft had no trouble with.

I am saying that as writers, we develop a massive catalog of our work –good, bad and in between – which fades in our file cabinets or which we carelessly trust to “live” on virtual reality clouds. I am saying that even if it all deserves to go nowhere, it is who we are and what we did with our lives. And sometimes – just maybe – it matters.

It certainly did with Lovecraft. And that is why I took a much closer look at how we almost lost him…

The Need For APA’s in Our Genre

There’s a reason I really like Lovecraft – besides his monsters, I mean.

I like Lovecraft because he was not a bashful, easily intimidated writer of our genre hopefully waiting to be discovered. He wasn’t exactly stable, either, but then how many of us are after a few years in the trenches?

Lovecraft was a perfectionist, a notorious grammar hound haunted by his own insecurities – once even asking an editor for his stuff back as a second thought… He knew that what he wrote was not the flavor of the day, and admitted that he probably only had a handful of readers who liked what he wrote.

That is important, folks. Because he also believed that those readers deserved a well-crafted story in which the writer was deeply invested – so much so that Lovecraft constantly preached (liked Literary Critics) that a writer should never write for the money…

And while many of us can point out that Lovecraft descended from wealth, he also descended from a degree of madness and landed in poverty like the rest of us. He did not make a living as a writer.

Read that again: H.P. Lovecraft did not make a living as a writer.

He made his living as an editor, and a ghost writer for other writers. Just like some of us work in retail while writing, or write blogs, or work at newspapers, or become contract employees for firms that need copywriters, or tech writers, or web content writers.

H.P., in his flawed way, was one of us.

So I became interested in his “story.” How did a writer of such modern genre importance keep his writing safe in a world that almost completely rejected him?

The answer: he joined amateur press associations – both the United Amateur Press Association (UAPA) , and the National Amateur Press Association (NAPA). These were associations created for journalists…and yet Lovecraft managed to use them for his own purposes… for fiction writers. Under his tutelage, his participation in APA’s morphed into what had to have been one of the first writer workshop groups.

He and several other writers from around the Northeast pooled together to write and exchange their writings for internal critique and internal publication in a newsletter. The object was to improve each other’s writing and preserve it in limited run publications within the group. The result was Lovecraft’s work being collected by co-member and dedicated fan August Derleth and later to be preserved by Derleth’s publishing company Arkham House – created specifically to preserve and publish Lovecraft’s work.

Read that again: without being in an APA, there might not have been the fandom of Derleth, the creation of Arkham House, and the rest of Lovecraft’s essays, letters, and work not published by Weird Tales.

Without Derleth and the APA, we might have lost Lovecraft…

Few “experts” of his time valued his work. Fewer liked him personally. Yet who do today’s experts thrust eagerly in our faces?

How do we know how many Lovecrafts are actually out there now? Being rejected? Maligned? Self-publishing?

The answer is: we don’t.

Any Lovecraft who might be out there won’t likely find out he or she was a Lovecraft until long after they are dead and their work is “discovered” lying in a heap of e-papers or discolored print. This is a sad reality of a life in the Arts: new developments that actually advance the genres of any of the Arts take time because Critics need time and distance to see the common thread that is advancing said genre. It simply cannot be done with any guarantee during the writer/artist’s lifetime. Derleth was right, but he also got lucky. Lovecraft, however, died poor and unrecognized.

There but for the grace of Cthulhu go we…

With the effect the National Amateur Press Association (NAPA) and the United Amateur Press Association (UAPA) had on his work, I am wondering why APAs fell out of favor… because in reality, they were working writers groups – serious writers groups. They were among the first to utilize writer workshops and peer review through critiques.

And in all other academically-infused professions, peer review is the way things are done.

I am not saying APAs are gone: both the NAPA (http://www.thefossils.org/horvat/aj/napahistory.htm ) and UAPA (http://www.amateurpress.org/ ) still exist, and new ones have cropped up for other genres… But I am saying that from what I can see they are often dysfunctional. One problem I see is that the sheer number of members tend to overturn the lifeboat. This is complicated by the fact that aside from the NAPA and UAPA, other genre APAs tend to be untended gardens where wild growth distorts the tight control needed to help every member writer. It’s almost as those either the ambition was not carefully channeled, or there is so great a need that everyone is rushing for the rescue boat.

Worse, I have been unable to find a standalone Horror APA…instead, our genre succumbs to invitations to join other genres. And I see a problem with this: how can writers from another genre productively critique Horror writing without understanding all of the tropes and conventions therein?

I am thinking it is time to revive APAs for the sake of the history of our genre. I am thinking Horror deserves its very own, dedicated APA.

Why? Because who is being published is not necessarily providing the body of work spawning the future of the genre.

You heard me. I am among the many who believe that The Best are not always the best… only that they are the best of those that made it across a given editor’s desk, that fitted the personal preferences of the moment – i.e, Lovecraft would not have been there.

This thought disturbs me. It keeps me awake at night. And let me make it clear I do not think of myself as a Lovecraft. But it bothers me to think that a Lovecraft may be out there right now – without his or her August Derleth to save THE WORK from oblivion.

Because it really is ALL ABOUT THE WORK – not the author…

The future of the genre has always risen from the muck of amateur writers trying to tell better stories… it is in the sloppy craft that comes with enthused storytelling, and the determination to improve upon that craft, with the ignorance and exuberance of youth. It is in the gritty plasma seas of writers who tell the kind of stories that prove they don’t know better and didn’t know they couldn’t or shouldn’t… It is in the warm primal pools of creativity that come in lives without editors and Critics… incubated in the minds of writers who have whole mythologies and lineages in their heads… tortured in the nightmares of the isolated and oppressed.

It scares me…how many good writers I have met, read, and seen vanish back into the woodwork working in retail, in fast food, in cubicles, cleaning hotel rooms, repairing my car… people who have whole finished manuscripts, screenplays, portfolios of artwork, graphic novels… people who don’t know if it is yet good enough, or how to take the next step…

Published writing – as wonderfully validating as it is – is just a collection of work that a handful of star-making editors are able to present to the public eye. It is not the whole of what is being written.

Those of you who abhor what you see being published…Lovecraft may be out there. He may be you…

And although I – like many – like to see what modern “experts” think is good, solid, capable writing in the genre, I also miss the tales told with campfire enthusiasm. I miss the stories like we used to see in Weird Tales and Amazing Stories.

Now that such magazines are being lauded for finding canon-elect authors of our genre, they no longer accept the same type of unknowns… they also are The Best Looking for The Best, if and when they revive and fold and revive again. We have no new Weird Tales… no magazine that is rich with the pulpy roots of who we are as a genre looking for the raw voices of new tales, no magazine just satisfied to put stories out there for simple digestion. What pulp there may be we cannot find before it fades…It is not that we don’t want it: it cannot survive in the vacuum that happens before its audience can find IT.

Writers cannot hope to make a living with modern magazine markets – who now keep your work for almost a year while they think about it, remind you that they only seek the best of the best, and are proud to pay a whole ten-spot for the privilege. Even if you are published, that paycheck doesn’t even buy a print cartridge.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we didn’t see the need to be published traditionally? That we didn’t put a minimum dollar amount sold on our right to write in our own genre?

That – like Lovecraft – we simply saw the importance of writing what we honestly felt and in pursuing the execution of it capably, certain in the knowledge that a handful of our trusted contemporaries might accidentally or on purpose be the source of our work’s preservation?

It is clear to me as an older writer that we cannot continue to depend on the technologically-imposed isolation that the modern world is heaping upon us to create stellar new works. On the contrary; with everyone shoving the whole educate-yourself paradigm in front of us, maybe it’s time we did exactly that.

Nowhere in our genre are we getting guidance, yet criticism abounds as it always did – in personal attacks and elitist organizations too great to assist in the training of our neophytes. So why don’t we help ourselves? Let the Elite be the Elite in their Elite Bliss. The rest of us have to work for a living.

So let’s band together. Let’s help each other. Let’s quit courting those who don’t want to give us the time of day. We don’t need attitude, we need constructive criticism, we need professional support, we need markets that really want our fiction, and we need other pairs of eyes to help us be sure we are worthy of getting there.

We need the attitude of Lovecraft. And maybe we deserve to keep our money in our own pockets by using the skills of each other to get what we each want.

That is what an APA can offer. It’s the choice of the members what will be the goals and what will be accomplished. It is a working writer’s group…not an exclusive rewards club. It is a place for writers to write, to meet and support each other.

 Never Fear, Lovecraft Was Here

It’s okay to still love traditional publishing and the myth that goes right along with it. But Happily Every After is pretty much a fairy story for most writers. The pyramid is still a pyramid and the point is just not big enough for all of us to perch upon.

Combine that simple truth with the convoluted messages today’s publishers are sending, and there is a whole lot of fiction being written in the large shadows of What Worked Before…

Part of the problem is that traditional publishing serves two masters: the fickle public, and the Call to Elevate Literature. The two could not be more dissimilar in their wants and needs. On one side, the very powerful lure of Hollywood and bestseller paychecks for all have the allure and power of drug money…with the equally damaging delusions and mixed messages. On the other is the confusion and disillusionment with the Literary establishment, with its lack of communication in not only what is desired, but how to accomplish it.

Writers are famously criticized for improperly overinflating the importance of magic in our writing processes, and yet the examples we are given as Literature are held up to the sun and moon as Divine Creations only True Geniuses could construe.

No wonder so many writers drink, have mental breakdowns, and get the other kind of Weird.

And what if that isn’t you? What if you have muttered in the dim glow of your computer monitor, “I don’t write what I am seeing published”? What if you agree that what you write doesn’t fit the creative climate of the three magazines taking submissions for the Best of the Best? What if you are shocked and/or appalled at what you do see being published – not because you think you are better, but because you expected a helluva lot more out of all that bragging?

What if you write in a subgenre that is suffering through professional and critical doldrums? What if you cannot find a place for what you write but you still want to master your subgenre and want to push the envelope a little?

All of these things contribute to your personal Hall of Rejections. They contribute to the isolation, and the fear you have that when you die, nothing will remain of all of your efforts. Maybe you are not looking for fame (although the fortune sure as heck wouldn’t hurt), but to be the best that you can be, and maybe birth something new and unusual…

Keep reading, if you are he or she.

We also hear how overwhelmed publishers, editors and publishing venues are… that positively everyone thinks they can write and by golly sends their masterpieces to them…that they are drowning in so much substandard matter it is a pure miracle anyone is ever fished out of the muck to be “discovered.”

We also hear that there are a wondrous amount of “good” authors that must be routinely passed over for the “great” simply because publishing is expensive and positively must earn a decent return for the publisher’s investment… that there is simply not enough in the publishing coffers to experiment on as many newer authors as in the “recent” past (i.e., the 1970’s and 1980’s).  Previously fair-performing, decent midlist authors were laid off, after all, as well as so so many good to great editors in all genres.

Where does this leave a writer like you?

Everyone – including those same publishing professionals “explaining” why they are so busy and you are so unpublished – points to the internet, to online magazines they will later condemn publication in, to subsidy and vanity publishing, to self-publishing and rival independent publishers as options. And then they will condemn those choices for all but the few who capture national attention and elusive bestsellerdom.

So do you abandon the traditional route in absolute frustration and total ignorance of where you are on the scale of potential success and pony up the funds to self-publish or co-publish? Do you fade into obscurity? Or bet the rent on one last story contest?

I’m telling you that the state of publishers, editors, and ever-materializing and vanishing venues is not your fault. For one thing, if some of us didn’t provide the stark contrast between good and stellar, between fair and truly incompetent, how would the real geniuses stand out? And more importantly, how would we learn the ropes, since everyone is so busy to otherwise teach us?

But I am also telling you, this is not a new situation. Writers have historically been here time and again. The only difference is that for most of us, our collective “recent memory” of the history of writers in publishing has been all about the rise of publishing… and here we are in the decline of it.

But there is something to understand here.

Tech people like to talk about adapting, when tech people tend to obliterate every choice that does not involve something they are selling. Here’s the fact: publishing is not going away – but it has had to slim down due to the masses “buying into” the mythology that reading is done, and print is dead.

Neither are true. But what is true is that the 1970’s and 1980’s are dead and will likely never return. Gone are the big author advances, the multi-book contracts, the writer who lives big on one great success. So today if you want to be a writer, you have to mean it. You will probably do a lot of it sandwiched between minimum wage jobs, personal challenges, and clinging to dreams of discovery. But many of us – whether we are “good” or classically pulp, or simply not good at finding our way in today’s confusing world – are going to have to make peace with a certain level of anonymity in our chosen profession.

Never fear. Lovecraft too, was here.

The Rejection Merry-Go-Round

We’ve all been there; and sometimes – perhaps more often than we’d prefer – we might even have belonged there – among the rejected. But the problem with rejection is that there is no standardization of the process – except in the cold anonymity of it, the simple “not for us” default. It makes it difficult for a writer to get honest feedback: should he or she find another career, or is it a matter of learning how to tweak an otherwise salable piece?

We’ll never know, because – we are told—editors are busy people. Apparently, writers live lives of leisure and incredible wealth by comparison. And only genius talents – who are of course born rich –  should be allowed to see print. Apparently, we should deduce the psychic sonar that goes along with a rejection – from the “you almost had it” to the snort and sneer – and behave accordingly, so we can stop gumming up the publishing machinery.

So then I have to wonder, how hard is it to create a standardize piece of paper with critical answers to writer’s rejection questions, all lined up next to boxes the rejecting editor could instantaneously check?

Wouldn’t that be of more service than haphazardly plying publications with different stories harboring the same technical problems?

Just sayin’…. I mean if time is really of the essence and you really know why you are rejecting a piece and aren’t afraid to or are longing to say so…

Simple issues like “wrong format” or “sent to wrong editor” or “proofread before resubmitting” or “craft issues” or “genre issues” or “no supportable story arc” or “overdone concept” or “no visible concept” or “editor personally dislikes” versus “not our type of story”…

Adding boxes like “worth revising” “please revise and resubmit” or “salable but not to us upon revision” would be additionally helpful. “Future submissions welcome” versus “More work on technical and craft issues needed before submitting further pieces” would also be helpful…even if not everyone read them or attended to those issues. Many of us would. Especially if we kept seeing the same boxes checked time and again…

Not to worry, Lovecraft may have had it worse… In a world where the publishing community, writers and editors and critics knew each other more intimately, many writers like H.P. lived with stinging criticisms and sometimes very personal attacks.

This was why he valued the APA. He knew that his fellow writers were on his side, knew something of and appreciated what he was professionally exploring. They also were writers. They knew when something wasn’t working and could deign to tell him. He would not feel under any obligation to “do as he was told” but to take all criticisms under professional advisement.

Wouldn’t that be great to find without having to fork over six figures for a master’s degree? Without having to sacrifice virgins in the hope that your next sale would be enough to qualify you for paid membership in the Professional Association of your genre?

Well, if you are a Horror writer you don’t have to.

Something Wicked This Way Comes

I’ve had it. Really. So I decided to do something about it.

As of October 2016, I am founding the Greater Rocky Mountain Horror Writers – an APA. The domain grmhw.org has been purchased, an email account established at grmhw.org@gmail.com , and a preliminary website set up at https://grmhwapa.wordpress.com.

It’s going to start small, most likely. It is not going to be regionally restricted, but it will be regionally located in the Rocky Mountain region. It will be based in my office in my writing room until it no longer fits, if that should ever happen. It will start with a small website on WordPress, and if it grows and is able to sustain a requirement for dues (not to be more than $25) then a larger, maintained website will be designed. Publication will ensue within the group, which will have chapters if locations or subgenres need to be served.

This is a wait and see proposition. I am taking names and email addresses. Please visit the site available October 1. You –no matter who you are, no matter where you write Horror – are invited to join.

Knock Knock. Who’s there? Cthulhu. Cthulhu who?

 

 

 

Grandma Drove a Hearse (or, Why I Write Horror)

A lot of folks don’t “get” Horror writers. But they especially can’t understand what would make an otherwise respectable girl turn to Horror when they would much prefer to have raised a nice poet, or Nobel Prize winner.

Why? they ask, Was it something we did?

Well, maybe. Not to trot out the arm-chair psychologist or anything, but sometimes it has to do with simple curiosity – the kind that blooms in childhood in attic bedrooms cluttered with Victorian antiques smelling of mildew and wood rot…and sends thick, hungry vines to wrap around the trellis of imagination.

 

 

Me…Post Ghost

 

A Brief History. With Ghost.

Take my Grandma. She actually did drive a hearse. And I was at times awed and terrified by her – curious about her. She was a delicate-looking woman who was excruciatingly formidable, a tough woman shaped by the hard and fearful era that endured the Great Depression and World War I. At some awkward age, having spied a photograph of her as a young woman, I dared to utter, “Grandma, you were pretty.” To which she flew verbally at me to say in all seriousness, “I still am.”

You see, in my Grandma’s times, children were to be seen and not heard. You were a Young Lady the moment you weren’t in diapers. You sat quietly on the sofa, hands in your lap, legs demurely crossed, and mouth shut. Period.

You did not wander into rooms not for public viewing. You did not wander into rooms not intended for children. And you certainly did not pry into business not specifically your own, or speak before properly spoken to. Meanwhile your eyes took in the ball-and-claw furniture, the hand-woven rugs, what I now know to be folk art portraits of hideously miscalculated anatomy in solemn poses, dimly lit floor lamps married by tangles of extension cords, actual drapes framing the windows…

You heard the conversations about relatives and wars and matters of family. You could feel the fabric of mystery, of things left unsaid or understated. But you didn’t dare ask.

In other words, it was boring. And eerie. And cold.

And as an inevitably flawed child, it was treacherous navigating those social waters you were flung into every major holiday. But I was also simultaneously fascinated that my grandparents had had lives.

I used to sneak into the room where my Vietnam-era father (a career army officer), sat and talked to my Grandpa about his service in World War I, and his passion — the history of the Civil War. It was there I fell in love with history, because I could see its relevance to real people. But it was also where that matter of the hearse came up – because my Grandma had taken over for the men who would have done the job had they not gone off to war. No Rosie-the-Riveter, my Grandma… she drove the hearse.

Neither did it dawn on anyone that living for any length of time in Grandma’s haunted house might have had some influence on my ultimate choice of career. Never mind that I saw my first ghost there – that of my Great Grandmother who purchased the house and whose photograph I recognized years later when my own mother passed away – cuz yep that was her alright, sitting in the rocking chair at the foot of my bed, dressed in Victorian black and glaring at all four years old of me clutching my little toy dog. (My mother had later admitted that the house was haunted by Miss Mary, and that was “her” bedroom and “she” didn’t like kids. Thanks, Mom. Thanks for sending me back up there. Alone.)

So I guess it came as a surprise to me that anyone would be disappointed in my decision to be a writer or in my genre choice, sitting in a houseful of antiques where coffin boxes routinely did double-duty as linen storage.

But the decision to pursue the arts was not welcome in our family; it was a nice hobby. But it was a frequently expressed and common opinion that I needed to do something else with my education. I can’t tell you how many private talks were had that left me perpetually baffled, deflated, and professionally adrift. In fact, I attribute those conversations from my early years to the hideously long delay in starting a writing career.

Scary old folks who drive hearses and have intimidating opinions can have that effect on a young writer.

And it was only the bestsellerdom of a certain Stephen King in the 1970’s that began to change my parents’ opinions…I think they were more dazzled by his successes and the promise of Big Money than I ever was… But by then the damage to my ego had been done. By then I had subverted my love for writing and could only rebel by not becoming a chiropractor  (believe it or not, my grandparent’s dream for me.)

So I dropped out of college in my twenties. I couldn’t find a “calling” that did not include the Arts and a bad paycheck. Or the humanities and a bad paycheck. Or a bad paycheck.

I misspent years of my youth in the shadow of the oft versed collective condemnation of my elders by not writing…and I was miserable.

Then indeed came the Era of Stephen King. And suddenly not only was writing cool – writing Horror was cool. It was as though the whole condemnation thing had been an hallucination…and I was misremembering my entire youth, every verbal barb. Instead, it was all about, “when are you going to write a book?”

So, okay, you realize (I was thinking loudly), it’s not like I can just flip a switch here…. Or wave a wand at New York. I had buried a lot of stories…buried them deep… And never mind that once the Muse is insulted enough, she goes AWOL.  Even if I could find a thread of a tale, there was another problem my years of denial had created:  when I did sit down to write, I found I felt…uneducated. Like I didn’t know how to go about it.

It was an epiphany moment when I realized that for all of the compliments English teachers gave me in high school, they didn’t really give me direction. Partly this was because teachers are so constantly overburdened with a wide range of students and abilities, and partly this was because University-level education in English at that time led to the otherwise unfocused study of Classic Literature, or teaching. But not writing. Not invention. Not story construction. Not craft.

Apparently, we haven’t advanced much – relying now upon a few undergraduate courses, expensive workshops, horribly expensive MFA’s, or collective groups of writers who are no better educated than yourself about what ails your fiction.

But we are also no better in helping writers find out who they are as writers, and about educating them within their chosen genre. I realized that this is because we do not educationally link all of the things that make writing dynamic. Instead we loudly identify and point out the fawn lying in the tall grass… and sometimes those of us lying down only see the big teeth after that moment.

No one takes vulnerable youth and guides it….they seem to think we are homing pigeons born with our own magnetic compasses destined to take us infallibly to our careers… And that if we fail to navigate successfully, it is a sign we deserved to fail. We are not worthy.

Try battling that ghost…

Writing is Curiosity

One of the truly coolest things about writing is the full scope of the brain that gets involved in the process.

None of this was lost on me sitting in that bed at Grandma’s that night, certain a ghost was in the room with me. And it is exactly that kind of thing that gets the old curiosity going.

Never mind that many writers who write Horror typically don’t “believe” in the supernatural; many of them are agnostic, or have fallen away from their respective childhood faith. Some of us do get into it because of the things we’ve experienced, but don’t understand. Some of us were obliquely analytical about those hairs standing straight up, and managed to get a bit addicted to the frisson of terror that dilates the pupils and spills questions from your mouth like, “did that door just move by itself?”

We might sit in graveyards, or watch Horror movies with the lights out. Just because. And then we might dive into philosophy and religion and psychology because we sense it is all interrelated. And we find it’s fun…scaring ourselves.

But it also means we know how hard it is to recreate. Because who knows what witches’ brew of written ingredients will cast the right spell? We have to pull the fear out of our minds and inject it into those of perfect strangers – about whom we only know that they have the same addiction to scaring themselves. How to surprise them…

Horror is so brain science! Psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience, neurolinguistics, linguistics, memory, information processing, emotions, responses – learned and innate, physiology, biology, language formation and use…

When you see a ghost, why don’t you run? When you see something you know is not there, why does your heart race? What does it mean if you see a ghost? Is there something physically wrong? Mentally wrong? Or worse, spiritually wrong? What does that say about humanity? About the soul? About death? About religion? About God?

Horror is all about the Big Questions. From Great Grandma sitting at the end of the bed all dead, to what is the real meaning of life… Horror is the one genre willing to get down and dirty with the harsh imaginings of what it means to be human.

And as such it can spread its prose to encompass the symbolic, to haunt the guilty, to cry for justice.

Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it also made for some of the greatest Horror ever written. And it’s why as human beings we love scary stories, the macabre, the eerie.

Life Sucks. Death Sucks Worse.

So as you get older and people around you start dying, you also start wondering just why you are –especially after all these years— a writer of Horror. You wonder if you shouldn’t have channeled yourself into some other people-pleasing genre, written about hunks from history or epic battles. But then you get all excited about the new Joyce Carol Oates book, or rediscover some Shirley Jackson novel, or embrace some Roald Dahl or go all Saki with “Sredni Vashtar” and you just realize…you like it too much.

You realize that at the end of the day, you need to aim for the least amount of regrets. And if that means you spend your time sitting in a room writing scary tales – or trying to write them, then so be it.

Life sucks. Sometimes you’re the hearse-driver, sometimes you’re the hearse passenger. Life may be hard and unforgiving, the paychecks may be smaller in the arts, but death without having tried sucks worse.

It’s why if you are a young person whose parents frown at what you have chosen to write, you need to just keep writing it. Don’t ever stop writing. You can’t get those years back. And not-writing will make you miserable. It’s why if you are an older writer still waiting to for the right time to write, you need to pose those ghosts in your head and paint prose pictures right now. Just clear a space in a quiet corner and start writing. You probably have years of failure to spend catching up on lost time and opportunity… and like me, you aren’t getting any younger. Go for it. Set your soul free.

So I guess I’ll stay right here, totally remembering the image of Great Grandma in that rocking chair, totally awed by my hearse-driving Grandma. I have a lot of catching up to do, a lot of stories to unbury. And with beginnings like that, surely there’s one good tale in me worth telling.

Now to find the kitchen shears to root it out…

 

Dead Fish Swimming: a Horror Story for Creators of Intellectual Property

I recently visited a product development and turnkey services blog right here on WordPress that contained a post about Apple and its “accidental” confiscation of original music. What, you are wondering, does this have to do with writing Horror?

Answer: Everything. It erased original files of original music from the artist’s hard drive.

Why is that important? Because it is the musicians who are leading the charge in intellectual property rights and – it seems – violations.

The post is titled “Apple Stole My Music – No Seriously” and is located at https://blog.vellumatlanta.com/2016/05/04/apple-stole-my-music-no-seriously .. It is a hard lesson learned that anyone who does creative work using a computer and accesses the web should read.

Why? Because I suspect Apple is not alone in poking its blind fingers in intellectual pies. And in a world of Thought Police and creative control (along with its residuals and rights and proof of existence) it is the Artists that must be muzzled first.

It doesn’t have to be intentional to be covert. It doesn’t have to be mean-spirited. It just has to happen. And it is. Happening.

http://pacman.wikia.com/wiki/File:Pac-Man-and-the-ghostly-adventures-pac-man-and-the-ghostly-adventures-34928389-960-540.png

Technology is Not a Safe Zone

We hear warnings all of the time…about hackers slipping into your private reserves of data, snagging everything and holding it hostage. We hear about tech crashes, about small children barely out of diapers who reprogram things into user oblivion, about spilt beverages and lightning strikes. But we forget that every time we log onto an online service – paying a fee or just trying it out – that we give control of our hard drive to that service to download its software in order to make that service usable.

Embedded within that software can be innocent-sounding script that reads the rest of your files for the purpose of consolidating data…

But here’s the thing many of us have to learn the hard way: computers don’t really “think” – at least not in the variables and preferences that the human mind does – computers process data, consolidating data that appears to be the same, often having been written to favor the newest version of things…

It is easy to hide behind the veil of software programs and the decisions made in back rooms by programmers conveniently not thinking about such things, by those paid to “look the other way” or paid to just benefit the company that employs them when in doubt. It’s also easy to blame non-programmers for “operator errors” that they have no idea how to disprove.

But today’s artists are having to become more and more fluent in technology – including programming languages – in order to create and sell their products. And as in this particular case, the artist was too savvy to be “snowed” by those unwilling or unable to help.

Not many of us can make the same claim. And it is for that reason that the reference to that blog post is on THIS blog post.

Computer programs DO NOT THINK….they do as programmed…

As Artists, our only protection from that blizzard of HTML and newer languages in an innocent download or opening an email is TO BACK UP OUR WORK.

Not just “save” it…. Put it on another drive separate from your computer – like a thumb or zip drive.

This is especially true if other people have access to or USE your computer….

 

http://www.retrocomputers.gr/forum/games-gaming/17023-oi-psifiakoi-iroes-ton-paixnidion-pou-agapisame

 

This is About More Than Your First Draft

Really think about what a loss of your data means….as a writer….

Your computer files date the origination and time of your file creation and record your saves… a valuable piece of copyright protection.

Maybe you experiment with your drafts well into many versions before deciding on one. Or two. How many pages is that? How many words? How many unpaid hours of your labor?

If lost, how likely are you to recreate the same story the same way with the same word choice as before?

What would that loss feel like?

Answer: You don’t want to know. EVER.

Never mind that such a program intrusion as mentioned in the post seizes your data as its own, placing it in ITS catalog for purchase or download…And YOU would have to REPURCHASE your own work potentially. But altered. To the program’s preferences.

Never mind that this is a little too Big Brother for most of our liking.

As Artists, our work is our BABY. Our SANITY. It is who we are.

This is intellectual assault in the worst form.

Imagine for just a moment a total loss of everything right now on your computer.

It won’t matter that it was “innocent” or “accidental” or just “part of the program.”

“ ‘Sorry’ seems to be the hardest word….” (thank you, Elton John!)

And you probably won’t hear it.

Because most of the Technology Sector doesn’t appear to be. It’s why you keep having to buy the newest technology to access everything you’ve already bought with your hard-earned money.

It’s why I work in a bookstore.

It’s why I have print in my house. And buy DVDs. And keep CDs. I don’t want any computer anywhere (or by extension its programmer or parent company) to decide how, when, what, or what version of what I want to read, listen to or watch.

That is the definition of CENSORSHIP.

 

http://pacman.wikia.com/wiki/Blinky

Back It Up, Back Musicians Up

I’m going to say it again. Musicians are on the forefront of the battle against the control of technology and the theft of intellectual property by those who feel so entitled.

But our work – the work of Artists – is only free when we SAY it is. And until Technology is completely free, Technology needs to keep its opinions about the obligations of all Artists to provide free access to our work and its sticky tentacles off our creative endeavors.

Fans need to realize that Art is not created in a vacuum, but by real people putting in real blood, sweat and tears for years of unpaid labor to bring them just a few minutes of unforgettable pleasure.

If it isn’t free for the Artist to create, it shouldn’t be free to download. Unless the Artist gives his or her permission.

Costs need to be respected because they support whole industries that support whole legions of people working real jobs. That means money must be exchanged or you are contributing to the death of that industry and the end of original Art.

So fellow Horror writers, and writers, and Artists and fans of Artists and writers of every ilk…

Support musicians EVERY TIME they stand up against the bullying of Technology and its less savory users. The music industry is setting the precedent that intellectual property cases will rely on far into the future.

Be present and accounted for. And don’t forget to back up your files.

 

 

Cover Story: Judging the Book Business of Horror

I miss the ‘80s. All of the time. And I miss it because of the book covers.

This is not a product of my age, however. It is instead the fact that we face an inexcusable irony in today’s Age of Information Technology: it’s harder than ever to find information…sound, truthful, vetted information. About anything.

From who wrote what to canon lists, from how to write a short story to the definition of Literary terms and Literary Criticism…All the way to where is the New Horror shelved….Just because it once was aptly published does not mean you can find it – or find it easily – today. Even when it is right in front of you, it’s almost impossible to see.

This has more to do with the packaging than you think. And with Technology, the packaging seems to have homogenized along with everything else. Technology has this nasty habit of making everything disappear, right before the eyes.

But if there are exceptions, why isn’t the proof of the past and the proof of current sales figures enough to send us right back to the awesome book covers of Yore? Why do we assume it to be more complicated than simply judging a book –and buying it – by its cover?

Still a Snipe Hunt

Younger, tech-savvy folk might not want to admit it, but when actual people were in charge we managed to have accurate systems for searching and retrieval, for validation and reference. One didn’t have to go far to find someone who could explain the system. You were one summer afternoon away from the Vaults of All Human Knowledge…and from all the Horror you could handle. One simple reason was book cover art.

Ahh, the Good Old Days… when monsters roamed the paperback displays and color shouted genre.

The real bottom line in retail book selling is that books are judged by their covers in a serious and instantaneous way that has dire consequences. Says Mark Coker (founder of Smashwords) in a 2013 article for The Huffington Post: “ ‘Our brains are wired to process images faster than words…When we see an image, it makes us feel something.’ A great cover, he says, can ‘help the reader instantly recognize that this book is for them.’ ” (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/30/book-cover-design-indies_n_3354504.html )

In other words, it connects the reader to the content – to expectations that include genre. That can lead to a purchase, even if the author is unknown.

But it can also make inferences about the level of faith the writer and/or publisher has in the work, the quality of editing and writing within, and provoke gut reactions to the book as a product. Continues Coker, “In addition to promising what a book will deliver, the [cover] image also promises (or fails to promise) that the author is a professional, and that the book will honor the reader’s time.” (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/30/book-cover-design-indies_n_3354504.html )

So why aren’t we seeing more commitment from publishers? Are they intentionally trying to disguise Horror? Is this part of the movement to eliminate genre altogether, to “improve” the overall Literary quality of our writing, or a denial of our denial that all writing is Literature (of some sort)?  Or is it simply a part of a larger manufactured truth manipulated to prove to everyone that Horror (as a target genre) is changing and has lost its teeth? If Horror falls, is another genre next?

Yet good Horror is toothy. It’s edgy. And it’s typically not Literature. So why are we trying so hard to herd all writers into the same corner, starting with the book cover? It’s not going to improve literacy, book sales, or the quality of the writing.

I still buy Horror, and so do others. When we find it. It is simply more disappointing when the cover seems artless and flat, when it doesn’t invite you to hold it in your hands, to caress it, and clutch it to you when the world intrudes. It also doesn’t make it stand out on the shelf…from all of the thousands of others.

Working in a retail bookstore has been a blessing for the reader in me. It’s helped me “happen” across new Horror and new Horror writers without the very prejudiced opinions of publishing house marketing departments.

I don’t have to worry that Stephen King might be fulfilling a contract agreement or personal favor he couldn’t get out of by recommending a title, I don’t have to feel manipulated by “bestseller” lists, or have titles pushed at me. But it has been an exercise in frustration in setting out to find Horror on any given day.

And even when I find it, if I don’t buy it immediately, it still tends to disappear almost as quickly as it is discovered, sent back to publishers for not selling, or purchased but not scheduled to be replenished…never mind the rhythm of my paychecks. This means that a Horror fan must be a predatory bookstore regular…prowling the aisles in search of the next book, willing to purchase immediately (pounce), put the item on hold (stalk), or order a copy unseen (track).  It means we must be able to find it and find it fast.

But it also means that in today’s environment of wanting it all handed directly to us, we must become diggers. We have no choice but to research our own genre ourselves and root out all of the information we can like miners in a dark tunnel… because we are in fact alone. Horror is still a genre… a niche read… and experts on the genre with author names and titles and genre history at their fingertips are still somewhat rare.

Publishers seem to be in a trance, dazed and wandering about mumbling that Horror is dead and nobody buys it. So marketing departments are happily tucking it between non-traditional bookcovers, disguised as …gag….popular fiction.

Not only has our section been eradicated in the erroneous belief that Horror has gone Literary or just gone, but it is decorated like something that sits next to The Great Gatsby or The Grapes of Wrath.

 

What’s a Horror fan to do? Like long-playing records (now coquettishly called “vinyl”), Horror has often been bought and read because of the covers… But the truly fabulous, eye-catching art that screamed “Horror Novel…Beware of Nightmares Within!” are gone. Those magnificent illustrations have absconded to Science Fiction and Fantasy, Graphic Novels, Comics, and Young Adult fiction…leaving Horror with uninspired cover art that does not distinguish the genre from the run-of-the-mill. It doesn’t say “see me” or “hold me” or “luxuriate in my imagination.” It says “I promise to not clash with your fifty shades of white décor,” and “no one has to know you like tentacles”…

Why is this?

Tentacles Anonymous. One Day at a Time.

Some of it has to do with costs (like paying actual artists and reproduction expenses which by default then are not going to someone else), and not much is invested in things that don’t have a reputation of selling. But we have to convince publishers that this is a self-fulfilling prophecy issue: that if we can’t find Horror we don’t buy Horror.

Vibrant cover art with splashy images can help us see it, and can warn readers in search of a cozy mystery off it. The fact that Horror people also tend to be cyclical purchasers expanding their collections at pause-points of the year – like before a big storm, ahead of the summer vacation, Halloween – doesn’t always help, especially if a book is published and has its sale trial during an off time. But such knowledge can also be a marketing boon…if a publisher uses it.

Therefore we also have to remind publishers that it helps to have Horror “come out” when it is most likely to be remembered, sought out, and displayed by merchants – like at Halloween, or riding the coat tails of summer movie blockbusters. And it helps to issue it in a format we can afford – paperback, even mass-market…because we also tend to be the working poor.

All of this is alleviated if we can simply find it because it is decorated to be seen. And this is especially true now that so much Thriller/Suspense and Psychological Suspense is snarfing on our genre images to punctuate their covers…

Nor does it help to force Horror into a Literary box before it is ready. While much of the genre is experimenting with better craft and broader audiences, we all need to be more honest here: Horror is and always will be a niche audience. Far too many people want to live in their own genre bubbles; they are not interested in being converted nor are they happy about being tricked. Meanwhile, ignoring the audience that does want Horror is genre suicide.

What publishers need to rethink is this whole “genre-less” environment thing… It does not lead to more people discovering more books and authors, to higher and broader sales. Trust me: I work in a bookstore. People come to find something they want…a formula they find satisfying – whether it is classics, cozy mysteries, romance or fan fiction and military science fiction, elves, dwarves, or superheroes or poetry. They don’t look at the publisher imprint. They don’t care if the writer has a degree. They don’t know who Raymond Carver is. They might not even know anything about Critical references to Hemmingway. They wrinkle their noses, they gawk at the prices and mutter something about Amazon when neither they nor ourselves can find what they want. And one of the most requested things is…The Horror Section.

Be still my heart….

That’s right. Our fans are die-hards, and they are collectively in disbelief that the Horror section is not only gone, but remains gone. Sometimes they think they found it when they happen across the letter “K” in general fiction, until they realize the three bays are only the current catalogs of King, and Koontz. They wander for hours before dragging their exhausted bones to Customer Service like wanderers in a desert to ask “where the heck is the Horror?”

(Hey, I have a solution. Everybody out there writing Horror….quick… change your last name to start with a “K”… Take my Horror section will ya….)

Meanwhile, imagine my frustration when I have to say…”there is no Horror section. It is all out there. Somewhere.”

Keep in mind, some of us are getting old and memories fail. Names sometimes defy my speedy recollection. If only I had a section, I murmur like a mantra…I could go right to specific authors and say “this – this is GOOD”… But no. And all too often when I do remember a new title or name, the book is not there because nobody found it and it didn’t sell so it went back.

Horror Writers Unite!

It may take authors to put pressure on Publishers. That may mean that authors have to take the creative bull by the horns and actually be ok with what they write. It may mean that an author has to argue with an editor about “possibilities” versus “realities.”

Note to Publishers and Horror authors: what we as readers and retailers need to buy and sell Horror is Horror that is identifiable.

That means that in lieu of an actual, let’s-make-life-easy Horror Section, we need genre codes. Visual cues…

We need to be able to spot our authors buried in the stacks of popular fiction. We need to find them when they are old, and when they are new. We need to know we are looking at Horror… not a Literary work with a handy set of (surprise!) Horror conventions.

Horror fans really are a forgiving, fun-loving bunch. We are fine with kitsch when the story is good. We are ok with pulp. And we admire the well-crafted miracles of any Poe or Lovecraft we discover. So we forgive any author trying to up their game, following the advice of marketing people who think sales will follow in confusing the public.

But we are your fans. Please stop trying to blend in. Unless you want a garage full of first editions of your book. Demand your audience be able to find you and that spectacular best seller you are sitting on.

Demand book covers that will telegraph your genre to your waiting and hungry audience. There is a lot to be said for judging a book by its cover. And that works both ways.

Horror Publishers Wake Up!

And if PUBLISHING wants a solution, if it really wants to sell books…quit messing with the genres. Books are just like anything else. It’s not the quality items that make your sales goals…it is the simple stuff. The cheap stuff. Those of us who buy it make it possible for you to pay the True Artists their Mega Paychecks. Give us our stuff. We want it back.

Really. Once upon a time our purchase of genre Horror supported whole subsidiaries and imprints, supported midlist authors, pulpy magazines, rank and file editors, bookstores, printers, artists, reviewers, critics…Hollywood… Put it back! It might not be as lush as before, but if economists are to be believed and cost of living is really relative to pay throughout history, then we should be able to finesse it. Right?

And bring back our artists! We do want monsters and tentacles and screaming girls and evil scientists and dark cemeteries on our covers – not “pretty” artwork from other genres. We do want covers that tell us we are in Horror-land – the reds, the blues, the greens… just like old movie posters…the day-glo stuff, the textured stuff, images that announce a Horror fan is reading Horror… The grunge fonts, the dripping letters…

God, I miss the ‘80s.

And all I have to do to see what could-have-been is go to the Young Adult Section.

Because Young Adult publishers and marketing departments are doing it RIGHT.

Artwork to die for.

Artwork to put in a picture frame.

Artwork that shouts “find the print!” “Who’s the artist?” “I have to have that book!”

 

Maybe if adult Horror fans felt like publishers had a little faith in the product…

It’s not too late to turn it around. Print is not dead and neither is Horror. And better book covers is one of the easiest ways to get our genre mojo back. We want color, we want texture, we want artwork, and… we want category identifiers on the spine – the kind that say HORROR in large letters, repeated on the back at the bottom or top of the blurb. HORROR. All caps. All the time.

It’s the way we find our genre. It’s the way we roll when we have a little spending money in our pockets.

So, publishers… You want in on this action? Or not?

 

GOOD HORROR I HAVE ACCIDENTALLY FOUND

(Nonfiction)

Grant, John. Spooky Science: Debunking the Pseudoscience of the Afterlife. New York: Sterling, c2015.

Jones, Stephen, ed. The Art of Horror: an Illustrated History. Milwaukee, WI: Applause Theater & Cinema Books, c2015

Travis Langley, ed. The Walking Dead Psychology: Psych of the Living Dead. New York: Sterling, c2013.

Peterson, David J. The Art of Language Invention: From Horse-Lords to Dark Elves, the Words Behind World-Building. New York: Penguin Books, c2015.

(Anthologies)

Datlow, Ellen, ed. The Monstrous. San Francisco, CA: Tachyon Books, c2015.

Dziemianowicz, Stefan, ed. Classic Horror Stories. New York: Barnes & Noble Inc., c2015.

Dziemianowicz, Stefan, comp. Great Ghost Stories: 101 Terrifying Tales. New York: Fall River Press, c2016.

Guran, Paula, ed. Mermaids. Germantown, MD: Prime Books, c2015.

Guran, Paula, ed. New Cthulhu 2: More Recent Weird. Germantown, MD: Prime Books, c2015.

Jones, Stephen. Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth by H.P. Lovecraft and Others. London: Titan Books, c2013.

Matheson, Michael. The Humanity of Monsters. Toronto, Canada: ChiZine Publications, [c2015].

(Novels & Single Author Anthologies)

Aronovitz, Michael. Phantom Effect. New York: Night Shade Books, c2016.

Baker, Jacqueline. The Broken Hours: a novel of H.P. Lovecraft. New York: Talos Press, c2016.

De Kretser, Michelle. Springtime: a Ghost Story. New York: Catapult, c2014.

Kupersmith, Violet. The Frangipani Hotel. New York: Spiegel  & Grau, c2015.

Lebbon, Tim. The Silence. London: Titan, c2015.

Reid, Iain. I am Thinking of Ending Things. New York: Scout Press, [future projected release June 2016 – with an excellent cover on the advance copy, by the way]

Crisis on the Leng Plateau: the Struggle for the Soul of American Horror

Maybe it’s Lovecraft’s fault… After all, he did it so well.

But lately I figure somewhere there must be an explanation as to why in contemporary American Horror, the weakest point of the story tends to be the monster. I’ve fallen for blurbs, for cover art, for Famous Horror Writer recommendations. Yet time and again the monster just isn’t scary, or eerie, or haunting. If I come away with any manner of emotional displacement, the author (or the concept) tends to be from an earlier period of Horror history, or not to be American at all.

Could it be that we are so excited about what we hope to write that we forget WHAT we are writing? Are we that ignorant of our own genre history? Is it possible that we don’t even know what genre writing is anymore?

Monsters – By ANY Other Name

The genre of Horror has actual history… it has a bloodline and a marked route of exploration and developmental growth. During its earlier years when the term “Gothic” or “ghost story” would no longer adequately encompass what was being written, writers and editors and publishers began calling what was being produced by new and confusing names – Supernatural Fiction, Spectral Fiction, Strange tales, Weird tales, Terror, and Horror.

True to form, everyone had a different interpretation of definitions and definition boundaries even then. And this confusion continues a bit to this day, but now more in the Critical quarter – because remember that it is the Literary Critic whose job it is to decide how to categorize Literature for the sake of Literary analysis. And we now have actual Critics in our genre corner…

With changing times, the former discourse between writers of subgenre fiction seems broken, its writers (new and seasoned) now scattered about in genre isolation with less publication venues to offer dedicated subgenre havens, fewer informed editors and actual examples of subgenre fiction. So the rest of us just tend to pronounce ourselves as writing this or that with no real forethought or thorough Literary understanding of the definitions we use.

But today we are blessed to have S.T. Joshi and China Mieville in our genre corner. And it is the coming of these two Literary Critics that has lifted our genre from the stage of Literary argument (is Horror Literature) to the stage of Literary analysis (which Horror is Literature and why). Of the two, I find the most useful published Criticism by S.T. Joshi (although I really would like to see something more and intense by Mieville). And it is Joshi who has started me thinking – well, Weird.

As part of his job as a Critic, and one of the first in our genre, Joshi has taken the necessary step of attempting to tackle the definitions of genre and subgenre work in Horror and to nail them down. In his book The Weird Tale, he takes the opportunity to present an argument to clarify his rationale for chosen categories in the genre, and to open the discussion on how the genre should be Literarily argued. What is exceptional here, is Mr. Joshi’s attempt to include the modern Horror reader and writers in this discussion.

He does not “talk down” to genre fans and writers; he simply explains how he sees the parsing of the genre for Literary analysis and –most importantly – why he believes his rationalizations are either correct or ripe for discussion. Yet isn’t it awkward that most of us have no idea what Joshi is talking about? Or know that he is talking? This ignorance of our own literary progression has left our imaginations (replete with monsters) high centered on a plateau of mediocre fiction…a Leng Plateau…

I’m saying that the reason we don’t know is exactly why our monsters are in crisis, why our writing has lost its authoritative voice, why the British seem to have a strong sense of place in their fiction and we seem to be nomads. We have disconnected with the past; we are balloon writers floating above the plains of Leng…

It is also why we have lost our Horror section.

We have allowed ourselves as writers (sadly, sometimes innocently enough) to be led by the public, by publishers’ guesstimates of what the public wants, by editors who might be coerced into finding the next Stephen King instead of the next genre-changer. Worse, we have allowed ourselves to be led by the promise of Hollywood and merchandising. We have committed the greatest sin in Lovecraft’s eyes: writing for money…

Okay, so let’s be clear: Lovecraft desired publication, he submitted stories, he was occasionally paid for them, he lived off an inheritance and a wife as long as he could, then was reduced to editing other authors for a living. Lovecraft was not saying he was against publication. He was saying one doesn’t change the story to get it published. He was saying a writer needs to pursue the higher art offered by the story, no matter how many rejections that equates to; that a writer should be true to his or her vision. In this case, he is firmly in alignment with the Literary Critic.

Yet how many of us actually have cultivated a vision for our writing? How many of us think in terms of legacy instead of simple solvency?

The problem is, no one is out there teaching us about the history and mechanics of Horror. No one except our very own Critics right now. We need to read them. We have artistic decisions to make.

Golden Age writers knew what they were writing, where it could find an audience, what publications were their choices… Today, we just write, and submit to any publication that we can find. Most of us cannot categorize ourselves, let alone our fiction, because to categorize our work would be to narrow our choices, our sense of opportunity.

Example: I recently visited a website for a regional writer’s group, looking for Horror writers. What I found was the comment “is willing to write Horror.” WILLING to write Horror?! Where is the writer who unabashedly is PROUD to write Horror?

Sometimes I think we lost our own section in Horror because many of us have lost the understanding of what we are intending to write. And marketing departments are only too happy to pronounce the demise of genre writing.

So why does the very thought cause us an instinctive knee-jerk reaction? Is it because the meandering away from genre conventions is an accidental misstep and that we never meant to abandon genre? Yet is that also why our monsters have lost their teeth and grown human appendages where tentacles should be? Do we know how to get back into formula?

My Weird Tales Epiphany

Maybe it’s time we listened to our elders – the genre greats who started a conversation that just seemed to evaporate in the 1990’s altogether, and which has been resuscitated in part by S.T. Joshi. Have we forgotten the rabid dedication many authors and editors once had to the argument over terms and subgenres?

Today if a writer doesn’t research the genre personally or trip over key essays chances are he or she just hasn’t a clue what has gone before and where we are now. For instance, since the genre began to grow in popularity in the 1930’s and 1940’s, there have been arguers and defenders of the usage of the terms Horror, Terror, Supernatural, Strange and Weird to define the many types of writing we may do.

Did you even know that there has been an internal unrest about what our genre should in fact be calling itself for quite some time?

This is the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Because if you write Horror, you are on the battlefield up to your Muse. Shouldn’t you be at least aware of your place in the tradition? The British (our main competitors) seem ever to be…

While a large part of writing – most specifically drafting – is drenched in magic and mystery and wonder, in the end we need to know as ­authors of a story exactly what we are trying to say. Then we need to revise to be sure we are saying it. Only then can we be certain that the genre is worthy of its name – whichever one is ultimately chosen.

The name “Horror” has taken a beating for a while now. It and “Terror” in its turn has been commandeered by current events to the point that many are reluctant to use it. It has driven genre fans in droves back to more “antiquated” terms like “Weird” and “Strange” to defend and salvage the genre. But I think we shouldn’t be letting “world events” distort our genre to that effect. I think the conversation of what we are writing is germane to what we choose to call it. And I don’t think we can call it something if we don’t know the definitions of those terms.

Horror itself has been keelhauled for being an emotion. Why, ask its detractors, do we want to name our genre with an emotion when almost all other genres are described by nouns or adjectives? I believe that the word – emotion or not – encompasses all that the genre tries to inflict upon the reader – an emotional response. In that capacity, it is like Thrillers, Suspense, and Romance. It is asking the brain to explore dark corners, to revisit the primal place of fear, terror, revulsion, disgust, dread – you know – horror.

But some genre experts (those who have duly earned their stripes as writers, editors, and Critics of the genre) sometimes feel otherwise, that Horror is more about gore and dismemberment – fear of our fellow man or human-ness than that which merely disturbs. They will argue for other terms – like Weird. I’m thinking we are arguing over semantics here, over connotation and denotation... But what is important is agreeing on what our genre is and should be called, what its conventions and formulas should include or exclude. There should not be any question in a writer’s mind.

Enter S.T. Joshi, Literary Critic and the best friend Horror has in Literature right now. Joshi, perhaps the world’s greatest contemporary expert on all things H.P. Lovecraft, has embraced the Weird. Like his object of research, he has come to believe that Horror is more a subgenre of Weird fiction than the other way around. And he uses Lovecraft to explain why. Whereas according to Lovecraft “The crux of a weird tale is something which could not possibly happen” (Joshi 6), Joshi states, “I begin my own study with a rather odd assertion: the weird tale, in the period … (generally 1880 -1940) did not (and perhaps does not now) exist as a genre but as the consequence of a world view…” [his emphasis] (xiii).

Most assuredly, that is the Literary Critic in Joshi talking… because it is the presence, the omniscience of a world view that elevates a work from genre to Literature. And if Weird fiction is more commonly Literature than average Horror fiction, then is it not the tree from which the apple falls?

You can see how quickly this conversation becomes interesting and relevant to all genre writers and fans. It is why Joshi has put his work out there. Discussion is the key to movement… to breathing life into the Critical process.

But it is also integral to creating new Lovecrafts. We all have to be on the same page. And at a time when we seem to have lost our national genre compass, shouldn’t we get on board with this very basic Critical idea – the naming of parts, the re-establishment of genre, the enforcement of boundaries and celebrating rebellions against the very same? How else can we commit to writing a story we can encapsulate with a category name if we don’t know the terms of surrender?

Believe it or not, many of us as Horror writers have never really considered this, and it may be the deserving reason we get rejected.

Here’s a thought based on that statement: to elevate a story beyond the genre, to be genre-changing we must first be able to write genre.

Can you? Can you structure a monster based on a subgenre? Do you know what that means? I am not so sure we do, because I don’t see any establishment figures laying out the formula they claim is criteria. I see allusions to formula, partial lists of conventions, scattered tropes…I do not see a book or website or rule guide dedicated to defining the genre as only this and never that. A writer should not have to piece genre formula together like a quilt, over decades of rejections and gleaning gems from essays and editorial forwards and interviews. Yet only the subgenres of Weird (pardon me for the classification liberty) and ghost story/Spectral fiction have easIER guidlelines to find…

Editors have pronounced themselves too busy. Universities are teaching and preaching against genre. Workshops are a gamble, writers groups may “accept” but don’t generally specialize in genre writing, how-to’s have Gone Hollywood. What’s a genre purist to do?

If you want technical assistance, you need a Critic: read Joshi.

If you want written examples, read Golden Age genre writers – read Weird Tales from the day.

That’s right. Under the scales and leathery wings of the greatest of all Literary Horror monsters (Horror being the overarching term I am predisposed to), beats a heart of pulp.

Get thee to a collection of early Weird Tales… I recently found a copy at a used book shop, one edited by famed genre editor Marvin Kaye, who back in the 1990’s also edited several anthologies of the subgenres including Terror, the Supernatural, the Unknown, Ghosts, Witches, Devils and Demons… I remembered having read many of the stories when I was a kid, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth. I assumed I would read them, smile in remembrance, and move on.

Wrong.

I was awed. Stunned. My imagination was RE-filled with the passion that started my love affair with the Horror genre. How did we lose this? I wondered aloud. How did we lose this awesome ability to tell tales that in mere pages can keep us up and night and hungering for more?

Is it because authors in those days had a bevy of magazines whose “bar” was set a bit lower to acquiring and keeping a basic readership – not set to making an author’s or an editor’s Big Break, not set to doubling its subscription base annually or it is a “business failure,” not reliant on burying writing among ads just to stay in print… not set to the equivalent of tossing a bottle out on the ocean so it could be “discovered in its excellence” by the masses who would theoretically spend lavishly to keep it on the internet ocean?

Is it because it was “just pulp” and not overreaching to call itself high Literature, its writers happy to just spill its monsters into cheap prose to see what else might hatch? Is it because no matter how poorly writers were paid, writers could by being prolific, actually make a poor living doing it?

Who knows? But those very circumstances led to some of the absolute greatest writing of our genre – some of it now admittedly Literature…

It also inspired contemporary writers – like Stephen King and Ramsey Campbell – our current models of success with totally different styles. It set the standard for Horror in Literature by revisiting Poe and Lovecraft, Machen and Blackwood, Dunsany and Bierce. It made all of us want to be Horror writers…

Calling Central Casting

To perform at our best, to exercise the boundaries of genre and flirt with the meaning and power of Literature, we cannot be trying to manipulate our fiction so Hollywood can use it. We cannot be motivated by fame and fortune. We cannot allow ourselves to be told we either “write for Hollywood or for Critics.”

It’s not about starving. It’s about producing ART, not mass producing drivel. Because if that is what we are teaching ourselves to write, then we roundly deserve the stinging criticisms of editors and Critics. We are rolling our monsters out on a rack time after time and expecting a different result.

Stop the insanity!

We need to write for ourselves. For our genre. For our audience.

When you read fiction written for you, there is no doubt; you are sitting next to the campfire, the storyteller is looking at you right in the eye, and the monster is drooling just at the edge of the darkness. You can feel his breath on your neck, imagine his fangs tearing at your flesh…and anything is possible…even the impossible.

So are you writing Weird or Horror fiction? Or are you perhaps writing in the subgenre of Terror or Strange tales?

And if you don’t know, shouldn’t you be finding out? Because right now our monsters are suffering from a clear identity crisis. We don’t seem able to write them without it looking like we are attempting a parody or poking fun. American monsters leap, crawl, and ooze onto our literary theater with the impact of a stage magician pulling a very tired old rabbit out of the hat. We have lost something besides the element of surprise.

Surprise! Storytelling is an art that has its own rules. I say again…look at pulp.

Stories fail for so many different reasons. They should not be failing because we glimpse the monster, or we rolled him out on a rack. That should be a moment of pure Terror. Horror. Weirdness. FEAR.

Surely, we can still manage that…

 

References

Joshi, S.T. The Weird Tale. Holicong, PA: Wildside Press, c 1990.

Montague, Charlotte. H.P. Lovecraft:the Mysterious Man Behind the Darkness. New York: Chartwell Books, c2015.

Weird Tales. Marvin Kaye, ed. New York: Barnes and Noble, c1988.

Recommended Websites:

Weird site: http://greydogtales.com/blog/?p=1336

Horror site: http://www.thisishorror.co.uk/category/columns/

 

Horror and the MFA in Creative Writing: Vanity Degree or Elevation of Genre?

I’ll be the first to admit my head was turned.

I was about to graduate, drunk with ambition and that sense of promise a newly minted college degree inserts into the psyche. It had been a long and perilous journey – the muse had almost drowned in other peoples’ opinions and swamps of guilt trips. But I had finally realized that writing wasn’t a dream – it was a vital part of who I am. Several professors had suggested I seriously consider pursuing a Masters in Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing. And I found myself seriously considering it.

At the precise moment a person realizes that they are a writer because they are a writer and not because someone else gives them permission, an insatiable hunger forms – the hunger for craft.

I know, I know. Most writing elitists would never believe it: the proof is in the pudding, they would say, most novice writing stinks — genre or otherwise. But amazingly enough, when a person starts to write they inevitably become part of a very old argument:

Can great writing be taught, and if so, should it?

Born This Way (or Not)

Believe it or not, this is actually part of an argument tossed about by Literary Critics – those crazy fiction fanatics whose job it is to dissect prose in the academic pursuit of the secrets of invention. They have ignited a firestorm of passionate discussion about what makes a writer a Writer of Literary standard – are they born with it? Is the birth of a Literary Work a spontaneous act of innate factors valued above the talents of a common writer who needs to be taught?

Critics are indeed Purists…the High Priests of Prose. They love and protect Literature, and see themselves as the most likely to find that answer.

But I wonder sometimes how far they think about what they are really saying.

If one looks at author biographies for Literary works, what one finds consistently is a group of  elite writers who grow up in some kind of informed community – other established Literary Writers, teachers, activists, printers and publishers, poets, religious groups, artists, philosophers…critical thinkers of their time.

In those groups the young writer is nurtured, mentored, emotionally supported. And being raised around the humanities boosts the moral imperative to create and to create powerful vehicles of communication and thought.

A far cry from what we offer young writers today. Or old ones, for that matter.

Today, we expect Literature By Divine Intervention… prodigies only are the real artistes… Everyone else is a hack.

No wonder most of us have fled to the genres. Why bother to try if your pedigree is going to be a factor?

Arts – of which writing is one – flourish in community more than in isolation. We learn from each other — successes and mistakes. We learn and share technique, we withdraw from the world and hang in enclaves that carry us through the creative doldrums and celebrate our victories as part of a community. We mentor each other, experiment with the limits of craft.

Except that today, most writers don’t. We get ‘A’s on papers early on, mystifyingly amazed looks from teachers, vague comments that encourage but tell us nothing, and are left to fantasize about writing…not to learn about it. We wind up eventually believing the myths created by people who either do not understand the tidal pull of the arts on the soul, or who (for our own good) wish to kill it. We work in jobs that eviscerate our imaginations, and use us up until there is nothing left to use to write – not even in our “spare time.”

We spend years trying to understand whether we are writers because we need to write, or whether we are writers only if we sell $20’s worth of fiction… Which sounds easy until you can’t find $20’s worth of magazines to submit to (i.e., that are accepting submissions and/or accepting them from unknowns). Just sayin’…

And that conundrum pushes us further into private hells that have no exit except in writing…so we do. We continue to write and practice writing badly because no one teaches us how to write well. No one teaches us how to properly construct a story, develop character, follow arcs, adjust tension, manage dialogue, or even defines what Literature IS and what it DOES.

We spend hours trying desperately to be in awe of The Classics and Literature Reading Lists, trying to scry from oceans of antiquated prose why everyone thinks this is GOOD…to figure out what teachers are REALLY looking for in term papers and literary analysis assignments….

We don’t know because none of this is taught.

In the Big Rush to not contaminate the “pool” of possible prodigies, we have thrown away generations of writers who just needed sustenance and common instruction in technique.

How sad is that?

But amazingly, we have the CIA to thank for considering education to be the key. In fact, the story is that if it weren’t for the paranoia of government officials about the Soviet Union outperforming the U.S. in the development of national Literature, we would never have gotten the Iowa Writers Workshop and its illustrious and original MFA program (number one in the country, mind you).

Literary-worthy Writers were examined, allegedly three were chosen, and their styles became the models for American Literature to emulate.

And it was exactly that discovery about style that began to un-turn my head about the MFA.

Yet this MFA position has taken the pendulum to the other side of the argument… Given enough money, ANYONE can be a writer by learning to write.

Maybe we just need rescue from these particular academics for a few moments…

Because after all of my research – and I did a lot of research – I was left with the question for MFA programs nationally: why are you teaching style instead of technique?

Writers come in various sizes of style. But we all have to learn technique.

Not so, think Critics… talent is innate. Yep, it is. But if no one ever taught me to hold a pencil and shape letters, how to form noun + verb + adjective, where and when to place a comma… So go ahead. Take away the crayons from your prodigies and let’s see how much Art you get.

Good or bad, I already have a style, thank you, and young writers deserve to find their own within and between the ghosts of the whole and entire scope of Literary choices. I don’t mind learning about a successful Literary Style, but I don’t want to be identifiable as a certain MFA program graduate – like I was a suit rolled out on a rack. I don’t want to write like someone famous….I want to write like me.

Needless to say… doubt began to erode my MFA dreams. I found myself stalling my old professors who kept asking where I had applied for an MFA.

The Assault on Speculative Fiction in MFA Programs (or Why I Remain a Genre Writer)

For me, part of the problem is that I love and write genre…maybe not strict genre, but genre nonetheless, which I discovered begets yet another complication for MFA students: one of the other kind of style. I am fine with being a genre writer. I like genre writing, although I also like Literature and enjoy my genres with the occasional Literary overtones. I am certainly not ashamed of writing Horror – at least, not anymore.

For years I found myself apologizing for what I do and who I am (“I’m sorry…I write Horror”) watching hopeful enthusiasm turn into crestfallen faces that had a serious similarity to the expression of disappointment. But these are people who don’t understand the genre, and worse – who seriously underestimate the Literary contributions of Horror. For centuries, Horror has been a constant driver of Feminist/Gender Literature and what used to be called Freudian but is now called Psychoanalytic Literature. It lurked throughout the Gothic Romances, exquisitely tortured the Victorians, exploded all manner of social issues using monsters and ghost stories.

Horror – even modern Literary Critics finally acknowledge, has the occasional work that exhibits the highest Literary merit. It is a genre with tremendous Literary potential, even as it produces the most generic and luxuriously sloppy pulp. Horror has range. And it has writers that ride that range.

Yet academia – being a product of government-style structure – moves ever so slowly. Educators (like MFA instructors) often spend their entire lives in the system, sometimes self-reinforcing their personal beliefs and rejecting new ideas that challenge their own. So instead of arguing the merits of both, they dismiss and insult…and most of the MFA program graduates who have shared their experiences in recent books reviewing MFA programs have stated repeatedly that instructors and mentor and professors had belittled, trashed, forbidden and condemned genre writing as…crap.

While it is admittedly not always Literature – sometimes joyously so – it is not “crap.” It is genre. It is formula. It is common at worst. It is also storytelling, albeit sometimes bad storytelling. But then, pulp writers are not trying to write Literature. Venom needs to be reserved for those who might roundly deserve it – and that most certainly is not a genre writer sitting in an MFA class hoping to learn better craft and Literary Technique.

So why do we have this abyss between Literature and Genre? What should be a peaceful and tolerant co-existence has been fanned into a Style War. And maybe there is so much genre-writing because writers can figure out genre writing a heckuva lot faster than they can figure out Literature and Literary Criticism.

Imagine if Literature and Literary Criticism were actually taught in high schools? Wouldn’t that education automatically bleed over into the genres? Up everyone’s game?

Is THAT what Literature Purists are afraid of? A little competition?

Well wheel out your prodigies then. It’s Junior Rodeo on…

The current environment of genre-bashing that seems rampant (if not bragged upon) by MFA programs is off-putting to say the least. And while many programs may prefer that it be thus and prefer to communicate that folks like me are not welcome unless I am willing to join in the genre-bashing and convert to Literature… I have to question their motives.

And that made me wonder if I DID set aside genre — just for the duration of the degree, just to learn craft – would it ruin my voice and inject the ghosts of dead American Literary Greats into my prose which I might not be able to exorcise? In other words, would it ruin writing for me?

Ultimately, I chose not to take the chance. Wrongly or rightly, I don’t want Raymond Carver in my head…Or any spark of the alleged other two (again, the rumor being that all MFA programs are modelled after three preselected American Literary giants, and the helpful application hint being that a writer needs to understand which writer which program emulates in order to find the best “match”).

I mean I’m sorry but all of a sudden we are talking about idols and how to mimic them – and not about craft, technique, LITERATURE. THEORY…. All after fielding a cost of some $35-50,000 for the privilege of sitting in a classroom…you know – where open-minded learning is supposed to take place…

How can I possibly be a rebel if you are teaching me to be a conformist? Even if we are talking style?

Again, I chose NOT to take the chance. Even when I found ONE program that proudly announced it supports Speculative fiction writers. Because it proudly denounced LITERATURE.

It’s like watching a tennis game. And all I wanted to do is learn better craft. To infuse my genre writing with Literary elements and improve as a writer. Silly me.

Silly Critics if they think that this academic solution is any kind of solution. We don’t need more polarizing thoughts and behaviors.

We writers – genre and Literary – need to be on the same side as the Literary Critic, who needs to be on the same side as writers who want to learn to be better writers.

We can’t help each other if we set up schools to teach novices how to insult each other in some giant argument from ignorance.

Proof in the Pudding (or, You Get the Monster You Create)

So I had begun to think that the authors of The Portable MFA were right: a writer just might be better off saving the money one would use for an MFA in Creative Writing and buy a better computer, more printer ink, more 20-lb white bond paper.

And such thinking was further reinforced when I tried an experiment of my own – reading the published works of MFA graduates. (Here, working in a retail bookstore became an advantage. And I purposely read “first” books by MFA grads whose programs I neither knew nor researched.)

The result was shocking. Shockingly disappointing. Sometimes even…bad. It was like reading genre fiction without the “spark” of genre…watered down, lackluster yet eerily “perfect” in construct…I couldn’t really argue with structure… But most of the time characters didn’t “pop,” prose didn’t engage, and I had to force myself to finish even ghost stories. Ghost stories for Poe’s sake! I mean didn’t these people read the British canon of Literature?

Like the Critic I am starting to wonder if we are doomed…

And I was left wondering how these writers managed a publishing contract. Perhaps it was one of those “networking” sessions with agents and other publishing professionals so heavily promoted as a benefit to MFA program participation. Maybe it is the high influx of MFA grads who (thereby) get jobs in publishing who “grease the wheels” for fellow MFA grads… Several books I used for research made mention of exactly that sad possibility, and which in turn in my mind further tarnishes just such a degree.

Doesn’t that reduce the lofty intention of the MFA from one of increasing our Literary output to a sad paper mill for a vanity degree?

And shouldn’t it matter to the writer IN an MFA Program that what gets published gets DESERVEDLY published?

I admit that I did not research the published fiction of MFA grads who went back to the genres… But if what I am seeing on the bookstore general fiction shelves is any indication of what MFA programs are churning out, then I am FINALLY glad that so much Horror has been re-disseminated into other genres. Because I don’t want any association with what I am seeing – not as a Horror writer. And no worries about Literature, either…one course in university –level Literary Criticism taught me that most of that MFA-produced stuff isn’t going anywhere but the remainders pile. One INTRODUCTORY COURSE in Literary Criticism, mind you…

No harm, no foul? I think differently. Because that was the final nail in the MFA coffin for me.

Maybe I should have title this essay “How I Decided Against Pursuing an MFA in Fiction…”

I only know I don’t want to be published at any cost. I want to be proud of what I write and be satisfied that it was good enough to pass the muster of traditional editing (from line to content). What I don’t need is an albatross hanging around my neck…an albatross that should have stayed in a drawer somewhere.

If that means no fame and fortune for me, at least I won’t live my life in embarrassment. Because there is a LOT to be said for the value of the editorial talents of the old major publishing houses. Especially if we have now simply created yet another Good Old Boy’s –type system that has nothing to do with Literary value.

Ironically, a lot of us unwashed masses laboring in the genres have THAT in common with Literary Critics. Isn’t it time we joined forces? Isn’t it time we got our game back?

I mean… not to be inflammatory, but in the name of healthy competition…The British have…

Just sayin’…

 

References

Affording the MFA [blog} https://affordingthemfa.wordpress.com/

The Gotham Writer’s Workshop. Writing Fiction: the Practical Guide From New York’s Acclaimed Creative Writing School. New York: Bloomsbury, c2003.

Kealey, Tom. The Creative Writing MFA Handbook: a Guide for Prospective Graduate Students. New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd., c2008, 2005.

McGurl, Mark. The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, c2009.

MFA vs NYC: the Two Culture of American Fiction. Chad Harbach, ed. New York: n+1 /Faber and Faber, c2014.

The MFA Blog. http://creative-writing-mfa-handbook.blogspot.com/

The New York Writer’s Workshop. The Portable MFA in Creative Writing. Cinncinati, OH: Writers Digest Books, c2006.

Olsen, Eric and Glenn Schaeffer. We Wanted to be Writers: Life, Love, and Literature at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. New York: Skyhorse Publishing, c2011.

Wiedbrauk, Eileen. Speak Coffee to Me [blog] http://speakcoffeetome.blogspot.com/

Embrace the Horror: Life After the English BA

So I was walking around my bookstore, straightening shelves and adjusting product when a customer suddenly approached me and confessed regretting every English degree she had achieved – right up through the Ph.D.

Nothing had turned out like she planned. People got in the way, had foiled her at every turn, and now she was questioning every move she’d made professionally. Never, she’d said, would she allow her children to major in the Arts and waste their time. Never.

Know what my thought was? (Prepare for irreverence…)

Then you’re not using it right.

What IS an English Degree?

An English BA is a wild, carefree trip through the Humanities. It allows the student to explore their undecided side… perhaps fiction, or philosophy, journalism, or psychology, religion or art, history or politics, law or logic. It allows the student to try on a few hats, test their interests and abilities, see if anything “calls” to them.

The problem is, sometimes something does. And in today’s world, there is nothing like a degree in the Arts that translates into poverty for most of its graduates.

Why is that? Because we no longer value people who critically think in this world. Thinkers are dangerous people. When they see something that is wrong they are wont to try and change things. And there is usually Big Money and wanton Power attached to things done wrong.

If you want to kill an army, you need to cut off the supply train. (See? I was paying attention in history class!)

Arts people are the canaries in the mines. Often times we make bold, scary-to-parents statements. We rattle cages and in some countries we risk our freedom or our lives just to make a statement.

Nothing scares people who love you more. Because they want you to have a nice, cushy life in the suburbs, and hope that you will be (in better ways) a nice little carbon copy of themselves to carry on the magic and fairy glamour of American Life.

And Technology is out there promising you that you too, can be smarter than everyone else and with the right career choices in math and science, can live in the Big House, safe and away from those huddled masses of unemployed, trouble-making Arts people.

But getting a degree in a Tech field as an Arts person really solves nothing. Tech people know their own, and if you are an Arts person in Wolf’s clothing, you will not be embraced even if you get the job.

Today’s world does not want thinkers, it wants drones. Like the bee kind… That work to death and are tossed out of the hive at Christmas (only they will call them lay-offs).

An English Degree then is a degree in Critical Thinking. You will be taught how to and be required to dissect everything you read and everything you think. You may find out you don’t think like you thought you did. You may discover something deeply important about yourself by what you dislike or prefer, in hearing a tone of voice in your own verbal arguments.

It also teaches you how to express those thoughts and opinions – graciously to not offend, or disguised as metaphor for your secret audience, or angry as a polemic. It shows you how to use words or pictures or cultural beliefs to communicate….anything.

And it teaches you that people are complex biological factories of precarious thought and driven by powerful, life-altering emotions; that we are subject to our neurobiology and our psychological quirks, religious views or lack thereof, limits or expanse of geographical and economic horizons…

A degree in English is a degree in seeing, describing, illustrating, comprehending and communicating with…people.

No wonder the tech world dislikes us. No one abhors the vacuum of html space like an English major.

(Why? Because it’s not the troll online you have to worry about. It’s the radical terrorist invading your country and condemning your right to speak freely, to converse, argue, condemn, endorse, explore and experiment… because if your words, your actions, or your ambivalence made him or her feel justified, then to reduce the number of terror candidates you better know it and know how to unmake him or her and whether or not you should…a task that is not on a computer game.)

An English major will teach you that words matter. They have the capacity to incite, to wound, to inform, to heal. It will teach you to see and recreate the difference.

How You Know You’re An English Major

You know you’re an English major when you’re just standing on the street corner and you see things. You see poverty, injustice, inequality, and homelessness in the richest country in the world – when you work forty hours and can still see homelessness from your back porch and bank account. You know you’re an English major when you can’t wait to read something for yourself – whether it is a novel, a political treatise, or the Trial of Socrates. You know you’re an English major when you’d rather read Dickens or Austen or Morrison than the latest Star Trek novel (even though you have an extensive Star Trek novel collection).

You know you’re an English major when you’ve tried not to be and you keep running screaming back to the English department, breathing a sigh of relief when you are finally seated in a rhetoric class because you know the definition of rhetoric.

You know you’re an English major when you love language, the way it works and sounds and looks on the page, when linguistics excites you, when you read dictionaries and thesauri. When you love saying “thesauri.”

You know you’re an English major when you can read and appreciate an opposing viewpoint because it is well stated and well argued. And especially if it changes your mind.

You know you’re an English major when you know you are nothing else. So stop letting other people make you feel ashamed. Own it. Do what you were meant to do and stop looking for wealth (Most of us aren’t going to get it anyway: you might as well be happy.)

How You Know Doing Something Else is Worse Than Everyone Else’s Disappointment in You

One thing the world has taught me is that for every job out there, there is someone who has made it their dream and life’s purpose.

And there is nothing worse than living someone else’s dream… Unless it is applying for the job that you don’t get (no matter how much it means to you) because someone who’d rather be doing something else gets the job instead. Or maybe it is working with that person…

But work – when it is done right – takes a lot out of you. What you will have left at the end of the day will determine what kind of life YOU have…family? Kids? Career plans? House? Decent car? Best-selling novel?

The sad truth is that if you are an Arts person, the economic deck is stacked against you. Not only has the American economy morphed into a tech-loving, art-stomping beast, but it has lost its middle class and that necessary plateau of jobs needed to support people who kind of don’t know what they want to be when they grow up. In this economy, you either “have it” or you “don’t”… and there is a good chance that if you are an Arts person with an English degree, you will be not in the right category. Who knows how long this will last? How many shifts flipping burgers have your name on them with or without a degree?

However one thing is for sure: happiness is the only way you’re going to survive whatever lies ahead. Dreams are the pathway to finding that happiness. I’ve gotten a lot of forty-hour mileage out of dreams.

Maybe there aren’t enough jobs in publishing right now, or enough opportunities to support all of the writers already out there. How do the rest of us fellow-writers and English majors know you aren’t The One who will shock it all back into sense? How do we know WE aren’t?

The only thing we DO know, is that when and if the world ever comes back to its senses, if there is any chance at all that you can make a living writing or with your English degree…you will need to be prepared. Do it now.

Really. The Zombie Apocalypse could happen at any moment. Wouldn’t you rather have your English degree when it does?

What You Can Do About It

Number One: Stop listening to other people who want you to be as professionally miserable as they are.

Number Two: Trust that somewhere out there is your ideal job and that your English Degree is required for it.

Number Three: Don’t stop until you FIND it.

Number Four: If you don’t find it, consider creating it.

Why You Should

The Arts are not dead.

And while you are toiling away at that data entry job, or trying convince yourself that you can do I.T. better than a person whose dream it is to be an I.T. person… other people out there have been honing their Art…and making money at it…working their way to some measure of fame. You – on the other hand – are still waiting to write in your spare time, hope that by Divine Intervention instead of practice you will do as good or better with your one offering to the world (if you finish it), and still believe in the myth that even one published book equates to a lifetime of riches.

The hard fact is, any career in the Arts requires years of study (not necessarily academic study, although that can help make you a better student of the Arts). There is no free lunch, and prodigies are indeed a rarity (contrary to the message of social media).

You may have talent, or you may not. You may have more talent than people getting published or not. Success in the Arts is shaped like the very same pyramid you find in the regular workplace, sometimes with plenty of cult priests with butts to kiss perched on the steep slopes, sometimes with rare Oracles you can barely hear dangling off a brick, and sometimes there is that pebble in the sand – the editor who likes your style and talent enough to gamble on you and approach their boss on your behalf. But you must always remember it is a pyramid, because not everyone is going to wind up on top – even if they climb over you to get there.

So you must have faith in your goal and your plan for getting there. Stop waiting for angels to descend and carry you topside. You are going to have to work harder than you’ve ever worked before, and probably do a lot of self-education to grow professionally.

A good start is always a BA in anything. But the BA in English is a nice, round humanities degree. It is the perfect base degree for many Master’s degrees, and thereafter for Ph.D. degrees. Getting a BA in English for a writer is boot camp. It will help you decide how far you want to go with your education (in any field), while teaching you about your passion and your ability to listen to and apply criticism – something you will need even as a novice writer submitting stories to magazines, book editors, or agents.

Keep in mind there are actual jobs out there that require a BA in English – such as those still remaining in publishing, Library, retail bookstores, technical writing, journalism, education, Literary Criticism – and many of which do require higher education thereafter.

But also keep in mind there are a lot of English majors applying for those, and there is the same kind of (let’s call it “competition”) for those positions as there are for other jobs.

So you need to know you. What do you want? Because it should never involve a single other person’s interests. Because you are going to have to live with yourself no matter what you choose.

Choose wisely. Choose what makes you happy, even if you have to struggle against the tide the rest of your life. Trust me, the tide is elsewhere too. Pick your own tidewater. If you’re going to make it up that salmon ladder or get eaten by bears trying, it might as well be for what’s in it for you.

How do I know this? It took me thirty years to get my BA in English. And I don’t regret a minute of it.

What I do regret is all of the time I lost following other people’s suggestions for how to make myself less of an English major and more of a cog in someone else’s money machine.

Would I still be working at the same retail bookstore for lower than stellar wages? Probably. Only now I would be a manager with a retirement plan instead of an economic refugee with a lost retirement and no chance of strolling about my own bookstore with a coffee cup and a wry sense of humor.

I am sorry I did not have the courage when I was young to be what I am – a writer. Of Horror fiction. Who works in a bookstore. I am sorry I didn’t have the courage to seek out teachers of fiction and fellow writers in workshops and conventions. I might still not be big-published, but I bet I’d be writing better fiction, and that would make me happy no matter how many shifts I worked.

No, I would never discourage anyone – especially a young person – from a life in the Arts. That IS life. Gritty, poor, honest. What could be a better inheritance than a life well-lived – the one that leaves YOU loving YOU.

So yep, I told this lady wandering my bookstore I had not a single regret about going back to college for my English BA. I told her why.

She asked if we had any openings…

Horror the Second Time Around: the Paradox of Misremembering Scary Things

In the constant quest to scare myself and compare newer works to old, I have come to notice something peculiar happening: when I choose to revisit that special movie or book a second time to recapture that eerie, horrified feeling of doom and dread… to savor it once again, to relive the scary…the magic isn’t there. (Or maybe I should say: the same magic isn’t there.)

In fact, whole sections of rather detailed – and what I recall as emotionally integral – terrifying scenes routinely turn up muted or missing.

How can this be? What happens to the mind reading Horror or sitting in a dark theater that we invent so much that isn’t there? Does Horror really lose its effectiveness because we get older? How do we come to misremember the Horror that we remember so well?

Our Brains in a Jar: the Science of Horror

When H.P. Lovecraft rose to the defense of our genre in his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature, speaking against the Literary Critics of his time, he stated:

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown” (105).

Savor those words a minute…because the literary definition of Horror has long been “stories that exploit fear…”

It is around the potency of this emotion that the Horror genre (even when called Weird) is built. And for that exact reason, every student of Horror should dig deeply into the anatomy of fear. Of course that means digging into some science – specifically the science of the brain (neuroscience), the science of perception (psychology), and the science of the body (biology).

Because for anyone who ever wondered why watching the movie or reading the book the second time around is so totally not the same experience, reading up on the technical end of things sheds some fascinating light. Horror, it would appear, it a whole-body experience.

One of the most interesting books I happened across recently is called What We See When We Read: a Phenomenology with Illustrations, by Peter Mendelsund. The associate art director at Alfred A. Knopf and designer of some pretty iconic book covers, Mendelsund did some interesting digging of his own into the application of imagination in reading.

What do we see when we read? This (it turns out) is a very interesting question. Because apparently, reading is a kind of marriage between what the author suggests and what we remember.

You read right: what we remember. Because according to Mendelsund, we build new literary images from consolidating relevant or similar details born of our own experiences.

Says Mendesund, “the idea of [a] house, and the emotions it evokes in me are the nucleus of a complex atom, around which orbit various sounds, fleeting images, and an entire spectrum of personal associations.” (207)

Furthermore, “These images we ‘see’ when we read are personal: what we do not see is what the author pictured when writing a particular book. That is to say: Every narrative is meant to be transposed; imaginatively translated. Associatively translated. It is ours…and the feeling has primacy over the image…” (207)

So when we read, we reach into that catalogue of remembrances for the most similar thing and attach it to the skeleton of the author’s words. We shape and refine, correct and adapt as the author gives us more information, but the power of the moment – the very images we associate with that first reading – are not only retained in ghostly fashion, but are most likely ours and based on our personal experiences at that moment in time.

Says Mendelsund, “Much of our reading imagination comprises visual free association…untethered from the author’s text… (we daydream while reading)…A novel invites our interpretive skills, but it also invites our minds to wander…” (294)

And wander Horror minds do…

It goes back to the psychology of the moment associated with the image the author has summoned by the spell of his or her words. Say our victim is wandering an old house in her nightgown. We all have a concept of an old house in mind, but we all also most like remember a very specific old house, one that had some creepy element that haunts us still. We also all understand what it is to discover that we are not safe after all when we are asleep at night (at our most vulnerable, very likely naked or nearly so). So with one simple concept, likely one simple sentence, we have created the whole scary house and put ourselves in it.

We remember, we empathize, and we shiver. It doesn’t matter that, as we read the book, we concede certain facts to the revelations of the author – who constantly divulges them bit by bit. We keep what we kill.

“When we remember reading books, we don’t remember having made these constant little adjustments…We simply remember it as if we had watched the movie…” (Mendelsund 53)

Unfortunately, when we re-read the same sentence years later, we very often have more houses to compare the images to, and have made some decisions about sleeping naked (or nearly so). Therefore when we read the same book or passage years later, it is not the same because the house is different, the victim is different, and the survival plan has changed.

The truth of why Horror doesn’t scare you the same way a second time is one of biology: you changed and the book did not.

Thank God! It’s Brain Science & Not Old Age…

People like to say that Horror is a young person’s game. They claim that it is really a Young Adult obsession, or worse – a phase.

But it turns out that this is not completely true. Of course there are consequences to growing older that affect how our brains ­process Horror. And that has more to do with memory than it has to do with becoming more “emotionally mature.”

But the good news is: if you love Horror, you can love it all of your life. Contrary to speculation (if not popular opinion), we do not outgrow Horror… we out-fox it.

First, we have to look at the profile of those who like Horror, who love to scare themselves, those who refuse to let go of the genre. While there may be a thrill-seeker or two among us, we tend to be pretty “normal” types. But we do confess to having an addiction to adrenaline rushes that a good Horror story can inflict. Having seen what Real Life can do, we also tend to prefer the mental-emotional playground that is the Horror genre.

We also tend to have been the types that have drilled ourselves relentlessly from childhood on how to survive life-threatening events – including the monster under the bed. Only now we choose Zombies over middle-eastern wars, troublesome Ghosts over broken social mores, Vampires over empty relationships. We still have minds that like to work on problem-solving (as all humans do). So we like to pimp our ride: we decorate the threat with shreds of rotting flesh and fangs dripping with radioactive drool and see if we can survive the experience of the encounter.

The reason any of this works or presents any “value” is because of what that little primal germ of fear enables in the brain. As Mendelsund says with regard to the feeling, we “do not want it supplanted by facts.” (206) We crave the feeling of fear.

So with Horror we recreate the tiger in the tall grass, and every time we make him bigger, gnarlier, scarier…to challenge ourselves.

We practice survival of the primal instincts as complicated by the rational mind.

And biology is our co-pilot.

…Because it is the nature of biology to adapt to changing circumstances and ever-changing threats, and Horror is one biological roller coaster ride that lasts from the first sensory intake, loop-de-loops through the amygdala, races through the nerve endings and thrusts fast-twitch muscle fibers of our legs into action even as the scream leaves our mouths.

Yet even then something is happening in our brains – young or old – that makes a significant difference in recapturing that same feeling more than once.

Just as we are hard-wired to jump at indistinct motion in the darkness (thus illuminating the biology behind the jump-scare success of Hollywood), we are hard-wired to catalog the experience for comparison later.

A tentacle wraps around your ankle like a cat…you scream…

And you live to tell all your friends the next day over lunch. The next night, a tentacle wraps around your ankle like a cat… you wonder where it is coming from….

Already your brain has logged the experience as non-lethal and maybe not even important – just curious.

Your brain has stepped in and…”helped” you. Now you won’t waste precious time and calories running crazily and needlessly through the tall grass. You can wait for the next tiger. The bigger, more lethal tiger. Because this one has shown you all of the criteria for being present and noticed but not a danger to you – not worth endangering yourself. See enough tigers, and you might become desensitized.

Suddenly the Zombie is just this wobbly dead guy; sure he’s ugly, but he’s slow and if you split open his head, it is Life As Usual. Big whup. What else you got?

But this is not necessarily a good thing. Every Zombie has the potential to be different the way every tiger is different. Sometimes we have to remind the brain that it is prudent to run… which is why the rational part of our brain keeps buying into Horror. Deep down, we know we are prey and we really, really want to run…

But this presents a challenge for the makers of Horror, who battle their own cardboard tigers even as they figure a way to surprise their audience with new and improved tigers to fool the brain… So the successful Horror story becomes one in which a new Horror emerges – one you never thought of. It means we have to find ways to outsmart ourselves and our increasingly desensitized audience.

Which makes writing and reading Horror as an older person …even harder; we go through more books and movies before we find a passable scare because as we get older, we have a much thicker catalog to compare things to. But it also means (if we are also writers) that we have the opportunity to make things even more interesting.

Misremembering: It’s Not You, It’s ME

It’s so easy to blame the filmmaker or think the author tricked us. Somehow. All that time ago.

Because the truly weird thing about Horror the second time around is the inserting of whole scenes that we come to discover were never there.

How and why we do this resides in the way human memory works. Because we form memories from a collection of our own experiences – even as we are gathering new ones – every monster is Frankenstein. When we read or see certain images, they resonate with our subconscious and glom together in the darkness of our imagination. Sometimes right in the middle of a book or a movie we go off on a primrose path lined with gothic bleakness and horrible thoughts or crippling fears born of our own personal experiences… our own minds present a few what-if scenarios connected more to our pasts than to what we are reading or seeing and we subconsciously press the emotions generated right into the pages of a book or the cells of a film. We create a ghost of those personal memories and mistakenly think the book or film is speaking directly to us. But then we risk imagining terrors greater than what are actually shown or described. And terror lasts a long, long time in our limbic system.

Being aware of this recollection and comparison of intimate and personal Horrors makes no difference to the outcome.

Even as we rationalize about how that moment is taking us right to this or that memory or traumatic event, it is incorporated into the exoskeleton of the story. Later when we recall the book or film, we remember the terror invoked even when it was our own terror that rose from the ashes of real memory or supposition. We attach those emotions to that fiction and tell ourselves, “that was a good Horror story.”

We even tell our friends. And then they go see it or read it and think it was inane or toothless and tell us so.

And then in indignation, we go and read it or see it again and think what was I thinking? What about that scene where… But there is no such scene. Or it is a big nothing…a field of monster seedlings that no longer germinate in your mind.

Your brain has moved on.

And boy, do you miss that scary part that was never, ever there. You can keep the book as long as you like, but the fairy glamour has dissipated…a fading spell, well-worn even as it has been touched and caressed many times in the imagination. The Horror has become a ghost.

It’s called “emotional re-learning,” and it’s how we manage our trauma which, in turn, transforms the impact of the original Horror.

Here we can learn a lot from sufferers of PTSD. For example, “the sense in which PTSD patients feel ‘unsafe’ goes beyond the fears that dangers lurk around them; their insecurity begins more intimately, in the feeling that they have no control over what is happening in their body and to their emotions. This is understandable, given the hair trigger for emotional hijacking that PTSD creates by hypersensitizing the amygdala circuitry.” (Goleman 210-211)

Nobody wants that. Except that we do –as Horror fans. It is exactly what we attempt to create and experience in a good genre novel or film. But the revelation as to why Horror loses its punch the second time around has a lot to do with how PTSD sufferers resolve their traumas…

Because one step in healing PTSD “involves retelling and reconstructing the story of the trauma in the harbor of that safety, allowing the emotional circuitry to acquire a new, more realistic understanding of and response to the traumatic memory and its triggers. As patients retell the horrific details of the trauma, the memory starts to be transformed, both in its emotional meaning and in its effects on the emotional brain.” (Goleman 211)

In other words, it is the turning on of the lights and the exiting of the theatre where “The therapist encourages the patient to retell the traumatic events as vividly as possible, like a horror home video, retrieving every sordid detail…the goal here is to put the entire memory into words, which means capturing parts of the memory that may have been dissociated and so are absent from conscious recall. By putting sensory details and feelings into words, presumably memories are brought more under control of the neocortex, where the reactions they kindle can be rendered more understandable and so more manageable.” (Goleman 212)

What Horrors cannot be rewired? The ones we can’t put into words… I detect a conundrum…

Every time we intentionally revisit the memory of that movie or book that scared us so well, every time we read it or see it or talk about it, we remove a tooth from the tiger…we are rewiring the memory and its requisite trauma. And we can’t help ourselves. It’s a brain thing.

The Difference Between HD and Analog

The pure biological truth is tough: we are going to have to outwit ourselves, to trick our brains into being scared in order to keep enjoying Horror. We do that by making and seeking monsters that are infinitely indistinct, partially sensed, indescribable, primal creatures. We do it by letting the audience fill in important blanks with their own PTSD, phobias, and painfully personal details.. and then by not spoiling those images with a far-too total reveal.

Look at Stephen King’s It (in particular in movie form)…a great, truly creepy story that I always abandon at the ending. It got ruined when they wheeled out the Muppet Spider. It was too much information that my own brain had a solution for (a really big shoe). I much prefer to stay in that nebulous, monster-and-clown-infested country that Stephen King novels create before Hollywood gets hold of them.

It really is the difference between analog and HD… because our brains (once they categorize something) shift the images right into analog: worthy of note, but not anything to write home about… a kitschy black and white monster with the zipper showing. We see that the tiger has gray on its muzzle and a bit of a limp; we suspect we can out run him.

In our first encounter on the savannah we saw sudden, undefined motion in the dark…then the green glow of eyes…then TEETH… we imagined the claws ripping us apart and we screamed and grabbed our boyfriends. Or girlfriends. We came out of the movie theater or put down the book and felt positively breathless…like we had stood in a wind tunnel that sucked away everything but us…

But once the biology sets in, there is no getting that feeling back. Once we see tons of tigers, we start counting stripes instead of teeth. We biologically forget the danger because our experience nullifies it. Our inner computer updates with what is – in reality – wrong information. But it is right for the suburban family whose main concern is paying the cable bill and what’s for dinner. Horror works when the writer or film maker can change out the predictability expected by our brains. And what works for me might not work for you…

This is why success in Horror is spelled Stephen King: he connects with the broadest sampling of modern fears. The rest of us (in trying to out-Horror the King of Horror) all too frequently discover that our fears are more to the outside of the mean. Maybe we like Old Horror because those stories contain the kinds of Horror that sneak up on our brains…while maybe Old Horror falls flat to the guy who lives near a graveyard. Horror is relative. Figure in the unpredictable amount of experiences a person can have that mutes those Horrors and the genre is a challenge. But it is a fun challenge.

Just don’t expect to be scared effectively twice by the same monster… Only irrational fears get past the catalog. Even Muppet Spiders. For the rest of us, it’s an endless search for HD in an analog world. Beware the tall grass.

 

References

Mendelsund, Peter. What We See When We Read: a Phenomenology with Illustrations, by Peter Mendelsund New York: Vintage Books, c2014.

Goleman, Daniel. Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ. New York: Bantam Books, c1994.

Lovecraft, H.P. “Supernatural Horror in Literature.” At The Mountains of Madness.The Definitive Edition. New York: The Modern Library, c2005.

ZOMBIE TIME

Confession: I don’t know what I was thinking.

There I was feeling guilty for slowing down my input at my local blog forum, when my platform folded up its spidery legs and…died.

(Surprise!)

It was like hanging on the edge of a cliff and suddenly discovering you’re holding two ends of the same, life-saving rope.

It’s either good news or bad news.

I’ll let you know what I decide. Right now I’m still thinking about it.

About The Old Horror

(Um… that is not me…although I am an older Horror writer.)

It all started when I began a blog in 2012 called The Horror at now-defunct Open Salon. I did it to ease myself out of the academic environment of the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs where I was completing a thirty-year quest for my BA. I wanted to keep myself writing and producing to deadlines. I wanted to do research not always appropriate for research papers, but always nagging me as a writer of Horror fiction.

I had questions and I had qualms, pet peeves and aggravations. There were things I wanted to know that no one seemed to be interested in talking about.

I was the one wanting thicker, denser, meatier articles on how-to and how-come. I wanted the whys and wherefores… So since I wasn’t going to rest until I GOT those answers, I figured maybe other folks might be interested in sharing in what I discovered.

As the blog unfolded, I became certain of one thing: a lot of us have the SAME questions that no one is answering. So the Horror germinated on Open Salon… a convoluted, verbose trip through the gathered mists of the Horror genre, an under-published writer seeking explanations for things no one seemed interested in explaining or clarifying.

Ooooo… people said…..nobody reads dense text anymore….

Ooooo… print is dead.

30,000 hits and three editor’s picks later…

About the New (Revised) Horror, or Going Zombie

I began to realize that I wasn’t alone in my curiosity about and love for the Horror genre. I also discovered some things about myself as I wrote the blog – namely that I am a fan of Literary Criticism, indeed a feminist-after-all-these-years, a big fan of the ghost story in genre Horror as well as Literature, and a defiant Defender of books in actual PRINT.

So when OS expired, I thought to myself… perhaps I am not done rambling and researching about. Perhaps I like talking about Horror and exploring the intricacies of its publication and review. So after a pause to refresh, I slowly decided to resume the blog “somewhere” new.

Next came my search for a platform with decent SEO capacity and a friendly Help department, which is how I wound up choosing WordPress. And of course I would need a different name for the blog – partly because The Horror appeared taken (in many, many ways) and because I felt I have changed a lot since the original Horror began. (I have graduated, and gotten a few things published since, and returned to the luxurious life of retail work schedules and binge writing. Plus, I am even older, if either you or I can imagine it.)

So the Name Hunt began.

It occurred to me that The Horror was being resurrected from its sudden death, and like a zombie it was probably going to lurch about for a while until I found its “new” voice. So I Googled “zombie” and there it was… Zombie Salmon.

It isn’t every day that one is confronted with the concept of Zombie fish. But there it was… an article about scientists in September of 2012 studying the brain and its mysterious (albeit supposedly limited) activity after death, within which it was confessed that awkwardly suspicious results had “detected” actual brain activity in actual dead salmon.

And aside from developing a new trepidation about eating seafood, I knew in an instant, the name was perfect for my new blog.

 (“Bennett doesn’t claim to have discovered a zombie salmon, in fact, he thinks this is probably just a false positive, or as his team put it their paper:

Either we have stumbled onto a rather amazing discovery in terms of post-mortem ichtyological cognition, or there is something a bit off with regard to our uncorrected statistical approach… In layman’s terms: we didn’t do a good enough job accounting for the things that went wrong or salmon can come back from the dead to stalk the living.”) http://www.outdoorhub.com/news/2012/09/23/zombie-salmon-researchers-honored-for-showing-meaningful-brain-activity-in-dead-fish/ 

Trust me.. I have a somewhat disturbing cartoon of this running in my head. (Somewhere on a river in salmon country…dead salmon continue to climb fish ladders moving ever inland…their motives unknown…)

And to make matters worse, I see the parallel between being an under-published, time-constrained, working Horror writer and undead fish with X’s for eyes and a primal code requiring them to keep heading upstream…even after death. Writing is an obsession that once begun drags the writer away from sleep and most forms of human contact. It becomes a subliminally ingrained habit. We emerge from our dens to savage food we can bring down with our own bare hands and to stumble off to work… where eight hours on Old-People feet leads to even more stumbling, lurching and, yes – moaning. Becoming a zombie is part of the program. Sad to say, we writers may still lurch about to check our email and mailboxes long after we have expired. Like bad fish. Or Atlantic salmon, as the case may be.

Hence, Zombie Salmon.

To sum up, I am an older writer, returning late to the game, having finally completed my higher education in December of 2012 at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. With a shiny new BA in English with an emphasis in Professional and Technical Writing, I rediscovered my passion for fiction and find myself unhappy with the world technology has wrought upon my art. Ironically.  I am therefore rediscovering that mysterious (seriously underappreciated and underpaid) country of creativity and manuscript submission in a time of reduced publishing capacity, disappearing formats, and endangered print. I have had one short short story published (“Florida at Night” in Dark Moon Digest No. 10) http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/dark-moon-digest-issue-10-various-authors/1114072015?ean=9780988556911 , and a nonfiction article published in online magazine Talking Writing, December 2012, entitled “Why Horror Movies Disappoint” http://talkingwriting.com/why-horror-movies-disappoint-readers/ .

But I am also a working writer – that is, a writer who works while writing. This means I know what it is to struggle to manage my time and my Muse while battling bills and Life’s ugly intrusions. I also know what it is to try to finesse reading fees, and find publications to submit writing to, to wrestle with the meanings of editorial comments, and to occasionally “step in it” with the bigger names of the genre (my most successful post being one which contained a faux pas and subsequent mea culpa to one of Horror’s greatest editors http://www.open.salon.com/blog/thehorror/2012/05/25/defining_the_best_in_horror_3_editors_3_publications , and which at last count had garnered over 30,055 views before going dark.)

Therefore, I am no stranger to the artistic struggle and public shaming that comes with the territory of being a writer in our upstream, highly competitive, highly public technology-ridden world. Like many of you, I fling my creative self at the rocks and ladders, hoping to someday make it over the little dam we call success, realizing that it is more probable that one such as myself in this day and age, might well wind up a bloated carcass at the feet of Cthulhu instead.

This is all right, as at my age one has to be grateful for the opportunity to write, to submit, and to revise. One must make a certain peace with the reality that even if one has talent, talent does not equate to automatic success in the arts. But rather, it results in a kind of twisted wisdom and private moments of pride and happiness. One realizes that success is in the eye of the beholder, and sometimes that means just getting up every day and writing in spite of all those people who said you couldn’t, shouldn’t, and wouldn’t amount to anything special.

A pox on both their houses.

A real writer writes even when no one is watching… or reading. Personal happiness is ….personal.

And so I write this blog. It isn’t – in truth – likely to be much different than the old blog… I still ramble.

But Horror makes me happy. And as a writer who constantly turns the Rubik’s Cube of established Horror writing in search of the many elements that makes our genre great, I like to share what I find… Because Horror is Literary as well as pulp. It is psychology and brain science, entertainment and pedagogy. It makes being an English major fun, and the classics very interesting. It reflects the trajectory of women and minorities in writing http://www.open.salon.com/blog/thehorror/2014/02/16/women_in_horror_month_pseudonyms_author_anxiety  , it represents our cultural mistrust and dissatisfaction with our times, social and political disasters http://www.open.salon.com/blog/thehorror/2014/05/17/rise_of_the_bone_woman_word_choice_the_abramson_firing , enlightenment and the dark ages, encapsulating the raw emotions that accompany interpreting the most basic fairy tale or Hollywood blockbuster to coping with the Industrial Revolution or today’s Technology/Information Age.

Horror is for us. It is indisputably ours. It keeps us young, and defines where we feel we are in society. From wondrous Golden Age writing machines like Stephen King, to young adult writers breaking into the genre via YouTube like Paige McKenzie http://www.open.salon.com/blog/thehorror/2015/03/09/in_the_tradition_of_mary_the_sunshine_girl_franchise , Horror is on the move. It is growing and changing and threatening to reclaim its place among the mainstream of pop literature. It is also carving its own niche in Literary Criticism, with established critical authorities like China Mieville and S. T. Joshi http://www.open.salon.com/blog/thehorror/2013/09/01/critical_mass_why_stephen_king_annoys_critics_part_1      leading the way at a time when Literary Criticism is making a revised return to the discussion table.

Horror is a viable genre, a living genre.

So why talk about it? Because apparently I need to ramble.

And because it is hard to find meat and potatoes about the genre in today’s abbreviated, tech-shaped formats…in a world where technology nurtures the damaging, soul-killing rumors that print is dead and therefore writing is pointless, that “people don’t read” and “people don’t like large, dense blocks of text.”

My experience at Open Salon proved the reality to be quite different. I admit I ramble. But some 30,000 people apparently didn’t mind. So I say, maybe the “critics” of the arts and specifically of writing are….WRONG. Dead wrong.

I say people are hungry for discussion about the Horror genre. They want to know if there is a Horror canon, then where is the list (there kinda isn’t one) http://www.open.salon.com/blog/thehorror/2013/10/31/trick_or_treat_reading_the_elusive_horror_canon), they want to know how to interpret terms, to decipher the mystery of Literary Critics http://www.open.salon.com/blog/thehorror/2013/09/17/if_not_king_barker_or_rice_the_quest_for_literary_horror   and why a favorite author isn’t (yet) considered Literary http://www.open.salon.com/blog/thehorror/2012/02/24/cannon_fodder_horror_and_the_pursuit_of_literature. They want to know they are not alone in the struggle of piecing together a short story, in finding a market, in dealing with those impersonally personal rejections, in understanding how to revise, to determine why something lays flat on the page instead of grabbing the reader. They want to know success is possible, but need to know that success does not always mean financial security or movie contracts. They need the encouragement to go back to school or not http://www.open.salon.com/blog/thehorror/2012/02/27/the_horror_of_returning_to_college_at_middle_age, to pursue graduate programs like the MFA in fiction or not, to reclaim their own identity as a member of the arts community. They need information.

I found this out because I needed the same information. And despite all the bragging of writer’s magazines and organizations…that information is unforgivably hard to find.

So when I find it…I will publish it. Right here, now that Open Salon is dead and gone.

(And yes, I know the links don’t work. Anymore. Open Salon is not a zombie. You are stuck with me.)

About My Posting Tendencies

When I started blogging, I had a schedule which was – ironically – easier to keep during my senior year in college than it was after I graduated. But I still sometimes stagger out of bed and into my “office” to construct an essay that is nagging me in the wee hours, often with research and writing on my mind. So pardon my sporadic posting; I am sleep-deprived. But dead fish do apparently blog.

I am also a w-r-i-t-e-r. This means there are times I am writing fiction instead of blogging. This is not only necessary, it is good. Writers of fiction need to write fiction in order to get duly published. I will surface now and then to complain or comment upon all of those rocks and bear teeth, about ghosts and zombies and vampires and were-things, about the weirdness that being a writer causes one to notice—like Zombie salmon.

I may ramble. I may be silent for weeks at a time. But I will be here. Talking Horror. Swimming upstream between working retail hours and 3:00 a.m. Musefests.

I am a writer. I am old and cranky. I ramble. And I love it. Won’t you get your feet wet?