Posts Tagged ‘urban fantasy’
In my recent newsletter, I wrote about how fun it has been to break some WRITING RULES during the month of November. You might want to consider breaking some writing rules, too.
I’ve been taking inspiration from Durham author and podcaster Mur Lafftery. She is creator of the delightful podcast called I Should Be Writing.
Like many folks, I am working on a NaNoWriMo project and juggling other writing projects, work and life. Also, like many folks, I recognize that we’re moving into a time of the year where it can be harder to get creative work done due to holiday travel, holiday plans, increased expectations about spending time with family and/or friends, etc.
I won NaNoWriMo in 2014, but I used an outline and prepared for months. This year, I don’t have an outline, so I’m “pantsing it” and to boot my NaNoWriMo project is an urban fantasy novel co-written with my sister. Complicated!
Mur typically does a special NaNoWriMo series on her podcast. This year, she’s been posting daily using the metaphor of The Purge (which was a series of horror movies). The NaNoWriMo Purge suspends and breaks “all writing laws/rules” in service of getting more writing done.
These movies look scary!
Hearing her encouragement on breaking writing rules has been a lot of FUN and given me PERMISSION to try new things. A writing rules purge every once and awhile is probably good for us. It builds a sense of excitement and rebelliousness when we come to the page.
So, here are some writing rules to consider breaking—just for the month of November, because well, you know how this month goes. You might be doing NaNoWriMo and trying to get more words written or you just might want to get writing again. Anyway, without a bit of fortitude it’s cold turkey sandwiches, sticky leftover cranberry sauce, the last slice of pumpkin pie, a retail headache and a lot of regret by November 30th.
Writing Rules to Break in November according to Mur (with my interpretation)
–Write every day. Nope! Now usually this is a good rule to have because it helps with our consistency. Well, as Mur notes, a major American holiday intervenes in the midst of November which usually includes lots of cooking, eating and retail adventures. You can break this law! Instead think about what writing might realistically fit in your schedule. Plan to be interrupted. Find time to steal. Maybe you will write in the car (assuming you aren’t driving) on the way to Thanksgiving dinner. If you are used to doing a specific word count, consider what it would take to write just a little bit more when you can—so plan to make your word count up over six days, knowing that you will probably not be able to write during the holiday weekend.
– Don’t write dream sequences. Nope! Many writers are absolutely terrified of putting a dream sequence into a novel. OK, sometimes they are overused, but that’s not always the case. A dream sequence can be just what you need to get your writing juices flowing—it can always be cut later. Put on your Freudian or Jungian hat and write a dream sequence. Use it to foreshadow an event, get into your characters’ subconscious, and show us their desires or their fears.
–Don’t head-hop. Nope! So the rule goes don’t go head-hopping between characters in the same scene. You can confuse the reader and it is not as common in literature as it once was. Though as Mur points out Agatha Christy did this within in a scene and even within a paragraph! So, head-hop all you want. Tell us what Janelle thinks about Damon and then tell us what Damon thinks about her. Tell us what the server in the restaurant that is watching them thinks. Give us all the points of view possible in the very same scene!
-Don’t start a scene with dialogue. Nope! This is one of my additions. Common writing wisdom frowns on starting with dialogue as it disorients the reader. Readers need context. I think it depends on what the characters are saying. Read the fantastic mystery writer Walter Mosely, and you’ll find that he often starts his scenes off with dialogue and trust me, you are immediately hooked. I would have never finished my first NaNoWriMo if I stuck to this rule. Starting with dialogue can be a way to get the reader quickly involved into the emotion of the scene.
Can you think of more writing rules that you’d like to break? I bet you can.
You can listen for free to the first of Mur’s NaNoWriMo Purge series here. The rest of her series is available through her Patreon page. Patreon is a platform that lets you directly support artists and creators.
Break some rules, people! It’s really fun. We will return to our writing law-abiding selves after November. Promise.
An Irreverent Podcaster, Genre Crosser and Prolific Writer: Author Interview with Jake Bible
Posted on: February 27, 2017
Dear readers,
I’ve missed you. It’s been more than a month since my last post—extremely unlike me. I will have lots of wonderful writing updates to share shortly—which will explain my absence. And, I expect to resume my weekly posts. In the meantime, I am excited to share the interview below.
***
In 2016, I became a fan of Jake Bible, a writer and the host of the ‘Writing In Suburbia’ podcast. Writing In Suburbia is geared toward pro-writers, but is chock-full of great information for writers at all levels. The podcast is irreverent and speaks to the less glamorous side of the writing life (e.g. embracing housework chores of the day). Jake’s a prolific writer across many genres. He typically writes a novel a month. You read that right, a novel a month!
One of the features that Jake hosts on his website is ‘Friday Night Drabble Party’. Drabble was a new term to me. A drabble is a 100 word story. He writes a new one just about every Friday. I enjoy reading his drabbles and that got me interested in microfiction.
I’m grateful that Jake is always encouraging writers to look at our self-limiting beliefs and challenges us to prepare for success. Check out his ‘Prepare for Success’ episode on WIS.
I didn’t believe that I could write a drabble, or rather a good drabble. But, I decided that such a belief was really limiting. What was it based on anyway? I had never even tried to write a compressed story. So this spring, I challenged myself to write several drabbles a week for fun. I read a lot of micro and flash fiction and got very inspired. I got into a rhythm with writing drabbles and thought some of them were good enough to submit. One has already been published in the Thing Magazine and another has been accepted for publication (news forthcoming). This happy turn of events would not have happened with being inspired by Jake’s fiction and podcast.
When I heard that his new novel was in a genre he hadn’t written in before and with a new publisher, I figured that he would have valuable insights to share.
Jake Bible is a Bram Stoker Award nominated-novelist, short story writer, independent screenwriter, podcaster, and inventor of the Drabble Novel. Jake is the author of the bestselling Z-Burbia series set in Asheville, NC, the bestselling Salvage Merc One, the Apex Trilogy (DEAD MECH, The Americans, Metal and Ash) and the Mega series for Severed Press, as well as the YA zombie novel, Little Dead Man, the Teen horror novel, Intentional Haunting, the middle grade scifi/horror ScareScapes series, and the Reign of Four series, which he calls “medieval space fiction” for Permuted Press. As of 2017, he also publishes with Bell Bridge Books and will be releasing three books, starting with Stone Cold Bastards.
I’m delighted to welcome Jake Bible to ‘The Practice of Creativity’.
-Tell us about your new novel, Stone Cold Bastards. What inspired it?
The title. I came up with the title one night and wracked my brain trying to figure out what story would go with such a cool title. It came to me eventually, since it’s kind of in the first two words: stone and cold. What are stone and cold? Gargoyles!
-Can you tell us about some of the characters that we meet in this work?
The novel centers on a rag tag team of misfit gargoyles that have been tasked with protecting the last of humanity from the demon-possessed hordes that have taken over the world. This is a novel that has a lot of characters. You have the gargoyles, you have the humans being protected, you have demons, you have other survivors out in the ravaged landscape. My favorite of them all has to be Mordecai. While not the leader of the gargoyles, he is the one the others turn to when things are about to go down. He’s kind of the rock of the group, no pun intended. He’s a gruff bastard and constantly has a cigar clamped between his stone teeth. Yet despite that hard exterior, he does have a soft spot inside for the humans he’s been given the impossible task of keeping alive. He works his stone butt off and takes his job very seriously. I really dig Morty.
-You’re known as a writer who crosses many genres. This novel is urban fantasy, a genre that you hadn’t written in before. What did you learn about yourself as a writer while completing this novel?
I learned that while genres matter, and make a difference in the tone and setting of a novel, in the end all novels come down to the story and the characters. Once I got into the swing of the story, just like I do with all the novels I write, the setting fell away and I was able to concentrate on the characters. I was able to focus on action and dialogue. The fact that it was a new genre was more daunting in the beginning, but after a couple of chapters I said to myself, “You’ve got this. It’s just another novel. Do your thing.” So I did my thing and was able to relax into it.
-What aspect of the writing craft felt the most difficult for you to understand and execute when you were a beginning writer? How did you overcome this?
The mechanics of writing was tough for me. I do not have a college degree. I didn’t go through a creative writing program. I am 100% self-educated, so I had to apply everything I’d learned as a reader to my writing. Simple mistakes in grammar that sound good coming out of my mouth, were not so good on the page. I had to unlearn a lot of my verbal affectations so that my writing could come across as something other than illiterate garbage. The way I overcame this was to write my very first novel in a drabble format. A drabble is a piece of micro-fiction where the entire story is exactly 100 words, no more, no less. I wrote Dead Mech in 100 word sections. That forced me to go back over what I wrote and edit on the spot. I quickly saw my mistakes, fixed them, tightened up the prose, and moved on to the next drabble. By the end of the novel, I was a tight writer. The grammatical mistakes I was making when I started were corrected by the end. I’ll never write another novel that way again, but it gave me a crash course in the craft that I’d missed by not going to college.
-If you could invite three living writers to a dinner party that you’re hosting, who would you invite and why?
Living writers? Yikes. Uh, Cormac McCarthy because Blood Meridian is one of the greatest horror novels ever written even though people call it a western. It’s not. It’s horror. Robert McCammon because he has been a huge influence on me as a writer. Also, I want to pick his brain about going from a career writing horror novels and into writing historical mystery novels in his Matthew Corbett books. Jeez, picking a third writer is hard. All my heroes are dead. Maybe Christopher Moore. I love his writing and the guy is hilarious. He’d help keep the dinner talk from getting too morose and serious.
-What’s your best writing tip that you’d like to share?
Never quit. Sit your ass down and do the work. Writing is work. The vast majority of people who are not writers think it’s fun and being a writer must be a dream come true. It is fun and it is a dream come true, but the fun and the dream happen because you sit in your chair and work until you can’t work anymore. Then you do the same thing the next day. And the next. You never quit. You do the work and keep doing the work until you get to where you want to be.
Born Jacob David Bible pre-Microsoft in Bellevue, WA, Jake was whisked away to the Beaver State when he was three and raised fundamentalist pagan. Fed a steady diet of Doritos, Fritos Bean Dip and Chinese herbal tonics, Jake had so many vivid hallucinations that he was writing and binding his own books by fifth grade. True story.
He grew up fascinated with the speculative and the macabre. He spent many summers on his grandparents’ lake reading a leather bound, Franklin Library Edition of The Tales of Edgar Allan Poe. No, it wasn’t a haunted book. And, no, it wasn’t a haunted lake. Yes, his grandparents were actually re-animated corpses that had been accidentally murdered and then raised from the dead when a cocktail party got just a little out of hand. And they drank gin and tonics. True story.
Jake currently lives in the Asheville, NC area with his wife, two kids, and two dogs. And although he writes about zombies and cannibals, Jake does not eat of the flesh himself (that means he’s a vegetarian, son. I say, I say, stop bein’ so dense, ya hear?). But, he will eat the non-homicidal animal foodstuffs because pizza is its own food group and soy cheese just ain’t gonna cut it.
True story.
Visit him at https://jakebible.com/
Podcasting as a Calling and Writing About ‘Monsters’: Author Interview with Mur Laffetry
Posted on: March 23, 2015
Long before Mur Lafferty became a well-regarded speculative fiction author, she was known for her compassionate, funny and engaging podcast called, ‘I Should Be Writing: A Podcast for Wanna be Fiction Writers’. She has been hosting this podcast for ten years. Mur’s honesty about the ups and downs of the writing process really speaks to me. She’s very encouraging and a master at sharing tips on how to keep one’s self writing (and why it is important to do so). She periodically conducts interviews with leading authors and also an occasional feedback show where people can send in questions that she answers. She has inspired many people and has served as a model for some to start their own podcast about writing, including, ‘The Dead Robots Society’ (of which I am also a fan). ‘I Should Be Writing’ has won the Podcast Peer Award and three Parsec Awards.
Mur Lafferty has an MFA in popular fiction from the Stonecoast program at the University of Southern Maine. She has published two novels with Orbit Books. The Shambling Guide to New York City won the 2014 Manly Wade Wellman Award. Its sequel, The Ghost Train to New Orleans, came out March 2014. In 2012, she won the distinguished John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.
She has hosted and/or created shows for Tor.com, Lulu, and Angry Robot Books, as well as created several of her own shows like ‘Geek Fu Action Grip’ and ‘I Should Be Writing’. Her nonfiction essays have appeared in Knights of the Dinner Table, The Escapist, and on the podcast ‘The Dragon Page’.
The Shambling Guide was a breakout hit. It told the tale of Zoe, a young human woman who finds herself working with monsters, or “coterie” (the preferred term for nonhumans). Yes, they do exist, everyone from zombies to water sprites. They travel and they need to know places to stay (and where to eat) when they do. Enter Zoe, the most unlikely editor of a travel guide for the coterie. Hilarity, a bevy of misunderstandings and juicy subplots ensue. This is urban fantasy at its best. Although I am not doing a review of the book here, let’s just say when I finished TSG, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on Lafferty’s latest novel, Ghost Train. In Ghost Train, we find out more about Zoe’s mysterious background, the different factions of coterie, all while enjoying the sights, sounds and cultural history of New Orleans.
I recently caught up with Mur and invited her to talk about her work and the writing life. I’m so delighted to welcome Mur Lafferty to ‘The Practice of Creativity’.
Tell us about your new book The Ghost Train to New Orleans. What inspired this book?
Ghost Train was born from a story I wrote in 2005 to benefit the Red Cross after Hurricane Katrina. I had an idea about a tour guide who loved her job so much that after she died, she kept doing it. The idea stuck with me, and when I turned it into a book, I took my travel writer, now a human writing guides for monsters, to New York for my first book, but always intended to go back to New Orleans.
You’re much admired for conveying humor in your novels. How did that aspect of your writing voice develop and how do you nurture it?
I read a lot of Douglas Adams growing up, and was the shy class-clown type. If such a thing exists. My humor tended to veer toward the amusing, and it’s what I enjoy writing the most. As an adult I’ve been inspired by Connie Willis, a writer with sometimes subtle humor, sometimes obvious humor.
You helped pioneer podcasting as an engaging and entertaining medium. After ten years of podcasting I Should Be Writing, what do you still love about hosting a podcast?
I love that I’m still influencing new writers. At the beginning I felt like I was just whining into a mic about how I couldn’t get published (but was continuing to keep trying) and I’ve heard from so many people that they relate to this. Now my listeners are starting to email me with news about publishing deals, which is amazing.
What authors do you consistently mine for inspiration?
Connie Willis, Douglas Adams, Neil Gaiman, and Seanan McGuire.
What’s next to your bed (or in your Kindle)? What are you reading now?
Currently going through the Ancillary series by Ann Leckie, with Kameron Hurley’s Mirror Empire waiting for me.
What’s your best writing tip that you’d like to share?
Never give up. That’s the fastest way to failure.
Mur Laffetry is author, blogger and podcast creator. She’s been the editor of Pseudopod, Escape Pod, and is currently the editor of the upcoming ezine from Escape Artists: Mothership (launching August 2015). To find out more about Mur, check out her website The Murverse Annex.
