Reasons For Moving

I haven't written in my writing blog since May? Holy crepes.

Anyway...

Harlan County Horrors is available for preorder. If you spread that fact, you can win some cool Harlan County stuff, like a copy of the excellent documentary "Harlan County USA." Here are the details.

Well, you want it alphabetically or in order of importance?

Specifically, this is how it is:

I was just making a spreadsheet to help me keep track of my WS queries. I sent what I thought were "a bunch" on Sunday. Turns out I sent six. But I put in a lot of research as well, which is probably why it felt like a bunch. Of the six, one is closed to subs through June 1. That info wasn't on the agency website so that was a bit of a surprise. I'll try again June 1 if I haven't heard from others by then. I don't expect to.

So anyway...

I decided I'd use my RFM queries spreadsheet as a template. The date on my most recent query-related activity? 5/15/08.

WTF is wrong with me? I sat on two completed mss for a year? Granted, I was revising and also doing fresh writing on Nine, "Inheritance" and some other shorts, plus articles and editorials and TC editing. But still. What am I waiting for?

At least I can say I have some queries out there now and if/when rejections start rolling in, I have to remind myself to kick my own ass about staying with it.

Source

Harlan County Horrors is a regional based horror anthology edited by Apex Magazine submissions editor Mari Adkins. It will feature stories by Alethea Kontis, Debbie Kuhn, Earl Dean, Geoffrey Girard, Jason Sizemore, Jeremy Shipp, Maurice Broaddus, Robby Sparks, Ronald Kelly, Stephanie Lenz, Steven Shrewsbury, and TL Trevaskis.

Publication date: October 1st, 2009

Pre-order before October 1st and save nearly 20% off your purchase.

I made a Wordle of the whole WS ms. Vox doesn't like HTML markup so I have to link.

People have asked me a lot over the last couple of months if I'm nervous or anxious about the contest. Sometimes I have gotten anxious. Right now I'm trying to channel that anxiety into reading mss for friends and working on Nine.

If you think about the contest like "American Idol," for example, my theory is this: I don't have to get up once a week and write a new story. My part is done. Once I entered, it was out of my hands. It's in Jake's hands now (the narrator). It's his job to engage a reader, tell a story and entertain. I'm the parent sitting in the audience biting my nails while I wait to hear what the judges say.

I have lived with some version of this story since my first undergraduate writing course in Spring 1991. The challenge was a five page story with "a setting you know," after half of us turned in our first assignment set in New York (or New Orleans), myself included. At the first class meeting after passing out our crit drafts, the professor (the marvelous Dinty Moore) asked how many of us had stories set in NYC. Easily half of us raised our hands. Then he asked how many of us had been there. Maybe two people. Maybe. He said that it showed. His advice was that the setting is another character in the story, that even if it's one we invent, we have to know it as well as any other major character. When we launched our Toasted Cheese, I asked to write our first Absolute Blank article first because I had a particular one I wanted to write: "Setting Yourself Up."

So anyway...

For the assignment, I wrote a story I didn't like and took a draft in on the due date (a Tuesday). I showed him that I'd done the work and I said, "I'm not happy with it. It doesn't feel right." I'd set it in a fictionalized version of the house where I'd spent my teen years, kind of a haunted house mystery thing. I asked if I could have until Thursday to write something else. He quickly looked over what I had and said, "Do something with a wildly different setting and see how it goes."

I moved around a lot as a kid, every couple of years. One place where we actually spent more time than anywhere else was Perry, Florida. Perry has problems, like any small town, but I loved my experience there and there's something that feels very homey to me about it. There's a reason I choke up when I see spanish moss dripping out of live oaks or how easy it is to slip into a Perry (read: south Georgia/north Florida) accent. When Hawk was sick... well, dying actually... in November and I was living in the ICU waiting room, my mind was so absolutely elsewhere that I barely paid attention to what I was saying much less how I said it. Then people started asking me, "Are you from Texas?" I looked down at myself thinking, "Wha?" I say I'm not. Then I got "South Carolina" and I thought, "Why are people assuming I'm from the South?" Then I realized: I had my good ol' Perry accent going on. The very accent my brothers discouraged but my mother liked my picking up b/c it mean that I called her "Maaaa-mah." It used to come out when I got angry or excited. I don't know if it does now. In everyday speech, I'm far more Pittsburghese.

So anyway...

I wanted to write about Perry... somehow. At least about the South because I knew it and I knew it through physical setting as well as through people and my own experience.

Then I thought about a constant no matter where we lived: there was always some house in the neighborhood that we kids were forbidden to go near. It had a History and there were Secrets. I thought, "I want to write about that house."

Who's in the house? I based my character on a lady who lived next door to us in Lake Wales (central Florida by then). Very old school Southern and steel magnolia-y. Her name was Gwen so I named a character after her and the name "Baker" popped in there and voila. I needed a narrator so I made it be a little kid but the kid was an adult looking back. Way too To Kill A Mockingbird, I know. But I was 19 and I wanted to write what I wanted to write.

In the original short story -- I've forgotten the title -- in a little dust speck of a south Georgia town in 1938, Miss Baker has just died in her big red house at the end of the street. The narrator -- JD Dawson -- is trying to find out why the lady everyone vilified when she was alive is suddenly everyone's saint. His dad is a little condescending to his mother (I didn't know that at the time; I thought he was just wise) but he talks the truth to JD. The family -- JD & his parents, Wilkes and Thaddea -- go to church the following Sunday and the minister is pissed off about everyone having treated Miss Baker badly when she was alive. He's angry and ashamed about the congregation's behavior but he also doesn't expect it to change. I forget how it ends but JD's obsessed with the house & finding out who Miss Baker really was.

A couple of years later, I picked it back up and I thought, "I could write more about this." So I did. I turned in entirely too many short stories for upper level undergrad writing classes at FSU that involved this story. It became a lot about the kids and it was fun to write but really, I had no end point in mind.

A couple of years after that, I'd been laid off from the weekly newspaper I wrote for (it closed) and I thought, "I have the opportunity to write a book." So I started working on this again and studying what I'd done. I'd established that the minister (now the age of JD's parents, not the old fire and brimstone minister from the first draft) had grown up with JD's mother in a little town called "Lucy's Cotton" closer to the Florida border than where the main action is set.

I thought, "What's their relationship like?" The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I was far more interested in the minister (Pastor Jake) than I was in JD or Miss Baker or anyone else. So I started over again and I let Jake tell me his story.

He had a lot to say. Right now it stands at 106,000 words, including Maggie Baker's diary entry. I changed Miss Baker's name for literary purposes but I kept "Gwen" for another character. I kept the big red house at the end of the street, with its Mystery and Secrets, and I kept that twisted little love letter to the flawed but beautiful little southern town that inspired it.

And thanks, Dinty, for those extra days and the assignment and the advice. It paid off.

Whited Sepulchers - Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award entry

Stephanie Lenz

The Publisher's Weekly review of my novel (not just the excerpt) has been posted:

From Publishers Weekly
Every town has skeletons lining its closets, and Blooming Tree, Ga., is no exception. Set in the 1930s, this novel examines the dark past purposefully shrouded by those who live there. When young Baptist pastor Jacob Buchanan is sent to Blooming Tree, he faces the challenges of overseeing a parish (namely appeasing the First Redemption Parish Ladies’ Society) and ends up living on the same street as his former lover, Thaddea, and her family. Since the murder of popular Pastor Joseph in 1909, Blooming Tree’s parish office has had a revolving door. When the purported murderess, Maighdlin Baker, gives Jacob her diary, he is confronted with a conflicting appraisal — villainous, lecherous — of Pastor Joseph. At first doubtful, Jacob struggles to uncover the truth while confronting his own demons and complex feelings for Thaddea. Though the voice loses some clarity in the diary excerpt, it is more of a hiccup than a trend, and, overall, the narration is engrossing and the plot careful and suspenseful, culminating in some satisfying twists.

I need reviews, please. Review activity is important in this round apparently. So download the free excerpt (it's the first chapter), read it (it's a 10-20- min read, max) and treat it like you would any Amazon product, review-wise.

People talk about having playlists while they write or songs that make a soundtrack of a certain book. WS doesn't have a soundtrack. I used a lot of classical music while I wrote WS b/c I like to use period music and when I wrote the early drafts, it's not like I could get evocative 1930s music. I did use some contemporary stuffto write certain scenes, stuff that made a reaction in me that translated to paper. I also listened to a lot of Tori Amos when I wrote the diary bit, which helped give it a different feel than the parts Jake narrates.

"Nine" is being written almost exclusively to "American Idiot." I don't know how that started. Probably b/c it was the CD in the laptop. I'm branching out now and when it's complete, I'll post a "soundtrack."

This evening I was supposed to get my hair done and I didn't get the phone call canceling the appointment (hairdresser had a wreck & is fine but had no transportation). As I walked back out to the car, I thought, "Well what shall I do w/ my free evening?" When I got in the car and the radio came on, the song playing was "Don't Bring Me Down." The Great Mother was giving me an answer to the question I posed inside my head; "Don't Bring Me Down" is the "theme song" of RFM (which I may have mentioned here). BTW: When I told Hawk this story and I got to the song title he said, "So you robbed a convenience store?" Yes: that's how RFM opens. And no I did not.

So just now I thought, "Hey, I could put the RFM 'soundtrack' on my writing blog b/c I've made a rough playlist." Keep in mind I didn't use iTunes or anything while I wrote RFM. I just put CDs on. I then got a little free mp3 player and I put some music on it and I've since added to it. These are most of the songs that helped me create RFM. Music, especially lyric, figures heavily into the symbolic structure of the story.

The ones before the little break actually figure into the story and I listed them here in the order in which they appear. The other songs I think came up alpha by artist. See if you can tell offhand in what what year RFM is set.

Don't Bring Me Down                             ELO     

867-5309/Jenny                                     Tommy Tutone

Bodies                                                 Sex Pistols

Baba O'Riley                                         The Who

Smells Like Teen Spirit                           Nirvana

April Come She Will (live)                       Simon & Garfunkel

Enter Sandman                                      Metallica

I'm Too Sexy                                         Right Said Fred

Rockin In The Free World                       Neil Young

Drain You                                              Nirvana

One                                                      U2

Purple Rain                                           Prince

Silent All These Years                            Tori Amos

 

God Only Knows                                                The Beach Boys           

With Or Without You                                          U2                   

All Along The Watchtower                                   Jimi Hendrix

The Wind                                                          Cat Stevens

How Soon Is Now                                               The Smiths

Been Caught Stealing                                         Jane's Addiction

Atlantic City                                                      Bruce Springsteen

London Calling                                                   The Clash

I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For            U2

I Will Follow                                                       U2       

About A Girl                                                      Nirvana

So Lonely                                                          The Police        

Behind Blue Eyes                                              The Who

The Chain                                                          Fleetwood Mac

America (live)                                                     Simon & Garfunkel

King Of Pain                                                      The Police

Girl                                                                   Tori Amos

Crucify                                                              Tori Amos

Redemption Song                                              Bob Marley

Absolute Beginners                                            The Jam

Nothing Else Matters                                          Metallica

In Bloom                                                           Nirvana

Come As You Are                                              Nirvana

Breed                                                                Nirvana

Lithium                                                              Nirvana

Polly                                                                 Nirvana

On A Plain                                                        Nirvana 

Something In The Way                                       Nirvana

Down By The Water                                           PJ Harvey

I'll Stand By You                                                The Pretenders

Brass In Pocket                                                 The Pretenders

Losing My Religion                                             R.E.M. 

Beat On The Brat                                               The Ramones   

You Can't Always Get What You Want                The Rolling Stones

Today's Teaser Tuesday excerpt is from "Inheritance," the short story that's being published in the upcoming anthology Harlan County Horrors. This is the opening:

The kitchen reeked of lilies and Jania's diaper. I scrubbed Becca's lasagna pan with steel wool and stared through the window at a patch of early-turned leaves.

Becca thunked a laundry basket onto a clear space of kitchen table. “Baby needs changed,” I said.

“You can't do it?”

“I'm washing your dishes.”

“So? I was washing your shirt.”

“Where is it?” I half turned to look at the laundry basket.

Becca scooped up her youngest and tickled her. “In Mark and Tommy's room.”

“Is that where I'm sleeping?”

“Unless you want the attic.”

“No,” I replied too quickly.

“You still afraid of the attic?”

“Not afraid,” I said, running fresh, steaming water over the pan. “The stairs are too narrow. Too steep.”

“I put the boys up there,” she said, turning her back to me.

“Do they go up there much?” I tried to cover the crack in my voice with a cough.

“You are still afraid of the attic.”

I began to protest but she'd already taken Jania up the stairs.

 

That night, I read while the boys watched an obnoxious movie on DVD. Becca knitted a sock, her first, and she constantly wrinkled her nose at the book providing the instructions. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her sigh, close the book and coil the half-knitted sock around its needles. She stashed everything in a canvas bag and popped back the recliner.

“What're you reading?”

“It's for work,” I say, not looking at her.

“About what?”

“Selkies”

Her sons turned around. “What's a silky?” Tommy asked.

“Selkie, not silky. It's like a woman with a seal skin she can take on and off, kinda like a mermaid.”

“Never heard of that,” Becca said.

“We got a report of some sightings in Scotland.” I decided to keep my transfer to myself. The timing was perfect and I'd been raised too superstitious to do anything to jinx it.

“Cool,” Matt said.

Becca threw her feet over the edge of the chair. “How do you study all these things and you don't believe any of them?”

“Because I study them.” I turned a page I hadn't really read.

Matt opened his mouth but before he could speak, Becca announced that it was bedtime. The boys groaned. “We have to get up early for Grandma. I don't want any fighting or sass tomorrow.”

Soon as the three of them headed to the attic, I flipped off the TV and followed their footfalls. The boys settled in the back of the attic, near the door for the steps. That was good. It was the front of the attic that concerned me. I hadn't yet figured how to get Becca to allow me to poke around but I needed to see the trunk. Better yet, I needed to see that it wasn't there.

I'm an ABNA semi-finalist!

I think that warrants an exclamation point.

Well I didn't properly participate in Nathan Bransford's "Agent For A Day" but these are the ones I would request:

#10
#20
#33
#36
#48

*rereads rules*

Actually I guess I have a week to reply to everyone. Most would be getting a standard rejection or "I don't represent [genre]" so it might not be as difficult as I thought.

BTW: I didn't cut any from my list to have a max of five. This was it.

ETA: Rejections & requests sent.