4 posts tagged “apex”
"Evil lives in the hills of Kentucky, as black as coal and buried just as deep"
Harlan County Horrors is a regionally-based horror anthology edited and compiled by Apex Magazine submissions editor Mari Adkins. While the table of contents is not complete, the following writers are set to appear in HCH: Maurice Broaddus, Earl Dean, Geoff Girard, Ronald Kelly, Alethea Kontis, Debbie Kuhn, Stephanie Lenz,* Jeremy Shipp, Steven Shrewsbury, Jason Sizemore, Robby Sparks & TL Trevaskis. Cover art (above) is by Billy Tackett.
Harlan County Horrors is scheduled for publication in October 2009.
* That's me. My story is called "Inheritance."
Well I can finally cross this off my list. I figured since I did it, I'd share it:
"Inheritance"
Peter returns to Harlan County for his mother's funeral and his inheritance consists of an old steamer trunk, a keepsake brought back from his father's second tour in Vietnam and the Purple Heart that came with it. He discovers that the secret of the trunk, which he shared with his mother, is only a sliver of the story. His father's suicide had been a lie, designed to hide the fact that his p'ai (minor soul) lives inside the shell of his body, sleeping in an abandoned mine. Upon her death, Peter's father awakens, emphatic that he will make his wife a creature like himself but Peter has other plans for his inheritance.
I'm working on this story for the Apex anthology and I'll need to out my monster: he's a variation on chiang-shih, which is a Chinese vampire.
So Mari e-mails today & says:
I need everyone to turn in a plot synopsis by September 15th. This is just to make sure we don't have thirteen "creature from the bottom of an abandoned mine devours Harlan County" stories.
So I wrote back and said:
Well, I have the creature and the abandoned mine but it doesn't devour anything. Should I change it? ;)
Apparently I have dibs on a Chinese vampire hanging out in an eastern Kentucky mine. But you know, by definition we are naturally going to gravitate to the mines so I don't know what they expect. And sci-fi set in rural Kentucky? Short of dropping in aliens, I don't know what people are going to do on that front (and apparently there is an "alien in a mine" story already).
In any case, I Googled "chiang shih" to see what turned up and I found out that the head of the mechanical engineering department at my alma mater is named Chiang Shih. Beware!
I finished the first draft of a story for the Apex anthology Mari invited me to write for. I grabbed a copy of the latest Apex from my local B&N and haven't read it yet. I need to know if I'm going to have to shoehorn some SF into this story. I think that, up to a point, horror writing is fantasy writing. Sure not if the horror is something grounded and real but once you start throwing in supernatural creatures, otherwordly occurrences, etc. you have fantasy elements.
Now I don't know how you move from horror to SF, the marriage of which is the backbone of Apex. Thing is, the story has to be (1) set in rural Kentucky and (2) horror. That's great. I can handle that. But how do I get SF in there? I think what I have is going to have to be SF enough (which is zero).
I'm going to rearrange some things and I think I need to expand some of the end. Then I have to go back and cut it. First draft is pushing 8k and Mari said they want it around 5k. No worries. I cut "Jacqueleine" from 10k to 5k.
It was weird writing something that has such an unbelievable key element (the horor/supernatural part). I tried to base it in reality and I mixed it with a little mystery so I think that, with a built-in audience already suspending disbelief b/c of the nature of the stories, I won't need to explain or justify the unusual elements. I admit that horror is not my thing but I write a great deal about horribleness and the real-world horrible things that people do. Plus if you write well and tell a good story, your goal is met. I think once I get this cleaned up and polished, I'll have met that goal.
I also got a rejection on my Cole story but it was a "not this but send us more of your stuff" rejection, which is good. So I submitted the Cole story to a print journal. And my query for RFM is still out there (still never heard from Dude #1).
Next thing to do is to write the May AB article (it's about writing communities; I've been joining a bunch so I can spy). Then I might either do a quick run-through of RFM or start working on Nine again. The Apex-antho story isn't due until about next March. What can I say? I like to have a nice cushion before a deadline,
