7 posts tagged “fiction”

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

Harlan County Horrors

"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.

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,

So I printed out a copy of the new story (I'll call it "Cole" after the one character for now) for Hawk to read. Apparently he read it sometime last evening. His single comment on it was "Is this based on someone you know?"

Yes. I know so many rock stars and, as you know, I am a world-traveling music journalist.

He did the exact same thing w/ RFM. To this day he insists he is Seth. This means he is a 19 year old drifter who writes poetry and smokes weed.

See, I made the mistake of once writing a story that was based on something real that involved him: Time Bomb. It was a fun little piece that I actually got published. He loved reading about himself. Since then I've written two books and I don't know how many short stories and he keeps looking for himself in them.

I think he'd be better off to look for me in what I write. As I was working on my NaNo, I realized that I have some very definite theme that I write about. There is always a sibling relationship that somehow drives my MC. This is strange as my siblings (I'm an adoptee; they're biological children of my mother) want nothing to do with me and never have. Probably why I examine the theme so often. Another theme that has come up in each book is an unintended pregnancy. In WS, it's central and in RFM, it's incidental; in Nine it's a false alarm that works as a catalyst. That probably comes from my fears in my teens & early twenties and then issues beyond that within marriage.

Naturally the core of most everything I write is sex. I'm not sure what all it says about me but I know it says a lot. I'm sure psychiatrists, behaviorists, etc. would enjoy the analyzation. It was hard to keep it out of this short story. I had to fight it off (but there's a little something in there). When I told Hawk, "Be prepared. There's no sex in this." He said, "But you always have sex in it." I think he was disappointed. In fact, I'm sure he was disappointed.

When I was actively writing and publishing BDSM erotica, he was under the impression that I was 100% into everything I was writing about and putting myself in the female role (even in my ultraflash guy-guy story so I don't know how that worked). That's not to say I wasn't interested or that I didn't find it exciting; that's pretty much the point of the genre.But he couldn't draw the line between me and my characters.

I ran this latest reaction past a writer friend and she said, "I can see he'd say that. Because, of course, everything authors write about is always true." We went on to have this exchange:

I had a cool dream last August with a fairly realistic plot. I woke up before the dream was over but I thought, "I could make this into a story, I think." All writers have this plan approximately 27 times during their careers and it rarely works b/c dreams aren't like that.

So I wrote some when I could and it kind of fizzled out. I didn't know the ending and I didn't know, in terms of it being a short story, what I wanted to say with it. I had some symbols in mind, dependent on a real life setting. I had two characters, the narrator being one.

I went to open Nine yesterday, saw this and thought, "Work on this." So I did.I didn't know my end point, whether I had the right narrator, whether some backstory I put in was too tell-y and should be excised, etc. So I made a Google doc and shared w/ three writing buddies. Then today I managed to make time to finish it up. Jam gave me some good insight on it last night & made me think that in terms of an ending, I was looking beyond the natural end. So I took her advice and brought the endpoint closer and it seemed to work.

Since it's a first draft, it'll need more work (of course) and I'd like to get it under 5k but I think I'll be able to send this out before too long.

Oh and it needs a title. I would rather send it out to a dozen journals than have to come up with a title. I hate titles. I'm so bad at them and when I come up w/ one it's boring or bizarre. I could actually call it "Untitled" if I wanted to b/c that's kind of a part of the story. Hrm. That might work. I'll think about it.

A writing friend of mine is an editor at an online journal. She announced their annual Halloween contest and, of course, I'm a sucker for Halloween. I asked on the TC boards if it had to be Halloween-specific and it doesn't. It does have a theme: "post-Apocalypse."

Years ago I had a post-Apocalyptic dream that was so real and so long, I thought I was living it. When I woke up, I wrote a lot of it down. So I used that scenario for my version of the Apocalypse and went from there. It's also horror and the word limit is 2500. Hard to achieve horror in 2500 words but I think I made it a bit scary.

I won't say the name of the story in case my friend, who's a judge, reads here. Thats also why I'm not saying anything specific about it.

Hawk read it and his reaction to "did you like it?" was "Um yeah." Whatever. He also said there were some typos. Fine. He's been a real help as a reader lately.

Anyway, I have a little time to clean it up. A couple people might look at it and then I'll submit it. I haven't sent anything to a contest in ages so this is a step back toward writing for publication again. Yay me!

I haven't decided if I'm trying NaNo or not. I know I could do it, as I proved by finishing RFM as I did. I have zero ideas for any stories (I was lucky that the Apex contest had a specific theme & genre to focus me). Maybe I'll try an erotic novel, like last year. I didn't do too badly in NaNo 2006. I just got bored & overwhelmed by life & stuff.

I had a form rejection while we were on vacation but the agent I sent sample chapters to hasn't contacted me and the Dream Agency still has my complete ms. The form rejection -- meh. I haven't sent any new queries b/c I want yes/no answers on the few I already did first.

... which is slightly different from the welcome wagon.

I've been working on a short story and it's been like trudging through thick pudding to get from one line to the next. I'm pretty sure it sucks but I'm going to write through to the end and let a friend tell me whether it sucks or not and how much.

More importantly, I've been querying! I sent three e-queries this afternoon and printed one. For the printed one, I need to include my first three chapters. So I'm taking a break from the computer (after I write this) and I'm going to sit & edit tonight. I thought my edits had taken but apparently not. I may have done them in Word instead of Open Office or something and just printed the wrong version when I went to print a copy not long ago. In any case, I needs to be editin'.

Maybe I'm too picky about querying. Maybe I should just blanket the entire literary agent marketplace with my query. I don't. I've been using Agent Query. I do a search for "literary fiction" and "accepting queries" and I go from there. I read the agent profiles. I go to their websites, when available, and I read what they're looking for and what they've sold. And if it sounds good, I write up the query and I say why I think it sounds like a good match. And I send it. And maybe it'll work.