#i mean it's always been an interest in kind of literary fiction/realist movies

[cavitymagazine]

Haptic Narratives: The Absurdly R EA L Artifacts of Dale Brett / / / [part 2]

[D]: Lately though, most of my influence has come from other forms of media opposed to writing. I have found the more I write, the less I read – at least long form. Music, animated series/films - both Japanese anime and stuff like Adult Swim and internet culture - all of these things come through in my work.

[W]: Music.

[D]: Definitely music. I often try to write with a type of musical style I enjoy in mind. This is, believe it or not, one of the reasons I decided to re-commence writing fiction. I was sick and tired of googling combinations of "vaporwave + fiction + dream" or "shoegaze + literature + drugs" to try and find works that fit a certain aesthetic that did not exist. So why not create them myself? For instance, ambient and to a lesser extent dreampunk, would be the genres I was trying to build on in Faceless in Nippon. With Ultraviolet Torus it is no secret that it is my shoegaze project. As you know with our mall collaboration [cloud mall and maze/mall], this will be vaporwave-heavy in aesthetic and theme. I think these musical styles also take me right back to the original interests that I have garnered from literature: how to feel and express oneself in light of the consumerist dream, how to find meaning in the face of a constant blurring reality. I want to produce words that create a sensory experience. Words to touch your skin, words to make you see refracted colours, words to make you realise life sucks but it's all okay.

[W]: Aesthetics are important to me as well. The depth of the surface. The synthetic, simulacra. I suspect any "honest" portrayal of our day-to-day life, even a so-called "realist" presentation, would be sci-fi, at least in part. The kitchen-sink realism of today would include game realities and all sorts of "tropes" – or what one used to call tropes – of sci-fi. DeLillo’s White Noise is a big work for me, related to some of the consumerist themes. The three layers you refer to are impressive – you've put a lot of thought into where your work comes from, what it's shaped by. I've never thought in those terms really. Although "Pessoan cyberpunk nihilism" as a blurb would have me buying whatever that book is. Abe's The Box Man - I read that in I think 2015 or so. I see Abe's tone in some of your prose. That is a hard tone to tap. It's soft and dislocated. Requires a gentle hand, and a kind of amorphous thought process. In recent years I've taken influence more from video games and commercials and music than anything textual. I assumed your influences now were primarily visual. Graphic novels, anime, bad TV movies - I cull more from kitsch than I do from literature now. Would you tell me a bit about your time in Japan? And how would you describe Faceless in Nippon to a reader who knows literally nothing about it?

[W]: I relate very hard to your not being able to google, say, "vaporwave + dream + fiction" and get a hit. You had to create your hits. I feel the same way. It's like I want "Borges + USA Up All Night" or something similarly niche and not-quite-available-elsewhere. The established subgenres you mention, like dreampunk, are still these largely unexplored parks of the mind. There aren't a whole lot of titles. Do you view Faceless in Nippon as your first book and Ultraviolet Torus as a sophomore effort?

[W]: One aspect of your work that struck me right away is its sensory nature, and its desire to make complex emotions like melancholy or lostness more tangible or tactile.

[Ed.:  racetams with caffeine are ingested.]

[D]: I really like your description – “the depth of the surface.” This really fits what I’m trying to achieve with writing. I try to attain a certain sensory experience with abstract imagery, but endeavor to maintain a somewhat conventional narrative or “everyday” story underneath. For instance, Faceless in Nippon was always meant to mimic the feeling of floating in/on water, gently bobbing through society’s ambient capitalist waters attempting to find a purpose. This incorporeal imagery juxtaposed with the more straightforward vignette format and story arc of a young western male living abroad. With Ultraviolet Torus, the prose and format are more unconventional – it was designed to mimic gemstone/mineral structure and shoegaze music, with the narrative underpinning the imagery taking the form of the rise and fall of a standard relationship. I agree that even a “realist” presentation is somewhat sci-fi these days – it is unavoidable. Our friend, contemporary, and collaborator James Krendel-Clark and I have often spoken about how the only thing left for sci-fi is this almost meta-sci-fi angle, where all the tropes have become so cliché and ingrained that really any attempt at sincere “world building” is futile. It’s better to experiment in syntax and delve into what another contemporary of ours, Nick Greer, likes to call “hyper-genre”. Use the tropes, but explore them linguistically, see what they do for the reader sensorily, opposed to using them as the building blocks to create another mundane genre narrative. I have certainly done that in shorter form through the Concentric Circuits: CODA stuff on Surfaces. I think my sci-fi influence comes through in both Faceless in Nippon and Ultraviolet Torus, certainly in the way that I frame the setting or landscape as a character almost, similar to how Ballard and Gibson craft their prose. I have had a lot of time to think about the aforementioned literary influences. I am slightly OCD too, so I often create these massive lists and Venn diagrams and shit of artists/works with certain styles and aesthetics that overlap. I do like to think of myself as a modern-day Walter Benjamin in the way I compile notes and lists and memories that form the basis of my artistic and existential exploration. I think Benjamin would have had a hell of a time with the notes app of a smart phone.

[D]: Regarding Kobo Abe, you are correct, certainly not an easy tone to master, and one that I definitely have not. My writing is not as sound as a master like Abe, which I think is why I subconsciously fall back on the sci-fi landscape syntax/prose mentioned above and the more colloquial twenty-first century alt-lit style to strive forward in my work. I am still developing though, and hopefully, opposed to just replicating Abe’s tone, one day I will be in a position where people are speaking about a tone entirely of my own that others will use as an influence. Abe is also a good segue into other forms of media that influence written work, as he has often been an inspiration to artist’s in the visual field such as filmmakers and video game creators. It is no secret that he is Hideo Kojima’s favorite author.

[D]: Since re-commencing my fiction-writing, which was at the beginning of 2019, you are accurate in your inference that I have primarily relied on other forms of media to influence my work. I have barely read any novels at all in the last couple of years comparative to the previous decade of reading. I garner much more from music, anime, and internet culture these days. I am glad you brought up the influence of commercials – I think we certainly share an avid interest in exploring the consumerist sphere and its effects on art and society. There are a number of important moments in Faceless in Nippon dealing with commercials, products, stores and their underrated aura. Hell, I even created fictional beverages and advertisements for the book.

[D]: My time in Japan was an incredibly formative experience for me. I really only returned to my home country, Australia, when my wife became pregnant. Otherwise I would probably still be there, cruising around upper-class malls, lower-class malls, drinking massive cans of Asahi on the train, staring at LED signs from concrete overpasses at night interminably. I certainly still yearn for my time there. I did go back to visit friends recently and it was a strange experience, like I could not re-create the feelings of my time there in the past no matter how hard I strived. It became apparent that my yearnings were purely for a time in my life while stationed there, opposed to the setting itself.

[D]: I would describe Faceless in Nippon as a meditative, aqueous travelogue on what it means to exist as a middle-class person in the twenty first century, the entirety of which is set in urban Japan.

[D]: I really admire artists that have an unmistakable aesthetic stamp on their work. Auteurship, if you will. For what it’s worth, I think you are one of the few that has a singular, univocal voice in the online “outsider” lit community or whatever you want to call it. I would like to think mine is the same. That people will read it and go, “Oh fuck, that’s Dale alright.” I have been told before that my work reads like MDMA. I am exceedingly happy with that comparison. I would be pleased if that was how I was known as an artist after my “career” or whatever you want to call it is over. Basically, I want to create things that are uniquely my own, things that have not been attempted before. Another reason I think that you and I gel well together as creatives is that despite our many differences in aesthetics, we are enamored by the depth of so-called low culture and continually mash it together with the supposed “high culture” of literature. 

The "Borges + USA Up All Night" example illustrates this perfectly.

[D]: Both Faceless in Nippon and Ultraviolet Torus will be available at similar times. However, there is no doubt that Faceless is my first book. It is the first thing I started working on when I didn’t know it was going to be what it became. Torus was a more experimental foray into the literary field. I compiled Torus, an exploration of gemstone and dream imagery, between drafts of Faceless. I was particularly taken by crystals, shoegaze, and giddiness over my interactions with some beautiful people on the internet at the time. It proved to be a fruitful break from Faceless rewrites, as not only did I let the novel marinate and become better before publishing it, I also gave birth to another creative treasure.

[D]: Making emotive words tactile, rendering the textually intangible tangible. This is something I want to see extended even further as we continue collaborating on our mall project. I want to delicately wrench the phaser knob on these effects and really see where we can go with our adventures in the literary sensorium.

[W]: I remember you saying you wanted Faceless in Nippon to "feel like floating in water." It made me think of a novel as a kind of sensory deprivation tank, the floating and the effects. Did you think of Ultraviolet Torus as a gem, in the abstract, or was the structuring of it more precisely gemlike? James [Krendel-Clark] and I wrote the rough draft of this Blanchot-bodyhorror, broken-videogame-reality novel called Cenotaph, and much of it deals with irrational spaces and Phildickian pulp. As far as sci-fi goes, the more subjective my take, the more "sci-fi" it seems to become. Just last night I drifted between three realities - one in which I was an unemployed writer living under Covid-19, one in which I destroyed an organic ship/braincraft with a cyber-tank, and another where I trained as a druid mage in a treacherous cursed desert. Of course these last two were games and that doesn't even entail any other branching realities that came about as well with regard to books, narratives, televisual influences, lies we tell ourselves, 5G brain-attacking waves, et al. It's late and I'm stoned and tired but yeah. Nick Greer is a fascinating individual. I didn't know you knew him. We spoke about set theory once. Gödel. I read very little, yeah. Or I should say I don't sit and read a physical book as often as I used to. I read rigorously for a good 20 years. If I'm awake enough to read, I usually would want to spend that time writing, or perhaps gaming. Or dreaming. All of these beats - the fictional beverages and ads and playing metafictionally with products and whatnot - I kind of live for that shit. I do that more and more. And it's not even a critique or any kind of satire of it for me - like the low-rez haze of 1-900 commercials was a fuzzy heaven in a box for me as a kid. The K-Mart cafeteria did possess a unique and strange power. I think we're kind of on the same page here as far as we share a kind of reverence for the artificial, the things rendered meaningless through mass production, and other similar slippery intangibles. There is a wonder here that sets it apart from, say, a satirical/scathing view of consumerist life. God, yeah, your experience in Japan. I think I've experienced similar stuff. I remember a time in 2000 when Boca Raton, Florida, was kind of magical for me. I went there a few years back; it's just any place now. Such a strange thing. And sad too. This is the only kind of interview I'd conduct, one with a writer whose work I think truly good. You might've remarked upon the melancholic allure of vending machines coding out at night. Or something similar. It's that sort of sentiment I recognized straightaway as what I consider tuned-in to a cryptic aesthetic I love. I was relieved to discover your wordcraft was honed – that's usually the big problem for me liking someone's work. One of the big draws for me about your work is the stuff you're able to do that I really dig but am not really suited to pull off myself, such as the MDMA vibe, or the ennui mixed with light, hope, etc. There are a dozen or so singular voices around in the online outsider-lit community/whatever, voices I'd consider distinctive: you, Clark, Elytron Frass, Durban Moffer – a few others.

[W]: Your themes I would say demand nuance and control. We've talked about how our mall project is slow-going because it seems very painstaking, almost like etching or surgery or something. Introspective, in any case. Although I just sort of dismissed reading a second ago, I do believe that a unique body of work is made unique by a dizzying variety of blendered influences. I had that 15-year stretch in the suffering cubes to read pretty much constantly, and haphazardly, as far as selection, in a lot of ways, so my influence map is like really fucking bizarre and extensive, which I think makes my stuff appear unique, when all that is unique about it probably is my little perspective or whatever subjectivity is injected into this array of eclectic influences.

[easyhairstylesbest]

Lauren Oyler on Writing a Book 'Good Enough So People Can't Hatchet-Job You'

Lauren Oyler is the kind of literary critic who makes thin-skinned writers think twice about putting their thoughts onto the page. She once questioned if New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino had ever met someone who wasn’t pretty (yikes!) and asserted that the best-selling novel American Dirt could have “perhaps used a little more self-doubt” (…fair). With bylines in the London Review of Books, New York Times, The Baffler, and more, Oyler often reflects on online phenomena like the popular rise of astrology and the destabilizing effect of social media on our collective mental health. More than one of her pieces of criticism have gone viral, a feat for the genre in its own right, but all the more extraordinary for their lack of sensationalism. Though her critique is often sharp-edged, it does not sacrifice nuance.

Now, she’s turned efforts to her own novel, Fake Accounts, which distills much of her critical musings into a timely premise, with a protagonist who feels like someone you follow on Twitter—an Internet writer who lives in New York City. The unnamed narrator discovers that her boyfriend of several years has been hiding a second life as a popular online conspiracy theorist on the eve of Donald Trump’s inauguration, but as she roves the sea of pink pussy hats at the 2017 Women’s March that same weekend, her boyfriend dies in a freak accident before she can confront him. Left in a social media-hazed mania, the narrator flees to Berlin, embarking on a truly deranged online dating spree and other expat follies.

The book mirrors details from Oyler’s own life—a writer, often for the internet, who lives part-time in Berlin—and parodies the contemporary literary trends she often critiques, like autofiction and the fragmented structure popularized by Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation, to explore the tension and lack of distinction between our real and online personas. If, like much of the population, you are addicted to social media, the book resonates in a very specific way.

ELLE.com talks with the author about how she deals with her inner critical voice, her lukewarm feelings about social media detoxes, and how she found empowerment in blurring the lines of her online persona through fiction.

I first heard about your book after seeing a tweet from Emily Gould that calls you an “enormous bitch” but then praises the novel as “unimpeachably great.” How do you unpack a comment like that?

Ha! I don’t think Emily meant that being a bitch is a bad thing necessarily. We’re so used to seeing more or less positive criticism or only tepidly questioning criticism, but not a ton of harsh book criticism, so I seem like more of a bitch than I think I am. But I mean, that’s totally what I was going for—make the book good enough so people can’t hatchet-job you, right? That’s what everybody is going for, I hope.

I imagine that task was really challenging as someone who reviews books. How were you able to shut off those critical voices and write?

I think a lot of people are probably feeling pressure from hypothetical critics now. Social media puts everybody in this position where you’re constantly imagining how something is going to be taken the wrong way, or the least generous reading of something that could possibly be made. How likely is it that someone will make it? There’s an aspect of the novel where the narrator is constantly anticipating the reader’s thoughts, and she is trying to justify her thinking or how she’s behaving. So I think that’s a broader issue and not just related to the fact that I’m a “bitch.” [Laughs]

AKA critic! Reading your criticism, I have been struck by the level of authority you assume—as a writer, I always struggle with “what’s my right” to say any of this. I’m curious where that comes from for you.

I think it does come in part from growing up in a place where people were not quite interested in the same things I was. I grew up in Hurricane, West Virginia, a small town between Charleston and Huntington, and I was not a total misfit, but I wasn’t encouraged the way I might have been if I had gone to a nice private school in New York City. I had to learn to trust my process of thinking through objections and criticism and shoring up all sides—because I do feel, and maybe some people would disagree, that I think quite a lot about things before I say them, and that’s part of where the sense of confidence comes from. But I do have social media-inflicted paranoia.

You’ve written a lot about social media as a critic—what made you want to approach the topic from a literary standpoint?

There’s this idea that floats around periodically that the realist novel is not equipped to respond to the pace and technology of the day, and you can’t put the Internet in a novel and have it still be literary because the Internet is inherently tacky and ephemeral and nothing on it matters and everyone on it is kind of stupid. We have this idea about literary fiction, that it has to be very elevated and concerned with the greatest issues of human life, but I think the compulsion to be sort of ephemeral and the willingness to be stupid in public without thinking much about it is a very human impulse. I was interested in this idea of the realist novel and the quote-unquote “traditional novel” that is supposed to be inimical to the Internet and social media.

What was your writing process like?

When I started thinking about writing this novel, the voice didn’t come to me immediately. I was really struggling with it. And then I wrote a version of the first paragraph, which has this much more cynical, slightly complicated tone with an inherent ironic quality that is really appealing to me, and then went from there.

One thing I thought about a lot is the possibility that people will read the book autobiographically in some way and take something about me from the protagonist. I started to feel very empowered by that, building up this fake persona that was still definitely connected to my real self.

That sounds absolutely terrifying to me.

I think it’s personally empowering because I don’t think I care if someone thinks a certain detail or one of the things the protagonist says is attributable to me. It may be attributable to me, or it may not be, and keeping both possibilities alive throughout the text is something I was concerned with. I think what is compelling about experiencing art and also making it is that it allows you to create your own agency. You can, within the confines of the work, do more or less whatever you want. I think it’s very important for people to have at least one sphere of life where you can sort of control how it works.

I have listened to and read a lot of interviews with authors who get frustrated with the notion that some part of their novel is autobiographical, and they have a point, but I also think the process of writing a novel is one in which you are pulling all sorts of things from your life. You only have what’s in your mind, what you can imagine or experience. Now, increasingly, we live in a time where we just know a lot about each other, and what I try to show in the book is that the construction of online persona versus the construction of a quote-unquote “real persona” is a very fluid process. You can’t point to any one thing and say that’s real and that’s fake. There are definitely things that are straightforward lies, but there are lots of ways to fudge things without lying and, in some way, you’re being more truthful by not being completely honest, which is the nature of fiction traditionally—that it’s saying something true by saying something false.

As a literary critic, how do you hope your book is received?

First of all, I know this is a trick question, but I hope it’s not just seen as a commentary on social media, because I think that discussion of social media even now can be siloed, like, “Oh, that’s what’s happening on the Internet. That’s an Internet writer.” I would ideally not be considered a quote-unquote, “Internet writer.” I would be considered a writer, one of whose themes is the internet.

“I started to feel very empowered by that, building up this fake persona that was still definitely connected to my real self.”

Has your relationship to social media changed since the pandemic?

I’ve got to say no, but that’s because I didn’t have a job before, so I was always on the computer at my house and I continued to be on the computer at my house. I’m kind of disappointed that I haven’t had an awakening that allows me to get off it for good. I did take a five-month break last year, and that was sort of nice, but it didn’t change me as much as I hoped. I obviously get quite a lot out of social media—my career definitely has a lot to do with having been on Twitter for ten years—and I think it’s very fascinating just to watch people and see what they do on it and how they respond and interpret things. It’s an amazing opportunity to watch this many people just behave.

What books or authors do you think people should read more of?

As far as contemporary authors go, I think Miriam Toews deserves much more attention. I loved Patrick deWitt’s novel French Exit, which didn’t get very much attention when it came out (and looking it up just now, I had no idea it was made into a movie). More people can always be told about The Last Samurai and Helen DeWitt (no relation to Patrick, I think). Joan Silber, Percival Everett. I think it’s safe to say that most authors in translation who aren’t extremely famous deserve more attention; it’s hard to go wrong with translated books in the U.S. because so few authors get translated, and the ones who do are usually some of the most renowned authors in their own countries. Which is a problem, because in the U.S. we have no idea what’s going on with contemporary literary culture in other countries, but it’s a useful way to narrow your search. Daša Drndić, Jenny Erpenbeck, Alina Bronsky (I liked The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine). Tove Ditlevsen’s memoirs, The Copenhagen Trilogy, are being reissued by FSG in January, and I wrote about them and loved them. I still think about the book Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami, who has a few other books out here, too.

Annie Werner Annie Werner is a writer from Texas living in New York.

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Lauren Oyler on Writing a Book 'Good Enough So People Can't Hatchet-Job You'

[kyanve]

“Oh, it’s just fantasy/sci fi” in writing.

Okay so.  I decided I wanted to write - like seriously, I wanted to make the novels I grew up reading, and I set my mind to that when I was like, eight.  Unlike a lot of other things I decided I wanted to do with myself when I was eight (”Herpetologist!  Paleontologist!  Fighter pilot!”), writing stuck.

I spend my childhood and teenage years collecting issues of Writer’s Digest and resources on how writing fiction worked, how to build stories.  I ended up with a sort of head start on a lot of my English classes because while I wasn’t always coming at it from the same direction, I already knew what things like theme and tone meant.  

And in college, I started taking writing classes.

I’ve gotten a ton of “Oh you can never make a living at that” re: writing fiction.  I haven’t, yet, but I’ve also basically chickened out and had life stress and anxiety knock me out of seriously working on publication.  Give me a year or two and I might be able to write something inspirational about that, right now it’s more “Okay seriously you can be realistic about the odds of making big money without treating it as a garbage job”.  

And when I got to college, well.

See I don’t have a lot of interest in writing any “respectable literary genre”.  I started out intent on writing fantasy and science fiction like what raised me, and damnitall, I’ve spent most of my life to some extent trying to do that, even when I didn’t necessarily manage to beat anxiety and self-consciousness to do anything anyone else could see.  I also used to write horror occasionally, but I don’t think I could sustain it for too long right now.

And I have been through so many teachers determined to convince me it was a Tragedy that I was Wasting My Time And Talent on Trashy Genre Fiction when I could be teaching literary criticism or writing Real Literature.  

(The “Wasting my obvious talent” is a little insulting now, because the teachers who did it always seemed to inevitably think my only source of instruction was them and other teachers, that any other ability I had came from some magical wellspring, and that I couldn’t possibly have been dedicating a shitload of time and effort to finding resources to teach myself.  It’s like art in that respect, you get better if you practice, use references, and look up guidelines on technique, but don’t get too hung up on stylistic instruction beyond “what you like or don’t like”.)  

One of the teachers never budged.  He was a particularly egregious asshole about it, too, and would insist things like “Don’t use death in your writing, or even reference death.  It’s overused and overdone and melodramatic.”  

He also told me I should write more like Flannery O’Connor, which is where I looked between the short story of hers he’d assigned us where a wandering hitchhiker murders a family that tries to help them for no other reason than to make some kind of Statement about the Futility of Life, and him, and just stared for a good ten minutes.  

He asked me to write something extra-credit “Like what I would normally write” instead of following his restrictive prompts.  I wrote a short story about one version of a high-fantasy character of mine who’s been through about twenty different versions and incarnations; this one was the magically talented son of a military leader in a border keep, caught facing a war against a magically-focused enemy.  The keep itself was a castle I’d walked through the ruins of in Germany.  I’d researched the appropriate battle tactics and equipment.  The mageling and his peers were twelve and thirteen, going through training to fight for the keep and weapons training, because I’d researched the equivalent time periods in Europe and it was setting-appropriate.  A lot of his interactions with his peers were based on my own experience as an army brat and how the rank of parents and inclinations of kids compared to their parents impact bullying and social stratification.  

I got back five pages of him being utterly horrified that I had written about CHILDREN with access to weapons.  Horrified that some of the stuff the bullies had done would be potentially life-threatening kinds of hazing/harassment, like that doesn’t happen in schools.  He ranted about how the entire setting was foreign and unrealistic, and that I should “Write what I knew”.

I had rants to my roommate for two hours about how I had damn well written what I knew, I HAD WALKED THE WALLS OF THAT CASTLE DAMNIT, the world might have been fantasy but that hill and keep exist in Germany.  

So for my final project, I got vindictive and decided to write something fueled by pure spite to see if he’d notice.  It was a relatively short “magical realism” slanted urban fantasy set on the college campus we were on.  The main character was not even subtly based on myself - a college student with a brass-shod staff to deal with the Fairbanks ice and a black lambskin trenchcoat bought with a summer job paycheck.  The protagonist could also see and talk to spirits and beings most of the others on campus couldn’t; I put a dragon in the story-world version of UAF, ravens that weren’t really ravens, and a handful of other things.  The whole story was basically a very sad meditation on how depressing it was that most people had so little imagination that they would reject, mock, and drive out anyone aware of “the REAL world around them”, so intent on being sure the world only existed as a tiny little puddle that even if they did see for a few minutes they would reject it.

Yeah.  It was pretty ham-handed of a call out.  If I ever find it again I’m not sure I could bring myself to publish it because I don’t even like writing like that. But it was me trying to mimick the writing styles of some of the “Great Literary Authors” he focused on, keeping the fantasy elements where someone REALLY stubborn could call them “ambiguous and maybe not actually real”, and centering everything on a theme and on a location that he knew.

He loved it.  Said I should write more things like that and less of the “Silly genre fiction that wasn’t real literature”, and “stick with what I knew like this” - ergo, modern, nothing too unusual, familiar locations by his standards.

Let me tell you, with one exception that’s going to its own post in a minute since this is pretty long, if my anxiety was more self-conscious about teachers not liking Non-Literary-Genre Fiction, if I hadn’t grown up on science fiction and fantasy, if I didn’t manage to be blisteringly angry enough to bull through the anxiety and self-consciousness out of sheer spite, I might have given up on it just for the amount of sheer “It’s not real, respectable writing, it’s just vapid escapist consumer pandering” I got in college.  I also mostly gave up on writing classes after his and stuck with grammar, communication, rhetoric, and finding subjects I thought I could use.  

(I am self conscious about it, but it’s more “will the actual intended audiences want this and like this?” and “As I start sending things to publishers do I have a chance of getting published?”  That last one is a killer and has gone full executive dysfunction a few times on just finishing pieces; that’s the real dragon I’m throttling down into its hole.)  

Holy shit, kids, fanfiction writers, people who want to word gud and tell stories, do not let the collegiate academics and people who call genre fiction “silly and pointless” or “childish” grind you down.  They’re going to tell you that it’s “commercial pandering” and “vapid escapism”, but you can pretty much look around you to see how much impact that “vapid escapism” has.  Even people who have never seen the movies have a clue what “May the Force be with you” means.

Don’t fall for it.  Don’t believe that writing about aliens and castles isn’t “writing what you know”, because if that’s what you’re interested in, that’s what you research and surround yourself with, you damn well do know it.  If you’re writing people like ones you know in your Impossible Worlds and writing about events that happen in the real world like wars and conflicts and trust and friendship and romances and fear and abuses, you are writing Things You Know, you are writing REALITY, and it is valuable, not fake or empty or “meaningless and with no bearing on Truth”.  

(And don’t think fanfiction is worthless either; fanfiction is a wonderful thing for writing just for the joy of it, for getting to stretch and practice and see what you can do as a writer.  Also, it’s honestly in some ways more of a challenge; if you’re writing your own characters and worlds, you’re the final arbiter of how it works and what’s in character for them.  Writing someone else’s?  You’re playing a game of seeing how well you can figure it out and portray it recognizably to other fans who are probably pretty detail obsessed themselves, and that’s a challenge in and of itself.  You may not earn a living off it, but it’s perfectly good work.)  

[imanidavis]

The Ethics of Problematic Protagonists: Netflix’s You

Originally published at www.thatsmye.com on January 23, 2019.

For as long as stories have been told, we have had the protagonist. In many situations and in the most fabled of tales, the protagonist is known to us, the audience, as “the good guy” — but this is by no means a requirement.

In the most technical of terms, all this person needs to be is “the leading character or one of the major characters in a drama, movie, novel, or other fictional text”. That’s it. They have no literary obligations to be kind, moral, just, or “the good guy”. And, in my own personal opinion, it is the stories that revolve around the ones who aren’t quite as morally sound as the ones in fairytales, that happen to be the most interesting.

The rise of streaming services has done a lot to disrupt the formerly strict setup of the entertainment industry and studio system. Gone are the days of being obsessed with ticket sales on opening weekends, massive P&A budgets dedicated to a single film, and the reliance on the typical formulaic blockbuster setup that has been the trend for.. well, forever. The goal now is to keep your eyes on their prize.

That is not to say that things have somehow gotten easier. The stakes are higher than ever for HBO, Hulu, Netflix, and others to experiment, push the limits on traditional storytelling, and keep you far away from the cancellation button in your account settings.

The latest in Netflix’s planned journey of ambitious programming is their show called You, which is already creating quite the buzz with thought pieces and explanations coming from every direction. It is very well done, with a star-studded cast, an 8/10 on IMDB, and a 91% on Rotten Tomatoes (and this somehow all started as a Lifetime show..). Now, I’ll start with the most basic of facts: this show is creepy. But a different kind of creepy from the normal modern day Hitchcockian-thriller that we are seeing more and more of these days. The twist is: the creep is the protagonist of the show. It’s like if Psycho was told completely from the perspective of Norman Bates and we heard almost every messed up thought of his through voice-over; and the plot isn’t too far off either considering Joe Goldberg, You’s star played by Gossip Girl’s Penn Badgley, is also a socially awkward and murderous stalker.

The writing in this show is good — a little too good. Like I said, we hear the inner thoughts of Joe throughout the entire show and even have — and it pains me to say this — sympathy for the guy in the beginning. He is very normal at first, kicking off the plot by noticing another main character, Guinevere Beck (played by Elizabeth Lail), in a book store where he is the manager, and falling in love at first sight. Cute, right? No! Not cute! Soon, we begin spiraling along with our protagonist into a deep, dark hole of stalking, breaking & entering, and murder. The whole time, I found myself rooting for Joe to just stop being creepy and be a normal boyfriend and live happily ever after.. like a normal person!

But then I asked myself, “everyone else that’s watching this also thinks it’s messed up, right?”. Are there people who think that his behavior is justified? Because we can hear Joe’s own rationale for his actions and it technically makes sense in the most technical of ways, would someone think that it is okay? You can hope for people to have morals but at the end of the day, some don’t. You can hope that people know the difference between right and wrong, but some don’t. Does the entertainment industry have an obligation to portray the good guy as always winning? Does the “bad guy” always need to be punished? Because in You so far, the bad guy wins, and he wins a lot.

This brings me back to the days of the Hollywood Production Code, which was a set of rules in play from the 1930s to the 1960s dictating what could and could not be in films. Something that was hounded on in these rules was making sure that the audience is sure that evil is wrong and good is right. As a result, “the bad guys” could not win in a film, ever. With so much new content coming out and so many innovative storytelling tactics riling up the masses, maybe they had a point? Didn’t a bunch of people commit murders similar to the ones that were portrayed in the show Dexter?

Sit on the question of what kind of responsibility Hollywood holds in emboldening those that wish to make their art into reality.. All in all, this show is really great and does a fantastic job at playing with irony in its purest form. There is one scene where Beck’s best friend, Peach (who is also pretty obsessed with her), is secretly looking at Beck in the bathtub, while Joe is secretly watching Peach, and we are (secretly?) watching Joe, which was a great and subtle point of humor in such a dark storyline. The events are predictable, but predictable in a way that highlights the realistic traits of these characters, especially Joe. He’s just a dumb, creepy guy who makes some really bad and unnecessary choices, but man, he sure is charming.

[konnl]

Craig DiLouie, Thriller, Apocalyptic/Horror and Sci-Fi/Fantasy Author

Craig DiLouie, Thriller, Apocalyptic/Horror and Sci-Fi/Fantasy Author

The first guest of 2019 is author Craig DiLouie who is known for writing thrillers, apocalyptic, horror, sci-fi and fantasy fiction. His work has been reviewed hundreds of times, being praised for his gritty realism, strong characters and action. He has been nominated for major literary awards. His novels have been translated into multiple languages and optioned for film. Let’s welcome Craig to the blog and learn more about his writing!

Thank you for joining us Craig DiLouie. Can you share with us how you first got into writing?

Thanks for having me as a guest!

I grew up on a farm outside a small Andy Griffith-type town in New Jersey in the 1970s, so I got very good at using my imagination to keep myself entertained. After growing up on movies like Soylent Green and The Towering Inferno, I discovered the works of Robert E. Howard. He fired my imagination and inspired me to create my own worlds to discover.

Tell us more about your latest work, One of Us, which is set to be on paperback February 26th.

 One of Us is a dark fantasy story about people in a small town who live in constant fear of the children living in a nearby orphanage, who are monsters because of a mutagenic disease. When a body is found and a plague child is blamed, the tension between the townsfolk and the plague children comes to a head.

Thematically, the novel is about prejudice, a universal human trait, and whether monsters are born or made. Stylistically, it’s a Southern Gothic, which traditionally includes elements such as the taboo, grotesque, and a society in decay.

Author Claire North called One of Us “To Kill a Mockingbird meets The Girl with All the Gifts,” which I think nails it.

One of Us has been called heartbreaking and a powerhouse of a novel. What was the inspiration for this story?

Thank you for calling that out, I certainly hope most readers agree that’s true. One of Us started with an interest in developing a fresh take on the misunderstood monster story, and recasting it as a Southern Gothic, which offered me as a writer a veritable playground of rich language and tropes. I wanted the reader to experience what it’d be like to be living in the town and in the orphanage through a highly empathetic ensemble cast of characters, this being a character-driven story.

Besides Southern Gothic literature, inspiration was found in works like Frankenstein, The Island of Dr. Moreau, X-Men, and the film The Conquest of the Planet of the Apes.

You have an impressive collection of work, is there a type of genre you are not fond of writing in?

I’m interested in writing good stories with an emphasis on seeing what ordinary people are made of when challenged by extraordinary circumstances. Genre fiction offers the most fertile ground for that, from WW2 historical to sci-fi and fantasy to horror and apocalyptic. My current work with standalone novels published by big houses like Orbit tend to be strong genre backed by a powerful theme or big idea and with a literary bend/character focus.

That being said, the extraordinary circumstances are as important to the fun for me as the ordinary people, so I don’t think I’d be very good at say literary fiction. I think it’s important as a writer to play to your strengths and be realistic about your limitations, while at the same challenging yourself to grow.

Is there any story you have written that you personally hold in higher regards? If so how come?

While I love each of my works at least for one particular thing, I have to say overall One of Us is my overall favorite. I wrote it with a fierce joy without the usual angst and speed bumps. It just poured out of me. This novel was my first with Orbit, which allowed me to work with Bradley Englert, an editor who knows how to get the best out of me. He challenged me to refine the book and take it to another level. That part was even harder work but just as joyful and rewarding. I couldn’t be happier with the result.

After One of Us releases, what is your next project?

I just turned in final revisions for Our War, set to be published by Orbit in August 2019 and available in audio, eBook, and hardcover and trade paperback. The novel is about a UN worker and journalist who discover the use of child soldiers during a second American civil war. The story focuses on a brother and sister forced to fight on opposite sides. As with One of Us, I hope readers will find it powerful and heartbreaking, and that they’ll reflect on the theme of political tribalism and its dangers.

For aspiring writers, what would be one piece of advice you would give them?

Everybody’s path to success is different and depends on differing definitions of success, so it’s hard to offer hard and fast advice. The closest thing I’ve found as a formula for success in fiction is to always be producing, always be learning and growing as an artist, and then to be at the right place at the right time with the right book. In short, be the best you can be and hope that the elusive X factor in publishing, which is really luck, goes your way and your book resonates in some way with your intended market. (Which also means it’s good to understand who you’re writing for.) Often, this is not a rags to riches kind of thing but instead a ladder with many rungs. So I’d also counsel patience and perseverance.

Let’s thank Craig DiLouie for joining us to talk about him writing!

Thank you for having me as a guest!

You can find Craig DiLouie’s work and social media from the links below:

Novels

http://craigdilouie.com

https://www.amazon.com/Craig-DiLouie/e/B001JS1SCQ/

Social Media

https://www.facebook.com/craig.dilouie

https://twitter.com/CraigDiLouie

Craig DiLouie’s Biography

Craig DiLouie is an acclaimed American-Canadian author of literary dark fantasy and other fiction. Formerly a magazine editor and advertising executive, he also works as a journalist and educator covering the North American lighting industry. His fiction has been nominated for major awards, optioned for screen, and published in multiple languages. He is a member of the Imaginative Fiction Writers Association, International Thriller Writers, and the Horror Writers Association. He lives in Calgary, Canada with his two wonderful children.

[theconservativebrief]

This week, critic at large Todd VanDerWerff (who hasn’t read any of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels) and culture writer Constance Grady (who has read the first one) got together to discuss the first two episodes of HBO’s adaptation of the first book in that series — My Brilliant Friend. Beware! Spoilers follow!

Todd VanDerWerff: As someone who’s never read the Elena Ferrante Neapolitan quartet that inspires the new series My Brilliant Friend, what most surprised me about the series’ first two episodes was how borderline pulpy they were.

Don’t get me wrong. This is still a show that puts its best “coming of age story” foot forward. It is, above all else, the story of Elena and Lila growing up as poor girls in an out-of-the-way Naples neighborhood. But mixed in there are darker, pulpier elements, like murder and horrifying cellars with strange shadowy figures in the corner and hints of organized crime. I’m starting to see why these books were such a phenomenon — they both capture certain truths about female friendship that aren’t always well portrayed in culture and they wed those truths to storytelling elements that carry an air of popcorn fiction.

I mean, I assume! Again, I haven’t read the novels. And every single one of the pulpy elements I’ve listed above turns out to have a completely logical explanation that mutes it somewhat. That shadowy figure in the basement? Just the local pawnbroker! Though as you learn about said pawnbroker, you start to realize that he, too, is a story in and of himself.

That sort of realization is what the first two episodes of My Brilliant Friend evoke so well, I think. When you’re a certain kind of literary-minded kid, everything that happens to you feels like the start of some fantastical story or voyage. Elena and Lila are that kind of kid: intelligent, but also too young to fully understand every aspect of the world around them. So they fill in the gaps with stories. What they don’t yet realize is the most important story they’re involved in is the one centered on their friendship.

Constance, you’ve read the book that My Brilliant Friend’s first season is based on. One thing that some critics who’ve read Ferrante’s novels have said about the show is that it can occasionally feel like a perfunctory adaptation — taking bits that sang on the page and literalizing them onscreen in a way that works for those who don’t read much, but falling just a little flat if you know what’s coming. How do you feel about the series’ adaptation choices? And can we talk about how remarkable its child casting is?

Run, Lila, Run: A film by Tom Tykwer HBO

Constance: I am ready to talk about those child actors all day. You get such a strong sense of their personalities from the way they’re shot, and the continuity between the child actors and their teen counterparts is honestly astonishing.

In terms of the adaptation: I think that the pulpiness you pointed to is actually one of the biggest changes we see from page to screen. On the page, Elena describes the murder and violence and horror around her so matter-of-factly that it doesn’t quite register as violence.

We know that Elena is afraid of Don Achille, for instance, and that she thinks of him as a monster — but she writes about that fear as though he’s just a creepy old neighborhood man who the local children have made up some stories about. When I was reading the book, it wasn’t until Elena was well into her teens that I finally put together that oh, okay, Don Achille is a local crime boss who got rich off the black market during World War II. He runs the neighborhood like it’s his private fiefdom, and he is ultimately killed by another local crime family who want to get rid of the competition. In the book, Elena just doesn’t think of her neighborhood in such terms, so I didn’t either.

But the TV show makes it clear who Don Achille is almost immediately. There’s a kind of doubled vision here: We see Don Achille as Elena and Lila see him, as a fairy tale ogre who goes around stealing dolls and putting them in a black bag — but we also see him as he is in “reality,” as a petty crime boss.

The TV show also makes the rest of the violence around Elena and Lila a lot more vivid and concrete. There’s a scene in the second episode in which Lila’s father throws her out a window in a fit of rage. Onscreen, it’s horrifying: You hear voices shouting and crescendoing, and then you see Lila’s tiny child’s body crashing through the window to thud painfully on the ground, shards of glass everywhere. It feels like a monstrous act of violence.

But on the page, the violence of that scene is muted. You have to dig for it. It’s almost comic: “Suddenly the shouting stopped and a few seconds later my friend flew out the window, passed over my head, and landed on the asphalt behind me.” Listen to how peaceful those verbs are! Lila is flying, passing, landing; you don’t get a strong sense of brutality from this language. The horror here is subdued, below the surface, and it only dawns on you gradually how terrible and violent the thing you just read was.

As a result, the TV show feels a lot bleaker and more harrowing than the book does in its beginning. Elena and Lila still have their sense of childish wonder and delight at the world, but now overlaying it we can always see the reality of how terrible their world is, and how difficult it will be for them ever to escape. In the book, you have to work for that realization. The shift in emotional register isn’t necessarily bad, but it is noticeably different.

Todd: That’s really interesting to me! As more and more acclaimed novels are adapted into TV shows instead of movies, and as those TV shows tend to streeeeeeetch everything ooooouuuut, I’ve been thinking a lot more about how onscreen depictions have a tendency to make everything blunter than it would be on the page.

To be sure, that’s not always the case. No Country for Old Men is magnificently blunt both on the page and on the big screen. But your highlighting of Ferrante’s verb choices makes clear that a mini-arc within the book must be Elena’s slow realization of how the world around her actually works, as she loses her childhood innocence and observes more nuance as she gets older. (Obviously, this is something all of us experience.) That’s difficult to portray onscreen, where a small girl flying through a window is hard to depict as anything other than brutal and horrifying, unless you’re deliberately going for comedy.

That also speaks to another adaptation problem I think My Brilliant Friend gets around beautifully — namely, even though Elena is the point-of-view character and one of the two leads of the story, she doesn’t really do much throughout the first two episodes, which makes Lila feel like the more dynamic and engaging character.

I sometimes think of this as the Harry Potter problem. In the first few books of that series, Harry is the point-of-view character, which means that we’re getting a fairly vivid portrayal of the wizarding world through his eyes. But onscreen, the point-of-view character is almost always going to default to the camera. A skillful director can change the audience’s relationship to point-of-view (as Alfonso Cuarón did in the third Harry Potter film and Chris Columbus… pointedly did not in the first two), but they’re always working against the way the audience on some level just wants the camera to be an impartial, unseen observer. So how does My Brilliant Friend avoid this issue?

Well, director Saverio Costanzo (as well as writers Ferrante, Costanzo, Francesco Piccolo, and Laura Paolucci) is always cognizant of how we understand the world through Elena’s point-of-view. When she first becomes aware of Lila in class at their school, Costanzo films the revelation in close on actress Elisa del Genio’s face as it cycles through frustration, irritation, and intrigue. Who is this person? Who does she think she is? And more importantly, when we see Lila, it’s from the perspective Elena would see the girl from — seated at a desk.

Costanzo returns to these filmmaking tricks throughout, at moments of emotional importance, so that we are firmly with Elena. Even when we see things that Elena couldn’t possibly have seen — like the murder of Don Achille — they’re presented almost abstractly, as a small child might imagine them. (The murder is revealed via a knife popping in from offscreen to sink into a neck that gouts blood. Not only does it obscure the identity of the murderer, but it also underlines the way a little kid wouldn’t quite understand how all of this works.)

Adult Elena is telling us this story via narration, which also shoulders some of the point-of-view burden, because we’re always reminded that these are her memories. Elena’s narration also subtly frames the story as something of a mystery about who Lila is. (It would seem something bad happened to Adult Lila in the present.)

When Kid Lila takes those dolls and pitches them down the chute into the cellar, it’s presented as impetuous and rude, but also as something almost impossible to understand. The moment underlines one of My Brilliant Friend’s themes, and one of the reasons point-of-view is so important to its success: No matter how well you know someone, they’ll always be a mystery to you on some level.

This theme also extends to how the little plaza where the girls live is presented almost as an entire fantasy kingdom when they’re kids, full of odd nooks and crannies and adventures just waiting to be uncovered. How do you feel about the “world-building” of the show, for lack of a better word? And do its places match up to the ones in your mind’s eye from the book?

Elena and Lila enjoy reading Little Women, another realistic fiction novel that employs wonderful world-building as it follows girls from childhood to adulthood. HBO

Constance: The world-building is another great example of how My Brilliant Friend has to reconcile the reality of the larger world with Elena’s childish understanding of it. In the book, the neighborhood doesn’t really register as filthy and squalid until Elena has a chance to get out of it and catch a glimpse of the rest of Naples; she’s just living her life in the only place she knows. And we see that onscreen, we see what it is about this neighborhood that would be fun for a kid to play in. But we also see that it’s cramped and impoverished and the light is always gray — and in a way, that raises the stakes. We want these girls to go to school so that they can leave this place, before it seems to have fully occurred to them that they might like to.

One of my favorite things about the friendship between Elena and Lila is just how much of it revolves around their shared desire to escape. Elena first decides to befriend Lila specifically because she can see that Lila is smart enough to get out, and if Elena follows her, she’ll be able to leave as well. She won’t live the life her parents lead, and, as she puts it, her mother’s limp will stop chasing her. (What an image that is!) And Lila, in her turn, seems to be drawn to Elena both because she can see that Elena is the only one in the neighborhood who is almost as smart as Lila is, and because Elena has an ability to please the people in charge who can be useful to Lila.

Their teacher, meanwhile, deliberately sets them against each other as friendly rivals, because she can see that they motivate one another to do better — and when it becomes clear to her that Lila is a lost cause, that her parents will not allow her to go to middle school, she drops Lila, and encourages Elena to do the same.

So much of this friendship is built around utility, around the idea that this person, this one, can be an escape route, a way out of the neighborhood. But what’s fascinating is that even as it becomes clear that even if both Elena and Lila are getting out, they’ll be taking very different paths, the friendship never quite curdles. There are moments of profound resentment — that scene where it becomes clear that Lila orchestrated Elena’s punishment for going to the ocean in the hopes that her parents would be too angry to send her to school is just heart-stopping — but there is never any question of the friendship breaking apart.

They mean too much to each other for that to happen. Each one is the other’s “brilliant friend,” and so their bond keeps evolving and mutating but stays forever intact.

Todd: In my review of the season overall, I described Lila as the “brilliant friend” of the title and was met with a degree of pushback from readers who feel that each of the girls is the other’s “brilliant friend.” And, yes, that is obviously where the series is heading (though it feels to me like it will take several seasons for Elena to get over her Lila-themed inferiority complex), but it also strikes me as something very true about friendships between kids and teens.

We’re so often drawn to people who mirror the things we value most in ourselves, and we’re so often drawn to people who — to us, at least — seem to do those things just a little bit better, to the degree that we can make it to adulthood and still be racing against our childhood best friend just a little bit. I mean, I’m sure there are some people who don’t have this complex, but Lord knows I do, and lots of the people I know and love do as well.

Every brilliant friend, on some level, is also a brilliant rival. Elena and Lila seem to have a pretty good balance right now, but I wonder how that will change as the two are separated by their parents’ decisions, by aging, and by time. They can make each other better, but they can also make each other worse. That dynamic is bound to pay dividends the deeper we get into the show.

My Brilliant Friend airs Sundays and Mondays at 9 pm Eastern on HBO. Previous episodes are available on the network’s streaming platforms.

Original Source -> How HBO’s My Brilliant Friend translates Elena Ferrante’s beloved book to TV

via The Conservative Brief

[tanmath3-blog]

Raised in the Finger Lakes region of Upstate New York, but forever longing for the white sands of New Mexico, Pamela has always loved mysteries and the macabre. Combining the two in her own writing, along with her love for historical research and genealogy, came naturally. Hours spent watching ‘Monster Movie Matinee’, ‘Twilight Zone’, a myriad of Hammer Films, and devouring books by Stephen King, Tanith Lee, and Anne Rice probably helped, too.

Outside of her work as a novelist, Pamela has written numerous historic articles for the Tioga County Courier, an Owego, NY newspaper. She has done genealogy research for family and friends and was a Civil War reenactor for close to ten years. In 2014 Pamela joined the ranks of writers for the online magazine, The Good Men Project. She also enjoys scrapbooking, bad B-Movies, road trips with her husband, and feeding the crows that frequent their back yard.

  Please help me welcome Pamela Morris to Roadie Notes…………

1. How old were you when you first wrote your first story? I was all of nine when I wrote and illustrated “Bill, The Worm Who Ran Away”. It’s an adventure about a runaway worm who was named after my father. This was soon followed by my first ghostly thriller/mystery “The Strange Well”. Both are 3rd Grade literary masterpieces, I assure you. Thanks to my dad, I still have both of the originals of the above titles in my paper files.

2. How many books have you written? I have written eleven novels, ten of which have been published. One is currently out-of-print as it was never quite what I wanted it to be and it needs a lot of revisions. My first published novel was released in 2006 and started a four-year journey down the road of writing erotica. Once I got that out of my system, I began seriously writing what I love most; mysteries, thrillers and horror. “Secrets of The Scarecrow Moon”, a paranormal murder-mystery, came out in 2013. My most recent title, “The Witch’s Backbone 1 – The Curse”, came out in September of this year and we’re hoping to release the psychological horror “Dark Hollow Road” next spring.

3. Anything you won’t write about? Bestiality, cryptid erotica, and dinosaur porn are at the top of the list. I have no interest in walking down the pure erotica-of-any-kind path again, either. I won’t write about anything that portrays any form of abuse in a positive light. “Dark Hollow Road” does contain both sexual and child abuse, but by no means is it done in a way that glorifies the subject, just the opposite.

4. Tell me about you. Age (if you don’t mind answering), married, kids, do you have another job etc… I’ll be 52 in December and recently (in 2016) remarried. My first husband and I have two children. My son just turned 27 and my daughter is 24. No grandkids as of yet. I’ve worked for the Cornell University Library system for 30 years.

5. What’s your favorite book you have written? This is tough. It’s like asking me which child is my favorite. I love them all for different reasons. I’m very fond of my Barnesville Chronicle books because they are set in the fictionalized region I grew up in. It almost feels like I’m cheating with those because it’s like going back home again and hanging out with old friends. “Dark Hollow Road” is probably the most complex and darkest thing I’ve written. It’s very psychologically dark and disturbing. While working on certain scenes I kept wondering where in my psyche it was all coming from. In that sense, it’s my favorite.

6. Who or what inspired you to write? I’ve loved to write since I learned how, so I don’t think anyone was my initial inspiration. It’s as much a part of who I am as my hazel eyes and brown hair. However, my parents have always been very encouraging of my writing. As I mentioned earlier, my dad is the one who saved those first two hand-written stories I wrote over 40 years ago. My mom’s a big reader and belonged to a book club. Books have always been part of my life. Getting books for Christmas and my birthday was, and still is, one of my favorite things. As far as writers whom I admire and who have influenced me, I’d have to say the stories of Rod Serling have had a strong impact on what I enjoy writing. As a teenager, I discovered the work of Tanith Lee, a British author that a lot of people have never even heard of. She has a very unique style that I very much enjoy. Shirley Jackson, Clive Barker, Wilkie Collins, Poe, Richard Matheson, Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, and Anne Rice have all played roles in what I write and how I write, too.

Inspiration for a story can come from just about anywhere. My ghost story, “No Rest For The Wicked” (available through HellBound Books Publishing) arose from a friend and I discussing how he wanted to write a ghost story as if it were being told by the actual ghosts. He couldn’t quite get the idea off the ground so I asked if he’d mind if I gave it a go. He didn’t. I added several ‘dead’ characters from my erotica-writing days to the mix and “No Rest For The Wicked” was born.

“Dark Hollow Road” came about during a trip through Pennsylvania when we passed a side road actually called “Dark Hollow Road”. I saw that and was like, “If that’s not the name of a scary novel, I don’t know what is.” At the time, I had no idea what it would be about, but I had a title! The Barnesville Chronicle titles have a lot to do with my love of local history and historic research. Some of what is mentioned in those books is based on real event that took place (or are rumored to have taken place) in the rural area I grew up on.

7. What do you like to do for fun? Other than writing, you mean? I read a lot. That’s rather part of being a writer, I think, the love of reading. A warm summer day spent with my husband out on the Harley is always amazing. Apart from writing, I think being on the motorcycle with him is my second best form of mental therapy. Whatever stress I’m having, pretty much evaporates during the ride. I dabble a bit with various forms of art; drawing, painting, photography, making book trailers, clay sculptures, and a touch of scrapbooking. And I love to travel to places I’ve never been before.

8. Any traditions you do when you finish a book? No, not really. I sit back and bask in the afterglow for a while, but that’s about it.

9. Where do you write? Quiet or music? The majority of my writing takes place in the living room on the desktop, but I’ve also enjoyed getting work done outside on the back deck with the laptop. Nothing really beats that, to be honest. I’d do it more often if weather and time allowed. For some reason that big mug of hot coffee and those cheerful chirping birds brings out the horror in me. I prefer to write in solitude and when I do play music, it’s the Blues. Anything else I find very distracting. I’m very much a morning writer, too.

10. Anything you would change about your writing? I’m always looking to improve so I guess I’d say fewer typos! That, and to hone my skills to the point that my readers aren’t just reading a book. I want them to feel involved in the atmosphere and setting and invested in what’s happening to the characters.

11. What is your dream? Famous writer? I dream of the day when I can make a living as a fiction writer, but I’m a realist and understand that’s incredibly hard to do. I’d love to have multiple homes, to be able to keep the one I have now, fix it all up properly, and get a second one either in New Mexico or Texas – something that’s very Southwestern. A log cabin in the woods would be nice, too. Mostly, I just want to be able to share my stories with people and hope that they enjoy what I’ve spent so much time and love creating.

12. Where do you live? I live in the Finger Lakes Region of Central New York State. Our house was built in 1886 and I’ve lived here since 1995. It’s a great old house and came with its resident ghost, Herman. He’s an older gentleman who keeps quiet for the most part, but every now and then he’ll make just enough noise so we know he’s still around.

13. Pets? The wild crows who visit and demand peanuts probably don’t count, do they? No, no pets at the time. I’d love to have a cat. My husband would love to have a dog, but it’s also nice not to have the responsibility of having either. We are free to come and go as we please without having to worry about their care while away.

14. What’s your favorite thing about writing? The part about writing that always amazes me is when the characters take over. That’s the magic right there. Although I will have a general idea of where I want the story to go, I don’t outline. I allow each scene to unfold logically from what has come before, while attempting to steer it along. However, there are times when the characters say phooey to what I have in mind and go off on their own little tangent. I let them. I figure they know more about what’s happened or happening than I do and I’m just along for the ride. To a non-writer, that may not make any sense. It’s fiction, how can that happen? Well, it does, a lot. It’s a thrill ride for me to see what’s next and then try to pull in those reins to maneuver that ending I was shooting for. Sometimes that sort of things throws a wrench into what I had in mind, in which case I make the adjustments and follow where the characters seem to want me to go instead.

15. What is coming next for you? As I mentioned, “Dark Hollow Road” is scheduled for a spring 2018 release. I’m really looking forward to getting this one out to people because of its depth and darkness. Half of it is told in 1st Person. That has a lot to do with why it’s so different from my previous novels. You really get into the head of that particular character and that’s not always a place the reader will want to be at all. My current WIP is “The Witch’s Backbone 2 – The Murder”. It picks up exactly where TWB 1 – The Curse ends. I’m about 1/3 of the way through writing the first draft.

Aside from the novels, I was asked to write a foreword for a friend of mine who’s working on his first short story collection. I was both surprised and honored he asked. And, I’ve accepted a gig writing book and movie reviews for The Final Guys website. This will force me (yeah – twist my arms, right?) to watch more horror movies if nothing else.

I have a couple of poems in HellBound Books most recently released anthology “Beautiful Tragedies.” I’ve not been able to get a copy of it myself just yet, but plan to do so as soon as I can. I hear they are doing a second volume for this and although I was asked if I’d be interested in submitting something for that, poetry of the type they are looking for, and that I’m willing to share, isn’t something I produce a lot of.

You can connect with Pamela Morris here: You can find me lurking in a few places in Cyberspace. My main website is http://pamelamorrisbooks.com where you’ll find info on all my books, some free short stories, and my blog where I write book and movie reviews, a monthly author interview, and share a little something called “The Horrors That Grew Me” where I talk about the things and people who have influenced me as a lover and writer of the Horror genre. I post and share a lot over on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/PamelaMorrisBooks/ and you can find me on Twitter as @pamelamorris65. I have an author page on Amazon https://www.amazon.com/Pamela-Morris/e/B00BCJTNP6/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0 and one over at HellBound Books where you’ll find not just my titles, but some other awesome authors. http://www.hellboundbookspublishing.com And finally, as mentioned, you’ll be able to read more of my movie and book reviews over at The Final Guys http://finalguys.com/ soon. As of this writing, it’s still a work-in-progress.

  Some of Pamela Morris’s books: 

Getting personal with Pamela Morris Raised in the Finger Lakes region of Upstate New York, but forever longing for the white sands of New Mexico, Pamela has always loved mysteries and the macabre.

[infinitehouseofbooks]

BLOG TOUR - Still Black Remains

About the Book

Still Black Remains Synopsis “Still Black Remains” is an original work of fiction.  It tells the story of Twist, one of the leaders of an inner city gang named the Skulls, and the architect of his gang’s decision to kidnap a mafia soldier in a last-ditch attempt to end a violent turf war.  The war started when the Skulls tried taking a bigger piece of the drug business in their Newark, New Jersey neighborhood from the organized crime family who had once been their partners.  Like most great ideas, the plan doesn’t turn out as expected. Negotiations between the gangs deteriorate, words fail, the violence escalates, and the only recourse left is the inevitable execution of the hostage.  Chosen to be the one to execute the prisoner, the story covers Twist’s ability to pull the trigger, the consequences of that action, and his internal struggle.  As the volatile situation grows more explosive by the hour, the lines between right and wrong blur; resolution comes with a price and Twist has to decide if pulling the trigger will get him what he wants, and if he can live with that cost.

Interview with the Author

What initially got you interested in writing?

I love writing.  There is unimaginable power and enjoyment in using imagination and creativity to tell stories – writing makes me feel complete.

I think Hemingway said it best: “My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.”

Every writer is by nature, a story teller, and we all have stories we want to tell.

I was an avid reader as a kid – I read any and every book I could get my hands on, and I always loved the way writers created their own universe to tell their stories. I loved the power of imagination – as a writer you could tell any story you wanted.

  I wrote in high school and college (school newspapers and magazines), although it wasn’t until a few years ago after a career as a corporate samurai that I decided to pursue my dream of writing fulltime.  I had written off and on for a few years while working, but never pursued it seriously.  It comes down to that desire and need to write or tell a story.  Writing gives me complete satisfaction and in a lot of ways, creates the kind of happiness I had always been seeking and never found in business.   Throughout all the years I worked in the business world I felt that dissatisfaction gnawing at me, and I knew I would never be happy until I pursued my dream.  I can’t imagine finding happiness doing something other than writing.

  My only regret is that I didn’t choose this path earlier.

    How did you decide to make the move into becoming a published author?

I was completely dissatisfied with the path I had taken.  My career in business had been successful, if you measure success by things like money and possessions, but it left me unfulfilled – empty. I wanted to be able to do something that made a difference, and for me, writing was that vehicle that could make a difference.  I spent a number of years working at writing, reading a variety of authors, and honing my skills and technique.  Writing is a craft and you can’t just show up and expect to find success without putting in the time and the effort. I wrote a number of short stories – ranging from flash to longer stories – taking chances with some of the stories, and experimenting with voice and POV. Very early I was fortunate to find sites like “Six Sentences”, “A Twist of Noir”, “Fictionaut”, “The Foundling Review”, “At The Bijou”, and “Cavalcade of Stars” who published my stories and gave me an audience of writers, editors, and critics who supplied feedback on everything from structure, to voice, to plot.  Feedback is important – even when you don’t want to hear criticism- because as a writer you need to know what works and doesn’t work for readers. Those magazines also allowed me to carve out my own identity as I found my voice as a writer.

  What do you want readers to take away from reading your works?

Even though there’s violence throughout the book (after all, it deals with inner city life and a gang war based on drug trade), there are moments where the books as well as much of what I write is still about people and their feelings for each other. In “Still Black Remains”, Twist genuinely cares about Maria and Angel, and he thinks about getting out of the game while taking them out of Newark, but he’s incapable of showing that in ways that work for her. He saw something special in Malik and took him under his wing, trying to steer him away from the kind of world he and his brothers lived in – he knows there are only two outcomes to that life (dead or in prison), and he wants more than that for Malik.  Eddie Dallas loves and protects his mother and sisters by sheltering them from the world he lives and works in. And for all of Bone’s toughness and hard edges, he mourns his brother and is motivated by revenge for his death.

What I found surprising was that at the core of the book (and my writing) it’s all about the human experience each of us shares.  We are all just people.  When you dig down underneath surface differences, we are all human beings no matter what our backgrounds. And all of us want essentially the same things at our core. We want to love and be loved. We want to be safe. We want our loved ones to be safe. We want to feel that what we do with our lives has meaning. I didn’t expect to see that in the characters when I created “Still Black Remains”.  That’s what I’m hoping readers see: that beneath the grittiness and violence of life in an inner city, people still live their lives and do what they have to do to survive.

  What do you find most rewarding about writing?

I get complete satisfaction from writing – I can’t put it any more succinctly than that.  The creativity involved in writing fills a need.

A writing career isn’t like being a rock star or a movie actor – very few writers show up in the headlines, wind up on the cover of People, or get interviewed on Entertainment Tonight. But that’s not why you write – you write because you have stories you want AND need to tell to any audience that will read what you’ve created. It’s a need to be a storyteller.

    What do you find most challenging about writing?

Finding the right publisher who will work with you as a writer, and share the same kind of vision for your books is probably the biggest challenge.  I needed a publisher who was willing to take a little bit of a risk on something that was outside the mainstream and didn’t fall within a specific genre.  That was my biggest obstacle – “Still Black Remains” doesn’t have a clearly defined niche or category like horror, fantasy, or romance.  There’s more broad-based appeal to the story and it crosses over between different genres like contemporary fiction as well as crime fiction.  Agents and editors who first read the book felt it was a strong story but they didn’t know how to position it in the market or where to target the audience (most were afraid it would fall through the cracks). The other issue that came up was voice- most of the characters in “Still Black Remains” are black, and I was told that some publishers might be reluctant to publish the book because I wasn’t black (assuming that only a black writer could write and market a book from that POV….which is idiotic because that would mean only women could write books featuring women characters, only real cowboys could write westerns, and only zombies could write about the zombie apocalypse. That kind of belief and attitude diminishes and dismisses a writer’s creativity and ability to imagine).

Literary Wanderlust appealed to me for a number of reasons.  I think the diversity of the writers who are published by Literary Wanderlust speaks volumes about their approach.   I wanted a publisher who would invest in the book and invest me as an author.   Their business model keeps overhead low and allows them to take more risks with newer and mid-list authors, and I was encouraged by their feedback when I initially submitted the manuscript.  Their editors worked closely with me to help tighten the story, making it much stronger and focused – their recommendations made the characters’ POV clearer, heightened the conflict, and ultimately made the book better.  The Literary Wanderlust team came up with a viable marketing plan so that the book won’t get lost on book shelves and will find its audience.  From the beginning we have worked together as true partners, and I have felt that my success is their success.

    What advice would you give to people wanting to enter the field?

You need to write – every day.  And you need to keep writing. And when you’re not writing, read.  Stephen King said, “If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time or the tools to write.”

Never stop trying to improve and never stop working at your craft – the most important thing you need to do is to keep writing. If you want to write realistic dialogue you have to listen – every conversation has a certain style and flow, and as a writer you need to capture that and reflect it in the dialogue your characters use.  Keep working at it and never allow yourself to get complacent or careless.  Then edit.  Revise and review what you’ve written, and don’t be afraid to make changes, even when they are drastic.  Make the book as tight and error-free as possible. Edit ruthlessly.   Don’t be afraid to cut out the parts that don’t work. Then finish what you’ve started – the best advice I got was this:

“You have to finish things — that’s what you learn from, you learn by finishing things.”

Don’t give up. And don’t let somebody else tell you that you can’t do something. Take rejection as a motivator – learn from it, work hard, and study the craft and keep trying to get better.

    Is there anything else besides writing you think people would find interesting about you?

I sometimes get mistaken for Bryan Cranston (okay – actually Walter White from “Breaking Bad”).  It happens all the time so I’ve gotten used to it, and it’s kind of fun playing along when people ask, “Do you know who you look like”?

I’ve had random strangers approach me in airports, grocery stores, even standing in line for a Broadway play – although if I was really Bryan Cranston I doubt I’d be waiting in line.  But any number of people have stopped me so they could pose for selfies and pictures, even after I’ve explained that “I’m not him”.  One lady said she thought I was “the guy from Breaking Bad”, but after hearing me speak said I cursed more like Samuel L. Jackson.

    What are the best ways to connect with you, or find out more about your work?

Website:     http://kevinmichaelsfiction.com/

Facebook:   https://www.facebook.com/kevin.michaels.37

Twitter:       @KMWriter01

Instagram:  KMWriter01

LinkedIn:     https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-michaels-aa136519

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4256551.Kevin_Michaels I post my fiction along with periodic writing updates at both A Cold Rush of Air, and  Sliding Down the Razor’s Edge where I offer my opinion and POV on topics not too earth-shattering in size, scope, or detail. And those few people who really want to know more are always welcome to email me at info@kevinmichaelsfiction.com.

  About the Author

Kevin Michaels’ Bio Kevin Michaels is the author of the critically acclaimed debut novel LOST EXIT, as well as two entries in the FIGHT CARD BOOKS series: HARD ROAD and CAN’T MISS CONTENDER. He also released a collection of short stories entitled NINE IN THE MORNING. His short stories and flash fiction have also appeared in a number of magazines and indie zines, and in 2011 he was nominated for two separate Pushcart Prize awards for his short stories. Other shorts have been included in the anthologies for SIX SENTENCES (volumes II and III) and ACTION: PULSE POUNDING TALES (2).

In April 2017 his latest novel STILL BLACK REMAINS will be published by Literary Wanderlust LLC.

He has also published a number non-fiction articles and stories in print publications ranging from the NYTimes.com and the Life/Style section of The Boston Globe to The Bergen News and Press Journal and raged in print at places like the triCity News, NY Daily News, and The Press.

He is the Founder and Creative Director of Story Tellers which is a community-based organization that develops and promotes literacy through writing. Story Tellers provides under-served teenagers, young adults, and women from distressed situations the opportunity to discover the strength and power of their own voices (self-empowerment through self-expression).

Originally from New Jersey, he carries the attitude, edginess, and love of all things Bruce Springsteen common in his home state, although he left the Garden State to live and work in the foothills of the Appalachians (Georgia) with his wife, Helen and an assortment of children and pets.

BLOG TOUR – Still Black Remains was originally published on the Wordpress version of SHANNON MUIR'S INFINITE HOUSE OF BOOKS.