Category Archives: The Writing Life
THIS WRITING LIFE EPISODE 9A: SNOWBOUND WITH ZOMBIES is live!
One of many amazing Halloween items at Cracker Barrel. I left with an almost empty wallet.
This Writing Life Episode 9A: Snowbound: with Zombies is live! You can watch it here: https://youtu.be/BE0wZM3cTtk
Copies of Snowbound on the Dent sisters’ display table.
In this episode, we jam the Snowbound: with Zombies release event into a full weekend! Snowbound: with Zombies is a collection of scary stories by several New England writers, and 100% of the proceeds benefits the Whittier Birthplace Museum in Haverhill, Massachusetts. Available in both print and Kindle. Get it here: http://bit.ly/SnowboundPrint (Kindle link posted on that page too). Oh…and we also find a cool Cracker Barrel.
Don’t know much about Whittier but want to? I recommend The Poetry of John Greenleaf Whittier: A Reader’s Edition, edited by William Jolliff.
http://bit.ly/WhittierIntro. Or plan your visit to the birthplace! Visit http://www.johngreenleafwhittier.com/
There’s now a second collection for mystery lovers! If you love mysteries, give back to the community and pick up Murder Among Friends (which contains my story “The Cricket in the Wall”) here: http://bit.ly/MAFCricket
THIS WRITING LIFE EPISODE 8: TOTAL BRAIN ERASURE
So…writers are thinking. All the time. How do we turn that off? Here’s one way to do it on Episode 8: Total Brain Erasure! You can watch it here: https://youtu.be/68NnQlQahm0
Keep in mind that just about any location you love that gets you to relax and focus on other activities besides writing will work. While I’ll say the vacation was incredibly effective in turning off my brain–as most Disney vacations are for me–I will say that cutting down the several hours of video I had while trying to tell an effective story in under five minutes was more than just a little challenging! Have fun!
THIS WRITING LIFE EPISODE 9: TAPING THE TACO SOCIETY
In the latest episode of This Writing Life, Stacey Longo and I hit the road for New Hampshire, where we will be featured on an episode of the YouTube series The Taco Society. Some things we do as writers are more play than work (fighting with cocktail swords comes to mind) … and damn, green screens are cool!
Toasting to a job well done following the taping of The Taco Society Episode 12!
The Taco Society is a crew of writers (Tony Tremblay, Philip Perron, Sydney Leigh and Gardner Goldsmith) who interview other writers of dark fiction. Some episodes also feature readings of the writers’ work. You can check them out on their channel here.
Getting gussied up…writer Sydney Leigh brought us the coolest nail art to put on before the interview! Writer Stacey Longo checks it out.
Writers: SCRIBEDelivery March Unbox!
The March 2017 SCRIBED Unbox…underneath, from left, the Kukuyo Notebooks and the Smock Workbook. Writing instruments, from left: the Tombow Mono Drawing Pencil, the Kokuyo Beetle Highlighter, the Sailor G-Free Ballpoint Pen, and the Tombow 8900 Drawing pencil.
SCRIBEdelivery is a monthly box of themed goodies especially for writers or lovers of notebooks, pens, and the like. Each “box” is carefully curated by people who love the stuff just like we do. I’ll let Chris and Holly tell their story in their own words…you can find out more, and get your subscription, here: http://www.scribedelivery.com/.
That said, here’s the March Unbox…the theme of which is Read the rest of this entry
Writers: SCRIBEDelivery February Unbox!
The SCRIBED “boxes” have thus far arrived in padded envelopes.
SCRIBEdelivery is a monthly box of themed goodies especially for writers or lovers of notebooks, pens, and the like. Each “box” is carefully curated by people who love the stuff just like we do. I’ll let Chris and Holly tell their story in their own words…you can find out more, and get your subscription, here: http://www.scribedelivery.com/.
That said, here’s the February Unbox…the theme of which is “Sharing” — each product in the box supports a cause. Check it out!
Who doesn’t love to find…
…an Amazon box that was delivered to your house, never opened, and shoved in the basement when you were cleaning up for a party that you completely forgot about? I found this one a year after it was delivered.
I had to open it to find out what was in it, but I can’t can’t tell you what it was. Turns out it was intended to be a Christmas gift for someone, who will get it this year instead.
Out they go…
This stack of drafts was in a copy box in my basement. The novel was edited/revised seven times. One of the drafts is missing because I bound and gave it away to a reader.
One of the toughest things about being a writer is getting rid of clutter. While it’s a given we need our project materials, as well as the things that inspire us (anyone remember that picture of Ray Bradbury’s office?), there’s more: old projects and stacks of drafts.
While it’s gotten much easier since the age of electronic documents (I can keep drafts in a compact form now), there are still times when paper accumulates…and forget about years ago, when everything was done on paper. My most recent project has been to take paper drafts of stories, scan them into PDFs, and store them that way.
Bad Apple took two years to write and revise, then another two years of polish once the novel was sold to Dark Alley Press. What resulted were seven giant drafts peppered with notes and Post-It flags, wine and coffee stains. A few years back I took one of the early drafts, bound it, and gave it to a reader as a gift–but other than that, they were all there.
Scanning these all to PDF, I felt, was going to be a waste of time and energy–am I ever going to look at these again?Who is going to give a crap, anyway? So…I made a deal with myself. I photographed the pile. Just so I’d always have it to remember.
Then off to the shredder it went.
Bad Apple was published by Dark Alley Press in 2012. You can get your copy here: http://a.co/htRbr9v
Tot Terrors: Rikki Tikki Tavi
I often get asked about what influences my work as a writer. Inspired by the amazing website Kindertrauma–which is right up my alley–I’m compiling all of my childhood (and some adult) terrors.
The title card for Chuck Jones’ Rikki Tikki Tavi special.
Back in the 1970s, every Easter–usually on Good Friday–one of the major networks (I wanna say CBS, but it could’ve been ABC) would air Chuck Jones’ cartoon special Rikki Tikki Tavi, based on one of Kipling’s Jungle Book tales about a mongoose and his fights to the death.
Despite the fact that I looked forward to this every year–it might have had something to do with the fact that my young mind associated it with the Easter Bunny’s visit–there were things in it that were so terrifying they’d haunt my waking (yes, waking) hours.
From the opening credit sequence…abandoned temples of a forgotten civilization.
- The opening credits show us a violent, terrifying storm deep among the frightening, mysterious remnants of the abandoned temples of a lost civilization. This was like a train wreck I couldn’t stop watching.
- The narration by Orson Welles. His voice was chilling enough, but there is some kind of reverb or something put on it that gave it a slight echo, rendering it almost ghostly. I sounds like a dead person talking from beyond the grave. This really bothered me.
- The first time we meet the cobras, Nag and Nagaina, they are presented as looming shadows speaking in sinister whispers (which are performed by Welles as part of the narration). Heart-stopping.
- There is also another snake the color of sand, so he’s presented against the sandy background as almost spectral. Yipes.
The heart-arresting shadow of Nag the cobra. Just…holy SHIT.
I was not alone in my terror. Kindertrauma (if you’ve not heard of this website, you owe it to yourself to check it out–I have managed to rediscover horrors that had become nameless over the years) has Rikki Tikki Tavi featured here.
Still, there were a couple of positive things I never forgot. I always remembered the line “A full meal makes a slow mongoose,” and I swear to God that’s what’s kept me for never being overstuffed at a meal, even one as big as Thanksgiving. It’s also where I learned all about mongooses and their relationship with snakes, and probably where I got such a fascination for all things overgrown and abandoned (one of the sources for that, anyway–I also know I was fascinated with the abandoned temples in Disney’s animated version of The Jungle Book).
As far as this has influenced my writing, when I was in high school, I wrote a story (two versions of it, actually, a couple of years apart) set in a village in India with the terrible title of “Slithering Serpents” (the stories are probably equally terrible). It was Rikki Tikki Tavi that made me start reading about India, and that’s how I learned about the subject matter that inspired the stories.
God knows why I’m doing this, but you can read both versions of the story by opening the PDF below. Special thanks to my friend Rob Mayette, who found the only existing printed copy of the one that was published in The Piper — our high school literary magazine (which I’d forgotten even existed) in his basement during a move.
slithering-serpents-only-existing-copy
If you’d like to cleanse your palette after reading those pieces of crap with Rikki Tikki Tavi, you can get it here.
Literature Without…
A decade ago (I can’t believe it’s been THAT long), I was lucky enough to do the teaching practicum required for my Goddard MFA at Gibbs College in Norwalk (thanks to my friend Chris Emmerson-Pace). I taught Comp 101, which required this book which was expensive as hell (as most college textbooks are): Literature Without Borders.
Despite the book’s cost, it was the absolute cheapest thing I’d ever seen. Pages–in sections–started falling out. By Week Four of teaching, I had to use an elastic band just to hold the pages in. By the end of the semester, there wasn’t one page attached to the binding or the cover. It might as well have been a loose stack of manuscript pages.
I’d forgotten about it, but last weekend, I was looking for another book when I discovered it in the bottom of one of my many bins of books. Apparently I was annoyed, because look what I did to it.
Writers: SCRIBEDelivery January Unbox!
The contents of SCRIBEdelivery’s January 2017 box!
Have any of you heard of the SCRIBEdelivery Monthly Subscription? I hadn’t until a very generous coworker gave me a three-month trial membership for Christmas…and if you’re a writer (and/or an office supply geek) then this is for you!
SCRIBEdelivery is a monthly box of themed goodies especially for writers or lovers of notebooks, pens, and the like. Each “box” is carefully curated by people who love the stuff just like we do!
I’ll let Chris and Holly tell their story in their own words…you can find out more, and get your subscription, here: http://www.scribedelivery.com/.
That said, here’s the January Unbox…the theme of which is “Organization.”
