Unusual Plots of the Early 20th Century

So there's this idea out there that every story that can be written has been written, and there's no truly new or innovative story left. It may be true that there are some well-worn paths through the Forest of Story, and it may even be that there's a superhighway shooting through it (I think I'll call it Chosen One Road, with major routes through the towns of Don't Go Down There It's Not Safe and Happily Ever After....Or Was It?). I am even a champion of the idea that you don't have to be original in your ideas and plots in order to tell a good story. Shakespeare wasn't. It's just that he knew how to treat a story right. (Most of the time. I still think Much Ado About Nothing is a bit of a hot mess.)

Anyway, I've been doing my best to do a lot of short story reading lately, and in the name of having complete coverage in the field of horror, I picked up The Century's Best Horror Fiction (Vols. 1 and 2), edited by John Pelan. This monster of an anthology is unwieldy, my friends. It is not the kind of book you take with you on the bus. It is a commitment.

The fact is, though, that it is also lovingly and knowledgeably curated. Pelan's task was to select one story from each of the years of the 20th century, the best that each year had to offer. His only limit was that any given author could only be represented once. The stories are absolutely wonderful. The results are well worth reading. (Sure, you can pick up some of the more popular early stories online for free, but you can't get them all, and you won't get Pelan's terrific editorial notes on each one. I've worked on similar anthologies in the past. It is a lot of painstaking work to put something like this together.)

What's really interesting about the earlier stories is that among them are some of the best-worn horror tropes. (He was really a ghost! Be careful what you wish for! The family curse is real!) There are also some stories that are just quirky enough or somehow maybe not easily represented on film or...something...that I've never quite seen their type before. For sheer audacity of storytelling and a pretty creepy use of a framing device, you must read Arthur Machen's "The White People." If you haven't read it before (and I hadn't), you're in for a treat. Last night Dave and I read "Thurnley Abbey" by Perceval Landon, a writer Pelan identifies as a kind of one hit wonder. Despite a long preamble, "Thurnley Abbey" is such a revelation. I was really glad that I was reading it aloud to Dave, since it has a moment of such total absurdity that I needed a witness to share it with me. Really weird ghost story.

It's just so nice to know that, once upon a time, there was something that could maybe only have been said in that storytelling moment, and it was said, and it was a pretty unique thing unto itself. I don't want to say more than that, because I don't want to spoil it for you guys if you're inclined to go read either of those stories. If you've read them, let's discuss in the comments.

Mama

Oh joy! Oh bliss! So there's this new horror movie, Mama, coming out. Guillermo del Toro produced it, and I must say I'm excited. It's been a tricky couple of weeks over here at command central, since we haven't been able to haul ourselves out to the movie theatre. Yesterday we seriously considered Zero Dark Thirty or Gangster Squad...such is our sadness. It's been all downhill since Django Unchained.

Anyhoo, a new horror movie with del Toro's thumbs up is all good to me. Here's a little taste of the short film that inspired it.

 

My Big Break

Caveat lector: this post includes some detail about physical injury. If you're squeamish about these things, please don't read this! ETA: I mention this later, but the accident I'm describing happened a couple of decades ago, so I am absolutely fine. 

In my last post (a million years ago), I mentioned that I've experienced a pretty serious accident that resulted in a lot of injury to my upper body. Some of you asked about that or commented on it, so I thought I would elaborate on it for a few reasons: first, it is a dramatic tale about me, and, uh, this is my blog. Second, if you've never suffered a serious injury, broken bone, or skull fracture, it might help you to know what it's like from a writerly perspective. If you're not a writer, it might help you to know what it's like from a human perspective. Finally, although I was a horror / grimdark fan before the accident, going through such a visceral experience really helped me appreciate body horror that much more.

Also, because of this event, I am a cyborg. (Or, at least, titanium-reinforced.)

Here's what happened. In the summer between second and third year university - about 22 years ago - I moved back home with my parents. Second year of school was the first time I'd lived away from home, and that was really good in all the ways that a first taste of independence can be. Moving back in with them, not so much fun. I wasn't having much luck finding work, and I wasn't sure how to go about supporting myself when I moved out in third year. Also, I had fallen in love with someone deeply inappropriate for me, and who I knew my parents didn't like.

To soothe myself, I got into cycling. I rode my bike all over the small town where my parents lived and deep into the concessions and farmland outside of town. I felt a sense of freedom on the bike that I couldn't feel in my living situation. It was a weird summer, full of arguments and testiness and ingratitude and the kinds of big feelings one has at age twenty.

One day in late July, my dog escaped from the backyard. He was a little white terrier, the dog my parents gave me when I was thirteen. He was pretty much the only family member with whom I wasn't chronically annoyed that summer. It wasn't anybody's fault: the gate latch just hadn't caught. My mom and I set out to find him. She took off in my grandmother's Toyota. I got on my bike. At a major intersection in town, I was trying to turn left. The oncoming car was turning left too, so no problem. As I was heading into my turn, a van pulled around the oncoming car and sped through the intersection. It struck me, or I struck it - things get fuzzy at this point. Basically, I bounced off it, flew twenty feet, and crumpled into the road.

For years, I had vague impressions of what happened in the next couple of hours. Those impressions seemed dream-like, or as if I had made them up: a certainty that I was going to die; a memory of swearing at people who were reaching to touch me; a trip in an ambulance; people shouting. Later on, I worked with a hypnotherapist to recover the memories and to release some of the trauma associated with the accident. I know now that what I thought I'd invented was the memory. It was just shrouded in a kind of veil, where I couldn't access it directly.

I was taken to a burn / trauma unit. They didn't give me pain meds because I had a head injury, and they needed  to figure out how bad it was first. My experience of having a severe injury and no medication is that I seemed to retreat into a little room in my mind, where the pain wasn't really directly accessible. Whatever I was going through, I think didn't really get written into memory, or wasn't experienced directly. When people talk about prey animals going into a kind of trance as they die, I think about what happened to me during those hours. Nature has its mercies.

Eventually they took me in for surgery. I remember sucking hard on the anaesthetic. I wanted to be knocked out.

Sum total, these were my injuries: two broken wrists; one broken elbow, one smashed elbow; one broken humerus (that was a compound fracture, my only compound fracture); one broken collarbone; one broken head. I was not wearing a helmet. (Sue me: I was trying to save my dog.) My brain was pretty much fine. The fracture was hairline. It bled like a mofo, though, so much so that the blood poured out of my ear and knocked loose my bones of hearing. Those are the little bones that sit in your ear canal and amplify sounds. The accident partially deafened me. I also lost my sense of smell - caused by damage to the sensory area of the brain - but it eventually returned. (This is a pretty interesting phenomenon: more info here).

Because everything was stabilized through plates and pins, I was able to start moving my right arm very soon after the accident. There was more swelling in my left arm, which prevented me from using it at first, but it soon followed. I had a big bruise on the inside of my left leg where the bicycle seat had hit me as I flew off the bike, but that was my only lower body injury.

The doctors told my parents that I would be in the hospital for five weeks. They told them to tell me it would be three weeks (I had a bit of a bad attitude about the hospital). I was out in two. I think the main reason for this is that I was in relatively good shape when I had the accident. After all, I'd been cycling all summer. I was able to hook my feet under the metal rung at the end of the hospital bed and use that to sit up. I was soon walking around freely. Miraculously, I didn't experience any vertigo. A few days and a blood transfusion after the accident, I was feeling pretty energized. The pain was bad, the hospital food was terrible, but I was healing. I went home after two weeks.

The dog, by the way, was fine. Somehow he crossed the highway on his own without anything like the problems I'd had. One of my cousins spotted him trotting down the street. She nabbed him, checked his tags to verify that he was indeed our dog, and deposited him back in our yard.

There were a few long term aftereffects from the accident. I went on my own course of rehabilitation after the surgeon who worked on me turned out to be a bit of a dick. I took up tai chi, and that, as it turned out, opened up a huge vista of all kinds of cool stuff for me. I suffered from PTSD for a lot of years, which mostly involved feeling really nervous any time I had to cross the street. I don't much care for cycling, although I can do it and do somewhat enjoy it, so long as I'm nowhere near car traffic. I have a good sense of what it's like to be wholly dependent on others for the little things you take for granted (brushing your teeth; independent bathroom usage; feeding yourself). I was told that I would have arthritis by the time I was thirty-five. I didn't, and I still don't, mostly because I stretch all the time. I was also told that the range of motion I had six months after the accident was all I'd ever have. That was also not true - see above re: stretching all the time.

A lot of people who pursue a spiritual path (as I do) will talk about an event in their lives that really started them on their path. One of my mentors calls it your "Mac truck moment." I think of my accident as a big spiritual redirect. Without the accident, I might have taken a lot longer to try tai chi, and thus might have taken a lot longer to learn about energy and energy healing, about the holistic approach to healing, and about meditation. In the context of my life as a whole, that's how I assign meaning to this absolutely dreadful event. In the context of my life as a writer, it goes into the big bundle of things I've experienced that will probably show up in my fiction at some point.

Questions: ask 'em if you've got 'em. Stories of your own: tell 'em if you want.

NaNoWriMo 2012: The Being Lame About Posting but Focused on Writing Update

From Wikimedia Commons

Weirdness has been afoot this month, which has been a capsulized, compressed version of the weirdness that has been going on all year. Personally speaking, 2012 has been a challenging year ("challenging"). Along with the year that I broke pretty much everything in my upper body and the year that I had to finish my half-not-done-yet PhD thesis in under two months, 2012 is a contender for hardest year of my adult life. It is up there. And probably it isn't in the number three slot. November saw fit to throw all the challenges of 2012 into the pot at once.

Yet I've kept writing. I've been feeling blue and strange and discombobulated, but somehow I've still found it in me to hit the last few days of this challenge with everything I've got. I won NaNoWriMo ("won") this past Tuesday. I've just about finished with the middle of my story and I'm into the gear up to the final conflict. There will be much to flesh out. I can see myself hitting 83614, my secret personal November goal, by the end of the day November 30. These numbers in no way are representative of the serious slogginess of writing this particular book. It's dark and nasty. I'm turning over a lot of rocks for this one, even as a lot of rocks are being hurled at me in regular reality. 

It's a rock thing. 

What's the single hardest writing challenge you've had to face? I want to hear your inspiring stories. Or some spam advertisements for shoes or survivalist websites. Either way. 

(61806 words)

NaNoWriMo Up to Today

Okay somehow Blogger's spam filter is kaput. Great, just great. Don't take it personally if I invoke Captcha for a while, although I hope there's a workaround.

Ummm let's see. I've had a busy non-writing week, and an okay writing week too. I'm about to hit a couple of kaboom moments that I've been waiting to unleash for a while, so that's exciting. My main character isn't going to see what's coming. As it turns out he's a wee bit smug, so I think I'll enjoy smashing him in the face with the plot equivalent of a wet fish.

In the meantime, I've been reading super short novels and ultra short stories. If you haven't read them, I heartily recommend Daisuki by Hildred Billings and The New Death and Others by James Hutchings, for totally different reasons.

Hildred's book is naughty lesbian erotica (or maybe porny romance?). Hildred manages to deftly balance fun sex scenes with an exploration of what it's like to be a gay woman in Japan and a central romance in which, despite conflict, we aren't asked to choose sides but rather understand both characters' points of view. It's lovely.

James Hutchings's short story collection sits somewhere between a modern, snarky Aesop's Fables and a perverse version of the Grimm Brothers' Fairy Tales, with a smidge of Cthulhu thrown in just for fun. There's some shorter poetry in the mix, also, which is everything short poetry should be, which is to say clever. James, I trust you wouldn't mind my sharing a bit from the poem that convinced me I was going to have a great time reading the collection, "If My Life Was Filmed:"

If my life was filmed, it would
go straight to DVD
and someone who was famous once
would have the role of me
and if five stars meant 'excellent'
you'd give it two or three
and most of those who rented it
would watch ironically.

Seriously, The New Death and Others is worth your time if you like smart ideas played out in the time it would take to crack a whip. It's worth the investment to get to read the second half of "If My Life Was Filmed."

(37060 words)

NaNoWriMo 2012: The Lost Week (Days, uh, Five Through Ten?)

By Andreas Praefcke, via Wikimedia Commons

So, I've been writing. And there was that little blip in the middle of last week when I participated in Mina's Resurrection Blogfest, which was great. I am still making the rounds of people's entries, so if I haven't visited but you're on the linky list, I will see you sometime soon.

This year's NaNo isn't the frenzy that last year's was, but it is going well. Every time I write a novel length manuscript (and I've done five or six, I guess?) I feel like I'm getting closer to a real book. Last year's was an amazing bit of chaos, for which I still feel that I have to do some research to supplement what I wrote. (Seriously. I don't want to be irresponsible about stuff.) This year, my plan to go way more character-focused has paid off, not necessarily in terms of sky high word count, but most definitely in terms of feeling like I know what my next step will be, and writing with that in mind. 

I'm at the point now where my main character has to make the decision that will determine his fate for the rest of the story - or at least set the parameters for the rest of the story. Oh, and there's a nasty fellow whose eyes are sewn shut. Yup, we're still in the dark here. It's a good place to be.

Word Count: 25126

Resurrrrection Blogfest: How Do You Free Yourself?

Deets!

Woof! That first year of blogging, yikes. Like probably everybody, I have found the act of going back through my archive just a touch awkward. Don't get me wrong: there are triumphs in that first year. I still think my first attempt to blog NaNoWriMo is awesome - way more awesome than the resulting novel draft was. 

After reading my first year archive through my fingers, I chose something for the Resurrection Blogfest that I wrote during November 2008, less than a month after I started this blog. In my opinion, there are some cringe-worthy aspects to this post. I no longer like discussing writing and craft from a "let me tell you how it is" perspective. I know now that I'm not qualified to interrogate anybody else's creative activities, so I tend not to try, though I am still into exploring my own choices from time to time in this space. I picked this post because it offers a terrific snapshot into where I was when I first embraced the idea that I needed to make writing a major focus. I remember that confusion. I remember how terrifying it was to powersteer myself out of the life track I'd chosen and into a whole other place. I remember being scared that I couldn't do it. 

Four years later, I'm in a great place as far as writing goes. I've been able to make it a major focus. It doesn't feel risky any more. It feels like what I do. It is great, however, to revisit the process that brought me here. 

Without further ado, I give you November 10, 2008's post, entitled "How Do You Free Yourself?"


In many ways, this NaNoWriMo season is a culmination of a long and slow climb toward self-awareness and freedom (in the broadest sense of the term).

Once upon a time, I knew that I wanted to be a writer (since grade three, in fact, thanks very much, Mrs. Cooper, for liking my story about the duck).

And then I decided I had to have some way to make money, some kind of a title, some kind of a place in the world, a job. But the world of literature kept calling out to me, and I decided that a reasonable compromise would be academia. Ten years ago I went back to school for a Master's degree in English literature, and I really loved it. When you're doing degree studies, it's neat because you have more coaching on your writing than you ever will in any other circumstance. It seems like an ideal scenario, really, because you can read all the time and write about what you're reading. And there is an art to the academic essay, whatever people say about how incomprehensible academic writing can be (and oh, it can be ornery stuff).

I finished my PhD three years ago. As I began to go on interviews, though, I began to feel really sick in my heart. I'm sure it showed: the interviews were mostly terrible and even the ones I enjoyed, I ended up with a bad feeling about. I didn't get any job offers. It seemed I had stalled out. I decided not to continue.

That's the superficial level of what went on. But the real story isn't about how I failed at the job market (and oh, I did fail. Sarah Palin's interviews looked pretty good compared to some of the answers I gave). While I was doing all that flunking out career-wise, I was slowly building up my resources elsewhere.

While to the outside world I was working toward my PhD and earning fabulous scholarships and shaping up to be the next bright thing, I was also performing acts of creative espionage. I was having a little bit too much fun. I was spoiling myself for the austere life of a professor:

I read novels that weren't on my reading list. I attended a conference outside of my area of study, but on the topic of one of my favourite horror films, The Wicker Man (the original 1973 film starring Edward Woodward and Christopher Lee). I wrote a short story and sent it out to a good magazine. It didn't get published, but I got a nice note back from the editor about how it was an "almost". I enjoyed my area of study a little too much. Some of my research sent me into a giddy bouts of raucous creativity, as I imagined ways to spin what I was learning into a fabulous novel about plague and zombies and vampires and Shakespeare. (This is the novel I'm beginning with NaNoWriMo this year.)

Deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole I went: I meditated a lot. I chanted. I did tai chi. I opened my mind way, waaay up. I listened to some pretty weird shit. I did Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way course - twice. I still faithfully write morning pages every day.

It wasn't all nice. I suffered through a mid-degree nervous breakdown. I had panic attacks that were pretty scary. I cried a lot of tears. I felt a lot of distress. I did a lot of therapy. I did a lot more tai chi. I meditated. I chanted. I went for long walks in the woods.

Finally, I recognized that the academic world didn't acknowledge or allow for most of the things that rocked my boat. I wished it did. I wished the job market had been better. I wished that being a professor didn't entail sacrificing everything else. And then I decided that the only thing to do was to face the truth. To acknowledge my truth.

So I quit. About a year ago, I had to decide whether to go on the market again or not. I decided not to. I still say the degree was worth it: I have mad research skills now, and I can read just about anything that's written in just about any sort of English. It took me a year to extract myself from the contract work I was doing. Thanks to my ridiculously supportive partner, I'm taking this time to build a fiction portfolio.

At thirty-seven, I decided to begin again. At thirty-eight, I'm doing exactly what I want to be doing. I'm doing it in relative poverty, mind you, and I'm doing it with a lot of consciousness that I will eventually need to find a way to bring some dollars in. I'm doing it with a healthy heap of guilt, reinforced by our culture at large, that I'm not being "productive". But I'm also doing it with the understanding that doing the PhD was a lot harder than what I'm proposing to do now.

Sell some stories? Way easier than selling out.

This is not to diss the academy altogether. There are a lot of people there, people I consider to be great friends, who are genuinely and deeply invested in expanding knowledge and educating students. But they're working under a sick administration, and the resources they need to do their jobs well are simply not there. The support for a true diversity of opinion is not there. And in English departments everywhere, there are a lot of people who would much rather be writers. Who ache to create, and who are instead looking longingly and lovingly at the work of others, and trying, sometimes even patiently, to explain to undergraduates why creative work is important. But it's a hard place to be. And I don't want to sacrifice myself any more.

My suggestion? If you're reading this, do something creative today. Pick up a paint brush, get your hands on some clay or some plasticene, or write a little poem, play a little music. It might feel silly. Do it anyway.

Chant "om". If that starts to feel good, go for "omanepadmeom". It will open your heart.

Find a good teacher who will show you how to meditate. Stretch a little. Go for a walk. Talk to an animal. Adopt an animal.

Anything to get a wedge into your routine, especially your routine channels of thought.

Open the floodgates, just a crack, so that a trickle of fresh, clear water can run into your life.

And don't forget to ask if you're doing what you really want to do. It's the most important question you can ask yourself. And you might want to ask it over and over again, until the answer is a resounding YES!