On the Premises Super Secret Mini Contest

It takes me a while to clue in sometimes. Ever since I signed up for On the Premises' snazzy newsletter, I've been scanning them to see what their current contest is, but missing the fact that they run a mini contest too. Wee!

OTP is fun because every four months they run a contest that invites you to write a piece of fiction on a very specific theme. It is free to enter and the first place winner gets 180 USD. They don't place any limits on genre: anything goes, from literary fiction to pulp to high concept sci fi or whatever.

Mini contests are super tiny, but still come with a $15 prize for the winner. If you're like me and you're looking for a quick way to boost your writerly self-esteem by submitting some work, this could be it. The current contest has a 25-word limit (and yes, the theme is something you can reasonably complete in 25 words). Deadline is April 28, 2013.

To get the theme for the mini contest, you have to subscribe to the newsletter, which is infrequent and succinct and purple toned (just in case the colour of the newsletter has any bearing on your desire to receive it). OTP uses the newsletter not only to let subscribers know about what's going on with the magazine and contests but also to brag about writers who have been part of their contests and who have gone on to find success elsewhere. They also recommend stories published in other venues, just because they love stories. I think that's sweet.

(I won't say what the current theme is because I think you should just get the newsletter if you're interested, but let's say it's really ripe if you're into horror, suspense, or creepy stuff.)

Via.

"We Obey Some Secret Command; We Sail Under Sealed Orders"

Okay for my money Vincent O'Sullivan's 1921 story "Master of Fallen Years" is pretty much what you want in a weird tale. It's weird: the central problem in the story is not quite a haunting, but more like a reincarnation glitch / possession? The central problem goes unexplained / underexplained, which offers a maximization of the heebie-jeebie effect. In terms of execution, it is gloriously consistent with itself and with certain cognitive experiences that we all have on a regular basis, but which may have sinister explanations. This is probably saying too much about my personality, but the ending also made me lol.

If you're a slowish reader like me it will probably take you 20 minutes to read it? Go now go. I hope you like it.

(p.s. I found this story via the exquisite Century's Best Horror Fiction, edited by John Pelan. I've written about it before, but I can't recommend it enough. Ask your Sugar Daddy / Sugar Mama / Dark Lord Who Rules You to buy you a copy.)

Source

April Challenges Bring May Tears and Recriminations

Wee! It's April. In my blogrolls those A to Z posts are starting to crop up like the lovely spring crocuses in my backyard. I see the signup list is ABSOLUTELY MASSIVE again this year. I had planned to join in with some graphics-based posts, but alas, it just didn't happen in March and I'm camping right now, in addition to trying to get some short stories off my hard drive and out into the world, not to mention that pesky novel I've been trying to revise since January. 

What I will do is use that A to Z linky list to find new blogs to follow. Even if you're not into writing 26 blog posts in April, A to Z is a fabulous resource for meeting other folks who are looking to network. A to Z-ers tend to be interesting folks with things to say, and they tend to follow back, and we all can use a little follow back now and again. 

Happy April, everybody, no fools.

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Thee, Thou, Thy, Thine: A Guide for Writers

I am a writer and reader and watcher of speculative fiction. At one time I was a fancypants academic with training in the literature of the English Renaissance. Mostly these two things go together very harmoniously but every once in a while they clash horribly, as when I am reading or watching a speculative story in which the writer has failed to grasp correct usage of old timey words. The most abused words are "thee" and "thou." These two words are not interchangeable if used correctly, but rather serve two distinct purposes when used in a sentence. Likewise "thy" and "thine," although these two are less likely to be abused and a little more flexible, at least with regard to each other.

Mary Tudor does not approve of your old timey language usage. (Via.)

You might think this doesn't matter, but if your reader happens to be someone who has read a lot of Shakespeare or those other guys from the Renaissance, she might have absorbed correct thee/thou/thy/thine usage on a subconscious level. In this case, your clumsy attempt to sound old-timey will rocket her right out of your story as surely as a comma splice, using the word "exhort" when you mean "exert," or any other grammatical shoddiness. 

So, here's how to use "thy," "thine," "thee," and "thou" correctly, with examples from Shakespeare.

"Thy"

"Thy" means "your." Here's a quote from Cymbeline Act 4 Scene 1. The speaker is Cloten:

Posthumus, thy head, which is now growing upon thy shoulders, shall within this hour be off.

"Thine"

"Thine" is a little bit tricky. It can mean "your" or "yours." 

Polonius's famous speech to Laertes, from Hamlet Act 1 Scene 3 includes this line:

This above all, to thine own self be true,

And it must follow, as the night the day,

Thou canst not then be false to any man.

Here, Polonius is using "thine" to stand in for "your." Note that "thine" is sometimes (but not always) preferred if the word following begins with a vowel sound. So we have "thine own," but in Cloten's speech above, "thy head." The "n" sound in "thine" closes the word off so you don't end up with vowel sound soup. 

"Thine" means "yours" in other contexts. In Sonnet 40, Shakespeare writes, 

Take all my loves, my love, yea, take them all;

What hast thou then more than thou hadst before?

No love, my love, that thou mayst true love call;

All mine was thine before thou hadst this more.

You can't go wrong with "thy" and "thine" if you use "thy" to mean "your" and "thine" to mean "yours." You can also use "thine" to mean "your" if you want.  So long as you never try to use "thy" to mean "you" or "thine" to mean "you," you will be fine. 

"Thou" vs. "Thee"

In our modern English usage of today, we have one word, "you," that serves many purposes. It is the second person pronoun, used to refer to any number of people whom one is addressing, no matter where "you" sits in a sentence. This is inconvenient and leads to all kinds of imprecision, but so it is. (When you shout, "Hey you," you might find yourself clarifying whether you mean one "you" or a bunch of "yous." It's sad, really.)

Old timey English users had a way to differentiate between a "you" who is the subject of a sentence, and "you" who is the object. This is where "thou" and "thee" come in.

If the "you" starring in the sentence is the one doing the action, i.e. is the subject of the sentence, the word you use is "thou."

Here are some examples: 

Wilt thou ever be a foul-mouthed and calumnious knave? (All's Well That Ends Well, Act 1 Scene 3)

Thou losest thy old smell. (As You Like It, Act 1 Scene 2)

Hast thou slain Tybalt? wilt thou slay thyself? (Romeo and Juliet, Act 3 Scene 3)

 "Thee" is what you use when the "you" is the object of the sentence, the one unto whom something is being done. "Thou" is the action person; "thee" is on the receiving end. Examples:

I would not be thy executioner; 

I fly thee, for I would not injure thee. (As You Like It, Act 3 Scene 5)

But he that temper'd thee bade thee stand up,

Gave thee no instance why thou shouldst do treason,

Unless to dub thee with the name of traitor. (Henry V, Act 2 Scene 2)

There are exceptions to this that you will find on occasion, where a writer will use "thee" instead of "thou." It is more rare to see "thou" used as a substitute for "thee." However, it's important if you're using old timey English to know that "thou" and "thee" were not interchangeable. If you indiscriminately use "thee" all over the place, as seems to be the favourite choice of modern writers, you will be sending up a burning flag that says "I don't really know what I'm doing." That is something thou shouldst not do, no matter how much it tempts thee.

Wooooo!! Woooooooo....

No I am not a ghost. I am just trying to get up some excitement for March and meeting March goals. April is A to Z month again. Woooo! Are you guys doing it? I'm hoping to prep a little bit ahead of time this year so I can spend April visiting people's websites. If you don't know what I'm talking about, then go over here to the blogging from A to Z April challenge site. Their countdown clock is terrifying me for some reason, but I suspect it's mostly because right now it's day 28 and you can watch the milliseconds zipping away and imagine that we are almost at the zombie apocalypse.

Are we still worried about the zombie apocalypse? Maybe we're more worried about meteors now.

This guy isn't worried. I want to be like this guy.

Somehow I feel like I was really scattered through January and February, or maybe spread out a bit too thin, or spread out in the wrong way, or just unfocused. I got stuff done but too slowly. My constant lament.

I'm giving NaNoEdMo a try this month. This is a challenge to do 50 hours of editing in March. I thought I would give it a whirl last year, but I just sat in a stupor any time I tried to edit any of the longer projects I've got. It seems to me like the longer a manuscript is, the greater the chance that it is profoundly broken in ridiculous ways. Anyway I got myself together and thanks to the promptings and rave reviews of my friend Chris, I decided to try Holly Lisle's How to Revise Your Novel course. I'm still working my way through the first lesson, but so far it is brilliant. I am not paralyzed with fear and confusion about how to proceed. Basically the course is like someone who's been through it before holding your hand while you try to edit, and coaching you: here, don't try to do this all at once, take one baby step at a time. It is all do-able a tiny chunk at a time. The way you build your notes, you can put the down, go deal with other stuff, and come back to it. No rush, no emergencies, no fear.

What about you all? What are you writers doing these days?

A Non-Review of Mama, and Some Further Thoughts on Horror

Spoilers ahoy in this post!

So Dave and I went to see Mama the weekend it came out. We had a great conversation about it afterward in which Dave elucidated a theory about ghost stories the main point of which I'm going to relate here.  He's an engineer, so structural concepts come pretty easily to him.

I'm not going to exactly review it here, except to say that it was visually great, and if visually great stuff amuses you, then you should see it. Jessica Chastain looked amazing, as did Handsome McCutiepants, the male lead (I know I should just Google it but to do that would freak out my ancient laptop and I'd never get back here to finish this post). I often find kid actors noxious, but the little girls were really terrific. The ghost looked great, as did her retro run down cabin in the woods. So yeah: Mama is very pretty.

Structurally it is flawed, albeit in interesting ways. So after we watched it we came to the conclusion that there's a problem with ghost stories, and that problem has in part to do with the lore of ghosts and in part with the narrative imperative to wrap things up in a tidy package at the end.

The lore of ghosts has to do with understanding them. There's this idea that you can solve a haunting if you can just get the ghost to go into the light, or figure out why they keep moving great grandma's brooch, or whatever. I'm not talking about actual hauntings here, of which there are many different kinds and different ways of dealing with them. I'm talking about predominant cultural notions.

Here's the thing though: if your ghost story falls under the purview of horror, and you at some point in the story reveal, for example, through elaborate and awesome looking dream sequences, why the ghost is so upset that it needs your babies (hint: you took away her baby, or someone did (or some nun did)), you drain all of the energy out of your plot. Then you no longer have a horror story: you've got a science problem. Give the ghost the brooch / the corpse of her baby / the more feral of your wolf children, and you'll solve the problem. (Child protective services might have a few questions about what happened to the more feral of your wolf children on that cliff that night, but that's a problem for a different story.)

In essentials, if you allow your horror story to devolve into a science problem, you're joining the ranks of Ghostbusters and Scooby Doo. Nothing wrong with that - horror comedy is built on a foundation of ghost-stories-as-science-problems. It's just if you want the story to remain a horror piece, maybe best to leave your characters haunted.

What haunts us? The missed connections, the unresolved puzzles, the things we said we'd do that we never did, the promises we broke, the lies we told, the secrets we hid? Or: the cruel things we said and did, the hurts we inflicted and never apologized for, the confrontations we failed to stage, the ways we rolled over and gave in? I can think of many things. Some of the better haunting stories I've read recently never resolve the haunting, and indeed, revolve around the utter failure of the main characters to engage with their ghosts in anything like an effective manner.

Discuss, preferably with examples. Or: write your own unresolved haunting story this week and let me know how it goes.

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.