08/11/2010

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WNW talks with Carrie Cuinn, the woman behind the Cthulhurotica anthology

By Elizabeth Milo and Sarah Schiavoni
(image credit: Dominique Signoret)

Cthulhurotica - n. (kə-THoo-loo-rot-i-kuh) – an anthology of Lovecraft-inspired erotica; a new branch of “weird erotica.”

WritersNewsWeekly recently spoke to Carrie Cuinn, the woman behind Cthulhurotica, “An Anthology of Lovecraftian Lust.” As an emerging new genre of weird erotica—erotica based in science fiction and fantasy—Cthulhurotica has received some raised eyebrows about its choice of inspiration. Will too many tentacles keep readers from enjoying the stories? Creator Carrie Cuinn stands by her decision to pull together an anthology all about the sexual encounters of these Lovecraftian characters: “For us, Cthulhurotica is the logical extension of the works of H.P. Lovecraft, who often mentioned female characters that he never explored.” Cuinn views this anthology as an opportunity for writers to explore the lives of minor characters in the Cthulhu tales and expand on Lovecraft’s stories. Cuinn is also quick to clarify that this is erotic fiction, not porn.

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Directions By Jessica Quillin

I started this column over a month ago with the goal of sharing my experiences as a writer who purposefully wears many hats working across different fields. Yet, for me, I think this past week is the first time that I have ever felt completely confident in applying the title “Writer” to my own profession.

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Daughters of the Witching Hill by Mary Sharratt

Review by Carlotta G. Holton

This spellbinding tale dredges up the very real hysteria and societal pressures that pitted neighbor against neighbor in a time when Catholicism and the old folklore religions were being replaced by Protestantism. The memorable cast of characters is led by widow Elizabeth “Bess” Southerns, aka Mother Demdike. Living with her in a crumbling old watchtower in the countryside of Pendle Forest is her dependent daughter, Liza Device; her dim-witted grandson, Jamie; and her granddaughters, Alizon and Jennet.

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Put Down the Pen and Step Away from the Manuscript By L.L. McKinney

Last week I made a promise of sorts to utilize one of the methods listed in the article on ways to combat writer’s block. Let’s get that out of the way before delving into this week’s topic, which believe me, is a good’un.

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WNW talks with author Jamie Penn

By Megan Morrow and Elizabeth Milo

WritersNewsWeekly recently spoke with up-and-coming British author Jamie Penn about his new novel, The Altruist’s Prey. The Altruist’s Prey is meant to be the first book in a three part series.

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By Carlotta G. Holton

Decades before America’s infamous Salem witchcraft trials, men and women were being hanged for similar crimes in England. Such is the case in this fictionalized account of the true story of the Pendle Witches who were believed to be responsible for the murder of seventeen people in 17th century Lancashire.

This spellbinding tale dredges up the very real hysteria and societal pressures that pitted neighbor against neighbor in a time when Catholicism and the old folklore religions were being replaced by Protestantism. The memorable cast of characters is led by widow Elizabeth “Bess” Southerns, aka Mother Demdike. Living with her in a crumbling old watchtower in the countryside of Pendle Forest is her dependent daughter, Liza Device; her dim-witted grandson, Jamie; and her granddaughters, Alizon and Jennet.

Demdike has always had a way with animals, and can calm and heal them with periodic help from her familiar, Tibb. In this time of religious transition under King James I, Demdike must recite her prayers to the Virgin Mary and the saints to help with her healing in secret. She is well aware of her precarious situation. Demdike notes that she is “known as a cunning woman and she who has the power to bless may also curse.”

The wealth of historical research involved in this book is apparent as the reader learns that during the Jacobean era, there was a fine line between being cunning and being a witch. Anti-papism resulted in statues being smashed, and abandonment of the celebration of saints and the recitation of prayers. Priests were driven underground and those who had the means to hide the priests within their own homes did so to save them from being drawn, quartered and beheaded.

If the characters are memorable, so too is the vividly described setting in which nature rules the lives of these poor individuals seeking their daily bread in exchange for a full day’s work in the fields, barns or kitchens of those who are better-off. There is poetry in the magical, Robin Hood-type atmosphere of the forest, described in passages such as, “the air is tangy with wood smoke, filled with wild primrose and violets,” and the “trees are crowned in buds set to burst forth into leaves.”

The reader can relate to Sharratt’s story on many levels. Multiple friendships are ruined over misunderstandings. For example, when Demdike’s childhood friend Anne comes seeking help to protect her daughter from a cruel landlord, Demdike balks at using her powers for evil. Her answer is to teach Anne her spiritual ways so she can work her own herbal magic. When things go awry and Anne cultivates the powers of evil, a downward spiral ensues between the two families. As a result of a man’s death, Anne is labeled a witch and is shunned.

Generational differences occur as Demdike’s grandchildren mature. While dim-witted Jamie seems to have some talent, he is unable to differentiate good from evil. It is Alizon who possesses the true talent. But like her mother Liza, she refuses to learn how to channel those powers – including accepting a familiar in the form of a dog - fearing suspicion and reprisal from the law. Ironically, it is Jamie’s deeds that finally lead to the family’s arrest.
Through all of their tribulations, Demdike remains strong. This trait carries her and her family through much humiliation, starvation, and eventual disaster. In a time when men ruled every facet of the culture, Demdike is a rare and shining example of a matriarch of goodness in a world of drastic change and political upheaval.

Sharratt builds suspense as the family is arrested and innocent intentions are misinterpreted when Alison’s efforts to purchase pins for her dress from an arrogant peddler seem to result in a paralytic stroke and accusations that she bewitched the man. As the women sit in the lice- and rat-infested jail, Alizon notes that her grandmother “worked for good and her every charm was a prayer of the old religion. Yet her many hardships went to show that there was no way you could win at this game.”

Daughters of the Witching Hill is a compelling look at the upheaval and changes of 17th century England that provided a ripe setting for the suspicion and paranoia that resulted in accusations of witchcraft and the murders of innocent men and women. It is a very worthwhile read for fans of historical fiction.

Carlotta Holton is the author of Salem Pact, Touching The Dead and Vampire Resurrection, and is a member of the National Federation of Press Women and an affiliate member of the Horror Writers Association.

Sarah Schiavoni

By now, most people have seen Girl with the Dragon Tattoo featured on bestseller lists around the world, heard about the movie version (released in 2009), or read it for their book club. My mother heard of the book through the latter of those three but barely got past the first few chapters before losing interest and passing it on to me. The title intrigued me, and the green Chinese water dragon slithering across the cover caught my eye, so I decided to give it a shot. Like my mother, I was unimpressed and slightly confused by the first few chapters, which consisted of a lot of discussion and debate about financial magazine reporting, a journalist facing jail time for false reporting, and a large corporation fighting against possibly true allegations of some sort of financial scandal. As the book is set in Sweden, I couldn’t get my bearings straight and had no concept of what the towns and businesses were like—forget being able to pronounce the characters’ names properly. Despite this not-so-great start, as I read further, the story quickly became clearer and I became more invested in learning about the lives of the characters.

Girl with the Dragon Tattoo follows the stories of Mikael Blomvkist, a financial journalist caught in a journalistic scandal, and Lisbeth Salander, a pierced-and-tattooed 20-something with a knack for spying and using advanced technology. Blomvkist, accused in court of libel, is struggling to put his life back together when he is contacted by Dirch Frode, lawyer for the aged but famous businessman Henrik Vanger. Vanger offers Blomvkist a two-part job that is to last a year in Hedeby, the town where the Vanger family lives: he is to write the autobiography of the Vanger family, but his true purpose is to research the disappearance of Harriet, Vanger’s grandniece, and try to find out what happened to her. Salander, a sullen and difficult ward of the state, works for Milton Security, taking on freelance jobs involving extensive background checks on select individuals. She is first connected to Blomvkist when Frode contacts her to look into Blomvkist’s history before bringing him to Hedeby. When her research is complete, she works on other jobs in Stockholm, facing terrible problems due to her status as a ward of the state. The story is peppered with scandal, familial and romantic tensions, murder, sexual violence, and mystery as Blomvkist steadily works toward finding out what happened to Harriet and reconnects with Salander in order to find the truth.

Though the book had a confusing and slow start, it quickly improved and was incredibly hard to put down. I had a thousand guesses about what happened to Harriet, was caught by surprise when murder enters the already convoluted story and creates an even more expansive mystery, and was curious to learn more about Salander and her sad past. The story is detailed, intense, and, at some points, graphically violent, but it is very well told and maintains a high level of suspense even until the end. I’m most definitely considering picking up the second book of this 3-and-¾-book-long series, though I’m curious to see how Larsson’s death before the completion of the series will affect the whole story.

By Elizabeth Milo and Sarah Schiavoni
(image credit: Dominique Signoret)

Cthulhurotica - n. (kə-THoo-loo-rot-i-kuh) – an anthology of Lovecraft-inspired erotica; a new branch of “weird erotica.”

WritersNewsWeekly recently spoke to Carrie Cuinn, the woman behind Cthulhurotica, “An Anthology of Lovecraftian Lust.” As an emerging new genre of weird erotica—erotica based in science fiction and fantasy—Cthulhurotica has received some raised eyebrows about its choice of inspiration. Will too many tentacles keep readers from enjoying the stories? Creator Carrie Cuinn stands by her decision to pull together an anthology all about the sexual encounters of these Lovecraftian characters: “For us, Cthulhurotica is the logical extension of the works of H.P. Lovecraft, who often mentioned female characters that he never explored.” Cuinn views this anthology as an opportunity for writers to explore the lives of minor characters in the Cthulhu tales and expand on Lovecraft’s stories. Cuinn is also quick to clarify that this is erotic fiction, not porn. The submission guidelines call for stories that “entice, flirt, and tease,” not stories that are violent or demeaning. Cuinn says, “there is a difference between sex, and sexy.” Although when people hear a name that includes “erotica,” they may assume that these stories are going to be hard-core, but the anthology is attempting to veer away from just that. Cthulhurotica is going to bring a new quality to Lovecraft’s works and characters and explore the vast world of the Cthulhu mythos. This anthology is trying to branch out from what is expected and bring a little love back into these Lovecraftian tales.

WNW: We’ve heard of Star Trek Slash fiction, Harry Potter fan fiction, and countless anime spin-offs created by fans, but why Cthulhu and the stories of H.P. Lovecraft?
Cuinn: Until this question, I had never considered whether what we’re doing with Cthulhurotica could be “fan fiction”. That’s like saying anyone who writes about zombies is writing George Romero fan fiction. In the United States, where we’re located, fan fiction is considered a derivative work of a currently copyrighted piece. It generally exists outside the canon of the original literature, and is rarely professionally published. H.P. Lovecraft’s works are no longer under copyright protection, and in addition there is a precedent of established writers continuing to expand the Cthulhu Mythos (most notably by August Derleth, Lovecraft’s friend, and the man who coined the term “Cthulhu Mythos”). To me, this kind of expansion is on par with Caleb Carr’s Sherlock Holmes novel, The Italian Secretary, or Seth Grahame-Smith’s addition of zombies into Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice.

WNW: In your brief explanation of the anthology, you told us you hope to expand on the stories of the female characters in Lovecraft’s tales; would you say you are trying to bring gender equality to his stories?
Cuinn: Absolutely. Whether it was a symptom of the time he lived in, or a personal choice, Lovecraft rarely included positive female characters in his stories. Asenath Waite, from “The Thing on the Doorstep” was actually an evil old man wearing a girl’s body like a suit, and his other major female character, Lavinia Whateley from “The Dunwich Horror” was merely a servant of a greater evil. Lovecraft usually limited his women to a mention that the main character had a wife, one who faded from the story a sentence or two later. To be fair, Lovecraft didn’t just limit female sexuality – none of his characters are romantic or sexual either. He simply left it out. We don’t want to only expand the role of the female in the mythos, we also want to include a spectrum of gender and sexuality models, to better reflect today’s society.

WNW: How do you see your anthology fitting into the relatively small world of Cthulhu fiction already out there? How will your anthology differ from or expand on other Cthulhu fiction?
Cuinn: Most writers who want to work in the Cthulhu mythos are drawn to it by its surreal qualities and the ability to explore madness. For Lovecraft, the moment of enlightenment in his stories usually drove his characters out of sanity and into a place both glorious and terrifying. By adding elements of sex and romance into that, we can touch on those places where lust and madness meet. Humans are often attracted to what they know is bad for them, and how much worse can you get than dark gods and slithering monsters?

WNW: How would you define “written porn” versus “erotica”? How explicit will the stories that you accept be, compared to, say, romance novels?

Cuinn: Pornography exists to show us sex. It’s graphic, and it rarely involves a plot more detailed than a broken sink or a pizza delivery. The point of porn is to get to the sex. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s in a different category. Erotica includes sex as part of a larger story that has to have a theme, a plot, and character development. When you read a story where two characters kiss and then retire behind a closed door, you know what they’re doing in the bedroom, the writer’s just choosing not to share it with you. In erotica, the writer leaves the door open a crack, and you get to glimpse the best moments.
As far as what we’re planning to accept – that’s going to be open until all of the submissions are in. The level of sex we’re comfortable with is just past “romance novel” but not all the way to “porn”. In other words, what could you get away with doing and still be able to say, “We didn’t have sex,” with a straight face? It’s possible we’ll accept stories on the condition that they tone down the sex a bit before publication, but it’s unlikely we’ll accept anything that needs major revisions (or additions) of plot.

WNW: Do you expect more humanoid on humanoid stories, or humanoid on tentacle romance?
Cuinn: I hope it’s a good mix of both!

WNW: Do you expect Cthulhu to become a Zeus-type character -- coming down to Earth for copulation?
Cuinn: So far none of the submissions we’ve received have actually featured Cthulhu, though it’s always possible. Cthulhu is more of an icon, the symbol of a mythos that includes a wide variety of characters and monsters. And, technically, it would be “rising up to the Earth” since current reports put him in R’lyeh, somewhere deep in the ocean.

WNW: This idea of collecting H.P. Lovecraft-inspired erotica is certainly quirky. How do you hope to garner attention for this anthology when it’s released and draw in a wide audience?
Cuinn: Because it is quirky, people are starting to take notice, and we’ll back that up by delivering an anthology full of beautifully crafted stories. I like to tease my writers that the thought process behind their submissions is, “Cthulhurotica? Oh, that’s too weird for me. Well, I can see how it would work for some people, but not me. Actually, I do have an idea…” and I’ve been told repeatedly that’s how it’s worked for them. I think that readers will approach it the same way. Once they see that it’s more than a quirky theme, that the book has great stories and helps to develop this longstanding fictional universe, they’ll read it and recommend it to others. I will continue the same level of marketing that I am currently doing (which is a combination of persistence and politeness) to keep our name on everyone’s minds.

WNW: Do you think that this Cthulhurotica anthology will draw its audience from current Cthulhu fans, or draw in new fans from other erotica fan groups?
Cuinn: I’m guessing that we’ll mostly appeal to those interested in the mythos to begin with, but also to fans of this new genre of “weird erotica” I see popping up all over.

WNW: Are you planning to tackle more anthologies in the future? Are there other mythical creatures or book series that you’d like to build upon outside of the realm of H.P. Lovecraft?
Cuinn: Along with my own writing, I do plan to edit another anthology some day. I enjoy taking a vision, releasing it onto the population, and waiting to see what comes back to me. Since I create mainly speculative fiction in my own writing, it will probably be on a similar theme, something I’m already invested in. My current loves are space, zombies, mad science, post-apocalyptic stories, and alternate history, which give me a lot of room to run wild.

Want to learn more about this project and its creator? Interested in submitting a story for consideration for the anthology? Visit the Cthulhurotica website for information and submission guidelines. Cthulhurotica is currently accepting submissions, but the submission period ends September 15th.

By Sarah Schiavoni

He loved the suddenness of spring—closing his tired eyes on grey and brown and opening them to shades of cool green hovering just outside his window. Spring always seemed to arrive overnight, but really it arrived by steady ascent, with hardly a soul taking notice. While the skeletal trees cast shadows on dry grass and brown earth, spring slowly brewed in their roots and branches, ready to arrive in spurts of crisp green and soft yellow. Spring woke everything from a cold, winter slumber—the unfurled leaves yawned on trees, the flower buds stretched out on their stems.

He loved falling asleep seeing the twiggy crabapples outside his window and waking up to find them dotted with vibrant pink blooms. He loved to stand by the flaky brown tree trunks and splay his hands over the bark, feeling the gritty curls scrape against his fingers and palms. His kept his feet bare so he could feel the grass between his toes, wet with dew and springy in the early morning. He loved the fresh smells, the caress of sunlight, and the subtle calm, but mostly it was how spring arrived, so sudden and triumphant after such a long cold spell—it was life after death; a reawakening of the senses.

His mother had always loved the winter, even before she got ill. She loved the frost; loved to wake up and see its spiky fan over the windows, like iridescent lace. On winter mornings in the kitchen, while piling golden pancakes and steaming eggs onto plates, she’d ask her son if he’d seen “Jack’s paintings” on the windows that morning. She loved the crisp, glittering snow, white sun, and bare trees.

It seemed to suit her that her hospital room was always like winter—the bare wooden chair in the corner like a solitary tree and the white walls like sheets of shiny snow. The only color in the room came from a sparse grouping of smudgy Kinkade’s, their blurry cottage scenes a poor substitute for the spring season her son loved so much. Her room was a mix of cold metal, white plaster, and dry air. The starched, white sheets and itchy, vanilla-colored blanket on her hospital bed were synthetic and rough against her icy, translucent skin. He could have paid for her to be moved to a nicer room, but she always shook his head at the suggestion. He wanted her to feel at home in her room, but so long as she got hot tea in the morning and was able to watch the local evening news, she was content and needed nothing more.

He hated to sit with his mother there, watching her stare listlessly out into the hall at the passing nurses, her hands white with cold. She never looked at all the “Get Well Soon” cards she got, painstakingly arranged on the windowsill by him. Her wig rested in tangles on a stand in the bathroom; though her head was only dusted with feathery down, she felt no need to cover it up. He hated her apathy and the emptiness in her voice when they spoke during his visits.

“Mom, why don’t you let me bring some flowers in here?—Perk up the place?”
His mother shook her head and stared out the grubby windows.

“The gift shop girl told me she has red tulips…you like the color red, don’t you?”

Still staring out the window, his mother sighed and straightened out the covers by her waist. “The room is fine as it is. You know the pollen makes my nose itch.”

She looked tired and small. Her lips were chapped from the winter air drifting through the cracks in the window frame. Her hands were crawling with spidery, blue veins that disappeared under the skin of her wrists and elbows.

“How about Gerber daisies? She’s got every color under the sun down there.”

His mother groaned. “They look fake. Too bright. I don’t know how they get them to be those wild colors.”

“She’s got roses down there too. Remember how dad used to always get you a yellow rose on your birthday?”

She smiled just a bit at the memory, but quickly pushed the thought aside. Her husband had died the year before. Heart attack. She’d just found out the month before that she had cancer and was making plans for chemo. They’d spent hours browsing online wig stores during that month, laughing at the ridiculous hairstyles and colors that were offered.

“I don’t need the clutter. I’ve already got enough junk on my nightstand—those nurses keep bringing me these silly gardening and cooking magazines. And I don’t have space on the windowsill with all those cards filling it up.”

Her son frowned at her as she gestured at the table by her bed, pointing out the little pile she called “clutter.”

He wanted to bring a little color and life to her room. Every time he visited, he stopped by the gift shop and perused their small flower selection in the grimy, chilled container in the back. The shop mostly stocked generic, seasonal flowers, but occasionally they received prettier flowers, like star gazer lilies or purple irises. When he got to her room, shuffling slowly on the newly-waxed linoleum, he’d tell her about the flower selection and they’d argue over whether or not to put some in a vase in the room. Sometimes, his mother relented, too tired to grouse about flowers agitating her allergies or messing up her nightstand. Most times, his mother started to ignore him after the third or fourth flower suggestion, choosing instead to turn on the TV and tune him out.

When he did succeed in bringing her flowers, she’d complain to him—the flowers were too bright, they made her eyes water, they cost too much. She never threw them out, but, inevitably, the nurses would forget to change the water in the vase, the flowers would lose their color, and eventually, the blooms shriveled up and fell from the stem.

She allowed flowers on her birthday, and he brought her yellow roses, hoping to conjure up happy memories of her times with his father; hoping to bring some life to her cloudy eyes. For once, she didn’t complain. When he set them by her bed, her eyes crinkled with happiness for a brief moment, but she didn’t thank him or smile when he and the nurses sang a quiet “Happy Birthday” to her after.

“Your father was a wonderful man” she said, her eyes rheumy.

He smiled at her, but she had a faraway look. She’d forgotten he was in the room.

She died a few days later, wrapped up in her itchy blanket with the tiniest of smiles on her face. The roses drooped in the vase by her bed, touched with the winter cold. Their petals were wrinkled, the edges brown and curled under. She hadn’t asked the nurses to put clean water in the vase or trim the ends of the stems. What water was left was a murky yellow-green and the stems were ragged and soft where they’d been left uncut. She liked her empty, cold room and itchy blankets. She preferred the white walls of the room and didn’t mind when the paintings got caked with dust and lost their color. Yellow roses were no substitute for the husband who had left her behind. The first blooms of spring had burst outside her hospital room window. She hadn’t even bothered to open the blinds.

By Megan Morrow and Elizabeth Milo

WritersNewsWeekly recently spoke with up-and-coming British author Jamie Penn about his new novel, The Altruist’s Prey. The Altruist’s Prey is meant to be the first book in a three part series.

WNW: What inspired you to write about a serial killer
Penn: I didn’t start out planning to write about a serial killer. The original idea I had was a story about a man who spoke his mind about everything and didn’t care about what people thought about him. The idea to have this man with no inner-monologue start to receive gifts from a killer just came to me one day, literally as a day dream. I thought about the characters for a little while, got into character in my head, and then began writing as them. I hadn’t been thinking about writing a book; I just started writing and did not stop until it was finished.

WNW: What was it like narrating certain portions from the perspective of the killer and trying to get inside his head?
Penn:Worryingly, I found it relatively easy to get inside the killer’s head-- a lot easier than any other character in the book. Once I began writing as the killer I became addicted and I found it easy to do. It seemed that new ways of him approaching and killing his victims would just appear in my head exactly when I needed them.

WNW: What method did you use to plan out the storylines and narrative voices you switched between?
Penn: I originally had an outline to plan the storyline, but then I began to just write whatever came into my head. At times, I needed to put more thought into the structure and the feel of how the interlinking stories were all going to come together, but mostly I just typed it as it appeared in my head. I wrote everything chronologically so I knew exactly where I was in all four of the interlinking stories.
Writing in the different narrative voices also came naturally. On a few occasions I wrote in the third person instead of the first person in the wrong chapters. However, it was soon filtered out when I completed my first edit. I did get into character before writing each part of the story, though, so at times I must have been quite a bastard.

WNW: The staff at WritersNewsWeekly had fun guessing what we thought the ending would be-- did you intend to leave hints along the way so that readers could make predictions of their own?
Penn: There are hints and twists all through the book as to who the killer might be-- right up until the final three chapters. I did throw the odd curve-ball in there to make people think that a certain someone could be the killer. When it came to writing the final third of the book, I had four different endings in my head. I thought about all of the endings for two weeks until I finally chose one and ran with it.
Someone close to me told me that I should write all four endings and publish all four books, thus making more money.

WNW: What writers have inspired you?
Penn: I love Jeff Lindsay and his Dexter books. I act like a child when the next one is coming out, nervously waiting for the postman to arrive. Stuart MacBride’s writing style slapped me across the face and I love it. His writing is so real and gritty and a pleasure to read. It is cliché to say Stephen King, but his Dark Tower books kept me so gripped that I took them everywhere with me just in case I had a spare minute to read what happened next.

WNW: You and Tim share very similar jobs-- how much of Tim is meant to be autobiographical?
Penn: A lot of how Tim feels about the treatment of elderly people with dementia comes straight from my heart. I too sometimes have no inner-monologue, and I just say things that I think are the truth. I was always brought up not to lie, so I don’t-- ‘blatantly honest’ is what my wife calls it. Apart from that, I am nothing like Tim. However, there are parts of the killer’s (nearly said the name then) personality that are similar to mine also. Like I said previously, it’s worrying.

WNW: Do any of the objects that the killer leaves Tim have special significance for you?
Penn: Eight of the objects were trinkets that I recollected from childhood times spent with my parents, brother, and grandparents. The other two were literally just plucked out of thin air.

WNW: Have you noticed a difference between the UK publishing system versus the American counterpart while trying to navigate both systems?
Penn: To be honest, I have not yet. I have yet to be successful at getting a literary agent, though I do have a London-based publisher and an American independent publisher interested in looking at my full manuscript. But when I first started writing, Rob Grant tweeted me that I need an agent first and foremost; they are just hard to come by.

WNW: Do you anticipate a challenge in garnering an American audience because you make frequent use of slang British terms?
Penn: I honestly feel that an American audience would have the intellect to read the novel without many tweaks to it. I think a lot of books have regional slang in them, and that contributes to part of their uniqueness. Obviously if a publisher felt that things needed to be edited for the American audience, then I would endeavor to make those changes. To go back to Stephen King again, he uses a lot of colloquial terms in his novels, more so the earlier ones, and although I sometimes had to puzzle out the phrases, it didn’t spoil my enjoyment. A good story will out, if you will.

WNW: What plans do you have for future works?
Penn: I have three more ideas for future books: a prequel to The Altruist’s Prey, a sequel, and another story in a completely different genre to this one-- more of a fantasy novel.
Although the books in this as-of-yet-untitled series will be released out of order, I feel that The Altruist’s Prey needed to be written first; if it wasn’t for this book, there would be no prequel or sequel. I will write the prequel so that it can be read as a stand alone book or as answering some questions from The Altruist’s Prey.
After I complete the series, I have another definite story idea, which I had actually been planning to write after The Altruist’s Prey was completed. However, due to my interest in a particular character from The Altruist’s Prey, the prequel has now taken over. I do intend to write the other story eventually as I feel it will be just as hard-hitting, but in another genre. I also have a few other ideas floating around for various genres.

For more information about Jamie Penn and The Altruist’s Prey, please visit his Twitter page or website.

By Chris Stokum

Despite my one-time intentions of writing a scathing polemic against the Oxford comma, this piece is nothing of the sort. I’ve come to realize that its supporters won’t be swayed by pragmatic, rational arguments, or by my cries of, “But why put one if you don’t need one?” So, here’s my final word on the subject: use them if you like them; leave them out if you don’t. If you choose the first option, I wish you a happy, successful and blissfully over-punctuated writing career. If the second option is more your bag, I invite you to watch your Oxford commatic friends cringe as they read the previous sentence.

I am less willing to give up on a number of other punctuation issues. For while the Oxford comma is something like a bauble – it might dress up an underwhelming sentence a bit, but it won’t help one that’s shoddy to the core – other punctuation marks are frequently used as crutches, allowing defective sentences to hobble along, slowing traffic and stepping on healthy sentences’ toes.

Take the exclamation mark, known in computer programming and typesetting as a “shriek” or “screech,” both of which are apt names. As a reader, I want to come across an exclamation mark about as frequently as I want to hear someone shriek or screech. Any more than that, and I either develop a headache or start ignoring the screams. (As this display of remarkable compassion shows, you probably do not want to get mugged outside of my apartment). It’s essentially a boy-cries-wolf scenario. If a writer uses an exclamation mark once to indicate that a sentence is uttered with particular force or vivacity, I’ll take note. But not every sentence can possibly be uttered with particular force or the author would run out of breath before the second chapter.

If the exclamatory author can’t honestly mean every exclamation mark he includes, then what are all of those marks for? What work are they doing?

In short, they’re used in lieu of sharp writing to indicate when the reader is to laugh, gasp, chuckle, recoil, etc. They are the “Applause!” signs of writing, meant to raise unremarkable sitcom actors to the level of skilled comedians, in terms of audience response. As F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke,” which, honestly, no one likes.

Worse than recurrent shrieks is the repeated exclamation mark, native to post cards and e-mails and middle school notes. Once introduced to a piece of writing, they spread like the Clap and are just as irritating. Unless the speaker thoroughly ruptures his vocal chords while delivering his line, a single exclamation mark should suffice. According to Terry Pratchett, stuttered shrieks can also be used to indicate looming mental collapses: “Multiple exclamation marks […] are a sure sign of a diseased mind.”

There are, of course, exceptions. Tom Wolfe’s account of Ken Kesey’s psychedelic adventures, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, contains some of the most erratic punctuation in modern literature. He includes repeated colons, for example: “He looks away, out over the Pacific and at the stars – then swings back suddenly toward the bus ::::: IT IS STILL UNPAINTED ::::: STILL VIRGIN SCHOOL-BUS YELLOW.” They might indicate the observer’s dawning recognition of the bus’s potential or the halting cognition of the love-child in question. Later, they suggest dappled light, nervousness and insomnia.

Wolfe even includes some exclamation marks, inverted ones when the speaker is Mexican, regardless of whether the words are Spanish or English – “‘¡Hoy! ¡Pronto!’ he keeps shouting, ‘¡Hurry up! Get your asses back to the store!” – and the occasional repeated mark. He avoids sounding hysterical, however, by attributing the repeated marks to another character or group, always outside of his own authorial voice. Those guys are the pricks yelling outside of your apartment, he seems to say. I’m just the reporter.

Exclamation marks are certainly not the only abused punctuation mark. Semicolons are the most misunderstood and are frequently inserted in place of periods, commas, dashes, spaces and most other varieties of pauses. Kurt Vonnegut calls them “transvestite hermaphrodites,” which admittedly may be a bit harsh, but there’s truth in the notion that it’s difficult to pin down exactly what they are. Some writers wrap scare quotes around “random phrases,” indicating a double meaning where only a twelve-year-old boy could find one. And since the conception of postmodernism, parentheses have been used to fracture words, separate prefixes from their roots and hopelessly complicate how a (cult)ure (mis)reads its own literature.

A rant like this could continue for pages (see Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style), but I’ll wrap it up before I start to sound bitter. I don’t advocate complete standardization of punctuation, nor do I expect every writer to follow my sensibilities. What truly needs to be increased is not authors’ knowledge of any unbreakable punctuation rules, but their awareness of the effects that punctuation marks produce in their readers.

By Jessica Quillin

I started this column over a month ago with the goal of sharing my experiences as a writer who purposefully wears many hats working across different fields. Yet, for me, I think this past week is the first time that I have ever felt completely confident in applying the title “Writer” to my own profession.

Like many professionals, I sometimes feel like I am having a constant identity crisis when it comes to my career. I don’t think that I figured out what it is that I actually do and, in turn, what I want to do for a living until I started doing it. This may seem cliché and silly since I’ve been working in content and communications for over a decade. Yet, I think that I’ve spent so much time working in a project- or deadline-driven manner that I’ve never allowed myself the time to step back to understand and contextualize what I was working on, if that makes any sense.

Like many female authors, I can easily say that I have wanted to be a writer since the age of 9 when I first read Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. The notion that Mr. Bhaer could identify the protagonist, Jo March, as a writer by her ink-stained hands was enough to make me run for the nearest fountain pen (a tool that has never seemed to work quite right for me). After having my first haiku about rainbows published in my elementary school newspaper, I felt destined for future success as a writer.

Yet, university and later graduate school somewhat muddled my professional goals, setting my sights first on teaching and then on not teaching without any strong sense of direction. This lack of focus, if you want to call it that, led to many interesting professional opportunities in communications and marketing and then applied education research. However, all along, I had a lingering sense of anxiousness over my profession and professional development.

Of course, this unsettled-ness was augmented by my continuing battle toward and away from academia. As I described a few weeks ago, I have applied to every available teaching job over the past 7 years almost out of habit. It’s as if I’ve been afraid that if I stopped applying for these university jobs, then the academic/literary side of me would dry up. This fear was magnified as my day job became increasingly bureaucratic, requiring only marginal brainpower and zero creativity.

Now, however, things are different, only it’s taken me a while to realize it. I’ve been so busy since April setting up my business, bringing in clients, and doing work that I’ve scarcely had time to sleep, never mind reflect on my efforts. Indeed, on vacation last week, my husband joked that I was a perfect advertisement for Blackberry on the power of handheld devices for small business, as I typed furiously under an awning in the middle of a rainstorm waiting for a bus to carry us to our next destination.

Workaholic tendencies aside, I nevertheless feel rather sheepish in relation to my writing business. I read so much about the trials of the freelance life and the number of small businesses that fold within the first year that it’s all I can do to keep my head down and focus on what I am trying to do. Yet, as I mentioned in my column two weeks ago, I have been fast approaching a very large fork in the road. After having fought a seemingly endless war over limited academic positions in my field, I was flattered when the director of a local university’s professional writing program approached me with an offer to teach two advanced undergraduate courses. However, I was left at an impasse as to whether or not I could balance teaching with my other commitments and, frankly, whether or not it made any sense given my current professional direction.

The teaching offer finally came through last week. I was on vacation, so I allowed myself a few days to procrastinate, but also to reflect on what I wanted to do. The decision? I opted not to teach--at least not this year. With several new client prospects on the horizon, with an academic book nearing completion, and with a paid research paper in the works, writing seemed the more sensible and the most exciting option. It’s a much more unpredictable path, at least in terms of financial continuity, as well as one that is arguably less familiar to my university roots. Yet, I feel like I can always turn back to teaching at a later stage when my business is more firmly established.

So, I’m embracing my virtual ink-stained palms. Maybe I’m fooling myself, but I feel more like a writer with a capital “W” after this decision. I want to pursue this profession of words, ideas, and syntax and see where I end up. Perhaps throwing myself into my writing business is a risk, yet I no longer feel lost and submerged by work even while I’m immersed in it. Plus, it’s incredibly refreshing to be able to approach work with passion and creativity and to feel motivated about what I’m doing.
But, now that I’ve turned left at the fork in the road, where exactly am I going? Ah, back to pitching, writing, revising, writing, and revising….

Jessica Quillin owns Quillin Consulting, LLC, a consultancy in Washington, DC, focused on content development, research, and strategy for the public and private sectors. She holds a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Cambridge.

By L.L. McKinney

Last week I made a promise of sorts to utilize one of the methods listed in the article on ways to combat writer’s block. Let’s get that out of the way before delving into this week’s topic, which believe me, is a good’un.

As I explained in Bridge the Gap, I am in the middle of another first draft, and I’ve run into a bit of trouble. My protagonist has found out a big secret, and I’m trying put down the proper reaction. I know my character up and down, left and right, but I was worried about his response being too muted or too over the top. I literally sat for weeks staring at the same sentence, willing something to come forth, but it wouldn’t. Then I used the method called Problem Solving. I won’t go into detail here (If you want the nuts and bolts of what happened you can shoot me an e-mail at Tangynt@gmail.com) but the long and short of it is, it worked! I not only got past the scene, but I also finished the entire chapter, and even moved on to the next one before I stopped for the night. I’ve used the Alternate Scene method before, and now I can say I have personally tried two of the four prescribed techniques and met with success.

Right then, on to the main event! This week we battle another foe often faced by writers. This enemy is more prominent and, in my opinion, more deadly than the dreaded block. It kills the work of many fledgling writers within a few chapters, or even a few pages. It is the evil Early Revision, and the only weapons we have against it are resistance and determination. When we start our stories, more often than not, we’ll wind up with what we feel is a solid beginning down on paper. Then we’ll take this beginning and show it to friends, family, anyone who will sit down long enough to read it. Small issues will be pointed out, typos and missed punctuation, and we go to fix them. That’s when the Early Revision’s poison sets in. We correct our mistakes and show others our revised material. Uh-oh: a few more problems we didn’t notice before are pointed out. We fix those. This time we find other plot holes or grammar issues leading to more corrections. We go back and forth until it becomes a vicious cycle. What’s the danger here? We allow days, weeks, months to pass without making any true progress on the story. Books are more than beginnings-- there has to be a middle and an end, and if we never get around to either of those, we never have a novel.

I spent years scratching out opening after opening, and now I have a notebook filled with hundreds of pages and not a single, cohesive story in the whole mess. I fell victim to the Early Revision. I was so focused on perfecting what little I had that I missed the point of writing to begin with: to finish the whole story. I wish someone had come along sooner and taught me this bit of obvious knowledge. Writer’s block may be an annoyance in the process, but, in my opinion, Early Revision is more detrimental. It’s up there with the excuses we give ourselves to not write at all, something I discussed in an earlier article. The more we go over portions of an incomplete manuscript, the less time we spend on finishing it. It’s a waste of effort and time, especially when one considers how much cutting will be done at the end. Early Revision tempts us to polish pages we may delete from our stories as early as the second rewrite!

I did a lot of Early Revisions with Swayed, too. (This gives you an idea of how long it took before I knew better.) I wrote my first few chapters, took them to my writers group to get feedback, came home and fixed everything I was told need correcting, and then took them to the next meeting. Rinse and repeat over the next three or four meetings. Four whole months passed before I got around to continuing my story. The worst part? In that amount of time I found tons of new inspiration and ideas, which was wonderful, but in order for any of it to work my so-called perfect beginning had to go. You can imagine my displeasure.

From then on I refused to get in my own way like that ever again. I wrote, I took new chapters to my group, I got feedback, and I fought the urge to immediately start fixing things (unless it was something big like mixing up character names or eye colors). My goal was to write a book, a whole book, not a few pretty pages or a couple of nice chapters. I was determined to change, so I had to resist my old ways. When I stopped bringing in my revised chapters it surprised my writers group, but they were happy to see new material and I was happy to provide it. When they asked about the change, I explained that there would be no more revising until I completed the first draft and started the second. They were impressed by the show of self-discipline. A few of them even admitted to struggling with the Early Revision bug as well.

Get the story down then make the corrections. It doesn’t come out glittering like gold, sure, but it’s a first draft and first drafts are, frankly, supposed to suck. It’s the natural order of things; birds gotta’ fly, fish gotta’ swim, first drafts gotta’ suck. One of the best things we can ever do for ourselves and our work is put down our little red pens and step away from our manuscripts. Making Early Revisions is like icing a cake while it’s still batter sitting in a pan; it ruins it when you get around to sticking it in the oven.

“Don’t get it right, just get it written.” - James Thurber

Happy writing!

L.L. McKinney is a freelance writer, a published poet and a playwright. As an active member of First Tuesdays and YA Lit Chat, she is currently seeking representation for her young adult paranormal urban fantasy, Swayed.