Author: terribleminds (page 150 of 454)

Psst.

Yeah, you.

*pulls off werewolf mask*

Click here.

See in the comments? People have written scary stories — or, rather, the first part of a scary story. Your job now is to continue the tale. Grab one you like and write PART TWO of it —

But once again: do not end it. You are not to conclude the story! But rather, leave it open.

Write part two at your online space, but please make sure in your tale to link to the first part.

Your second chapter is due by Friday, October 21st, noon EST.

Length should be ~1000 words.

GO FORTH AND BE SCARY.

HEY, LOOK, A BOOK ANNOUNCEMENT.

From Publishers Marketplace:

NYT-bestselling author Chuck Wendig’s EXEUNT, a post-apocalyptic novel pitched as in the vein of THE STAND about a mysterious event in which a thousand people begin walking together to the same unknown destination — and the loved ones who follow along to protect them, and a second untitled novel, to Tricia Narwani at Del Rey, by Stacia Decker at Dunow, Carlson & Lerner.

I am very excited about this.

I am so geeked to be continuing my relationship with Del Rey, and especially with Tricia, who is aces. (Tricia helped edit Three Slices, which contains the Miriam Black novella, Interlude: Swallow, and also contains stories by Kevin Hearne and Delilah S. Dawson.) Exeunt is a book that’s been juggling around my brain for several years now, and only recently did it kind of coalesce into a proper novel. It’ll be epic and scary and ahhh. I hope you like it. See you in 2018.

His mind can save the world, if she can save him from the human race… 

The Shield is Earth’s only defence. Rendering the planet invisible from space, it keeps humanity safe from alien invasion. The Actives maintain the shield – no one is sure how – but without them, the Shield cannot function.

When an Active called Tobe finds himself caught in a probability loop, the Shield is compromised. Soon, Tobe’s malady spreads among the Active. Earth becomes vulnerable.

Tobe’s assistant, Metoo, is only interested in his wellbeing. Earth security’s paramount concern is the preservation of the Shield. As Metoo strives to prevent Tobe’s masters from undermining his fragile equilibrium, the global danger escalates.

The Shield must be maintained at all costs…

* * *

Just how obsessive I can become.

I’ve never been a writer who writes every day. I know that’s what writers are supposed to do… I’ve seen the rules. I guess what I’m saying is, if you’re going to write, you might want to make your own rules.

I’ve always written in fits and starts, but when I get started I can’t stop. That might have been one of the things that prevented me from finishing longer pieces of fiction before I wrote ‘Savant’. I used to force myself to stop.

The writing starts slow, but, boy, when I hit my stride there’s no stopping me. Literally, nothing stops me writing. If I wake up clear-headed, I might even write all day without once thinking about getting out of my PJs. And when I say ‘all day’, I do mean sixteen or eighteen hours a day, sometimes for weeks. Towards the end of a book, I can write fifteen thousand words in a session. The hoovering doesn’t get done, and I forget to eat, but it turns out, that’s OK, because the faster I write, the faster it’s all over. I also discovered that I live with people who can fend for themselves, perfectly well.

What comes before informs what comes afterwards.

Not only do I not need a plot before I begin a novel, I don’t want one. When I began ‘Savant’, all I had in mind was a theme. I wanted to write about unconditional love. If I’d plotted that book, it would’ve been very different from the one I ended up with. Of course, having so little at the outset meant I had to be patient with the process. I spent a lot of time going back, changing things around, and rewriting the first third of the novel. But, during that period, the characters grew, the world emerged, and the theme took a new turn. The book evolved during the writing process, and that, for me, at least, feels like a good thing.

Not everybody will understand what you’re doing, but that’s OK.

I learned this over a long period of time, longer, probably, than it needed to be. The first few people who saw ‘Savant’, including a writer, a reader, a publisher and my first agent didn’t get it. I assumed that meant it wasn’t good. When the book fell, almost by accident, into Jonathan Oliver’s hands, he was the first person in six years to get excited about it.

That I had a novel in a folder on my desktop for six years was my own fault. I should have shown it to more people sooner. Have a little confidence. Trust what you’re doing. Knock on doors, and keep knocking.

Keyboard skills are important.

I learned to touch type when I was eight or nine (don’t ask). I can type a hundred words a minute, accurately, when I’m in full flow. I hadn’t realised what an asset that could be until I was churning out scads of words every day of the last week or two of writing this novel. It’s pretty tough to write fifteen thousand words a day. I couldn’t have done it if I wasn’t able to type. I guess It’s like driving a car; if you want to go faster or master tricky manoeuvres, it’s a good idea to be well practiced in handling those pedals and that gearstick.

There’s irony in the fact that we all use keyboards, all the time, but few of us take typing classes.

You can’t write for an audience.

Or, at least, you can, and I do, regularly. I’ve written tie-in fiction, but there’s a certain discipline in that: knowing the IP, plotting, re-plotting… It’s about giving the client what he wants.

Writing independent fiction isn’t like that at all. If I’d had an audience in mind while writing this book, I think I would’ve been missing the point. I wrote the book I wanted to write. I told the story that I wanted to tell. I did what mattered to me. I gave no thought to the audience… Any audience. I didn’t think about impressing an agent or a publisher, and I didn’t think about the reader.

In the movie, ‘Field of Dreams’, Kevin Costner’s character, Ray, hears a mysterious voice. It tells him, “If you build it he will come.” This is regularly misquoted as “If you build it they will come.” And, it’s misquoted for a reason.

No writer should be compromised, and neither should any artist. Feedback comes in so thick and fast in the internet age that it’s tough for a writer, for any artist, to ignore that stuff. A first time novelist doesn’t need to have that on his or her radar. No one is breathing down anyone’s neck. I know established writers and artists who are forever being told by their audiences what should come next.

The point of the writer must always be the reader. I get that. I say it all the time. Here’s the thing, though: No writer has more freedom than the first-time novelist. Nobody is trying to mould that story; nobody has a vested interest in it, yet. That isn’t true of second and subsequent novels.

I was lucky to learn this while writing ‘Savant’, because I was already in the industry. I tried to take advantage, to write what I wanted to write, and not what others might want me to write, or what they might expect from an SF novel. I urge all first time writers to enjoy that freedom.

Nik Abnett: Website | Twitter

Savant: Amazon | B&N | Kobo

John Persons is a private investigator with a distasteful job from an unlikely client. He’s been hired by a ten-year-old to kill the kid’s stepdad, McKinsey. The man in question is abusive, abrasive, and abominable.

He’s also a monster, which makes Persons the perfect thing to hunt him. Over the course of his ancient, arcane existence, he’s hunted gods and demons, and broken them in his teeth.

As Persons investigates the horrible McKinsey, he realizes that he carries something far darker. He’s infected with an alien presence, and he’s spreading that monstrosity far and wide. Luckily Persons is no stranger to the occult, being an ancient and magical intelligence himself. The question is whether the private dick can take down the abusive stepdad without releasing the holds on his own horrifying potential.

Words are hard (but not impossible)

When I first started out, I wrote about 200 to 300 words of fiction every other day or so. It was a good day when I hit 500 words. Which is a paltry sum compared to the output of true professionals. According to what I’ve heard, 2000 words is basically the industry average.

And that knowledge is intimidating. Like, seriously so. I spent more time agonizing about my output than anything else, I think. Not craft, not quality of prose, not narrative structuring. Those are skills you can learn, can workshop, can develop. But the idea of coming up with so many words every single day was daunting.

Coming from a journalism background, I’m used to producing content on a tight schedule. In other words, there’s really not much time to weave through drafts so I edit as I write. Which is a terrible idea in fiction, as anyone can tell you. But Hammers on Bone managed to propel me to a 1000 words-a-day average. (I’m slogging towards 2000 words a day. It’s long, sad climb.)

The weird thing about that was this: all that advice about making space for these words? It’s true. I wrote most of Hammers of Bone across the course of January, between navigating the spectacle of Las Vegas. I was bored. I wanted it done. (And to be honest, I think I wanted to prove to C.C Finlay that I knew how to let a story breathe.)

So I gave myself two weeks to hit 15,000 words. I sectioned off my day to include fiction. I made it a point to sit down and write. After all, if Ken Liu can carve a handful of minutes each day from a lawyer-y schedule and Chuck Wendig can write 10,000 words in a day, I could do something, right? [I almost never write 10k a day! — cw]

And it worked.

I know it sounds obvious on paper. Self-discipline? Of course, that’s how you do it. But when you’re faced with a blank document, with the idea of writing for weeks, with the thought of committing yourself to thousands of words that may never see publication? Common sense gets squeezed out of the window and anxieties set in. What I learned writing Hammers on Bone, though, is this: you can totally be the boss of those fears.

You need to give a story room to breathe (but not too much)

A story is a puppy: it starts out small and cuddly, full of potential, practically quivering with a rambunctious desire to please. You and your puppy – you can be anything, anyone. You can go anywhere, have a variety of adventures. You will be best friends.

Of course, puppies grow up, shedding their wobbly-legged cuteness in favor of whatever they were meant to be. And like dog owners, writers are going to need to adapt to these circumstances. A Pomeranian is going to be perfectly happy in a one-room studio, but a German Shepherd will quickly tire of the limited space, simultaneously withering in its confinement and laying havoc on the room.

Er.

Complicated metaphor aside, the point that I’m trying to make here is that stories always start out the same way: with the sense that anything can happen. Then, it gets going and what’s interesting is that the story doesn’t always accommodate us. Sure, we might say that this was intended to be a piece of flash fiction. Sure, we expected a 10,000-word novelette. And sometimes, that’s true. (For plotters, in fact, that might always be true.)

But sometimes, it’s not.

Hammers on Bone was a 3,000 word story that I wrote up in two weeks and sent to F&SF, hoping that it might resonate with editor C.C. Finlay. To an extent, it did. He rejected it, of course. But not without first telling me that this was a story that had merit, but also a story that needed room to breathe.

So I gave it room to breathe. Slightly begrudgingly, of course. I was the dog owner who’d expected a lap-puppy, but ended up with three-times-a-day walkies. But I let Hammers on Bone breathe. I mapped out spaces for tension. I gave Persons and McKinsey room to be alpha dogs at each other. I sketched in the world that existed in my head.

And then I stopped. Because I’d said everything I wanted to say about the story. Things had happened, events had transpired. It was time to go. Sure, I could have given the tale another POV character, maybe write in more lore, but this was a story with a limited time frame. It had to go from point A to point B very quickly, and any detours would cause some grumpiness.

Was I right about that? Was Charlie right about his critique? Yes, I guess. It found a home with a wonderful publisher, in the end. Stories really need space. Sometimes, 14,000 words worth of space.

Noir is very casually sexist

Classic film noir, along with the hardboiled fiction that inspired it, has always been exceedingly masculine in tone. The hero is inevitably an alpha male. He is ruthless, indomitable, alluring, immune to feminine wiles. He is the mercenary, the ronin, the man that will never be tied down, a creature of endless adventure, destined to just the right amount of hardship. In other words, he is a fantasy.

The problem with fantasies, though, is that they are intrinsically selfish. By and large, noir was disinterested in women, preferring to see them as either adversarial elements or objects of licentious desire. I like to imagine that this approach to female characters wasn’t always driven by ill intentions, that some of the authors were simply trying to stay true of the genre.

But regardless of how you cut in, the language of noir is very casually sexist. Women are never their names but instead a litany of diminutives: toots, babe, skirt, bird. You ‘shack up’ with a ‘roundheels,’ and ‘chew’ and ‘neck’ and ‘mash’ and ‘fumble’ your way into the boudoir of a saucy little ‘dish’ The sharp ones are always careful to be ‘sheiks,’ avoiding the trap of bar-haunting frills. Don’t be a ‘boob.’ You don’t want a ‘tramp’ to make you a ‘twist’, do you?

What’s also interesting is how easy it absorb all that by intellectual osmosis. While writing Hammers on Bone, I tried my best to keep the women in my book from suffering unnecessarily. After all, they were, by consequence of the plot, already going through horrific things. They didn’t need to be put down, objectified, reduced to a foil or a sex toy. But while the book was going through edits, I discovered something I hadn’t even really thought of. John Persons was still very flippantly chauvinistic. And it genuinely floored me as to how much.

Reading through the novella months later made me realize how much of that is true, and how much we glaze over things like that at first glance. I’ve thought about toning those elements of Persons down but for various reasons, I didn’t. Partly because it fit the plot, partly because it fit what I needed Persons to be, and partly because I wanted to remind myself of how easy it is for anyone to slip.

Shock factor is seductive

Hammers on Bone is a rough book. There is a lot of violence, both on-screen and off-screen. People get hurt in gruesome ways, and one of the climatic scenes in the end is straight out of my childhood nightmares of John Carpenter’s The Thing. (Thanks, mom. Thanks, dad. Having a 9-year old watch that movie was a great idea.)

That said, there are only three occasions where a woman is physically harmed in the novella. None of it is played for titillation. At least, I don’t think so. When I started writing, I made a promise with myself to not have the marginalized suffer gratuitously. If something happens to them, it won’t be in a space where it can be savoured, be reinterpreted into a cause for pleasure. (Thank you, college mates, for showing me that some people will publicly cheer at rape scenes. Ugh.)

Despite all those grandiose plans to do better, the temptation to play up certain scenes did manifest while I was writing Hammers on Bone. And it surprised me as to how easily that happened. Popular media had coded certain expectations into me: masculine character development is prefaced by a tormented woman.

Breaking it down, that trope makes a horrendous kind of sense. The desire to protect something weaker than yourself, to safeguard the vulnerable, to hold onto the people you love – these are the universal impulses that have fueled miracles. What better way to motivate someone than to tell them that everything that they love is at risk? What better way to prompt change than to take away everything that anchors a character to current reality?

Most importantly, it is an easy, reliable solution. In some ways, most of the work had been done already. Wasn’t I proof? For better or for worse, we all know that the pain of a woman kickstarts a revenge plot, or something subtler but no less potent.

So I wrote that.

I had wanted to create a tragic moment, something heart-wrenching. I wanted people to care. I wanted the characters to think about what they’d done, and who they were, and how all this affected their humanity. And then I looked down at what I’d written, retched a bit in my mouth, tore out the paragraphs, put them into a meat grinder, and sat in cold, clammy revulsion. Because I’d done that thing. I’d exploited one of my own characters. I had done it to shock, to appall, to move someone else’s character arc.

From a clinical perspective, it’s fascinating as to how that could even happen. As a queer Asian woman, you’d think I’d know better, especially since I had promised myself I wouldn’t do something like this. And I do.

But at the same time, decades of Hollywood and mainstream literature had apparently left an indelible impression. I had to catch myself. I guess my point here is that no matter where you’re coming from, there’s deprogramming to be done, there are biases and problematic thoughts to deconstruct. We’re all flawed people and no matter our good intentions, we will fuck up. So we better be watching for it, and we better be ready to fix it, and if it gets into the wild, we damn well better be ready to own up to it.

The world is full of monsters

Another no-brainer. At least, in theory. But we forget, sometimes. By and large, popular media defines our understanding of the world, flattens it to two-dimensionality. We buy into tropes, into the idea that our villains bristle with capes and menacing tattoos, that they announce their intentions in a dramatic manner, framed by the clamor of an unsuspecting city or a background of lightning.

We imagine child predators to be men in brown trenchcoats, balding and sweaty, possibly mustached, unmistakably creepy. We expect men with smiles like sharks. And it is always men because the sexual advances of a woman are never undesired, because men never say no to sex with a woman, and everyone knows that queerness is a joke to be played out on loop.

Popular media tells us we know who the bad guys are.

We don’t.

I’m writing a separate post somewhere else that digs into the statistics of domestic abuse, about how often the sexual assault of men and boys go unreported, and the culture that leads to this lack of visibility. As such, I’m not going to go into it too deeply here. But I wanted to touch on something related.

The story behind Hammers on Bone is real. There are two boys out there who were victimized for years, who went to school and met with their relatives, who had birthdays, who acted slightly-out-of-bounds but were largely treated as rambunctious kids, a little damaged from a difficult home situation but otherwise fine. There’s a woman who was afraid to leave, a woman who whispered about how her abusive partner got into her head, how he kept her pinned down with her own fears. There is a monster in London who is living quietly, awaiting proper conviction, gleefully unrepentant.

But you wouldn’t know he was a monster from looking at him. You wouldn’t have known that there were problems in that household. You would only have seen the family, only seen their outings together, only seen their laughter and all those things they wanted you to see. Because people are good at keeping their darker impulses under control. Tigers have their stripes. Humanity has a different kind of camouflage.

Predators need an edge, you see?

***

Cassandra Khaw is the business developer for Singaporean micropublisher Ysbryd Games. When not otherwise writing press releases, she writes fiction of grotesque dimensions. Her short stories can be found in places like Uncanny, Clarkesworld, and Fireside. HAMMERS ON BONE is her first novella with Tor.com

Cassandra Khaw: Website | Twitter | Facebook

Hammers on Bone: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Goodreads

Donald Trump, the oleaginous pre-ejaculate that somehow gained sentience and is now running for president, is a bad dude who says horrible things. These things are not merely “lewd comments,” nor is it “potty-talk.” His comments form an implicit admission and explicit endorsement of sexual assault, which to most folks who have studied Trump for more than fifteen seconds, does not come as a particular surprise. And watching him in the debate stalk Clinton across the stage like the monster from It Follows (and then inexplicably dry-humping a chair, quite unlike the creature from It Follows) only enriches our picture of what a brutish, loutish abuser he is.

Here’s though, where it gets a little weird, at least for me.

Normally, the #NotAllMen crowd comes from the alt-right side of things, like, “Hey, don’t you dare talk about rape culture, because NOT ALL MEN blah blah blah,” and then the progressive side steps up to say, no, not all men, but yes all women, and yes some men. Clearly, certainly, surely some men, and clearly, certainly we need to talk about them.

Given that this entire election has been delivered to us through a portal leading straight to BIZARROLAND, that narrative has shifted somewhat, and it’s honestly a little uncomfortable for me. Now we have the alt-right and GOP side of things saying, “Well, pfft, pssh, this is locker room talk and all men do it,” thus effectively taking on the role of YES ALL MEN, while on the other side, the progressive side, you have a lot of dudes who are saying, NOT IN ANY LOCKER ROOM I’VE EVER BEEN IN, which is to say, they are taking over the position of NOT ALL MEN. Some of the vigorous advocacy of men in this regard has been almost flailingly defensive — things said like, real men aren’t like this, or I’ve never heard this kind of talk, ever.

Hm. Really? Really?

I’d encourage you to read into Kelly Oxford’s hashtag, #NotOkay — here’s an article about it, and note, it’s triggering. (Troublingly, this entire election is triggery.) She asked for women to tweet at her, effectively cataloguing their sexual assaults.

Millions responded.

Millions.

Now, unless we are to assume that these millions of women have been assaulted only by Trump and his cronies, I think it’s woefully fair to expect that these women are telling the truth and have been assaulted by everything from ex-boyfriends to husbands to family members to random men on public transportation. Which is to say, Trump is not a singular creature. He was not created in a vacuum. If there are millions of women assaulted, then there are millions of men doing the assaulting. We need to believe what these women are telling us.

I don’t know that in my life I’ve ever heard commentary like what Trump uttered at quite the level of pure, unmitigated rape culture he’s spouting — his words were, like I said, an admission and an endorsement of that kind of culture. It offered a clear picture of terrible men holding power and expressing that power not on behalf of women but rather, against them. Power serving as a weapon of desire and control.

But just the same, I’ve heard some nasty shit.

I’ve heard men talk about women as if they’re objects. Not people, but just disconnected body parts suitable only for lust. I’ve heard men take away a woman’s identity as a person and turn her into a receptacle for their urges. That’s not to say an admission of desire or an expression of proper human sexuality is bad — but when it comes at the cost of un-personing a woman? When it fails to form the recognition that the woman is a human being with autonomy over herself and her body? Nnnyeah, now we’re starting to get close to Trumptown. I never heard talk like this from close friends, no, but I’ve heard it from some family members, I heard it in high school, and in college, and at jobs. Early on in life I was not good enough to push back against it because that can be tough, and it requires courage that I didn’t then possess. But it’s there now, and I think it’s vital that men summon that courage when they can — and even when they can’t, to understand the danger in themselves and to raise their children (sons in particular) with the understanding of what this is, what it means, and how our sons can grow up to be better men to women and to one another. Because seriously, this shit is real. Toxic masculinity and rape culture are not separate from one another. Those two demons have their tails neatly entwined.

I’ll give you a good example — you ever heard any men give the friend zone talk? You know the drill: oh, I’ve been such a good friend to her, but she won’t date me, won’t sleep with me, oh woe is me, I am relegated to the friend zone. It’s shitty. It’s shitty because it assumes:

a) friendship is just a key to unlock a woman’s panties

and

b) that decency on behalf of the man means the woman owes him something for his efforts

It is on the same spectrum of what Trump said, just at the other end of it. Trump is speaking from a place of power — he’s rich, he has celebrity, he has unlocked that door and can walk through any time he likes, thank you very much. Friend-zoners are speaking from a place of perceived non-power — oh, I have no power, I’m a nice guy, I should be owed what a guy like Trump can take. It’s the same coin, it’s just the other side of it.

Nigel Farage, that blunt and clumsy thumb, says that this is just how men talk. All of Trump’s supporters are saying that, right? Oh, this is just how men talk, it’s just boasting, it’s just locker room talk. When they bring this up, our defense cannot and shouldn’t be:

“No, men do not speak like this.”

Because men do talk like this sometimes.

And some follow it up with actions, too. Or other men become emboldened by this kind of talk, and then choose to act accordingly. It normalizes all of it.

The trick is, that doesn’t make it okay.

It doesn’t absolve the sin. It does not change the problem. It doesn’t stop the fact that these “just words” are the backbone to actual actions, to a culture both personal and institutional that treats women like toys, like pets, like something you own rather than a person with whom you are equal. But they are real. This happens. One’s vigorous defense of NOT ALL MEN is not appropriate here. What’s appropriate is acknowledging the reality of this by listening to the women at the #NotOkay tag, and saying, okay, this is endemic. These are millions of women with millions of stories. Trump was not made in a vacuum. He was not born from some other place, some heinous clown-stuffed hell-realm. He isn’t a monster out there on his own — he’s a monster we know. And he’s damn sure a monster women know, and watching this election is reminding far too many women that they know guys like him. They’ve been stalked. They’ve been dismissed. They’ve been grabbed. And as men, I think it’s on us to not simply dismiss Trump’s comments simply because we want the purity of the political win. We want to believe that OUR SIDE isn’t like that, like no men we know could ever do such a thing, but statistically, we absolutely do know men like that, even if they’re not saying this stuff out loud.

This is real.

No, it’s not all men.

No, it’s not all “locker rooms.”

But it’s some of them. It’s more than we’d like.

Just ask women. And when you ask them? Listen to their answers.

So, here how this is going to work.

You are going to write the first part of a SCARY STORY.

You will write 1000 words.

You will not finish this story.

Consider it the first act of a three-act tale.

You will post this at your blog. You will expect quite fully that next week, someone else will pick up your tale and add another 1000 words to it. This is an experiment in collaborative storytelling, of passing the story from one another to the next and to the next, until we have a completed spoooooooky story.

Due by: THE DREADED FRIDAY THE 14th, noon EST.

Word limit: ~1000 words.

Post at your online space.

(Do not finish the story!)

Give us a link.

Go be scary.