Ghosts of the World

I promise this is about Ghosts. So just keep reading.

So, I’m a mutt. My heritage is basically a strange amalgam of people whose branches started in Eastern Europe and what would become the United Kingdom. These people then screwed their way across a landmass until they found each other, then found an ocean to cross, then continued screwing away on the other side of it.

Mayflower — Probably on the boat too. Not even gonna lie.

This means that Europe is where my inherent world views sprang from. It’s no one’s fault – it’s chance. I happened to be born from those branches of human culture. This means I carry the baggage that comes with it, culturally speaking. I grew up with European stories and mythologies. I learned about what the early European settlers carried with them and what grew out of it. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow to The Fall of the House of Usher to the latest Stephen King novel have come to inform my reading and writing choices when it comes to horror and the supernatural. We get Faeries, Vampires, Valraven (this concept is as fascinating as it is gruesome), Ghouls (though technically these came from Arabia), and probably a hundred different kinds of ghosts.

As I’ve noted before, the idea of Ghosts has gripped me firmly since childhood. I have always been fascinated with both the idea of cheating death (who hasn’t, really) and the idea of the spirit lingering on in the world toward a singular purpose. Of course the stories aren’t all that way. Improper burial, desecration of grave sites, or committing brutal crimes in life could all get you sentenced to a maddening half-existence where you are present, but ineffectual at causing anything else but misery and fear.

cubicle — Meet the new life – same as the old life.

But, the myths do leave some room for interpretation in Europe. Not all ghosts are necessarily evil. Some come to portent events that can be altered. Some reveal the nature of crimes done against them in life so that justice can be served. Others linger to protect loved ones. It’s all definitely creepy, but not all based on ill-intent.

hamlet's dad — Hamlet’s dad, his heart was in the right place. I don’t think he wanted THAT MANY people dead.

Now, my girlfriend on the other hand, her cultural ghost interpretations are entirely different.

She comes from two cultures that pretty much define ghostly existence to be absolutely the worst thing that could happen for all parties concerned. I’m sure you’re familiar with the Japanese take on ghosts. Because they tend to go something like this:

And this…

These… are decidedly unfriendly ghosts. The concept of Casper doesn’t fly in Japan I’m told. Ghosts are there for one reason only: to torment the shit out of the living. I am led to believe that this impression, J-horror films aside, is not an outlier. This is straight up what ghosts do in Japanese folklore. Kami (the revered spirits of the Shinto religion) can be beneficial. But Yurei (a Japanese catch-all word for ghost) are straight up torture and murder machines. Take a look if you like. Ghosts are all about wrath or unfulfilled lust it would seem – the more the better. Certainly every portrayal of a Japanese ghost I’ve seen leads to at least one more dead body to add onto the pile.

The other side of my girlfriend’s heritage is that of Native North America, specifically the Lakota people. I’ve not had much experience with Lakota folklore and tales, but she assures me that generally speaking, Lakota culture is generally anti-ghost. Any spirit of the dead who is hanging around the living is manipulative at best, and is more likely to be angling for someone to follow them into the land of the dead with them. It is exceedingly rare that a dead human’s soul would hang around for any kind of good reason she tells me.

When I write about ghosts, I tend toward the cultural tones I see on my side of things – though it certainly benefits the craft when I expand the repertoire. It’s also why ghosts are such great subjects for stories, at least in my own opinion. given my interest in the topic, it sometimes puzzles me why I don’t write more stories about ghosts. It’s clearly something I love reading about.

I guess a part of it is simply being scared – not of the ghostly aspects of things. Clearly I’m okay with writing about horrifying things on occasion. But the fear I think comes from being able to fully live up to the stories from all of the cultures I know of. I rarely do it (though one of the preceding links contains a rare example where I do).

I think I ought to do it more.

I had an idea recently in the middle of the night – which is the perfect time to be thinking about ghosts – so maybe I sketch that out a bit more. See what falls out.

March 31, 2015 0

Altering the Deal

In light of my most recent writing challenge, I’m looking back at the goals with a fresh eye. The challenge’s rules were pretty straightforward per my post where I outlined the basics:

I’m thinking that the challenge should involve the script that Ben hooked me up with, already pre-loaded with the 20 master plots, and, genres, settings, and elements that I already like. Each short story should be somewhere between 1,500 and 2,500 words (challenging for me – my average ‘short story’ is something like 5K-6K words).

Given the above, you can extrapolate:

– No longer than 2,500 words.
– Incorporate all elements from the script.
– One short story a week.

I’m wondering if all of these rules are good ones. Maybe it’s time to alter the deal.

I’m still down with the word count rules – in fact my stories have all been 2,000 words – and I am down with the deadline. What I’m having issues with is the script.

For all of the random permutations it could create, I find that I’m already starting to trip over things I’ve done in other stories. I can expand the entries – but ultimately, the master plots are going to be repeated at least twice for each if I spread them out evenly – some will get three times. And it’s clear I’m not good at some of them. Love and The Riddle come to mind – they don’t cram well into short works. And I’m ultimately, my goal isn’t to get good at them if I’m being really honest.

Riddle me this: why would I force myself to write something I don't enjoy? — Riddle me this: why would I force myself to write something I don’t enjoy?

I’m all about expanding my horizons and personal growth in my work – but isn’t life too short to be spinning cycles on things that don’t utilize my actual skills? I think my repertoire is pretty good with the things I am good at.

I’m finding that my deeper goal is that I want to write. I want to write about the things I’d want to read.

Is that enough?

I think it might be.

So, I may alter the deal. I’m thinking that I should be using the prompts as guidelines – not a rule.

First person to say parlay gets a cutlass to the face.

As noted earlier, the script is great for mashing up ideas – but sometimes the plots or the settings don’t match (though there’s a case for this in stories like Moneyworkers) and as a result, there’s no flow. No flow means less writing, which in turn means more failed challenges.

I’m thinking the challenge would be modified as follows:

– No longer than 2,500 words.
– Alter the script to drop the master plot element (let me write the kinds of stories that work for me while retaining setting, genre, and elements)
– One short story a week.

It’s presently food for thought for me. I haven’t decided yet.

Ultimately, I have to do what’s best to develop and refine my skills. If you have thoughts on it, post to my Facebook Page. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

March 18, 2015 0

Learnings – Writing Challenges

It’s been two months since I started this crazy writing challenge and there’s been a lot of stuff learned. I wanted to set aside just a minute to think out loud, not just for myself, but also for the lot of you that have been tuning in every week.

So, here goes my impromptu session of ‘what I’ve learned during my last two months’ session.

– First and foremost, I’ve been learning to cut things a little closer to their cores. I like to let things reel out and take as long as they take. Unfortunately, in a world of dwindling attention spans, that doesn’t always work.

So Brevity is a thing I’ve been working on. In my editing passes, I look for two things primarily. the first is ‘Did I say this already?’ I like to repeat myself, I think for emphasis… but it doesn’t do any emphasizing. Second, I ask ‘Do I need this?’ If a thing doesn’t serve a function in telling the story, I axe it. I feel these two things have tightened the work. I can even see it coming up as I write, not as I edit. Behaviors are being learned, and that’s good.

– Randomness promotes new ideas. The script has been doing well by me. Putting together things I didn’t think would fit made for things I wouldn’t have otherwise explored. Moneyworkers, for instance, put wizards, the temptation of power, the corporate world, and occult societies in one place in a contemporary setting. Then I had The Ferryman in which I did a horror pursuit story in a starship featuring biotechnology and dogs. I don’t think I would have come up with these on my own. I can write about each component individually – but it’s made me explore familiar components in unexpected ways, which has resulted in sudden intuitive bursts and creative explosions.

– Being on a schedule helps the process. I have a deadline to which I hold myself accountable. Every Wednesday morning, it’s time to post, whether I feel the story is shit or not. I only missed one challenge day so far, and given circumstances, I think it warranted the delay. Plus, the following week I had a double header in which I caught up. It was both gratifying and terrifying to take on 4,000 words in a week, and I finally digested a bit of a story I’d been working on for a very long time. Even if the whole deadline is artificial, it metaphorically makes the occasional diamond out of common coal.

– I also know now that maybe keeping my personal and business lives separate in social media hampers me a little. When I started this thing, I had about forty some odd likes on my Facebook Author Page by sending out invites over the course of two years. I picked up about fifteen more in a month when I took the page to my actual Facebook timeline. And then I saw the organic outreach quadruple in my post reaches. People actually subscribe and read a lot more (or let’s be honest, people click more) when I open myself up to more than just people who like the page.

– If Facebook’s analytics are to be trusted, there may be enough people taking an interest that I can seriously research self-publication of my short stories. If I could turn even a couple of short story clicks from the blog into a paid, ninety-nine cent borrows from programs like Kindle Unlimited, I might actually be able to make beer money of the project.

– If I look at everything I’ve written since I started this, we’re looking at 22,000 words in a little over two months. This is huge progress since my writing slowed down a few years back. If I could keep this type of schedule up for editing and writing, I could finally expand into the spaces I’ve always wanted to. I’ve always wanted to write novel length work, and these little exercises could snowball into the ability to do better work in a longer form.

– It’s made me get back into graphic work again as well. Every week I place an image. It’s usually not mine – the stuff up now is stuff I find in image searches, most times with some touchups or composition work done in Photoshop – one of my first creative loves. But, it’s making me want to look into providing my own illustrations/photos or to collaborate with other creatives in my circles. I want to take all of that stuff from online down and make something I can actually post that I made between my own illustrations and my photo edit skills. Plus, it’d make for good cover art for online publication or eventual print publication.

– People care. I get a lot of feedback from a lot of places. I have a critique from one person in particular just about every week, and several others to boot with more intermittent frequency. A lot of the feedback is very useful, and that feedback often times informs the work as I progress through my challenge.

– It’s rewarding personally. For a while there, I wasn’t writing. I was just numbing myself with Netflix and video games. Wrtiting makes me feel like I’m doing something positive, something constructive. It puts me in a better mood and makes me strive for bigger things creatively.

I’m sure I’ll learn more along the way, but this is what I have for now.

In the meantime, keep reading and I’ll keep writing.

March 16, 2015 0