Pazuzu’s Girl by Rachel Coles will be released February 10th, 2012. It will by released by Journal Stone Publications.

Congrats Rachel!

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Rachel Coles has produced two new horror short story anthologies. In the Ruins and Beyond the Veil are both available from Amazon.

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Tattered Souls 2, published by Cutting Block Press, includes “Becca” by Kaletheen Dale. Congratulations Kathleen!  Check out Tattered Souls 2.

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I’ve been working in emergency preparedness for about eight years now, and writing seriously for the past year and a half. Those worlds seem very separate and different. But they accent each other in unexpected ways sometimes.

In my admittedly short experience writing, I still have some observations to make about necessities for all writers. One of them is research, research, research. This can be difficult sometimes, depending on what it is we need to research for our story.

Since the advent of the internet, research has become a billion times easier than in the old days of shadowing the world of the character you were writing about. Now if I want to write a story from the perspective of a one-armed radioactive chicken-plucker from Lithuania, it is almost certain that no matter how bizarre or specific the topic or point of view, someone somewhere has posted it on You-Tube or Wikipedia or some other address on the world wide web. The web truly is world-wide with possibly more data available to people’s fingertips in an hour, than people had access to in their entire lives a few decades ago. It began as a river of information that turned into an ocean. And it is one that I make use of as much as anyone. In fact, as I have recently discovered with my daughter, it is now acceptable for children to make use of it for science reports and other academic pursuits, it has become so mainstream. I remember when something you got off the internet ‘didn’t count’ for school research homework. Yes, I’m getting old.

However, one thing I have discovered is that nothing can replace the weight of actual experience. Whether or not a police officer is a good writer depends on the police officer and what he/she likes to do on the side, but the fact is that no one can write about police work with the same authority as someone who does it every day. Can writers run and try out for the police academy when they want to write a short story involving crime?  Not usually. However, there are fun things that one can do to increase experience not gained through reading on a computer. For that specific example, your local police station will tell you that you can go on ride-alongs in your district.

But one thing that has been indispensable in my job, and is available to anyone who wants to learn more about disasters or emergencies and the workings of the agencies who handle them, from public health, to local emergency management, is participating in exercises.

Most urban areas have them, and depending on the types of exercises, you don’t have to be a local responder to take part. Many of these exercises call for volunteer victims. If it is a decontamination exercise, you have the opportunity to get into your bathing suit and ‘be contaminated’ by whatever they have in the scenario, and then be deconned to assist the local hospital to figure out what to do with you. If it is a medical surge exercise, you have the opportunity to get made up like a zombie apocalypse victim or victim from a horror flick, complete with dripping gunshot or axe wounds, and let the local EMS transport you where the hospital then triages you. Or you can be a hysterical parent of one of the ‘victims’. In terms of the role-play, it’s like being in a grown-up game of Dungeons and Dragons, except far more real.

Last Friday, I participated in one of our local exercises, and one of my volunteer victims should have won an Oscar. I won’t go into the details of the exercise, but it dawned on me how valuable an experience that was, not only for us emergency preparedness and response folks, but also for citizens, and other people who want to get a sense of how the system works from the inside. It is a terrific and fun opportunity for writers to get to know local emergency response procedures and what things might look like in an emergency of various sorts.

I just got permission to, at some point, create a zombie apocalypse exercise, since it was discovered that it only cost the CDC $87 to publicize their zombie-based disaster. I’ve been wanting them to do that for years. So hopefully, in the next year or so, we’ll see a zombie disaster exercise that you can all participate in. Keep your eyes peeled, and if this comes to fruition, I will proudly shine my Geek symbol into the sky above Denver in a call for all volunteers to be victim/zombies and those who are interested can get a terrific and useful glimpse into emergency operations.

But whether or not we are allowed to do this particular incarnation of emergency operations exericise, if you are a writer, you should consider the value of exercises as experiences in understanding not only the resources and agencies you live with and call on, but in understanding how we learn to improve those systems. So the next time you want to write about a disaster in your book, or even a local emergency, look up your local emergency management office. It’s something you should know anyway, since you should be familiar with your counties’ emergency operations plan. Their contact information is available on the internet. Or call your local police or sheriff’s office, sometimes they are one and the same in rural areas. Ask how to get involved in exercises as a volunteer in your area and help out emergency preparedness and response personnel, and get really cool experiences for your stories at the same time!

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We are closing membership applications for now. If you have sent one in and have not heard from us yet, you will be getting a response shortly.

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We do a number of challenges at Denver Fiction Writers. These result in some interesting short stories and a chance to see us stretch our comfort zone. Some of us have to wait until the inspiration strikes.

I know. If you just wait for inspiration, you’ll never get any writing done. As writer, I tend to have a backlog of ideas though. When I write, I stick any ideas that come up in a file and then I have those to go back on once I finish my current project.

Getting ideas is a whole nother ball game. I’ve gotten them from watching clouds, from crazy dreams, and magazine clippings. If one idea meshes with another, I combine them until I think I have enough for a story.

When it comes to challenges, I tend to the be the late one. I’ve only made one by the deadline. That’s not an excuse not to do them. Stretching your writing wings is important. It lets you play with other worlds and toy with words. What writer wouldn’t want to do that?

I’m just slow.

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Denver Fiction Writers is now accepting new members. If you would like to join us, please fill out our membership submission form. Update: Membership is currently closed. There will be a new post when we are accepting new members again.

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1. Join Us

I’m always amused by the English language. There is a joke (button/Tshirt) that says the English language leads nice languages down back alleys, then beats them and steals words and grammar from it, leaving the language to die. We have nothing on the Japanese, who has a whole alphabet (syllabry if you’re nasty) dedicated to stuff they’ve taken from other languages not counting the apprehension of an entire system of pictographs from another language.

That being said, English is a living language. It’s used around the world and can vary night and day by region. Think about it this way. I took seven years of Spanish between middle and high school. Yet, I was ill prepared to be an exchange student in Mexico. How you may be asking? Well the way you ask for the check in Spain will get you beaten up in Mexico, mainly because it’s not nice to ask the waiter to masturbate for you.

The point is, what you learn in school doesn’t apply in real life. That goes for English too.

I’m sure you heard the news today that Oxford is dropping the serial comma from their style book. This has been a trend in writing for a while. Both AP and Chicago Style allow for no comma before ‘and’. In fiction writing style guides may or may not be used but I know, I’ve confused a few of my fellow critiquers by using AP style in my novel and short story. (Hey, it confused me too. Taught me to be clear about what I was doing when I ask for line edits.)

The shock and aw over what goes where in a sentence (is there punctuation rules in any other language as complicated as those in the English language?) depends on what you were taught in school, what you had to use to work and what the folks around you use. As a living language, words and punctuation change all the time, despite dictionaries and style guides.

Word usage is what really gets me though. I’m sure you heard in school that contractions are not really words and should never be used, only to have them appear on spelling tests the next year? There have been screaming matches at the use of a lot. Or in my own manuscripts I’ve had editors and critiques tell me to use all right instead of alright. Then the next batch will tell me that alright is correct. Hell, in Word, which I have set in AP Style finds alright correct in the former sentence and incorrect in the latter.

The key is to be consistent. Once you decide how to present your prose stick to that. If your publisher has a style guide they want used they’ll tell you (or put it in the submission guidelines. I have seven versions of ‘Get’em While You Can’ because of grammar requests differ depending on market.) It’s not going to kill you to remove the comma before ‘and’.

I’d say goodbye to the serial comma but I haven’t used it in years.

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Sorry for the outage. We have moved servers. So back to writing!!

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It’s been an interesting year in my writing career for me.

I’ve had my first print publication from Cutting Block Press, to be released in August in their new anthology, Tattered Souls 2.

I’ve been to my first convention as an author with something being sold and celebrated at the convention. There, I signed my first autograph for a complete stranger.

And now I’m taking on my first novel editing commission as a freelance editor from someone I didn’t personally know.

It’s been pretty amazing. I’d like to describe all these processes, so you can see what they’re like from the inside.

I submitted ‘Becka’, my horror novella, to a few places before Cutting Block Press. I approached the submission process with a strong amount of confidence in the work. I’ve submitted short stories before, to lots of places. Following standard advice at the time, I usually submitted with the philosophy that if you start at the top (in pay terms) and go by what genre and general type of story the magazine likes, you’ll eventually get there. That didn’t really happen.

With ‘Becka’, I had a much smaller field to go through – it’s not easy getting novella length work into print. But I knew it was a fantastic story (no false modesty here). And so I approached it with the attitude of finding a worthy home for it – somewhere that it would fit in to the attitude and desires and body of work of the press in question. The second place I looked happened to be Cutting Block, and I sent it off really hoping they would accept it, because they were right for the story. And it got accepted.

Later I found out they were having a release party for it at the World Horror Convention in Austin, which happens to be a place where I have relatives. I also had a friend who wanted to take me to Florida and could sort of fold a trip to the convention into the general vacation. Now, let’s be clear: that meant I didn’t have to pay anything in particular for this trip. Travel costs, convention entry, all covered. As an ENTRY LEVEL published writer, I would strongly recommend not spending much to go to conventions where your stuff is published – it’s fun and exciting, but makes zero financial sense and there’s not that big a boost to your career. Go to your local ones, because they offer so many benefits that it’s worth the entry costs. But when you factor in hotels and flights, better wait till your career demands it.

That said, I learned a lot. I mostly learned about the horror community. Now, be aware that I’m comparing it to the SF/Fantasy community, which is mostly where I spend my time. In comparison, I found that the horror convention was much smaller. Smaller even than my local Denver SF convention, Mile Hi Con. And this was the WORLD Horror Convention.

Everyone I met at the convention was wonderful. Nice people, friendly and interested (and interesting). Interestingly, everyone I met was a writer, or an artist, or a publisher, or an editor, or attending with one of the above. I do mean everyone. At Mile Hi Con you have a large surrounding flood of readers, appreciators and people who come to meet the writers/editors. Yes, nearly every SF fan is an aspiring writer somewhere in the closet of his soul, just like me. But at the horror convention, the attendees were almost universally in the biz. These people were primarily selling to one another.

It may be as a direct consequence of that, but I also felt that there was a strong uniformity to cover design, art and clothing of choice – all of which were black, with a strong iconic image and/or statement.

It was all very interesting and I enjoyed it greatly. There were some fascinating panels. As usual, the combat panel, staffed by ordinary looking people who could tear you into small pieces if necessary, dissolved into anecdotes – they do that at the SF conventions too and it’s always a blast. I had a great time manning the booth for Cutting Block, quizzing anybody who sat with me about aspects of the business that I wasn’t fully familiar with yet. Learned a lot there, too, especially about when it is and isn’t useful to sell your own books. And I signed an autograph or two for people I’d never met, which I count as a landmark too.

Good stuff, and I had a great time. Conclusions: there’s lots of room for innovative new writers in the horror field, and make sure you spend your money wisely when considering conventions.

And finally, the freelance editing section of my website garnered a customer for the first time. As you know if you’ve been reading this site or following me on Twitter, the marvelous Jeff Kirvin got me into the whole editing thing, flooring me a year ago or so by asking me to do this job I’d never considered at all. Like Miles Vorkosigan, I never thought this was a job that had any reference to me, but I took to it like a bat to warm blood. The term addiction may be useful here.

So these are the landmarks of my career recently. It’s not all been roses – I seem to be rather stuck in terms of getting any writing of my own done recently, for example. I’ve been through patches like that before, however. And health issues have really interfered with things in the last months. But that’s hopefully going to turn around.

The future looks interesting. Thanks so much for being part of it. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have work to do…

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