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The End of the Marathon

Holy Snikeys, squiders, how is it Thursday already? Between it being the last week of the critique marathon and having chapters due to my in-person critique group for the meeting this weekend, I feel like I’m behind on everything else.

But, yes, this is it. The end. Week 12 of the 12-week critique marathon. I’ve got Chapter 8 up for this week, which is kind of funny to me, because this is the same chapter I got through last time I ran Book 1 through the marathon, except it used to be Chapter 9, so we’ve actually gotten worse.

Except not really. I took two weeks off (due to travel) and had to rewrite two chapters (3 and 5) due to the rules of the marathon, and the resulting rewrites are much much stronger. Who knew that having people call you on your bull would make you actually fix it, and hey, make it better.

(I mean, everyone. That’s the point of critique.)

So now, moving on, I shall have to go through the rest of the revision without people calling me on it, and I’m a little worried that I’m going to fall back into my lazy ways without the constant feedback.

I will still have my in-person group, who is also lovely, but that’s once a month, so instead of getting through 3-4 chapters a month, I shall be down to 2 (and I’m unsure if there’s a standard for when to rewrite versus just pushing on. I shall have to ask.). Feedback-wise, at least. Hopefully I’m getting through 3-4 on my own, and then I’ll have margin.

The winter marathon typically starts at the beginning of January, so there is the possibility that I can run the second half of the book through then (the book is 30 chapters) but I would also, you know, not like to be revising this book for the rest of my life.

On the other hand, I am a little weary. Aside from receiving critiques one must, of course, give critiques, and that does mean there’s a few hours a week going to critiquing versus working on my own stuff.

(Although there’s also the possibility that I will procrastinate my own stuff, but I don’t tend to procrastinate critiquing other stuff.)

We shall just have to see how it all goes down, I guess.

I need to do some other stuff too. Figure out what we’re doing about SkillShare, for one. Send out my newsletter.

But the general plan moving forward is to spend my free time next week updating the current draft with feedback from my in-person group (after the meeting Sunday), then updating based on the last two weeks of the marathon, and then just moving along on my own. I may try to keep the Monday-per-chapter deadline to make sure I’m moving along.

Anyway, wish me luck!

The Workers Have Descended

Hey-ho, everybody! Sorry for going all incommunicado on you this week.

As you know, we had two major disasters in May and June with the basement flood and the tornado. June and July was spent on clean-up (well, actually, the remediation people were here last week to dry the last of the basement, remove mold, and spray stuff places) and so now we focus on putting things back together.

There’s two distinct areas of work:

the yard (tornado damage)
the basement (flood damage)

In terms of the yard, we’ve had the fence replaced. Next step is removing the two damaged trees that are still standing (on the schedule for the end of September), finding some way to shade the patio (since the tree that did so is now deceased), and re-landscaping (though we can’t put in new trees until the old ones are removed). The fence was the big thing, and the rest can get done whenever.

But the basement. Oh, the basement.

The basement has always been hard for us. Basements are kind of weird in general. I’ve almost always had them, because tornados are a thing (if normally rare) but we’ve never utilized them well.

In fact, the basement of one of my childhood homes was the setting of a re-occurring nightmare I had, despite the fact that it was arguably the nicest basement we ever had.

We don’t need the space; we don’t even need to go down there on a regular basis because our laundry is on the main floor. All attempts at making it a useable space that people wanted to hang out in on a regular basis have thus far failed.

But because the basement is literally in pieces we decided we’d try to put it back together in a way that made it more useful.

This includes:

the addition of an egress window so people don’t die if trapped in the basement
a door between the hallway and the “bedroom” so it could indeed be used as one if someone wanted
a new hallway to close the finished portion (currently nonexistent thanks to the flood) off from the unfinished
a complete redo of the basement bathroom, which has always looked vaguely like it was leftover from the 1970s and hadn’t been cleaned since then, no matter how many times you actually cleaned it
- including the addition of a utility sink closet

My spouse has never been one to procrastinate, so since a plan has been put into motion, into motion it must be. In theory having work people in the house shouldn’t distract me but in practice it is wildly disruptive and I can’t think.

Also we’re doing some of the work ourselves, which means I get dragged off to hold thing or give opinions, invariably right when I finally get moving on something.

(I realize this is all very first world problem-y. I have a house! It mostly works! Blogging in general is very first world-y.)

All this to say that I might be spotty on my posting schedule for the next month or so.

(The egress window is done, the drywall – new door frames, walls, closets – is being done as we speak. This weekend will be the new shower and lighting. Somewhere painting must go. Yay. The doors and then flooring – not carpet, never again carpet – and then finally furniture and bathroom fixtures.)

I hope you’re getting everything done that you want to be, squiders! See you next week.

Promo: Pirate Gold

Good morning, squiders! I’ve got a pirate-themed anthology for you guys today! (I love pirates. I’m going to write a pirate novel some day.) Take a look!

Action and Adventure, Paranormal Fantasy, Lovecraftian, Anthology

Date Published: July 31, 2023

Publisher: Dragon Soul Press

photo add-to-goodreads-button_zpsc7b3c634.png

Treasure is within reach.

Nineteen original tales of swashbuckling glory are at your fingertips in this anthology. From pirates lured into traps, treasure hunting gone wrong, and epic battles on the open sea. From vengeful ghosts to gruesome mutinies. Living on the edge comes with high costs.

Featuring stories by Paulene Turner, James Romag, Maeve A. Baird, Matthew Fryer, Isa Ottoni, Bianca Breen, Charles Kyffhausen, Allison Tebo, Douglas Allen Gohl, Edgar Mahaffey, Jennifer Strassel, Stephen A. Roddewig, Robert Allen Lupton, K. Anders, Barend Nieuwstraten III, Melody Bowles, and C.L. Hart.

The Quest for Captain Sammy’s Treasure

Five centuries ago, Captain Sammy buried his treasure in an unlikely location before letting the sun burn his body to ash to avoid becoming a vampire. Now the spectral pirate is back in the Jungle of Kled to reclaim his treasure, accompanied by two unusual friends.

Rilpu is a young sorceress born as a serpent but transformed into a humanoid female by a spell. The wizard Zkauba hails from the doomed world of Yaddith. They are soon joined by an impressive companion: Yadira, the daughter of Nyarlathotep. However, it is possible that even Nyarlathotep’s daughter may not be able to defeat the abomination standing in the blighted clearing under the pedestal where Captain Sammy’s treasure is hidden.

Do the ghostly pirate captain and his friends have a chance of reclaiming the treasure and continuing their mission to save the Cosmos from destruction or are they destined to fail?

About the Author

C. L. Hart, the owner and sole employee of Naughty Netherworld Press, is spoken of in hushed tones. She is described as The Mad Scribe of the Northeastern Colorado Plains, The Terrible Old Woman, and The Author That Should Not Be.

When not penning sanity-destroying works of dystopian fiction, Lovecraftian fantasy, or old-school horror with the occasional sweet romance thrown in to upset the cosmic apple cart, Ms. Hart enjoys creating baked goods she hopes will be considered palatable.

Ms. Hart shares a home in a remote rural town of 134 souls with her adult son and three cats. Her sense of fashion is best described as Early Twenty-First Century Unmade Bed. This disabled former nurse can usually be found arguing with herself about subplots or rehabilitating eldritch horrors.

Follow C. L. Hart

C. L. Hart Amazon Author Page

Naughty Netherworld Press Blog

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Excerpt:

(My apologies, squiders, I think the excerpt they sent me got oddly cut off. Enjoy what I have!)

Darkness and ominous silence dominated the Jungle of Kled. Strange towering trees moving in ways that defied explanation cast shadows that shimmered and danced. Each rustle in the darkness represented a potential threat, and every shadow teemed with unseen danger. A network of twisted vines snaked through the underbrush, their thick tendrils blocking any light that might have penetrated the canopy above.

A palpable sense of dread filled the air as strange and terrifying cries echoed from the shadows. The flapping of massive leathery wings could be heard as monstrous creatures ascended into the dark green sky. Insects of enormous size buzzed and crawled across toxic flowers. The feeling of being watched was ever-present, a sense of malice stalking every step.

It was into this scene that three peculiar travelers fell from an ovoid of light the color of key lime pie filling. Despite the bumpy landing, the first of the trio seemed unperturbed. This sturdy, mature gentleman quickly righted himself, doing a jaunty jig in the air, his silver and gold curls bouncing as he moved.

WriYe and Characters

haHA we have caught up. Good job, team.

August’s prompt is: What character type always appears?

We’ve talked about character archetypes here on the blog before. But I suspect what the question is actually asking is what sorts of characters do I tend to use in my own stories.

Hold on, let me think.

That’s a hard one. On one hand, you want to be like, “Oh no, I don’t have character types, everyone is a unique and special snowflake because each story is unique and different!” But on the other hand, that’s a load of crap. Humans are creatures of habit; we have things we like and patterns we fall into, and that includes writers as much as everyone else.

I went back and looked at my archetype posts to see if that was going to help, but kind of the point of the posts was that there’s a lot of variation to what counts as an archetype, and that characters can be different archetypes at different points in the story, so, uh, it wasn’t. Helpful.

But I am having a hard time thinking of characters that I use in all, or even most, stories. Are there repetitions across all my stories? Oh, absolutely. But ones for all or most stories? Not as much.

I guess I have a sweet spot for goofy sidekicks, but that’s really uneven. I do like my characters to have siblings, especially older ones, but even that’s only a handful of stories. Animal sidekicks? That’s, uh, at least two stories. Maybe only two stories. Frustrating mentors? That might actually only be one story (Across Worlds with You, currently coming out once a month at Turtleduck Press) but I really like her.

Maybe it’s more obvious to someone else looking at my stories, or maybe if I consciously took every character from every novel/novella I’d ever written and put them next to each other, the patterns would be easy to see. I suspect a lot of my main characters tend to be fairly similar in personality (which we shall call “Kit MC Personality Alpha” because why not) but I’m not sure how exactly I would quantify them.

So, uh, I don’t know! But it’s nice to have a prompt that’s new and actually made me think for a bit.

See you Thursday, squiders!

WriYe and Giving Up

Howdy howdy, squiders. Let’s continue with our catch-up, shall we?

July’s prompt is: When to give up on a novel/story. Do you ever?

The short answer is: yes. Yes, I do.

But I really, really don’t like to.

Since I started writing seriously in 2006, I have started many, many stories of varying types. Short stories, novels, novellas. One musical that really never made it anywhere. A couple of serial stories. (Speaking of which, Part 3 of Across Worlds with You went live yesterday.) One screenplay. A couple of children’s books. A whole series of nonfiction books.

Anyway, you get the point.

I tend to write short stories in a single sitting, but I normally outline the story in a different session before I start writing. If I can’t get the outline to work, I don’t write it. I guess that’s true across the board, actually. It’s very telling if you can’t get the basic shape of the story.

Not to say that having a complete outline will save you, in the end. In most cases, I can get to the end of a draft if I’ve outlined (and is partially why I outline, after too many stories where I had to pivot in the middle because I didn’t think things through). But not always. If you guys remember, I spent most of…2020? on that changeling novel that ended up not working at all. That was really the first time that my process had failed me, where I couldn’t get the story to fit what it needed to be.

Writing can be awful, tedious, frustrating, and depressing. (Not always! I’ve had drafts that I floated through, easy as pie.) That doesn’t necessarily mean there is something wrong with the story itself. Sometimes you can’t make time, or can’t focus, or any number of things that don’t have anything to do with a story’s viability. And sometimes a story isn’t working for you personally, not because anything is wrong with it in general.

(My mother asked me to ghostwrite a middle grade historical mystery for her, once, and I couldn’t get through it. I am not a fan of historical fiction and it turns out that no amount of money is worth it to me to write something that I dislike. Plus I didn’t–and still don’t–have experience with MG or historical fiction.)

I think over time you gain an instinct as to whether something is wrong with the story or with your process (or life generally getting in the way). I suspect all stories are ultimately fixable. But are you willing to put in the time? The effort? Is it worth it to you to fight with it to make it work?

That varies person to person and story to story. And it’s okay if the answer is no.

Probably won’t see you until next week, squiders. Happy August!

Better than the Book: Good Omens

I know this is an unpopular opinion, but I don’t necessarily like a lot of Neil Gaiman’s novels. They’re excellent on worldbuilding and characters but not always the best on, well, plot. But I do like Good Omens. It’s funny, it’s witty, and it’s clever. What is not to love? An angel and a demon work together to avoid the apocalypse.

(It’s also what got me into the Discworld novels, which I am very slowly working through and enjoy quite a bit.)

When Amazon said they were going to make a miniseries of Good Omens, and that they’d secured Neil Gaiman to do the screenplay, it seemed the best possible outcome. A miniseries isn’t a movie–you can fit a lot more into it, so it’s closer to the book. And it had excellent casting with David Tennant and Michael Sheen.

If you haven’t seen the miniseries, you really should, by the way.

And I would say that the miniseries is better than the book. If you read the book, Aziraphale and Crowley are present throughout, but they’re less fleshed out, and they’re not necessarily the most…useful characters. They kind of bumble through the whole book.

The miniseries really allowed the characters and worldbuilding to flourish. Heaven and Hell are such separate and distinct aesthetics, and they make perfect sense, and, without changing the plot too much, Crowley and Aziraphale have much more agency and really step into the parts they should have had all along.

(Also, there’s a second season coming out TOMORROW. Ask me how many times I’ve watched the trailer. I’m so very excited. It looks amazing. I was a little hesitant when I heard they were going to do a second season, but I guess it’s based off of notes from a potential sequel that never got written.)

Basically, they took the book, and somehow made it even better. It truly is amazing.

Thoughts, squiders? Excited for Good Omens season 2?

WriYe and the Creative Well

Onto June’s prompt! Moving right along. Be caught up in no time at all.

June’s prompt: Non-writing hobbies that refill your creative well.

At least this one is self explanatory!

I definitely agree with having hobbies outside of writing, both creative and non-creative ones. Letting your brain focus on other things actually makes it easier to come up with solutions to problems or other issues you might run into while writing. I think we’ve probably all come up across an issue where we feel like we’re just banging our heads against it, getting nothing accomplished.

Doing something else is often the answer.

So, my hobbies.

I like to consume other media when I hit a bit of a spot. Video games, movies, TV shows, books. (Especially books.) Sometimes I’ll look at craft–how the plot is crafted, how they’re dealing with specific aspects of storytelling–but a lot of times I just consume. I tend to think about stories after I consume them, analyzing them and playing out other possibilities in my head.

One thing leads to another, the ol’ brain gears get some lubricant, and off we go.

Physical activities are also helpful–going for a walk, especially by myself, exercising, sitting and slowly eating or drinking something, etc.

Other creative things can also be useful. Traditionally I’ve done sewing (I used to do a lot of cosplay) which can be kind of repetitive and mindless in places. Nowadays I mostly draw, as you can take that anywhere with you without a lot of extra supplies. Requires a bit more concentration, but it still helps.

Well, squiders, what helps you when you get stuck? Or when you need to replenish your motivation?

Better than the Book: The Last Unicorn

Good morning, squiders! This week, in our continuing series, we’re looking at the Last Unicorn. If you’re unfamiliar with the book or the movie, the book was written by Peter S. Beagle and published in 1968, and the movie came out in 1982 and is TERRIFYING.

Seriously, what were children’s movies in the ’80s. No wonder we all grew up the way we did.

My grandmother owned the Last Unicorn on VHS, and every so often, I could convince my sister/cousins to dig it out and watch it at family events. The movie is classic Rankin/Bass (think the animated ’70s version of the Hobbit) and the Red Bull was (and is, we recently rewatched the movie) unnecessarily scary. I wasn’t ever a horse child, but this movie did get me onto the unicorn train.

(There was a children’s book series called The Secret of the Unicorn Queen that I was super into.)

The movie is definitely worth a watch if you’ve never seen it, and it’s got some pretty impressive actors on it for being from the era before A-listers were the only people who could voice an animated feature. And the music is really great.

Like Jurassic Park, except even more so, I saw the movie before reading the book. I think I was…five or six when I first saw the Last Unicorn, and I probably didn’t hunt down the book until my late teens or early 20s.

But unlike Jurassic Park, I wouldn’t say that there’s a clear winner between the movie and the book in my eyes. The book is also really good! There are aspects of it that I do like better than the movie version (character personality stuff, the way some things are explained). But there are also things that are better in the movie (again, some character personalities, some other plot points, the Red Bull).

Thoughts on the Last Unicorn, squiders? Thoughts on ’80s kids’ movies?

WriYe and Genre

Still playing catch-up, squiders! We’re doing May this week.

May’s prompt: What genre scares you the most?

So much interpretation on the prompts this year. Oh well! This one I’m going to say means what genre scares you the most to write. Like, what sounds like the hardest.

There are many genres that I don’t have any interest in writing. They’re not necessarily “scary” per se, just not interesting.

But ones that are actually scary…hmmm.

Romance is scary on some levels. I always worry that it’s coming across as silly, or that I’m not properly explaining things in a realistic manner. I mean, I’ve never had complaints, but maybe it’s only a matter of time.

Mystery is scary. I love mysteries, but they seem very hard to write. You’ve got to have enough possibilities in play that your reader can’t predict what’s going to happen, and you’ve got to know exactly how everything went down without accidentally foreshadowing things too early.

I wrote a cozy mystery a few years ago for Nanowrimo, if you’ll remember. I was pretty pleased with it–a good first try, in my opinion–but it definitely has issues. A little light in the second half on twists and whatnot. I’d love to fix it (this goes back to last week, when in my perfect year I’d be getting stories revised faster) but it’s a couple stories back on the queue.

Hmmm. Not sure anything else I write or would like to write is “scary,” in my mind.

Is that arrogant? Maybe. But part of writing is because it’s fun, and to explore things, and to try new things. If it’s scary–too scary–then what’s the point?

Better than the Book: Jurassic Park

Hey-ho, squiders! This is the start of a maybe-ongoing series. The saying goes that the book is better than the movie, but have you ever come across a story where the opposite is true? Where you liked the movie (or TV show) better than the book?

I’m sure this is all subjective, so feel free to argue with me if you want!

I read a lot of Michael Crichton when I was a teenager. Sphere, Congo, Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park, Lost World. Big fan.

But I love Jurassic Park the movie more than I liked the book. (The Lost World movie is a mess.)

Part of this might be because I read the book after I saw the movie.

I was 10 when the movie came out, and it was the first PG-13 movie I ever saw. And, squiders, I loved it. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen it, honestly. I am anxiously awaiting the time when the small, mobile ones will be old enough to watch it with me. (The bigger, mobile one is older than I am when I saw it, but he doesn’t want to. In retrospect I think it’s because when he was 2 we went to a museum with a full-sized animatronic t-rex and that was a bit traumatic.)

(The T-Rex was a surprise for us all.)

I think I may have searched out Michael Crichton’s books after the movie, so it was a while before I got to reading Jurassic Park the book.

Often the complaints about books made into movies is the amount of things that are left out–side plots, characters, entire plot points, etc., because in almost all cases it’s impossible to adapt everything from a book into a 2- or 3-hour movie. In many cases I’ve also found that characters’ personalities are changed as well, which tends to really bother me.

All those things are true here. There’s characters in the book that don’t carry over to the movie, and the ones that do are different, sometimes in arbitrary ways. Different people get eaten by dinosaurs. John Hammond’s vision is completely different, and there’s the danger of the dinosaurs escaping the island. By all rights, I should have been annoyed by the discrepancy.

(That being said, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned to be more tolerant of changes in story between different mediums. A story can’t–and shouldn’t–be the same in different formats, but needs to be adapted to work in that particular form. For example, I’ve read Pillars of the Earth, watched the miniseries, and played the video game. All of them are different, but still good in their own form. And I once took a class on Coursera where each week we’d watch part of Fellowship of the Ring, read the same section in the book, and play that area in Lord of the Rings: Online. It’s actually quite fascinating.)

(Arguably where the issues arrive is when changes are made that change the core story.)

I think I’ve mentioned this before, but I do truly believe that whatever form you’re first exposed to for a story (assuming you liked it) tends to be your “base” for that story. I saw the movie first, so I like it better. Maybe if I had read the book first, I’d be chalking Jurassic Park up as another example of the book being better than the movie.

(Some stories, however, seem to work great in a number of forms with a number of changes. I don’t know how many variations on the Wizard of Oz I’ve consumed over the years, but I pretty much like all of them.)

(I don’t make the rules.)

What do you think, squiders? Thoughts on Jurassic Park specifically? Thoughts on whether seeing a movie first changes your perception?

Books by Kit Campbell