Top Ten Internet Horror DON'Ts (Part 2)

**Note: Clicking on the links throughout this article will take you to horror of varying types and degrees, from mildly unnerving to gory to existentially terrifying. If that kind of thing wigs you out too much, or that's just not what you're looking for, this is your warning. I also take no responsibility for any curses, brainwashing, sudden deaths, or other similarly odd events potentially connected to these links. And, like Arthur Weasley said, don't trust anything intelligent if you can't see where it keeps its brain. Oh, and spoilers are going to exist in this article.**

Well, I hope you’ve read the first five don'ts in the last post, as well as the top ten dos. If not, they are HERE, HERE, and HERE, in publication order. Once you've caught up, swing on back here and we'll go through the top five things not to take from internet horror. Or my top five, anyway.

5: DON'T Underestimate Your Audience

Yep, I made this point in the do section, but I want to harp on it more. I want to harp on it over and over and over again, because damn it, it's important.

Your readers are not stupid. Your audience, if you're creating, say, film, are not stupid. Please remember that. You have room to be subtle. Seriously, I cover this in more detail in the dos, I just wanted to really drive it home. So much internet horror is done by amateurs, and those amateurs can be talented… but by and large, they overexplain. They give the reader too much handholding, and inadvertently damage their own work.

4: DON'T Hide Everything, Otherwise You Have Nothing

Okay, this may be counter to what I just said, but… well, it's a balancing act. Even the smartest reader needs something to work with. If you hide everything… what's the point of your story? Writers see advice (Like the advice I gave.) saying to be subtle and not play your cards too soon. So, rather than overexplaining, writers underexplain. You see no sign of anything weird. The character is therefore scared of… the next plot point?

It's fine to have a mysterious entity in horror. H.P. Lovecraft was a master of it, rarely ever describing the otherworldly horrors he created. But even Lovecraft mentioned a creeping tentacle or a flash of color. So many internet horror writers have this tendency to write their story without anything to actually horrify. And, perhaps in the worst horror of all, it's starting to creep into traditionally published writing. Professional authors… I just can't, with that. Give the audience enough without giving them too much.

3: DON'T Forget the Polish

Now, I did say that passion would make people appreciate your work. But if you don't pay attention to the polish of your chosen craft, you're not going to rise to any height. If you're a writer, you need to know your grammar. You need to know how language flows. Film makers need to know about their angles, the use of focus, their editing techniques. That kind of thing is what moves an okay, likable work into something worth paying attention to.

Polish is something I would really like more of in the world of internet horror. You see it in some work. Don't Hug Me I'm Scared is very polished and put together. TheRussian Sleep Experiment is wonderful. But by and large, even some of the best work out there (Marble Hornets, Candle Cove, Tribe Twelve) lack a shine and shimmer that a little more attention would have brought them. They're wonderful, but I can't say that they're great technical creations.

2: DON'T Forget Your Twist

There are no original ideas left. Sorry, it's true. Everything has been done. There are only three stories, in the end. Or thirty six. Or nine. Whatever you want to pick, there are only a set number of actual plots. Your idea has likely been done before, too.

I know that I'm focusing a lot on creativity, but that's because it's a massive success of internet horror, when it works. It's also a massive failing because, even though I think the idea of gatekeepers in publishing is patently ridiculous, there is something to be said for mitigating clichés. It doesn't mean it's going to be good, but it won't be something seen a million times unless something actually happens to it that's different.

Your audience will love you if you do that. So will editors and critics. There's very little people enjoy more than seeing something expected actually turned around. It can be hard to come up with the idea, but when you do, it can be some of the most powerful fiction created.

1: DON'T. Pull. Your. Punches.

Ignore everything else in these four posts if you have to. Seriously. This is easily the most important thing I have to say in this whole thing: don't pull your punches. Whatever the reason you may have for it, conscious or not, pulling your punches will only harm the end work. You have to fully commit to the work, and this is where internet horror falls flat and falls hard. Okay, that's contradictory to a previous point saying that they do well in this, but again: those are the outlying standouts, not the massive bulk of the genre.

You can tell when someone put the forethought and love into a piece to make it really special. But you can also tell when someone doesn't, and they just want to get popular without trying. The first step to actually throwing solid punches is training it up. This is where learning comes in. The polish. The passion. All of it.

Your punches will be weak if you don’t work up your skill. But even if they're strong, you can kill yourself on it. If you’re worried about not pissing anyone off… you're dead. You're throwing shallower punches. You have no follow through. I was taught years ago that, if you're going to punch someone in the nose, you don't aim for their nose. You aim for the back of their head, and their entire head just happens to be in the way.

Pulling punches is a way to absolutely destroy any emotional impact you might have had. You can't keep people 100% happy and deliver a powerful story. If you don’t want to risk ever upsetting anyone ever, your work will be placid and gray.

"If everyone likes your work, but nobody loves it, it will fail." That's from Mark Rosewater, and it's an absolute truth when it comes to internet horror. 99.9% of work produced in the "genre" fails. No one really watches the videos or plays the games or reads the stories, and those who do… they don’t care enough to fight for the work in question. And the only way to make someone love something is to risk other people hating it. It's that simple. So for the love of god: Don't. Pull. Your. Punches.

And that is my final word on the matter. I hope this has been helpful to you. It was helpful for me to write it. Really sets some things clear in my head.

Until next time, lovelies,

Voss

Top Ten Internet Horror DON'Ts (Part 1)

**Note: Clicking on the links throughout this article will take you to horror of varying types and degrees, from mildly unnerving to gory to existentially terrifying. If that kind of thing wigs you out too much, or that's just not what you're looking for, this is your warning. I also take no responsibility for any curses, brainwashing, sudden deaths, or other similarly odd events potentially connected to these links. And, like Arthur Weasley said, don't trust anything intelligent if you can't see where it keeps its brain. Oh, and spoilers are going to exist in this article.**

So, the last couple posts, I went over the do's from internet horror as its own weird little genre. What we can learn about writing horror, and just about writing in general, from the online scarefest that's been blooming over the past decade or so.

But as many of you probably already know, internet horror is far from perfect. For every Candle Cove and Marble Hornets, there's a dozen "WHO WAS PHONE" and "Jane the Killer" stories to muddy the waters (Although WHO WAS PHONE is at least funny.). There's a lot to learn from all that bad horror about what we should absolutely avoid doing, too. And I've got ten of those nuggets plucked from the pile here.

You can read the do's, as well as my definition of internet horror, HERE in the first pair of articles. This set will be largely self contained, but there will likely still be references back to the first two, so I do recommend reading these all in order.

Now, enough of all the lead-in crap – let's get right to what we all want out of this: numbers in descending order!

10: DON'T Abuse Internal References

This is low on the list, since it's not always applicable, but I feel like it has to be said nonetheless. The world of internet horror is largely composed of Creative Commons elements reconfigured into something unique. Whether that's good or not is not the point here. What matters is that it makes for a very self-referential genre.

If you're going to do something like that, you have to do it well. Slenderman, the Rake, Jeff the Killer, and the Brutal Obscene Beast all get cursed by Smile Dog and Normal Porn for Normal People… that's not a good story. That's a mess, and it happens way too often. Well-done internal reference can be seen in works like EverymanHYBRID (Slenderman/the Rake), but the key is that it's brought in well. It makes sense. It works within the world and, perhaps most importantly, the elements that are borrowed and included are not all that exists. They're not even the main antagonistic forces. That honor falls to Habit in that universe, and Habit is an entirely original character created by the guys.

Outside of actual internet horror, I'd say this has the most application in Lovecraftian fiction. Sure, Nyarlathotep, Hastur, and the Hounds of Tindalos might all be hunting the same guy together… but I doubt it, and I doubt even more an author could make it work without some very original worldbuilding to tie the disparate elements together. And really, the same could be said when using any mythological elements. Use them carefully, know them well, and bring something original in, but don't overuse any of it.

9: DON'T Assume Your First Idea is Clever and Amazing

It's not. I would put money on the first idea you have for something being trite, cliché, and generally predictable, in fact. It's not a mockery or me being rude or mean. You could say the same thing about my first idea for something, too. Our brain stores up ideas it's seen already. If we see a solution work once, our brain is designed to remember it, because from a survival standpoint, it makes sense to just do it the way you know for sure works.

That, however, is the absolute death of creativity. But the internet horror community seems largely ignorant of this fact. Almost every story in the internet horror community involves Uncanny Valley Creature #12 stalking Mary Sue/Marty Stu through a setting that is barely touched upon, causing insanity/sickness as well as electronic interference. Also this is the last journal entry Mary Sue/Marty Stu made. It's done over and over because there are several well-created, popular internet horror pieces that follow this formula. The plot is stored in your brain already, and it leaps out when presented with an opportunity.

I guarantee that, when you see a call or a specific theme, you come up with a half dozen ideas that you've seen somewhere else before you get to something worth dealing with. You may drop everything rapidly, but it comes up nonetheless. That doesn't mean you should write it. Well, not normally…

8: DON'T Just Reuse Someone's Idea (Caveat Incoming)

To go along with the last point, you can't just find a successful idea and do it over with a different veneer. You have to change something to make it work out as something worth doing. I mentioned that in the do's, but it's important. It's so important, and especially in internet horror, it's way too prevalent.

This phenomenon is really easily seen with Slenderman. So many Slenderman based creations floating out there, to the point where it has passed out of the internet and into the mainstream. And unfortunately, the mainstream does Slenderman… poorly, as a rule. Take a look at the Marble Hornets movie to see that in full glory… or, actually, don't. It's so bad. It's so bad, guys. Not only did they not understand what made Marble Hornets work, the changes they made… just didn't work. They weren't original. Instead, it actually took something that had some interesting elements, something original, and shaved off all the edges to fit it into the same box we've seen a hundred times in every forgettable horror movie.

Don't be Always Watching. Please, please, please.

7: DON'T Rely on Blood and Gore

I praised internet horror for subtlety… but again, that's the really good stuff, the stuff worth learning from. For the most part, the common horror tactic of "let's drop blood everywhere" is so overused. I'm a fan of splatterpunk, personally, but there's a way to eviscerate hundreds of people and make it actually work. Read Peel and Eat Buffet by Vincent W. Sakowski to see it well-used. Assuming you have a strong enough stomach.

This isn't a large, complicated point: use your blood and intestines sparingly. They're expensive, and they're best left implied, in my opinion.

6: DON'T Rely on Aesthetics

Internet horror is full of aesthetic terror. Pictures and videos, yes, but in a genre that has an unfortunate tendency to leave out grounding details, the horrific entities are often described in excessive detail, often to the point of just throwing up a photograph.

That is not enough, no matter what anyone thinks. Even the most unnerving pictures won't save a story. Jeff the Killer is popular, but widely acknowledged as just straight up bad. The plot is weak, the writing is awful, the characters are ridiculous. The image associated with Jeff the Killer is terrifying, but if you don't stop there, if you look at anything beyond the aesthetics, it falls apart. You have to bring more than some scary imagery to your story, whatever the medium. Otherwise, you end up with a mess. You end up with, at best, a work that will only ever be known for one, fleeting element of it.

And those are your first five don'ts. Tomorrow, we'll have the top five, and the end of a very fun series for me to work on. I like these bigger collections of blog posts… so you could safely expect more, most likely.

A Conning I Shall Go... Again

It's that time of year again. Normal people are buying chocolates and roses and pretty cards.

Which means I'm packing up books and clothes and makeup and all sorts of other things I'm going to need for Radcon 6C. Yes, I do need the makeup. Why?

Because I'm bringing Rocky to Radcon this year.

Yep. That Rocky.

And on top of all that, the ConCom's got me running ragged this year... mostly because I kind of asked them to. And I don't have much to complain about, I suppose. Frog Jones has, if I counted correctly, 14 panels to attend to this weekend. He also brings this on himself... but it puts my six in perspective.

So Friday, I'll be chatting it up with folks on what it's like to write under multiple pen names (courtesy of The Other Me), then later be going over one of my favorites: tropes. That panel's a bit terrifying, because they stuck me on it with the writer guest of honor, Jim C. Hines. Yeah. But I'll manage. And then, of course, Rocky that night, which promises to be amazing.

Then comes Saturday. Myself and some others go over tips for including more minority, QUILTBAG+, and female fans into the still largely homogeneous geek community. Should be entertaining, at least. Then that night, I'm back for a talk on gender and sexuality. I guess Saturday is my social justice day this con.

And of course, Sunday is a nice, light workload. A single panel, talking about cryptozoology. Which I love, if you didn't know. Hopefully a good end to what looks like it might be a really good con.

And just like last year, me and mine will be in a dealer's room, trying to schlep our word-monkey output to the masses. If you're at the con, bychance, stop on by and take a look at the Moses Lake Muses shop.

And now, I fear I must away... because I still have a lot of crap to pack up, and some serious wordsmithing to get to so this week isn't a total bust. Tata, for now, my lovelies,

Voss

Pre-Order: The Park

12 Contestants

20,000,000 Dollars

1 Survivor

http://www.amazon.com/Park-Voss-Foster-ebook/dp/B00QT0UWXA/

Available for pre-order at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Park-Voss-Foster-ebook/dp/B00QT0UWXA/

Releases January 1st, 2015

For more information, check out The Park tab at the top of the page, or subscribe to my newsletter to keep up with all new releases and get information before it hits anywhere else.

King Jester Novellas

Hello, all! I'm sorry I haven't been here as much as I would like. My laptop charger is currently... well... dead. The new one is on it's way and, for the time being, I'm using a friend's spare computer.

So, I'm sure by now that all my regular readers know about the King Jester books. While the last one won't be out until next year, I'm already feeling a little pang of pain to see my babies go. But as I was reading through, I got some ideas.

So I'm making the announcement here: the King Jester books are not done with just the trilogy. The 'Tales from Zirkua' novellas are already in the works on my end, and I'll be able to devote a lot more time to them once NaNoWriMo is done and over with.

'Tales from Zirkua' will give you the chance to see more of the characters we love. Or at least I love. Right now, there are six planned, each exploring the past of a separate character from the King Jester universe.

I hope you're all as excited as I am about this. I know I'll have a lot of fun with it, and I sincerely hope you'll have fun reading the books.

Ta-ta for now,
Voss

Snarkology Halloween Hop: Top Three Halloween Reads

Dead leaves. Heavy rain. Cold air. Sales on chocolate.

Is it any wonder I love Halloween? I mean, those are some of my favorite things. Throw some good vodka into the mix and I'm set for a week.

But Halloween inspires something else in me: it makes me want to curl up with something familiar, and something seasonal. That covers everything, too. A mug of hot chocolate. An old quilt. The same cat that sits in your lap in spite of the date even seems more special to me this time of year. And it affects how I read too. So, I present to you my top three Halloween reads in no particular order.

Harry Potter: I'm not entirely sure how Harry Potter ended up as a Halloween thing... and a Christmas thing... and a summer thing, too, in fact. But I remember Harry Potter marathons on TV leading up to Halloween. And getting ready to watch the movies always involved reading the books again, for me. Which is why I've read them 10+ times. So this one's a little bit more personal than the others on the list, but it brings up memories of Halloween for me just as much as say, Hocus Pocus or Halloweentown.

Berenice: Poe has always been one of my favorite authors, and not just for horror. But Halloween does always bring me back to that creep factor, and I can't think of another Poe story creepier than Berenice. The teeth. The disease. The psychosis. It's chilling and I love it. Hands down my favorite Poe story.

The Night Circus: And here it is. This book feels like a rainy day to me. Something beautiful to be savored while it lasts. Someone very very dear turned me onto it, and I'm so glad she did. It's pretty clear that I like circuses, I think. It's dark. It's magical. It's romantic. To me, The Night Circus embodies everything I want out of Halloween. Which is why, when leaves crunch underfoot, I find myself wanting to dive back in again.

So there it is. What are your favorite Halloween reads? Comment below, and don't forget to check out the other bloggers on this hop HERE!

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Friday Writer Roundup: 20,000 Names

Yikes. I've been so caught up in drafting, I've completely neglected the last few Friday Writer Roundups. My apologies. This book has stolen my attention quite effectively.

But I'm here today, however late, with one of my favorite resources: 20,000 Names.

When it comes to naming websites, it's not the most glamorous, but it's by far my favorite. It gives the ethnic origin, the meaning, and the traditional gender of all the names it lists. And, while I can't say for certain that they actually list 20,000 individual names on their website, it wouldn't surprise me if that number was at least close.

But there's another one I find almost as useful: the Social Security Administration's Baby Names Section. It only really helps with American names, for obvious reasons, but it has lists of the top hundred or so names for boys and girls in any decade from the 1880s to the 2000s. Which makes it awesome for NPC characters. Just give a guess to their age, subtract it from the date your work is set, and then go through that decade's listing until something catches your attention.

Of course, there are always other alternatives. SeventhSanctum has several name generators in its depths, including Angel Names, Vampire Names, and plain General Names. Another one that can be useful, and also make a very good breeding ground for procrastination, is Behind the Name's generator. You can customize your generator for several factors (origin, masculine/feminine, style), and have it provide you with a matching surname, or provide your own. The downside? It does one at a time only.

So, I hope you have a lovely rest of your Friday. And don't forget, there's still time to enter the drawing for free copies of Zirkua Fantastic and The Jester Prince.

Voss

Friday Writer Roundup: Tomato.es

Last year during NaNoWriMo, my Co-ML came up with an ingenious method to make our Nanites work their tails off. She started us off sprinting. Short bursts of writing (10-20 minutes) intermixed with 5-10 minute breaks. It was a way to show the Nanites who were 'too busy' that they only needed to devote an hour or two a day, whenever they could get it in. Fifteen minutes here, ten minutes there. Turns out, of course, that it wasn't an original idea, but she hadn't heard of it when she came up with it, so it was a totally awesome little brain-baby.

Well, I found something just as good, and it has it's own website. Today, I bring you the Pomodoro Technique, and a free supporting website, Tomato.es. The basis of Pomodoro is to increase productivity with the same basic principles that make sprinting work: concentrated periods of work, interspersed with regular breaks.

You work for twenty-five minutes, then mark off that twenty-five minute work session and move on to a five minute break. After four sets of twenty-five, you take a fifteen minute break. And it's that simple. It sounds a little strange, but it really works. Not only do you write words, but you condition yourself to write a lot of words in a short amount of time. I mean, you only have twenty-five minutes to work right now. You can't rely on more. So you'd better bang out some words. When you then don't use the Pomodoro Technique, you'll find that you're writing words faster in general, hence increasing overall productivity.

It's that simple. And the Internet is full of so many ways to work it. There are even apps you can download to help you, such as Pomodroido, Pomodoro Timer, and the desktop compatible, and very unobtrusive Tomighty. Or , of course, you can do it the simple and cheap way and just watch the clock, or use one of the thousand online timers out there. But if you, like me, would rather cut back on your workload as much as possible, and you have access to the Internet, you'll be best off with Tomato.es.

Voss

The Big Reveal

I think it's time for this. It's been a long time coming, but I think it's really, truly time to make the final announcement.

See, I live a double life. The one you've seen, Voss Foster's life, is the one that most people see. It's basically accurate, minus a few personal details I would simply rather not share. But everyone has those.

However, there's a whole separate life that I've been... not hiding, but certainly not making clearly public information.

I am Raven de Hart, author of gay erotica and erotic romance. Since the inclusion of her as a pen name, I have kept it mostly on the down low. My writer and reader friends know, for the most part, but that's about where it ends.

Until today. I made a statement about it on the Torquere Twitter account this morning, and just put up a corroborating statement on my Twitter account. So it's out in the open. I am a singular person, yes. But I have two brands, for lack of a better term. This way, no one accidentally picks up a steamy erotic book, not expecting it from Voss Foster. And it works in reverse--they know that, if it says Raven de Hart on the cover, it's not going to be PG.

So there it is: the secret is out in the open. I feel liberated: no more hiding anything, now. I am free. We are free?

There's freedom, at any rate.

Voss

Friday Writer Roundup: Sonar

One of the most embarrassing things that can happen to a writer is submitting a piece to a market that already rejected you. I mean, getting rejected once is bad enough as it is, but twice? From the same people? On the same piece? Now, not only do they not want it, but they're starting to question just how desperate/egotistical/insert adjective you are, subbing to them multiple times with this thing?

Well, those worries are ended (and for someone as paranoid as I am, it was a big worry) with Spacejock's Sonar Submission Tracker.

When you first open up Sonar, it can be a little intimidating. There's a touch of a learning curve to it, and the Manual that's provided is sometimes less than helpful, depending on what it is you need to do. But it's well worth the small amount of effort you put forward.

So let's go through it, just very quickly. The very first thing is to start a new file. Call it whatever you like. Mine is 'Submission Tracker.' Cut and dry, easy to find. Once you have that, you'll have this nice blank spreadsheet looking thing.

Now you load up your work(s), one at a time. This is where you can begin to see the first glimmer of hope—this program could rock. You go up to Works, click add, and enter in the vitals of each individual piece: the title, the word count, the genre, any description and comments you might have for it. You can even link to the actual file, right in here, so you can easily access it while you're going through Sonar. So, you set up MegaDoc, your novel about a robot crocodile that got infected by a corrupt Word file. It's all in there, and ready for step two.

Now you set up the markets. For the most part, your markets are probably going to just be the places you submit whatever pieces to, but if you have markets you submit to regularly, it wouldn't hurt to add them in. It's the same shtick for adding a market as it is to add a work. You go to the Markets tab, click Add, and begin. The name of the market, the editor, the guidelines, even all the contact information for them. And you've decided to submit MegaDoc to Corporate ArtSlayer Press, dedicated to wringing every bit of artistic merit out of their books before publication.

Again, we hit the tabs: Submission, Add. Then you pick your work, you pick your market, and you enter the date. Once you do that, it'll tell you exactly what's going on: MegaDoc <> 2014-08-22 <> Sent to Corporate ArtSlayer Press (Out 2 days). And it lets you see if you've sold it, too.

Now, this is where it becomes your safety net. Say that Corporate ArtSlayer doesn't take this genius manuscript, for whatever reason. Bad taste, most likely. It then sits there for a while as you mope and consider if you should maybe cut it down from 400,000 words. But then, as you're looking around one day, inspiration strikes: you should submit it. And you found the perfect press: Corporate ArtSlayer. So, you get ready to go and… wait… Sonar says I've subbed this to them already. Oh lordy lord, thank you for saving me, Sonar!

Now, there are other options for this, although I don't think any of them quite stack up to Sonar in usefulness. Duotrope, of course, has a submission tracking option for paying members, which also gives you access to the response data, something I very much miss. The Submission Grinder has the same exact setup, but they are A: still new, so not very well-known, and B: Free. It's a trade-off, really. Or, you could do what I did before I found Sonar: an Excel document or other spreadsheet. It works, but with Sonar being free, I'd say it's worth it.

Voss

Friday Writer Roundup: Microsoft Word

This week, I'm touching on something so ubiquitous in the modern writing world that it honestly didn't occur to me until now that I might want to do a feature on it. And, for once, my big, main selection isn't free. I, the master of frugality, am recommending that you pay for something out of your wordmonkey pittance of a salary. This week is word processors and for me, Microsoft Word is the alpha and the omega.

And it's not just because of my personal feelings. In general, if you intend to publish your work, it will probably, at one point, have to be in .doc format. It's just the way that the publishing industry works.

But aside from that Microsoft Word has been around for quite a while, and that's let it learn a few tricks. Aside from being a moderately simple word processor (Honestly, you don't normally touch 80% of the tools provided in the program.), it has Track Changes. Nowadays, most word processors have a Track Changes feature. This lets you (or someone else) make changes to a document without deleting the original, so that you, the author, can make a decision on how to change things, or whether you should change them at all.

Word's Track Changes feature is just better. I've tried many over the years, but Word's is the most user-friendly, the simplest, and the clearest. It may not seem like a big thing but, at least for this writer, a good, reliable Track Changes is very, very important. And Word also has a decent, though not perfect, spell check (I wouldn't trust the grammar checker a far as I could throw it, however… and given that it's just a string of ones and zeroes, that isn’t far.) and is very easy to use for basic formatting changes (Alignment, font size, italics, bold, et cetera.).

The biggest downside, of course, is the price. It's… steep. Not Photoshop steep, but steep for what amounts to an electronic sheet of paper. But I wouldn't switch to another program for a hundred bars of chocolate. And that, my friends, is saying something. I do love me some chocolate.

As always, there are alternatives. The big competitor is Scrivener. It's billed as a tool specifically for fiction writers. It includes planning and organizing tools for your notes, your plots, your chapters. All that good stuff. Personally, though? I can't stand Scrivener. A lot of my writer friends use it, and it works wonders for them. I just can't. It makes me want to throw things.

Another program that I recommend, despite my somewhat checkered past with it, is Open Office. And this one's actually free. It's designed to fill the void for people who can't get their hands on Microsoft Office for whatever reason, and it can actually save files in .doc format. However, I have had issues with it changing formatting when saving in a foreign file type like that. Putting whole paragraphs in all caps and such like that. I've also talked to a lot of people about that, and I seem to be the only one who ever had that issue. So take that as you will.

Aside from those big three, there are some interesting little processors scattered around, including Word's former competitor, Corel WordPerfect. You won't hear much about it anymore, but it still has a fairly faithful following. It's really not that much different from word, aside from having more control available for internal formatting and saving as a weird file type no publisher will touch. OmmWriter is one of a new school of word processors, designed for meditative writing and, theoretically, to help you enter the all important flow state. And another one I found and intend to play with is Q10. Perhaps that will, at long last, unseat Word as the crux of my writing. We'll see.

Any word processors you love that I missed? Let me know, and be sure to subscribe for more, and to see how my relationship with Q10 goes.

Voss

Shifting Gears

Lord, I have terrible titles, don't I? But it works.

See, with 'The Jester Prince' coming next Wednesday, and the third book just waiting for a single editing pass before I send it in to Prizm Books, I feel like playing somewhere else. I've been in the circus for a long time and I loved every second of it. But now... it's just time for a change.

I have a few projects still to be worked on, of course. My book about marionettes. My air pirate adventure novella. My big sci-fi series. And some smaller things, of course. Shorts and such. But lately, I've been bombarded with new ideas. Not all of them will turn out to be viable in the near future, but I'm confident that all of them can be placed, when the time comes.

I'll be sad to see the circus go, and I won't see it again, other than my final edits, until close to when book three comes out. Do I think it will be my last circus book? Well, I just have an answer for that one. It could be. Or not. I don't even know if it's going to be the last time I play in that world, yet. It's all up in the air.

What I have are possibilities. And those are good things to have.

Voss

Friday Writer Roundup: The Submission Grinder

This is one I'm particularly in love with. Does anyone remember Duotrope? I mean, Duotrope's still around, but they finally had to become a subscription site in order to cover their costs. For a long time, I missed them greatly. There just wasn't a replacement.

And then, along comes the new kid. Diabolical Plots'Submission Grinder.

It's great. It's almost like having Duotrope back in my life, which pleases me to no end. For anyone who never got to use Duotrope, it was the king of submission aggregators (and still is, actually, but I prefer free, and I prefer to offer you free tools, when possible). It had all the submissions categorized by genre, sub-genre, theme, word count, payscale, type of project, and a handful of other things. It was glorious.

Well, The Submission Grinder does pretty much the same thing. It lacks the subgenre category, which is a slight annoyance on occasion, but it also let's you search for markets with certain qualifications, such as SFWA and RWA Qualified. Which is awesome, from time to time. And, as with Duotrope, you can register in order to help you keep track of your submissions, as well as improve the data The Submission Grinder has to draw from.

Now, as always, there are alternatives. If you just want a listing of open markets, specifically speculative fiction, head over to Ralan.com. It doesn't have a search function, but it has categories based on pay, as well as a category for anthologies, one for contests, and one for miscellaneous things, like flash, poetry, and audio.

Another one, specifically for any erotica authors out and about here on my blog, is ERWA's Author Resources. Now, don't go here if you don't want to risk some explicit language, but, if you writer erotica/erotic romance, it's a good place to find not only anthologies and magazines, but also full-length markets.

And of course, there's Duotrope. It's not exorbitant in any sense of the word. $5 for a month or, if you go for a year subscription $50. I know a lot of authors who will spend that much just on their own website hosting, if not more. If you plan to write, or find yourself writing, a lot of short stories, I would say it's a good investment to at least consider making.

If you liked this and want to learn more about writing tools next week, pop up top and hit subscribe.

Voss

6 Lies Fantasy Writers Tell

6: Harry Potter? Yeah, it's all right.

5: I don't need to explain it. It's magic!

4: I didn't plan any of this. It just happened.

3: Maps? Who uses maps? I've got it all right up here.

2: My dragons/vampires/elves are different. I called them drakes/bloods/angelicks.

1: No, it's not Tolkienesque.

Friday Writer Roundup: Twine

And welcome once again to the Friday Writer Roundup. Today I bring you a piece of software very close to my heart, and possibly very close to the hearts of some of my readers. Did you ever read the Choose Your Own Adventure (or similar) books growing up? They were some of my favorites in elementary school.

That's what Twine is all about. It's a simple program for organizing interactive fiction books, and it then spits them out as HTML, which means that they can be put up just about anywhere on the Internet, from self-publishing sites to blogs to web pages. Or you can use it simply to help you track your interactive fiction and then put the full product together in the word processor of your choice. It's a little more work, doing it that way, but it gives you a lot more freedom when it comes time to hit publish. More on that a little later.

For those unfamiliar with interactive fiction, it's sort of a hybrid. Part game, part story. The writer creates many possible plot arcs for the reader to follow. Traditionally, this is where we actually see second person point-of-view in its natural habitat. You walk into the creepy old house. A puff of dust hits you in the face. If you turn around, go to page 3. If you hold your breath and continue forward, go to page 17.

And it continues from there.

Twine starts you off with three boxes: a title, an author, and a Start. You can mess with whatever you want except for the word Start. It has to remain that way. Otherwise, when you go to try and preview everything (which I recommend whether you intend to compile it in HTML or just use Twine to storyboard), it's going to be all screwy. And, if you go the HTML route, messing with the word Start will change around the HTML file it spits out, too. So don't touch it.

From there, you add your events and, via internal links, begin to open up your lines of interaction. Believe me, having a program to help you keep track of everything is much easier than trying to do it all on paper or, even worse, in your head. You want to leave your reader with as much freedom as you can manage, which means a lot of possible ways of interacting within the fiction.

Now, Twine is not the only one you can use for this, but it is one of the few, and it's the easiest to learn and deal with, even if it doesn't have a nice, flashy appearance. The other one I would recommend possibly looking at is Inform7, but only if you think interactive fiction is going to be a major part of your writing lifestyle. It's a little easier on the eyes, and it, like Twine, is free and cross-platform. Inform7 takes a little bit more dedication to learn than Twine, however, so it's a matter of personal choice. For me, Twine is the best option.

For those who intend to use it just as a storyboarding tool, you don't have too much more work to do. But, when and if you format it for print, you will have to edit it after the fact to put in appropriate page numbers. For eBook, depending on how you go about it, you may be able to just use your exported HTML and keep the links, or you may have to go through and manually add the links after the fact. But I trust you can figure it out.

If you believe me, turn to page 62. If not, turn to page 38. If you want more like this article, go to the top of the page and subscribe.

Voss

Friday Writer Roundup: Written? Kitten!

Hello, writerly types, and welcome again to the FridayWriter Roundup!

This week, we're going over one of my favorite tools: Written? Kitten! Those of you familiar with Dr. Wicked's Write or Die will understand the premise. However, Written? Kitten! is a much softer, more user-friendly version. And, unlike Write or Die, there's no option that deletes your words… ever. And that's wonderful. Missing words keep me up at night.

Written? Kitten! is a fantastic tool for the simplest, and sometimes hardest, part of the writing process: getting out the words. Sitting down and plugging away, throwing one word right after the other until you have a sentence. Then a paragraph. Then a chapter. And then, finally, a book. It sounds easy, but sometimes, the motivation just isn't there. Or just isn't stronger than vegging out on TV and video games all day.

You set Written? Kitten! to a certain number of words and begin typing. Once you hit the word count you selected, guess what? You get a kitten! Yes, a cute, fluffy kitten will pop up on your screen to remind you that, hey, writing actually is worth it! That's the sheer beauty of Written? Kitten! Positive reinforcement, but somebody else does all the work, leaving you to plug away at your keyboard.

Now, it should be noted that Written? Kitten! does not, in any way, save your words for you. You absolutely have to, have to, have to copy and paste them into a file that you can save. Otherwise, all the work was for naught. An that makes kittens sad. And nobody wants sad kittens.

"But I don't like kittens!"

Shun the non-believer!

Oh… sorry. Freudian slip. What I meant to say was this: there's a way around that. You don't have to have a kitten. You can put in just about any search term you like, and those are the pictures that pop up. Just modify the URL like this:

writtenkitten.net/?search=searchterm

Obviously, you would modify it to whatever you want instead of searchterm. It will then pull pictures at random from Flickr.com's 'Most Interesting' category for that search term. There are three built in options that hang out below the text box, down with the word counters: kitten, bunny, and puppy. But, of course, you can do anything. I like chocolate, myself. Nothing better than an endless stream of chocolate floating by on your computer screen, after all. Well, eating it would be better… just not for my waistline.

(If you have a search term with a space in it, just replace the space with '%20.')

Now for those of you out there with different tastes, you can of course use the traditional Write or Die, or the new and improved Writeor Die 2. They've adopted the positive reinforcement model introduced by Written? Kitten!, and I actually kind of love it. Dr. Wicked may convert me yet, despite my love for kittens. There's also an interesting dog based one called Write orBite. It rewards you with a cute puppy picture, but if you fall below your set WPM, you get a picture of a biting dog, instead.

I hope you enjoyed this installment of the Friday Writer Roundup! If you want more, go up top and subscribe to keep receiving these posts.

Voss

6 Warning Signs That You're a Fantasy Addict

Sit down. I think we need to talk.

You see, your friends and family are very worried about you, dearie. They think you might have a bit of a problem. An addiction to fantasy books. So they called me in. It's sort of my specialty. We're just going to go over a few little things. We'll take appropriate action from there.

1: You can rattle off your top ten fantasy books at the drop of the hat.

Oh, you can? That's… interesting…

2: Your idea of a good Halloween costume was always witch, wizard, dragon, or some other such thing, rather than Frankenstein's monster or pirate.

A dark sorcerer? Four years running? All right, then…

3: You fight tooth and nail to prove that Dragonriders of Pern is just fantasy with some sci-fi sprinkled over the top.

Really? That's on there? Well, that's ridiculous. Everyone knows that's true…

4: An unviable system of magical laws can completely ruin a book or movie for you.

Well, you can say no all you like. The whole point was to see how well you understood the concept of a magic system.

5: You can (and do) rank authors on the originality and presentation of their version of high elves.

I personally prefer Douglas Niles' Sylves… but we're not talking about me, are we?

6: You can name at least three publishing houses or imprints that deal in fantasy. Without Googling it.

Well, of course you can.

I have some news for you. You're a fantasy addict, dearie.

Oh, now, don't cry. It's nothing to get upset about. In fact, you should smile. See, I have a secret for you. You aren't alone. Not at all. There are millions more just like you out there. Millions more just like us. Yes, yes, I'm in the same boat as you. A longboat. A longboat piloted by giants.

If you, like me, are a true and honest fantasy addict, stick around. You can subscribe through Blogger, through RSS, and through eMail.

Dreaming of fairies,

Voss

Friday Writer Roundup: StayFocusd

Hello, and welcome to a new feature here at Demon Hunting and Tenth Dimensional Physics: the Friday Writer Roundup. Rather than posting writerly advice and finds and such on the rest of the log, from now on, I'll be doing them here, every Friday. Fun fun fun!

This week is a doozy, at least for me. I'm sure I'm not the first to talk about StayFocusd, and I probably won't e the last. For me, it's a godsend. Like a lot of writers, I have a nasty habit of procrastination, and my biggest crutch is Facebook... and the occasional online game I get obsessed with. With Stayfocusd, that's not much of a problem. I load up my list of blocked sites, however many I need to keep myself from, and I just hit the button. Then I pick my time (I just stuck with the default ten minutes) and there you go. That's the amount of time you have per day to go to your sites. Not the amount of time you have for each site, the amount of time for all of them. Now, you can change your time... but only while you still have time left. If you use up all ten minutes and then decide you want more Twitter or Facebook or Pinterest... sorry? You have to wait until the next session.

Now, if you're disciplined enough to have specific blocks of time where you work, you can also set the program to only run during those specific blocks of time and then leave you free outside of those blocks.

And then there's Nuclear Mode... we don't talk about Nuclear Mode. Just like we don't talk about Kamikaze Mode in Write or Die. Nuclear Mode is a complete Internet block. If it's not in the allowed sites, you don't go there for however many hours you set the timer for. It is t be sued with caution, as you will definitely be without distraction but you may lose access to research material, your eMail, your bank account... important things. Definitely not something to use for more than a couple hours.

The downside? It's a Chrome Extension only. No other browsers. But there are programs out there to help with the same thing. Firefox has an Add-on called LeechBlock. There are programs you can download. The most popular I've heard of is Anti-Social. It works on any OS and blocks all of the social networking sites for you. That one, however, costs fifteen dollars. Leechblock and StayFocusd are both free.

One more issue with StayFocusd, which most Chrome users will be familiar with, is the somewhat finicky attitude the Extensions can have. You may be uninstalling and reinstalling the extension a few times, with no notice. It doesn't take long, and it remembers which sites you've blocked.

So, there's the Friday Writer Roundup. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did writing it. I'll be back next Friday with more advice from the trenches,

Voss

GUEST POST: Dragging Yourself Out of a Creative Dry Spell

Today, I'm thrilled to have Esther Jones over for some demon hunting... or tenth dimensional physics. Whatever she's in the mood for. Esther is part of the writing duo Frog and Esther Jones. Along with their Gift of Grace books (Grace Under Fire and Coup de Grace), they also run the Friday Indie Review. Check all of it out, and check out Esther's tips for getting out of those nasty creativity droughts.

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Voss asked me for a guest post on writing a while back, and since this is something I’ve struggled with recently, I thought it would be a good topic to talk about while it’s still fresh.

As writers, we’ve all had the weeks (or months, sadly sometimes years) where we just don’t feel those creative ideas percolating like they used to.  Personally, I’ve been fighting with a creative dry spell on and off for what feels like, oh let’s say, the last millennia or so.   

Now, I know that’s not factually true, because (for example) I’ve had short stories and a novel come out in the interim. 

But while standing in the middle of my own personal creative famine— where no new ideas for stories are showing themselves— it can be really difficult to remember the times when a story just walked up and walloped me behind the eyes without warning. 

Here’s a secret:   Every writer goes through periods of feast or famine like this.  It’s what you do to drag yourself out of the famine and keep writing that makes the difference.  Or at least that’s how it goes in my (admittedly somewhat limited) experience. 

Unfortunately, I am not one of the characters I write, and there is no summons or plot device that will make the ideas instantly come flocking back—like simply swiping blood across a rune.  But there are things I can do to go back to my roots and remember what inspires me. 

To drag myself out of the hole, I need to remember what I love about writing, and what I am trying to do by telling stories to myself and others. 

Now that last paragraph sounds pretty great in theory.  But what does it mean? 

I’m getting to that, I promise.

First off there are some very simple questions I need to ask myself.

11)      What inspires me and urges me write in the first place? 

For me, it’s always about an idea, and the characters that spring up in my head as a result of that idea… Which means if an idea isn’t coming, then I’m pretty stuck, right?  Well, not necessarily.

22)      Is the reason I’m having trouble writing due to something in my environment? Is it something I can fix?  If it isn’t, what can I do to lessen the impact it’s having on my creative psyche?

Sometimes when I’m having trouble writing, it really is because something in my vicinity is disrupting my focus.  It doesn’t have to be something big either.  It can be subtle.  

For instance, I usually listen to music as I write.  Occasionally, I’ve found my music clashed with the thought those wily and secretive creative-imps were trying put together in my head.  As soon as I turned the music off, the scene actually started behaving and flowing naturally.  

 If you’ve eliminated all the distractions, and you’re still staring at a blank screen, continue on to the next question.

33)      Am I just having general focus/self-confidence issues?  If so, maybe it’s time to go get some love from people who enjoy reading my work. Frog and I have often talked about how it’s necessary to have someone with a critical eye look at your work.  But sometimes it’s just as important to take the time to remember that you don’t suck.  There has to be balance.

44)      What do I love reading?  What do I love writing?

It can also be important to remember what I relish about books.  Sometimes, I’m a little embarrassed to admit my true tastes. They’re not always highbrow, or deep, or as literary as I think they should be.   Am I holding myself back from an idea, because I think other people wouldn’t like it, even though I (secretly) think it’s pretty cool?

Maybe it’s time to get down with writing some pure popcorn fiction, or just allow myself to write something crazy that I don’t think anyone else would ever want to read.  Those are usually the times where I surprise myself. 

Finally, if I still feel like I’m struggling, dehydrated and devoid of hope in the event horizon of a blackhole that (once upon a time) used to be a desert, I ask myself one more question:

55)      Where can I go or who can I enlist who will be willing to creatively engage with me? 

Don’t forget the resource you have in your fellow writers and friends.  No writer is an island; we all stand on the shoulders of the writers who came before us, and the hand-in -hand with the writers we read and interact with.  If I can’t figure out what I should be doing on my own, it’s time to go looking for advice and other authors who have been there and clawed their way out. 

Or I might even just immerse myself in the energy that comes along with being at a writer’s retreat or gathering.   Sometimes it ok to stop freaking out about being in the dry spell and just enjoy my friends and the craft of writing.

It’s always ok to step back and recharge.  Once you’ve done that, go back and start again—at question 1, if you need to. Hopefully you won’t need to.

You can do it. You can make it out of a creative dry spell, no matter how dire it seems.  But you can’t give up, and then you can’t give up some more.  Like everything else in writing, overcoming a slump or lack of ideas relies on your own persistence and will to keep trying to move forward.  

Radcon 6B: Report

I returned, and I'm finally functional, again. Sort of. I wrote yesterday at any rate, which is a pretty good general sign of life. I think. Heck, I'm not a doctor, so I guess I can't say for sure.

But, as someone who is either functioning and alive, or a zombie, I have to tell you: this was a CON this year. Big time.It was also a pretty different experience for me. Now, this is not my first time on panels. That's not what was strange. This was the first year I didn't really go to any panels. I hit one on coffee roasting, but the only thing I heard about writing all weekend is what I heard in my panels and what was hit on in the green room or by my traveling companions.

And that was okay with me. More than anything, this con sparked something. A lot of us said it. This Radcon was really different. 2014 is going to be a year of opportunity, for those brave enough to reach for it. This year has been inspirational. It brought out artistic sides in people that they didn't really know they had.

I'll use my brother-in-law as an example. For the past few years, he's been floundering artistically. He doesn't see any value in any of the work he can create. So he goes to con. We have a good time, order some Round Table Pizza (god, is that stuff good), go through the dealers' rooms. And then, at the end of con, we go home.

The next day, he tells me that con gave him a personal 180. He's ready to start making things and doing things. Why? Because he went to con. He saw that there are people who actually would enjoy the things he makes. He sees that there are people his age and younger already starting out on creative careers. Like con does to everyone, it charged him up, got him ready to do something. Anything.

Not to say that this convention was all some philosophical wonderfest where we sat around in togas discussing the universe. It wasn't, believe me. It was a damn blast, is what it was. I mean, where else (besides the now defunct Quark's in Vegas) can you go to the bar and order a Romulan ale? Not many places, is what I think.

We wandered the party hall, wandered around the shops, just generally wandered, to be totally honest. Even with my foot in agony (I was crippled up something fierce), I can look back on this convention fondly (although my bad attitude from my pain may or may not have made me something of an asshole that first day... maybe).

Even our bad experiences weren't entirely bad. We had a fire alarm pulled the second night. My friends were in 10 Forward, I was in the D20 Girls' room. We eventually found each other and we decided to go check the sliding glass door on our dealer's room. With 2,000 plus people wandering around, you can't be too careful. Just as we started walking, they let us back in. So we rush over to the room and, yes, it was open a bit. Nothing missing, though. We realize that we forgot to bring our promo table in from the outside, though. So we do that. I'm holding the door. In comes the table.

And in come these two girls we don't know. I figure they're lost, and they'll walk back out. Then one of them screams 'Oh, books!'

We immediately clear the way to the merchandise. Believe me, they were a lot of fun. And they bought a book, which is always nice. But, as soon as they left, we all burst out laughing. It was awesome. It also told us that we really need to keep our room open longer next year. Book people stay up late. Go figure.

So, that was Radcon 6B this year. As always, it's a great convention. There's a reason I go every year, after all. And, if you're in the area, I suggest dropping in next year. Especially if you've never been to a con. This is a good one for beginners.

Happy trails,
Voss