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.

Top Ten Internet Horror DOs (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.**

Welcome back to hell. Or… my blog. Whatever. Yesterday, I did entries 10-6 on this series, and you can read that by clicking on the big happy face.

Remember the happy face. You might need it as we go through the last five. I will… of course, I don't handle this kind of horror particularly well either. But it's there if you do need it.

5: DO Focus on Your Concept

I teach a short story class with another author, and one of the things we both try to drive home is the importance of your idea. Especially in speculative fiction (Including horror), the idea needs to be solid. You need to know what your idea is, and you need to know it well.

Again, internet horror comes in to drive home a point that I would make anyway. It is a singular concept that sells most written internet horror. Jeff the Killer, for its many flaws, hinges on a well-traveled concept: the consequences of your actions may be larger than they appear. Smile Dog: misery loves company. Candle Cove: perception may lie. One concept, and everything builds around it.

4: DO Have Passion

No one has perfect execution on every part of a creative project. It's fucking impossible, in fact. Even if someone actually produced exactly what they had in mind, someone else could hate it. Look at Van Gogh's Starry Night. It's a master piece… but some people think his paint was laid on too thick. Because of that, they not only dislike Starry Night, but everything Van Gogh painted.

You know what people respect, though? Whether or not they like something, they want to see you go balls deep into it. Even if they don’t like what you've produced, they can then see that you, as a creator, were passionate about it. And if they do like it, then that will help them love it.

I'm not going to run through specific examples of this one. Internet horror is full of missteps, things that could have been done better or had more time given to them. But you know what? The genre is still successful, and the people doing it are still passionate. And that is a testament to the creators, in my opinion.

3: DO Shirk off the Genre Shackles

… or at least wiggle around in them a little bit. Horror is a breeding ground for monsters and aliens and magic. I love all those things. I love them done and I love them redone. But I also love it when some creator throws caution to the wind and goes outside of their purview. Or, at the very least, takes the access road running next to what's "normal."

The best example I have of this is a fairly popular series on Youtube called alantutorial. It's not supernatural. It's not particularly scary, in the traditional sense. But it is one of the most unnerving experiences I've had with fictional media to date. To sum it up, alantutorial is the web series of a man with unspecified developmental issues. He makes tutorials on ridiculous things no one would need a tutorial for (Such as crushing a can with wood.), or just makes incorrect tutorials. But he loves it. It's his passion, and damn it, he's going to do them.

As the series progresses, he seems to love the tutorials less and less. He has some traumatic experiences. He becomes destructive, and eventually, his caretaker (We assume his brother from context clues) locks him out of the house and bars his windows shut. This is a man who really can't take care of himself. And the ensuing abuse that follows Alan is not any easier to play witness to.

The series isn't scary because there's a monster after you, ooga-booga. It's scary because there's a… depravity to the kind of person who would do that. It's scary because we know this isn't all that fictional – this sort of thing happens all the time when someone with one of any number of mental disorders, learning disabilities, et cetera becomes "too much" for their caretaker. It's especially scary if you know someone who is reliant on another person for so much of their wellbeing.

Alantutorial is entirely fictional, thankfully (As a side note, Alan Resnick, who was behind it, is brilliant. Check him out.), but it feels a little bit too real. Even when it's clearly going over the top, you can't help but feel dread for Alan in that situation.

Now, it's not the only piece that does that. A lot of horror feels maybe just a bit too real in certain places. Sections of a lot of these indie horror shows online have a lot of realism to them. I can't make too many recommendations because the more realistic they get, the harder it is for me to watch them. As the whippersnappers say: it's too spoopy for me.

2: DO Embrace the Unknown

Not knowing is the basis of all fear. What's in the dark that I can't see? What are the motives of this thing? Why is this guy avoiding the moonlight? What's going on in my dreams?

But often, those questions are answered. That's totally valid, don't get me wrong. But I tend to lean with H.P. Lovecraft on this one: the not knowing is worse than the knowing. Or, as I've heard it many times: the audience's imagination will come up with something ten times worse than you ever would have created. Something unknown and not seen can't be ruined by substandard description or bad effects or a lack of budget or any other problems. In the mind of the reader, that terrifying fill-in-the-blank can be the scariest thing in the world.

Again, it's not the only way, but it is a way, and it's one that the internet horror crowd has taken to heart. I'm going to point you back at the SCP Foundation. Redaction, Expungement, and Black Boxes are key components in many of their pieces. SCP-087 does something awful if you send more than one person. SCP-447 does something with dead bodies that's too horrible to detail out. And then you have SCP-231, which is one of the most heavily redacted entries in the project. And Procedure 110 Montauk to control SCP-231, which is so horrid you need special clearance to learn about it. That is the power of the unknown. A few clues, some information skirted around… and the audience's imagination, now their own worst enemy.

1: DO Twist the Unoriginal

Internet horror, as I kind of hope I've shown, is… vast. There's a lot of it, and a lot of it interconnects somehow or another. But more than that, a lot of it comes from seeing it, hearing it, reading it. When Marble Hornets hit the scene, suddenly another half-dozen indie horror shows in a similar vein started… and flopped.

Because we've all seen Marble Hornets, too. You can't just remake it with your characters. You have to do something that's actually original with the idea.

I love riffing on ideas. I love squishing two or three disparate things together. It's actually one of my favorite ways to create new fiction. But when I do it, my first question to myself is: what's the angle? Where and how am I approaching this to bring something fresh to it? That's unfortunately harder to find in the wild. What comes immediately to mind is the channel StanFrederick. After you've watched some of the other similar shows online, find that one and you'll see what I mean.

But by now, I've started you down the rabbit hole, or you've already been there. So what did I miss that twists the norms around? Let me know so I can tap into the new veins of horror even deeper. And stay tuned for the top 10 DON'TS we can learn from internet horror, too.

Voss

Top Ten Internet Horror DOs (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, this is going to be different. And long. On a random fluke, I wrote up a two day blog post a while back. I didn't expect that, but I went with it. This time I'm expecting it. I'm expecting twice as long, actually. This is probably going to spread across 4 blog posts, so I hope you're in for the long haul.

So, Top Ten Do's to Take from Internet Horror. Two posts. Top Ten Don'ts to Take from Internet Horror. Two posts. But what the hell am I talking about when I say internet horror? What makes it special or unique? I'm a reader/horror fan/random passerby, why do I care about any of this? I'm not a writer!

What I'm talking about/What makes it special: Horror is an old, old genre, and it's gone through countless permutations. Gothic horror, with vampires and werewolves. The existential dread of H.P. Lovecraft and his contemporaries. 80's slasher flicks. The 90's brought splatterpunk. And in modern times, there's what I consider a new genre of internet horror. It's… hard to define. It encompasses creepypasta and the ARG phenomenon. We'll learn more detail about it as the list goes on.

Why you should care: admittedly, I'm putting these articles together with an eye to helping writers… myself included. But, at the very least, you may find some new things to read/watch/listen to. At the most, you could find it interesting to peek behind the curtain and see Professor Marvel pulling at the levers.

Okay, this intro is already getting too long for my tastes – let's get going.

10: DO Experiment

Now, this isn't exactly unique advice to be gleaned from internet horror, but I feel what people are doing with their online spooks drives it home very well. Traditional horror is just that: traditional. It follows a narrative structure, and it's told the normal way a story is. And that's great.

But internet horror doesn't need that to function. In fact, the lack of traditional narrative structure can be used to make it better, if handled correctly. One of my personal favorites is Candle Cove. It's just a basic, epistolary short story, told via forum posts, but it wouldn't be the same if told simply from beginning to end. Or, perhaps a bit more famously, you have the SCP Foundation. It's easily got to be the largest collaboratively written spec fic online… maybe ever. The community behind it creates everything. While there are narrative pieces involved, you don't need it. It's not the core of the work. Instead, everything comes from "internal files" written as a record of contained phenomena, detailing effects, encounters, and security measures. And believe you me, that shit is scary. Which, speaking of that…

9: DO Scare the Audience

I honestly can't believe I have to put this in when talking about horror, but here we are. I recently read one of the recent editions of Year's Best Horror. I put it off, because I read at night… and fuck that noise. But when I eventually started in on it… there was not a lot of terror there. The first story was, at best, funny. At worst, it was dumb and disjointed. But it was not God damn scary, and even if I was a little cautious about reading it, I wanted scary from my horror. Go figure.

Scary is not hard. If you try, you can sit there for a few minutes and come up with a list of shit that's scary. Big things, small things. It doesn't matter, something should be there that actually qualifies your work as horror. Even if it's just creepy.

Internet horror turned a husky into one of the most prevalent horror creations in decades: Smile Dog. Huskies are fucking cute, and if they can be scary? You can do something with it, trust me (Sorry, that was angrier than I intended it to be.).

8: DO Devote Yourself

Any modern indie creator will tell you that it's not easy. We're all struggling in one way or another. You can't start in as a creator of any sort if you're not ready to accept that, and lots of people quit when it doesn't work out how they want.

But let me tell you a story. It's a very short story about determination. In fact, it's seven words that speak to my point: EverymanHYBRID has been going for five years. Here's another one: Marble Hornets lasted for five years. Or how about this one: the SCP Foundation began in 2008.

Internet horror thrives on a devoted base of creators. These are people who do it for the love of what they're making, and that love drives them through the process of creation, come hell or high water.

7: DO Respect Your Audience's Intelligence

While it can be tempting to spell everything out, people are smarter than a lot of content creators seem to give them credit for. They can pick up on context clues. They can piece things together, and that’s especially important and useful when you're working with horror.

Now, this can be in a narrative sense. Take Candle Cove again. The ending could have been spelled out very clearly, thus robbing it of any value and ruining one of the best new horror stories in quite a long time (Okay, my opinion. But still. It's damn good). Instead, the author leaves it with the revelation that, as a child, he would watch static for half an hour when he said he was watching Candle Cove. That's creepy as shit, guys.

But there are broader strokes to it, too, and sometimes cleverer. SCP-231 has hidden text that can only be revealed if you mess with the scripts on the page. Marble Hornets and other similar projects hid actual ciphers and codes to be resolved in their work. Hell, NOC +10 may as well just be called "See if you can crack this code." Or heck, try pulling up all the information about "This HouseHas People in It." And good luck.

The modern horror audience doesn’t want to be spoonfed every scare. They want to have the realization that they should be terrified, and it's the creators job to just stay out of the way.

6: DO Embrace Subtlety

To go along with the intelligent audience, it's worth it to use subtlety to your advantage. I'm going to chime in with Marble Hornets stuff again because it's very popular and, of the three big-time Slenderverse Series, it's the one that I think is creepiest. And a lot of that is down to subtlety.

At first, you don’t see the monster. Not really. Anything you get from him is fleeting. A quick turn of the head, him standing in the background, the camera just quickly panning past him. That changes as the series goes, sure, but it's subtle to begin with. The Operator in Marble Hornets is… there. And that's the real terror. It could be there at any point. It probably is. It's probably around the corner. It makes every single episode tense, because you're watching and waiting for the Operator to show up, just like the characters.

In fact, the very original Slenderman "story" is all on its own very subtle. It was literally just two photos with the Slenderman in the background, and some implications of missing or dead children. That was it. And that was all it needed to be.

And with that, I'm going to put this aside for the day. I'll be back tomorrow with entries 5-10, and I hope you'll be back, too.

And… umm… here's some kittens to make you feel better, in case you actually went to any of those links. I did warn you.

Voss

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

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 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