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

The One Where Voss Shares Too Much

(Sorry. Couldn't resist the Friends reference.)

The ground is covered in a sheet of snow, I have four half-drunk bottles of wine in my kitchen, and I keep scribbling out 2015 and correcting it to 2016. Seems like an average New Year to me. Although I’m really hoping not. I’m hoping for a kick-ass New Year this time around, and it appears to not be sucking totally right now (Knock on wood.).

Now, I’m going to give a hat tip to the elephant in the room before I continue on with things that are a little more fun. The third Evenstad Media book is coming, I promise. There was a bit of a snafu on the production side of things, so it’s going to be a bit delayed. Good news for anyone who needs to catch up, but bad news for anyone who’s been waiting for this one to release, so I do apologize. At the very latest, it’ll be out by mid-February, but a lot sooner if I get my way.

So, what about the year going forward? Well, Evenstad four is also on the docket, though I’m keeping it pretty well under my hat right now. Details will come when we get closer to the actual release date for that one (Some time this summer, unless gremlins gum up the works on this one, too. Here’s hoping not.). And, with The King Jester Trilogy totally finished at long last, I’ll be able to give some more focus to other ideas. Old ideas. Pretty ideas.

If you’ve been here for a while with me, you might remember the odd mention of Rings of Treachery here and there over the years. Well, it still exists, but I’ve vowed that I’m going to put it out this year, come hell or high water. In the interest of full disclosure, it’s currently out on submission with a publisher, so I should hear back within a few months… hopefully. If that works out, then I might have to bend a little on my schedule. Let’s say ‘published or contracted’ this year instead, yeah?

After that, depending on the phases of the moons and what the chicken intestines tell me (Or, you know, whatever I feel like), I could pick up a number of other projects. I have an old book about puppets that’s been weighing on my mind lately (Though that may just be because the puppet army is taking over Radcon this year…). Or I might turn to something a little less well-formed and see where that leads me, in the end. It’s really open. That’s what happens when a series closes off. Something that’s sort of filled your attention for months on end is finally gone, and you begin to see past it to what you can do next. Completely the opposite of reading a series. Then you just sort of feel lost and hungry for more books that don’t exist.

Or maybe that’s just me.

I’ll also be picking up on writing short stories again so I can spread tiny versions of my writing far and wide. Kind of like a plague, but slightly less deadly. Very slightly.

And when it comes to things in a non-writing sense, I’ve made some decisions about the year ahead as well. The main one is to have less anger and negativity. I tend to get rather upset with people, but it does me no good. So I’m working on it. Not to say I’ll turn all peaceful—anger is still an emotion and it’s still useful—but I’ll be more careful with how it comes out, and evaluate it more. See if it’s doing anything, or if it’s just causing me pain.

I’m also going to return to some of my other passions (This is where the part when the sharing begins. First and last warning.). I consider 2015 the year where I sort of got lost. There was really a lot of turmoil going on in my psyche at that point. I’d put back on all the weight I’d lost and shot back over 300 pounds. I wasn’t reading. I was even angrier than usual. I’d just moved away from most of my friends and family (It was really a good decision, but still. It’s hard no matter what.). I was readjusting, and things just started to drop off. I wasn’t reading anymore. I wasn’t singing anymore. I hadn’t played trombone in months and months. And eventually, that started to encroach on my writing. I hated doing it.

Eventually, I figured that I hated doing the actual writing work because I wasn’t doing anything else for myself. I used to say ‘If I’m not singing, then I know that something’s wrong.’ Except I ignored that advice and kept digging through the writing. The more I did it without anything else going on, the more I just hated doing it. And when I hated it, I hated myself a little more. The writing didn't suffer, just me.

Well, suffice it to say that’s over and done with, now. I’m not a New Year’s resolution kind of person, but I made some this year. Read more. Sing more. Make time for things that I’m passionate about. I still haven’t gotten around to belly dancing with any regularity again (Working on it.) and my trombone has only been out of the case once or twice in the past few weeks (And one of those times was to clean and oil it, so…), but it’s going to come. I’m determined not to fall into the Swamp of Sadness again this year.

Stupid horse…

So that’s my uncomfortable level of sharing. How about you? Are you taking 2016 as a chance to get shit back on track, or are you just going to continue to rock the socks off life? Let me know.

Voss

An Update

Gee, thanks for the helpful title. Aren't you an author? Shouldn't you be better at this?

Most likely, but I don't like your attitude, voice in my head.

I've been meaning to get on this here blog of mine for a while and post wonderful things... but then, just like up above, the voices in my head got in the way, which means lots and lots of ideas in various stages of completion. Including some ideas for my blog (and The Other Me's blog).

So, a few weeks ago, I finished up the sequel to The Park. I'm aiming to have a release in that series every six months, so the next would be in July. Keep your eyes peeled for that little number: Evenstad Media Presents: The Mall.

I've also got some things potentially in the works for The King Jester Trilogy. The third book, A Fool's War, will come out later this year, which is always exciting.

I've also been working on a big new project for The Other Me, which I'm starting for Camp NaNoWriMo next month. It seems to be the year of me making really long series, because that one is set up to run indefinitely. Which was the point, I suppose. Doesn't mean I'm not slightly terrified of it. Only very slightly though.

Also on The Other Me front, I'm nearing publication for an urban fantasy novella through Storm Moon Press, but you'll have to bebop over to the appropriate blog for info on that.

I'm also, as always is the case, working on short stories for various things. I unfortunately couldn't pull anything together for Queers Destroy Sci-Fi, but I recommend picking up that issue of Lightspeed when it comes out. It's bound to be awesome. But I do plan on trying to get some things pulled together for other projects, so keep your eyes peeled for those awesome little tidbits.

I'm also thinking of delving into non-fiction, but I want to keep that mostly under wraps for the time being... just in case I change my mind about writing the book...

As for the blogs, I'm going to do my best to post regular content on here and on the other blog, like I did before. Not revealing what that is, either, but I think it'll be exciting.

But enough about me. What are your updates for me? Always happy to hear from y'all, when I get the chance.

Voss

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

New Year, Same Me

Although I'm starting 2015 with about fifty pounds less of me than when I started 2014. Yeah, so, I guess that's different. But other than that, I'm still just the same old me.

Nope. Nothing out of the ordinary there.

And, just like in years past, I'll be attending Radcon this year. I think we're on Radcon 6C this time around. And I think it's going to be a good con. Kevin J. Anderson, Jim Hines, and Dragon Dronet all together in one hotel? Can't really go wrong with that.

On the writing front... well, things might be a little bit different, there. In 2014 I think I put out two or three books, total. In 2015, I'm aiming for 12... or more. It all started with The Park, which has since hit the Hot New Release list in both Dystopian fiction and Technothrillers. But that leaves me with at least 11 to go. Now, they probably won't all be under Voss Foster. At least 1 or 2 will hopefully be as Raven de Hart (no clicking if you'e under 18, please!). But either way, that's a lot of new work out in the market, and a lot of hours and words for me. Combine that with Write 1 Sub 1 and all the other various things I'm sure I'll be doing aside from my schedule, and you can bet your sweet britches I'm looking at a productive year.

So, what is in store this year? Well, I won't give specific dates, because I don't have anything nailed down too far, but:
A Fool's War (King Jester Book Three): That plan could get derailed a bit, but barring the unforeseen, this will definitely be hitting the net in 2015.
4 King Jester Novellas: They'll give stories of some of the characters from before Zirkua Fantastic (Right now, I'm working on Madame Zerga's book: The Psychic.).
The Mountains of Good Fortune: This one should come out sooner rather than later. I'm calling it electropunk, for lack of a better term. Definitely aiming it for the first half of 2015.
Rings of Treachry: The first book of the Rings of Vivak books. People who've been around for awhile on here might have some inkling of just how long I've had this book written. Well, Things are in motion to where I can actually get the thing out this year.

And at this time, that's all I can say. Well almost all.

I wouldn't be where I am today without a lot of wonderful people. The good folks at Torquere/Prizm, who gave me the confidence to actually keep going when they took that first book. My writing group, the Moses Lake Muses, who catch me on all my crap when it comes to writing and publishing. And of course, my readers. You are the lifeblood of this whole thing. I heard something, back when I was a little baby writer, just taking my first toddling steps into the murky waters of publishing. And it's something that stuck with me through all these years.

"Once you write the book, it's no longer yours. It belongs to the readers."

So these books, like all my books, are for you.

Peace and a groovy New Year,
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.

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

National Coffee Day: 5 Coffee Factoids about Voss Foster

It's today you know.

There are a handful of literary holidays, observances, and celebrations out there. Banned Books Week. NaNoWriMo. Edgar Allan Poe's birthday (January 19th). Edgar Allan Poe's deathday (October 7th).

But, to many a writer, there is no more important day than National Coffee Day. September 29th. Free coffee at some of the big chains (Dunkin' Donuts and Starbucks), and some of the smaller local shops (Unfortunately none of them in my town, but life does go on... theoretically.).

So, in celebration of this most glorious day, and as an occasional worshiper at the Church of the Immaculate Roast (Praise be to the grower, and to the roaster, and to the French press.), I want to share my coffee preferences with y'all. Just a few.

1: I may be a Washington native, but Starbucks is not my first choice for coffee. At all. I prefer The Hardback Cafe. If you haven't been, give it a try.

2: If you ever have to make me a cup of coffee (for whatever reason), it's three sugars and four creams.

3: My favorite coffee mug, a gift from Andy Jensen over at Pigs and Mirrors (sorry about the image quality):

4: When I'm at home, I like my coffee simple. Not that I have an issue with fancy coffee... but my wallet does. I go straight for the Folger's Black Silk, and that runs through my $8 Wal~Mart coffee maker.

5: I once drank so much coffee I got actual, factual caffeine poisoning.

How about you? Any coffee stories to share? Favorite way to have it? Thoughts on flavored coffee? Latte? Espresso? I can talk about this subject for days.

And don't forget to subscribe!

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

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

My Apologies

Hello, everyone.

I feel I need to apologize to y'all. With The Jester Prince release, I've been majorly busy, and my blog has been suffering for it. But fear not, I intend to return. With The Park totally drafted, the blog tour petering out to the end, and a whole world of creative freedom stretching before me, I'll be free as a public domain Kindle book on Amazon. For a little bit, anyway.

So stay tuned for your regularly scheduled programming. I'll be here Friday with the Friday Writer Roundup. If you need your fix before that, I'm on Speculative Friction today, and I'll be talking to Jennifer Willis tomorrow.

Until then, I bid you adieu.

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: MyNoise

Here we are once again, and today, I have an interesting little website for you. It's called MyNoise.net, and it's a personal ambient noise generator, which is wonderful. There are a number of studies showing that ambient noise, in spite of what anyone might think, actually allows the human mind to focus better on the task at hand (I'll link some down below for you to look through at your leisure.). And if anyone needs help focusing, writers need help focusing. There's only so much your mind can handle, and writing tends to be a push toward the outer limits of that, depending on the day. Anything to help us get through those next two, three, or ten thousand words is good by me.

When you first go to MyNoise.net, you'll want to do the personal calibration. Go to the Online Noises tab and it should be in the top left box. That will take you to the calibration screen. All you do there is turn your volume up (I had to have mine all the way up, but I also don't use headphones, just my laptop speakers; please don't do anything that might damage your hearing.) to where you can hear the static it's producing, and then you'll adjust each slider to where that particular frequency is just barely audible. The hit done, and MyNoise will actually save all that calibration info for you, so it's there every time you come back (While I'm not fully sure of the mechanism involved in that data storage, I'm pretty sure they use cookies. So if you have cookies disabled, it most likely won't remember you. Fair warning.). Since over ninety percent of the sounds on there can be calibrated, it's worth the two or three minutes, I think.

MyNoise has more than a few generators. As a rough estimate, I would say 25-30, but don't quote me on that one. And, at the top of the Online Noises page, they give you a little legend that gives suggestions on the quality or effect of each noise generator. Eerie, meditation, noise blocker. My personal favorites, as of right now, are the Cat Purr, the Rain Noise, and the Himalayan Bowls.

Now, if you'd like to donate to them (they provide this whole service for free), please do. Not only does it help out, but it allows you to get the new sounds before non-contributors have access to them. Which makes me jealous, since they have a coffee shop generator in the works. I may have to donate and get that one.

And on the subject of coffee shop noise generators, I have a couple alternatives, as well, if you don't like MyNoise. The first one, Coffitivity, is a web app, but can also be downloaded onto Droid and iPhone/iPad (at one point, it could run on the basic Mac OS as well, but when I looked into it, the link was broken. If anyone knows otherwise, let me know and I'll edit the post accordingly). Coffitivity is a collection of recordings from various coffee shops all over the world. On the web app, you get three: the morning coffee run, the lunch rush, and a collegiate café.

The other one is Rainy Café. It only has two sliders to control—rain and café—but it's surprisingly useful. To boost my personal creativity, I prefer to crank the rain up really high and keep the coffee shop murmuring about halfway, maybe a little less. I guess white noise just works better for me.

If you have any other noise generators you love like this, particularly good ones that can run on Windows, let me know. They're some of my favorite productivity tools. If you want to hear what else I have to say, hit subscribe up on top of the page.

Articles:
http://99u.com/articles/16711/turn-it-up-how-the-right-about-of-ambient-noise-increases-creativity

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/21/how-the-hum-of-a-coffee-shop-can-boost-creativity/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

Voss

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