Tag: Beloved Lives

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Brevity, the Soul of Wit

I just found out one of my flash fiction pieces has been accepted for publication. Mind you, it’s probably going to be a really long time before it shows up, like a year and a half or so. Still, as they say, any publicity is good publicity. The publisher is Vine Leaves Press. They electronically publish a story every day–they call them 50 Give or Take, and the stories are, you guessed it, 50 words more or less.  In Novembers they publish an anthology of the stories from the past year or so. Mine apparently will show up in the 2024 anthology, but maybe not. It’s story number 1436. As of this morning they hadn’t broken 1100. I don’t mind, really. Getting published is a waiting game, decidedly not for the impatient.

I sometimes wonder why I like writing short stories and flash fiction. I suspect it’s because I’m lazy. Still, writing a good story of whatever length takes work. My novels, Beloved Lives and The Ginger Bread House (the latter currently being reviewed by a publisher), aren’t epic 100,000 word tomes. Wasting Water wasn’t even a novel.  I’m suspecting Wickham’s Daughter is going to be a lot longer just because there is so much story to tell, but it’s not my usual modus operandi. The other novels still in the doodling phase of development may or may not be longish. It’s hard to tell at this stage.

The cool thing about writing short stories and flash fiction is that you are creating a little jewel, self contained and concise. The characters don’t take a lot of side streets and get lost. They go where they need to and do what they need to do. You tell their whole story in a snapshot.  A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a flash piece, usually less than a thousand words, shows a moment in time, a significant event contained within a careful word count where each word matters.

During this National Write a Novel in a Month November, I’ve taken a little detour from writing my current novel to jot down a flash piece that has been stirring around in my mind for more than a year. Just because flash pieces are short doesn’t mean you don’t spend a lot of time thinking about them, developing them, writing, rewriting, and visiting them again and again.  I am pretty lazy, but that doesn’t mean I don’t work at writing when my muse pokes me. And she can be a real pain.

Now, back to the novel.

Image: Small things. By Marilyn Evans

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Where the Heck Have I Been!

People who read my blog: So, Marilyn, what have you been up to (instead of writing blog posts)?

Me: Grab a beverage, sit down. This might take a while.

First and foremost, sometimes I feel like I’ve got nothing to contribute to the world of literature at large. Other times I have lots of ideas but don’t seem to get them down and in the ether before they slide away. Either way, there can be a long pause. I apologize to my teeming masses of adoring fans.

Of course, there are other things in my life than writing blog posts. There is the eternal struggle with my garden, for example. Cloud, our opera singing cat, has taken it upon himself to keep the bunnies and chipmunks in hand (paw?) which my growing things much appreciate. At least those of the growing things that could be bothered to come out of the ground. I have discovered that our house is too cold in the winter for seeds to germinate. Maybe next year starting in February or March we’ll all snuggle together under the electric blanket. Then in the spring, out of doors it was first too cold, then too wet, then too dry, then too hot. The seeds stayed in bed. Not sure I blame them. But there is always one showoff—the cucumbers are going berserk. I have so many that pickles are inevitable. As for the rest? The tomatoes keep losing focus, the radishes have forgotten that they exist for roots, the cantaloupe and watermelon have all the vines in the world but not much else. I may have potatoes some day, but I’m afraid to look. I’ll just believe and hold out hope until I’m forced to dig them up. Schrodinger’s potatoes.

In other adventures, when I couldn’t get glasses to make things pretty and clear, cataract surgery it was. Since the worse of the two eyes is always done first, for a week or so you get to walk around switching eyes and saying, “Holy mackerel! I had no idea I have been looking through pond water!” Now I get to see without glasses for the first time since first grade, except when I want to read. Putting on glasses instead of taking them off to read is sort of weird.

And finally, what have I been writing instead of blogs? Query letters, synopses, cover letters, the things I hate most in the world. I know Stephen King says he loves all aspects of writing, but honestly, these are harder for me than anything. I’ve now sent off my father’s memoir to a publisher and The Gingerbread House, as well. I should be getting rejection letters in a few months, and then I’ll do it all over again. But now that those odious tasks are out of the way, on to the fun stuff.

First, I get to write a blog post moaning about my garden and the agony of trying to get things published. Next I’ll start working on my very first screen play, which I’m pretty pumped about. Mind you, I haven’t a clue what I’m doing, but that has seldom stopped me in the past. Between the scenes, I’ve started working on a nonfiction book. I’ve written way more nonfiction than fiction, so this should be easyish. Maybe. Perhaps. We’ll see. After those, there is probably going to be a Gingerbread House sequel, I need to finish Wickham’s Daughter, there is still The Iliad in Space (working title), and Jocasta of Thebes hasn’t even loaded into the starting gate. If I have a great time with the screen play (I’m doing my friend, Dennis Young’s, Mercenary because the tutorials say you should never do your own adaptation first), I will go on to do a screenplay for Beloved Lives.

So that’s what I’m doing on my summer vacation. You?

Image: Cloud taking a break from bunny wrangling. By Jonathan Hutchins.

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Back in the Saddle Again

Maybe it’s the pandemic, maybe it’s the season or the era or something else entirely, but it’s been hard to write lately. I haven’t been the only writer having a long dry spell. I simply haven’t been able to get myself motivated. However, the contract with my publisher recently ended so he’s stopped supporting my book which means it has been listed on Amazon as out of print. That means I either had to find another publisher or self publish. I haven’t self published before, so I thought I’d give it a shot. I did a bit of editing (there was a continuity error that needed fixing and a couple of other things I wanted to add or change) and suddenly the second edition of Beloved Lives is on line and available as an e-book or paperback.

Mind you, I have been writing a tiny bit over the past months. Story ideas come in the night and poke me until I wake up enough to work them out and/or write them down. In the morning I’ll get a draft together, let it sit a while, then do serious editing after a decent interval. Then it needs to rest a bit more. It’s kind of like making bread with time between steps to allow the yeast to work and the loaf to rise. One story has gone off to be published eventually in an anthology. Anthologies are notoriously slow, so no telling when that will be in print, but there is nothing like getting an acceptance letter to get the juices flowing. And I have a couple of other new stories that are trying to find homes as well. When I’m sure of the publication dates or see actual contracts, I’ll let you know where and when these things might appear.

I have to admit, the process of reviewing and editing Beloved Lives got me in the mood to revisit The Gingerbread House, a mystery that wasn’t quite mysterious enough and needed a couple of red herrings thrown in. Over the past year it has been really hard to get back to it, but lately I’m having a lot of fun working on it. Revisiting my characters is being a real treat. I hadn’t planned to finalize and publish it until 2022, but Jonathan, my beloved spouse, thinks I ought to try to have it done in time for Christmas. If I work hard over November, that is a real possibility. Once all those things are done, perhaps I can finally get back to The Iliad in Space (working title, of course). That one has been in process for a very long time.

I do enjoy my stories, and I love my characters. It’s good to be back in the saddle, riding along with them into the publishing sunset.

Image: Fort Leavenworth Fox Hunt at Mulvane Ranch in the Flint Hills. By Jonathan Hutchins.

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Bingeing and Other Indulgences

My husband and I binge-watched Game of Thrones a few months ago, at least the last several seasons we hadn’t seen. I followed this with a binge of Lord of the Rings–Peter Jackson’s great films. I have now moved on to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and will follow that with Babylon Five. I actually own all of these so I can watch deleted scenes, interviews, “making of”, and anything else my little heart desires. I especially love the “making of” bits. I like seeing how and why what was done was done. The details–set design, costumes, special effects, and all fascinate me.

I love film and well done television. I actually also love live theater, but that’s not happening right now. Books are amazing, and I read obsessively, but I really like seeing someone’s idea of how something should be brought to life on the screen, the television, or the stage. And it’s always fun to see a new or different interpretation, a re-imagining. Jane Austen, Shakespeare, Sherlock Holmes all have been remade a hundred times, and I’m always fascinated. The real reason I wrote Beloved Lives was because The Hunger was such a great re-imagining of the vampire world that I wanted to see the same take on The Mummy. I was not impressed with the new films, so I wrote my own version. I’d love to see it be a movie some day. Not holding my breath, though.

Writing can be somewhat collaborative, but mostly it’s a solitary affair. On the other hand, making a film calls on the talent of a vast number of people. Even the shoestring-budgeted indie, Pi (not to be confused with Life of Pi--see info at https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0138704/), had quite a few people to pull it together.

A film can be made or broken by the strangest things. A bad director can get a lack luster performance from a great actor, the wrong music can kill a film. Terrible special effects can turn a potentially great film into a laughable cult classic. But when it all comes together in the right way, when all the moving parts mesh, the result can be epic.

One of my favorite books by the late Dick Frances is Wild Horses about the madness that surrounds making a film. In the end, a mystery is solved, a great film gets made, and everyone hates the director and treats him badly, but he doesn’t care because he’s already thinking about his next film. That’s kind of the way I write. I don’t write great things, at least not in my opinion. But I enjoy writing and sharing what I’ve written. If no one likes it or reads it, never mind. I’m on to my next book or story or article or blog post. And if anyone ever decides to turn any of what I write into video, I’ll be fascinated to watch how it was made.

Image: Jonathan and friends settled in for a binge. By Marilyn Evans.

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Side characters

Last week I attended a reading by my friend, Alan Proctor, for his book The Sweden File: Memoir of an American Expatriate. I hadn’t been to the National Archives building before, and it was an interesting visit. Alan’s reading was pretty great, and I scored a copy of the book that he graciously signed.

While we were standing around before the reading, nibbling on snacks and chatting, I spoke with a couple of people who had read my book, Beloved Lives. Both expressed an interest in knowing more about the main character’s best friend, Trish. I must concede that in many ways, Trish is more interesting than April, but I meant for her to be. April is supposed to be a bit ordinary, and therefore, more relatable. Anyway, that was what I was shooting for, and apparently, I was somewhat successful.

This seems to be recurring issue for me. In the book I’m currently writing, one of the side characters is more interesting than anyone else in the story. I kind of want to keep him that way, but I begin to wonder if maybe there are times when the most interesting character ought be the star of the show. Of course, that would make a very different story.

I once wrote a short story that was supposed to be lighthearted, a tale told from the point of view of a lawyer come to visit his old college buddy who had gotten rich through his talent with genetic engineering and proteomics. For a lark, the friend had populated his secured retreat with creatures of his own making–a griffin, a unicorn, and his own daughter who was a mermaid. It was meant to be fun, but I realized, the more I thought about it, the better story was the daughter’s. To be the only one of her kind, her human skin and fish skin each never comfortable or appropriate for the other’s environment. I imagined the rage she would have against her parents for having created her. Not the same story at all.

Many books and articles have advice regarding the creation of characters. They will tell you to write detailed descriptions, comprehensive backstories, recurring mannerisms and habits, and so forth. It’s all good advice, but some characters seem to grow on their own, to fully inhabit their story world and only let you borrow them for a while before they go off to live a life that you have only glimpsed and recorded to the best of your ability. I am very fond of those characters. Perhaps I should be writing their stories instead. I’ll get back to you on that.

Image: Left to right, me, Monique, and Chris, each a character in her own right. By Jonathan Hutchins.

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Treat Night

When I was  kid, one night a week my dad would let us stay up late to watch scary movies and eat junk food. We called it Treat Night, and the treats included pop (I’m from north Missouri so it’s “pop”, not “soda”) and ice cream, a candy bar, or popcorn. The movies were the Universal Studios horror collection released as Shock Theater for television syndication. There were about 50 classic films, and most were black and white.

Our local host was Gregory Graves, the wonderful Harvey Brunswick in a fright wig and with black circles drawn around his eyes. Gregory was funny and a welcome  relief when things started to get a little too scary. I have to admit, the seven year old me had a little bit of a crush on Gregory.

One of my favorites of those old 1930’s and 1940’s movies was The Mummy, but I also loved Dracula, The Wolfman, and Frankenstein. When, many years later, I saw Catherine Deneuve, Susan Sarandon, and David Bowie in The Hunger, I thought the film brilliantly re-imagined the vampire legend. I hoped someone would do something similar for my other favorite films. I had an idea about how I’d like to see The Mummy done, but I waited to see what would happen.

When reboots of the various films started to come out, I thought they were fun, but they weren’t how I would have done it. That’s when I took matters into my own hands. The result was my version of The Mummy rebooted, my book Beloved Lives.

I’m happy to see that late night scary movies are still going on, with crazy, over-the-top hosts. I hope a new generation of kids will be inspired to write their own versions of the classics and keep them fun and fresh to scare us anew as we eat our junk food and huddle together on the sofa.