E.M. Markoff's Blog, page 4
May 22, 2020
LWTF: May 23 | Theater History and Roman History, Horror Movie Comedy Dub, and More
“Last Week This Friday” is just me sharing what made me happy last week in the hopes it brings a laugh or that you discover something new
EducationI. Love. YouTube. Both Crash Course and Kings and Generals have been my faves ever since I came across their respective channels last year. The content is super educational and fun af. Lately, I’ve really been into theater history and Roman history—being able to see the battles reenacted from a bird’s-eye view is wonderfully satisfying. The quality for both of these channels is top notch and the animation is a visual treat.
Happy Happy, Joy JoyFor everyone who is not a fan of horror films, this comedy dub of A Quiet Place by HISHE is hilarious. And thanks to L.S. Johnson for sharing the Avatar TikTokA Quiet Place and Avatar the Last Airbender.
Y’all have to watch this shit.
May 21, 2020
Writing Tips I learned at Flights of Foundry
It’s day 66 of sheltering in place in San Francisco. Clear blue skies and blinding sun are dominating the day, and the the Assistant—Kanoqui the Feral Prince—is quite happy with this change in weather. Kanoqui tends to get rather cranky when there is no sun for him to bask in, and he will stare and meow at me as if I had the power to make the sun appear. To date, I have not been able to successfully convey to him that I lack the ability to control the weather. Is anyone else’s fur baby like this, lol?
This past weekend was Flights of Foundry, and it was great! There were a few audio issues at the beginning that made it impossible to hear what the panelists were saying, but the glitches were quickly resolved. The convention went pretty smoothly after that and wow, did I learn a lot! It was the writing therapy I didn’t realize I needed, and my writer’s soul feels much calmer now. As a friend recently pointed out, validation in this industry is important, not just after the book is published, but throughout the writing process as well.
From what I heard there were over a thousand attendees this weekend, which is pretty amazing! I highly recommend attending Flights of Foundry, so keep this one marked in your books for future online literary events.
I wanted to share the writing tips I learned, some of which I may or may not already employ. Sorry for the vagueness, but I don’t want to accidentally give something away about book2/The Faceless God!
Plots aren't static but can develop as you write.
How to use pronouns without it getting confusing:
Read your work out loud. If the balance between name and pronoun is not clear, it’s time put the name in.
Vary the syntax and dialogue.
Switching POVs can help open up possibilities that you didn’t think about before because you were locked into a prior POV. Don’t be afraid to switch POVs.
A way to explore characters (especially in a group dynamic) is to write the dialogue first. It’s OK if the dialogue doesn’t make it into your story, but this can help you get a feel for how your characters speak and interact with each other.
Keep in mind the way characters treat each other and those around them. A character will treat friends, family, coworkers, etc differently.
Write something you are passionate about, and that passion will come through.
You do not have to do an apprenticeship in short fiction to get an agent or be a legitimate writer.
90% of your marketing effort is wasted, but you can’t obsess over it.
How many beats are ideal in a fight scene?
It depends on how big the fight is. Turning points are important to keep the fight from becoming grinding.
Have breathing spaces between dramatic fight scenes.
Track the flow of how information is revealed in your story (i.e., who knows what, and when is that information revealed).
For revisions:
All forms of plotting and revision work so long as it works for you.
Make a bullet list of key turning points.
Make a “stakes map” and color code the stakes so you can see at a glance what is happening in your story and to your characters.
Note which character is in which scene and if they need more "screen time" or less.
Forcing yourself to finish the draft or “go on” is not always the right choice. If you feel resistance, you might be pushing the story or character in the wrong direction. Stop writing, look closely over your story, and try to figure out what is throwing your story off.
Watching “making of a movie” videos is a great way to learn how to edit your story by analyzing why certain movie scenes did not make it into finished films.
As you write, take notes of what needs to be changed, and then go back and revise it later so you can get that first draft out.
Be aware if changes in your story during revisions cause a ripple effect. Changing one thing can change everything else.
How your characters develop and behave is not something that is set in stone before writing. Your story is a single work that can change as you write it because of the group dynamics revealed as you progress.
The 3-act story structure used heavily by Western media is not universal. There are also 4-act and 5-act structures. My Neighbor Totoro is an example of a 4-act structure.
Memory is ephemeral, unreliable. The more you remember something, the more distorted it becomes. That kind of unreliability is something you need to be aware of as you write your characters.
Decolonizing the SFF genre:
Question your fundamental assumptions about the world.
S. Qiouyi Lu has a great article on Tor.com that talks about the framework of decolonizing speculative fiction
Even within small communities, no culture is a monolith:
Don’t present communities as purely homogenous.
Don’t have one person represent an entire culture.
Once you are aware of how you are colonizing, that is a huge step toward decolonizing.
The “wrong” or “right” narrative is a Western idea of there being only one truth, that only one side can be right, or that only one narrative can be true. This is not universal to all cultures.
The gender binary was imposed to get rid of traditional gender roles and to impose a system of power that favored gender imbalance. It’s a means of control, but it has been so internalized that it is never questioned.
Do not italicize non-English words.
Revel in yourself and in your culture and don’t worry about whether everyone can relate to it. As long your story is good, the reader will find something to relate to on their own.
I hope you find something useful
All the best,
EMM
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Subscribe to my blog, connect with me on social media, or read my books :)
Read the books already? Please consider leaving a review on Amazon. It really makes a difference in helping others take a chance
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May 14, 2020
2020 Events Update and Flights of Foundry: An Online Convention During COVID-19 | May 16-17
It’s day 59 of sheltering in place in San Francisco. The past few days have been rainy and today is no different, but I love rainy days
Photo Credit | Flights of Foundry
The panel I am really looking forward to is “Using Mythology in SFF” since I incorporate my own culture and mythology into the secondary world of the Ellderet. The knowledge you gain from hearing first-hand the authors, editors, artists who have “been there, done that" has been invaluable to me. Literary conventions are basically CEU (continuing education credits). Do I think I’m the greatest writer in the world because I go to these conventions and attend these panels? Hahaha, no. But I do know I'm a better writer than I was when I first started, and that’s part of what my #writerslife or #authorslife journey is about.
If you would like to attend the panels, you have until May 17 to register. Flights of Foundry is free, but donations are welcome.
All the best,
EMM
Stay in touch!
Subscribe to my blog, connect with me on social media, or read my books :)
Read the books already? Please consider leaving a review on Amazon. It really makes a difference in helping others take a chance
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May 12, 2020
Guest Post | HorrorAddicts.net Press Presents: Dark Divinations edited by Naching T. Kassa
Book Trailer: https://youtu.be/ilQ-BfW6BRs
It’s the height of Queen Victoria’s rule. Fog swirls in the gas-lit streets, while in the parlor, hands are linked. Pale and expectant faces gaze upon a woman, her eyes closed and shoulders slumped. The medium speaks, her tone hollow and inhuman. The séance has begun.
Can the reading of tea leaves influence the future? Can dreams keep a soldier from death in the Crimea? Can a pocket watch foretell a deadly family curse? From entrail reading and fortune-telling machines to prophetic spiders and voodoo spells, sometimes the future is better left unknown.
Choose your fate.
Choose your DARK DIVINATION.
**********
An excerpt from Dark Divinations
Of Blood and Bones
Jeremy Megargee
London, 1893
Camille inhales sharply through her nose, the burning incense turning her little attic room into a dragon’s pit and she traces long, delicate fingers to match the whirling of the smoke tendrils. Rain beats against the windowpanes—aggressive and loud—as though it seeks an invitation. The gaslights along the street burn low, turning her small private space into an orange-tinted lair with a vague undercurrent of the macabre infecting the crooked walls, ceiling, and floor. One hand is balled into a tight fist, and she shakes it from side to side. The contents hidden within rattle as her sinuous figure sways from side to side like a serpent being charmed.
She sits cross-legged, lanterns burning from multiple surfaces in the room, and her shadow looms large, almost like it is not the shadow of one woman, but the shadows of a horde. There’s old Creole blood in her, traced back through a bloodline more tangled than the vines on her trestle, and it was from her great-grand mother that she learned the nature of divination. The year is 1893, and it has brought Camille nothing but a suspicious reputation in her neighborhood, and outright guffaws from those who think her a dolled-up charlatan. It matters not to her, because she knows what she is able to harness is real, even if it proves unpredictable at times.
Her right hand unlatches, fingers unleashing, and she throws the bones. Rodent teeth, rattlesnake tail, shells from the Caspian Sea, and the largest, Camille’s own fifth metacarpal, tumble out across the chalk-lined square on the pitted hardwood. She lopped off her own pinky finger with a cleaver at age twelve and that level of sacrifice won her even more trust from some of the less than cooperative shades.
She leans close, dark eyes gleaming—dark like doorways with no firm destination—and she listens with the threads of her soul. The bones can provide something akin to a portrait, but for her, it’s always an indistinct outline. The voices fill in the blanks and her open mind and heart do the rest. She has nothing to compare the experience to but that infernal creation Edison is responsible for, the kinetoscope, where a person can stare through a peephole and see people and pictures in motion. It’s sort of like that, but not exactly. Her brain hinges on the framework of the bones and the sights and sounds form there, grainy at first, but gaining traction with each passing moment.
She’s staring hard, so hard she has forgotten to breathe, and the stump of her pinky finger itches beneath the rawhide covering. A bad omen. That stump always itches fiercely when something malicious is stirring in the bones and deep inside she knows what she hunts for is the worst fiend of them all. But hunt she must, even if each reading slices through the meat of her sanity, presenting it like a thin cut in a butcher’s shop window. It feels like that window always swarms with flies and the search is wearing Camille down, taking an irreversible mental toll.
But she won’t stop. She’s too damn stubborn for that. Her sister, Babette, chose her trade. She chose to lift up her petticoat and spread her thighs on that bug-infested mattress for each john with a pocket full of coin, but she did not choose to have her brains beaten from her ears in her scummy flat on Sutter’s Lane. She didn’t invite the terrible savagery of that night, and Camille still breaks out in gooseflesh when she thinks of rushing past the constable, screaming herself hoarse, wanting to embrace any tangible part of her sister, even if she was nothing but a red ruin.
She remembers falling to her knees—a traumatized heap of sorrow—as the crowd outside looked on from the crude wooden sawhorse barriers, gazing into that open door frame like vultures scenting carrion. She hated humanity more than anything at that moment. She detested the human race so deeply, because it was the human race that spawned the hard-hearted beast who opened her sister up like a sack of soft and wet parts.
The memories start to fade and she refocuses on the bones, shells, and curios. Her teeth grit and her eyes narrow. She’s starting to hear, starting to see…
Sideburns. Long, tangled, almost lupine.
A cane with a silver tip and the polished head of a vulture skull.
Boots that no self-respecting gentleman would wear. Boots with spurs, boots that clang, boots that like to make an entrance.
A top hat with a wilting tulip in the brim.
She sees the rabid bastard tipping that top hat, saccharine sweet, and when he grins, you almost overlook the fact that his canines are just a bit too jagged to trust…
To read more, go to: Amazon.com or order the special edition, signed copy with hand-painted tarot cards at HorrorAddicts.net
All images on this post provided by HorrorAddicts.Net Press
May 8, 2020
Last Week This Friday: May 8, 2020 | Free Nahuatl Online Course, Buck-Tick, and More
Hello
EducationWant to learn a new language? Why not learn one of the indigenous languages spoken by the Aztecs (Mexica) and still spoken today by 1.5 million people for FREE?! David Bowles is kindly making his online Nahuatl course available for free. I took a few of the lessons and found them educational as he really lays down the groundwork for the grammar. The two-week Nahuatl course I took back in 2017 at UC Berkeley was more like Rosetta Stone in how you were immersed into the language, but without too much emphasis on grammar, which was taught later. I really wish I had kept it up as I’ve forgotten so much of what I learned during that time. But diving back into Nahuatl will have to wait. Right now, my priority is writing and publishing the sequel to The Deadbringer. Afterward, learning Nahuatl will be my priority. It means a lot to me to learn one of the native languages of my ancestors.
MusicA year and a half ago, I created an online Basic Classical Nahuatl course. Thirteen, self-paced modules with narrated slides and exercises.
— David Bowles (Mācuīl Ehēcatl) (@DavidOBowles) March 17, 2020
I'm now giving everyone free access to the course.
As you shelter in place, study a vital indigenous language. https://t.co/ifPt4fUSlx
Buck-Tick is hosting a live streaming special on YouTube on May 9th, at 5:00 a.m. California time. I LOVE Buck-Tick so damn much! I wrote a blog post talking about how I discovered this band in the pre-YouTube days (on super-slow dial-up) and how my mom, despite not knowing English or Japanese, fell in love with them as well. Their song “Jupiter” was one of the last songs I played for my mom when she was moved to hospice. You can read that blog post here, which is still on my old Blogger site. The other song I played for her was “Arrullo de Dios” by José Alfredo Jiménez.
Favorite TweetsAnother way to keep people 6ft away #whatisnewyork pic.twitter.com/YKEUdhIVy7
— WhatIsNewYork (@whatisny) May 4, 2020
Some Research Material for the world of the Ellderet@NYGovCuomo talking about his daughter’s boyfriend @andrewcuomo pic.twitter.com/B2VyzMM87o
— Maria DeCotis (@MariaDeCotis) May 1, 2020
Much love,
EMM
May 2, 2020
Tales for the Camp Fire 1-Year Anniversary: Our Wildfire Relief Charity Anthology of Short Horror Stories
Happy Saturday! I'm excited about today as it marks the 1-year anniversary of Tales for the Camp Fire!! Within one day of the ebook going live, the charity anthology I published reached #3 in Amazon's Best Sellers in Horror Anthologies, and the 100 print books I had taken to Bay Area Book Festival sold out!
During that launch weekend at the book festival, many readers shared their personal stories of how they or someone they knew had been devastated by the wildfire that tore through Paradise, CA in late 2018. The loss was heartbreaking. By the end of 2019, we raised $2,200 in profit and donated it to North Valley Community Foundation’s wildfire relief fund. All of this was possible because of the readers, authors, organizers, media outlets, and local bookstores who supported the charity anthology in one way or another. I'm very grateful and proud of this book because I and a lot of other people donated our time and labor to give back to the community.
Many thanks to Jonathan Maberry for blurbing the book (eekk! mind blown!!), Petersen Games for donating the awesome cover artwork, Deirdre Spencer for designing the cover, to the estate of Clark Ashton Smith for graciously donating a story, to Bram Stoker Award nominated author Loren Rhoads for stepping up as editor, to L.S. Johnson and Qamber Designs for taking on the ebook, to all the contributing authors who donated their stories, to author Ben Monroe for coming up with the idea of putting together a charity anthology, and to director and author Death's Parade Film Fest and Chad Schimke for going above and beyond to spread the word.
I feel very grateful to have been a part of this ❤ If you would like to help out and get a great collection of horror stories, you can find the anthology in print and ebook on Amazon. All profits from the sale of this anthology will be donated to Camp Fire relief and recovery efforts administered by the North Valley Community Foundation.
All the best,
EMM
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*click on the images for the full picture
Originally posted on my Instagram @tomesandcoffee 5/2/2020 . Minor edits were made to the text for the post. Additional photos were added.
May 1, 2020
Last Week This Friday: May 1, 2020 | Alameda NAS, Poppies, AI Memes, and More
Walking Dead in Alameda NAS
Today is International Workers’ Day and day 46 of sheltering in place in San Francisco. Sending love and solidarity to the workers of the world
The title for this post is 100% indebted to John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight. I love John Oliver and the way he delivers relevant information with tender loving care and a dash of wake-the-fuck-up. As a matter of fact, Last Week Tonight along with Asian Boss have had some on-point well-researched videos covering COVID-19 that I found very informative. Here’s a YouTube Playlist of the collected videos.
So what is “Last Week This Friday”? It’s just me sharing what made me happy last week in the hopes it brings a laugh or that you discover something new
me at the goth club when this is all over pic.twitter.com/moAYA1Y0lf
—
Last Week This Friday: May 1, 2020
Walking Dead in Alameda NAS
Today is International Workers’ Day and day 46 of sheltering in place in San Francisco. Sending love and solidarity to the workers of the world
The title for this post is 100% indebted to John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight. I love John Oliver and the way he delivers relevant information with tender loving care and a dash of wake-the-fuck-up. As a matter of fact, Last Week Tonight along with Asian Boss have had some on-point well-researched videos covering COVID-19 that I found very informative. Here’s a YouTube Playlist of the collected videos.
So what is “Last Week This Friday”? It’s just me sharing what made me happy last week in the hopes it brings a laugh or that you discover something new
me at the goth club when this is all over pic.twitter.com/moAYA1Y0lf
—
April 29, 2020
Day 44 of Sheltering in Place in San Francisco: I Don't Want "Normal," I Want Better
It's day 44 of "sheltering in place" in San Francisco. I hope everyone is keeping safe as best they can
Stay safe and healthy, everyone
EMM
Originally posted on my Instagram @tomesandcoffee 4/29/2020 . Minor edits were made to the text for the post.
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San Francisco street art
April 25, 2020
The Assistant Takes a Nap
Day 40 of “sheltering in place” in San Francisco.
Wishing everyone a lovely weekend
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