C.M. Rosens's Blog, page 50

Let’s Talk About Wolves #3 : Kinship and Kindness

Author Kara Jorgensen has her own thoughts about werewolves and has used them in her most recent novel, Kinship and Kindness, available to pre-order, released on 1st July 2020.

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Kara Jorgensen is a queer, anachronistic oddball with a penchant for all things antiquated, morbid, or just plain strange. While in college, she realised she no longer wanted to be Victor Frankenstein but instead wanted to write like Mary Shelley and thus abandoned her future career in science for writing. She melds her passions through her books and earned an MFA in Creative and Professional Writing in 2016. When not writing, she can be found hanging out with her dogs watching period dramas or trying to convince her students to cite their sources.

Jorgensen on Werewolves

My first real brush with werewolves in film was in Van Helsing (2004). The werewolf was a hero in this case and took on Dracula. I loved that he was more of a tragic, heroic figure. It stuck with me as my favorite depiction. I never really liked werewolves portrayed as ravenous beasts because wolves aren’t like that in the wild. Misunderstood or heroic werewolves always made more sense to me.

It’s always someone we know who turns out to be a beast.

What I always found interesting about the werewolf is how widespread the myth is. We see similar myths with wild cats or coyotes. It’s always someone we know who turns out to be a beast. The were- myths speak to some inner part of us that still knows people are apex predators like the creatures they transform into. We fear people will turn on us and make us or those we love prey. That’s terrifying and powerful.

I do think werewolves have become less scary as wolves themselves have been hunted to near extinction. We don’t have that primordial fear of them, especially seeing them in the wild or rehabilitation zoos where they can interact with visitors. Werewolves are almost like vampires in that they’ve been somewhat domesticated by the media to make them far more sympathetic. Oddly, I don’t think this trend is all that modern. We see a sympathetic and good werewolf in Irish legends as well as Marie de France‘s (fl. 1160 to 1215) “Bisclavret.” A werewolf loyal to the king is a much softer figure than the slathering monster of German mythology. Honestly, I like wolves getting better press and not being seen as bloodthirsty beasts because they aren’t. In the US, we still have wolves in places, so even fictional press is good press to keep them from being hunted further.

I love the idea of transformation as body horror. In my own work, I tend to think of being a werewolf as two entities cooperatively sharing a body, and it’s painful to give up control for both parties. It’s an experience that totally breaks down the character and reforms them as something new. It’s rebirth as much as body horror. Plus, I like playing with the duality of man as beast and master, wild and tame. Being wild has shifted from total inhibition to kill to running freely and being able to commune with nature. As an animal, I think humans still crave that closeness to the natural world that we’ve lost and being an actual animal allows us to do that. It’s a softer side of being a werewolf but it’s just as relevant as turning into a predator if not more so.

It’s definitely a metaphor for finding a community who can love and support you for who you are.

When writing my books, I’ve always thought about how to rework British mythology, and while writing The Wolf Witch and Kinship and Kindness, I found an overlap between UK and US legends with the werewolf. We have the Rougarou who hunts the bayous of Louisiana and the werewolves of old in British legends. Why not have them together? I also really liked the juxtaposition of the uptight Victorians with people who turn into wolves.

Intersectionality and the Werewolf/Shifter Community

England has outlawed werewolves, so what happens when they come back or when something even scarier emerges from history? That’s what I ended up exploring in The Wolf Witch, and through using werewolves, I talked about PTSD and war’s effect on the psyche. That people can be latent werewolves but transform under times of great stress. It’s a scary thought to suddenly not know yourself. And it’s only when others reach out that they can find stability and balance who they are. It’s definitely a metaphor for finding a community who can love and support you for who you are.

When it comes to queer and transgender werewolves and shifters, I always thought of the wolves/foxes and whatever other animals I mention as genderless. It would set them apart from the “real” version of the animals. In The Wolf Witch and Kinship and Kindness, they refer to their animal forms as “it” rather than with gendered pronouns, while together the human and animal form are “they”.

For someone like Bennett, who is a trans man, he never has to worry about his fox form giving him away. Because the shifters are accustomed to being not quite human and being set apart from society, I picture them (and other magical folk) as being far more progressive in terms of gender and sexuality. Being magical flies in the face of Christian beliefs and since those tend to cause the most friction with the queer community, it would make sense that they would be at least somewhat more progressive. There’s mention of queer platonic and outright queer relationships among the shifters in my books. For someone like Bennett, being in fox form is a place where he hasn’t had to worry that he doesn’t fit or match his interior and exterior presentation.

On the other hand, for someone like Theo who has epilepsy, being a werewolf can be a hazard. He has quite a bit of anxiety about having a seizure while in wolf form and being killed by someone or hurting himself. Consider the book takes place in the 1890s, so someone might mistake him for having rabies or that he should be put out of his misery. He tends to reject his wolf form because it brings a lot of fear that his human condition can and will spill over into his wolf form, especially since wolves and dogs can have epilepsy.

‘Hot-Housing’

Werewolves are always genetic. Supportive werewolf communities have a ceremony and ritual where the young people are able to commune and connect with their wolves to shift easier. Others don’t have that and it’s a surprise. It comes out under duress. If it’s particularly bad or done purposefully it’s called hot-housing (like plants).

Mentioned in The Wolf Witch, hot-housing is the deliberate creation of a deliberately hostile environment, like torture or a fight club, to force a latent werewolf into coming out. It’s natural instinct is to protect itself, so it’ll come out to save the human host but at a cost to it’s sanity/stability. Some can be rehabilitated if they’re more on the flight side of self-preservation.

It forces the werewolf out and makes them that scary, destructive werewolf legends talk about. The normal werewolves often hunt them down and kill them because the hot-housed werewolves will kill people because they’re unstable.

What do you think about werewolves? Join in the discussion on Twitter using #WerewolfTalk!

If you’re interested in reading more about Kara Jorgensen’s paranormal steampunk world, here are the books she has released (most are standalone but they can also be read in order):

READING ORDER:



“The Errant Earl”**The Earl of BrassThe Gentleman Devil“An Oxford Holiday”**The Earl and the ArtificerDead MagicSelkie CoveThe Wolf Witch

**Short stories

Pagham-on-Sea Town Museum & Containment Facility

A First Look with Guillaume Velde

The current site of the town museum was built-for-purpose in 1988 with Lottery Grant funding, when the buildings still standing in the Historic Docks were being redeveloped as a tourist attraction, educational resource and community hub. The museum is next to the Community First Centre and Credit Union, where the Citizens’ Advice Bureau is located on the second floor.

Pagham-on-Sea docks began life as a small harbour for subsistence fishing, which developed in the Industrial Revolution when Joseph Barker opened his factory and mills. Boats took products to and from here to Southampton and other major ports.

The museum was built at the same time that the town morgue was being carefully renovated (preserving the Georgian front). Both buildings appear strangely fortified. It moved from its previous location, sharing a Georgian building with the town library in the town centre, enabling the library to develop and for the collections of both to be better housed. There was some initial resistance to its relocation, but the Historic Docks has also attracted the redevelopment of businesses in that part of Pagham-on-Sea including the sea-view B&Bs, small cafés, kebab shops and the Red Ram, bought by a major national pub chain in 1990.

In this post, we take a quick introductory tour of the museum with Guillaume Velde.

Velde first took an interest in Pagham-on-Sea and its museum as a young boy, and has become an amateur authority on several of its collections and highlights.

It’s a pleasure to introduce the collections. Some of the items in the vaults are not on display to the general public, but special exhibitions make selected objects accessible to visitors throughout the year. Look out for the Smugglers and Wreckers exhibition, Floor 2, Arbuthnot Gallery, April-Oct 2020.

Guillaume Velde

The Arbutus Collection



[image error]The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Picture Collection, The New York Public Library. “Women’s Neckwear, 1870s.” New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed March 13, 2020. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e1-0369-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

Jeremy Arbutus was a vampire who gifted the museum his collection of c.300 years’ worth of ladies’ neckwear, much of it made of silk. It forms a unique cross section of the neckwear of the middle and upper classes, showing a rare exhaustive diachronic perspective on these garments. It is perhaps to be regretted that each piece is marred by a single bite mark, but this does not diminish the unique pedagogical value of this collection.

The Fossil Collection



[image error]A Middle Jurassic, fossil ammonite of the genus Stephanoceras from Switzerland. https://www.fossilera.com/pages/ammonites

Fossil hunting may be a fun pastime elsewhere, but in Pagham-on-Sea, it is frowned upon. The effect that the hyper-fertility of the soil has on fossilised creatures buried deep beneath the town is not something anyone wants to think too hard about. All fossils must be turned in to the Town Museum & Containment Facility without exception.

The Smuggling Collection



[image error]‘Them that ask no questions isn’t told a lie,
Watch the wall, my darling, while the gentlemen go by’
(Kipling: “The Smuggler’s Song”)

The eighteenth century saw a great deal of smuggling activity, and many items related to this dubious trade are in the museum, including a pair of pistols belonging to the infamous Seamus McVey, allegedly buried alive in a tunnel below Fairwood House (known colloquially as The Crows). McVey bet his pistols on a cock fight at The King’s Head, and lost them to a local farmer, Daniel Pierce. This event is recorded in Pierce’s journals, which are now kept in the East Sussex Record Office. McVey and his gang flourished in the 1740s with the aid of the local gentry, the Sauvants, who resided at Fairwood. Sir Thomas Sauvant was the local magistrate, which helped a great deal.

The Weapons Collection



[image error]https://awesomestuff365.com/19th-century-vampire-killing-kit/

There is a collection of assorted weaponry dating from c.1350-1890, which includes a variety of swords, daggers and guns. Some of these were clearly meant for members of the undead community, and so when they are exhibited, their public appearances are not without some controversy. They are only displayed in context of exhibitions designed by representatives of both undead and ante-dead communities with content warnings and age restrictions, where appropriate.

The Romano-British Collection

The Romano-British collection dates from c.60-490 CE (AD). The prize items in this collection (some of which are displayed publicly and some are not) are largely drawn from a shipwreck at the entrance to the Solent. How they ended up in the Pagham-on-Sea museum is not entirely clear. The list is as follows:

Three amphorae. Traces suggest they carried red wine.Seven swords, typical of the time and place. Of local manufacture.Several thousand pieces of broken pottery.Two bone flutes.The frame of one harp.One mat of something that turned out to be red human beard hair.One quern. Its upper stone is etched with signs of the zodiac.One table, which, according to the divers who found it, seemed to move under its own power every time one looked away from it. This item was thought to be lost, but resurfaced in dramatic style by chasing a small group of visitors down a corridor. It has since been recovered and is kept under lock and key.



Loose Items of Note

One (1) wooden sign that reads: Please Do Not Feed The Harpsichord. The whereabouts of the instrument in question is unknown.

One (1) sampo.

[image error]Photo by Ann H on Pexels.com

And that’s the end of our first quick tour! Do come back soon when a few more collections and loose items will be discussed. If you’d like to know about the fossil collection and when these will be displayed, the answer is never. Stay tuned for more on this in the forthcoming anthology of Pagham-on-Sea short stories, All Fossils Are Official Secrets, co-written with Guillaume Velde.

Let’s Talk About Wolves #2: Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?

Look at the soft, succulent flesh on that, Canis whispered, wheedling now, all warm-blooded and fattened up ripe and tender, you’ll still taste the vodka in the meat, in her warm, fragrant blood –

– oh god, Meredith thought, creeping closer until the scent of Tina’s subtle perfume filled her nostrils, Fresh blood pulsing into my mouth, over my face, oh my god that’s good–

-soft, slippery fat sliding by your muzzle to get to the good bits underneath, the plump liver and those tasty little kidneys, the bones grinding against your fangs when you crunch down, god, Meri baby, what are you waiting for, rip her up across the belly (you’ve seen her in that little black skirt where it strains across the middle, it’s getting small for her, it’s like she’s fattening herself up just for you), go on Meri baby, do it for me, baby, DO IT-

Tina spun around so fast that Meredith was startled, springing back just in time as the Taser waved in warning. She had crept up so close Tina must have felt her breath on her hair.

“Back off,” Tina snapped. “I don’t want to hurt you, Meredith, but by the gods I will fry your guts with this thing before you can say ‘silver bullet’. Got it? Go sit in reception if it’s too much for you in there. What the hell is wrong with you?”

~Real Meat Draft 1, Ch. 3

Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?

Not Tina Harris, for a start. Then again, it takes a lot to scare Tina Harris. In fairness, you probably ought to be scared of James Baskerville, he whose ancestor scared Sir Arthur Conan Doyle witless and shitless on a dark moor that one time, but he also calls himself “Canis” unironically and… there’s not a lot you can do about someone like that.

So who is scared of werewolves? Are we afraid of monsters the way we used to be? Or are we so familiar with the concept that we’ve tamed it, brought it down into the world of domestication and redemption arcs, and now it no longer bothers us or taps into current social anxieties?

I asked around…

Here’s author Richard Brown with his thoughts on this question.

Richard is the author of horror and speculative fiction short stories such as A Hole in the Somewhere, scheduled to appear on BlackPetals.net in the April edition.  He is currently finishing his debut novel, currently titled The Last Butterfly, about the innocuous encounters and events that lead to a bio-terror event that threatens humanity’s survival.  

Richard’s online presence:  www.facebook.com/blindwriter

www.writingmyownfate.blog

Twitter:  @RBrownAuthor

Werewolves entered my existence at the age of 5 when I snuck out of bed one night and hid behind the couch as my mother was watching The Howling on tv.  I think I wet the bed that night, and for several nights following.  Werewolves have had a special place in my heart and mind ever since.

I’ve seen Lon Chaney as a werewolf, and Michael Landon, but was unimpressed by those movies.  Maybe they were too old-fashioned for me?  I don’t know.  I’ve never seen a werewolf on screen that impressed me, actually.  I think it might be because Hollywood is unable to scare me, as an adult, as thoroughly as it did when I was five.  Silver Bullet, the adaptation of Stephen King’s Cycle of the Werewolf, was close to impressing me, but I was a young teen at that time, and King is a master of the mass-appeal story.

In IT, King featured a werewolf as the instrument of terror for one of the kids/heroes, and that was well done because it wasn’t the focus of the entire book; just one small part.  It was like a small taste of an old recipe, a favorite dish from childhood, without stuffing yourself full and missing out on new recipes.  Just a flashback to old, almost forgotten terrors.

In the new century, Jonathan Maberry wrote a trilogy that featured werewolves, vampires, and things more akin to zombies than anything else, except maybe ghouls.  In the Pine Deep trilogy, Maberry gives the werewolf in question mystical, sorcerous powers.  He also lets the transformation of the werewolf’s ‘children’, i.e. bite victims, last for almost the entire series, so readers get the chance to experience the mental, psychological, spiritual, and physical torment that takes place.  

Similarly, Stephanie Meyers’s werewolf in the Twilight Saga also faced moral dilemmas, not to mention racial stereotypes and biases, but came to terms with his ‘heritage’ fairly quickly and painlessly, at least as depicted in the films. The Twilight werewolf is a prime example of the trend of making the werewolf a tragic figure, and/or a heroic figure.  I think it’s good, in general, to twist stereotypes and cast surprising characters as heroes, and I’m especially a fan of the anti-hero.  I’ve always thought werewolves were tragic figures.  Lycanthropy has long been thought of as a curse, so I’m excited by the effort to describe why it’s a curse.   However, the power and abilities that typically come with the transformation would realistically lead to some characters seeking it out for their own nefarious purposes.  So, there’s always a place for the villainous, or at least threatening, werewolf.

The challenge for today’s authors is to create a horrifying werewolf.  With growing awareness of nature, ecosystems, and various wildlife specimens, the wolf no longer holds the terrifying mystique that it once did.  Now, the only aspect of the werewolf that really has a chance of scaring readers is the idea of losing one’s humanity.

Do you agree? What are your thoughts? Comment below!

Pagham-on-Sea Pub Crawl (Ultimate Challenge Version)

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Pagham-on-Sea, East Sussex, is a town described as “too bleak for the bleak geeks”, but it does have some quite good pubs, though. In this post, we look at the 11 pubs from best to worst (c.2019) at least according to the Good Pub Guide website:

The Red Ram
The New Inn
The Ship’s Wheel
The Mill House
The King’s Head
The Exchange Inn
The Old George Inn
The Snake and Feather*
The Full Moon**
The Mermaid
The Prince Albert***

*Should be higher up the list but has too few ratings. If you go in here and you think the drinks are ‘gimmicky’ and try something CLEARLY LABELLED acidic/alkaline for a laugh, you’re (a) in the wrong pub (b) currently dying. The beer on tap is really good though.

**This is a pack pub. It is not a good pub, but it’s the only one in Barker Crescent. If you do not have a pack tattoo or patch, or you’re not a lycanthrope, or you are not accompanied by a lycanthrope, you are in the wrong pub.

***If you find yourself in the Albert at any point in time, you’re either in the wrong pub or making all the wrong life choices.

[image error]Photo by Pressmaster on Pexels.com
The Red Ram

Now a family-friendly (in theory) chain pub by day and the starting point of most rowdy stag/hen parties by the middle of the afternoon, the Red Ram shows sports, serves cheap food, and cheap drinks.

POS pub crawlers start here: line your stomach with their daily food deal and whatever local craft beer they have on tap.

The Red Ram is the oldest surviving purpose-built pubs in Pagham-on-Sea, built in 1388. The name is thought to be an allusion to the original ostler’s seal, of which only one example survives on red wax, badly worn, but which appears to be a ram’s head. This is now kept in The National Archives, Kew. Other related documents of the building’s long history can be found in the East Sussex Record Office, The Keep.

Ricky Porter has been banned from this pub since his (now infamous) 18th birthday, during which he got banned from every pub he hadn’t already been banned from.

Carrie Rickard visits it with Mercy Hillsworth in The Crows. 

 

The New Inn

This is where you would take your grandmother for Sunday lunch. They have a Pub Quiz on Wednesdays and karaoke on Fridays.

Ricky Porter is not only banned from this pub but he’s also not allowed within 200m of it, or the landlord, or the door staff.

 

[image error]Photo by Stephen Niemeier on Pexels.com
The Ship’s Wheel

This is the pub most of the 18-30s crowd move on to after the Red Ram – cheap drinks, slightly pricier food, but great ale selections. It has a darts team.

Ricky Porter is banned for life.

 

The Mill House

Named for the actual mill that stood on this site before it became a pub (with accommodation upstairs), people insist on scrawling Simpsons quotes in the toilets so they’ve rolled with it and incorporated the popular cartoon into the decor with posters, framed prints and a Millhouse mascot doll behind the bar.

Ricky Porter has been banned since he was sixteen for (1) being underage (2) serving himself (3) breaking the barman’s jaw. He only came here once. He didn’t like it anyway.

 

The King’s Head

In 1716, after an ongoing feud between the landlord of this public house (Thomas Swales) and the landlord of The Exchange (Robert Eales) for the affections of recently widowed Maria Whitton, a duel was fought in what is now the King’s Head’s beer garden between the two men. At the time, it was a dirt yard where cock fighting and other such activities were usually conducted.

Swales chose pistols and shot Eales of The Exchange in the shoulder. Eales shot Swales in the thigh. Both men got patched up and survived the resulting infections only to find that Widow Whitton had run off with Capt. Nathanial Black of the Royal Navy.

This tale, and others, can be found painted on the walls of the pub and printed on the coasters.

It is a fairly respectable pub with a live band on Fridays and a DJ on Saturdays, a pool table and a darts team.

Ricky Porter is banned from this pub, too, and while he isn’t mentioned by name, you can find the story of how the pub was renovated after a serious fire (with framed photographs of before and after) on the wall by the bar.

 

The Exchange Inn

Apart from the duel in 1716, nothing has really happened in The Exchange. The rivalry between it and The King’s Head was evoked for a Comic Relief five-aside football match (where all the players come in fancy dress) in 1987, and the two pubs have played a match to raise money for either Comic Relief, Children In Need or Sport Relief almost every year since.

Tickets are £2 and there’s always a raffle.

There’s a live band here every Saturday.

Ricky Porter got banned preemptively when he was seventeen after a fight outside. It is the only pub in Pagham-on-Sea (apart from The Full Moon, a special case) that managed to ban him before he actually set foot in there.

[image error]Photo by Chris F on Pexels.com
The Old George Inn

Very quiet ‘old man’s pub’, has a pool table and three regulars throughout the week who never speak to each other. It does, however, have a darts team.

Ricky Porter’s last pub crawl (his 18th birthday) was the most exciting thing to happen to the Old George in over two decades. He has, obviously, been banned ever since after terrorising the regulars in 57mins and 43seconds of total carnage.

The Snake and Feather

The Snake is one of the best pubs in Pagham-on-Sea as far as inclusivity, variety and quality goes, but has very few reviews. You really need to know where it is to go there, and it’s not the kind of place you would want to stumble upon if you weren’t already in the know.

We’d love to tell you more about it, but we can’t. You’ll just have to find someone to take you.

This is the only pub where someone actually managed to lay Ricky out cold. No one ever talks about it and they really hope that punter never comes back, either. Revenant Rage is not something you want to happen in your pub twice.

 

The Full Moon

The Full Moon is Barker Crescent’s only pub, and it is fully understood that no one drinks there except werewolves.

This being the case, and it also being a Known Fact that pretty much anyone in the Pendle Clan could skin a werewolf with their bare teeth (that is, anyone directly descended from the three Pendle Sisters, which includes the Wends, the Shaws, the Foremans, the Wend-McVeys and the Porters), absolutely none of them are welcome in the pub.

This is… difficult to enforce, but Ricky has never set foot there because his Great-x-Grandmother Beverley Wend (née Pendle) has an Understanding with the Alphas.

Ricky is therefore banned by default.

The Mermaid

It is very unfair that The Mermaid is still languishing at the bottom of the table since Gus, the old landlord, died, and his nephew Gary has taken over. Gary hails from Chichester, West Sussex, and is easily one of the nicest guys let alone landlords you’ll ever meet.

[image error]Photo by Rene Asmussen on Pexels.com

Gary is all about making inclusive community spaces. There is an undead support group who meet there on Thursdays, which, unlike other such groups, has no restrictions on type of undead who can attend meetings. Gary understands that everyone needs support from time to time, and possessed toys may freak people out but that’s no reason to exclude the cymbal-banging monkey of your nightmares just because he’s a polyester blend. Also, his name is Fred.

In the old days, The Mermaid was worse than the Albert. Ricky got banned from here too, which was a genuine blow since Gus never checked ID and he’d been drinking here with his cousin Wes since they were fifteen. Ricky can’t remember why he got banned but presumes it has something to do with the night he staggered home with Gus’s (severed) hand in his pocket.

If he ever takes up drinking again, this is where he’d go first to try his luck. Gary seems like a soft touch into second chances.

The Prince Albert

If you’re not here for a dodgy deal, do not approach the booths or the snug.

If you are not prepared to get stabbed with something (up to and including a used syringe), be mugged, leave with stolen goods, or get offered seriously dodgy cocaine cut with various household detergents/powdered glass, do not sit in the main bar area.

If you do want sanitary toilets, a quiet drink, or not to get started on by some random guy on meth, you’re in the wrong pub.

That’s about all we have to say about The Prince Albert.

It shouldn’t be possible to be banned from this pub, but Ricky Porter has managed it. He can’t remember why, but if it tops the severed hand in his pocket then it must have been one hell of a night.

The Prince Albert was getting worse. The barman, a sallow faced young man with styled, dirty hair and a sullen attitude, caught her eye and pointed at a booth. The oak door was ajar, wreathed in cigar smoke. Meredith nodded and swaggered over, sliding effortlessly around the sticky table into the stained seat. The door swung shut, and she was trapped in what amounted to a claustrophobic, mood-lit cubbyhole, hemmed in by panels on all sides. A dim lamp picked out rings of spilled beer, and the Albert’s ragged beer mats that had seen much better days. It threw no light at all on David Wend, a hulking shadowy presence opposite her. She could make out the collar of his trench coat, but it was as if he absorbed the light around him, blurring his silhouette further with the fragrant puffs of his long cigar. His face was hidden from her, and the roughly cut hair around his ears seemed to hide two other profiles, as if he had three faces rather than one. She wasn’t sure what she was looking at. It was best not to look too closely. 

David Wend chuckled deep in his throat as she studied the beer mat in front of her instead. “Ms Blake. Lovely to finally make your acquaintance in person.” 

Meredith’s lips twitched. “Likewise.”

~ Real Meat, a first draft scene

 

 

 

LOOK OUT for the next werewolf post – Thursday! Featuring an interview with author Richard Brown.

Let’s Talk About Wolves #1: Werewolves in the Paghamverse

CW// discussions of addiction, relapse

Alright, so I’ve been prompted to think more about my werewolf thriller, Real Meat, and how I’m going to revise it. I’m getting back into the mood with… well, not werewolf lit so much, but three books I find really interesting:

–Wolves and the Wilderness in the Middle Ages, Aleksander Pluskowski, (Boydell & Brewer, 2006), [something I used for my PhD thesis but ended up reading more for fun]

–The Book of Were-Wolves, Sabine Baring-Gould, (1865)

–Wolves, Werewolves and the Gothic, ed. by Robert McKay and John Miller, (UWP, 2017)

I’ll probably be doing a blog post (or maybe more than one?) on the last one, in the same way that I did a summary/review of Body Gothic by Xavier Aldana Reyes.

If you just can’t wait, Sam George has already done a really good review of WWG on the Open Graves, Open Minds project blog, 30.03.2018.

Real Meat & the Werewolves of the Paghamverse

[image error]In Real Meat, Meredith’s inner demons (personified by her ex-lover’s voice in her head) remind her of what a werewolf ought to be, part of an ongoing dialogue she has with her addiction to human flesh.

We made them run, their eyes rolling back in their heads like frightened deer, leaving a musky trail of fear for us to follow, marking every tree they touched with their cold, cold sweat …  we were  mighty .  T hey deified us, worshipping with their terror. We were their gods of death, gulping up their prayers as they begged us, begged us on their backs, begged us  on their knees, begged us  writhing on their soft, warm bellies, please, please,  please …

I was thinking about the way cannibal stories show negative physical side effects of eating people, and how this might translate to a werewolf who is human at least part of the time, even if Turning is at will. I was also thinking a lot about the folklore that attributes compulsions and ‘tells’ in behaviour to those suspected of vampirism or of being a werewolf (the two in folklore are often interchangeable, and according to some lore, a person who is a werewolf in life is guaranteed to be a vampire after death).

I looked at real-life wolf behaviour in the wild versus in captivity, and wondered how to blend these with human behaviour and the norms of a humanocentric society.

There’s been some debate around whether wolves in the wild have an ‘Alpha’ construct, and how wolf behaviour in the wild differs to that observed in captivity. Compare G. B. Rabb’s 1967 study on captive wolves in Chicago zoo with a more recent 2016 study on captive wolves and dominance relationships (Cafazzo, Lazzaroni and Marshall-Pescini).

I tried to figure out how all this worked with concepts of unity/duality, and constructs of Self.

 

Constructions of Lycanthropy

From this as my starting point, I figured that constructions of werewolf society and experiences of living with lycanthropy would differ for people, depending on if this was an inherited condition or if it was something contracted later in life.

Experiences and language used to express and explore these experiences would differ depending on whether someone was born into a pack or ‘adopted’ into one, and at what stage of life the adoption took place, and whether this was the result of a consensual bite or not.

I’ve also debated about using this kind of pathologising language and what werewolves themselves would think about this.

I think there’s a definite move in some quarters to eliminate pathological language and to stop calling lycanthropy a ‘condition’, while others, especially those who feel as if this has been ‘done unto’ them (i.e. those Bitten without consent) would definitely consider it a ‘condition’ and be looking for a cure.

Those born into a lycanthropic family might have any number of ways of conceptualising their existence and dual natures, and would probably be brought up not to think of themselves in ‘duality’ but to embrace themselves as a whole, as One. This construction may make werewolves more inclined to religious faith, rather than less: they have an intrinsic way of thinking about themselves that can be applied to constructions of the Divine, too. It also positions them in a very interesting position where they clash with negative religious views on the werewolf as ‘evil’ or an ‘aberration’, which potentially spiritually aligns them with the human LGBTQ+ communities.

I thought a bit more about this and my own theological background and understanding of my own sexuality and gender from within that framework, and I also wondered how werewolves would work in terms of being non-binary/trans and how this would affect their change from one form into another. Would they give off pheromones in both human/wolf form that express their identity to other wolves simply as part of who they are, e.g.?

I’m still considering these aspects, and I should probably collate all the experimental #WiPWorldBuilders tweets on this somewhere I can sift through them.

[image error]Photo by Alex Andrews on Pexels.com
Pack Dynamics

With all this in mind, I settled on punk fashion as a means for modern-day younger werewolves to express themselves. This is not just a cool aesthetic. I liked how it could be adopted to represent a more democratic/anarchic system of pack relationships, albeit one where the stronger personalities will naturally rise to ‘leadership’ positions organically. The whole ethos of punk allows for fluidity within these younger packs and encourages self-expression. It also allows for the transference of responsibility as well as allowing for greater bonding and teamwork.

I covered this in detail in my post on Werewolf Fashion, which includes some short interviews with teen werewolves.

Traditionally though, a pack does have an Alpha (more usually an Alpha couple, who are not necessarily heterosexual and/or don’t even have to be romantically involved) who are connected to their pack through blood or Bite. Things look different for different kinds of family groups.

It’s more a system of administration and governance/policing, and pack councils are more democratic than the hierarchy implies. Alphas of other packs also have regular council meetings where packs live in close proximity to each other, since packs are generally made up of multiple family groups of up to 60 individuals.

In larger urban centres, packs can be fluid and you might end up with many smaller ones of only 5-10 (generally adolescents or young professionals bonding together as they move to different locations for work).

Rogues
[image error]Photo by Steve on Pexels.com

Those addicted to human flesh [known to pack wolves as Rogues] may try to fight their addiction, but the stigma and taboo around this can cause them to be ostracised. This is generally something they do alone or by going to meetings for other addictions. Since people at these other meetings tend to… be human… this is not the best solution. Rogues therefore often find themselves relapsing and falling into spirals of despair without the proper support.

This is a major factor in Rogues hiding their addiction from others and preferring to find ways of managing the symptoms and justifying the ‘lifestyle’.

There are several ways that these werewolves can do this, generally using historical constructions of the wolf and describing themselves as embodiments of the wilderness and forest which humankind has good reason to fear. They may see themselves as part of the natural order, a predator responsible for thinning the destructive virus that is humanity, or simply position themselves as godlike and therefore untouchable, making ‘justification’ irrelevant.

The penalty for turning Rogue is ‘leashing’ – hanged with a silver or silver-plated chain, then decapitated. Leashing doesn’t necessarily kill a werewolf, it’s the decapitation that does that. It’s an incredibly painful method of torture, though, since the intense allergic reaction to silver prevents Turning, but the hyperactive immune system and fast-acting cell repair ensures that the leashed werewolf won’t actually die of that, or at least, not very fast.

Leashing can be a penalty on its own, and does not necessarily have to be issued as a death sentence. That said, some werewolves, such as those Turned later in life who already had an auto-immune disease or more elderly werewolves, have been known to die from leashing alone.

 

Loners
[image error]Sean Pertwee in Dog Soldiers (2002)

Due to the “self-policing” nature of werewolf society, and the inherent dangers of lycanthropy (particularly the addictive nature of human flesh for werewolves), Loners are required.

A Loner is a lone werewolf, elected to this position in a particular region by the pack council (they must formally apply, even if the position has become de facto hereditary).

They are generally financially supported in some small way by pack funds, but could (and usually do) have a day-job and/or their own money, and should be largely self-sufficient.

Loners face a variety of challenges: policing three larger packs whose combined territory spans the entire Yorkshire Dales is one thing, while policing an ever-changing dynamic of 10-20 packs free-forming and disbanding multiple times a year in the London borough of Brixton is quite another. In Pagham-on-Sea there are five well-established packs (First through to Fifth) who live in Barker Crescent. All five are technically overseen by one Loner.

I say ‘technically’ because there are actually two Loners, one active (Meredith Blake) and one retired (Benito “Benny” Silvestri, who has returned to Pagham-on-Sea after serving the packs of Cheltenham as their Loner for over forty years). His goddaughter, Tina Harris, works at the morgue and periodically tries to persuade him to move out of The Willows Bed & Breakfast and into more appropriate sheltered accommodation. Benny knows about Meredith’s addiction, and is her only werewolf ally.

Loners are, by definition, badly suited to being a ‘normal’ part of pack life. They live outside of the pack(s) and are supposed to be neutral enforcers of law and order, like internal affairs investigators, and act as a deterrent to toxicity and ‘going Rogue’, ensuring through displays of brutality and aggression that ‘bad/toxic behaviour’ is not tolerated, not even and especially not from the Alphas.

Loners rarely have to execute werewolves, but when they do, they do it as brutally as possible and in public, in front of the entire pack, including the pack’s youngest members. A Loner cannot show weakness in front of the pack, and is often invoked by the young as a kind of bogeyman or Bloody Mary type figure. They are never invited to pack socials but may turn up randomly just to check on things.

Pack lore varies from place to place: having the Loner show up at your coming-of-age ceremony is either a portent of good fortune or doom, for example, and in Barker Crescent, Pagham-on-Sea, where the packs live in perpetual fear of Meredith Blake, the cubs chant a rhyme in the mirror of a darkened room in order to summon their Loner to the birthday party or social event of their enemies.

Loners police one another. In the first draft of Real Meat, only the Barker Crescent Alphas were on the council for Meredith’s tribunal, but the more I think about it the more I think that this structure needs to change. Loners ought to be autonomous but police each other, which gives greater concern for by-the-book, morally upright Loners if one of their number goes Rogue or if it is suspected more than one Loner is corrupt. This is a section I’ll be re-writing.

 

Next Steps

That pretty much sums up where I am with werewolves at the moment! Aside from delving back into the werewolf books mentioned above (I’m very excited for the Gothic one), I might re-watch a few of my favourite werewolf films and try to see a few I’ve not yet seen.

These may include Den of Geek’s 13 Must-See Werewolf Movies but probably these:

Howl (2015)
Blood Moon (2014)
The Wolfman (2010)
Dog Soldiers (2002)
Ginger Snaps (2000)
An American Werewolf in Paris (1997)
The Company of Wolves (1984)
The Howling (1981)
An American Werewolf in London (1981)
The Wolf Man (1941)

Looking at this list makes me kind of want to track down a sample of werewolf films by decade and see how they developed over time… but I guess that’s a post/project for another day…!!

Psssssssst. If you like my posts but don’t want to buy my book, no worries. You can buy me a coffee instead and help me continue to create Gothic content! I am 60% of the way towards my modest £30 goal (which goes towards the cost of my Premium WordPress subscription). >> https://ko-fi.com/cmrosens

#AmWriting (Honest)

So! You’ve read The Crows, or you’re nearing the end, and you want to know what I’m writing next? OF COURSE YOU ARE. I find it hard to keep all my eggs from rolling out of their respective baskets so here’s a breakdown of the projects I’m working on and where they all are in terms of progress!

I’ve linked my wiki-esque pages (made with Notebook.ai) for each character, and if you’re not familiar with abbreviations used in this post (like POV, MC, etc), I’ve linked the definition too.

First, let’s start with how all these projects fit together.

 

Interlinking Stories: What’s The Connection?

The Crows introduces you to Pagham-on-Sea through the eyes of a Londoner and a couple of locals, and through them you learn about the town’s human and paranormal communities (although some don’t like the term ‘paranormal’ and consider it derogatory).

I consider this novel to be not just a standalone Gothic paranormal exploration of trauma, death, life, acceptance and obsession, but also as a starting point from which you can branch out and explore the whole world and all the other people in it. As a gateway to this ‘verse, I think it’s the right one for me to have opened with.

Stories set in the town, whether set in modern-day or at various points in history, will be loosely grouped within the ‘Pagham-on-Sea‘ umbrella. Other stories may feature characters who are connected with the town or otherwise exist in the same universe as the town, and these will fall under different ‘series’ links but might be connected up later.

Right then: where am I with all of this?? Read on…

 

Completed Drafts
Thirteenth: A Pendle Clan/Pagham-on-Sea Novel
[image error]Mock temporary cover, made in Canva by moi

Thirteenth, the next chronological novel after The Crows, is complete as a first draft at c.102k words (too long) and I need to think about revising it before beta stages.

CW// drugs and alcohol abuse, body horror, gore, mild self-harm and unhealthy coping behaviours.

Thirteenth is essentially the story of Katy Porter, the thirteenth child of a thirteenth child, who has a walk-on cameo in The Crows. It’s not YA (she’s the only teen character with a POV, the other two MCs are both aged 29), but it does follow her coming-of-age journey as she comes to terms with her development from a human-passing A-Level student into an eldritch abomination who preys exclusively on her own family, whether she wants to or not.

It’s also the story of her oldest brother, Wes Porter, another cameo character in The Crows, who has never really emotionally dealt with his particular eldritch aspect, and isn’t much of a fan of pushing thirty either. Wes has always believed that Katy will end up killing him for Reasons, but she’s still his baby sister, and when the rest of the clan plot to control and/or eliminate her, Wes has to pick a side.

Their cousin, Ricky Porter, is… predictably the antagonist, if only because his interpersonal skills leave a great deal to be desired, and his interference is both infuriating and essential to both Katy and Wes achieving their respective potential, no matter how many times they desperately want (and try) to kill him. Nobody as dangerous as Ricky Porter should also be that annoying.

If you’re up for beta-reading, drop me a comment or tweet to me @CMRosens – I’ll add you to my list! I am looking for 6-8 people, particularly bi/pan and polyam for the very messy chaotic disaster that is Wes Porter and his long-suffering, far better put-together partners. This one has been tough to write for various reasons so I need some space from it before I go back in.

If you’re signed up to Booksprout I’m using that for ARC copies of the ebook, as I did for The Crows. We’re a little way off that stage yet, but hopefully it will be out by the start of 2021, or in time for Christmas 2020.

 

Real Meat: A Meredith Blake/Pagham-on-Sea Novel

I want to develop my straight-to-Wattpad werewolf thriller, Real Meat, which is currently complete at c.71k words and free to read in its [unedited] first draft form.

In Real Meat, investigative journalist Meredith Blake is thrown into a conspiracy of silence as a young werewolf teen is found dead and elderly werewolves start going rogue. Has ‘real meat’ [people!] got into the food chain? What’s the connection to Kench Foods, the town’s major employer? With her investigations hampered by a mysterious blackmailer who seems only too aware of her struggles to control her own real meat addiction, Meredith starts to wonder if she’s being set up for a fall…

Meredith Blake is more or less a malignant narcissist with a human flesh (so-called ‘real meat’) addiction, who is only on the straight and narrow after being threatened with execution at a tribunal. She’s an intensely difficult character to write and the inside of her head is not a pretty place to be, so in the first draft she has a core of guilt that gives her something that’s at least semi-redeemable.

I will be rewriting huge chunks of this as it aligns with a very old first draft of The Crows but not at all with the new version.

 

In Progress
Eldritch Girls Just Want To Have Fun: A Pendle Clan Novel

[image error]

Sasha Shaw is a career-orientated, human-passing eldritch horror who genuinely sees killing people on stage/camera as the next boundary for performance art. She meets Tosh Haraldson, an increasingly erratic hitman from Chicago, who is in Brighton to find his missing sister, Raine. Tosh is obsessed with snuff and torture porn (part of the reason his sister doesn’t want to be found) and his growing obsession with Sasha starts to interfere with his focus. As far as his employer and Sasha’s monstrous gangster uncle is concerned, she’s off limits. However, the sexual tension is undeniable, and when they’re caught in a compromising position, the latest corpse they’re found with is the least of their worries.

Word count at time of this post is 36k words.

Sasha took on a life of her own thanks to Nita Pan‘s snippet of a story idea which I thought sounded perfect for her backstory but didn’t want to steal. So we’re co-writing it and having a great time! It has turned into a standalone, bouncy, bloody slasher-romance that riffs off both noir-thriller and contemporary romance tropes and translates them into a romance novel structure, set in Brighton in early 2016.

There is a single scene that takes place in Pagham-on-Sea, so it’s not quite a PoS novel, but we do get to visit the Sandbox Café again (as featured in The Crows).

 

Outlining Stages
The Wishing Well: A Pagham-on-Sea Novel
[image error]Aesthetic: Egg & Gwen vs Nathan “For Science!” Porter

Eglantine “Egg” Pritchard and her life-partner and ‘companion’, Gwen Mostyn-Jenkins, have already thwarted one elder god apocalypse back in 1925, and now, under cover of the ‘War Effort’, it looks like they’ll have to thwart another one.

Wishing Well is set in Pagham-on-Sea in 1943 during the Second World War, and is both an origin story for the Porter branch of the Pendle Clan and a chance for me to finally give Eglantine Pritchard (the Welsh hedgewitch responsible for magically locking Ricky’s family out of The Crows) her own story.

This is a challenge to write because it’s historical fiction and requires a lot of research. It also features two characters in their 40s who have been together for about 25+ years at this point, and the dynamics of the relationship are already well-established, so we’re parachuting in to a stage of their lives when priorities are shifting and they are already dealing with life on the Home Front. Getting all of this right in the exploration writing is key, as is striking that ever-tricky show/tell balance.

Basically, it’s a fun paranormal romp with plucky evacuees, strange lights in the night, a wishing well that works (and the creature that lives there), and shadowy forces who will stop at nothing in their pursuit to control dangerous occult forces ‘for the War Effort’.

 

Aislynn (working title): A Pagham-on-Sea Novel

Aislynn O’Keefe has a rare sleep disorder and has learned to take control of the dreamworld. Her (divorced) mum Karen is her full-time carer, struggling to maintain their disability benefits with the support of her next door neighbour and potential love interest [40sF, unsure of name]. Aislynn’s older sister Jo is a legal administrator at a local solicitors’. Jo’s boyfriend, Charlie Prince, is the son of a local gangster. Aislynn has been killing men like Charlie’s dad in their dreams, and Charlie is trying to find out who is behind these brutal, mysterious murders before his dad is next.

This one is kind of a Sleeping Beauty meets A Nightmare on Elm Street concept with a dash of Inception and I, Daniel Blake.

There’s a lot going on in the initial outline but I’m not sure how it will pan out when I get started! I will need to do a LOT of research for this one, too.

 

Short Story Anthologies

I’m also teaming up with the mysterious [lol] Guillaume Velde to write two anthologies of short stories and flash fiction.

One anthology, All Fossils Are Official Secrets, is a Pagham-on-Sea anthology, and the other, The Carp Who Thought She Loved The Moon And Other Stories, is unrelated to the Paghamverse and is essentially a collection of whimsical fairy tales for sad people.

Here’s an unedited sample of Velde’s style, reproduced here with permission, which will preface The Carp collection:

Listen: a carp in a deep lake once thought she loved the moon, the dancing lines of light at night when the wind caught the surface.  And one night she swam up to gape at the moon. But when she broke the surface all the shining lines just flowed over her, and she did not understand what she saw.  And the real moon shone above, cold, distant and unlovely. So she dived, she dived again until she forgot, and the water was enough for her.  

And the moon shone on.

 

All Fossils Are Official Secrets

I don’t want to give too much away about this collection, but here are some of the titles of the shorts going into this anthology, all of which are set in Pagham-on-Sea…

All Fossils are Official Secrets
Graveyard Shift at the Crazy Golf
The Last Lighthouse Keeper
The Punch and Judy Man (a sample of which is on my blog… it may be reproduced as is)
The [Second] Battle of the Trees
A Short History of the Shipwrecks
Love Song to The Crows (which will be edited further)

 

…So my goals are to keep pecking away at these, basically, and to have made “tangible progress” on them. This may include research notes, outlines, and actual words/edits.

Let’s see how March 2020 goes.

Happy St David’s Day!

Happy St David’s Day/Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Hapus.

I’m late posting this, but let me rectify it by offering you a recipe for Welsh Cakes and Crempogau (Welsh Pancakes). The recipe for crempogau is (apparently) one of the oldest in Wales. They aren’t like crepes or American pancakes and take about 55mins to make so allow the time!

Both Welsh Cakes and crempogau are best made on bakestones/griddles, and we used to have a cast iron one that I wish I’d kept. FORTUNATELY we were gifted John Lewis vouchers by lovely relatives as wedding gifts, so guess what I’m buying this Spring (for post-Lent noms)…!

[image error]Welsh Spinners: Public Domain: A late 19th century photo of women in a rural Welsh costume, Library of Congress
Welsh Cakes

I usually adapt this BBC Food recipe and add a lot of cinnamon and some nutmeg to the mix, but that’s my preference-!

I’ll take the opportunity to link you to the traditional recipe and in so doing plug The Market Bakery, Abergavenny, which is really worth a visit if you’re ever in that area.

Crempog

I’ll share this traditional recipe: traditionally eaten on Shrove Tuesday/Dydd Mawrth Ynyd (Pancake Day) but tasty all year round!

This recipe has some ideas for hot/cold toppings (both sweet and savoury)!

Traditionally it came with a folk song chanted by children as they went house to house on Shrove Tuesday asking for pancakes:

(English translation from National Museum of Wales)

Woman of the house and good family,

Please may I have a pancake ?

Mother is too poor to buy flour

And Father too lazy to work.

Please may I have a pancake ?

My mouth is dry for want of a pancake.

If there is no butter in the house

Put a large spoonful of treacle,

And if there is no treacle in the house

Give a terribly large pancake.

Terribly, terribly.

You can listen to the song in Welsh here from the National Museum’s page.

The music is available to download as .pdf.

St David’s Day
[image error]Castell Coch stained glass panel (19thC)

St David is the patron saint of Wales and his day has been celebrated for centuries. There’s a gorgeous 18thC oil painting by an unknown(?) artist of the ‘British School‘ I wanted to add here but can’t so I’ll link you to it instead: A Celebration of St David’s Day, NMW A 29327

St David was a 6thC saint who was big into living in community, what’s now termed (loosely) eco-spirituality, and enacting transformation through small daily acts. His last words to his followers were (according to Rhygyfarch, who wrote his hagiography, available to read in full in translation here and on archive.org): “Do the little things, the small things you’ve seen me doing.”

WalesOnline has a nice article of facts and links that might be of interest, and a lovely picture of a St David’s Day parade in Cardiff which, as well as the Welsh flag, features both the black and yellow cross flag of St David, not featured in the Union Jack since Wales was subordinate to and classified as ‘England’ during the Union Jack’s design and adoption and so was not represented as part of the Union on its own merit, and the flag of Llywelyn the Last (the four lions rampant, red & yellow).

If you’re interested in how the struggles of Welsh nationalism and independence have been represented in Gothic literature, I’ve done a few posts based on Jane Aaron’s excellent study, Welsh Gothic, (University of Wales Press, 2013). The context of modern social unrest and the relatively short-lived rise of Welsh paramilitary groups is covered in this post.

 

Spooky Spring #WritingPrompts

After a #SpookySat hiatus, we are entering the warmer weather and lighter evenings of springtime! A time when things are not as spooky? Not necessarily.

If you want to participate in make spring a spookier time, here are some word prompts to use to create some tweet-sized micro-fiction and send a few shivers up your followers’ spines!

 

March 2020

#SpookySat

7 Mar: GREEN

14 Mar: QUIET

21 Mar: BIRDSONG

28 Mar: OAK

 

April 2020

#SpookySat

4 Apr: TOADSTOOL

11 Apr: WILLOW

18 Apr: STREAM

25 Apr: RAIN

 

May 2020

#SpookySat

2 May: SECLUDED

9 May: BRIDGE

16 May: WOODS

23 May: SUNBEAM

30 May: ECLIPSE

Spooky Spring

After a #SpookySat hiatus, we are entering the warmer weather and lighter evenings of springtime! A time when things are not as spooky? Not necessarily.

If you want to participate in make spring a spookier time, here are some word prompts to use to create some tweet-sized micro-fiction and send a few shivers up your followers’ spines!

 

March 2020

#SpookySat

7 Mar: GREEN

14 Mar: QUIET

21 Mar: BIRDSONG

28 Mar: OAK

 

April 2020

#SpookySat

4 Apr: TOADSTOOL

11 Apr: WILLOW

18 Apr: STREAM

25 Apr: RAIN

 

May 2020

#SpookySat

2 May: SECLUDED

9 May: BRIDGE

16 May: WOODS

23 May: SUNBEAM

30 May: ECLIPSE

Co-Writing for Beginners

Writing is a collaborative process. Even if you write purely for yourself, you will be in dialogue with the world around you, your influences, other authors, and the context in which you write. No one can write anything in a vacuum.

There is already a lot of discourse on critique partners, beta readers, sensitivity readers, and content warnings, aimed at both improving an author’s work and improving their relationship with their readership. I’m not wading into this here. I am, however, going to talk about the process of co-writing a novella/novel with someone else, which I’ve often wondered about and thought was not for me… until this year.

My [Our] New Project

[image error]

I’ve recently started co-writing a novella set in the Pagham-on-Sea universe. Pagham-on-Sea itself appears in one chapter, but the story as a whole is set in Brighton (the real place) in early 2016.

This came about after I had drafted the sequel to The Crows, which is set 8 months later and currently titled Thirteenth. In one scene of Thirteenth, Wes Porter is dragged along by his younger sisters to support Cousin Sasha, who is starring in a snuff film. It’s meant to be an introspective scene where Wes has a drug-addled revelation, so it could take place anywhere, but it actually takes place in a VIP lounge in an undisclosed location watching Sasha perform a series of brutal gorelesque acts through a one-way mirror.

I didn’t know anything about Cousin Sasha. She was literally a name I picked out of the air, and I wasn’t sure which branch of the family she even belonged to. She is now a Shaw purely for the tongue-twistery consonance.

In a Discord writing group channel on 10 January 2020, Nita Pan, whose short story Life and Death I really admired and whose other (draft-form, unpublished as yet) work really struck chords with me, posted a casual note she’d found for a dark romance story idea:

“He’s into snuff films and she eats people”.

I (half-jokingly) said this sounded like Sasha’s backstory.

We got excited by this, and as she enjoyed The Crows and its world (read her review here), she was up for writing it together since I didn’t want to steal her idea.

This was one of the best artistic decisions I’ve ever made (I wonder, when we’re done, how many will agree with that, but I stand by it), and has taught me a massive amount about the creative process and also really helped me with my own mental health.

This is how the noir slasher-romance, Eldritch Girls Just Want To Have Fun, was born, and why I consider 10 January to be Sasha’s real birthday. She’s a Capricorn.

[image error]

I suck at writing summaries and this is still in early first draft stages, but here goes:

Eldritch Girls features an erratic hitman from Chicago, Tosh Haraldson, who arrives in Brighton (UK) to look for his missing sister. Tosh is the disgraced son of an Orthodox priest with a boatload of issues, a snuff film enthusiast, and has a nasty tendency to stab people with scissors. A previous employer puts him in touch with a snuff film producer in Brighton so Tosh can earn some cash while on his family quest, and ends up on the radar of the enigmatic David Wend, an eldritch gangster with a wayward niece.

Sasha Shaw, currently under the watchful eye of monstrous Uncle David, is a human-passing eldritch horror and attention-starved, easily-bored professional dancer, sick of Gentlemen’s Clubs and bar work, limited in job prospects by her most recent restraining order. Considering herself an avant-garde performance artist, Sasha enjoys performing brutal Goreleseque acts with power tools (including a chainsaw) where the blood isn’t fake and the soundtrack is nearly always ABBA.

When Tosh meets Sasha at a gory snuff film audition, he knows there’s something different about her, and it’s not just the fact she can do things to people with a dentist’s drill that have to be seen to be believed. Repeatedly warned to stay away from her by both the Producer, who sees her as a major asset, and her dangerous uncle whose side business involves a lorry full of human organs, Tosh knows that doing anything about their sexual tension is risky to the point of suicidal… but Sasha Shaw always gets what she wants, and what she wants is Tosh Haraldson.

Is there any hope for this twisted Romeo and his dark Juliet, or will he end up as a prop in one of her films?

Co-Writing: The Process
[image error]Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Establish your hard/soft limits with your co-writer(s) and ensure that everyone respects each other’s boundaries. 

I’m not going to lie, if I had known how intense this was going to be, I probably would have thought twice about it. I am not known for my willingness to share. But fortunately, I am writing with exactly the right person not just for the project but also who tessellates with my personality really well, and that has made it such a brilliant experience (so far!).

Trust is key. Our Discord group has a trigger warning channel where we laid out the things that our work contains and the warnings we ourselves need, so that we could be more mindful of the topics we openly discuss in the general chat channel, and what to expect from work swaps.

I personally don’t need Trigger Warnings, but I do appreciate a bit of a head’s up on content depending on how my mental health is doing, which I would describe more as my hard and soft limits. Nita had already done the same thing, so we were already familiar with each others’ boundaries and had been talking long enough for that sense of trust to be already established.

When we started writing together, it was really important to lay these out again and as we outlined just check in with each other to make sure that suggestions were not going to become problematic in the writing/reading stages.

 

A shared, editable document is the way forward, BUT… how comfortable are you with your co-writer watching you write?  

As I think most of us who write know, a draft, especially the very first one, is not a finished product that you can professionally distance yourself from to sell. There is nothing like someone else watching you bleed it onto a page to make you realise how vulnerable you can be in those initial stages of drafting.

If you are the kind of writer whose first drafts are tightly plotted, well planned and edited as you go, so are very clean and much closer to the end product than someone else’s, then you will obviously need to take into account that your co-writer may not write this way, and may feel differently to you about the writing process.

We have a shared Google doc for this draft so that we can get used to each other’s writing styles, make comments in real time (there’s a time difference of 5 hours plus different work schedules to write around), and see where these sections are going.

Both of us tend to ‘pants’ around a basic outline in our own writing, and like to have the freedom to adapt things as we go along to hit the key beats. This means, when I wake up and check the doc, new stuff has appeared that potentially takes things in a slightly different direction to the one I thought it might go in, and I might need to slightly adapt my section to follow on from it.

I absolutely love this part of the process, because it keeps me challenged and thinking about the story from different angles. It’s also proof (to me) that this is a much stronger story than it would have been if I’d written it alone. Since we both think in very similar ways, we bounce off each other really well, and that also helps.

However, there are times when we both open the doc together, and one of us is writing while the other one is thinking, and may or may not be watching in real time as a section gets written, deleted, scruffily sketched out with gaps for dialogue thrown in, etc.

Consider before you start how comfortable you are with letting someone watch you write like this, and if you start out thinking it’s okay but this changes for you later – or if there are sections you really don’t want to draft in full view – have another private doc to do that in.

Personally, I haven’t used a private doc very much except to store cuts from the main one, and the time difference often means we are online at different times anyway, so that gives us both space. I think we both enjoy the times when we can watch each other’s drafting/word vomit processes, and that really helps, but it might not be the case for everyone. Nita has a separate fluff scene doc that she shared with me too, where she dumped a load of soft, sexy scene snippets that might not be in the book but which show that side of their relationship, and this is one of my favourite things to read… I love our messy murder-babies.

 

How comfortable are you working on certain personal topics with your co-writer(s) and/or being open about any mental health impacts your story’s topics might have?

Nita and I have both been open about our respective mental health issues from the start, so if you don’t know your co-writer well this would be an important thing to broach if your story is straying into difficult territory.

Letting someone watch you draft plays into the trust issue again, of course. It depends entirely on the project, but you might find yourself writing experimental scenes that (a) won’t be in the final cut but help you explore situations, characters and the world, and (b) may end up exploring topics very personal to you. You need to be able to do this without worrying about judgement or potentially hurting/upsetting your co-writer.

Communicating this is key, and this is also where a separate document might be useful. Don’t censor yourself at the start of the process, but do be mindful of the impact your drafts might have on both you (as the exposed or vulnerable person) and the person/people you are writing with.

Eldritch Girls is, by its very nature, the mental equivalent of a rage room with added steamy softness and wish-fulfilment bonuses.

If you are also writing within a “rage room” space, even (or especially) alone, then it’s good to exercise caution and self-care because without the right tools and support this can sometimes be detrimental to your mental health rather than good for it. In our case, it’s been (so far) very positive and cathartic, but we also both have good support systems and tools from previous and/or current therapy sessions. We also check in with each other about how we’re doing, which helps not to take each other’s mental health for granted and to make sure that we’re both in the right head-space for the story (and life in general).

If your project is doing similar things, or you find yourself projecting something more personal into a character than you initially intended (such is the drafting process!) keep the lines of communication open (respectfully) with your co-writer and be honest about when you need to take steps back, have breaks, or just do something else for a while.

 

How flexible are you at waiting during a project, and writing linearly versus out of order?

Here’s the thing: people write at different speeds and have various ways of coping with writer’s block. That’s fine. Be gentle and respectful with yourself and your co-writer(s). Additionally, if you and/or your co-writer(s) are disabled or maybe have a bad mental health day/week/month, then it may not be practical to set word count goals or even to write every day.

Figure out how best to work around these things as you go along and be prepared to be flexible.

If you are writing from different POVs, it is easier to slot it all together later, but you can end up with a lot of downtime while you wait for someone else to do their sections. This is not a criticism!! It’s just reality, and it doesn’t have to be frustrating.

Waiting can give you time to edit your own sections, work on other projects, or dive down rabbit holes of exploratory writing, like Nita’s gorgeously steamy fluff-sex doc. We have so much bonus material for the paperback [or a sequel] I can’t even tell you. Plus, even though the fluff-sex doc is not anything really to do with the main story, I think we’d both be a lot poorer for not having it around, and it’s really helping us figure out what their relationship could look like, how they are with each other when not in the throes of the plot, and where we want them to end up by the end. Equally, she lets me play with sections in Sasha’s POV that we’ve agreed will end up in Tosh’s, just so I can figure out her responses and inner world while that scene is taking place.

Nothing is a waste of time.

Meanwhile, even though I know we aren’t going to use a lot of it, or it’s definitely going to work better in Tosh’s POV not Sasha’s, I can write other scenes to see what the family dynamic of the Shaws looks like, bring in Easter eggs for The Crows and other Paghamverse stories, and hand that over to Nita to do her Thing with later. (Yes, a certain fate-obsessed cousin gets a dishonourable mention but doesn’t actually appear).

We also leave dialogue highlighted so the other person can come behind us and fill in with how their character talks, as I can’t get Tosh right (not being familiar with a Chicago accent or its dialectic inflexions) and Nita sometimes needs me to fill in the Cockney/Londonised East Sussex dialects.

So far, including outline notes and chapter headings, we’ve written around 35K words in four weeks in the main doc and have the rabbit hole of sexy sweet softness as well. It’s not just taking our issues to bits in front of each other and bashing the hell out of human piñatas.

So, Is Co-Writing For You?

It may not look like this, but how well it works is ultimately up to the personalities involved and the nature of the project itself. If you choose the right partner for the right project, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t work brilliantly and add an extra dimension to your writing. 

It’s not for everyone, and these considerations are just food for thought.

Comment with additional tips if you have any! Would love to hear other perspectives on this, or hear if our process has helped you.