DeAnna Knippling's Blog, page 89

Fiction: Creators of Small Worlds

Now available at Smashwords, Amazon.com, OmniLit, and Barnes and Noble.  More sites to come…

Creators of Small Worlds

by DeAnna Knippling

Horror/Cthulu.  Yes, this is my "I met a worshipper of Cthulu on Facebook" story.

Andrea had one chance to talk to Chris Demoulin before he unleashed horror on Las Vegas—and failed.  Now the question isn't, "could she have stopped him?" but, "can she keep stop herself from becoming just like him?"

It's true, I saw Chris Demoulin a few months before he destroyed Las Vegas.

He found me on Facebook. Usually, the way you find people is via a friend of a friend, but he wasn't friends with anyone I was friends with, so I'm not sure how he found me. He didn't have actual friends on his friends list, just political figures and celebrities. Did he look me up on purpose? At first I was shocked that he was on Facebook at all. Then I read his wall and realized that to him, it was just another soapbox with no one listening.

I had both hoped and feared that I would run into him. We all have our heroes, no matter how naively we choose them.

When I first met him, in high school, he was an infamous bad boy. He was the leader of a gang of smart boys, boys that were sarcastic and witty and lived outside the box. They wore different clothes; they listened to different bands. They doodled brightly-colored skulls on their arms because they were too young to get tattoos.

He wrote poetry.

I wrote poetry.

He got a girl pregnant.

I stayed a virgin.

If I'd been a boy, I would have been in his gang of smart boys. But I was a girl, so there you go: subhuman. I could barely talk. I was friends with people who were kind but not terribly—sorry—interesting. Solid people, people at the bottom of the pecking order, but good people.

But oh, how I wanted to get into that gang of smart boys.

Years went by, and I switched from writing poetry to creating small worlds. At first they were only in my head on a little shelf, like collectable ornaments. But then I put to paper some reallybad short stories and a novel that was even worse. I kept at it: I created characters and killed them off; I damned them; I redeemed them. I got better.

And then I got his friend request.

Review of Tales Told Under the Covers

Emma Honeyball reviewed Tales Told Under the Covers: Zombie Girl Invasion & Other Stories for me and had such nice things to say…

These are stories where the kids are in charge. The cohesive family unit is important, but the kids are the ones who are empowered to save the world. The adults are largely helpless. Astra's Dad is physically helpless, he's been injured and can't work, which forces his daughter to take matters into her own hands. Neil's parents don't know the right way to kill zombies. Cat's parents are frozen with horror as the Sushi monster attacks and Marina's parents are eaten by Nibbles the giant rabbit. These children can walk into a world of the unknown and come up with a way to win. probably the best example of this is Connor, who is absorbed into a world of robots and works out how to win their war. De's characters are flawed, vivid and real. They are gutsy, intelligent and brave. I loved every one of them.

Read the whole review here, at her website, In Potentia.  I should blush.

 

Fiction: The Woods Behind Grandmother's House

Now available at Smashwords, OmniLit, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon.com.

The Woods Behind Grandmother's House

by DeAnna Knippling

Warning: Strong language and adult situations.

I set this behind my grandparents' house–actually, it's behind my great-grandmother's little house, across the road from my grandparents.  The roses come from the other side of the family, though.  The places I played as a kid have become abandoned as generations of farmers stop farming.  It's very sad.

—

Ellen warned her fiance Philip not to get involved with the Rockford brothers. But now he has gone with them down a dark path heavy with deadfalls and demons, and only she can bring him back.

In life, we follow some paths we shouldn't; we open some doors we were never meant to go through; we acquire regrets as though they were limited-time collectable figurines and line them up on the shelves of our hearts, dusting them on a regular basis. I'm not sayin' that I'm above all that. I'm just saying, if you open a door, you better know how to shut it. I learned that one the hard way, in the woods behind Grandmother's house.

To sum up, my brother Jim and I were playing back there and dug up under the rotten old leaf mold. It was spring, and I think that's what saved us, because the long winter was over, but it wasn't warm enough for all the grownup to be out in the fields. The door was a bare tin cover with an iron lock on it, only the iron had rusted through, mostly, and we beat it the rest of the way off with a piece of granite that had worked its way up from under the soil, out in the field. The edge of the wood was lined with those things, as they got chucked out of the fields.

We were able to open the door, only because we'd happened to read a certain book earlier that morning. But I'll describe that more later. We climbed down the worn metal ladder bolted to the side of the hole, down a long dirt tunnel, and into a magical world: to us two kids, it was a candyland where we ate pink happiness and drank blue sky and bounced on marshmallow clouds of joy.

Fortunately Grandmother caught up with us and set off her old travel alarm clock, which rang to wake the dead, right in our ears. In a second we could see just where we'd gone: straight to Hell. There are places where pieces of Hell come up to the surface, like hard pieces of granite in the field. Some folks get rid of 'em. Some people keep 'em around, in case they're needed, like a pile of hard rock. And if you're one to argue that nobody ought to keep pieces of Hell around and can't understand that they might be needed, this story ain't for you.

The demons fell on us as soon as they saw that we could see what they really were—screamin' and hollerin' the way we were, no wonder—but Grandma had a bit of fire in her hand, blue and bright, and she tore bits of it off and threw it at the demons, who flinched back from it. Why demons shimmering with heat and thick with scales and horns should have been afraid of that blue fire, I still don't know, but that's the way it was.

She got us back up through the door and out, and shut it. To sum up, my ass hurt bad for a few days after that, and the door got a new lock. But it wasn't never buried under the leaves again, not while Grandmother was still alive.

 

Indpub: DRM

What with one thing and another, I hadn't run into DRM problems until a couple of weeks ago.

I bought a book I wanted to read that was only on Amazon at that point, downloaded it, and went to convert it to .epub so I could read it on my Nook.

No.  Calibre would NOT convert the file for me.

Now, I had previously thought that DRM was something I didn't approve of, because I'd rather have my work read than not.  Someone steals a copy?  Considering how hard it is to increase my numbers at this point, I'm flattered.  You want to steal my work?  You're very sweet.  Plus, I think it would be hypocritical of me:  when I first started reading manga, I read it using scanlations, or scanned versions that had been translated by volunteers into English.  When I started reading it, it was really hard to find any manga at bookstores – now there are tons of shelf space for them, even in used bookstores. Hundreds of dollars later, I can say that had I not read those pirated versions, I would not have spent anything on manga.  Eh.  Manga.

Plus, you know what's a great way to get people to start reading your stuff?  By putting it up for $0 on Amazon.com.  Whether it's officially free or pirated, it seems to have the same affect on my wallet:  I spend money.

So there I am, looking at the results of that file conversion.  I forget what the error message was, but "file protection" was involved, I think.  I saw red.

THAT BOOK WAS MINE.

I PAID FOR IT.

THERE WERE NO OTHER OPTIONS OTHER THAN TO BUY IT IN A FORMAT MY READER CAN'T READ OR TO NOT BUY IT AT ALL.

I will never read a book from that writer again.

Well, okay, it was good but not great (I ended up reading a novel on my phone, which was a pain and made my thumbs tired), so I probably wouldn't have tracked the sequel down anyway.  But there are enough things for me to read out there that I don't need to get tagged by someone else's paranoia.

Yeah, I could have found a way to strip off the DRM.  But I don't know where to look, I didn't want to spend the time looking, and I didn't want to risk going to a jerky site to get it.

Sure, there are cases where it gets forced upon you by your publisher, and there are cases where authors are systematically being ripped off (by people taking their files and publishing them under different names and titles, etc., and I'm pretty sure those bastards don't care if they have to remove the DRM from your files, and they can).  Do I care?  No.  I can read something else.

 

Alice Timeline

I am GOING to lose this otherwise…saved by the Internet!

A timeline of events I consider relevant to the Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There books (and to the book I'm writing, Alice's Adventures in Underland).  Ages approximate.

1832 – Charles born.

1846 – Charles goes to Rugby (age 14)

1849 – Charles leaves Rugby (age 17)

1851 – Charles is accepted at Christ Church; his mother dies two days after he arrives (age 19)

1853 – Alice Liddell born

1855 – Henry Liddell becomes Dean of Christ Church

1856 – Charles gets a lectureship at Christ Church (age 24)

1856 – Charles first sees (Alice) Ellen Terry as a child actress (age 9)

1856 – Charles takes first photos of Liddell girls after going to Deanery to take pictures of scenery (C 26, A 5 or I think 6)

1858 (18 April) to 8 May 1862 – Charles's diaries missing, probably destroyed by family after death.

1860 – Queen Victoria stays with the Liddells at the Deanery.

1861 – Charles is ordained a deacon, taking a vow of celibacy (age 29)

1861 – [I think] The point where Charles starts to become outspoken in criticism of Dean Liddell

1862 – When Charles' diaries resume, they are full of prayers to keep him from sin.  Die down by 1872-3.  Seems doubtful that they have anything to do with the Liddell girls, as tone changes completely in diaries when referring to them.

1862 – July 4 boat trip to Godstow  during which the core tale of AAiW is told.  Present:  Charles, Rev. Robinson Duckworth (instructor & governor of Prince Leopold at the time), Lorina (Ina) (13), Alice (10), Edith (9?)

1863 – Mrs. (Lorina) Liddell forces a break with Charles and the family; June 27-29 diary page missing, probably destroyed by family after death. Later note found stating reason for break with Charles is that Mrs. L. thinks he's using the children as a method of courting either their governess Miss Prickett or Ina; provenance unknown/unprovable. (C31, A 11)  (Alice's parents had 15 years' difference in age.)

1864 – Charles gives Alice a handwritten copy of her story (C 32, A 12)

1864 – Charles meets Ellen Terry in person (she's 17); the same year, she marries a much older man but splits with him after ten months.  Charles stops speaking to her (Victorians were not supposed to divorce) until much later, after she remarried.

1865 – AAiW published after several years of production issues (Charles 33)

1866 – Charles starts writing TtLG toward the end of the year

1868 – Charles's father dies (Charles 36).

1870 – Mrs. Liddell brings Ina and Alice to be photographed (the girls look miserable in the photos) (C 38, A 18)

1871 – TtLG published (with 1872 publication date) (C 39, A 19)

1872 to 1876 Prince Leopold studies at Christ Church; at some point, he and Alice seem to be romantically attached, but the Queen gets him married to a German princess instead.

1874 – Penned parts of the Snark while caring for Charlie Wilcox, a cousin, who was dying of tuberculosis.

1876 – Hunting of the Snark published (Charles 44)

1876 – Edith dies (age 22) of peritonitis or measles

1880 – Alice marries Reginal Hargreaves (C 48, A 28)

1880 – Charles stops taking photos.

1881 – Charles stops teaching (C 49)

1889 – Charles writes Sylvie and Bruno (57)

1898 – Charles dies of the flu and pneumonia, just before his 66th birthday

1928 – Ellen Terry dies

1932 – Alice Hargreaves visit the US for to commemorate Charles's 100th birthday (age 80)

1934 – Alice dies (82)

When is a story ready to be submitted?

The question came up yesterday–how do I know when I'm ready to submit a story?

Okay.  The answer is very scary, difficult to accept, and goes against what lots of people will tell you.

Write the story as close to straight through as possible.
Put the story in standard manuscript format (I used to do this first, but I'm using Storybox to write in, so now I do that afterwards).
Spell-check.
Read through for oopsies (light editing).  I do not change the plot, characters, beginning, ending, etc.
Sometimes, send through critique group and incorporate changes, if I like the suggestions – usually, it's logical inconsistencies, the equivalent of the shirt being buttoned in one shot and unbuttoned in the next.
Select market and read directions.
Follow directions.
Send story.

You can stop here; the rest is just justification.

Here are the reasons it's starting to work, after a year and some:

I write a story a week and multiple novels every year, on top of my freelance work.  I'm always writing.
I take the attitude that a story is a transient thing, something that comes out of whatever you happen to be thinking and feeling at the time–it would have been different, had you chosen to write it six months earlier or later, or even a day earlier or later.  It is not immortal, unless the readers like it.
I will rewrite a story, if I see a fatal flaw in it later and it's been rejected a number of times, or if I'm getting personal rejections coming to the same thing.
I will rewrite to editor request–up to a certain point.
Working as a slush editor, I know that the job is to make the readers happy–not the writers.  If I get rejected, it's not about me.  If I get accepted, it's not about me.  Oh, it feels like it's about me, but it's not:  that's pure vanity.  Did the story do the job the editor needed done?  No?  Then move on.  Yes?  Then move on.

Why this works:

I'm learning how to trust myself and trust the reader (and editor).  If a story doesn't sell:  I have at least another 24 stories out at any given time.  I resubmit to somewhere else, or I e-publish.  I have been bootstrapping myself up in writing quality by sitting down and writing, and writing, and writing, and reading, and reading, and reading.

No, none of my stories is perfect or even all that good.  Yes, every time I think about them, their imperfections come to mind.  Yes, I'm tempted to fiddle with them over and over, and on a couple of them, I have.  I'm not any happier with the fiddled stories than I am with the ones that I wrote, cleaned up, and sent.  Yes, I viciously attack myself on how terribly I write on a regular basis.

But a writer cannot survive on writing one novel every ten years, or even one novel every two years.  You do not train yourself to spend six weeks editing a short story or two years editing a novel, sell, then suddenly become so good that you can write two novels a year, or fifty short stories.  If you try to do that, you may end up massively dropping the quality of your stories, because you don't have enough time to edit them to the same standard.  You can go broke being successful that way.

Yesterday I mentioned that imperfections were okay…as long as your story was decent and you sound like yourself, and as long as it was what the editor was looking for.  Because it will sound like you, and only like you:  unique sells.

Let's say it takes you two years to write and edit the perfect novel.  Then it will take you another two years to go through the submission, editing, and publishing process.  (You might write another novel during that period, but you probably won't, with the extra work that trying to get published piles on you.  Say you do.)

By the end of those four years, you might have written two perfect novels.  Or you could have written:

8 decent, unique novels at the rate of two a year.
200 decent, unique short stories at the rate of one a week.

…while holding down a full-time job (I write more novels with my extra time).  If you had learned to trust yourself and let yourself write instead of edit.  Life might get in the way…you might only get 150 stories and 5 novels done, and only half of them were decent.  If writing is what makes you a better writer, then there's no way that fifth novel is going to be as good as the first perfect novel.  It will be better.  Because you showed up for practice, day after day after day.  You did the work.

There is no magic secret to getting published:  there is only the work.

Submission Tips from the Slushpile

As you may know, I read slush for the wonderful Apex Magazine.  I previously posted some tips for submission, but someone asked me to write some up, and I ended up with different ones.  Who knew!

Here they are:

There are a lot of decent stories out there.  You have to better than all of them to get on the short list.  And then you have to be better than everyone on the short list to get published, or at least you have to be exactly what the editor is looking for, or be what caught the editor's eye.
Submitting a short story is a job interview.  Be 100% professional - follow directions and edit to as near perfection as you can get it. You'll never get a job because someone feels sorry for you; you only get the job if you beat out the other applicants.
Your job as a writer is to hook the reader from the first sentence and never let go.  If you can't do that, then you're not the person for the job.  There is no "keep reading, it gets better, you'll like it…" in a short story.  Maybe in novels, but not in short stories.
If you sound like everyone else, then the only way you'll get the job is if you are better than everyone else.  If you sound like you, then your chances greatly improve, as long as your story is decent to begin with.  The novelty and individuality of your voice, as a writer, is what makes readers read your stories rather than someone else's, especially with short stories.  You can be less than a perfect writer if you sound like an individual instead of a cookie cutter.
Make me feel something to the point where I can't help reacting: get me laughing out loud, crying, hair standing on end, gaping with the slow unfolding of horror as I realize that things weren't as I thought they were, beaming as two people fall in love…

Back from Pikes Peak Romance Writers

I lived!  Fortunately, I knew quite a few people in the room at the Pikes Peak Romance Writers meeting, although I have to admit I kind of went into extrovert mode for a while and thus into an altered state in which I can't quite remember everything that happened.  Weird, that.  I finally got to talk to some people that I recognized from PPW meetings but hadn't really met, which was nice.

Milt Mays and Robin Nolet both talked about their different roads to publishing, too, which was great.  It was funny, though, that Terry O'Dell and Magaret Brettschneider (of the people I recognized and knew were in self-publishing; apologies to those I missed) were both in the audience, and I just assume they both know more than I do by a long shot.  However, I think what has proven true so far is that ebooks and this new wave of self-publishing with POD are still so new that everyone who so much as dips a toe in that water can have something useful to share–and to learn. "How did you do THAT?"  "Did it work?"  "Oh, that's an awesome workaround."  "Good warning…I'll think twice before I do this other thing."  If I get nothing else out of self-publishing, it's the pleasure of knowing other people who like to poke around like I do, who take an experimental approach to publishing, rather than a fearful one.  (Not that sheer panic isn't involved.)

I passed out my Roadmap to Indie Publishing, and that went over well.

Other notes:

To those who don't understand Facebook/Twitter:  Just talk to people.  You're a writer; you are, by definition, interesting.  Yes, on occasion, tell people about the work you have to sell.  But mostly talk, and listen, and respond.  If it were a private conversation, it wouldn't be on Twitter.  (Treat it like a cocktail party where you can jump into anything interesting, say anything [as long as it's interesting], and show up for in your bathrobe.  Downside:  having to provide your own booze and snacks…)
I can't recommend starting with Smashwords strongly enough.
My two biggest setbacks (although I doubt I would change them) have been 1) writing under more than one name and 2) giving stories away for free to my family.  Doing so set me back three months.  I'm just starting to recover.  Your family and friends are part of a critical mass that you need to get started, and I should have waited.  But eh, it makes me happy.
My friend Mark Fassett is the guy who does the awesome writer software:  Storybox is for writing, and helped me crank out words about 50% faster than I had before (when I'm on a roll, that is), and Trackerbox is for tracking your sales on Smashwords, B&N, Amazon, etc.  Nice.
I sold two books!  However, I was also a dork…due to the magic of the Internet, I can take orders for books, have people pay online with credit cards (via my PayPal merchant account), and have the books shipped to them.  I forgot to mention this…even after I created some last-minute order forms.  Siiiiigh.  I also didn't have coupons ready for free books, like Robin did…AND I forgot to pick up one of her coupons.  I had biz cards, but they were the old ones that just have this site on them.  My head = attached, but only barely, in case you were wondering.
I brought books with me in a rolly suitcase a la Beth Groundwater, which worked very well, but the books slid around, and now one of the covers is bent.  I'll have to rethink how to pack them.  But otherwise it was handy.
I think it was Milt who mentioned that Tattered Cover has a local authors program where they will also consider self-published authors.  Neat!  Link to program is here.  "Local authors" is definitely Colorado authors; possibly those from Wyoming, New Mexico, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Utah, Arizona, and Kansas; and possibly authors from worldwide who are writing specifically about Rocky Mountain state-related topics.
I plugged for NaNoTryMo:  The Pikes Peak Writers' NaNoWriMo write-ins, which are at the Imagination Celebration station, at the Citadel Mall.  They're from 6:30 to 8:30.  It's free!

I wish I'd taken more notes about what my fellow authors had said…ack!  I though I'd written down stuff they were doing and wanted to copy, and I didn't!  What a dork.  I guess I was just too excited

I hope everyone had fun and will consider trying at least to put up a short story as an ebook.  Don't knock it until you try it

Fiction: Hand of Glory

Now available at Smashwords, Amazon.com, Barnes and Nobles, and OmniLit.  Coming soon at other online bookstores.

Hand of Glory

by DeAnna Knippling

Young adult/Crime/Coming of age.  An MMORPG Noir…I think I've been playing too much World of Warcraft and Rifts lately.

This cover was designed by the excellent Zachary Lin.  The story was actually written to fit the inspiration from that hand…awesome.  What would a digital hand of glory be like?  I had to find out.

Georgia's brother didn't hang himself for being gay or for being bullied about it. He was murdered over something that happened in the game—possibly over a mysterious hacker's item called the Hand of Glory or Butler's Candelabra, that lets you go anywhere, kill anyone, and steal anything.  And now it belongs to Georgia.

Warning: Strong language.

When you're playing the game, you don't think about ethics. You don't think about right or wrong. Kill a unicorn? All right. Bring back eight unicorn hearts, still beating, never mind the drop rate. All right.

You do the job, and the next job, and the job after that. You level. You raid. You bring home the blues and the purples and you sell them at the auction house. You donate to your guild. You build up honor and reputation, both the kind you get points for and the kind that means when you say you're going to show up on a Saturday night for a raid, you do it. You don't wig out.

That's the ethics of the game: don't wig out.

 

They said Charlie finished the raid, wrote a suicide note, and hung himself off the back of one of the support beams in the basement. Meanwhile, upstairs, I was still logged on because I had some crafting to do.

Two floors below me, my brother was thinking, "Gosh, that was a great instance that I just ran with my little sis; we didn't wipe once. What better time to kill myself for being gay?"

Bullshit.

Okay, the fact was, his Facebook was filled up with posts from his classmates at high school calling him a faggot and a queer and threatening to expose him to the world. Like he wasn't already exposed. He didn't try to hide it; the only secrets he kept were other people's. For example, I wasn't supposed to know who his boyfriend was, but I did: Gary Martin.

Gary was in my grade. I'd known him since we were little. In a world where kids waved at you their last day of school saying they'd see you again in the fall, then disappeared forever, Gary was a fucking rock. He didn't live down the street, but he was within biking distance. I was kind of embarrassed at first when I found out he and Charlie were together, because neither one of them had told me. I felt like Gary didn't trust me. The guy who swapped homework with me. The guy who lied for me about being at the library. The guy who told me to get my hair cut and stop staring at my feet and dragged me onto the dance floor to make my super secret crush jealous (that last part didn't work as planned, but I got to dance with him anyway). Charlie, well, he always had his secrets; I've always spied on him.

We didn't find him that night. He swayed back and forth in the basement from that piece of wood, on a piece of clothes rope. In the morning he didn't follow the routine of getting ready for school. It was loud; the sound of not running out of hot water was loud. I was late getting out of the shower because it took longer for the water to get cold and Mom yelled at me and I was surprised: I had water temperature vs. time down to a science.

So I tore off downstairs to see what the fuck Charlie was up to. I ran down the stairs two at a time, thinking, "That's it, this time I'm going to tell him I know about Gary." I kicked open the door, because it wasn't me who was going to get blamed when he moved out next fall for college if there was a hole in the drywall. The door hit the wall so hard it punched a hole through it and stuck.

By then he wasn't swinging.

Oh God I fucking screamed. I don't remember breathing.

 

Indie Review: Vermin by Allison Dickson (4)

**** Recommended, for horror enthusiasts only though.

This was a straightforward but spectacularly EWWW horror short story. A couple of exterminators have to clean up a house that's rumored to be haunted and discover more than they bargained for: it's either going to be a retread or it's going to be a classic, depending on the way it's pulled off, right?  It's a classic.  YUCK.  I hate bugs.

Yeah, someone should buy this and make a low-budget horror movie out of it, which I will not watch.