Jennifer Brozek's Blog, page 35

March Monthly Stat Thing

(Crossposted from Jennifer Brozek)

I’m going to ignore that it is the first of April and pretend that “lie and be cruel to the people who trust you most” day doesn’t exist.

Year-to-date stats:
Fiction words written: 58,210 / 200,000
Article words written: 4230
My novels/collections edited: 3
Other novels/anthologies edited: 4
Events attended: 4 / 9

Mostly, I’m boring. I’m drafting my Shadowrun novel, MAKEDA RED. This means no social media until I hit word count unless there are extenuating circumstances… like picking up my new car.

I didn’t want to have to buy a new car, but mine got totaled at the end of February. I’m still reeling from sticker shock, but I do like my new car. It’s a Subaru Crosstrek Hybrid in sage green. I got my all wheel drive hatchback. The Husband got his hybrid. We’re both happy.

We think he’s told us his name but we’ve got to drive it a bit more to be sure.

Bubble and Squeek for 22 March 2016

(Crossposted from Jennifer Brozek)

Bubble and Squeek is full of all kinds of good news. It helps me get over this terrible throat thing ("acute pharyngitis") I've been dealing with. Thank goodness for antibiotics. I am no longer contagious and will be at Norwescon.

Article: Never Let Me Sleep got a shout out in this article: 13 Horror Books that Might Be the Next Hit Movie. Can I just say, "Yes, please."?

Audible: All three Melissa Allen books (Never Let Me Sleep, Never Let Me Leave, Never Let Me Die) are available for pre-order on Audible! My first audiobook series. This is thrilling and terrifying.

Award: I’ve won 2nd place in the 2016 Jim Baen Memorial Short Story Award Contest! The thing I really like about this contest (besides that it is free to enter) is the fact that it is a blind read. It is the story that won. Not the author’s rep or connections.

Pre-Order: The Usual Path to Publication edited by Shannon Page. My own essay, "No One True Way," has three different examples of how I sold something to be published.

Release: Happy book release day to me. The Karen Wilson Chronicles ebook and paperback omnibus! It has all four KWC novels, every Kendrick story written (even the ones not in the four KWC books), and a new John Corso story. It’s pretty hefty and can be used as a bludgeoning instrument. I am so proud of this book!

Release: Speaking of the Karen Wilson Chronicles omnibus, it is also available in a Signed, Limited Edition Hardback form. We will only sell these at conventions (like Norwescon) and on the AIP website. Once they are gone, they are gone.

Reminder: I will be at Norwescon this weekend and here is my schedule. Hope to see you there.

Norwescon 2016 Schedule

(Crossposted from Jennifer Brozek)

Here is my Norwescon schedule. If I am not at a panel, I will be at the Apocalypse Ink Productions table in Author Avenue. Come say hello, buy books, and get them signed. I’m happy to chat with you. Don’t be shy around me.

Thu 8:00 PM-10:00 PM - Cascade 12
Writers Workshop: Practicing Your Pitch
Jennifer Brozek (M)

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Fri 3:00 PM-4:00 PM - Cascade 9
Why Editors Pass
Phoebe Kitanidis (M), Jennifer Brozek, Betsy Wollheim, Sheila Gilbert

Fri 4:00 PM-5:00 PM - Cascade 10
Diversity, Society, Military, & SF
Kevin Mathews (M), Mike Brennan, Cheryce Clayton, Jennifer Brozek

Fri 6:00 PM-7:00 PM - Cascade 9
Writing is a Long Con
Elizabeth Guizzetti (M), Annie Bellet, Gregory A. Wilson, Jennifer Brozek, Dean Wells

Fri 8:00 PM-9:00 PM - Cascade 10
Young Fans & the Military
Elliott Kay (M), Alicia Faires, Jennifer Brozek

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Sat 2:00 PM-3:00 PM - Grand 2
Autograph Session 1
Amber Bariaktari , Caroline M. Yoachim, Dave Bara, Dean Wells, Erik Scott de Bie, G. Willow Wilson, James C. Glass, Jennifer Brozek, John (J.A.) Pitts, Kristi Charish, Django Wexler, Frog Jones, Rhiannon Held, Sonia Orin Lyris, S. A. Bolich, Morgue Anne, Robert J. Sawyer, Spencer Ellsworth, Steven Barnes, Tori Centanni, Cat Rambo, Don Maitz, GregRobin Smith, Jeremy Zimmerman, Laura Anne Gilman

Sat 6:00 PM-7:00 PM - Cascade 10
Outlining for Pantsers & Everyone Else
Tori Centanni (M), Jennifer Brozek, Catherine Cooke Montrose, Raven Oak, John (J.A.) Pitts

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Sun 12:00 PM-12:30 PM - Cascade 1
Reading: Jennifer Brozek
Jennifer Brozek (M)
I will be reading from Never Let Me Sleep.

Bubble and Squeek - The Melissa Allen Edition

(Crossposted from Jennifer Brozek)

I've been writing a lot on Project Joe. I also just taught at Foolscap and was the writer GoH at RadCon. So, there's not much to report except that I'm working lots. In lieu of new content, here's the great big awesome Melissa Allen trilogy round up Bubble & Squeek.

For NEVER LET ME SLEEP, I wrote for SFSignal and Chuck Wendig.

SFSignal: Melissa Allen and Mental Illness.
Five Things I Learned While Writing Never Let Me Sleep.
Bonus 1: The pre-order for the NEVER LET ME SLEEP audiobook is up.
Bonus 2: NEVER LET ME SLEEP has been nominated for the Bram Stoker award for Superior Achievement in Young Adult Novel!

For NEVER LET ME LEAVE, I wrote for Wag the Fox and Damien G. Walter and had an interview with Spotlight Radio.

Wag the Fox: Characters With a Mind of Their Own.
When It Comes to Fighting Monsters: Why a Bat?
SF Spotlight Radio interview.

For NEVER LET ME DIE, I wrote for Jim Hines.

Revealing Personal Details Through Your Writing.

For NEVER LET ME, the omnibus, I wrote for John Scalzi and Mary Robinette Kowal.

The Big Idea: Who I wrote Never Let Me for... It wasn't just for who I thought.
My Favorite Bit: Where Melissa realizes something about herself.

Not a bad list of links, if I do say so myself.

Tell Me - Peter M. Ball

(Crossposted from Jennifer Brozek)

It is my pleasure to have Peter tell you about the Flotsam trilogy: Exile, Frost, and Crusade. It's still one of my favorite works by him.
---

IT ALL COMES DOWN TO NOSTALGIA AND COLLECTIVE PERCEPTION
I started writing Flotsam because all my friends were watching Supernatural and raving about the show. In reality they probably raved about all sorts of things, but the bowerbird like brain only remembers the bits that make for a good story, and in this instance this came down to three details:

horror
the decidedly late eighties/early nineties influences in the soundtrack
two brothers driving around in a black chevy Impala, fighting evil

I still haven’t gotten around to seeing Supernatural, which will probably cause some friends to break into my house and force me to watch the entire series, but that combination did get me thinking about what an Australian version of supernatural would look like. In the aussie version of that, I figured, it would be a guy driving around in a ute with a dog in the back.

And in that idea, Flotsam was born. The ute and the dog never made it into the book, but the music sure did. The day before I started writing, I went down to my local music store and picked-up their complete supply of Guns N’Roses albums.  Appetite for Destruction. Use Your Illusion I & II. G’N’R Lies. Songs I hadn’t listened to since I was fourteen years old and just starting to figure out how much I disliked living on the Gold Coast.

I spent a good hour listening to Paradise City on repeat, which had become a very different song in the twenty-five years since I’d first heard it on the radio. It surprised me how nostalgic the song had become, how much it was laced into my memories as the song that understood the ironies of living in a place most people go to for a holiday.

But the nostalgia was the easy part. The city was where it got tricky.

THE ACCUMULATION OF NAMELESS ENERGIES
One of my favourite scenes in Don Delillo’s White Noise takes place where Jack and Murray visit THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. Murray settles in and comments on the inherent irony of tourism and collective perception.

“No-one sees the barn,” he says. “Once you’ve seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn.”

There are few things that have resonated with me quite so much, in fiction.

Given time, any place, any city, will begin to accrete stories. Eventually those stories harden into a specific narrative, a thing that overlays the experience of being there. There are stories that feel like they’re are built to exist in Los Angeles or new York, stories that are naturally set in Paris or Berlin. Go to those places, and you’re consuming the stories as much as the city.

The Gold Coast doesn’t fuck around. Its narrative is built on tourism. The quick trip in for a few days at the beach and local theme parks. Schoolies week, where flocks of recently graduated high-schoolers hit the tourist spots and party. Family trips to Coolangatta, away from the crowds.

It’s easy for tourists to lose sight of a place, simply because their repeating the experiences of those who came before them. But it also makes the Gold Coast a weird place to grow up, because that narrative is so strong, so central to the city’s existence, that it makes living there outright weird.

I had friends who drove cabs on the Gold Coast, and passengers would routinely ask where they were from. The idea that someone resided there permanently - a resident of a city a population of over a half-million people - was deeply unfathomable to the tourists.

BEING HERE IS A KIND OF SPIRITUAL SURRENDER
Another quote from White Noise, which I kept my computer as I wrote.

California deserves whatever it gets. California invented the concept of lifestyle. This alone warrants their doom.

If Australia has a place that sits in the national psyche like California does in America, its Queensland. And if there’s a bit of Queensland most Australians wouldn’t miss, should it slide into the sea to kick off an apocalypse, it’s the Gold Coast.

The accumulated stories about the Gold Coast are all about anonymity and waiting for something bad to happen. For a city people love to visit, the fiction surrounding it universally touched by darkness and loathing.

I went into Flotsam intending to give the city everything it deserved, but the surprise of writing Flotsam was discovering exactly how much the Gold Coast meant to me.

Guns N’ Roses did that, way back at the beginning, bringing back all the memories of nights spent wandering the beaches when no-one else was around, or laying claim to little bits of the Coast for art when it wasn’t a particularly art-friendly city.

I’d intended to focus on the mutability of the Gold Coast with the story, but I kept finding islands in the chaos. Little bits of reliability that served as touchstones for me, when I lived there, and bits of the story.

It’s still a deeply weird city, custom built for horror and urban fantasy stories where things tend to lurk behind the shifting population, doing bad things to humanity. But, much like Keith Murphy, there’s a party of me that is never really going to leave.

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Peter M. Ball is a writer from Brisbane, Australia. His most recent book is Crusade, the third novella in the Flostam series about Ragnarök and the Gold Coast, and his short stories have appeared in publications such as Apex Magazine, Eclipse 4, and Daily Science Fiction. He can be found online at petermball.com and on twitter @petermball.

Tell Me - Dobromir Harrison

(Crossposted from Jennifer Brozek)

Rachel is a hot, sexy vampire story set in Tokyo. I really enjoyed it. Also, I think Dobromir is a great guy and an excellent author.
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The Man in Rags

Rachel was a mess.

Not the character, though she had her own problems, and they were entirely intentional on my part. But the story was going nowhere, and I was getting frustrated.

Rachel was my first novel, started as part of National Novel Writing Month in November, 2010. I had a beginning I liked, and Rachel herself appeared fully-formed, leaping off the page (iPad screen) and almost writing herself. I’d started with a dream of writing the best vampire story I could imagine – punky and violent; urban, gritty and drenched in blood; with that weight of history I love about the genre. Lost souls looking for succor in the wrong places, the beast within, et cetera, et cetera. It would be diverse and interesting, and take place in “real” Japan, not the stereotyped version we often see. I even set most of it in familiar locations. Rachel would fight and almost be killed a few blocks from my old apartment.

But a sinister man in rags was spoiling it all.

See, the second part of the book takes us away from Tokyo, and I’m not going to say where, but I’d finished 50,000 words by the end of November and most of it was a mess. I’m what George R. R. Martin calls a “gardener”; I write without planning, just get stuck into the words, then see what I have. Cut away most of the first draft and start again. And that’s how the ragged man crept into the book.

I knew when I wrote him he shouldn’t have been there. I’d added him as a disturbing antagonist in part 2, someone to challenge Rachel and drag her down, force her to the limit to survive. But he never belonged. Nothing seemed to improve him.

And I tried! I made him a vampire, then a human. A serial killer. I gave him sharp teeth, teeth all over his body. Made him pitiful and sad, then lord of where he lived. Then sad again. Friends who read my early drafts (and I am so sorry for what they had to plow through!) were polite, but I could tell none of them liked him. “Cartoonish” was the word I came up with, and people agreed. The rest of the story was gritty, the characters real and deep, but he was obviously in there to be “dark” and “edgy”, and it stuck out like a bloody knife handle.

There was only one recourse, and I couldn’t put it off any longer.

I cut him out. Just stripped him from the book. I deleted words, started again. Kept the darkness subtle. Pitted Rachel against real fears and situations. Her biggest enemy was always herself, I realized, and that’s when the pulsing heart of the story revealed itself, ripe and ready to be eaten, dripping down your chin. Rich and filling, like any good narrative.

Writing is rewriting, as better authors have said, and I rewrote a lot. Still do, and maybe that’s how I need to write. I don’t have the patience for planning, but I like writing and being surprised, and Rachel provided that for me. I hope other people respond to it in the same way now it’s out of my hands.

The best part, however, is that the man in rags is still in the book. I left traces of him, though you’d never know it. But I see them. It’s like he’s haunting the book; a sad, clownish figure, hiding between the words. That’s how I like to think of it, anyway. A swish, swish of his rags in the dead of night. Footsteps on creaky floorboards. The stench of his clothing as you lie in bed.

A hidden history, visible to a few, behind words that are much more effective for his absence.

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Dobromir Harrison is from the UK, spent 11 years in Japan, and recently moved to Northern California. A childhood spent reading the likes of Clive Barker has given him a love of the grotesque. He especially loves stories told from the monster's perspective, and is committed to writing diverse fiction exploring the lives of women, people of color and LGBT characters. When not writing, Dobromir plays board games with his wife. They live in Crescent City with their cat, Koshka, who keeps them awake most nights with a truly hideous meow.

Tell Me - Kacy Jey

(

Crossposted from Jennifer Brozek )

Ever since the day I died, I’ve been trying to write my story. On September 18th, 1988 at the young age of 18 my family, everyone I’d ever known or cared about, killed me.

I was raised a strict Jehovah’s Witness and when they disfellowshipped me, everyone, even JW’s I don’t know, treated me as if I were dead. I’d been disfellowshipped once before when I was fourteen. It lasted for six months and it was hell to get reinstated. I couldn’t do it again. So, I’m still dead to every JW the world over, including my mother, father and sister.

I left that confining existence, where you aren’t allowed to associate with anyone but other JW’s, and went out into the real world.  That experience is told in Jolene, but fictionalized big time, in Jolene, You're Not a Monster. Instead of a JW, Jolene was created and raised in a lab. Military Intelligence trained her and uses her as a spy, but one of the doctors that created her is trying to terminate her and another group is trying to capture her.

I made her birthday September 18th 1988 and the story is set in 2009. She’s hardheaded, resourceful and wants to live. There are so many things she’s never done, just like there were so many things I’d never done.

One of the first things I did when I got out on my own was have sex, so does Jolene and it kind of sucked for both of us. I’ve never talked to anyone whose first time was all that good. Still, like me she doesn’t give up until it gets better. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t an erotic novel, but it is a character driven a science fiction thriller and young twenty-somethings do it. (Okay we all do it, I hope.)

Another aspect of Jolene that mirrors my life is that from a young age, her father figure, Dr. Carter taught her to never kill. They may have kicked me out of the religion, but I still believed that Armageddon was coming soon and when it did I was going to die with the rest of the worldy, non-JW people. I had nightmares for years about Jesus riding down as explosions went off around me, pointing his sword at me personally and yelling, “You betrayed me.” Lightening would flare out of his sword and I’d explode with my last thought being I’d screwed up.

It wasn’t until college that I managed to chip away some of that brainwashing it. It’s hard to look at something you’ve believed all your life and pick holes in it. Jolene goes through what that feels like when to save herself and others, Dr. Carter tells her to kill. Everything she’s believed about Dr. Carter was from a daughter’s perspective. She has to see Dr. Carter as a person not just a parent. She has to go through everything I did when I got hit in the face with that realization at 18. My parents who were supposed to love me more than they feared dying at Armageddon, didn’t.

I am not 18 anymore,  I’ve had children of my own and I’m no longer brainwashed,  but that 18 year old, naïve girl is still inside of me, just a little less now because she’s also out there as Jolene who is now her own person born of my pain and joys at that time in my life. It wouldn’t surprise me if she knocked on my door and asked who gave me permission to write her story. It would scare me though, because she is a bad ass monster.

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Kacy Jey is an award winning author with short stories in Bonded by Blood Anthology III, SNM Horror Magazine and articles in various magazines. Jolene, You’re Not a Monster is her debut novel. Kacy, born in San Bernardino, California, currently lives in Texas via Michigan after six years.

Foolscap and Radcon

(Crossposted from Jennifer Brozek)

This Friday, I will be at Foolscap, teaching a workshop on planning a book series that I call "Combat in the Land of Forgotten Details." Then, next week, I will be the Writer GoH at RadCon. Hope to see some of you there.

Radcon 2016 Schedule

Friday, 12 Feb
7am-2pm, School Visits
Support our local schools by volunteering for school visits to libraries and classrooms! RadCon provides drivers to and from the schools. Lunch is provided for visiting professionals who volunteer all day.

6:45pm-8pm, Opening Ceremonies, Bronze Room

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Saturday, 13 Feb
12:30-1:30pm, Writer Guest of Honor: Jennifer Brozek, Bronze Room
Writer Guest of Honor Jennifer Brozek shares her insights, inspirations, and latest work.

1:45-2:45pm, Making Your Own Way, 2201
Living the creative life and making a living at your art seems like the impossible dream to some. There are conventional ways to go about this, but breaking the rules may be just the thing. A discussion on the trials, challenges, and benefits of escaping from the default world's default choices.
Jennifer Brozek, John Lovett, Kevin Wiley, Tamra Excell, Vandy Hall

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Sunday, 14 Feb
10-11am, The Business of Gaming, 2207
So you love gaming and would like to do it for a living? Come learn about the reality of gaming for a living, from Table top to video games. It can be fun, but to make money at it, you have to remember... It's a business.
Jennifer Brozek, Will Carson, Zach Brockway

11:15-12:15pm, Writing With Dyslexia, 2203
Dyslexics are creative, imaginative and natural born storytellers, who happen to have problems reading and writing. That paradox never stopped Agatha Christie, Mark Twain or Anne Rice. We will discuss tricks and technologies that can help get the world in your head onto paper.
Eytan Kollin, Jeanette Bennett, Jennifer Brozek

12:30-1:30pm, What is Ingress?, 2207
After 2 years this game is growing around the world. So come learn what the game is and how to play. All you need to play is a smartphone and the eagerness to get off your butt.
Gene Armstrong, Gibbitt Rhys-Jones, Jennifer Brozek, Martin Cameron

Tell Me - Jamie Lackey

(Crossposted from Jennifer Brozek)

My first professional short story sale was a zombie story without any zombies in it, and zombie fiction has always had a special place in my heart. But while I love zombies, I generally prefer science fiction and fantasy to horror, and optimistic stories to grim ones.

To me, there's a connection between zombies and rebirth—it's a twisted connection, but that doesn't make it less real. Zombies do come back from the dead, after all. They're animated by a hunger for brains and human flesh, but they are up and moving around. Undead is as much of an opposite to dead as alive is. And in some zombie mythology there is at least a vestige of the person that they once were, hidden deep beneath the hunger.

I wanted to explore that connection, and I ended up writing this zombie novella. It never felt like the best idea, really, but It was one of those stories that I couldn't help but write, even though I had a list of other projects as long as my arm. I also wanted to explore the thing that makes zombies scariest to me—their ability to take anyone that you care about and turn them into a monster. 

In every zombie movie that I've ever watched, the instantaneous and correct response to a zombie bite is suicide—because death is preferable to transformation into a zombie.  But in Moving Forward, people can survive infection. They can live for years, even decades, before the virus catches up with them and transforms them into ultra-dangerous, living zombies. Is suicide still the correct choice? Or is the time that you have left worth more than the danger to those around you when you finally turn? Is there a way to manage the danger, a way to be prepared for the worst while taking advantage of the life you have left?

That is where the infected sanctuaries come in. Infected people are isolated from the rest of society, where they can't infect anyone else. They're like leper colonies, except that the residents could lose it and start attacking everyone else at any moment.

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Jamie Lackey earned her BA in Creative Writing from the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford in 2006. Since then, she has sold over 100 short stories to places like Daily Science Fiction, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and the Stoker Award-winning After Death... anthology. Her fiction has appeared on the Best Horror of the Year Honorable Mention and Tangent Online Recommended Reading Lists. She read slush for the award-winning Clarkesworld Magazine from 2008-2013, and she worked on the Triangulation Annual Anthology from 2008 to 2011. She edited Triangulation: Lost Voices in 2015 and is currently editing Triangulation: Beneath the Surface. She studied under James Gunn at the Center for the Study of Science Fiction's Writer's Workshop in 2010. She's a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Her short story collection, One Revolution, is available on Amazon.com, and her debut novel, Left Hand Gods, is forthcoming from Hadley Rille Books. Find her online at www.jamielackey.com.

UBS Reading and Signed Copies

(Crossposted from Jennifer Brozek)

Last night’s reading was really good. It was nice to see familiar faces (shout out to my Ingress buddies!) as well as unfamiliar faces drawn in by the concept of NEVER LET ME. Lots of books were sold and it was a good time.

Readings are funny things. You never know if you are going to get 200, 50, 10, 2, or 0 people showing up to them. Here’s the trick about readings—I read to an audience of 2 the same way I read to an audience of 200. I try to make sure everyone there feels like they are the most important person in the world. Because, in truth, they are. Without readers, we authors would be shouting into the void. So, I try to make my readers know they are very much appreciated.

Duane Wilkins and the University Bookstore were lovely hosts as always. If you would like a signed copy of NEVER LET ME or any of my other print books, you can get it from the University Bookstore.  Visit their website or call 1.800.335.7323.