Writing in the Dark: Tiny Words

Miss me?

It’s been a while since my last blog entry (and newsletter and YouTube video). Aside from teaching Spring semester classes at my college, I was desperately trying to catch up on various writing projects. I still have a couple books – one fiction, one nonfiction – and a few short stories I need to finish, but at least my head’s (slightly) above water again. Plus, the spreading infection of fascism in my country has caused my persistent depressive disorder (also known as dysthymia) to kick into high gear again. So far, I’ve managed to avoid falling into a major depression, but I haven’t had the mental energy for anything extra, which meant my blog, newsletter, and video channel went by the wayside. They all focus on writing, and while I use them as promotional tools for my work, my main goal is to help writers, just as I’ve been helped by so many over the forty years of my career. I tried to come up with ideas, but none of them appealed to me. Besides, what was the point? In the face of what’s happening in America right now – and how much worse it might get – what good could my essays and videos about writing do? Once, I was writing while extremely sleep-deprived, and I kept nodding off in front of my computer. During one of these times, I heard a voice whisper in my mind. (Don’t worry, this kind of thing doesn’t happen to me on a regular basis.) It said Your words are tiny words. I was startled awake, and I knew instantly that when the voice said tiny it meant inconsequential and worthless. Words that didn’t have even the most minimal impact on the world, words which might as well never have been written at all.

I didn’t take the voice seriously. As I always say to writing students when talking about self-doubt, “Remember, those voices always lie.” And writers that don’t find some way to keep going despite their doubts aren’t going to last long in this game. But over the last few months I’ve been feeling that my words really are tiny, at least compared to the march of totalitarianism in the USA – and I know I’m not the only one.

Getting older isn’t helping, either. I turned sixty-one a couple weeks ago, and a writer friend of mine, Brady Allen, died unexpectedly on my birthday. He was six years younger than me, taught composition and creative writing at a local university, and was the father of two daughters. He wrote horror fiction, too, among other genres. So we had writing and teaching career in common, as well as both of us having two daughters and a love of horror fiction.

Here’s a link to Brady’s Amazon page, where you can find out more about him and order his short story collection Back Roads and Frontal Lobes: https://tinyurl.com/nhc94hjv

In late December, a good friend from college, Brad Marcum, passed away after a long battle with early onset dementia, and another college friend, Paul Custodio, also died recently. At the first Stokercon in Las Vegas in 2016, I was talking with author William F. Nolan at dinner one evening. Bill was in his nineties, and he said, “The hard thing about living so long is everyone I grew up with is gone.” Bill died in 2021. Dennis Etchison (one of my favorite authors of all time) was with us at that dinner, and he died in 2019.

Here's a news article about Brad: https://www.news-expressky.com/sports/remembering-brad-marcum/article_ef0dd644-c93c-11ef-a8f6-ffbc02d5776d.html

Here’s a link to Paul Custodio’s LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulcustodio/

Here are links to Bill’s and Dennis’ Wikipedia pages:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_F._Nolan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Etchison

Given all of this, it’s only natural for someone (aka me) to wonder what the point of it all is. And by it, I don’t mean life. My first close relative died when I was nine, and I almost drowned the same year. I’ve had fifty-two years to come to terms with the reality that our lives are finite. I mean the point of a writing career. In the face of all the darkness in the world, all of our words can seem pretty goddamned tiny. But our words matter, especially during dark times.

So if you’re having trouble seeing the point of your writing, consider the following.

It’s Okay Not to Write

Writers often feel guilty when they aren’t producing words. If you write to make a living, there’s very real financial pressure to produce, of course, but most of us probably have day jobs (I do), and our writing has little to no financial impact on our overall income. And if it does, we can most likely get by without that money. At this point in my career, I make decent money from my writing, enough to live on if I lived extremely modestly, but writing money ebbs and flows, so it can’t be relied on. Plus, I like teaching (even if I am looking forward to retiring in a few years). But if I become overburdened emotionally, I know it’s okay to take a break from writing (or slow down my rate of production), and I’d do my best not to feel guilty or surrender to self-loathing and begin thinking of myself as a failure. One of the things I learned when I became a parent was that if I don’t take care of myself, I can’t take care of others. It’s like what flight attendants tell you about the oxygen masks. Put yours on before you try to help anyone put on theirs – because if you pass out, you can’t help anyone.

Your Writing Keeps You Sane

I need to write like I need to breathe. Both my ex-wife and my current wife have told me that if I go several days without writing, I start to get moody, then cranky, then depressed. Writing is as important to my mental and physical health as exercise, good nutrition, and sleep. (Not that I get enough of those latter three…) There’s an infinite number of things that I can’t control in this universe, but I can control whether I write, and sometimes having even a small thing in your life that you can control can help you make it through bad times. Creation, however modest it may be, is a positive thing. You’ve brought something new into being and – whether you take this next bit literally or as metaphor, it still works – you’ve added to the sum total of Light in the universe. Plus, just as reading allows people to escape their troubles for a time, so does writing help us escape ours.

Your Writing Helps Others Cope

Stories are refuges for both those who make them and those who read them. Forty or so years ago, my mom was scheduled to undergo surgery, and while my dad wasn’t the kind of man to display much emotion, I knew he was worried about her. The night before mom’s procedure, Dad and I went to a small local bookstore. The unwritten rule in my family was that anyone who bought a book got to be the first to read it. I can’t remember which book Dad bought, but I bought the fourth book in Piers Anthony’s Xanth series, Centaur Aisle. I’d had no idea there was a fourth book, so as a fan of Xanth, I was very excited to find it. As we paid for our books, Dad saw Centaur Aisle, and he asked if he could read it first. I was shocked, since this Simply Was Not Done in my family. Then I realized Dad wanted to read the book because he needed a silly, imaginative adventure to occupy his mind while Mom was undergoing surgery. Of course, I said yes. I understood that day that popular fiction could be much more than simple entertainment. It can be a lifeline for people in so many ways. I did something similar several years later when my first wife was in the hospital with complications for several days before our daughter was born. I read the first few books in Jennifer Roberson’s Tiger and Del series to help me cope then. (I highly recommend those books).

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B074CJYQLN?binding=hardcover&searchxofy=true&ref_=dbs_s_aps_series_rwt_thcv&qid=1742830080&sr=8-4

Your writing can do the same for people. A Stephen King or Nora Roberts’ novel might help millions cope, while a short story you publish in a small-press journal might help only a few people. How many people we reach doesn’t matter. Helping one is as good as helping many. The point is simply to help on whatever scale we can, whenever we can.

Your Writing Shows People They Aren’t Alone

I experienced a very dramatic example of this at the 2024 Stokercon in Pittsburgh. I was scheduled to do a reading with two other authors. The idea behind readings like this is that a more-experienced writer serves as a draw to bring in a larger audience for newer writers. Having done these kinds of readings many times, I know that while the authors should split the hour equally, newer writers almost always take up too much time. For this reason, I always go last, and I bring several pieces of flash fiction to read. That way, I can fill up whatever time I have left to me without stopping in the middle of a story. Before I left for the con, I printed out several pieces of flash fiction, more or less at random, to read. It’s not standard practice, but I like to read a piece that I’ve never read in public before whenever I do a reading, so one of the stories I chose was called “Faithful Friend and Companion.” It had appeared in the late lamented Vastarian, and it was a short, surreal story in which I processed the death of one of my beloved dachshunds. He was only seven years old when we had to put him down, and doing so devastated me.

So when my time came, I read “Faithful Friend and Companion” to a group of around fifteen people. Like an idiot, it never occurred to me that I should preface my reading with a content warning. One of the people in the audience had recently put down her dog, and the trauma was still very fresh for her. When I was finished, people clapped, and several said how impactful they found the story. Then the woman who’d just lost her dog told us what she’d gone through not long ago, and I was filled with horror at unknowingly re-traumatizing her. She said if I’d given a content warning, she would’ve left the room, and she didn’t realize where the story was going until it was almost over (flash fiction, remember?) and she hadn’t felt comfortable leaving at that point. I apologized to her, but she said that while the story was painful to listen to, it was a good experience. She said she could tell from the story that I had gone through the same thing – and I admitted I had – and then she said, “It helps to know that I’m not alone.” Anyone could tell someone else about having to put their dog to sleep, but as a writer, you can make someone feel that you experienced the same emotions as they did. That creates a deep, powerful connection.

Your Writing is Your Voice

There are good reasons dictators fear writers and other artists. One is what I talked about in the previous paragraph. Using our voice as artists, we can make deep connections to our audience through our work – connections that are out of a dictator’s control. What’s more, our audience can connect to each other through our work. We can speak directly or in metaphor and symbol. We can engender and strengthen empathy. We can help people imagine possibilities, conceive of a better world, believe they can become their best selves. Art is one of the most powerful forces humans have ever created, a weapon that ultimately cannot be stopped as long as our species endures. It absolutely terrifies those who, as XTC sings in the “Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead,” “would keep us on our knees.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYupSHWEJxA

Maybe you don’t feel your voice is loud enough on its own to do any good. But think about Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who. The Whos were microscopically small, but when they combined every last one of their voices – their tiny voices – they were finally able to make themselves heard in the larger world. Horton’s line that he repeats throughout the story, “A person’s a person, no matter how small,” could just as easily have been “A voice is a voice, no matter how small.”

And each and every one of them is important.

DEPARTMENT OF SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION

Just Add Writer

My latest how-to book is all about writing media tie-ins. It comes out from Raw Dog Screaming Press in May 2025, and it’s available for preorder at the Raw Dog site – and you get a discount if you preorder! How great is that? And if you’re a reviewer, the book is also available to request from NetGalley.

https://rawdogscreaming.com/books/just-add-writer/

And speaking of tie-ins…

The X-Trilogy is Complete

With the release of MaXXXine in February, all three novelizations of Ti West’s X-Trilogy are out! The best place to buy the books is on the A24 Publishing website, where you can purchase them individually or in a bundle.

https://tinyurl.com/2e73zfme

Preorder, by Crom!

My novel Conan: Spawn of the Serpent God will be out in October 2025, but you can preorder it now! And you’d best be quick about it if you don’t want to make a certain Cimmerian angry.

https://titanbooks.com/72365-conan-spawn-of-the-serpent-god/

Scheduled Appearances

Authorcon V. March 28th to March 30th. Williamsburg, Virginia.

StokerCon. June 12th to June 15th. Stamford, Connecticut. I’m one of the guests of honor!

Signing at Vortex Books. June 26th, 5-7pm. Columbia, Pennsylvania.

Horror on Main. June 27th to June 29th. Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

Gencon Writers’ Symposium. July 31st to August 3rd. Indianapolis, Indiana.

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