At Book Expo America 2018 with members of my literary community: Hunter Shea, Jonathan Janz, Don D'Auria, and John Everson
February is Women in Horror Month, a time dedicated to
recognizing and promoting women in the horror field. In both publishing and
film, women creatives of horror have often been seen as producing less intense
work than their male counterparts because of their softer feminine emotions.
And that’s if women horror creatives are even recognized at all. All too often
they’re invisible in the industry. If you want to learn more about Women in
Horror Month, here are a couple links:
Every year on social media, some idiot male posts a
variation on this comment regarding WIHM: “When is it going to be MEN in Horror
Month?”
(The answer is “Every fucking month is Men in Horror Month,
jackass.”)
And sure enough, this happened on my Facebook feed the other
day, and I’ve since seen other men complaining about WIHM (the poor fragile
things). These men weren’t being good literary citizens, and while there’s no
requirement that writers have to not
be assholes, there are many good – and even selfish – reasons to be the best
literary citizen you can be.
So what is literary citizenship? It means thinking of
yourself as a member of a literary community as opposed to a lone writer who’s
in a Battle Royale-type competition
with every other writer out there. Writing and publishing guru Jane Friedman
explains it thusly:
“For those unaware of
the term, it’s widely used in the literary, bookish community to refer to
activities that support and further reading, writing, and publishing, and the
growth of your professional network. . . . It operates with an abundance mindset.
It’s not about competition, but collaboration. If I’m doing well, that’s going
to help you, too, in the long term. We’re not playing a zero-sum game where we
hoard resources and attention. There’s plenty to go around.”
Here’s a link to Freidman’s full blog on the subject: https://www.janefriedman.com/limits-literary-citizenship/
(And if you don’t regularly read her blog, receive her
newsletter, or read her books about publishing, you need to fix that. She’s an
expert in up-to-the-minute information on changes in the writing and publishing
world.)
What’s great about the literary citizenship model is that it
works whether you’re a person who believes in helping others or if you’re a self-centered,
heartless bastard out only for yourself. The phrase “a rising tide lifts all
boats” applies here. And I believe this is even more true in these days of
constant social media interaction, where we have countless ways to connect to –
or alienate – an audience on a daily basis. Regardless of whether or not you’re
an asshole, practicing good literary citizenship makes you seem like you aren’t one. It’s an essential
professional survival skill in a world where so many thousands of books are
traditionally or indie published each year, and it gets harder and harder for
any one book (or author) to snag readers’ attention. It would be nice if all we
had to do was sell our product, but we need to sell ourselves, too. That’s the social aspect of social media. It’s just
as important to consumers who they are buying from as what they’re buying.
Maybe more.
So here are some tips to becoming a better literary citizen:
1) Accept that you’re
part of a literary community – and figure out which one it is.
Of course, you don’t have to be part of anything if you
don’t want to be. Bentley Little’s first novel was published in 1990, and he’s
been publishing books regularly ever since. He’s famous for being something of
a recluse. He has no online presence of any sort, and he doesn’t attend
conventions. Has this hurt his career? Damned if I know. My guess is he’d have
more fans and more sales if he didn’t keep to himself so much, but his career
is his, and if he’s happy with it, then good for him.
Being part of a literary community is a way to more
effectively network. Networking is more than just being known by writers,
editors, agents, and publishers. It’s not about what others can do for you.
It’s what members of a community can do for each other. To put it in starkly transactional
terms, helping others is how you pay for the help you receive from them.
Networking is how you learn about publishing opportunities, sure, but it’s also
helps you mentally and emotionally survive the all-too-often crushing up and
downs of an artistic life. I’d argue that this last part is the biggest and
most important benefit of literary citizenship.
And while it’s easy to identify the basic literary community
where you’d best fit – science fiction, fantasy, mystery, horror, romance,
literary, children’s, YA – there are subgroups. Horror can be separated into
literary, weird, extreme, realistic, supernatural, bizarre, and more. There’s a
lot of overlap between the subgroups but discovering to which subgroup you
belong can help you more effectively target an audience who’ll enjoy your work
and build a network of like-minded writers. It also helps you better target
your social media posts and commentary.
You can belong to more than one community. I identify as a
horror writer, a media tie-in writer, a fantasy writer, a short story writer, a
novelist, a writing teacher, and someone who writers about writing. In horror,
I identify as a writer of weird, pulp, literary, and extreme fiction. Would it
be more effective in terms of the business side of writing if I focused on one
subgenre? Maybe. But I love exploring different types of horror, and that’s not
something I plan to change anytime soon.
2) Be a contributing
member of your community.
Given the caveat that none of us can spend all our time
posting online or mentoring others (we have to get our own writing done
sometime), do what you can to contribute to your community. Join a writers’
organization, post on their Facebook page from time to time, contribute
occasional material for their newsletter or blog. Engage other writers and
readers on social media and talk about topics that are of interest to the
community – without constantly promoting yourself and your work. Interact with
the people of your community as a human being. Engage in conversations that
aren’t about writing and publishing. Support other members of the community
when they’re going through a hard time. Celebrate their accomplishments and
cheer their victories.
3) Start conversations instead of making statements.
Instead of making empty, thoughtless pronouncements on
social media – “I just saw Hereditary,
and my dudes, that ending SUCKED!!!” – try to start quality conversations. “I
just saw Hereditary, and while I enjoyed
the film for the most part, I’m not sure about the ending. What do you all
think?” (For the record, I loved the ending.) People want to talk, not be
talked at. In many ways, all Art is a conversation between creators and
audience (and that audience includes other creators). Learn to listen as much –
if not more – than you speak.
3) Promote others
(and by doing so promote yourself).
Promoting the work of others benefits you in a number of
ways. It makes you seem like a positive force in your community, you add to the
conversation about art that I mentioned above, people like reading
recommendations for books and films that they should check out, you build good
will among members of your community, and you don’t seem like a 24/7
self-promotion machine. Honestly, no one gives a shit about your
self-promotion, and if that’s all the social media content you have to provide,
no one will pay attention to what you have to say. Promote others a good
portion of the time, and people will be more open to occasional sales messages
from you.
4) Share resources,
insights, and advice.
People want to know what you can do for them. Share links to
submission calls, share your experiences with writing and publishing – what’s
worked for you and what hasn’t – and provide advice on writing and publishing
(without coming across as a know-it-all). Not only will this build your
audience, other writers will share their tips with you. Give your readers a
behind-the-scenes perspective into your own work as well. Talk about where you
got the idea for your latest story, what your inspiration for a fan-favorite character
was, etc.
5) Try to be
positive.
While there will always be a certain number of people who
love it when writers shit-post, hate-watch (or hate-read), stoke controversies,
engage in literary feuds, or just plain bitch about whatever’s irritating them
at any given moment, these behaviors drive away more people than they attract.
And while there’s no way to prove whether the people who thrive on negativity
will respond to your sales messages, my guess is they won’t. Supporting a
writer is a positive thing, and people who thrive on negativity online aren’t
there to be positive. They’re deeply cynical (or at least come across that
way), and cynical people are most likely to resist a sales message simply to
prove how cool they are. (And I admit I may well be grossly oversimplifying and
stereotyping here. I’m just sharing my impressions for whatever they may – or
may not – be worth.)
Being positive doesn’t mean you have to agree with everyone
or everything in your community, of course, but you can do your best to
disagree civilly, without indulging in personal attacks. And if you think you
can’t, you can also just keep your mouth shut. You’re not required to comment
on every damn thing that comes across your social media feed.
6) Don’t be afraid to
call out bad behavior.
See a publishing scam? Warn other writers. See a writer
harassing someone? Tell them to cut it the hell out. See someone posting
racist, sexist, homophobic horseshit? Call them out. You can try to engage these
people in the hope of helping them understand why what they’re doing is
destructive, but it’s not your job in life to educate assholes. If you choose
to engage, you can choose to disengage when interacting takes too much of your
time and mental and emotional energy. Part of what a community does is build
consensus on what it means to be an effective, contributing member of that
community. These standards are fluid and can change over time, and this is a
normal, natural process. But this consensus-building can be destructive when it
becomes a mob mentality, an excuse merely to exclude or castigate others, or
tribal Us vs Them behavior. Try not to be too quick to judge. Someone
exhibiting bad behavior might be uniformed, ignorant, young (in terms of being
a member of the community if not in actual age) or they might have been told
that being “edgy” is the best way to get attention in an over-crowded
marketplace. But while community-building is about making connections and
offering support, yes, this doesn’t mean you have to put up with any shit you
don’t want to. Trying to be understanding doesn’t mean giving everyone a free
pass to be an asshole. You decide where the line is drawn and act accordingly.
7) Volunteer/Do pro
bono work/Mentor.
It’s important for us to serve our community, and while we
can’t spend all our time doing so (remember that writing thing we need to get
done?), there are all kinds of ways to serve, not all of which require massive
effort or investment of time. Volunteer to help out in a writers’ organization
or at a con. Contribute an article to a writers’ organizations newsletter or
website. Serve as a mentor to other writers, whether you simply answer
questions they ask about matters of craft and publishing, provide feedback on
their work, offer to blurb their work, or introduce them to members in your
professional network. Do as much as you have time and energy for, and as much
as you feel comfortable doing. Don’t make the mistake of allowing volunteering
to become your life. Your writing and your career come first. The more
successful you are, the more knowledge and experience you gain, the more you
have to offer others.
8) Be kind.
When in doubt about saying or doing something in your
literary community, ask yourself a simple question: Is this kind? Does it make
a positive contribution? This doesn’t mean always being nice. If you block a
racist on Facebook, they can no longer post on your threads, which prevents
other people from having to read their racist comments, which ultimately is
being kind to those people. If someone asks you to read a story of theirs and
it has a lot of problems, you need to be honest in your feedback. It might not
be pleasant for the writer to hear about those problems, but it’s ultimately
kind. At the very least, try to think like a doctor: First, do no harm.
9) What about
politics, religion, etc.?
You have to do you, and if you’re passionate about ideals
and causes, and you want to use your platform to champion them, go for it. You
may gain a following of like-minded people, but you may drive away people who
don’t agree 100 percent with you. Not only might this decease your overall
audience – and sales – but it might further foster divisions within your
literary community. In the end, you’re only going to be talking into an echo
chamber anyway. You’ll be preaching to the choir. There will be no one of
differing points of view listening, so there will be no minds to change. I’m
not conservative or religious, but I don’t unfollow people on Facebook who are.
I do, however, unfollow people who are cruel to those who don’t share their points
of view. For example, the author Larry Correia is a well-known conservative
who, by all accounts, is a lovely man in person but who is savage on social
media to people who aren’t conservative. I used to follow him on Facebook, but
I got sick of his constant tirades and belittling of non-conservatives –
including personal attacks against people – and I stopped following him. I also
have no intention of supporting his work or his career. (He has such a gigantic
following that I doubt he’d lose a second of sleep over this.) Am I hurting
myself professionally by cutting out a potentially useful contact from my
network? Maybe, but I don’t give a damn. I can’t stand vitriol and personal
attacks, and that’s that.
I tend not to be an aggressively political person anyway, so
I don’t post many political messages on social media. There was a time when I
tried to post messages in support of women writers and writers of color, but
several people sent me private messages saying that while they appreciated the
effort, I was merely talking into an echo chamber. Besides, talk is cheap. You
want to help us? Then help actual people. Introduce them to editors. Blurb
their work. Mentor them. I’m grateful for those people reminding me that
activism is about taking actual, substantive action, not about simply posting ultimately
empty messages on Facebook. They helped make me a better citizen of my literary
community.
Being an effective literary citizen takes time, thought, and
effort, but the payoff can be huge. Not only will you be helping your own
career, but you’ll be helping the careers of others and having on impact on the
overall health and growth of your genre. To me, this is at least as important a
legacy as the number of works I publish before I die, and in the end more meaningful.
DEPARTMENT OF SHAMELESS NON-SELF-PROMOTION
In the spirit of this blog’s topic, I’m going to promote
work from people other than myself, AND since it’s Women in Horror Month, I’m
going to feature work from my sisters in darkness. They are all wonderful
writers, and I urge you to check out their work.
Alma Katsu’s The
Hunger was one of the best novels I read last year. Highly recommended!
Evil is invisible, and it is everywhere.
That is the only way to explain the series of misfortunes
that have plagued the wagon train known as the Donner Party. Depleted rations,
bitter quarrels, and the mysterious death of a little boy have driven the
isolated travelers to the brink of madness. Though they dream of what awaits
them in the West, long-buried secrets begin to emerge, and dissent among them
escalates to the point of murder and chaos. They cannot seem to escape
tragedy...or the feelings that someone--or something--is stalking them. Whether
it's a curse from the beautiful Tamsen Donner (who some think might be a
witch), their ill-advised choice of route through uncharted terrain, or just
plain bad luck, the ninety men, women, and children of the Donner Party are
heading into one of one of the deadliest and most disastrous Western adventures
in American history.
As members of the group begin to disappear, the survivors
start to wonder if there really is something disturbing, and hungry, waiting
for them in the mountains...and whether the evil that has unfolded around them
may have in fact been growing within them all along.
Effortlessly combining the supernatural and the historical,
The Hunger is an eerie, thrilling look at the volatility of human nature,
pushed to its breaking point.
I just picked up Melanie
Tem’s gigantic collection Singularity
and Other Stories. Tem’s an amazing writer, and you need this collection in
your life!
Singularity gathers award-winning writer Melanie Tem’s most
important short fiction, highlighting her diversity and mastery of her art.
The sixty stories collected here range from "Sitting
with the Driver," a western with a dark woman at its center, to
"Little Shit," a contemporary tale of a woman who uses her deceptive
appearance and psychic power to trap those who prey on the helpless. The child
in "Corn teeth" longs not only to become a part of an alien family,
but also to become an alien. And in the title tale, a man studies singularities
and strin theory to both understand and blind himself to the truth about the
woman he loves. Although the story is not science fiction, its exploration of
physics is as rigorous as that found in the best sf. Here you will find no
triumphant warriors, no powerful and beautiful protagonists, no monsters from
beyond the dark cold void or madmen bent on conquest.
Tem's characters are mothers and siblings, orphans and
lonely seniors. Her stories are often about family, and always about
relationships. Even though Kelly is the only character in "Iced in,"
the bitter truth that lies at the story's heart is that she is doomed by her
failure to maintain relationships. Melanie Tem's stories are often haunted by
ghosts and monsters, ghosts and monsters revealed as all too human. In
Singularity, she explores the love and terror that lie deep within all of us.
Lucy A. Snyder
has an excellent new collection out called Garden of
Eldritch Delights.
Master short story author Lucy A. Snyder is back with a
dozen chilling, thought-provoking tales of Lovecraftian horror, dark science
fiction, and weird fantasy. Her previous two collections received Bram Stoker
Awards and this one offers the same high-caliber, trope-twisting prose. Snyder
effortlessly creates memorable monsters, richly imagined worlds and diverse,
unforgettable characters.
Open this book and you’ll find a garden of stories as dark
and heady as black roses that will delight fans of complex, intelligent
speculative fiction.
Lee Murray’s latest novel, Into the Ashes, is a fantastic dark
fantasy/adventure tale. Coming soon from Severed Press.
No longer content to rumble in anger, the great mountain
warriors of New Zealand’s central plateau, the Kāhui Tupua, are preparing again
for battle. At least, that’s how the Māori elders tell it. The nation’s leaders
scoff at the danger. That is; until the ground opens and all hell breaks loose.
The armed forces are hastily deployed; NZDF Sergeant Taine McKenna and his
section are tasked with evacuating civilians and tourists from Tongariro
National Park. It is too little, too late. With earthquakes coming thick and
fast and the mountains spewing rock and ash, McKenna and his men are cut off.
Their only hope of rescuing the stranded civilians is to find another route
out, but a busload of prison evacuees has other ideas. And, deep beneath the
earth’s crust, other forces are stirring.
You can check out previous books in the series here: https://www.amazon.com/Lee-Murray/e/B0068FHSC4/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1549831943&sr=1-2-ent
Gaby Triana recently released City
of Spells, the latest in her popular Haunted Florida series.
When a mysterious old gentleman
enters Queylin Sanchez's trendy new age shop, she hopes he'll buy incense,
sage, maybe a nice rose quartz pendulum for his wife. Instead, the man enlists
her help getting rid of La Dama de Blanco, a ghostly woman in bloody white
dress who's been haunting his 100-year-old Palmetto Bay estate.
But Queylin's rituals and spells
uncover terrifying secrets hidden in the walls of the estate when she realizes
La Dama de Blanco is only the beginning of the haunted home's evil legacy.
Tori Eldridge’s kick-ass novel The
Ninja Daughter in available for preorder.
The
Ninja Daughter is an action-packed thriller about a Chinese-Norwegian
modern-day ninja with a Joy Luck Club family issues who fights the Los Angeles
Ukrainian mob, sex traffickers, and her own family to save two desperate women
and an innocent child from a violent land-grab scheme.
After her sister is raped and
murdered, Lily Wong dedicates her life and ninja skills to the protection of
women. But her mission is complicated. Not only does she live above the Chinese
restaurant owned by her Norwegian father and inspired by the recipes of her
Chinese mother, but she has to hide her true self from her Hong Kong tiger mom
is already disappointed at her less than feminine ways, and who would be
horrified if she knew what she had become.
But when a woman and her son she
escorted safely to an abused women’s shelter return home and are kidnapped,
Lily is forced to not only confront her family and her past, but team up with a
mysterious―and very lethal―stranger to rescue them.
J.H. Moncrieff’s creature-feature novel Return to Dylatov Pass is recently out from Severed Press.
In 1959, nine Russian students set
off on a skiing expedition in the Ural Mountains. Their mutilated bodies were
discovered weeks later. Their bizarre and unexplained deaths are one of the
most enduring true mysteries of our time.
Nearly sixty years later, podcast
host Nat McPherson ventures into the same mountains with her team, determined
to finally solve the mystery of the Dyatlov Pass incident. Her plans are
thwarted on the first night, when two trackers from her group are brutally
slaughtered.
The team’s guide, a superstitious
man from a neighboring village, blames the killings on yetis, but no one
believes him. As members of Nat’s team die one by one, she must figure out if
there’s a murderer in their midst—or something even worse—before history
repeats itself and her group becomes another casualty of the infamous Dead
Mountain.
P.D. Cacek’s novel Second
Lives is available for preorder from Flame Tree Press.
When four patients unexpectedly
wake after being declared dead, their families are ecstatic and the word “miracle”
begins to be whispered throughout the hospital. But the jubilation is short
lived when the patients don’t respond to their names and insist they are
different people. It is suggested all four are suffering from fugue states
until one of the doctors recognizes a name and verifies that he not only knew
the girl but was there when she died in 1992. It soon becomes obvious that the
bodies of the four patients are now inhabited by the souls of people long dead.
Autumn Christian’s new novel Girl Like a Bomb is available for preorder from Clash Books.
Autumn Christian's third novel is a
dark journey of self-discovery. An existential labyrinth of love, sex, and
self-actualization where the only way out is through.
When high schooler Beverly Sykes
finally has sex, her whole life changes. She feels an explosion inside of her
that feels like her DNA is being rearranged, and she discovers a strange power
within. After chasing that transcendent feeling and fucking her way through the
good, the bad, and the dangerous boys and girls that cross her path, Beverly
notices that all of her ex-lovers are undergoing drastic changes. She witnesses
them transcending their former flawed selves, becoming self-actualized and
strong. Beverly gives herself over and over to others, but can she become who
she is supposed to be, with the gift and curse that nature gave to her?
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