• About the Author
  • The Thorns Series
  • Short Stories/Poetry
  • Standalone Novels/Novellas
  • Content Warnings
  • Contact

Amanda M. Blake

~ Of fairy tales and tentacles

Amanda M. Blake

Monthly Archives: October 2017

Nocturne Release Day!

31 Tuesday Oct 2017

Posted by amandamblake in Novels

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

dark, dream, gothic, horror, nightmare, nocturne, release, self-publishing, supernatural, young adult

coverAppropriately, this Halloween I’m facing my terrible dread at putting out total dreck by publishing my first novel, Nocturne, a beautifully gothic YA horror novel thirteen years in the making.

I just got the proofs in from Createspace, and they’re so beautiful I could spit. Covers by Combs did exceptional work on the cover and formatting design – I can’t recommend her enough. The paperback has been approved, and they should be ready to purchase at Amazon within a week (UPDATE: They are now available at Amazon!). In the meantime, the ebook is now available.

Seventeen-year-old Callie dreams nightmares every night. Now the nightmares want to meet her.

Goodreads: http://bit.ly/2ijOtuJ
Amazon US: http://amzn.to/2xIALI0
Amazon UK: http://amzn.to/2ik21pS
Amazon Canada: http://amzn.to/2xFYt7P
Amazon Australia: http://amzn.to/2lAY1Gr
Barnes & Noble: http://bit.ly/2A4FHJ1
iBooks: http://apple.co/2zVgm3f
Kobo: http://bit.ly/2zVgiAs

Self-Publishing Addict

29 Sunday Oct 2017

Posted by amandamblake in A Few Thoughts, Novels

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

nocturne, novel, self-publishing

I’ve submitted everything to everywhere it needs to go. I’m just awaiting the paperback proof, which I expedited to hopefully get it on Oct. 31, but it may come on Nov. 1. All the moving parts are in motion. While I was initially dreading it, I think the anxiety has partially transitioned to excitement.

Aside from an embarrassing OCD loop episode during the finalization of the formatted files (how many times can you read over a blurb before losing your mind? do you really want to know?), I really like the self-publishing process. I like controlling the creative vision; I like being the boss of the process, not the employee. And seeing Nocturne in all my distribution bookshelves, all by itself, only makes me want to publish more. I’ve got the bug, y’all, and it’s dangerous.

I keep having to tell myself that while I have plenty of books in my trunk, they’re not near ready for publication yet. I need to be patient. Nocturne‘s just going to have to be by its lonesome for a while. It deserves the spotlight, though. I owe it that.

Nocturne/Halloween Playlist

28 Saturday Oct 2017

Posted by amandamblake in Soundtracks

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

fan soundtrack, halloween, horror, inspiration, nightmare, nocturne, novel

coverBetween trying to finish a writing project, wrestling with ideas that keep coming to me, finalizing Nocturne for self-publication, preparing for NaNoWriMo, and dealing with a seriously brutal episode of depression, let’s just say it’s been quiet around here.

So I thought I’d give you something to listen to.

Usually, around this time of year, I’m listening to my Halloween playlist round the clock, but for some reason, my brain just wants to listen to Legally Blonde: The Musical over and over and over again, with the occasional side of Sara Bareilles’ Brave Enough or Lady Gaga’s Artpop. At least Delain’s Moonbathers and Nightwish’s Imaginaerium also get an honorable mention—they have good atmosphere.

However, when I’m working on Nocturne, I crave the playlist I created for it. When I wrote the first draft, that was before I had iTunes or an iPod and still played my CDs on a boombox, but I was writing at night, so I had to write in silence. But since then, I’ve amassed a fairly solid fan soundtrack (can the author be a fan?) that set the mood for rewrites and edits, with songs that sometimes reminded me so strongly of elements in the story that it was kind of scary.

It just so happens that, since Nocturne is a horror novel, the playlist would do wonderfully as a Halloween set. So if you want to grab a few of these from your music library of choice for Halloween or if you want to prepare for Nocturne the way your humble author does, here’s my curated playlist. (I tried to make sure an artist wasn’t featured more than three times.)

“Asleep” – Emilie Autumn
“Avalanche” – Epica
“Cold Caress” – Sirenia
“Coma White (acoustic)” – Marilyn Manson
“Crushed Dreams” – Tristania
“Dark Shines” – Muse
“Dead Boy’s Poem” – Nightwish
“Dead is the New Alive” – Emilie Autumn
“End of the Dream” – Evanescence
“Enjoy the Silence” – Lacuna Coil
“The Essence of Silence” – Epica
“Fallen Star” – Kamelot
“Fate” – Tristania
“Haunted” – Evanescence
“Here’s to the Fall” – Kamelot
“I Know Where You Sleep” – Emilie Autumn
“I Make the Mistake” – Mortal Love
“I’ll See You in Your Dreams” – Moonspell
“Insomnia” – Kamelot
“It’s the Fear” – Within Temptation
“Lights” – Ellie Goulding
“The Lonely” – Christina Perri
“Lost” – Within Temptation
“Lotus” – Tristania
“Loverman” – Nick Cave
“Me” – Paula Cole
“Monster” – Panzer AG
“Not Alone” – Sara Bareilles
“People are Strange” – Johnny Hollow
“A Song to Say Goodbye” – Placebo
“Restless” – Within Temptation
“Sleepwalkers Dream” – Delain
“Suffocating Right” – Neuroticfish
“Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” – Marilyn Manson
“Tear You Apart” – She Wants Revenge
“Turn the Lights Out” – Delain
“Uninvited” – Alanis Morissette
“Virtue and Vice” – Delain
“Whispers in the Dark” – Skillet
“World of Glass” – Tristania

Also, if you’re interested in my Pinterest board for Nocturne, you can find it here. I think I created it sometime after the first major rewrite, and it’s been lovely visual atmosphere inspo for all subsequent edits. If you like those creepy illustrations from Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, you’ll like the board.

Cover Reveal – Nocturne

25 Wednesday Oct 2017

Posted by amandamblake in Novels

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

cover by combs, cover reveal, gothic, halloween, horror, nightmare, nocturne, young adult

cover

I’m shooting for a Halloween release at this point. It’s no gimmick. That’s really just the way it’s turned out.

Shout out to the fabulous Covers by Combs for the custom cover design and formatting.

It’s been eight years since the car accident that stole Callie’s voice and plagued her with terrifying nightmares every night. Four years since her family wrote her off as a lost cause and abandoned her at a boarding school for troubled teens. Despite friction with some of the other residents, seventeen-year-old Callie has nevertheless thrived in a place where they don’t expect her to be normal, but she’s not sure she’s able to thrive anywhere else.

Then one night, a man who calls himself the Guardian pulls her into a subterranean world filled with all the monsters from her dreams and ruled by the Night Mare herself. Down in the darklands, Callie’s nightmarish creations worship her. Down in the darklands, she isn’t tired or sick or hungry.

Down in the darklands, she can speak.

As her waking life deteriorates under the weight of exhaustion and other complications, Callie’s nightly forays into the nightmare world also begin to take their toll. And it’s getting harder to tell which world is really the nightmare.

What Fresh Hell

23 Monday Oct 2017

Posted by amandamblake in Novels

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

dreams, hallucination, hypnagogia, inspiration, nightmare, nocturne, parasomnia

496265_22437560bycristinaAt the time I wrote the first draft of Nocturne, then called Nightmare, I was at a strange place in my experience of the horror genre. I’d read most the RL Stine oeuvre from children’s books to young adult, then devoured Christopher Pike. Dracula was (and still is) one of my favorite novels, and Jekyll & Hyde was my favorite musical. I’d started reading Stephen King and Thomas Harris in secret, because my parents thought I was too young for them. I’d been introduced to a handful of horror movies, but only PG-13 at the time. I loved horror, but I was still fresh enough to it that I hadn’t started seeing the mechanics of the genre—the conventions, the cliches, the timing, that sort of thing.

It wasn’t until my freshman year of college that I really started watching all the rated-R horror movies I’d always wanted to watch, and it’s been steady consumption since then. But I wrote Nightmare in the summer between the end of high school and the start of college, before I’d introduced myself to Freddy Krueger or Michael Myers or the Wishmaster, before I’d experienced the sensuality of Coppola’s Dracula or the brutality of Saw and Hostel, before my family had started bingeing on The Twilight Zone every New Year’s, before I knew about the meta-horror of Scream or the way a person can use horror trends to gauge a whole society’s fears.

Between the first draft and the first rewrite, I had about nine years to develop a finer palate for horror appreciation as well as my skills as a writer. I added a few new elements to the story to add some much needed meat to the bones (the first draft was a little more than half the size of the final draft) and fixed the beginning and ending. (Beginnings are always my weak spot, but that original ending was truly awful, and even at the time I knew how unsatisfying it was .) It only needed one more reworking to fix some of those new elements before I was finally satisfied with the body of the novel, somewhere around two years later, and set forth polishing it.

And now here we are, thirteen years from the first draft. I don’t know how many versions there have been—somewhere between twelve and fourteen. It’s a love letter to the horror genre, a sprawling examination of demons that have plagued me from puberty through adulthood, though I don’t suffer nightmares nearly as often as you might think. Nocturne itself, a novel of nightmares, isn’t based solely on mine. I made sure a few of them make a cameo, because how could I resist?

Parasomnias (sleep disorders) have intrigued me more over the last few years, though, because I started experiencing the hypnagogic hallucinations commonly referred to as exploding head syndrome, which sounds a lot more alarming than it is.

I sometimes wake up to the sound of a terrible scream that’s almost mechanical but still sounds so very human—except I experience the sound as though it comes from inside my head. It isn’t thought-sound. I experience it as actual sound. I’ve also woken up to thumps and knocking. On occasion, I’ll think the cat has jumped onto my legs or I’ll think someone’s tapping me awake, but nothing is there (touch hallucination, a bit rarer).

Just last night, I had some trouble in the middle of the night passing between dream state and waking consciousness with some auditory hallucinations—voices of my family that I knew were from evil spirits, actual voices that woke me up because they were heard and not just thought, but I kept waking up first in the dream before waking up for real, so it got a little confusing.

It’s a fascinating phenomenon, and though these auditory hypnagogic hallucinations are usually accompanied by a sense of dread or the feeling that what it’s coming from is evil or demonic, once I’m awake, the worst I feel is a bit unsettled. As long as these things don’t repeat when I’m completely awake, I calm down pretty fast. It helps knowing what’s going on and not actually worrying about evil spirits in my bedroom. I think if I had visual hallucinations as creepy as the auditory, I’d be much more freaked out. It would be a lot harder for me to convince myself that what I’m seeing isn’t real.

And strangely, just this year, I’ve also had markedly more nightmares than usual. I’ve always had bad dreams, but they say the difference between a nightmare and a bad dream is that a nightmare wakes you up because your brain can’t handle it anymore. The tornado dreams I’ve had all my life used to create tornadoes all around me, with only the threat they’d hit. Now, however, they’re hitting. Last night (after the hallucination/evil spirit nightmares), I dreamed interstellar grasshoppers were crawling into people’s mouths and taking them over. The zombie dreams are getting more intense. One night, I woke up from a tooth-crunching dream with aching teeth—I assume from grinding them, but for a second, I thought I’d really crunched my teeth down. I got a sleep guard pretty soon after that.

Sometimes I’ll die in a dream and jolt awake with a hypnic jerk, which I’m also prone to, and there’s a theory that hypnagogic hallucinations are just hypnic jerks translated into sensory representation because the brain gets its wires crossed.

But I’m a little strange, because about seventy-five percent of the time, even though I still have residual terror in my system, I’ll be so intrigued by the nightmare upon waking that I’ll deliberately go back to sleep to try to go back into the dream and see what happens. Side effect of being a horror geek, I suppose, and I’m always on the lookout for the next horror idea. I won’t lie—I’ve come up with a few good ones by doing that.

Here’s hoping that Nocturne is just the first fresh hell I can share with you. Because these hells are far preferable to the ones I have to wake into.

 

Review: THE RUINS

21 Saturday Oct 2017

Posted by amandamblake in Movie Reviews

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

body horror, carnivorous plants, horror, movie, paranoia, review, the ruins

The RuinsThere were mixed reviews for this movie among friends and critics, but it’s one of my personal favorites, a regular go-to for a bit of character-driven body horror. The more I watch the movie, the more complicated it gets underneath the rather unoriginal, shiny exterior, which is why I feel The Ruins is seriously worth a horror fan’s time. As a shiny movie, it might also appeal to the non-horror fan, if they have the stomach for it.

Plants are a funny thing to make a villain, and I can see how some people might not go for the idea of carnivorous plants as something that can get your skin crawling, but it’s been a bit of a peripheral fear of mine. One of the shorts in the Creepshow anthology, the one featuring Stephen King as a simple-minded farmer baffled by a meteorite with a gooey interior that causes grass to grow on everything like a fungus has stuck with me for years—hits me again every time the parsley gets overgrown and starts trailing onto the porch.

Forests do get nutrients from death of both flora and fauna; creeping vines can infest and infect a whole grove; the fight for sunlight in rainforests is a brutal one; oils on leaves or thorns can cause serious damage or horrible death, all in the name of self-protection, and all without an as-yet demonstrable consciousness, which isn’t to say that plants don’t respond—which is the freakiest thing that I just said. We’re surrounded by plants, but too often, they’re just scenery or accessory to us, and that’s a mistake.

All that to say that, as much as I love my backyard and adore big trees and roses, I still find plants kind of creepy. So I can get into the mentality of villainous plants more quickly than some people. What can I say? I’m an ideal horror audience. (Not so much on board with the villainous vegetarians, but Trolls 2 is still worth a watch as one of the most awesome terrible movies ever made.)

After a cryptic prologue, The Ruins opens on a bunch of young, pretty twenty-somethings on vacation in Mexico—bikinis, alcohol, sun, sex, all pretty much the accoutrements of a typical horror movie, which is why it’s easy to think The Ruins is going to follow the usual, unoriginal punishing formula. Nothing new to see here, folks. Situation normal; all fucked up.

And as a trope, The Ruins definitely falls under the label of Tourists Behaving Badly. Or, more specifically, American Tourists Behaving Badly, although they’re tagging along behind a couple Germans and Greeks. It’s easy to roll your eyes when they flash money to do The Forbidden Thing, when one of the characters takes pictures of the Cute Locals in their Native Environment, and when the emergent leader of the group declares with absolute, desperate certainty, “This doesn’t happen! Four Americans on a vacation don’t just disappear!” People disappear all the fucking time, man, and not just on vacation. Naive affluent illusions, shattered.

However, though The Ruins works within the framework of a fairly typical twenty-somethings-suffer horror movie, it’s what the screenwriter (same as the author of the original novel, which I plan to read one of these days) and the director did within that framework that’s worth a second glance.

I don’t think The Ruins would have done so well without an exceptional cast. Shawn Ashmore is one of my favorite underrated actors (actually, I’m a fan of both Ashmore twins, and they both have feet in the horror genre). Jonathan Tucker is a familiar face in the genre, and he has a quiet, odd-faced, hard-bodied intensity to him that serves him well. Jena Malone is also a surprising force of nature despite her slim build. Sergio Calderon plays the lead Mayan, and he might be a face you recognize, but you don’t know from where. I think he lends some unexpected gravitas in a role where nothing that he says is understood, but his face and tone speaks volumes. There’s no weak link in the cast, although the script has some weak points that don’t do them any service. One of the best things about this film, though, is that whoever you think the characters are at the beginning, they subvert those expectations by the end, which is the marker of good storytelling.

The basic premise of the movie goes something like this: The tourists visit Mayan ruins that aren’t on any of the maps to meet up with a group of archaeologists. They trespass onto forbidden land and touch the strange vine that seems to grow on the ruins and nothing else. A band of Mayans who apparently protect the area around the ruins quarantines them there. As expected, they’re in the middle of nowhere, no cell service, no sat phone, no airplanes, little expectation of rescue. And they quickly discover that the original archaeologist team is dead and that the vine is responsible.

What follows includes unspoken tensions between the members of the group coming to a head, some brutal decisions about how to take care of the wounded in primitive conditions, and what to do about the vine spore that’s entered into those wounds and coated everyone’s clothes and skin. If you’re a fan of body horror, there’s some good, flinching gore for you, but it’s the human element that keeps the movie grounded in something almost paranoid. Some of the best horror, in my opinion, comes from the lengths we’ll go to when we’re desperate to survive.

I won’t spoil anything about the nature of the vines or the fates of the characters, but it doesn’t disappoint, though the unrated ending beats the theatrical (unrated version also has an extraneous scene, but I can forgive it). In a contest between The Ruins and Cabin Fever about horror getting under your skin, The Ruins beats Cabin hands down.

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

NOW AVAILABLE

WHERE IT ALL BEGINS

TINGLE YOUR SPINE

What I Write About

  • A Few Thoughts
  • Interviews
  • Movie Reviews
  • Music
  • Novels
  • Poetry
  • Series
  • Short Stories
  • Soundtracks
  • Television
  • This Land
  • Thorns
  • Uncategorized
  • Writing

Archives

  • May 2023
  • April 2023
  • March 2023
  • February 2023
  • January 2023
  • November 2022
  • October 2022
  • July 2022
  • June 2022
  • April 2022
  • January 2022
  • September 2021
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • January 2020
  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • October 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017

Website Built with WordPress.com.

  • Follow Following
    • Amanda M. Blake
    • Join 123 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Amanda M. Blake
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...