No news this week, but I do want to remind you, post Winter Solstice, that if you want erotic horror romance with Nosferatu vibes following your viewing of Eggers’ gorgeous gothic masterpiece (saw it yesterday as a Christmas gift to myself, loved it, precisely my thing), I wrote wintery gothic trilogy Nocturnal Creatures under my other name. You can get the giant doorstop omnibus paperback or the omnibus ebook. The paperback is admittedly expensive due to its size, but the ebook is an eminently reasonable discount for the three novels, Longest Night, Beasts, and Grayling.
It’s vampire/werewolf high dark fantasy (with forced marriage, monster romance, and an enchanted gothic castle), Beauty and the Beast meets Dracula (I’m nothing if not consistent), and I’m really proud of it. So if you need something to warm these longest nights, Nocturnal Creatures may be right up your alley.
Works in Progress:
I’m still rewriting/editing Masque. It’s taking longer than I’d like because of the retyping, even though that’s the process. It feels like I’m going so fast, and then I really I’m only about a third through. However, one good thing is that I’m really not changing much where I don’t outright rewrite.
I’m heading into delayed holidays with family, my period’s on my doorstep, add into that the weirdness of the week between Christmas and New Year’s and the impending darkness of next year, and this liminal space seems extra liminal.
I’ll continue working on Masque to the end of the year and hope I cross the halfway point, and I’ll have my Resolute post out for you on New Year’s. It wasn’t the most financially successful of years, but notable things still happened, and I have to remember that. I think I’ll share another longer poem as well, my gift to you.
Books I’m Reading:
The Fisherman by John Langan Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier Sister, Maiden, Monster by Lucy A. Snyder
Things I’m Listening To:
Christmas playlist
Things I’m Watching:
How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000) Legion (it’s a Christmas movie) Klaus Holidate Hot Frosty Single All the Way The Muppet Christmas Carol Black Christmas (1974) Mickey’s Christmas Carol The Santa Clause It’s a Wonderful Life Nosferatu (2024) The Christmas Cookie Showdown series (finished) Holiday Wars series (finished) Elsbeth series Ghosts (US) series Longmire series Columbo series CSI: NY series S.W.A.T. series
My dark poem “Keeping Secrets” was included in the Breath and Shadow Fall 2024 issue. It’s free to read here. My inspiration for it was the fact that I’m pretty good at not telling secrets, but I absolutely cannot promise that I won’t tell under the most mild of interrogations. My secret integrity completely depends on the fact that people don’t ask me about them in the first place.
Undertaker Books announced their Table of Contents for Stories to Take to the Grave: High Seas Edition, and my story “Floaters” (referencing corpses) is included in the line-up. It’s quieter horror than I usually do, and with a little hope thrown in there. It’s one of my stories I submitted far and wide to a variety of publishers, but it kept getting rejected, and I really wanted a good home for it.
Works in Progress:
Since it includes some rewriting, the first-round edit of Masque is going more slowly than I would like. I’m sorry, crisis after crisis and anticipation of collapse is not conducive to creativity. Nevertheless, I’ve started, and honestly, it wasn’t as info-dumping as I thought it would be. Or maybe adding a character that needed context helped give the world-building info reason to exist.
But I’m not having trouble concentrating because I don’t enjoy it. When I’m working on it, I love Masque‘s lushness. The difference between the much sparer found-media transcription style of the Dracula reimagining and the Gothic embellishments in Masque is pretty stark. I like both.
By and large, my shorter creature features, Deep Down and Out of Curiosity and Hunger are both spare as well, Deep Down because of the protagonist’s numbed emotional state and in Out of Curiosity and Hunger because of both the protagonist’s detachment and sort of wanting to write found-footage style without actually doing so—very documentarian. Whereas my first book, Nocturne, and novella The Damp definitely leaned into the Gothic style as well. I think doing both allows me to enjoy them better, because I’m never locked into one way of writing and it keeps me interested.
I can also write somewhere in between. I would argue that, though the Thorns series books are long, they’re quite traditional in style, and so is Question Not My Salt. Drift and A Woman Alone are dreamy outliers, but probably fit in here, too, although I would argue they’re actually Gothic in elements rather than writing style.
I’m very much a believer of ‘form follows function.’ Sometimes you need a modular cottage and sometimes you need a big honking castle. One is not more intrinsically correct. I think I’ve once shared on here, though, that a more elaborate Gothic style of writing more closely resembles how my brain actually thinks. The denser, sparer writing, on the other hand, gives my head a bit of a rest.
Christmas to New Year’s is a weird time, even as a freelancer, so I’m not sure how much I’ll actually get done, but I’m still aiming to get Masque and the Dracula reimagining completed by end of January. At the very least, I’d like to get Masque done if the call I’m finishing it for is, in fact, open in January. If they’re open to novellas, I can submit The Damp if I don’t finish, though. The Dracula reimagining doesn’t really need to be finished. I’m just hoping to start subbing it out to agents as soon as possible. I’m also perfectly open to self-publishing it. I have two covers in my already-purchased folder that could fit the story.
Books I’m Reading:
The Fisherman by John Langan Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier Sister, Maiden, Monster by Lucy A. Snyder
Things I’m Listening To:
Christmas playlist
Things I’m Watching:
Die Hard (My verdict? I don’t understand how this isn’t a Christmas movie. Loved it.) Krampus Christmas Inheritance Home Alone 2: Lost in New York Black Christmas (2006) P2 The Nightmare Before Christmas Holiday in the Wild The Case of the Whitechapel Vampire (Sherlock Holmes) The Christmas Cookie Showdown series Holiday Baking Championship series (finished) Holiday Wars series The Great British Baking Show series (finished) Elsbeth series Matlock series Ghosts (US) series NCIS series Longmire series Columbo series S.W.A.T. series
Nothing to see here, other than fact that it seems appropriate that I’m finally watching all the Omen movies around the time of Damien’s birthday (which my nephew shares). I’d only ever seen the 2006 remake prior to this (it’s largely faithful to the original and I actually appreciate it more after watching the original), but I wanted to watch the rest of the franchise before tackling The First Omen, which I hear good things about.
Works in Progress:
I finished May Cooler Heads Prevail at 21,633 words. I still can’t say whether it’s a novelette or novella, since it could go either way in edits. I’m really pleased to have that concept story written and waiting for me when I’m ready to work on it again.
I then proceeded to throw my previous schedule out the window to attempt writing and editing a full alternative-history gothic novel, Masque, before the end of the month. I’m doing it to try to make a novel submission call, but also for myself. This story has been with me for years, probably since the mid-2010s. I’ve put off writing it all these years because it was one of those ideas where I would think, I’m not ready for this one yet. I need to cook more as a writer before I even try. I still have stories like that, and I’ve had stories that I tried to write before I gave myself time to cook.
I’m not sure whether I’m ready, but I’m 25K words in and still going strong. It helps that I wrote a comprehensive outline, which I think I will do for every story going forward so I can see where I’m going without having to hold the whole story in my head at all times. I just don’t have the attention bandwidth for that anymore, so my methods have to change. But the timing couldn’t be better, because it occurred to me while I was writing that I would not have been in the best position to write a plague story prior to COVID. I can and have read about plagues, but going through a pandemic answers questions you don’t think to ask and don’t always know where to find the answers.
The other wonderful thing about this story is that I’m going full-out gothic prose, with long sentences and giant paragraph blocks, whatever my heart desires. I cut my teeth on 18th and 19th century literature, and even Stephen King was of a more elaborate and gothic style for his time. The way I think very much resembles how these stories’ syntax was structured. I’ll clean and tighten it up in edits, of course, but it’s been fun letting the style run wild for now.
I’m going for my usual 5K words per day that I try to do for a novel. In theory, banging this novel out is entirely doable, depending on how much longer it is than my initial estimate of 100K words. As usual, we’ll just have to see.
Part of the reason for writing the novel instead of editing Crooked House (Thorns 5) is the frustration that I am still not employed and cannot yet spare the formatting costs. But as soon as Masque is completed, I’ll start Crooked House‘s final edits anyway. I may or may not be able to tackle a short story before the conclusion of a June call, but I can’t promise anything, and the story for it is more undefined than I’d like.
Books I’m Reading:
Mary Reilly by Valerie Martin The Tommyknockers by Stephen King
Things I’m Listening To:
Pop playlist The Village soundtrack Knowing soundtrack Sacrificium Instrumental Versions by Xandria Nightwish
Things I’m Watching:
The Omen (1976) The Exorcist: Believer Pearl Five Nights at Freddy’s Damien: Omen II Omen III: The Final Conflict Omen IV: The Awakening Summer Baking Championship series The Amazing Race series CSI series CSI: Miami series CSI: NY series 9-1-1 series
Poem of the Week:
no matter what you do whether you spin the world off axis untether sky from earth steal worth from paper and precious metals stain great lakes red marry the newly freshly dead you can always count on family to stand with you at the altar
Nothing of a writerly nature, unless you count a light redesign of the website.
However, as I wrote in a previous entry, I injured my right leg, assumed a grade II tear of the calf muscle. I was progressing all right, with some stumbles on the way, but about three weeks ago I tried using the elliptical machine. I felt okay on the machine, but after, I felt the strain. The healing process regressed, but worse, it didn’t improve much after and there’s consistent over-stress in everything between the ankles and knees.
So I went to the doctor today, and I’m getting an MRI tomorrow to determine what might be going on and how to proceed. My health insurance is basically catastrophe insurance, so I’m paying out of pocket, if you’d like to help. I’m not going to go broke, though, so don’t feel any pressure.
In less grave news, I’m finally buckling down and watching the end of MCU Phase 3. The length of the Avengers movies is prohibitive, but I’m committing to it this weekend. That’ll make proceeding with Phase 4 while working out easier (if I’m ever able to work out again).
Works in Progress:
This last week was something of a pet project week.
I wrote a novelette version of We Follow You in the Dark with more short-story pacing to see if I could write something closer to the original vibe. Because the short version and the long version have the same setting but different characters and outcomes, it’s less like a different version and more like different stories in the same universe. I’m still pursuing publishing the novel, and novelettes are murder to sell. I’m thinking about providing a collection of short story/novelette versions of longer stories, kind of a ‘what might have been,’ because, strangely enough, I happen to have written more than one of these. So they’ll be useful eventually, but for now, it was more of an experiment.
I also wrote a long short story that was supposed to go one way and ended up another, and was definitely supposed to be shorter. It’s too long to sell as a short story and too short to sell as a long story, but it’s weird and erotic and uses some of my for-funsies college subjects. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it, but it was great fun to explore that world. My wanting to finish it is why I’m writing this so late.
This week, we had a break in the three-digit heat with a delightful false fall, so I worked outside on our porch for most of the week (see the photo above). Tomorrow will probably be the last day I can do that for a few more weeks, but I assure you, the mosquito bites were worth it.
Coming up, I have a short story I need to edit and send back to the editor. Then I’ll be doing my proofreading run of Puppeteer (Thorns 4).
Books I’m Reading:
IT by Stephen King Discount Armageddon by Seanan McGuire Cruel Summer by Wesley Southard Pornography for the End of the World by Brendon Vidito
Music I’m Listening To:
Halloween playlist (it’s that time of year)
Things I’m Watching:
Grave Encounters Devil Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) The Wrath of Becky The Avengers: Infinity War America’s Got Talent series Dr. Pimple Popper series CSI series CSI:Miami series Murder, She Wrote series White Collar series Locke & Key series Buffy the Vampire Slayer series
Poem of the Week:
You’re looking for my sister, you say? Well, you just missed her on her way to the graveyard for our father’s funeral. Such a yawn, gravestones and funereal blacks, but someone has to represent a repressed and resentful family. She’s the one who stands to gain the least, so she could not have slain that beast.
Not only do I have two poems coming out in Crow Calls Vol. 4, a short, melodramatic little story can be found in the June 2022 Melancholia issue of the gothic lit zine The Crow’s Quill.
I concluded 2021 with one of the worst work weeks in a bad year and started 2022 with period cramps—like, right after midnight. It’s a good thing I’m not superstitious, otherwise I’d consider it a bad omen. I think most of us agree that 2021 was the last in a trilogy of terrible years that I hope doesn’t have more in its series, but it’s hard to hold out hope these days. I just try to take it a week at a time. Looking too far ahead leads directly to despair, do not pass go, do not collect $200.
However, in spite of the tint of my pessimism glasses, I do have to admit that even a year that tipped toward the bad side of the scale doesn’t necessary have nothing on the good side.
My niece was born at the end of 2020, so we spent 2021 watching her grow. I’m neither maternal nor particularly nurturing, so there aren’t going to be children from my line, but I love that little girl, and getting to see her in person and in pictures and video was the main highlight of my year.
On the writing side, the highlight was publishing the third book in the Thorns series, BLUEBIRDS, although that series is still under most people’s radar. I keep at it in case it crops up later and because I don’t like unfinished things, plus I like this universe. I did my first editing pass of PUPPETEER (T4), cutting the bloated 219K words down to 183K. I’m on the second editing pass now and shooting for under 170K words, if possible, before sending it out to editors and beta readers.
The rest of the writing side was a bit shaky. I tried to write the DRACULA reimagining scheduled in the spring, but I made it about 75K words before I realized it was Not Working. Instead of finishing it and hoping to clean it up later, I wrote myself so deep into Not Working that I had to just stop. When I try again this year, I’m going into it with an outline and an adjusted style for the video epistolary, so we’ll see whether that works.
With the failure of the reimagining attempt, I was a bit at odds with my writing, so I decided to take on a novella—something shorter that wouldn’t hurt as badly if I had to stop. I finished writing creature feature short novel THE VERY HUNGRY at the end of May. I’d originally conceived of it as a short story, so I decided to see if I could recreate that feeling in my head. I came to the conclusion after several starts and stops that some things that play as a movie in one’s head doesn’t always translate to the page, because movies can show rather than tell in such a unique way not available to written narrative. However, after the fourth try, I managed to write a short version, although it’s too long for most anthology calls. I’ll see what I can do with it in the future.
Trying to write the short story version of THE VERY HUNGRY, however, triggered something that I hadn’t planned on for my year. After years of assuming that I wasn’t a short-form writer, I actually ended up writing for a number of short story anthology calls. I do have more stop-restarts than I do for novels, which is frustrating, but at least you don’t lose as much time when you stop-restart after 6K than 75K words. Not counting a few pieces of flash fiction, I wrote 15 stories of 1-15K words. Some of them were too long for the calls and had to be put to the side for now. Of the ones I submitted, some received personalized rejections (which is a good thing), and one of them was accepted! “Resin,” my queer horror-tragedy short story, will be published Feb 2022 in Ghost Orchid Press’ BEYOND THE VEIL.
In addition to short stories this year, I tried my hand at poetry. I’ve always tagged my song lyrics as ‘not a poet,’ because I always felt pretentious as hell writing poetry before, although I’d done a few pieces over the years. I didn’t feel I deserved to call it poetry, much less call myself a poet. But the gothic/horror prompts from Quill & Crow Publishing House inspired me, so about mid-July, I took the plunge. Ever since, I’ve been posting flash poetry daily on my Twitter feed, and I found my voice in it so that I don’t feel pretentious anymore (most of the time). It’s a lot of fun, just trying to create a feeling or image and play and paint with words on a micro scale, and two were published in Quill & Crow’s Volume 3 of CROW CALLS.
Writing both short stories and poetry was a bit like learning a new language, and for a few months after starting each, my brain lit up from all the new imaginative muscles flexing. They’ve since settled, but it was still quite a creative high.
For NaNoWriMo, I planned to take a break from editing PUPPETEER to write a few long short stories or novelettes. I had a list of about three or four I intended to finish during the month. Little did I know that the first one, HOSTILE TERRITORY, would turn into another short novel. So that happened. It needs some work and will probably be a novella by the time it’s trimmed down, and I still have some things I’m not sure about with it. But at least I don’t need to scrap it like the DRACULA reimagining. Just another story to store in the trunk until I can tackle it again.
On a personal level, I didn’t lose any more weight. In fact, I gained a little during the holidays. However, I did get off of my insulin-resistance and cholesterol medications, and the holidays are almost over, so hopefully I’ll be able to get back down to a more manageable level. I’ve come to accept that I am fat and will always be fat at every size, and nothing short of devastating illness or cosmetic surgery is going to change that, so I have to focus on my health rather than my size to avoid disappointment.
I don’t really have personal goals for the year. Like I said, if I try to look much farther than a week, it’s not the greatest feeling. I’ll stick with writing goals, although even that hasn’t been without its frustrations.
In 2022, I’ll finish editing PUPPETEER (T4) and send it out. I hope to self-publish it by the end of the year, although I feel on shakier ground with it than the other four I’ve written. When that’s done, I’ll probably edit short novel THE VERY HUNGRY to prep for submission, although I don’t know where yet. Then I’d like to tackle WILDWORLD (T5), although there are still elements I’m unsure about, so I might need to do some basic outlining to figure it out. After that, I think I’ll block out some months for short story anthology calls and some of the shorts/novelettes on my list. Then I hope to revisit the DRACULA reimagining with a tight outline and see if that helps. For NaNoWriMo 2022, I’d like to start the sequel to UNDEAD ANONYMOUS, which was NaNo 2020’s project, but although I know how it starts, I still don’t know where it’s going, so we’ll see. There’s always something else to work on. My project list doesn’t really get shorter.
Here’s hoping 2022 has more grains of rice on the good side of the scale.
One of the things I love to do with most of my novels is create a fanmade soundtrack (hey, authors can be fans of their own stuff; in fact, I encourage it) of the songs that inspired me before, during, or after the writing and editing of it.
With all the stories, songs, and poetry created within Drift, it’s really not strange that I was so musically inspired from outside of the writing as well.
Usually, my rule for a soundtrack playlist is no more than two songs by the same artist, but in the case of Drift, I’m breaking the rules with my bonus track section, because the songs just fit too well not to include as a kind of lyrical epilogue. And honestly, this might be my favorite novel playlist so far, possibly tied with Nocturne. Very emblematic of my softer musical tastes in general.
As atmospheres go, the music here is mellow, impressionistic, with a touch of the gothic and dark fantasy minor key here and there. Fire and water are easy elements to find in music, so the water theme in Drift called me to a good number of songs—easy to find just the right ones. If you need a moody, sometimes cinematic, sometimes singer-songwriter, heavily female playlist, you’ll like this one. And of course it’s good to listen to during a read to grasp where I was mentally while working on it.
Hopefully available by the end of the month, Drift is a standalone novel inspired by fairy tales and folklore, with a splash of American gothic.
After her mother’s funeral, Dani nearly drowns at the lake where she’s lived her entire life. She learned to swim before she could walk, but the water tingles and prickles over her skin, drawing her under.
She’s saved by a stranger trespassing on her father’s boat who claims that the rains follow him, who sees when her father treats her the way a father shouldn’t.
Her mother left behind more than just memories and an empty lake house. And if Dani can’t find it, she’ll never break free from the shackles that her mother couldn’t escape.
“I have so much to tell you, my love. I can only hope that you heard me.”
Hopefully available by the end of the month, Drift is a standalone novel inspired by fairy tales and folklore, with a splash of American gothic.
Amanda M. Blake 