This week we have three readers for our Featured Reading on the June 30th. Here’s a little bit about each reader and a few questions that will help you get to know them and what they will be presenting at the mic for us.
Martel Sardina is a long time Twilight Tales favorite. She’s an award winning author and former staffer who has recently added editor to her long list of credentials.
Joshua Doetsch is also a returning favorite and has recently had his first book published. He works mostly in the horror and fantastic reality genres, but his talents are sure to delight and surprise.
Nathaniel Gray is a new voice at our mic. He comes to us from Tina Jens’ class. his first appearance at our mic was all too brief and left many of us wanting to hear more of the story he presented that night. Here’s our chance to hear it.

Following are their answers to our interview questions.

Let’s start with the basics, what’s the title of the story you’ll be reading?

Martel: Let’s see…there’s the transgendered Frankenstein story, the noir murder mystery, and two really creepy ideas that are floating around in my brain. I suppose it will depend on my mood.
Josh: I’ll be reading excerpts from my new novel, Strangeness in the Proportion.
Nathaniel: Three pieces. The first is a short short titled “Interlude.” The second is an excerpt from my novel, The Rider. The third is a short story titled “Just Jazz.”

Who or what inspired it, and tell us briefly about the action?

Martel: The transgendered Frankenstein story was inspired by a conversation I had with a couple of teammates after a recent softball game. Ahh, the things you can think of with good friends over a couple of bottles of beer.
Josh: A lot of the inspiration (and the title) comes from the quote I use to open the novel:

“There is no exquisite beauty…without some strangeness in the proportion.”
—Edgar Allan Poe, “Ligeia”

The book is set in White Wolf Publishing’s World of Darkness setting (a real world setting with monsters in the shadows). It is technically a horror novel…but I like to think of it as a love story on the other side of entropy. As for inspirations…there were a lot of them. I wanted to story where a Tim Burtonesque misfit, drawn by Edward Gorey (with shades of silent film comedic heroes like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton) is forced into the dark underworld of Frank Miller’s Sin City as if directed by Edgar Allan Poe. The story is about an eccentric, absinthe addicted forensic pathologist, Simon Meeks, who falls in love with a Jane Doe cadaver. When Jane disappears, Simon snaps and goes off in search of her (scalpels in hand), plummeting into the hidden supernatural world that lies just under the surface of Chicago. It’s kind of about love and relationships with the dead…like the movie Ghost…only where that movie was more “Unchained Melodies”, my book is more “Mary Jane’s Last Dance” The lyrics and music video of the Nine Inch Nails song, “Perfect Drug” was also an inspiration (in fact, the lyrics work as a very vague plot synopsis). And finally, Count Carl Tanzler von Cosel (the infamous romantic/necrophile of Key West, Florida), offered some inspiration.
Nathaniel: Interlude came from an idea for a series of short stories all involving the same situation in this diner, where each story uses different groups of characters to see how they would play out in isolation. Those stories never got written, but Interlude, a conversation between the Cook and the waiter, did. The Rider is one of those pieces that has been gestating since my young childhood. I’d seen a screenshot for a game called “Full Throttle” which had this badass biker crossing a desert. I knew nothing about this rider or the story, but the image burned itself on my mind and I’ve been trying to get it out ever since. Just Jazz came from an idea about seeing and changing the future and my frustration with the only medium people use for that being weaving. I see the future as this ordered set of outcomes interconnected with other outcomes. This thought reminds me of music and how every note and chord affects the following notes and chords, and changing one will force others to change. So I made that into a story.

What’s the most interesting reading you’ve ever had?

Martel: I’d have to say my first ever reading at the Twilight Tales Open Mic at Love Is Murder 2005. I was so nervous that I was shaking which caused the paper to make a lot of crinkling noises. But after it was over, one author told me that he liked my story. If that hadn’t happened, I might have given up on this writing business then.
Josh: A drumming circle open mic night at Twilight Tales. I was reading an emotionally heavy piece…and the drums got me more into it…and I think that helped the drummer to get even more into it…and round and round and it felt like the most intense reading I’d ever given.
Nathaniel: This is actually my second reading ever (the first also being here at Twilight Tales with Tina Jens’s Fantasy Class through Columbia)

What inspires you to write, or what makes you want to tell a particular story?

Martel: I tend to write about things that upset me or things that scare me.
Josh: There is a ghost tree that grows in my head. On each of those thousand-thousand ghost branches are a thousand-thousand ghost ravens and each raven has a story to tell. When it is ready, a raven pecks at my eyes from the inside. I’ve learned the hard way that it’s best to obey the ravens.
Nathaniel: I’d heard about this condition called graphomania, and I think I have it. The Rider definitely comes from that incessant urge. I’ve been trying to tell his story since Middle School , and only in the past year or so has it really seemed possible.

What insights would you like to share with other authors about the writing process, getting published, or overcoming an obstacle in the story?

Martel: J.A. Konrath once told me that there was a word for writers who never gave up…published. I think that’s the most important thing for writers to remember. Never give up.
Josh: (1) Do not kill the things you love because of other people’s pretensions. Do not throw away your comic books, Godzilla movies, and Halloween decorations because someone says they’re tacky. The things we love fuel our stories and if you really love them, your stories will be deep enough. (2) Do not develop any pretensions. Only spend your energy on enthusiasms. The difference between a pretension and an enthusiasm is the difference between a man showing off his luxury car to his peers as a symbol of affluence…and a boy tearing the hell out of his new bike on a dirt hill, alone and in ecstatic joy. Never use a big word because you worry about what someone thinks. Use a big word because it’s fun and you want to play with it—play the hell out of it—work it to the nub. (3) And do not fall into the hysteria of anti-pretension either. Never throw away a big word because someone tells you you’re pretentious. Remind them that you have no pretensions, only enthusiasms. Make sure you are telling the truth when you say this. Or don’t. You are a writer, and thus a con-man of a sort, after all.
Nathaniel: Oh god, umm… You know? I have no idea. I keep asking those questions and all the answers I get seem too simple to be possible. So to help confound matters further I’ll tell you to: Just write. Get it out in any way possible. And above all be prepared to suck (at first).

Is there anything you’d like to tell us about yourself , or your writing that will help us understand who you are as a writer?

Martel: Just remember that I’m crazy and it will all make sense…LOL!
Josh: When I was a boy, I had a water bed. Water beds tend not to have a space underneath. No space, no monsters under the bed. My writing teacher and mentor in college is still convinced that I’m making up for lost time.
Nathaniel: I am terribly inconsistent. I’ll have weekends where I’ll get thousands and thousands of words out (many of them crap) and then there will be long stretches of time where writing becomes me saying to my friend, “hey I’ve got this great idea” and then not touching it for a long time. It’s very much a little-kid-in-a-house-of-mirrors syndrome. Everything is “ooooh shiny!” and I get distracted easily.

Finally, is there anything else you’d like to share?

Martel: Yes. I’d just like to say thank you to everyone who has tried to help me become a better writer over the years. I’d name names but I think that would encompass the entire Twilight Tales audience. So thank you everyone!
Josh: My first novel, Strangeness in the Proportion will be out sometime in the near future, by White Wolf Publishing. If you’d like to know anything else about me, you can check out my blog at www.myspace.com/nevermore_66.
Nathaniel: My brain can’t wrap itself around such an open ended question… I can’t think of anything.

We hope you’ll join us on Monday June 30th at The Fixx Coffee Bar (3053 N. Sheffield) to hear Martel’s, Josh’s, and Nathaniel’s fiction and perhaps more discussion!

I’m Eric M. Cherry, the emcee for the Twilight Tales reading series and host of Shop Talk.� Shop Talk began in October 2006, it runs on the third Monday each month, and focuses on some aspect of the craft and business of writing.� Last Monday, we talked about setting design with Jude Walter Mire.� Jude is a fine writer of science fiction and fantasy, published most recently in Book of Dead Things.

Jude’s first observation is that most authors have a blind spot in their creative vision.� Consider the antagonist: we’ll dream up nightmarish histories for our evil stalkers, supply our masterminds with cunning ploys and toys, and equip the fantastic aliens or wizards with spectacular powers.� To build a monster, we’ll rack our brains for a new twist.� Yet when these titanic forces clash with our protagonists, where do our battles take place?� In the same forest, on the same plain, and among the same hills as every other writer has drawn upon.� Chases between unique enemies will pass through the same old urban alleys, along the same old highways and byways, and into the same old homes, offices, malls, etc.

It’s time to open our eyes and look around our created worlds.

But our long-shut eyes hurt in the light.� Jude has some cool shades we can wear until our creative eyes adjust.� In order to build better settings, try this tool.� He calls it…

Elements of Reality

“When writing a scene, first decide the general location: a room in a hotel, a hillside, a car in a parking garage, a forest,” Jude says.� “Once you have a ‘normal’ location in mind, run it through the following filters and see how you can toy with it to become something interesting.� As you do so, keep two things in mind:

1. Your overall setting: how would this change work in relation to that?� Does it enhance or detract?� Is it consistent and viable?
2. The characters in the scene: how does this reflect on them?� Would it change their behavior?� Does the scene alter the action due to their responses to it?

Color: Simply shifting the colors of something makes it more interesting or appealing.� Why the heck is that bridge purple?� Yellow pool water is never a good sign.� Red lights on nighttime snow create an icy hell.

Scale: Make things bigger and smaller in your mind.� In a forest, shrink the trees to saplings.� Make your rowboat huge and too wide to maneuver.� Give your cop a coffee in a 96-ounce cup from the world’s tiniest convenience store, where he must walk sideways down the aisle.

Material: Go through all the options of what the things in the setting could be made of.� Pull up in a bamboo car from Gilligan’s Island.� Make the mayor’s house out of brick in a town of log cabins.� Dress your sci-fi crowds in styro-foam hats.

Orientation: Tip things upside down and flip them on their sides.� Put your homeless people in a fallen-over building that hasn’t been wrecked yet.� Have spies meet in a container yard so full that containers are stacked upright like Stonehenge.� Watch the Poseidon Adventure and see Gene Hackman have fun with an upside-down cruise ship!

Incongruity: Put something that doesn’t seem to belong into the scene as a focal point.� Everyone’s seen the picture of a single red umbrella adrift in a sea� of black umbrellas.� Pull something out and make it pop.� Give your inner city kid in the grungy apartment a state-of-the-art chrome refrigerator.� Plant some flowers on the roof of the smoke-belching factory.� Keep a grim warlike statue in the town square while the festival goes on around it.

Blending: I also call this Frankenstein Genetics Technique.� Basically, you take an item that has nothing to do with your setting and ’squish’ it into the scene.� Don’t add it; mix it.� Example: You’re writing a science fiction story and want a captivating city set.� So you’ve got a city.� Make a list of city items, then pick a few.� Let’s say you start with buildings.� Now you take ‘building’ and squish it with several random things to see what they do to the architecture.� Building + Car Engine = Factory-looking, industrial city.� Building + Wine Bottle = Seamless, fluted-looking wind chime city.� Building + Umbrella = Opening and closing solar city.

Once you’ve brainstormed an interesting take on your setting, go through the details to make sure it doesn’t contradict your overall setting.� If you’ve devised something different or odd-seeming, you own an explanation to your reader.”

The Shop Talk Round Table

We spent an hour or more going over some twists on these ideas, seeing how these cool shades worked out.� We saw that the reality of the scene isn’t the only facet available for sprucing up.� A character’s perceptions of the scenery could be all that’s abnormal: tinted glasses provide new colors to see; short, tall, fat, and thin characters pass through the same room with a different experience of its scale; craftspeople perceive the materials of the world with different focal points; a person in a tree sees a different yard than the person on the ground; etc.

Also, the story’s forward motion can be slowed or stopped, depending on the quantity of description used.� For pacing control, establishing mood or suspense, nothing works half so well as description: add some, slow things down.� Too slow?� Cut the description.

What Else?

There was more — too much to cover here.� Jude wrote an article for us (excerpted above) that addressed logistics, sense data, and more.� And gathering in the wisdom of the authors at the table is far beyond my scope tonight.� But come out to the show sometime� to check us out, hang out after to chat, and we’ll get into it again.

� � - emc

I’m Eric Cherry, the emcee for Twilight Tales.� If you have attended the show when I’ve been there, you’ve probably witnessed a discussion of writing technique.� It’s something of a habit: I study the craft by dissecting fiction, interrogating authors, and experimenting with tools.� This week, Brendan Detzner read a good section from his continuing piece, “Sleepwalking.”� Afterward, we had a chance to chat (read: I interrogated him), and he passed on some observations about magic.

Magic exists in fantasy stories of all sorts, from Conan-style sword-and-sorcery tales to surreal, urban prose poems.� Characters encounter magical forces, and some characters wield magic themselves.� A character with the power to wield magic can perform impossible feats of wildly varying descriptions, and a story that contains magical elements can cover some incredible ground.� Writing a story that contains magic can be its own kind of challenge.

Brendan’s first observation was about the kinds of magic: a good world wherein evil magic intrudes; a neutral world with neutral magic as a kind of natural force; and a wicked world occasionally saved by good magic.� As a general description in broad strokes, this strikes me as perfectly reasonable.

Knowing which kind of world I’m writing about can help me to avoid certain problems.� In the novel that I’m outlining just now, I’ve been treating my world as neutral with magic as a neutral, natural force.� However, that’s a default state for me, and it’s entirely wrong for the novel: my story demands a good world invaded by evil magic, and invaded on a semi-regular basis.� A few major events make this clear, and remembering this broad-strokes classification will help me to incorporate this fact into several lesser events for the sake of integrity and conflict.

The second observation has been in my thoughts since we talked, and it strikes me as immensely valuable.� Brendan has two rules for magic, which I’ll give in reverse order here.

One: Magic has a cost.� This wasn’t new to me, though it bears repeating.� If there are no consequences to using magic, then why not use it all the time for everything?� Special effects are pretty, sure, but it’s the costs paid by the characters that are interesting.

Two: When things get dull, introduce a man with a gun and make damn sure that the magic-wielding character can’t ignore the gun.� This might sound obvious, but how many times have I written exactly this sort of error into a scene?� How often have I seen this abomination on screen, or yawned at it in some other story?� Magic that nullifies a conflict without a cost also nullifies the dramatic interest.

A counter-example springs to mind: Spiderman.� He’s magical, for all that his powers stem from technobabble sources, and his magic lets him ignore all manner of guns, and generally without cost.� Now and then, comic book writers and movie makers show off the special effects and let Spiderman wow us, but the narrative purpose is generally to establish the rules.� They don’t do it for long, they keep it entertaining, and then they move on.� What do they move on to?� Costs and bigger guns: personal obligations in conflict with heroic duty, guilt and grief, and sadistic choices.� Explosions, magical villains, and one crisis too many to juggle.

My novel’s setting� imposes costs on the practitioners of magic: taint.� Exposure to magical forces afflicts people with taint, and taint has an array of unpleasant effects.� The stuff is evil, and people tamper with it at their peril.� So I’m good there, but it’s good to check the basics now and again.

At a few points in the story, assorted non-magical folk use mundane force against magical beings.� Do these magic-wielding beings worry about the guns?� Sometimes yes, sometimes no.� When they can ignore the guns because of their magic, the magic has a cost.� For now, I think that my on-again, off-again magic obeys consistent rules, but I’ll revisit that as I go along.� The important thing is that I have acceptable magic:guns power ratios.

� � - emc

You can catch Brendan’s writing in The Book of Dead Things, published by Twilight Tales, and you can find him most Mondays at the show.

Here’s a great guide on how to prepare successful e-mail queries. (With lots of information on e-mail submissions, too.)

• Did you know that text should not simply be cut-and-pasted from most standard word processing programs?
• Did you know that single-screen queries are preferable? No scrolling please?

Filled with insider information even a seasoned veteran might not know. Go read “Preparing E-mail Queries” by Moira Allen of Writing-World.com.

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Here’s a thought for our writers:

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

From http://www.quotationspage.com/

Writer’s Digest has announced a poetry award contest. Prizes offered are the following:

• First Place: $500
• Second Place: $250
• Third Place: $100
• Fourth Through Tenth Place: $25
• Eleventh Through Twenty-Fifth Place: $50 gift certificate to Writer’s Digest Books

For more information, see:
http://fwpubs.sparklist.com/t/2002940/5506773/947/0/

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World Fantasy Convention, one of the five largest annual networking opportunities for the genre, is coming up in November. Check Nikki Pill’s article for advice on what to expect and how to network effectively.

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By Martel Sardina

A recent appearance by Neil Gaiman challenged one writer’s view of escapism.

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By Brad Warren

The World Horror Convention comes but once a year to some lucky (or cursed, depending on how you look at it) city and the ghouls flock from the ends of the earth to attend. Brad Warren gives us the Down Under perspective of being a stranger in an even stranger (but wonderful) land.

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