The book that scared the crud outta me

Once upon an autumn, I was a lone weirdo in a gothic Texas family. Like, I read a lot of Stephen King and J.R.R. Tolkien, and everybody else in my family went bow-hunting and two-stepping and listened to Merle Haggard. My parents clearly didn't know how to shop for me, and my newspaper route paid crap money, so I supplied my book habit at yard sales and the public library five-bucks-for-everything-you-can-fit-into-a-paper-sack sale.

I wasn't old enough to stay at home on the long weekends when the family all went deer hunting, so I got hauled along to leases out west of San Antonio, usually some rocky windswept ranch, usually to murder wildlife, which was very much not my thing.

On one such trip, I brought along one of those library-sale paper sacks full of treasures books.

One of those books was called The Amityville Horror.

The rest of the camp went out on a hunt right before twilight, because deer come out to forage at sundown, and that's apparently the best time to kill them. If someone "got" a deer--i.e., shot one-- they had to wait until the hunt was over to go out and find the unlucky creature and, if it wasn't dead yet, put it out of its misery. Sometimes the search-and-finish could last for hours, long after dark.

I almost always stayed behind in the camper. And read books. It was glorious.

Except that one time. With that one book. 

I didn't know it then, but the evening hunt was pretty successful. Several deer were "got," and several searches ensued. I was alone in the camp with only the wind for company for miles and miles of dark Texas night. Just me and my delicious readable.

I considered myself fairly brave as far as books went. At least, I hadn't read one that stopped me from reading others. King and Koontz and Poe and Susan Cooper, not to mention all those collections of ghost ship stories and unsolved mysteries, had inured me to losing my shit over a book. I mean, they were just books. Just in my mind. All made up, fantasy stuff. 

Right?

So I snuggled down in a sleeping bag, cracked open The Amityville Horror, and read blithely, bravely, decadently.

For those who haven't read the book or seen the movie (movies?) this starts off innocently enough. Normalish family moves into a house. It's a nice house, kind of fancy even, with a boat house. But (SPOILERS!) it's haunted as hell, and freaky stuff starts happening, and the dad goes a little crazy, and suddenly there's a demon pig in a rocking chair up in the attic. 

Which was when something scratched on the side of the camper. 

I kid you not. Something was out there. Scratching. Low, near the ground. Right below my camper window. A sound that was not the wind. It was close.

Scratch, scratch.

Remember, every human person was out in the night wilderness killing Bambi.

So what was scratching out there?

I sure as hell wasn't going to go outside and investigate. And I could not, could not just keep reading.

Demon. Pig.

That was totally a demon pig outside.

I closed that book, shoved it way, way down the sleeping bag, and huddled there in the camper, listening. Terrified. For hours.

Family got back eventually, skinned their kills, and iced down the meat, and then we all went to bed. Next morning, after I slept not at all, I woke up and checked out the side of the camper.

There were scratches on the side. True fact.

Never did finish that book.

(Happy Halloween, y'all.)

The Scariest Books I Ever Read...

The scariest books I ever read were...

The Girlfriends' Guide to Pregnancy

Your doctor gives you medical advice. Your mother buys you baby clothes. But who can give you the real skinny when you’re pregnant?

Your girlfriends, of course—at least, the ones who’ve been through the exhilaration and exhaustion, the agony and ecstasy of pregnancy. Four-time delivery room veteran Vicki Iovine talks to you the way only a best friend can—in the book that will go the whole nine months for every mother-to-be. In this revised and updated edition, get the lowdown on all those little things that are too strange or embarrassing to ask, practical tips, and hilarious takes on everything pregnant.

What really happens to your body—from morning sickness and gas to eating everything in sight—and what it’s like to go from being a babe to having one.

The Many Moods of Pregnancy—why you’re so irritable/distracted/tired/lightheaded (or at least more than usual).

Staying Stylish—You may be pregnant, but you can still be the fashionista you’ve always been (or at least you don’t have to look like a walking beachball)—wearing the hippest designers and proudly showing off your bump.

Pregnancy is Down To a Science—from in vitro fertilization to scheduled c-sections, there are so many options, alternatives, and scientific tests to take that being pregnant can be downright confusing!

And much more! For a reassuring voice or just a few good belly laughs, turn to this straight-talking guide on what to really expect when you’re expecting.

What To Expect When You're Expecting

This cover-to-cover (including the cover!) new edition is filled with must-have information, advice, insight, and tips for a new generation of moms and dads. With "What to Expect’s trademark warmth, empathy, and humor, it answers every conceivable question expecting parents could have, including dozens of new ones based on the ever-changing pregnancy and birthing practices and choices they face. Advice for dads is fully integrated throughout the book. All medical coverage is completely updated, including the latest on Zika virus, prenatal screening, and the safety of medications during pregnancy, as well as a brand-new section on postpartum birth control. Current lifestyle trends are incorporated, too: juice bars, raw diets, e-cigarettes, push presents, baby bump posting, the lowdown on omega-3 fatty acids, grass-fed and organic, health food fads, and GMOs. Plus expanded coverage of IVF pregnancy, multiple pregnancies, breastfeeding while pregnant, water and home births, and cesarean trends (including VBACs and “gentle cesareans”).





Dear readers, when my sister announced she was expecting her first child, being the supportive sort of gal I am, I co-read these books with her. I...I...

~runs shrieking off into the sunset~

Nope. Nope. Nope.

Two books for shivers.

Okay. I read a LOT of horror. let me clarify that for you. A. LOT. OF. HORROR. BOOKS.

Guys, seriously, I've been writing the stuff professionally for over twenty-five years. it's my comfort zone.

The thing is, I don't scare easy. Hell, I don't even squirm easy. I'm not made uncomfortable by much not even what most people consider "taboo" because, frankly, I've read it all.  That's not really an exaggeration.From Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker to Stephen King and Anne Rice and Robert R. McCammon. there's remarkably little that gets past me without being read, assessed and catalogued in my mind.
And only a handful of the books have ever actually unsettled me.

First up, I give you Stephen King's PET SEMETARY. The misspelling is deliberate and the story has a powerful, deeply unsettling note to it. A great deal of King's work is creepy, but that's the one that unsettled me the most.  Not surprising, really, as King himself shelved the book for several years before deciding to go ahead and publish. Why? He thought it was too grim. He's not wrong.

The premise is simple enough: new doctor in a college town discovers a dark miracle of sorts n his backyard (well, a few acres into the treacherous woods behind his yard, but still). That dark miracle takes place past an animal cemetery set up by the local kids and added to over the decades. As the catch phrase for the movie says, and as the book proves true: Sometimes Dead Is Better.

The second book I look at for this is BALTIMORE: Or The Steadfast Tin Solider And The Vampire, by Christopher Golden and Mike Mignola. The two gents in question had a wonderful ay of working together and their first serious collaboration, the aforementioned Baltimore is a brilliant tale of revenge set against a backdrop of World War One Europe. There are many moving parts here, including takes within tales and the rich fabric of the story is worth savoring.

There you have it. Two of the very finest works of horror I can recall. Let me reemphasize this. HORROR. As in scary stuff. Grim stuff. Don't expect happy endings.

Have a happy Halloween!

Two Books that Freaked Me the F*ck Out

Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is, appropriately enough, our favorite horror or scary book.

Now, I don't really a lot of horror or scary books, because I am a fragile flower. I've never really gotten the point of reading something to be frightened or horrified. So, when I thought about what my favorite books in this genre would be, I could think of exactly two. 

But it's cool because they're by friends - which is the only reason I read them.

I really loved them, too, even though they freaked me the fuck out. 

A HUMAN STAIN, by Kelly Robson - who most usually writes SFF, is a wonderful story that starts with low-level dread that gradually builds to a truly freakifying conclusion. Read it if you love gothic slow-burns. Avoid if you have a tooth phobia. You can read it in BEST HORROR OF THE YEAR, Volume 10, which I'm sure is fabulous, since Ellen Datlow edited it. I, of course, *won't* be reading that!

Megan Hart started out writing erotic and nuanced romance, but has moved into more horror lately. LITTLE SECRETS is a haunted house story that also plays on the insecurities of pregnancy and the strain that - and moving into a freaky house! - puts on a marriage. Read it for the subtle build of terror and rich story. And don't worry - the cat's okay. 

A Very Different Ghost Story for Halloween!

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Happy Halloween in just a few days! Next week we’re going to talk about favorite spooky or scary books written by others but I thought it’d be fun to lead into the week talking about a very unusual, award winning ghost story I wrote a few years ago.

(I’m ignoring our actual topic of this week, which is Point of View because I’ve written about it here before on SFF7, I’m not a fan of anything written in first person, Halloween is coming and there – I’m done with the subject.)

Ghost of the Nile is one of my “Gods of Egypt” paranormal series set in ancient Egypt. For quite a while I’d been fascinated with the idea of writing a story set on an estate in the 1550 BCE era. One of the interesting things about Egypt was that for literally hundreds of years the climate and the daily life stayed pretty much the same. Pharaohs came and went but the more ordinary folk had quite an unchanging routine, linked to the Nile’s floods. I felt my ghostly hero could return from the Afterlife and fit right into his old home, although as a guest, not a resident. I thought the challenges for him could be intriguing.

The Egyptians of 3000 years ago believed that unless you were buried in the soil of Egypt and had all the proper rituals recited for you, as well as your name preserved, you couldn’t enter the Afterlife. So my hero Periseneb, who was murdered and didn’t receive the rites at the time of his death, has been condemned to roam the fringes of the Afterlife and wage endless battles against demons and giant snakes.

I’m always fascinated with the goddess Ma’at, who represented truth, balance, justice…and who happened to be the goddess of second chances. I’m a Libra myself – scales, balance…. She was one of the Judges who weighed the heart of a dead person, to see if they deserved the Afterlife. So I decided she’d need a champion to accomplish some task in Egypt, and selects Periseneb, who she believes deserves a second chance at entry to paradise. A favorite old movie of mine is the 1963 version of “Jason and the Argonauts”. I love how the goddess Hera tells Jason she’ll help him three times along the way. I decided Ma’at would help Periseneb, and you’ll see in the book how he has to call for her assistance.

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The next intriguing concept this novel allowed me to play with was the ancient Egyptian idea of the terrifying nature of ghosts, or akhs. They believed that a person's soul was split into various parts, anywhere from three to five. Each part of the soul had different powers and concerns. For my novel I simplified the situation and concentrated on the 'intellect as a living entity' portion of the soul and selected those aspects which worked for the story.

According to Wikipedia, the akh  “could do either harm or good to persons still living, depending on the circumstances, causing e.g., nightmares, feelings of guilt, sickness, etc. It could be invoked by prayers or written letters left in the tomb's offering chapel also in order to help living family members, e.g., by intervening in disputes, by making an appeal to other dead persons or deities with any authority to influence things on earth for the better, but also to inflict punishments.”

The hero of my book, Periseneb, is uncomfortable with being an akh returned to Egypt, and worries a lot about inadvertently loosing the evil powers he now possesses on the innocents around him.

And last but not least, there’s the terrifying goddess or demon Ammit the Destroyer, who was part lion, part hippo and part crocodile, and known as Devourer of the Dead. I’ve wanted to find a way to incorporate her into a novel in a meaningful way because she’s so intriguing.

The story:

Betrayed, murdered, and buried without proper ceremony, Egyptian warrior Periseneb is doomed to roam the gray deserts of the dead as a ghost for all eternity.

But then the goddess of truth offers him a bargain: return to the world of the living as her champion for 30 days. If he completes his mission, he’ll be guaranteed entry into Paradise. Periseneb agrees to the bargain but, when he returns to the living world, two hundred years have passed and nothing is quite as he expected.

Neithamun is a woman fighting to hang onto her family’s estate against an unscrupulous nobleman who desires the land as well as the lady. All seems lost until a mysterious yet appealing ex-soldier, Periseneb, appears out of nowhere to help her fight off the noble’s repeated attacks.

Meanwhile, Periseneb’s thirty days are rushing by, and he’s powerless against the growing attraction between himself and Neithamun. But their love can never be. For his Fate is to return to the Afterlife, and Death cannot wed with Life…

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POV Invitation

The beasts have breached the sanctity of the bed! It's adorable, but it's also slightly short on sleep. Still. They have a hard time working out that bed means sleep. This picture to the contrary notwithstanding. They seem to only want to sleep in the bed when the humans aren't in it. If the humans are in the bed, then it's a playground. Oh. And the elder girls are horrified by this development.

All righty. Why were we here? Oh yes! POV. You've had definitions. You've seen arguments regarding which POV goes with which genre. Some of us have expressed our preferences regarding which POVs we prefer either to read or to write.

Here's my slightly out on the fringe rant about Point of View.

It's an invitation. Point of view is my engraved invitation to you to enter into an emotional journey. How I word that invitation dictates how you'll experience the emotional arc of the story and the characters. First person asks you to step into the roll of main character. Third person puts you at a slight remove from that, but it allows you to slip on the masks of multiple characters rather than just the protagonist's. It's my job to decide how deeply I want to immerse you into the feelz of a book. If I'm writing Women's Fiction, deep emotion is the expectation and first person is going to make it easy for me to pull you in. Not to say that Women's Fiction can't be third person. It  can and often is. It's just that deep POV in third person is harder work.

Summary on that: POV is a tool that dictates how readers will experience emotion in a story. Know your story, your genre expectations, the limits of your toolset and then go forth and break all the damn rules about POV and story just to see if you can make it work.

Why do I say that? I have distinct opinions about what POVs I prefer. Distinct. Opinions. And every single time I voice them, someone comes along and writes a POV I profess to hate. They do it so skillfully that I end up loving it. So maybe I am finally learning to say, 'hey, with enough vision, skill and drive, you can make anything work.'

Another note on POV - I draft in first person and then (if the story calls for it) rewrite to third person. It's a tip an editor gave me back at the dawn of time. It was one of those things I shrugged figured I'd try once and discard, but it stuck. It forces me to really immerse into a character and connect with what's going on in a story. Does it make rewrites a pain in the kazoo? Absolutely. And yet if I try to skip it and write straight to third person, my beta readers throw things at me because half of the emotion is missing. So there you are. I write weird, I guess.

I'm sorry I don't have great golden wisdom to impart about point of view and how to pick which one is best. Emotion governs the decision for me - not mine. The reader's. Once I know what and how much I want readers to feel, I can make a POV choice. And like Jeffe said. No one wants to notice POV. They just want that invitation slipped into their hands so they can edge into the story and lose themselves  in it.

In keeping with the incredible shit storm that has been today, I'll tell you that I wrote this post yesterday and scheduled it for super early this morning. No problems right? Imagine my surprise when I check in on the blog tonight and my post is nowhere. Uhm. Blogger? Oh look. My SFF Seven THEMED post went live on some other random blog site. Nice. I'm comfortable certain those people think I am out of my damned mind. They may well be right. 

Point of View and Trust

Point-of-View is one of those funny things writers get very worked up about.  And I’ve noticed, reading through some older books I have, making concrete POV choices is a relatively recent development.  I mean, yes, certainly, the distinction between first-person and third-person (and the rare second-person) was always clear.  But third-person was often more of a muddled third-person-omniscient instead of the discrete multi-person third-person-limited, where individual scenes have a clear POV character.  Even the idea of a “POV Violation” as a writing mistake seems to be a relatively new thing.

Because, let me tell you, a lot of classics are just loaded with POV Violations.

However, the standard today, when writing third-person multiple-POV is for clear, discrete definition of whose head your in for any given scene or chapter. George R. R. Martin’s Song of Fire and Ice books do this explicitly, telling you who the POV character is instead of a chapter title.  I hear a lot of “rules” of how to do a POV character, who can be one in your book and when you can let them be one.  I’m of the opinion that who can be one and when is whoever you need it to be for the scene, whenever you need that scene to be.   Frankly, one of my favorite bits in The Holver Alley Crew is when Mila steals the dress from the rich woman, because it's from the woman's POV.  She's just a one-off character, that scene alone, and some people will tell you it's against the "rules", but I say BAH.

My big thing with POV is trust.  Unless the Unreliable Narrator is a technique you’re utilizing, then you have to present your POV character in an honest way.  You have to have trust in that character and their engagement in the plot.

Now, that doesn’t mean the POV is limited to the “good guys”.  I love my antagonist POVs, as long as they are antagonists that I can trust are being honest with how they engage in the plot.  If I have a character who is against the hero privately, but acts as his friend, and I don’t want the reader to know that… then that character can’t be a POV character.  But if I want that betrayal clear, then that’s exactly who I want as POV.

This was especially hard for me in A Murder of Mages, which is probably my most constrained work, POV-wise, in that I only have Satrine and Minox as POV characters.   This is because, at its core, it’s a murder mystery, and if you go into the head of murderer, then the mystery is given up.  By limiting the POV to my two Inspectors, then the reader has the same set of data that they do.
In The Way of the Shield, it’s more complicated than that, but similar rules of not using a character for POV apply.  There are people whose motivation and trustworthiness I want the reader to keep in question, even in a subconscious way.  Ideally, when their truths come to light, it will hit the reader like a hammer, because they might not have even suspected it.  That's where a lot of the fun is.

Right now, I'm working on The Fenmere Job, and I've imposed one rule regarding POV on myself for it, because I think it's the best choice for the story.  But I might decide over the course of things to break that.  If that's what's best.   We'll see. 

The perils of point of view

When I was chiefly a reader and not interested in selling my scribbles, I’d buy a book because it looked fun or was recommended to me, and other than broad categories like romance or fantasy or whatever a book store considered “general fiction,” I didn’t pay attention to its market. I also didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to whether a book was written in first-person, second-person, or third-person point of view. (Aside: If you have no idea what I’m talking about when I reference “point of view” in terms of writing craft, Jeffe Kennedy did a fab run-down earlier this week.) Now that I am trying to sell my stories to other folks, I pay a lot more attention to point of view, and I’ve discovered a few patterns. Here are some quick answers to "which point of view do I use for my story?" quandaries.

Lots of characters with thoughts? You want to use third person.

In books where readers get the interior thoughts of more than two characters, writers tend to use the third-person point of view. Think of, for instance George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy series: so, so many characters, and a large number of them are point-of-view characters (i.e., we experience the story through their “eyes” and thoughts). If that epic were in first person, I would be perpetually confused.

Note that I’m careful here to recommend third-person specifically for stories that feature the interior thoughts of more than two characters. I did not say fantasy as a whole. Some fantasy writers manage to tell stories using first-person and make it not at all confusing. However, the successful fantasies that do this typically focus narrowly on one character, sometimes two. Amanda Bouchet’s recent Kingmaker series, for instance, is written in first person, but since we are only given and are only interested in the main character Cat’s point of view, the first-person POV works well.

Main character in the young-adult(ish) range? First person.

YA novels, regardless of their genre, tend to be written in first person. If you read a few, you can see why this POV choice aids the purpose of a YA book. Because a good YA book is about one character’s attempt to grapple with relevance in a world that keeps telling them “you don’t matter yet,” the narrative must of course be all in that character’s head. It must of course be suffused with all the agony and frustration and hope and striving that is typical of not-quite-adult-ness. First-person point of view allows angst-wallowing in a way that no other POV choice can.

Hint: the POV recommendation is applicable to character age and also reader age. If your target audience --  your market – is young adult, first-person POV is a good choice.

Similarly, if your characters are recent teens and now just barely adults – a niche that was until recently called “new adult” – I’d stick with first-person POV. First-person books featuring 22-year-olds in their first post-college job yet still making iffy decisions tend to sell a lot better than third-person omniscient books covering similar topics. Somehow, if the character does a boneheaded thing blithely , optimistically, and with no thought of possible consequences, it feels like a grand adventure rather than a poor life choice. Plus, if such an episode were written in third person, there’s always a danger it might sound judgy.

Are sensory details super important to the story? First person.

I’m going to disagree with my awesome co-SFFSevener, K.A. Krantz, and say that if you’re writing erotica or erotic romance, first-person POV is the way to go. Most erotic stories are written in the first person, so it’s a reader expectation. Also, in erotica, if you’re doing it right, the sensory details are front and center. In a story that is about the character completing his or her arc by having sexual adventures, nothing matters more than how that character feels. I mean both internal thought feeling and also satin-sheets, chocolate-sauce, feather-tipped leather feeling. Do I need to go on?

Often paranormal and urban fantasy stories are written in first person, and again, I think that sensory (or in this case, extrasensory) details are central to those sorts of stories.

Trying to sound literary or experimenting with an unreliable narrator? Either first or second might be fun.

Most of the time, second-person POV is only useful for experimental literary fiction or choose-your-own-adventure stories. Note that the latter are not exclusively for kids. A site called Silkwords used to publish choose-your-own-adventure erotica and erotic romance stories, and they were definitely not for kids.

Do I have to pick just one?

Er… technically no? One of my favorite young adult books, The Farm by Emily McKay, uses first person for the main character and her sister and third person for Carter, whose loyalty and good intentions we are supposed to doubt at the beginning. Although using both point-of-view choices works brilliantly for this story, I’m not sure it’s a good idea for a writer with less experience and storytelling command to try. So, although no, technically you don’t have to pick just one POV, please do realize that picking two complicates your work. A lot.

What about you, Viv?

Oh right. My opinion. Seriously, this is necessary? The truth is, I’m an easy read and have favorites using all kinds of narrative choices. However, though I won’t throw a book against a wall just because it’s, say, in first-person present, most of my DNFs (books I did not finish reading) tend to be told in first-person from the point of view of a character I can’t root for. Sometimes that character is too whiny, too certain he’s funny when he’s not really, too oblivious, or too self-absorbed. Sometimes I just can’t bear to be in the head of that person for 300 pages.

Bottom line, though, think about this before you start writing, make a deliberate choice taking all market and reader and genre expectation variables into consideration, and then tell me your story. If you tell it well enough, I won’t even stop to worry about your POV choice.