Steven James Scearce

I was recently asked to write a guest blog article for the Inkpunks. The following are the opening paragraphs to the article; at the bottom is the permanent link for the whole article at the Inkpunks website.

On March 1st of 2011, I began writing a novel-length supernatural horror story called Cottonwood. I’d spent two months in planning and preparation. I’d drafted a seven-thousand-word treatment in three-act structure and revised it until I thought it was water-tight. I created a chapter-by-chapter outline and a stack of 5×8 note card “call sheets” for each day’s writing. I made a map of the town where the story takes place. I wrote character profiles.

Going into the actual writing – a plan that netted me 192,000 words in 255 days – I felt confident. I had, for Christ’s sake, thought of everything.

I hadn’t.

At 9:30PM on October 17th, I watched in terror as the cursor stood blinking next to the last word and the final bit of punctuation. The room was dead silent. I’d been stabbing at the keyboard for 36 weeks straight. It was done. I wanted to celebrate but couldn’t.

I called fellow horror writer Jacob Ruby for advice. “I finished Cottonwood,” I said. “What the hell do I do next?”

At the time, Jacob was still working on his first novel. “Take a break,” he said.

It was too easy. “What?” My head felt like it was full of hot roofing nails. “But the story is fresh in my mind. I have all this momentum built up and…”

“Take a fucking break,” he said. “You’ve done enough. Jesus, you worked for eight days while in Hawaii for your brother’s wedding. Step away from the story. Read a fantasy novel. Go see a bad movie. Write some short stories. Anything else.”

I hung up… [more]

Read my whole guest blog “I’ve finished writing my first novel. What the hell do I do next?” at Inkpunks.  

About Inkpunks:
The Inkpunks are a collective of authors, editors, free-thinkers and creative professionals, whose members include John Remy, Galen Dara, Andrew Penn Romine, Christie Yant, Erika Holt, Adam Israel, Morgan Dempsey, Sandra Wickham, Wendy Wagner and Jaym Gates.

I was recently asked to write a guest blog article for Dagan Books (publishers of Cthulhurotica and In Situ). The following are the opening paragraphs to the article; at the bottom is the permanent link for the whole article at the Dagan Books website.

I’m fascinated by the weird things that writers do to get their head in the game. Writing is a solitary and sometimes tedious effort. Some writers require distractions to pass the time at the keyboard. Others need quiet. I personally know three writers that usually have a TV in their office playing a movie or a DVD while they work.

I can’t do that. I need something to help pass the time, but it has to help me immerse myself in what I’m trying to envision and flesh out – rather than provide background noise and occasional distraction. For me, the ideal writer’s retreat is a well-lit room and an iPod full of ambient sound. Yes, writers are creatures of strange habits – second only to professional baseball players. I know that I’m probably preaching to the choir here, so I’ll spare you the eccentricities made famous by Hugo, Nabokov, Dumas, Kerouac, Faulkner, Wolfe, and Twain. I have my own odd habits. I alternate sitting and standing (I had additions built for my writing desk to accommodate the quick-change). I find that I can’t write with someone else in the room (or the house, for that matter). I only drink green tea while working.

But I also do this weird thing whenever I’m working on a piece of writing, where I create a custom iTunes playlist that is tailored to the period and the assumed music interests of the main characters in the story. This is something that I’ve been doing for the last year or so, and I find it enormously helpful when it comes to getting into the right frame of mind, seeing the world through my character’s eyes, and putting myself in front of the computer for a 3-4 hour stretch… [more]

Read my whole guest blog “Music and a Well-lit Room” at Dagan Books. 

About Dagan Books:
Dagan Books is an independent publisher of the weird and wicked, the beautiful and brilliant. They publish both academic non-fiction and fiction works (specializing in speculative fiction).