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).

I’ve been playing around with an idea for a novel-length manuscript for some time.  I hatched the idea on a road trip through Nebraska and Northeastern Kansas last October. It’s a story about two brothers who come to a small Kansas town late in the summer of 1975. The younger brother is running from something – a terrible experience that haunts him, pursues him. The older brother settles in among the townsfolk easily enough, but he accidentally digs up something from the past that sets off a horrific run of murders.

I’m barely brushing the surface here – the story gets real weird real quick.

I spent all of January and February working through the details of the story. I re-read all my Joseph Campbell, Syd Field, Robert McKee, Burroway, VanderMeer, Mort Castle, Orson Scott Card, and Rittenberg & Whitcomb. I delved into a little fiction inspiration from Stephen King, Edgar Allan Poe, Dan Simmons, Lovecraft, Jack McDevitt, and horror-newcomer Robert Jackson Bennett. I also received some sage advice from writers Christie Yant and Erika Holt.

I then went to work developing my characters and white-boarding all the story elements. I wrote a 6,000-word summary of all the action (chapt. by chapt.) and drew up my call sheets for each scene (an old film director’s trick).

Helping me out with the period details and the mood, I have maps, charts, diagrams, two dozen overdue library books, and an iTunes playlist chock-full of music from the period (Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, Creedence, KISS, Van Morrison, The Eagles, Aerosmith, and The Doobies).

As any writer will tell you, it then comes down to the real work.

One of my writer friends – a fine fellow named Jacob Ruby – was a bit amazed at the two-month prep run-up to the first day of actual writing.

Hey, every writer’s process is different, I told him. My process is highly-detailed and controlled. As I write, I know exactly where I am in the story – and I know where I’m going.

So, why all the trouble?

From all my reading and training in the screenwriting arena (something I’m now certain that I will never try to get in to), I know that every story must have a solid beginning, middle, and end (or Act 1, Act 2, Act 3). And along the way there are a certain number of elements that must be included to keep the reader actively engaged as your story unfolds.

I am not the type of writer who likes to jump right into a story and hope that I don’t crap out half-way through the Second Act. To me, that’s poor planning.

I am also not the type of writer who will bang out 1,500 pages of wandering copy, in hopes that I can salvage 300 pages of good stuff that may be publishable. To me, that’s wasted time.

So, yes – I spent two months working on my story concept (filling in all the little buckets), drawing up character descriptions, outlining, researching, and correcting everything I could find. As I don’t have a lot of personal time to waste, I know that it much easier to fix a 6,000 word story summary than it is to fix a 125,000-word completed manuscript. And I think it would be hard to argue against that logic.

So, my 125,000-word story should be completed in six months. I have a writing goal every day. I’ll spend two months with some lovely beta readers and then tackle the edits. If I come away with a piece of storytelling that’s engaging and great, I’ll take it to the World Fantasy Convention in October and show it around to a few people.

In the end, some of my fellow writers may think I’m nuts. They may be right. But the proof of any writing process is in the finished material. If you can write from chapter to chapter and not lose control of your story – and if you can complete your story as originally envisioned – your personal process probably works.

Cheers!

It was an unremarkable three-story building with rough-faced stone construction, a slate-tiled roof, and an unfinished carriageway that led to a covered stone porch at the front entrance. Where it stood on a remote seventeen-acre wooded tract at the north edge of Cook County, the Almshouse at Dunning Wood was an eternal testament to human frailty and mortality.

Erected in 1835, after the first major outbreak of cholera in Chicago, the hospital played host to patients with highly-infectious diseases, such as cholera, scarlet fever, and smallpox. Patient overcrowding, minimal heating, and poor ventilation hampered treatments and high death rates followed. A mass grave was dug on the north side of the building. When weather conditions did not permit immediate burial, bodies were wrapped in blankets or sheets and carried to the root cellar, where they were sprinkled with quicklime and abandoned.

In 1912, the old hospital was ordered closed. The doors were chained shut.

For more than a decade the old hospital at Dunning Wood sat dark and silent among the tall blades of switchgrass that whispered in the wind through the fields that surrounded the decrepit stone structure. The forlorn building had stood empty for more than a decade, abandoned but not entirely alone. Within its walls, the hallways echoed no sound of footsteps. The bare bulb ceiling fixtures gave off no light. The small Birchfield steam boiler that fed a network of heating pipes was seized with rust and cold. The casement windows and roof dormers were cracked and darkened by years of dust. But the Almshouse at Dunning Wood was not alone. It was never alone.

There were field mice, rats, crickets and cockroaches that scurried through the empty rooms and hid in its dark corners. Outside, crows congregated in the branches of the surrounding black walnut trees, filling the air with the sound of their caws, rattles, and clicks. And on a moonless November night in 1924, Liam Finnegan’s small band of bootleggers and racketeers cut the chains to the doors and entered the old hospital. Once again, the Almshouse at Dunning Wood served its purpose and hosted a terrible new malady.

[This is an unused preface to a short story that is up for consideration in a new anthology.]

Through mirage-like heat waves shimmering on the far-eastern desert horizon, they first appeared as wavering black specks against the reddish sunrise.

The herdsman was first to notice. He leaned out from inside the small mud hut near the pump well. Behind the hut, his flock of young camels took water for their journey to market. He stood and squinted against the coming light. A dust cloud momentarily obscured the black specs in the distance. He cocked his ear to one side and heard the distant rumbling of military vehicles. A great number of military vehicles.

So, once again, I’m back to the drawing board: Yellow pages from the legal pad scribbled over with copious notes. Collections of downloaded images saved to the project folder for inspiration. A stack of clean, white printer pages ready and waiting. Red pencils sharpened.

Ah… short stories for anthologies. So much to say within a limited word count. This one will be unique. I even sought some assistance from a Professor of Cultural Anthropology in Olympia, Washington. He had great notes:

… any sort of “magical” element tends to be denounced as heretical within the dominant orthodoxy, as these magical elements are dangerous to the state and to the official religious order.

- Eric Stein, Ph.D

This one will be fun to write. Should be a great story. I hope they like it.