On Spooky Stuff
Fantasycon wrap-up
So this year Fantasycon was in Chester and, as always, it was a fabulous convention. I was on a few panels, moderated a panel, saw so many friends and made new ones, and lost an award. To be specific, Spec Fic for Newbies (vol 1) was up for the Best Nonfiction award, and lost out to a worthy winner. This year, our writing guide made two award shortlists, the Locus Recommended Reading Lit, and nearly got on the Hugo shortlist. Pretty good way to end 2024! Let’s see how vol 2 does next year ;)
Why do in-person bookselling events?
This year, as someone who finally ramped up her life as a freelancer after years of a steady job (that’s a whole other story!), I signed up for several in-person events where I could sell my books and meet readers. I’m lucky enough to live in a town that has a close-knit group of writers, and we sign up for these things together, sharing tables and even carpooling. But some people wonder If you’re not self-published, why stand behind a table and sell your books, bought from your publisher(s), and barely cover the costs of the table fees, food, and sometimes transportation? The publishing industry is big and complicated and, dare I say, spooky, even for those of us who have been connected to various aspects of it for a long time.
Marketing has become as big of a job as writing; no longer, even if we’re traditionally published, can we just hand in a book and move on (though, for our own mental health, that’s the best thing to do!). We have to be online, in person, and anywhere else possible to build word-of-mouth, which is—contrary to all of the above—the only known way to build any sort of recognition. To market my books, I’ve done blog interviews, given talks at the local library, been on panels and run workshops at conventions, and even did a WI talk at a small town an hour away from my house. With library budgets being slashed and bookselling being mostly relegated to the big online river site, writers now have to find readers where they are. And for me, this year, that was at local-ish small SFF conventions, craft shows, and other events that had me behind a table asking passers-by, “Are you a reader?” and, if they nodded, “What do you like to read?”
It can be uncomfortable and a bit awkward, but it’s good practice in talking to strangers one-on-one if you’re the sort of person who doesn’t do well talking to large crowds. After a while, you build a sixth sense and can sometimes guess when you see someone across a room whether they are your audience or not. (Ask me how many times my second question gets “Crime fiction” as an answer, even at a SFF event! That still throws me!)
But when you get an interested reader who picks up your book to read the back, who has questions about the story or about you as a writer, you have made a connection in a reader’s brain between you—a normal-looking middle-aged woman in jeans and a hoodie—and them (often another normal-looking middle-aged woman!). You aren’t some WRITER living in a castle (ha! I wish!) and dining on caviar (ugh! I don’t wish! like licking a fish!). You’re just someone they live next door to who happens to write books, and readers love that … and they love to tell their friends about it.
So, if you get the chance, do in-person events where you not only stand behind a table with your books but talk to people about them, sell them, and sell yourself as just someone regular they can relate to. It’s eye-opening on both sides and not spooky at all.
How many sleeps until Halloween?
I love Halloween. I grew up mostly in Nevada, which became a state on Oct. 31, 1864, so Halloween was Nevada Day, which meant no school! Halloween was a holiday and my family never forgot it. I grew up with a mother and grandmother who liked to dress me and my sister up every year as ghosts and fortune-tellers, “hobos” (hey, it was the ‘70s) and other things I can’t even remember. One distinct memory I have from when I was around 6 is of my mother putting on scary make-up and a tattered grey wig, using a creaky old witch voice, and sitting in a chair in our open front doorway to hand out candy in a dark living room lit with just candles. To round it all out, she’d put an album of scary haunted-house noises on the record player. Trick or treaters were terrified of her. I was terrified of her. And this was decades before we had pop-up Halloween superstores or pumpkin-spice everything. She wasn’t messing around.
When I was a bit older, I was allowed to go out trick or treating with the neighborhood kids as long as we stayed together and only knocked on doors that had porch lights on. And then came the books. My mom and grandma loved Stephen King, and I cut my teeth on his work when I was around 11. Following that was all of Dean R. Koontz, The Exorcist, you name it. I love horror stories but I can’t do horror films, much to my mother’s disappointment. (She’s sadistic. Ask me about how she’d sidle up to me in the middle of the day at the supermarket and say, in that voice, “Your mother sucks c*** in hell” and I’d nearly jump out of my skin.)
So lately, I have been writing more horror. None of it is balls-to-the-wall gory or terrifying, but softer and, I hope, weird enough to be a bit of a shiver up the spine. (I hate that cliche, but sometimes things are cliches because they just work.) Last month, I had two new stories come out. One is online at HorrorTree.com under their Trembling With Fear tab and free to read, inspired by a nursery rhyme and a really dumb play on words related to classical mythology, “The Oracle at Dairy” (find it here). It begins: “The Oracle at Dairy prophesied only to women who reached for the whole milk, never to those who bought the two percent or skim. The voice spoke phrases cryptic and vague, for a divination isn’t a favor; understanding it must be earned.”
The other story is in Black Shuck Book’s newest anthology, Great British Horror 9: Something Peculiar, which also features stories by Grady Hendrix, Michael Marshall Smith, and others. My story, “Until the Wheel Spins Round Again” is about a woman who flips houses for a living and keeps on hearing a baby cry in the dark each night, and then the pandemic happens. Her story is threaded with another about a young woman in the 1600s who is in physical and spiritual danger. What connects them is that they both live in the same house. For this story, I chose a house in the town where I live as the blueprint, though I’ve never been in the house. There is just something about it and its location that worked for what I wanted, so I placed the story’s events there in my head. I also got to play with history a bit, which I love, especially the darker history connected to the witch trials and the paranoia and frenzy that accompanied them. In the end, people are messy and complicated (which itself can be scary), and that’s why I love to write about them.
Where I’ll be soon:
Nov 23-24 Stonham Barns Christmas Fair
Nov 30-Dec 1 Stonham Barns Christmas Fair (take two!)
Until next time,