Research for 'Asylum'

I decided to spend today doing some much-needed worldbuilding for a story of mine whose working title is Asylum. It's about a private mental hospital for supernatural beings. The term 'asylum' has gone out of fashion nowadays because it has too many connotations of Bedlam and mentally ill people being chained to walls and mistreated. I prefer to keep the term because an asylum is exactly what it is in the original sense of the word--a safe haven, a place of refuge.

It is set on an island in the mid-Atlantic that has been owned by one family of magically gifted people for generations--several centuries. The island is home to the owners' estate, the mental hospital, which is located on the estate grounds, a neighborhood of the owners' fellow mages, and a small town with a harbor and a residential area and arable land for the town's residents.

I had decided a few things about this island. I wanted it to be about 36 square miles in area, I wanted it to look a lot like Inis Mór in the Aran Islands of Galway Bay--rocky cliffs rather than beaches and not volcanic--and I wanted it to be in international waters so that no existing nation could claim it and so that it was not answerable to any national or international health codes. This hospital is not listed in the Wikipedia of its universe. From the air it looks like a secondary mansion built on the estate, sort of like the Old House at Collinwood from Dark Shadows.

According to Wikipedia, Inis Mór is 12 square miles in area and supports a population of 840 people. I decided I wanted my island to be three times larger for a couple of reasons. First, I wanted for there to be plenty of acreage between the asylum and the town, and I wanted the owners' estate to act as a buffer separating the asylum from the town. The owners' estate must be large enough to encompass home farms for both the asylum and for itself. I also needed for there to be enough acreage for cattle grazing, to include beef cattle, goats, and sheep.

So where does the research come in?

I knew that I wanted the island to not be volcanic. According to trusty DuckDuckGo, this means that the island must be tectonic--created by an uplift at a point where two tectonic plates abut against each other. I had wanted this island to be located about 200 miles off the eastern United States coast, perhaps near North Carolina, where I know a lot of other islands exist.

Those islands, however, are too close to the US for my purposes. They are what Galveston Island is to Texas, and that won't do at all. Run a secret mental hospital on a private estate in the US, and all kinds of hell will come down on you if that is discovered. Dealing with US medical regulatory policy is not what I want to write about, so the island had to be in international waters. I wanted it to be close enough to the US that a plane could get to the mainland within an hour or so. But when I saw where the North American Plate meets the Eurasian and African Plates, I discovered that my island needs to be much farther away from the US than 250 miles. In fact, it will be closer to Europe, way out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

Another thing I had to figure out was cattle raising and land management. If the island is in the middle of the Atlantic, it can't easily buy its foodstuffs from the US or even from Europe; it will have to provide for its own needs, and items from elsewhere will be luxuries. This means extensive acreage being needed for home farms, cattle ranches, a small lumber industry, and mills. So I needed help from this handy site to teach me how much acreage I will need for raising cattle of various kinds.

I haven't done the acreage math yet, but it's something I know I must consider. So, lots of fun in store for me as I continue to build this little island world.

How Easy It Is to Be Culturecentric

I came across this question about visual acuity on Quora and eagerly answered it.

Oh, this is just converting to a Snellen equivalent, I thought and happily described the math needed to convert an acuity value of 6/9 to one of 20/whatever.  I did the math and derived an answer.  Voila!  I am awesome at Quora!  I so rock!

I decided to check my answer at this site, which confirmed my math.  But it also showed me that vision tests could be done in meters.  I know, what a concept, right?

So I added a qualifying paragraph into my answer, stating that I was presuming that 6/9 was measured in feet, but if it referred to meters, then some adjustments to calculations might need to be made.

Only then did it slowly dawn on me that, hey, most of the planet uses the metric system.  In fact, only the United States, Myanmar, and Liberia still use the imperial system, and Myanmar plans to switch to metric soon, if it hasn't already.  So this question about a 6/9 acuity probably didn't need a Snellen equivalent at all; the asker probably just wanted an explanation of how visual acuity measurements are derived and what they mean.

Egg on my face!  I sounded like a blithe, US-centric jerk who didn't even notice the eye-rolls--and that is exactly what I was.

So, again, I rewrote my answer and exchanged the presumptuous pronoun 'we' for 'I' in a couple of places where it desperately needed to be changed.  I added some commentary about being American to explain some of my presumptions and then gave the answer that was probably desired in the first place.

It's scary to realize how easy it is to write as if your culture is the be-all and end-all of the world.  It's scary to realize how easy it is to presume that of course, everyone thinks as you do--and all of this with no intention whatsoever of offending anyone.

Originally posted on LiveJournal.

Ignored Your Blog?

Today I started reading someone's blog post entitled, "Ignored your Blog for Months?  13 Tips for Getting It Back on Track" by Miranda Hill.

I chuckled, admitted to God, "Yes, I have so ignored my blogs," and resolved to at least let you all know what I've been up to.

What I've been up to is school.  I attend Western Governors University and am pursuing a bachelor's degree in Healthcare Management.  We also suffered a death in the family in December, along with another family member's ongoing illness, so December was pretty much a mess in terms of personal life and education.  I am now back on track with school and am looking to complete the second class of my current term soon--but it's been a struggle.  Including my current class, I need to complete 27 more courses to finish.

To do this, I have had to put all of my writing on hold.  Every once in a while I will, out of wishful thinking, look at an open submission call and think, Oh, I really want to write a story for that!  But I am deluding myself.  School really is taking all of my time and attention, and any time or attention I don't devote to school is stealing from it and from my professional future.

It's to the point where I'm thinking of quitting voice lessons for a while so that I can save the money and not have to commit to daily practicing.  I already have stopped attending Thursday night choir practices at my church--because I can attend the practices on Sunday mornings, when I wouldn't be studying, anyway.  I've stopped  visiting Eastern Star chapters that I don't belong to, because attending their meetings takes time away from studying.

Not writing, though, is driving me batty!  When I don't write, I don't generate ideas for stories.  I feel creatively dead at the moment.  I don't know how I ever came up with story ideas; that happened to some other person.  Every once in a while, usually on a Saturday, I tell myself, To hell with school!  I'm going to write.  MUST.  WRITE.  SOMETHING!  And so I do, just to get it out of my system--and it feels wonderful!  But I also feel guilty about it.

Sometimes I wish this were a creative writing degree--but I hate those, because I hate trying to come up with ideas and plots on cue.  I suspect I would fail miserably if I pursued a degree in creative writing.  But sometimes, I am so tempted.

So that is why I've been absent, why you've seen no posts from me on anything.  I still have bouts of wishful thinking and self-delusion.  One of those might turn into a finished article or two, but I'm not holding my breath at this moment.

Love to you all!  I will post here occasionally, to let you know how the studies are going, but for now, I have to make this sacrifice, because the degree is worth it.

False Logic

I am reading Robert W. Bly's book, The Copywriter's Handbook, to learn the art of copywriting--writing advertisement copy.  Bly has written an informative and eye-opening book, which many people in the advertising business consider to be the copywriter's Bible.  I am currently reading the chapter in which Bly discusses the concept of false logic.

Falso logic is not exactly false advertising.  False logic is a true statement that misleads the customer and plays upon the customer's desires.  For instance, take this passage from a freelance writing company.  They pay so poorly that they could be considered a content mill, except that they have sane turn-around times.

As you develop your skills and portfolio, your rate may increase - many experienced freelance writers receive in excess of $100 per article.

It is absolutely true that your rates 'may' increase.  And they may not.  It is also true that many freelance writers earn more than $100 per article.  But whether this particular company will ever pay that amount to a writer is anybody's guess.  The company never asserts that they will pay their writers that amount, just that others have.

I see false logic used a lot in the ads I read on the web.  It is implied when the fine print says, "Your results may vary."  So be careful of it.  Read advertisements critically, and keep an eye out for verbal sleight-of-hand.

Checking In

Hello--I'm checking in to let you all know that, yes, I know I haven't posted here in a while.  I am in mostly a fiction-writing hiatus for the best of all possible reasons--I am pursuing a Bachelor of Science degree in Healthcare Management from Western Governors University.  I plan to submit a story to one fiction anthology later this year, but aside from that, any non-educational writing I do is likely to be articles about medicine.  I'm working on building a portfolio of medical writing so that I can start a content writing business.  Medicine was one of my first interests, and my love for it has not waned.

I am currently reading a book about copy-writing, which is a writing style that I want to learn.  It interests me because writing advertisement copy is completely different from the other kinds of writing I have done before.  At the moment I am in the stage of taking copious notes.

In other news, I resumed taking voice lessons last June, which makes me very happy.  My voice sounds so much better and is so much stronger now that I can hardly believe it.  It is now easy to sing notes at both extremes of my range.  I am so thankful to have found my new voice teacher.

I wish you all a very happy Labor Day weekend!

Microfiction on Zathom!

Three of my microfiction stories have been bought by the editorial team running the Zathom app, which goes live on Friday, October 20.  The stories by me are called "Masked," "Suspect," and "Two Weeks and No Utilities."

The third story is somewhat autobiographical, relating to 16 days without electricity that my husband and I experienced after Hurricane Ike in 2008.  The weather afterward was still hot and steamy in the mornings, and I'm sure we both looked like the great unwashed.  We certainly felt it. 

The first two stories are purely from my wild imagination, using words provided by Zathom's editors that had to be included in the stories.

Strayhaven

I am working on a novel idea whose working title is Strayhaven. It's an earldom in a fictional country called Comhar, which uses elements of Irish culture for its setting. I'm starting the world-building and plotting now. It is my hope to have enough of the pre-writing work done by November 1 that I can successfully complete this as my NaNoWriMo novel for this year.

I haven't posted to this journal in a while because I hit a creative dry spell and was doing nothing but RPG (role-playing game) writing.  A couple of weeks ago, however, I found out about a story-writing app called Zathom that is in development.  Once the app is rolled out, it will be a platform on which users can write flash fiction stories of either 55 or 415 words in length, using certain words chosen by the Zathom organizers.  For their roll-out, the designers were soliciting a whole slew of 55-word stories.  So I submitted about 24.  I will let you know if I sell any of them.  

The Zathom work has been somewhat of a jump-start for me.  it convinced me that I could still write and that I could still come up with interesting ideas.  I really needed that emotional shot in the arm.

Also helpful was reading an excellent book on writing by Marshall Dotson, called The Story Structure Secret:  Actions and Goals.  This is the kind of information I have been needing all of my writing life.  It has been of more help to me than even Donald J. Maas' Writing the Breakout Novel and James Frey's How to Write a Damn Good Novel.  It is because of Dotson's book that I feel able to work on Strayhaven and to feel that it has more than a snowball's chance in Hell of becoming a good story.  Dotson's book is giving me a very clear road map and is allowing me to see that I will be able to finish what I start.  That in itself is a great relief.

Military Information - Time in Service vs Time in Grade for Naval Promotions

I was curious how long it takes to be promoted from one naval rank to another, so I looked it up in terms of the US Navy and found these stats:

ENS to LTJG:  TIS:  2 years.  TIG:  2 years

LTJG to LT:  TIS:  4 years.  TIG:  2 years

LT to LTCDR:  TIS:  9-11 years.  TIG:  3 years

LTCDR to CDR:  TIS:  15-17 years.  TIG:  3 years

CDR to CAPT:  TIS:  21-23 years.  TIG:  3 years

They want their higher-level officers to have much more experience than the minimum time in grade would indicate.  I call BS on Captain Kirk being promoted to captain at age 34.  He should have been a lieutenant commander at most.  :)

'Dragons & Witches' Now Available for Pre-Order!

Dragons & Witches, the next anthology in which one of my short stories will be published, is now available on Amazon for pre-order!

The link goes to Amazon Smile, which donates a small portion of the book's price to the Texas Masonic Retirement Center to help support the nine elderly ladies who live there.  If you would prefer not to support a cause, you can pre-order Dragons & Witches here at the usual Amazon site.  Whichever way you might choose to purchase the book, you have my sincerest gratitude.

My short story, "The Eyes of Death" was declined for the anthology, The Death of All Things.  Back to the drawing board!

Status - "Where To, Ma'am?"

Good news and bad news!

My short story, "Where To, Ma'am?" was declined by Flash Fiction Online, but I did receive a note from editor Suzanne Vincent that it had reached the final round of their selection process before being rejected.  I take that as a good sign.  Ms. Vincent offered me the chance to receive some feedback on the story, so I have accepted the offer and will use the feedback I receive to, I hope, improve the story and my writing.

In other news, I decided to back the launch of Cloaked Press, a small, independent SF/F press run by author Andrew M. Ferrell, who lives in Wisconsin.  You can visit its Kickstarter page and give it some love here.

Final bit of news:  I have been invited to submit a short story to a middle-grade children's anthology, so I will be working on that.

Good night!

Submission to Flame Tree

This evening I submitted my short story, "Choosing Chains," to Flame Tree Publishing to be considered for two of their 2017 anthologies:  Heroic Fantasy or Supernatural Horror.

"Choosing Chains" is an odd story.  I personally classify it as dark high fantasy with a horror element, but I have no idea how anyone else would classify it.  I want to find it a loving home, preferably one that does not involve me self-publishing it.  And if I can find it a good home, maybe Hand of Vengeance might find a home in the same place.  Keeping my fingers crossed!

I will look through my stockpile of other stories and see if there's anything else that might be suitable for Flame Tree.  I do, however, want to also write them a nice sword & sorcery story, because that's my favorite genre to write.  Let's see if I can finish one by February 28, 2017.  Wish me luck!

Actually, no, don't wish me luck.  Wish me self-discipline, please.

The Monthly Checker - Morgen Bailey Entry for January 2017

The prompt for Morgen Bailey's January 2017 100-word story competition was to write something based on the title, "The Monthly Checker."

I actually wrote two stories for the January competition.  The first one, "Where To, Ma'am?" was just awful when whittled down to 100 words, so I let it be as long as it needed to be and found that it turned into a pretty interesting story at about 1300 words.  I submitted that version to Flash Fiction Online and am waiting to hear back from them.

I was able to come up with a 100-word story for Morgen with the requisite title and submitted it.  It was "highly commended."  It is probably also the story Bailey mentions that was, "eek-making, in a good way!"  It features a woman with proprioception issues involving her breasts.  And then it turns out that there is a non-neurological reason for her lack of proprioception there.

Now that the contest for January has ended, and I am free to give the story my preferred title, I will call it "Xenomelia."  I can use the slightly longer draft and send it out to possible markets.

Xenomelia is defined as, “the oppressive feeling that one or more limbs of one’s body do not belong to one’s self."  Breasts are not exactly limbs, but it was as close as I could get to an accurate name for the condition.  If you are interested in learning more about this condition or mental state, I highly recommend that you read Dr. Oliver Sacks' book, A Leg to Stand On.  Sacks was a brilliant writer, and I always find his books about neurology fascinating.

Every time I enter one of these Morgen Bailey competitions I learn something new.  The striking thing I observed in the stories that won in January was that not one of them read as if it had been whittled down.  The language in each of them flowed naturally, yet all three told a succinct story in 100 words, an impressive accomplishment by their authors and one that I will strive to achieve for February and for my future writing.

A Possible Story for 'Chicken Soup'

This evening I looked over a list of upcoming titles of books to be published by Chicken Soup for the Soul and decided to contribute a story for the Step Outside Your Comfort Zone book, whose deadline is March 31 of this year.

I completed an 1100-word first draft this evening, called, "There Are More of Them!" but I can already see things I believe I should do to make it a story more fitting with what they're probably looking for.  Among those things is, I really ought to read one of their books!

Yes, I have so far gone through my entire life without having read a Chicken Soup for the Soul book.  I know, right?  What planet have I been living on, all these years?

The story I wrote chronicles some of my experiences while working for my former employer...which is kind-of, sort-of my current employer, only not, exactly.  It's a long story; there was a legislative session and a sunset committee involved.  So another thing I need to do is find out if I am even permitted to make money from telling a story about my work experiences, in the first place.  I don't name anyone I worked with or anyone I served, but I feel enough uncertainty that I should ask.  I am unsure if this would constitute a conflict of interest issue.

If that turns out to be an impassable roadblock, I will simply look for somewhere else to submit my story.  I'm sure there are plenty of non-paid markets that would accept a story/essay of this type, so I'll look there.

Anyway, I had a blast writing the story, and I do hope I will be able to get it published somewhere, though I hope it can be at Chicken Soup.

Submission: "The Monthly Checker"

This evening I submitted "The Monthly Checker" to Morgen Bailey's 100-word flash-fiction competition.  The story prompt for January 2017 was the title.  This story is about weirdness involving a woman with proprioception issues.  If it doesn't place in the contest I will expand upon it and submit it under a different title to a market that accepts flash fiction.

First Submission of 2017

My first short story submission for 2017 was to Flash Fiction Online today.  The story is called, "Where to, Ma'am?" I originally wrote it for Morgen Bailey's January 100-word competition, but the story was terribly disjointed with so much meat taken out.  So I put the meat back in, and now it's in the ether.

Idea Generation

Where do I get my ideas from?  Apparently writers get asked this question often.  No one has asked me yet, so I'm going to just be brazen and come right out with it:  I read--a lot.

I have found that I get a lot of ideas and help with difficult plot problems simply by researching stories.  The more you read and learn about a time period or a culture, the more ideas you get.  For instance, a line from a poem gave me the idea for my short story, "Strands of Grass."  Reading about the Greek custom of eating mezedes (snacks eaten while drinking ouzo), gave me the idea and setting for a short story called, "Stavros."

I have gotten ideas by reading short stories I have already written, because I see things that the characters in such a story might do in the future.  I find that I like to write series of short stories featuring the same characters--not necessarily in a seamless story arc.  A lot of these are stand-alone stories.  I sometimes don't want to stop writing about certain characters just because their first story ended.

Some stories come to me when I ask myself a question.  For instance, I was in awe of the truly impressive amount of gold that Smaug had collected in the movie, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.  It was every fan's ultimate wild fantasy of how much gold a dragon could collect.  The dragon could have swum in it, he had so much gold.  And then I asked myself, "What would be a logical reason for dragons to hoard gold?"  So I came up with a reason.  My reason also came to me because of an awesomely simple and brilliant therapeutic item made for children who have autism, but the main impetus for the idea was the question.

Reading about medicine gives me ideas for stories.  I had the greatest fun reading about the actual health problems of giants, and my giant, Kiernan's, health problems in "The Witch of Braighe" figured prominently in the story I wrote about him.  He and his friend, a witch named Triona, are other characters whom I want to write more about.

Do I ever feel like I've run out of ideas, that I can't possibly come up with new ones?  Yes.  But then some idea surprises me, and I realize that, no, thank goodness, the well hasn't run dry and never will, as long as I continue to have an inquisitive mind.

So where do you get your ideas from?

Now Out: ARC Proofs of 'Dragons and Witches'

Today in my email I found the advance reader proofs of Dragons and Witches, along with an image of the front and back covers!  This is the initial proof, unedited, which is sent to book reviewers so that they can write reviews before a book's publication date.  In about a month, I and the anthology's other contributors will receive our final proofs, which will incorporate whatever edits we specify from this current draft.  The anticipated publication date for Dragons and Witches is June 2017.

This book was titled Witches and Dragons up until now.  I am rather fond of dragons, however, so I don't mind the change.  :)

While reading the proof I came up with an idea for a further story featuring my two main characters, Merka and Emarys.  I look forward to writing it.  This new story will allow me to develop Emarys' and Merka's world more.  They are going to travel to the kingdom of Navethia to return a stolen item.

I'm trying to be good and am waiting to read everyone else's stories when the book is actually published.  Yeah, we'll see how long that lasts.  It's a long time until June!

Anthology Co-Author Published!

Know what made today particularly awesome? A fellow author from One Thousand Words for War, Valerie Hunter, also has a story in the 2017 Young Explorer's Guide anthology, and she lists One Thousand Words for War in her bio! I was so thrilled to see that, and congratulations to Valerie for her additional publication!

Characters with Anachronistic Mindsets: Do They Have a Place in Fiction?

Parental warning:  I speak frankly about romance novels below.

*  *  * 

I always get nervous when I see book blurbs like this: "A 14th-century story told with a 20th-century sensibility.” 

Ugh.  I hate that!  By and large, people of the 14th century did not have the sensibility of people living in the 20th century.  Please don't give it to them!

Whether my perception is accurate or not, the above statement screams to me: "The heroine in this book will be an anachronistically modern-thinking woman, and the villains will be portrayed as period-stereotyped chauvinistic assholes!"  Granted, this is my knee-jerk reaction, and it will have to be tempered by me actually buying and reading the book in question.  I simply saw the blurb today and groaned.

The reason I am having this knee-jerk reaction is that it is, sadly, so often shown in books when the author and publisher want to make a point and care more about that than about maintaining historical accuracy and entertaining readers.  You often see this in Hollywood movies, too.  That type of movie often fails because audiences don't want to feel that they are paying to be preached to.

I fervently hope that none of the red flags popping up in my mind will be true for the above novel.  I believe that, if you're going to write a historical novel, you should be very well versed in the attitudes of the day and understanding of them, at least for the length of the book.  Yes, it is quite possible that at least a few people back in the 14th century held to more progressive beliefs than the norm.  If they had not, we would not have had the Protestant Reformation, for example.  But whether the Church was Catholic or Protestant, 14th century attitudes about morality, particularly female morality, were anything but those of the 20th century.  The same is true of ecological concerns and attitudes toward people of certain ethnicities or sexual orientations.  I hope the author of the above book kept that in mind.

I also wonder if some of my objection to finding characters with anachronistic mindsets stems from the fact that I read science fiction, in which it is not uncommon to read something from the point of view of an alien.  The more alien such a character's thought process is, the more interesting.  Frankly, exploring the point of view of a character from an earlier time period is quite similar to looking at the mind of someone who is sort of alien.   If the aliens in SF novels thought exactly the way we do, there would be little point in making them aliens, right?

All of that said, there are times when I have enjoyed slightly anachronistic character attitudes in books.  Ellis Peters' Brother Cadfael novels, for instance, always intrigued me with the way Brother Cadfael would figure out ways using the technology and logic available in his time to do things that we know to do in the 21st century to find out who committed a murder.  

In the romance genre, author Eloisa James regularly deals with topics which used to be taboo in the industry when I was a teenager--but I like that she acknowledges them and has her characters deal with them--painful intercourse, oral sex, homosexuality, and so forth.  These are issues that modern people deal with, too, and it is refreshing to see that her heroines tend to be equal partners in their lovemaking.  Unfortunately, ignorance of sex, particularly among well-bred Victorian girls, was something that too many of them did experience before marriage, and I think that is tragic. 

I believe a definite and subtle balancing act is required between writing characters whom readers can relate to and making them mostly accurate examples of their time and culture.  Would most of us want to read a story about a Regency or Victorian-era girl who truly is ignorant of what goes on in a bedroom and who believes all manner of bizarre and period rumors and superstitions she's been told, or would we want to toss the book away in disgust because we can't believe any girl of eighteen could be that ignorant?  It's an interesting question to me.

Latest Short Story Submissions

Early, early this morning I submitted my completed story for the Snape Showcase.  I also just now submitted a short story, "The Eyes of Death," to the anthology, The Death of All Things, which is being published by Zombies Need Brains LLC.  Here is a link to the ZNB Kickstarter for The Death of All Things and two other anthologies to be released next year.

Now, to start work on more stories.