Horror equates to trash. Horror stories cannot be considered as literature. Whilst good books improve the mind, Horror rots it. If you read trash, you’ll end up with junk for brains.
Moviegoers whose taste in cinema consists entirely of keeping up with the Joneses, or if they’re confident in their ignorance, being the Joneses - the middlebrow, the great washed – believe that Hollywood takes fine literature and inevitably turns it into shit, though of course the middlebrow euphemism for shit is bad movies. Take The Bridges of Madison County. Now that is a great book, they all agree - but what a bad movie! In fact, The Bridges of Madison County was shit to begin with and shit it remained onscreen.
It’s common for many writers today — beginners and pros — to deliver characters on a sort of post-modern pedestal. Instead of offering compelling, substantive, flesh-and-blood people, the writer is instead content to use characters as a social springboard to evangelize some sardonic commentary about the modern world as we know it. Regardless of its wide usage, producing characters for quick reader judgment is almost always a bad idea.
So you’ve published a book. Maybe you landed a fat contract from a publishing house. Maybe you went the DIY route, formatted your book and slapped it up on Amazon. Either way, congratulations! You are an author!
You are also a brand. And you better put some serious thought into how you sell yourself.
Because here’s the thing: No one’s going to just buy your book. You need to sell it, and more than that, you need to sell yourself.
Brandon Tietz is the author of Out of Touch (Otherworld Publications; 2011) and the upcoming collection, Vanity. His work can be seen in Cannoli Pie Magazine, Troubadour 21, Outsider Writers Collective, Red Fez, and Rotten Leaves. He's also featured in the anthologies Warmed and Bound (Velvet Press; 2011) and Amsterdamed If You Do (CCLAP; 2011).
Richard Thomas was the winner of the 2009 "Enter the World of Filaria" contest at ChiZine. He has published over forty stories online and in print, including the Shivers VI anthology (Cemetery Dance) with Stephen King and Peter Straub, the Warmed and Bound anthology (Velvet Press), Speedloader (Snubnose Press), Murky Depths, Gargoyle, PANK, Pear Noir!, Word Riot, 3:AM Magazine and Opium. His debut novel Transubstantiate was released in July of 2010.
Last time, we tried starting a story by writing the end first. You may eventually place the ending you wrote at the actual end of the story, or, as we discussed using an example from The Usual Suspects, you might use part of the last scene to open your story.
Rock and roll was born in the 1950s. It got downright sassy in the 60s, pounded its chest and roared in the 70s and went way over the top in the 80s, leaving everyone channeling their inner Peggy Lee and asking, “is that all there is?”
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