Reading: The Wannoshay Cycle by Michael Jasper
Music: Sam & Dave
TV/Movie: Harvey Birdman
Link o' the Day: Shirley Jackson Awards



Yesterday I talked a little about writers groups and it's still a subject I'm mulling over in my head. Local inquiries and searches on craigslist haven't really revealed anything, which kind of surprises me in a burg as literary as Providence. I imagine most of the groups, if they exist at all, are on college campuses which don't advertise or circulate with folks off-campus. That's fine, though. I belonged to a pretty decent writers group back in college, but I don't think I'd get into a group exactly like that now.

I'm not saying they were a bad people or bad writers. Quite the contrary. Some were quite talented and I've always thought it a crime that certain members of that little group hadn't gone on to write more--or at least seek publication. Therein lay the rub, I think. The members of the group hadn't really put publication high on their list of goals and I think that hurt them. I don't know what I was thinking of doing with my writing, but it would be over ten years before I'd submit anything for publication. I remember one telling incident in which I wrote a story with a very strong "literary" flavor, i.e., it was unconventional and stream-of-consciousness. This was very well received. I next wrote a horror story in a more conventional manner. This was roundly panned with people bitterly disappointed in me. It pretty much killed any genre writing I'd wanted to do for years to come, even though I was an avid reader of science fiction, fantasy, horror and mysteries.

Eventually I grew up a little and got over myself and over the attitude that, I suspect, infiltrate a lot of writers groups--like that one in Warwick I tried a few years ago. Being a genre writer with commercial ambitions was selling out The Craft.

And there seemed to be an avoidance of seeking publication. I shudder to think of the number of really good poems I've read that no one else will ever see.

Thank god for the internet, eh? Introduced me to writers who wrote the stuff I like to write and read. People to whom commercial writing was a craft worthy of respect. Finding a community of writers online who were like me, with similar interests and goals helped me move beyond scribbling in notebooks to submitting work for publication and getting paid for it. Stories, poetry, even nonfiction.

That's why I'm looking for a group that's genre friendly and a group that has a set agenda for encouraging submitting work for publication. I've seen some online sites. I still have it in my head to find an offline group, and if I can't find one--I'll make one.

Do I need a group to keep writing? No. But I'm noting a lot of my contemporaries getting a lot out of their groups, and I think I might give it a go again myself.

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It's been a very productive week thus far. I've been knocking out covers to go with the book layouts that I've also been knocking out. Likewise magazine layouts. Here's the cover to a fun short book of verse entitled Growing Up With Monsters: My Times at Universal Studios in Rhymes! by Carla Laemmle and Daniel Kinske, with foreword by Ray Bradbury and illustrations by Jack Davis and Hermann Mejia. This is a fascinating little piece and Carla Laemmle, whose story this is, relates, in verse, her experiences playing minor roles in many Universal Studios horror movies like Dracula (in which she provides the first spoken line of the film) and The Phantom of the Opera.

Today I'm adding a short article to the medical journal, working on the cover for Character Kings, editing some TumbleTap publications, prepping some photos, and looking for paperwork necessary for a meeting later on this week.

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The Shirley Jackson Award, presented yearly at Readercon in July has posted its nominations list. It seems to me an odd name for an award. Her most famous story, "The Lottery" features someone getting stoned to death for "winning." Is this something we want to encourage? Apparently, though, I'm fixating too much on the short story. This was the same woman who gave us The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived In the Castle. In any case, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that one of the nominations for Best Anthology is Bound For Evil edited by Tom English (Dead Letter Press) in which my story "Pact Anthology" appears. It has some stiff competition and I think it's a long shot, but it's nice to see it nominated just the same.

Today's link takes you to the Shirley Jackson Awards website where you can read more about the award and see the full ballot. (Thanks to Scott Edelman and John D. Harvey for the link.)

Cheers!