Results of 2nd At-Home Writing Retreat of 2024

Last week I used vacation time to take a second at-home writing retreat. My goal was to prepare the eight remaining chapters for a novel-in-progress for final editing and to (HOPEFULLY) release before 2024 ends.

Despite a retreat that wasn't quite a retreat (LOTS of life happening, too), I am happy to report that I made my goal.

The novel is called “House on Top of the Hill” and it’s the third book in the BryonySeries Limbo series. The first and second books in that series are “The Phoenix” and “Call of the Siren.”

I conceived the concept for the BryonySeries Limbo trilogy in early 2019. During Christmas break later that year, I had all three books outlined.

Before I go further, the store page on the BryonySeries website will provide more about the individual titles I'll be mentioning in this post. There are far, far too many titles to hyperlink in this blog.

Oh, and the store is closed for renovations, most likely until Timothy finishes his master's degree in February. But the store link will take you to the full list of books on Amazon. 

Now back to our regularly scheduled program.

It feels good to near the finish line of what could be my last novel.

My fiction focus for the next few years will be completing the last four books in the Girls of the BryonySeries and catching up with The Adventures of Cornell Dyer series. Both are subseries in the overarching BryonySeries world.

Plus, I have tons of Bertrand photos for future books I need to address.

Now, I could be wrong about “House on Top of the Hill” being the last novel. But at age sixty-three, I want to be sure I finish these other BryonySeries books, while I’m still able to finish them. So I'm definitely not bidding creative writing good-bye. I have plenty of book projects to last me a long time.

Also, for anyone who has read the BryonySeries, this "House on Top of the Hill" brings the series to a nice full circle. 

You see, if one starts with the drop of blood trilogy (“Bryony,” “Visage,” and “Staked!”),  the five installments of “Before The Blood” becomes a terrific prequel to the series. Limbo then fills in the time period between “drop” and BTB, the eighty years when nothing seemingly happens.

Or if one reads the books in chronological order – beginning with “Before The Blood,” and then moving onto to Limbo and then “drop of blood,” the novel “Staked!” gives a nice finish to the series. 

And if you start with Limbo, you can read BTB and “drop” to see what happened before and what happens after, which also works quite logically, especially since "drop" seamlessly follows "House on Top of the Hill."

Now, I don’t want to forget HOW to write a novel. And who knows? I might have another lurking in my brain somewhere, just waiting for the right time to show itself.

Or perhaps I’ll co-write a novel or helps other authors polish theirs. But from my viewpoint on this Monday morning, “House on Top of the Hill” is likely my last novel.

Of course, I did say that after “Before The Blood,” too. 

And if we want to travel down that path, I really only intended to write one novel, “Bryony.” But the story was too big for one book. 

Fine, I thought. I’ll write a sequel. But the story was too big for THAT book, too.

Fine. A trilogy then. Except now I had all this background backstory and my little band of fans for “drop of blood” wanted to read the series back story, which turned into an eight-year project for the five installments.

So there you have it. A series that overtook itself much like the poisonous bryony took over Simons Mansion, the Simons estate, and worked its way into the woods (which wasn’t Simons Woods after all, as you shall see in "House on Top of the Hill").

A quick word about the structure of this latest novel. Despite the wording of the synopsis (see below), none of the story is actually told from the perspective of Steve Barnes.

Instead the novel, which spans forty - fairly consecutively - years, is told through a slew of different protagonists in a seemingly short story format. But the chapters all possess an underlying theme, recurring characters, and an ending that won't make sense if you skip to it first.

Anyway, here is the synopsis. Below the synopsis are the chapter titles and cover image by Timothy Baran.

Happy Monday!

Change comes slowly to Munsonville, and for Steve Barnes, who spends his entire life in the village, that's just fine. From boyhood to manhood, he savors the slow pace and friendly smiles, even while working by his parents' side from sunup to sundown to run the family diner.

The only blight is this fishing village's preoccupation with an empty mansion in the woods, whose tales of former glory and catastrophe fueled a rampage of ghost stories. Steve doesn't believe them, but some do – and no no one can deny the power the crumbling old building holds over them.

Especially when it changes everyone, including Steve, forever.

Prologue

Chapter 1: The Traveling Salesman

Chapter 2: Roundtable

Chapter 3: Bottle of the Red Stuff

Chapter 4: Cracking Open the Nest Egg

Chapter 5: Picture Postcards

Chapter 6: Whispers of the Heart

Chapter 7: I Run at Night

Chapter 8: Laid to Rest

Chapter 9: Necking

Chapter 10: Spider and Fly

Chapter 11: Death Heard Round the World

Chapter 12: Mine

Chapter 13: Second Sight

Chapter 14: Chop, Sizzle, Broil, and Bake

Chapter 15: The Rage

Chapter 16: Hard Choice to Make

Chapter 17: Through the Camera’s Eye

Chapter 18: Words Enough For Me

Chapter 19: The All-Hallowed Albatross

Chapter 20: Dancing in the Past

Chapter 21: The New Professor

Chapter 22: Enigma in Residence

Chapter 23: Rain

Chapter 24: From Fry Pan to Factotum

Chapter 25: Nutty Tina Swanson

Chapter 26: Preternatural Guest

Chapter 27: A New Lease on a Very Old Dream

Chapter 28: The News That Changed Everything

Chapter 29: Journey of a Thousand Heartaches

Chapter 30: Severed Links

Epilogue

Ten Reasons Why Gothic Fiction Still Rocks

I wrote this piece for another blog as part of the 2018 BryonySeries Blog Tour.

The site that hosted this piece is currently down, a little sad for me because I wanted to link it. Fortunately, I saved the original in my files.

It was a fun piece to write. I had never organized and articulated why the genre is entertaining to me, and I enjoyed calling to mind and referencing some of my favorite stories.

Gothic fiction.

Just hearing those words makes one think of Wuthering Heights, Mr. Rochester, and John William Polidori's creation of the suave gentleman vampire.

Although the genre is associated with crumbling old houses, the supernatural, and feminine heroines in love and distress (my BryonySeries has all three), the real genius to the genre lies in its core characteristics, which will never really go out of style, methinks.

Below, ten reasons why Gothic literature endures, with examples. And yes, the BryonySeries stands up to all ten.

1) The horror occurs in the characters' minds - and isn't always explained by the author.

Graphic violence is jolting to the sense, but psychological suspense is more terrifying. Shirley Jackson was a master at this.

Jackson's short story The Lottery is well-known, but have you ever read her last novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle?  I read (and read and reread it many times) in high school. Just...WOW!

Another great example is Henry's James Turn of the Screw. The book's theme: Does the governess see ghosts or is she mad?

The young adult novel Jane-Emily by Patricia Clapp is another must-read.  So is Ruth M. Arthur's A Candle in her Room.

2) An entwining of eroticism and death

Gothic stories is full of variations on this theme: dead lovers returning as vampires to prey upon the living (Lucy upon Arthur in Bram Stoker's Dracula), people falling in love with vampires (The Vampire by Conrad Aiken), the living resembling the dead due to love lost (Miss Havisham in Charles' Dickens' Great Expectations), ghost lovers (Quint and Miss Jessel in Henry James' Turn of the Screw and Bess  and The Highwayman Alfred Noyes' poem, The Highwayman), resurrecting a lost lover (as Walter did to Brunhilda in Wake Not the Dead), and obsessing with someone else's dead lover (as did the unnamed narrator in Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca).

And of course Melissa Marchellis in Bryony, letting John Simons access to her blood so she can pretend to live as his dead wife.

3) A blurring of life and death

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is obvious, but other good examples include Lamia and La Belle Dame Sans Merci by John Keats, Ulalume by Edgar Allan Poe, Christabel by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and The Giaour: A Fragment of a Turkish Tale, by Lord Byron

Vampire slayer Cornell Dyer explains the connection this way in Visage, the second novel in the BryonySeries: “Life. What a transient entity. We imagine we can create it. We can take it away from someone if we choose. Yet there are individuals who become stuck in that strange land between life and death, where their ability to either live or die becomes complicated.”

4) Emphasis on the sublime

Life, death, and the merging of the two often prompt certain awe. Gothic literature is full of characters stricken with awe, wonder, and terror...and sometimes a combination of all three, such as the teen Laura feels toward her new companion Carmilla in Sheridan Le Fanu's novel of the same name.

A bit of loathing that isn't easily explained helps the foreboding mood, too.

5) Shadows and veiled appearances

In Gothic fiction, the reader is never quite certain what's behind a door or another character's facade. This type of intrigue keeps emotions on edge - and pages turning.

I mean, just because Melissa in Bryony DREAMED of her English teacher as a vampire didn't make him one, did it?

Did it?

6) Duality/Man and Beast

Think The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Lewis Stevenson

Or think of the way Melissa sees John Simons in her dream in the woods: A large animal dashed out from behind a tree and rushed past... screamed and jumped back. It wore a full suit of clothes and ran on its hands and feet. The creature’s long, golden hair—or was it a mane?—streamed behind it.

Why is this appealing? Most likely because we all have a bit of the monstrous inside us, but we're overall good at keeping the monster caged.

And yet, we instinctively know our monster could get loose. And then what?

Gothic stories are good at answering the "then what."

7) Mad scientists

Mesdames and messieurs, I present an excerpt from the BryonySeries prequel, Before the Blood.

"Come, come, Dr. Gothart," Dr. Stone said. "You don't propose to abandon clinical experience and empirical observation for the theories of pathology and physiology?"

"Microscopes and their specimens don't lie."

"Neither does clinical experience and empirical observation."

A murmur ran around the room. Bryony strained to hear, every fiber taut.

"So you no longer bleed patients, Dr. Gothart?"

"Occasionally, when certain conditions warrant. But it's been decades since Dr Hughes Bennett established the overall inefficacy of bloodletting. I prefer to give more blood than I take."

A gasp ran around the room.

"Medically speaking, of course."

8) The best action takes place at night.

One of my BryonySeries vampires (Kellen Wechsler) even starts one of his stories this way in Before the Blood: "It happened at the time of night when sleep is heaviest and nightmares darkest, when shadows of dread cloak the soul as it slumbers."

Darkness obscures the light, making one doubt the next step and bringing fear to the surface. Great stuff when used in stories. Not so great in reality.

And yet...

We do like to shiver. When we're home safe tucked away in the blankets and NOT when we're lost in a haunted mansion at midnight, and the candle's just gone out.

Wait! What was that noise?

9) Uncertainty if characters will make it out of the story alive.

Unlike much popular fiction where it's considered not cricket to kill off main characters, Gothic fiction plays by its own rules. Any character is fair game. And often is.

10) Abstract yearning

Characters in gothic stories often pine for that indefinable something beyond them. Could be love. Could be immortality. Could be anything that makes them hopes there's something beyond dust and worms.

 

Imagery over "Jump Scares"

One of the elements that separates Gothic fiction from modern horror writing is the focus on shadowy imagery instead of jump scares.

Early silent films, which had no CGI or sophisticated technology, used this well, as this YouTube clip shows: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxFVHQTqMRg

One modern film that did an outstanding job of imagery is The Autopsy of Jane Doe. It's been several weeks since I watched it with Daniel, and remnants of impressions have clung to me ever since. 

If you haven't seen it, here's a trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtTAhXuiRTc

Gothic Book Club: First Meeting

Several members of the critique group WriteOn Joliet write in a genre one might describe as "Gothic."

Not a popular genre in the 21st century. Nor do we care.

But we did want a forum where we could gather with the like-minded and discuss out works. No such entity exists in the area.

So we made our own: WriteOn Joliet Gothic Book Club. We had three attendees, enough for a thoughtful discussion, with questions moderated by the author.

And yes, the woman on the right is playing with Bertrand. He couldn't pass up cheese and crackers.

The club is open to anyone who enjoys Gothic fiction. One need not be a member of WriteOn Joliet. We aren't charging dues.

 However, keep in mind we will be reading books written by WriteOn Joliet members, and reading the book is a requirement. We are currently reading Birthright by Sue Mydliak. Today we discussed the first seven chapters. 

Our next meeting is from 12:30 to 2:30 p.m. July 7. We will discuss chapters eight through fourteen. \

For more information, visit https://www.facebook.com/groups/2094850277406343/.

Awesome meeting space, huh?

"Ten Reasons Why Gothic Fiction Still Rocks" Tour Host: Vanessa Stephens

We're are halfway through the BryonySeries inaugural blog tour, which picks back up today with a fellow fan of the Gothic genre.

I hope you're enjoying getting to know the tour hosts and, again, I encourage you to pick up souvenirs (i.e. check out their writings, etc.) along the way.

Today's tour host is Vanessa Stephens, who, according to her website, is an aspiring writer who spends much of her time writing flash fiction, short stories, working on her debut novel, or spending time with her family. She lives in the Joliet area with her husband and daughter.

And here is a good place to add that Vanessa's daughter is a fan of Bertrand the Mouse. And Bertrand is a fan of hers.

But most of all, Vanessa loves Gothic fiction as much (or more) as I do, so she asked me to write a post for her blog on why Gothic fiction is so great.

You can read that post here:

https://www.vanessajcstephens.com/blog/ten-reasons-why-gothic-fiction-still-rocks

Vanessa also wrote a lovely introduction to me, which I didn't see right away as I spent much of the weekend working and feeling like I was getting nowhere. So I felt very encouraged to read it, to say the least!

You can read that here:

https://www.vanessajcstephens.com/blog/a-prelude-to-a-tour

5 Ways to Write a Scary Story

1) Quickly establish a bond between reader and protagonist.

You want your reader to walk closely with your main character.

2) Foreshadow early in the story.

Creates unease in protagonist AND reader.

3) Confine evil to shadows.

We fear what we cannot see.

4) Take the normal and natural and give it a hard twist to the left.

Our minds find safety in the predictable. Shake that up.

5) Wrap up the story (but not really)

Let your protagonist think the danger has passed. Your reader will know better.

The Marketing Challenge...

...especially for an author (me) who has chosen the hard way to publish (as if other ways are easy).

I have self-published (without backing of a traditional press) a literary-ish (difficult to market even for a traditional press) gothic-ish (a dead genre) trilogy.

So how do I connect readers to the reading? What has worked? What has not worked? What won't I do?

Won'ts/Not worked:

1) Blow up my social media feed with exhortations to buy my book or follow me because I'm an expert in "this" or because my writing is so "that." Social media is meant to be social, not MEdia. There's plenty of that online already. It turns me off. I'm sure it turns others oof, too.

2) Keep doing the same thing over and over and over if it's not working. Example: craft fairs (unless I ever auxiliary craft items to sell, in which case craft fairs would be a marketing opportunity for me). One member of WriteOn Joliet says she does well at craft fairs. I have not.

3) Author events that aren't part of a larger event. Example #1: Coming into the venue where I am the only draw. I'm sorry stunning enough for people to take a chance (I hear objections from loved ones, but it's true). Example #2: I did well at Indie Author Day at the Plainfield Public Library. Organizers planned conservatively (a small room with about fifty chairs set up for the author panel). The day consisted of a one-hour author panel and then one hour to browse the authors.

4) Paying an exorbitant price for table space. I almost never make the money back. Exception: My mother paid almost $300 a few years back to be part of a three-day craft fair at a local mall. We did well the first two days and almost made our money back.

5) Spend so much time marketing that I lose sight of writing.

What's worked:

Consistently? Nothing.

Moderately: Again, being part of a larger event.

Ironically: random online purchases (go figure), especially overseas. This last doesn't surprise me, as that had been my hunch when I began the series.

And yet: I have a small tribe of extremely devoted fans (i.e. not my family and friends) that LOVE this series and exhort me to push the marketing.

The challenge:

Finding ways, and then encouraging, other authors to find their ways, to connect their books to the right readers. I have a hunch some of it might be genre specific, but that's okay.

I'll keep you posted of my progress (or lack thereof...)