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My kids’ story, Beware the Easter Moon, is available on Kindle for free this Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.  (It’s exclusive on Amazon until, um, July something, so if you need a copy in another format, contact me.)

Beware the Easter Moon

by De Kenyon

Colin’s tired of Grandpa stealing kids’ chocolate Easter eggs. So he hatches a plan to make his Granpa eat one of last year’s Easter eggs. One of the regular kind. That stinks when it gets rotten.

It was a terrible plan. But it was also a great plan.

He just shouldn’t have gone outside at the farm to get the egg on the night of the full moon before Easter.

Colin sneaked out of his grandpa’s big old creepy white house with the tree branches that scratched the windows and the heaters that went hunk hunk hunk all night long while his pile of cousins slept, drooling and farting and snoring.

Grandpa didn’t lock his doors, because he lived a long ways away from anybody else, but his shotgun was on a shelf in the closet, too high to reach unless Colin dragged one of the big silver and green chairs out of the sunroom and into the entryway and stood on it to see. Grandpa always said it was for coyotes.

But all Colin wanted to do was get his egg.

He grabbed his coat off a wire hanger in the closet and stepped into Grandpa’s boots, because Grandpa’s boots were always muddy, no matter what Grandma said, and nobody would notice in the morning if they weren’t clean.

He slowly turned the handle and slowly pulled on the door, but it wouldn’t open and he jerked on it hard and then it almost hit the wall.

But he caught it.

Then he slowly opened the creaking screen door and slowly shut both doors behind him.

The stoop looked white at first because the moon was so bright. But his eyes adjusted, and he tiptoed with the big dried-mud boots down the hard old steps as quietly as he could. The sharp steps had already cut his cousin Maria right across her eyebrow.

A gate creaked and slammed against the post. The trees scratched the windows. The ground was white from the storm and the moon, and the threes only cast thin shadows on the ground.

He liked Grandpa’s farm better when the leaves were out in the summer and the wind whispered through them like the running of a river. But now it was so quiet he could hear the coyotes out in the pastures. And it was cold enough to bite his ears and get up his nose and smell like nothing and make his nose drip.

But he wouldn’t be out here long.

He went out the gate, and it creaked when he opened it, but it always creaked and slammed all night in the breeze anyway. One ear was already colder than the other, and he wished he’d brought a hat.

He went down the muddy path to the chicken coop, where the chickens were all sleeping inside the dark building. The coyote howled again, and Colin started running as fast as Grandpa’s boots would let him.

The egg was behind the chicken coop.

It wasn’t a regular chicken egg. It was a last-year Easter egg.

He crunched through the snow, not caring about the loud sound so much as wanting to get back in the house as fast as he could. But his feet sank in and the hard snow tried to take Grandpa’s boots off, so he had to bend over and pull Grandpa’s boots out of the snow with his bare hands and his foot still in it.

The coyote sounded a lot closer now.

Colin looked into the cow pasture, which had a tall, square-wire fence all along the edge so the cows didn’t get out. The snow was deeper on this side, with long strings of dead grass all the way through it. On the other side it was empty and white and went up a long hill with two brown streaks of road for Grandpa’s tractor tires as he took hay out to the cows in a hay trailer and Colin and all the cousins would throw it out to the cows, who would eat it from between the bars of the trailer while they were still moving.

He didn’t see anything on the hill, so he went around the corner of the chicken coop and stomped a hole in the top of the snow.

Carefully, he dug down through the snow to the ground.

Please be there, please be there.

His hand scraped the top of something harder than snow and he saw it: the egg.

 

In brief, the news this week is…still trying to get my head screwed back on.  I may be done learning Wonderful New Things for a bit, as my brain is screaming at me to stop thinking, and how often does that happen?  Rarely.

This story was originally published in Crossed Genres #30.

Available at Smashwords, Amazon.com, B&N, and more.

Paid

by DeAnna Knippling

Time travel in a multiverse sounded great…except that some of inventor Beauregard’s alternate selves aren’t so nice. Now he’s a private dick hiring himself out to try to clean up the mess he made.

Beauregard is called to investigate the gruesome death of a girl who was crushed to death while her babysitter watched TV downstairs. Due to the nature of the death, he already knows that the Outlander—a version of himself trapped outside the multiverse—is involved…but how?

If you walk into a bar and make a bet that there are two people in the room with the same birthday, if there’s over forty people, you’ll usually win. That’s statistics. If you walk into a bar and bet that there’s someone with the birthday October 23, 1976, and you win, that’s time travel. And you’ve probably just met another version of me.

I came up with a solid time travel theory in 2007 and swore I’d never build an actual machine. I built it 2009 anyway; long story. If you’re reading this, it means you’re stuck here with me—or you are me. Sorry about that. Any set of universes in which someone discovers time travel tends to implode, because the set tends to attract the mass of all the different versions of the time traveler in the multiverse.

Some versions are pretty big. I see them when I travel. Quantum foam: it sounds small, doesn’t it?

I looked past the spinning rings of the Eclectolux at the boiling, purple-green mass below me (that is, if you consider below to have any meaning); it looked like living vomit that had just eaten its way out of a dog. It looked as big as the Cities when you’re flying into MSP, but it was actually much bigger, because I was very far away.

Yeah. Another version of me. I call it the Outlander.

I dropped the glass vial through the bars of the Eclectolux. The vial twitched as the bars whooshed past it, then fell out of sight, toward the foul city of me. The city had seen me (that is, if you could consider what it does seeing) and was sending up tentacles the apparent size of the Empire State Building. The Eclectolux dipped as gravity distorted. I popped out of the foam before the tentacles got within half a thousand clicks. My job was done.

I came to in the storage unit. The three rings had stopped spinning, as had my stomach, so I must have been there for a while. The gunshot wound in my stomach was gone, which meant I’d died and been replaced.

Damn it. Every time I had to be replaced, the universe opened another hole to the Outsider, and it would be another race to see who found it first (that is, if first could have any meaning with regards to time travel). Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have minded being dead. It was not being able to make it stick that got to me.

I shut off the Eclectolux, turned off the generator, and flicked off the lights. Outside, Durwood, as big and hairy as a mountain gorilla, with a similarly-sloped forehead spackled in orangey curls, sat in his 1975 Chevy Caprice Classic convertible, cherry red, top down. He saw me and honked the horn six times. I hated that car; it clashed with his hair and the top never worked when I wanted it to.

I crossed the street. “Stop that.”

He honked the horn again. “When are you going to let me handle the Eclectolux?”

“Never.”

“How did it go?”

I pulled up my shirt and showed him my stomach. Durwood groaned, and I tucked my shirt back in.

“Back to the office then?”

I nodded, got in the car, leaned the seat back, pulled my Akubra over my face, and went to sleep.

This story came from…a series of chess games, I suppose.   I was working with a guy who liked to play chess; we set up a board on the cross-piece of our cube walls and made moves with no time limits.  He’d played a lot of chess in prison–he wouldn’t talk about it, other than to say, “Sometimes getting revenge isn’t worth it.”  Fair enough.  He was this enormous guy, width-wise, but not terribly tall, say 5′ 9″, and his hair was cut off flat on top: which, to my mind, made him look even shorter.  Hands, same way: their width made them look very stubby.  But he never was clumsy with the chess pieces.

I’m an indifferent chess player; I just like to talk to weird people.  But I got a lot better while playing with this guy.  He talked a lot about kinds of choices you can make in chess.  I don’t know if I can remember how it all went now–there are opening moves, which have all been pretty much worked out; there are endgames (I asked him how to know you were in an endgame; I wish I could remember how he’d explained it, but I know the feeling of it still, if not the logic) that have been all worked out; there are groups of tactics that happen in the middle.  There are groups of things that happen over, and over, and over, with only minor variations.  Once you know the patterns, it becomes easier to predict the outcome.

He said that chess was what made him realize that revenge was a bad idea, that chess was all about anticipating the consequences to your actions, and how he hadn’t had a sense of consequences, before he started playing chess in prison.  Still, he wasn’t the wisest guy I ever met.  But pretty damned smart.

Somehow, being me, I didn’t walk away with all that much in the way of chess.  But I did get an idea for a story: about the guy who discovered time travel and subsequently wished he hadn’t.  I had this whole plan for a series of short stories for Beauregard, based on the Major Arcana of the tarot.  This was supposed to be #0, The Fool.  It went all right.  But when I tried to write #1, The Magician…ugh, I couldn’t do it.  Now I can see that it should have been an origin story.  But anyway, back then I skipped to #2, The High Priestess, which was supposed to be about Beauregard’s secretary…well, let’s just say there was waaaaay too much duct tape, so I let it be.

I might write at least the origin story some day.  Then again, maybe not: ever since  writing this story, I’ve had a sense that somewhere out in the multiverse, I’m writing every possible variation of every story I’m currently working on.  It’s distracting, feeling like every word I type spawns a different universe, then making a typo and deleting a word, and wondering whether I just deleted an infinity to go with it.

I finally finished a rewrite on a short story that I like, that keeps getting rejected.  I ended up…I don’t know, maybe saving two particularly clever lines and a handful of ones generic enough not to need changing.  Plot?  Different.  Character voices?  Different.  Settings?  Different for the last half of the story.  One of those rewrites.  I even changed the title.

It was exhausting.

I was experimenting with the story structure that I talked about here, from Story Engineering.  I really liked the new version of this story…up to the ending.  Then I realized that I didn’t want to write the ending that I had planned.  Bleah!  It would involved basically a novel’s worth of material squished into a long fight scene.  It’s not that I’ve never had a story turn into a novel (and I usually enjoy it when it does), but that I didn’t even want to write that novel.

So I went for a two-hour walk to brainstorm, in which I spent a certain amount of time reading the first chapters of three books at the library.  I just could not focus.

At any rate…I ended up going around and around in circles.  Tracing out character-development arcs.  Making sure I knew who the antagonist was and could say that they were getting in the way as much as possible.  Trying to find a different ending that still fit the pattern.

But the problem was that the main character’s goal had to change, right at the moment that it really shouldn’t.

Here’s the gist of it:

R. says “yes” to his girlfriend (setup).  Well, there’s someone else who wants him (S.), and S. doesn’t have scruples.  S. abducts the GF (first plot point) and threatens to take R., too.  V., who is the GF’s ally, gets R. out of the picture (reaction), while R. sees the brutal murder of V.’s friend F (pinch 1). R. fights his way back to V. who tries to shoo him off again.  He insults her to the point that she agrees to go after GF, even though it’s the worst thing they could do (midpoint).  They get through a couple of challenges with increasing difficulty (action), then witness the brutal murder of the GF (pinch 2).  Then the person who wants R. gets hold of them both (second plot point), and…

And I was going to say that S. makes a very convincing argument that he needs R. and V. for the same reason that GF really wanted R.  (GF’s motivations were ulterior…but also genuine, I should stipulate.) And then send R. and V. off to fight that battle, in the name of both S. and GF.  But, of course, I couldn’t do it.  Ugh.

What I eventually came to was to do a twist.

What most people assume when they’re reading a story is that it’s about the main character.  Duh, right?  That’s how stories work: the story is about the main character having a goal and seeing it through, either succeeding or driving it definitively into the ground.  Or changing goals from a stupid external goal to one motivated by their deepest passions.  That kind of thing.

But.

Is that how the real world works?  No.  Sometimes, it’s not all about you.

So what I did was look at V.’s character arc.

If R. is the protagonist, then S. is the antagonist, and V. is the helper/relationship character.  R. has a lot to learn from V., and in fact does: his entire character arc is driven by going, “What would V. do?”

BUT (as stipulated by my original ending), what if S. is right?

Then V., who has been egging R. on to go against S., is the antagonist, isn’t she?  And R. has something to learn from S.

And from V.’s perspective, S. is the antagonist, and R. is the helper character, and she has something to learn from R.

So the ending goes like this: R., following S.’s lead, corners V. into making her do the thing that R. should be doing for S., which is the last thing she wants to do.  R. does this by forcing V. to kill him, watch the consequences, and come to the conclusion that she has to take R.’s place.  (I should note that I use two alternating POVs, R.’s and V.’s, throughout.)

–It’s funny.  I wrote this as horror (V.’s perspective) OR as really dark fanatasy (R.’s perspective), but now I want to write it again as a crime story.  Or maybe as something like Attack the Block.

The point being, this twist isn’t about A Big Reveal at the end of the story.  A Big Reveal is, in fact, not a twist.  It’s just A Big Reveal.  A twist…is when you reframe what was previously defined in the story.  A hero is a monster (like in Up).  A monster is a hero.  The person you always hated is the one person who will ever make you happy.  That kind of thing.

But my favorite kinds of twists are the ones where the whole story shifts, based on the fact that every character is the hero of their own story.

It’s weird.  You have to make sure that the former protagonist’s story has its own satisfying ending; you can’t just let them dangle.  You have to show that the new protagonists’s story has had a satisfying character arc all along.  (Inflexible, short-sighted V. learns to have a wider vision, to do more than make the sacrifices she feels like making, but make the ones that need to be made.)  And you have to have a reason to write it: in this, the whole story is about people who find out that their conceptions of what’s going on is wrong.  So it seems fair to do that to the reader, too.

So now – off the story goes.  We’ll see if my theory works…

Okay, if you just want the cover and blurb, scroll down till you see the cover.  There aren’t any spoilers in the following (other than a very rough clue about the kind of ending it has), and it’s all talk about how and why I put the story together the way I did.

—

This was an amusing story to write–it’s a test run for a new plot structure that I picked up from Larry Brooks’ Story Engineering.  I stripped this down as much as possible, because I wanted to write a short test story.  I wrote a middle-grade because I have a captive test audience that I can watch read this stuff, so I can see how it goes over moment by moment.  Cruel and manipulative, I know, but that’s my job, and I love it.

Here are the plot steps (according to Story Engineering, which is based on playwriting structure), so you can follow along and judge how well I did, if you care to do so:

• Setup (first 25%) – while there are problems in this section, the full extent of what’s going on is not yet revealed.
• First Plot Point (at about 25%) – the problem is first fully revealed (note: the sample stops right here).
• Reaction (second 25%) – the protagonist reacts to the problem (try-fail cycles center on reactive tries).
• First Pinch Point (at about 37.5%) – the problem hits the protagonist as hard as is possible at that time.
• Midpoint (around 50%) – the context of the problem changes to the extent that the protagonist knows that proactive steps must be taken.
• Action (third 25%) – the protagonist actively attempts to solve the problem (try-fail cycles center on proactive tries).
• Second Pinch Point (at about 62.5%) – the problem hits the protagonist in the worst possible way.
• Second Plot Point (at about 75%) – the protagonist knows now what must be done and how; final battle commences.
• Resolution (last 25%) – the protagonist carries out the last, do-or-die try/fail cycle.

I was talking to Annie MacFarlaine about how or whether this plots out to the Joseph Campbell cycle, and we didn’t come to any real conclusions.

In My Mom Ate My Homework, I didn’t focus on the protagonists’s interior journey at all; one, I was going for as short a story as I could reasonably pull off, so I could test it on Ray (and it still ended up over 2500 words), and two, I was afraid I’d overthink it if I did.  Annie was talking about some things I could have done to make the character have more of a journey…and honestly, the more I thought about it, the more I’m glad I didn’t.

Aside from just messing with this as a technical exercise (to see if I could yank Ray’s chain, really), I have to respect my kid readers.  When I write these kids’ stories, I’m writing the things that it’s not okay for kids to say or think, and giving them a way to express them.  Like fairytales.  The more you tone them down, the less effective and memorable they are.

This is a story expressing the fact that the mom has become irrational about cleaning things.  As a mom, you know there are days when you cross the line, when you take your frustrations out on your kids (or your house, or whatever you’re cooking, etc.) rather than deal with them in a healthy way.  There are OCD days when you think, “Oh, if only everything were clean, it would really mean something.”  Okay, maybe some moms don’t, but having been raised in a culture where most women are taught to think that they’re supposed to be The Domestic Goddess and that all other functions in life are kind of secondary, I’m pretty sure most moms can relate.  Most women?  Not necessarily.  But most people who identify themselves as moms.

So.  What we have here is a horrific scenario where housecleaning gets out of control, where that becomes the most important thing in your life.  And you know what? When that happens to people, it’s pretty horrific.  I don’t want to give the protagonist kid a full character arc–I don’t want them to feel like things are fully resolved or good.  I want my kids to be a little disturbed by the thought that the same thing that happens here might happen to their moms (or, someday, to them).

“The monster isn’t dead yet!” endings in the Freddie horror movies always cheesed me off.  And now I think I know why–there’s this whole completeness, this resolution, and then the monster jumps out.  Whereas you get An American Werewolf in London, and it just freakin’ ends.  As a writer, it drives me up the wall to watch that movie.  But…that’s how it’s supposed to end, with a non-ending.

So, here, if you read the story–there is an ending, because of that whole writer thing.  But the ending isn’t really a resolution in that it makes everything magically all better.  It’s a moment of cognitive dissonance, where the characters act like everything’s magically all better, but you can tell it isn’t.  Because the real situation, when you strip off the fantastical elements here, is the same way–people act like everything’s okay, when it isn’t.  And that’s something I want kids to be able to have a way of talking about.

—

My Mom Ate My Homework

by De Kenyon

Available at Smashwords, B&N, Amazon.com, and more.

This story was inspired by Ray’s recent testing of the “how much can I get away with” thing with regards to leaving her crap all over the house and putting off cleaning it up as long as possible.  And homework.  Dawdling for hours over her homework.  I was feeling kinda nutso about having to discipline her, too.  Like–you’ve been through all this before, and I thought we’d worked it out already kind of thing.  But I know, as Ray develops mentally, that this is exactly what I have to expect, and should be worried about if I don’t see: it means she’s approaching situations differently, as she tries out new ideas.

To make a long story short, it’s better.  And she did enjoy the story, bouncing and yelling and laughing and more.  But she was very disturbed about a few details that I copied from our lives.  She could accept that the main characters weren’t us…but the mention of her green bat socks.  That threw her.

We agreed that Lee should never give me a vacuum cleaner.

Aya’s mom just told her to pick up her stuff for the 1,001th time…she was almost going to pick it up for reals, but then her mom gets turned into a cleanicidal vacuum cyborg. And now Aya’s almost late for school…

Aya held the big box of Fruit Loops in one hand and The Best Cereal Bowl Ever in her other hand, ready to pour. The Best Cereal Bowl Ever had two sides: one side for the crunchy and delicious cereal, and the other side for the cold and delicious milk, so you could scoop out a scoop of cereal, dunk it in the milk, and eat it at the moment of best coldness and crunchiness.

Unfortunately, Aya’s mom chose exactly that moment to stomp up to the table so hard she made Aya’s spoon rattle. “If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times!” Aya’s mom yelled. “Pick up your trash!”

Aya looked around the kitchen. Okay, so most of the table was stacked with her folded laundry, and her homework was all over the floor under the table where she’d been working on it last night while Mom cooked, and maaaaaybe she’d left a few candy wrappers under her pillow, and okay, so her computer desk had two soda cans and a pile of tissues on it, and, um, okay. But she was seriously hungry.

“Can’t I wait until after I eat breakfast?” she asked.

“No!” her mom yelled. “I told you to clean yesterday morning, and you didn’t. And then I told you to clean after you got home from school yesterday, and you didn’t. And I told you to clean before you went to bed last night, and you didn’t. And today is my birthday, and you know what’s the worst birthday present ever? Having to clean up your daughter’s mess. So now I don’t care if you starve at school today—pick up your traaaaaash!!!”

Mom yelled so loud that Aya’s hair streamed out behind her and her mother’s coffee-smelling spit splattered onto her face. Mom was so gross. After a few seconds of glaring at her, Mom stomped into the living room, saying something mean-sounding under her breath.

Aya sighed, put the cereal box down, and wiped her face with a napkin. “That makes it a thousand and one times.” She picked up an armful of her clothes and started carrying them back to her room.

From the living room, Mom’s new vacuum cleaner started running. Dad had bought it for her birthday, so she wouldn’t have to vacuum anymore: it was a self-driving vacuum cleaner that would vacuum the carpet and even wash the kitchen floor to pick up any mess from spilled food.

Aya was about to shove all her clothes in her top drawer when suddenly she heard her mother scream, “Help, Aya!”

Aya dropped her clothes on the floor, jumped over her toys and books and dirty clothes, ran down the hallway, and jumped down the two stairs into the living room.

Mom wrestled with her new vacuum cleaner, a loud, gray machine that had all kinds of tubes and cords coming out of it that wrapped around her arms and legs. The back end of the machine spat out black, stinky smoke that covered the ceiling and made Aya cough.

Mom held a pair of scissors that she used to stab the machine, but the cords just wrapped tighter.

The machine—it had to be Mom’s new vacuum cleaner—suddenly sucked down Mom’s arm with the scissors, while an electrical cord climbed up her arm and plugged itself into her nostril.

“Mom!”

 

I dream of getting back into a routine…but it just ain’t happening right now.  I’m going through an awesome if somewhat disruptive learning process right now, complete with attendant mood swings (“I can’t write worth a damn!” “This is so much more awesome than anything I’ve written before!” etc.), and I’m not sure which way is up these days, let alone how to think more than one step ahead.

But when I think about what  might happen when I get a grasp on this, I twitch with excitement.  So I’m going to say I’m headed in the right direction.

I’m not sure how things are going to go for the next few weeks; I may not get a lot of blogging done.

At any rate, I do have a new story up, under another pen name.  I hadn’t planned to whip this name out until I got YOUR SOUFFLE MUST DIE out, but it really is that same sensibility.  Sam from YSMD is shinier…but just as violent, underneath it all.

So:

People Juice

by Diane R. Thompson*

(available at Smashwords, B&N, Amazon, and more)

If there’s one thing that can ruin your workday, it’s getting harassed. Beautiful, blonde Jackie has figured out how to handle it—most of the time. But last Friday she almost got snagged in the parking lot by a guy in a hoodie wearing too much aftershave, and now she’s out for revenge.

People juice. It’s what I call my ability to handle other people and their idiot problems. I’m not shy, but I’m an introvert—being around other people just sucks the energy out of me. So when I’m out of people juice, that’s it. It doesn’t matter whether I’m having the time of my life or I’m at my ex-in-laws’ house. Love ya, gotta go, goodbye.

Fortunately, not many people notice at work. I’m in Quality Analysis at Bell-Maus Software Design, and everyone thinks I’m a stuck-up bitch out to get them. And the guys who hit on me don’t notice anything but my breasts anyway.

Hit on me. Good phrase.

So Monday I come into the office with a black eye. I’m making coffee in the tiny break area, because I’m the only blonde chick in the office, and if I don’t make coffee it’ll look weird.

José comes up behind me and tries to rub up against my butt as he slides past me to the fridge, but I twist out of the way and shove him from behind, so he gets cock-blocked by the garbage can.

“Hey!” he says. “What did you do that for?”

“What?” I say.

“Push me.”

I shake my head. “No way, José.” He hates that.

“You did!”

“Awww, did somebody lose his balance and decide to blame the dumb blonde?”

He finally manages to get his eyes out of my cleavage, sees the black eye, and says, “What happened to your eye?” Then the jerk tries to feel me up again.

“Fender bender,” I said. “Friday night. Some guy in a hoodie tried to jump me in the parking lot, then rammed me from behind when I got in my car. I whiplashed into the steering wheel. As if you didn’t know.”

I step aside, pour myself a cup of rancid coffee, and sip it noisily. Last warning. He’s wearing a white shirt, and I’ve performed scattershot on him before.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I didn’t get a look at the guy, but I smelled him. And you were working late last Friday, too.” I take a deep whiff of his aftershave.

He splutters. “Are you accusing me?”

“Change your aftershave recently, José?”

He leaves the break area without another word, and yeah, he’s so mad that he forgets to pretend that the only way he can get around me is by bumping uglies. He’s in his supervisor’s cube faster than you can say “preemptive accusation of sexual harassment.”

I like messing with José. It doesn’t use up much of my juice.

*R is for “Raclette.”  Foodie pen names need foodie middle names: it’s a melty cheese that’s traditionally toasted in front of a fire, then served melted on potatoes with pickles. Yum, right?

I have a new article up at Indie Author News:

There’s a lot of good advice I didn’t take because I didn’t understand it at the time. Granted, taking advice before I’m ready for it isn’t smart–like taking the training wheels off my bike before I have a sense of balance. But now I have those training wheels off (although I haven’t stopped training), and I need to re-look at a lot of that advice.

Right now, I’m studying the use of all five senses in my writing. When I first heard the advice, I blew it off. “That’s so obvious, duh!” I said…but didn’t do it. Maybe because it never clicked. Maybe because it was explained poorly. Maybe because I wasn’t listening.

So why is it important?

Not because it makes my fiction “more realistic.” After all, it’s stuff we’ve made up; why is being “more realistic” important (especially in a fantasy or in a surreal work)?
It’s important because it’s easier to control your readers’ thoughts and feelings when you use sensory details. Or, if you want to sound less like a mad scientist and more like a literature professor, “to help your readers see the world in a new way.”

Granted, this comes out the morning after I just finished reading a Stephen King book, so I’m a bit depressed on my writing skills.  But the advice is really, really good.  And many thanks to Dean for giving it to me

I just got back from the Pikes Peak Writers’ Conference, and boy, is my brain tired.  But I had to write this down…I was talking to Chris Mandeville about feeling like a failure as a writer at one point during the conference.  I said something like, “And then I realized I was feeling extremely negative, so I went down my checklist and realized I was just tired.  All better now.”  And she sounded kind of shocked…a checklist?!? Yep.  I have a checklist.

—

Feeling negative about your writing?  Lots of critical self-talk?  Wondering why you ever thought you could write, no matter what positive things other people tell you?

Before you give in to despair, stop and go through this checklist!

Every writer I’ve talked to about it, from newbies to professional writers, has admitted they have overwhelmingly negative thoughts from time to time.  So rather than running away from your writing or digging youself a hole of depression, go through this checklist to make sure your negativity isn’t coming from an easily-repairable source.  By the time you get rid of everything on the list, you should be either writing or taking care of what needs to be done.

(Non-writers: yes, when we’re writing or stuck at writing, these really are things that we don’t notice.)

Physical

• Are you hungry?  Eat something healthful.  (Prepare ahead with appropriate snack foods.)
• Have you had enough water today–not coffee, not soda, but water? If not, drink water.
• Are you in pain or discomfort (headache, allergies, sinuses, backache, carpal tunnel, etc.)?  Take medicine and write down a note to address root causes later.
• Are you tired? Sleep.
• Are you sick? Take medicine and write down a note to address root causes later.
• Are you stiff? Walk around.  I find this the perfect time to do laundry/dishes/etc.
• Have you exercised in the last two days?  If not, exercise.
• Are you tense (you may need to dig deeper for the reason)?  Stretch, meditate, take a walk–whatever works for you.
• Are you indulging in a repetitive habit (you may need to dig deeper for the reason)?  Change what you’re doing for a few moments to see if inspiration hits; your subconscious is trying to tell you something.

Mental

• Are you bored?  You may be writing the wrong thing or headed in the wrong direction.  Reread last few pages and see if you like them.  If not, remove/save elsewhere back to the last place you read and liked (don’t “think,” read and then decide).
• Are you restless?  You are looking for something.  Do research.  Do something (anything) new.  Expose yourself to the random for a while.
• Are you stuck?  You are probably not in your character’s head(s).  Make sure you know what the character is wearing and review what’s happening for all five senses.  If still stuck, change what you’re doing for a few moments to let your subconscious process any complex situations (again with the laundry/dishes/etc.).
• Do you find yourself making excuses rather than write?  Free write for ten minutes, exploring the reasons you’re avoiding writing, but allow yourself to wander as necessary.  When you’re avoiding writing for no conscious reason, then your subconscious muse needs to tell you something.
• Are you easily distracted?  Make sure your external world aligns with your internal world–clean, organize, add inspirational objects, mess things up, etc.–but don’t stop to make it perfect if you feel suddenly focused.
• Do you feel you’re not coming up with inspired choices?  Free write/brainstorm/outline/idea map every dull choice you can, then change your behavior for a few moments to allow your subconscious to process new ideas.  Identifying the less than optimal in a conscious way clears the subconscious for further inspiration.
• Are you overwhelmed? Your subconscious relies on your conscious brain for logic when intuition isn’t working.  Approach a problem analytically until your writer brain can take over again.

Social/Emotional

• Do you feel like a fake?  Overdo it in an area over which you have control: write a lot, submit (and get rejected) a lot.  You cannot fake wordcount or the number of rejections you have (you can only lie about the number).
• Are you stressed about external approval?  Use your social network to gain external approval in a minor way–share funny, sweet, cool, or otherwise awesome things on a regular basis.
• Are you unacceptably jealous of another writer?  Put them in a story, changing any identifying details or history, and do something terrible to them.  You’ll either feel satisfied or you’ll feel sorry for what you’ve done to them.  Either is better than jealousy.  (This works for all kinds of unacceptable feelings toward other people, really.)
• Do you have too many things to do?  (See the tip on being overwhelmed, too.)  Write a list of what you need to do, and prioritize.  Consider ways to get rid of all but the top five items on your list.
• Too many emails? Unsubscribe from as many emails as possible or change your settings to digests.
• A note for freelancers–not making enough money? unhappy? bored? not diversified?  Pick your most unsatisfactory client and politely get rid of them.
• Are you stressed about a major life event? Allow yourself to cope.  Thinking the same thoughts/feeling the same emotions over and over is a sign of not coping.  A good method of coping is finding a metaphor for what you’re going through and writing a story using the metaphor (we do become writers partially because that’s how we process the world around us, by organizing it into a story and giving it meaning).  Sometimes you just have to stop creating and heal.

Fundamentals

• Are you a “good enough writer”? Questioning your ability is a sign that you’re ready to learn something new; people who are incompetent can’t recognize their own incompetency (the Dunning-Kruger effect).   Take heart; you’re getting ready for a jump to the next level as a writer.  You will never stop learning how to write better, and it’s uncomfortable every time.
• Are you in a rut? Pick a new genre/media/format/length to write in.  You will need to read & research to find out what your sweet spot in that genre is.
• Do you feel dissatisfied with your writing, but you can’t identify what you need to learn/fix?  You should a) keep writing, b) free write on your dissatisfaction, and c) read various approaches to writing advice that may or may not have anything to do with what you suspect the real problem is.  When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.  If you look.
• Do you feel that you are following all the advice you’ve read, but you want to push yourself outside of a rational approach to writing (I find that both rational and irrational approaches work best when used together)?  Read until you are conscious of reading something especially good, then type it up.  You’re forced to go into real-time (meditative) brain mode, which goes straight to the subconscious to teach you how the greats did their work.  Warning: can spoil you for a lot of shoddy, one-trick writing.
• Are you really supposed to be a writer?  Assess how you spend most of your leisure time.  If you aren’t a reader, then you may not be a writer.  If you are a reader, take a break from writing for about two weeks, then schedule a solid block of writing and force  yourself to do it, whether you want to or not.  If you feel better after you write (fewer nightmares, better alertness, feeling of purpose, relief, etc.), then be a writer.  If you feel worse, then you may not be a writer.  It’s a calling; that means you stop being fully functional when you don’t do it.  Conversely, if you haven’t been writing, schedule a reasonable, regular writing time/wordcount per day for two weeks, then stop suddenly and see whether you feel better or worse. Don’t count how you feel while writing, only when you’re done, and for the next few days.
• Feel that you’re handicapped by some shortcoming as a writer? Every aspect of writing, from speed to focus to dialogue to query letters, is a skill, and someone has figured out how to build that skill.  Find out who does that skill at a remarkable, insane level, and find out how they built that skill.  Read some Tim Ferriss while you’re at it.  If you are really good at something (that’s not writing), analyze how you did it.
• Are you not sure whether what you’re doing is worthwhile?  (The “but I could have done something useful with my life, like being a teacher or a nurse” interior monologue.)  It’s never a bad thing to ease the burdens of another person’s life by entertaining them, or to help them process something painful or bewildering.  It’s only a question of whether you’re giving people something or calling attention to yourself.   To paraphrase Robert Crais at PPWC the other night, it’s not about you, it’s about the story.  Work to get over yourself.

There you go, the checklist  An interesting experiment, writing the whole thing down.  Usually, I’m good by the time I get through physical and mental, but sometimes I do have to go all the way down.  If you have more items, share

Update:

Of course I forgot something, and I’m doing it right now…I call it “having a zen day.”  It’s when I’m having the kind of day where everything is so complex you don’t know up from down, your brain is full, and even writing a list doesn’t do it.  At that point, I just do whatever the next thing is, when I get done with the thing before it.  Like, you look at a piece of paper and decide that it’s trash, so you dump it in the recycle box, see a piece of clothing on the floor, dump it in the laundry, get inspired to write a blog post, then see a pile of receipts that needs to be put into Quicken, etc.

Apologies, I’m writing this ahead of time, because I’m actually at Pikes Peak Writers’ Conference.  April 21-22, my ebooks Beware the Easter Moon and Alien Blue should be free at Amazon only.  Pass the word!

New kids’ fiction now available from Amazon, Smashwords, and Barnes & Noble,with other sites to follow (Kobo, Apple, Sony).

I’m trying something new…

This is actually a two-story pack, with “The Test” and another kids’ story set in a fantasy world, “The Scaredy Wizard of Theornin.”  Both play around with Grimms’ fairy-tale themes.

The Test

by De Kenyon

Mari von Ingler is good for nothing, not making sausages or sewing a straight line or anything of use in her village, so her father arranges for her to be an apprentice to a mage…but only if she can pass the mage’s test.

But when the mage arrives, he only sends her out into the forest with no instructions but to come back and tell him whether she passed. She means only to stomp off into the woods and hide for an hour, but now she’s so lost that it would take magic to find her way back…

Mari von Ingler leaned gently against the warm white wall of the inn on the bench made out of half of a tree trunk that nobody but travelers sat on. She didn’t dare move an inch more, or the splinter poking through her thick wool skirt and linen underthings would bite her. She closed her eyes and tried to swallow back the rotten taste in her mouth. She wished she hadn’t eaten Mama’s good food; she wished she couldn’t smell the roast turning on the spit, inside the inn.

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New fiction!  This is another book that’s going up on Kindle Direct Select, which means I’m leaving it up there exclusively for three months (until July 9).  I’ll announce when it’s available on other sites, but for now it’s at Amazon.com.

If you buy an Amazon copy but need an additional file format, contact me at publisher [at] wonderlandpress [dot] com.

Inspired by a discussion with one of Ray’s school crossing guards about the madness that was Easter on her grandparents’ farm–including finding last year’s Easter eggs.  And from Britney’s mention that they put out 500 eggs for their day-care Easter party.  500!  Which only worked out to five eggs per kid.  The joke at the beginning…well, that’s from Lee, which should surprise nobody who knows him.

Beware the Easter Moon

by De Kenyon

Colin’s tired of Grandpa stealing kids’ chocolate Easter eggs.  So he hatches a plan to make his Granpa eat one of last year’s Easter eggs.  One of the regular kind.  That stinks when it gets rotten.

It was a terrible plan.  But it was also a great plan.

He just shouldn’t have gone outside at the farm to get the egg on the night of the full moon before Easter.

Colin sneaked out of his grandpa’s big old creepy white house with the tree branches that scratched the windows and the heaters that went hunk hunk hunk all night long while his pile of cousins slept, drooling and farting and snoring.

Grandpa didn’t lock his doors, because he lived a long ways away from anybody else, but his shotgun was on a shelf in the closet, too high to reach unless Colin dragged one of the big silver and green chairs out of the sunroom and into the entryway and stood on it to see. Grandpa always said it was for coyotes.

But all Colin wanted to do was get his egg.

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