Blog – Page 21 – Kit Campbell Books

Everything Hurts and Nothing is Getting Done

I mean, to be fair, every year I think I’m going to be productive in December, and every year I am surprised when I am not.

(Imagine the Surprised Pikachu meme here.)

(Actually…)

Right, moving on.

There’s holiday stuff, of course. Our cards showed up today, so I’ve addressed, oh, five of them and then have given up for the day because I have to double check addresses and I don’t actually have stamps yet. (Well, I have Day of the Dead stamps, but somehow that doesn’t seem seasonally appropriate.) Most-ish of my Christmas present shopping is done, including the selection and purchasing of our traditional Christmas Eve books, though one child still needs a gift, and I do need to do stocking stuffers (including for myself and the spouse). But in general, sitting fairly pretty. It just takes time and effort.

But the biggest issue is the slipped disc I told you guys about.

It turns out I have one slipped disc and another one bulging, and the slipped one is pressing on my L5 nerve root, which is what is causing the nerve pain down my leg. I’ve been trying to get on top of this, so I’ve been seeing my chiropractor twice a week, and last week I also started seeing a physical therapist (mostly because the orthopedic surgeon I went to see said insurance was unlikely to approve an MRI without doing physical therapy first, but then they went ahead and approved the MRI anyway). As you can imagine, four appointments a week is really eating into my time.

And well, last week I would have said I was getting better. But over the weekend I caught a cold (I actually slept most of Saturday) and as you can imagine, coughing and sneezing in combination with a messed up back was a bad combination. I literally only had that cold for Saturday and Sunday, but by Sunday night my back and leg pain was at the worst it has ever been. I haven’t been able to sleep because I haven’t been able to get comfortable, and exercises and positions that have made things better over the past few weeks have now proven to be useless.

Today I made an emergency visit to my doctor to hopefully get some relief, so now I have prescription painkillers and some steroids, and hopefully these will calm the inflammation in the area enough that my body can repair the discs on their own. Fingers crossed!

All this is a long way to say, uh, sorry for not blogging last week. Did I blog last week? I have no idea anymore.

The good news is that I have sorted out the character issues with Book 1, and am working on a slightly wonky subplot, and then I have another slightly wonky subplot to poke, and then I’m going to do a scene outline and identify what needs changing where. Not as fast as I hoped to be working, but definitely making progress.

Every little bit counts. Progress is progress, no matter how slow, and sometimes I have to remember that.

I hope your December is going better than mine! (And if you have disc tips, I’d love to hear them.)

WriYe and Nano

Hey, so I realized that I hadn’t done the WriYe blog prompt for the month. And the month ends tomorrow.

(How goes my revision, you might ask. Well, I got to the chapter in the character book that talked about character arcs, and I was like, YES, give me tips on how to make a character arc, I need ideas for this so I can fix Lana’s arc, but it didn’t. It was like, here’s how you check your arc to make sure you’re not missing anything. I did eventually sit down and pull out a character arc, which is a huge step, but the book wasn’t as much help as I needed, and this was the area I really wanted help with. Alas.)

Anyway, prompt: Your thoughts on NaNoWriMo.

Being November, of course, it always comes back to NaNoWriMo.

(Funnily enough, WriYe, when I first joined it, was NaNoWriYe, and was a direct spinoff.)

I have been doing Nano forever. I’m sure I’ve told you guys this. I seriously considered doing it in 2002 (it started in 1999) and ended up not doing it as I was double majoring in two engineering degrees at the time and figured that was too much all at once, and 2003 was going to go the same way, except I woke up on Nov 3 with a fully-formed plot and gave into the urge.

2003 Nano was a very different place than modern Nano. I think there were only 5000 of us doing it. You could actually keep up with the entirety of the message boards.

I did not win Nano in 2003. I got, oh, 29K? I also got a concussion and the death flu. And that story has never been touched again.

I did and won Nano 2004-2011. In that time I wrote Book 1 (2004, 2005, 2009, 2010), Broken Mirrors (2006), What Lurks Beneath the Bleachers (2007), Shards (2008), and Book 2 (2011). (Book 1 lurks everywhere. Still. Continuously.)

Then the bigger, mobile one arrived, and I took a break.

2014 I won again with the Space Dinosaurs story, and then the smaller, mobile one showed up, and I didn’t come back until 2019, where I won with World’s Edge, and in 2020 I wrote my first ever complete draft with my cozy mystery.

Last year I only got 31K on Hallowed Hill, and yet here we are a year later, with it published and everything.

Nano was a huge deal to me when I was first getting started with writing. I mean, I’d always told stories, as long as I could remember, in various forms, but I didn’t often finish stories. I had (maybe still do, somewhere) a folder in high school where I’d put all my stories, and it was dozens of story starts–a few pages, maybe a chapter or two–but they never went anywhere. I never finished anything. I never even got more than a thousand words or so.

That first Nano, in 2003, showed me that I was capable of writing more. And when I got the initial draft of Book 1 done in 2005, that was huge. I had written a novel. Yes, it was terrible, but it was done.

And that is the magic of Nano–the ability to show you that you are capable of more than you think you are. And when I was first starting out, I needed that.

In 2006 I started writing year-round. I joined a number of writing groups, including WriYe, and I began to expand as a writer.

But now that I am a more experienced writer–Nano doesn’t really work for me anymore. I know I can write 50000 words in a month, but sometimes that’s not the right choice. Sometimes I need to focus on revising what I’ve already written instead of churning out more words. And Nano itself has changed. There’s so many people that it’s easy to feel lost, and not make the connections that used to be easy.

I will always remember Nano fondly. I lived in the Bay Area in the mid-2000s, and I got to meet Chris Baty (the founder) on several occasions, and he even remembered my name most of the time. I think I’m in some promotional video in there somewhere. And on one memorial occasion, I went to Nano HQ to help them box up and mail out merch that people had ordered.

(I’m sure they don’t do that themselves anymore.)

I love Nano, but I’m not in love with Nano, you know?

I think it’s a great program, and I hope many more people find it and get what they need out of it. It’s just not what I need anymore.

Thoughts on Nano, squiders? Thoughts on the impending avalanche that is Christmas? Hell, thoughts on character arcs?

An Update, Thanksgiving, and a Landsquid (Walk Into a Bar…)

Sorry, it started to feel like a joke setup.

How goes the revision, you ask? Well, I have made it further in the character book/exercises, which continue to be a mix of helpful and not helpful, but not as much as I would have hoped. Having the small, mobile ones around has been even less productive than hoped for. We managed half an hour at the coffee shop on Monday and have not managed ANY sewing, so that’s about that.

Also I slipped a disc in my back. Did I tell you guys this? I don’t think so, because it happened midday on Thursday and I think I blogged beforehand. It hurts SO MUCH. And what hurts the most is, inconveniently, sitting.

I can’t sit anywhere to save my life. What do I need to be able to do to write, sew, read, etc.? Sit. Sigh.

And, of course, the rest of the week is essentially useless for work purposes. We host Thanksgiving every year, which I think I’ve told you guys before, plus my mom is coming down this afternoon and staying through probably midday on Friday. And then, this weekend, it’s full speed ahead on Christmas, oh no.

Oh well. It is what it is. My chiropractor is having me come in a few times a week to go on the decompression table, which, as far as I can tell, is a modern version of the rack. In theory, this will create a vacuum that will suck the disc back where it’s supposed to go, but I’ve done it twice so far and continue to be in pain. My spouse would like me to go to an orthopedic surgeon, but back surgery seems like a very major step.

Sigh. Anyway.

I drew you guys a landsquid! Been awhile, so I figured I should.

I hope everyone in the US has a survivable Thanksgiving, and I will see you next week for inevitable holiday panic and whatever else is happening.

(Also, any thoughts on decompression tables vs orthopedic surgeons?)

In the Depths of Character Exercises

Where did I leave you, squiders, before I forgot Tuesday existed? Oh, right. With the grand plans that I was going to have an updated revision outline and be ready to dig into actual revision.

Well, we haven’t gotten there. But there are definitely ideas swimming around, on that front.

When I found the notes for the revision that I did before Hallowed Hill took priority, I also found some character notes I’d started.

You see, back in, uh, 2017, I think, my sister and I went to the Pikes Peak Writers’ Conference. Which was a bit of a mess emotionally, for me, but I went to some good panels and reconnected with other writers I knew, and so forth and so on.

One of the best panels I went to was run by a writing acquaintance of mine, Stant Litore. I don’t remember what it was about (though, hold on, I’ll check the archives here…) Aha. I did a panel by panel breakdown, good job me. The panel Stant did was called Bringing Characters to Life on the Page. Anyway, long story short (too late), I was so impressed by the panel I went and bought his book on the subject, Write Characters Your Readers Won’t Forget.

This is a short book full of character exercises and, at some point between May of 2017 and whenever I started poking at Book 1 again, I did the first couple of exercises with both Dan and Lana and then gave up on the whole thing.

(I am not and have never been great with writing exercises, which is probably a failing of mine.)

Anyway, since they were literally on the page before my revision notes, I was reminded that I own this book and, since a lot of the beta feedback I got was specifically about Lana (we talked about that two weeks ago), I thought, hey, I should run through the book and do the exercises and focus specifically on Lana and see if I can fix the whole thing that way.

Except, of course, this is taking a while. I’m on exercise 11? of 40. The last few exercises have been on character work in general instead of character work in specific, which is less helpful, so I may jump ahead to save time. Characterization is not a weakness of mine, so I’m finding this section a bit tedious.

Still, it doesn’t hurt to be reminded of things.

Anyway, that’s what I’m up to. Maybe next week we’ll be outlining, but who knows with the turkey holiday (I must procure a turkey) coming up and the small, mobile ones being out of school. Monday, at least, I’m thinking of proclaiming Sewing Day, where the smaller, mobile one and I will finish the Loch Ness Monster stuffies we started over the summer, I will finish my mending, and the bigger, mobile one can work on the cloak he so desperately wants (we bought the supplies for it a few weeks ago).

Thoughts on character exercises, squiders? Any you’ve found especially helpful?

Promo: Jarrod and the Demon’s Knight by P N Burrows

Good morning, squiders! Today I’ve got an urban fantasy novel that sounds fun for you!

Dark Urban Fantasy

Date Published: 05-02-2022

photo add-to-goodreads-button_zpsc7b3c634.png

The wizard, known simply as Jarrod, has been living covertly amongst humans for over a decade. As a Professor at the University of Magic on his own planet, Prushal, he is ostensibly on Earth to research humanity’s ancient magic. But the university’s council no longer trust his motives and want him back.

Jarrod’s peaceful guise as an expert in historical artefacts is shattered as he becomes embroiled in a series of gruesome demonic murders where he becomes the prime suspect. With pressure mounting, he doesn’t have much time to confront the demon’s knight, and clear his name. An unlikely alliance forms between Jarrod and Detective Widcombe as she and the wizard work to uncover the real murderer and the evil he is unleashing on mankind.

About the Author

P N Burrows lives on a rather wet mountain in rural Wales. Phil has worked in a variety of roles over the years from IT Consultant to a Business Advisor. In his spare time, he loves to read and particularly enjoys crime thrillers. He also enjoys working his way through a comprehensive bucket list that he and his partner have created; they can frequently be found dancing the Lindy Hop.

P N Burrows has also written a 5 book science fiction series starting with the Mineran Influence and a children’s diversity picture called Emily and Her Mums.

Contact Links

Purchase Links

Excerpt:

Damn it, he told the truth. She was sure this was an insurance scam. Someone had tipped off the crooks and this man, in his retro burgundy suit, was hiding something. She could smell it. He wasn’t fazed by her questioning. He was too calm and he’d conveniently turned up after the break-in.

‘I like to know the facts, Mr Wentworth. I observe and I learn. I’m sure you’ve seen it on TV, it’s called police work. It helps to solve cases.’

‘Please, call me Jarrod.’ Jarrod smiled up at the detective. ‘Close your eyes and describe me.’

‘What?’ She stared at the man, wondering if she should ask one of the uniformed officers to join her. Weirdos, I always get the fucking weirdos, she thought.

‘I want you to prove that you are as observant as you claim.’

‘No,’ she answered, as a uniformed officer knocked on the open door. The policeman proffered a computer tablet. Should she ask him to join them? ‘Thank you, John.’ She rolled her eyes at her colleague and dismissed him. She could put this creep down if he got handsy.

Closing the office door, Detective Widcombe could feel the old man staring at her. A shiver went down her spine.

———-

If this sounds exciting to you, squiders, check it out! See you back here next Tuesday for more Nano misadventures!

Killing My Darlings

Hey, squiders. You’ve probably heard the term “kill your darlings” before. Some people take it to mean that you have to get rid of anything you truly love about a story to make it better, but what it really means is that you have to look at everything and, no matter how much you love something, if it’s not helping tell the story, it’s got to go.

My brain gets in this weird rut every time I start a revision. A “this is the way the story has to go and I can’t possibly figure out a different way it can go, even though this way has problems” rut.

It is ridiculous. I have gutted so many stories. I have added characters, removed characters, smooshed multiple characters into a single character, changed people’s personalities, motivations, arcs. I have taken out what at one point felt like essential plot points, and I have rerouted entire subplots. Or taken out subplots. Or added new ones in.

And, especially looking at Book 1, which I have written three entire drafts of (the first one being 93K, the most recent 116K)–nothing should be sacred at this point. I have removed characters and renamed other ones. I have changed people’s roles in the stories and done personality triage. I have added in a ton of subplots over the years, and the only real thing that is the same from the initial draft to the current draft is where the book ends.

Yet my brain still goes into the “HOW CAN I POSSIBLY CHANGE THE WAY THE STORY GOES; THE STORY GOES LIKE THIS” mode every time.

It may be because each draft the story gets ever closer to actually working. The first draft…had so, so many issues. It was a first draft, to be sure, but it was also my first draft. The first complete novel draft I’d ever finished. It was never going to work as it was. If I recall correctly, I wrote half of Book 2 and had to stop, because I’d written Book 1 in such a way that the story was irreparably broken, and there was no way to get from where I was to where I wanted to be.

I had a number of partial drafts before I decided to rewrite the whole thing. The second draft was infinitely better! I wrote drafts of Book 2 and Book 3 (still, arguably, both fairly solid despite the changes I made on the third draft) with no issues. And the third draft fixed many more problems.

It is somewhat infuriating to still have problems.

Because Draft 3 included a number of major changes, and because the book is fairly solid, I think that may be why I’m getting such strong “NO THE STORY CANNOT CHANGE” vibes at the moment. Or it may just be that I get them every major revision and I don’t remember because it’s been a hot minute. Hallowed Hill didn’t need any major changes, just some clarification and a couple of subplots that needed to be evened out, so I didn’t go through this then. And I’ve been working on and off on revising this version of Book 1 since, oh, 2017 or something. So this may also be the longest I’ve been on a particular draft of Book 1 as well.

I did find my notes from earlier in the year when I started ramping up the revision (before Hallowed Hill got moved up in the publication schedule and I needed to switch projects). Which is good, because I totally forgot I was going to move the plot point from Chapter 6 to before the story starts. Ha. Haha.

Back then, I also made a list of problems and potential fixes, which includes such gems as “Problem: First part of book feels disjointed; Fix: Giving Lana internal conflict will help, as will, hopefully, war already being declared” but also things like “Problem: Chapter 8 sucks; Fix: ???”

Good job, past!me. I’m very proud.

I think the next step forward is to look at my subplots and the main plot, and look at what ABSOLUTELY must happen and what is changeable, and move things around in an outline form until it looks right. And then I can rewrite as necessary and, fingers crossed, the book can finally, FINALLY be ready to move to the next step, which will be submission to agents and publishers.

Wish me luck! And cross your fingers that I shall be able to quiet the “OH NO DON’T CHANGE THE STORY” voice enough to get all my ducks in order.

I’ve got a promo for you on Thursday, squiders, and I’ll see you back here on next Tuesday (hopefully with a completed, updated outline).

The Plan for November (and the Revision)

Happy November, squiders! Or IS IT. (I don’t know. Just being dramatic.)

I went to the Nano kick-off party, as I said I might, and I got three years worth of stickers, talked to some lovely people, was a unicorn, and made myself sick by drinking coffee after 10 pm. I had thought I’d leave right at midnight, since I’m not actually writing, but no one else did and then I felt weird, so I hung out for an hour reading back over Book 1, and then I came home and couldn’t sleep (probably because of said coffee. I’d say I’d learned a lesson, but I so rarely try to drink coffee after 10 pm that I doubt it’ll stick).

It took me a few days to get all the way through the current draft (which sits at 116K words), but I am done now and ready to move forward.

My general plan goes something like this:

Read through story (done!)
Go through beta comments
Make revision plan
Do revision

I got through the chapter one beta comments and part of chapter two before I had to switch to Hallowed Hill, but I’m going to go back through them.

(As a side note, it amuses me that HH went from premise in late August 2021 to published in Oct 2022, where as I originally said I was going to write this trilogy in 1998, wrote the first draft of Book 1 in 2004/2005, and continue to still be having to poke at it, all these years later. Arguably it could be said that this is because I have improved as a writer over the past twenty years, though also arguably, a 50K Gothic horror novella is not as complex as a currently 300K+ high fantasy trilogy with many many characters.)

I did see issues, though, on my readthrough. That’s to be expected, or else I would not be revising it yet again.

There’s a fairly major plot point that the first step of is missing (probably got lost in the last revision). Weird vestiges of things I took out. A surprising amount of typos, even for me. And, of course, the disjointedness of the first part of the book and so forth.

When I ran the beginning of the book through the critique marathon, I did ask if people had suggestions on how to fix the disjointedness, and one of the suggestions they made was that one of the two viewpoint characters doesn’t have much internal conflict, so her chapters feel lacking, while that wasn’t the issue with the other viewpoint character.

One of the weird things about working on a story for so long is that things get lost. Things change. And some things get worse when you try and fix other things.

I was 14 when I created these characters. (Said characters were also 14 at that point, though they are not any longer.) I decided I was going to write the Trilogy because I spent a HUGE amount of time making up backstory for a character I was going to play in a Star Trek roleplaying sim. And then the ship only ran for a year and a half, and I was like, well, I put all this work in, and this is a really good story, so instead of, you know, moving the character to a different ship and continuing to play her, I was like, “The only solution here is to write an Epic Fantasy Trilogy and move everything out of the Star Trek universe since I can’t publish original stories there.”

As you do.

There are two viewpoint characters, Lana and Dan. Dan started off as an antagonist–I think he may have been supposed to be the main antagonist at one point–so it’s kind of weird that I included his viewpoint at the beginning anyway, in retrospect. As the story has evolved over the decades, he’s become an equal protagonist to Lana, so I’ve spent a ton of time working on him. Giving him an internal arc, making sure his actions–even the questionable ones–have forgivable motivation behind them, making him a complex character with flaws and strengths and goals.

And Lana, I just…didn’t.

To be fair, Lana has changed since the beginning draft too. (One beta, after the first draft, stated that she wanted to punch Lana in the face.) She’s less stuck-up, less braggy. As you can imagine comes from a character that a 14-year-old made to play herself, she had some Mary Sue-ish qualities. But I haven’t done very much character work on her because, once the Mary Sue issues were resolved (fairly easy, done by draft 1.5, if I recall), she was fine. Benign. Maybe even a bit bland.

But a bit bland isn’t going to cut it, not anymore. And worse, compared to Dan, she comes off as boring.

It was a slog to fix Dan, I’m not going to lie. But I’m really happy with him, in this most recent draft. He’s memorable, he’s sympathetic. No one who has read the most recent draft has suggested killing him off to put him out of everybody else’s misery.

(There’s still some work I’ve got to do, to still make him sympathetic for Book 2, but that is a problem for future!Kit.)

Lana should–knock on wood–be an easier fix. It’s really just a problem in the beginning, before she understands what’s happening in the plot. And she’s not moving from being an antagonist to a protagonist/love interest, because she’s always been that.

I’m hoping, as I go through the beta comments, an easy and appropriate fix will present itself. Otherwise, I have some vague ideas that I could poke out (though perhaps the most logical has its own issues, because it’s similar to some of Dan’s issues and I don’t want the repetition).

Wish me luck, squiders.

(Oh, and if anyone knows if there’s a way to change goals on the Nano site from word count to literally anything else, let me know. I put in a revision goal and wanted to do time, but couldn’t figure out how, so now apparently my goal for the month is 1500 words instead of minutes. Whee.)

(Also, they email me like every day to be like “Start Your Nano Project!” which is not going to happen, because if you select Nano it won’t let you change off the 50000 word goal.)

MileHiCon Aftermath and a Look at November

Oof, sorry for going all radio silence all week, squiders. Everything is fine! Except I’m avoiding editing my SkillShare class, not sure why. I think it’s because I feel like I need it to be quiet and I keep getting distracted by other things. Who knows.

MileHiCon went well! I got less things done around my panels and stuff than normal, which I think is because I had more panels, and also because I didn’t get to doing my research for the panels before the con. They moved Fall Break on us and so I had the small, mobile ones all week, so that was a bit distracting.

(Also, apparently I’m out of copies of Hidden Worlds. I didn’t think to check the stock on the older books before the con, so that’s on me.)

Basically all I got done was some pages in my sketch travel journal about our Scotland trip. (Shhh, pay no attention to the fact that it’s been almost five months since we got back from Scotland) and the panel research that I should have done earlier.

Oh well. It’s fine. Always good to see everyone and make new connections, and I sold a good number of books too.

The panels were kind of a mixed bag. The Night Vale panel was fun–I love Night Vale–but it wasn’t reader’s theater so much as round robin reading, where we all sat in a circle and read for a bit before passing it on to the next person. Didn’t seem to be any reason to have panelists, honestly. I’ve never been to this particular panel before because it’s at 10 pm and normally I’m out of the Con by 8 or 9 at the latest (if I’ve stayed for the costume contest and literacy auction), and, to be honest, it felt very late to me and I don’t know that I would do again in the future.

The Flash Fiction Chopped panel was the best of the bunch. It was a flash fiction writing contest set up somewhat like the Chopped cooking show. So each round the audience gave us a character, a setting, and a conflict, and then we got a few minutes to write based off of those prompts. Each round someone was cut, based on audience vote. There were four of us, and, hey, I won! One of the other panelists had won a Hugo, even. Now, I realize that this is completely arbitrary, and that in this particular case with these particular prompts I was able to write a better story than the others, and in other circumstances someone else probably would have won, but it was a big boost to my confidence and now I can say I beat a Hugo Award-winning author in a writing contest.

The Seelie, Unseelie, and Beyond panel was fae-focused, as expected, but it’s good that I looked at stuff beforehand, because there was also an aspect where we were supposed to bring and read from a fae-related story. Now, I trolled through every story I’ve ever had published (surprisingly a lot) and I’ve never had an explicit faerie story published, partially because, well, I don’t really write them. There was, of course, the Changeling novel I spent most of 2020 on before giving up on it, but that had many issues (not least being that I was having issues getting the fae elements to be as alien as I wanted them to be), so that wasn’t going to work. I ended up doing To the Waters and the Wild (currently available in The Best of Turtleduck Press, Vol 1) which hints at fae and the Otherworld without being explicit about it. And the rest of the panel went fine, because I do actually know quite a bit about fae nonetheless. It felt all awkward though, because I sat next to Carol Berg and had a terrible bout of imposter syndrome (even though I’ve known Carol for years and she is very nice), so that was fun.

(Normally you can’t ever get on panels that ask for panelists to read their stories, because everyone wants to be on them, so I’m not really sure how I landed this. Maybe con staff just likes me.)

Beyond the 3 Laws of Robotics went, well, not great. Robotics is not my forte, and I don’t even use them in stories that much when I’m doing scifi, though I have read a lot of Asimov’s robotics stuff. And I did do a fair amount of research, about why the 3 Laws aren’t actually useful for programming, and alternatives that have been put forward instead, and some research on AIs and AI laws that have been passed, but I’ll admit it was pretty top level stuff, and I was sitting next to a guy who actively works in robotics and specializing in general AI. I always feel silly when I’m on a tech panel that I don’t really understand, because I’m invariably the only woman and 15-20 years younger than the other panelists.

(Con staff knows I used to be an aerospace engineer, so I feel like sometimes they just use me as filler on tech panels that they didn’t get enough interest on.)

All in all, though, a good experience. The larger, mobile one may actually build a Critter for the Critter Crunch for next year. We shall see.

Now, of course, we’re a few days out from November (and Halloween–I’m going to be a unicorn, one of those nice, warm fuzzy pajama type costumes) and we must, as always, acknowledge the omnipresent looming of NaNoWriMo.

Now, as perhaps you can guess due to the lack of posts on the subject, I’m not going to be participating this year. Well, I am, and I’m not.

Hallowed Hill has taken a lot of my time this past year–I outlined it in August, wrote it November through February, edited it in May and July, and spent August through now on publication and marketing. One one hand, yay, I got a book out in about a year! On the other hand, I’m a bit tired. And definitely not ready to start something new, not when I’ve got four books that need to be revised.

So I’m going to work on my Book 1 revision during November. I actually think this is going to go really well. It gives me an excuse to go to write-ins, which I’ve desperately missed the last few years. And if I set myself some sort of goal (is 50 hours too much? Probably. Maybe 25 hours), even if I don’t reach it, it hopefully gives me the dedication I need to make some real progress, or maybe even finish it up.

So that’s my plan. A little late in the year to really be digging into the revision, but oh well.

How are you doing, squiders? Thoughts about November?

WriYe and Horror

Catching up on my WriYe blog circle prompts, plus it’s an easy blog topic in the midst of convention planning, haha.

(Trying to figure out my last outfit for the con. Do I want something that says “horror writer” to go along with Hallowed Hill? Do I want to look professional? Do I want to look eclectic and artistic? Do I want to just dress like myself? Should I wear unicorn pajamas? Options abound.)

Here’s October’s prompt: Your thoughts on horror/gore/scary stories?

In general I am pro-horror, which comes as no surprise. I love ghosts especially, and am less enamored of other paranormal creatures such as werewolves, vampires, and zombies. I don’t read or watch a lot of those.

I’d say ghosts first–and ghosts are a major draw to a story for me–and eldritch horrors second, or really any story where you’re never really sure what it is that’s out there, if anything. And ghost-adjacent things are also good.

I am also fond of Gothic literature, though I do prefer there to be actual paranormal aspects, or at least a really juicy mystery or family secret. (One that’s not just dead children buried on the premises. God. I am so sick of dead children.)

I love scary stories, where the scares come from the atmosphere, or the unknowing, or the mystery. Which is probably why I like ghost stories so much, especially ones where it’s the little things you really have to look for.

I am not a gore person. If a game or a book or a movie relies mostly on gore and violence, count me out. I don’t need that in my life.

(With books I’m a little more flexible, because I can skim through violence or gore if necessary if the story is worth it otherwise. Though I have found that if the story feels like it needs quite so much gore and/or violence, it doesn’t necessary have the legs to stand up otherwise.)

I mostly read or listen to scary stories (through podcasts or YouTube videos) and don’t really watch a lot of horror movies or television shows. I don’t necessarily scare very easily, but I do have an overactive imagination, and even visuals that weren’t especially scary in the moment tend to pop up at inconvenient times (usually the middle of the night).

(When I saw the Ring in college, I slept with the television on for three nights straight, because if the TV was already on it couldn’t turn itself on. Though I either saw or hallucinated a really disturbing episode of the Flintstones one night, so that’s a thing. And when I saw The Witches when I was six, I thought a witch was living under my bed for about six months, despite that not being an aspect of the movie at all.)

What are your thoughts on horror and scary stories, squiders? What’s your favorite scary movie? (I’m rather partial to The Village, which is not technically horror, I don’t think, and also has a very predictable twist.) Favorite ghost story? Especially share your ghost stories.

Prepping MileHiCon and Books!

It’s MileHiCon this weekend! They gave me an unprecedented five panels this year, though I had to drop one so I could take the larger, mobile one to the 20-lb Critter Crunch. I may have already told you guys this. There’s been a lot going on lately.

(The Amazon issues are mostly fixed, except reviews still aren’t showing up, alas.)

The ones I still have on my docket are:

Welcome to Night Vale Reader’s Theater
Flash Fiction Chopped
Seelie, Unseelie, and Beyond
Beyond the 3 Laws of Robotics

Once again, kind of a random selection of topics (and no moderation of any editing panels, if there are any). The Night Vale one is especially random, especially because it’s about four hours after the time limit I gave on panels, but I’m going to do it anyway because I love Night Vale and I also love doing Reader’s Theater.

I’m going to have to look at the panel descriptions and do some research on the rest, which is par for the course at this point. At least I am familiar with flash fiction, fae, and the 3 Laws of Robotics (I read a LOT of Asimov as a kid), so anything will be better than the memory one I was on last year where I had no business being.

I’m pondering doing either excerpts or bookmarks for the con, but seeing how we’re three days out, excerpts are looking a little better. Thinking about printing them out with a QR code on the back that links to the Hallowed Hill sales page. Also need to set up a Venmo account. But I did already send in my sales permits and order books, so I suspect I’m ahead of where I normally am.

Speaking of which:

The color’s a little off in the pictures, but I got my copies of Hallowed Hill to sell at the con, and they are gorgeous. This is definitely the prettiest of my books.

I’m excited for the Con! I always have a nice time catching up (both with friends and on work that it’s hard to focus on around day-to-day responsibilities–for example, I outlined a ghost story weeks ago that I’ve yet to get around to writing), and it’s relaxing to have the weekend to myself to occasionally sell things or do panels but otherwise just chill and take everything in.

Fingers crossed that everything gets done! It normally does, albeit somewhat last minute. I should be back on Thursday or Friday pre-con, though, so I’ll see you then, squiders!

Books by Kit Campbell