Still working on your entry for the Frightening Fiction writing contest? If so, you definitely want to check out ConstructingHorror.com. It’s filled with articles and interviews with top horror writers. Sign up for their newsletter and you’ll receive a free ebook, Worth Dying For – Your Protagonists Goals and Behavior by Sara Caldwell, author of Splatter Flicks.

Here’s a sampling of some of their recent interviews:

• PhD. DAVID D. GILMORE
• Tim Lebbon
• Jeffrey H. Goldstein, Ph.D.
• Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
• Stanley Wiater

And articles…

• Why We Love Stories – storytelling and the discoveries of neuroscience
• On Children and Horror – An interview with John Ajvide Lindqvist
• The Basic Elements of Horror Screenwriting
• On the Art of Film Music : An interview with Composer Kurt Oldman
• The Skeleton Key

And…it’s all free! I suppose at some point they’ll want to sell you something, but I haven’t seen it yet, and if it’s up to par with the rest of the site, it’ll be worth buying.

The Curse of the Pirates writing contest is already under way, but you can give your book a leg up…with its curb appeal!

Our community manager, Ayelet, just posted a tutorial on how to change fonts (into piratesque ones) and add a pirate-inspired cover.

In conjunction with our Frightening Fiction writing contest, which is now underway, I thought I’d share some videos on horror writing. Today, the king of horror writing, Stephen King:

Aye, so you need some help writin’ like a pirate for the Curse o’ the Pirates Contest? You don’t have t’ write like a pirate, o’ course, but if you need a little help with the dialog, you might check out the Pirate Translator.

And in case you’re wonderin’ what kind o’ results you’ll get, this whole durn blog post has been run through it.

Ye’ll ne’er get me buried booty!

Image credit: amy_b

Popular BookRix author Steven Nedelton says that American fiction is far from “culturally irrelevant”, as cultural critic Lee Siegel recently wrote in The New York Observer.

WRITING ANOTHER ‘FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS?

They say this is the end of American fiction. “For about a million reasons,” Lee Siegel claims.

I believe I heard of Mr. Lee Siegel, but I doubt that he is right in his rather far-fetched prediction. For most of fiction comes from actual events and characters disguised into the fictitious, and so, fiction and non-fiction are inseparably intertwined.

L.A., June 17 (UPI) — Film stars Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman have been cast in an upcoming HBO film about late U.S. author Ernest Hemingway, TVGuide.com said.

Hemingway, even vampires, are still very much alive. Thank you UPI.

The first books I had read were Gogol’s short stories and then Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, my presents for my twelfth and thirteenth birthday. And they hooked me. Since then, I never stopped reading.

I began writing seriously about ten years ago. My first novel ended after thirty thousands words with a firm writer’s block. Whatever it was, I was flat out of ideas. For a while, I thought I would never write again but then, quite unconsciously, I recalled a short sentence I read in a major newspaper back in ‘92. And that was it, I just had to write a suspense novel based on paranormal. My Crossroads was the result, the novel of espionage, of international and extrasensory, and based on true happenings. I did a lot of research for that book and rewrote it — at least twice.

By then I had started my second one, The Raven Affair. I was almost done with my third, Dawn for the Fearless, when I found a publisher interested in Crossroads.

I would say that in order to get accepted by a publisher, one must have a well-edited manuscript. A high score in BookRix competitions is a great help, witness Scott Kelly’s Frightened Boy.  However, getting published is only the first step along a very muddy road to acceptance by readers. Good reviews are important, yet, I am not yet sure which ones are the most beneficial. Midwest Book Review is one of the prestigious and so is the Kirkus Review. Which one results in a larger readership, if any, I really don’t know. I must add that Preditors & Editors is a very useful service for all, published and unpublished writers.

You can read samples of Steven’s published novels on BookRix. They’re also available for purchase at Amazon.com and other major book retailers. You can also learn more at his website, snedelton.com.

Scott Kelly is the author of Frightened Boy, the highest-rated book on BookRix (5 stars out of 5 on Idea/Concept, 4.88 for Spelling, 4.74 for Expression/Language, and 4.76 for Design/Layout). We asked him to share some of his best writing tips:

How I Write, by Scott Kelly

Here’s how I write: by putting letters in consecutive order.

First, I find a concept or theme that interests me. These usually fall under the umbrella of what I consider to be “strictly human” problems, because that’s what I think literature should be about. The three tenets of the “Strictly Human” problem are as such: identity, perception, and death. Only we conscious meatbags face these philosophical and psychological problems.

Second, I try and think of the most interesting way possible to approach that issue. In my novel Frightened Boy, I wanted to deal with issues of perception. In order to address that, I decided to work the artist M.C. Escher into the story – because he was a master at twisting perception. I wanted to draw in the perceptions that were being thrust upon me in my life at the time; Bush was president and fear permeated the air, choking me. So I set the book in a world where every terror-mongering story you might find debunked on Snopes.com was true. Every bird had avian flu and every stranger was a rapist, murderer, or worse.

Third, I drew my characters. Characters that are a part of me, but also a part of the fabric of the themes I’ll be weaving them into. Clark is my narrator, so it’s important that he be an alien to the action. That handles the exposition – it’s new to the narrator, so as he learns about it, so will the reader. Keeps me from having to situate thick rocks of data into my stew and expecting my readers to gnaw through them. Likewise, Escher is a solipsist who believes that all reality stems from his own mind, and that nothing is real – and sometimes it turns out that way. Again, we can see the issue of perception at play.

Fourth, I began to think about each scene and how to make it as exciting as possible. Here, I place myself in the director’s chair and make-believe I’m Quentin Tarentino. Books have to happen a certain way – introductions, narratives, plot lines, etc. But how we present them is what makes us great, or good, or awful authors. In Frightened Boy, I worked under the belief that the most interesting way to write an action sequence is from the point of view of the person being rescued, not the one doing the rescuing. So I made my narrator Clark a real coward – that way, when the action unfolds, he’s in the center observing it.

Lastly, my secret weapon: editing. Kurt Vonnegut once said that there are two types of writers – bangers and thinkers. I’m a banger. Thinkers lay out every line very carefully, usually by hand or with a typewriter, and don’t place a sentence until they know it’s perfect. Not me. I see my first draft as a giant block of wood; I bang it out with as little filter as possible, usually set to music that helps set the mood I’m going for. Then I whittle, and whittle, and whittle. I don’t let anyone see my first or second drafts. By the third draft I’ve usually approached every single paragraph under the view of “what am I trying to say here? What’s the most entertaining way to say it?”

And that’s just the beginning of the editing process. To see more of it at work, please visit http://www.the-novelist.com

- Scott Kelly