What Tropes Are Selling In Spec Fic? What Is Tough To Sell?

10 01 2023

I have to be circumspect in this post, because I present information from a private online writers group. A writer in this group wondered what tropes sold well in today’s market. This writer is also a statistician. The writer polled dozens of published writers within this group. He asked which tropes sold easily to editors in this market. He ranked the responses. Here are the five highest selling and the six toughest selling tropes in spec-fic.

Toughest To Sell Ranked To Most Difficult:

6) Prominent Violence.

5) Prominent Sexual Content

4) Body Horror

3) Vampires

2) Werewolves

1) Furry

Now I was alarmed to see Body Horror on the list at all. But fourth from least popular isn’t so bad…right? Violence and Sex have their markets of course, just not as large a market as others. Some twenty years ago Vampires and Werewolves took up entire shelves in bookstores. Now, expectedly, editors are looking for new twists due to reader fatigue. As for Furry, author Dr. Lawrence M. Schoen is writing about his universe of anthropomorphic spacefarers. He tells me that while he did not write to the Furry audience, he finds them a small but enthusiastic fanbase.

Most Popular Ranked To…Most Popular

5) Time Travel

4) Robots With Feelings

3) Fairytales, Folklore, and Mythology

2) Prominent Humor

1) Ghost Stories

Well, this tracks, doesn’t it! How many anthologies have we seen featuring all of these tropes? How many novels have you seen with robots grappling with their burgeoning humanity? Notice that truly popular novel series seem to have all of these elements: Discworld and Hitchhikers Guide being two. What is it about these subjects that their appeal is so long-lasting?

While I may wish for the powers of a vampire or werewolf, they have pronounced drawbacks. And my upbringing was a bit prudish and meek, so violence and sex sets off my discomfort. Furry stories are fun but I’ve noticed I write about humans all the time and may have an unconscious bias against Furdom. Body Horror expresses my anxieties about mortality very well, so there lies my aesthetic.

The Most Popular tropes seem easily for people to take personally. Want to change something in your past? Are you a history buff? Travel in time! Feel awkward? So would a robot. Wanna just get away to simpler, artful places? Fairytales etc! I like ghost stories for the afterlife and the idea of getting away with just loafing about.

So yes, I am wondering about a time-traveling AI dealing with his banshee sidekick. Not really, but this information is intriguing.

Meanwhile, enjoy this hipster fish!





Did You Write a Monster Or A Careening Semi?

3 01 2023

Lately, I’ve been tempted to write about the politics of our time. Or about issues in our zeitgeist. Or about the changes in our society. You know…Make A Stand About Something. Wield Art like a glowing sword, shining as a beacon, hacking through the darkness of ignorance.

Let’s overlook the fact that I, a Gen-Xish Provincial Liberal Straight White Guy, have neither the chops nor the lived experience to expand the cultural debate. I can write about my own experiences, of course, like John Updike but anxious, with more sentient body parts.

Over the past few years, I’ve encountered a few stories which address social issues. I’d felt that the monsters in these stories lacked agency, that these stories were parables with monsters in them, and weren’t truly Horror Stories.

I’d come to realize that this lack of agency wasn’t endemic to topical stories, but what I’d actually found were stories with weak monsters, and those monsters just happened to be used as symbols.

How do you know if your monster has little agency or lacks depth?

If you can replace your monster with a careening semi without it affecting the plot, your monster may need more.

Keep in mind that I respect these stories and other works by these same authors. It’s just that these particular stories share a common trait which hampers their emotional impact. That common trait is a lack of depth or agency in the story’s monster.

If you can replace the monster with a careening semi, then you have not written a horror story. You have a parable with a horrific setting.

Honestly, I forgot who wrote this first story, except that it is contemporary. A group of construction workers are part-way through building a house in a wooded development. The sun goes down. A werewolf appears and kills all the men but one. Though uninjured, the survivor suffers from the werewolf attack through weeks of guilt and misplaced sense of manliness. The story ends with the man back at the development screaming his anguish at the moon.

Do you see it? That the werewolf could be replaced by any catastrophe, by a careening semi, and the story would not need to change a whit? Many say “trauma transforms us as surely as lycanthropy”. I call this story a parable and not a story, then I imagine a story where his scream brings the werewolf back for something resembling an arc, then imagine another story where he looks to the moon and screams out the long blast of a big-rig airhorn. I set that last story idea aside to workshop.

Another recent novella is set in the early 1900s, in a rural community is threatened by a White Supremecist’s plans to create an armed enclave. The monster comes in the form the Gifters, three spectral women who visit those who disrupt their community. They present a gift to the interloper, a trinket meaningful to that person. Then the person explodes into a spray of gore. This story’s language, tone, and characters compel and chill, and it is a great story from a great podcast. But a careening semi could have done the job, and kicked the wrapped gift out of its cab door.

Think about popular stories with strong monsters like “I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream”, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”, or “Dracula”. If a careening semi appeared, the plot would be dramatically difficult, especially “Dracula” as diesel rigs hadn’t yet been invented. These all have strong, decision-making, influential monsters.

Think about great works of literature. There are examples where the monster is a bit weak.

“The Grand Inquisitor” in “The Brothers Karamazov”: The Inquisitor interrogates the Prisoner and explains why he must die. The Prisoner busts out in a cloud of diesel exhaust and roars away to freedom.

“Moby Dick”: Some sort of submarine?

“Gunga Din”: Again with the air horn.

Keep in mind that I have a Bachelors in Communications and as such, know a little about everything.

More experienced writers, think about your favorite story. Does this test stand up?

Can your monster outperform a semi?





Jordan Peele’s Advice On Writing Thrillers

22 12 2022

Another comedy writer and performer making horror. I don’t feel comfortable giving advice, but this guy knows stuff!





Articles About Writing!

14 10 2022

Consider Setting Your Story During A Notable Time Period, courtesy of This Is Horror.

The Ten Best Writing Exercises. The headline aside, I do recommend writing to your expertise. Writing needs to bring the reader into a new environment, and writers often use their day jobs as setting in their fiction. Why not use yours?

A Personal Vision Statement. What do you want out of writing? Kierkegard says to allay your anxiety by picking a direction and just write (according to a YouTube I watched). Ayn Rand says art should inspire the best (According to my former roommate, who was both an Objectivist and devotee of Baba Jee). At the very least, this will get wheels turning and kill five minutes.

You Want Some Cool Monster Designers? Go to Twitter just long enough to look at these artists. Then get the Hell out because its Godforsaken Twitter.





Writers Groups Like My New Novel Darft (Draft)

12 07 2022

Yes it does say “darft”, I’m trying to generate some whimsy here.

Because things are going quite well. Everyone is following the sequence of events and understanding the cause/effect of the “magic system”. The darft tenses shift around and I have to fix that. The big reveal is shocking! The climactic resolution? It resolves five characters — five! — in one scene! And everyone is good with it! The characters are all likable and relatable!

The main characters are women. The women who are critiquing like the woman characters! I kept their motives as sex-free and guy-free as possible, and the critics really liked that.

What they seem to like: there is no villain, just people bumbling around making mistakes; the use of unusual settings like Ren Faires; taking risks with descriptions of emotions, getting as precise in their physical affects as possible; personal quirks that aren’t eccentric (showing reliable bias towards particular flavors, styles, tastes); keeping real-life branding and signifiers out of the story (I am reminded of a National Lampoon parody of Stephen King: “Pepsi!” he screamed in terror.)

This book is such a change from the previous book. “The Flesh Sutra” is a fix-up novel episodic, gothic, nudging on erotic (meter and rhyme accidental here, that was cheesy). “Saints of Flesh” is streamlined more like a novel with lots of ghastly stuff but literally no sex.

I’m still compiling reviews, but I dunno, maybe it’ll be off to agents/editors by the end of the summer?

I want to work on flash fiction for a while.





Portents? Am I Magicking Myself?

14 06 2022

I woke last week with a muscle cramp in my right shoulder spreading from my forearm to outside my shoulder blade. I tried to gut it out over two nights bad sleep. Then I was reminded of the deep tissue massage kiosk at The Mall. I paid $30 to be pummeled over a total 30 minutes. Felt better just in time for a day off so I could work on the revision that I realized I had been procrastinating.

Drank a cola at lunch and the pain came back almost as bad as before. At Panera, in front of my laptop, it did not subside.

I looked at my hand. I honestly became concerned. The ache spread so badly. Would this interfere with my day job? Would I even be able to type?

A realization quieted everything.

“Would I be able to type?”

I thought the pain may be something like how my body reacted when it was time to become Big Time Publisher and throw panic attacks at me.

Immediately, I opened my draft. I began fixing the first sentence of the chapters. And the ache ebbed away.

Then the pain came back. No easy answer here. No such luck.

I did a pass on the last three chapters for clarity. Now that I’m done, the pain is like an ice-cream headache centered on my shoulder.

I’m rather happy for this book.

Had a dream after seven this morning, maybe based on the ibuprofen kicking in. I dream often of enormous wooden structures, boarding houses the size of stadiums. Usually they are in need of repair. This morning the building was seemingly brand-new. I was part of a loose-knit theater group that had forgotten that today they were to perform.

The performers were a few former members of my comedy group and a variety of 30-ish people like those at my day job. The performance was supposed to be a multi-media comedy/drama of some critical importance. My first reflex was to head for the hills.

We pulled together and created this piece that mixed back-stage preparations of the show with the show’s performance, which is something I had wanted to do for decades. Dozens of 30-ishes leapt in with big trucks and lots of their own props to assemble spaces throughout this small area of this enormous victorian house. The set pieces include existing stairways, storage rooms, porches, rooms where one wall faced the outside. Props were automobiles, stage lights, tapestries, junk, all in the earth tones of the discarded. Audience wandered through all day.

At one point, though, I am not wearing clothes. A few 30-ish audience see my genitals. They giggle or show disdain at my performance faux pas. The performance had taken a hit by my blunder. What I remember is a 30ish telling me that one of our performers Dean Martin (that Dean Martin) took off his shirt and did a GG Allin punk-rock body thrash on the small wooden stage.

It was understood that overall the show had satisfied, in the way an ensemble piece satisfied; my own performance had not been good that evening, but it was the performance and its dialogue with the audience that had created a unique, satisfying moment. I awoke feeling that a portion of me had briefly reawakened; that bit of brain from being an impulsive kid at heedless play, something more basic than professional improvisation, or maybe a place without consciousness. The feeling opened a sunny, living part of me I had forgotten.

If I’m lucky, I have thirty years of life before me. If I can get back to that state of mind, I will count myself fortunate.





Is Writing Magick?

3 05 2022

As mentioned before, I am nearing the end of my first-ish draft of “Saints of Flesh”. My primary writing group Noble Fusion Eastern Court have been impressed at how I’ve kept a lot of plates spinning in the plot. The problem now is bringing the plates together while still spinning, stacking them together, then lowering them to the floor to rest in a satisfying manner.

Some days I look at descriptions of other books and think “damn, my stuff is a bit goofy”. Then I look at other books and think “maybe my book is supposed to be a little over the tops like these guys”. I can’t honestly say that I’m writing a book that I’d want to read. I am writing the book that is there in me right now.

There are so many small press publishers out there. I am encouraged by this because having read many small press through Kindle Unlimited, I know I have a solid book. We all know the trick with small press; get a publisher with a good track record. I had been interested in one publisher with a good track record, but then they published something controversial and now have gone to ground. I passed on going to the writers’ fest in Williamsburg VA because I have nothing to market quite yet and I have a reflexive aversion to try to work into existing social groups.

The good thing here is that I do enjoy writing every day. It’s becoming easier to focus on that. Writing has been fun lo these many years, but lately I’m wondering if my subject matter is harming my outlook.

I am anxious and depressed, less so than I used to be, but still it’s something I work on. I had quite an interest in writing humor. Over the years, though, as I discovered that good writing comes from the heart, I lost a lot of my mirth. Jokes still come when I talk with people, but not so much when I write.

Jokes were my way of distracting myself and being endearing to others. Placing a distancing TV frame around everything helped my anxiety. That frame is my earliest childhood memory. So I realized that joking was not so much a choice as a compulsion. Did I choose to daydream all the time? Did I choose to create? Maybe I did.

Humor has disappointed me in these past years. My stabs at sketch comedy and movie production lost their momentum when I needed to risk my ego by going to the next level. I could go on about how comedy in the U.S. relies way too much on improvisation, and how Lorne Michaels is killing creativity, and that I don’t laugh at movies because I can see the stitching in the fabric. I’m still sussing out how I feel, but it just may be that no one makes anything quite to my taste.

Horror became a means of being outrageous with catharsis.

I’ve realized that horror reinforces my anxious view of the world. Someone said somewhere that Horror is Fantasy for atheists, and I agree with that. Is writing horror bad for my health?

A last thing I have noticed: writing is cathartic, but it also helps to process problems at a less-than-aware level. Concentrating on Alecsi in “The Flesh Sutra” reinforced a doomed romanticist perspective. In this book, Olivia is more proactive and does a mind-bending amount of personal examination and growth. These reflect my states of mind during their creation. I would like to experiment with writing a Marty Lou for the purposes of hacking my own psyche, much like Grant Morrisson did with King Mob.





Horror Podcast and How It Relates To Humor

12 12 2021

Try this podcast called “Wrong Station”. I’ve listened to a couple of episodes so far and the writing and directing are very good.

Here is Episode 88 “The Sea Provides”.

The podcast is written by three guys involved with the satirical site “The Beaverton”, which is also very good.

Are horror and humor closely related? Comedians and comic actors seem tor take on dark acting roles, at least in the US. Robin Williams played the disturbed villain in a few movies. Jordan Peele is creating horror satire. Michael McKean played evil characters in “Law and Order” and “ST:Voyager”. Scads more examples abound. Speaking for myself, I used jokes to avoid difficult emotions. Once I recognized that I started writing horror and that let me frame those emotions in a fictional context. I haven’t really turned back to humor even though I joke quite a lot in real life.

That reframing encourages me to look at the world through a “frame”. When I examine current events through that frame, I see foible and anguish everywhere. A timeless perspective; “A Modest Proposal” and so on. Humor and horror can be equally numbing. They can be equally useful tools for imagination.





NEW VIDEO: The Land Of Mystery

12 03 2020





MY OUIJA BOARD SPEAKS

27 02 2020

Could you give it a thumbs up? It would boost my confidence.

 








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