(Or, you can have my auxiliary verbs when you pry them from my cold, dead fingers.) Today we’re gonna get a little English Geeky up in here. We’re gonna to use spooky words like conjugation and modality and, at the end I’m gonna make you diagram a sentence. Just kidding! I know we’d all rather claw our own [...]
Archive for the ‘The Horrors of Horror Writing’ Category
The Horror of the Passive Voice
May 19th, 2012 
Lorna D. Keach The Horror of Self-Critique pt 2
October 1st, 2010 Lorna D. Keach 
(Or, Why don’t we just put the Writer’s Market down for a bit and relax?) I collect old college Literature textbooks. It’s a wretched habit, because it means there’s now 70 copies of Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” in my house—but, then again, none of my habits are particularly healthy. Still, this week, I stumbled [...]
The Horror of Self-Critique, pt 1
September 24th, 2010 Lorna D. Keach 
(Or, why won’t my inner voices just shut up?) I’ve got a book coming out. It’s small press, and its only loosely horrific so I’m not plugging it here, but suffice it to say the experience has taught me quite a lot about publishing novels. (I’m working out all my industry naiveté before my Great [...]
Harper Collins Does Something!
September 10th, 2010 Lorna D. Keach 
So, I was gonna do a post on the Horrors of Writer’s Block, but I couldn’t think of anything to write. (Ha!) Instead, I will share some news about Harper Collins merging it’s scifi/fantasy/horror imprint (because horror always comes last in that lineup, Grr!) from Harper Eos to Harper Voyager. What this means to the [...]
The Horrors of Formatting
July 30th, 2010 Lorna D. Keach 
(Or, is that 90,000 words in your pocket, or are you just screwing with my head?) I am currently formatting a novel for submission. I want to die. No, seriously—it would be preferable to lay naked, bound and baking under a hot desert sun, with starving vultures pecking incessantly at my midsection in order to [...]
The Horror of Waiting
July 2nd, 2010 Lorna D. Keach 
(Or, the Horrors of the Form Rejection Revisited) I don’t send simultaneous submissions. There are those who will tell you, yes, even though the guidelines say “no simultaneous submissions” professional writers do it anyway—and that’s fine if they want to say that. That’s fine if “professional writers” want to send out the same story to [...]
The Horrors of Electronic Media pt 2
June 11th, 2010 Lorna D. Keach 
(Or, hey, maybe e-media IS that bad…) So, when we last left our intrepid heroes, brand new USB ports were being installed directly into our foreheads. Now that we’re equipped with the latest technology and a new love for electronic media, we’re all going to rush right off and self-publish our books, so we can [...]
The Horrors of Electronic Media, pt 1
June 4th, 2010 Lorna D. Keach 
(Or, hey, e-media’s not that bad…) We’ve all heard it. Soon, we’ll be burying the bloated corpse of print media and reading all our newspapers online, and the internet will plug directly into our skulls to feed us mortgage refinancing commercials while we sleep, et cetera, et cetera… And, truly, it’s a horrifying thought. Every [...]
The Horror of Backups
May 14th, 2010 Lorna D. Keach 
Or, Save Early, Save Often! Sometimes, I suspect my Microsoft Word is possessed by a foul-tempered Taiwanese gremlin. I’ve had too many experiences with glitchy text, overbearing grammar checkers, and tables that move about the page as though they’re self-aware and plotting my destruction. While the program is certainly far better than Corel WordPerfect or [...]
Posted in The Horrors of Horror Writing 
Tags: back up, backups, gremlins, horror, horror fiction, horror writing, lost data, lost writing, Microsoft Word, Papa Legba, writers, writing 
5 Comments »The Horror of Writer’s Doubt
April 23rd, 2010 Lorna D. Keach 
(Or, is that an angry mob in your pocket, or…uh…) Writers have a lot of afflictions to suffer from. We have the commonly known Writer’s Block, the lesser known Writer’s Apathy (when we need to write but kinda don’t want to at the moment), Writer’s Carpel Tunnel, Writer’s Desksores (like bedsores), Writer’s Syphilis…okay, maybe that [...]
