Strange Needs, An Honor to Be Nominated, and the Meaning of Retreat

Posted on March 6, 2018 by Annie Neugebauer

It’s been a little while since I’ve checked in here, because sometimes life grabs your planner and runs away giggling. That and, as I’m sure some of my old regulars know, writing for LitReactor about twice a month and Writer Unboxed every other month (now every three) takes up a lot of my blogging time, so I post here less often. That works out okay, considering personal-level writing blogs seem to be on the downtrend. I won’t fight it, but I do like being able to come here when the urge strikes me and say hi to all my ethernet friends. 😊 (I’ve checked, and at least some of you seem to be made of real skin and not pixels, which is reassuring.)

So before I get into what I’m up to, here are the four posts I’ve had elsewhere since last time (click the images to go to the posts):

Summit Fever is about appreciating the journey of writing instead of constantly striving for goals. Artistic Nemesis is a cheeky but actually pretty useful post about allowing yourself to hate good books. Women in Horror is a totally biased list of kickass ladies you should read (all year round). And the Horror post is a huge, intricate infographic that breaks down everything you’ve ever wanted to know about genre, style, and more; it borrowed hours (okay days) of my life and I don’t even want them back, so I hope you’ll go check it out.

Aside from the occasional blog and infographic and tweet, what have I been up to? Well, I had a pretty intense love affair with Tana French’s books, which are these amazing mystery novels with touches of horror and a whole lot of complex character building. French’s prose is some of the best I’ve read in recent years. I’ve read all there are so far and will preorder the next as soon as I can. My point being, definitely go read those. Probably start with Broken Harbour.

I’ve also been working very hard, quietly, and diligently on my WIPbeast, which is what I’ve nicknamed my seventh novel. Somewhere along the way I actually managed to finish drafting it and tame it into a functional shape, so now I just get to make it pretty. It’s probably my most ambitious project to date, and man am I a person who thrives on a challenge. It’s been a fantastic ride, and I hope I get to tell you about it sooner rather than later.

Notably, this past awards season I was nominated for two different honors. In a super sweet surprise, I was up for the Published Author category of my local community awards, the Denton Arts & Music Awards. And in a huge personal thrill, I was also nominated for a Bram Stoker Award in the Short Fiction category for my story “So Sings the Siren” in Apex Magazine. I think these were my two first nominations, and what a strange and wonderful experience they both were. I didn’t end up winning either of them, but the reality of that gave fresh understanding to the trite old phrase “It’s an honor just to be nominated.”

For the DAM Awards, my first reaction was thrill, followed very quickly by imposter syndrome, followed gradually by genuine delight. I went to the awards ceremony and didn’t win, and it turns out I was just fine with that. I think it’s really cool that someone in my community thought I was worth putting up for the award at all. (I heart my writing community.)

For the Stokers, my first reaction, upon making the preliminary ballot, was… holy shit. Then elation. Then telling myself not to get my hopes up. I mean, real talk, I have always dreamed of winning a Stoker. I knew what the Stokers were before I even knew what the HWA is. My dad used to get his what-to-read-next books from the winners lists. (Which also means many of the books I took from his shelf came from the winners lists.) So when I say I dreamed of winning a Stoker, I really mean, like, long-term dream goal. A someday thing. Maybe in ten, twenty, thirty years I might be in the running for a Stoker. So to be nominated now—well, it’s been the thrill of my career so far. And to make it to the final ballot was way more than I expected, so, yeah, really, it is an honor just to be nominated. The nominees are a swoon-worthy list, one I’m elated to be on. 😊

Now that awards season is over and life has slipped my planner back under the door, I find myself all itchy and antsy. That sense of yearning with no exact object in mind: that happens to me over and over in my life. It expresses itself as wanderlust, as autumn restlessness, as spring impatience, as summer jobs, as poems that burst with need, as feeling called to the ocean in almost mythological proportions. I want, and that wanting has come again. I want spring, and the sea, and my next big project, and deep, sweet things that have no name. Strange needs I can’t name but try to meet anyway.

Something about them, the needs, has had me thinking lately about the meaning of the word retreat. My annual writing retreat with my bestie is coming up—just days away—and I couldn’t be more eager for it. I’m going to use it to dive deep, deep into the WIPbeast and push it towards finished, that good hard work that needs to happen in long chunks rather than short snippets. Concentrated effort. It’s retreat work, and it’s interesting to me how I’ve come to think of that over the past five years of this particular tradition with my friend. What does it mean to retreat? To withdraw, draw back, retire, slink away into privacy and seclusion. All of that to work, uninterrupted, on the art I work on all the time. So it’s actually the opposite of a vacation, where I leave work to enjoy life. In retreat, I leave life to enjoy work.

Retreating is kind of like a second honeymoon with writing. We’re already committed. We already spend most of our time together. But this one trip is extra special. It’ll be fun. It’ll probably be pretty emotional, secretly hard. But if we both put in the time, I’ll leave it feeling recommitted, reinvigorated, and reinspired. To retreat is to renew. It’s to cover a bunch of ground, crank out tons of work, have some fun, get punch drunk, and do deep work that renews all the good things. We don’t retreat from writing; we retreat to writing.

And I am very much looking forward to that.

What have you all been up to? Anyone overdue for a retreat of your own?

Posted in My Process | Leave a comment

Celebrating 2017

Posted on January 4, 2018 by Annie Neugebauer

I love the New Year. Honestly, it’s not so much about the fresh start as it is about the closed cover, the checked marks, the lid snugly fitted on the pot. I like to finish things. I like things tidied up, accounted for, and filed away. That’s my nature. So while, yes, a fresh start looks awfully pretty, for me it’s less about the opportunity to change things and start over than it is the reminder to pause and look back. It’s time to appreciate, reflect, and let go.

So I’m looking back on 2017, trying to get the taste of the year as a whole.

A couple days ago on the 31st, I sat down with my brand new planner all spread out with stickers and pens as per my annual tradition. (Yes, bask in my nerdom; isn’t it glorious?) I love filling out my new planner with all I know so far: birthdays, plans, trips, appointments. And I love filing away my old planner, all stuffed full and marked up. One of the final things I do with it is total my word count for the year. A few weeks before the end of the year I let myself get a preliminary total just from curiosity, and I was at 216,000. I was pleasantly surprised by that, especially considering that (unlike 2016, my year of 1k a day) I was not trying to get tons of words in 2017. No concrete daily goals, nothing. I was just working.

A month of thinking my total would be at least 220k, my best year yet, and then I counted up the year. 196,500.

3,500 words short of a nice even 200k, and thousands less than I’d counted. (And I still don’t know how I miscounted that first time, or maybe even if I missed recording some words somehow.) Not gonna lie to y’all: I cried. I was so disappointed. I knew it was stupid even as I was crying, but I felt how I felt. I know that 200,000 is an arbitrarily even number and doesn’t mean anything. I know that 196,500 is a fantastic word count. I wasn’t even trying for high words this year; my intent was to focus on the work and not the numbers—which I did beautifully until I saw 216k and got all happy about it. If I’d never had that number, I would’ve been content with my 196k.

The thing is, my job is so intangible. It’s a privilege to be able to write full time; don’t think I don’t know that. But it’s also really hard to work my ass off all the time and have so little concrete product to show for it. I don’t get a regular paycheck, and the income I do make is meager. Word count is one of the most concrete things I have to point to (for myself; no one is demanding this but me) to say, Look how much I’ve done.

Clearly this is an opportunity to get a better perspective and grow. I know. I knew it even as I was being all disappointed.

The next day, January 1, I did my traditional ordering of the year’s financials. (Again, glorious nerdom; try not to swoon.) For several years now I’ve used New Year’s Day to get all of my writing receipts and records in order so that taxes will go smoothly. And I am about to try to sell you here, but I swear every word of this is true: my traditional largest-chunk-of-the-day tidying has whittled itself down to ten minutes thanks to my Writing Expense and Income Tracking Spreadsheet. Yes, I use my own resource. And yes, it works really freaking beautifully. I opened it to delete the rows I never used and input my utility bills for my office portion of the house. That was it. It took ten minutes. Tradition happily spoiled.

[Even more blatant selling pitch: I love my spreadsheet so much, and believe in it so genuinely, that I’m offering a New Year’s discount for writers who want to start their own. You can use it year after year. Enter the coupon code New2018 to get $3 off, which means it’ll be 6 bucks. Steal.]

So anyway, I finished up my financials for 2017 and found one happy surprise: I’m in the black this year. I’ve made income for several years now, but by the time I deduct every last work expense allowed to me (retreats and conferences and printer paper and website hosting, etc.), I’ve always ended up technically in the red, even if it’s just a little. This year I’m in the black, and that gives me something tangible I can point to.

I made this family $32.07. 😀

Joking aside, it does feel good to have some concrete stuff. I also took a good hour or so making a big list of work things I did in 2017, which I’ll share here for anyone to skim or pick through if they’re interested in catching up (but feel free to skip down if you’ve been following me already):

I admit, I felt surprised by the time I’d finished that list. I did much more than I’d felt like I did. And when I went through my Joy Jar, I realized why:

It’s because day after day, week after week, month after month, I showed up. I did the work. I made the effort. Even when it didn’t feel good, when the work was slow or hard or crappy, I showed up. And that’s why, piece by tiny piece, I was able to cobble together a year worth making a list about. I’m proud of that. I wish it didn’t take a New Year’s list for me to be proud.

Which brings me to my resolution for 2018: I’m going to celebrate more.

Most writers don’t share the bad news. It’s not good business to share every rejection we get, each time we’re heartbreakingly close, each time we have to scrap or trunk or overhaul a thing we love. But this job is filled with more nos than yeses. I promise you, no matter how successful the writers you follow, they have heartbreak and trial and rejection going on behind the scenes—probably much more of it than the good stuff you get to hear about.

I have a tendency not to want to share my good stuff too much because I’m afraid people will feel like I’m misrepresenting the bigger picture—or worse, bragging. That’s bullshit. I know it’s bullshit, and I’ve already been working on it, but this year I’m going to work on it with more intention. I shouldn’t feel like I need to apologize for landing an amazing story publication or being endorsed by someone I admire or working my ass off to get an ambitious novel written. Each announcement doesn’t need to come with a humility caveat. I should just be happy, and share it, and let the people who want to be happy with me be happy with me. (And the others, well…)

So I will, and I hope you will too. I love to be happy with you all as well.

What do you have to celebrate from 2017? Have you named a resolution for 2018?

Posted in Personal | Tagged | 10 Comments

How to Have the Witchiest Halloween Ever (Plus Our Winner!)

Posted on October 31, 2017 by Annie Neugebauer

Happy Halloween!!

We have a winner of the #BooksBrewBoo giveaway. The lucky little goblin who will be receiving a Starbucks gift card + creepy poetry anthology is:

Traci Kenworth!

Congratulations, Traci!

I’ll be off soon to cavort with bats and sweet-talk cats, but first I wanted to share with you guys one last how-to: how to have the witchiest Halloween ever.

Click photos to enlarge!

Start early. (Witches plan ahead.) Two and half months before Halloween begins, find the coolest, quirkiest, most amazing witch hat ever and fall in love, deciding then and there that you’ll be a witch this year.

At the very, very earliest we-are-really-stretching-it-here-let’s-be-honest-it’s-basically-just-pretend hint of autumn, snuggle in with your crafting bestie and decide you’re going to make a witch book. Upon deciding what exactly it will be/look like, brainstorm so many cool ideas that the project quickly expands to become an entire grimoire of witch books, plural, that will fill your mantel. Go overboard. (Witches go overboard.)

Spend many hours over the next free evenings and cozy Sundays crafting strange, beautiful, macabre books befitting the finest witch.

Start dreaming about what else will go on the mantel with them.

Become bewitched by an enormous, shockingly well-priced black tulle skirt online. Order it.

When a few of mushrooms pop up in your yard after a heavy rain, pluck them and hang them from twine in the back of your closet to dry for the next month and a half, figuring you can do something cool with them. (You’re definitely right.) Likewise, save the dead, blackened flower heads from those potted plants you accidentally murdered. (Woops.) Dry them too.

On October first, pull out all your decorations and have at it. Begin pulling things from around your house that look particularly witchy.

When the weather actually gets cool, go for a walk and commune with nature. Find those weird green bois d’arc fruits you’ve always been secretly smitten with. When your husband gets home, tell him you’re going to get witch apples. Laugh when he doesn’t even question you (go ahead and fall in love with him a little bit more, as you do), just picks you up and drives you with your cauldron to the spot you found them, where you gather a potful like a sneaky little thief.

Marvel at the kismet of washing your old green drinking glass that’s been in the guest shower for years, unused, at the same time that you find the tiny baby doll your dad once hung in fake spider web as a macabre Halloween decoration. Realize said baby doll fits uncannily under the glass, which happens to be the perfect shade of green. Assure your husband that it is not, in fact, watching him every time he walks across the room.

Convince your besties that your skirt, which has arrived in fluffy, splendiferous glory, is too amazing, and that it simply must be photographed on a very cold night as sunset turns to dusk to night. Bring a cape you made on a whim one evening from sheer curtains you’ve had folded in a box for five years. Get weird. Get witchy. Get scary. Touch the moon. Keep some secrets. Laugh a lot. Come away with dozens of super amazing photos, because your friends are the best friends.

Play an ongoing game of hide-the-severed-foot with your husband. Be hilariously surprised when it shows up, complete with cleaver, in your sock drawer, under the bed, inside his boot…

Arrange your mantel. Gather some of the already-cut vines from your garden and let them creep from the shadows of your grimoire. Light your candles, cast your spell, throw some glow on it.

Have over unsuspecting victims friends and enjoy a night of magnificent revelry.

Rest up. Enjoy your witch nails for three more days.

Spend a quiet, nigh-holy night reading spooky, lovely things. Stop often to smell the air, to write a poem, to dance in the moonlight. Hand out poison apples candy to tricky little children brave enough to approach your cottage, where they’re greeted by your two familiars, eyes aglow.

Stay up until the witching hour, then fall asleep one content little witch.

Have the happiest Halloween.

Posted in Just for Fun | Tagged | 6 Comments

The Shed

Posted on October 24, 2017 by Annie Neugebauer

It’s the 24th; do you know what that means? We’re right on the cusp of Halloweek! That’s right, you have one week left to comment, share, and love on my happiest month for your chance to win a free Starbucks giftcard + a spooky book in my #BooksBrewBoo giveaway! That’s a win for both of us!

Since Apex’s Undead anthology hasn’t come out quite in time for me to post a video reading of my poem (look for it next month!), I’ve decided today to reprint my poem “The Shed” that appeared in last year’s HWA Poetry Showcase Volume III by the Horror Writers Association. This year’s volume, by the way, is one of your prize options if you win! It’s on the right, below, in a satisfying chain of slim paperbacks full of bite:

“The Shed” is actually one of my favorites, so I’m happy to be sharing it here today. I hope you enjoy!

The Shed

The lawn lays wide
and bright with yellow
sunshine, spread flat
with no corners,

except the shed.

The shed’s paint is pale
but dull, as if the owners
who inherited it
thought the best
they could do was make it
“blend in.” And it does,
for a second

until your eyes catch
the black rectangle
of the haphazardly open doors
stuck in their tracks
gummed up with debris putrefied
to the same color of black,
jarring in all that wide bright.

And you try not to picture what lies in there
what things might collect and colonize in a structure
so low and squat,
but there you go picturing centipedes
and scorpions, spiders and weevils, snakes and rats,
and other, darker things that can’t be
—can’t possibly be in that shed—yet there
you go picturing them: tentacles from corners
and tall, pale men standing against the walls,
and chittering, creeping things that slide down off the ceiling and
open your doors at night, when they can’t be seen,
but then, then, that’s not the most disturbing
part of that old shed.

The most disturbing part is how the structure itself seems sly and sentient with its thin metal walls propped like foldable gills, with its near-flat little roof peaking subtly like an eyebrow, how its rotted wood floors lie in panels, like they could all be rolled back like a tongue shoving food to the gullet, how that open rectangle of black at the doors sits still, patiently, waiting, and how eventually, when this moment of feverish imagination has regressed under the rightful armor of adulthood and you have nearly forgotten all about it (nearly),
you will have to go inside it.

© Annie Neugebauer, 2016

Finally, a reminder to enter, enter, enter! Mix and match at will; here’s a list of all the easy ways you can be entered to win a book + brew:

Thanks to everyone who’s been helping spread my news this month! The winner is coming in a week!

Posted in My Works | Tagged | 9 Comments

IT the Movie vs. the Book

Posted on October 17, 2017 by Annie Neugebauer

Today, by request (thanks, Jay Lemming!), I’m going to give my review of the move It. But first, I’d like to draw your attention to my three newest treats:

First, if you haven’t already, I really hope you’ll go read my story “So Sings the Siren” in Apex Magazine Issue 101. It’s free on their website now, and at just over 1,000 words is a quick read. It does come with a trigger warning; it’s not for the faint of heart, but it’s horror that means something. And Apex picking it up means a lot to me, as does this story itself. It’s straight from my dark little heart. So if you enjoy it, please share it with anyone you know who might enjoy it too. <3

Second, this year’s edition of the Horror Writers Association Poetry Showcase—Volume IV—is out now! I’m pleased to have a poem in this one for the fourth consecutive year. “Unravel” is an unsettling horror love poem. Yes, you read that right. 😉 You can order a copy of this year’s showcase in paperback for $7.99 or as an ebook for $2.99. This is also one of the potential prizes included in this year’s #BooksBrewBoo! (Which is still going on, by the way! Commenting on this post enters you to win, as do all of the helpful options at the bottom of this post. Entries have slowed down mid-month, so please share if you can; you have a good chance of winning!)

Third, my next LitReactor post is out today, so be sure to check out “13 Halloween Themed Anthologies to Fill Your Season with Fright.” (Note: this is also an eligible entry for #BooksBrewBoo.)

Okay, on to It!

What did I think of the movie It? I was disappointed. I thought it had a lot going for it: fantastic acting by the children, beautiful production value, and a powerful nostalgia factor. It was charming to see the kids interact, and refreshing to hear them curse like kids really do. If it had been its own creation and not a movie with source material and a previous version, I might’ve liked it a lot. Unfortunately, those are the facts of this film.

One of my most popular blog posts ever has been this one: “Thoughts on IT by Stephen King, What it Takes to Enjoy Horror, and Why I Write It.” In it I talk about that infamous novel and why I love it despite its flaws: it’s truly scary. The biggest reason I love King is his understanding of fear. Creating fear in readers means understanding its sources, not just what’s scary, but why. In my opinion, King is the master of that. It serves as a case in point: it’s the only novel to give me a nightmare as an adult. That’s powerful stuff.

Modern horror movies are a mixed bag—as are all movies in every time period—but one thing they widely have down incredibly well is the fear factor. Is it a deep-seated, insidious fear that sticks with us the way the best horror novels do? Very rarely. Still, it’s incredibly effective in the moment. I feel unnerved, tense, scared, or outright terrified at at least half of the horror movies I bother seeing in theater these days. (Which, admittedly, weeds out the ones so obviously bad I don’t bother.)

So It, a movie based on one of the scariest novels of all time, made during the height of scary movie techniques, was poised to be a homerun, right?

Not for me. I was never scared during the movie. Not once. Not even a little. And you guys, I scare easy. Given the promises of Pennywise and Co., to me that’s a pretty serious fail. I don’t even know how they managed to do it. How did such a high budget, well-made production like this fail on its obvious primary objective?

I’m not a movie-maker, so there are probably subtleties I missed, but I can tell you that from a horror creator’s perspective, they didn’t understand their fear-maker. Pennywise is insidious in the books because he gets to the root of each kid’s fears. He sneaks, he slithers, he stalks. He doesn’t show his face much. That makes him scarier, because it makes him unknown. We’re afraid of the unknown; we project our worst fears into it. King understood that. The movie doesn’t.

Pennywise in this film gets almost as much air time as the actual kids. He’s there all the time. Jeeze, P, give us a chance to miss you. Although visually gorgeous in a photoshoot way, Pennywise’s costuming is way off the mark here. Clowns are inherently creepy because they fall into the uncanny valley. They’re supposed to look happy but they don’t quite. They unnerve us because we almost see the person beneath the grotesquely exaggerated makeup. We want to focus on their jovial demeanor but the unknown (ah, see there?) person beneath keeps peering through the façade. A stranger. Dangerous.

But It’s Pennywise looks like he could only be in a horror movie. Even a kid as young as Georgie would know on sight that this is an evil, scary thing. If that’s chasing you down the street you might—might—have an argument for overt creepiness being more effective. But if that’s luring you into a storm drain, it’s no contest: subtle wins. If it’s subtle, you can understand why a kid might fall for it. If you understand, it means you can imagine it. If you can imagine it, it means it could happen to you. Fear.

Back to back you can really see the difference. The first is from the original movie, of course, and not the book, but it’s one thing the original got right in a big way.

I have lots of nitpicks of the movie, but my post can only go on so long. The main issue for me is the fear factor. The other is the overall tone. I know they were trying to cash in on Stranger Things’ nostalgia boom with the feel-good childhood mojo and shifting the original 50’s setting into the 80’s, but for me they leaned too heavily into that happy sweet side of things. I love a goodhearted movie, but not when the book has such a dark heart. A little nostalgia sugar would’ve been enough. And although I’m glad they changed that unsuccessful and highly disturbing sewer orgy, I don’t think a literal group hug was the way to do it. (And that’s not a sentence I ever imagined I’d type. Life is weird.)

A lack of fright and a lack of nihilism? Doesn’t sound like King to me. So maybe It is a good movie, but for a book fan like me, it was rather disappointing.

Finally, a reminder to enter, enter, enter! I want to give you guys some yummy coffee and a spooky book this Halloween. Here’s a list of all the easy ways you can be entered to win, for a total of 13 entries! You can:

Thanks everyone, and good luck!

Have you seen IT? What did you think?

Posted in Books & Movies | Tagged | 20 Comments