Release Date: 14/01/13
Publisher: Writers Digest
SYNOPSIS:
Take your first draft from so-so to sold! You've finished the first draft of your novel-congratulations! Time to have a drink, sit back...and start revising. But the revision process doesn't have to be intimidating. Revision and Self-Editing for Publication, Second Edition gives you the tools and advice you need to transform your first draft into a finished manuscript that agents and editors will fight for. Inside you'll find:
Self-editing techniques for plot, structure, character, theme, voice, and more that can be applied as you're writing to reduce your revision workload.
Methods for fine-tuning your first draft into a tight, well-developed piece of literature.
The Ultimate Revision Checklist, which seamlessly guides you through the revision process, step by step.
New Chapter! Exercises and techniques for "deepening" your work to engage and excite readers like never before.
Whether you're writing a novel currently or have finished the first draft, Revision and Self-Editing for Publication, Second Edition will give you the guidance you need to revise your manuscript into a novel ready to be sold.
REVIEW:
OK, you’ve spent quite a bit of time writing your first draft. Congratulate yourself, you’ve achieved something really special here, but lets face it, you know that you’re going to have to go through it and start editing to make it not only better but slicker. It’s a tricky conundrum about what to keep, what to cut and what to rewrite but you know what, this book is there to help.
It gives great advice, some wonderful techniques and aids you to polish the manuscript so that it shines. It’s a tool that the writer really does need and whilst you can pay out for an expert to do it, in my opinion its always best to tackle a lot of it yourself so that you get used to having things done without getting too upset. It also demonstrates that you’re willing to put in the time to make sure that your book is the best it can be. All round a great little item.
Release Date: 30/11/12
Publisher: Writers Digest
SYNOPSIS:
The Writer's Lab provides writers, journalers, and creatives (anyone with a desire to write, really) with a medium for playing around with prose, poetry, etc. There are no rules here - only creative prompts and plenty of room for writing, sketching, diagramming, and planning stories, essays, and more. The "Lab" is loaded with fun exercises that foster creativity and a love of writing, along with space to experiment with your craft and improve it. Want to plot a murder? You can do that here. Create the cast of characters for your next novel? There's room for that. Feel like designing your own planet? Try page 144. In the Lab, you can play, experiment, and explore the nuances of fiction without having to create anything more challenging than a page or two of content. It can be picked up or put down on impulse, available to inspire creative thinking and offer pure joy on demand.
REVIEW:
Sometimes you have an idea that just forms and the inner writer just can’t help but sit down and get on with this epic project that your muse is forcing you to create with her point blank shotgun. Other times you want to sit down and relax to write something but cannot for the life of you think what you want to do.
At times like this, you need to reach for this book, it has a lot of questions and exercises that get your inner writer moving which not only helps you ask the right (or write) questions but gives you a whole host of new idea’s to explore as well as helping you improve the skills that you’re developing. It’s a great little tool and to be honest when dressed up in the fun way that they’ve done with this feels more like taking a break than doing any real work. All round a cracking title and one I’ll use each time I get stuck. Great stuff.
Release Date: 27/05/12
SYNOPSIS:
"How to Blog a Book" teaches aspiring authors to create a blogged book with a well-honed and uniquely angled subject, targeted posts, and a readership large enough to get noticed by an agent or a publisher. It explains how writing a book in Cyberspace allows writers to get their book written easily while promoting it and building an author's platform at the same time. Readers will find: basic information on how to set up a blog and the essential plug-ins and other options necessary; steps for writing a book easily from scratch using blog posts; advice on how to write blog posts; tips on gaining visibility or promoting the blogged book on line and off; tools for driving traffic to a blog; information on how to monetize an existing blog into a book or other information products; and, profiles with authors who received blog-to-book deals.
REVIEW:
I’m always interested in taking the next step with writing and in a time where getting a contract is not only difficult but the author is expected to do a lot of marketing on their own, its always helpful to find ways to help get the message out there.
Whilst this title by Nina is mainly about writing a book in instalments and placing it on the web, it does carry a lot of useful advice for the writer on how to get themselves noticed as well as building up a regular readership, creating a demand for your work. The tips feel useful, the concept wonderfully explained within and when added to a friendly writing style (as if the author was giving you the inside scoop) really gives you a great beginning to get started.
It won’t tell you how to write the story (after all that’s a different kettle of fish altogether) but getting yourself out there and helping get a web presence alongside working on other essential author survival tools really helps you get that start you’re looking for.
Release Date: 03/11/11
SYNOPSIS:
How To Be a Writer is a comprehensive guide to the career of writing from experienced writer and creative writing tutor Sally O'Reilly. The book will cover questions such as: If you want to be a writer, should you invest in a creative writing course? If so, which one? Are writing groups a good thing? What grants, awards and prizes are available to the aspiring writer? How should you plan your career in the long term? It will also feature an introduction from Fay Weldon - 'Why I wish I'd read this book when I was 25' - and will include comments and case studies from other established authors, agents and industry experts. How To Be a Writer will include everything that a writer needs to know about running their own career, from choosing an agent to cafe scribbling, and from filing a tax return to flirting with the literati and it will be an essential reference book for any author who takes their work seriously.
REVIEW:
OK this book is a little different to a lot of the books out there as rather than deal with getting that first book done, what this concentrates on mainly is building your career as a writer from networking to contracts, from PR to the Perils and Pitfalls as well as giving you the reality check about how to make your finances stretch.
It’s well written, the author clearly knows what they’re talking about and it’s a book that helps people take that next step into a world that is not only cold and harsh but one that many have had to learn the hard way in how to survive almost as if writing that first book plunges them into the middle of the ocean with sharks waiting for that buffet bell to ring. It’s a similar circumstance as it’s a sink or swim usually and the ones that you tend to hear about are the survivors rather than those who fell foul.
Add to this a book that is broken down into manageable chunks and a style that is friendly as well as informative and its almost as if you’ve been kitted out with that special survival training that you’re going to need. All round, for me, this is a great book and whilst I’m yet to be published it’s a title that gives me area’s to focus on to help improve areas of my craft that I haven’t even thought about. Solid, helpful and a title that I think a great many writers will find useful.
Release Date: 26/05/11
SYNOPSIS:
Novel writing is a popular hobby and this book will provide the would-be and starter novelist with all the tools needed to get started. This title includes a thorough grounding in essential fiction writing skills and clear guidance on how to get published from top industry names.
It provides a complete glossary of terms and listing of all publishing contacts needed by an author, from book publishers and agents to festivals and online links. It includes tremendous resource of instruction and information that will prove invaluable to the armies of would-be and practising novel writers.
REVIEW:
The creation of a novel is something that many of us would love to do. Yet where do you start as there’s so many different methods out here and not everyone will work for you. What this title does is take you by the hand and introduce you to the basics from getting down and persevering with your script right the way through to the later stages such as submitting and who to submit too. Whilst in some respects it a more slim line version of the Writer’s Digest Writers Market it does offer some solid advice that works extremely well for the UK market.
All in a decent book that will help you more in the later stages rather than the early ones but the motivation is there to help get you started in the first place. Decent enough although I’d say that this title is more a companion to another title such as Writing the Paranormal Romance (or a title specific to the genre you wish to write in) rather than a pure standalone.
Release Date: 25/03/11
SYNOPSIS:
Writing a paranormal novel(those with ghosts, telepaths, vampires, werewolves, fairies, witches and more) takes more than tossing in a sexy vampire or adding a magic wand. It takes an original idea, believable characters, a compelling plot, surprising twists, and great writing.
Broken down into four parts, Writing the Paranormal Novel explores:
Prewriting - what a paranormal book is, how to choose supernatural elements, deciding what impact the supernatural will have on your fictional world, research tips, and how to deal with cliches;
Paranormal Character Building - techniques for creating different types of supernatural protagonists and antagonists, supporting players, and - of course - the non-human;
World Building - developing a strong plot and complementary subplots, controlling pacing, writing fight scenes and flashbacks, using dialogue, and much more;
Submitting - tips for preparing your work for submission, polishing sample chapters, and more.
REVIEW:
As a part time writer I do spend a certain amount of my free time going through advice titles to make sure that area’s that I know I’m weak within I can improve not only through hard work but through words of wisdom from people who have trodden the same path before.
In this title by Steven Harper you get a lot of advice pertaining to the Paranormal novel and whether you like the elements or Kelley Armstrong’s Werewolves or you want Stacia Kane’s Ghosts or even perhaps the Wizarding world of JKR or Jim Butcher it helps you identify what you need to do in order to keep the rules constant so that the book wouldn’t be one singular element or character to place it within the genre.
What really works for the majority of these books from the Writers Digest, in my opinion, is the fact that they’re written clearly, they have some great pieces of advice that can take years to learn and even the pieces you do do well can be improved and worked upon almost as if you were creating a mural with words as your paint.
Finally add to this helpful information for what some would term as standard writing practices such as character growth alongside dialogue and it’s a book that has taught me more than a few lessons as well as giving me a greater understanding for why some of the writing I do works well whilst others don’t.
Release Date: 18/01/11
SYNOPSIS:
Writing for children is fun and rewarding - if you can break into the fiercely competitive world of children's book publishing. With The Everything Guide to Writing Children's Books, 2nd Edition readers learn how to write and promote a children's book that will impress any publisher. Whether writers have a basic idea or manuscript ready to go, they'll need to build a successful career as a children's book author. This clear and concise guide helps readers: formulate an original idea, create an outline, and write the book; learn the basics of children's storytelling, from point of view to story pacing; find helpful writing workshops and conferences; design a winning book proposal, get an agent, and negotiate a contract; create a marketing a publicity plan; and, use professional and social networking sites to promote their book. Full of eye-opening insider information and invaluable writing advice, this book should be on every aspiring author's bookshelf. It features: advice on how to protect your work, and to gradually build up confidence; updated information on using the internet to promote yourself as a writer (blogs, websites, professional networking sites, social networking sites); information on M.F.A. programs, both traditional residency and brief-residency, with writing for children tracks; and, details of the YA phenomena, including Harry Potter and Twilight.
REVIEW:
To be honest with you, I’ve read writing guides on everything from novels to dialogue, from pacing to specific genres yet I’ve never looked at one before that deals with young adult. Whilst my own preferred writing method is more for the picture book side of things, this title has a lot to offer. After all there’s a hell of a lot of information out there but it can be confusing as well as misleading, so having a title to help hold your hand is a great thing.
Not only does this title deal with finding the right type of Young Adult Literature for you to write but also gives you advice on what your title needs to contain for the relevant age group. Back that up with some help on obtaining an agent, query letters alongside how to make the most of self-marketing and web presence and you can see that this is a title that could be worth its weight, especially when you back that up with the authors friendly voice to help encourage you.
All in a descent book and one that whilst perhaps not pertinent to all writers is one that can definitely help point you in the right direction which whilst focuses purely on the US market doesn’t make the advice incompatible to the UK one as the advice is pretty universal. Finally add to this some advice on your writers writes and it’s a title that is worth the read if only to help point out some floors in your master plan.
Here's a new feature that we're introducing this year, guest posts by friends of the blog. Here, in the debut, is a post by our friend Diane Girard, writer and observationist...
I enjoy reading and writing personal essays. If your only experience with the essay format was writing the academic essay during your school years, then you could discover that reading a personal essay or perhaps writing one, is not at all boring. It can be fun and even, dare I say it, enlightening. Imagine that! And allow me to tell you why I believe it.
Fortunately, especially for writers like me, a personal essay need not adhere to a strict format. To quote Wikipedia, the source of many definitions, both dubious and correct, “the definition of a personal essay is vague.” Although like any other piece of writing, it should have a subject, thoughts about the subject and an ending, there is room for opinion and for tangential thoughts. It can even include an aside like this one:
My earliest memory of writing an essay for school is not pleasant. We were charged with the task of writing about our summer vacations and I did. Unfortunately, I did it so well that the teacher assumed my mother had written it and she blessed my words with an F.
Personal essays can include anecdotes and mini-stories that illustrate the subject and allow the readers to draw their own conclusions and very occasionally, because it wouldn’t be wise to do it often, they might point gently toward a moral. I use anecdotes frequently and readers tell me they enjoy them.
The focus of a piece can be as small as what kind of pajamas you prefer. In the winter, I like flannelette ones and I have written about them and other types of lingerie, in Keep Those Paws off My Pajamas. Or, the focus can be on something that most people have experienced, or will experience; like the possibly negative effects of gym membership, which I attempted to explain in Fitness Follies: My Life at the Gym. (These essays and others appear on www.seniorwomen.com.)
There is really no limit to what you can write about, provided you are not the only person who would be interested in your thoughts. I’ve considered serious subjects like greed, (the stock market fiasco and the desire for higher and higher returns on money), Canada’s decision not to participate in the Iraq war, and Remembrance Day among other topics.
Since most personal essays are not very long, they do not require the months, and in some cases years of concentration that are required to write a novel. And, if you have are opinionated -- I’ll bet you are -- you have an opportunity to present your personal view on a topic of your choice.
I’ve found it’s the concrete details that make words come to life and since the personal essay is a form of creative non-fiction, an occasional slight exaggeration of the facts is permissible and sometimes more humorous than the literal truth.
I should also tell you that there are a lot of markets for personal essays. You’ll see them on the Op Ed pages of newspapers, in magazines and journals, and collected in books. Although I haven’t worked hard at marketing my essays (I’m lazy) and I don’t write tons of them, they have been published in diverse places including Adbusters Magazine, The Western Producer (newspaper) The Waterloo Record (newspaper) and my blog at http://upwritewoman.blogspot.com/
So, if you are tempted to write one, read some: you can find them everywhere, and then take the plunge. The water is warm and full of other friendly swimmers. Have fun.
Release Date: 30/04/10
BOOK BLURB:
The Writer's Market Guide to Getting Published, 3rd Edition , with its insider advice from successful authors and editors, gives readers a professional overview of what it takes to get their work out into the marketplace, get it published, and get paid for it. Topics featured in this book include: state of the publishing industry information; inspirational instruction to get readers motivated and writing; research strategies and interviewing techniques; tips on selling magazine articles, nonfiction books, novels, scripts, and more; instruction on self-publishing and print-on-demand options; and, cutting edge marketing and publicity guidance.
REVIEW:
Whilst having recently spent time reading titles that purport to help the author write a better novel, I’ve finally come across a guide that not only helps, but explains the various steps from finding out whether your talent lies more with magazines or with novels. Beautifully laid out, easy to follow and above all else lessons that can take years to master but presented in such a way that its easy to follow, easy to understand the goal and of course helping you find that special something deep within.
BOOK BLURB:
This thoughtful new writing resource breaks down the fiction writer's process into four levels: soul, substance, structure, and style, and shows how misunderstandings at any of these levels can result in failure, and that the key to success lies in avoiding such misunderstandings. The book explores such topics as melodrama and violence, the use of autobiographical elements, plot, point of view, character development, false starts, flashbacks, suspense, symbolism, metaphors, tone, overwriting, and more. 150 to Save a Novel offers technical solutions while simultaneously helping writers to think more deeply, more wisely, and more carefully about their choices, big and small, so they make the right choices - the choices that will result in a work of art.
REVIEW:
As an amateur writer (or rather scribbler in my case) I’m always looking for ways to try and fix the problems that I’ve hit in order to get that mythical beast, a finished first draft. So when this offering came my way I felt that I’d have a chance to see where I’ve not only made a hodge podge of the situation but to see about ways to not only patch the error but move the overall story forward.
Unfortunately what this title has to offer really isn’t what you’d expect, it felt more like a title that is being used to allow the author the chance to privately have a dig at a lot of successful authors as well as mock their writing style. Not only did this “writer” proceed to tell everyone exactly what the successful tales have done wrong but told the reader what rule’s they’ve broken and why the title isn’t really literature. The author in my opinion is unfair in their judgement and just because the things that these others have done isn’t exactly text book, writing a novel isn’t either. It’s something that has to be done by the individual and done so that what they end up with is the type of tale that they love to read.
All in all this title was less than helpful and I personally felt it was a case of sour grapes and the old adage of those who can’t, teach.
BOOK BLURB:
The Writing & Critique Group Survival Guide presents the best way to create a respectful, productive writing or critique group, discussing all the important details of finding a group, running a critique meeting, and building a group that will evolve with its members. Each chapter, whether discussing plot or character or voice, teaches the writer how to read for a critique, learn from criticism, organize and prioritise feedback, revise based on the specific feedback they receive, and more. This title is perfect for writers and creative-writing students.
REVIEW:
Whilst some would say that the sheer volume of reading that I do is to big to count, I tend to utilise it as a lot of research to learn what not only works within the writing world for me, but also to learn what I didn’t like and thus learn lessons from within. Currently I’m going to be looking into creating some basic tales to learn the background but in order to grow as a writer you have to not only submit pieces but learn how to take critism without turning into the Incredible Hulk. (A lesson that a number of established authors are still learning the hard way.)
What this book will do is help you to find the right (or perhaps write) group for you to submit pieces to, how to critique others pieces and how to take what they’ve got to say about your own. It’s a minefield out there so its always a tricky ground to walk. This book is really an invaluable guide to a newbie as well as one that will help others to learn how to improve some of their already established skills and has something for every writer within. A good title and one that will invariably have the reader flicking from time and again into its pages for a touch of inspiration or to relearn the odd lesson.
BOOK BLURB:
How do you write about characters who are nothing like you? If you haven't experienced what your characters have experienced, if you don't think the way they think, how do you successfully get inside their heads and portray them as real people whom readers would want to know? "Breathing Life Into Your Characters" has the answers to these questions. Author and psychotherapist Rachel Ballon shows you how to mine your characters' backstories; use transactional analysis for more complex characters; understand the correlation between needs, motivation and emotions; create characters different from yourself; understand a character's internal and external struggles; provide your character with an emotional transformation; understand the influence of a dysfunctional family dynamic; unravel natural defensive mechanisms; and, much, much more.REVIEW:
This title is one that I’ve had to take a lot of time to review. As an amateur writer I look to find ways in which I can improve my writing and as such saw this title as a good way to get to know my characters a bit better. One of the reasons its taken so long for me to get this review done was the fact that I wanted to complete each of the exercises within and as such have found that I do have a clearer understanding as well as backstory for the vast majority. It’s a great exercise so when I come to write the full tale (which I can now expand to a series now) I feel that I’ll have something that is not only realistic in certain ways but fully rounded characters for the reader to love or hate. It takes a lot of time to establish this but when you get the hang the files that you end up with really do make them something special and more tangible. Definitely a writing book that I’m going to recommend to others even if its just to complete one or two parts so that they can find that inner voice.
Hail Mighty Readers,
As many visitors to the blog tend to be authors-in-waiting, we like every so often to bring you things such reviews on help books to aid you get that better deal, along with interviewing authors about thier work to see if that one little glimmer that they found matches the one that you've got safely stashed in that secret nook or cranny that your just waiting for that special time to unveil.Here our friends at St Martins Press and Zeitghost wanted us to let you see how Christopher Ransom went about it and kindly passed on, in his own words, how he was influenced and set about his first novel. He'd also like to hear about your own Supernatural Happenings and Ghost Stories at his blog here. So for you delectation we proudly present Chris's Something Birthed This Way Comes, in his own unedited words...Sometime around 1979, my father announced to my older brother Mike and me that he had installed a PIRATE ANTENNAE, so we could now watch HBO for free! ‘But don't tell anybody,’ he warned us. ‘It's sort of illegal. And your mom will probably give me hell about it.’ In an effort to get the most out of his purloined ‘cable’ service, Dad's policy on what the kids were allowed to watch was, shall we say, lax. Following this domestic technology revolution, we Ransom boys were exposed to Richard Pryor: Live in Concert, Alien, Urban Cowboy, My Bodyguard, Jaws, The Blue Lagoon, Kramer Vs. Kramer, Convoy, Hooper, Alice, Sweet Alice, The Elephant Man, and Dressed To Kill among many others.Fighting. Drinking. Cussing. Cars and stunts. Guns and knives and blood. Monsters and human monsters, aka crazy people, and, when you were really lucky, naked breasts. I remember looking at my brother in the dark, our eyes this wide, sending each other the same message – Can you believe Dad's letting us watch this? and, Don't you dare tell Mom, you little shit!There were a lot of pirated movies. But the one that really stands out for me is, of course, The Shining. I don't remember much about that Saturday night. Just that there was very little talking going on while we watched.The little boy running in the snow in that maze. And the cackling woman in the bathtub. And the twin girls in the hallway. And the axe landing in that man's chest, and the geysers of maroon-black blood that flowed from the elevator.This was 1981 or so.I was nine. Then came Cujo, on the eve of my 6th grade year. I saw that little summer surprise in the movie theater. Twice. A few months later I was strolling through the book fair being held in our elementary school cafeteria when I stumbled across a little paperback. Had the same cover art as the movie poster. Ominous farmhouse in the background, the white picket fence with Cujo spelled out in dripping bloody letters. ‘Now There’s a New Name for Terror’ it said, and there was, but it wasn't Cujo. The name was . . . well, you all know the name, don't you? A light went off in my eleven-year-old brain. I'd seen the movie. Now I could read the book and do it all over again, everyday for optional reading time!Okay. My parents were divorced. They were not wealthy. Their friends were contractors, teachers, barbers, realtors, lawyers, and gas station men. Some of these people had problems that even an eleven-year-old could see. In short, I knew people like the Trentons and the Cambers, the white and blue-collar families in Cujo. I recognized them. I knew my parents loved me very much, like the Trentons loved their boy Tad. But sometimes life throws you a rabid dog. We had been through rough times, but we'd been lucky so far. I hadn't been trapped in a car for three days, dying of thirst while under attack by man's best friend.Not long after cracking the opening chapters of Cujo, my 6th grade teacher Mrs. Schrag, a good teacher who could go from motherly sweet to drill sergeant stern in about half a second, interrupted optional reading time and called me to her desk. I went to her, holding Cujo in my hand.‘Christopher,’ she said, her brow hunching steeply. ‘That book you're reading.’‘Yeah?’‘That's a Stephen King book.’ A new name for terror, indeed. ‘Are you really reading that?’‘Whattya mean?’‘Do you . . . ah . . . understand it?’‘Cujo? Oh, yeah, sure,’ I lied. ‘Uhm. Most of it. I think.’ Better.‘I see.’ Mrs. Schrag had a hard eye for liars, and she was pressing me with it full force. ‘Do your parents know you're reading that?’‘Oh, yeah! My mom bought it for me.’ This was true. ‘And it's okay, I saw themovie. Twice! It was awesome!’Mrs. Schrag’s eyes darted around the classroom to be sure no one was listening. She leaned over her desk, grabbed my arm and whispered, ‘I know. I saw it too! Wasn't it great? I just love all of his books!’Mrs. Schrag and I understood each other after that. Later in the year she recommended Pet Sematary to me. I read all of the King books, then Dean Koontz, Clive Barker, Robert McCammon, Dan Simmons, and so many others.There are many reasons that I was never really a good student after the age of thirteen, but dark literature and scary movies sure ain't one of them. I found trouble enough as a teen, but I shudder to think what kinds of trouble I would have found for myself without the books.I dropped out high school at age seventeen. I took some college courses, earned a few As in my writing classes. But in addition to majoring in Beer Guzzling, I kept finding myself staying up late with my nose in some horror novel or another, unable to focus on the ‘serious literature’ I was being prescribed by my professors. Oh, if only they had been offering course titled ‘Ghosts, Pimps, Cops and Ho's: Genre Fiction in America’!I read a lot – just not textbooks. I had no interest in college, and so I made myself a deal. I agreed to let myself fail, again. On one condition. I vowed to become a professional author. I would become real writer – even if it took a decade, twenty years, a lifetime. Because in writing, the only failure is to quit.I filled journals, I penned sappy poems, I labored over a couple dozen short stories. I moved to New York. I worked lots of jobs. I wrote millions of words. I moved to Los Angeles. I got married. I wrote eight screenplays, including romantic comedies, neo-noir thrillers, and two sort-of-horror scripts.I amassed some four hundred rejection letters and sold not a single story.I was failing, again. But why? What had I been doing wrong?The answer is, I no longer loved writing. Working on screenplays, I had fallen into a creative coma. I wasn’t following my heart. I had always loved novels more than movies. I had always loved dark fantasy and thrillers and horror fiction more than romantic comedy and pretty much everything else I’d detoured to write.So I wrote my first novel, a psychological horror-thriller called The Birthing House. It took three years, working seven days per week, nights and weekends when I was not working at (and commuting an hour each way to) my full-time job as a copywriter for Famous Footwear. Two bestselling authors read early drafts and provided unsolicited quotes in support. I landed a passionate, gun-slinging agent named Scott Miller. He sold the novel almost exactly fifteen years after I made that promise to myself.But why? Why now, and more to the point – if I had found that which moved me above all others when I was a teenager, why did I not begin my first horror novel until age thirty-two?The quick answer is, I wasn't ready. I hadn't experienced anything worthy of a novel, and I didn't have the emotional stamina and discipline to spend three years writing one. But the other answer is probably the most-fitting answer: fear. I was afraid to attempt what my heroes did year-in and year-out, which is delve deep into themselves and write about what scared them most. But here I must give credit to the house itself, because she played a role . . . and then some.In 2003, my wife and I decided to leave the Big City life behind. While knocking around Wisconsin we discovered Mineral Point, a charming town of approximately three thousand souls, located some fifty miles southwest of Madison. Art galleries, historic buildings, and an honest-to-God Ben Franklin five-and-dime. Old trees and old houses, many of them Victorians at prices that, compared to Los Angeles, seemed astonishingly low. We toured a few of these charming homes, found one on a half-acre lot, with a small library on the second floor, and bought it (relative to Los Angeles) for a song.Only after we had moved in did I realize that our lives had taken on the trajectory of the first hundred pages of a horror novel. You know how it goes – young couple moves from the city to a small town in rural America to start a new life, only to discover that their new neighbors are the offspring of a centuries-old satanic cult that’s just decided to bring back the annual tradition of roasting the new City Boy and His Purty Wife over the communal Halloween bonfire. Alas, our new neighbors turned out to be some of the kindest and most genuine people we have ever known. But we did discover something odd about our new residence. Shortly after we finished unpacking, the former owners showed us a hundred-year-old, sepia-toned photo of a group of women standing on our porch. Dark dresses and pale countenances. Some were wearing aprons, others were wearing nurse caps. None were smiling. This did not appear to be a family gathering.Our hundred-and-forty-year-old home was once a birthing house, we were told. A what? Yeah, a birthing house. You know. Doctor’s quarters. Midwives. Wet nurses. A birthing house. Neat, I guess. I forgot about the photo a week later.So my wife and I began the first year in Wisconsin doing what you do to ‘start a new life’. Look for jobs, find the good restaurants, make new friends. We also began to talk about having children in ways we never had before. Neither of us were in a hurry, but I kept asking myself, what are we doing out here in the sticks, in a four-bedroom house? Besides enjoying a slower pace and the clean air? Did we come here to have children? Time to quit dallying and write that novel. They say one should write the book one would love to read but can’t find in a bookstore. Well, I hadn’t read a good haunted house story in a long time. I mean the kind that grips your throat while you’re in it. I also knew that I wanted to do something scary and full of sexual tension. I’d been reading a lot of Colin Harrison – Afterburn and The Havana Room are two of my very favorite novels, not least because of how deftly Harrison weaves sex and food and money and race and class and more sex into his characters’ lives, their motivations, and the larger dynamics of the urban noir. Because come on, isn’t that what drives us, so much of the time? Our appetites? I certainly thought so. Because during those years of living in New York and Los Angeles, I experienced – and witnessed my friends engaged in – an almost constant tug-of-war with temptation. Jobs for more money. Drugs for more fun. New partners for more sex. New choices for a whole new lifestyle. It seemed as if everywhere I turned someone I knew was up to something your parents warned you to avoid. And for a short period it almost seemed . . . normal. At least until the hangover set in and your dreams, or your family, had gone up in smoke. It was perhaps too easy to imagine taking the big job, experimenting with the next drug, and falling into some stranger’s bed. But if those alternative paths were easy to imagine, then so were the consequences. And no vision frightened me more than the prospect of losing my wife, my best friend, the woman I had been writing for all along. The pain I would inflict and the hell my life would become if I gave into that temptation, were so ugly and disturbing to contemplate that I never crossed the line. Instead, I told myself to get back to work. I wrote about crossing the line.Isn’t that what readers want from authors of the dark? Our gravest fears playing out on the page? The Shining is, after all, not only about a haunted hotel and a psychic little boy. It’s about alcoholism and the legacy of family violence. It’s about a boy who foresees his parents’ divorce, and worse, their approaching REDRUM. Cujo is not only about a rabid Saint Bernard. It’s about how the career demands that separate man and wife can lead to infidelity and become a rabid dog that kills your kids. The human sex drive. It’s partly responsible for the continuation of the species, but it can, when left unchecked, also give birth to a monster. So here were my ingredients: a childless couple with a history of deceit, a house built for birth, and several ghosts of women past. Things going bump in the night, things going bump in the writer’s mind. I felt the first contractions. Ready or not, something was about to be born. Then one night I had a real humdinger of a nightmare. One that did not end when I woke up. And I’m not making this part up, folks. Trust me.In the nightmare I was with one of my ex-girlfriends and we were close to . . . becoming intimate, is the polite way of saying it. I was reaching out to her, this shadowy beauty from my past, but something was holding me back, forbidding me. In the dream I was aware that I was in a bed, and there was a great weight pressing down on my body, ethereal but strong, like a force field of smoke crushing me into the mattress. Then my ex-girlfriend was gone and I began to wake up, sort of stranded between the dream and the part where you wake up screaming, and I could not see it – this force – but I sure as hell felt it, and then knew somehow that it wasn’t an ‘it’ at all, but a her. The woman hovering over me was not my ex-girlfriend, and she was certainly not my wife, who lay sleeping soundly next to me. I was on my side facing my wife, almost flat on my stomach, so I could not look up or behind me to the side of the bed. But I felt a curtain of black hair tickling my shoulders as she leaned over the bed and whispered in my ear.‘Stay . . . stay down.’It was at that time I experienced a sublime terror. I woke all the way up and the pressure lifted. I rolled onto my back and pulled covers up and blinked into the pitch-blackness of our bedroom, trying to see her. To see if she was still in there with me. And then I remembered the sepia-toned photo of the women standing on the porch of our house a century ago. Midwives, wet nurses, maids. Mothers gone astray. And I thought, What if one of them is still here? What if she suffered a loss . . . and wants compensation? So, after spending the rest of the night in a delirium of cold sweat, I had my novel. Well, not my novel. But I had what better writers than I have called the hard, unshakable center, that seed from which all else would spiral out. 
One can never know, but I suspect that this may be the last time in my life I am handed the gift of a premise for a novel by way of a real estate transaction and a nightmare. Was it really the house that gave me the novel? Or one of the women? Go ahead and laugh, but I have wondered. All I know for certain is that the birthing house and The Birthing House taught me to love writing again. Wherever I go from here, I hope I don’t have to move halfway across the country to find my next book. I’ve come to love this old girl, her warm hearth, her cozy little library. And since writing a novel inspired by her and the women who once ushered in new life under her roof, she lets me sleep soundly.
Most nights.CTRAuthor WebsiteThe Birthing House Book TrailerFT Review of The Birthing House
BOOK BLURB:
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REVIEW:
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