Mid-nineteenth-century English Christmases were saturated with ghost stories.

The oral tradition of gathering around the fire to share chilling stories during the longest nights of the year had been parlayed into a successful holiday marketing strategy. One used to push gilded red gift books and special editions of popular magazines.

Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is just one notable example of these ubiquitous Christmastime must-have gifts. It was published on December 17, 1843, and was sold out by Christmas.

As it still does today, such familiarity bred contempt.

To my surprised delight, as I was dipping my toes into the academic study of Victorian Christmas books, I stumbled upon satire of this haunted genre.

First, I found Tales Told After Supper, written by Jerome K. Jerome and illustrated by Kenneth M. Skeaping in 1891. This is a parody of the standard written Victorian Christmas ghost story device: The framed tale, which uses the main story to set the stage for telling other stories.

Jerome tells us that “Whenever five or six English-speaking people meet round a fire on Christmas Eve they start telling each other ghost stories…. It is a genial, festive season, and we love to muse upon graves, and dead bodies, and murders, and blood.”

He then allows us to join a group of drunken men sharing copious amounts of whiskey punch and their lampooned ghost stories.

These tales feature various caricatures. One is a weeping ghost that is too depressing to be borne. Another is a foolish gentleman, who, thinking that a spirit leads him to a hidden treasure, nightly dismantles parts of his home until the house is destroyed.

My favorite is the tale of a man who was cursed to become a ghost for murdering all manner of noisy neighborhood people. Among his victims’ number muffin men, carolers, and organ grinders.

The narrator claims of the murderer, “Young men and women who recited long and dreary poems at evening parties, and callow youths who walked about the streets late at night, playing concertinas, he used to get together and poison in batches of ten, so as to save expense; and park orators and temperance lecturers [he] used to shut up six in a small room with a glass of water and a collection-box apiece, and let them talk each other to death.”

This night of tale-telling continues until the celebrants fall asleep at the table, and the narrator goes out in his nightclothes and harasses the neighborhood policeman.

Then I discovered the 1919 essay, “The Passing of the Christmas Ghost Story” in The Bookman: a Review of Books and Life, by Stephen Leacock. This charmer starts by comparing the modern New York Christmas to Victorian country estate Christmases of the past.  

Victorian country Christmases required guests to struggle through a cold and challenging journey to arrive at their destination. Leacock asserts these guests had earned the comfort of the best seats by the fire and to be plied with hot drinks. As opposed to, “Take as against this a Christmas in a New York apartment with the guests arriving by the subway and the elevator, or with no greater highwayman to fear than the taxi cab driver. Warm them up with spiced ale? They’re not worth it.”

Leacock goes on to muse that the modern world has also displaced many of the old Christmas ghost story tropes.

For example, the wind sighing around the chimney, which frightened those living in the mid-19th century, would not have the same impact on those living in the 20th. Since modern guests would arrive in cars instead of horse-drawn carriages, the car’s engines would drown out any wind moaning about the masonry.

Further, if the gathering heard the gusts while inside, they could always phone a tradesman, “Hullo this is Buggam Grange speaking. The wind is soughing rather badly round one of our chimney tops. Will you please send up a man?”

He goes on to poke at additional worn-out ghost story conventions. Such as one can expect the ghost has been murdered precisely fifty years ago and never forty-nine. Or that the butler of the manor has just one trick to add to the atmosphere, “another melancholy shake of his head.” And that, “No man I think can be blamed for admitting he lives in deadly fear of miscellaneous phenomena. We all do.”

Finally, we learn that in the bright modern world of 1919, ghosts are just too common and passe to be feared. “So the ghost story is dead. Let it rest in peace — if it can.”

In the twilight of 2021, I like to think that we have had enough space from the Victorian Christmas ghost story to enjoy it anew. And so, I do hope you will enjoy the samples of stories I share in the below links.

Academic M.R. James (1862–1936) savored the tradition of Christmas ghost stories by composing them to read aloud on Christmas Eve to his friends and select students at Cambridge. Learn more about him and access Kindle, Epub, or PDF versions of his ghost stories.

With a 1933 publication date, we see a later than expected Christmas ghost story in “The Crown Darby Plate” by Marjorie Bowen (1885–1952). This English writer would have grown up with Christmas ghost stories and applied this immersion to her writing. How could you possibly resist an opening line like this: “Martha Pym said that she had never seen a ghost and that she would very much like to do so, ‘particularly at Christmas, for you can laugh as you like, that is the correct time to see a ghost.’ ”

I also urge you to read Tales Told After Supper by Jerome K. Jerome. It is hilarious, and the language feels surprisingly contemporary for something written 130 years ago.

References

Jerome, J. K. (1891). Told after supper, by Jerome K. Jerome ... with 96 or 97     illustrations by Kenneth M. Skeaping. Leadenhall Press.

Leacock, S. (1919). The Passing of the Christmas Ghost Story. The Bookman; a Review of Books and Life (1895-1933), 50, 257.

Moore, T. (2006). Victorian christmas books: A seasonal reading phenomenon (Order No. 3221087) [Doctoral Dissertation, University of Delaware]. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I; ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global.

University of Glasgow (1999, December). Charles Dickens: A Christmas Carol. Charles Dickens: A Christmas Carol (gla.ac.uk)

If you enjoyed  this post, please consider supporting me a buck a month on Patreon by  clicking on the link below.

This post was made possible with the generous support of the following patrons. Thank You!

• Kid Cryptid
• Pat Schoettker

Your writing partner has asked for some feedback on her novel.  Now what?

The Three P’s: Purpose, Plan, and Process

The Three P's of providing feedback will help you provide feedback that your writing colleauges can actually use.

Know Your Purpose

Grounding yourself with the purpose of your feedback helps keep you productively focused. Clarity of purpose should be your starting point before you even start reading or listening to a written work. It will guide your attention and ensure you are more likely to help than harm your writing partner. In other words: Are you giving tough feedback to someone who can benefit from it or shattering a new writer’s confidence?  Are you there to help a new writer feel heard, or are you working with someone half-way down the path to develop their craft? Are you looking down in the weeds or at the big picture? Asking the writer what they want from you at the beginning of the feedback process is the best way to guide your efforts.

Make a Plan

Sitting down to provide feedback can mean different things to different people on different days. We are all busy and distracted, and having a targeted agenda can make sure we stick to our goals. Once you have your purpose in mind, it can help to have a written plan of attack that will allow you to focus your efforts and make sure you don’t forget to cover all the ground you intended.  This plan can take the form of a simple to-do list or a more formal planning tool like the one shown above and below.

You can get it here:  Creative Writing Feedback Planning Tool

Your plan should include the purpose of the feedback you are giving and critical areas you will be addressing, such as emotional reactions, story structure, craft, or editing. For long-term projects, keep each feedback sitting’s planning tool. Collectively, they can provide a historical record of the feedback supplied over time, which can help identify areas of feedback yet to be covered, or recurring problem spots.

Have a Process

Building a standard process can help you do your best work. Sample from these steps to make your own workflow.

1. Centered around the purpose of the feedback at hand, create your plan.

2. Set aside an appropriately sized amount of time.  If your plan will require multiple sittings, go ahead and schedule these out on your calendar, so time doesn’t get away from you. I find it very inefficient to let too much time pass between sittings because I lose a sense of what I have already done and must start over to orient myself.  Who has time for that?

3. Find a place where you can focus, be that hiding from your family in the bathroom, in a coffee shop soothed by the white noise of steaming espresso, or, if you are lucky enough to have one, locked in your home office.

4. For your first pass at written notes, make a version of the document, be it printed or an electronic file, that no one besides you will ever see. Here you won’t have to hold back or filter your thoughts. Having an eyes-only version of your first feedback pass ensures more helpful feedback later and allows you to move more quickly.

5. Read the document or portion you are working on more than once. It is hard to give good feedback if you have only skimmed.

6. Follow your feedback plan and take written notes about both what works very well and what needs improvement on your private version of the document.

7. You can wordsmith the final feedback on the version of the document you will provide the author at the end of the process. Don't overwhelm new writers with too much feedback - prioritize. Remember that writers at all levels appreciate kindness.

8. If possible, share your feedback with the author in person while physically present or using conferencing technology.  A conversation allows the author to ask the reviewer for clarification and squeezes the most value out of the feedback.  This connection is even more important when you are working with newer writers. One-on-one feedback allows you to nurture a trusted relationship with inexperienced writers that will help build their confidence.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the following blogs for the fantastic information about giving feedback to creative writers.

How to Give Better Feedback to Your Peers

How can we give constructive creative writing critiques to our peers? These tips will help you give more helpful feedback without being hurtful.

The Balance Careers

The dos and don’ts of giving creative feedback

Giving good creative feedback can be tricky when you’re not a designer, copywriter, or otherwise creatively inclined. Here are a few ways to get it right.

Wavelength by AsanaJenny Thai

Giving feedback: how to do it, how to make it really useful

I blogged a few years back about how to process feedback, but the funny thing is that many writers find giving feedback more difficult than receiving it. Often, they’re some of the nicest people: they’re worried about hurting their fellow thin-skinned writers’ feelings and know that hurting their co…

This Itch of Writingon GoodReads

How to do fiction critique (feedback) in a writer’s circle

The Novel Factory Blog - articles to help writers become more productive and knowledgeable.

How To Give Feedback to Creative People

I have been working with creative people ever since I first set foot in the advertising agency where I started my first job right after college. It’s fascinating! I was fascinated then, and the…

Better MarketingZita Fontaine

If you enjoyed  this post, please consider supporting me a buck a month on Patreon by  clicking on the link below.

This post was made possible with the generous support of the following patrons. Thank You!

• Kid Cryptid
• Pat Schoettker

Sometimes the weather just calls you to snuggle in with your words. Other days it makes you restless and invites you to adventure.

Sometimes you get lucky and get to do both!

On such a day, my dear friend Ruth Benander, an English professor at the University of Cincinnati, invited me to join her at the Cincinnati Art Museum (CAM). There, we played a writing game she had cooked up.

Ruth had prepared 12 genre cards.

We then jointly selected a work of art, and each drew a genre card to inform the style of our individual fast writes.

We stood around like loons scribbling in our notebooks and scrutinizing the piece of art for about 20 minutes. Writing our tales through the lens of a specific genre was so engaging. It was also intriguing to wonder what genre the other person had drawn and how they were approaching their story for the same artwork. We did fast writes on four pieces of art and then shared our stories, and delight, over wine in the museum cafe.

Let me share the works of art we selected and the genres we drew for each. Also, I will share one fast write dyad for your enjoyment.

Plaque Fastwrite Genres

Ruth: Science Fiction
Amy: Dystopia

Landscape in Westphalia Fastwrite Genres

Ruth: Fairytale
Amy: Crime

Still Life with Glass and Lemon Fastwrite Genres

Ruth: Paranormal Romance
Amy: Gothic

Sideboard Fastwrites

Ruth: Comedy

My husband got this godawful piece of a Baroque mountain he said was a “sideboard”.  Sideboard? This chunk of furniture would never be on the side of anything! It was a main event of carved wooden fruit, evil little putti glaring out of their tiny empty wooden eyes, a marble top that contributed to half of the ton the behemoth weighed, and topped off by a huge wooden pointy carved deer head, mounted as a trophy at the perfect height to hang a hat and then poke out an eye as you went to retrieve your hat.

Jack, the aforementioned husband, had pulled up in the rusty pickup we used for hay, shouting, “Look what I got for a song at Heitman’s! He said if I could move it, I could have it.”  I considered the folly of this project, but Jack was so happy, I figured I ought to try to be happy, too. I called up to Jack, “So do you want me to get a drill so we can put a tap in that counter? I’m guessing we could get a keg into that cupboard thing, maybe two.”

“Yeah,” agreed Jack, “But I damn near put an eye out on those antlers. Could you get some tennis balls to put on the pointy bits? I reckon we’ll need about eight.”  Oh, yeah, I thought, a baroque sideboard kegerator decorated with tennis balls. This was surely going to be a piece for Country Living Magazine.

Amy: Magical Realism

The sideboard had been with Sarah’s line for over a hundred years. Its dark wood and white marble weighed more than the invading armies and looters could carry away. Which was how her family had kept possession in these dark times.

The heirloom bore the frustration of those who had coveted it. Carvings of bountiful fruit and flowers were scarred with pocket knife graffiti, and the caryatids supporting the marble counter were now faceless. The glass from the two oval mirrors under the top shelf had long been smashed and carried away.

Still, the empty sockets sometimes reflected vital information that might cause the ruin of the invaders.

Sarah saw herself folding a letter and slipping it into the mouth of the carved stag whose mighty horns crowned the sideboard. The scene shifted to the high mountain pass above the snow-blanketed fields of her farm.

She well knew how to get through that pass when the winter had closed all other roads.

She turned from the vision, reaching for paper and quill. The stag would send her letter to the right hands.

Final Thoughts

Are you curious about who chose which artworks? Amy was drawn to three-dimensional objects that were created by Cincinnatians in choosing the plaque and the sideboard. Ruth took to oil on canvas from very different schools of artistic expression.

We have story dyads for all four artworks. If you would be interested in seeing a particular one we didn’t show here, request it in the comment section below, and I will make it a blog post.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider supporting me a buck a month on Patreon by clicking on the link below.

This post was made possible with the generous support of the following patrons. Thank You!

• Kid Cryptid
• Cynthia Keller
• Pat Schoettker

When I kicked off my blog in the summer of 2019, I threw a launch party. I never got around to doing a post about it, but it was so much fun! One thing that made the day extra special was folks’ participation in a poetry puzzle activity, an activity I created in honor of the launch.

For the activity, I had my teenage niece pick out seven poems for me. She selected works from Atticus, Rupi Kaur, Stephen King, Edgar Allan Poe, Dylan Thomas, and Vanessa Angélica Villarrealand. I chose a few lines from each of the poems and scattered them on a table, well mixed-up. I then invited people to make their own poems from the lines and text photos of them to me.

People had a great time and were excited to show off their poems.  This game gave them a chance to easily revel in the beauty of language, particularly those who were intimidated by creative acts. It raised the energy of the room and got people talking and interacting.

Some fantastic poetry emerged that day:

To Create Your Own Poetry Game

Materials:

• Six or seven poems that resonate with you
• Computer
• Printer
• Printer paper
• Construction paper
• Scissors/paper cutter
• Glue
• Stapler

Preparation:

• Get the text of the poems into a word processor
• Save the poems with author attributions into a master document for later
• In an additional file, save the 25 lines you want to keep. Delete everything else
• Make the font large enough to read (I went with a 22-point font)
• Print
• Neatly cut out the lines of poetry
• Paste lines to strips of construction paper for added stability and color
• Mix-up lines thoroughly on table
• To the side, provide the master poem document with the complete poems with author attributions out of respect for the poems’ creators

Activity:

• Invite one person at a time to use the lines to create their own poems
• Remind people to photograph and share (make sure they have your phone number) their poems
• Reshuffle the lines of poetry after each turn

Thank You

Special thanks go out to Susan Monroe, Denise Saker, and Kate Riker for providing the awesome live Irish music that made the launch party so lively. Click on their names for information about their bands.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider supporting me a buck a month on Patreon by clicking on the link below.

This post was made possible with the generous support of the following patrons.Thank You!

• Kid Cryptid
• Cynthia Keller
• Pat Schoettker

The implicit ideas and values that weave through our writing are called themes. These are what our stories are really about just below the surface.

For example, J.R.R. Tolkien may have plotted Bilbo all the way to the Misty Mountains and back again to the Shire, but underneath the adventure was an exploration of the comparative values of material wealth and conflict versus simple pleasures and peace.

Themes

There are many different literary themes. Here are a few of my favorites:

Creators of stories, song lyrics, poems, movie scripts, and plays take advantage of themes such as these to make meaning and allow the audience to connect emotionally to their work.

Just for fun, I ran the lyrics of my favorite songs from Green Day’s American Idiot album (i.e., most of them) through a word cloud generator. The more common words appear in a larger font.  The results did not surprise me as the major themes that emerged captured the elements of the songs that most resonate with me.

Finding Your Theme

Just like with all things writing, there is no one set path for finding theme clarity.

Some people like to pick out their themes ahead of time, and some prefer to see what emerges as they write their story and then refine them in later drafts.

I am a mixed-methods woman myself when it comes to writing. I like to free-form a rough start of the story first. This helps me develop my characters and world-build. It also gives me a sneak peek of the themes hidden in the story.

After that initial way finding draft, I switch gears and outline the story from soup to nuts, which I find further clarifies the themes. Then, I deliberately tweak the outline to support the development of the themes before I begin focused writing.

Laying the Breadcrumbs

Themes should not be morality hammers. If your readers feel like you are preaching to them, they will disengage. Instead, leave clues so your readers can figure out the themes themselves (or not).

Your story at its heart is an exploration of a theme, from inciting incident to resolution. There are many opportunities to present traces of your theme to your reader:

• Premise
• Characters’ flaws or strengths
• Setting
• Dialogue
• Characters’ growth or downfall
• Key plot points
• Obstacles
• Conflicts
• Repeating ideas
• Symbols/Motifs

Less is More

You can have more than one theme in a story, but having too many makes it difficult to tease out the signal from the noise. Keep things simple so your most important theme clearly rings out. Having a deep connection to a theme is one reason a reader can’t set that perfect book down. Make sure your critical theme can be perceived!

If you enjoyed  this post, please consider supporting me a buck a month on Patreon by  clicking on the link below.

This post was made possible with the generous support of the following patrons. Thank You!

• Kid Cryptid
• Cynthia Keller
• Pat Schoettker

Here you are, living your typical work-a-day life. You follow a routine. You know what to expect. Things are comfortable. Then down swings that celestial hammer and knocks you off your path. You get fired. Open a magic door. Let a stranger into your car. Suddenly you stagger forward from your backstory and into your adventure.

Inciting Incidents

In fiction, inciting incidents are the events that disrupt the normal existence of your protagonist and sets them on their quest. They create urgency and raise questions. They grab our attention and make us want to see what happens next.

Thank goodness Bilbo ran after the Dwarves and Lucy explored that wardrobe. Otherwise, we would spend hundreds of pages just watching Bilbo eat and some bored kids waiting out WWII in the countryside.

Inciting incidents don’t have to be the first scene of your story, but they should happen early. Some say they should occur within the first ten pages of the book. Others say within the first quarter. The longer you take, the more you risk your reader losing interest and setting down your story before it gets good.

Inciting Incidents Can Be:

• Positive or negative events
• The outcome of a character’s actions (choice)
• Caused by chance
• Unclear whether something happened by choice or chance

Inciting Incident Multitasking

Why not get as much value from this scene as possible? With some planning, your inciting incident can:

• Create the core problem the story needs to resolve
• Spark the conflict between your antagonist and protagonist
• Reveal essential facets of your main character
• Set your readers’ expectations for the story
• Provide character motivation
• Crank up the tension and urgency
• Exploit your protagonist’s inner conflicts
• Raise questions
• Stimulate character growth/change that will last throughout the story
• Set the tone of the tale

Inciting Incident Pointers

• Should be life-changing events

(Picking up that hitchhiker and dropping her off at the bus station and continuing on your way to work isn’t a strong inciting incident. If the hitchhiker compels you to run away and join her doomsday cult... well, what happens next??)

• Often are a result of external forces
• Should set the stage for a believable (but not obvious) story ending

This was just a brief overview of a much-discussed topic. For further reading, check out K.M. Weiland’s blog post, Your Book’s Inciting Event: It’s Not What You Think It Is.

If you enjoyed  this post, please consider supporting me a buck a month on Patreon by  clicking on the link below.

This post was made possible with the generous support of the following patrons. Thank You!

• Kid Cryptid
• Cynthia Keller
• Pat Schoettker

As I was trying to pin down the internal conflicts for Seep’s main characters, I realized I was drifting too much into external conflict territory. The margins were not clear. I took a break and refreshed myself on the differences between these two types of conflict.

Internal Conflict

Internal conflicts take place in the mind of your character. These are battles of the self. They can take the form of beliefs, emotions, cognitive dissonance, dreams, mental illness, or self-talk, to name a few. And just like we all experience in our own psyche, these private gremlins are not always rational or true.

Internal conflict gives your characters complexity and makes them interesting. It helps your reader understand the motivations behind your characters’ actions, and to feel empathy for the struggles of what might otherwise be a two-dimensional paper doll.

These conflicts inside the heads of your characters are not just there for window dressing. They serve a structural purpose in your storytelling. Your characters’ struggle to overcome their inner conflict powers an engine of rising tension to fuel the intensity of your story.

External Conflict

External conflict comes from forces and events outside of our characters. They fall into the following categories.

Character Versus Other People

Examples include personal conflict, competition, greed, and jealousy.

Character Versus Nature

Examples include animal attacks, weather, terrain, or limited natural resources.

Character Versus Society

Examples include economics, religion, freedom, injustice, and politics.

Character Versus Technology

Examples include automated factory jobs, sentient computers, broken machines, and robots.

Character Versus Supernatural

Examples include ghosts, vampires, zombies, magic, and ethereal/occult forces.

Just like internal conflict, external conflict is one of your storytelling tools. It grounds us in the moment and drives the gears of the plot. By giving our characters something to struggle against, we are raising the stakes and increasing dramatic tension. External conflict helps the reader to further understand the motives of characters, particularly non-point of view characters.

Interface Between Internal and External Conflict

Both types of conflict work together to provide context and weight to the stakes at risk in your scenes. How internal and external conflicts play off of each other will help or hinder your character in their growth and in meeting their goals.

For example, Seep’s main character’s socially isolated childhood stunted the development of her people skills. She is very anxious about fitting in with the rest of the police force (internal conflict). It doesn’t help that the rest of the force thinks she is a fake psychic and resents her presence on the team (external conflict). So, when someone on the police force is particularly unwelcoming to her, she gets extra awkward. She might say something stupid while spilling her soda on the Sargent, therefore confirming everyone’s poor opinion of her (intersection of internal and external conflicts).

If you enjoyed  this post, please consider supporting me a buck a month on Patreon by  clicking on the link below. I am trying to reach my $500 a month goal.

This post was made possible with the generous support of the following patrons. Thank You!

• Kid Cryptid
• Cynthia Keller
• Pat Schoettker

Here you are at your partner’s work Christmas party, martini in hand and biting your tongue. Your partner is entertaining their boss with a story about that one time you dyed all of their work shirts a splotchy pink because you left a red sock in the wash. You know, ha ha, that time the big clients were in town.

You throw back your drink and keep your mouth shut because you don’t want to make the love of your life look bad in front of the person who writes their annual performance review.

However, your partner is not a reliable narrator. At all.

They don’t mention that they were the one who did that load of laundry… that it was their own damn fault for waiting till the last minute… that they bought those bright red, non-color fast socks… that they didn’t sort the laundry before washing.

Ugh!

The values, goals, and information known by the storyteller influence their narrative. If you have ever accused someone of telling the story wrong or leaving out the best parts, you have experienced this yourself.

This makes the selection of your story’s point of view (POV) character  a critical choice. The story belongs to your POV character, and a poor choice here diminishes your ability to tell your tale.

The POV character needs to be someone the audience cares about, be it the protagonist, antagonist, main character, or the narrator. They need to be important to the story and able to move it forward.

Here are some questions to ask yourself when considering who to make your POV character:

• Who knows critical information?
• Who will be in your story right through the very last scene?
• Which character has to make the hardest decisions?
• Whose voice will set the correct emotional tone?
• Who will create the most suspense?
• Which character’s goals match the theme of the story?
• Who has the most skin in the game?
• If your book became a series, who would you want to keep writing about?
• Who will the readers identify with?
• What gets left out if we don’t get into a character’s head?
• Who is your story about?
• Who has needed memories?
• Does the POV character distract or focus the reader?
• Which character is the least boring?
• Who can help the reader understand what’s going on?
• Which character will be the most transformed by the end of the story?
• Who can help you best conceal a plot twist?
• Who can reveal secrets or lies?
• What does your genre assume about your POV character?

The answers to these questions can also help you decide if you need more than one POV character in your story.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider supporting me a buck a month on Patreon by clicking on the link below. I am trying to reach my $500 a month goal.

This post was made possible with the generous support of the following patrons. Thank You!

• Kid Cryptid
• Cynthia Keller
• Pat Schoettker

I think I have figured it out!

Last week we determined that my novel Seep was not housed in the genre of magical realism. Further research has revealed that instead, Seep fits in the diverse and wide genre of urban fantasy.

The more I learned, the more I wanted to smack my forehead in irritation at my own blindness. It turns out that most of the fiction bowing my bookshelves is classified as urban fantasy. These are the stories I devour, so of course, that is what I am writing. (Why was this so hard?)

Down the Rabbit Hole

Urban fantasy is often called a sub-genre of fantasy. However, Stefan Ekman makes a strong case for urban fantasy standing as its own genre. Because urban fantasy is the fusion of many genres, not just a narrow classification within the genre of fantasy. Depending on the story, there can be elements of fantasy, Gothic horror, alternate history, romance, thriller, mystery, crime fiction, humor, or the post-apocalyptic. Not all urban fantasy stories contain all of these genres, so there is no one iconic example of the genre. It is fluid.

In urban fantasy, the setting is typically based in our contemporary reality with the addition of magical or paranormal aspects, such as witches, ghosts, or humans with magical powers. Unlike in magical realism, where magic is a part of normal life, here, the collision of the paranormal with everyday life causes unexpected ripples in the fabric of reality, which becomes an essential part of the narrative.

As the genre has developed, the word urban has become something of a misnomer as the story need not be set in a large metropolis—though indeed many are, with the cities themselves acting as main characters. Instead, urban fantasy has come to mean contemporary fantasy. More important than the physical setting is the notion that modern life is flawed. Even supernatural beings must cope with problems like lead paint and aging transportation infrastructure.

Urban fantasy tends to include the tropes of crimes to solve, a dark mood, and angsty romantic entanglements. (However, the romance should only be secondary to the main plot. Otherwise, you find yourself in the genre of paranormal romance.)

Further, Ekman points out that the common element of crime fiction in urban fantasy strengthens the genre’s ability to explore and highlight the challenges we face in the modern world.

Similar to magical realism, urban fantasy often weaves an exploration of societal themes into the narrative. What can look like a simple ghost story can be at its heart an exploration of what it means to be an invisible outcast.

In a Nut Shell

In urban fantasy, you have supernatural elements intersecting with everyday reality. I am borrowing an idea from Melissa F. Olson’s “What the Hell is Urban Fantasy” blog post, where she made a Venn diagram describing urban fantasy. I am redoing it based on my story, Seep.

Urban fantasy requires detailed world-building with rules and consequences. Urban fantasy is character-driven, particularly by female protagonists. The main character’s personality, struggles, and triumphs are what keeps the readers coming back.

Books in the realm of urban fantasy from my shelves:

What is My Genre: Reprise

So, what makes Seep belong to the genre of urban fantasy?  Well, it checks most of the boxes for the genre.

Before I read Ekman’s Crime Stories and Urban Fantasy, I believed that I was just telling a story for fun and was not writing about profound ideas. However, he surprised me by pointing out the social discourse embedded in the Hollows series by Kim Harrison. I had considered these stories, personal favorites of mine, to be merely delicious junk food reading. Fantasy Cheetos as it were. However, it turns out that the themes of standing up to social injustice in these stories were so obvious that I could not see them.

So, who knows? Maybe my own deeper themes are just as invisible to me right now. Perhaps they will emerge as Seep develops.

Selected References and Further Reading

• Ekman, S. (2016). Urban fantasy: A literature of the unseen. Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 27(3), 452–469, 554.
• Ekman, S. (2017). Crime stories and urban fantasy. Clues, 35(2), 48–57.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider supporting me a buck a month on Patreon by clicking on the link below. I am trying to reach my $500 a month goal.

This post was made possible with the generous support of the following patrons. Thank You!

• Kid Cryptid
• Cynthia Keller
• Pat Schoettker

I am hard at work determining what genre might best fit my novel Seep. Knowing your genre provides scaffolding and direction for story development. Genre clarity also makes your work more attractive to publishers.

The basic premise of Seep is that in a typical, mundane world, the door between the realms of the living and the dead has been jammed nearly closed for centuries. This has resulted in an overabundance of starving, earth-bound spirits.

Based on my experiences as a reader, I wondered if this story might fit into the genre of magical realism, so I went researching.

Down the Rabbit Hole

Within the bounds of this genre, I discovered a specialized candy shop of ideas: Glass jars brimming with bright gumballs of fabulism, boiled sweets of the marvelous real, sugar whorls of the baroque, lollipops of Latin literary forms, and caramel creams of German art critique.

Like anyone with limited pocket change, I had to keep in mind what I really wanted the most in the face of such bounty. I was here to identify my genre, not to overindulge in too many sweets. With a mighty application of willpower, I only sampled enough to get a taste.

In a Nut Shell

Magical realism is a sub-genre of fantasy. Here, stories are set in our everyday world alongside a coexisting element of magic or the supernatural. The people in the story, and the narrator, take this combination of the regular and extraordinary as read. What the reader might perceive as fantastical is not questioned or explained, forcing the reader to also normalize the premise. These stories surface the magic of everyday life and allow for explorations into the nature of reality.

(Above my pay grade is more academic discussions of how this form can be a  platform for political subversion, exploration of societal mores, and facilitating revolution. But, I do love this quote from 1920s art critic Franz Roh: “With the word ‘magic’ as opposed to ‘mystic’ I wish to indicate that the mystery does not descend to the represented world, but rather hides and palpitates behind it”.)

Books in the realm of magical realism that I have read:

What is My Genre: Reprise

So, does Seep belong to the genre of magical realism?

In some ways, it does. It is housed in a realistic, contemporary setting with a supernatural element. However, I think I am going to be violating the rule of narrator reticence. I have deeply explored the whys of my supernatural elements. I am looking forward to threading that explanation throughout the narrative.

Also, my research about magical realism made its stories feel like high art with deep underlying meaning. When Seep plays out in the theater of my mind, it has the feel of indulgent escapism. I’m not trying to make a commentary on anything, just telling a story.

So, the jury is still out, but my gut tells me that what I am writing isn’t quite magical realism. It’s not fancy or meaningful enough.

I think I have some more genre exploring to do, starting with urban fantasy.

Not an Excuse to Stop Writing

In the meantime, I am going to keep writing Seep. It would be very easy to let this exploration get in the way of the essential work of getting the words on the page.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider supporting me on Patreon by clicking on the link below. I am trying to reach my $500 a month goal.

This post was made possible with the generous support of the following patrons. Thank You!

• Kid Cryptid
• Cynthia Keller
• Pat Schoettker

So, I did it.  I wrote 50k words in a month. Sometimes it was exciting and fun. Mostly it was brutal because I only allowed myself to do it when my other duties for the day had been completed. Given that a majority of those duties involved mentoring 13 graduate students through their program-end capstone papers, I was cognitively exhausted by the time I came to my personal writing each evening.

But, as I  have said before, the metrics drove me forward. Please allow me to show off my beautiful run chart one last time! (I do hate that little dip ten days out from the end, but that's water under the bridge now.)

I am so glad I pushed and made it through. I learned a lot about myself as a writer. I uncovered deep details about my book's world, characters, and plot. And, who knew?  I'm a WINNER.

Another good thing about being a 'winner' is the awesome deals you get from the companies that support NaNoWriMo. I just purchased Scrivener for half-off and subscribed to The Great Courses Plus for almost free.

Now I am off to build upon my 50k words of rough source materials and make some magic happen.  

Watch out, I am raising ghosts.

An affinity diagram is my favorite brainstorming tool. It is one of the two quality improvement tools I would drag along if I were stranded on a desert island (the other being a process map). I’d be making coconut radios in no time!

In its simplest form, the affinity diagram has two steps: 1) free form brainstorming that is 2) later sorted into thematic groupings.

In other words, it gives your subconscious a chance to spawn interesting ideas which you then can sort into rational categories. This illuminates the broad strokes of the critical issues at hand while preserving actionable detail. My teams have used it quite effectively in healthcare-related quality improvement. I have also used it to help me think through some world-building concerns in my writing.

Most recently, I applied the affinity diagram to help me think through the implications of my protagonist’s socially isolated upbringing.

Because of specific vulnerabilities, it was not safe for this character to be out in the world, so she spent her childhood homebound. When she is an adult, she must work with a team. How would this history influence her present-day social interactions?

Since brainstorming is most effective when done with others, I asked my writing partner Karen to help me brainstorm about this.

Here is how we made our affinity diagram and insights we gained about my character.

Generating an Affinity Diagram

Step One

Karen and I discussed the purpose of our activity for a few minutes to ensure we were on the same page. We decided we wanted to know what the impact of having a socially isolated childhood would be on an adult who finds herself regularly working with a team of people. What happens when she is trying to interact?

Step Two

We each silently brainstormed by independently writing our ideas onto sticky notes. Only one idea went on each sticky note. We kept going until we ran out of ideas.

Step Three

We spread our stickies out on the table, randomly mixing our notes together. In my old life, the sticky notes went on a conference room wall. In this case, since Karen and I have our weekly writer’s meeting in a bar, the stickies went on the table. Of note, I was trying to use up some old heart-shaped stickies. I was not trying to be cute. (Ugh.)

Step Four

We grouped the sticky notes into thematic groups silently, only speaking to clarify the meaning of sticky notes as needed.

Step Five

We negotiated the titles of the thematic groups.

Step Six

After reducing redundancies, I typed up this information to use as a character-building tool for my story.

Debrief

The exercise with Karen was a simplified and informal use of a potent quality improvement tool. Yet, it yielded just what was needed for our purposes. It was fun too!

If you are a quality improvement friend of mine, then you should read more about Affinity Diagrams and remember these key points:

1. This activity allows the team to synthesize and find relationships between granular bits of information. This leads to a broader understanding of an issue while maintaining actionable details.
2. This form of silent brainstorming allows the introverts on your team space to contribute.
3. The silence also minimizes the impact of dominating personalities/influential people.
4. The anonymity (when done in a group) makes it safer for front-line participants to share their honest opinions.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider supporting me on Patreon by clicking on the link below. I am trying to reach my $500 a month goal.

This post was made possible with the generous support of the following patrons. Thank You!

• Kid Cryptid
• Cynthia Keller
• Pat Schoettker

I found myself using running metaphors last week.

Writing my daily NaNoWriMo 1.6K words was demoralizingly difficult. It felt just like starting out on a long run: I was stiff, it hurt, I didn’t wanna, and only kept going through stubborn will power. It was grueling and not at all fun.

Since I am new to NaNoWriMo, I didn’t know that the struggle of week two is a well-discussed phenomenon, so I tumbled into the abyss completely unprepared.

Last week was difficult for other reasons too. Harp lessons were especially arduous. (I am convinced that all harpists are secretly Cirque De Soleil contortionists or Time Lords.) Also, one feverish cat needed regularly force-fed, and another cat ate one of my psych meds and needed emergency care. I even had a key QI consulting milestone to reach.

Despite all of that, I was able to get the writing done anyway. I reached a 16-day writing streak and am close to 30K words.

I can’t adequately express how empowered this achievement makes me feel.

If I can write productively during a week like this, then I can count on being able to be a productive writer period. I didn’t know that about myself before, and it is a happy discovery.

I was able to get here by strategically employing known motivators as well as benefiting from dumb luck.

Known Motivators

Metrics

By logging my data into the NaNoWriMo website, I was able to let my slavish devotion to hitting targets drag me along.

Accountability

My inner Girl Scout's need to meet my commitments was harnessed by my daily NaNoWriMo Instagram update. I did not want to be in a position to say the X-day writing streak had been compromised. I did let myself whine a little on Insta, and was intrigued to observe that the whiney posts got fewer likes. Still, I’m all about emotional honesty, so I will keep on whining as the situation demands. Otherwise wouldn’t it get boring?

Reward

My daily reward for hitting my writing goal was to find a fun picture to represent the latest X-day writing streak on my Instagram update. It doesn’t take much to make me happy, and I really looked forward to picking out a picture on the tough days.

I was tempted to go esoteric for some of them but held myself back. For example, I wanted to use a picture of Eleven from Stranger Things for day 11 or a picture of a quinceañera dress for day 15. I abstained but had fun dreaming about it.

Dumb Luck Motivators

Retrospectively, I went out and read about the hell of NaNoWriMo week two. I found some tips and tricks, some of which I had unknowingly employed last week. Next year, they will be slotted into the ‘Known Motivator’ category.

Chloroformed My Inner Editor

I know this is kinda the point of NaNoWriMo in the first place, but Ms. Inner Editor was still there, causing trouble and slowing me down. To survive and get through it last week I honestly stopped caring if what I wrote was any good. I was just marching for volume. You know, it was really refreshing to be completely free from her and allow my subconscious some breathing space. I came up with some really fresh ideas without the filter.

Pursued Some Ant Hills

This means writing things you want to write, not things you feel like you should be writing. Aimee Bender tells us this could be our unconscious trying to speak to us. I let myself come up with crazy hypotheticals that will likely never be relevant to the story and then crafted them into scenes. For example, I allowed myself to write about how my protagonist would totally blow it when she met her love interest’s mother. But you know what was interesting about that? I stumbled upon a new aspect of world-building for the Seep!verse that was really cool, and I am going to keep using it. I think I might not have discovered it otherwise.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider supporting me on Patreon by clicking on the link below.

This post was made possible with the generous support of the following patrons. Thank You!

• Kid Cryptid
• Cynthia Keller
• Pat Schoettker

I am nine days and over 16K words into NaNoWriMo 2019. I am going to end up with a 100 page (single-spaced) Word document that will be a hodgepodge of disjointed novel narrative (ha!) and book planning.

Digging through this mess at the end will be a grim and painful task. So much so that, despite good intentions, I might never get back to it. What a waste.

Cue the Lean Six Sigma existential crisis.

Waste is my sworn enemy. There has to be a way to work smarter than this:

And it looks like there is a better way!

Wavemaker

My dear husband forwarded me an episode of his favorite podcast, Erasable, in which the hosts were talking about how they approach NaNoWriMo. Here I learned about what looks to be the tool for the job.

Wavemaker is a free application for writing and planning. It provides a selection of planning tools, such as timelines and mind maps, that link directly to their relevant sections of prose. The associations can be easily switched around through dragging and dropping.

As this tool is very visual, it will be most useful to show you some quick videos about it.

Wavemaker FAQs

• Created and freely shared by Iain Wood.  If you like it, consider supporting him on Patreon!
• Will work on almost any device. Cross-platform.
• Syncs up to Google Drive.
• In Iain’s words, “Wavemaker is a PWA (Progressive Web App), which at it’s most basic level is a website that you can install locally and run without an internet connection.” Iain recommends that you use it with Google Chrome, but expects that over time, additional browsers will work too.
• Wavemaker privacy policy.
• This is not a robust tool for editing.  Do your edits in a word processor.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider supporting me on Patreon by clicking on the link below.

I have officially lost my mind.

Not for the first time. Those who know me well will recognize the below pattern of over-commitment.

All of my contracting side-hustles sprung to life in November. (Yay for paying work, but I didn’t expect them all to pan out, or to happen at once!) I am still updating the blog once a week too. So I thought to myself, why not also do NaNoWriMo, and add writing 2K words of fiction a day to this lovely month that already runneth over?

NaNoWriMo

NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month, with the goal of writing a 50K word novel during November. The concept here is just getting the words out and worrying about quality only when you revise later. This makes sense as we all know the magic of our writing happens in the editing, but you need to get words on paper first.

Personal Contracts Matter

As ridiculous as this sounds, I think NaNoWriMo will be a saving grace for me during this busy month. I was worried that my writing would decline in the face of so much teaching, course redesign, interprofessional education consulting, and Quality Improvement work. All of these projects carry a heavy cognitive load, and I foresaw being too tapped out to write.

Luckily, I did a well known Amy Hack, which is to make a measurable commitment to writing in November through the NaNoWriMo website, and now it’s ride or die. The below run chart will be my motivating force in a way little else could be. So Yay! Writing for November is saved.

Seep Expansion

For NaNoWriMo, I am turning my short story, Seep, into a novel. This is the story of Marta, a young woman who can see the dead, who, in turn, want to devour her. She uses her harp to lull the specters into eternal sleep. Let’s grow this little story from 4,000 words to 50,000 in one month.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider supporting me on Patreon by clicking on the link below.