Saturday, June 23, 2012

My Fiction Writing Expeditions: Summer 2012

This summer, I told myself that I would use the time to get myself a job that brings in consistent income. With the rest of the time, I would use it to continue going forth with my writing. Unfortunately for us in the blogging world and the writing world, we are part of a craft known as starving artistry and even if we have the credit of creating a degree related to our goals, it takes being discovered until we could make it big. We're not like math, science, and technology majors that have to put in a lot of time and effort, but have something that continues to await them, especially in the medical field. For us writers, we have to find a job that could provide for us until we get something better. First it's the typical, everyday job, then possibly a teaching, editing, reporting, or job that needs to get done in these specific fields IF you get hired. However, I remain an optimist with my work and continue to build upon my thoughts and ideas.

As mentioned in my profile, I dream of becoming a successful horror fiction writer. This is a genre that doesn't get a lot of attention in its authentic state. People who read Stephen King don't read much other horror, even though his horror fiction is known, respected, and really good. Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft are known for their works of horror, but they could very well be considered classic. On the contemporary side, excluding Stephen King, not too many authors have made it beyond huge. Dean Koontz and Anne Rice have been successful, but the former not as much as King and the latter for the Interview With A Vampire series.

My approach tends to be like that of Ray Bradbury and Richard Matheson in the way that I write in order to make an impact, regardless which genre I'm using. If anything, I would consider myself an author of impact horror or impact fiction, perhaps psychological horror. My goal is to make the reader think about the story long after it's done and make it so it leaves that necessary impact. It doesn't matter how it ends, if you make the reader think, you win. However, if I want to be the next anything, I want to be the next Josh Caporale. In the horror field, I constantly hear, "You're writing horror? Are you going to be the next Stephen King?" I hope that someday, I make a mark to literature and the horror fiction genre like Stephen King did, and I really enjoy his work (which could be explained by the fact I own just about all of his books), but I really don't want to be a new version of him. I want to be my own author.

As for the work in itself, I completed a horror novel (though it may be more so a novella), a science fiction story I'm looking to enter into a contest, a children's book for children in the preschool/kindergarten/first grade range, and I'm currently working on a short story collection. For the horror novel, I'm looking to take the necessary steps in order to get it ready to publish. I edited it myself, am having an aspiring editor look over it, and hope to get some professional editing before looking for a publisher. It'll be a long road, but that's my major goal.

These four works are pretty different from one another in nature, but with the exception of the children's book, these are impact novels in the horror and science fiction fields that I think people will enjoy reading. I just need to do some research as to taking the necessary steps to getting my work out there and then building on top of that. My dream of being a horror fiction writer is something I am really looking to contribute to during this summer and what ever time I have beyond that point.

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