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So, you want to change the face of horror writing?
Here’s what you do.
Go to:
http://campaignforrealfear.wordpress.com
Your subject line must have Submission: [title of story].
Put your 500 word story in the body of the email as text. (If you want to format, italics can be expressed as _this_ and bold as *this*)
Leave your name, contact address, and a one-line bio. Your submission will be automatically acknowledged.
Anything that’s over the word count or doesn’t conform to the specified format will be discarded. Entrants must agree to grant copyright to the Campaign for publication.
Got a question? Go to our FAQ, or email:
realfearcampaign@gmail.com
The deadline for entries is 5pm GMT, Friday the 16th of April, 2010.
You wanted change? Here’s your chance to prove that fear is for everyone.
Get passionate. Get personal. Get published.
Andy Cox at Britain’s finest horror magazine Black Static and Simon Taylor at Action Audio have both pledged support for our campaign. If you’re joining us late, here’s the story so far.
Horror has some great champions in the UK, but some of them seem to have forgotten that it doesn’t exclusively belong to a small group of white males. Recently, anthologies and magazines have been running state-of-the-art articles on horror and have managed to avoid including any women or minorities, not because they aren’t there (they are, in healthy numbers) but because their selection process has been entirely run by the boys’ club. The story has been picked up by the national press, and questions are being asked.
It must be pointed out that the problem lies mostly with the New School journos and writers, and not the older players like Steve Jones, editor, or Jo Fletcher, publisher, who have scrupulously included the best women and men in their anthologies. Selection of material should always be about what constitutes great writing, and not who is represented – but it’s easy to unthinkingly narrow the field by trawling through your own contact book and not bothering to look for new talent.
That’s what the Campaign For Real Fear is all about.
It’s not a club; you don’t get a membership badge. It simply shows a level of awareness on your part and allows us to gauge how much work needs to be done. But we hope it will lead to new writing and a fresh perspective. Britain has led the world in great horror and fantasy in the past, and should be able to adapt to the rising challenges of the future.
Maura McHugh and I are looking for ten members who can write just 500 terrifying words. That’s the length of the kind of column most journalists can manage in an hour. We want horror that’s relevant to the modern world. The old vampires and werewolves scenarios have been worn to death – where are the new fears that reflect our world – fear of alienation and losing your identity, fear of manipulation, cruelty, xenophobia, class divides, fear of difference, fear of simply going unnoticed and unmourned. Anything and everything is fair game.
With Andy and Simon on board, the idea is to publish the first ten in Black Static magazine, and to publish an Action Audio book version of the ten stories, with the writers sharing any profits. It’s important to stress that all of this may not work – Maura and I may be proven horribly wrong. We may only get stories from middle-aged white blokes about sexy vampires. In which case I’m going to give up writing and become a greengrocer.
But it’s worth a try, surely? Reflect what you feel and frighten us in just 500 words, whether you’re an old lag or have never written before. Treat it as a mental exercise and have fun. Details about how and where to post your entry will be published here.
This is the Shambles in York. A lot of towns have them but most have been pedestrianised and packed with Starbucks. This one appears more intact than most and probably has shops that sell greetings cards and craft bits ‘n’ bobs like pointlessly small vases, by order of the council. The point is that it has been voted Britain’s prettiest street, proof – if such were needed – that we all want to live in the kind of Harry Potter land that existed in the 1950s and Ladybird books.
I suppose it’s cute and a bit like a film set, but as AS Byatt once pointed out, Britain is a country held back by its past. We see instability and as creatures of habit we want a bedrock of common sense. We don’t want Berlin’s Alexanderplatz with bits of steel and windswept concrete all over the place, we want old blokes selling magic potions to toddlers. We want yo-yo’s and mangles and old-fashioned prams where the baby faced you so it could read your expressions, and postmen who knew your name (I’m still getting Christmas post, by the way. It’s March. Thanks guys.)
Well maybe that’s not so bad, but I for one would miss the city’s cosmopolitan energy. I like the modern world, and don’t want to live in a museum. Then again, I don’t have kids, and I guess it would be easier to raise them in the former, although they’d be more likely to be frightened by difference and grow up to be bigots.
With an election approaching, it seems to me that whoever can guarantee more cute little Olde Worlde streets would win by a landslide.
Something that might go a long way toward explaining the strange English psyche of the postwar baby-boomer generation is Ladybird Books – these surrounded kids as they were growing up, and depicted a safe, secure and comfortably middle class world where you went shopping with mummy on Saturdays and nobody tried to stab you. Although I think that grocer looks a bit smarmy, and probably had his finger on the weighing machine as he slipped you a few duff oranges.
I’ve seen a couple of the old Ladybird books ironically rewritten to make them darkly funny, but was surprised to discover dozens of collector sites for these serene slices of the past. The pages of Ladybird books feature lollipop ladies, milkmen, coalmen, jolly policemen, sailors and lots of ladies in sensible coats and woolly hats. The children have been dressed for display and warmth. Nobody wears a shell suit and a scrapie, or is morbidly obese. Clearly no riff-raff ever entered the lives of these people or disturbed the status quo with their filthy rap music and parkour and ecstasy.
The artwork seems similar to those paintings of seaside towns that used to feature in railway carriages when people could still be trusted to behave in single compartments without cutting lines of cocaine and having sexual relations with strangers. There’s a great book of these pictures written by Michael Palin. His caption for a crowded Weston-Super-Mare beach remarks that everyone seems very happy in the days before awareness of untreated sewage.
   
Incredible as it may seem, there are days when I can’t update my site (last weekend in rainswept Nice I forgot to charge my laptop, so I went off to see ‘Shutter Island’ instead. It’s no better in French.) But I have a fail-safe. Assuming that there’s someone out there who is so bored that all they can think to do is flick through this site, I hide extra stuff on it before I go away.
For example, I wrote a blog while in Oman recently, then couldn’t find what I did with it. The damned thing surfaced today on another computer, so I uploaded it under ‘Why I Hate The King Of Sweden’ – you’ll find it there now. I’m also going to add all my Black Static columns, as per a reader’s suggestion, and I extend other items so that there’s always something new. Here’s a shot I took on the Oman trip, which I also managed to lose when I first posted the piece…
Before I start, let me say that this is going to be a rolling discussion – there are no villains here, but quite a few heroes.
I’ve been contacted by quite a few established authors lately whose mainstream UK publishers aren’t offering them good deals, and who are starting to consider small press for the first time. Why is this? Let’s look at the arguments.
1. Small press doesn’t reach volume audiences. No, but it can specialise. There’s probably one out there who would function as publishers used to do; nurturing your book and carefully tailoring it to a specialised audience. That may be better than chucking it into a huge publishing house and having it lost in the shuffle.
2. Big Publishers thrive on innovation. A twentieth book by an author isn’t as enticing as their first. But small publishers can capitalise on an author’s fanbase and bring it over to them.
3. Big publishers don’t advertise like they used to. We made a cinema commercial for my first novel – that sounds completely unbelievable now. To put it in perspective, the budget for that was higher than my advances are today. Authors do their own publicity on websites. There’s no Point Of Sale book advertising anymore, and all you’ll get is a vague promise from a publisher to take out an ad. What you need is good reviews and a good website.
4. As big publishers pick a few smash-sellers (predetermined by their spend) most of their other authors are squeezed out anyway. Small press (particularly in the US) doesn’t have to be that small. What it has to do is care about its authors. I have big house editors who are incredibly caring and great to work with, but due to the pressure of volume and turnover, they can’t spend the time they’d like with you.
5. There was a time when big publishers were trusted brands. Now a small publisher is more likely to get a reputation for a particular kind of book, and become a brand in itself. Big houses are forced to diversify. Small ones don’t have to.
6. Long Tail Economics and the tribalisation of the market means that, just as indie bands keep overtaking the big names, small houses can break out books over time. It’s no longer just about throwing money at a product (I hate to call a book that but that’s what it is). Small press can do the one thing big houses can’t – they can take time to make sure a book reaches the right market.
There will be more on this, I’m sure! Comments here, and I’ll monitor them.
A couple of disturbing stories reach me today, both of which make me wonder about editors – if I put either in a short story, would they insist such notions were unrealistic and unlikely, and suggest I remove them?
The first involves a South Korean couple whose addiction to the internet allowed their three-month-old baby starve to death while they were raising a virtual daughter online. The pair fed their own premature baby just once a day in between 12-hour stretches at an internet cafe, the official Yonhap news agency reported. Police officer Chung Jin-won told Yonhap they “lost their will to live a normal life” after losing their jobs.
The 41-year-old father and his 25-year-old wife were arrested in the city of Suweon, south of Seoul, earlier this week, five months after they reported the death of their baby. An autopsy showed her death was caused by a long period of malnutrition. The couple had become obsessed with nurturing a virtual girl called Anima in the popular RPG Prius Online, police said on Friday.
Second, what has a street in New Jersey got in common with a Muslim fundamentalist state?
This story involves police in New Jersey ordering a family to cover up their snow sculpture of the Venus de Milo after neighbourhood complaints. Eliza Gonzalez sculpted the snow-woman with her son and daughter on her front lawn in Rahway following a snowstorm. After the cover-up the police agree that the snowy Venus now looks “more objectified and sexualised” than it did before they were forced to intervene.
Clearly, writers have to play catch-up with the World of Weird out there…
(thank & a tip of the hat to writer Roger Gray who mailed the stories)
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It’s a glorious evening that feels vaguely spring-like, and that calls for a song. This was the first single from Royksopp’s ‘Junior’ album, combining several interests of mine ie neon, science fiction, surrealism and the wanton destruction of public buildings. I’m off to Nice, so no posts until Monday. Bon Weekend y’all!
Incoming! ‘Hellion: The Curse Of Snakes’ is my first teen novel, and should shut the little buggers up for a few hours while they ponder the meaning of life and death before they return to carving their initials in the foreheads of their enemies with switchblades. It’s written in concise, clear language that even a Radio One DJ could follow, and there’s danger of a sequel tipping up if anyone likes it enough. Price £5.99 from the lovely people at Andersen Press. The idea started when I wrote a short story called ‘The Rulebook’, which will shortly be available online at the Edge Hill website.
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Recently the Tate Modern hosted an exhibition about the commercialisation of art, on which one wall of the gallery featured a giant Kirsten Dunst in Japan. Funnily enough, when the McG-directed video was posted it quickly started getting taken down by the producers, thereby proving a hypocrisy about the exhibition ie you can show the commercialisation of art but only in an art gallery. Well, it’s not art as such, it’s a music vid, and it’s back up here.
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