Tag Archives: books

Back to work…

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I’ve had a lot of thoughts this week. All of them about my writing and which direction it’s headed.

As I said in a previous post, I’ll only be writing horror for publication from now on. Anything not horror will be for me. I have a list of places I’ll be submitting short stories and the novellas I’ve written. Those will be going out in the next few months.

I can’t not write. I’ve created stories since I was a little kid. It’s as much a part of me as anything else. I will narrow my focus on horror.

I love to watch and read horror and while I enjoyed writing books like Disunion, those will be trunk books or books that will never see the light of day.

I hope you’ll continue to follow me on here as well as Substack. I also recently pulled Disunion and my collection. I’m figuring out what to do with the collection. Disunion and Jax Reed are going to be done. While I love the world I created with him and Griggs and the research I did was a lot of fun, I feel those stories are not what was expected of me.

I’m going back to horror unless something pulls me another way. I don’t see that happening. Disunion’s reception hurt and it’s the main reason those stories are shelved.

Have a good weekend,

Brian

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Complaining too much and my brain telling me things.

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Disunion by Force by Brian J. Stone

Everything I’ve written for the last couple of weeks is terrible. Whatever I picked up to read bored me and I’ve talked about it on social media.

Now, I try not to do this, but last week my brain told me off through a dream.

All the writers I interact with had an intervention. One said, “We’ve been watching you for a couple of years. I don’t know where you fell off, but you need to stop complaining and work.”

Needless to say, I thought of this dream for a couple of days. It resided in every waking moment. When I thought I got away from it, there it was, reeling me back in.

The funny thing is, I thought everything was fine. I didn’t see it. My subconscious did. It yelled at me in the dream, “You’ve been doing so good. You need to stop this complaining and work.”

Now, this is not a complaint to follow up on by the subconscious. It’s more of a story that I need to listen to that voice in my head that says to work.

I have a book out in a month, and I will promote the hell out of it for the next month and thereafter. What I will not do is complain about how hard this shit sometimes is. How hard I’m working. I want everyone to read Disunion By Force. I wrote it for me, so maybe it won’t reach the people I want it to, but I know someone will enjoy it.

They say you should write what you’d read and this is what my fourteen-year-old self would have read. It’s a book I think my biological father would like.

You have to put a book away sometimes.

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Last year I struggled to read books. I started strong but got stuck along the way. I’m certain I know which book did it: Lonesome Dove.

Don’t get me wrong I loved the book, but I felt like I read it for months. I’m feeling the same way with The Brothers Karamazov. Which I’ll be setting aside for a while. I finished Lonesome Dove last month, followed quickly by Streets of Laredo which was a good book, but it’s not the same as Lonesome Dove.

I need to read something fun. Dostoevsky is not fun. I’m enjoying reading about the characters but feel like so much is dragging on about various story threads. It feels closer to a bunch of stories put together to form a book rather than a novel with cohesion. I don’t care for the story, but the prose is incredible. There’s a difference.

If you follow me on Twitter, you know that I picked up a couple of books recently and I’m a subscriber to the Nightworms monthly book box. I received last month’s books and haven’t touched them because I’ve been reading Karamazov.

I recently finished watching the Reacher show on Prime and while I’ve read the first book, I haven’t read any of the others. I think I’ll read some of them for a while, then read the Nightworms books.

It’s okay to put a book down if you’re feeling overwhelmed, bored, not digging the story, or that you’d rather brush your teeth than go through another paragraph. Read what you want to read and read for enjoyment, not for a number.

Anyway, I enjoyed the Reacher show. I’m glad they’re going to do another season. I’m going to read something fun for a while. Dostoevsky feels like schoolwork.

There is a bit of transference…

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I’m going to continue on this tangent about books.

I’ve dropped reading Horror for a little while to work on my craft. I’m finding that when I read better writing my writing improves. I’ve ignored this for a while as I knew it happened, as it’s happened before, but I really like horror.

My current read is The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky. While reading it I’m realizing a few things about my own writing as well as ways to improve my craft. These things have to do with paragraphs and how to structure them. The problem is I’ve written a blog for so long that what I do on here flows into my other writing. The short clipped sentences you’re “supposed” to use in blogs made their way into my novel writing.

When I discovered this I knew I had to change a lot of my writing. The latest rejection told me that there were a lot of single-sentence paragraphs, which I knew came from my blog writing. I will be adjusting this and you will see that adjustment. I’m trying to get the length correct and keep to one idea within each paragraph. I’m aware this is how paragraphs should work but the way I used to right created problems and I’ve fixed them along the way to where I am. These adjustments took time to break and I’m still working on them.

Now I love horror, but sometimes the language and the structure isn’t as good in horror as it is in other fiction. There are writers whose prose baffles me. I’ll look at some writer’s work and think, “damn I can’t do that.” Afterward, I think, but I’m going to work on it until I can. That is my goal in this art, to get better.

I know this is a bit different for me, but I’ll continue to write on this blog, it may come across a bit different as I work on my craft issues. I hope you’ll stay as adjustments are made.

Fear of the Classics

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I have a problem, it’s with classics but not all classics just some of them.

I’ve read, Frankenstein, Dracula, most of Lovecraft, Alexandre Dumas, and I love Algernon Blackwood, Dum. The Willows is one of my favorite stories I’ve ever read.

But there are others that I have trouble with; Dostoevsky, Faulkner(not all of them), Melville. I know that I should read them and enjoy them but I don’t. I have tried reading Crime & Punishment at least 10 times, but on the last read, I quit. I can’t read that book.

I wish I knew why I have this trouble, but I’ve narrowed it down to fear.

What if it’s amazing and I wished I’d read it earlier. I feel that way about Frankenstein and a few others, but they’re either sci-fi or horror. It’s the literary classics I have trouble with. It’s not the way it’s written, it’s the fear that I’ll either hate it and feel like I’ve wasted my time on it or I’ll love the hell out of it.

This comes in many ways to me. I am going to read a bunch of classics this year and my current read is ‘The Brothers Karamazov’. I know it’s Dostoevsky, but I want to read it for my own reasons. These books are part of my learning as a writer and while I hope to enjoy them, there’s that fear I won’t.

It’s the whole I’m not good enough to do this writing thing. What if I read something and I feel I’ll never accomplish that grandiosity of what I’ve read? This came to me a lot in the early days of writing but hasn’t been raising its nasty little head lately.

I don’t know how to get past all of this other than keep reading, keep writing, and ignoring the voice in my head, so I’ll ignore it and read all these books.

This started as a conversation between my wife and me. I bought Don Quixote recently and she was surprised I’d never read it. I told her it’s one of those books I was afraid to read for all of the reasons I stated above.

Anyway, read what you like and don’t let that voice screw it up for you.