The grueling part of writing novels is the need to promote your own work. This is especially true of authors who get published by small presses like me or those who go the self-publishing route. Promotion involves an extensive amount of activity on social media sites, and for many authors this is a real chore (that’s me, too).

I have found one social media format quite enjoyable: Bublish. Please note that this blog is not an advertisement for the platform, nor am I receiving any reimbursement for writing about it. I am just excited about Bublish and how I have been able to promote my work.

Basically, Bublish is a social platform that allows authors to display excerpts from their work. Authors can choose as many excerpts as they want and to display them on whatever timeline they prefer. What makes Bublish rather interesting is the ability of authors to also write insights about the passages. That is, authors can include “behind the scenes” information that highlights their perspective, logic, or state of mind related to that passage. Have you ever wanted to know how an author got an idea for a particular scene or why they wrote a passage the way they did? Well, here is an opportunity to find out.

Right now, I have my two horror novels, Dead Works (3 excerpts and insights) and Birth Offering (4 excerpts and insights) loaded on Bublish. Using Bublish, I was able to address why I used child sexual abuse as an underlying theme of my recent ghost story, Dead Works. I found writing about this topic, even in the vague sense that it appears in Dead Works, rather difficult, but I was able to explain the process very succinctly in a book bubble and relate it to an excerpt. I was also able to explain what a Practicum class looks like to readers who are not familiar with the training of graduate psychology students.  For my first novel, Birth Offering, I was able to describe how I got the idea for the novel while on vacation (nearly 20 years ago!), and tie it to the very passage that was my first mental glimpse of the book.

I should be preparing at least one more excerpt and insight for Dead Works. I don’t know why I think four passages per novel represents a nice round number – but at the moment, that is where I am stuck. You never know, however, maybe more will appear. In the meantime, here is the link to my author page on Bublish: http://t.co/c7BSg8Ipaq

Check it out, and see if you like it and the platform itself.

Horror author Brian Moreland interviewed me for his blog. Here is the link. I am absolutely thrilled that he conducted the interview - and honored that he took the time. He is a great guy, and if you want some great horror reads, check out his novels.

A number of reviewers and friends have noted that my novel Birth Offering qualifies as a YA novel. Granted the main character is a teen, but I would not have considered the book to be YA. I always thought that young adult fiction had certain distinct qualities, the most obvious having a youth or youths as the main character(s). In addition, though, I often thought that the narrative was written in the first person – and entirely from the adolescent’s perspective.  I’m not sure where I got that idea from, but there it is.

Birth Offering has multiple limited third person perspective, with 14-year old Ryan the most central character. But the point of view shifts to a special agent and the boy’s mother. So, just because the main character is an adolescent (and probably 50% of the story is told from his limited, third person point of view) could this novel “qualify” as YA (or a crossover, if that is such a term)? Maybe I am missing an audience…

During the editing process for Birth Offering, I was informed by the folks at Damnation Books that my cover artist would be Ash Arceneaux. I wasn’t familiar with her work, so I checked out her titles and her website – and I was really pleased when I saw her creations. She is a gifted photographer, and frequently uses local models when producing covers. She enlisted Billy Taylor, high school student in Florida, for the Birth Offering cover - which, I must say, is an absolutely fantastic cover. I received this picture of Billy (and my cover) the other day. I thought I’d share it. It’s a great shot…

My novel Birth Offering has been in release since mid-September. Like most other first time authors, I revised the work more times than I could count - and reread it a few more times than that figure (whatever it is). I thought I had captured every typo, every grammatical error, every homonym error, every misplaced comma, and every extra space. Then the publisher's editor read and reread Birth Offering and found a few more. Then I found a few additional ones after the editing process, and finally caught a handful more when looking at the proofs. 
 
I thought I had found them all.

Alas, no. 

As friends grabbed the first available copies, many gave me high marks for the story, but would whisper, "you know, there were a few mistakes, errors, typos... your editor missed a few..." So on and so forth. 

I really am quite embarrassed about this. As a university professor, I get after my graduate students about catching this stuff. As a psychologist, I consider myself a pretty decent researcher and scholarly writer. So, to make these mistakes is rather humiliating. (As I write this blog, I am almost fearful of some hidden typos seeing the light of day after I hit "publish".) Some friends have said that "you need a second set of eyes" and have graciously volunteered to read the galley proofs of the second novel coming sometime in 2014 (Dead Works). I'll definitely take them up on it. Some say that my editor should have caught these errors. Maybe so. Probably so. Still my name is on the book, so I consider it my responsibility.

Over the past few months, I have offered reviews of numerous horror novels on this blog. In some of them I would indicate that typos existed - and even contact the author to let him/her know. I never did this to embarrass them. Rather, I thought they would want to know. At the time, I thought I would certainly want to know. Now that the shoe is on the other foot, I feel the embarrassment - and subsequently feel bad about possibly humiliating any other author by pointing out the mistakes. 

Now that I know what it the experience is like to find out that your book has errors, do I still hold the view that I want to know these things? Actually, yes. As humbling as it is, how else are you going to improve your craft? I suppose knowing is better than not knowing.

I think.

My novel, Birth Offering, is being featured Saturday, Dec 7th, at The Fussy Librarian, a new website that offers personalized ebook recommendations. You choose from 40 genres and indicate preferences about content and then the computers work their magic. It's pretty cool -- check it out! www.TheFussyLibrarian.com

A few more final thoughts (for now at least) on the creepy-kid genre.

While I focus on fictional accounts, there are unfortunately numerous examples of real-life prominent cases of violence and terror perpetrated by children and adolescents. One of the Boston Marathon bombers was merely nineteen. Vicious crimes are committed by teenage males (usually), sometimes individually and sometimes in packs. School shootings are now a fairly regular event, and their occurrence leaves us shaking out heads in confusion looking for reasons why these things happen.

We are destined to be confused after each and every occurrence because there are multiple reasons for each one, and these reasons differ across events. In addition, there will always be unknowns in each occurrence which we simply cannot identify. This missing data is frustrating because we cannot fill the gaps and we want to know – we want to be assured that this situation cannot happen to us. We want to think, well it’s no wonder this terrible thing happened, look at how he lived…or look at his parents – their lives are a mess, or it’s drugs, I tell ya…

Chances are, many of these variables or other related factors play a role in the disturbing acts of youth - or none of them do. More likely, though, the etiology is an unpredictable combination of genetics, biology, parenting skills, family dysfunction, abuse, alcoholism, mentally ill parents, individual child factors like poor social skills or coping skills or reasoning skills, neurological issues, violent TV preferences, living in a violent neighborhood, an absent father, the proliferation of automatic weapons… we can go on and on. And, this interacting combination of factors will vary from kid to kid. The same risk factors might produce drug abuse in one teenager and an eating disorder in another. Likewise, there can be multiple risk factors that vary across kids which promote the same problem.

For many parents, you don’t need supernatural events to watch your beloved child struggle on a day to day basis. The emotional distress in a child is enough to ravage parental hopes and dreams. The sense of panic doesn’t relent as parents watch their children grow despondent or become fearful or descend into a nightmare of self-destructive behavior.

When I went to college, I had it in my head that I would major in something like political science and then go to law school and become a lawyer. My freshman year I took an Introduction to Psychology class as an elective. I fell in love with the topic. I found myself really interested in developmental issues – the stages that kids go through as they mature, the skills they learn to navigate their world, how they mature in their cognitive or reasoning abilities – you name it, I found it fascinating. This class changed my life trajectory. I was intrigued with how kids develop and became drawn to examine factors that might play a role when things go wrong. I started studying and researching the moral and social reasoning in delinquent adolescents. This lead to working with adolescents to improve self-control skills and anger-management skills. Somewhere along the way, my professional interests shifted to kids who seemed to function okay on the outside but who struggle internally with anxiety and stress. From there, it was only a short jump to focusing on youth with chronic health conditions and any related adjustment problems or adherence problems. While some of this work was conducted in a clinical setting, the vast majority of my work occurred in academic settings. That is, as a university professor, most of my professional work emphasized the training of graduate students and conducting research on these very topics.

You’re probably wondering, what’s the point of all this?

Well, here goes.

There is one thing I can say about my life with absolute certainty: I am sure glad I didn’t become a lawyer.

This career has been very fulfilling. It has been an honor to work with graduate students in order to train them as counselors and psychologists. My work with teenagers and their families has also been very rewarding. I’ve seen kids learn new skills and make sense of their experiences. Sometimes, I’ve seen the impact of therapy through the eyes of my students – when they are excited in their reports of client improvement. These are truly remarkable moments.

Since I have been writing horror novels on the side, so to speak, I have tried very much to incorporate these observations. In Birth Offering, I wanted Ryan to experience a lack of certainty about what is going on with him. I wanted his mother’s concern that he is developing a mental illness to feel palpable to the reader. My incorporation of these notions into a horror story worked pretty well, I think.  Incidentally, I will have a novella published next year by Damnation Books, entitled Dead Works (this is the first unofficial/official announcement, I guess), and the story line addresses this topic more directly. The entire novel takes place within the context of a therapy session between a doctoral psychology student and his 13-year old client. The focal point of the story is essentially this: is the client being haunted or is he developing a mental illness?

Well, I apologize for a certain lack of cohesion in this entry. There is a certain connection with the topic of the past two posts, mainly in terms of how “it all fits”. Now, if I can just figure out what it all means…

As I’ve written about in an earlier blog, I can trace my enjoyment of the creepy kid sub-genre back to around 1960 where my six-year old self was terrified, yet simultaneously fascinated, by the movie trailer (or coming attractions as they were called then) of the Village of the Damned. The thought that kids could be monsters (not a surprise to my mom and dad, I’m sure) both scared me and thrilled me.

So, as I decided to start writing horror fiction, I guess it was no surprise that a kid would be the main protagonist in my first (and subsequent) efforts. Not to be outdone by other writers, I ended up with multiple kid characters in my debut novel, Birth Offering. The main character is Ryan Perry, my hero and, if you take a look, the kid who is in frequent peril. So, he satisfies the youth as hero character – well actually he more than satisfies the youthful hero description (I ended up really liking this kid). On the other end of the divide – the creepy kid character – Birth Offering has not one but three creepy kids. These fit the supernatural end of the creepy-kid spectrum. One ghostly apparition and two “feral” kids who are a lot more than just feral. These two kids, Hugo and Max, are my favorite creations. While they do not have a tremendous amount of “page-time”, their presence is hinted at frequently, and their actions are downright ghastly. A review on Amazon called Max a “thoroughly unsettling portrait”. I am really pleased with this description – I really wanted to aim for something like this.

I really focused on trying to create credible youth characters in Birth Offering. In the case of my hero, Ryan Perry, this meant making him seem like a typical kid despite the fact that he constantly faced extraordinary circumstances. He had to be smart and brave enough to consider and engage in dangerous courses of action and be in great physical shape to endure some excruciating consequences of those actions. He had to be impulsive enough and, there is no kind way of saying it, immature enough to engage in some stupid courses of action and also whine about the consequences. He had to be inexperienced enough to be flustered by the presence of a pretty girl – enough so that he could completely lose sight of the fact that something supernatural is intent on killing him.

My task for creating Hugo and Max was not that much different. These kids were monsters, but their actions and their behaviors had to be tempered with those that made them look very much like 12 and 9 year old boys. There was the selfishness and sullenness that comes with a 12 year old that was incorporated into Hugo’s character, and the cuteness that defined Max. The grounded characteristics really provided an extreme contrast to the horrifying nature of their actions when the deeds become evident. 

Cake for my author event at Boswell Books this evening.... what a scream

In my post-Birth Offering efforts, two novellas entitled Sweet Aswang and Dead Works, I found myself writing about teenage characters again. While it was intentional with Sweet Aswang, the appearance of a teenager as a main character in Dead Works came out of left field. He was meant to be on the periphery, but his narrative became so engrossing that he moved to center stage. I’ll be writing about these works in the future.

One anecdote from these two projects: when I showed my in-house editor (that is, my daughter – who was around 20 at the time) a draft for Sweet Aswang – which has two adolescents, a boy and a girl - the subsequent exchange went something like this:

Me: “So, what did you think?”

My daughter: “Not bad. But geez, dad, stick with boys. You couldn’t write from a girl’s point of view if your life depended on it.”

She is an honest reviewer; I can say that with certainty.