IS YOUR NOVEL SEXUALLY ACTIVE?

Robert E. Howard, ghost writing ...

Yes, though I am a ghost I keep up with the evolution of words and phrases.

After all, during the Great Depression

my stories earned me an income that surpassed the local banker's in my small Texas town of Cross Plains.

So again I ask you ... is your novel sexually active?

Or does it just lay there on the page?

Homer, Shakespeare, Poe, Twain -- the immortals of fiction knew it was the key to fiction :

The heart draws the eyes --

if you want your novel read, it must have love and action.

Characterization is great,

but Edgar Rice Burroughs (the father of all cardboard heroes) was the most translated author of the 1900's. He took exotic locales, a man of action, and love in jeopardy, mixing them in a stew millions and millions bought.

Those of you who know only my characters but have never read my stories, you may think of cold steel, hot blood, and sensual women. Yes, they were in my stories. And no, they weren't. The heart was there and mystery.

J K Rowling? Where's the love there? What heart doesn't go out to a mistreated boy? Oliver Twist. Wart, young Arthur. Harry Potter is a meld of those two icons.

The heart draws the eyes. The action, tension, and danger keeps the pages turning.

Your dream is to be a professional.

Yet, only the big name authors can keep to their genre of choice.

The rest of us must be adaptable enough to go from genre to genre, depending upon the demands of the market.

To sell as many stories as I did, I had to go from one genre to another : Westerns, Sea Stories, science fiction, horror, fantasy, even war stories.

If we are professionals, we can cross genres because we know the core skeleton of a good story :

The heart draws the eyes. Action and dread turns the pages.

We all know the core plot :

The underdog hero/heroine is pulled into a problem beyond his/her capacity to handle.

He attempts to solve it to only to find himself plunged into deeper dangers that grow logically out of his actions and the actions of his adversaries.

All appears lost : the dream is crushed, his friends are gone, and hope has died.

In this midnight of the soul, he learns a Truth about himself, about Life that re-shapes his thinking. He struggles, renewed and reborn.

He triumphs or loses magnificently ... or a little bit of both.

Some turn up their lips at the thought of formula --

but from HAMLET to THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA if you look closely enough, you will see the core skeleton of every good story.

Love in jeopardy draws the reader in. The tension of what waits around the corner keeps the reader turning the pages. And flashes of action, like lightning bolts, spur the reader on.

Like cooking a stew, you must sift the proper balance of ingredients. A likeable hero. A dream/love just out of reach. Danger. Tension. A hope of success. Series of cruel failures. And the last triumphant struggle.

Remember :

The reader wants to be kept in perpetual anticipation,

to not be able to put the book down,

to laugh, to cringe with sympathy at cruel blows, and to cheer at the end.

Last thought : sizzle sells the steak.

Suspense is better than action. (And you can stretch it over more pages.)

The fear of the unknown is always stronger than the grabbling with the monster unmasked. Action taken against a barely seen adversary is always to be preferred.

Happy NEW Year writing.***

MAGIC, HORROR, AND OTHERWORLD BEAUTY

What draws us to write?

It is a solitary sojourn. Most of us will never receive world acclaim ... nor do we expect it.

What then propels us on this journey? What swept you up when you first started to read for yourself? How often do you find a book which conjures that same spirit within you now?

Not often I would wager.

I believe we write to create that world which spellbound us into reading in the first place. What voices called out to us then? What lessons did they teach us?

For me the voices were :

Magic, horror, and otherworld beauty

These three sirens dominated my solitary reading of choice during my high school years. And their voices can be heard in the background of all that I write. Like the three fates, they weave the tapestry of my unconscious muse.

As a young child, I wandered alone into Edith Hamilton's MYTHOLOGY. In junior high, I joined the League of Five and group reading with BEAU GESTE and DR. FU MANCHU. In high school, I was alone again in my reading, open to any influence that caught my fancy.

The authors of those years were my unknowing mentors in how to write well. And oddly enough it was an artist who led me in the land where they all dwelt : Frank Frazetta. And he painted the first road sign on my path to becoming a writer :

1) OTHERWORLD BEAUTY WILL HAUNT YOU, BRINGING YOU BACK TO THE BEGINNING. {AND DON'T FORGET THE EYES.}

EERIE #23 : THE EGYPTIAN PRINCESS
When I spotted the cover to EERIE#23 with Frazetta's "Egyptian Princess" in a used book store, I was spellbound. Yes, she was clothing-challenged. But it were her eyes that ensnared me. And my encounter with her made me quite a few dollars lighter. EERIE #23, even back then when dinosaurs roamed the earth, was a collector's item.

From that moment on, I noticed eyes : weary ones , dull ones, evaluating ones, and those who were black windows into the nothingness that lived in the souls of those who possessed them.

As I began to write, I realized eyes could be the shorthand definition of the characters owning them. I noticed that when the eyes of strangers boldly met mine, it often meant the same thing as when Nixon proclaimed, "I am not a crook." I started counting my silverware.

But back to Frazetta. His art was vibrant, moody, and on-fire all at once. His paperback book covers led me to Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, and even to H.P. Lovecraft. And those three authors sketched the second sign post :

2) HISTORY IS NOT WHAT WE THINK - THERE IS MYSTERY AND MAGIC UNDER THE TOMBSTONES.

UNDER THE PYRAMIDS by H.P. Lovecraft (with Harry Houdini)
My hands went into warp speed when I saw the Frazetta cover emblazoned with that title. Frazetta. Harry Houdini. Wow. I didn't know this Lovecraft fellow, but I had to see what kind of supernatural trouble Houdini had gotten into in his Egyptian travels.

And I wasn't disappointed :
The first sentence : "Mystery attracts mystery."

I was hooked. Then, came the terrible imprisonment within an ancient, dark pyramid. The clever escape and the final glimpse of horror :

"The Great Sphinx! God --

that idle question I asked myself on that sun-blest morning before . . .

what huge and loathsome abnormality was the Sphinx originally carven to represent?

Accursed is the sight, be it in dream or not, that revealed to me the supreme horror—the Unknown God of the Dead, which licks its leering lips in the unsuspected abyss,

fed hideous morsels by soulless absurdities that should not exist. The five-headed monster that emerged . . . that five-headed monster as large as a hippopotamus . . . the five-headed monster—and that of which it is the merest fore paw. . . .

But I survived, and I know it was only a dream."

***
From Frazetta, Burroughs, Howard, and Lovecraft ... I learned how history can be made alive and alluring ... and supernatural. It is a lesson that stays with me still.

3) ROGER ZELAZNY'S LORD OF LIGHT :

Perched in the used bookstore shelf right next to a Frazetta cover of a Conan novel was the book that was to teach me that prose could be beautiful and evocative without being stale and stiff. I picked up LORD OF LIGHT and read the first paragraph :

"His followers called him Mahasamatman, and said he was a god. He preferred to drop the Maha- and the -atman, however, and called himself Sam.

He never claimed to be a god. But then, he never claimed not to be a god. Circumstances being what they were, neither admission could be of any benefit. Silence, though, could.

Therefore, there was mystery about him."

{It is no accident that my own hero is called Sam.}

Mystery. Evocative imagry. I was hooked.

I became his student -- through his books, his essays, and his poetry.

Some of his words :

"No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words."

"For you see, the headwaters of Shit Creek are a cruel and treacherous expanse."

"I like libraries. It makes me feel comfortable and secure to have walls of words,
beautiful and wise, all around me. I always feel better when I can see that there is
something to hold back the shadows."

"There's really nothing quite like someone's wanting you dead to make you want to go on living."

"Occasionally as an author, there arises a writing situation where you see an alternative to what you are doing, a mad, wild gamble of a way for handling something, which may leave you looking stupid, ridiculous or brilliant -you just don't know which.

You can play it safe there, too, and proceed along the route you'd mapped out for yourself. Or you can trust your personal demon who delivered that crazy idea in the firstplace.

Trust your demon."

"I try to sit down at the typewriter four times a day, even if it's only five minutes, and write three sentences. It seems to get the job done. I've written a lot of novels."

And Roger Zelazny led me to this quote by Ernest Hemingway years before it made its way into the latest PREDATOR movie :

"There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter."

THE SIGN POST MARKED DIALOGUE :

I have the eye-aching habit of writing long posts, so out of compassion for your eyes, I will leave that sign post to another day.
**************
And here is a glimpse of the Frank Frazetta Museum. His wife was the custodian of it. She died in 2009 after a year's valiant battle against cancer.

The children started savagely fighting over the paintings. Sigh. Charges of burglary and theft were lodged against Frank Jr. by the rest of the family on March 2010. Matters were solved on the surface. But it proved too much for Frank, mourning the loss of his beloved wife of forty years. He died this year on May 10th.

{In early 2000, he suffered a series of strokes, losing dexterity in his right hand. The champion that he was, he taught himself to paint with his left. The painting of the warrior fighting the Mastodon in the arena towards the end of the clip was done with his left hand.}

One of the prizes on my wall of Movie Memorabilia is a Frazetta lithograph of a bear {I like to think of it as Hibbs, the bear with 2 shadows, on a bad day} signed by the artist himself.
*******************

***

{The Frank Frazetta Estate owns all rights to Frank Frazetta's sketchbook.}

WHAT WAS YOUR SIREN'S CALL?

What draws us to write?

It is a solitary sojourn. Most of us will never receive world acclaim ...

nor do we expect it.

What then propels us on this journey?

What swept you up when you first started to read for yourself? How often do you find a book which conjures that same spirit within you now?

Not often I would wager.

I believe we write to create that world which spellbound us into reading in the first place. What voices called out to us then? What lessons did they teach us?

For me the voices were :

Magic,

Horror,

and Otherworld Beauty

These three sirens dominated my solitary reading of choice during my high school years. And their voices can be heard in the background of all that I write. Like the three fates, they weave the tapestry of my unconscious muse.

As a young child, I wandered alone into Edith Hamilton's MYTHOLOGY. In junior high, I joined the League of Five and group reading with BEAU GESTE and DR. FU MANCHU. In high school, I was alone again in my reading, open to any influence that caught my fancy.

The authors of those years were my unknowing mentors in how to write well. And oddly enough it was an artist who led me in the land where they all dwelt : Frank Frazetta. And he painted the first road sign on my path to becoming a writer :

1) OTHERWORLD BEAUTY WILL HAUNT YOU, BRINGING YOU BACK TO THE BEGINNING. {AND DON'T FORGET THE EYES.}

EERIE #23 : THE EGYPTIAN PRINCESS
When I spotted the cover to EERIE#23 with Frazetta's "Egyptian Princess" in a used book store, I was spellbound. Yes, she was clothing-challenged. But it were her eyes that ensnared me. And my encounter with her made me quite a few dollars lighter. EERIE #23, even back then when dinosaurs roamed the earth, was a collector's item.

From that moment on, I noticed eyes : weary ones , dull ones, evaluating ones, and those who were black windows into the nothingness that lived in the souls of those who possessed them.

As I began to write, I realized eyes could be the shorthand definition of the characters owning them. I noticed that when the eyes of strangers boldly met mine, it often meant the same thing as when Nixon proclaimed, "I am not a crook." I started counting my silverware.

But back to Frazetta. His art was vibrant, moody, and on-fire all at once. His paperback book covers led me to Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, and even to H.P. Lovecraft. And those three authors sketched the second sign post :

2) HISTORY IS NOT WHAT WE THINK - THERE IS MYSTERY AND MAGIC UNDER THE TOMBSTONES.

UNDER THE PYRAMIDS by H.P. Lovecraft (with Harry Houdini)
My hands went into warp speed when I saw the Frazetta cover emblazoned with that title. Frazetta. Harry Houdini. Wow. I didn't know this Lovecraft fellow, but I had to see what kind of supernatural trouble Houdini had gotten into in his Egyptian travels.

And I wasn't disappointed :
The first sentence : "Mystery attracts mystery."

I was hooked. Then, came the terrible imprisonment within an ancient, dark pyramid. The clever escape and the final glimpse of horror :

"The Great Sphinx! God --

that idle question I asked myself on that sun-blest morning before . . .

what huge and loathsome abnormality was the Sphinx originally carven to represent?

Accursed is the sight, be it in dream or not, that revealed to me the supreme horror—the Unknown God of the Dead, which licks its leering lips in the unsuspected abyss,

fed hideous morsels by soulless absurdities that should not exist. The five-headed monster that emerged . . . that five-headed monster as large as a hippopotamus . . . the five-headed monster—and that of which it is the merest fore paw. . . .

But I survived, and I know it was only a dream."

***
From Frazetta, Burroughs, Howard, and Lovecraft ... I learned how history can be made alive and alluring ... and supernatural. It is a lesson that stays with me still.

3) ROGER ZELAZNY'S LORD OF LIGHT :

Perched in the used bookstore shelf right next to a Frazetta cover of a Conan novel was the book that was to teach me that prose could be beautiful and evocative without being stale and stiff. I picked up LORD OF LIGHT and read the first paragraph :

"His followers called him Mahasamatman, and said he was a god. He preferred to drop the Maha- and the -atman, however, and called himself Sam.

He never claimed to be a god. But then, he never claimed not to be a god. Circumstances being what they were, neither admission could be of any benefit. Silence, though, could.

Therefore, there was mystery about him."

{It is no accident that my own hero is called Sam.}

Mystery. Evocative imagry. I was hooked.

I became his student -- through his books, his essays, and his poetry.

Some of his words :

"No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words."

"For you see, the headwaters of Shit Creek are a cruel and treacherous expanse."

"I like libraries. It makes me feel comfortable and secure to have walls of words,
beautiful and wise, all around me. I always feel better when I can see that there is
something to hold back the shadows."

"There's really nothing quite like someone's wanting you dead to make you want to go on living."

"Occasionally as an author, there arises a writing situation where you see an alternative to what you are doing, a mad, wild gamble of a way for handling something, which may leave you looking stupid, ridiculous or brilliant -you just don't know which.

You can play it safe there, too, and proceed along the route you'd mapped out for yourself. Or you can trust your personal demon who delivered that crazy idea in the firstplace.

Trust your demon."

"I try to sit down at the typewriter four times a day, even if it's only five minutes, and write three sentences. It seems to get the job done. I've written a lot of novels."

And Roger Zelazny led me to this quote by Ernest Hemingway years before it made its way into the latest PREDATOR movie :

"There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter."

THE SIGN POST MARKED DIALOGUE :

I have the eye-aching habit of writing long posts, so out of compassion for your eyes, I will leave that sign post to another day.
**************
And here is a glimpse of the Frank Frazetta Museum. His wife was the custodian of it. She died in 2009 after a year's valiant battle against cancer.

The children started savagely fighting over the paintings. Sigh. Charges of burglary and theft were lodged against Frank Jr. by the rest of the family on March 2010. Matters were solved on the surface. But it proved too much for Frank, mourning the loss of his beloved wife of forty years. He died this year on May 10th.

{In early 2000, he suffered a series of strokes, losing dexterity in his right hand. The champion that he was, he taught himself to paint with his left. The painting of the warrior fighting the Mastodon in the arena towards the end of the clip was done with his left hand.}

One of the prizes on my wall of Movie Memorabilia is a Frazetta lithograph of a bear {I like to think of it as Hibbs, the bear with 2 shadows, on a bad day} signed by the artist himself.
*******************

***

{The Frank Frazetta Estate owns all rights to Frank Frazetta's sketchbook.}

MAGIC, HORROR, AND OTHERWORLD BEAUTY

What draws us to write?

It is a solitary sojourn. Most of us will never receive world acclaim ... nor do we expect it.

What then propels us on this journey? What swept you up when you first started to read for yourself? How often do you find a book which conjures that same spirit within you now?

Not often I would wager.

I believe we write to create that world which spellbound us into reading in the first place. What voices called out to us then? What lessons did they teach us?

For me the voices were :

Magic, horror, and otherworld beauty

These three sirens dominated my solitary reading of choice during my high school years. And their voices can be heard in the background of all that I write. Like the three fates, they weave the tapestry of my unconscious muse.

As a young child, I wandered alone into Edith Hamilton's MYTHOLOGY. In junior high, I joined the League of Five and group reading with BEAU GESTE and DR. FU MANCHU. In high school, I was alone again in my reading, open to any influence that caught my fancy.

The authors of those years were my unknowing mentors in how to write well. And oddly enough it was an artist who led me in the land where they all dwelt : Frank Frazetta. And he painted the first road sign on my path to becoming a writer :

1) OTHERWORLD BEAUTY WILL HAUNT YOU, BRINGING YOU BACK TO THE BEGINNING. {AND DON'T FORGET THE EYES.}

EERIE #23 : THE EGYPTIAN PRINCESS
When I spotted the cover to EERIE#23 with Frazetta's "Egyptian Princess" in a used book store, I was spellbound. Yes, she was clothing-challenged. But it were her eyes that ensnared me. And my encounter with her made me quite a few dollars lighter. EERIE #23, even back then when dinosaurs roamed the earth, was a collector's item.

From that moment on, I noticed eyes : weary ones , dull ones, evaluating ones, and those who were black windows into the nothingness that lived in the souls of those who possessed them.

As I began to write, I realized eyes could be the shorthand definition of the characters owning them. I noticed that when the eyes of strangers boldly met mine, it often meant the same thing as when Nixon proclaimed, "I am not a crook." I started counting my silverware.

But back to Frazetta. His art was vibrant, moody, and on-fire all at once. His paperback book covers led me to Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, and even to H.P. Lovecraft. And those three authors sketched the second sign post :

2) HISTORY IS NOT WHAT WE THINK - THERE IS MYSTERY AND MAGIC UNDER THE TOMBSTONES.

UNDER THE PYRAMIDS by H.P. Lovecraft (with Harry Houdini)
My hands went into warp speed when I saw the Frazetta cover emblazoned with that title. Frazetta. Harry Houdini. Wow. I didn't know this Lovecraft fellow, but I had to see what kind of supernatural trouble Houdini had gotten into in his Egyptian travels.

And I wasn't disappointed :
The first sentence : "Mystery attracts mystery."

I was hooked. Then, came the terrible imprisonment within an ancient, dark pyramid. The clever escape and the final glimpse of horror :

"The Great Sphinx! God --

that idle question I asked myself on that sun-blest morning before . . .

what huge and loathsome abnormality was the Sphinx originally carven to represent?

Accursed is the sight, be it in dream or not, that revealed to me the supreme horror—the Unknown God of the Dead, which licks its leering lips in the unsuspected abyss,

fed hideous morsels by soulless absurdities that should not exist. The five-headed monster that emerged . . . that five-headed monster as large as a hippopotamus . . . the five-headed monster—and that of which it is the merest fore paw. . . .

But I survived, and I know it was only a dream."

***
From Frazetta, Burroughs, Howard, and Lovecraft ... I learned how history can be made alive and alluring ... and supernatural. It is a lesson that stays with me still.

3) ROGER ZELAZNY'S LORD OF LIGHT :

Perched in the used bookstore shelf right next to a Frazetta cover of a Conan novel was the book that was to teach me that prose could be beautiful and evocative without being stale and stiff. I picked up LORD OF LIGHT and read the first paragraph :

"His followers called him Mahasamatman, and said he was a god. He preferred to drop the Maha- and the -atman, however, and called himself Sam.

He never claimed to be a god. But then, he never claimed not to be a god. Circumstances being what they were, neither admission could be of any benefit. Silence, though, could.

Therefore, there was mystery about him."

{It is no accident that my own hero is called Sam.}

Mystery. Evocative imagry. I was hooked.

I became his student -- through his books, his essays, and his poetry.

Some of his words :

"No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words."

"For you see, the headwaters of Shit Creek are a cruel and treacherous expanse."

"I like libraries. It makes me feel comfortable and secure to have walls of words,
beautiful and wise, all around me. I always feel better when I can see that there is
something to hold back the shadows."

"There's really nothing quite like someone's wanting you dead to make you want to go on living."

"Occasionally as an author, there arises a writing situation where you see an alternative to what you are doing, a mad, wild gamble of a way for handling something, which may leave you looking stupid, ridiculous or brilliant -you just don't know which.

You can play it safe there, too, and proceed along the route you'd mapped out for yourself. Or you can trust your personal demon who delivered that crazy idea in the firstplace.

Trust your demon."

"I try to sit down at the typewriter four times a day, even if it's only five minutes, and write three sentences. It seems to get the job done. I've written a lot of novels."

And Roger Zelazny led me to this quote by Ernest Hemingway years before it made its way into the latest PREDATOR movie :

"There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter."

THE SIGN POST MARKED DIALOGUE :

I have the eye-aching habit of writing long posts, so out of compassion for your eyes, I will leave that sign post to another day.
**************
And here is a glimpse of the Frank Frazetta Museum. His wife was the custodian of it. She died in 2009 after a year's valiant battle against cancer.

The children started savagely fighting over the paintings. Sigh. Charges of burglary and theft were lodged against Frank Jr. by the rest of the family on March 2010. Matters were solved on the surface. But it proved too much for Frank, mourning the loss of his beloved wife of forty years. He died this year on May 10th.

{In early 2000, he suffered a series of strokes, losing dexterity in his right hand. The champion that he was, he taught himself to paint with his left. The painting of the warrior fighting the Mastodon in the arena towards the end of the clip was done with his left hand.}

One of the prizes on my wall of Movie Memorabilia is a Frazetta lithograph of a bear {I like to think of it as Hibbs, the bear with 2 shadows, on a bad day} signed by the artist himself.
*******************
***

{The Frank Frazetta Estate owns all rights to Frank Frazetta's sketchbook.}