S.G. Browne

For the past month I’ve been working on a collection of short stories that I plan on releasing as an e-book sometime later this year. Some of the stories were written between 1997-2004 and some of them have appeared in anthologies and collections, but never before have they been collected together. And several of them are brand spanking new.

The collection will include the following:

“A Zombie’s Lament” – My two-thousand-word short story about a newly reanimated corpse that was the genesis of Breathers.

“Shooting Monkeys in a Barrel” – One of my newest creations, a cautionary tale about what happens to a writer when he purchases words from a drug dealer.

“Dream Girls” – A futuristic story about sexual obsession, extraterrestrial intelligence,the death of Marilyn Monroe, and the assassination of JFK.

“Softland” – A family of luck poachers living in central California deal with the consequences of their actions. This story spawned my next novel, Lucky Bastard.

“The Sodom and Gomorrah Shore” – The Seven Deadly Sins in the original reality television show, set back during the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. This one was written after Fated.

“Zombie Gigolo” – The shortest story in the collection, this took third place in the Gross Out Contest at the 2008 World Horror Convention.

There are four other stories, including “Dr. Lullaby” and “My Ego is Bigger than Yours,” both of which are sneak peeks of two novels I’m currently writing. The collection will also include an introduction and author notes for each story so you get some kind of background information on how the stories came to be written.

I’m excited to have the chance to share these with everyone, so I’ll keep you posted as to when you can expect the collection to be available. And thanks for reading!

This blog post is inspired by my friend and fellow writer, Steve Hockensmith, who posted a list of 50 Dos and Don’ts for Wannabee Writers. I’m not quite as ambitious as Steve, so my list is a little shorter. And it’s not nearly as amusing. But I hope it’s just as helpful.

DO write every day. Ideally at the same time. Preferably without distraction. Half an hour. An hour. Fifteen minutes. Whatever works with your schedule. Just pick a time and develop a habit and stick with it.

DON’T worry about your word count, especially when you first start out. If you don’t write much of anything and just sit there and stare at your computer, it’s okay. The practice is what matters. Eventually the words will come.

DO some writing exercises if you can’t think of anything to write. Pick a scene and write the same scene from different points of view: first person, second person, third person limited, third person omniscient. Or pick a scene and write it in different tenses. Anything to help stimulate your mind and challenge you to write something you might not be comfortable doing.

DON’T pay attention to how much other people are writing. It doesn’t matter if all of your writer friends on Twitter are pumping out 2000, 3000, or 4000 words a day. Just focus on what you can control and don’t compare yourself to others. After all, it’s about quality, not quantity.

DO carry a journal with you in your purse or backpack. Yes, that’s right. I said a journal. An actual book of blank pages that you write in using something that’s called a pen. It helps you to keep in touch with the physical process of writing. And it’s easier to write an idea down in a notebook than waiting to fire up your laptop.

DON’T check your Facebook profile or your Twitter account or your e-mail during your dedicated writing time. Staying disconnected from the Internet will allow you to stay connected to your writing.

DO read as much as you can. Novels, short stories, magazines. Read humor, romance, horror, mystery, suspense, non-fiction, memoir, poetry. Don’t get stuck reading the same thing over and over, even if it’s what you’re writing. A well-rounded reader is a well-rounded writer.

DON’T expect that you can learn how to write by reading a bunch of books on how to write. The best way to learn how to write is to write.

DO pay attention to song lyrics and movies and appreciate why you like them. It’s all writing, even if it’s in a different form. A writer can find inspiration in all sorts of places that aren’t the printed word.

DON’T pay attention to what other people say you should be writing.

DO write something that speaks to you. Something that makes you laugh or cry or get chills down your spine. Something that resonates with you. Because if it doesn’t resonate with you, chances are it’s not going to resonate with anyone else.

DON’T try to get it absolutely perfect the first time. That’s what rewrites are for. If you spend all of your time rewriting your first chapter, you’ll never get the second chapter written. Or the third.

DO get feedback from a writers group or a couple of trusted friends or colleagues. Family members are okay, too, but only if they’re going to give you an honest critique. Criticism is only helpful if it’s constructive.

DON’T try to please everyone who gives you feedback. Writing is subjective and everyone is going to have their own reaction to what you’ve written. Use what suggestions help to improve the story you want to tell and throw the rest of them out.

DO realize that once you send your novel out into the world, it doesn’t belong to you anymore. It belongs to everyone who reads it and not everyone is going to like it. Accept that fact and deal with it and learn how to not take anything personally.

DON’T forget that you’re supposed to be writing every day.

I recently watched half a dozen episodes of the reality television series Jersey Shore in the name of research. Since I don’t watch much TV, and rarely, if ever, watch reality TV, I felt it was imperative to get some insight into the dynamic for the short story I’m writing about the Seven Deadly Sins living together in a reality TV type environment.

I have to admit, while the first three episodes of Jersey Shore were for research, the last three episodes were because I couldn’t look away. Fortunately, I haven’t given into the temptation to do more research by watching Keeping Up With the Kardashians.

When it comes to research, I tend to be more of an armchair researcher rather than going out into the field, using the world at my proverbial fingertips to help add details to my writing. These details, I feel, help to enhance the mythologies and universes I create and ground them in a sense of reality.

While writing Breathers, for instance, I added a good deal of information as to what happens to the human body when it decomposes and what cadavers are used for when donated to medical science. Most of this information I found in STIFF: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach. Had it not been for that book, I wouldn’t have known that a cadaver head is about the same size and weight as a roaster chicken or that when maggots feast on subcutaneous fat it sounds like Rice Krispies.

In addition to the various aspects of human decomposition that helped to give Breathers it’s somewhat dark tone, I also researched wine, recipes, reality television, granaries, the SPCA, the Sistine Chapel, Social Security numbers, and how to apply makeup. All of this was accomplished by using the Internet, though I did visit the Soquel Cemetery to add atmosphere to those scenes. And all of the headstones I mention truly exist there.

As for Fated, the time I spent in Manhattan definitely helped to add some details to the scenes that took place there, details I otherwise would have missed. Like being able to hear the traffic on the Hudson River Parkway while sitting on the promenade beneath the cherry blossom trees. Or that there were cherry blossom trees to sit under. However, I never set foot in Scandal’s in Queens to get a lap dance or had a drink at Iggy’s on the Upper East Side.

Since Fate has been around since the dawn of man, I wanted to include his personal relationship with humans over the millennia.  So I did a fair amount of research on world history, using details about Henry VIII, the sinking of the Titanic, Neolithic man, the Renaissance, the Hindenburg, Moses, the birth of the Roman Empire, and the Black Death, among others. This helped to add a realistic element to my supernatural universe.

I also researched the ingredients of crystal methamphetamine, celebrity deaths in Los Angeles, shopping malls, world population, the Greek Gods, New York City real estate, strip Scrabble, BDSM, the Daytona Beach Dog Track, and the fact that in the state of Minnesota it’s illegal to have sex with a bird.

Oh the things you can learn on the Internet.

So I’m in the process of doing edits on my third novel, Lucky Bastard. These edits are based on feedback and notes from my editor at Simon & Schuster and about a 90-minute phone conversation spread out over a couple of days which ended up with me writing down about four pages of notes.

And you thought writing the book was the tough part.

Right now, I’m on my third pass through the manuscript over the past three weeks, making edits based on all of this feedback. So far, including the two rounds of edits the novel went through before I gave it to my writers group and the two additional rounds of edits it went though before I sent it to my agent and the round of edits I did based on her feedback before it even went to my editor, that makes eight passes through the book I’ve done so far. I’ll have another round of line edits, copy edits, then proof page edits, bringing the grand total of full manuscript edits up to eleven before the book goes to press.

It better not have any mistakes in it, that’s all I have to say.

The process wasn’t a whole lot different with Breathers or Fated. Both of them probably went through close to ten rounds of edits before the books hit the shelves. And every time I do a round of edits, I read the complete manuscript.

That’s the thing no one tells you and that you don’t realize when you start down this path of writing: before your book gets published, you’re going to end up reading it a dozen or more times before it hits the shelves. So you better like what you’ve written because you’re going to be spending a lot of time with it.

It’s kind of like choosing a partner. Or your friends. You better choose wisely because if it turns out you don’t enjoy their company, then you’re going to get sick of them pretty fast.

So I decided to give myself a break from rewrites of Lucky Bastard last night and watch a movie.

I had Rachel Getting Married from Netflix all cued up in my DVD player when I caught the end of the Family Guy episode “Something, Something, Something Dark Side” on TV, which is a parody of The Empire Strikes Back, and I decided to watch Star Wars again for the first time in nearly ten years. On VHS.

Yes, I still own a VHS. And I have a cathode ray tube television that weighs a thousand pounds. I have trouble getting rid of things that still work.

But back to Star Wars.

While I still have a soft spot for what was the most awe-inspiring and memorable movie-going experience of my life (having seen the original release at the Festival Cinemas in Hayward in 1977), I discovered that the writer in me couldn’t abide several problems in the film that I used to be able to overlook.

For one thing, the Stormtroopers need some target practice. Sure, you can argue that on the Death Star they were missing on purpose to allow the good guys to escape so they could track them to the rebel base, but throughout the film they were about as accurate as a weather forecast.

Speaking of shooting, when you have a single point of entry to defend where only one stormtrooper can come through at at time (like when the stormtroopers are coming out of the elevator into the detention block), it seems like Han and Chewbacca could have picked them off one by one as they came out. Not that I have any experience fighting with plasma bolt weapons, but it seems reasonable to me. Just sayin’.

But the part that really gets me is at the end of the movie when the Death Star approaches the planet Yavin, on the other side of which sits the moon that is home to the rebel base. With all of that “ultimate power in the universe” hyperbole, couldn’t the Death Star just blow up Yavin to get to the moon and take care of wiping out the rebellion in a matter of minutes? Instead, the Death Star goes into a leisurely orbit around the planet, which takes thirty minutes and gives the rebels plenty of time to attack the Death Star and blow it up.

Lame. Not as lame as regurgitating the same plot point in Return of the Jedi, but still lame.

If there’s one thing that irks me in films, it’s contrived or inexplicable plot points that allow the story to unfold in a manner inconsistent with the existing story elements.

But then, George Lucas has a bazillion dollar movie franchise and his own special effects company and a campus in the Presidio in San Francisco with a Yoda water fountain out in front of it, so what do I know?