S.G. Browne

Yes, I know it’s a week past due, but better late than never. Besides, I was busy enjoying 80 degree sunny days on the Gulf of Mexico, which even in California are a rarity right now. So I couldn’t very well spend them sitting at a computer.

But here we are, a week after my first time attending the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts (or ICFA, for the multi-syllabic challenged) and I’m happy to announce that I had a wonderful time.

I have to admit, I was a felt a little out of my element about attending an academic conference of literature students and scholars, since I am neither an academic nor a scholar. Especially when I needed a dictionary and an interpreter just to understand some of the titles for the papers, like:

Languages, Litanies, and the Limit: Mathematics as Discourse in Neal Stephenson’s Anathem

I still have no idea what that means.

In any case, with four days of round table panels, author readings, and academic papers, I had the opportunity to meet a bunch of great people, make a lot of new friends, share my thoughts on humor in horror on my panel, and even attend a couple of papers on zombies that referenced Breathers, including:

The Decomposition of the Contemporary Family: Zombie’s Role in the Transmogrification of the Nuclear Family (by Emily Mashak);

and The Politics of Zombie Love: Subversion, Self-Actualization, and Erotic Zombies in S.G. Browne’s Breathers (by Professor Franc Auld).

It was interesting to sit in on the papers and hear someone else’s interpretation of Breathers, which is another blog post entirely, but I very much enjoyed the conference and I’m looking forward to going back to ICFA again next year.

I’ll just make sure to bring along an interpreter.

Congratulations to Maria Garcia, who the Random Number Generator selected as the Grand Prize winner in the Breathers Birthday Bash Giveaway.  Maria takes home signed copies of Breathers, Fated, and the Breathers UK edition (pictured here).

The RNG also selected two more winners, Arielle Jovellanos and David Sobkowiak, who each receive a signed copy of the Breathers UK edition.

Thank you to everyone who entered the contest via my web site and through my mailing list and who shared their favorite characters from my novels.  Your support and enthusiasm is appreciated.

Happy reading!

It’s a birthday bash for Andy, Rita, Jerry, and the rest of the gang at Undead Anonymous.  That’s right.  Two years ago tomorrow, Breathers hit the shelves in the U.S. and Canada.  To mark the occasion, I’m going to be giving away a signed copy of Breathers.

But that’s not all!

Tomorrow also marks the birth of Breathers in the United Kingdom, with a spiffy new cover. (Check it out on Amazon UK.)  So I’m including a signed copy of the UK edition, as well.  Two books for the price of none.  How can you beat that?

But wait, there’s more!

Act now and I’ll also throw in a signed copy of Fated, which has only been out for four months and is just a baby in book years, but I didn’t want Fabio, Karma, and Death to feel left out.

That’s right.  For the price of nothing, you get signed copies of all three books!

I’ll also be giving away a signed copy of the UK version of Breathers to two other lucky winners.

So three winners in all!

To enter, just leave a comment on this blog post with some way to contact you and, if you’re so inclined, include a note as to your favorite character in Breathers or Fated.  If you haven’t read the books, that’s okay.  There’s no judgment here.

And feel free to sign up for the RSS feed (at the top, right next to the navigation bar).

Contest runs until 11:59pm PST Sunday, March 6th.  Winners will be chosen from all entrants using a random number generator.  (Unfortunately, I do have to limit this to U.S. residents only, so my apologies.)

Ready?  Go!  And good luck!

For the most part, it’s a bad idea to read your reviews. One, they’re just someone’s opinion and not necessarily indicative of the quality of the work, good or bad. Two, writing, like any art, is subjective. As a writer, you have to remember that and not take anything personally. And three, it’s much too easy to get caught up in what someone says, whether it’s positive or negative. But as any writer can attest, no matter how glowing the reviews, a negative review has a way of embedding itself in your DNA.

Not that I don’t read any reviews. I give a look to those from places like Kirkus and Publishers Weekly and The Washington Post in hopes of a good review that yields a nice, juicy blurb.

Those are always fun. And I’ll read reviews on blogs that have requested a review copy or for which I’ve authored a guest post. As for the reviews on Amazon and Goodreads and random blogs that show up in my Google alerts? I do my best to avoid them.

But sometimes, you can’t help it.

While checking online for local bookstore locations where I might be able to swing by and sign stock copy, I came across a reader review about Fated that gave it one star and included the following gems:

Could it be the worst book ever written?
Completely mindless.
Worst use of $$ I’ve ever spent.

Ouch. But at least they read the book to the end because they didn’t believe it could be that bad all the way through.

Aah, another satisfied customer.

And then there’s the blog that listed Breathers as one of the most disappointing books of 2010 (even though the book came out in 2009). For the most part, the blog explains in detail why Breathers failed to live up to expectations, then finishes with this:

As a result — and due to Browne’s at-best serviceable prose — Breathers fails to elicit either laughs or sympathy. It’s horrifying, but not, I suspect, in the way that Browne intended.

Can I have some salt with that knife wound?

These are just a couple of examples of the criticism that authors expose themselves to when they get something published. That doesn’t mean we have to believe it. Or take it personally, which isn’t an easy thing to do. The trick is to try to have a sense of humor about it and realize you can’t please everyone. But if you please yourself, then you’ve done your job.

And if that doesn’t help to make you feel better, you can always respond to your bad reviews like this:

I’m frequently asked about my writing process. When I write. Where I write. How I write.

When? Mornings and evening, mostly. I like to use my afternoons for running errands and taking naps. Yes, I take naps. Discovered them in college following late nights of, ahem, studying. I love naps.

Where? In my apartment, either at my desk or on my couch with my laptop. I’m one of those rare writers who doesn’t drink coffee. Plus I’m easily distracted. So going to a cafe to write is mostly pointless. And at a cafe, I don’t have my cats curled up on either side of me.

How? I’m like Indiana Jones in The Raiders of the Lost Ark. I make it up as I go.

Generally, I get an idea of how I want to start a story. Or where I want it to start and then I start writing. When I’m finished, it may not begin in the same place or in the same way, but that’s what gets me moving forward.

For instance, Breathers originally opened up with what is now Chapter 2. But after doing some rewrites, I ended up switching things around and beginning the book with a scene that takes place in Chapter 37 and having the first 200 pages be a flashback to explain how Andy got there.

But how he ended up in the kitchen, standing in front of the refrigerator and finding his parents’ body parts in between the mayonnaise and the leftover Thanksgiving turkey isn’t something I planned to have happen. It’s just the way the story developed.

Generally, I don’t know how my story is going to end, or at the very least, how I’m going to get there. I didn’t have definite endings for Breathers and Fated when I started, but rather a vague idea of what might happen. The eventual endings developed from the actions of the characters.

“My notion of a story is an interesting situation in which a human being has to cope with a problem, does so, and thereby changes his personality, character, or evaluations in some measure because the coping has forced him to revise his thinking. How he copes with it, I can’t plot in advance because that depends on his character, and I don’t know what his character is until I get acquainted with him.”
— Robert Heinlein

Much like Heinlein said in his quote above, plotting out what my characters are going to do before they have a chance to get there doesn’t work for me. I don’t know how my characters will react to certain situations until I put them in those situations, so I can’t tell them what they’re going to do ahead of time until I get to know them. Otherwise, I’m just forcing my will upon them. Instead, I let my characters’ actions dictate where the plot is going to go.

Of course, not knowing where you’re going can sometimes lead to moments of complete and absolute terror when you’re two-thirds of the way through the manuscript and you’re not sure what’s going to happen in the third act. But it’s what’s worked for me for most of the last two decades, so I’m sticking with it.