Ben Monroe's Blog

I’ve been drinking from the firehose this past few months, and just realized I’ve let the blog go fallow here. So, here’s a quick update of sorts, to let folks know what I’ve been up to in the past few months.

The Seething released in March, to great reviews! I’m finding that folks who read it seem to like it, and that makes me happy. If you haven’t read it yet, you can find it in all the usual places you buy books. Or your local indie book store can order it via the Ingram Spark program.

In May, I attended the annual Bay Area Book Festival with friends from my local HWA chapter. We always have a great time at that event, and this year was no exception! I was honored to have been asked to moderate the BABF’s first ever horror panel, and had a great time chatting for an hour with horror authors Nick Medina, Jessica Johns, and Francesca Maria. Listen to the recording here, if you’re interested.

I’ve been doing a lot of guest posts on various horror and book blogs. In fact, I think one of the reasons I’ve let this blog go fallow is that I’ve been writing so much for other blogs, I just keep forgetting about my own! The latest one dropped this morning, and is my list of the Best Scary Books To Bring on Vacation. You can find links to a ton of other podcasts, blog posts, etc. here on my website’s media page.

Oh! And lest I forget, the Seething won a “Readers Choice” gold medal for the Paranormal/Supernatural category in the Connections Magazine annual Readers Choice awards. I guess I can now call myself an award-winning author, so that’s pretty neat.

I guess that’s a quick wrap up for now. Stay spooky, my friends!

To quote Doctor Strange: “We’re in the end game now…”

My new novel of slithery monsters and small town weirdness, The Seething releases on March 23rd. Buzz about it has been pretty good so far, and I’m excited to see where this story goes.

“Midsommar meets The Mist in The Seething, a slow-burn small-town tale of creeping terror and a pressure cooker of a novel from horror’s rising star Ben Monroe. Not your usual summer vacation by the lake, The Seething is irresistibly ominous.”—Lee Murray, four-time Bram Stoker Award®-winner and author of Grotesque: Monster Stories

My publisher has set me up with a number of interview opportunities lately about the book. If you’re interested, you can hear me talk a little about it with Lou Systema on his youtube show “The Writers.”

I was also invited recently to write a little about my thoughts on creating a setting for fiction on the “Cats Luv Coffee” blog. You might get a kick out of that piece I wrote. I sure had fun writing it.

I’m doing a couple more podcasts and youtube shows before it launches, and I’ll try to collect links to all of those on the Media page of this website.

It’s a weird place, being in the last few weeks before release of this book which I’ve been working on for the last few years. I’m excited and terrified and anxious all at the same time. I sure hope folks enjoy reading the book even a fraction as much as I did writing it.

It’s currently available for preorder as an ebook. Print versions should be available soon. Amazon’s got it for $0.99 until five days after release (so March 28th, I guess). Hope you like it!

And in the meantime, I’m just getting back to work. Working on a couple of short stories now, as well as a new novel I plan to finish this year.

For the first couple of weeks of August, the family and I finally took our much-delayed trip to the UK. This was originally to be a week-long trip we’d planned back for spring break in 2020, but was delayed time and again due to … well, you know.

I think the simplest way to sum up what we saw would be to quote Bilbo Baggins himself: “Lots, and none at all.” Over two weeks we traveled to four cities (Bath, Edinburgh, York, and finally London), and saw so much stuff, but still only barely scratched the surface.

My older child, who is fascinated by archeology and history, got the chance to see so many old viking sites and artifacts, visit WWII memorials, and just immerse himself in so much history. The younger one really enjoyed seeing some Harry Potter and fairy tale things, as well as visiting funny little book stores, shops, etc.

Me, I hadn’t been there in 22 years, and it was amazing to me how much had changed, yet inevitably how much stayed the same. The city of York is just fascinating to me: how you’re walking along the medieval walls of the city, and yet there are modern cars and houses right next to you. The city I live in in California dates back about 150 years, but the neighborhood I’m in was pretty much farmland until the late 1940s. The idea of having dinner in a pub in the UK that’s in a building literally ten times older than my house is strange, and fascinating to me.

There was plenty of interesting historical and cultural stuff to see, and as usual I had to take a dive into the “weird” here and there. On our first day, as we were wandering around Bath, my older son and I dipped into Mary Shelley’s House of Frankenstein. This is a multi-level small museum which is devoted to Mary Shelley’s life in Bath, as well as a bunch of Frankenstein-related stuff. The top level of the place is a few rooms showing clips from Frankenstein films, as well as displays of ephemera: posters, toys, etc. It was a fun diversion for an hour. Might be worth your time, if you ever happen to be in the area.

All in all a successful trip, and probably better since we had an extra couple of years to plan it. Doubt we’ll get back there any time soon, and I’m glad we were able to do it with the kids while they were still young.

Sadly, in addition to a backpack full of candy, “biscuits,” and various souvenirs, we also brought home COVID. So we’ve been in rotating isolation over the last few days, but thankfully none of us have managed to get a bad case of it. Thank goodness we all got vaccinated when we did, I suppose.

Over the past two weekends I was able to attend two really great author/literary events.

I read my story “the Blooming” with the local chapter of the Horror Writers Association at the Hayward “LitHop” event on April 30th. Fun event, with the HWA reading horror stories for the first hour, and then the local chapter of the Mystery Writers of America getting sinister in the second half. Sounds like they’re planning that to be an annual event, so if you happen to be local to the San Francisco/Oakland Bay Area, keep an eye out for it again next spring.

This past weekend was the Bay Area Book Festival’s triumphant return to scenic downtown Berkeley. Always a fun event, though it does always feel weird to me when I arrive, and remember that the are set up for vendors and authors is in the same park where the stoners used to hang out when I was in high school.

The Book Fest was a lot of fun, and I highly recommend others check it out in the future. I’ve gone twice now as a representative of the HWA and had a good time. Some day I’d love to go and sit in on some of the panels, presentations, etc., but I’m usually too busy working at the booth.

As a promo item, I had a QR code at our booth which would take people to a download page to get a free epub of my story “the Blooming” (the same one I read at the LitHop). And my takeaway from the weekend was that nobody pays attention to QR codes. I had the thing posted in a couple different spots at the booth over the entire weekend, and only got 2 scans the whole time.

Anyway, if you’ve read this far, and are interested, here’s a link to download “the Blooming.” It was first published in early 2020 in the charity anthology “Infected: Tales to Read at Home.” It looks like that publisher has closed up shop, and the book’s getting harder to find, unfortunately.

A few days late, but better than never, I suppose.

Despite all the complete chaos of the world around us, 2021 was another pretty good writing year for me. I had three stories published over the course of the year, “A Hell of a View,” “Darkness Peering,” and “The Devil in the Details” (links go to Goodreads entries for the respective anthologies). Over the summer, the anthology Monsters, Movies & Mayhem (with my story “Vinegar Syndrome”) won the Colorado Book Award for best anthology, so that was pretty neat.

Over the course of 2021, I wrote 8 new stories (including “Darkness Peering,” above). 3 of them have found homes, and I’m hopeful for the rest.

The biggest project was finishing up my second novel the Seething. It’s a weird monster-horror book I’ve been working on between short stories for a couple of years now. I think it’s solid. I finished it in the spring, polished it over the summer and started sending it around in the fall. I’ve had a couple of bites, so hopefully some news about that soon.

Since it’s the time of year when awards are being considered, I should mention that all three of the stories mentioned above are eligible for short fiction awards. I sent “Darkness Peering” and “A Hell of a View” out for consideration to the Bram Stoker awards which are presented by the Horror Writers Association. I didn’t send out “A Hell of a View,” because I don’t really consider it a horror story. It’s dark, of course, but not really horror in the traditional sense. I momentarily considered seeing if there are any awards for “slow-burn stories about once-sided romances that go off the rails and end in nuclear fire.” But probably not worth the effort.

If anyone reading this is interested in reading those stories for awards consideration, drop me a line here, or email me at benmonroe (at) iCloud (dot) com, and I’ll see about sorting you out with copies.

So that’s a wrap for 2021. Let’s see where 2022 takes us.

A couple of weeks ago I began querying my novel. It’s been a really weird feeling sending it out to a bunch of agents who looked like they might be good matches for the piece, as well as future projects I have planned. I wouldn’t say that querying has been the nightmare some have made it out to be, but it is a process, with a lot of stumbling blocks along the way.

So far I’ve heard back from about 20% of the agents I queried, and sadly received mostly “just not for me” rejections. But I’ve also received a handful of personalized rejections which were quite complimentary on my samples from my book, even if the agent passed because it wasn’t for them. So that’s something, I guess.

Now, I’ve been doing this actively for like, three whole weeks, so I’m totally an expert at this (narrator voice: “No, he’s not.”). But I thought it might be helpful to collect some of the things I’ve learned along the way. Maybe it’ll save you some time in the future.

The first thing I found helpful was to occasionally search the #MSWL tag on Twitter. This is where agents and editors post the type of stories they’re interested in looking at. You can throw in clarifying words as well, to narrow the search. EG: I usually check that hashtag as well as adding things like “horror” “spooky” “vacation” and other relevant words. Think of it like, if you were searching for a book like yours on Google, what search words would you use to look for it? Even while I was finishing up the novel I was keeping an eye on that, and making notes of possible agents to send it to when I was done.

You can also look for agents actively seeking books by genre on the MSWL website. QueryTracker also has a way to filter by agents. I haven’t dug into that one yet; I’m saving it for my next round if nothing pans out with the agents I found on the MSWL site.

And for goodness sake, keep a spreadsheet to keep track of all the people you contact. The one I built has the following columns: Name, Agency, How I Found Them, How I Queried, Response, and Notes. I found it’s important to keep track of the Agency name because most agencies only want you contacting one of their agents at a time.

That should get you a solid list of agents to start with, but that’s just the beginning of the process. Read each agent’s query submission guidelines, and only send them exactly what they ask for. I’m not even talking about not sending a gory horror story to someone who’s only interested in reading flowery romance (though that’s also good advice; don’t do that). No, I’m talking more about what you’re going to put in your query submission “packet.” This got fun pretty quickly because almost every agent I contacted asked for slightly different things.

A the core, you need a query letter. The query letter is going to introduce you to the agent, and agents are notoriously busy, so you want to pack as much information into as little space as possible. Introduce yourself, introduce your story, and try to explain why you think the agent might like your piece (EG: “I noticed on Twitter you said you like stories about giant penguins! My story features a giant penguin!”; but don’t act like a creepy stalker). More advice on a query letter here. Everything I read said that this part of your query should be under one page. Stick to that.

The query letter I wrote includes a two sentence “pitch” for the book, and then a five sentence “blurb” as well. You’ll want to have both a pitch and a blurb, in addition to a synopsis. The synopsis was really tricky for me, as I had to describe the entire plot of the book in just a couple of pages. You want to highlight all the story beats, and spoil the ending here. And all in like, 1% or less of the length of your entire book. A friend described writing a synopsis as “imagine you’re telling the story of a film to someone who’s never seen the movie.” All the highlights and beats of your story. Here’s a good article on writing your synopsis. And remember that you really do have to “spoil” the ending of the book here. You’re querying someone who’s going to (hopefully) want to represent your book to publishing houses, so they need to know what they’re getting into.

The query letter and synopsis were the two biggest things I had to complete to begin, but along the way I was also asked multiple times to provide the following samples from the book. I ended up creating files with just these pieces, so I could attach, or copy/paste the text as necessary (note that some agents would accept attachments, many wouldn’t, so have both ready):

5 pages

10 pages

20 pages

30 pages

First chapter

First two chapters

First three chapters

For the 5-30 page samples, I tried to get as close to that total page number as I could while also ending on sort of a cliffhanger each time.

I guess that’s about it for what I’ve learned so far. Hopefully some of this is helpful to others out there in the #WritingCommunity who are hitting the querying trenches. Remember not to reply to rejections, even the kind ones. Also remember (or try to convince yourself) that rejections aren’t an indictment of your work, or your worth. I always try to remind myself that all art is subjective, and even if one person didn’t care for my work, the next person might love it.

Oh, and don’t send your queries out in December. That’s when agents are getting slammed by people who wrote their novels in November during NaNoWriMo.

Good luck!

I've seen a lot of talk about "content warnings" in horror fiction recently, and that's got me thinking. Some folks are for them, some are against them. It’s great that people are talking about stuff like this. Definitely some important things to think about, and the subject is worth some thought and discussion.

I think that content warnings aren't a bad thing and can probably be helpful. Most people like to read horror to be scared and thrilled, not traumatized. And as there are obviously events that can be very upsetting I don’t necessarily object to horror fiction coming with some sort of warning. If a publisher or author wants to include that on a book, I think that’s a fine thing.

What I wonder about, I suppose, is how can a publisher/author predict what could be seen as traumatic? From what I’ve seen through engaging with the horror community for many years, there are definitely some common elements that can cause trauma, and should be treated with kid-gloves. Those sorts of things I can definitely see the need for content warnings. (EG: I read a story recently that I was quite enjoying, and recommending to a friend as I was going along. Then right in the middle of it there was a pretty graphic sexual assault scene which I found upsetting. I knew that my friend would find it really upsetting, if not traumatic so I warned them off, and let them know why in vague terms.)

How far does the publisher/author need to go to produce those warnings? If they list every potentially upsetting element of the book, is that helpful, or just overwhelming? How can they can possibly cover every potentially upsetting element of the story?

When I talk about horror movies and books with people who aren't genre fans, if they ask for recommendations, I always try to gauge their interest level, and how much they’re willing to put up with. There’s plenty of great “entry level” horror out there that I don’t mind recommending. And save the harder stuff for people who really show interest in the genre. I guess that’s sort of what the idea of putting a content warning on a book is for. Movies do this already in the ratings bar (where it’ll list the reasons why a film was rated a certain way).

For what it’s worth, I started thinking about this seriously the other day when I read something that I found really upsetting. Not necessarily a “triggering” event, but it threw me off for a couple of weeks while I processed it. I spent a lot of time talking with friends and family about it, trying to work through how I’d felt about the element in that story, and decide what I should do about it. However, I also realize that of all the people who could potentially have read that piece, more than likely the only person who’d get upset by it was me. There’s no way the publisher could have known how much that element would upset me, and I’m sure that nobody else who read the thing had anywhere near the same reaction.

Lots to think about, I suppose. But in the end, yeah, I can see the use of content warnings.

I’m often reminded that trying to create a career as a fiction writer is really about focusing on the “long game.” I’m always thinking a couple of steps ahead, trying to see where new opportunities might be, and trying not to get discouraged by the inevitable disappointment of rejection.

The ongoing work of a writer is not simply putting words on a page or screen, and coming up with ideas. It’s also perpetually punctuated by submitting stories, self-promotion, industry research, reading (whether for knowledge, inspiration, or pleasure; often “all of the above”). Getting stories out into the world is part of all of this, of course, and brings with it its own sort of challenges.

The last few weeks were very much a reminder of that. I’ve got a couple of short stories I’m working on for open submissions which look like fun books. I’ve also got a project for an RPG publisher to finish up in the next few days.

During all of this, I got the unfortunate news that two stories I had really high hopes for were not accepted for the anthologies I’d submitted them to. In all honesty, I wasn’t all that surprised. The anthologies were high-profile books, with a lot of relatively “big-name” authors already invited to write for them. I wrote a story for each as part of the blind submission period and hoped for the best. I think my stories were solid, but they were apparently just not what the editors were looking for.

I have to admit I was pretty disappointed. I wasn’t upset or angry or anything, but I was disappointed. I think it’s really important for creatives of any type to remember that all art is subjective. Just because the editors of those anthologies didn’t want my stories, it doesn’t necessarily mean the stories are bad, or the editors are jerks (in fact, one of the editors told me they really liked my story, it just wasn’t 100% what they needed for that book, and encouraged me to submit to their future anthologies). It just means that that specific piece didn’t work for that specific viewer.

And then right while I was stewing in disappointment, Monsters, Movies & Mayhem (which includes my story “Vinegar Syndrome”) won the Colorado Book Award in the Anthology category. So that’s kind of cool, and was a much-needed moment of encouragement.

And that helped to ground me again, and remind me of the long game. Reminded me that I’ve got to take the bad with the good, and not let either get too deep my head. Not everyone’s going to like everything I write. Some people might really like something I write. All I can do is keep writing the best stories I can, keep sending them out into the world of submissions, keep trying to engage with the community, and hope for the best.

(Oh, and as a post-script, don’t forget to subscribe to my bi-monthly newsletter. Issue 3 goes out next week, and one lucky subscriber is going to win a vintage paperback copy of Stephen King’s Bachman Books. See last month’s blog entry for more details.)

Hey, everyone. One of the new self-promotional tools I’ve been playing around with is publishing an author newsletter — Making Monsters Out of Molehills — every couple of months. I hit the ground running with people who’d subscribed to my blog/website, and gained a few new subscribers via my fumbling social media presence. I started it a few months ago, and it's going well, but I feel like I really need to kick my distribution up a notch and bulk up my mailing list.

So, I'm trying a little experiment here. I'm going to give away this vintage, first edition paperback copy of The Bachman Books, which includes his out of print story Rage to one lucky subscriber. Rage is the one thing he’s written which he’s let go out of print, and has no intention of ever letting it be printed again. It’s getting harder and harder to find copies of that book, and has become sort of the Holy Grail of King fans. If you’ve ever wanted to read that story, this is your chance.

What do you need to do to enter the drawing to win this book? Simply sign up to get my newsletter, and in the July issue I'm going to randomly pick a winner from everyone who's subscribed at the time. If you’re already subscribed to it, you’re already entered in the drawing. And who knows? If this works, I might do more drawings like this in the future.

Good luck!

Sign up here: https://www.getrevue.co/profile/_benmonroe_ 

Almost two years ago, I worked with my local chapter of the HWA to put out a charity anthology to support relief efforts for the devastating Camp Fire. Twenty four northern California horror authors got together in order to help our suffering neighbors. The book was skillfully edited by Loren Rhoads, and E.M. Markoff took on the task of publishing the book.

The book was released at Berkeley’s annual Bay Area Book Festival, to great response. We sold dozens of copies of the book over the weekend. And in the two years since, the book has managed to raise around $2500 for the wildfire relief efforts.

While the initial donations went specifically to a Camp Fire Relief fund managed by the North Valley Community Foundation, now all profits from the book go to their general wildfire relief fund. With the rampant wildfires in California over the past few years, it’s still helping as intended. I would like to reiterate that, to be clear: all profits from the book are being donated to the fund. None of us who worked on the book are making anything off of it at all. It was 100% a volunteer effort.

So if you’ve got an itch to read some excellent scary stories, and support a great cause while you’re at it, mosey on over to Amazon and grab yourself a copy of “Tales for the Camp Fire.”