Jan Miklaszewicz's Blog: Hartmouth Horrors

This Monday morning, my mind is finally moving on from Drudge, which has now been released in paperback, with the eBook just around the corner. But, and there’s always a but, I do have one more thing to say on the matter, and that’s a huge and heartfelt thank you to all the people who helped along the way.

First, my alpha readers, who not only read the first draft and gave me some great suggestions to work with but also kept encouraging me and were always there if I needed a sounding board.

Second, my beta readers, who made the time and effort to read the second draft and share their thoughts, as well as catch some little glitches here and there.

And third, my ARC team, who were kind enough not only to read the final draft with a ticking clock in the background but to post some truly generous and insightful reviews.

The indie space is much maligned, and it’s true that it attracts more than a few bad actors and insincere types, but there are also people like you, those mentioned above. I am hugely grateful for your friendship and your support, and I will always do my best to offer mine in return. Thank you.

And that’s my penny’s worth for today. Until next week, happy writing to you all.

This Monday morning, my mind is on the upcoming launch of Drudge, which I recently put up for pre-order on Amazon. Unfortunately, the pre-order system doesn’t allow for any previewing of a book’s content. So what I thought I’d do is share a wee sample here instead, namely the prologue of my third Hartmouth Horrors novella.

Of course, it’s always a bit risky posting book content for public consumption, as I open myself up to unsolicited critique, especially from the prologue disdainers of the world, but anyway, here it is, and I hope it gives you a ‘pleasant’ taste of what’s to come.

DRUDGE - PROLOGUE

I tell him it’s delicious, knowing that anything less will only get me into trouble. And God knows, once you’ve been on the receiving end of his ministrations, for want of a better word, you’re not in any hurry to relive the experience.

“Do you mean it, Jacob?”

“Of course,” I mumble, the left side of my mouth still in a world of pain. “It’s really… excellent.”

“Excellent, eh? I like that.”

I manage to swallow the next proffered forkful, a vile pie made with seafood that’s clearly several days past its best.

“Though it does sound like excrement.”

Tastes like it too, I think to myself, and there must have been a glimmer of mirth in my eyes, because now I’m getting the look. The one that says I’ve offended him and he’s going to do something about it later, probably in the middle of the night.

“Mum used to tell me I couldn’t cook to save my life.”

“No, really, it’s great.”

“Hmm,” he says, a sly grin creeping onto his stupid fat face as he serves up another foul-smelling portion. “Very well then.”

Mouthful after mouthful goes down, my stomach silently shrieking, and I try to distract myself by looking around the cellar that’s become my prison cell. This rickety bed with its wafer-thin mattress, the stack of stools in the corner, the workbench, the mystery manhole cover, the plastic dust sheets and tins of paint, the rolls of old carpet.

“If you finish it all, I’ll bring you down some painkillers, and something to clear up any infection.”

Tongue going now to the ragged, throbbing gap where just hours ago a couple of molars resided, I give him the sweetest look I can muster, no easy task when all I want to do is jam my thumbs into his eyeballs.

So there you go. If you like what you read and want to get 1/3 off the regular eBook price, you can pre-order via this Amazon link.

And that’s my penny’s worth for today. Until next week, happy writing to you all.

This Monday morning, my mind is on my Hartmouth Horrors novellas, which I don’t plug anywhere near enough. To wit, I’m going to show them off below and you’re going to be so dazzled you won’t be able to resist picking up a couple. Or at least that’s the plan. So without further ado, let’s take a quick look at the three suspects.

EYES WIDE OPEN

This is the first Hartmouth novella, the tragic tale of eight university students living in a shared house. When a night of drunken high jinx brings an evil presence into their midst, things go Pete Tong for them pretty damn quick. Think slasher vibes with a supernatural bent, and a slow burn that leads to explosive mayhem in the closing third.

THE DEVIL IN MIA

The second novella, a foul-mouthed possession tale, focuses on an alcoholic husband and his depressed, beleaguered wife. Can they survive the hellish hand grenade that’s just been dropped into their marriage? Maybe yes, maybe no, but one thing’s for sure, there’s going to be plenty of filth and furore along the way.

DRUDGE

The third and latest Hartmouth novella finds a young man getting abducted while on a solo summer holiday. This one is darker and less playful than the first two books, but it more than makes up for that with outrageous tension, gruesome captivity scenes, and a finale that will really blow your socks off. 

So there we have it. The Hartmouth Horrors series, which you can access via this Amazon link. Go on, take a punt on some homegrown British horror and see just what the indie scene has to offer.

And that’s my penny’s worth for today. Until next week, happy writing to you all.

This Monday morning, having finally finished Hartmouth Horrors novella number three, the dark and somewhat harrowing Drudge, my mind is firmly on the next. I already have a title, a cover, and a loosey-goosey blurb, so now it’s time to get things underway.

Being a fairly extreme pantser, that’s pretty much all I need. I’m going for a backwoods vibe, setting this one on the moorland to the north of Hartmouth and aiming for a cast of five poor souls to put through the wringer of witchcraft, unhinged locals, and rusty old farm tools.

So without further ado, I’m going to get started. With any luck, at the lightning pace of a few hundred words per day, I should have a first draft ready by the end of the summer.

And that’s my penny’s worth for today. Until next week, happy writing to you all.

This Monday morning, my mind is on the use of song lyrics in fictional works. It’s something I’ve noticed in a fair few indie books and has always struck me as ill-advised, being that there’s a major risk of copyright violation for any material not yet old enough to be in the public domain—unless express permission is sought and, much of the time, paid for. As a disclaimer, what follows should not be considered legal advice but a starting point for your own research.

First things first, using song lyrics in a book you intend to sell on any sort of scale is fraught with danger, and you would do well to simply avoid it. But if you do insist, here are a few pointers which are covered in more detail under the doctrine of fair use (link goes to the official US Gov website). Please be aware, however, that in practice, song lyrics are often afforded far greater protection than other media.

Song titles are fair game as they can’t be copyrightedSome form of summarising is okay, and you can probably get away with carefully paraphrasing a line or twoShort, verbatim excerpts may or may not be problematic

The waters are further muddied by the intended purpose of the lyrics as used in your book. Some quarter may be given if they’re for critique, satire, or education, and whether their inclusion is likely to diminish the commercial value of the original work.

In reality, though, you’re looking at a set of vague criteria that can be bent at will, most likely in the favour of the prosecuting party. Which basically means, if you get pulled up for using the lyrics of someone with more clout than you, you’re probably going to come out on the losing end. Either that or they’ll just arrange to get your book yanked from wherever you’re selling it.

As a small case study, and to poke my own head over the parapet, here’s a poem I published some years ago (about how women don’t recognise when men try to express their feelings) in which I went as near to the knuckle as I dared with song lyrics.

Brick

He plays ‘The River’
when he’s proper drunk,
and she talks over it
every goddamn time,
and he never even
had a girl at school,
let alone a shotgun marriage,
but when that plaintive,
haunting harmonica hits,
when Bruce remembers
those rides in his brother’s car,
well, that’s as exquisite
as any longing can get,
so close to the wound
that every man suffers,
and yet, it’s only a song,
it’s only a song,
you never think to ask
how my day has gone,
as sensitive as a brick, you are,
stupid-ass song about
some stupid-ass reservoir.

A few points to note. First, I acknowledge the title of the song, as well as the name of the singer, albeit indirectly; second, I only use a handful of words from the lyrics (such as brother’s car and reservoir); and third, I do little more than touch on the basic premise and spirit of the song.

Does this constitute fair use? I believe it does, but I certainly wouldn’t risk going any further. And Mr Springsteen, Boss, if you’re reading this (and really, you ought to), please don’t be mad. ‘The River’ is brilliant and inspiring, and I hope I did it justice and didn’t step on your toes in the process.

And that’s my penny’s worth for today. Until next week, happy writing to you all.

This Monday morning, my mind is on a poll I ran recently asking writers whether their work was more like a rough pencil sketch or a photographic oil painting. The reason for my wondering comes from something I once watched on the idiot’s lantern that really stuck with me, so here it is, an anecdote with at least a passing relevance to the world of writing. As a disclaimer, though, this is just my recollection of what I saw, and my memory is quite the fabulist.

So, many moons ago I caught the last few minutes of a daytime TV show, a contest in which three artists were charged with doing the portrait of a guest celebrity. The first was using watercolours, the second acrylic paints, and the third oils. They’d just finished when I tuned in, and the celebrity was looking at each effort in turn before choosing his favourite.

Portrait one, the watercolour, was really good, at least to this layman’s eye. The artist had done a pretty faithful rendering, capturing the pose and expression nicely and using a fairly breezy palette that gave the finished article a bright and optimistic air. Thumbs up so far from the celeb.

Portrait two, the acrylics, was also really good. Stunning even, in its attention to detail. The celeb was super impressed by how accurate the thing was, commenting that it was practically indistinguishable from a photograph. At this point, I had the feeling I was looking at the winner.

Then came portrait three, the oils, and when he saw it, the celeb visibly flinched. And not in a good way, because the artist had made him look a bit of a state. Eye bags, sallow skin, dark lines and creases, the whole shooting match. I mean, it wasn’t exactly Dorian Gray, but it wasn’t far off.

And this was where things got interesting. There was a short break for deliberations, and when the winner was finally announced, it was the oil painting that not only got the nod but also a heap of glowing praise. The celeb explained that he’d been so taken aback by the portrait because it was exactly how he saw himself when he looked in the mirror. In effect, the artist had captured something that the other two hadn’t been able to intuit.

This, to me, was fascinating, and it still is. How could that artist find something beyond what was literally sitting there in the flesh? How could he so successfully reach through the obvious and take hold of something far more profound? Could the same apply to writing? In fact, how on earth could it not?

Granted, this may not be much of a revelation to anyone else: I’m not the fastest of horses when it comes to this sort of thing. But a revelation it was, as it showed me I could write however I wanted. I could pick my shots and maybe find something truer than a faithful recounting of events and images. Which is incredibly freeing. Of course, some, if not many, readers may not like the little charcoal sketches I’m knocking out, and that’s alright. There’s nothing wrong with preferring precise attention to physical details, bright and bountiful colours, and so on and so forth.

But this is me. I choose what I choose, see what I see, and feel what I feel, and I do my level best not to second guess myself by wondering if my writing is going to please others. And it’s this realisation that’s made all the difference to what I write about and how I write about it. So my question is, are you being faithful to your own vision? If so, you just might be able to make someone flinch then fall in love with what you’ve written.

And that’s my penny’s worth for today. Until next week, happy writing to you all.

This Monday morning, my mind is on the fact that someone just subjected one of my books to over two hours of less than complimentary video analysis, as well as covering it in some blood-like fluid and driving a knife through it to create a thumbnail image. And rather than piss and moan about this—which, trust me, I’d really love to do, being as big a crybaby as the next man—I’ve decided this is a good time to renew my commitment to being a positive presence in the indie writing space.

Yes, I’m primarily here for myself, to promote my own writing, so this isn’t some heroic declaration. But I don’t think that’s incompatible with putting my best foot forward along the way. After all, a love of telling stories and a desire to build an audience for them is ultimately about looking for connection, at least in my own case. If I can find others who love what I love and get what I get, that’s pretty much job done, right? The sales, the relative popularity, are simply a byproduct of that.

So the point is how I intend to conduct myself. It’s no secret that the indie space has its issues and is by no means a meritocracy in terms of the better books having the higher levels of success. There’s bias, there are cliques, how popular and well liked you are goes a long way to how well your work is received and perceived, and so on. But that’s no reason to be bitter, cutting, snarky, or unkind.

No, I’m going to keep seeking out and celebrating the things I enjoy. Will I run into books now and then that I might need to be a little faux positive about? Yes, no doubt. Will I run into books that I really don’t like and be tempted to wax lyrical about how awful this or that was, or how indie needs to be taken by the scruff of the neck and have its standards raised? Again, yes, no doubt.

But I won’t be going down the route of stepping on others in a bid to elevate myself. That’s not the sort of person I want to be. So I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing, looking for connection, finding kindred spirits, and shouting loud and proud whenever I find an excellent book or writer or resource. It’s really that simple. So if you find me behaving otherwise, please feel free to give me a verbal kick in the nuts. Or you could stab one of my books, I guess, but let’s be frank, that would be pretty fucking weird.

And that’s my penny’s worth for today. Until next week, happy writing to you all.

This Monday morning, my mind is not at all on this blog, since I’ve just started the next draft of Drudge and am already consumed by it. So, rather than half-assedly flap my gums about some writing-adjacent issue or other, I’m going to whole-assedly, and hurriedly, flap my gums about how much I love what I’m doing.

After a month of not peeking (much) at my first draft, and having already incorporated the large-scale changes suggested by alpha readers, I can now begin to sprinkle in those creative flourishes, cut out any repetitious words and phrasings, finesse the prose for accuracy and flow, and generally whip the manuscript into shape.

At a pace of around 2,500 words a day, and being that Drudge is a fairly short novella, this means I should have a draft ready for beta readers by next Sunday afternoon. And by that point, the last of the heavy lifting will be done and I can turn my mind to other bits and pieces, such as tweaking the blurb and the cover art.

So yeah, that’s it. Seven whole days with no reading commitments and enough time on my hands to give this third Hartmouth Horrors novella my undivided attention. I know the revising and editing process isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but I for one am absolutely loving it. And with any luck, all this pleasure in the writing will translate across to pleasure in the reading.

And that’s my penny’s worth for today. Until next week, happy writing to you all.

This Monday morning, my mind is on a tweet I read about modern readers passing over quality prose for something simpler, or words to that effect. By asking the OP, I was able to narrow down ‘simple prose’ to that which takes little or no effort to read (sounds pretty good to me, not gonna lie), and this got me thinking about something dear to my heart, namely text readability.

For a bit of context, I started writing in my early twenties, and I really wasn’t very good at all. Not only did I not have much to write about—something that’s improved after a long hiatus—but my prose was heavily on the purple side. That was, until I attended a short talk on text readability, which was a real game changer for me. Turns out I was making two main errors that were leading to chewy, hard-to-digest prose.

One, far too many words with high syllable counts. One or two of these bad boys here and there doesn’t make for much of an issue, but stack them up and the cognitive load on your readers really does go through the roof. Couple this with the age-old advice to avoid the five dollar word wherever possible, and bingo.

Two, overly long sentences with too much material between too many commas (aka as a proliferation of embedded phrases and clauses, or summat like that). Again, this puts extra stress on readers, who in extreme cases are liable to have forgotten what you wrote at the start of the sentence by the time they reach the end of it.

The fixes, of course, are first to dial back on the fancy words, at least in as much as opting for simpler alternatives when they’re available (which often amounts to choosing the Anglo Saxon over the Latinate, having a character ‘go down’ instead of ‘descend’ and ‘think’ instead of ‘cogitate’). And second, as I’m doing right now, to either split those sentences (ignoring the classic schoolroom dictum to never begin one with a conjunction) or to find other means of keeping them from running on too long and containing too much parenthetical material.

Accusations of dumbing down will abound, but I don’t really see a problem with presenting ideas in an easily digestible form if the content and message remain the same. I also don’t present this as something to slavishly follow, checking with religious fervour those Flesch-Kincaid stats available in various word processing programs.

Rather, it’s just something that’s worth keeping half an eye on. I don’t check the readability of my prose at all these days, but in the early going, when I was finding my way, getting a handle on those two main problems really helped me, and maybe it will help you too.

And that’s my penny’s worth for today. Until next week, happy writing to you all.

This Monday morning, my mind is on elegant variation, a term coined in the early 1900s to describe the using of synonyms and substitutional phrases to avoid repetition in prose. Taken with a pinch of salt, it’s not such a bad idea, but taken to the nth degree, it can produce some pretty hilarious results. And unfortunately, it seems to crop up a little too often in indie writing.

Let’s take a moment first to consider the writerly avoidance of repetition. I don’t know exactly why we do this—and if there are solid, well-researched answers out there, I’m too idle to look for them—but it appears that we do, at least in the Anglophone world. When I notice recurring terms in quick succession in my own writing, I find myself cringing and doing what I can to remedy the situation, and I strongly suspect that you do too.

So, accepting that repetition is something we want to avoid, what’s to be done about it? Well, I never envisioned this weekly blog as a writers’ advice thing, so I’m not about to start pontificating now. Surely we can all find our own methods, either by trial and error or by doing some research. But I don’t mind pointing out a couple of things we might consider avoiding.

The first is tarrying too long within the pages of the old thesaurus. I’m not a fan of this at the best of times, as I feel like synonym-seeking can take away our natural voice, but when we end up with particularly outlandish new words just to avoid saying walked, well, there’s only so much traversing and perambulating this reader can take, that’s all I’m saying.

And the second, akin to the previous point, is coming up with entire phrases to replace the repeated word. This can be quite the creative endeavour—I mean, yes, a wallet is indeed a small leather pocket receptacle for the storage of cash money and bank cards—but I’d contend that it doesn’t lead to breezy prose or some degree of gravitas, if that’s what we’re aiming for.

I don’t think there’s anything to add on the matter, at least not from my end, and what I’ve pointed out may just be a case of personal preference, though other writers I chat with on the regular seem to share my misgivings. Either way, do with it what you will.

And that’s my penny’s worth for today. Until next week, happy writing to you all.