THIS POST WAS ORIGINALLY HOSTED ON SUBSTACK

Welcome to the Newsletter!

Thanks for stopping by! I hope you enjoy it and will share it with your friends and family.

Thanks for reading Billy Don Loper-Fiction and Fascinations! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Subscribed

Recent Announcements:

THE SUMMER GOTHIC was released with Panorame Press, which contains a lot of great short fiction including my short story “Key to the Heart.” Read it here: https://balaflannan.wixsite.com/panorame-press

I have an interview coming up with FANTASTICLAND, THE PACK, and KILLING IT author Mike Bockoven coming later this month! Stay posed for updates on that. 

Project Progress:

My Sci-Fantasy project is back from beta and undergoing another round of edits before going to my copy editor for another pass! My other projects are on hold in the meantime. 

Special Announcement!

My wife, Miranda Loper, has started accepting freelance editing services. If you need an affordable fiction editor, find her at @mloperediting!

Recent Fascinations:

When I opened this document, and in the week preceding it as I thought through what all I needed to cover, I planned to talk about my thoughts on social media. I even made a note a little while ago about exactly that, telling my paltry handful of readers to expect it. Then, of  course, a new wrench entered the tangled disaster that is our digital existence: Meta’s “Threads.” I have a lot of thoughts about this, and the perpetual search of someone to replace our dying Uncle Twitter, but those thoughts are nebulous and this, frankly, isn’t Twitter or a space for unformed “discourse.” So, I apologize, but I’ll be waiting another month to talk about social media and what it’s doing to us. 

Instead, I think instead I want to talk about something a little more squarely focused on the actual craft of writing: The emotions of version editing. 

As I write this newsletter, I’m also finishing up my seventh version of my Sci-Fantasy manuscript, which will likely turn into an eighth and maybe even a ninth version. Hell, maybe a tenth. I am not a Stephen King-type, who does three or four drafts and is done. I edit and read and edit and read and get others to read it and then edit it again. Writing is collaborative for me, a work of collective art between me and my beta readers and my copyeditor. Writing is, for me, a process of versions. 

For short stories, this is a pretty quick process for me, and often connected to rejections. When a story I submit is rejected, I edit it and then submit it somewhere new. A neat process of feedback, if just implicit feedback, and revision. As I’ve worked on truly finishing my first full manuscript draft, the inherent emotional rollercoaster of that has really become apparent. This is the seventh version, but, because of how I write, is really only the forth solid, concrete version. As I’ve gone through this cycle of edit, beta, edit, editor, edit, beta, etc. etc. etc, I’ve realized that I am going through a pretty consistent cycle of emotions. The more I work on a round of edits, the more I begin to doubt my work, the more I begin to hate this project, the more I start to stray to other creative ideas. 

This isn’t a unique experience, and in fact almost every major writer I can think of has written about this at some point. I have, however, started trying to pull apart why this process makes me start to feel this way, and have come to some conclusions that have given me a little piece of mind. I hope it can do the same for some of y’all. 

When I’m editing, especially after receiving feedback of some type on my WIP, I become laser focused on the issues at hand. The gaps in story or character or pacing. The, by the very definition of feedback, places where my story has failed in some way. That focus on flaw, failure, and shortcoming, wears on me over time and, as is the case for so many writers, I hate everything about it by the end. I sent my current WIP away to my editor with a sense of literal relief. When they told me it would be a month before they can get to it, it was just a further sense of relief. I don’t want to look at it, I hate it. I’m tired of it. 

I know when I get it back, I know that I will be in love with it all over again, because that is how it has been, every. other. time. 

That is perhaps the most surreal part of the process for me. The total sense of excitement and elation that comes when I’m given the chance to work on this project again after a break. As I’ve honed in on the dichotomy between the feeling when I am near the end of an edit and the feeling at the start of a new one, I’ve started to focus more on that point. A fixed moment on the horizon when I will get to start chipping away at this story again, knowing that eventually it will be done. 

Eventually I’ll set this aside to start it down the query trenches. Eventually, that elation and excitement has to stop. So it is better to focus on the coming excitement, than current irritations. Like so much in fiction, I’ve realized that to really love my art, my craft, I have to cast off the expected negatives and stereotypical complaints and focus on my love for the process. Instead of becoming steeped in the negative, I have started, or tried to start, seeing the editing process as steps towards further collaborative excitement. More feedback. Another beginning.

Yes, editing does feel miserable right now, but it won’t later. Later, it will be art again.

Thanks for reading!

Thanks for taking the time to read my newsletter.

Check out my website: billyloperhistory.com

Check me out on Twitter at: PineyWoodsHIS

Check me out on Facebook at: Billy Don Loper-Fiction

Check me out on Instagram at: bloperficiton

THIS POST WAS ORIGINALLY HOSTED ON SUBSTACK

Welcome to the Newsletter!

Thanks for stopping by! I hope you enjoy it and will share it with your friends and family.

Thanks for reading Billy Don Loper-Fiction and Fascinations! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Subscribed

Recent Announcements:

My interview with Kyle Starks had to be delayed due to a number of recent life events. It’s still coming, so keep an eye out! 

My short story “Key to the Heart” will be published in THE SUMMER GOTHIC later this month. Be sure to follow Panorame Press on Twitter and Instagram. 

Project Progress:

My beta readers are still working through my Sci-Fantasy story, and I am making some progress on the speculative sci-fi piece in the meantime. 

Recent Fascinations:

It took a lot of consideration on what direction I want to take before I felt ready to discuss it here, but I think I finally have enough put together about self-publishing vs. traditional to give it a shot. 

This back and forth has been a process that I’ve gone through in pretty consistent cycles since I first started writing seriously in 2020, and my general hesitance to give any real concrete decisions on it has also been consistent. As a person, I prefer to thoroughly examine my options, but when I make a decision it is typically set and concrete from that point forward. Over the past several months, I have been doing a lot of research on the general costs and requirements that go into each approach, trying to decide which direction is right for me. Writer Quinton Li and the Publishing Rodeo Podcast were both huge helps in this. Quinton was kind enough to take time out of their day to talk through their self-pub experience with me, and Sunyi Dean and Scott Drakeford have crafted an indispensable resource for all writers, especially those considering traditional publishing. 

There are some factors of everything that are, or at least feel, obvious. Self-publishing is undeniably more expensive than the traditional route, with costs of editors, cover designers, and other marketing factors able to stack up pretty quick, even on the cheaper end coming out to at least a couple thousand dollars. On the other hand, traditional publishing comes with a lot of additional stressors, finding current comps, finding open agents, and the constant existential pressure of querying. While there are more minutiae on each side of publishing, those two sort of serve as the balancing weights. 

Self-Publishing: Financially Expensive

Traditional Publishing: Emotionally Expensive

Both take a lot of your time, essentially becoming second full-time jobs that have to ride right alongside your day job, which in some cases, mine included, can already be pretty demanding. So, for me it came down to a decision between paying the financial tax or the emotional tax. Depending on the day, and how I felt about my own writing (imposter syndrome isn’t something I struggle with, but that’s a topic for another month), both path felt attractive at different times. That leads me to a moment that pushed my final decision: PitDark.

For those unfamiliar, PitDark is a Twitter pitch event where participants pitch their completed, ready to query projects to gauge interest from agents and publishers. Likes from agents are requests to query. So, on a whim, I decided to participate since my current Sci-Fantasy story is in query-ready shape. 

Participating in PitDark forced me to prepare a query letter, synopsis, and polished first chapter in order to be ready should my pitches get any interest. So, I did. I built out a query and got second opinions and edited it and crafted pitches ahead of time and by the end of it I felt…excited. The process of building comps and preparing a query and finding a way to distill your story down to its essential parts is an infamous, often decried part of the traditional publishing process, but it energized me. As I sit here typing, I feel more energized about my sci-fantasy project than I did the day I finished the current draft. I feel excited. I feel like I understand my story better than I ever have before. At the end of PitDark, I had no interest from agents, but I did have a lot of encouragement from other participants and a lot of people saying that my themes and ideas resonated with them, which further pushed me to keep working on this story. 

I also found myself with a crafted query letter and synopsis. The hard part of the query preparation process was handled, and my general lack of fear of rejection (hard earned through a handful of years submitting short fiction before my first acceptance last year) led me to start heavily considering what it was I wanted out of publishing. If the process of traditional that so many people suffer through seemed, on the outside, a pleasant process, then what benefits did self-publishing hold for me?

There are benefits of increased control, and in turn increased control on the financial output of your writing, but money is not really a concern for me in the entire process. My day job is good and supports me, and writing is an artful pursuit for me, not something I’m worried about making my living on. Actually, the idea of being forced to manage distribution and sales on top of everything else was a major factor keeping me from self-publishing, only ever balanced by the supposed potential emotional tax querying might bring along. PitDark showed me that, at least in my case, the emotional tax of querying isn’t really something that I will struggle with the same way some other writers might. It’s part of the write and revise process, a process I enjoy and get a lot out of. Of course, I’m not deep in the legendary querying trenches yet, but the rote process of write, submit, reject, repeat isn’t a problem for me. Coming from a literary writing background, it feels as much like part of the writing process as outlining and drafting. PitDark showed me that my own personal “hard part” of traditional publishing, finding comps, building a query letter, wasn’t hard. It was fun. It was part of the craft. It was, to mix my art metaphors at least a little the bit of the process where I fired the clay.

It showed me that traditional publishing is the path that I need to take, because it is the path that works best for me, my personality. It also showed me that, above everything else, no one can make this decision for me. The decision around the publishing journey is one that each writer has to make alone.

Thanks for reading!

Thanks for taking the time to read my newsletter.

Check out my website: billyloperhistory.com

Check me out on Twitter at: PineyWoodsHIS

Check me out on Facebook at: Billy Don Loper-Fiction

Check me out on Instagram at: bloperficiton

THIS POST WAS ORIGINALLY HOSTED ON SUBSTACK

Welcome to the Newsletter!

Thanks for stopping by! I hope you enjoy it and will share it with your friends and family.

Recent Announcements:

My essay on Stephen King’s FROM A BUICK 8 came out in late April with THE SINISTER SCOOP. Be sure to check that out here

I have an interview with Kyle Starks coming out late this month with the Scoop. Keep an eye out for that!

Project Progress:

My beta readers officially have the newest version of my sci-fantasy WIP. While they read that, I am working on my speculative sci-fi piece, still no other news to share there or on the horror WIP. 

Recent Fascinations:

My previous fascination seemed, at least to me, to carry a lot of weight, and I’m not really sure how to follow that up in this one. I have been thinking a lot on self-publishing versus traditional publishing (in relation to the direction I want to go), but I don’t think I have enough concrete thoughts on that to really talk about it here. Instead, I’d like to take a moment to share something I’ve had on my mind for a long while that is much less important, but still pertinent.

But first, some photographs of a book crime:

Above are some pictures of my personal copy of CHRISTINE. It’s one of my favorite King novels, and that particular copy is the first King book I ever purchased (in about 2009 for 60 cents). As I’ve started down the path of collecting all of King’s published bibliography, this little copy (a first edition signet paperback from ‘83) has stuck out as the lone survivor of some long forgotten past. It rode in my backpack for damn-near all of highschool, and has seen hundreds of miles of highway and probably more than a dozen read throughs. It seems like a strange contradiction to my pristine first edition hardback of DUMA KEY and my collection of Grant DARK TOWER books, but when I feel a deeper connection to that battered and abused paperback than I do a lot of the other books in the collection. 

This isn’t another essay on King, I’ll save the story of that particularly abused copy of CHRISTINE for when I do that entry in my essay series on the Scoop, but instead a conversation on book collecting. Right around the same time that I decided to build a complete King collection, I started an Instagram in connection to my writing. As a natural connection, I also began following some King collectors. I quickly found myself in a wild world of ornate bookshelves, multiple-full run paperback collections, and incredible levels of collection preservation. 

I want to stop for a second and have an aside where I make two quick statements:

1. I am not passing judgment on collectors who have really elaborate set-ups.
2. I am not making any commentary on the bookstagram/bookish/shelfie process or influencer industry. 

Instead, what this is really about, to me, anyway, is what I see my book collection as. It seems that, unlike a lot of other online book/writing space folks, I’ve read a good bit of what’s sitting on my shelves. I try not to hang on to books I don’t really love, or at least have some connection to, and even the few there I haven’t read have often been read by someone else in my household. Not only have most of my personal books been read, but they have been well read. Many have broken spines, torn covers, annotations written in pencil. Many have sticky notes that have been in them for years. I abuse my books, with no real regard towards whether they are hardback or paperback. In comparison to a lot of influencers online, my bookshelf looks…unsettling. 

Here, take a look:

That’s just one of my shelves, and the other one isn’t much better. And again, this isn’t to say that my shelf is a real, lived shelf and the shelves of influencers are facades. I’m jealous of their aesthetic flair (and space!), and I’m also decidedly not an influencer centered around my collection. But I am someone who DEEPLY loves books. I spend about as much time reading as I do writing. It can be a bit disheartening, or at least a little frustrating, to see the internetification of book collecting head in a direction that delegitmizes my own personal collection. Commentary about spine cracking, about bent or torn pages. 

All of this eventually led me to thinking about my own work, and what I want out of my books once I (finally) put them out into the world. I’ve been thinking about whether I want to see them on the shelves of collections, neat and protected and not a scratch, or if I want to see them beat to hell. I see authors like Sanderson releasing bespoke, short run leather editions with neat gold lettering. Those are obviously books never meant to be read (take the fact that there’s an entire guide to reading them without rubbing the gold embossing off), and that idea just…irks me. It irks me in a way that the neat and aesthetic shelves do not. Even books like that previously mentioned DUMA KEY get read. I don’t purchase books I do not intend to read.

I can’t say that I will never release a bespoke edition of one of my books. But I can tell you a couple things with absolute certainty. I’m keeping that copy of Christine, and I want my books, every edition of them, to be read. 

Thanks for reading!

Thanks for taking the time to read my newsletter.

Check out my website: billyloperhistory.com

Check me out on Twitter at: PineyWoodsHIS

Check me out on Facebook at: Billy Don Loper-Fiction

Check me out on Instagram at: bloperficiton

THIS POST WAS ORIGINALLY HOSTED ON SUBSTACK

Welcome to the Newsletter!

Thanks for stopping by! I hope you enjoy it and will share it with your friends and family.

Thanks for reading Billy Don Loper-Fiction and Fascinations! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Subscribed

Recent Announcements:

My interview with MALEVOLENT creator Harlan Guthrie went live on THE SINISTER SCOOP earlier this month, so be sure to check that out!

I also just announced that I will be interviewing comic creator and all around artistic great Kyle Starks this month, and that article will be coming out in May. 

Project Progress:

Still making steady progress on edits to get it to a second round of beta readers. Currently at about 50% completion of this read through. All other projects are on standby at the moment!

Recent Fascinations:

For a long while, I’ve had a lot of ideas and feelings about being a writer percolating at the back of my mind. After my conversation with Harlan Guthrie, and our in-depth discussion on the reality of being a creative, those ideas finally crystallized into something real that I feel like I can vocalize in an at least halfway clear manner. 

Early on in my real-writer journey, I fell in with the Taco Bell Quarterly craze of raging against the literary machine and discussing the anti-glamorous life many creatives lead. But as I shifted my focus more and more towards genre fiction, I started to second guess the entire world I’d been raging against. I stopped focusing on the literary-ness of everything and started following more and more indie authors, more hard-genre writers, and more horror media creators. As I entered that space I found a world absent of self-important pretense, of constant cloying for membership to the exclusive club of literary writers. Instead I found a community of writers who just love to fuckin’ write. Who support each other. Who offer free to submit, paying markets that encourage the entry of new writers. Who publish anthologies based on vibes, not the hunt for understanding from an abstract literary empire that no one really understands. 

In other words, in the genre writing scene, I found the world Taco Bell Quarterly hopes to create. I don’t know any other way to put it. 

What shocked me though, as I started to fall more and more into this genre space, is how totally unaware so many literary writers seem to be of its existence. More times than I can count I have seen a writer complain about the intricate, gatekeeping issues of the literary fiction space, and wish for a myriad of improvements. An overwhelming number of times, that improvement is already a common, expected factor in the genre publishing space. That is not to say that genre publishing, which makes up an overwhelming majority of the entire field, is not strife with its own problems. Getting an agent and getting published is intense and more difficult than most expect. Marketing for books, even once they are published, is inconsistent and rests largely on the shoulders of the author. Self-Publishing isn’t much better, often expensive and almost always a sunk cost, all to publish into an overstuffed space dominated almost entirely by one corporation. 

So, like I said. Genre has its own problems. But the thing is, those issues are ALSO Lit-Fic’s issues. 

So, if Lit-Fic is strife with additional problems that genre seems absent of, despite its own issues, then why aren’t writers, not necessarily publishers, but writers, taking genre’s lead? I pondered on this for a good while, but it wasn’t until my interview with Guthrie that I really started to see what might be the heart of the issue. 

Throughout the second half of the interview, Guthrie talked a lot about “writing for the medium,” and while we weren’t talking about genre or literary versus genre fiction, the topic struck a chord with me in a way I did not expect. I don’t have an M.F.A., but I am, or was, an academic. I’m a historian by training, and throughout my undergraduate studies I took a handful of creative writing courses, all of which focused exclusively on Lit-Fic. Genre was discouraged for a number of reasons I won’t go into here. I say that only to say: I am familiar with the space and the expectations it contains. I understand the gatekeeping and expectations intimately. In fact, of my three published/accepted short stories, all of them are literary fiction. And to me, there is the crux of it all. I am a published literary fiction writer, but I also write genre and participate in genre spaces. I participate in genre spaces, because literary spaces are filled with anger, frustration, and constant pretentious comparisons.

So, as I ruminated on this juxtaposition, I wondered why many of the TBQ warriors demanding a more open, welcoming space didn’t just transition to the genre space. Why are so many literary authors perfectly happy to ask for paying markets and welcoming spaces, but scoff at the idea of just hanging out with the genre-writing public. The non-M.F.A. holding, day job working, good-times loving part of the writing community. You know…the NANO crowd.

Fighting to find a table at the literary community has a long and storied history in literary writing, but that sort of thing is what TBQ hopes to push away from. But at the same time, a lot of Lit-Fic writers still decry genre and focus on only “real” writing. In other words, they aren’t writing their story, they’re writing to push themselves into a space that has a number of restrictions, of expectations. They aren’t writing for their story, they’re focused on writing literary fiction, on writing for the medium, not the project. Literary writers are trying to find a way out of the gated community that is Lit-Fic, they’re trying to find a way over the wall. All the while trying to claw their way into a “genre” of fiction that has the highest gates of all. Instead of just writing their art and being part of a group that wants them, they aren’t writing the story and letting the medium follow. They’re writing for the medium. A lot of my fellow literary writers spend, from my perspective, more of their time complaining about writing than they do actually writing. In the modern social media landscape, being a Lit-Fic writer is more about complaining about Lit-Fic publishing than it is about actually writing Lit-Fic.

Like Guthrie said, “…if you are a creative, and you want to create, don’t start at the finish line, sit down and think of what kind of story you want to tell.”

Or, if I might put it in a more blunt way taking a slightly modified page from Brent Cobb’s songbook: 

Sometimes sayin’ nothin’ says it all and then some more

Conjecture causes bull and fuels unnecessary wars

Poets know hiding the truth somewhere between the lines somehow

Makes it seem worth more for those looking to find

Some answers to the troubles this life brings

Shut up and sing

Maybe it’s time for Lit-Fic to drop the pretense and stop complaining about the sheets that are on the bed we made. Shut up and write. 

Thanks for reading!

Thanks for taking the time to read my newsletter.

Check out my website: billyloperhistory.com

Check me out on Twitter at: PineyWoodsHIS

Check me out on Facebook at: Billy Don Loper-Fiction

Check me out on Instagram at: bloperficiton

THE POST WAS ORIGINALLY HOSTED ON SUBSTACK

Welcome to the Newsletter!

Thanks for stopping by! I hope you enjoy it and will share it with your friends and family.

Thanks for reading Billy Don Loper-Fiction and Fascinations! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Subscribed

Recent Announcements:

This month I will be interviewing Harlan Guthrie, the man behind the Malevolent audio drama podcast. I can’t wait to sit down with him and talk about all things eldritch horror, podcasting, and the connections between audio drama and prose fiction. 

Also, I’m excited to announce I’ll be interviewing Harlan Guthrie of Malevolent, a wonderful eldritch horror audio drama later this month. Updates to come!

I also completed my interview with Cat Voleur early this month, so be watching out for that this summer in ARCHIVE OF THE ODD. Updates to come. 

Project Progress:

Sci-fantasy story is back from the copy editor! I’m making the changes in preparation for a second round of beta reading. I made some progress on the scifi story this month, but all other projects are still on second-class status until this one is finished. 

Recent Fascinations:

Imposter syndrome is a hell of a thing, ain’t it? For authors it can come in so many forms and at so many different places along the process that it is almost a required right of passage. Every writer feels imposter syndrome at some point. Sometimes it’s when you read someone else’s work and it feels so, so much better than your own. Sometimes it’s when you are working on a project that has you stumped, and you wonder why you even bother. For a lucky few of us it’s when we get published, even just short fiction. We get published and immediately start talking about how hollow it all feels and how we have to chase the next high (Also Known As the TBQ Effect). Then at times, it’s when we edit and wonder what bumbling, pig headed, jackass idiot wrote this in the first place. And whose decision was it to make me clean this mess up? And WHY exactly can’t this idiot just get it right the first time?

If you can’t tell, I’m currently feeling a touch of that last one. 

I’m most of the way through a pretty serious edit of my sci-fantasy manuscript after getting it back from the copy editor and, of course, I’m feeling some doubts. My main character needs serious edits to keep her personality consistent, and her love interest required much of the same. I think I’ve got the love interest’s personality straightened out, but I’m not sure I have my MC’s nailed down just yet. Part of me knows I will eventually. I still have another round of beta readers left and another read through by my copy editor, and by the end of it all I know I’ll have everything worked out. Still, though, it’s hard not to dwell on the issues while they’re there on the page. 

This is especially true during the editing process, when you’re spending hours and hours hyper focused on the flaws of the piece, trying to find every way you can to iron them out and make everything neat and proper. 

Maybe modern review culture is partly to blame, it is certainly to blame for the idea that everyone has to like everything and relate to it for a work to be considered good in the common way. My MC isn’t particularly likable, she’s anxious and headstrong, and aggravating, but that’s the point. This is a single story in her journey, and it’s a journey I want to tell, because it’s one I identify with, regardless of if I like her. 

I have to keep reminding myself that even the finished product won’t speak for the entirety of my ability, that it’s a process made up of many people wearing many hats. Most of all, I have to remind myself that there’s no one I’m impostering. 

I’m just a writer, and when I’m done it might be good or it might be bad, but It will undeniably be mine. 

Thanks for reading!

Thanks for taking the time to read my newsletter.

Check out my website: billyloperhistory.com

Check me out on Twitter at: PineyWoodsHIS

Check me out on Facebook at: Billy Don Loper-Fiction

Check me out on Instagram at: bloperficiton

THIS POST WAS ORIGINALLY POSTED ON SUBSTACK

Welcome to the Newsletter!

Thanks for stopping by for my first newsletter of 2023! I hope you enjoy it and will share it with your friends and family. 

Thanks for reading Billy Don Loper-Fiction and Fascinations! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Subscribed

Recent Announcements:

Since my last newsletter two of my short stories have been accepted to publication. The first was “Father, or the Pain that Lingers,” and it was published in late January. It can be read here: http://www.usmproductmag.com/current-issue. The second was “Key to the Heart,” a story which recently won a story competition at a local bookstore (The Author Shoppe, Hattiesburg, MS). It’s been picked up by Panorame Journal for their Summer Gothic issue, which will come out Summer ‘23. 

Outside of these publications (wild that I can put an ‘S’ on the end of that already), I have also joined THE SINISTER SCOOP horror media website as a contributor. (check them out here: https://www.thesinisterscoop.com/home). There should be some cool stuff coming from me there soon. 

Also, in March I’ll be interviewing horror author Cat Voleur for ARCHIVE OF THE ODD, (

https://archiveoftheodd.com/

), so stay tuned for more there. 

Project Progress:

My sci-fantasy story has officially been sent to the copy editor! Once I get it back, there’ll be a lot of work left to do, but in the meantime I’ve moved back to my speculative sci-fi story and hope to make a little progress on it in the meantime. 

Recent Fascinations:

Two of my most recent reads have put an interesting topic at the front of my attention. In January I read through Stephen King’s novel HEARTS IN ATLANTIS and D.J. James’s novella STITCHES. These two stories, despite both being part of the paranormal genre, could not be more different. However, it isn’t the distinctions of genre nuance (such as STITCHES being a body horror story and HEARTS IN ATLANTIS being a psychic thriller), but instead it is the classification of writing the two fall into. 

While the spectrum of written works is as wide a tapestry as possible, two extreme distinctions exist that do not necessarily communicate quality, but do communicate density: Literary Fiction and Independent Genre Fiction. Literary Fiction is often dense, metaphorically layered, and an overall more complex experience. Independent Genre Fiction, on the other hand, is often quick to read, exciting, and focused on telling a compelling (or terrifying) story. Language and metaphor come second in Independent Genre, in other words. 

I’ve often considered myself a primarily-literary reader. Prose and metaphor have always been very important to me, and because of that I’ve often scoffed (yes I’m ashamed of this) at independent fiction. However, reading STITCHES and then finishing up HEARTS IN ATLANTIS really caused me to think about what that kind of perspective means. King is the undeniable…king of genre fiction, but HEARTS IN ATLANTIS is a true masterwork in literary fiction, it just happens to have a slight paranormal tint in places. If Shirley Jackson or Nathanial Hawthorne are literary writers, then so is King in the instance of HEARTS. D.J. James, though, did not write a literary story in STITCHES. James instead invokes memories of 1960s and 70s pulp paperback horror novels. STITCHES is bloody, disturbing, and fast moving. It leaves the reader with a feeling of sick dread. The prose is simple, if at times a little clunky, but it conveys its story in a quick, direct fashion that leaves plenty of room for the disgust to splash out of the page. HEARTS IN ATLANTIS is a story in the vein of THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE, while STITCHES is the paperback version of 1980s slasher horror. B-Movie on the page, and there’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, that kind of fiction is an important part of the genre, and often provides room for more literary works to breathe. 

So as I read STITCHES and began making criticisms to myself about the quality of the prose not being quite as high as other books, I found myself realizing that those kinds of criticisms are, by definition, meaningless. STITCHES was not supposed to be a literary masterpiece. It isn’t a psychological, complex horror movie. It is FRIDAY THE 13TH. 

And that’s okay. You should read HEARTS IN ATLANTIS, but you should also read STITCHES. 

Thanks for reading!

Thanks for taking the time to read my newsletter.

Check out my website: billyloperhistory.com

Check me out on Twitter at: PineyWoodsHIS

Check me out on Facebook at: Billy Don Loper-Fiction

Check me out on Instagram at: bloperficiton

THIS POST WAS ORIGINALLY HOSTED ON SUBSTACK

Welcome to the Newsletter!

Thanks for stopping by for my first newsletter of 2023! I hope you enjoy it and can share it with your friends and family. 

Recent Announcements:

In late December of ‘22 I started a “Bookstagram” account on Instagram in an effort to further share news about my writing and do a little review work on the books and media that I spend so much of my time consuming. So far it’s been an interesting experiment, and if you want to check me out there my username is @bloperficiton. 

Project Progress:

I’ve moved onto the next stage of editing of my sci-fantasy manuscript, grammar edits to prepare it for my copy editor. However, that process is taking far longer than I anticipated, because I did not get near the amount of writing done during the Christmas/New Year holidays I had intended. It’s likely that that planned deadline is going to have to be moved back to the second half of this month/early Feb. 

Other projects are still on hold until this deadline is dealt with. 

Recent Fascinations:

After finishing up THE FAR MERIDIAN, which I still highly recommend, I moved on to another podcast-audio drama titled GIVE ME AWAY, which I don’t recommend (check out my review on Instagram). However, as the year wound down and I progressively started focusing more of my free time into my writing, specifically the not-writing part of being a writer, I’ve found myself considering the idea of “being literary” and being a writer in general. 

In December, my first story was accepted for publication. While it won’t be in print until the Summer, the guarantee of publication shifted the way I think about being a writer in a way I never thought it would. I had told myself for a long time, years and years, that once I was published I wouldn’t be an aspiring author but a real, proper writer of fiction. Even though I won’t earn a red cent from this publication, it’s still the lifelong realization of a childhood dream. I found out my story was accepted just as I pulled into my driveway after a long week at my day job, and I sat in the car for a minute, telling myself over and over again that I had finally made it. 

I’m a writer.

Then I went inside and cooked and tended to my infant the same as any other day. The next Monday I woke up and went to work and did the same work I do Monday-Friday. There were certainly congratulations from friends and family, and I’m still ecstatic to have achieved this, but to me it seems that as soon as I reached that long-chased goal, another appeared just as fast. 

I’m a writer, sure. Now let’s find a way to do it for money. And that, dear reader, is the real hat trick. 

So I started a Facebook page and this newsletter and an Instagram and suddenly there’s more to all of this than writing. There’s building an audience and posting and being public. And to be quite frank, none of it feels very “literary” at all. 

A part of me had always imagined big bookshelves and roll top desks and quiet contemplative writing framed by the chase of publication as the peak literary goal. Certainly that’s part of it, at least part of the mindset, but so too is the marketing and the audiences and the social media of it all. The meaning of “suffer for your art” really seems to have changed, at least for this social media luddite. 

Anyway, @bloperficiton, like-share-subscribe, and all that good stuff. 

Thanks for Reading!

Thanks for taking the time to read my newsletter.

Check out my website: billyloperhistory.com

Check me out on Twitter at: PineyWoodsHIS

Check me out on Facebook at: Billy Don Loper-Fiction

Check me out on Instagram at: bloperficiton

THIS POST WAS ORIGINALLY HOSTED ON SUBSTACK

Welcome to the Newsletter!

This one will be a little different than what I have planned going forward, but thanks for checking it out.

Why a Newsletter? (and why now?)

Author newsletters are the lit world’s standard, and Substack makes that process a lot easier than running a traditional email listserv. So instead of running a listserv, I’m going to try out running a monthly (as it is currently planned anyway) newsletter here.

As far as why now: I’m early in my writing career, having just had my first short story accepted for publication. I’m hoping that this space can become an accountability tool as much as a genuine place for delivering updates and other tidbits. Writing often and in many different ways is a key way to hone the craft, so that’s part of what I hope to do here.

So here is the first edition of my newsletter! I hope you enjoy it, and thanks for reading.

Recent Announcements:

• In October my short story “Key to the Heart” won the Author Shoppe’s Scary Story Contest. You can read the story here: https://billyloperhistory.com/short-stories/a-short-story-key-to-the-heart/
• In December my short story “Anatomy of a Waterfall” was awarded 3rd place in the Tishomingo Arts Council’s 2022 Fall Writing Competition. It was then selected to for publication in the 2023 Edition of THE VIEW FROM WOODALL.

Project Progress

I’m currently working my way through an edit of my current manuscript, a sci-fantasy series focused around a library. I’m planning to get it to a copyeditor by mid January.

Outside of that, I’m also working on a horror novella and a sci-fi story unrelated to my other manuscript. Those are both on pause until January.

Recent Fascinations:

Lately I’ve been working my way through THE FAR MERIDIAN, a magical realism audio drama focused on mental health and trauma. (Check it out here: https://www.whisperforge.org/thefarmeridian). It’s a fantastic show that is as thought provoking as it is genuinely charming. For me, audio dramas are hit and miss as a format, but this one has been an absolute hit. But it, combined with my read throughs of Stephen King’s THE INSTITUTE and a friend’s manuscript, has me thinking about theme in the context of different genres.

THE FAR MERIDIAN is a deeply introspective and emotionally powerful story, while THE INSTITUTE is a thriller mostly focused on fast paced action and shocking revelations (a standard for most King stories, to be sure), and my friends manuscript (which I will be providing no plot details for out of respect for him) is an absurdist comedy. Yet all three of these works focus a lot on repressed trauma in one form or another. The different genres of these stories lend themselves to different explorations of this topic, each does it with the reverence and respect it deserves.

Far Meridian focuses on the ways that unexplored trauma can fester in unexpected and unseen ways. Kings’ Institute spends most of its page count exploring the institutional exacerbation of trauma and oppressive unforeseen forces. My friend’s manuscript explores generational expectations and the trauma it imposes. Each of these stories are different from one another in almost every way except the underlying theme of trauma and what it means to the characters. Genre does not, after all, define theming.

I don’t know how I ended up going through three stories with a similar theme at the same time, but it has ended up topical to my own writing as I work through one of my own characters with PTSD. I’m a discovery writer, so as of now I have no real idea where this character will head in the coming sequels to my current project, but I know their past and their trauma will play a major role. All of these works have shown me that, regardless of the direction in style and tone the sequels of this project take, there will be a way to tackle this trauma in a respectful and accurate way.

There’s not much detail I can go into here beyond that (I don’t like to reveal details about my stories until they refinished and settled). I can say that all of those stories handle the theme well, and I hope to do the same.

Check out THE FAR MERIDIAN and THE INSTITUTE. They’re both worth your time.

Thanks for Reading!

Thanks for taking the time to read my newsletter.

Check out my website: billyloperhistory.com

Check me out on Twitter at: PineyWoodsHIS

Check me out on Facebook at: Billy Don Loper-Fiction