Q is for quitting. No, not quitting writing, though I have to admit, some days I’ve considered that too. No, what I’d like to quit is all the self-doubt and second guessing myself. I’ve been doing that most of my life. It’s interesting. Our students did a study today on coaching, looking at which students had more self-confidence and success, the ones who were given praise or the ones who were subjected more to the militaryesque screaming. It was closer than comfort allows but praise did win out. I was raised the other way by teachers who screamed and belittled. I’ve come to automatically assume everything I do is wrong and not up to snuff. The worst were the surgeons who taught me surgery. Most of foot/ankle surgery isn’t done under general anesthesia which means the patients are more or less awake. During more than one surgery I had a patient call out, ‘will you quit screaming at her. You’re making me terrified.’ (Meanwhile my hands are shaking because they’re terrifying ME too).

So I am probably one of the most accomplished people you’ll meet with self-esteem this low. Have the time I’m convinced everything I’ve written, everything I am is absolute rubbish. I need to QUIT that. I let it paralyze me. Hell I haven’t written anything of note in nearly two months after being convinced my writing isn’t worth even looking over to edit.

I am crawling back out of that depression but I need to quit letting it get to me. I can’t take two month hiatuses because I’m letting self-doubt destroy everything I’ve worked for.

The other thing I have to quit is letting people talk me out of the things I want to write. That has happened so many times. I’m getting a little depressed with insta-freebie and other giveaways because I see SO MANY ghost and/or witch mystery stories. In the mid-90s I wrote a mystery novel where a ghost played a role in solving the mystery. My usually supportive writers group went ballistic (mostly the guys, the ladies were all right with it except for the lady lawyer). They were out rightly cruel, laughing at me, making me the butt of jokes for months. I put my mystery on the shelf (I think it died in a computer crash which is sad because I liked the one character, a homeless jazz sax busker.

Also in the 90s I tried selling stuff with Nephilim characters. No one wanted it. AT ALL. Some even yelled at me for being blasphemous. I ended up putting those characters in a shared universe I wrote in with & (One looked a lot like Heath Ledger and another like Alan Jackson).

Now you can swing a stick without hitting ghost mysteries or a Nephilim/Angel character. It’s a touch disheartening. I’m not sure I would have been good enough 20 years ago to be published but I would have been right there are the leading edging of a trend, not piling on at the end.

So yes, I need to quit listening to the nay-sayers. I need to write what’s in my heart and I need to quit doubting myself.

P is for Pradesh. My demon hunting trio in Soldiers of the Sun & The Darkest Midnight in December originated in the UK. Caleb from Wales, Temple who had run away from Paris to London and Agni Pradesh who ended up in London by way of Bombay. They were then sent to fill out the ranks in Pittsburgh’s Sun headquarters after a demon uprising decimated them.

I wanted a little cultural diversity in this story and considered, for better or worse, England’s colonial ties to India. I’ve always had a fascination with Hinduism so Pradesh was born. What I absolutely didn’t want was him to be subservient to his two White partners in any way. Agni isn’t the leader (that would be Caleb) but the Pradesh family is a well-known, well honored group of demon hunters stretching back generations on par with Temple’s family who had been Knights Templar (demon hunters as well in this universe) since before they were officially an organization.

Agni is the quiet level headed studious one of the bunch but of course this leaves me being cautious not to tread too close to the ‘inscrutable Asian’ stereotype. Agni is open and honest about his feelings but on the other hand, feels he needs to be the anchor for the group. Temple is certainly not up to that task (and definitely needs anchoring). He shoulders burdens to allow Caleb, whom he has loved since the beginning of their partnership, to lead without as many worries.

Agni does try to hold on to as much of his culture as he can, which isn’t easy in 1930s America. His apartment is his refuge, decorated as closely to the average household in Bombay as he could manage. He struggles more with food but since the Soldiers of the Sun pull from peoples worldwide they try to help them feel comfortable by supplying things like ethnic food items as much as they can. Agni is unashamedly Hindu and his gods are prominently displayed in his apartment including the god he was named for.

Of course, this is 1930s America and Agni’s dark skin and accent (more the skin tone) can be a problem. This does crop up in the stories, especially in Soldiers of the Sun and the high end exclusive clubs they have to investigate don’t want to allow him entrance. I didn’t want it to be a huge part of the narrative but I didn’t want to simply pretend it wasn’t there. Yes, this is a different universe but I kept it as close to our world as I could. Prejudice was a huge issue in the 1930s obviously and I had to address that.

He faces another issue, being gay in the 1930s. Their leader General Taglioferro knows they’re gay. He knows Caleb and Agni are lovers. He probably even knows they’ve invited Temple into their bed as well. So long as it doesn’t interfere with their combat skills, he doesn’t care. He even considers the fact they might fight harder to save each other because they’re in love. Their homosexuality isn’t well known within the organization in general, however and Temple is a known womanizer (more about him at another time) and probably distracts attention from Agni and Caleb.

Agni might be a studious taciturn bookworm in public but behind closed doors he’s happy to remind everyone that Indians actually did write the book on lovemaking. He had been uncertain about bringing Temple into the relationship as they are polar opposites but was pleasantly surprised to find how compatible they were in bed.

Agni also gets to use the coolest weapons, preferring chakrams as his weapon (If you’re unfamiliar with them, think the metal discs Xena Warrior Princess used). Technically they’re Sikh weapons, not Hindu but in a world where you’re fighting demons, you learn to use every weapon you can get your hands on.

Agni is a fun character but hard to write. I hope I did him justice.

You can find his stories here. (Yes they’re in a series but they can be read as stand alones because hey 1930s demon hunters, right?).

Soldiers of the Sun. (novel)

The Darkest Midnight in December. (novella)
Snowbound. (short story)
And here’s some fan art done by one of my friends, Kira. Isn’t it cool?

O is for Once Upon a Time. Some of the best known stories in the world start that way. There’s something about those words that capture our attention. The once upon a time I want to talk about isn’t a fairytale. Instead it’s a LGBT anthology Once Upon a Time in the Weird West which is a great collection by some truly excellent authors.

It started as an email that read something along the lines of would you be interested in writing a short story for an anthology with a weird west theme? Would I? I wanted it bad. Actually I’m not a huge Western fan but you jam the word ‘weird’ on there and I’m all over it. But my excitement was about more than that.

You see, I’ve been in anthologies before but they’re all open calls. This wasn’t that. This was the first time I was invited in by other authors. I was over the moon because of that. It was validation by my peers. In other words, they like me, they really like me! I felt honored and excited to be asked and there was no way I was going to fail to turn out a story. I couldn’t fail, not when I had actually been invited.

I was going to say authors come in three varieties, the super self assured, the quiet competent one and the neurotic but that’s true of most jobs. The quiet competent ones are always there bringing their A game without much of a hub bub. Then the super self assured ones can be split into two or three groups themselves. There are the arrogant Tony Stark types who ARE as good as they think they are. I was going to say Elon Musk types but I’m not sure he’s arrogant (I don’t know him but oddly enough I was friends with his former father in law!) There’s no doubting their skill. The other super self assured think they’re better than everyone else but aren’t. I had one like that in a shared universe I was part of. You could NOT criticize her at all (because her work was too good for that) and if you did (because no, her work really wasn’t) she would have a tantrum. Once at a con after her work was shredded in a writing workshop she infamously locked herself in the bathroom and had to be bodily removed by her lover.

Then there’s the neurotic type. That’s me. I’ve been a big ball of anxiety and self doubt my entire life. I’m always afraid I don’t measure up (even though I know I’m pretty damn good at most things I really work at). Being asked helped to wipe those fears away.

I’m proud of my story in spite of the fact it was nearly 10K too long and I had to hack and hack to get it to only 3K over (sad face). This story wrote itself so easily. The theme of ‘weird west’ is so wide open. The anthology has SF stories, ghosts and demons and so much more. (Seriously if you like this sort of thing, pick it up!). My story is set in Virginia City, Nevada (fascinating place) and is steampunk. Dr. Isaac Adler was a doctor in the Civil War and it haunts him so he tried running from himself to the west, answering an ad from a retiring doctor to take over his practice. Isaac gets screwed by this guy and is scratching out a practice just the same. He answers the call when an airship is attacked by pirates. This is where he meets Tsela Zahnie, the Navajo first mate. Tsela is being followed by a skinwalker, an evil witch from Navajo lore. Isaac’s life just got complicated.

I’m proud of this story and this anthology. It took a lot of research of Jewish customs in the 1800s, ditto Navajo and all that rich Virginia City history. I loved every second of it (even when I was complaining). And yes even though I was asked, even though I knew the story was good, I was still neurotic about it somehow getting rejected. That’s just how I am.

You can find the anthology here.

And here have a picture of Tsela drawn by Lex Chase as part of a trading card set for the anthology

N is for names. If there is anything harder than putting a title on a story (I’m horrible at it) it’s finding the names for your characters. Of sure, on rare occasion I’ll end up with someone who pops in my head fully named and confident about it, like Temple Chevalier from Soldiers of the Sun. Mostly I waste hours going through name books (back in the old days and occasionally now) and hanging out at Behind the Name. online. I love that you can sort by ethnicity because on more than one occasion the character’s heritage is important to he or she is.

Finding the right name can be agonizing for the author. I’ve been known to change a character’s name mid-way through. Thank God for the search function in Word because I put it to good use. I’ve also been known to put in place holders like XXX or YYY to use the global find and replace later on once that jerk of a character finally chooses a name. I’ve even held contests to help name characters. My usual beta will help me and then say ‘you won’t use them. You never like my names.’ That’s true (and probably goes both ways).

And that brings me to the other difficult thing about naming characters. What works for someone might not work for another. There is nothing you can do about that of course. I once knew a woman who literally hated her parents in part for her name which was a bit different but I thought it was beautiful and would have loved it. There’s a romance author I’ve run across recently (I don’t read a lot of het romance but this cover struck me and I looked her up) and the names were so bizarre and so weirdly spelled that I found it off putting. Heck I find it off-putting even with my students where you have a relatively normal name spelled so strangely as to make their child ‘different.’

Some names, however, should probably send up red flags to us and make us rethink. The fantasy genre for instance usually has bizarre names and using regular names might give the fantasy reader pause. I mean would Frodo, Samwise, Gandalf and Aragon have been the same if they had been named John, Tim, Dave and Bob? Conversely if you’re writing contemporary fiction and you named your protagonist, Dylton we might look at you strange (Charlaine Harris does that in her Midnight Texas story, all the characters have slightly weird names like Fiji, Xylda, Manfred and Bobo but they ARE slightly weird people). Right now I’m reading a story that I keep getting kicked out of because of the name Jock. Yes I know it’s a real name but naming the assassin athletic jock character Jock is just weird.

Some names make us judgy even if we don’t mean to be. If I told you this woman’s name was Cinnamon you probably would assign jobs in your head to her (like I know I’ve seen strippers with that name, just saying) and never guess she writes science text books (she does). Some really make you think what were the parents were thinking (and if that’s part of your story then by all means go for it!) Like the race car driver, Dick Trickle, with all due respect to the man who has since passed. Or like someone I interact with professionally whose actual name is Precious. That’s a cute nickname for a baby sure but now she has to endure that name professionally and to an outsider, hearing a doctor call a nurse that would sound like grounds for a sexual harassment suit.

Names are very important. My great grandmother on Mom’s side of the family refused to Anglicize her children’s names when she came here from Italy. She was forced to do it for herself by the government (going from Guiseppina to Josephine) but her children she gave Italian names. On Dad’s side of the family they hid their Italian heritage. Many people did because of the racism of the day. We use names as clues to heritage and sexual identity, for better or worse (often worse). My actual name is unisex. When I noticed I couldn’t get a single response to my job search back when I was seeing patients I removed ‘American Association of Women Podiatrists’ from my resume and got dozens of call backs because they thought I was male (and then hung up on me when they learned I wasn’t). A prejudiced character could easily use a character’s last name to judge him or her without even meeting them, assuming for instance Lanisha is African American or Po Chin is Chinese or Stern is Jewish (Hell I’ve seen people doing that looking over resumes and tossing the ones they think could possibly be non-White, non-Christian because that is their only clue since ethnicity etc. would be off limits when it comes to job applications, and yes it made me see red.)

So yes, naming those main characters is a time consuming job, fraught with emotions (damn you why don’t you like ANY of these names?). Sometimes it’s fun. Sometimes you just want to murder the character before you’ve even written about him.