Guest Post, Podcast Appearance, Call for Guests, & Links

Hello! I was remiss in posting a couple things that popped on IWSG day, so even though I added them to the post that evening after my hosting duties, I wanted to give them due credit before posting this month's submission links.

I visited Damyanti Biswas with a guest post on Writing Short Stories: Benefits for Novelists. As creatives, we always have to be thinking on our feet. My post discusses some ways novelists can use short stories to their benefit. Plus, did you know Damyanti has a new book up for preorder? Blue Bar can be found in various online shops.

Myth & Magic fantasy podcast for writers

In addition, I was a guest on Myth & Magic, a podcast hosted by Neil Mach. He was a delight to speak with. Because he's in England and I'm in Colorado, USA, we met up at 2 AM my time and first thing in the morning for him. You can listen to that episode via Apple Podcasts or via Google Podcasts. Myth & Magic is a fantasy podcast for writers. He also has several novels available for sale.

Neil Mach, host of Myth & Magic

Both of my above hosts are great resources for writers, albeit in different formats. Another resource I've found to be wonderful is PodMatch. It's a website that matches podcasters up with guests. I first found it for my true crime podcast, but haven't actually used it to book anyone yet. It allowed for me to set myself up as both a guest and a host, so I put myself out there as a guest, as well, and have been invited by several interesting podcasts to be a guest. Myth & Magic was one of those. As was DJ Curveball's podcast a few months ago. And I'll be recording with an Italian podcast next week, which is exciting! I'll pass that information along once I have air date and links. As authors, this is a helpful resource, so I wanted to pass it along.

We're always seeking writing guests for Mysteries, Monsters, & Mayhem. If you'd be interested in being a guest, which would involve you telling us and our listening audience about a true crime, a haunting, or something similar with which you have some sort of personal connection (even if that connection is that this is a thing that has interested you for a time and you want to look into it further and chat about it). You would have about 20 minutes for your piece, and we would each also be presenting a [possibly] related story for 20 minutes each. We record Sundays at 2 PM MT. We always chat for the first few minutes in order to ask you to introduce yourself and your books. If you're interested, please fill out the Google form.

Okay, NOW it's time for links. We're in a busy season for short submissions, so there are a lot in the rest of March and April. Bear in mind I'm not endorsing these, merely passing them along. Always do your own due diligence before submitting.

B Cubed Press is seeking short stories, essays, or poetry with the theme of speculative fiction holidays for Alternate Holidays. 100 to 7500 words, but longer stories are a hard sell. Pays $.03/word, plus royalties, and a portion of profits goes to the ACLU. Deadline March 30.

B Cubed Press is also seeking short stories, essays, or poetry with the theme of female leaders for Madam President. Same details as their anthology above.

Bag of Bones Press is seeking stories set in 2022 in the genre of horror or dark speculative fiction for Annus Horribilis. Up to 2022 words. Pays £6.66. Deadline March 31.

Iron Faerie Publishing is seeking short stories for fairy tale retellings involving a mirror. Speculative fiction. 2500 to 7000 words. Pays in royalties. Deadline March 31.

Hiraeth Publishing is seeking paranormal short stories for ParAbnormal. 3000 to 6000 words. Pays $25. Deadline March 31.

Android Press is seeking solarpunk and/or cyberpunk stories for an anthology. 500 to 7500 words. Pays $.08/word. Deadline March 31.

Lackington's is seeking speculative fiction about prehistories. 1500 to 5000 words. Pays 1 cent CAD/word. Deadline March 31.

Cohesion Press is seeking weird western action horror for SNAFU: Dead or Alive. 2000 to 10,000 words. Pays AUD5c/word. Deadline March 31.

Cursed Dragon Ship Publishing is seeking speculative fiction stories about previously full spaces that have been abandoned for Legion of Dorks Presents: Abandoned--An anthology of Vacant Spaces. Up to 7000 words. Pays $50. Deadline March 31.

Eric Raglin is seeking body horror stories for Shredded: A Sports and Fitness Body Horror Anthology. 2000 to 4500 words. Pays $.03/word. Deadline March 31. 

Cemetery Gates Media is seeking short stories set in a graveyard for Picnic in the Graveyard. Must take place in a cemetery/graveyard. 2000 to 4000 words. Pays $.07/word. Deadline April 1.

Android Press is seeking lunarpunk stories for Bioluminescent. 500 to 7500 words. Pays $.08/word. Deadline April 1.

Bullshit Lit Mag + Press is seeking ridiculous riddles, stories, poems, art, and word games. Up to 2500 words. Pays $5. Deadline April 1.

Camden Park Press is seeking stories that combine fantasy (magic) and cozy/soft-boiled mystery for Witches of a Certain Age. The main character must be a female/female-identifying witch over 40. 6000 to 8000 words. Pays in royalties. Deadline April 1.

Seaborne Magazine is seeking short stories and vignettes having to do with the sea. 1500 to 4000 words for short stories. Pays £5. Deadline April 3.

Terrain.org is seeking stories, poetry, nonfiction, and art about wildfires. Fiction is up to 5000 words. Pays $200. Deadline April 4.

Donnie Goodman is seeking marijuana-related horror for the Strange Weeds Anthology. 1500 to 4200 words. Pays $10. Deadline April 20.

Dragon Soul Press is seeking steampunk stories for Age of Artifice. 5000 to 15000 words. Pays in royalties. Deadline April 30.

Ghost Orchid Press is seeking horror stories inspired by neurodiverse experiences for Rewired. 1000 to 6000 words. Pays $.03/word. Deadline April 30.

Kopfkino Publishing is seeking fairy tale themed horror for Midnight in the Dying Garden: Fairy Tales for the End of the World. 1000 to 7000 words. Pays $25-$150CAD. Deadline April 30.

Water Dragon Publishing is seeking short stories with positive visions for the future for The Future's So Bright. 2000 to 8000 words. Pays $.02/word. Deadline April 30.

Have you listened to Myth & Magic before? Have you heard of Podmatch? Do you have any questions about possibly being a guest on the podcast? Any of these submission links of interest? Are you submitting right now? How's it going?

May you find your Muse.

IWSG: Making Time & Space, Plus Damyanti Stops By

It's the first Wednesday of December, which means it's time for the Insecure Writer's Support Group, the brain child of Alex J. Cavanaugh.

All are welcome to participate. Just click on Alex's name above, sign up on the list, and post about your writing insecurities. There's a convenient optional question in case you're just not sure what to say, but want to take part.

Thank you to this month's co-hosts!

Tonja Drecker, Beverly Stowe McClure, Nicki Elson, Tyrean Martinson!

Be sure to visit, Alex, the co-hosts, and some of the other participants, so you can meet some new folks!

Last month was busy, and this month is shaping up to be the same. To get back to previous writing levels, I'm trying to guarantee myself one solo writing date out of the house per week at a local cafe, plus a writing date with friends, hopefully also once per week. A guaranteed two days per week is all I can do right now, but I get a ton done when I make the time. 

My office had also become crammed full and messy due to having to move things to have windows put in. Plus, I came off several appearances, and had just shoved my stuff from each engagement into the office and hastily packed what I needed each time. I find I avoid my office when it gets in a messy state like this, because it overwhelms me. I freeze up, because I feel like I can't get anything done until I clean/tidy it. I've now tidied it up, and am looking forward to getting back in there.

So my insecurities this month involved making time and making space. Now that I've completed that, I'm optimistic about getting some writing done!

Now that we've discussed my insecurities, I've got a guest post from Damyanti, delayed from what was to have been an earlier posting. It's about writing crime fiction, and her journey to publishing You Beneath Your Skin.

On Amazon USA: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07X8WCKH6/

On Amazon India: https://www.amazon.in/BENEATH-YOUR-SKIN-DAMYANTI-BISWAS/dp/9386797623

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/47634028-you-beneath-your-skin

It is not easy for me to speak about my journey into fiction, because I never imagined I’d be a writer. And ten years ago, if you’d have asked me if I’d be a crime writer I would have laughed.

I’d started writing by then, but I thought I would write realistic, literary stories.

Always been a compulsive reader—it is hard for me to survive without reading—even on days I don’t have time to eat or sleep—I read a little, of something. It is mostly reflex action. One of the reasons I write fiction is because I’m insatiably curious, and curious about people. Reading does not always satisfy this curiosity. I want to know what makes people tick, to figure out why humans do the mundane and extraordinary things they do. In my writing, my effort is to render the mundane extraordinary, and to examine the unusual and make it familiar.

Stories come to me from characters and my urge to understand them-- and in so doing, in a curious, intangible way, to understand myself.

Some of my first crime stories began as attempts to make sense of human nature—I wrote about a voyeur first, ( we had a voyeur in our neighbourhood) and then another story about an unrequited lover avenging the death of the woman he’d been devoted to. Yet another was a traditional woman, a forensic expert, who realised that the long-distance online relationship she’d been having was with a fraud, who’d been cheating her for money. She avenges this by shooting him and burying him in her backyard. I proceeded to write about a husband taking care of his moribund wife—we do not know if he mercy-kills her in the end, but we suspect it.

The turning point came with reading In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. This was literary writing, but it described horrors we humans are capable of. It made me think of writing about the characters who had haunted me over the years. Anjali, specifically. And she appeared in Delhi, a city I’d spent many years of my life in, and one rather infamous for crimes against women. As the novel evolved, and I worked with Julia Bell, my mentor from Birkbeck University, I realised I had a crime novel on my hands.

I studied under various tutors, understood POV and characterization, plotting and dialogues, and the novel kept changing shape and size, morphing into the being it is today.

Engaged in telling the best story I could, I found acid attack as a plot point, and being the obsessive sort of person I am, I wanted to meet at least one acid attack survivor before I wrote the draft. That changed many things, because having met acid attack survivors, heard their stories and held their hands, it was impossible to turn back. I was still writing a crime novel, but you cannot reduce horrific pain and devastation into plot devices—you must either write about them exclusively, or if they fit into your story, write about them with the greatest respect and as much authenticity as possible.

Book Launch with Acid Attack Survivors

This is how You Beneath Your Skin came about. The framework is of a crime thriller, and it can be read as one. But my years of supporting Project WHY has somehow trickled through—the alleyways I’ve visited, the people I have met there. The acid attack survivors and their pain has seeped into the story as well, and all my proceeds of the novel go to Stop Acid Attacks and Project WHY.

Writing a crime novel, here’s what I have learned:

• Characters are everything. Many readers have written to me about how much they cared about the characters, how pleased or disappointed they were for these fictional people—Anjali, Jatin, Maya, Pawan, Nikhil. How the novel stayed with them. So I believe characters must be 4-dimensional, unique, independent beings.
• Setting. No one thinks of New Delhi as a cold place, but it gets close to freezing in winters. For the last few years smog has been a huge issue—New Delhi now has the dubious distinction of being the world’s most polluted city. All that grime and dark lent well to You Beneath Your Skin. When writing crime novels—whether cosy or hard-boiled or literary, the setting needs to be a character, and be used for the plot. In You Beneath Your Skin, the smog and traffic become effective blocks against the protagonists.
• Motivations are important. Whether you’re writing a traditional whodunit, or a literary whydunit like my novel you must know what motivates each one of your characters. Who is doing what is important, but the novel becomes stronger if the reader knows why they’re doing it.
• Pace is crucial. Not imposed pace, but pace that comes from all the story questions raised. Each chapter must end on a story question or a revelation that leads to more questions. The plot must follow this path: Incident> Insight> Decision> Consequences> Insight> Decision> Consequences.
• You can’t be didactic. You Beneath Your Skin raises many issues, but that’s because New Delhi is a very complex city and all the issues are part of its fabric. In a crime novel, story trumps everything—if you raise issues, they should be a corollary of the story, not its main thrust.
• Research. Make your novel as real as possible. If the details are right, the reader sinks into a fictive dream, believing all of that happens in the story is real. That’s what you need in order to keep them turning the pages.

Writing crime fiction is not for everyone, but it can be a very rewarding experience. It leads to tons of fascinating research, a deep insight into human nature and the thrill of creating scenes that lead neatly from one to the other.

About the author: Damyanti Biswas lives in Singapore, and supports Delhi's underprivileged women and children, volunteering with organisations who work for this cause. Her short stories have been published in magazines in the US, UK, and Asia, and she helps edit the Forge Literary Magazine. She has recently been shortlisted for The Fay Khoo Award in Penang, Malaysia.

You can find her on her blog and twitter.  

Her debut literary crime novel is an Amazon bestseller, and all the author proceeds from You Beneath Your Skin will support the education and empowerment of women at Project WHY and Stop Acid Attacks.

What about you? Do you read or write crime fiction? What kind of crime novels do you read or write? Why or why not?

What are your insecurities this month? Do you find that a mess keeps you from writing?