Maurice Broaddus is the author of The Knights of Breton Court series of novels and the co-editor of the Dark Faith anthologies. His short fiction has appeared in Weird Tales, Cemetery Dance and Apex Magazine, among many other publications. Visit him online at mauricebroaddus.com. Recently Maurice talked with Weird Tales about his writing process, doing research and combating writer’s block.

Tell us about your writing process.

I get up Monday through Friday and drive down to a coffee shop, arriving as soon as they open, to begin my writing day. I treat it like going to the office. I work for about four hours on whatever projects I have going on and then break. When my sons get home from school, I typically do the business stuff of writing or try to squeeze in a blog post. Then late at night, once the rest of the house has gone to bed, I try to get a few more words scribbled onto a page.

Typically, I get an idea (or pull one from my running idea file) and let sit with it for a while. I may do some free writing, jotting down snippets of dialogue or description, just so that I’m armed when I finally sit down to do battle with the blank page. I tend to outline my way through sections (because even if I outline the whole thing, especially in the case of a novel, by the time I’m halfway through so much has changed that I have to scrap the rest and re-outline anyway).

What are the most important questions to ask before writing a story?

Whose story is it? and what does the world look like? My favorite part of the writing process is figuring out the world the story takes place in. So a good chunk of my pre-writing involves figuring out the world and doing character sketches for some of the folks in it.

Another question I ask, but usually later in the process, is “what’s the big idea?” Sometimes I start a story wrestling with some question or issue, but other times I like to wait until I’ve at least done most of the first draft to see if there’s some central idea I can build on in the next draft.

How do you approach research? Do you tackle it before you write, during?

I am a trained research scientist and that was my career for twenty years. So research is one of the things I love to do. It’s one reason why I enjoy writing alt-histories so much. Any excuse to learn about a people, their history, their culture, I seize upon it.

I’m also pretty relational, meaning I love to get out and meet folks. Getting to know people is my favorite way to research. Two quick examples:

1) My Knights of Breton Court series sprang from me working with homeless teenagers, which was how I was able to capture the vibe for those stories. But I still went out to some…questionable areas of town to watch drug dealers in action. Not a recommended way to conduct research, by the way.

2) My current project is a middle grade detective novel. So I find that I’m spending more time with middle schoolers and actively listening to their conversations, the way they speak, and the situations they find themselves in.

How do you combat writer’s block?

My wife often reminds me that we have bills to pay and can’t afford my writer’s angst.

What is your biggest stumbling block when it comes to crafting a story?

Ending well.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received?

1) Writers finish things. Plant your butt in a chair and write until it’s done.

2) Don’t be afraid of the process. Don’t short cut it, take your rejections, and keep improving.

3) Be careful who you take advice from.

Darrell Schweitzer is the author of about 300 short stories and the novels The White Isle, The Shattered Goddess and The Mask of the Sorcerer. Along with George Scithers and John Betancourt, he refounded Weird Tales magazine in 1987 and continued to co-edit the magazine until 2007. He won a World Fantasy Award as co-editor of Weird Tales, along with Scithers. Darrell has edited numerous anthologies, including The Secret History of Vampires (2008), Cthulhu’s Reign (2010) and Full Moon City (2010, with Martin H. Greenberg). He has a story collection called Echoes of the Goddess and a historical Cthulhu Mythos anthology titled That Is Not Dead coming out soon. Darrell also has a story, “The Runners Beyond the Wall,” in Weird Tales #360. Below, he talks about the craft of writing.

Tell us about your writing process.

I wish I had more of it. I am doing too many things and really wish I could write EVERY DAY the way so many writers do, but then I have never been a 9-to-5 sort of writer, even when I have a novel going. I once did write two chapters of a novel in a single sitting. I am usually fairly fast when I am going good. My preferred method is to write whole stories or at least whole chapters in a single sitting.

I am old enough to have been trained on a typewriter. I wrote the novels The White Isle and The Shattered Goddess on manual typewriters. It took me a while to fully adjust to computers, because I would often write two drafts, or one and a half anyway, rather than just go through a first draft and mark up a word here and there. I want to retell the story AGAIN, and this process involves pacing and free invention and considerably more than just touch-up. It’s the difference between “Remember that joke I told the other night? Well the punch line should have been this ____” and actually telling the joke again, with your timing and delivery in place. There was a period when I would write the first draft on a typewriter and then take it to the computer, revising it as I retyped it. Nowadays, still, I will sometimes begin a story on the computer, go on for several pages, realize that this isn’t quite working and then stop. I may wait a day or so. Then I will print out the fragment, open a new file, and start over, using the text before me as a rough guide until I have built up enough momentum to leap right over what stymied me the first time, and make for the ending. Usually what was wrong with the first version is that the pacing was off or I had not authentically captured the narrator’s voice (I do a lot of first-person).

You have probably deduced I am not much of an outliner. Indeed, I don’t do outlines. I also NEVER tell anyone in any detail what a story I propose to write is about. Many writers are like this. You need to tell the story on the page (or screen), not verbally, or else you will lose it. On the contrary, though, there are writers like Larry Niven who insist that if an story isn’t worth talking about and maybe worth starting an argument over, it isn’t worth writing. I suspect this is more true of idea-driven science fiction writers, than horror writers who are more interested in atmosphere and texture and often plot by something close to subconscious association. I bet mystery writers are outliners and talkers too, but I don’t know enough mystery writers to be sure. I am otherwise an expert on this subject. I have interviewed over a hundred writers over the past 39 years and almost always I ask about writing methods, even as you are doing now, so I have in effect made an extensive survey.

What are the most important questions to ask before writing a story?

I am not sure we consciously “ask” them but we develop a sense of who is this story about and why does it matter to him/her? The other one is what does this story “sound” like. That is, what is its narrative voice. This is particularly true in first-person narratives, but true in all of them. You will note that, say, The Once and Future King does not sound at all like Titus Groan. The narrative voice is totally different. But that is what gets a story started, a convincing and appropriate tone and voice.

How do you approach research? Do you tackle it before you write, during…?

Well, if I need a specific fact, I will look it up beforehand. If I am writing some sort of pastiche, I will reread the relevant material. Thus when I recently wrote a story set in Clark Ashton Smith’s Hyperborea for an anthology, I reread some of the Hyperborean stories, of course. But that is obvious. Otherwise, I usually write about things I already know something about. If I set a story in a historical era, I will pick one I already know something about. I have written two mystery stories in which the narrator is Pliny the Younger, writing to the emperor Trajan. I am already familiar with the book of Pliny’s letters, and I know something about the period, but I would do such things as look at a map to figure out which cities Pliny was visiting in his tour as governor. I also looked at some guidebooks of Turkey to get some idea of what the landscape of Bithynia (northwestern Turkey) looks like. It wouldn’t do to describe it as forested if it’s desert. I also asked my brother, who lives in Istanbul and has lived in Ankara, to describe the landscape for me.

Much research is actually memory. When you read my story (forthcoming in WT) “He Speaks Through Those Who Do Not Die” you should be able to tell that this is written by someone who has been in the woods at night, in the winter, and done it as a child. Someone who spent all their life in a big city would have to “research” that, but I already knew it.

Since I usually write stories quickly, in a single sitting, any research is done beforehand, except maybe some fact-checking if something doesn’t look right. You also do that sort of fact-checking as an editor. As editor of The Secret History of Vampires I had to find out (because of a reference in one of the stories) if there were still gaslights in New York in the days of Conan Doyle and Houdini, for instance. (We concluded it would be unlikely.)

Everything a writer does or reads is “research.” That is because everything you know or experience can eventually find its way into a story. To mention the Pliny mysteries again, I would not have written about “The Stolen Venus” if I had not known about the multi-breasted cult statues of “Diana” from Asia Minor. I’ve seen one, in the Vatican Museum. I then went on to bend the research a little, hypothesizing that this statue represented a purely Asiatic goddess, who was identified as various Graeco-Roman deities in various places. So my characters encountered this goddess as “Venus” and somebody said, “Yes, they have one of those in Ephesus and call it Diana.”

It is very important when you go out on a limb like that to be correct, or at least cover your tracks. By that line I reassured the reader that I was at least aware that this statue is usually called the Diana of Ephesus. Or, for example, in “The Adventure of the Hanoverian Vampires” (my alternate historical Sherlock Holmes vampire cat story, which was published in Sherlock Holmes MM) I used a German phrase (to describe the wicked Hanoverian pretender, Victoria) and asked someone whose German is considerably better than my own to make sure it was right.

More generally, my favorite sort of research (for historical matters) is material written by people in the period in question. What you’re looking for is the “everybody knows” assumptions from that time and place which are different from our own. You want to know how your characters should think and what they regard as commonplaces of life. You can go as far as Gene Wolfe did in Soldier of the Mist, a novel set in ancient Greece. He learned classical Greek. I myself have never gone quite that far. The one thing I have in common with Shakespeare is that I too have little Latin and less Greek.

How do you combat writer’s block?

Ted Sturgeon (who was an expert on writer’s block, having battled with it for many years) once said that it is often a DOING block. He said if you can’t write, wash the dishes, mow the lawn, do SOMETHING. There are times when I cannot write a story because it has not come to me yet. But I have never been so “blocked” that I can’t write, say, a book review, or this interview response, for instance. It is one thing to create something out of your subconscious. Sometimes you can’t do that just now. But I at least am always able to respond to something. The best thing I can advise is try to avoid commitments for things you have not written yet. The ideal situation is to write the story first, then sell it. This is admittedly harder to do with novels. If your fictional inspiration seems to have dried up, go write non-fiction for a while.

What is your biggest stumbling block when it comes to crafting a story

I suppose I have some difficulties writing to order. I am not quite the sort of writer who can fill an assignment of “Write me a story about A, B, and C by Tuesday.” When faced with that sort of assignment I tend to get silly. Sometimes I get really inspired this way, though. I was once asked to write a vampire conspiracy story. It was for Ed Kramer’s Dark Destinies III, one of a series of anthologies involving conspiracies, new world orders, secret societies, and that sort of thing. I had already contributed the somewhat silly “One of the Secret Masters” to the first volume. Now this third volume was to be about VAMPIRE conspiracies. The result was “Kvetchula,” which is not only one of the (I dare say) best Jewish vampire stories every written in dialect voice by a Gentile, but it also did involve vampire bureaucracies, conspiracies, etc. etc. Oy vey, did my kvetching vampire complain that the coffins were cramped, the Gypsies told lousy jokes, Castle Dracula was such a mess…until finally the Count had enough, nailed her into a box, and shipped back to New Jersey by Transylvanian Express. You would think that this time I really rose to the occasion and saved myself, but, no, the editor told me he ALREADY HAD a Jewish vampire conspiracy story and so turned down mine. Fortunately it later had ‘em rolling on the floor at Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine, and the story was published there to great acclaim and merriment.

My biggest “stumbling block” occurs when I find myself trying to write material which is not my own. See my essay “My Career as a Hack Writer” (in Windows of the Imagination) on this. The two real catastrophes of my career have involved novels based on other people’s material. One was a novel written around a calendar done by a famous pair of artists (the project collapsed, leaving me with an unpublishable novel) and the other was a Conan novel, Conan the Deliverer, commissioned by the de Camps, accepted and paid for by Tor, and suppressed ever since when they (entirely too late) changed their mind about the book. Neither of these is likely a great loss to literature. The Conan novel was not a very good Robert Jordan pastiche, and it wasn’t very good Schweitzer either, though there were inventive bits in it. But it mostly involved this muscular cardboard cut-out wandering through interesting landscapes. The one good thing that came out of this was that the story was set in Stygia and the Stygian underworld (the land of the dead, not gangsters) and this got me thinking about Egypt and pseudo-Egyptian settings and, once freed of all constraints, I wrote The Mask of the Sorcerer on the rebound, although Mask has nothing in common with the Conan novel other than imagery evocative of ancient Egypt. (And there is a character named Sekenre in the Conan novel, a Stygian prince, a very minor figure, bearing no resemblance to my boy-sorcerer character. I had cribbed the name from a book called The Literature of Ancient Egypt.)

The calendar novel wandered from image to image. It had a guy in a Buck Rogers type suit with a ray gun AND a girl in a loincloth AND dinosaurs AND wizards AND mammoths wandering around, and I had to try to force all this to make minimal sense. There was one funny bit set in an Atlantean fast food restaurant in which they had a T-Rex slowly roasting on a spit in the middle of the room. Most of it I can’t remember (this was written in the early ’80s) save that it wasn’t very good. I do not respond all that well to being forced to plug in arbitrary images like that. There was even a cute animal sidekick intended for the stuffed toy market.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received?

It may have been the one from L. Sprague de Camp who said that the key to writing is “The application of the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.” That is, there is no substitute for actually doing it.

My own advice to writers is to be true to yourself, do not compromise your material, and do not quit your day job.

Jon Sprunk is the author of the fantasy novels Shadow’s Son, Shadow’s Lure and Shadow’s Master (Pyr Books). Jon, who lives in central Pennsylvania with his wife and son, is also a mentor at the Seton Hill University Writing Program. For more info about Jon and his works, check out jonsprunk.com. Jon talks about his writing process, research and writer’s block.

Tell us about your writing process.

I’m a planner. When it comes to novels, I outline the entire manuscript before I start writing, which takes me about two to three months. Then I just dive in at the beginning. I don’t edit as I write. I focus on getting to the end. Then, I let the manuscript rest for a week or two before I re-read it. That spurs a lot of note-taking and kicks off the first of a series of revisions. When the book gets to the point where I start to trust it, I hand it out to a few beta-readers for feedback. My agent also gets a look. After I collect their notes, I do another revision. Then it’s off to the publisher. The entire process from brainstorming to complete manuscript takes me anywhere from 12 to 18 months, depending on the length. I write in the evenings, aiming for a thousand words per day.

What are the most important questions to ask before writing a story?

What is the heart of the story? Is it a tale of love, revenge, loss, remembrance? Often I won’t know the answer to this question until I’ve started writing — sometimes not until after the first draft is done. Yet I try to keep that question in the back of my mind as I’m planning and writing. Another vital question is: Who is the best character to relate the story? I tend to write in multiple points of view, so I’m always concerned with who is in the best position to report on a given scene.

How do you approach research? Do you tackle it before you write, during…?

Mostly afterward. Research is addictive. I could lose myself in libraries, reading everything on a subject, and end up wasting weeks if not months of writing time. So I write the story first, and then go back to research the details I want.

How do you combat writer’s block?

I don’t think I’ve ever suffered from it (knock on wood), so I have no idea. I imagine I would take long walks with just a notebook and a pen, opening myself to the inspiration of the universe. But, realistically, I’d probably just watch TV.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received?

Sit your butt in the chair and write. Writing as a career is as much about production as anything else. That may sound crass, but nonetheless I find it to be true. So drop the excuses, close the door to your writing space, turn off the phone and write. Don’t wait for inspiration to strike. Don’t wait for permission from your family. Just write. Oh, and read. A lot.

What is your biggest stumbling block when it comes to crafting a story?

Getting past my self-doubt. Whenever someone says they’ve read one of my books, I’m amazed they took the time. The greatest gift a reader can give me is a simple email saying they liked it. Those notes get me through the dark days when I feel that I’ve got nothing worthwhile to say.

Carrie Vaughn is the author of the Kitty Norville series of novels. Her latest installment, “Kitty Steals the Show,” was published yesterday. Her other novels include “Discord’s Apple,” “After the Golden Age,” “Voices of Dragons” and “Steel.” Here, Carrie shares some writing tips with us.

Tell us about your writing process.

Generally I get an idea, let it stew for a while, make a bunch of notes, write a rough outline (about the equivalent of a Google map on really low resolution), figure out the ending, then I start writing. I’ll jump around, I’ll usually have to stop and redo the outline once I have a better idea of the story. I’ll revise a couple of times, print a draft, do a heavy revision, let it sit for awhile, maybe give it to a couple of beta readers, revise again, and then it’s pretty much done. The process can take anywhere from a couple of weeks for a short story to about six to eight months for a novel. I write a little bit every day, usually 800-1200 words a day, sometimes more, sometimes less.

What are the most important questions to ask before writing a story?

What’s the story about? Not what happens, but what’s the point, the meaning behind the plot? Who are the main characters and what’s the point of their journey? What’s the story mean to them? What’s it mean to *you*? Why are you writing it?

How do you combat writer’s block?

A block usually means the story has taken a wrong turn. I’ll either take a break and work on something else for awhile, or I’ll take a few sheets of paper, leave my office, and sit and brainstorm about what’s gone wrong. I think about what could possibly happen next in the story that I haven’t thought about, and I write down all the possibilities. That usually jump starts a stalled story.

What advice do you wish you had or listened to when you were just starting out?

I’m not sure — mostly there’s advice I wish I hadn’t listened to. I’m actually really glad I didn’t listen to people telling me how hard it was going to be, because I might have quit. “Write for the market” is advice that didn’t serve me well early on, and I abandoned it fairly quickly. I often got good advice — write every day, just keep sending stuff out — that felt more like validation than advice because I was already doing a lot of it. Validation was valuable.

Oscar Wilde once said, “Books are never finished, they are merely abandoned.” When do you know it’s time to abandon your book and present it to the public?

When I’ve hit the deadline? Actually, it feels more like hitting a wall. When I can’t think of anything else to do to a story. When I think of revisions that when I go back to the manuscript to make, they’re already there. When making any more changes starts to change the overall structure and story that I worked so hard to build in the first place. When it feels like I’m spinning my wheels.

If you prefer your elder gods in fun size, you have to check out Impact! Miniatures’ Kickstarter campaign.

The company is looking to produce a line of classic creatures from H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos — including the Weird Tales author himself, Cthulhu, Dagon, Azathoth and Nyarlathotep. For $9, you can get the Lovecraft mini. Cthulhu or Dagon will run you $22. The complete set of 15 is $125.

All miniatures are cast in lead-free pewter and are unpainted.

Link: http://kck.st/M87l7v

The movie, based on Robert E. Howard’s short stories (first published in Weird Tales), hit international theaters back in 2009, but for some reason was never released in the States. It stars James Purefoy as the wandering 16th century hero who owes his soul to the devil. The late Pete Postlethwaite, Max von Sydow and Rachel Hurd-Wood co-star. It’s gotten favorable reviews, scoring an impressive 83% at Rotten Tomatoes, so it’s even more of a mystery why it took so long to arrive on our shores.

Solomon Kane will hit video on demand on August 24 and theaters September 28.

The latest trailer was released at this year’s Comic Con.

Soon we will unleash an army of Xena: Warrior Princesses and the world will bow before us.

In a case of life imitating fantasy, the US military is developing Xena-style body armor for female soldiers. According to the Christian Science Monitor, the Army has been working to improve its female armor in the hopes that it will give our woman warriors “greater protection on the battlefield, with more curves in the chest and hips.”

Lt. Col. Frank Lozano, who helps develop female body armor, says women need different armor than men because of the shape of their bodies. (Yes, it took them this long to figure that out!) A 2009 study found that ill-fitting body armor is “more than a matter of comfort… It affects combat effectiveness,” making it difficult for female soldiers “to properly aim their weapons and enter or exit vehicles.”

Since then, the Army has been working on improving body armor for women and some believe Xena holds the answer to their problems. “Some people would like to eventually make plates so it’s like Xena: Warrior Princess and conforms to the shape” of female soldiers, Lozano says.

Female soldiers currently have a choice of 11 male body-armor sizes. But the Army is now testing eight sizes made specifically for women, with such changes as narrower shoulders and “bra-shaped darting” in the chest.

The next step, of course, is training our female soldiers to use Xena’s battle cry. Then even the gods will shudder at our might!

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It’s official — mermaids are not real.

The U.S. government broke the hearts of Ariel fans in a post titled “No Evidence of Aquatic Humanoids Has Ever Been Found” on the the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s website. They announced:

The belief in mermaids may have arisen at the very dawn of our species. Magical female figures first appear in cave paintings in the late Paleolithic (Stone Age) period some 30,000 years ago, when modern humans gained dominion over the land and, presumably, began to sail the seas. Half-human creatures, called chimeras, also abound in mythology — in addition to mermaids, there were wise centaurs, wild satyrs, and frightful minotaurs, to name but a few. But are mermaids real? No evidence of aquatic humanoids has ever been found.

Why sink the mermaid myth now? It has to do with an Animal Planet show people took a bit too seriously. “Mermaids: The Body Found,” which aired last month, was a documentary-style program that, according to a press release, “paints a wildly convincing picture of the existence of mermaids, what they may look like, and why they’ve stayed hidden…until now.”

The verdict is still out on unicorns, gryphons and manic pixie dream girls.

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(image by Daniela Uhlig)

Prada gets all steampunky for its fall 2012 menswear line, modeled by Willem Dafoe, Gary Oldman, Jamie Bell and Garrett Hedlund.

Check out the rest of Prada’s Menswear Fall 2012 Ad Campaign here.

Would you wear these duds?

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If you’ve always felt your G.I. Joe action figures lacked a touch of cosmic terror, then you’ll love this. Artist Alex CF has created an H.P. Lovecraft doll, er, I mean action figure, complete with a Necronomicon. Also perfect for tea parties with Cthulhu Barbie.

Alex explains his project:

One of my favourite authors, the grandfather of maddening cosmic horror, Howard Phillips Lovecraft. A homage to his writing, my first DIY action figure project is a hand molded, cast and painted effigy of Lovecraft, along with a copy of the fabled and despised Necronomicon! Each figure will come as part of a larger box set — including a copy of a comic I have written and drawn, a screen printed t-shirt, a screen printed poster, badge and sketch, all in a wax sealed box! These will be available very soon! email merrylinhouse@gmail.com for inquiries!

(via atheological)

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