J.M. Bask

Attention: Writing

June 5, 2026 / Jessica Bask / 0 Comments

A vulnerable post but, first, a writing history:

I was acting out fanfiction on the playground in elementary school thirty years before I even knew what fanfiction was. My best friend, Justin, and I pretended to be characters from movies we liked and acted out entirely new stories on the playground. He would be King Triton and I would be Ariel, sent on an adventure that had nothing to do with some boy up in a castle. We would play invisible baseball with our monstrous imaginary friends, Beetlejuice, Drop Dead Fred, and Maurice. I wanted to tell stories even before I knew that was a job you could have.

By sixth grade, I realized people were paid to write books and I knew I wanted to be An Author. So I started writing

Weirdly, though, I had a hard time finishing what I started. I would write a chapter or two and go back and edit, edit, edit until I lost interest. If I did happen to get farther (I once filled nearly an entire notebook with what I realized, years later, was Interview with the Vampire fanfic), I would lend it to a friend for feedback and lose interest by the time I got it back.

In my twenties and early thirties, I won Nanowrimo multiple times, back when Nano wasn’t taboo due to AI use, always hitting that lauded fifty-thousand word mark…only to stop before fifty-one thousand words. I meant to get back to it those stories. I just never did.

Then, the pandemic came, and the literal threat of death made me realize if I did not take writing seriously, I would never be a published writer. Mid-2020, I started churning out stories long-hand and piecemeal between dealing with two young kids in virtual school, then typing them up later. By the middle of 2023, I had sold my first story.

The next year, I told myself I would write a book. I wrote the whole thing longhand on half a dozen legal pads, but got off track around 95% done. I fought myself for months to write the ending. I knew what I wanted to write, but every time I wanted to sit down and do it, it was like walking through sludge or trying to press myself through a brick wall. When I finally talked myself into it, it took a handful of hours and added up to less than 3,000 words. (I typed it all up in 2025, and have spent the first half of 2026 telling myself I’m going to pick it up and start cleaning it up).

By this point, the vaccines had rolled out and less and less of my friends and family went out masked, so the urgency to write-or-die waned. The kids were back in school. I still wrote down my story ideas and wrote a story here and there, but it was becoming harder. I still wanted to do it, more than anything.

Fast forward to 2025: in the fall, I hit perimenopause loud and clear with symptoms I won’t bore (or disgust) you with, and suddenly everything I wanted or needed to do became more difficult by the day. I had always kept lists for the grocery store and a planner with to-do’s. Suddenly, I wasn’t remembering to write things on them. Whatever hormone had given me the urgency to do the laundry or dishes or pickup drinks from Costco before we ran out–let alone write a story–has started only showing up at certain times of the month.

If you’ve made it this far and haven’t figured out what has been holding me back, it’s ADHD. And anxiety, but mostly ADHD. I got my ADHD-Inattentive diagnosis, a few weeks ago in May of 2026.

For the first week, it was a relief! I wasn’t lazy! I really do want to write! It’s just the dopamine and the norepinephrine and other complicated brain-chemical-stuff I don’t understand.

And now I’m in the grieving period. Realizing thirty years have gone by that I could have been writing and actually finishing things if someone had caught it. (Yes, other things I missed out on, but god the writing I could have done! THE WRITING I COULD HAVE DONE).

I am about to travel the road most ADHD adults travel: finding the right medication and lots of therapy to deal with what I lost. In the meantime, I am also trying to find my way into writing daily again, mostly by journaling what I am going through.

If you’re interested in reading about that experience (there will be lots of em-dashes, italics and parentheses and NO AI), then, please, follow along. I am doing this partly for myself but, also, in the hopes that I’ll find some other writer out there who is dealing with ADHD the same way I am, and that we’ll both feel less alone.

On that note, if that’s you, I’m looking for someone (or more than one someone) to be my accountability partner—and vice versa—to check in on word counts and trade manuscripts and cheer each other through that stupid stubborn wall in our minds.

FIN.

Fall 2025 Updates–New Stories, Recommended Reading

November 25, 2025 / Jessica Bask

Hey, it’s actually been a pretty busy fall for me.

My horror short story, “I’m Not From Here” came out on September 1, 2025 in the Costs of Living anthology from Whisper House Press. The editor, Steve Capone Jr., was a pleasure to work with and really made my weird little second person story the best it could be. If you’re interested in reading it, it’s available at the link above.

At the same time, my suburban fantasy/slipstream story, “A Sea of Laundry,” debuted in Trollbreath Magazine’s Fall 2025 issue. If you care to subscribe, the link will take you there. Again, the editors were amazing and made my story the best it could be.

And now, “I’m Not From Here” has appeared on the Horror Writer Association’s reading list, in the short fiction category. The list compilation of recommendations by members, which means someone in the HWA liked my story enough to recommend it. I am absolutely blown away to be in the same section of the list as such wonderful authors as Joe R. Lansdale, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Paul Tremblay, and Jonathan Janz (who by the way, I’m sure is going to win an award for his short piece, “Lenora” because it was asbolute fire).

I guess I better push aside all the other stuff I have been dealing with this fall and get back to writing to make sure this is the first time I appear on a recommended reading list, and not the last.

Best,
J.M.

I Have Never Lived Alone (A Rant)

June 17, 2025 / Jessica Bask

I have never lived alone. I have never lived alone.

I was the youngest of three siblings. I have never lived alone. I always had roommates to share the fridge and the bathroom and the workspaces. I have never lived alone. There have always been the smells and sounds and sights of other people in my personal spaces. I have never lived alone. A toilet flushes, Mom cooks dinner in the kitchen, my brother screams my name. I have never lived alone.

I went from living with a roommate to moving in with a boyfriend who became a fiance who became a husband. And then we multiplied. We made two people who call my name and and ask for lunch and what’s for dinner and where are we going today and what are you doing. I have never lived alone. I try to write in the dining room where no one goes, but they find me. I have never lived alone. I write in my bedroom with the door open, and they stand and stare in silence. I have never lived alone. I buy a desk and move it to the room off the basement and shut the door, but they knock anyway. I have never lived alone. I tell them not to knock and Dad tells them not to knock and I hear their voices loudly asking where’s Mom. I have never lived alone.

Now all I want is to have a place to be alone. I want a tiny house, right next to my husband’s because I have never been alone. It will have a bathroom, a bed, a desk, a fridge for cold drinks, shelves for books and I will be alone. I also dream of soundproof walls so I can’t hear the leaf blowers and the hedgetrimmers and I can feel alone. One-way windows so no one can see if I am home and I will be alone. I don’t even need the internet or cell service. Don’t call me, I’ll call you and maybe I won’t, just so that I am all alone I’ll write my stories on pieces of lined paper and type them up later. Leave me the hell alone.

For a day. An hour. A minute. I want to write in silence and know that no one is going to call my name or turn on a TV or trim a hedge outside my window or ask what’s for dinner because I’ll be all alone. I just want to be alone. I just want to be alone. Not all the time. Just for a little while. But, goddamnit, I need to be alone.

Words Matter (And Not Just the Ones in Books)

June 15, 2025 / Jessica Bask

It’s been so long since I have regularly posted on this blog, that I’m not sure I have ever written about why it has taken me so long to be a published writer.

I have known I wanted to be a writer since elementary school. I can’t pinpoint the exact time or place (or book) that made me sure that was what I wanted out of life, so we’ll just say the age of ten. That’s over thirty years in the past and yet I didn’t get my first publication until two years ago, didn’t finish my first draft of my first book until this past year. Why?

The simple answer is support. Or lack thereof.

I remember having a typewriter and writing a ‘children’s book’ and getting a rejection in the mail for it when I was thirteen or fourteen. In the intervening thirty years, I didn’t submit anything else. And it wasn’t because of that rejection.

It was very simply because every time I mentioned wanting to be a writer, wanting to go to college and get an E

A few days later, I was talking to my husband and, wondering aloud, I said, “I wonder if I would have made it as an author if someone had encouraged me when I was a kid?”

nglish or journalism degree, wanting to write novels, I was told I would be wasting my time and money. “You can’t make a career of writing.” “It’s so hard to be a novelist.” “If you’re going to get an English degree, the only thing that’s useful for is teaching.” I was a child and these were adults. So I believed them. I stopped finishing stories. I stopped prio

A few weeks ago, I got my copy of the anthology I am in that comes out in September, Costs of Living from Whisper House Press. I showed it to my husband, excited, and to my kids, excited, and all of them were proud of me. My daughter (a surly, preteen who pretends to be disgusted with me most of the time) even told the friend she was chatting with on the phone.

Without missing a beat or stopping what he was doing, he said, “Of course you would have. You’d probably be famous already. Look at you now, you’ve already sold a couple of stories and you just started trying to sell them.”

I wish someonehad encouraged me then, the way he does now.

By the way, just sold another story. Details to come soon.

Updates

May 12, 2025 / Jessica Bask

I’m apparently really bad at this blogging thing since the date of my last post is eleven months ago.

So, quick recap:

I never finished the second novel I was writing in the last post. I do plan to, even though it’s not my usual genre (it’s fantasy romance).
I didn’t finish it because I got caught up typing up the second draft of the first novel (I handwrote the whole first draft because I’m crazy).
I got another story accepted. This actually happened at the end of last year, though the anthology it is in does not come out until September 2025. The story if “I’m Not From Here” and will be in Whisper House Press’ Costs of Living anthology, which you can preorder from Amazon at the link or at the less distasteful bookstore of your choice. If you’re a writer, you can check our Whisper House here. I really enjoyed working with the editor and they have more horror anthologies forthcoming.
While I am not currently finishing the fantasy romance (working title: The Bog Witch) I am currently working on another long piece and finishing up some shorter stories I have going on.
Neil Gaiman turned out to be a creep. That was disappointing. I still own a bunch of his books, but I’m not sure I will ever be able to enjoy them again.
In terms of writing, I am writing way more consistently this year. I am already way further on overall word count than I was at the same point in 2025, and I have already submitted more stories than I did for all of last year.

I think that about covers it, writing-wise. I am going to try to post more content here, even though I’m 90% sure no one reads it.

Frozen…

June 6, 2024 / Jessica Bask

…And not in a good way. Not in a self-discovering, ice-castle-making, singing-on-high kind of way.

I’m currently working on my second(?) novel(?) with double question marks, because the story I am currently writing I did not intend to be anything but a short story but, as stories often do, it took on a life of it’s own and recently passed 15,000 words with no end in sight.

And with no end in sight and a meandering fifteen-thousand word tale, I had an epiphany of how the story should have began. That beginning would change the whole story and I would have to start anew.

I know what I’ve written so far isn’t very good. I know it is directionless. I know it is something I was writing just to keep writing and prove I could finish it (eventually). And I know for that reason I should start over. But, that’s also the reason that’s making it hard for me to start over.

See, if you know anything about me you know I have been writing for 30 years, and only started finishing things three or four years ago. Yes, that’s right, nearly three decades of half-done stories, novels that didn’t go more than three chapters, and several that had tens of thousands of words…and then just stopped.

I just recently proved to myself that I could finish things. And I’ve only finished something so lengthy once (finished first draft of first novel in March of this year). So I’m afraid if I start over, I’ll be falling into old habits and this will just become one more thing I didn’t finish. I also know what I’m writing now isn’t that great, and what I would write, if I began again, could be awesome.

I’m frozen, a big ball of anxiety. I hope I figure it out soon, because I tend to only draft one project at a time.

Guess Who’s Back…

May 21, 2024 / Jessica Bask

…back again, Jess is back, tell a friend…

Yeah, I’m that old.

Anyway, the site was down for awhile due to some PHP stuff which, as a writer, I am completely unfamiliar with. Thankfully, however, my husband is great at all things tech (and I’m based off his server) so he handled it.

Of course, that doesn’t excuse the long absence of me posting anything before the very short one of my website being wonky. That one had more to do with a mix of seasonal depression and being overwhelmed as a parent, partner, and human being for most of the winter.

More to come, and soon.

-J. M.

Anxiety is a Bad Storyteller

June 21, 2023 / Jessica Bask

Anxiety, for me, is a bad storyteller. It’s half your brain, telling you bad stories all the time. You don’t want to hear them, but can’t help but listen.

One of the most famous writers of all, Stephen King, has said that he doesn’t plot, but instead uses “what-if” scenarios. “A strong enough situation renders the whole question of plot moot. The most interesting situations can usually be expressed as a What-if question: What if vampires invaded a small New England village? (Salem’s Lot). What if a young mother and her son became trapped in their stalled car by a rabid dog? (Cujo).” –Stephen King

Well, anxiety is your brain telling you “what-if” scenarios all the time. However, they are simultaneously weak plots and yet, also, the kind that will send a person into a panic spiral. For example, it’s been raining here for three days so here are some of the what-ifs my brain is giving me: “What if you get another roof leak? What if you get a leak, but it’s really water seeping into the house and it’s really slow and you don’t catch it right away? What if that imaginary slow leak causes the walls to fill with mold? What if you catch it, but your home insurance won’t pay for it? While you’re busy worrying about the roof, the walls, and the whole house leaking, what if your car is leaky too?”

None of these things would make a particularly good story. (Okay, maybe the one with the mold, but only if the mold is sentient and starts talking to you). But I hear this kind of thing in my mind, all the time. It’s my brain’s response to everything from one of my kids sniffling to someone driving erraticly in traffic. What-ifs, what-ifs, what-ifs.

It’s not all bad. I tend to notice bad drivers, and stay well away from them. I’m sure to catch any leaks, should I get one in my roof. But it’s hardly a super-power. It’s just more worry about things most people are able to brush off.

Now, I know what you’re going to say, which is probably going to be something along the lines of “Just don’t think like that.” Person Reading This, I have tried. Have you ever had a toddler follow you around and ask you questions and you can’t shake them, no matter what? Sometimes you give them a cookie and they go quiet to eat it for five minutes but then they’re back? That’s anxiety, except the toddler is IN MY HEAD. And that toddler is insistent. But, thankfully, also like the toddler, if I give my that part of my brain well-reasoned answers–“we checked the ceiling already and there are no signs of leaks and there has been no wind to cause damage, so it’s fine” or “No the basement is not going to spring a leak as it would take a lot of water to soak through eight inches of cinderblock”–eventually it will accept them and take a nap, for a little while at least.

And, like most storytellers, every so often that half of my brain comes up with a “what-if” I can turn into something…besides anxiety, that is.

This blog post was brought to you by my brain not being able to sleep at night and coming up for with this idea at 1 a.m. thanks to Anxiety!

Imposter Syndrome, It’s Coming For Ya! (Or My First Story Got Published)

June 18, 2023 / Jessica Bask

Back in mid-March, I received an email every writer longs to get. You know, the one that starts with “Your story has been accepted…” and follows up with said writer’s utter disbelief. My personal favorite story, “Doran” had been accepted by Allegory Magazine for publication in their May issue! And there was even token payment involved! I didn’t scream. I did shout at my family very loudly and very excitedly.

You would think that would solve that imposter syndrome, that finally having a story published would make me go, “Yes, I am a talented writer.” Instead, even as I signed the contract, wrote up and sent them a bio (I hate writing those by the way, and should you go read the story, I almost want to hear what you think of the bio more), and waited for publication day, I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. For the magazine to fold, for the editor to tell me it was a mistake and they meant the other story about a swamp child by the other J. M. Bask. But nope, my story got published (and yes, it’s at that link up there).

But the imposter syndrome is still here. My brain is convinced no one has read it. My brain is convinced no one will publish anything else of mine.

And you know what I do? I tell my brain to STFU. It doesn’t work, not really. Those thoughts come creeping back. Every time I send out a story it tries to tell me I’m wasting my time. Every time I pick up a pen to work on my novel, it literally asks, Why are you doing this? I can’t get it to shut up, but sometimes, if I shout back loud enough–Because I want to! Because I AM good at this!–that stupid part of my brain that wants to see me fail will at least go hide in a corner for a little while. And if that’s enough for me to keep going, then I’ll take it.

My Life in Books

March 7, 2023 / Jessica Bask

The other evening, I went out to the bookstore–with no kids in tow–and grabbed myself a chai tea and started wandering the aisles. It was the first time, in a very long time, that i had been in a bookstore without a child demanding my attention or dragging me from shelf to shelf. It was seven p.m. on a Wednesday night, with no errands or chores or plans awaiting me at home or anywhere else.

B&N had rearranged the shelves again and, when I went in search of the horror section, I found myself face to face with cozy mysteries instead. Hundreds of thick, paperback mysteries, and so many of them solved with the help of cherubic puppies and slim kittens that graced their covers.

This immediately reminded me that I used to love reading Lilian Jackson Braun novels. Lilian Jackson Braun, if you aren’t familiar with the author, probably originated the cozy cat mystery genre with her series of “The Cat Who” books, about a retired journalist in a small town, who solves murders and mysteries galore, with the help of his two Siamese cats. And back, then, I didn’t just read a couple of them. I checked out every single one my library branch had.

I–the woman who writes stories about swamp boys and cannibal mermaids and sand monsters–loved to read about crime-fighting cats.

It made me realize what I was reading at certain times in my life seemed to indicate what I was going through or the kind of person I was or wanted to be at the time. I’d be willing to bet this is true for a lot of readers. But let me share some examples from my own life.

At the end of elementary school, I was obsessed with books that featured talking rodents as main characters, from The Secret of NIMH to The Mouse on the Motorcycle. My best friend and I talked about how we would live, if we were mice, and my mom would be happy to tell you that I wanted to turn into a mouse. And I did. My home life was starting to get rough (I’ll spare the details) and my foray into the world of magical rodents was my first foray into fantasy as escapism. And, man, did I want to escape.

A few years later, around the age of twelve, after moving across the country and being thrust into a Southern school where I was very much the odd-girl out, I started reading anything and everything Stephen King (starting with The Tommyknockers, which I’m only mentioning because it feels like every writer wants to know what every other writer’s first Stephen King book was). I made a blatant point of reading his big, thick tomes in class. I was the only seventh-grader reading Stephen King. My logic was, if they weren’t going to like me anyway, I could at least be a little scary, too. This kept up right through high school, when I morphed into an amorphous blend of goth, punk and grunge.

Funnily, this was the same era of those Lilian Jackson Braun novels. I never took them to school, though. Mystery-solving Siamese cats aren’t scary, and probably would have further relegated me to the ‘nerd’ (and not in a good way) category that the other kids had assigned me to. Nerdy or not, the cats always solved the mystery. Those books represented a time in my life where I wanted something to go right, I wanted answers. And Koko and Yum Yum always figured out the answers.

My twenties led to more escapism. If it was five-hundred pages thick, and came in a minimum four book series, I was reading it, especially if Tad Williams name was on the cover. Neil Gaiman was a big feature those years as well. We’ll just say I spent my twenties at a job I hated, with a string of, uh, less than savory boyfriends. I needed all the magical doors I could get, be they to Otherland or London Below or Mid-World. (You can argue with me all you want, but I still think the Dark Tower series is more fantasy than horror). Portal fantasies (and horrors) still remain my favorite genre.

Then, I met my husband and things settled down. As we married and started having kids, I found myself drawn to the classics. When I had time to read, I went back and read a lot of the books I had missed in high school and middle school. I was in advanced and AP English classes, so often was assigned books considered ‘above’ a lot of the more commonly prescribed books, like The Scarlet Letter or Catcher in the Rye. This devouring of classic lit was partly nostalgia for youth as mine faded toward middle-age, but also a weird preparation for child-rearing. If my kids were going to have to read Of Mice and Men in 8th grade, I wanted to have read it too.

I started reading A LOT of horror in the last several years. I think that one is pretty self-explanatory. In a world which seemed like it was falling apart (and still does, some days), it was reassuring to know at least we weren’t living in a house with a haunted sibling, fighting off neighborhood vampires, or being sacrificed to an old god in an amusement park.

Maybe I’m just psycho-analyzing myself through books, or maybe my theory holds some weight, I dunno. I do think, for true readers, we read what we need.

Or maybe I’m just rambling, since no one is going to read this anyway. But if you do, maybe it’s what you need. Maybe this is the sign to figure out what books are missing from your life right now, and to do that, you’ve got to think about the books that you needed in your past.

Happy book-hunting.