Author: Jessica Bask (Page 1 of 2)

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.

Untitled Project from 2010: Chapter Two Excerpt

February 14, 2023 / Jessica Bask

In 2010, I had a lot of free time in my hands. I had no kids, was newly engaged, and worked a slightly more than part-time job. So, in November of that year, I took an half-baked idea and turned it into a half-baked novel. That’s right folks. I did NaNoWriMo. And I won. If, by won, you mean I hit the fifty-thousand word mark. I never finished the novel (and never will). Reading back over it, there are parts that don’t suck, so I’m going to polish them up and post them here. This is the second excerpt. You can find them all, as they are posted, by searching the tag #NANO2010 and each will be individually tagged by order, so this one will be tagged #2010ExcerptTwo, and the next will be tagged #2010Excerpt Three and so on and so forth.

It had been a back and forth summer, the kind where one day the air was dry and static and so crackly it made the hair on her arm stand on end. Then, the next day, violent gray clouds would roll up out of the hills on a hot wind so quickly that she’d barely get the last window shut before fat raindrops would begin to rattle and sizzle their way across the roof and rumble down the spouts.

Just before lunch on an August Monday, another of these storms sped in hard, and Adrienne had a feeling it would end by mid-afternoon the way they always did, with a cool mist creeping out of the woods and the temperature of the whole house dropping a few degrees, making a perfect afternoon for working in her attic studio. With a few hours to wait before that, she decided a BLT and a book in the corner of the library was a good way to waste a few hours. Taking her sandwich and a glass of milk, she curled up in her favorite spot, an old wing chair with cracked brown leather and an ottoman to match. It had it’s back to the room and it’s face to the front of the house,
so Adrienne could read and watch as the storm crept back down the hills much moreslowly than it had come. With a hardcover edition of a giant Tad Willimas tome open on her lap, she fell into the story like it was the first time she’d read it, rather than the seventh. Within moments, nothing but crumbs of the sandwich remained and engulfed by familiar words, a fully belly and the sound of the rain,
Adrienne started to drowse as Yogurt crept on to the open pages of the book and settled himself in, a warm, purring mass.

* * *

Schhhhppppt. Adrienne startled awake to the familiar sound of one sheet of paper sliding against another, just behind her. She jumped up from the chair, letting the book slide from the lap to the ground with a solid thump. She hoped it would be worth it to catch Yogurt messing around on the bookshelves, a place the cat knew he wasn’t supposed to be. However, when she stood and turned, there was nothing, not a
movement, not a breath, not a whisper. She had expected to see the cat flying downfrom one of the tall library shelves, to at least see his pitch-black tail darting out the library door like a shadow, but there was not even the sound of paws beating a fast retreat down the hall. There was nothing but the stillness of an empty house. Adrienne realized she must have been dreaming of paper as she had so many times before and immediately felt a bit silly that her mind had automatically jumped to the cat, who’d never bothered with the library shelves before.

Still, as she picked up and closed the book, she couldn’t quite shake the feeling that the library was just a millimeter different than it had been before. When you lived alone for a long time and nothing ever moved without your guidance, you became familiar with rooms like they were parts of your body. Adrienne knew something had changed, something subtle, like a single hair going gray overnight. She put the book down on the table beside her plate and half-empty glass and began to pace around the room, glancing over the bookshelves and all the paper sculptures upon them.

Nothing jumped out at her. Every book was on the shelf exactly where itshould be and so was every paper creation. She’d hoped for a trail of cat fur or telltale paw prints in the thin layer of dust on every shelf, but there were no such clues. Finishing a lap of the room, Adrienne picked up the dirty dishes and, smiling a little at her own silliness, she made her way toward the door. Stopping to pull it open with her
foot, she paused, something catching the corner of her eye.

On the last shelf beside the door sat the entirety of C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia and there was that brown paper wardrobe she had made a few years before, but the legs were no longer visible beneath the wardrobe’s door. It was as though, after standing still and
silent for so long, the little paper Lucy had finally decided to crawl over to the land oof the lamppost.

Setting Writing (or Other) Goals for the New Year

January 24, 2023 / Jessica Bask

My first rule of setting goals for the New Year is obviously going to be that this is not a big deal. This is getting published in late January, so the main thing you need to know is to not put a lot a pressure on yourself. This should not be something you agonize over, because that will make you not want to do it. This leads into my first actual tip:

Make your goals doable. If you read my last blog post, you’ll know I made about 100 short story submissions in 2022. For 2023, I set my goal to half that. Why not set it higher? Well, first, my hope is that some of those will get published and, therefore, cannot be re-subbed. Secondly, my goal for 2022 was to make 25 submissions, so 50 is actually doubling that. I know it’s achievable, and I’m still improving on the previous plan, but I am not setting myself up to fail.
Write your goals down. Seriously. Scribble it on a sticky note. Make a detailed graph with plot points. Do a spreadsheet. You do you, but write them down. Studies have shown (but I’m not looking them up right now because I’m lazy) that people who write down their goals are considerably more likely to achieve them.
Make your goals for you, and NO ONE ELSE. That writer over there might write 1,000 to 2,000 words a day, but maybe they have a cushy job or a rich spouse. Maybe they don’t have kids. Maybe they do have kids and they neglect them. You know what you have going on in your life–be it school/work/family obligations/a need to rewatch the entirety of Parks & Rec once a month–better than anyone else. You also know whether you’re a major procrastinator or not, so factor all those things in when setting your goals.

Much like making goals, the tips for making goals are pretty simple. Make them achievable, write them down, and make them for you and no one else. That’s all I got. I don’t want to agonize over this post anymore than you should agonize over those goals.

Review: “How to Sell a Haunted House” by Grady Hendrix

January 20, 2023 / Jessica Bask

Be warned: Spoilers, puppets and creepy dolls ahead.

Grady Hendrix’s How to Sell a Haunted House tell the story of two siblings, Louise and Mark, who come home to Charleston to take care of their parents’ estate after both their mother and father pass in a tragic car accident.

The story gripped me in the second chapter, when Mark calls Louise to inform her of their deaths, and he begins to regale her with a very gory description of the incident because he said ‘it helps to know the details.” His sister has only had seconds to process the loss of both parents and already he is telling her that. Wow, what an asshole, I thought. And then, I hope Grady kills him off by the end.

With that thought in mind, as Louise leaves her daughter and flies home to help younger brother, Mark, deal with the estate and sell the house, I began to think this was a story of sibling rivalry. I watched, through Louise’s eyes, as she returned to the house for the first time in years, as she witnessed her mother’s doll and puppet collection collecting dust and the house in disarray, as she reminisced to herself about her parents’ lives, her mother’s puppet ministry and her father’s Christmas stollen. I watched as she discovered a boarded up attic and indications that something in the house had gone wrong just before her parents’ car accident. Louise tells the reader about the way her brother dropped out of college, and meandered his way through bartending jobs, while the mom and dad supported and encouraged every failure he made. At this point, I was sure this was a book about sibling rivalry and the way our parents completely mess us up, intentionally or otherwise.

Hardover version of "How to Sell a Haunted House" by gRandy Hendrix laying on a grey background.

How to Sell a Haunted House by Grady Hendrix. No creepy dolls in the photo because I don’t keep them in my house–like a sane person.

Then Grady pulled the strings of his puppets on the page and the story began to twist and the characters became real, the same way the puppets in the story begin to take on a life of their own. The story went from what I thought it was, what I wanted it to be—as a sister and a sibling—to something else. How to Sell a Haunted House is about so many things—how we only know our own sides of the story, the secrets people keep for good and bad reasons (and how those things can be one and the same), how a family’s way of telling stories can just be another way to lie. It’s about all those things, as well as grief and terror, evil dolls and murder puppets, and it’s got the aforementioned sibling rivalry and parental damage to boot.

Grady Hendrix manages to take a story about a couple of siblings and a house full of haunted dolls and puppets and add to it layer after layer, to make it true horror—something that strikes at our deepest fears of love, loss and grief, that is more than just a story of murdeous marionettes. This book

made me laugh, it brought me near tears, and it gave me the damn creeps. It’s also, easily, one of the best books I’ve read in the last year, in this genre of any other.

Oops…NaNoWriMo Was It?

January 17, 2023 / Jessica Bask

Hmm.. *checks notes* It looks like my last post was way back in November, saying that I was going to write 30,000 words of my novel for NaNoWriMo, and finish it by the end of the year. I also said it was going to be, and I quote “a busy damn month.”

I wasn’t wrong about the later. Kids got sick. School (for me, not them) was more overwhelming that I expected. I discovered that I really like reading and analyzing fiction, but do not enjoy writing essays about it. Then, there was Thanksgiving, which we hosted, and Christmas shopping. And all the things that come with the holidays when you have kids, like baking cookies and making sure the house is decorated.

That 30,000 word goal was a stretch to say the least.

I didn’t do too badly though. I could have hit it if I had kept going. I got seventeen thousand in less than two weeks and then…honestly I don’t know what happened. The last half of November and all of December were a blur of brightly colored wrapping paper, holiday spices, and reruns of Call the Midwife.

Now, school is back in (for me and the kids), and things are returning to normalcy and I am hoping to be more productive in the coming year. I have set some writing-related goals for the New Year, and they are as follows:

Write seventy thousand creative words. This is about what I wrote in 2022, so if I actually finish said novel and write some stories, should be doable.
Finish that novel. I don’t expect it to be good. I just want to finish it to prove that I can, as well as for practice.
Make fifty or more short story submissions. I made almost exactly one hundred this past year, and none of them got accepted, so this one is definitely doable, considering I have at least two stories from last year that haven’t even been typed/edited yet, in addition to all the ones I will write, and all the ones that have not yet found homes.
Post here more. If I’m hoping to actually get published and have my bio for that link here, people have to have something to read, right?

Just going to throw this out there that I’ve been a little depressed, which is has been a huge contributor to my lack of writing (and to me watching over half the seasons of Call the Midwife in less than three weeks). Not a lot depressed, just the kind where one feels like being more of a couch potato and less of a productive potato. I think trying to do so much just overwhelmed me into submission.

I’m going to try to not spread myself so thin this year. You shouldn’t either. You deserve to be a pat of butter, not a smear.