JM Bask

writes and writes...

Month: January 2023

Setting Writing (or Other) Goals for the New Year

January 24, 2023 /

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 /

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 /

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.

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