Benjamin Kane Ethridge on Collaborative Writing

As part of DarkEva’s blogtour for Benjamin Kane Ethridge’s new book Dungeon Brain, Mr. Ethridge graciously agreed to write a guest post. It’s about time we had a little class around this joint.

Collaborative Writing Dos and Don’ts
By Benjamin Kane Ethridge

I’m asked often about the writing process, but never the co-writing process. I’ve co-written an epic fantasy novel, two novellas, a handful of short stories and soon I’ll be working with another writer for a shared world anthology meta-story. Now, while I’ve had some experience in splicing a story together it must be said that I am always learning. Every writer is different and every marriage is different. You have to approach it with a measure of caution, common sense and honesty. First off, you need to know thyself. If you’re still trying to figure out how to write something, it might be difficult to work with another—or, it might be just the thing to teach you something about your own process. I’ve prepared three dos and three don’ts for collaboration that should be considered prior to this endeavor.

DON’T fight with your partner. Suggest your feelings about the direction of the story. If they don’t see it your way, it’s time to make a decision. Will the effect be devastating or irrevocable? If no, then carry on. If yes, do you want to pull out of the project? That’s your decision and it must be made sooner rather than later. Out of respect to your collaborator, you should do your best to find common ground.

DO discuss the trajectory of the story beforehand. It’s okay if you both don’t want to outline, but I suggest at very least knowing what you’re aiming at before you fire the gun.

DON’T leave your partner waiting for long periods of time. Everybody has different lives, different schedules and can write at different velocities, but at least attempt to return your work at a similar rate. If he or she writes twice faster than you, then make an effort to increase your own pace a little. That’s the best you can do. I bring this up for the story’s benefit. While advantageous to wait before returning to edit a piece, I don’t believe it’s helpful to halt creation of a story mid-flow. If you dally too long, you might not only throw yourself off, but another person as well.

DO keep your partner entertained. There’s nothing better than receiving a new portion of the story that ends on a cliffhanger. It gets the story-mind working. Move the plot along and your partner will be eager to pick up on where you left off.

DON’T remove large portions of prose or dialog from your partner’s contributions without careful discussion and justification first. Slipping into the nursery in the dead of night and tossing someone’s baby out the window is way not cool.

DO communicate constantly. Try different approaches to see what works. Do you need to finish a chapter? Reach a certain word count? And where? Do you want to end mid-paragraph, sentence, etc? You will find out how easy or how difficult it is to jump back into a moving story. Some writers get stuck and there is nothing wrong with having your collaborator come up to bat early—in fact, that’s what is truly awesome about collaboration, the two heads are better than one deal. As long as you’re honest and keep those lines of communication going, you’ll be surprised at the tales that these unions can produce.

About the Author: Benjamin Kane Ethridge is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of the novel BLACK & ORANGE (Bad Moon Books, 2010). For his master's thesis he wrote, "Causes of Unease: The Rhetoric of Horror Fiction and Film." Available in an ivory tower near you. Benjamin lives in Southern California with his wife and two creatures who possess stunning resemblances to human children. When he isn't writing, reading, videogaming, Benjamin's defending California's waterways and sewers from pollution.

Dungeon Brain

This is part of a blog tour organized by the Mistress of Horror herself, the one and only Dark Eva.

I read a lot of books, but it’s a little bit rare to come across one with a truly original concept. Novels tend to recycle the same old tropes, with only the execution to set them apart. I can’t say that about Benjamin Kane Ethridge’s new novel Dungeon Brain, as it definitely took me to unexpected places.

When the story begins, June Nilman, whose surname seems quite appropriate, wakes in an abandoned hospital somewhere in a dystopian future. It’s a world devastated by war, where programmed content is fed to the inhabitants through ocular implants. June has a few problems. She suffers from some form of amnesia, but even worse, her brain has apparently been stuffed with myriad other personalities and memories, a sort of punitive schizophrenia. Finding herself in the mental mob is a difficult task. In addition to her psychological obstacles, she has a human nemesis in Maggie, a Nurse Ratched-type character who seems to control the institution as well as a type of alien creature that acts as a sort of security patrol.

June needs to escape, and to do so she needs to access the personalities locked in her head, with the danger of being lost inside them. Even if she manages to escape the labyrinthine facility, Maggie, and the creatures, there is no way of knowing things will be better outside her prison.

Dungeon Brain is more science fiction than horror, but it is certainly horrifying science fiction. Losing oneself inside yourself is probably about as scary a possibility as exists, and the novel reinforces Douglas Winter’s thirty-year-old assertion that horror is an emotion rather than a genre in and of itself.

Ethridge writes with clarity and literary depth, and does an excellent job of creating the feeling of existential terror that permeates the novel. His writing shows a sense of craft above what you typically encounter in the horror field today while still connecting on the visceral level where horror (emotion or genre) lives. This is the first of his books I’ve read, but it won’t be the last.

You can order Dungeon Brain from Amazon, and check back here on the 14th for a guest column from Mr. Ethridge.
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Photo From the New Hellraiser

 

Source:  http://www.picassodular.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/520wide/tortured_winnie_the_pooh.jpghttp://www.picassodular.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/520wide/tortured_winnie_the_pooh.jpg

Quiet House: A Halloween Story

If you are in the mood for a little seasonal reading at a great price, I would recommend “Quiet House: A Halloween Short Story” by Norman Prentiss, author of one of my favorite novellas, Invisible Fences. This story of psychological horror tells about the first year Jeremy is old enough to trick-or-treat, his anticipation at being able to visit the legendary Myrick house, his disappoint, and the consequences of a thoughtless act of revenge. The story is only 99¢, and can be ordered through Cemetery Dance or Amazon.
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The Final Destination

The Final Destination movies (of which there have been five to date, with further installments planned) have always been a guilty pleasure. The theme of inescapable fate, with death coming to those who thwarted it with various Rube Goldberg-esque machinations, was fairly repetitious, but there was a certain fun-loving quality amidst the gore, and I enjoyed the first three installments to some degree. Not enough, I suppose, since the fourth movie, titled The Final Destination*, sat on my shelf for over a year until I finally got around to it this week.

A group of vacuous twenty-somethings – who are supposed to be students, I guess – go to a track together to attend an auto race. None of them seems very interested in it but Hunt (Nick Zano), who is only there because he wants to see a wreck, and who is a dear friend to the others despite having a personality that makes you want to run over him with a steamroller. He gets his wish when a car wrecks, spins into the crowd, and kills the entire group along with various other bystanders in grisly fashion. Boy, that was a short movie, can’t say I’ll miss them thou – oh, it was just a premonition by Nick (Bobby Campo). He manages to get his friends, some of the bystanders, and a security guard out before the fatal accident. Well, that’s a more disappointing end, bu – oh, yeah, it’s the same setup for the other films. They have cheated death, but death doesn’t take that lying down, and will get them in the sequence they were supposed to have died. A few gory deaths, a trademark scene of gratuitous nudity, and a fiery climax at a 3D movie (how meta!) and it ends the same way as the others did.

Gallagher has gone too far!

There are a couple of differences. Nick continues to have vague premonitions (unlike the first specific one he had) although that mostly leads to frustration because his friends absolutely refuse to believe him. After all, his vision only saved their lives. There is also a minor twist that someone who has cheated the reaper can’t die until it’s their turn in the sequence again, which would allow you to have a pretty exciting day or two. I can’t see that these additions add or detract from the movie, but one change does: Tony Todd is not in this film. If you have seen the first three, you know he appears as a mysterious character to explain things to the victims-to-be and to thoroughly creep them out. Todd had a scheduling conflict that kept him out of this one, and the film suffers for it, for as I’ve said before, a movie should have as much Tony Todd as possible.

The big failing here is there is no reason to care if the cast survives, with the possible exception of George (Mykelti Williamson), and in the case of Hunt and Racist (that’s the only way he’s referred to in the film or credits) you actively root for them to get it. If you don’t care about characters, you won’t care about the movie, and The Final Destination definitely falls short of the guilty pleasure status of its predecessors.

The Final Destination was the first in the series to be filmed in 3-D, but I watched it in 2-D since I’m not a fan of splitting headaches.


* I’m sure it’s an example of some form of OCD, but I can’t express to you how much it irritates me the other movies are titled Final Destination, Final Destination 2, Final Destination 3, and Final Destination 5, but this one is called The Final Destination. Consistency, people! It makes my shelf look unorganized.
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The Faculty

Back in the 1990s, Kevin Williamson probably did more than anyone to bring horror movies back to popularity. The writer who was best known as the creator of the angsty teen drama Dawson’s Creek also created the Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer franchises, making slasher movies hip for Generation X. In 1998, he turned his formula to a re-visioning of the alien body-snatching subgenre, with The Faculty, directed by Robert Rodriguez (Sin City, From Dusk Till Dawn).

In a typical high school in Ohio, we find a fairly standard collection of students. There is Delilah the mean girl (Jordana Brewster), Zeke the slacker drug dealer (Josh Hartnett), Stokes the goth girl everyone thinks is gay (Clea Duvall), Stan the jock who wants to be known for more than his physical skills (Shawn Hatosy), and Casey the hopeless geek (Frodo Elijah Woods). We are introduced to each in short illustrative vignettes, most notably a group of students picking up Casey and slamming him crotch-first into a flag pole, over and over. As a confirmed hobbit-hater, I approve of this. The kids have little in common except the usual teenager’s belief that adults are aliens. In this case, they’re right.

Starting with the teachers, people are taken over and controlled by alien entities that love water and conformity. Our gang of misfits are the only ones who tumble to the truth before it’s too late, and it is up to them to stop the alien takeover. They have two advantages. Stokes is a science fiction reader, so she knows they only have to find the alien queen and kill her to end the reign of terror. They have a weapon when they discover Zeke’s homemade speed is lethal to the invaders (Nerdism: Zeke says his power works against the water-based aliens because it is a diuretic. I think he means it is a dessicant, because it doesn’t give the ETs an uncontrollable urge to pee.).

This is not a terribly well-regarded movie. Robert Rodriguez has mostly disavowed it, saying he only did it to learn how to work with CGI and to satisfy a contractual obligation. It is the only one of his movies without his distinctive special features on the home video release, and has little of his individual style. It currently has just a 6.3/10 rating on imdb.com.

Still, I love this movie. It doesn’t take itself very seriously and try to be something it’s not. It is, I think, a lot of fun. Williamson was the first screenwriter to write a slasher movie where the characters realize they are in a slasher movie, and here, thanks to the character of Stokes, they are aware of the science fictional precedents. Stokes quotes Robert A. Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters and Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers, even getting the name right on the later. Curiously, she doesn’t mention John Carpenter’s version of The Thing, but that maybe because The Faculty steals/pays homage to it so directly. For instance, when our heroic band decides to test themselves to see if any of them are aliens, it is virtually the same scene as the test sequence from The Thing, right down to the couch and the revealed alien crashing through a wall to get outside.

If this sort of a thing interests you and you haven’t seen it yet, you might want to give The Faculty a try. If you are a political conservative, you will probably be delighted when Jon Stewart gets stabbed in the eye. (In the interest of political balance, liberals should watch Anaconda, where Jon Voight gets eaten by a snake.
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The police say they have some questions for Bill O'Reilly

The Wicker Tree

The 1973 movie The Wicker Man is probably one of the more beloved cult movies of the horror genre. It had a very spotty distribution record outside of the U.K., and in some places only made it to the screen after 10 years or more.) The story of an upright, religious, and sexually repressed policeman who investigates the case of a missing girl in the Hebrides and has his faith challenged and his life taken by the pagan locals was very daring for its time. Home video increased its notoriety, and for years the original writer-director, Robin Hardy, has struggled to make a sequel. A big-budget remake was released in 2006 that has become legendary for how awful it is. Look for youtube clips of Nicholas Cage wearing a bear suit and screaming “Oh no! Not the bees!” if you dare.

In 2010, Hardy finally succeeded in filming a sequel, entitled The Wicker Tree, adapted from a novel he wrote called Cowboys for Christ. Was it worth the wait? Let’s just saying I was really missing those bees before the end.

Steve and Beth (Brittania Nicol and Henry Garret) are two sincere young Christians living in Texas, where all the men wear cowboy hats and everyone speaks with an exaggerated Southern accent. Beth used to be a successful country singer with songs about drinkin’ and whores (like all good country songs) but she saw the light and now sings turgid religious songs. Steve and Beth are engaged and wear silver rings as a promise they won’t have sex until they are married. They are the people you hope you won’t have to sit next to at the company picnic, but end up having to do so anyway.

Scotland, it seems, has a chronic shortage of evangelical Christians, so there is a Lend-Lease type program called Cowboys for Christ that sends Protestant missionaries over to witness to the heathens. It’s a shame Scotland doesn’t have Protestant churches of their own. They could even call their church The Church of Scotland if they wanted to. But, I digress. Beth and Steve arrive in Tressock, Scotland and begin preaching and singing to those sinners. They learn the locals worship Sulis, a version of Minerva, and accept it calmly, rather than freaking the hell out like real evangelicals would. A Scottish hussy flashes her boobs at Steve, his chastity ring flies off at the speed of light, and he begins the forbidden boning. He could have remained pure if he hadn’t traveled to Scotland, the land where women have breasts.

A tender, romantic moment

It turns out the pagan-ness is the result of some manipulation by the local bigwig. He owns the local nuclear power plant, which has been leaking a peculiar kind of radiation which apparently makes men sterile without any other effects. Lest the townsfolk turn against the power plant since they can’t have children, he has convinced them to wear silly masks and practice cannibalism and human sacrifice to restore their fertility. Groundskeeper Willy would be offended by this depiction of the Scots. In due course Beth gets her bare butt buttered (!), Steve is part of a very special meal celebration, a tree gets torched, and Beth has a chance to escape if she’s smart enough to do so. I’ll leave you to guess how that turns out.

This is a terrible movie, and it’s hard to believe the same person who made the first one is responsible for this as well. The stereotypes of Texans and Scots are painful to watch, and it has the depth of a puddle. The original presented the culture clash of an authentically religious Christian against true pagans, but here, no one really seems to be much of a believer. You know all along where this is heading, and the only suspense is how they get there. Hardy is supposedly working on a third film in the series, but my expectations are now low.

Christopher Lee was supposed to be one of the leads in The Wicker Tree just as in the earlier film, but an injury restricted him to a completely unnecessary cameo.
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