No matter how much you want to call your new story a short novel, do not do so when discussing it with agents. It’s a novella. No-vel-la.

Novella.

(Just between you and me though, brain, we both know it’s, well, a story. Stupid protocols.)

Who is reading this stuff? Are you guys really doing that? I can imagine a few folks picking one up off the clearance table at Urban Outfitters a year and a half after the book comes out, or some older parents picking it up for their kids in Brooklyn who “love this sort of thing, but I don’t get it.” But is there really a solid market for taking obscure, funny, ironic themed blogs and making books out of them?

Um … erm … yeah. I don’t know. If good fiction is all about character and story alone, then it’s a non-starter – it’s just clever, Andrew Dice Clay’s bit about Jack & Jill and the two-fifty. After a contemplative shot of Firefly iced tea vodka (I still can’t make up my mind whether it’s genius or terrible, but it is the only thing in the freezer, direct tequila donations to the contacts page), I’m resolved that I don’t like it. Great for clever opening sentences and great closing sentences, not so much a “story.” You fall in love with characters, and you revel/despair in their actions – mucking about with the language for the sake of showing one could muck about with the language killed horror fic in the ’90s – I like to follow the character’s journey, and most of the Twitter fic stuff I’ve seen is more about the exercise than the tale, IMHO.

Halloween is on a Saturday this month. That might not mean a lot to kids who are going to be done trick-or-treating by 8 p.m. or adults who define a holiday by its paid-day-off value.

But it means a lot to me. Halloween is my favorite holiday, and as a member of that cabal of adults who still love the childlike aspects of the imagination-firing holiday, I look forward to those years when it actually falls on a night that doesn’t involve me worrying about the following day. I can give candy to the kids, and not be concerned about showing up to Roger’s block party too late, the awkward guy arriving to a shindg that’s been over for two hours because everybody has to get up for work the next day.

But “adult Halloween” seems a little, erm, dead this year. The cable channels that usually run horror movies starting around the first of the month have been derelict – look, I love Anthony Hopkins’ Magic as much as the next die-hard, but AMC seems to have abandoned Fear Fridays completely, and Syfy (what’s up with that “redesign” BTW, I coulda killed it for half the price) is running pretty much regular programming under the false aegis of their Halloween-centric marketing plan. Yeah, they’re rolling out new shows like Stargate Universe, and new seasons of Sanctuary, but none of it is particularly horror-themed or Halloween-centric, so, you know … WTF?

I don’t ask for much. I sit through hours of bad horror movies looking for the kernel of originality or creativity – looking for something good to say about a genre that increasingly lends itself to dismissiveness. Because I LOVE IT. And I wait for Halloween to fall on a weekend night because I figure other horror-fied adults do the same, and will treat it with a little extra-special action because our schedules might permit. But nobody at all is stepping up this year; it’s as if Halloween is actually less important to grownups this time around, despite the fact that we’re going to be able to celebrate it with both our kids and our adult friends.

Welcome.

I’m Ravis. I’m a writer. This is my new website. We’re still in beta right now, but what the hell, the damn thing’s up, so why not let’s use it. Come back often for news, new writing, news of new writing, and whatever else I have the time/inclination to prattle on about/support/impugn.

Thanks

EditRed is a great online writer’s workshop/networking site upon which I stumbled a few years ago. I generally don’t go in for those things – time suckage, petty squabbles and all that – but I immediately made some friends and got some pretty insightful feedback from members, so I hung around. (It didn’t hurt that I read some really great short stories for free on the site.)

The site tries to put out a couple of books a year when the funds are available, and a flash-fiction piece I submitted for one of their themed competitions made it into the collection that resulted. The anthology is a collection of short stories, poetry and nonfiction called City Smells; my story is called “The Ferryman.” It’s about … barter, I guess, and how when it comes down to it, all we really have to fall back on are our talents.

Anyway, if you’re down, you can order a copy of City Smells through this site’s BUY link. It’s up there on the right.