Adventures in Writing ~ by Holly Barbo

Every author brings to their writing elements of their past, their interests and… what makes them tick. They create the magic from the essence of what they are and you; the reader, gets transported into another world. I write in and mix several genres. Not sure if that makes me confused or multi-faceted.

~ grin ~ 

One of my earlier childhood memories is of wanting to learn to read. Starting school meant going to that place where I would learn the key. It was the only purpose for school, in my mind. Well… it turned out it wasn’t quite that simple, and I struggled with the skill. The much younger me persevered. I was determined even then.

Once I caught on, I sampled different genre of books in the school library but, I found the stories that swept me into another place fell into a cluster of categories: adventure-intrigue, suspense, thriller, sci-fi / fantasy and historical fiction. Those were magic. My childhood favorites were: Mara- Daughter of the Nile by McGraw, Mrs. Mike by Freedman, several of James Michener’s books and, of course, all of the Dragon Riders of Pern tales by Anne McCaffrey. If you are familiar with any of these you can see what makes my writing tick. Writers were a marvel! I was content to sit with these books and never write… only read.

In spring 2009 I was working in our furniture store. The market had crashed 6 months before and business was quiet. A story crept into my mind. I pushed the bothersome thing away. I needed to vacuum, dust, fluff pillows and make my store appealing to the invisible hoards of customers who were waiting to stream in and be tempted beyond their restraint. Once the housekeeping duties were done the story pushed again. It wanted out. Finally I gave in and sitting down at my computer I began to write what became The Sage Seed Chronicles. For the most part, I was the conduit. Ten months later, four of the five books in the fantasy series were complete.

We list The Sage Seed Chronicles as fantasy but it also has sci-fi elements. I seem almost incapable of writing a pure genre story. Eventually I sampled writing in several other genres: steampunk, thriller, dystopian, adventure, historical fiction and suspense. Several are combination. But what I was drawn to write is where I loved to read.

One of the online groups I was a part of suggested a multi-author short story anthology. Short story? How do you write a short story? Really. I’m sincere. I hadn’t a clue. I’d just completed five books with the word count around 86,000 each. The pace and development of a novel is measured and developed. Now I’m being asked to write a story in about 5,000 words? 

After the initial disbelief in the concept I read and studied a few short stories. The pace was different, and the skill was to cut out the unnecessary… whatever that was. I took on the challenge. My first short story was also a new genre for me: dystopian. The Tin of Honey was a hit with the readers and eventually made the Semi-finals in the ScreenCraft Cinematic Short Story competition.

Since that time I’ve used short stories to explore genres. I don’t write romances, zombies, horror but seem to be suited to weaving historical with contemporary-suspense/thriller and like world-building.

From the very first of the Sage Seed Chronicles I’ve taken current event worries and woven them into a plot. The books aren’t diatribes on what is happening now. I work hard to take concerns and put them into another setting. It’s therapeutic to “solve” something in a story I have no power to fix in real time. 

If you look at the graphics, you will note the genre spread: steampunk, thriller, dystopian, adventure, historical fiction and suspense. Currently I have nine full length books. Three books have won a single award and Vortexes has four by itself.

~YAY and Happy Dancing~ 

Also on my bookshelf are several short stories. We titled one set Quick Reads (above graphic) and the tales are longer. Perhaps a couple of lunch breaks in reading time per story. All of these are long enough to be singles but are also gathered in a five-story collection. Another set, above, is a trilogy and (LOL) one is waiting to become a trilogy.

~Whew~

Continuing to a smaller scale, I’ve a seven-story collection of mini tales that are too tiny to be out on their own and are only found under the title of Tendrils. Again, whether it be books or short stories, my genres cover the same territory… that which I fell in love with as a child.

I need to make a point here. Many of my short stories have children in them but are NOT children’s books. My readers range from 14-16 to in their 90’s. I write about serious topics which are not intended for young children. The only ones which could be read by kids, as far as subject matter, are The Dragil (from the Quick Reads set), Rockets (found in Tendrils) and the Beyond Time Trilogy.

A bit about me. Earlier I mentioned a furniture store. We closed the

Author Holly Barbo and Misha

store but continue to custom build, restore and repair wood furniture. You can see examples on our biz website: https://www.barbofurniture.com. Yes, I still write between work projects. You must do something while glue is drying, etc. My author website is http://hollybarbo-books.com. Come visit. 

Oh… and I’m currently working on a new thriller. Watch for it this year.

Real Life Influences What We Write ~ by Eric Lahti

photo courtesy of en.wikipedia.org

I grew up in a trailer park on the outskirts of Farmington, NM. I’m

not gonna lie and say it was the greatest place on Earth. It was home and that was good enough.

We had a real rouge’s gallery of people that lived out there. For some, I suspect, it was an opportunity to get out of the hustle and bustle of Farmington, a town with a population of a little over 30k at the time. For others, it was probably the fact that trailers were cheap, and rent was cheap, and living out on the hill in a trailer they owned was better than renting any of the run-down apartments in town.

On one side of us, we had a guy who had the occasional party. Nothing too big, just some friends drinking beer and hooting it up. What made the parties interesting in a terrible kind of way was the fact that, no kidding, he’d go out and steal someone’s sheep for dinner.

Across the street was a guy that woke me up at 3 a.m. one morning screaming about how terrible the world was. Apparently, he’d gotten drunk as a skunk and managed to bounce his girlfriend’s head off the cement. She was out cold, probably massive head trauma. The cops and ambulance showed up and we never saw those people again.

But the sheep smuggler and skull smasher aside, the real bull-moose loony were our other neighbors.

Brett and Joyce used to have epic fights. The kind of fights that

rattled not only the windows in their trailer, but the windows in ours. They were experts at escalating, too. They’d feed off each other’s rage and amplify it in a massive feedback loop until the screaming was so loud it became pure white-hot noise.

On the nights when it got really bad, we’d see the back door of their trailer fly open and Joyce would fling one of Brett’s beloved beer steins out. Some bounced when they hit the back yard, others shattered. A few minutes later, the back door of the trailer would fly open again and Joyce would go sailing out. She’d hit the same rocky ground, get up, brush herself off, and go right back in again.

Then another beer stein would fly out the door. Then Joyce would fly out the door. Lather, rinse, repeat until they were both so exhausted they couldn’t keep the rage going anymore. In the morning, my mom and would I gather up the unbroken beer steins and put them on the rickety wood steps to Brett and Joyce’s trailer and life would otherwise go on as normal.

This wasn’t an every night affair, by any means. You’d have to be superhuman to do that level of fighting every night! But it happened. The SWAT team would show up, using our trailer as a wall, tactical gear and full-auto weapons trained on Brett and Joyce’s trailer and we’d just move to the other end of the trailer and keep our heads down until it was all over.

Eventually Brett and Joyce split up, which was probably a good

thing for everyone involved. She left, hooked up with some other guy and everything was quiet for a while. But the thing is, both of those two had learned to hate each other and they never let that go. Things finally came to a head when Joyce – after moving out and finding someone else – hired a hit-man to take Brett down. Brett survived because he happened to bend down to pick something up just as the shot was fired.

Joyce wound up in prison. Brett moved out. Things quieted down. It was just us and sheep smuggler and a whole bunch of people we didn’t know. Everyone kept to themselves and, other than the trailer down the block from us catching fire, things were quiet on our end of the park.

From the outside, that place was like a war zone. SWAT teams, sheep smugglers, hit-men, guys bouncing their girlfriend’s heads off driveways. Most people would see that as madness. I just saw it as something that happened and went about my business of riding BMX bikes and getting into the occasional fight. That, as far as I was concerned, was just what life was.

Now, here’s the really interesting thing. For all their screaming and violence, Brett and Joyce were fundamentally good people. She made the best tortillas in the world. He collected rare beer steins. They took care of me when I was sick, and my mom couldn’t stay home from work. Literally, anything you needed, they’d help out with. Our back doorsteps got rickety over time and we came home one day to find the sheep smuggler out there fixing them. My mom got sick and Joyce made her dinner and brought it over.

We, as a species, have a tendency to focus on the negative. Those

photo courtesy of en.wikipedia.org

people are fighting all the time? Must be bad people. He steals sheep for dinner? Bad person. Stay away. But people are just people. Unpredictable, dangerous sometimes, but ultimately they’re just people. And, no matter what anyone says, no one sets out deciding to be the bad guy that day. Even in the heat of the fight, when beer steins and wives are flying, no one thinks they’re the bad guy. As a species, we also have a wonderful ability to justify our actions to ourselves, flimsy though that may sometimes be.

It was that kind of early exposure to what most people would write off as the “criminal element” or “bad people” that shaped me. There’s that realization that people can be complete train wrecks one minute and ready to give you the shirt off their back the next. Or they try to tear each other apart one second and be the most gentle, reliable people you’ve ever met the next. People are just people. They do stuff and that stuff ain’t always pretty.

So, flash forward a few decades and I’m revising Brett and Joyce, a

photo courtesy of Pinterest

couple I haven’t even thought about in years, and wondering if they didn’t provide some kind of template for characters in my books. I don’t write about nice things. You can call it urban fantasy, you can call it crime noir... call it whatever you want, but I tend to have less-than-stellar good guys and I always strive for sympathetic bad guys. Because, just like Brett and Joyce, those bad guys are just people doing what they do. Be it revenge, power, freedom, whatever, the difference between good and bad has nothing to do with the want; it has everything to do with how they try to fulfill that want.

And that right there is the key to villainy. No one is evil all the time. From their point of view, they know what they’re doing, they’re doing the right thing. Be it protecting your beloved beer stein collection or destroying beer steins because he loves them more than he loves you, there’s always a good reason. Seen from the outside, especially when things and people are flying out the door, it may look despicable, but to make a truly believable bad guy you have to look a little deeper and have some sympathy. Maybe not sympathy for the action, but sympathy for the reasons behind the action.

Eric Lahti is a writer of paranormal crime fiction. He currently

Author Eric Lahti

lives in Albuquerque, NM where he works as a programmer, studies Kenpo, and lives with his wife, son, and two basset-hound mixes that think they’re the toughest dogs in the world. You can connect with Eric at the links below.

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