Canadian author, SARAH BUTLAND, asked me to take part in a Monday morning blog hop.
It went something like this.
Sarah: “Do you want to participate in a blog hop?”
Steve: “I don’t know about hopping. My feet are kind of sore this morning. Couldn’t I just text you folks? I mean – if I actually owned a cell phone – which I don’t – I’d be GLAD to send everyone a text – just so long as it wasn’t a pop quiz text. I always hated those in school.”
Sarah: “I think you mean test, not text.”
Steve: “Text, test – either are both beyond my capabilities. Can’t you just ask me to do something easy – like drink a bottle of cold beer and chase it with a cheeseburger? I can have that barbecue blazing in a minute, if you like.”
(pause to salivate over the thought of cheeseburgers and beer)
Sarah: “Listen. It’s easy. You just have to answer the following four questions on your post next Monday, ask three other authors and link to all of them.”
Steve: “Three other authors? And then they are going to link three other authors? This is beginning to sound an awful lot like one of those chain letter pyramid plans.”
Which is my long-winded way of saying that I completely forgot to contact three other writers and so I have broken the chain letter blog and I’ll probably have horrible luck from now on and probably grow up to be a writer or something instead of the dentist that I was supposed to grow up to be…
I’m sorry, but the doctor has got his hands full…
Question #1 – WHAT AM I WORKING ON?
I am just about to begin working on a time travel novel set on Citadel Hill, right here in Halifax. This novel involves a couple of ghosts that are drawn from an actual authentic ghost story that has been told about Citadel Hill for about two hundred years are so. I will be writing this over the month of July as part of the July Camp NaNoWriMo write-a-fifty-thousand-word-novel-in-a-month-or-die competition.
Question #2 – HOW DOES MY WORK DIFFER FROM OTHERS OF THE SAME GENRE?
Wow. That’s a tough one. I’ve been told that I have a heck of a storytelling voice and that I bring that with me every time I set out to put words down on paper. Other folks tell me that my work is different in that I frequently leave beer and cheeseburger stains on their e-reader screens. I’m not quite sure how that works – but I have heard that it actually happens.
Question #3 – WHY DO I WRITE WHAT I DO?
I’ve had an awful lot of relatives ask me that very same question. I think it all started when I was a kid watching the old horror movies on CBC. Once a month on Friday nights they would run an all-night horror marathon with Vincent Price and Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi and a whole mess of wicked cool old-time horror movies. I never missed a single marathon. Since then I have fallen deeply in love with the realm of the booga-booga. Anything nasty and scary and fun just fits naturally into my creative world.
Question #4 – HOW DOES MY WRITING PROCESS WORK?
It’s a little like constipation. My stories get clogged up inside of me, bound tighter than a month on an all-cheese diet. The pressure builds until the words are just screaming to get out. Then I let them pour out onto the keyboard and do my best to keep up with the flow.
That is probably a little more graphic than cultured might approve of – but the simple fact is I am one of those strange dudes who would rather write a story than talk. I am a living, breathing storyteller. I can’t help it. I was warped at birth.
Lastly, I am supposed to link up with three other writers – so I spared no effort in unearthing three local writers who were happy to appear here in my blog.
What do you mean those aren’t real writers? Who are you to judge? Just because none of them have the digital quality (meaning fingers) to successfully unleash their creativity upon a keyboard does not disqualify them from having the ambition to create whole stories from the stuffing and nonsense of their tiny toy imaginations.
All right – so I goofed up. I left the actual search for guest writers to about thirty-eight minutes past the last minute – give or take a week or so. Blame it on my mind being preoccupied with no projects. Blame it on the fact that I actually released three new books over at Kobo and will eventually enter them into Kindle later this week.
The truth is I am not even sure what the name of this blog hop is supposed to be so I just invented that “Chain Letter Blog Hop” title up above. If the thought of someone actually making something up like that offends you than you really ought to stop hanging out with writers. We are notorious liars. We make things up at the drop of a hat.
So I goofed up.
Blame it on the fact that I am a careless kind of fellow.
I am a worm.
I am a lowly wiggling worm.
yours in storytelling,
Steve Vernon
YOURS IN STORYTELLING... 