[Guest Post] Writing Black Rose by Arlo Z Graves

 Writing Black Rose

by Arlo Z Graves

 

 

 I knew I wanted to tell stories in first grade.

I entered kindergarten late because at five, I still couldn’t talk well. Not long after, I ended up in special education classes and speech therapy. The special ed teacher, a lovely soul of infinite patience, assigned us a retelling of Cinderella.

I hated school. The sounds, smells, social rules, they overwhelmed me. But this story, this retelling of Cinderella…it made sense. I could do that. I couldn’t read or write to any extent at the time. I recall knowing the alphabet and little else, so my mom typed the thing while I dictated it.

It was terrible, naturally, the Cinderella story. It changed me. I knew it was what I wanted in life. I knew I had stories to tell. I knew I wanted to be a writer.

 

I didn’t learn to read until I was sixteen. It’s still a struggle. My brain sees the negative space around the words and letters before the words themselves. Sometimes there are colors involved too. It’s a processing difference that modern technology allows me to adapt around. But before I could change the display of my laptop or simply have it read to me, my mom read to me. She read so much of my college curriculum, she deserves her own degree.

My dad told me stories. Every day on the way to school, he fabricated outrageous adventures of magical creatures living on Mars.

Between my parents, I might have been behind my peers in terms of ability, but I was well-read and inspired.

In high school, I started writing fanfiction. I went through a several-year hyper-fixation on the movies Van Helsing and Tombstone. So, I wrote about them. I put Van Helsing in the American West. I pitted him against a shapeshifting menace with a magical revolver. It was asinine teenage stuff. I called it Black Rose after the magical revolver.

“That’s a good story,” Dad said. “That’s a fun story.”

I forgot about it and moved on. Fast forward through a creative writing program at UCSC and several years spinning my wheels querying.

One day, my partner and I had dinner in Scotts Valley. I remember tearing up at the table. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” I said.

I’d been writing and querying, and piling up dozens, then hundreds of rejection letters.

I don’t remember exactly what my partner said. Something to the tune of: the right opportunities are coming.

Whatever he said, I got myself together and walked across the Safeway parking lot to the CVS for soap.

“Excuse me,” said a voice behind me. “That is the most amazing coat.”

I turned to thank her.

“You look like you stepped right out of a book. I write fantasy, you could be a character.”

I almost started crying again. “A real writer?” I asked. “You’re a real writer?”

She was indeed. She was Lillian Csernica (who writes about Finding Happiness in Writing here.)

We ended up meeting for tea. Then tea again. She introduced me to Duotrope and got me writing in different lengths. Flash fiction, short stories, novellas. She pushed me. She believed in me.

More important than anything else, than any stories I may write or sell, I made a friend that day. A stranger in a Safeway parking lot picked up my broken hope, dusted it off, and handed it back to me. “Let’s fix this up. You’ve got things to do kid.”

 

I wrote about things that scared me. I wrote about the fire, the CZU. That piece went on to win the grand prize in Stories That Need to be Told.

My parents saved half of our neighborhood during the fire, and I want to give something back to them. My dad, at seventy years old, held a firehose over our cabin while a crew backburned up the mountain. Pieces of homes fell on the roof.

“Are you ever going to write Black Rose?” my dad still asks me.

 

I wrote Black Rose.

It’s so stupid, it’s too stupid…I kept telling myself.

I imagined Lillian’s voice in my mind asking: why? Why is it stupid?

I outlined it, made the magic system, sat down and wrote the thing. I drew heavily from the Louis L'Amour books my mom read to me in bulk. I drew from the bonkers antics of my dad’s bite-sized space operas.

Using my winnings from the fire memoir, I booked a trip to old west ghost towns for research and took my mom with me. This was such an important experience. I’d looked at hundreds of images of Rhyolite and Goldfield Nevada to craft a wasteland setting for the book. But when we got there in our rental car, we found the landscape rich with color and diverse in plant and animal life. If I’d gone off of Google’s visions of the Nevada desert, I would never have known to incorporate so much beauty into the story. To me, those little details tied it all together into a piece I can be proud of.

 

Every time I give my family a writing update, Dad asks: “when are you going to write Black Rose?”

Don’t tell him I already wrote it. I hope someday soon, I can hand it to him, bound and polished. He always believed in it and I’m not sure why. And yet, here it is in spite of everything.

 

 

Postscript: Black Rose just made the long list for the Uncharted Novel Excerpt prize.

 

 

Arlo Z Graves is a nonbinary hillbilly who lives in a shack in the woods. ‘Zven’ enjoys ocarina, night hikes, and goth fashion. Their story Gerald: a Memoir won Stories That Need to be Told 2023 and their work can be found at Dragon Soul Press, the 96^th of October, and others. Visit Zven on Instagram.

https://www.instagram.com/arlozgraves/

 

 

 

Time, Patience, and the Beginning Writer

Beginning writers enjoy the unappreciated luxury of time. They can work without submission deadlines and crash and burn editorial demands. There’s an undeniable glee in such deadlines; they are the mark of a professional author, aren’t they? They demonstrate our commitment to our writing careers, and that our publishers take us seriously. Deadlines, especially short ones, imply an editor’s trust in our ability to work competently, even brilliantly, at speed. Surely, that’s proof of a high degree of Expertise, not to mention Importance.

If you haven’t picked up the sarcasm in the opening paragraph, please insert it now. Bleary eyes, aching shoulder muscles, unwashed laundry, family eating frozen dinners, and kids running amok from neglect are nobody’s idea of good working conditions. For many published and publishing authors, these things happen from time to time as a part of the publishing industry’s inherent chaos. If we can’t change them and don’t feel we have the option to refuse, then we make them more acceptable via glamorization of suffering. To be sure, when we were beginning writers, we may well have regarded the necessity of dropping everything to proofread a book that should have been done two months ago as a good thing. We wanted to see our work in print, the sooner the better, and too many of us jumped at the chance of being published anywhere.

The time during when we are writing seriously but not (yet) on contract offers its own gifts, and one of them is freedom from publisher- (or editor- or agent-) induced overwork frenzy. We may be overworking in a different way, juggling day jobs, families, and other responsibilities. Our friends and families may regard our writing as a hobby, no matter how seriously we take it, because we have yet made any money at it. (And when we do, the bar escalates: we haven’t sold a novel, we don’t earn enough to support ourselves entirely from our writing, we haven’t won a national award, etc., and with the achievement of each goal, we are subjected to another, even more difficult one.)

A beginning writer has the flexibility to accept external deadlines, like for submission to an anthology or contest, or to ignore them.

Supporting a New Writer 1: Introduction

Recently, I received this letter from Wendy, a fan with whom I’d been corresponding. It spoke deeply to me, and rather than answer it alone, I asked some of my writer friends to join in a series of round table blogs on the issues raised. If you’ve been there, too, I hope you’ll follow along and offer your own wisdom.

I've been trying to reconnect with writing friends after a hiatus from the creative life.  I've spent the past year or so taking care of my mom and working to pay the bills.  Mom passed away in October. 

When your last parent passes away, it changes you in many ways.  That foundation you always relied on -- even as an adult -- is gone for good.  Whether you're ready or not, you are truly on your own in the world and must somehow carry on without their nurturing presence.  One of the most difficult aspects of my mother's final days was the fact that she had so many regrets about life.  She once had goals and dreams, but left them behind out of fear and a belief that these dreams were just not possible.  

I'm 54 years old.  More than half of my life is over.  Writing has been a dream/goal of mine since childhood.  My mom was the only one who believed in me. I don't want to leave this world regretting the fact that I never pursued this dream to the fullest. To be honest, my writing "career" never took off.  I let fear, doubt and the negativity of others keep me from my dreams.  I want so much to be brave, to take risks with my creative life. I truly wish for a group of fellow writers who are willing to give me the encouragement and support I need to write with my heart and soul, to grow as a writer and a human being. And I want to be a support for others as well.  

How do I get back into the writing life after leaving it on the back burner for so long? 

Effie Seiberg: I hear you. Writing is such an inherently lonely business, spending that much time in your own head, that a good support group is critical. When I first started writing I went though wild mood swings ranging from "OMG this is the most hilarious thing ever" to "Why did I ever think I could English? This is total crap," and I began to fear that I wasn't emotionally stable enough to write. It was only after I found a community of supportive writers that I understood that this is just how writing works, and the only thing that improves is your ability to enjoy the highs and survive the lows. A good support group bolsters you through both.

Effie Seiberg is a fantasy and science fiction writer. Her stories can be found in the "Women Destroy

Science Fiction!" special edition of Lightspeed Magazine (winner of the 2015 British Fantasy Award for Best Anthology), Galaxy's Edge, Analog, Fireside Fiction, and PodCastle, amongst others. She is a graduate of Taos Toolbox 2013, a member of SFWA and Codex, and a reader at Tor.com. She lives in San Francisco, recently and upcoming (but not presently) near a giant sculpture of a pink bunny head with a skull in its mouth. She likes to make sculpted cakes and bad puns. You can follow her on twitter at @effies, or read more of her work at www.effieseiberg.com.

Barb Caffrey: For now, though...I can say this much to Wendy. It's never too late to do what you feel you must, as a creative artist. I have often felt like it's too late for me due to how my husband passed away suddenly; I'm now trying to carry on his work, and mine, and sometimes this seems like an overly heavy weight.

The important thing is that I'm doing it. No matter how long it takes, no matter what is up against me -- bad health or family health issues or foreclosures or anything -- I keep on working. Some days, all I can do is look at my works-in-progress and say, "Hmmm," and do a little fiddling but add nothing tangible. The next day, or maybe the day after that, the dam bursts and I have more new words again.

The most important thing you can do -- and it unfortunately is also the hardest -- is to believe in yourself, and that what you are doing is valuable. No matter what anyone else says, no matter what anyone else does, you are going to do what you feel you must.


I wish I had a better answer, but persistence has mostly worked for me.

Barb Caffrey has written three novels, An Elfy On The Loose (2014), A Little Elfy in Big Trouble (2015), and Changing Faces (forthcoming), and is the co-writer of the Adventures of Joey Maverick series (with late husband Michael B. Caffrey) Previous stories and poems have appeared in Stars Of Darkover, First Contact Café, How Beer Saved The World, Bearing North, and Bedlam's Edge (with Michael B. Caffrey).

Alma Alexander: I'm roughly of an age with you, Wendy, and I think ours is now the generation which has to grapple with some of life's truths.  I’m technically only "half" an orphan at this point - my dad left us three years ago, my mother is still around, in her eighties now, frailer and more fragile than she's ever been before, both physically and psychologically, and it's something that it's up to me to deal with, I am in full defend and protect mode with her, often, and it takes up a huge swathe of mental and physical resources. But there will come a time when she too is gone and at this point it will be as you say - the foundation is gone. Until that moment you can always "go home". Afterwards, that first home, the foundation home, is gone, forever, and it takes a shift of thinking to adjust to it. So before anything else is said... there's that. There's the acknoledgment, and the understanding. We've been here, or we're coming up on that milestone, and we can look into that shadow and know exactly where you're coming from.