GUEST POST: Lillian Csernica on Finding Happiness in Writing

I’m delighted to welcome author Lillian Csernica, who writes eloquently from the heart about her life. She says the following essay “embodies the main theme of my NaNoWriMo project, Keep Getting Up.”

 

HAPPINESS: A WELCOME STRANGER

By Lillian Csernica

 

If you ask me where I make room for my happiness, it will take me a minute or two to come up with a reply. Not because I don't know where I keep it, but because in a very real sense, I don't have any to keep. I live with Major Depressive Disorder. It's not like I get depressed every now and then. I'm depressed all the time. I have to fight my way out of it to a state of mind that approximates the kind of baseline cheerfulness that gets most people through their day. The specific name for the no-happiness part of my condition is anhedonia. That's the inability to experience pleasure from normal activities such as watching a funny movie or playing with a pet. If that sounds sad, it is. Some days it goes beyond sad all the way into tragic. I sit there and watch life go by. I can see the colors and hear the sounds, but I can't feel anything other than depression. The tastes, the smells, the textures are there but they don't connect to the pleasure center in my brain.

I've had to actively seek out qualified people who taught me the skills I need to change my perceptions and reframe my thinking. I might not be able to feel happiness, but I take great pleasure in other people's joy. Here are two examples:

• My son John just finished taking a class at the library on using a digital camera and laptop to make movies. He learned how to use some new software and do some interesting things with the storyboard pages he'd spent so much time drawing. John doesn't have a completed animation project yet, but he did master a new part of the process in just one hour. I put the experience in context for him, explaining how the animators he admires had to learn step-by-step methods as well. John is proud of himself.
• Michael, my older son, just brought home his latest award-winning art project. He and his aide had kept it in his classroom until summer school ended because it's a triptych with two of the panels created by two of Michael's classmates. It shows a street scene right off the beach in Capitola, done in multimedia that includes paint and crayon and some glitter. While Michael didn't make it into the Top Three for this year's school district art contest, he and his team received ribbons for Awards of Merit. All of us at home made much over Michael winning his fourth award for an art project.

 I think I'm the closest to real happiness that I can get these days when I write. When I get into the creative trance, all sense of time passing vanishes. I leave behind the sorrows of the real world and function within the world of my story. I am on that intuitive wavelength where I'm processing structure and characterization and setting and dialogue all the way down to the microwriting level of word choice and punctuation placement. I could be a gem cutter working with the magnifiers and the precision tools that allow me to cut a stone into a solitaire, a baguette, a marquise, whatever best suits the particular gem. I reach into the story itself for its reality, its shape, the right way to show off its color, cut, and clarity. There is no pleasure like the pleasure of finding the exact word and putting it in the ideal setting.

I have to work hard at making room for happiness in my mind and in my life. Every day I have to survive in an environment of ongoing tragedy, knowing that because of their disabilities, both of my sons will not enjoy everything life has to offer them. I've learned that I can't hold on to happiness. Life changes too quickly, and some of the changes are permanent. I've learned that I have to take medication to correct my brain chemistry so I can get out of bed in the morning and get through the demands of each day. I've learned that I can't let my mental and emotional room be taken up by negative feelings and old baggage. Most of all, I've learned that if I just keep still and be in this present moment, happiness will wave at me or throw me a smile. Once in a while, it will even come and sit beside me so we can share the moment.

 

Lillian Csernica writes fantasy, romance, and horror. Her short stories have appeared in Weird Tales, Fantastic Stories, and Jewels of Darkover. Her Kyoto Steampunk short stories can be found in the Clockwork Alchemy anthologies Twelve Hours Later, Thirty Days Later, Some Time Later and Next Stop On The #13. SHIP OF DREAMS, an historical romance, is set in the Caribbean of 1725 during the Golden Age of piracy. A genuine California native born in San Diego, Lillian resides in the Santa Cruz mountains with her two sons and three cats. Visit her at lillian888.wordpress.com.

Citadels of Darkover Author Interviews: Lillian Csernica

Coming in May 2019

Strongholds of rock . . . fortresses of the spirit . . . a planet set apart . . .

Citadels can be psychic, emotional, and cultural as well as military, and the wonderfully imaginative contributors to this volume have taken the basic idea and spun out stories in different and often unexpected directions.

Here I chat with contributor Lillian Csernica:

Pre-order it at:

ePub https://books2read.com/u/4XRR0N

Kindle https://amzn.to/2TmBBW0

Deborah J. Ross: How did you become a writer?

Lillian Csernica: As far back as I can remember, I've always loved stories. I still have the copy of the Little Golden Book of Fairy Tales my mother gave me when I was in kindergarten. In elementary school we made our own books. Like many writers, I spent a lot of my childhood at the library. Stories have always been important to me, both for the reading and the writing.

DJR: What authors inspired you?

LC: Ray Bradbury, Tanith Lee, Harlan Ellison, and Agatha Christie, among others.

DJR: Were there any pivotal moments in your literary journey?

LC: My first short story sale, Fallen Idol, made it into DAW's The Year's Best Horror Stories XX. The sale of my pirate romance, Ship of Dreams, was a major career milestone. The Treehouse Writers Group, the folks behind the Clockwork Alchemy steampunk convention, invited me to contribute to their convention anthologies. We're currently in production on the fourth anthology in the series. Writing steampunk has opened my eyes to the wonders of combining science and fantasy.

[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/

 

 

 

JEWELS OF DARKOVER story list!

Here's the story list for Jewels of Darkover!

Golden Eyes, by Marella Sands

Little Mouse, by Shariann Lewitt

Avarra’s Scion, by Evey Brett

Finders Keepers, by Deborah Millitello

A Cold, Bleak Day in the Hellers, by Barb Caffrey

Field Work, by Margaret L. Carter and Leslie Roy Carter

To Reach for the Stars, by Lillian Csernica

Fire Seed, by Diana L. Paxson

Nor Iron Bars A Cage, by India and Rosemary Edghill

Pebbles, by Rhondi Salsitz

Berry-thorn, Berry-thorn, by Leslie Fish

Release date May 2, 2023

Preorder: https://www.amazon.com/Jewels.../dp/B0BWCJ1DB7/ref=sr_1_1...

CITADELS OF DARKOVER Table of Contents

I've completed the lineup for the next Darkover anthology, Citadels of Darkover, and here it is, a banquet of delicious stories featuring fortresses of the heart as well as those constructed of stone. Release date is next May, but I'll be posting author interviews and the cover reveal as we go along.

DANCING LESSONS

By Evey Brett

SACRIFICE

By Steven Harper

BANSHEE CRY

By Marella Sands

THE KATANA MATRIX

By Lillian Csernica

SIEGE

By Diana L. Paxson

SEA-CASTLE

By Leslie Fish

FIRE STORM

By Jane M. H. Bigelow

THE DRAGON HUNTER

By Robin Rowland

FISH NOR FOWL

By Rebecca Fox

DARK AS DAWN

By Robin Wayne Bailey

CITADEL OF FEAR

By Barb Caffrey

THE JUDGMENT OF WIDOWS

By Shariann Lewitt

Con-Volution 2016 Report

Con-Volution is a medium sized (700 ish members) convention in the Bay Area. I first attended a

couple of years ago and was pleased to be invited to return. This year’s theme was “Monsters,” so many of the panels and other events centered around Things That Go Bump in the Night, creepy-crawlies, and the like, a fitting greeting to October.

I arrived in time to attend part of “An Aviary of Beasties,” moderated by Juliette Wade and held in the parlor of a hotel suite, making it cozy and very difficult to find. Nevertheless, the small space was filled, and as I walked in, Juliette was discussing the difference between the wings of a bat and a pterodactyl. Panelists shared myths of flying creatures from many cultures. In wandered one of the residents-in-costume, wearing a marvelous kirin head, whose timing made a perfect introduction to tales about that creature.

My first panel was “Authors: Going to that Dark Place,” with horror author Fred Wiehe, Margaret McGaffey Fisk, Loren Rhoads, and Guest of Honor Ann Bishop. We approached the relationship between authors and “that dark place” from two directions. One involved delving into our own nightmares and using them to fuel our stories, and the stories then become cathartic or therapeutic in lessening the hold those catastrophes have over our lives and (hopefully) those of our readers. I was reminded of Octavia Butler saying she took her worst night mares and put them down on paper. This is also what I did in a number of stories (“Rite of Vengeance,” “Beneath the Skin,” “Crooked Corn”) following the murder of my mother, and also used for my hero’s journey in The Seven Petaled Shield. Others take another approach, which is to start with the story and find the darkness within ourselves to give it depth and power. Ann Bishop observed that horror stories are like a journey through a spooky forest with various companions that may survive or not, but we have faith that someone will make it through. “There is no light without darkness,” Fred Wiehe pointed out. Does the dark keep us sane?

For “How Cthulu Became Cuddly,” I was joined by Artist Guest of Honor Lee Moyer, Laurel Anne Hill, and Jennifer Carson.