Guest Post from Mercedes M. Yardley: Find Your Literary Voice

Things are tense these days. I hope I’m not shocking anyone by saying that. There’s a lot of negative emotions going around, and people deal with them in different ways. One of the healthier ways is to engage with a good movie, game, book, or other form of media and get lost in a story. As a person empathizes with characters, they achieve catharsis as they experience their emotional journey together with the characters they empathize with. People enjoy dramas to release their sadness, they enjoy action to feel power over a world which often shows them to be powerless. Some enjoy horror for the endorphin rush, or to release pent up negative emotions in a more healthy way than going to the hardware store and looking for a chainsaw that’s light enough to chase someone with, yet not so light that it can’t get the job done.

Um, for example.

You get the idea. Engaging with stories in all of these genres help emotions to be released, and these genres are taken more or less seriously as their own entity. They win awards, they get critical acclaim. People feel like they can discuss them as art.

But what about comedy?

Comedy provokes laughter, which is a way to achieve catharsis, too. Laughter is a bonding experience. Laughter allows us to cope with horrible situations. Laughter is, well, fun. Yet, somehow comedy doesn’t get the respect it deserves.

What is the last purely comedic book you read? Not the action-comedy, horror-comedy, romantic comedy, etc. It might be hard to remember.

It seems most times comedy is only accepted when it tags along with another genre. If genres were families, comedy would be the little brother that horror, action, romance, mystery, westerns, science fiction, fantasy, and drama are forced to drag along with them if they want to go out and play.

If you look at Amazon, or any other place to buy books, you’ll probably notice the comedy/humor section is dwarfed by the other genres. In fact, it’s lumped in with crosswords and other puzzles in some stores.

Why is that? Probably because comedy doesn’t sell. Somehow comedic novels don’t get the same attention as other genres, which is why they have to piggy-back onto them. It’s hard to figure out why. On the surface, comedic novels have the same elements as other genres. They have a beginning, middle and end. They have a plot and they have characters.

Maybe that’s where things start to fall apart. People read books for the plot; they read a series because of the characters. As the purpose of a comedy is to laugh, it’s often true that comedic novels don’t have the level of character development that other genres have, and the stakes aren’t often that high. And that’s where the trouble really lies. People need to care what happens in a book for it to grab their attention for long. Sure, some comedic books have deep characters and intricate plots, but chances are that it’s going to get a hyphen with some other genre coming first added to it to sell more copies.

So, wait. Maybe comedy novels are more popular than they first appear. True, the “pure” comedy book isn’t in fashion at the moment, but that doesn’t mean the genre is failing. On the contrary, comedic novels are doing better than ever, thanks to the expectations of modern-day readers.

Unlike in other eras, readers don’t want just one thing. No, they want at least a little of many things. Hybrid genres keep emerging constantly. Weird West, GameLit, and other genre blending categories give people more of what they want, before they even knew they wanted it. And do you know what? I bet they’ve all got a few jokes in them, too. Really, the hyphen is a friend. It’s the hook that gets comedy into your books, into your hands, and into your head.

By latching onto a larger genre, like a parasite, comedy sneaks into your favorite genres without you even noticing. Or like ninjas. Let’s say comedic books are giggle ninjas instead of parasites. Still sneaky, but less slimy. The point is, that fantasy book that made you laugh more than want to swing a sword around was a comedy novel. The horror story that made you chortle with almost shameful glee every time someone bit the big one was humor in disguise.

Comedy doesn’t have an ego. It doesn’t care if it gets second billing. No, comedy is flexible. It adapts to survive, to thrive. Like a thief in the night, comedy comes, does what it set out to do, and leaves. The hero still defeats the evil mastermind, the prince still wins the heart of the prince, princess, or whoever they’ve been trying to win over, and so on. They just do it with a little snark, a bit of whimsy, and the occasional laugh out loud moment.

Comedy never left, and it isn’t going anywhere, even if you can’t quite see it at the moment.

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BIO: Noah Sturdevant is a man of many secrets. Granted, most of his secrets involve lost socks and conspiracy theories about otters, so it’s probably better not to probe too deeply. Noah is originally from the U.S.A., and currently lives in Thailand with his wife and daughter. Noah never really knows what’s going on and isn’t sure why he’s writing about himself in the third person, but he hopes you enjoy his books, which you can find on Amazon.

Quick Draw! is an anthology of humorous flash fiction, with some of the biggest names in speculative fiction. In times like these a quick laugh is something we could all use. All profits from the sale of this anthology go to True Colors United, which helps homeless LGBTQ+ teens.

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In 2014 The North Bristol Writers created an anthology and successfully funded it via Fundsurfer. The book is now available to buy in eBook and paperback from Tangent Books & Amazon worldwide.

North by Southwest is an anthology by ten writers. The tales are mainly set in Bristol and are an eclectic and unlikely series of journeys through landscape and story. These are all new stories, never before published, and show great variety. Here lies the strength of the book, showcasing as it does the work of the writers after a year or so of collaboration.

Bristol is a vibrant, creative city and the tales here are infused with that energy. Bristol has had such a great effect on transport through the ages ““ it’s an airplane city, a railway city, and a port city ““ so naturally such themes recur, as does the theme of “˜North’.

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In February 2014, at a North Bristol Writers meeting I said, “We should write an anthology!” which was greeted by enthusiasm by all present. Writing the stories was the “˜easy’ part; how would we get it published?

A few friends had run successful Kickstarters and we toyed with the idea of crowdfunding but weren’t sure how to start. Then I had a chance meeting at a reading evening (the much missed Small Stories) with another writer ““ Amy Morse http://www.amymorse.co.uk/ who had just successfully funded her novel Solomon’s Secrets via a funding platform I’d not heard of ““ Fundsurfer, which is a Bristol based crowdfunding platform, very similar to Indiegogo and Kickstarter. I invited Amy along to a North Bristol Writers meeting to talk about her experience and after her talk we determined to use Fundsurfer. Mainly because Fundsurfer was local and the stories were mostly set locally.

We got on with writing the stories and recruiting local artist Claire M Hutt to do the cover and illustrations. Claire was a key addition as we could use her art for pledge rewards. I had a couple of meetings with the Fundsurfer guys, who were super helpful and also with local publisher Tangent who were going to facilitate the publishing process.

We budgeted for Typesetting, Design, Printing and postage & packing then set up the Fundsurfer page. The most difficult bit was making the video, no-one in the group had any experience of making videos. We recorded a few hours of footage and in the end I only used the audio from it.

We launched the Fundsurfer at the end of October 2014 at BristolCon, who very generously donated several sets of tickets for the 2015 Con that we could use for pledge rewards, and set it to run for until mid-December.

Friends who’d had successful crowdfunding campaigns gave some great advice. The best piece of advice was “build the crowd, then the funding” so we had spent a while telling everyone we could think of that the book existed and needed funding. So that when we launched the Fundsurfer campaign a lot of people already knew about it.

I’ve mentioned a couple of rewards already and obviously the rewards and the levels are key to the success of the project. We started with a long list of about fifteen rewards but with the advice of “˜less is more’ from the Fundsurfer guys we whittled them down to seven. Apparently it’s like the way people choose wine, some will go for the bargain basement (but in fact we had very few go for the lowest reward level) some will go for the mid-range and some will go for the top range. The majority of people will go for the mid-range. So having a range of rewards is more important than having a variety of awards. We budgeted for a certain number of physical copies and worked out the likely number for P&P. P&P kills many crowdfunding campaigns & is something you need to give careful consideration to!

We got some nice publicity from Bristol 24/7 and a very entertaining “˜celebrity endorsement’ from local writer Jonathan L. Howard.

With 10 writers, an editor and an artist involved we thought that funding would work out if we could all get a few friends & family to pledge. It was still a nailbiting few weeks as the project slowly accumulated the funds; slower than I would have liked. We reached our funding goals a few days before the project was due to end and got pretty much what we asked for, getting just £62 over our goal.

Often it felt like all those times in school when you tried to get money out of people for doing a sponsored walk, or similar. We mainly sold it as a pre-order for the book, but potentially didn’t set expectations well enough, that once we had the funding the process of getting the book published would begin, and as we all know, everything in publishing takes a lot longer than you think. However the actual process has been very smooth, thanks to Tangent. All the funders have now received their eBook and the print book is imminent. We are looking to have a local launch and have started planning our next anthology.

Would I crowdfund again? It’s a very viable way to fund a project but it does rely totally on people’s goodwill and it is a lot of hard work. The amount of people who will “get round to it” is very large and there is an inevitable amount of nagging, which I didn’t like at all. However we were successful and it was the most equitable way of creating the book.

Bio: Pete Sutton is a UK writer and blogger, one of the organisers of Bristol Festival of Literature and contributing editor to Far Horizons magazine . He is a contributor to the Naked Guide to Bristol and you can read his latest published story ““ The body in the lake in Fossil Lake 2 published by Sabledrake Enterprises.
Follow him on Twitter as @Suttope and read his blog here: http://brsbkblog.blogspot.co.uk/ & his website here: http://petewsutton.com/.

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