Guest Post: The Best Halloween Ever by Wendy Wagner

When I first started to take my writing seriously, I went to see Ray Bradbury at a UCLA event. I loved Bradbury’s work, my favorite short story being “The Veldt.” You can imagine my dismay when he stood on that stage and announced that women could NOT write horror fiction. I remember sitting there and asking myself, “Did he just say that?”

Later, when I became a television writer, I heard the same sentiment, only now it included science fiction and edgy drama. This is why I ended up writing for Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman; Touched by an Angel; and Murder, She Wrote (although I did get to write the vampire episode of the latter).

When I started my comic book company Kymera Press, I was told, “You can’t use all women artists. You have to have some men, or you’ll never sell your books.” That is why the company slogan is: We’re not asking for permission.

Kymera Press does use all women artists and writers, and we don’t have a problem selling our books. One of our titles, Ivory Ghosts, is in the Smithsonian National Natural History Museum’s gift shop in Washington DC.

I’ve been hearing women can’t for a long time. Though history has tried to hide it, women have been doing all kinds of things they’re not able to do. Hedy Lamarr, an actress during MGM’s golden age, co-invented a radio signaling device that changed radio frequencies to prevent the decoding of military messages. The system was a steppingstone to guaranteeing the security of communications and cellular phones.

You probably heard of Anne Easley, since the movie Hidden Figures was made about her and four other African American women who did significant work at NASA. Easley was considered a human computer in a time when there were no “machine” computers. When computers were born, she taught herself programming languages and worked as a programmer for NASA’s Centaur rocket project. This was the first technological stage for the space shuttle. Do you drive a hybrid car? Her work led the way to its development.

These are just two women who did what women supposedly couldn’t do. Women have been breaking barriers set for them for centuries. And this includes the field of writing.

Not convinced? When you think of Victorian writers, who comes to mind? Charles Dickens? Lewis Carroll? Bram Stoker? These men were famous in their time and ours. But what about Elizabeth Gaskell? Amelia Edwards? Margaret Strickland? These women were as renowned as the gentlemen above, but have you heard of them? An English major may answer yes, but the rest of us? Probably not.

Nancy Holder is a contemporary horror writer who has won 5 Bram Stoker Awards for her horror fiction. I am the owner of Kymera Press, a comic book publisher. The two of us teamed up to resurrect the stories of these amazing women by adapting them into a comic book series entitled Mary Shelley Presents. Mary Shelley and Frankenstein’s monster introduce the stories of Elizabeth Gaskell (“The Old Nurse’s Story”), Edith Nesbit (“Man-size in Marble”), Margaret Strickland (“The Case of Sir Alister Moeran”) and Amelia Edwards (“Monsieur Maurice”). Nancy writes the adaptations and artists Amelia Woo, Dearbhla Kelly, and Saida Temofonte bring the comic books to life. The text of each original story is printed after the conclusion of the adaptation.

Kymera Press, however, isn’t the only one resurrecting these women’s voices. Weird Women is an anthology that presents “Classic Supernatural Fiction by Groundbreaking Female Writers 1852-1923.” It was edited by Leslie S. Klinger and Lisa Morton. This anthology contains 21 short stories by women who wrote horror during the Victorian era. It includes “The Old Nurses’ Tale” by Elizabeth Gaskell and a different story by Edith Nesbit. It’s a fantastic anthology edited by two people who are well-known in both the academic and the horror fields.

You can help resurrect these women’s voices by buying a copy of Weird Women and supporting a Kickstarter for Kymera Press, launching on February 12, 2020. We want to collect the first four issues of Mary Shelley Presents into a trade paperback with an amazing stretch goal of a hardback.  Libraries and teachers prefer trade paperbacks, or even better, hardbacks, when stocking their shelves or using them in classrooms.

Perhaps, with the work being done to bring these women’s voices back to life, we won’t have to hear people who pass by the Kymera Press table say, “I didn’t know a woman wrote Frankenstein.” It’s time for people to know that yes, women can write horror. Women can do anything and everything. And we’re not asking for permission.

BIO: Debbie Lynn Smith Daughetee has spent most of her career writing and producing such television shows as Murder, She Wrote; Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman; and Touched by an Angel. She has published short stories in magazines and anthologies, including the Bram Stoker award-winning Dark Delicacies. In addition, she has also written audio dramas set in the world of the 60’s classic television show, Dark Shadows, including her Scribe award nominated, The Lost Girl. Most recently, Debbie created Kymera Press, a comic book publishing company that supports women in comics. She writes the comic series Gates of Midnight which was winner of the 2019 Irwin Award. She travels the country with her husband Paul attending comic book conventions where they sell their titles. You can also buy Kymera Press Comics at KymeraPress.com.

Probably the most interesting thing about Debbie is that she is a double lung transplant. Please become an organ donor. It saves lives. Like hers.

Twitter: @kymerapress

Instagram: Kymerapress

Facebook: Kymerapress, D. Lynn Smith

Kickstarter: Mary Shelly Presents

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What if prose were written like music? What if, instead, of a common world, stories in an anthology were steps on a share emotional path? Those are the questions the upcoming anthology Score is attempting to answer.

Emotions are a key part of our experience of art. The books that stick with you are often the ones that made you feel something. Even when we don’t recall the details of a plot (or painting, or movie), we’ll often recall how it made us feel. Even if you don’t recall the details of Watership Down, for example -“” the names of the rabbits, the original warren, etc. “” you probably remember how you felt about the rabbits and what happened to them. You remember how you felt when you closed the book. Even if you mislay every detail of a book, you’ll remember whether it made you laugh or cry or feel wistful.

Score is an attempt to tackle the emotional side of writing head on. A group of almost 20 authors set out not to write about robots or aliens or magic “” though we have all of those “” but to write from emotion.

What does that mean, and how does it work? It means, simply, that each of the authors worked from a coherent emotional score, knowing the emotions in the piece before and after theirs, what emotions they were to emphasize, and … nothing else. They had complete freedom of genre, topic, tone, approach, etc. “” so long as they worked with the emotions they were assigned. The result is a fascinating collection of stories with a distinct emotional progression.

Putting together the score was challenging. As the editor and ‘composer’, I defined fairly early on the emotions we would work with. I knew the direction I wanted to score to take – an overall path of ascending hope that I thought a good fit to the times “” but choosing emotional terminology that would work consistently across many different writers took some work.

In the end, we worked from a palette of six emotional ranges – six emotions with four variants each, two positive, two negative. For example, Hope ranges from Hope at the positive end to Despair at the negative end. These aren’t quite the emotional pairs used by social scientists, and we could have ended up with a wide range of others, but these six emotional ranges allowed ample scope for ups and downs. The emotions are loosely grouped into two sets – the Hope set (Hope, Curiosity, Awe) and the Joy set (Joy, Love, Lust).

Each writer was assigned a specific major and minor emotion, and the score has distinct movements. Using musical terms very approximately, there’s an Overture, a Hope triad, a Joy triad, a Bridge, a Joy triad inversion, a Hope triad inversion, and a Coda. There are high points and low points, but … spoiler alert… it all ends with Hope and Joy.

It’s been a lot of fun putting this together. While I personally often write from an emotional basis, putting together an entire score was an intriguing and challenging exercise. Each writer interpreted the task in their own way, putting their own distinct stamp on it, as artists will. The result is intriguing, and I hope will be as much of an adventure for readers as it was for all of us.

Score: an SFF symphony is out on March 2nd from Metaphorosis Books.

Enjoy this writing advice and want more content like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.

If you’re an author or other fantasy and science fiction creative, and want to do a guest blog post, please check out the guest blog post guidelines.