Finding the Modern Cabin in the Woods

A post by P.T. Phronk,
of Forest City Pulp fame

I'm currently on vacation in a cabin in the woods. The other night, the power went out for a few hours, and there's no cell service here, so I was literally in the setup for a horror movie. There was no light except flashlights, no Wi-Fi, no calling for help—if a tall, silent dude with a blade was running after me, I couldn't even Google the best way to get rid of him.

It got me thinking about how the horror genre is heavily reliant on lack of technology. For me the other night, it was slightly scary to suddenly not have instant communication with any person in the world, or at least access to the entirety of human knowledge.

Cozy getaway or the place you will most certainly die?

Twenty five years ago, that would be a normal day. Merely walking out of the house was the setup for a modern horror movie. No need to cut the phone lines or slash the tires or summon a storm to block out the LTE; in the 80s and 90s, if I wandered a few blocks from home, I might as well have been in a cabin the woods. Yet, I didn't feel unsafe. 

The feeling of safety changes from decade to decade. That makes horror as dependent on technology and culture as genres that more explicitly need to keep up with modern times, such as science fiction. More and more, horror set in the present day requires tearing down the layers of safety we've built up with technology before any character can be in danger. That can be done in various ways: isolation, sabotage, the technology itself turning insidious, or threats so powerful—or so subtle—that not even Google can save us.

What will happen when technology is even more advanced, and thus even more capable of keeping us safe in any location at any time? The electricity can only go out so many times. We horror authors will have to get more and more creative to set up an atmosphere of danger. We'll have to do our research to keep up with science and technology, and find clever ways of scaring people who may have grown up in a world where it's just not realistic to be scared of anything, because anything scary is taken care of by some android or nanobot or brain upload or whatever.

Alternatively, we can just set every horror story in the 80s. That would work too.

Marie Kondo-ing Your Writing Career

I had a new release a couple of months ago and now I'm deep in the weeds of (re)writing my next book, so I've been thinking a lot about how I want the rest of the year to shape up. And I've decided there's one thing I'm looking for above all else.

Joy. 

It sounds hokey, right? This is my CAREER. I spend a lot of money on covers, editing and ads, and I'm not doing this because I have a trust fund somewhere for all of that. I've come a long way in redefining my version of success as it relates to money, but I still want/need to make some. But for the rest of 2019 - and maybe longer - I'm taking the Marie Kondo approach to my writing career, and I'm going to advocate that maybe you should, too.

If it doesn't bring you joy, rethink it.

Like...all that social media. 

Do you really need to be on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest? More importantly, do you like being all of those platforms? I'm going to go out on a limb and say probably not. I know I don't. Twitter, especially, does my head in, (although I'm keeping my account so I can follow We Rate Dogs and Thoughts of Dog). And so I can signal-boost my author friends when they have something to shout about. Otherwise, in my quest to Marie Kondo my social media, I've decided Twitter is a passive platform for me. Is it a missed opportunity? Maybe, but Facebook and Instagram are where I like to be.

But not too often

To the surprise of no one, I've discovered that I work best when I get my words in before I dive into Facebook or Instagram. But I've also discovered my overall mental health is better too. Less FOMO, less multi-tasking, less mindless scrolling means more productive time I actually feel good about. I've started not even logging into Facebook until late afternoon and, it kind of pains me to say it, but I'm not missing much that I can't catch up on.

And sometimes the highlight reel is enough

There's a lot of noise on the internet and it doesn't always come from social media. Author chat groups, blogs, Goodreads. Checking sales/page reads and rank. Yep. In my quest for more joy, I'm marking KDP as noise. 

Question for you: How many times a day do you log in to check your sales and/or rank? I used to keep my KDP tab open in my browser and would flip over to it at least hourly, even when I didn't have a big sale or a new release. I justified it to myself by saying I always had ads running but truthfully it was another thing sapping both my joy and productivity. On a normal day, a check in the morning and another check at night are enough for me. I can still adjust ads accordingly based on the result (and my ad spend isn't crazy enough that I'm losing tons of money if my sales slide for a day), and I'm off the roller coaster of emotions that come with both a really great sales day and/or a really bad sales day. It's liberating.

So is setting work hours

I used to work all the hours I could. If I wasn't writing, I was making graphics, scheduling social media posts, reading blogs, catching up on industry news. God, it was stressful - mostly because it always felt like I would never catch up. It was only when I realized that for me catching up equaled done - and that was never going to happen - that I stopped. The truth is, there is always something more to be done. See any of the above, then add things like: updating back matter, revamping your website, finally writing that YA fantasy you keep thinking about. Oh wait, that's me. But the truth is once I acknowledged that I could work twenty hours a day and still not be done, it became a lot easier to be done for the day at a reasonable hour, to sometimes watch TV and to seldom work weekends. Weekends are my reading time and that, my friends, sparks joy.

Tell me what about your writing career sparks joy and what could you Marie Kondo?