Zombie Cookbook Writer Lisa Haselton

The Zombie Cookbook from Damnation Books is a fun and satiric romp combining two subjects you wouldn't guess would go together in an appetizing way--zombies and food. I was delighted to see many old friends among the writers, and volunteered to interview them for the ZC Virtual Blog Tour.

My first guest is Lisa Jackson, who writes under the name of Lisa Haselton. She contributed "A Zombie Named Clete" and a unique tale of revenge, "The Secret Ingredient." I've known Lisa for almost three years, from various writing groups at the Muse It Up Club and Long Story Short's My Writing Friend. We belonged to a group called Muse It or Lose It, where we had to critique eight thousand words of each other's novels every month. Not for the faint of heart! Lisa is a professional freelance editor and has worked for several e-publishers. Her short fiction has been published in Mysterical-E, the Fiction Flier, Flashshot and Penpricks, and she has quite a few non-fiction magazine credits as well. And now I get to pick her brain a bit! Welcome, Lisa....



How long have you been writing?

– Since I could hold a pencil! Hee hee, okay, so maybe that’s not entirely true, well, it is, but not what you were asking. I have been writing stories since a young age. I remember ‘winning’ a trip to a local college for a day when I was in fifth grade because of a story I wrote. Really wish I still had that story somewhere, but I remember how it felt to have someone interested in my writing and to be ‘one of a few’ chosen to explore a college. I’d actually been writing since my first journal. The journal recorded thoughts and feelings, but my mind was awhirl with stories. I grew up in a rural area and had few neighbors. I’d spend hours outside exploring and making up stories as I found crevices in hillsides, and funny-looking creatures in streams. I also loved to read (still do), and those stories sparked my curiosity even more. So, to answer your question, over 30 years.



What are you currently working on/have coming out?

– I’m working on several short stories at the moment – I’m now addicted to anthologies and would love to get in several others. I have a paranormal thriller that absolutely has to see the light of day soon or I might burst. I also have a mystery set in a fictionalized version of the city I live in. I’m writing a history book using my real name (Haselton is a pseudonym) based on a town that existed in southern NH from 1746-1770. That book should be out in summer of 2010 if all goes well. It’s my first non-fiction book and I’m very excited about it. And I have another persona who writes hot romances. Second book due out in December, working on a sequel to my first (which released in June).



What drew you to the Zombie Cookbook?

– It was the fact that a friend of mine through The Writer’s Chatroom put out a call for zombie stories, poems, recipes, and what have you, for The Zombie Cookbook. I’d never written a zombie story before and it felt a bit too much for me. I love vamps and weres, but zombies weren’t on my list. I let ‘zombie’ toss around in my gray matter for a bit and I had a slew of poems come to me. All based off of names. I submitted my favorite one "A Zombie Named Clete" and it was accepted. Well, then, that just got me excited and so I wanted to develop a short story around the poem. It took a while. I mentioned it to a couple of friends and one told me that zombies are averse to salt (I had no idea until then), so I let that tidbit mix with my poem and then I went on vacation to a dude ranch and THEN the story finally came together. It took a while. I felt out of my element, but I wanted to craft something to see if I could. And that’s how "Secret Ingredient" came to be.



Are you a pantser or a plotter?

– A punster for sure, but with my novels I have to become a plotter in order to make sure I have all the details correct. It’s a challenge for me to make the change.



How do you manage to turn "editing-brain" off?

– Excellent question! That’s my biggest challenge. I’m an editor by profession, so that side of my brain does not like to be silenced. I have found the absolute best way to turn it off is to do timed writings. And I discovered this by doing NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) and participating in "word sprints". It’s where you sign up with others on a chat board to write for a certain number of minutes. For example "starting at :30 of the hour, I’ll write for 30 minutes". You post your name to say you’ll do it, and then at the end of 30 minutes everyone posts their word count. Some times only one other person may be in the sprint, sometimes several people, but I tell ya, after doing it a couple of times, I didn’t care if I was doing it myself, the quantity of words the came from my brain to fingertips blew me away! Giving myself permission to "just write" seems to only work if I set a timer and just do it. Without a timer, my editing side chimes in with "oh, come on, you can choose a better word than that" or "this is crap, just give it up", hee hee. It’s so much fun to have the editor turned off!



How do you balance multiple genres?

- I can’t tell you how many years I struggled with this. I kept hearing "pick a genre and stick with it", and so I tried and tried to pick a favorite one, but I just couldn’t. After my MBA I went to school for a degree in writing and literature, hoping to narrow down my interests – thinking whatever course I did the best in would be the winner. Well, I found I liked every writing course I tried, so I ended up having MORE interests! It’s only been in the past few years that I’ve come to terms with writing in several genres. I don’t think I balance them, I think it’s more that they balance me. I’ve always loved to learn and I have a lot of varied interests. I do my best to write down my dreams when I wake up. And I have so many notebooks and scraps of paper with ideas on them, too. Ideas strike all the time. My lifetime isn’t long enough to get them all down. ;) I write YA and adult; flash, short stories, and novel-length; mystery, horror, romance, sci-fi, historical, humor, time travel, paranormal, futuristic, and anything in between. And that doesn’t even get into my non-fiction writing side!



What is the genre that most speaks to you?

– Mystery speaks the most to me with horror a close second.



What themes do you return to over and over?

– Wow, this is a good question. I haven’t thought about themes before. But in thinking about it, I’d say the general theme is a person discovering that he/she is unique and stronger than he/she ever imagined. I think so many of us go about our lives and get into a routine that we don’t dig deep to find out who we really are or what we can do. We give up too quickly, depend on others to carry us, or decide "I could never do that". And I think this is a theme with me because there was a time when I climbed Mount Washington in NH and got seriously lost. I was dependent on my partner. Eventually I figured out he had no clue what he was doing or saying and I sat down and said "I quit". I was going to figure out how to survive on my own…no joke, the clouds thinned and I discovered I could almost stretch out and touch the corner of the foundation. The building was right there and we had no idea until that moment. I was lucky that day, but it gave me a glimpse of how strong I could be, and I think it’s a theme I use a lot.



Who are your favorite writers?

– I devoured Stephen King for several years in the 80s and love that he finished The Dark Tower series (definitely effects my writing now), I like Walter Mosley, JD Robb, JR Ward, Jessica Andersen, Archer Mayor, and so many others. I’m always reading and discovering new authors and then I have to go and devour all their books.



What's the scariest book you ever read?

- The Fog, I can’t remember the author’s name right now [James Herbert], but I had to read that book in the daylight. Many restless nights with that one.



How do you get it all done?

– One word at a time!



Here's one from the Proust questionnaire: What are your favorite qualities in a zombie?

– That they remain uninterested in me! Hee hee. My folks were excited to learn that zombies have an aversion to salt. Since I’m always on them (and so are their doctors) to cut back on salt, they feel they will never be appealing meals for zombies. Really made their day to know that. ;)



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More about Lisa and her work here:
http://myspace.com/lisahaselton
http://lisahaselton.tripod.com/

Lisa will be lurking like the undead today...leave a comment or a question for Lisa and she'll get back to you as soon as humanly possible :)

UPDATE: OH GOODIE, PRIZES! Also, if you leave a comment for our Zombie writers, your name will be entered in our drawing. Win a free electronic edition of the The Zombie Cookbook or a special Damnation Books mousepad! Two lucky winners will be drawn and announced October 12th!

Zombie Cookbook authors coming soon...

Don't touch that dial! Here, starting October 9 I will be interviewing authors from Damnation Books' new release The Zombie Cookbook.

It would seem I know quite a few of the undead. :)

Sumerian Moon on CreateSpace

With a day to spare to the deadline (which it turns out I needed) I uploaded the formatted text for my first draft of my NaNoWriMo 2007 winner to Amazon's POD publisher, CreateSpace. (Chris Baty arranges a free proof copy for the winners. In previous years he's used Lulu. For 2008 and 2007 retroactively, he cut a deal with CreateSpace.)

I'm not as fond of CreateSpace as I was of Lulu. They are geared toward marketing (they assign you your own ISBN for example), so it is not as intuitive a process to make the content available only to you. I am making a proof copy only, something to sit on my own shelf. (I did not even think if having this ISBN assigned is going to mess up future publishing rights. I wouldn't think so, but Amazon, being as big and pervasive as it is, may not favor the individual in a situation like this.)

Second, they don't have their own pdf generator, which is a little bit of a pain. But I found a suitable one online.

Third, my files are subject to "review." In the Lulu universe, once you have a text pdf and a cover (uploaded or using their generator) you are ready to roll. In CreateSpace, I need to wait for someone to look at my material and see if it follows submission guidelines. Well, what the heck does that mean? Now I am paranoid that my political content will set off algorithms in a computer program. Or entry level dweebs are laughing at my sex scenes. And if my web generated pdf is not to their printing specs, what do I do?

So I'm waiting by my mailbox for the go ahead. :(

But I did have fun making the cover with their wizard. Wow, it looks like a piece of literature!

The Atheist's Way by Eric Maisel

If you've been interested in improving your creativity at all in the last twenty years, two names are probably familiar to you: Julia Cameron and Eric Maisel.

Julia, who wrote The Artist's Way, approaches creative recovery using the tools of addiction recovery, including the dimension of a higher power or Great Creator. Hers is an unabashedly spiritual program. Eric has written Fearless Creating and countless other books, and is the world's leading creativity coach. His background is as a writer and a behavioral psychologist, and his hands-on approach includes cultivating the empowerment that comes from assigning meaning to one's creative practice.

Both are humane, gentle approaches and complement each other. I have just about every book by each of them on my shelf. But I didn't realize until recently that Eric is an atheist.

I expected his new book the Atheist's Way to be a stretch for me. I grew up Catholic but left the church because of its dogma. One could say of any organization started with the best intentions that hierarchy and middle management eventually will subvert its members' experience. :)

So I'm not a fan of organized religion, but I'm an astrologer and the granddaughter of a Christian mystic. Eric's premise is that reliance on any supernatural experience is false and damaging. I'm not entirely sure. I think there might be a place for individual mystical experience.

He is right that the our country has a fundamentalist shadow that is problematic. We project it on our enemies, but express it ourselves. Blind faith, fed by (to put it nicely) major distortions and intolerance are considered justification for damaging policy.

Any system of belief needs to withstand critical testing. Any belief that makes you sign over control of your life to something outside you (even the Flying Spaghetti Monster) is not necessarily benevolent.

So this is a very useful little book about making individual meaning, and in some ways is the clearest and most direct of his meaning books. Making meaning means examining your values, and then choosing to live them full-time, reassessing your values constantly, and changing them when you need to. To really make meaning, says Eric, you have to go deep, making moral and ethical choices thoughtfully. The work is difficult but the rewards are great: “The painter creates a world, the writer creates a world; and you create a world, your own force field of ethical action. This is at least as beautiful a creation as any symphony or poem—more beautiful, really, because without it, civilization would soon collapse.”

We are the heroes of our own stories. Eric shows that atheism is not merely a dogmatic negation of gods, but a positive, active moral choice.

I consider it brave of Eric to write this book. Those who fly in the face of the status quo, who choose to make their own ethical choices, need validation. His book is necessary, encouraging, and eminently readable.

This is only one stop on the Atheist's Way blog tour. To see more, visit here.
Eric's blog on the Atheist's Way is here.
Purchase The Atheist's Way here.

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Here's an excerpted interview with Eric Maisel on The Atheist's Way:

You’ve written many books on creativity—more than
fifteen. Why a book on atheism from you now?

Like many lifelong atheists who want to communicate the
beauty and wisdom of the atheist worldview and lifestyle,
I’d wanted to write a book like The Atheist’s Way for a
long time. But the publishing industry had shied away from
books of that sort. Then, when several atheism books
became bestsellers, a few publishers took a second look at
their reluctance and stretched in the direction of providing
atheist authors with a platform. This is a book that I’ve
wanted to write for a long and now the times allow for it to
appear.

What is the central message of The Atheist’s Way?

There are three central messages. The first message is that
there are no gods and that the use of god-talk is a betrayal
of our common humanity. Anyone who plays the god card
is playing a dirty trick on his fellow human beings. The
second message is that a paradigm shift is needed from
seeking meaning to making meaning. Until people realize
that human-sized meaning does not exist until they make it,
they remain stuck embracing supernatural enthusiasms or
else pining for meaning. The third message is to describe a
beautiful and attractive atheist lifestyle, full of effort and
ethics—a complete way of life—that I hope people will
decide is exactly right for them.

What’s the real harm in believing in gods?

The harm is that it makes a person more stupid than he or
she would otherwise be, more authoritarian, and more
antagonistic to solving our shared human problems. It
amounts to a complete betrayal of our common humanity.
The instant a person gives in to the urge to answer difficult
questions about the facts of existence with false, slogansized
supernatural answers, he makes himself a smaller,
more frightened, less democratic person, lowers the critical
thinking bar, and endangers our freedom. Just imagine that
I started mouthing the made-up belief, “God says that blue
is bad.” Wouldn’t you immediately begin to fear that your
blue rug puts you in some undeserved danger? People
should not do that to other people.

Why should it matter to the rest of us whether or not a
person believes in gods?

A belief in gods is not an innocent thing. It is a position visà-
vis the world and vis-à-vis one’s neighbors. It is a refuge
for scoundrels who want their views to count more than the
next person’s, it is way to enslave the minds and hearts of
children, it provides cover for bigotry and prejudice, it
causes sharp divisions among people, and it makes the
world a less rational and a more dangerous place. Therefore
it should be the hope of every thoughtful person that beliefs
in gods wither way and the practice of every thoughtful
person to indict god-talk as a betrayal of our common
humanity.

Your book is also being billed as an “atheist lifestyle”
book. What does that mean?

When you’re an atheist, you’re obliged to figure out how to
live as an atheist. It isn’t just that you’re convinced that
god-talk is a human contrivance and a human weakness.
That’s only a small part of it. It’s a complete vision about
the finiteness of your time on earth, your intimate
relationship to nature, the sources of your values, and all
things human. If you’re addicted and intend to recover, you
recover as an atheist. That’s how an atheist recovers—
without god-talk. If you’re an artist and intend to create,
you sit down and create—you don’t wait for divine
inspiration. That’s how an atheist creates—by doing it.
Atheism supports and demands a completely atheistic
lifestyle, a way of life free of supernatural enthusiasms, full
of personal effort and responsibility, and beautiful in its
clarity and honesty.

Where do atheists get their values and morality?

How does a believer decide whether to stay at home with
his sick child or go off to war? He thinks about it, brings
forth his cherished principles and his ideas about right and
wrong, and makes an agonizing decision. That’s how every
human being who is not brainwashed into accepting the
slogans of god-talkers decides what is right for him to do.
He thinks about it, using his brain and his natural sense of
ethics. Every moral person is moral by virtue of the fact
that he is trying to be moral, that he is making the effort to
think through what is right and wrong. An atheist who is
thinking through what is right to do is more moral than a
believer who is mouthing some authoritarian slogan.

Isn’t atheism something of a fad?

Atheism is as old a tradition as the world’s religions. 2500
years ago Heraclitus wrote, “Religion is a disease.” At the
same time, Aristotle explained, “Men create gods in their
own image.” 2000 years ago Cicero wondered, “What old
woman is so stupid now as to tremble at those tales of hell
which were once so firmly believed in?” When the
disciples of Confucius wanted to debate the spirit world he
reprimanded them, “Why talk of spirits when you do not
understand men?” For thousands of years intelligent men
and women have been identifying god-talk as man-made
and religions as scourges. Atheism is not a fad: it is a
vibrant tradition and our best hope for the future.

The Power of Story

My husband and I watch PBS on Fri nights--Washington Week, NOW and Bill Moyer's Journal. We've dubbed the lineup "The Friday Night Smackdown," with only some irony. There is nothing more satisfying than seeing rational people wrestle with ideas.

I particularly enjoy Bill Moyers Journal. Moyers tells truth to power, but always looking for a little optimism. If he gives you a harrowing story on the economy or media consolidation, he'll balance it with a winsome chat with Nicki Giovanni. This last week the ubiquity of lobbyist influence/money was counterpointed with Parker Palmer of the Center for Courage and Renewal on America's need for self-reflection.

Palmer pointed out something I didn't know about how the Obama campaign was organized. Three years ago, Camp Obama gathered people together and encouraged them to tell three stories-- the story of "self," the story of "us" and the story of "now":

...To me, the underlying genius of what happened at Camp Obama was simply this. I don't remember until the Obama campaign a presidential campaign which we were not asked, I was not asked, to buy a presidential candidate as a commodity in a consumer culture. The Obama campaign did not ask me to buy something. It asked me to tell a story. And in that movement it turned me from being a consumer of a political commodity to being a citizen, a voice. Somebody wants to hear my story.

Palmer also talked about the "tragic gap" between reality (cynicism) and idealism and how we need balance between the two in times of crisis: "...If you don't have a capacity to hold the tension in your heart between reality and possibility then you're just going to give up eventually."

Transcript and video here.

Eric Maisel Interview Feb 26th on The Atheist's Way

Watch this space! I get to interview Eric Maisel again, this time on his new book The Atheist's Way. Eric Maisel is internationally known in the field of creativity coaching, and now he brings his background in psychology and creativity to the search for meaning outside of religion. Read the first chapter of The Atheist's Way here.

Eric's main site is here.

And his excellent podcasts on creativity and meaning are here and here.

To a Friend on Writer's Block

Letter to a flash-writing compatriot...cleverly recycled into a blog entry. We are nothing if not green!

I find the short fiction harder sometimes than novel writing. Although I had problems this November, too. Here are some things that worked for me:

1. Lowering the jumps. Of course, NaNoWriMo is all about lowering the jumps to nothing, but like you, I have standards. :) For me, it meant breaking down the 1667 into 500 word increments, real minimums I knew I could reach.

2. Remembering I was supposed to enjoy the process. Strange, but when I consciously decided to enjoy NaNo it started getting a lot easier and fun. Coaches and touchy feely types would call that reframing... Jill Badonsky, I think, came up with saying "Now I get to..." instead of "Now I HAVE to..." about your to-do list. But really, if you can get back in touch with why you like writing--what kinds of stories you enjoy and what kinds of subjects intrigue you and write about those, it helps.

3. People swear by timed writing. I sort of swear by it. First I have to get my butt in the chair. :) Five minute timed writings have gotten me all sorts of interesting things. I recommend at least one a day, but you could do a bunch back to back. Take a handful of prompts (I have a prompt basket--make it FUN) pick one, set the timer. Before I even start writing, I cluster the idea or set of ideas. Usually within 90 seconds BANG, it hits, and I write about whatever it is for the rest of the five minutes. Kind of like improv acting, if you ever did that. The time constraint makes you come up with a story FAST. Perfect for flash.

4. Sometimes you can use an additional prompt to narrow your focus further. Jurgen Wolff has a wonderful podcast on how he generated lots of ideas for TV writing, and it required combining two subsets--characters for the TV show (his given parameters) with random words.

5. Finally, I recommend going and doing something else, but specifically what Julia Cameron calls the "Artist Date"-- a twenty minute session to "refill your well." Go do something novel, like visit a model train store, or look through a magazine you would normally not buy. Or surf unusual websites. Here is a Chris Carter (X-Files) favorite, the New Scientist. Just a cursory look gives us all kinds of food for thought. Bacteria that causes rain. A baby who was genetically selected to be "cancer free." Video games used to treat trauma. Walking rocks on Mars.

6. It's entirely possible you need a break. Sometimes if you are not writing you might be in a better position to edit. Pull out something old and redo it. Even a new improved ending. The important thing is to keep moving if you can. Don't forget to check your ideas notebook and see if there's something you haven't developed yet. Eventually you will come up with something new again.