werewolf – Phil Slattery, Writer, Publisher

Lycanthrope: Update of April 5, 2022

An update on my progress with Lycanthrope.

I have finally broken through the barrier that has kept me from adding more to Lycanthrope. I still have more to go, but I am probably at about 67,000 of a desired 80,000+ words. I am coming up with some good ideas, but I must jot them down quickly or I forget them. Hopefully, I will be finished before long. I am focused on finishing this finally. It has been a long journey and the storyline is radically different from the original I imagined nearly thirty years ago when I was in the Navy and living in Bremerton, Washington.

I find that the best way to come up with ideas is by sitting down in the chair at the computer and just staring into the distance until an idea surfaces. A lot of times though, the trick seems to be to go to bed after having thought about the story throughout the day or at least just before going to bed. The ideas seem to just leap into my head at moments like those. Then I scrounge up some scrap paper or an old envelope on the shelves next to the bed and jot down all I can. Sometimes, to get paper and pen, I have to go into the adjacent living room. A lot of times, this seems to happen when I am tired. Sometimes, I just act out what the character is doing or maybe I just take a break and do something out of the norm and then I can imagine the character doing the same. For example, I took a break from writing late one night and, after grabbing a bottle of vodka, walked out to the empty highway running through the woods in front of my house. I live in a remote area, so I didn’t have to worry about any traffic at all. I then walked up and down the centerline looking at the moon and stars and sometimes going into the pitch dark section of the road running under the canopy of the woods. I had one or two swigs out of the bottle, but nothing to even give me a buzz. It was a neat moment and I did see a few shooting stars. However, when I got back to the house, I had the protagonist do the same, but I embellished it considerably as he thought of the nature of the world and universe while getting quite drunk. Trying to find his way back to his house, he bumps into a tree and falls to the ground, where he sleeps until his girlfriend comes looking for him and drags him back to the house, scolding him all the way. I think this scene turned out to be a very nice passage and I think I wrote it quite beautifully and poignantly.

When I first started writing the story in Bremerton, I envisioned the story as something much more conventional than I have now. Set in the forests and hamlets surrounding Bremerton, the idea was about a man who had become a werewolf and was the narrator as he watched the police get ever closer to finding out who he was. There is a lot of magick and fantasy added to the current story and it is set in another state. I am hoping the story ends up a lot more intense than my original concept.

I will write more updates as time permits. Now, I need to go grab some supper and get to writing again.

Hasta luego.

Update for March 4, 2021: Lycanthrope

Here is a quick update on my progress on my horror novel, Lycanthrope.

Currently, I have over 46,000 words on Lycanthrope and I am gradually building toward a climax, probably the first of two or three along with at least two plot twists that should spice things up.

The main setting of Lycanthrope is in rural southeast Arkansas, but it ranges over a lot of the area. So far, action has taken place in an unnamed small town in southeast Arkansas, Memphis, Little Rock, and Shreveport.

I like to set things in places where I have been because I feel it adds an air of authenticity to the story. In this way, I can describe things that people who haven’t been there would experience, but which natives would note as missing. Hemingway and Fitzgerald set the majority of their stories in places they had known. For me, this makes their stories quite realistic, which is a quality I would like to achieve with my writing. I want the reader to vicariously live the experience described in my stories. I want to make it so realistic that the reader feels that he or she is the protagonist.

I can write comfortably about southeast Arkansas, Little Rock, and Memphis, because I have been to those places. I have not been to Shreveport, however, and had to rely on the Internet to get an idea of the city. I described the Shreveport setting in rather vague terms, so that the action seems plausible. I hate it that I had to describe Shreveport without having been there. Maybe I will get the chance to go before I finish Lycanthrope. If that happens, I will be able to revise the Shreveport events in the story enough to intensify the reader’s vicarious experience. I have plans for later events to take place in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, but I have spent a lot of time there, so I can accurately describe the locations where events will take place.

Currently, I am writing about events that take place in Texarkana. I have been to Texarkana several times, so I have something of a feel for the place. However, I have not been to the places where the events are taking place and I am having to rely on the Internet, and particularly Google Earth, to enliven my description of the setting. However, Texarkana is only three hours from where I live in Gillett, so I can probably go up there one weekend and scope things out where the novel’s actions take place.

On another matter, I am going to explore using the Anchor App to produce podcasts of my posts, so that I can reach a wider audience. This post will be my first test of the Anchor system. I have liked what I have seen of the system so far and I think it will be useful.

Take care, stay safe, and have a pleasant day.

Update: Lycanthrope

I just now reached 40, 246 words on Lycanthrope. According to my scan of publishers on Duotrope, 40,000 words is the minimal word count that almost all publishers will consider a novel.

My best estimate currently is that I will need another 20,000 words to complete Lycanthrope. I have been working on this since the end of December. I stopped work on Shadows and Stars to pursue Lycanthrope because the ideas for it were coming fast and furious. They still are. I work on this almost every night.

I have recently come up with a couple of really good plot twists that should make this interesting. These will bring a supernatural element into the story.

Once I have the first draft finished, which should not be long now, I will do some editing, but I expect to do minimal revision. Of course, that could change. I am coming up with new ideas and I like subtle plot twists. I also like to leave some subtle clues hinting at a denouement, but these could be a red herring too.

This work is being increasingly intriguing for me.

For me, I see the events unfolding in my head and I just write down a description of what I am visualizing. Sometimes the characters take control and I just watch and record.

Hasta luego. I need to sleep.

Werewolf in Action (Theoretically)

I found this while surfing Twitter today. I dare say that this is the closest you will ever come to seeing an actual werewolf in action. Now, you understand why the peoples of 16th-17th century Europe feared wolves and were terrified at the thought of werewolves.

Anytime i hear AC: Valhallas Eivor being called wolf-kissed i'm like: "So like this?" pic.twitter.com/ChEsM97nk3
— Chaki@woof.bork 🐺🏳️‍🌈 (@Smorgasbork) February 24, 2021

Excellent Summary of Werewolf Lore

As you know, I have been working on a novel about a modern lycanthrope, called, appropriately, Lycanthrope. I researched werewolves sometime back as well as werewolf movies and videos. This video from YouTube’s Top 5 Scary Videos is an excellent, detailed, quick and dirty summary of werewolf lore from the historical perspective. I will post more werewolf-related material here as I come across it.

Update: Shadows and Stars, Lycanthrope

I haven’t written more on Shadows and Stars recently. I am deciding on a major revision or two and on the final length.

I have resurrected the first novel I worked on way back in the 90’s: Lycanthrope. This is my take on the legends of werewolves but set in present-day rural Arkansas. I am using stream-of-consciousness to make the story more immediate and powerful. I hope to end it with 50,000+ words. The writing is going surprisingly fast. I have been working on it for about 2-3 days and already have 4,000+ words, which, being stream-of-consciousness, I intend to edit or revise very little. The writing is straightforward now, but I hope to develop some plot and character twists to make it more interesting. It should be very interesting for those who enjoy character development and first-person point of view. I am striving to bring out the narrator’s twisted psychology.

I still have a couple of short stories I am working on and a play, “Incommunicado”, which is turning into a complex love story involving a man and a woman who are struggling with their inner demons.

I got a lot done on it recently when I traveled to Midland, TX, to visit the wife. I kept a voice recorder handy as I drove and took down a lot of notes and ideas, incorporating them into the script when I had time after arrival. I haven’t worked on it since returning to Arkansas though. I am going to experiment in developing it by writing up a long dialogue between the two main characters using stream-of consciousness/ automatic writing or whatever the popular term is now. This will hopefully lead me to new ideas and insights. Originally, this was to be a one-act play involving two characters. Now it will probably be three acts involving three characters. It will be set in the present in a remote ghost town in the Gila mountains of southwest New Mexico.

More to come as time permits.

The New Print Edition of A Tale of Hell… IS OUT and Costs $14.95.

Cover for New Print Edition of A Tale of Hell and Other Works of Horror

The new print edition of A Tale of Hell and Other Works of Horror is out at a much reduced price of $14.95.

The original print edition of A Tale of Hell and Other Works of Horror has been prohibitively expensive from the start. I recently decided to change that. Producing a new edition also gives me a chance to come out with an improved cover design. I was new at publishing with Amazon when I first published ATOH and my cover design came out as less than exciting.

One of the mistakes I made with the original print edition was that I chose the option for full color printing thinking this applied to the cover. Full color printing is always expensive, so I wasn’t surprised when the price came out at $53.99 and didn’t know any better. However, as I came to find out later, that option was for color interior pages. Amazon bases the printing cost on number of interior pages and whether the interior is in color or black and white. I found out that the cover can be color without affecting the printing cost so long as the interior pages are B/W. For example, when I published Click in print, its cover was in color, but the price was very reasonable (and still is).

I have been working on a second edition to bring down the price to something reasonable. Republishing it also gives me an opportunity to expand the distribution to brick and mortar stores by using Amazon’s expanded distribution, which I did not take advantage of initially. However, the important changes for the reader are that the price will be reduced considerably: down to $14.95 from $53.99 and finding a print edition should be easier. Note that A Tale of Hell… is about 300 pages long, so $14.95 is not unreasonable for a book of that length.