Your Hub

From 2007 to 2009 our local newspaper hosted a site called Your Hub. Perhaps you’ve heard of it or even participated. It was a community board where anyone who registered could post stories, photos, events, and just about anything that was happening locally. And the neat thing about it, at least to me, was the fact that once a week the Wichita Falls Times Record News printed some of the stories and photographs in the newspaper on a page titled “What’s Happening in Your Neighborhood.” Now there’s something about seeing your article and pictures in the newspaper that’s pretty cool. So I was a major contributor.

And, to my good fortune, the editor in charge of Your Hub called me one evening and asked for an interview. I, of course, posted about my books a lot, mentioned signings and showed the book covers. He wrote a very nice article about me: “Former teacher finds success writing.” Some nice publicity for an unknown author.

Over the short time Your Hub was available in our town, many of my articles were published in the newspaper. Sometimes, nice replies were posted on the site. Othertimes, I received personal email. Once I posted a picture of my aunt standing in front of the Pavillion that was at the lake many years ago. There also was an old-timey motorcycle that I asked if anyone knew what kind it was. A few days later a reply was in the newspaper. A man recognized it as a 1920 j-model Harley.

I talked about my cats and birds and asked how to keep ants off the hummingbird feeders. Several people replied with their solutions. I tried to find the owner of a stray dog that kept hanging around our house by putting his picture on the site. It appeared in the newspaper too.

Unfortunately, other people weren’t as excited about Your Hub as I was. A handful of contributors were faithful and posted regularly. I read some funny stories, some serious stories, and posts that told beautiful stories. But without enough participation, the paper finally closed the site. Other towns still have Your Hub. I know because I receive regular emails from Denver. If you’re interested in whether your local newspaper sponsors Your Hub, try http://yourhub.com. I can’t guarantee where it will take you. Mine goes to Denver. But it is cool getting your name in the newspaper.

Happy writing.

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Turning Dreams or Nightmares Into Stories

How many times have you dreamed something so vivid and life-like, you remembered it after waking? Or the dream was so powerful it woke you up? This happens to me quite a bit. Perhaps it comes with the territory of being a writer. I keep a notebook and pen beside my bed for just that reason. I’ve actually had dreams so vivid in detail that with very little tweaking, they became stories.

Here is one of my more recent vivid dreams that could probably become something. I know I was panting when I woke from this one:

I was traveling down river on a smallish boat. I’m sitting on a raised seat on a narrow platform behind the driver and passenger seats—a fishing platform maybe. There are two seats side by side but the other is empty. The boat’s sides are low and this worries me because I think monsters could get into the boat too easily. There is a man steering us down river with a woman seated beside him. A teenaged boy stands beside me, a younger boy is standing on the floor of the boat in front of the passenger seat. There’s a little water in the bottom of the boat.

The murky brown river is about 50 feet across with jungle growth along both banks. We keep dodging drifting fallen trees, stumps, and plants growing into the water from the banks. All around us are Cayman-sized gators which approach the boat and leap into it or try to. One succeeds. I'm screaming at the younger boy to watch out when two more gators leap inside then instantly become small dogs. They come onto my platform, rubbing and acting playful but putting their open mouths on our legs and arms. I tell them if they bite I'll kill them. One rolls his eyes playfully while mouthing my arm. I shove him off and he becomes the gator again and I shoot him.

Next there is a human arm reaching up from the platform trying to grab my leg. I stamp at it until it disappears.

So—what do you make of that one? If you dream analyze, I’m not sure I want to know what this means. But it seems like good fodder for a horror story.

Tell us one of your dreams that would make a good story or one you DID turn into a story.

What We're Given to Write

I heard an anecdote some years back that someone once approached Stephen King and asked him, with a sneer of contempt, why he wrote horror. Stephen King's answer was, "What makes you think I have a choice?"

And I agree. I don't know that I set out to write stories about the paranormal, particularly ghosts and ESP-type phenomena, but I do know that even when I try to write something that is mainstream, down-to-earth, and, well, normal, it isn't very long before a ghost pops up or a character develops psychic abilities that I had never planned.

I remember being in a workshop with a very nice young man who was trying to write a best seller. The workshop was called "How to Get Your Romance Novel Published." I don't write romance, either, it was the "Published" part of the workshop that brought me to it. But this particular student told the group that he was working on a romance, really slaving away at it, and on page 40, "the terrorists broke in." The instructors smiled at him and told that perhaps romance was not really his natural genre.

Does this always happen? Is Danielle Steele forever slated to write romance, and Jerry Spinelli books for the young? Can Neil Gaimann abandon his fantastic and shimmering worlds for a novel that doesn't involve gods, magic, or disembodied entities? I wonder.

I know that successful authors have found ways to buck their own trends. Judy Blume went on to write adult books, although I never met anyone who read any of them. I know one horror writer who occasionally writes YA books but I've never seen any of those, either.

Maybe we really are slated to express the stories and the magic that we have within us in a particular way. Dan Fogelberg, one of my favorite Illinois songwriters/musicians, always wanted to do heavy metal. The thought of that is nearly too strange to wrap my head around. When he made music things like "Part of the Plan" and "Longer" were what came out. His tunes didn't invite head-banging so much as soul-searching and he accepted that, although he still yearned for a screaming guitar.

I'd love to write an adult murder mystery and have been playing with something along those lines. Of course, when I gave my hero a love interest, she turned out to be psychic.

I guess paranormal is wired somewhere into my writing DNA and that's just how I define my writing world. And maybe that's just part of the magic that I call writing.