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Discussion: Christian HorrorReported This is a featured thread

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gsasscer
gsasscer
Christian Horror
Sep 19 2008, 3:40 PM EDT | Post edited: Sep 19 2008, 3:40 PM EDT
I began writing what Suffering Madness in 1995. My goals were small - I targeted short stories in magazines to develop a name. After enough rejections to wallpaper my office, I realized my writing was fairly bad.

Fortunately, my desire overshadowed any detail like the mechanics of writing. I was dumb enough to ignore the rejections. I joined 3 critique groups at the same time, each with assignments and critiques. I suffered through the bleeding on my precious creations, cutting up my babies, and splattering blood ink on my stories. I develop thick skin and separated constructive criticism from opinion.

Then Suffering Madness was conceived in the death throws of an assignment. Support from an otherwise critical crowd brought the story out of the obscurity and into the light of a realistic novel.

These specific words caught the eye of Suzanne Kirk, then Senior Editor at Scribner. She liked it, though without an agent, could not take me past a handwritten letter, two dots and a smiling mouth. Unfortunately, even with an encouraging letter from a prominent editor, agents would scurry away like frightened spiders. Why? Suffering Madness was too cross-genre to market.

I learned publishing is less artistic and more about business. The gatekeepers in the publishing world require a toll – you must be a good gamble. A cross-genre novel for an author like Stephen King or Dean Koontz is an easy risk or gamble, but the odds are against a new author.

Thankfully, there are specialty publishers willing to gamble on the results.

So, are there challenges in writing horror novels? Absolutely. Anything worth your blood and sacrifice, scraping the scales off the underbelly of society, staring evil in the eye, and still holding your head up in church is worth the challenge.

My advise to authors: hold onto what you believe in and write what you enjoy.

- Glenn Sasscer 1  out of 1 found this valuable. Do you?    

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