Thank you for your comment and encouraging words! I really enjoyed your story too and I’ve read Sherbet’s other adventures on Colliderscope. I think you mesh humour, horror and the detective genre really well and I like the artwork. The black-and-white reminds me of the horror comics I read as a kid but have a pleasing adult flavour. I’ve updated the post to avoid giving anyone the idea that I didn’t like it. I truly do! It is only my outfit I want to put back in the wardrobe.

I don’t think Julia’s Dream adds anything interesting to the existing batch of stories of this particular type, which is why I’ve retired it. There’s also a kind of relief in retiring a story: now I don’t have to fiddle with it anymore, trying to make it work. It’s gone, done, and I can move on to something new. I have another story that’s a cliché too, the one that was so nicely rejected, but that will continue to circulate, after a tweak or two. I still believe in that one. In fact, I really like it. Eventually, someone will take it, cliché or not. As you say, some ideas endure. (A friend of mine suggested that Julia’s Dream would perhaps not seem clichéd if it was sent to a non-sci-fi/fantasy market. The thought had never crossed my mind. I wrote it thinking horror and never looked beyond that.)

You make a very good point about a publisher’s comments reflecting their particular tastes and needs. It’s all too easy to generalize from one comment. As I continue sending things out and writing new stories, I’ll hopefully get more feedback and get better at knowing what to take on and what to shake off.

Thank you again for taking the time to comment. I’ll keep an eye on the Sherbet Lock blog and look forward to seeing more of her.

All the best!

Caroline

You linked to my comic up there and when I saw the quote attached in the pingback email, I was a little confused and concerned you were trying to accuse me of plagiarizing you, but upon reading the whole post, I see that wasn’t precisely your intention… that said, this must be kind of like seeing your outfit on ‘What Not to Wear’ feels like.

(Also tiny amendment; that Sherbet comic is five pages, not one page, they’re just squashed together by my terrible WordPress.)

Sure, we definitely cover the same ground here but the similarities seem to end with the ‘werewolf eats lover’ premise. Our approaches are both very different and I personally think those big differences between how we dealt with these things when they came up in our respective works shows just how much life there is left in these old ideas and why they still endure.

You take a more linear approach to the plot, starting at the beginning and working through to the end from the POV of the Werewolf herself, whereas I started at the end and then worked through to the middle via the interpretation of a Sherlock Holmes style interpreter. Yours was also a more serious, cerebral narrative shooting for psychological horror, whereas I attempted to splice the detective genre with light horror and humour to create a joke that relied on the general understanding of those tropes in order for the audience to get why it was funny.

My personal view of cliches and tropes such as these is that they shouldn’t necessarily be avoided, so long as they’re acknowledged. A prime example of this is a movie I only got around to watching yesterday – Cabin in the Woods. It starts off looking like the most cliched thing ever, but the further you get into it, the more you start to realize that there are reasons for the cliches and you’re not watching a cliched horror movie, you’re watching a movie ABOUT cliched horror movies.

There are also things like Harry Potter that embrace countless cliches in fantasy and horror and are wildly popular for it. It’s worth noting that J.K. Rowling once received a lot of the same kinds of rejection letters that you did and the only reason a Publisher even gave her a chance in the first place was because some guy’s kid daughter read the manuscript and loved it.

I’m not saying that you can’t learn a valuable lesson from listening to a publisher, but that lesson tends to be a lesson on what that specific publisher will or won’t publish. Not everyone is looking for the same thing though, and a story like Julia’s Dream could easily find a home somewhere else.

Anyway, whatever you thought of it, I do appreciate you taking the time to read my work. All the best with your own writing!

-MVB

She asks, “What’s it like being a writer?”
The pros intone in unison, “Poor”.

And now that you’ve told me what the story was about I suspect I was … right.

The Cucumber King teaches important lessons about democracy through the medium of fictional cucumber people. I think I was probably brought up a republican, but this book may have influenced my staying that way.

There’s something about that picture. I don’t know what it is… shiver.

It’s not by HP Lovecraft is it?

“There was something wrong about the man. He walked through the door and in the dim half light I saw it. His skin was dark green and glistened. As he moved toward me in the twilight the shadows picked out tiny ridges and channels that showed that this was not mammalian skin it was something else – something rough. On his hands he wore little white gloves and one of them raised as if in greeting. And then I saw the smiling face. It didn’t have lips but a crack which pulled back exposing lighter succulent flesh within and from the edges a thin milky fluid drooled.”

So glad you liked the birch bark detail. To me, the fairy tale landscape looks something like the landscape where I spent my summers as a child and I borrowed the bark craft from there. My uncle used to have one of those packs. I remember the feel of it, and the way the flap creaked a little when you opened it.

Good luck with your own creative writing! It’s hard work but it’s also very liberating.