Writer's Block is a nightmare. Every time you sit down in front of that blank screen or page and words don't immediately flow leads to frustration and apathy. It's one of the most frightening thing  a writer faces... and most do at some time or another. I've put together three ways of combating Writer's Block that really help.

1. Sonar.

Go and find somewhere (anywhere) that you can sit down with a pen and paper. Close your eyes and listen. With your eyes closed, describe (don't just list) the sounds you can hear. I know. Your handwriting will be terrible. Listen between the layers of sound. You'll be surprised at how much noise you can hear. When you're finished, immediately weave your sounds into 100 words of prose. You'll be surprised at what you've come up with.

2. Receipt.

You're going to look like a weirdo. Just accept it. It's going to happen. For this one, you need to go to your local grocery store (supermarket) and pick up dropped receipts. There's usually loads of them. I found one with diapers (nappies), chocolate spread and red wine on it. The laughs I had with that one. Just imagine it. Anyway, once you've got a few receipts (or have been chased away by security), go find somewhere quiet and examine your quarry. There's not much you can do with asparagus and cauliflower, but imagine the possibilities of c0-codamol, bungee cords and a knife sharpener. Then, turn it into 100 words of prose. You'll have great fun. I promise.

3. Alone in a dark room.

Get your trusty pad and pen... and a scarf, or something you can tie over your eyes Blind Man's Bluff or Pin The Tail On The Donkey style. Get a chair and place that in the middle of the room. Shut out the lights and tie the scarf over your eyes. Sit down and get writing about everything that's racing through your mind. Everything that you can hear, smell, taste in the air. Allow yourself to become gradually aware of the other presence in the room. Try to keep this up for at least 10 minutes. What is it? What do you imagine it looks like? Smells like? Tastes like? What is its intent? When you're sufficiently creeped out, leap up, rip the scarf from your eyes and flick on the lights. Write 100 words of prose about someone else having the same experience.

I hope these fun little ways of breaking Writer's Block help. The focus here is on fun, not creating a masterpiece. After all, isn't that why we all got into this game to begin with. Fun. If writing ceases to be fun, of course you're going to get 'bunged up'. Fun is the fibre of the writer's diet.

Eat up!

I know. Not horror.

I suppose what I am driving at, and the reason for this post, is that creativity does not have to fit within a certain set of boundaries to be successful. If we relate this back to my previous post on panopticism, we can see that not fitting into 'cells' where we can be 'corrected' is disturbing - it breaks our notions of what things are. And what is horror if it doesn't exploit the familiar, change our perceptions of realityIf poetry equals form and structure, what is its Other?

e.e. cummings’ poems are immediately recognisable by his unique approach to punctuation, grammar and typography. love is more thicker than forget typifies this approach. On first glance, this poem seems grammatically unstructured and is difficult to engage with. However, on deeper linguistic analysis, it becomes apparent that there is a definite structure to be found and understanding this structure leads to a more detailed understanding of the poem’s content.

Immediately obvious is cummings’ lack of capital letters and punctuation to mark sentence boundaries. In an essay by Richard Cureton, he claims that ‘cummings often criticizes teaching and/or the accumulation of knowledge while he praises the emotions’ (Cureton: p. 5). If Cureton’s claims are true, we can ascertain a correlation between teaching and structure, emotion and – to use cummings’ brand of deviant morphology – unstructure. Through this connection, it is easy to see that cummings violates traditional forms of written grammar in order to ‘get closer’ to his emotions.

In order for the reader to gain greater understanding of this poem, it becomes necessary to apply some standard punctuation and typology.(1) 

(L)ove is more thicker than forget(;)
more thinner than recall(;)
more seldom than a wave is wet(;)
more frequent than to fail(.)

(I)t is most mad and moonly
and less(,) it shall unbe(,)
than all the sea(,) which only
is deeper than the sea(.)

(L)ove is less always than to win(;)
less never than alive(;)
less bigger than the least begin(;)
less littler than forgive(.)

(I)t is most sane and sunly
and more(,) it cannot die(,)
than all the sky(,)which only
is higher than the sky(.)

Once the punctuation is applied, a structure becomes apparent. Each stanza is a sentence. 1 and 3 are lists, and 2 and 4 are standard sentences that each contain a parenthetical. By using these parentheticals as a starting point, analysis becomes possible.

Each parenthetical begins with ‘it’ which, for both, is an anaphoric reference to the prior ‘it’, which itself is an anaphoric reference to the word ‘love’. Love is clearly the theme of the poem, but cummings takes this further and attempts to ‘locate’ (2) love. He begins this location in these parentheticals. In the parenthetical ‘it shall unbe’, cummings coins a new word: unbe. This has been created as an antonym of be and suggests that love can cease to exist. When compared with ‘it cannot die’, there seems to be a paradox. However, if love cannot ‘die’ and yet it can ‘unbe’, cummings seems to be suggesting that love can cease to exist in a form that he recognizes but still carries on. Love, then, exists amorphously and is constantly subject to change. This idea is increasingly important when examining cummings’s attempts to reconcile love’s amorphous nature in the rest of the poem.

Looking at stanza one, the reader sees a list of comparative statements. Grammatically speaking, a few things don’t make sense. In the first line, cummings writes ‘love is more thicker than forget’. There are two glaring problems here: ‘more thicker’ and ‘than forget’. Thicker is a comparative adjective and, therefore, the ‘more’ that precedes it is normally redundant. However, this pattern of using ‘more’ before a comparative adjective is repeated in the next line, and also in the last two lines of stanza three (this is actually changed to ‘less’ in these lines). The second problem: comparatives apply to nouns. In this line, ‘forget’ is a verb. If we continue the line of thought that cummings considered emotions to be of much greater importance than structures – such as grammar – then the reader is looking at a complex comparison of love and the act of forgetting. The same thing applies to the following line, which amounts to another complex comparison: love and remembrance.

Worthy of note here is the correlation between the lines. Each line makes a comparison based on substance (thicker and thinner) and also what is being compared (forget and recall). The second line contains antonyms of the words in the first line. The same thing happens in lines three and four of stanza three: bigger and littler, begin and forgive. While the antonymy of the latter pair is not explicit, by using these antonymic pairs and then changing his pattern, cummings is able to draw our attention to this particular pair and suggests a journey that must be made in order to achieve forgiveness.

Looking at stanza three, we see the same pattern repeated in the third and fourth lines. In fact, stanza three is a mirror replica of stanza one: line one of stanza one matches line four of stanza three; line one of stanza three matches line four in stanza one, and so forth. With this in mind, more meaning can be drawn from the poem’s structure. The matches mentioned above amount to a comparison of forgiving and forgetting, and the frequency of winning and failing. This continues cummings’ attempts to locate love.

Returning to stanza one and the second pair of lines, the reader will notice antonymy again between ‘seldom’ and ‘frequent’. This illustrates cummings’s attempt to locate love’s frequency to further his definition. Line three is particularly problematic. cummings writes, ‘Love is more frequent than a wave is wet’. A wave is not always wet. There are a range of waves: sonic waves, micro-waves. In fact, the only waves that are wet would be waves of water. So, in the grand scheme of things very few waves are wet. cummings is saying that love is rare. This line’s match in stanza three is ‘Love is less never than alive’. ‘Alive’ is problematic because cummings isn’t explicit about ‘which kind’ of alive he is referring to. He could mean the physical state of being ‘alive’, or he could refer to the emotion of feeling ‘alive’. With cummings’s emphasis on emotion, the reader must be led in the latter direction.

There are also comparisons to be drawn from stanzas two and four. ‘Love is most mad and moonly’ suggests that cummings believed love to be a little bit crazy at times. By looking at the etymology of the word ‘mad’ and combining that with cummings’s coining of ‘moonly’, the reader is led to the word lunatic – the base word of which, ‘luna’, means moon.

Line one of stanza four follows cummings’s use of antonymy: ‘Love is most sane and sunly’. Here, cummings suggests that love is the most natural thing in the world. When compared with ‘mad and moonly’, this line serves to reinforce the argument that the poem’s meaning is based on the amorphous nature of love – sometimes love is ‘moonly’, sometimes it is ‘sunly’.

A further comparison can be drawn between stanzas two and four. Stanza two positions love as ‘deeper than the sea’. The word deep has emotional conditions. Love, then, is described as well as being positioned. The same thing happens in stanza four when love is described as being ‘higher than the sky’. When linked with the emotional connotations of the word ‘deep’, ‘high’ here seems to be a state of being. Also, if love is ‘higher than the sky’ and ‘deeper than the sea’, cummings seems to be suggesting that love is all encompassing on both a physical and emotional level.

To come up with a working definition of cummings’ location of love would take a much deeper analysis of his wider body of work. However, based on this poem, the reader can at least get a sense of cummings’ vision of love. This poem gives an indication of this in three ways: size and substance, frequency, and nature.

Size and substance are referred to in each stanza. Stanza one suggests that love is more substantial than the act of forgetting and less substantial than remembering. Remembering, to cummings, is easy, yet forgetting is a difficult act. It could be posited that cummings is writing of bad experiences of love. In stanza two, cummings refers to love as being ‘less…than all the sea’. This reference is mirrored in stanza four when he claims that love is ‘more…than all the sky’. The amorphous nature and size of love are a common theme.

Love’s frequency is also up for debate. It has already been mentioned that cummings clearly considered love to be rare due to his comparison between love and wet waves. He makes further reference to frequency in stanza three when he writes ‘love is less always than to win’. Compared with his temporal reference to failure in stanza one, love is positioned thus: love occurs more frequently than failure and less frequently than winning. In competition, failure and winning are the only outcomes, so cummings here leaves us with an element of paradox to add to his definition of love.

It is only by revealing the grammatical and syntactical structure of a poem that on its surface seems to defy and violate all traditional systems of grammar that the reader finds themselves in a position to reveal and understand cummings’s analysis of the nature of love. cummings leaves us with a vision of love that is an all-encompassing, paradoxical state of being that is constantly subject to change. Just about sums it up for me.


(1) All ‘corrected’ punctuation is denoted by ()

(2) ‘Locate’ here does not mean ‘find’ as in cummings’s search to find love, but rather his search define love in a particular mental and emotional space.


 

The purpose is of this short essay is to describe the Panopticon’s design and to explore how this institutional architecture performs as a disciplinary mechanism within society and how this relates to the horror genre. It will be, by no means, a complete account and I will be exploring this concept in a series of future blog entries.

To the left, you can see the diagram of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon: ‘at the periphery, an annular building; at the centre a tower; this tower is pierced with wide windows that open onto the inner side of the ring; the peripheric building is divided into cells, each of which extends the whole width of the building; they have two windows, one on the inside, corresponding to the windows of the tower; the other, on the outside, allows the light to cross the cell from one end to the other.’ (Foucault, p. 200.)

As you can see, once manned with a ‘supervisor’, the tower at the centre of the panoptic arrangement becomes an ‘all-seeing’ eye. (The word Panopticon means exactly that: ‘all-seeing’). This is a concept which many of you will recognize from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings with Sauron’s eye gazing out over Middle Earth in search of The One Ring. However, Sauron’s gaze is fallible. There are ways to hide from it, and he is not watching everyone, all the time.

Each of the cells in the Panopticon is flooded with light. The supervisor stands in an ‘all-seeing’ position. ‘All that is needed, then, is to place a supervisor in a central tower and to shut up in each cell a madman, a patient, a condemned man, a worker or a schoolboy.’ (Foucault, p. 200.) The Panopticon, then, provides a maximum disciplinary effect for a minimal investment of manpower. Furthermore, some panoptic constructions have mirrored windows on the central tower so that ‘inmates’ are never aware of precisely when they are subject to the supervisor’s gaze, rather they are left with the assumption that they are being watched continually.[i]

The next concept within the panoptic arrangement is that of position. The supervisor is at the centre, the ‘inmate’ on the periphery, the outside edge, liminal. Liminality (from the Latin word limen meaning ‘a threshold’) is defined as ‘a psychological, neurological or metaphysical subjective state, conscious or unconscious, of being on the ‘threshold’ of or between two different existential planes’.[ii] For the purposes of this and future essays, I will also extend that definition to include the concept of the ‘outsider’, the being who lives on ‘the edge’ or ‘threshold’ of societal norms.

So, darkness and light, liminality and centrality, the gaze and the subject, normality and abnormality. I’ll discuss darkness and light here. The rest will be addressed in future posts.

Taking the terms ‘darkness’ and ‘light’, within the context of the horror genre, and, bearing in mind the concepts of ‘hidden’ and ‘visible’ within the context of a panoptic construction, one is lead to an automatic conclusion: dark and hidden is bad, light and visible is good. For the inmate, or subject, perhaps. Perhaps.

Horror stories typically work within a moral framework. Wes Craven’s Scream, for example, puts the ‘morality’ of horror within a fun and modern context. But, through the ages, the likes of The Brothers Grimm have told ‘horror’ stories through collections of fairytales – and the original versions are so much more horrific than the watered down versions published for children today. Parents read these stories to their children in the hopes that they will conform to the societal norms displayed in such pieces. The ‘outsiders’ of the stories, who are usually treacherous and dark characters, always come to a sticky end; punishment, if you will, for their deviance from the accepted moral framework; to move, as it were, out of the darkness and into the light.

Horror stories tell us we should be afraid of the dark. We turn on the lights and check under the bed. Ghosts and devils lurk in the shadowy places of the world. Vampires are killed by the sunlight. The same applies to Gremlins. The hunchback, Quasimodo is hunted by the angry mob when he leaves the ‘sanctuary’ of his bell tower. When Sergeant Howie refuses to participate in Lord Summerisle’s pagan society in The Wicker Man, he is dragged from the darkness into the light, dragged up inside the eponymous sacrificial pyre. Light, then is seen as a corrective, disciplinary force in horror.

There is one problematic character: the werewolf, to whom the full moon’s light effects the horrific change. However, moonlight has often been regarded as feminine and has strong connections with the notion of ‘lunacy’. This is for another essay, but I will explain the links briefly. The phases of the moon are rhythmic, waxing and waning, affecting the tides. It has long been held that a woman’s menstrual cycle can be affected by the phases of the moon, as can ‘insanity’ and ‘lunacy’. Again, there is a long history between women and madness, hysteria in particular.

Although the werewolf changes under the light of the full moon, he is quickly returned to human form when the sun rises. Again, the light is a corrective force. Sunlight ‘normalizes’.

So, there are ‘bad things’ and ‘outsiders’ in the darkness and ‘normality’ and ‘safety’ in the light. For who?

Back to the Panopticon. If society is the ‘supervisor’ in the tower, the beings occupying the lightened cells ‘caught’ and subject to society’s corrective ‘gaze’, what space, then, do our ‘horrors’ occupy? Outside, ‘outsiders’, beyond the edge of the supervisor’s sight and, therefore, must be hunted, caught, enclosed and made ‘visible’.

But, ‘visibility is a trap’. (Foucault, p.200)

Let’s consider that for a moment. If the ‘horrors’ live outside the panoptic arrangement, and we submit ourselves freely to its cells (for safety, light), we make ourselves permanently visible to the supervisor occupying the central tower. But he occupies a darkness all his own, which we are not privy to. Isn’t being in the ‘light’, then, the most dangerous place to be? And how resonant then is Tangina’s plea in Poltergeist? ‘Stay away from the light!’


[i] http://www-poleia.lip6.fr/~ganascia/Catopticon

[ii] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon

Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault (Penguin, London: 1977)

I set out to write an entry about 'scary'. Oh, I had all kinds of intelligent comments about alienation and Other to talk about, but I had a few beers... You know how it is, surely? 

Then it struck me! Music! Thought, feeling, insight, reflection, evocation of emotion on a primal level. There's a definite 'scariness' - and poetry - which can happen in music. Not all music: There's only so much GaGa, Bieber, et. al, one can take! So I delved into the musical part of my mind for horror 'fun' and horror 'scary' and horror 'thoughtful', which is what Dark River is all about!

Some of you will know where I'm coming from, some of you will think I'm a bit retro in my choices. I hope you enjoy what I've chosen for you. And please listen to the words of these 10 songs!! Listen to them all. Be afraid. Enjoy, but think!

Number 10. I do hope you realise that this song is about a love affair between a women who dies and her lover, who digs her up! The greatest ghoul in literature: Get in there Heathcliff, lad!!

Number 9. Needs or beats? You decide. Either way...

8. Spend half-an-hour or so and appreciate this for what it is. Just amazing! That's what it is. Admittedly, Stephen King and Michael Jackson was not something I would have given creedence to, but... it worked!

#7 Who hasn't been in a place like this? You haven't? It's just me?

#6 I love the dead before they rise, no farewells, no goodbyes. I never even knew your now rotting face.

Number 5. Sex with a refrigerated corpse. You must listen! How did he get away with it?

Number 4. Oh, who doesn't love the classic horror nature of this?

Number 3. Love the intensity and lyrics. Such obsessions can be dangerous.

#2. How dark do you want it? Oh. just listen - and think!

My number 1 horror video. Watch and listen, and see why. Gore fans enjoy, but I hope you listen also! You will need to log in and prove you're 18 to watch this!

So, after reading my last post, you'll be wondering why I decided to squeeze in another post so soon. The answer is simple: I set myself a challenge. I tweeted out earlier that I'd have one out by 8pm GMT. A promise is a promise. It's 7:49 on my computer, make that 7:50. Time waits for no man. I meant to start writing an hour ago, but the phone rang, etc., etc., etc. I don't expect the grammar to be perfect - I'll fix that tomorrow! Hopefully!

One of the most horrific things I go through is when my children get sick. I remember one time, my eldest son got sick. So sick, in fact, that we had to call the doctor out to our house to have him looked at. I held him on my chest and I could feel him burning against me. He was only wearing a nappy and he was burning away. His face was red and he hitched when he breathed. He'd vomited all over me several times. 

I'd tried to take his temperature, but it's Sod's Law! The bastard thing's batteries failed. All we could do was guess...and wait!

The boy was floppy, lethargic. Hitching breaths. Face red as a Washington apple. No car. No cash for a taxi. We were waiting. And waiting. Utterly dependent on an NHS who are inundated with people bringing their pets to emergency room and women complaining that they can't get their false nails off in time for their holiday to Turkey. Yes, it's true!

So there we were sat, me and my wife (yes, the editor answers to a higher power - occasionally!) It's 7:59! Make it 8:00. Bugger. Time flies!

But not on this occasion. It seemed like hours. At times, my son's eyes would roll back into his head. Sometimes, he would lie so still, the only thing that let me know he was alive was his body heat. And I kept kissing him. My wife kept kissing him, running her fingers down his burning, naked back.

I kissed him because I didn't know whether it was the last time I could!

The doctor eventually showed. Rolling up in his Ford Fiesta with the green light on top. 'Honey and lemon,' he said. 'He only needs two teaspoonfuls of liquid an hour to keep him hydrated.'

'Bye.'

All night we watched, taking it in turns to make sure he was still breathing, poking him occasionally to make sure he was still alive. The night passed. The sun rose.

I was knackered. My wife was knackered. All we wanted to do was sleep.

All he wanted to do was play!

It's 8:07. I think it was worth the wait!

I thought I was going to do a blog entry a couple of times a week. I was mistaken.

Things have been so hectic! Between reviewing and recruiting, reading submissions, looking at artwork, designing and redesigning the website, negotiating contracts, answering emails, soliciting submissions from some very famous writers, contacting academics, creating our ad, compiling quizzes, creating reciprocal links, managing advertising campaigns, marketing, I have barely had time for a cup of coffee, let alone time to update my blog.

But today, I thought, I’ll take this day. This day shall be my blog day!

Then the phone rang, then I made the mistake of checking my email, then I thought I’ll just get that review done, then I decided to try and plan a competition (details coming soon!), then I realised I’d promised to write back to a few people regarding their submissions.

I sat down at 7:30 this morning. It is now 12:45. I just know there’s going to be a knock on the door any minute!

Dark River Issue 1 is still scheduled for a February release, but we may move that up to January!

The free eBook versions are a definite go. We are still trying to figure out how to produce a free print copy. One of our ideas is to do a limited run of print copies (A4 (8 and a half by 11, for you Americans) full-colour glossy, 104 pages), but these would have to be purchased. The proceeds would enable us to move forward with the free print idea. Is it something you would buy? The approximate costing so far would mean that they would retail for around £5 ($7.50 US) + shipping. Let us know by commenting below.

I hope you’ve been by to visit KA Opperman’s blog. The man is a wonder with words! Your horror vocabulary will never be the same. There are definitely more words to chill your heart than blood, flesh, sinew and the like. Visit Dan Mohan’s blog while you’re at it for a Zombie 101 class. Make sure you leave a comment to let them know what you think of their blogs!!

I bloody knew it! There’s the door.

Right, that’s done. Bloody mailman to see if I could take a parcel for the neighbour. Now, rejection letters to write, review material to read, post this on the website, oh and I have to phone…

We keep tweeting things like 'Send us something that will scare us' or that will 'keep us tossing and turning all night'. It is only logical that someone submitting material is going to ask about what that is. 

There is no precise answer to that. I mean, bees and wasps are a constant source of horror for us throughout the summer and early autumn, but they're not really scary. Likewise, we wouldn't want to get locked in a car full of food with a grizzly bear sniffing around. 

Men (or women) running around with chainsaws, fingerknives, machetes or a good old kitchen knife are entertaining (in a film/story context) but not particularly frightening. Neither are tales of indescribable horrors, dripping lake beasts with 'teeth like razors, blood oozing from between their gaping jaws'. Fun, yes. Scary?

'The Boogeyman' by Stephen King frightens us. It's not the tentacled, slithering beast. It's the cowardice of the man who hears noises in the room where his child is sleeping and refuses to enter.

It's a contextual thing.

'Halloween' frightened us a hell of a lot more than 'A Nightmare On Elm Street'. There was something about Michael Meyer's lack of emotion that produced fear, whereas Freddy Krueger's dark  humour devalued the fear he was supposed to produce. He was too familiar with us, the audience. People, I'm sure, will have their own opinion on that one.

'Eden Lake' was particularly frightening and disturbing. The horrors that we can inflict on each other are as terrifying, if not more so, than the ones we imagine. In the same vein, 'Five Across The Eyes' and 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre' do the same thing.

John Ajvide Lindqvist's 'Let The Right One In' disturbed us. The bullying, the alcoholism, the isolation. How willing we are, as humans, to put ourselves into inescapable situations. But more than that, the way in which the supernatural is so readily accepted by Oskar because of his loneliness and vulnerability.

It's a contextual thing.

It's alright to have the most horrific being ever imagined show up on a page or screen, but if the context's not there, neither is the fear. To us, horror fiction is another creature entirely.

Send us something that will frighten us here.

Hi all,

Thanks for stopping by.

We have decided to add two new features, and we are taking submission for them now. Check out the updated submission guidelines.

We are now looking to include graphic short stories or serials, and also short films or serials. We are hoping to launch the film section by the end of the month and the graphic shorts/serials will be included in the magazine. We may also provide a dedicated section of the site for these.

Also, we have expanded the More Great Horror section of the site to include your eBooks, Books, film sites, movies, etc. Please email us a link via the contact form. If you would like us to review the your product, we will need a copy.

We are growing all the time, so if you have a feature you would like to see, please let us know.

As we develop and enhance our site, we are constantly coming up with new ideas. Our latest is the Amazon shop. There are UK andUS versions at the moment, and more will follow soon. 

The reason we are providing a shop is in the hopes that faithful visitors will buy merchandise via Amazon. We get a small commission which goes towards keeping Dark River Magazine completely free. 

You may also notice the odd Google ad around the place. We also get a small amount of money each time you click on one of those ads. It is only small, but it will all help.

If we manage to get enough money together, we will be able to provide print copies of Dark River Magazine when it is launched and pay our contributors. We are also hoping to run competitions and prize draws. We want to keep this free and will do so as long as possible. 

I hope you choose to support us. because things are going to get very interesting around here. Wait and see...

Welcome to Dark River Press, the home of Dark River Magazine.

We want you to enjoy yourselves, so please look around and contact us. Let us know what you would like to see appear among our pages, or tell about something you think we should improve on.

We have received quite a few submission, but not enough. Please check out our submission guidelines and send us your stuff. We can't wait to read it.

Thanks for visiting.