Tag: October Kane

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The Constant Finding of My Creative Voice

I’ve written a lot. Professionally and as a hobby. Easily over five hundred million words—though that’s a rough estimate. I have no idea how I’d even try to check that. The point is, you would think, after all of that, I would’ve found “my voice.” 

You know the concept of a writer’s voice, I assume. It’s a series of vocabulary choices, pacing choices, sentence length, and rhythm decisions that make your art feel like yours. 

But I never found it. The writing voice that comes out of me doesn’t feel innate. Perhaps it does for others. I have to assume it does for others. But, for me, even in this article you are now reading, I am deciding what my voice sounds like. 

There’s a way I like my writing to read. 

Part of this is rhythm. I like my writing a little fast-paced. Go back and look, and you’ll see that I put a lot of short sentences around long ones. 

This isn’t always uniform, though. In my fiction, I like for more otherworldly and cosmic horror events to be more descriptive. I use specific words in those scenes. I save them for when I need to make a big impact. 

But here’s where I flip this on its head. Because isn’t what I am doing still my writing voice? I’m honestly not sure. Voice is supposedly this innate thing. A way of writing that occurs without thinking. Does it still “count” if it’s chosen?

And yes, this is going to be a little existential. I do write existential horror, after all. 

Because, to go down this line of thinking, we are essentially talking about the version of me that is writing and the version of me that is editing. I do make that distinction. I almost think of them at war. Or perhaps in a begrudging working relationship. Is the tempering done by the part of me paying attention to sentence length more or less my “voice” than the raw creativity before that tempering? 

Perhaps the true question to determine this is consistency. If voice is the art we cannot help but produce, then—by the nature of me always wanting to edit my work to a certain style—this controlled version of my creativity, what you are reading, is what’ll always happen. The rough drafts could be argued to contain more of my voice, but I hate my rough drafts. That’s ultimately what inspired me to pay so much attention to composition. It could be argued to be the catalyst for defining a style for myself.

Now, as is the case for a lot of these sorts of questions, I don’t actually think there’s a true answer. I don’t have one at least. The term “writing voice” is a vague enough term that someone may have already disagreed with my initial definition. And I wouldn’t blame them.But, as some form of a conclusion, I do believe that there’s something that changes in you when you’ve written enough. Your connection to words and sentences and stories becomes both more mechanical and more like sorcery. That is likely true of all art though, no matter the medium. And, frankly, that’s kind of wonderful. Let the mystery of voice continue, if only so we can try to understand it even more.

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A True Story of Cosmic Horror

Let me tell you a true story of cosmic horror. 

It’s a story from my childhood. 

I used to be so afraid of lightning storms. A long time ago now, I lived in Illinois, in a small town—I’ve basically always lived in small towns—and the weather in that state can be extreme. It’s got tornados, yes, and I have some memorable moments hiding from those—but that’s not what I mean. Illinois doesn’t mess around. 

The summers aren’t as hot as Florida, where I currently live, but they certainly weren’t pleasant. Springtime brought rain that would last for hours. The wind during fall was enough to make you step backward. And the winters…there’s a reason Chicago is famous for its winters. To my now Florida-acclimated self, the idea of the outside being that cold is truly scary. 

But what scared me was the lightning storms. The sound of them. The wind. Loud noises didn’t usually scare me. But the thunder did. I would try to sleep, try to rest, but each and every thunderclap would keep me awake. The usual childhood fears often didn’t find me, but the storm was real. I’d seen the damage storms can do. I can’t recall now, but I have to imagine I even feared that the house’s walls would not hold back the storm. That the world, at least where I was, was ending.

If you’ve read my first book, Nothing Will Be Left, the idea of something in the sky destroying things might sound familiar. The very first part—and still one of my favorite things I’ve written—of the book is about an event where hands from the sky take thirteen people. I gave it the name Murder Sky. 

One of the things I’ve always liked about exploring cosmic horror—and science fiction, too—is the idea of scale. Going back to my time in Illinois, I would marvel at the scale of a city. Skyscrapers are impressive, yeah, but it was thinking of each of those massive buildings being full of people that really got the mind going. Being stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic is unpleasant—to put it mildly—but even seeing that sea of cars hinted at how many people there were. Even to this day, I get a sort of existential vertigo when I consider that things are happening everywhere at all times. The stores are open all day, the restaurant makes hundreds of orders, and cars are constantly carting people to more locations than I can know, visit, or understand. 

It’s honestly kind of shocking it took me until my late twenties to really start writing cosmic horror, given all this. Sure, I haven’t been scared of lightning storms in a long time. Sometimes the arcing lighting is amazing, and the rain helps clear away the heat. I think I like storms now. But the sky is a different matter. I think about the night sky and the space between planets and it does, in a way, still scare me. 

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Series Catch Up: The Quill Point Chronicles

Series Catch Up: The Quill Point Chronicles

Do you love to dive into an amazing series?

We have the ultimate Thriller, Horror, LGBTQIA+ series for you: 

There are 2 books so far in the complete series.

Check out book one Nothing Will Be Left here:

Albert Turner was only supposed to be visiting Quill Point, but now he may never leave.

Quill Point, Illinois, used to be like any other small town. Most of its citizens have lived there their entire lives. Each of them is a part of a larger community of friends, neighbors, and coworkers.

When the sky changed, no one saw it for what it was: the beginning of the end. Now, as horrors and monsters rise, and the population of Quill Point dwindles, the remaining citizens must try to survive the evil machinations at the heart of this new apocalypse. They are in the middle of something beyond human understanding. Something primal and hostile.

Nothing Will Be Left is the first book in the terrifying Quill Point Chronicles. A cosmic horror anthology series told from multiple perspectives. It’s full of existential terror, body horror, and unknowable destruction waiting to be unleashed.

You can order this book  in all formats directly from our 4HP Website and receive 10% OFF using coupon code 4HP10!

Nothing Will Be Left (The Quill Point Chronicles #1)