About That Scholarship

Last blog post I talked about some recent successes I've had as a writer. It's been a while, but I finally have a few. On the other hand, I also had another rejection letter in my inbox the other day too. Anyway, the biggest of those success was winning the Horror Writers Association Rocky Wood Memorial Scholarship for Non-Fiction Writing. This has led to some interesting developments so far. One of the schools I work for, Paul D Camp Community College, set me up to be interviewed by the local newspaper, the Suffolk New Herald,  for an article. I also notified my alma mater magazines. We'll see if they choose to cover this or not.

This is not some ego burst, but an attempt to draw up some interest in the project to hopefully sell books whenever I can finish it and get it to an agent and/or publisher. I'm also working on a presentation for Monster Fest next week on this very project.

I actually applied to both the Rocky Wood Memorial Scholarship and the regular HWA Scholarship. Sometimes you have to throw your hat into many rings before one decides to take you in, just like my last blog post, "Throwing Shit Against the Wall." After they reviewed all applicants for several weeks, I received an email asking if I could be more specific about what I will do with their funds. So I did several things to accomplish this. The easiest was to create a wish list on Amazon.com.

I also knew I might need money for photos for the book, but I had no idea about the legalities of even using photos for books. I did know one thing, however, I knew David J. Skal wrote what I consider the best horror book I've ever read (and I've read a few), with The Monster Show. I friended Skal on Facebook, and interacted with him enough. This was not enough for me to say I "knew him" but enough to know he seems very approachable about this topic. So I Googled his name and found his author page, which provided me with his email, and I asked him about how to get photos. He proved to be as approachable as I previously thought as he replied to my email within 2 hours. I added this to my budget.

The third part of my budget was to purchase research articles. I work for two different higher education facilities, which allow me access to their article databases. These databases are enormous, and can provide a large amount of the information I'll need to write the book for free. However, while the majority of these articles are free, sometimes you have get an inter-library loan to get some of the articles. And these inter-library loan articles are often not free. I searched for some articles I knew I would have to pay for to get an idea of how much to budget for this. I found two articles that I felt were exemplary, one cost $6 and the other $36. So I budgeted as though these were the higher end and lower end of the articles I'd need.

They reviewed this for about another week or so, and then sent me an email telling me I won the scholarship. Now some of my colleagues at Paul D Camp are asking if I can do a presentation on my progress as I go. And I still need to contact someone to help me with the methodology, but that's a topic for another blog post.

Throwing Shit Against the Wall

I am from a blue-collar town in Pennsylvania, Erie to be exact. For whatever reason, everything up there relates back to various excrements and the crotch. We don't say a business went belly up, we say it went "tits-up." If an idea didn't work out, we say it "shit the bed." It's just part of the colorful way we talk.

So when we're trying all sorts of things to be successful, sometimes we'll say we're just "throwing shit against the wall to see what sticks." For some time now, I've been doing just that, and FINALLY, I have a few things that have stuck. Mind you, most of these things I was working on all summer in the hopes of drumming up some business during my slow time of the year as adjunct faculty. But then when things began to come in, it really began to pour.

First off, I spent part of my summer shopping my resume and a few clippings around to a few of the newspapers in the area to try and drum up business, keep busy, and bring in a few extra dollars. Well, they finally got back to me as soon as classes started again. I'll still work in a few articles into my busy schedule. I feel it is important for a writing teacher to continue writing for an audience anyway. And getting paid for it is always better than not.

Then the poem I sold at the beginning of summer is finally published in Teach. Write. Here it is. I seem to have a regular place to publish some of my more literary works since this is the second time they published my work. I have a personal essay I worked on over the summer that still needs some work, but when I do send it out, I will likely send it to them first. I like the publication a lot, and I think the piece is a good fit for them anyway. Their homepage is here.

Third, and most importantly, I just won the Horror Writers Association Rocky Wood Memorial Scholarship for Non-Fiction Writing for a non-fiction book idea I have on the history of Frankenstein in film. This is actually a really big deal. They split the award between myself and another writer, Joseph Maddrey, who seems like a real heavyweight, having published eight books and written and produced over 50 hours of documentary television. It's a tremendous honor just to be named in the same breath with someone with these kinds of accomplishments.

I'm sure I'll post much more about this scholarship and the project in the coming weeks and months. In the meantime, since winning this scholarship, I've received two more rejection letters in my email, but somehow, they don't seem so bad now.