Back of the Envelope

Welcome to the 110th Storyblogging Carnival. Enjoy the stories.

---

The Signal from Space
by Terry Haferkamp of Shadow Dwellers
A 330 word brief story rated PG.

A signal is misinterpreted. This is a science fiction story written from a prompt with a surprising twist.

---

Feeling the Breeze: Dreadless
by conditional cognition of conditional cognition
An 963 word brief story rated PG.

A tale of my experiences and people's perceptions of me during the 9 years I had dreadlocks, from DC to the OC.

---

Happily Ever
by Pietro of Engrossing Tales
A 1,384 word short story rated PG-13.

This is a love story of a different sort. They say love lasts forever, even beyond the grave... but what kind?

---

Believe in yourself! Baby 80 and 81!
by Harmonyloft of 100 Baby Challenge
A 2,927 word short story rated PG.

Cadence Sierra's wish is to have a huge family in Sims 3. She decides to take on a 100 baby challenge. Will she ever succeed?

---

Project हो तो ऐसा (बिलकुल न हो)
by Mohit Salgaonkar of Still Waiting to Wake
An 4,294 word short story rated PG-13.

Read the hilarious narration of how a crazy project in Mumbai University was (almost not) completed!

---

This concludes the one hundred and tenth Storyblogging Carnival.

If you'd like to take part in a future carnival, please contact me. I am also looking for hosts. Other carnivals can be found here.

The Storyblogging Carnival can be found at The Truth Laid Bear's ÜberCarnival.

Labels: Storyblogging Carnival

The next Storyblogging Carnival will be the one hundred and tenth. It will be hosted here, at Back of the Envelope, and going up on Monday, July 5th. If you use your blog to share your fiction, then the Storyblogging Carnival is your opportunity. Here we host any and all forms of storytelling in blog format. If you're curious about what this looks like, have a look at some examples of previous storyblogging carnivals.

If you'd like to participate, please e-mail your story submissions to me at dscrank-at-alum-dot-mit-dot-edu (or post in my comments), including the following information:

• Name of your blog
• URL of your blog
• Title of the story
• URL for the blog entry where the story is posted
• (OPTIONAL) Author's name
• (OPTIONAL) A suggested rating for adult content (G, PG, PG-13, R)
• A word count
• A short blurb describing the story

The post may be of any age, from a week old to years old. The submission deadline is 11:59 PM Eastern time on Saturday, July 3rd. More detailed information follows (same as always):

1. The story or excerpt submitted must be posted on-line as a blog entry, and while fiction is preferred, non-fiction storytelling is acceptable.
2. The story can be any length, but the Carnival will list them in order of length, from shortest to longest, and include a word count for each one.
3. You may either send a complete story, a story in progress, or a lengthy excerpt. You should indicate the word count for both the excerpt and the complete story in the submission, and you should say how the reader can find more of the story in the post itself.
4. If the story spans multiple posts, each post should contain a link to the beginning of the story, and a link to the next post. You may submit the whole story, the first post, or, if you've previously submitted earlier posts to the Carnival, the next post which you have not submitted. Please indicate the length of the entire story, as well as the portion which you are submitting.
5. The host has sole discretion to decide whether the story will be included or not, or whether to indicate that the story has pornographic or graphically violent content. The ratings for the story will be decided by the host. I expect I'll be pretty lenient on that sort of thing, but I have some limits, and others may draw the line elsewhere. Aside from noting potentially offensive content, while I may say nice things about stories I like, I won't be panning anyone's work. I expect other hosts to be similarly polite.
6. The story may be the blogger's own or posted with permission, but if it is not his own work he should gain permission from the author before submitting to the Carnival.

If you'd like to be added to the e-mail list, please let me know. Finally, I appreciate folks promoting the carnival on their own blogs, and I'm always looking for bloggers willing to host future carnivals.

Labels: Storyblogging Details

Old Post: My earlier post addressed the question of "What is horror?"

Since I've already addressed the question of what is horror, the next question is "What is Christian horror?" To answer that, I first have to answer the question, "What is Christian fiction?" This is a topic I've addressed before, but I'll do so again here. There are several possible answers:

1. It's written by a Christian.
2. It's written for a Christian audience.
3. It incorporates a Christian worldview.

Now, I left out some variants, such as "presenting the gospel message," but while that would definitely make something Christian, I don't believe that it's a necessary condition. And what I'm looking for is what is necessary for something to be considered a Christian work of fiction. Often what we mean by Christian fiction is something that incorporates all three: it's written by Christians, for Christians, about Christian things. Can horror do that? Well horror can definitely be written by Christians, and there are Christians that read horror, so I suppose 1 and 2 are possible. Is three? Notice that I said that it incorporates a Christian worldview--not that it advocates it. It needs to acknowledge and address the Christian worldview, not necessarily preach it.

And herein, I believe, lies the essence of Christian horror. It lies in challenging the Christian worldview. Or more specifically, in challenging the safe, conventional beliefs of the Christian worldview which very often have weak theological foundations. It means asking the hard questions and rejecting the easy answers. You see, Christians believe all sorts of scary things. We believe in demons--dark supernatural powers who wish us harm. We believe in the possibility of eternal damnation. We believe in a God who does not shy away from judgment. And we tell ourselves that we are safe from these things. God loves us and saves us and protects us. And yet... why are we so certain? Anyone who's read the Bible knows that for every passage that offers reassurance, there's another that challenges and condemns us. Writing Christian horror is not Biblical exegesis. It is not the writer's job to explain why the world is not safe, why Christians still suffer and die, why not everyone is saved. It is his job to show that these things are so.

For the Christian, the universe is not meaningless. There is a God, and he has a purpose. But that purpose is unfathomable to us--too deep for us to fully understand in this lifetime (and there aren't any promises for the next). It is bigger than us, vast and unmeasurable, but it is aware of us. We are caught up in it whether we want to be or not.

This is rich material for the writer to mine, and the inability to write horror when you have this to work with is more a failure of imagination than anything else.

New Post: More on the subject here.

Labels: Christianity, Writing