#98. Discoverability as a Writer and How to Push Through Self-Doubt

To listen to the show, click on a link to your favourite platform in the right hand column -->
or listen on the Brainstoryum page.
Transcription follows below:

Link to the British Fantasy Society Social Justice event: https://britishfantasysociety.org/product/playback-the-creative-fix-social-justice-through-writing/

Hello imaginative people. I’m Anna Tizard, and this is episode 98 of Brainstoryum.
 
One of the movies I watched over the holidays was The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, and we ended up watching the sequel as well, because they are just so lovely, and funny and uplifting, and we were in the mood for something gentle, though they’re not exactly Christmas movies. Between the two of them, there are so many enlightened quotes, that felt relevant to me, and to the writer’s journey, or any life journey, I suppose. A couple of really poignant ones are spoken by Judi Dench’s character, who says, "The only real failure is the failure to try," which is so true. I mean, that on its own is fridge door-worthy.
 
But the one that really made me sit up was in the second film, when she says, "Sometimes it seems to me that the difference between what we want and what we fear is a width of an eyelash."
 
This felt pertinent to me and sort of underlined something I’d been thinking about lately, about putting myself out there as a writer. Just before Christmas I got an email that I almost missed, asking me if I “still wanted” to do a ten-minute reading of one of my stories in front of an online audience for the British Fantasy Society. It took me a moment because I’d signed up for this thing so many months ago, I’d forgotten all about it. But my initial, gut response was anxiety. And I found myself thinking, “Oh, I don’t really want that hassle. I mean, it’s the middle of winter, I’m hunkering down, I just need to recuperate. Why couldn’t they have done this in summer when I’ve got more energy?” There were of course other thoughts underneath this one, like, “I hate being on camera, it’s so nerve-wracking. What if I stumble over my words, and look like a twit? It’s part of an event full of writers who are loads better than me,” and so on. It would have easy to give in to these worries and just say no. But after putting it off for a few days, I replied and said yes, I’d love to do it, because I knew that, logically, I can do this, and I obviously had wanted to it when the offer first appeared, otherwise I wouldn’t have applied. Also logically, I recognised that this was a great opportunity and I shouldn’t let nerves or self-doubt steal it away from me.
 
And this quote from the Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel reminded me why: what we want most deeply, most desperately, is necessarily bound up with fear, because if you really want something, then there’s a lot at stake, and failure is always possible. Just in the trying, just in the attempt, we put ourselves and what we desire on the line. We expose our vulnerability to other people; including complete strangers. But this is something we have to do, if we want that chance to get somewhere. Though this was just one event, I’m not expecting it to be life-changing, there was something about this invitation that gave me a “deer in the headlights” moment where I hesitated, because I didn’t feel up to it right then.
 
But also, something that life experience has taught me is that, it doesn’t matter if you’re not in the mood for something when you sign up for it. That just makes it more likely that you’ll be in the mood, or be able to get yourself into the mood, when the event actually takes place. There’s no point being in the mood for something when it’s not happening yet, so save your “in the mood” moment for when you get there.
 
Marketing in all its shapes and forms is difficult, for all of us, as artists and craftspeople who create on their own, away from prying eyes. First, we’ve got to just mentally leave a door open to it, and then, sometimes we have to step outside that door, outside our comfort zone. Be discoverable. Put your writing, and who you are as a writer, out there. That doesn’t mean that all opportunities are going to be right for you and that you should ignore your instincts. Just listen harder to your gut reaction and be honest with yourself as to why you’re feeling that way. Are you frightened of embarrassing yourself? Because people like people who are down to earth, and aren’t perfect, so that can work in your favour if you embrace it a little bit. Are you worried that you might be surrounded by writers who are better than you? We are always going to feel that. Comparisonitis is a bug we may never recover from. Don’t wait for the feeling to go away, because it probably won’t. The difference is, the power is, when you take action to do the thing anyway, and put yourself forward.
 
Well, in the end, the British Fantasy Society event was amazing, and I feel foolish for even hesitating to take part. As it happened, one of the other authors who was supposed to tell a story as well was unable to come, so my slot began slightly earlier than scheduled and I ended up with more time for Q&A, and I loved every minute. I read out an edited version of a Storm Brews which I drafted back in episode 87; I tried to be the scary old lady tea shop owner as I read it, as it’s written in first person; I had plenty to talk about afterwards as I was introducing what I do on this show, and how I get to share incredible fiction by other authors as part of the whole process. And the rest of the event—I wasn’t able to go to all of it, but it was a whole day, eight hours’ worth of content entitled, “The Creative Fix: Social Justice Through Writing”. There were fascinating panel discussions about social justice and how to bring concepts around that into fantasy fiction; other writers read out their fiction, and there was an interview with Philip Reeve who wrote the Mortal Engines Quartet (that’s when I started to really blush, that I was involved in an event where an internationally renowned author was speaking!). If you’d like to watch the event, it is free for British Fantasy Society members. If you’re not a member, you can access the event on their website shop, for a very modest fee. (I mean, it’s like a day-long Fantasy Fiction Convention and they are charging a mere £2.50 to view it all, about the price of a cup of coffee.) A cut version of my storytelling and the discussion afterwards will be available soon, I will either link it or embed it on my website, and during the next week I will update the Brainstoryum show notes to include that link. But in the meantime, if you’d like to see the entire event now, the link to that on the British Fantasy Society’s website is in the show notes right now.
 
**
Speaking of discoverability and putting yourself forward, I’m excited to share with you the amazing stories that my talented listeners wrote in with—and I must say, I was really blown away this time. It was quiet in the last show on the story submission front, because of the Christmas break, but the sheer range stories I received this time absolutely makes up for that. So I hope you’re sitting comfortably…
 
D. Krauss responded to “the quivering nightmare” which was a prompt from the Christmas show, with this interpretation:
 
“Formless, hidden in the shadows, a jelly or smoke or something boneless that quivers in hate, coming for me.”
 
This is eerie. It kind of sums up something that’s both abstract and tangible-feeling at the same time. Thank you, D. You can find D. Krauss, who writes horror and fantasy, at  dustyskull.com – that’s a hell of a url!
 
Paul McMillan wrote a story based on "the ghostly outline of the freakish reader" which came up on the last show.
 
“They whisper about the ghostly outline of the freakish reader in the drowned quarter of Atropy, a place where buildings lean like broken teeth and the fog tastes like old secrets. Some say he’s a librarian who refused to die, while others claim he is what happens when a person reads the same cursed book too many times.

Ryn goes looking for him after her father returns from the quarter with his eyes gone dark and his voice speaking in borrowed sentences. She follows the trail to a flooded archive where books float like corpses. The reader appears, pale and shimmering, as if sketched in wet charcoal. He cradles a book that hums like a heart. Ryn demands answers, and he simply opens the cover.

Her father’s voice pours out, begging her to run, while another voice, a cold, ancient one, invites her to stay and “know everything.” Ryn grabs the book and hurls it into the water, and the archive screams. The ghost lunges after it, dissolving as he sinks. The water stills, and the voices fade, but when Ryn races home, her father stands waiting, eyes glowing ink-black, and he says her name in both voices.”
 
Wow, this is so evocative, with so much vivid imagery and ideas. I feel like I’ve just stepped into a movie. Amazing, thank you, Paul.


Paul McMillan writes fantasy fiction and you can find him on social media at bookmarksloveandlore.
 
Jenni Thorne wrote a chilling piece of flash fiction based on “the ghostly outline of the freakish reader”—be warned, this one is scary:
 
“The Follower

You develop a sense for this sort of thing. When their profile pictures are something random, that’s usually the first warning. The comments start off gentle, kind, but somehow you get a feeling. You know they will escalate.

I should have known better than to interact at all, but I was rushing. All it took was one heart. As if tapping that icon switched on his crazy and switched off my life.

"Hey there, I'm your most devoted reader.”
"I've got all your books, even the rubbish feminist one.”

Then…

“I saw you shopping today, Sexy.”
“I like your red scarf, Sexy. It matched your lips.”

Then…

“Hey Sexy, why don’t you talk to me?”
“You think you’re too good for me?”

Then…

“I’m going to teach you a lesson.”
“I will see you soon, Sexy.”

The police said they would trace him and caution him. They assured me it usually did the trick. Unconvinced, I decided it would be better to get away. I thought I’d be safer at my parents’ cottage for a while.

Then…

“Mum and Dad can’t save you, Sexy.”

I can see the ghost of his hulking, freakish, wild-haired outline, silhouetted against the snowy lawn. The axe from the shed swings in his hand as he lurches towards what I am now realising, is a very delicate seventeenth-century front door. I don’t think the heavy curtain will protect us from him like it does from drafts.

I’ve called the police.

I hope they get here in time.”
 
Woah. This is really chilling. I like how we’re switching between external action, and words read online, so it sort of weaves in the psychological guesswork. Sweet-talk that turns to threats, with the final physical appearance of the stranger. Thank you, Jenni!
 
You can find Jenni Thorne, who normally writes poems, on Bluesky as jenthorne (and there’s an e at the end of Thorne).
 
Nick Vracar was also inspired by “the ghostly outline of the freakish reader”:
 
“Eva had filled the old house with cameras, the best money could buy, but there was a fault in the system. The camera she had set up in the library was on the fritz. She considered returning it. She opened it, tooled around with it, closed it back up.
 
The image on the viewfinder flickered, rapidly at times, then almost unnoticeable at others. She switched through its settings, cycling from normal vision to night vision and then to its electromagnetic spectrum reader. The image on the viewfinder blinked on.

She spun the camera around on its tripod, and it now pointed at the window overlooking the grounds. The image on the viewfinder shimmered again, and as it did there was an outline of a woman standing by the window, and then gone. Eva barely noticed it but she knew she had.

The image flickered again and the outline reappeared and disappeared with it. The image blinked faster and faster, and the outline of the woman remained longer and longer, standing at the window, her shoulders slumped, her head tilted as she turned to look at Eva.”
 
Ooh, this is spooky. Is she a zombie? A demon, or a spirit? What happens next? Another, completely different interpretation of “freakish reader”. Thank you, Nick. You can find Nick Vracar’s short stories and articles at nvracar.wordpress.com.
 
Paul Monteith also wrote:
 
The Ghostly Outline of The Freakish Reader

A hard rain peppered the library windows, and thunder shook the building. Lightning had knocked out the fluorescents, leaving only the low yellow glow of the sodium emergency lighting to illuminate the library.

A librarian watched as a lean young man exited the Paranormal section with several books. It was the man's gait that caught her attention. He didn't seem to be walking at all. Instead, the man seemed to glide across the room to the Reading Table.

At the table, he sorted through his selection: See The Ghost, Be The Ghost; The Grapes of Wraith; and Ghosting For Dummies. The librarian was captivated by the book titles and his appearance. His jet-black hair contrasted with his mausoleum-white skin. His clothes, hanging loosely on his bone-thin frame, made him look as wasted as a desiccated corpse.

His sunken green eyes and bony finger followed a line of text on the page. At intervals, something he read made his black lips curl into a wicked smile, and he would nod as if agreeing with the text, which made his stone Ankh earrings sway.

Perhaps it was the low lighting, but as the librarian watched the man, it became more difficult to focus on him. He was fading away into nothingness. He became as transparent as his subject matter on Ghosts until he was only an outline. The light bent around him until there were only contours of a form where once had been a living soul.”
 
Ooh, I love the descriptions in this one, and we are right there with the librarian’s fascination. The way he just fades from view. I think I’d be nervous to pick up the books after that, in case they have anything to do with his fading away. Thank you for your story, Paul.
 
You can find Paul Monteith on Bluesky as Quantum Fairy.

Sophie Desaules wrote in with a story based on the entire Exquisite Corpse, which was “The mediocre scholar saw the ghostly outline of the freakish reader”. She said, “For me, the "freakish reader" is a necromancer who can use books to communicate with dead authors, including one mediocre scholar...”

“The great Professor Archmortis yawned. She had been sitting in the dark of her office for hours, and her back was aching. Caressing the soft parchment on which she had spent the day writing her Treatise of the Dark Art, she read the last paragraph of today's chapter and jotted down a conclusion:

"If all the above have failed, sacrifice a kid to the devouring fire."

She paused. She knew she had read this somewhere. She considered searching for the reference, but her candle was almost out, and those who did not know this simple trick had no business reading her book.

As she put down her pen, a shadow passed over the page. The Professor knew not to dismiss such an apparition as a trick of the mind.

Closing her eyes and focusing outwards, she recognised the pull of a thanaturgic invocation. Someone was calling her through her manuscript. She quickly dismissed the uncomfortable thought that, for someone to reach her in this way, she had to be dead.

Leaning closer to her page, she tried to bring the shadow in focus. Under the trembling light of the candle, a dim face emerged. The Professor held her breath. What were this caller's intentions? She reassured herself. Most probably, they were a reader, coming to seek the darkness of her advice.

The face became clearer. It breathed in deeply and screamed:

— Write down your light-blessed sources, you twit! Do you mean a goat, or a human kid?”
 
That’s brilliant—love the twist at the end. And part of what makes this funny is the release of the built-up tension, because there’s that touch of fear earlier on at the possibility that the professor might be dead. Thank you, Sophie Desaules for sharing your story.
 
Right, it is time to reach deep into our imaginations once more, a journey which begins with… the socks of destiny.

SOCKS OF DESTINY ORGAN JINGLE
 
As you may already know, Exquisite Corpse mixes words and phrases from different players into a sentence that goes Describing word—noun—action—describing word—noun”…
 
This part of the show is un-transpose-able! There's much giggling and rustling of paper as I pull words at random from the Socks of Destiny to create three unique sentences. Today’s resulting sentences are:
 
1.  The excited phoenix violently jolted with a diabolical shift at the expansive lantern.
2. The congealing hedgehog cast long shadows over the Rabelaisian (having a bawdy humour) guru.
3. The terrible koala was hidden underneath the dazzling writer.
 
**

Okay, so now it’s time for the new section I’ve introduced in 2026, where I take the story brainstorms to the next level and see if the possible meanings of a word combination can morph into even more unique ideas, by applying different categories of interpretation.
 
For now, I’ll pick out three categories from the list of eight that I used in the last show, although this is something I plan to develop and expand as time goes on. Check the show notes if you’d like to see the full list. Last time, I just picked out three that jumped out at me, but today, I’m going bring in the element of randomness, because that is so Exquisite Corpse, it’s the way the surrealists intended, so I have an eight-sided dice, and an egg cup (people use egg cups, right? For rolling a dice? I haven’t rolled a dice in a long time, so… I think this is right. I seem to remember doing this in the 80s…)
 
But first, let me choose a word combination. We have had a “terrible koala”; a “dazzling writer”. An excited phoenix… I’m not going mention the hedgehog, that was just ridiculous… The word combination that seems to resonate most is from that first Exquisite Corpse, the “expansive lantern”. It feels like it’s ripe for new ideas.
 
Okay, so I have my numbered categories in front of me, same as last time, but let me roll the dice…
 
Seven. The category is “an invention”. Well that makes sense for this, because that’s sort of along the lines of what I was thinking anyway: my original idea was around people using clandestine crafts or skills to create weapons—or in this case, a form of interrogation. An expansive lantern, throwing light on the truth, showing up a person’s secrets. But what would that actually look like? A lantern rather than a lamp or a light is more likely something someone would carry around with them. I imagine them holding it up as they walk along a dark alleyway. The flame flickers inside, casting odd shapes on the cobblestones. Is it the flame itself that is magical? Or the glass that refracts the light? Or a combination of both?
 
Shapes dance with the shadows, twirling them around, doing battle with them. It feels like you’re seeing memories. Maybe the way it works is, you set it down on the table in front of someone you’re suspicious about—they’ll have no idea why you’ve kept the lantern lit, so maybe it’s best if you arrange the meeting in advance in somewhere you know will be poorly lit, as a good excuse. So they won’t suspect anything, and you’ve arrived straight from a dark street anyway, so why shouldn’t you leave your lantern lit? And while it’s on the table, you get them to talk about something, especially something you think they’re lying about, and it absorbs their thoughts. It sort of soaks them up, the way that fire absorbs oxygen as it burns. And maybe it turns colour, slightly, but hopefully not enough to give it away, that something’s different, magical, about this lantern. That could be the risk of this invention, and it’s always helpful when you’re creating a magic system, to find imperfections or flaws; or risks, that it won’t work the way it should do, or might give away the person who’s trying to use it. Anything like that is great for increasing the tension, keeping the reader on the edge of their seat: will they manage to absorb the lies from this enemy, for the lantern to interpret later in a light display of moving figures, in the pitch black of the alleyway? Or will it all go horribly wrong?
 
Okay, I’m rolling the dice again for the expansive lantern: three. That’s a pub or café. The Expansive Lantern? That’s a weird title for anywhere that sells coffee or beer, although it’s mostly the expansive bit that’s odd. You could have the something-lantern for pub, definitely. The flickering lantern—that would be quite eerie, but great if you have storytelling nights and you want to bring in fantasy fans to gather around the fire. Just The Lantern would be a good pub name. But the expansive lantern…
 
Unless this is to refer to the fact that the pub, called the lantern, is expanding. It’s having some building works done, to extend into what was a large but rather plain-looking patio. So apologies for the noise, all the banging, but really it’s loudest when you’re in the loos. It’s put off some of their usual clientele, but it’ll be worth it when it’s done.
 
But what can we say that’s intriguing and story-worthy about this extension? What if the extension is invisible from the outside? Now there’s a party trick that could attract a lot of attention. What if it contains a portal into a castle that, from the outside, just isn’t there? You push open a rustic door at the back, and find yourself at the top of a stairwell, leading deep into the belly of a dungeon. What’s that for? A bit scary, for an extension. Well, maybe this is the ideal spot to re-launch the Lantern’s storytelling nights.
 
Right, one last roll of the dice—what else could we do with the expansive lantern? Oh. Three again. Let’s give that another go…
 
One. A book or magazine. The expansive lantern—I feel like I’m going back to my original interpretation of… the truth being revealed, light in the shadow, but this time, it’s expanding in the way of a journal or blog…
 
The expansive lantern feels like it might be something deeper, more serious: again, something clandestine that’s happening in a time of great political tensions. I feel drawn once again to that original image I had, of the lantern that’s used for sly interrogations, absorbing and filtering lies, to… refract the truth in a strange and flickering light display. So maybe this magazine, which is more of a secret pamphlet, is named after this weird invention, as a nod to the uses it has in gathering vital information from the enemy—whoever that enemy is.
 
Interesting! So while these brainstorms brought up some different, quite distinctive ideas—and I’m still quite partial to that pub with the invisible extension, especially with the steps into the belly of the castle—but these other categories have helped paint a clearer picture, or maybe just more pictures, of this fantasy world.
 
So in a world that’s a bit obsessed with word count and getting down that first draft while it’s fresh, this feels like proof that it’s always worth giving brainstorms just that little bit of extra exploration, to see where your idea can go.
 
If you have a story idea or a poem based on the expansive lantern, or any of the other word combinations that have come up on the show, please get in touch with me. 250 words is the limit, but it can be as short as a sentence or two if you just want to sum up an idea or give us a glimpse of a story world.
 
I normally say at this point go to my contact page, but I have, at long last, created a dedicated “submit” page at annatizard.com/submit. It’s just better geared towards story and poem submissions. There are prompts to input your name, any website or social media handle you’d like me to quote, and you can describe the genre you normally write in. It all helps give listeners a better sense of who you are as a writer (good for discoverability). Along the navigation bar at annatizard.com, the submit tab is just underneath the Brainstoryum tab; or if you are on the Brainstoryum page, just scroll underneath the embedded recordings of the show and you’ll find a black button that prompts you to “submit”.
 
So get in touch! By the Friday after the release of this show, if you want to be included in the next one. But, you know. You can submit at any time, and I can always pass it on to the show after that.
 
Until next time, go forth and be inspired!