The Jack-O-Lantern, the Apparition, and the Jaguar? WTF? I guess, for a horror writer, Halloween is just another day in the life. We're always considering the gruesome and the macabre in our lives and in the greater world as we know it. Here's a creepy little scene I wrote today and I thought I'd post it in honor of All Hallow's Eve. She'd taken Harlan home to meet her parents and he'd been polite and charming and they'd loved him. Trent had been different. She met Trent one day in the student union building; she'd been studying alone at one the tables in the afternoon, thinking more about her recent breakup with Harlan than the chapter she was studying on the "stigma of psychological disorders," when this boy with messy dark hair and a worn leather jacket approached her. "Are you okay?" he asked and she looked up to tell this stranger she was fine and would he please leave her alone and she took one look into those eyes--dark saucers with almost no color, clear and intelligent--and she forgot her annoyance, her words dying in her throat. "Are you sure you're okay?" he repeated. She crossed her arms over her chest. "Fine." He sat down across the table from her. "My name's Trent. And yours is...Jess. Am I right?" She looked at him closely. Only her friends called her Jess. She nodded noncommittally. "How did you know that?" "I don't know, I must of heard it somewhere." "Look..." she began. "Do you like to go out?" "What?" "Dinner, would you have it with me?" Jessica wrinkled her nose. "Really? Just like that?" Trent shrugged. "Why not?" There was something compelling about him, something dangerous, but she said, "I don't think so." "Okay," and he stood and walked away. But after that brief encounter, she hadn't been able to get him out of her head. She began to have dreams about him and caught herself sometimes playing out their brief encounter differently, imagining how it would have gone if she'd said yes; how he would have smiled and asked if she liked lobster, which, of course, she did. She imagined getting lost in those dark eyes, while he held her, confident he'd never let her fall; never let her go. A couple of days after the encounter, she'd been scrambling some eggs in the shared kitchen in her dorm. It was a cloudy morning and a pall of gray seemed to tint the grass and the concrete walk outside, and the students, pale and etherized, floating grudgingly on their way to class. She wiped the crust from the corners of her eyes with the back of her spatula-wielding hand and a movement caught her attention; she looked out the little kitchen window and he was there, standing by a park bench on the other side of the courtyard, grinning at her. He waved once, then turned and walked away down the sidewalk. Later, she was at dinner with him and he was telling her a story about a date he'd been on once and she was laughing. "This girl, at one point during the meal, actually looked at me, in all seriousness, and said: 'ketchup is what makes Americans so fat'. Isn't that a weird thing to hear on a first date? But what made it funny was that she was actually dipping her fries in her ketchup while she said it, this distant awe-struck look on her face. It was so weird I had to stifle a snort of laughter and I bumped the table and her glass of Merlot splashed the front of her dress and her, uh, considerable bosom, was zipped up so tight that, I kid you not, the wine actually pooled in her cleavage and all I could think was: 'Okay, but who's going to drink it now?' I couldn't help myself after that. I burst into laughter and I was still laughing when my date stood and stormed out of the restaurant." And Jess laughed at his story, and she felt comfortable and safe with him, and he laughed to, and when she looked up from her plate of lobster tails, his eyes were huge and dark and too big for his head and that's when she awoke with a start, panting in the darkness of her dorm room, sweat beading on her forehead. Days later, he'd tapped her on the shoulder while she waited in line at one of the restaurants for a quick lunch in the Student Union Building and, when she turned and saw it was him, her heart fluttered in her chest like a cornered bird. Then he smiled--a kind, normal smile--and she immediately felt more at ease. "Hey, Jess. How are you?" he said, still smiling. "I'm good." "Yeah? Excellent. How about going out with me?" She looked into his eyes and something inside her jittered excitedly. "Where would you take me?" "Well, I was thinking...some place normal." He was cool and confident. "Pizza? How's that sound?" Before she could think to stop herself, it slipped out: "Okay." "Great! We'll go see a movie afterwards; anything, your choice. How's this weekend? Got a number?"
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So, I finally got myself an Iphone and guess what I've been doing with it? Processing words--Typing! If you're poor like me because you decided you wanted to be a writer when you grew up instead of going to school for a degree in Engineering or Computer Science or some other non-artistic subject, your computer is probably really old and cumbersome and way too heavy to be lugging around with you to your menial job (remember, you decided the arts were more important than money...) every day so you can write during your breaks. Okay, so obviously I exaggerate a bit; you can't be "poor" and still afford an Iphone (I paid 200 bucks for mine and the monthly bills are outrageous. Sad Face.) You have to have a job that feeds you and pays the bills and puts a roof over the 'ol head, and you have to have enough money in the bank to fend off the student loan officers that call at all hours of the night looking for their money (again, you just had to get that degree in English--how screwed are you?), but then, if it's really important to you, you can get an Iphone. Yay! My point is, it is possible to write on the go using your mobile device. So, what I did is I bought myself the Apple Wireless Bluetooth Keyboard and a stand for my Iphone and I bang out a few words at lunch every day--I write every day. I tried using the Pages app, but it has no landscape orientation and doesn't zoom in the way I'd like (unless you have an Ipad, save the 10 bucks for something else). I now use My Writing Nook, which allows me to sync the things I'm working on with my phone and on any computer I happen to be in front of (like the one I have at work...) through www.mywritingnook.com. So try it; I think you'll be surprised and impressed. But Word Processing? You can do that on just about anything. It seems like such a waste to use something so fancy to process words. Yeah, well, you can use it for other things if you really want to (phone calls, email, browsing, Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, Words with Friends, Chess with Friends, Amazon, ebooks, etc., etc., blah, blah, blah), but just think how convenient the damn thing is for writing your next novel--it's worth the exorbitant fees you'll have to pay every month and living on Ramen noodles and frozen pizza for a while...right? Murder Your Darlings? Fuck It, I'll Put 'Em in a Jar and Suffocate an Entire Epic World of 'Em!10/22/2011 It really hurts, it's a sad sad day, when one realizes all 400 fucking pages of one's novel manuscript are basically worthless. This proves especially true when it is said novel about which one originally based his online writing persona; this is before one realized he'd be better off without a fake and pretentious persona and stuck to the simpler task of being oneself. So, yeah, I have this great idea for this epic fantasy and I have many notebooks filled with scribblings of characters, and creatures, and concepts, and maps, and quotes, and all manner of other crazy things. I enjoyed so much the world creating process. Then, I came up with a story and it was glorious. Then, I spent the better part of a year in a fervor, writing at a breakneck pace, making things up as I go along, like I thought I could do like I used to when I was known for my dungeon master skills (yup, I actually had a reputation for a while as a creative and fun DM in Dungeons and Dragons!). After it's all done I take a break. I write other things. I start to decide I'm going to be serious about my writing and I write every day and I'm doing it, I'm really doing it! Months later, returning to my manuscript, I realize very quickly how much work the damn things needs. It's a mess. A disaster. A fucking hurricane of jumbled word-vomit that forms a spiral that I can't see going anywhere but down through the pipes at the bottom of my piss-stained toilet. What am I going to do with this thing? Reading through it, it is clear to me how much the entire project ran away from me. I created way too much material for a simple fantasy novel; I can find the pieces of at least six separate works and counting! I created an epic; I created a monster! What do I do? What can I do? Simple. For now. Write a new novel. I think that if I am not able to do that and do not have the perseverance for such a task, I will never be a financially successful (it pays my bills and I live without another job!) writer. Actually, it's a little Halloween writing contest MicroHorror throws every year. This is the first year I've entered and the theme this year is...Water. So, I had to take a break from working on my novel about a young boy with terrible dreams about fire and switch to terrible situations about water. These are primal fears, they are--and I am happy with the way this one turned out. I don't know if it'll win anything, but I think it's worth a read if you have a spare few minutes. People are horrible and disgusting, don't you think? --------- The Storm --------- Reading Joe Hill - In Which One of the "Nice Guy" Grows the Horns of Satan and Hookers are Discussed10/8/2011 "In a lot of ways, I guess Satan was the first superhero." "Don't you mean supervillian?" "Nah. Hero, for sure. Think about it. In his first adventure, he took the form of a snake to free two prisoners being held naked in a Third World jungle prison by an all-powerful megalomaniac. At the same time, he broadened their diet and introduced them to their own sexuality. Sounds kind of like a cross between Animal Man and Dr. Phil to me." -From "Horns" by Joe Hill After being tipped off about Joe Hill's novels by several of my peers, I eventually decided to check out one of his books and see what all the fuss was about. So I started reading Heart-Shaped Box...hmm, okay, not bad. It was a good read; a little slow to get going, and some moments at the beginning that felt like descriptions of movie scenes instead of prose, but I read through the book and was entertained. The best sections, in my opinion, were written in the backstory between Jude, an aging heavy metal rockstar, and his goth girlfriends. (It seemed a little self-indulgent on Hill's part to be writing from the point of view of such a protagonist, but the story had enough of a campy feel to it I think it worked. When I mentioned the character to my wife, she shook her head. "Of course," she said, a smirk playing at the corner of her mouth.) Hill is good with human connections and it shows in these scenes. At the end to the book there were the first two chapters of his next novel: Horns. I thought, why not? I was already planning on reading something else, but when I read the first couple of lines, I was hooked: "Ignatius Martin Perrish spent the night drunk and doing terrible things. He woke the next morning with a headache, put his hands to his temples, and felt something unfamiliar, a pair of knobby pointed protuberances." These two sentences are perfect, don't you think? Simple and brilliantly constructed and that was all the encouragement I needed to purchase the book and continue on my Joe Hill kick. While Heart-Shaped Box is a decent enough read--if you enjoy the horror genre and have at least a marginal sense of humor--Horns is actually a solid piece of fiction. It does flag a bit at points, but the story comes together as it unfolds. The characters are realistic and their relationships are intense and dramatic. The flashback scene of Ig and everyone as kids playing around in the woods, throwing insults, and generally being gross and offensive, was an excellent scene and brought to mind my own childhood, as I'm sure it has/will for others. (I also couldn't help but be reminded of the scene in Stephen King's It where the kids get together to build the dam in the wilderness area around town...) I wouldn't call this novel a "horror" novel, as it is not really "scary" in any way, but the novel is an interesting revenge story with an edge in the form of the devil as an entity whom advocates for the flaws and pleasures of the human race, not as a Mephistopheles-like seducer, but as an opposing force and defender against the fundamentalist purity of That-Guy-Up-There's demands. A good read. There is a short exposition of King's where he discusses "Hookers" (you can find it in his collection of essays, "Secret Windows," published as a companion to his book "On Writing" -- I recommend both to anyone wishing to find success with his/her writing). In it his young son, who is just beginning to discover his love for the story and for writing, asks him about "hookers," not the kind that stand on street corners and carry venereal diseases, but about those first opening sentence or sentences at the begin of a story that are intended to "hook" the reader into continuing to read. His son asks him if his stories have good "hookers" and King is forced to admit many of his opening sentences are less than successful in this department. What does this have to do with Joe Hill? Uh...nothing...only that Hill knows how to write a good "hooker" and the opening to Horns is a perfect example. We could all learn a thing or two from Mr. Hill. |
"Unrelenting Horror"- FREE!An award-winning author known for blending elements of fantasy with horror in his surreal, literary style. Author of WITHIN, A GAME FOR GODS and VIOLENT HEARTS.
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