I bet I’m not alone in occasionally looking for monsters under the bed, in the basement and behind the closet door. But most of my favorite monsters lurk on my bookshelves and in electronic files on my e-reader. I like fictional monsters. Yes, there are plenty of real monsters out there. There are, in no particular order, killers, sexual predators, identity thieves, corrupt politicians, malicious bullies, power mad bosses, drunks behind the wheels of speeding cars and really, really bad writers. Yes, I put the awful storytellers in the mix because sometimes I feel oppressed by a bad book. That
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Happy Memorial Day! Summer Monster season is upon us. That means I’ll be doing daily battle with the sunburn demon (my silver bullets are expensive French sun block with a high SPF and hiding in the shade). But freckles, wrinkles and skin cancer are not the only scary beasts of summer. It’s the season of sea beasts and creatures of the deep. Anyone old enough to remember the summer of 1975 will recall how JAWS — the Steven Spielberg film based on Peter Benchley’s book — changed that summer. You didn’t even have to see the movie to experience a
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My monster meditation on the subject of holidays for monsters has led to a story. It’s not done, yet. I’m about half way through the first draft, but I’m stymied. I haven’t come up with the name of the signature drink served nightly at sunset at the bar on the beach. It’s a rum punch with citrus fruit, ginger simple syrup and an edible origami frog (made of sweetened rice paper) instead of the clichéd little parasol. I’m not usually one for crowd sourcing, but I’ve decided to ask the Candy’s Monsters Facebook fans and blog followers to come up
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Today (May 22) is the birthday of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle — the genius behind the prototype of countless fictional detectives, Sherlock Holmes. Although Edgar Allan Poe started the long, twisted and incredibly fun, genre of detective fiction with his ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (published in 1841 in Graham’s Magazine), no character compares to Sherlock Holmes as a model for all the detectives to come. Holmes’ use of intense observation and deductive reasoning, his uncanny ability to see what others ignore and his outsider status, are characteristics that appear in all the great detectives. Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple
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For blog followers and monster fans outside the U.S., the long Memorial Day weekend at the end of May is the unofficial start of summer in the States. In New York, it signals the beginning of summer in ways that are both concrete and ephemeral. The city’s beaches open. That means employment for lifeguards and that’s important given the number of non-swimmers, and worse, the number of swimmers who overestimate their strength. It also means the beginning of ‘casual Fridays’ in offices, the weekly mass exodus to the Hamptons and Jersey Shore, and the influx of tourists from all over
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Did you ever see a giant squid? They are amazing, frightening, real life Monsters of the Deep! There’s a giant squid on display at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum in Washington, DC. It’s been a few years since I’ve been to that museum. I have to remember not to go during the school year when kids and their chaperons swarm like schools of fish all over the museum. Even if the kids are relatively quiet and well behaved as individuals, the sound level of their multitudes undermines the quiet that I need when I check out a monster. Still, I
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Here’s the secret about writing (drum roll), it’s all about the rewriting and reading and then the re-re-rewriting. TIME is a big ingredient in the creative recipe. In his book about writing ‘On Writing’ Stephen King describes leaving manuscripts in a drawer for six months before going back to them. I think most writers have a variation on that theme. Maybe it’s not six entire months, but there are natural breaks that enable you to get distance. These breaks are an essential part of writing. A little time in cold storage goes a long way! I’m in the process of
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In Oscar Wilde’s classic, Dorian Gray’s portrait grows uglier as his behavior goes from ordinary hedonism toward increasingly evil actions. The ‘monster’ in Dorian chips away at his humanity, but none of it shows on his face because the painting magically reflects what should be the marks of time and depravity. This connection between ugliness and evil is central to many fairy tales and it persists today. We expect the bad guy to be ugly and even the sexy-beast-monsters (vampires, werewolves, etc.) are never as classically handsome as the heroic figures. In a postmodern incarnation, the anti-hero is the protagonist
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The last remaining creature of any species is a sad sight. A while back when I was in London, I visited the museum of natural history in Kensington — a wonderful collection housed in a beautiful, ornate building from the early 1880s — where I saw small an exhibit on the Dodo Bird. Dodos may have existed for thousands and thousands of years on the island of Mauritius, but in less than one century they were gone. They were big (over three feet tall and over 40 lbs), flightless birds with no natural predators on the island. But, about 80
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Tonight the moon will be at perigee — the point in its orbit when it is closest to the earth — so the full moon will be a SUPERMOON. I’m looking forward to a big, beautiful full moon in the sky. I’m also wondering about what such a moon inspires. Does it really make us crazy? I’ve read mixed reports on the power of the moon. There are anecdotal stories about upsurges in crime and emergency room visits, but the hard data is difficult to come by. Or course all of that could be put down to werewolf activity —
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