The summer is rolling to an end in this hemisphere. Kids are going back to school. Beaches are closing. Hurricanes are brewing in the Atlantic. Business people are setting up auto responses to emails that say, “I’ll be out of the office until Tuesday, September 4.” Shops are poised to fill shelves with Halloween merchandise. And travelers are on their way home. In other words — It’s Labor Day Weekend, summer’s last hurrah! This, of course, started me thinking about seasonal monsters and how certain kinds of monsters seem to thrive in fiction set at certain times of the year.
Read More
Griffins were Jumping!
After my Monster Meditations on the Sphinx and two on Dragons (east & west), I’d planned do delve into the Chimera — another cross-cultural mythological monster — but on a recent visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art GRIFFINS kept jumping out at me. Well, not exactly jumping. But I wasn’t looking for them and yet, I kept spotting them! The Met is a large museum, and if you’ve never been there, I should mention that it’s easy to pass through a wide range of art going from one exhibit to another. It’s not weird to pass through Medieval Europe
Read More
Location, Location, Location… Lairs, Castles and Haunted Houses
I’m a New Yorker and all New Yorkers are obsessed with real estate. We talk about it. We dream about it. And we read about it. Show me a New Yorker who never checks out the real estate section of the New York Times or who doesn’t hyperventilate at the low, low prices in other cities, and I’ll show you a zombie (or someone suppressing their natural inclination to hover over the thought of an extra 50 square feet of hardwood floor, roof deck or storage space.V Classic monsters seem to be just as obsessed as my neighbors. Lairs, castles,
Read More
Last Summer Guest Post…
Science Fiction and Fantasy author Jon Jefferson is the final Candy’s Monsters Summer Guest blogger. He’s contributed a MONSTER MEDITATION that I think you’ll find intriguing. Here Be Dragons The tale is the same. We sit around a campfire to hear of the old explorers and their discoveries. The old maps were marked with what was known. There were sections for what would be explored. And then the section marked “Here be dragons.” These were the places no one returned from. Only the fools and the overly brave ( same thing really) would venture into these places. This was our
Read More
Fears, Phobias & Rollercoaster Rides
We all experience fears, but phobias are something else. A phobia is an intense, inexplicable and irrational fear of something specific. Phobias are interesting elements in fiction. Indiana Jones’ intense fear of snakes raises the stakes in his adventures and makes him more vulnerable and appealing. The latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) — the book used by doctors, insurance companies, etc. to define diagnoses — altered the clinical definition of Specific (AKA Simple) Phobias, Social Anxiety Disorder (Social Phobia) and Agoraphobia so that the individual does not have to recognize that their fear
Read More
The Aroma of a Ghost
I recently read a post on the ParaYourNormal blog about a ghost hunter. She discussed how her ordinary senses were impaired — some hearing loss and nearsightedness — while her senses picked up both visual and aural information outside the usual range. This got me thinking about the power of aromas and our sense of smell. In many people it is and under developed sense, but consciously or unconsciously aromas have a daily impact on our lives. Smells give us information. We can choose to ignore the whiskey on the teacher’s breath at ten in the morning. We make note
Read More
Talking About Talking…
Dialog often takes the driver’s seat in my stories and lately I’ve been concentrating on creating conversations that work on two levels. One, they carry the story forward with important exposition delivered in a natural manner AND two, they reveal as much about the speaker as they do about the story. This is a big challenge but… I’m up for it. My goal is to make language choices for each character that are spot on — maybe so spot on that reminders about who is talking will become irrelevant. This means talking about talking with my characters. Well, maybe not
Read More
The Tiger at the Foot of the Bed
There are cat people and there are people who don’t get cats. And I don’t mean the Simone Simon classic CAT PEOPLE horror film or the remake in the 80s that I somehow managed to miss. If you are a cat person, if you live with one — or two or more — domestic felines, sooner or later you are going to realize that there’s a bit of tiger in the small creature curled up on the sofa. Morse (named for the Colin Dexter detective) opens “cat proofed” cabinet doors with a combination of persistence and agility, overcoming his lack
Read More
Haunted Places
If you live in the same city or town for any length of time, you are bound to start racking up an impressive list of “haunted places.” A particularly bad date haunts a café you subsequently avoid, a storefront reminds you of a long dead friend or a park is filled with ghosts of youthful indiscretions best forgotten. In a city like New York, personal landmarks have a way of disappearing. “Institution” restaurants everyone assumes will last forever — like the Second Avenue Deli — lose leases and move or close. Department stores disappear — my mom and I still
Read More
