Everything happens for a reason. Well, it seems to in most fiction. The role that chaos plays in real life is often absent from popular genres. The chance encounters and equally weird missed connections that are part of life — at least my life — are often replaced with the concept that everything happens for a reason. People come into your life at a particular time and in a specific manner to “teach” you a lesson and the characters with faith in the wisdom of the universe prevail over those who maintain that there is an unpredictable, illogical, completely chaotic
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Morbid Moods and Scary Places
Some places are just plain creepy! The crypt in the cellar of the Berliner Dom (the impressive Lutheran cathedral located on Museum Island near the Altes Museum) is loaded with ornate coffins that just scream — set a vampire rising from sleep HERE! The birds nesting on one of the angels on the walkway around the dome were pretty bizarre too, as they all gathered on a single angel ignoring all the others. I wondered if it were simply the right time of day for the birds to gather on that particular angel, or if there were something that distinguished
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Strangers on a Train
Strangers on a train, a bus, a plane or at the next table in a restaurant, have always served as a source of characters and story inspirations. I’m not sure when I started making up stories about my tangential encounters with strangers, but I’ve been doing it since I was a child. The woman dining with a little girl — indulging her granddaughter’s every whim — becomes the kind of chatty character who provides important, and yet seemingly irrelevant, observations in a mystery. Two puffed up businessmen in pricey suits, become rivals for an important promotion, with deadly consequences. A
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Vacation Monsters
My trip is winding down with only four more days before I head home. It’s been one adventure after another, and along the way I’ve filled my notebook with odd bits and pieces, ideas for stories, snatches of dialog and MONSTERS! The monsters are piling up in my notebook and on my phone, too. Assyrian bulls, Etruscan griffins, Dragons, Titans and the rest appear whenever I travel. I’ve also snapped some monstrously bad photos of elaborate coffins in a cathedral crypt, skulls in an antiquarian collection, poisonous plants, diabolical weaponry, and one ancient and astronomically accurate, calendar hat. I’ll share
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Evil Wits
Although a good number of criminals are definitely less than average in intelligence, fiction is full of brilliant, evil people. The criminal mastermind is a stock character in genre fiction and we love them. We want our scary, demonic, monstrous, villains to be extraordinarily smart, because it makes their stories more compelling. There’s another kind of character, I’m been thinking about lately — evil wits. These are people, both real and fictional, with sharp wits, sardonic humor and the ability to cut everyone else down to size with a clever quip or funny comment. We love them and we fear
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Reading & Reality?
So far on this holiday I’ve been READING! I’ve read three historical novels — one set in Salem during the witch trials, one set in ancient Rome and a third set in ancient Egypt, plus a crime novel set in a part of NYC I know very well during the 1980s — when I lived there. Reading what Anthony Bourdain, the celebrity chef/TV personality/author did with well known organized crime figures from my old “hood” was fascinating. He turned Vincent “The Chin” Gigante into his own crime boss, Charlie Wagons, and the actor who played Grandpa in “The Munsters” into
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Precious Words
I do most of my writing on the computer — most, but not all. This enables me to get the ideas down quickly, to delete, cut & paste, check references and move from one thought to the next. It’s fast. It’s easy. It gets the job done. But I still like to have an old fashioned notebook in my bag so I can scribble a stray idea or jot down something to look up later. Sitting with a yellow pad when I’m drinking my coffee helps me organize my thoughts. Often these initial notes get transformed into stories, blog posts,
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The HORROR of Horrible Food
I’m not concerned with ordinary horrible food, or even the extraordinarily horrible mush that passed for India Vegetable Curry with Rice and Continental Breakfast on the United Airlines flight I took to Amsterdam. Both meals were awful (I picked at dinner and ate the grapes from the fruit salad at breakfast) but all they inspired was a ravenous search for breakfast at the train station — not true HORROR! There are plenty of great examples of scary food in folk tales, mythology and genre literature: the witch’s gingerbread house in the woods draws children to her oven, countless hypnotists convincing
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