I’m easily terrified. No joke. Although I’m a passionate fan of vintage horror—Mary Shelley, Poe, Bram Stoker, ghosts, vampires, werewolves, giant ants, the blob and the rest—I’m way too easy-to-frighten for most contemporary horror. And gore puts me way over the edge! I had to take two breaks during ‘Get Out’ (a brilliant film!) and I’m almost as prone to nightmares as I was when I was five.          That being said, lately I’ve been drawn to reading scary books & stories. I loved ‘Lovecraft Country’ by Matt Ruff; I’m slowly making my way through a collection of contemporary scary
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Can I still be shocked? Can you? Is it still possible? If nothing else, my constant infusion of news—on television, radio, the internet and, yes, even in print—has impacted my worldview. But has it changed what shocks me? Has it altered my threshold for determining what is credible? I think we’re dangerously close to ‘anything goes’ with a hard stop to the reign of old norms when Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927 to 2003, represented New York state 1977 to 2001) said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”          The political news in the
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Yes, I’ve grown and changed and experienced many things, but the older I get the more I realize that I am who I was when I was about eight-years-old. I started telling stories before I could read. My audience? Often just myself, but I did have some friends in my pre-school years who were willing to listen. It was around the age of eight that I became certain that I’d be a writer. I wrote a terrible little “novel” about an elf. I don’t remember the plot and I’m almost certain that it lacked an actual story arc. Like many
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When things are flowing in fiction, do you take time out to blog? When freelance clients call, do you blog? I love posting Monster Meditations and ideas for blog posts race across my mind all the time, but when I’m wrapped up in a fiction project AND producing text for freelance clients, the posts fall by the wayside.          Part of me wants to power through! WRITE, do it, don’t skip a single time. Be disciplined and controlled and pound those words out! The other part of me is trying to step back and have rational priorities. Rational priorities? What
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A friend told me about a TV channel that plays a weird selection of old and very old movies. It’s not an ART film station; it’s popular culture plain and simple. Early on Sunday mornings it often plays Sherlock Holmes films from the Basil Rathbone, Nigel Bruce vintage. I remember watching these movies over and over again as a child and I’m drawn to them still. Now, I’m much more conscious of the differences between the films based on Arthur Canon Doyle’s stories versus the movies featuring Sherlock Holmes battling Nazi spies. I can’t say that all the movies based
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The opening lines of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca are haunting, not solely for the obvious poetry of her language, but also because the house is a pivotal character in the novel: Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. It seemed to me I stood by the iron gate leading to the drive, and for a while I could not enter, for the way was barred to me. There was a padlock and a chain upon the gate. I called in my dream to the lodge-keeper, and had no answer, and peering closer through the rusted spokes of the
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It’s true that we inherit some characteristics—from nearsighted blue eyes to perfect pitch—and that there are all sorts of biological influences on specific talents. You could inherit height that is suitable for basketball or the innate grace of a slender dancer. But inherited inclinations and potential don’t guarantee that the talent will flourish or even manifest beyond a little spark in nursery school. Still the mythology that predates any knowledge of DNA persists and now clings to science for validity. So much is made of the stuff that we are made of. Both of my parents were avid readers and
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