I Wish I May, I Wish I Might

I Wish to Scare You Tonight

I'm looking for the chill that walks your spine. I wish to write the things that make you look over your shoulder or even lose just a little bit of sleep at night. Not gory. Not gross. Haunting. I'm looking for the edge of horror - no chainsaws allowed. I wish to make my writing walk the tightrope of stirring the hair at the back of your neck without falling off into the blood spatter and the wet, gristly shine of moonlight on exposed bone. 

I also don't want to fall off the tightrope into purple prose, and I'm afraid that's where I seem to find myself most often. I try to make something scary and it just ends up sounding silly. Or it's incomprehensible. Maybe the scariest thing is that I KEEP TRYING. 

 

Scary Scene from a WIP

Horror is not my happy place. I've tried to learn a little about how to write it. I've had classes in the language of horror and in some of the psychological tools used in horror. But honestly, I don't want to make you afraid. I'd rather creep you out. Fine line, I know, and I'm not sure I have the knack of it just yet. I'm not after terrified. I'm more interested in haunted. So I'll offer up a snippet from a book called Curse of the Lorelei. The book still needs some major rewrites to hop up the creepy and the tension.

The story takes place in the very early days of the Civil War. It's just after the fall of Fort Sumter. It'd be bad enough with just the start of the war. Unfortunately for our heroes, their version of New Orleans is haunted by more than Confederates and Union spies. Charlie is a young woman (and a Union spy) disguised as a boy. Hunt is a British spy bent on destabilizing the situation in the US with the notion that the British crown might be able to recover the errant colonies. They've rowed out to what appears to be a ghost ship that's anchored off shore in quarantine. Hunt boarded the boat. Charlie is standing to under the ship's rail aboard the row boat. Monsieur Foucalte is the dockmaster who won't let the ship dock for fear of disease.

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            Charlie forced her shoulders down. Rocked her head on her neck.
           A shrill scream, broken by sobs, wrenched her gaze upward. Every muscle in her body clenched.
            “No!” Hunt shouted.
            A body hurtled into the water three feet from the bow of the skiff.
            Water sprayed her. Charlie yelped and crouched low to steady the boat as the impact waves tossed her. Heart a gripping pain in her chest, she gasped, and scanned the surface of the river.
             “Can you see him?” she hollered to the two men still clinging to the side of the larger ship.
            The man surfaced. Flailing. Sobbing. “Help! Help me! Please – ulp!” He floundered toward shore.
            Charlie shot to her feet. The boat swayed in warning.
            “Turn around!” she shouted. “I’ll pull you aboard! Turn around!”
            Caught up in whatever terror had driven him over the rail, he either didn’t hear, or he ignored her. He struggled closer to shore.
            Shouts from the dock caught her attention and she glanced at the men on the wharf. The group roiled and waved, arms swinging in clear ‘go back’ gestures. It did no good.
            The man in the river, yammering a steady stream of pleas for aid, kept heading to shore.
            Monsieur Foucalte, recognizable by size alone, shoved through the knot of dock workers, a rifle in his hands.
            Charlie gasped.
            He raised it. Sighted.
            Her blood ran cold. “Wait! What –”
            The tenor of the swimmer’s cries changed. Climbed. Panic resonated in the sound, shaking her.
            Around the man, the water of the turgid Mississippi frothed. It took several seconds to register what her eyes tried to show her.
            Snakes. Dozens of snakes, wet skins glistening in the sun, surrounded the man. Slithered over his back. Tangled in his kicking legs.
            He hesitated, fell silent.
            As his legs sank and he came upright in the water, the first snake struck. She couldn’t see the fangs, but the big, black snake’s stiff pull back and launch forward was unmistakable. As was the man’s strangled shriek.
            A shot rang out.
            The cry died mid arc. The sailor slumped.
            Snakes - and something much larger, black, gleaming hide, fangs, and blood-red eyes - swarmed him. Kelpie. It surfaced. Made eye contact with her. Sneered. And took a bite out of the dead man’s poisoned flesh.

Plot Bunny Mob

Plot bunnies are everywhere. In everything. In everyone. In snippets of conversations overheard in what passes for public these days. There's no need to hunt them. If you're open to them, you'll stumble over them at every turn. A little like tripping over a cat who wants to be fed.

Plot bunnies carry no malice as far as I can tell. Might they be distractions wrought by a brain desperate for a bit of cognitive conservation of resources? Sure. Human brains consume a crazy high percentage of the daily calories we consume. We're designed to want to shirk heavy mental loads. So along come plot bunnies to tempt us to follow them into the weeds in a day-dreamy daze. They could also just be the delight of human brains that are designed to take a bunch of disparate data bits and combine them into new and interesting patterns.

I can't say I notice that plot bunnies strike more often while I'm supposed to be working on something else. In fact, quite the contrary. For me they mob me when I'm already doing something else - something like taking a walk, washing dishes, vacuuming the floor - anything physical that requires low cognitive input. Ideas come gamboling out of nowhere. So it pays to have a strategy for handling them. Otherwise, you end up starting twenty bijillionty things and finishing exactly zero. Don't ask how I know this.

I pat my plot bunnies on their furry little heads, smile, and say, "It takes a number, and it stands in line." The idea gets jotted down in barest form - a few sentences - just enough to spark the idea back into life at a later time. The file gets a name and gets remanded to a folder with the imaginative name of "Story Ideas." 

Have I ever mined that folder? Indeed, I have. The Nightmare Ink books were an idea languishing in "Story Ideas" folder when I hauled it out and got to serious work on it. The books and the original plot bunny bear only the slightest resemblance to one another. When a bunny graduates from the "Story Idea" folder, it gets a name of its own that serves as the working title for whatever it's going to become. 

It means I have plot bunnies in various stages of metamorphosis. Some are still itty-bitty things nibbling grass. Others have turned into the Vorpal Bunny of Antioch. They've got these big teeth. I have one of them chewing on me right now. It looks a lot like Frankenstein's bunny, being a mishmash of Civil War historical, fantasy, and a little horror. It doesn't know what it wants to grow up to be, so we just keep staring at one another over the pages of the SFR I'm contracted for. So yes. Sometimes, the plot bunnies start looking a little like the clown from IT.

#Horror Release Day: BOOMTOWN by James A. Moore

Oh dear readers, if you thought yesterday's post was a prank, I assure you, James is not April Foolin' around with his latest creepy #western #horror release, BOOMTOWN. Turn on the lights, grab a blanket to hide under, and try not to scream as Jonathan Crowley returns to scare the bejesus out of you.

BOOMTOWN

There is no peace in death. Some people know that better than others, In Carson’s Point, Colorado the dead do not rest, but rise every night and try to kill whatever crosses their path. Those dead are merely the symptom of something far worse, something ancient and evil that does not care for the Europeans taking the lands, or for those who lived there before.

The living do not matter, the dead are tools, the possible spawn of the pale, white thing lurking in the woods are all that is important to that dreadful force. It will kill anything that gets in its path and make the living and the deceased suffer for their transgressions.

Carson’s Point is on a course that leads straight to Hell unless something comes along that can fight back against the unnatural servants of the thing that wants the boomtown destroyed.

The wizard, Albert Miles, is in town for reasons all his own, escaping the latest terrors he’s spread across the land. He might well be able to save the town, but if he does, he’ll exact a terrible price.

The new sheriff has his work cut out for him. There are savages waiting outside the town, dead things crawling from the grave, bad men set on taking what they want and fools aplenty trying to survive the disasters coming their way until they can once again go hunting for the dreams they hope will change their lives.

Jonathan Crowley could very well be the salvation that the town needs, but he has no desire to help anyone living there and has settled himself on one mission and one mission only: revenge against the soldiers that left him for dead.

The Hunter has quit and no longer wants anything to do with justice for humans or stopping the evil things that feast on humanity’s sorrows. Evil grows throughout the town, mortal evil and things far worse. And when the sun sets, that evil takes root and spreads like wildfire.

BUY IT NOW: Amazon | BN |  IndieBound

Scariest Inside My Head

You want to know what's truly terrifying? Moving for the second time in one year. Seriously. The moving truck shows up tomorrow morning at 9AM. And I'm still stuffing shit in boxes. Does anyone else think inanimate objects breed overnight? Cause I'm pretty sure my stuff is propagating. There's no other explanation for why I'm still not done packing.

Okay. Seriously. Books. Scary books. Oh my dear friends. I am so amused you believe I can be trusted with frightening material. I can't.

Reason: I'm a wuss. Fact 1. I have mental health to guard. So I have to curate what gets fed into the mental systems cause those gears are kept turning by a trio of geriatric hamsters. They faint easily. 2. If I wanna get the crap scared out of me, or suddenly decide I want to peer unrepentant into the darkest soul of humanity, I need only turn on the godsdamned evening news. 3. I have an obsessive brain. Give me a single terrifying image and it will be seared into my grey matter for all my days.

Is anyone old enough to remember the movie An American Werewolf in London? Very opening of the movie (SPOILER ALERT) our heroes are attacked on the moor. One of them is killed. The final image of the attack is the dying man, torso torn open, rib cage exposed. I STILL SEE THAT SHOT. D'you know how old that movie is?? I didn't sleep for three nights after that nonsense.

Worse. I can still describe to you the scenes from shows that terrified me as a child. They weren't even supposed to be horror films. They were science fiction. In the 1960s. When science fiction meant that someone was going to die horribly. I was five when The Omega Man came out and ensured I would refuse to walk into a dark room until well after I was 10 years old. So yeah. There are things I don't need carved into my brain, thanks.

But hey. If you're a wuss like me. Try The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper. YA. One faintly creepy scene. Kept me up half a night. But it was fun.

Two Books that Freaked Me the F*ck Out

Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is, appropriately enough, our favorite horror or scary book.

Now, I don't really a lot of horror or scary books, because I am a fragile flower. I've never really gotten the point of reading something to be frightened or horrified. So, when I thought about what my favorite books in this genre would be, I could think of exactly two. 

But it's cool because they're by friends - which is the only reason I read them.

I really loved them, too, even though they freaked me the fuck out. 

A HUMAN STAIN, by Kelly Robson - who most usually writes SFF, is a wonderful story that starts with low-level dread that gradually builds to a truly freakifying conclusion. Read it if you love gothic slow-burns. Avoid if you have a tooth phobia. You can read it in BEST HORROR OF THE YEAR, Volume 10, which I'm sure is fabulous, since Ellen Datlow edited it. I, of course, *won't* be reading that!

Megan Hart started out writing erotic and nuanced romance, but has moved into more horror lately. LITTLE SECRETS is a haunted house story that also plays on the insecurities of pregnancy and the strain that - and moving into a freaky house! - puts on a marriage. Read it for the subtle build of terror and rich story. And don't worry - the cat's okay. 

Most Unlikely to Write

I found this great ceramic Dia de los Muertos doll a couple of weeks ago. It's difficult to tell from the pic, but she's made entirely of ravens. I would have bought her in a heartbeat if she weren't so expensive. For those of you who've read THE SHIFT OF THE TIDE, there's an aspect to this doll that reminds me of Moranu with her many faces. Even the cover of that book is reminiscent of the same images for me. Do you all see that?

There's a key difference, however, between the two - and that links into this week's theme, which is the genre we are mostly unlikely to write.

As much as I'm fascinated by the dark and grotesque, I think you'll never find me writing horror. I'm not a fan of the unrelentingly grim. Likewise, I think you'll never find me writing Inspirational - as I also can't see going to all sweetness and light.

Personally and artistically, I live in the middle, at the intersection of both. Or, were I a citizen of my created world in The Twelve Kingdoms and The Uncharted Realms, I'd be at the intersection of all three goddesses. Yes, I'd love Moranu of the shadows, the night and many faces, but I'd also be an adherent of Danu, of the bright blade and unflinching justice and wisdom. I'd also look to Glorianna, goddess of soft light and in-between spaces, of love and beauty.

That's why I doubt I can write horror -- not enough of love and light. Nor am I likely to write anything that's all in the sweet direction, because I also love the shadows.

Still ... I might have to go back and buy that doll.