I have always loved scary...always...
From The Uninvited to The Conjuring...if it's about ghosts and ghoulies and things that bump in the night, I am there...
I've read nearly every Stephen King book there is including the non-fiction. His books have a rhythm to them that beats in time with my own, swirling and tickling a brain that finds the same patterns in people and situation. I don't know how or why that is, it simply is.
It used to concern me. It no longer does.
I love Dean Koontz' Odd Thomas, the Mayfair Witches of Anne Rice, and the visitors in Shirley Jackson's Hill House. I adore the ghostly spirits of Peter Straub, Scott Nicholson, and Susan Hill, to name a few.
This is where I live and this is how I write.
And I write what I know.
I've written in various genres including erotica, romance, supernatural, and paranormal, but it seems to be the combination of three or four of them where I fall the most.
I have written stories that frightened myself. Even when I know what is going to happen, I still get a cold chill that stiffens my spine, calls forth goosebumps, and forces me to barricade myself in the house and turn on all the lights. And to me, those are the best.
I may have never have found my niche if it wasn't for the likes of Shirley Jackson, Edgar Allan Poe, and Richard Matheson, all writing stories in the key of MY life long before I realized it...
It's New Years Eve everyone!
I must admit one thing before we start. It's New Years Eve and my Christmas tree is still up. Horrors my mother would say, never have two trees in one year, bad luck and all that. Whether or not it is true, I am not taking any chances and my afternoon will be spent taking down the last of the Christmas decorations and putting them away for another year. It's sad, but it must be done to preserve our family's safety and well-being for one more year.
So, a new year is upon us and today many of us will spend some time on reflecting on what went right last year and what went wrong and we'll be planning out our resolutions hours before they are needed.
For writers, reflections of the year past can be daunting to say the least. For most of us, we didn't write as much as we would have liked and what we did write wasn't as perfect as we wanted it to be. Most of us didn't have books on the New York Times Bestseller's list or on any list for that matter, but we pattered on from month to month, writing when we could and many times writing when we didn't want to. We trudged on through NaNoWriMo and Book-in-a-Week typing endlessly and hoping our muse will at least show up for coffee once in a while and help us out. We write and hope and pray and bare our soul for everyone to see. This is not a glamorous life for the majority of us and for some, it's not enough to even pay the bills.
So why do we continue to write and put ourselves through the mental torture of word counts and deadlines?
It's simple really. We love to write. Even if we didn't make a dime on it, we would still write our stories and long buried novels that are always peeking at us from behind the slightly open door to the back of our mind. We want to frighten you, make you fall in love, or make you laugh. We want to educate you and make you think that even the impossible can be made possible with just a slight of hand over the keyboard.
Most of all, we want you to read us, peer into our tortured souls and understand what is going on in there. We have an inordinate desire to mine our subconscious with large pickaxes and spread it out there on the page for you to pick over, again and again. We want to tell you what scares us so that you may be scared along with us or why we love the way we do so that you may fall in love too.
As Stephen King once said, and I am paraphrasing here, you don't write for the money, you write because it's the monkey on your back. You can't NOT write, to be doing so would be unfaithful to the very being you are.
So Dear Readers, I will keep writing and keep baring my soul this coming year and hopefully a spark will catch and the fire of creativity will burn brighter than ever.
Happy New Year!!! Welcome to 2014!!!
