Laughing at other people's terror

My first marriage was a rocky one. We moved up to Dumas, a small town in the panhandle where my wife was born and where her parents lived. Being suddenly thrust into a town where I knew no one and where there were none of my usual interests put me in a bit of a spot. Everyone was friendly, but there weren't many people I could connect with.

At one point, the company I worked for changed their vacation schedule to synchronize it with the calender year instead of the fiscal year. Those of us with days left to take had to take them before the end of the period. I took four Fridays in a row off, and spent the extra time with my daughter.

Those were good days. I would sleep in (my insomnia was worse back then), write for a few hours or drive down and explore Amarillo, then pick Maddy up from the babysitters a couple of hours early. My wife was in a work-study program at the time, so we had the rest of the day to ourselves. These were Maddy-Daddy days.

We would go to the park, stop by the library to return books and check out new ones, play games, and read together. We had fun. Being the skilled chef that I am, when it was time for dinner I would boil water to make macaroni and cheese, and open a can of corn or some other vegetable that we both enjoyed. Before bed, we would watch some TV together.

Around that time, MTV came up with a new reality show called 'Fear.' They would gather a group of young, enthusiastic kids and drop them in an abandoned prison, hospital, or some other place that would make a good setting for a B-list horror movie. I've never had a taste for reality shows, because the concept has the same flaws that you'll find in true crime books and movies 'Based on a true story.' Reality doesn't make a good story, not unless you chop out a lot of the relevant facts.

But Fear, and all the similar shows that followed it gave me something I could use: an illustrated guide on how people scare themselves. I don't think that any of those kids found real ghosts, and I'm highly suspicious that it's become common practice to have some member of the production crew hidden at the location to slam doors, move objects, and open windows when no one else is looking. But the show, and the current shows, often managed to get the mood and tone down near-perfect. The kids were the stars, and deservedly so. They made up their own reasons why the spirits are either trying to communicate with them or telling them to get out. They nervously crept down into basements with rats, leaking pipes, and broken windows, wondering where those squeaking, dripping, and whispering sounds were coming from. Clutching each other in the dark, with one light right on each person's face (so the camera could get a good shot) and one focused light that only let them see a few feet ahead, they never let their night vision build up. Take away the scary back-story, or just let them perform all their tasks during the day, and the series would have been like every other reality show. Just overacting drama.

You haven't gotten the impression I didn't love watching it, though, have you? Or that I don't take advantage of the fact that SyFy has episodes of a similar series up on their website? Sorry, but when it comes to scaring people, I'll get out the Dots and the popcorn. My daughter got her share of giggles and smiles out of it, too.

Wow, thinking about that makes me want to write.

Roja, Mortal Kombat, and a genuine tragedy

This day started off on a bad note. The alarm went off, I hit the snooze, then said to myself, 'In ten more minutes I have to get up and get ready for work. That stinks.' It took me a long while to fall asleep last night, so I was already in bad shape. During those ten minutes, I lay there trying to build up the will to keep existing. Then I said, 'Hang on. I saw Skyfall with Claudia yesterday, and we saw it on Saturday.' Then I accused my alarm clock of being the male child of a female dog.

Part of the fun of writing is you're always exploring new ideas, places, and people. The downside of that is unless you already know everything, you need to do research to address your ignorance. Earlier today, I needed a name for a skin condition that would be a likely suspect for something in Roja, and browsing around, I thought of something I heard in the new Mortal Kombat trailer. (I'm a huge fan of the original movie, even though I only played the game a few times and got my backside handed to me) So I looked up Harlequin Ichthyosis.

I have learned so much over the years from writers who put little tidbits in their stories that were about something I had never heard of before. I need you to hear me say this next part in a grumpy old man voice, because it won't have the same impact if you don't. Back when I first started writing, if you needed to know something, you went to the library, and you hoped it wasn't something so exotic that the librarians wouldn't know what you were talking about. Today, we have Google, yet people on the whole don't seem to know much more than they did those few decades ago. I looked that skin condition up, and I got one of those shocks where my head is screaming, 'What the hell? How can something that disturbing exist and we don't regularly hear about it?' Babies get born with that condition, and life sucks from that point on. Usually, not for long.

Part of the way we deal with the world, is to build a picture of it in our heads. Let's say I have a brain saw, and I pull out your gray stuff and pop it into a scanner. A lot of the info that I read is going to be interconnected into an overall picture not of this world, but how you think this world is. Each brain world is going to be different. If you're a physicist, your world is made of atoms and quarks and semi-real strings, as opposed to a stockbroker, whose world only breaks down beyond physical matter when you think about it really hard, but that has this dynamic, chaotic system of how money works. If you believe in psychic powers, then some people show up too late to board planes doomed to crash in your world because on some level, they know what's going to happen. If you believe we went to the moon, then your world has a moon with leftover pieces of spacecraft on it. If not, it has governments that lie about those spacecraft.

This world building comes in handy for those of us who build new worlds all the time and then try to sell them. All we have to do is make worlds that you want to read about. Simple, right? I can hear Hollywood knocking on my door right now. Oh wait, that's my supervisor, wanting to know why I'm not at work. People are funny when it comes to what we like to experience, and what we want to know.

Does your world have babies that are born with skin that comes in plates, with weak gaps between them? Do those babies usually die of infection, or suffocate because that skin is too tight over their chest to let them breathe? Does your world only include women and men, and not people who are born with characteristics of both, or neither? Human beings are funny things, and the parts that make us up, physical, mental, and spiritual, fit together in all kinds of patterns. Is it possible for us to understand all those patterns? Maybe, maybe not. But we're aware of a hell of a lot more patterns today than we were yesterday.

Still mixing the patterns around. Still writing.