A necessary step?

Ask your standard Joe on the street what horror is sometime. I'm willing to bet that A: He or she gives examples rather than a definition, and B: Most of those examples are movies, and they include things like Dracula, Friday the Thirteenth, and Halloween, if they're my age. If they're not, well, hopefully it's American Horror Story or even Paranormal Activity. Just please not Twilight, because it really isn't horror.

Now I need to veer a bit to one side here. Hold on to the rail, please. While I'm distrustful of those who say one genre or another has a 'purpose' or function,' I do think that some types of fiction (printed or filmed) have effects on people. One effect that horror can have, depending on how your head is wired, is to help you deal with the 'real' things that you're afraid of. You watch Roddy McDowall triumph over a murderous, psychotic ghost, then you don't think having to ask your grouchy boss for some vacation time is as bad as you thought it could be. A girl survives (mostly) an encounter with a crazed family who kill all her friends with meathooks and chainsaws, so you can survive doing your taxes. A young doctor finds his true love and saves her from the vampirous reincarnation of her distant ancestor, so I can get over the disappointment of rejection and send more of my work out. We can tell all those motivational gurus that they're full of it, but those poor fools whose only sin was to take a wrong turn? Heck, that was us just last week.

Now here's my question, how far off the path of reality do we need to go? With the success of the Saw and Hostel series of movies, I'd be hard pressed to say that those films don't offer their audiences something. But I wonder if it's the same as the ones with a supernatural element. I know that there's nothing overtly supernatural in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, so maybe my second example isn't the best, but the sheer craziness of the Leatherface family keeps it from being torture porn. Even one of my favorite directors, Takashi Miike, filmed 'Audition,' and had a cameo in one of the Hostel movies (brief tangent, I saw Audition, and it creeped me out like nothing else since when I saw Night of the Living Dead, at about age ten).

Does it make the horror easier to deal with, if it's about something unreal? I'm not going to address people's beliefs on ghosts, etc here, because for this discussion it isn't rellevant. Do we come away better armored for having watched The Exorcist, or The Last House on the Left?

What, you think I know? I'm asking the question. What's your answer?

Sadly, the bit in the second paragraph about rejection is true to life. Amazon shot down Roja based on the pitch alone, and Gray Matter Press declined on Dirty. Oh well.

I'm still writing.

Why the ending matters so much

Okay, picture this: You're a contestant on a game show, and your challenge is to run an obstacle courser. It's a really strange one, and you've got a crowd of people standing in front of it, and they will decide whether you win or lose. It's a big crowd, too.

First, you get up on a stage, and you have to get the crowd interested. So you tell them a scary story about a family living in a haunted house, and how your heroes were smart enough to solve the mystery, and kind enough to be gentle to the people who had the best of intentions when they started it. You've got 'em.

Then you're off. You climb up a narrow beam, carefully balancing between falling one way or the other. You run at breakneck speed toward solid walls, nimbly finding some way over, under, or around them at the last minute. Far above the crowd, you get progressively farther out on ledges, somehow always able to keep from falling.

Through the whole thing, you've been moving in roughly the same direction. At the end of the course that you're headed toward there are two posts with a ribbon tied across them and a big sign above them that says 'Finish.' You spring over the last obstacle in your way and dash along the straight, open path. At the last minute, you come to a dead stop and run off in a different direction. You go to a tree that no one was paying any attention to, slap it like a kid playing tag, and take your bows in front of the crowd.

By the way, did I mention my wife and I watched 'Red Lights' on Netflix last week?

Most of the time when you tell a story, you're going somewhere. Cast your mind way back to geometry class and see yourself drawing your story like a line on a sheet of graph paper. You start at a point, and go in a certain direction for a certain distance. (So it's a ray illustrating a vector, if you remember all those terms) Even if you wibble around and don't go in a straight line, your reader can still see the graph in their heads. They can see where you started, and where you finished. They'll probably even draw their own simplified, straighter line to remember the story. So if you curve, have a reason.

But if you only curve a little (and some curving is a good thing), your reader soon gets an idea where you're headed before you get there. If you curve a lot, it takes longer, but most will eventually figure out the direction that you're going. This is a good thing. People enjoy having a certain amount of knowledge about how a story is going to end. Not all of it, but a certain amount. Letting them pick out the point of the ending, on their own, makes them emotionally invested. They're gambling with a bit of their own happiness.

So if you zip along in a straight line at the end and then suddenly go in a different direction and stop, your audience has invested with you and lost. How likely are you to keep investing with a broker that lost your money?

Given that, why would someone change directions at the last minute like that? Well, imagine you're the one running the obstacle course. The whole point of this is to please the audience. (You want them to keep investing with you!) So, right as you step out to wait for the signal to start the course, you take a good look at them, just to see if you can judge what they might be in the mood for.

They're all wearing masks; big, plain white ones with tiny holes for eyes. They don't even have any features. You have no idea if the people are smiling, frowning, or laughing while you risk life and limb for their amusement. Because we're using this as an analogy for making a film or writing a book, we can include the fact that you can have either test screenings or beta readers. But all that does is pull one or two people from the audience at those times that you take a quick break and have those people take off their masks for a minute while you ask them if they like how things are going so far. You don't get to run the whole course, and then do it again differently if most of the people didn't like it. You get one shot per course. Period.

So you better know ahead of time if the audience will appreciate your little twist that you think is the coolest thing ever. If you're a film-maker, you need to watch other films and learn how their audiences reacted. If you're a writer, you better read other books in your genre and know if the audience liked them or not. The people who went to see those film-makers/writers run their courses are the same ones who will be watching you.

By the way, a bit of research on the web shows that there might be an alternate ending to 'Red Lights.' I hope so.

Still writing.

How to dance

For the first few days after I sent Roja in, I was in this weird state of, 'okay, now what do I do?' Working on short stories after doing a book feels like a step back. I keep wanting to dive nosefirst into the next one. Of course, bitter experience has shown me that's one of the best ways to foul something up.

So I started on one that's a little different. It's not horror, or even science fiction. It might have its roots in the months that I spent down in Panama when I was in the Marine Corps, or it may just have been lodged in a loose stitch in my little bag of nightmares. Sometimes I get a stray beat in my heat that won't go away, the kind that you find yourself tapping your foot to when you're not paying attention. At some point, I could see a man dancing to that beat, and the audience clapping it in time. This guy can move like few human beings have ever been able to move, and people love him for it. Then I saw something really bloody happen, right there on the stage.

On a different note, my wife took me to see Hansel and Gretel, Witch Hunters today. It was a good fun, but more like an action movie than I thought it would be. It reminded me a lot of Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, only without the historical connections. That gave it a lot more room to play around with themes that it wouldn't normally have. It was fun.

Still writing, only right now it feels like dancing.

It's in

My first novel is out in the world. Amazon has a contest called the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, and a few days ago Claudia discovered it and sent me a link. It took a lot of work, and a lot of help from friends willing to give up their time and test read Roja for me, but I did it, and they did too. Roja is entered as of yesterday.

It still doesn't feel real. Yesterday, anyone who saw me would have thought I was inhaling laughing gas. I walked around the house giggling every five minutes and not knowing what to do. For months that book has been the focus of every bit of free time that I had, and now, it's going to sink or swim on it's own merits. I wonder when it will feel real.

It would never have gotten finished without the help I received. Even after my wife and I went through Roja page by page, every test reader found other mistakes that we both missed. Just another example of how writing a book is a different game than writing short stories.

So what's next? I won't know anything on Roja, good or bad, for a while, so I'm going to finish a short story that I started, and rewrite one that has been sitting idle for a bit. Then, it's off to the next book.

That's how I'm going to keep writing.

A successful marriage is one where no one gets killed

So my wife and I have made a decision. We're not going to kill each other, and we're not going to divorce. We are going to respect each other's point of view. But damn was it close for a while there.

My wife has her copy of Roja, and is going through it with me, one paragraph at a time. She read it by herself first, making some notes and sending me a text that said, 'I hate you,' when she came to a particular point in the plot. That lets me know that I did that point right.

We started editing it together as soon as I got home from work Friday night. It took us less than an hour to reach the point where we were glaring at each other, staying silent to keep from saying things we would later regret. We have been married nearly ten years, and we have never had an argument like the one we had Friday night.

My beloved knows the rules of grammar better than I do. She has a very clear idea of what parts go where. She busted her butt to learn all this, and she has edited fiction before. Me? In my own humble opinion, (stop laughing) I know the story. I have a sense of not just the story we're working on, but the living, organic thing that gets into your head and makes a home there. I also have the opinion that you can wibble the rules a bit, if it helps tell the story.

It does not help that I am a native Texan, and my wife is from up north. Most of the dialogue in the book is spoken by natives, and so there are a lot of 'Texasisms' being used. Where dialogue is concerned, you go with how the person speaks. When a character uses 'got' where 'get' would be better English, my poor wife gets a twitch in her eye.

Also, most of the characters are male, and not bothered by coarse language. My wife isn't bothered by it, but she didn't understand the logic of the nuts. When a man has to swear on one of his testicles, he uses the left one, not the right. There is an unspoken but near-universal belief that the right nut is primary, therefor if you risk losing one, it's the left. My wife gave me one of those looks when I finished explaining this.

No one's dead, so we still have a good marriage. Also, I'm still writing.

The non-representative villain

For Christmas, I got the movie, 'Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter.' It's not high art, but it doesn't try to be. It's good entertainment, and that's something that's not easy to make. The people who made it did a good job of crafting a fairly cohesive vampire mythology. It plays a bit loose with the real history, but that's how you make a real story out of reality. As the opening line says, 'History prefers legends to men.'

When you write a story, a cigar is never just a cigar. It probably isn't even really a cigar. It's a symbol of opulence, taste, coarseness, arrogance, toughness, weakness, masculinity, or faux masculinity. It all depends on how it's presented.

In that same light, a good villain is never just a foil for our hero. They are people in their own right, with strengths, weaknesses, beliefs, and personalities. They also need color to make them live. A technique sometimes used is to borrow color from some available source. Our villain (and our hero, too) can be a priest, a mailman, a politician, or a shaolin monk, as long as it's something we have a bit of familiarity with. It's important to note that our familiarity does not have to be fact-based. Anyone who watches kung-fu movies will know what a shaolin monk is, though they probably have no idea what the real ones are like.

That's where it gets tricky.

When I finally broke down and saw 'Avatar,' way back when, I kind of liked it. Then little things like the casual way Michelle Rodriguiz character switches sides, and the fact that there was only one 'good' guy in uniform, and no bad guys with blue skin, began to bug me. When you use real organizations, real people connect with them. If your connection makes them feel good about themselves, great. It might mean they want to see your next movie or buy your next book. Or it might 'only' put a smile on their faces, and they go on to judge your work on it's own merits. If you manage to accidentally (Or deliberately) insult them, well, you've just lost a customer. How many do you have that you can afford to do that?

SPOILER ALERT!!

But it's more than that. In my own humble opinion, it smacks of lazy writing. In AL:VH, the villains are vampires who start the Civil War to create a nation for vampires, where they can finally stand tall and be proud of who they are. A lot of the other plot devices are solid, and Rufus Sewell's character makes some good points on the concept of slavery, but the Civil War was started by vampires. Ponder that for a second. Every man and woman who died in it, died fighting in ignorance. Also, these vampires are smart, ancient, powerful, and wealthy. They've survived by staying in the shadows, then they line up to be on the front lines of a war. The writers borrowed Abraham Lincoln, all the people around him, and the Civil War, (borrowing all the people around it) and while I understand they needed to make a story, they used real people. If next week's topic is what I'm planning on, I'll give my thoughts on how that can break the magic spell.

My long-suffering wife is working her way through Roja slowly, and I can't tell you how hard it is to not hover over her shoulder while she reads it. Why don't I? Because she's told me how annoying that is, of course. Also, she owns an ax, a large one.

I'm getting a short set in the Great Dustbowl rewritten, as well as working on a short that's not really horror, but that's been kicking around in my head for a while. So yes, I'm still writing.

I have a book

It's done.

I can't tell you how long I've been waiting to write those words. Roja took a lot longer than it should have, in part because I put it aside to write short stories for a bit, but also because I was stumbling my way along in the dark as I wrote it. It isn't just making sure that I don't describe someone's eye color as brown on one page and blue on another, (although that did com up) it was making sure that the people stayed the same people through the whole thing. Because a reader has to assemble their own characters from the directions that the writer provides, we have to give directions that work. If you put a good coat of conservative flesh on the skeleton of a 'nuclear family' upbringing, you need to include a special attachment for that friend who's a confrontational, pot-smoking, liberal arts professor. If you don't, that friend won't fit.

So is it, Roja, any good? Well, if you ask me, I'll say it's damned good. Then again, I may be just a wee bit biased. My long-suffering wife is going to be my first test subject. She already endured me hiding up in my study until thirty minutes to midnight on new year's eve, when I came downstairs ready to bludgeon someone to death because as I was cleaning stuff off my printer, (I tend to use it as an extra shelf) I bumped something on my CPU, and my monitor went black. Be glad you weren't in the room with me just then.

After all that, I had to print it out in batches. I upped the font size to make it easier to read, which upped the number of pages. My poor printer hates me when I make it print a lot of pages at once, and it's kind of got me where it wants me, so I baby it.

On top of that, my poor wife read the first chapter, and found a lot of brackets and incomplete paragraphs that I hadn't noticed on my read-through. Last night, I finished the last of the fixes, and printed the last of the pages. I take comfort in the thought that if anyone tries to shoot my wife while she's proofreading my first book, all she has to to is hold up the manuscript. The damn thing is about six inches thick.

What's next? Well, I plan on going back to my old drill of writing something new while re-writing something else. I have short stories that have been collecting dust this whole time, and of course, it's time to look around for an agent and/or publishing house that will take Roja. I also won't be neglecting this blog like I did.

Whatever happens next, I'll still be writing. Thank you for reading.