Fright Night

Well, it's here, bringing to an end our big discussions about fears and scares and ghosts and goblins.

So, since we've avoided the big question, or saved it for last, tell me - do you believe in ghosts? Have you seen one?

I do believe in ghosts. Maybe not in quite the standard sense, of ectoplasm and shaking chains and all that. But I know that a certain amount of us is made up of energy - electrical energy - and that doesn't die. It might convert to another form or dissipate into the atmosphere but it doesn't simply stop. Did you know electrical current is always running through those magical plugs in your wall? It doesn't turn on because you've inserted the plug - that just completes the circuit. So just because we become unplugged, that magical electricity must be running somewhere, right? Maybe that's what we call a soul. That's for wiser people to figure out. But in my own little mind with the limited understanding I have of it all, I believe that there are ghosts. Like a reflection of a life, lingering with us for a little while, before they're ready to move on.

Have I seen a ghost. I don't think I've actually seen one. A couple of times, I've seen something out of the corner of my eye - but I have never felt enough emotion or presence to really think it was anything more than floaters.

But I have been touched by a ghost. The one time that I'll never forget is when I was laying in bed, in my mid twenties, and worried about something, when a gentle hand pulled the covers up and tucked me in. It was a loving and gentle thing. I wasn't scare, startled, very startled even, but it felt safe and reassuring. Like someone wanted to let me know I wasn't alone.

There's been other times where, again, I didn't exactly see a ghost but I definitely got a message. Like the time grandma died and I answered the phone on the first ring. Something had awoken me a few minutes earlier, and somehow I knew, so the ringing phone wasn't a surprise. Even more interesting because they weren't supposed to call our house, mom was staying with relatives near the hospital, but they messed up and called us instead. So someone woke me up and warned me, so I wouldn't be so shocked.

We've all had lots of moments like that. Some people call it intuition. Some say it's coincidence. Some say divine intervention.

Maybe it's my imagination, but I like to think that those we love are watching over us and sometimes they like to give us a little nudge or maybe a pat on the shoulder. Call me a romantic, if you like, but it makes me feel good. And that is what faith and our beliefs are meant to do, right?

Fear

Or should that be FEAR???

What is fear about? I think fear keeps us alive. It is an early warning system that we're about do go some place that's not safe, or there's imminent danger. Terror is one step further when our body is frantically screaming at us "what the hell are you doing there? Get out now!".

The fairy tales of old days - have you ever reflected on how scary those were? Why do we tell our little tiny naive innocent children about Hansel and Gretel going into the woods and almost getting eaten by an evil witch? Because we want to scare those little children. We don't want them wandering off by themselves into the woods where there are lions and tigers and bears, oh my! Or we don't want them wandering the city streets where there are pickpockets and pedophiles and drunks, oh my!

Snow White and the poisoned apple? Don't take food from strangers. Especially appropros on Halloween.

Cinderella and the glass slipper? (or was it mink?) - well that one was way ahead of its time...Don't rely on a handsome prince for your happiness. But that's a whole entire other story.

And yet, despite this ancestral passing of stories, of instilling fears and cautions into our children, we still write about people that seem to be missing the fear gene, don't we? What would a murder mystery be without someone brave enough or stupid enough to go into that dark basement, when the power is out, and a serial killer is lurking?

And why d0 people buy into that? I mean, Leslie Horton from Global TV is a rapid fan of my Kate Carpenter, but every times she talks to me (or reviews the books) she says the same thing - why does Kate keep going into that basement or down that hallway? And then the next words out of her mouth are - when is the next book coming out?

Well, if your main character is a cop or a private detective, you know they do it because it's their job. But if you have someone like my Kate, who is just a poor little theatre administrator, you have to come up with a good enough reason to make them go down that dark corridor. To do the things we would never do.

You've heard of plausible deniability? I call it plausible believability.

Your situation doesn't have to be real, because honestly there is almost nothing that would make me go down the hall after a serial killer, but it has to be real enough. So I spend my evenings wondering why Kate would get in between an abusive husband and his wife. Ah-ha! Because she's Cam's cousin. Or why she would care about who hung someone from the second balcony in her theatre? Of course! Because her former college professor and lover, who also happens to be a gorgeous French conductor, is accused of the dastardly deed.

So there's my lesson for today....Plausible believability. Use it wisely.

What scares you the most?

Do you know what scares me the most about Halloween? Going to the grocery store. Seriously. From about August onward every time I enter the grocery store I am surrounded by chocolate bars. Little mini chocolate bars packaged up in bags of twenty fives, fifties, or even one hundreds and twenty fives. The tower over you, at the entrance to every store. They wait for you at the end of every aisle. You turn and corner, thinking you're safe, and then they pounce on you for some sort of display case. It's terrifying. How many times can you be strong and walk past them without them turning up in your cart? How strong is one person supposed to be?



And somehow, if you manage to get through the season and survive the onslaught of the killer chocolate bars and the resulting weight management issues, then you're still not safe. Because the day after Halloween, they go on sale. So you've got another week or so of 30% off or two for one. And then if you survive that, thinking you'll finally walk past all those shelves and maybe they'll finally be filled with fresh fruit or high fiber granola bars you're wrong. You still won't be safe. Because Christmas is looming around the corner and suddenly you'll be surrounded by After Eight's, Chocolate Covered Cherries and Turtles. Then there's the 50% off sale after Christmas, which is really only a lead in to Valentine's Day and by the time they get that cleared up it's Easter and you're surrounded by chocolate bunnies and eggs and you're not going to be safe again until well into May.

And that's why going to the grocery store is the scariest part of Halloween.

But on the other hand, right now I'm looking forward to those toffees that are wrapped in the orange paper with black witches on them. Next week I'll have to start thinking of ways to justify that box of Turtles.

Boo!

So do books scare you? Have you ever changed your life because of a book? I have.

The first book that scared me enough to actually change my environment was 'Salem's Lot.

Thanks Stephen King, for the enduring horror of having to sleep through a horrible Calgary heatwave in July with all my windows shut, so that the vampires wouldn't float up and ask if they could come in. And I was terrified that if they should, I might turn over, half asleep, and ask them in. There are no such things vampires, you say? Prove it.

My electrical bills went up that summer too, as I decided that sleeping with the lights on would at least allow me to see the horrible monster as it crossed from my closet to the bed before it killed me. Maybe I could come back from the dead and let someone else know what it was (I mean, you have to have the right ammunition to kill these things, silver bullets for werewolves, stakes for vampires...). And wasn't Cujo, the rabid 300 pound St. Bernard, scary enough on his own? Why did there also have to be a monster in the closet?

Yeah, Mr. King seems to be tuned into a lot of my own personal fears and is excellent at phrasing them in just the right way to permanently scar my psychi.

How about It? Anyone staring down the drain in your sink while you're brushing your teeth and thinking that maybe dentures would be more adventageous than a blood sucking clown racing out of the drain to take you away?

Now, from 'Salem's Lot to It is many years over the life of Stephen King. Why didn't I just stop reading his books, you may ask?

Because we all love to get scared. But that's a whole other subject.

Happy Halloween and hope you read a good book today!

Monsters in my Closet

Halloween is approaching. I'm always jealous of the Americans at Halloween. They seem to celebrate it way more enthusiastically than we do in Canada. I anxiously await Martha Stewart's show during the month of October to see her ghouly creations. I listen to the American news reports, to hear about the people that turn their houses into haunted houses. It's a night full of mystery and intrigue. When spirits are allowed to roam the earth. It was only a few hundred short years that we humans cowered in our houses that night, placing charms on our doorways and window sills to protect us, leaving out treats to distract the spirits from attacking us. I always got a kick out of Buffy the Vampire Slayers' Halloween show. Creator Joss whedon went the other way - he said that Halloween was the one night a year the ghoulies took the night off. So Buffy and her friends were allowed out to parties and trick or treating...mind you they still had to watch out for the evil humans, whom, it seems, are allowed to walk the streets 365 days a year.




So what does this have to do with writing, one might ask. Well, that's a very good question. Here's the answer. People, including myself, always say that you write because you have to, not because you're trying to get rich or famous or whatever. So what does it mean to write because you have to? Well, most people would say that it means you would write whether you sold your work or not. Whether other people read your work or not. Whether you never made another single red cent from your work...you would keep writing. I agree with that. But for me, it actually goes a little further.

I do write because I have to. You see, from the time I was a little child I wrote stories. But the other thing I've done since the time I was a little child was to have nightmares. Horrifying nightmares. Nightmares so bad that they actually led me to seek medical help at one point. I recall the first dream I remember - I was about six - and I was sitting in a row boat in some sort of Florida-type swamp, with that moss hanging off the trees and brushing against us as we cut through the water. Everything was dark and gray and looked like something out of a horror movie. My mom sat in front of me, facing me and we rode in silence until the loud crack of a rifle shot broke through the air and a small hole appeared in her forehead, a single line of blood running down the middle of her face. I woke up screaming and yelling and crying and ended up spending the rest of the night sleeping in between my parents in their bed. I spent a lot of nights there throughout my childhood.


And it got worse as I grew up. There were times that I was under the covers screaming, holding the covers so tightly around me that they had to get to me from the foot of the bed, to stop my screaming. There was a time where demons fell from the ceiling every night, trying to take me off to hell with them, leading to about six months of almost no sleep and almost losing my job. That's when I sought medical intervention. The problem with that is they don't know a lot about sleep and dreams either. So a psychiatrist tried to probe my mind for traumatic events and a neurologist probed my nervous system for misfiring neurons. I had EEG leads hooked up to my head and lights flashed in my eyes. And then when no one really had anything brilliant to offer as diagnosis, I quit seeing them. And in effect, I learned to cure myself.

First I learned how to actually deal with the nightmares. I learned when I woke up from a terrifying dream, that if I just sat up, opened my eyes and looked around, I would immediately see that there were no monsters, it was just my room and it had only been a dream and not reality. It mostly worked. Didn't stop the dreams but stopped me from staying up all night, looking for the monsters.

And then one day, I made an astounding correlation. I realized that when I was writing regularly, I didn't have nightmares. If I stopped writing for more than three or four days, they would come back, with a vengeance. So I was being chased by demons, and not just in my dreams, but in reality. They were the creative demons. The demons that the muses turned into if you stopped listning to them.

So there you have it. I have to write. If I don't write, I don't get to sleep. I actually have to write.

Now, some might say I've just traded demons, the imaginary ones for the real ones in the publishing world. I say, I can sleep nights, and that's the most important thing. In all of it's many meanings.


Photo - publisher negotiating
contract with writer
(just kidding!)

Time wounds all heels....

Misha missing Mozart.

So time goes on, scar tissue is formed and the pain becomes less acute. Mostly. Of course pain becomes more acute when the survivor is wandering around the house howling, looking for the departed one. But then he remembers or gives up or whatever cats do and we both go back to resuming a normal life.

And then you thank the people that have put up with you for the past two weeks.

And then you pick up your laptop and realize you haven't written a word since October 3rd, when you wrote a rambling blog through tear filled eyes. And you have no idea where to start or where you left off or the mood or tone or if you can even get back there again. And then you open the file and you type a word or two and maybe it's crap - but doesn't matter. You can delete it tomorrow and try again.

Do I believe in writer's block I was asked. Nope. I believe it's a great excuse that almost nobody will argue with. You open the file and you type those words. You either are a writer or you're not.

Open you're file.

How do you mend a broken heart?

Mozart 1991 - 2006

Tonight there is a hole in my heart.
It is a wound so fresh that the pain still oozes out of it.
It hasn't clotted or scabbed over. It is fresh.
Today I lost a companion. A companion of almost 17 years.
He never judged me. He always forgave me.
He never thought any of my outfits made me look fat.
He met me at the door every night after work, he knew food was soon to follow.

Tonight I learn new euphemisms.
Lost. Passed away. Gone to sleep.
He is dead. He was sick. He gave me 17 years, I couldn't let him suffer.
He is dead. He is at peace. He looked beautiful when it was over.
His face was relaxed, there was no pain or worry.
No high blood pressure. No heart pounding in his chest.
No gasping for breath. He looked like he was a kitten again.

The hole in my heart oozes pain for me. But then I look at our other roommate.
His companion of almost 17 years. The one he was born next to.
The one he slept with every night, limbs intertwined.
They groomed each other as if they were one. Siamese twins with only spiritual bonds.
The hole in my heart spurts pain when I think of one sleeping alone tonight.

And I can't believe he's gone.
For weeks I have known this day was coming. Not quite this fast but soon.
But I still can't believe he's gone.
I have cried so many tears that I am dry.
Except for that hole in my heart, that still oozes.

I have a friend who lost a child. She says you don't get over loss.
Grief doesn't leave you. You just get used to it being there.
It becomes like a friend, like a chronic aching pain.
I have another that says your body treats grief like a wound.
It wraps it up in scar tissue to protect you from it.
To cushion the nerve endings from the constant pain.
I think that is right.
We shouldn't forget anyone that we loved enough to cause this much pain.

But I look forward to the wound beginning to heal.
I look forward to the scab and then the scar.
I look forward to saying his name without tears flooding my eyes.
Until then, I will do what the good author or actor should do.
I will memorize the pain.
I will study these feelings and file them away.
And one day, I will use them.
I will write a scene that will move people to tears,
And they will say, "I wonder how she could make that so real, how she could make those emotions so raw?"
And you and I will know where those feelings came from.
The last gift my companion gave to me.

For if you live without love, you can live without pain.
If you call that living.