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!)