The (Family) Cabin in the Woods

When I was about 8 or 9 years old, I was just starting to get into scary stuff. I had always been a bit of a wuss (it took me about twenty tries to get all the way through Pinocchio because Monstro the Whale scared the bejeezus out of me), but at about this point in my life I was just starting to appreciate the thrill that came with being scared. I was starting to read books like the Goosebumps series, and on Friday nights I would watch Are You Afraid of the Dark? on YTV. Often I would freak myself out, sometimes even giving myself nightmares, but I also loved the feeling of being scared, the giddy thrill.

At this time in my life my grandparents still had their cabin out in the middle of the woods. It was a modest cabin on a nice lot of land, and often our entire family would go out for days on end; we would cram aunts and uncles and cousins and family friends and sometimes even pets into a three-bedroom deal with one toilet and now that I’m thinking of it, was there even a shower in that cabin? It was crowded and half falling apart, and often we would arrive to find that a bat or a small family of mice had taken up residence while we’d been away, but it was awesome and we all loved it.

My grandmother, traveling the old roads with my cousin.

Loving the “coat” rack, eh? And my uncle, rockin’ the pink shirt!

To one side of the cabin property there was a small mobile home, an older model with only one bed. It was permanently parked there and sometimes a couple of the adults would use it to create more space when there were too many of us staying at the cabin all at once. As kids, my cousins and I loved this little trailer because there were just enough trees between it and the cabin that we felt like we were in our own area, free from our parents, camping all by ourselves out in the big, bad woods. We would have little adventures in that mobile home, and because I was starting to get into this idea of purposely scaring yourself (see how I brought those two subjects together?), I would often imagine that when we were in there we were surrounded by monsters or wolves or zombies. It gave me a little thrill, even though I knew I was perfectly safe and that my parents or my grandparents or my aunts and uncles were very near by.

Can you tell we were rebels back then? lol That’s me on the right…cute as a bug.

Lazy summer days…and we had NO TECHNOLOGY OF ANY KIND.

One particular night, some of my cousins and I were playing in the mobile home. As previously mentioned, I was about 8 or 9, which means that Tommy was the same; Leah would have been 11 or 12, and that would make Matthew about 5 or 6. The four of us were hanging out in the mobile home, all piled together on that one bed, and for the life of me I can’t remember what we were doing in there, but we were having a blast. It was getting dark outside and we were just enjoying having our special little place in the middle of the woods.

Then Matthew said something about seeing someone walk past the window above our heads. We completely ignored him because he was the young one, and the young ones never get listened to, am I right? A few minutes later he said the same thing again and I remember we were all like, “Matthew, shut up, geeze. Don’t be a baby.”

We continued on, ignoring the young one, as older ones tend to do, and then suddenly Leah heard something…a scratching noise. If I’m remembering correctly she ignored it the first time, but the second time it happened she shushed us all. And we heard it too. Every couple of seconds, a scritchy-scratchy noise against the side of the trailer. It brought to mind images of something with claws – coyotes were common in that area – pawing at the outer walls, trying to find a way in.

Here’s where nervous denial began to set in, because earlier in the day another of my cousins – Billy, who is the same age as Tommy and I – had gotten mad at us for some reason or another and stormed off. We anxiously assumed that it was him, trying to screw with us. Leah shouted out a couple of times for him to cut it out, that he was being a jerk. There was no response except for further scratching, which was now growing in intensity and seemed to be coming from multiple directions at once. There was no way Billy could be scratching the right side and the left side of the trailer at one time, we reasoned. Now we were getting really nervous.

The childish imagination is an amazing thing. All of a sudden there were a thousand possibilities running through our minds. What was out there? Why was it bothering us? Could it get in? Why did it want to get in? Where the heck was the rest of our family? Surely one of the adults would have noticed if something had approached the mobile home…right?

It seemed like hours passed as my three cousins and I glanced nervously from wall to wall, window to window, from one to another. And then the scratching suddenly…stopped. We glanced at each other, and for whatever reason our gazes all gravitated toward the same thing all at once: the door knob. I’ll never forget the three things that happened next…

Leah nudged Tommy and asked, “Did you lock the door?”

Tommy gulped and replied, “I think so.”

And then the entire trailer shook with an earth-shattering BANG! as if it had been hit by a semi truck.

To say that we reacted poorly might be a bit of an understatement. I have vivid recollections of Leah and I screaming for our grandfather, while Matthew cried for his mother and managed to shimmy his way up on top of my and Leah’s heads, and Tommy turned white as fresh snow and very nearly passed out. The decibel levels in that trailer nearly reached critical mass, and I’m sure each of us came as close as any young child ever comes to having a full-on heart attack.

A moment later the door opened to reveal our grandmother – who was practically in stitches – and our aunt, lamenting that she’d broken one of her nails whilst scratching the trailer. It took my cousins and I half a moment to realize what had happened, and half a week to forgive our relatives for nearly sending us all into coronaries.

But here’s the thing: as mad as we were at the time, and as difficult as it was to calm the panicked racing of our childish hearts, it has been one of our favorite stories to recount for the past decade and a half. The tension was so real, the terror so visceral, that I’ve never had any problem picturing the event just as it happened, even though it was years and years ago. I’ve even occasionally dreamed about that night, complete with the heart-stopping panic that accompanied it. That’s the power of fear, and it’s moments like this particular event that make me want to write horror. I don’t want to gross people out, or give them cheap SUPER-LOUD-NOISE! jump scares like so many of the horror movies of today. I want to scare. I want to make people’s skin crawl. I want to make my readers feel uncomfortable sitting in the dark by themselves. I want to make people feel the way I felt as a little kid, sitting in that trailer in the middle of the night, thinking that god-knows-what was about to break through the walls and steal me or eat me or rip me to shreds. I want to give readers that visceral thrill of pure, cold terror.

I think that’s an important part of an artist’s life: wanting to share your experiences, in whatever way you can. My inner child remembers the wonder of fear, the racing heart and ice-like chills, and I want to share that with the world if I can. If one reader someday tells me that I scared them out of their wits, I’ll feel like I accomplished something great.

Do you have any scary memories that stand out in your mind? Scary tales that you can look back on and laugh at? Did you like scary stuff as a kid? Do you enjoy it as an adult? Please share!

When Life Shoves Lemons Down Your Throat…

The other day while I was browsing the morning blog posts, I came across this one. In this post the author (whose actual name I cannot find on his blog) talks about the book The Artist’s Way. Specifically, he talks about the first step of the book which asks the reader to examine negative people/feelings/occurrences/etc in their life that have prevented them from reaching their full potential. The author of the blog post gave the example of being ashamed of his poor penmanship as a child.

That got me thinking about little things that affected me, growing up as a kid who wanted to be a writer. I was quickly able to think of two examples of things that were said to me, and one example of a choice I made that I believe have negatively affected my forward motion as a writer.

– When I was quite young and just really getting into writing, I used to spend a lot of time laying on my grandparent’s floor, scribbling in a notebook. Practically every time I did this someone (my grandmother, an aunt, an older cousin) would make a comment about how I was always writing and maybe I’d become a journalist when I grew up. It was meant as a compliment, I’m sure, but as a kid it boiled my blood because I had absolutely no interest in journalism. All I wanted was to write fiction, and I felt that by suggesting I become anything but a fiction writer, they were doubting my ability. As a (perhaps overly-) sensitive kid, that perceived doubt really bothered me and set the precedent for me to doubt myself. Kids are stupid that way.

– In the eighth grade I had this awesome English teacher I loved, and once I gave him one of my stories to look at. I couldn’t tell you what the story was about, but I can tell you that when he returned it he gave me a stern talk about the use of brackets. He told me that putting sub-thoughts into brackets patronized the reader by implying that they were too stupid to think of this additional information on they’re own. I’m still not sure I agree with that concept, but at the time I couldn’t help but hear an insult. This was my English teacher, telling me that I’d patronized him with my story. As a (definitely overly-) sensitive teenager, this incident helped me to further slide down the slippery slope of self-doubt.

– As high school graduation was nearing, all graduating students had to see a guidance councillor to discuss plans for the future. This basically involved telling the councillor what kid of career path you wanted to take, and he would explain what steps you needed to go through to make that happen. When faced with that meeting I made a choice. Instead of telling the councillor that I wanted to be a writer (and had, in fact, wanted to be one since I was about 8 years old), I told him that I wanted to do something with technology. I made this choice because, while I loved writing with all my heart, the image of myself as a “starving artist” was always at the forefront of my mind. I desperately wanted to write, but I also wanted a house, a car, a family…in other words, financial independence. I was scared. I’d come I seriously doubt my ability to ever make enough money with writing to survive, much less have the other things I wanted in life. I thought that if I pursued writing I would end up penniless and living in my parent’s basement at forty. So I chose to go where I thought the money was. I can’t say whether that choice was ultimately good or bad (though I’m leaning toward good since things have worked out pretty well for me), but I can definitely say that it has directly stifled my literary potential in a major way.

Life is full of these little setbacks, discouraging moments, and crossroads. The trick seems to be pushing past them. Kids take things out of context, pre-teens take criticism to heart, and teenagers have no way of knowing what is the best path for them. These things have negatively affected my growth and potential as a writer, but they’re also in the past now. I can’t go back and make myself feel or react differently; I can only accept how things happened and keeping a forward motion.

I may have had setbacks, and my life may have taken some different turns from what I expected, but nothing that was ever said or done has made me want to be a writer any less.

Interview with a Vampi-…Uh, I mean, Character

A reminder: This post courtesy of Julie Jarnagin’s 101 Blog Post Ideas for Writers.

94. Interview a character

For the purposes of this post, I did a quick Google search and found some good character questionnaires here. I’m going to use the first set of questions on the page, and since it’s supposed to be an ‘interview’, I’ll reword them a bit an answer them as though I am the character. Fun, yes? If the responses seem a bit vague or odd, it’s because it would ruin the actual story if I answered them in a straight-forward manner. 🙂

What is your name, and do you have any nicknames?

“My full name is Victoria Ann MacKinnon, but everyone calls me Tori.”

What is you hair color? What about your eyes?

“My hair is strawberry blond and falls just below my shoulders. I usually wear it up in a ponytail. My eyes are very bright blue; sometimes it freaks people out that they’re so bright…I always have people thinking that I’m wearing special contacts.”

Do you have any distinguishing features, such as a birthmark, or scars, and if so, how did you get them?

“Nothing major, really. I have a faint scar on my knee from when I wiped out on my bike when I was a kid, and one across my left index finger from the first time I tried to cook for myself. I’m…not good with knives.”

Describe your friends and family. Who do you surround yourself with? Who are you closest to and who do you wish you were closer to?

“My family is just my parents, Katherine and Robert. I have a few aunts and uncles, and three of my grandparents are still alive, but they live far enough away that I never see them. I used to have quite a few friends…before…but I haven’t seen many of them lately. The only one I ever really hang out with is Jacen, but that’s only because he won’t leave me alone. Not to say that I don’t like Jacen, but I really wish he’d mind his own business and let me…let me just be. My problems aren’t his.”

Where do you go when you’re angry?

“The nearest bar. That’s a bit of a cop-out though, because lately that’s the only place I go besides work.”

What is your biggest fear? Who have you told this to, and who would you never tell? Why?

“My biggest fear? Probably having to face the truth about my…condition. The only one who knows is…well I won’t talk about him. I would never tell anyone else,  because it’s hard enough dealing with it on my own without having to deal with the pity I’d see in other people’s eyes.”

Do you have a secret?

“You hadn’t figured that out from the last question? Yes, I have a secret. No, I won’t share.”

What makes you laugh out loud?

“Not much, these days. I used to really enjoy crappy old b-movies, but I can’t seem to get into them anymore.”

Have you ever been in love, had your heart broken?

“Okay, that’s it, this interview is over. Goodbye.”

Identity Crisis

A reminder: This post courtesy of Julie Jarnagin’s 101 Blog Post Ideas for Writers.

39. Pseudonyms

Pseudonyms are something that have always amused me. For anyone who might not know, a pseudonym is an alternate name or identity. For the purposes of writers, a pseudonym would be a pen name…a name that you would publish something under if you didn’t want to use your real name.

Pseudonyms amuse me because on the one hand, it’s almost like a game, picking a new name. Choosing a name is almost like creating a whole new identity; it’s like role-playing in the real world. You can be whoever you want! On the other hand, I’ve considered that I would want anything I publish to have my real name attached to it…wouldn’t I? It’s a bit of a loaded debate, actually. For instance, what if I decide to write a Harlequin Romance? There’s certainly nothing wrong with Harlequin Romances, but they do have a bit of a stigma attached to them. There’s the possibility of future publishers not taking me seriously if I’m a published “women’s porn” author. Not to mention there can be an embarrassment factor: who wants their parents or grandparents, for example, to find out that they’ve been writing smut for a living?

As an unpublished author, I currently have no pseudonyms, but I’ve considered a few in case I do end up deciding to use them in the future. I would prefer to use my real, legal name for anything I publish, but there are definitely certain publication situations where I might be a bit skittish to have my real life associated with it. As I am currently nowhere close to becoming published, it’s not a major concern for me right now, and the manuscript I’m working toward getting published is definitely one I’d want my real name on, so that pushes the concern back even further. But be aware that there is the possibility that in the future you may read something with one of my pseudonyms attached to it, and I’ll be quietly chuckling from a dark corner like the weirdo that I am.