For the A-to-Z Challenge 2017 I’m writing all about myself. Every post will be some random fact or bit of information about me that you may or may not have already known. Maybe you’ll learn something! Feel free to let me know! ^_^
Let’s get one thing out of the way right here and now: when I was a kid I was an epic wuss. The scariest thing I used to watch was “Are You Afraid of the Dark?”, and the scariest things I used to read were the “Goosebumps” books, and both would occasionally give me nightmares. I enjoyed kid-level scary stuff, but in general I couldn’t much handle horror. I remember I once, when I was about 8 or 9, I walked in on a friend of mine while she was watching Child’s Play, and I was absolutely petrified of dolls for months afterward.
That said, as I got older I got a little bit tougher and a little bit tougher…and then I started dating Jason, and things went from 0 to 60 real quick. You see, Jason was, is, and probably always will be, a horror aficionado. One of the first dates we had, he got me to watch Evil Dead 2 with him, and things just progressed from there. Before I even knew what was happening I’d seen more horror movies than most people I know combined. We went to the theater to watch them, we rented them (back when you still could rent movies), we picked them up on VHS when old rental places were getting rid of them, and bit by bit we amassed a collection of them on VHS, DVD, and Bluray, which now numbers in somewhere between 4- and 500 (I’ve lost count).
On top of that, being thrust so fully into the world of horror movies, I found myself gravitating more toward other forms of horror as well. I fell in love with Stephen King, among other horror authors, and began writing horror of my own. Jason and I would even play horror video games together sometimes, and although I’d become a little less sensitive to the genre by that time, playing Fatal Frame 2 nearly gave me numerous heart attacks.
Over the years I’ve become so desensitized to horror that very little really genuinely frightens me anymore, and believe it or not, I’m not necessarily happy about that outcome. Although it wasn’t the greatest being a little wuss who had nightmares all the time, the truth of the matter is that it can be very fun to be scared sometimes, under the right conditions, and I hardly ever experience that anymore now. There have been a few movies to genuinely freak me out in more recent years – Shutter, the original version from Thailand, scared the crap out of me – but there have also been plenty of supposedly super-scary movies that didn’t faze me in the slightest.
Mind you, that doesn’t change how much I’ve grown to love horror. It’s a part of me now, and I don’t think that’s ever going to change. Everything from the genuinely terrifying to the absolutely ridiculous (I’m lookin’ at you, Apocalypse Cow) tickles my fancy, and I imagine it’s going to be that way for pretty much the rest of my days.
I timed this one to be shared on Halloween, because it’s MONSTROUS! 😀 We were tagged by fellow YouTubers “Geeky Couple Carnage” to answer some spooky, Halloween-esque questions. ^_^
It may be a difficult thing to remember when you’re older and the genuine fears of the real world are always somewhere in the back of your mind, but it’s been well-studied that humans enjoy being scared. The rush of adrenaline and the ability to laugh about it later (assuming, of course, that the fear wasn’t justified by something horrible happening) is a wonderful rush and is the reason why horror movies/novels/video games/etc are such a big industry. It’s fun to be scared. It’s even more fun to be able to laugh and reminisce about it afterward.
When we’re young it’s even more fun because our imaginations are truly outrageous. As an adult we might get creeped out by a movie about ghosts, but afterward we’re pretty set in our beliefs that ghosts don’t really exist. As kids, we can go for years believing in a particular ghost story because we have amazing faith in the improbable. We’ll even make up stories and convince ourselves that they’re true. My friend and I used to spook ourselves silly with stories about how my house was haunted by the ghost of a previous owner, despite the fact that the house had only ever had one previous owner and he was still very much alive. It’s an amazing (and sometimes hysterical) trait that children have: the ability to completely make something up and then convince yourself that it is absolutely true.
I can remember tons of stories that used to be passed around when I was a kid, but one of the silliest was a tale we referred to as “the 21 Steps of Death”. You see, I grew up right along the Atlantic Ocean in Nova Scotia, Canada, and along the shoreline of my hometown are several “barracks” locations…that is, the old stone installments that were used by soldiers during the war. One particular area includes a three-story stone building that has been widely used by graffiti artists:
Photo taken by my father, Daniel G. Clarke. Awesome shot, dad!
…and the accompanying underground bunker which is set off to the side of the building. The bunker section of the barracks is visible from the ground only by an open rectangle through which two sets of stairs can be seen. Unless it is high noon, with the sun blaring down on top of you, looking down upon those two sets of stairs shows you only darkness below. A frightening image for a child.
And so there were the tales. Those steps, they said, were haunted by the ghosts of dead soldiers. Whichever staircase you took, there were 21 steps in total, and as soon as your foot touched the 21st step you would be whisked away by the ghosts, deep into the earth, to join them in their eternal watch for enemy ships approaching the Nova Scotian cliffs. Every kid I knew growing up believed in this tale. Many times I can remember standing next to those stairs, looking down with my friends, everyone double-dog-daring each other to go down.
What’s really funny about this story is that the main plot point, the number of steps, was complete and utter nonsense. First off, how did we even come up with that number when no one was willing to try going down? Who decided that the number was 21? I’ll never know, but when we finally became old enough and brave enough to actually try going down the steps, we found that there were…18. 18 steps. Even if you counted the ground at either end of the steps, that would still only be 20, and if you counted both sets of steps it would be 36. So where did the number 21 come from? Who knows. Presumably the first kid who came up with the story thought that 21 sounded spooky, somehow. In the end it doesn’t really matter; the point is that for a while, before we became brave enough to debunk the myth, we had a creepy story to keep us mystified.
A kid’s view of the world can be literary gold, should you only take notice of it (or make the attempt to remember back that far). I can remember so many scary stories we had; stories about dark paths in the woods, stories about monsters on the cliffs, stories about what was buried in the empty lot behind my grandmother’s house. We had a story for every locale, every imagined fear, and every misunderstood circumstance. And that made childhood all the more awesome.
What scary stories did you and your friends have when you were kids? Were they in any way based on truth, or were they the completely made-up insanity of kid brains? If you have kids of your own, what kind of crazy stuff have they come up with? Please share!
My husband and I are huge nerds. I’m certain that I’ve mentioned this more than once. We may not be the worst kind of nerds, but most of the things we enjoy are the geeky kinds of things, and with that comes a certain amount of collecting. I’m big into shows like Doctor Who, movies like Star Wars, and anything ever done by Joss Whedon; he has an outrageous number of horror movies, many of them VHS tapes of some of the worst pieces of cinema ever filmed. I have McFarlane Dragons all over my bookshelves, he has an entire shelf of horror character figures to go with his movies. We both almost exclusively wear t-shirts plastered with nerdy sayings, superheroes, or video game characters. The list goes on, but I don’t think I really have to go much further to prove that yes, we are huge nerds, so I rest my case.
Need I remind you that this was all amassed in a single day?
The point is that, because we’re nerds, and because we amass nerdy stuff, we regularly frequent what we refer to as “Geek Shops”. A nicer phrasing would be “comic shops”, but since not all of these stores necessarily focus on comics, we kinda figure that “Geek Shop” is a more accurate phrasing. These are the places you go to buy toys that you will insist are “collectibles”, and various forms of the kind of literature that makes your family roll their eyes and yell at you for wasting your money. These are the shops where the nerdiest of us go to get our guilty pleasures. These are the kinds of shops that my husband and I have watched fail time and time again.
The pop culture example would be Stewart’s comic shop on the Big Bang Theory. It’s a nice looking shop, and the Big Bang cast frequents it regularly, but we’re never under any kind of misunderstanding that Stewart is in any way successful. He regularly mentions such things as being unable to pay the bills, not having anything to eat for the day, etc. Even with people regularly in his shop, he’s failing miserably. The subplot is part of the humor of the show, but in real life my husband and I have seen this kind of thing time and again. Since we first started frequenting “geek shops” several years ago, we have seen no fewer than five of these shops disappear within a year because they couldn’t hold their own, and a few more downsize to significantly smaller shops because they overstepped their bounds and had a really rough time making a go of it. Alternatively, there are a few shops that have withstood the test of time, that have been around since long before hubby and I started shopping there, and will probably be there for years to come. So what’s the difference? Why is it that some shops are perfectly successful and others can barely stay open for a few months? I have a few thoughts. I’m going to share them.
The owners don’t consider their market/location.
When you open a specialty shop in a big city, chances are that someone will be into it, simply because there is a greater population and a greater variety of people and personalities. Alternatively, when you open a specialty shop in a less populated area, you have to consider that your clientele will not be as varied. Several times I have seen someone open a “geek shop” and immediately order a crap-ton of different comics, books, and collectibles from a great number of distributors. They want to have variety, so they order some video game stuff, some superhero stuff, some TV-related stuff, some movie-related stuff, and maybe even some tabletop board games, stuffed animals, collectible card games…you get the point. They order everything. And then they fail miserably because they can’t sell it.
In a big city this would be a more reasonable approach because chances are, at some point, someone is going to walk in who desperately wants a particular item that you happen to have in your vast inventory. In a small area, the chances of a customer arriving for each of the hundreds of things you’ve decided to stock is very unlikely. You might get lots of people coming in and buy comics, but you might find yourself sitting on thousands of dollars worth of tabletop games for years, unable to pay back all the money that you spent on them in the first place.
In the area where my husband and I grew up, big collectors are few and far between. People like us have slowly been appearing over time, but as a “by population” statistic, it’s a small percentage. Therefore, someone who opens a shop full to the brim with collectible figures in our area is likely to find themselves drowning in those figures for months, and maybe even years, until eventually they sell them all at a loss just to pay the last month’s rent on the store.
I’m not saying that a shop in a smaller area shouldn’t order lots of stuff, but you have to scope out your market first. Buy a few of a bunch of different things, see what sells, and then focus on that stuff. I’m sure that’s right up there in some of the top lessons they teach in marketing classes, and yet a large number of comic shop owners find themselves deep in the hole because they fail to have that little bit of common sense.
They cater to a certain crowd, and alienate everyone else.
Several of the geek shops I’ve seen fail had one big thing in common: they were constantly hosting tabletop or collectible card game tournaments in the shop. This, I’ve come to believe, is an enormous no-no. Why? Space. One particular shop I’m thinking of constantly had their entire store filled wall to wall with tables to host these tournaments, and the result is that no one else who comes in can reach anything. Entire walls of product will be inaccessible unless you want to press your entire body up against the dudes playing Magic the Gathering, or else climb right over the damn table. I have witnessed, on dozens of occasions, customers walking into a store, seeing the army of gamers taking up every inch of floor space, and turning around to walk right back out. No one wants to deal with that, I’m sorry.
Maybe the store owner earns a little bit of money from the tournament itself…maybe a few of those gamers buy something on their way out. But how many customers does the shop lose because they just can’t be bothered having to fight through the crowd just to be able to see anything?
I’m not saying that these shops should never host tournaments, because I’m sure there is some revenue to be had from them, but you have to consider the other customers as well. One shop I know of has a room off to the side that is set aside specifically for these tournaments. The gamers are away from the product, the door can be shut if they’re making too much noise, and other customers can come and go as though it’s any other day. That shop is successful. The one that constantly has it’s entire floor space covered in gamer nerds is not.
They spend tons of money on stuff they may never sell.
This one goes along with knowing your market. There’s a vast world of geeky items and collectibles out there, and for every item there’s someone who desperately wants it and will spend ridiculous amounts of money on it…but that person is not likely to ever walk into your shop.
I die a little inside every time I walk into a geek shop that has a $2000 sword replica hanging on the wall, or a huge glass case full of resin statues that range anywhere from $100 to $5000, because chances are that all of those items will still be there the next time I visit…and the time after that…and the time after that. Those items almost never sell, because honestly, what do you think the chances are that someone who just happens to have $3000 of disposable income in their pocket and really desperately wants a life-sized stainless steel replica of Ned Stark’s sword is just going to happen to wander into your store? Sure all that stuff looks awesome, but if you’ve bought it just so that your customers can say, “Wow, that’s so cool!” and then walk away…well, it’s not a very good investment, is it?
A more successful shop – one that has already stood the test of time and proven that they’re going to be around for a while – can get away with a few of these items because they have the capital to be able to survive if that item never sells. But when a brand new shop opens up and has their walls covered in the kinds of items that only the richest and most dedicated of nerds would ever even consider buying…that’s just dumb. There, I said it. Sorry, but it’s true.
They try to cheat people.
This is not something that every shop owner does, of course, but I’ve noticed it in several shops, some of them being the ones who eventually crashed and burned.
Here’s the thing…geeky stuff has become much more mainstream over the years, and that means that some of the items that we previously could only get at geek shops are now available all over the place. Therefore, where geek shop owners used to pretty much be able to choose their own pricing for items, now they have to consider what that item is being sold for at the Walmart down the street…and a lot of the time they don’t.
I’ll give you an example. I love Funko Pop collectibles. They’re adorable and I love ’em. When the hubby and I first discovered them they were something that we only ever saw in geek shops, but in recent years the cute little figures have become a lot more popular and can be found in lots of stores and also bought online. Therefore, tell me, please…why would I spend $20 on one of these figures from a geek shop when the local Chapters has the exact same one for $12?
Hey, profit has to come from somewhere, I get that, and if a collectible is obscure or hard to find I can totally understand a geek shop charging extra for it because it’s not like you can just walk down the street to buy it from someone else. But if you actually can just walk down the street to buy it from a dozen other someones…well, maybe – just maybe – you should consider not charging 30-50% more than those other someones. There are plenty of people out there who would prefer to support their local specialty shop, but the overwhelming majority of people are going to choose to pay less because of course they are.
This is all just my opinion, of course. I don’t claim to truly know anything about marketing, or business models, or any of that nonsense. All I know is what I see with my own eyes, and when I’ve seen the things I mentioned above, the result has almost always been a “Closed” sign on the door of an empty building.
Join me, my fellow nerds. Do you frequent “geek shops”? Do you notice these trends yourself, or have you noticed other things that tend to contribute to a shop’s downfall? Share!
**As first mentioned on March 21st** For the next little while I’m going to be busy building up a new backlog of material to post on Fridays, amidst the other stuff I’m working on, so for the next few weeks I’m going to satisfy myself to simply post a drabble a week. For you writers out there, feel free to use these drabbles as prompts toward writing something bigger and better, and if you care to share what you’ve written, please send me a link so I can check it out. 🙂
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Fight Back!
She wasn’t gliding towards me the way you imagine ghosts should. Her movements were jerky, twitchy…somehow insane. Perhaps she wasn’t a ghost at all, but more of a ghoul. She certainly looked solid enough.
As she shambled terrifyingly close, her slimy hair hanging across huge, saucer-like white eyes, I thought irresistibly of all the horror movies I’d seen. In those movies the actors always stared stupidly and let the monster get them. I didn’t want to end up like those characters. I wanted to at least make an effort at fighting back.
The “101” posts are going to be cut off short this turnaround because I was unable to get them written and scheduled ahead of time and now my attention is being snagged by a couple of fairly significant things that happen to pop up at this time of year.
First, we are now less than 9 full days till the beginning of National Novel Writing Month 2012. For those who have never heard of NaNoWriMo, it is a yearly challenge that occurs in November (although these days there are similar events during almost every month of the year) wherein thousands and thousands of people (no joke, there were over 70,000 people online on the forums this morning) attempt to write a 50,000 word novel in just 30 days. That’s approximately 1667 words a day. It is a difficult challenge, especially if you have a job/school/kids/other things that demand your time and attention. Sometimes it can be downright miserable. But it is also a ton of fun, a ton of motivation, and an incredible learning experience. The manuscript I’m currently working on editing started as a NaNoWriMo novel, and lots of previous NaNoWriMo participants have had their novels published. But if nothing else comes out of it, the feeling of crossing the finish line and being able to say you wrote 50,000 words in 30 days is paramount to running a mental marathon. I’ll be participating this year for the fifth year in a row, even though my current work schedule may very well prevent me from winning. If I don’t reach my 50,000 words it will be the first time I’ve “lost” NaNoWriMo, but I still want to make the attempt because I’ll feel like more of a loser if I don’t even try! If anyone else is participating, feel free to look me up; my username is Toreshi. If you aren’t participating, or if you haven’t decided yet, I definitely suggest you go to the NaNoWriMo website and look around for a while. Trust me, it’s totally worth it!
The other “fairly significant thing” that pops up at this time of year is a little thing you may have heard of called Halloween. Although I’ve noticed over the past few years that this spooky holiday is not nearly what it used to be, my husband and I are still big fans. Normally (i.e. when I’m not spending half the month in a camp in Northern Alberta), we watch a different horror movie every night of October, and on Halloween night, since we don’t get a whole lot of Trick or Treaters, we give out fistfuls of candy and chocolate to the kids who do show up. But a new tradition that only started last year, at the suggestion of my husband, is for me to make my daughter’s costume. Now lets get something straight…I am not a seamstress. I took a sewing course for kids when I was young, but it wasn’t exactly my thing and the most I’ve really done since is to close up small tears in my and my husbands clothes. So when he first suggested I make the baby’s Halloween costume (last year was her first Halloween), at first I balked. But in the end, since I was laid off at the time and had lots of time to work at it, I gave it a go. We chose a figure from our childhoods to dress her up as and I did a lot of thinking, planning, and cursing, and eventually created this:
A million points to anyone who knows who she’s supposed to be. 🙂
This year I had a tough decision to make because due to my work schedule (it all comes down to that, doesn’t it?) I wouldn’t have nearly as much time to work on the baby’s costume. To make matters worse, it was only a few days before I flew out that we realized that the playgroup Halloween party is scheduled for only one day after I fly home. In other words, if she was going to have a costume in time for the party, I was going to have to work on it while out West. Luckily I was able to get crafty with some cheap, plain clothing and a pair of rain boots she already had, but there’s still a bit of work to be done over the next couple of days… I assure you, it will be worth it. It’s not set together yet, so it looks a bit lopsided, but here’s a hint:
Didn’t I tell you it would be worth it? So you’ll forgive me if I just wander over here for a little while, right? *wanders away from the computer and slaves over a hot sewing needle*
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