Sweet Little Lies

Ava ran hard, her bare feet pounding the ground, oblivious to the rocks that poked and slashed at the sensitive skin there. The night air was cool on her skin, but all she could feel was the horrible heat spreading from her hammering heart to each of her extremities. It was the heat that he wanted, the sound of her terrified heart that drew him to her.

The books lied, a little voice in the back of her head told her. It was all bullshit. You never should have believed a word of it.

“I know!” The frustrated cry came out as a sob. “I know, I’m such an idiot!”

She heard the air move behind her and ran harder, knowing that death was at her heels, knowing that there was no way she was going to escape, but knowing that she had to try anyway. The wounds on her neck and chest wept blood, as though to urge her on. Run faster! the red liquid seemed to say. He’s almost on us!

She almost made it to the bridge; she could see the lights of the city as the forest thinned around her. Then she blinked, and he was standing in front of her, so close that she almost couldn’t stop. With a cry in her throat she tried to turn, but his arms snaked out and snatched her, pulled her to him, and suddenly his flaming red eyes were inches away from hers.

“What’s wrong Ava?” his cruel voice mocked. “Don’t you love me? Don’t you want to spend eternity with me?”

Tears spilled down her cheeks, but she couldn’t find the strength to answer. The books lied. Vampires are monsters after all.

With a vicious laugh, the horrible, beautiful creature pushed his claws through the flesh of Ava’s arms and ripped open her throat with his fangs, and all she could think was, The books lied. The books lied.

Transformation

I love monsters. It’s one of my (many) things, and one of my favorite monsters is the werewolf. These creatures have been romanticized in recent years, and I won’t say that I haven’t leaned over to that way myself from time to time, but I prefer the scary, hairy, rip-out-your-throat-style werewolf, and one of my favorite things about this particular brand of monster is the transformation. The movies, TV shows, and books about werewolves that I love the most are the ones that show the transformation as being a horrible, painful, frightening thing. Does that make me a little creepy? Bah.

So today I want to share a scene from a short werewolf story that I wrote. It’s not something that is ever likely to be published, but I had fun writing the transformation of the female character. Enjoy, and let me know what you think!

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Minutes passed while Aya waited to die. She’d managed to turn her body over so that she was laying on her back, looking up at the moon peeking through the trees. The rain poured into her wounds, but she didn’t care because she couldn’t feel them anymore. She couldn’t feel anything except the ache in her heart, knowing she’d found and lost love all at once, and was about to lose her life as well.

She lay for over an hour, just staring at the moon.

Then, strangely, her wounds began to sting again. She wondered at this. Did people get one last shot of physical pain before passing on? That seemed cruel and unnecessary.

As she thought this the pain came stronger. Suddenly she found herself hissing from the agony of the rain dropping onto her open flesh. A moment later she found the energy to roll over, and soon after she had pushed herself into a kneeling position with her fingers clenching at the ground for support.

She only had a few seconds to reflect on this strange end-of-life burst of energy when her entire body was thrown into violent spasms. At first she couldn’t even scream, the pain was so intense, but soon enough she found her voice and her shrieks sent night birds flying off through the trees.

Every inch of her skin was burning and freezing at the same time, every muscle twitching, every bone stretching as though it was about to crack in two. She had an almost uncontrollable urge to tear her skin from her body. It felt like there were bugs crawling beneath it, like it was shuddering of its own volition. Could this possibly be what it felt like to die? No, no, it couldn’t be. This was something entirely different.

When her jaw cracked and she felt her canine teeth suddenly jabbing into her lower lip, all at once she understood.

Kaleb’s last kiss. He’d bitten his lip a moment before. She hadn’t even registered the coppery taste of his mouth.

Blood. Werewolf blood.

She couldn’t keep track of all the thoughts rushing through her mind at once. She wasn’t dying! She was going to live! She was going to be a werewolf, but she’d still be alive! And she could be in Kaleb’s life, if she could rescue him somehow… She had to find a way to save him! If only she could get past this excruciating pain!

The flow of thoughts was cut off, as was her breath as she began to choke from the agony. She felt as though she was being stabbed by a hundred flaming swords, like her bones were trying to escape her body. Was it like this every time a werewolf transformed? It couldn’t be; it looked so flawless when the others did it! Was it just her? Was she broken somehow? Rejecting the change?

She couldn’t scream, couldn’t move. She simply fell to the ground and trembled, twitched, gasped in horror.

A long time later, when the pain finally subsided, Aya was no longer Aya. She was something more, something different, something wild. She didn’t think about who she was, where she was, or how she’d gotten there. She simply rose her nose to the wind and took a long, deep sniff. Her mind was muddled, confused, feral, but one thing was clear: she could smell them on the wind, the ones who had hurt her and taken her mate away from her.

She let out a long, loud howl toward the high moon and burst off into the woods as fast as her four legs could take her.

Irrational Fears and 64-Bit Digital Monsters

The definition of a phobia is that it is a persistent, irrational fear of a specific object, activity, or situation. People with phobias are usually debilitated by them in some way, such as a claustrophobic person being unable to enter an elevator without having a panic attack, or an agoraphobic person not being able to hold a job because they can’t handle going out into the busy world. But I’m not necessarily talking about those kinds of fears that affect your life in a profound and sometimes painful way; I’m talking about the ones that make you feel like you (or the person admitting their fear to you) might just be a little bit crazy.

You want examples? Oh, I’ve got examples. To protect the embarrassed, I won’t say who these fears belong to, but believe me when I say that I know…

– a woman who is freaked the hell out by cotton balls. She can’t even stand to look at them.

– a woman who can’t stand the trays that fast food places use to help you carry your cups. She says that the feel of them wigs her out.

– a guy who genuinely believes (and is terrified) that Muslims are going to take over the world. Seriously.

– a guy who can’t be anywhere near a cat, even if it’s just wandering by a few yards away.

– a woman who has acts as though it’s the end of the world if anyone gets dirt in her pristine house. (No, she’s not a germaphobe, she just can’t stand even the look of a little bit of dirt.)

– a kid who bursts into tears if another kid drops a baby doll on the floor (i.e. “hurts” it).

But of course, a post like this wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t share my own, personal form of crazy. Myself, I’ve always been a little freaked out by open water, because the idea of just floating there with miles of nothing above me and miles of nothing below me gives me weird little wiggins. That in itself isn’t particularly odd – lots of people don’t like open water – but what makes it weird is when that irrational fear crosses over into the digital world. Yeah, you heard me right.

The best example I can think of is an old Nintendo64 game called Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire. One stage of the game featured a boss battle with the dianoga, which is a large, tentacled creature with an enormous mouth full of sharp teeth, and one big eye on the end of a long stalk that would poke up out of the water. The way the stage was designed, you were in a circular room, the bottom of which was completely covered with the creature’s body. The room was then filled with water, except for the very top. You could rise up out of the water with your jetpack, but there was a low ceiling so you couldn’t really get away from the creature, and after a few moments your jet pack would run out of juice and you’d fall back into the water. So, basically, you had dark, murky water all around you, and an enormous monster that could surround you with all it’s flailing limbs. You pretty much had to be in the water to fight the beast, but I could never do it. The second I dipped down in to the water I would have this weird panic attack and I wouldn’t be able to actually look at the screen without feeling like I was going to start hyperventilating. The only way I could ever beat this stage was to fly up to the ceiling with my jet pack, close my eyes, and spin around in circles while firing every weapon I had. Eventually I would be lucky enough to hit the creature’s eye enough times to kill it.

Yeah…this, uh…this was a lot scarier back when this was an example of the height of graphics technology.

How ridiculously embarrassing is that? These days I’m not nearly so bad as I once was, but I have to admit that dark water stages in video games still make my heart flutter a little too fast for my own liking. Go ahead. Make fun. I can take it.

The point is… Uh, well, honestly I’m not really sure what my point is. I just find it interesting (and yeah, maybe a little bit hysterical) that people get so worked up over the silliest of things. So share with me, please. What irrational, embarrassing fears do you (or someone you know) have?

Fiction Fragment Fridays: Fight Back!

**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.

So I punched the bitch in the face.

A to Z Challenge Day 6: Freddy Krueger (the Nightmare Demon)

I’ve mentioned this before, but when I was a kid I was a right awful wuss. I watched shows like, “Are You Afraid of the Dark?”, but I did so through my fingers as I cowered from the corner of the couch. I read books like Goosebumps, but I’d have the light of a thousand suns burning in my room while I was doing so. I loved scary stuff and yet hated it at the same time. It was the silliest thing, really. I wanted ghosts and creepy ruins and all manner of monsters, but the second I had them it was like my heart said, “Okay, that’s enough, bye!”

It wasn’t until I started dating the man who would become my husband that I really started getting into horror movies, because he was a connoisseur of them, particularly the older ones, and the ones of the B-movie variety. It wasn’t until we were firmly seated within our relationship that I saw my  very first Nightmare on Elm Street movie. That’s right, in the year 2006 or so, I had never seen a movie starring Freddy Krueger. What the hell, right?

As it turns out, the Nightmare on Elm Street flicks were some of my hubby’s all-time favorites, and within the span of a few months I wound up watching every single one of them. Now, I’m not going to say that they were all cinematic masterpieces or anything. In fact, some of them are downright god-awful. However, since my hubby first began the slow process of completely desensitizing me to all things that go bump in the night, Freddy became quite possibly my favorite of all the horror movie icons. Why? Well for one thing, he’s creative. Being a nightmare demon has it’s perks, and a big one is that he gets to do or become effectively anything he wants. How totally cool is that? For another thing, Freddy is evil as hell, and I like that in a demon. I mean, come on…he’s all about killing kids. That is messed up. And finally, one of my favorite things about the Freddy character is that he was created because of the evil that exists even in innocent people. Spoiler alert, if you somehow have never heard of the story of Freddy Krueger before, but he became an immortal nightmare demon because he was burned alive by angry parents after he escaped child molestation charges on a technicality. There are other aspects to the story that are revealed in further films in the story, but the main plot point is that the parents of Elm Street, in their rage, took a child molester and turned him into a mass murderer who kills kids in their dreams. How screwed up is that for the adult characters, knowing that their vigilante justice ultimately got their kids killed?

Call me a psycho, but I’m a sucker for a good, creepy, outrageously uncomfortable-feeling-making back-story, and that Freddy Krueger has in spades.

Fiction Fragment Fridays: Monsters

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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Monsters!

Why does Godzilla always attack Japan?

As a young monster growing up I idolized Godzilla. He always seemed like the biggest and baddest of all the monsters. Even when he lost the battle he was still the coolest because he always came back.

But I did always wonder what exactly he had against the Japanese. I mean, with so many other countries just ripe for the picking, some of them even very close by, why constantly torment the same poor nation over and over again?

I’m all grown up now, a fully grown monster, and I’m going to attack Canada.

Young Me’s, Meet Older Me’s!

Occasionally I find it interesting to look back at my life, to mentally stack up the “Me”‘s from throughout history and to compare them. I find it interesting to look back and see how things have changed, how attitudes and interests have shifted…or how they’ve stayed the same, because some things never change.

For example, I STILL use this method to get my ponytail straight, even though it makes me look like a nut. 

When I was a kid I loved the winter. Now that I’m an adult with many daily concerns, I loathe it. I still love December because that’s Christmas and I don’t think I’ll ever stop loving Christmas no matter how old and crotchety I get. But as soon as the New Year rolls over I am officially DONE with winter, and then it’s just suffering for the next few months. When I was a kid playing in the snow was the best thing ever. Now it’s fun watching my daughter play in the snow, but only until my nose gets cold and then I’m bribing her with everything under the sun to convince her to come back in the house. I hate the wind, I hate the slushy crap that winds up everywhere once a bit of snow melts, and I hate the fact that it seems to last forever in Eastern Canada. There’s nothing worse than the first day of Spring when there’s still snow on the ground.

When I was younger I was an enormous scaredy-cat. I loved watching the “creepy” shows that YTV used to play on Friday night – Are You Afraid of the Dark? was my absolute favorite – and I read tons of scary books like the Goosebumps series, but underneath I was a total wuss. I’d hide my eyes during parts of the shows, and I’d have a hundred lights on around me while reading my books. I gave myself nightmares on a regular basis. And as I got older and was dragged kicking and screaming into more “adult” scary stuff, it got more pathetic. I couldn’t watch a horror movie without nearly having a heart attack. These days I couldn’t resemble that scaredy-cat girl any less. I partly attribute this to my husband who, while we were dating, subjecting me with a metric ton of horror movies, both good and bad, both genuinely frightening and only frightening in how ridiculous they were. At this point I’ve become so desensitized, it’s almost disappointing. I enjoy being scared now, but it happens very rarely. And these days my nightmares do not involve monsters, ghosts, or evil creatures; my nightmares these days involve my daughter having an accident, my husband leaving me, or my house burning down. Dammit, I’ve become such an adult.

In a twist, I was significantly more into video games as an adult than I was as a kid. Don’t get me wrong, I loved video games when I was little. I had an Atari when I wasn’t even in school yet, I treasured my very first Nintendo Entertainment System, and I only know one or two people who logged as many hours as me into Chrono Trigger. But video games were not my life when I was a kid. I played them, and I loved them, but I also spent a lot of time outside, riding my bike or my roller-blades. I spent a lot of time writing and drawing, and “building” things (have I told you about the entire closet that I devoted to creating a dollhouse?). Truth be told, I did not spend nearly as much time playing video games during the first 18 years of my life as I did in the five years following those. Maybe that was because I got lazier and wanted to spend more time just loafing around. I don’t really know. But in my early twenties I definitely spent a lot more time on video games than I had at any other point in my youth. These days things have slowed down simply because I have a lot more responsibilities on my plate, but my Playstation Vita has been reigniting a spark in me, and don’t think for a second that I wouldn’t spend every waking second playing games if I weren’t able to convince myself that I have more important things to do.

I’ve always hated to cook. I really don’t think that’s ever going to change. There have always been a few things that I didn’t mind making. When I was a kid I’d whip myself up some English Muffin pizzas, and when I was a little older I’d fry up some hot Italian sausages and hash browns (a totally under-recognized meal, in my opinion), but for the overwhelming part the task of creating edible, enjoyable meals has always been one that gives me a twitch right above my eye. I enjoy eating. I hate cooking. I don’t mind baking so much because it’s usually very formulaic – add ingredients, stir, pour into pan, bake – but there’s only so much sugar you can serve to your family. I don’t think I will ever enjoy cooking. It’s just not my thing, and I screw up often enough that even the eating part isn’t always enjoyable.

                                                                                         

Some things change, some things don’t. Some changes (or lack thereof) are quite surprising. Who else wants to share? Look back at yourself… What differences pop up in your mind and give you a little chuckle?

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!

Laugh, Cry, and Scream

Recently I’ve been doing a lot of jumping between stories. Within my own work I’ve been moving between zombie apocalypses and werewolf romances, between epic fantasies and personal journeys. At the same time I’ve been reading books, watching movies and TV shows, and playing video games. All this going back and forth between different stories with different characters has gotten me thinking about what makes a truly memorable character. What is it that makes a particular person in a book, tv show, movie, or game become this amazing character whom you can’t get enough of? What makes a character great?

I’ve given it a lot of thought, and I’ve come up with three answers, three things that make a character great, in my opinion.

Great characters make you laugh.

Humor is almost a given, isn’t it? Laughter is like a drug, one for which the only side effects are happiness and maybe some pleasantly sore muscles. Mentally and physically, our bodies get high on humor, which is why we love comedies so much, why we appreciate friends and loved ones who can make us chuckle, and why we tend to gravitate toward peers who share our appreciation for what is or isn’t funny. Sense of humor is not universal, of course, but almost everyone will find themselves drawn toward a character who can make them laugh, especially if that laughter is of the deep-down, belly-rumbling, gasping-for-air variety.

Characters who give me the giggles:

Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory – He’s just so absurd and stoic in everything he says and does that it’s absolutely hysterical. I genuinely don’t know how the actors of this show make it through their lines sometimes.

Tyrion Lanister from the A Song of Ice and Fire series (G.R.R. Martin) – I’ve rarely read a character so damn witty. His humor is rude and crude one minute, and exceptionally intellegent the next. Every second line out of his mouth makes me go “HA!”

Great characters make you cry.

Sadness is a little less obvious, but whether you might believe it or not sometimes we crave a good sob-fest. Why else would movies like The Notebook be so popular? The thing is, crying is cathartic; even if you didn’t realize you were stressed out or upset, crying gets all the pent-up bad mojo out, and while no one wants to be sad for real-life reasons, being sad for a character allows you to experience that release of emotions. Being able to feel for a character, to be truly empathetic toward them and experience their pain, releases a host of hormones and chemicals that leaves you feeling somehow refreshed and rejuvinated.

Characters who give me the sniffles:

Dean Winchester from Supernatural – It’s one part great writing and one part awesome acting on behalf of Jensen Ackles, and the combination is a character who has made me exceptionally weepy on more than one occasion (but don’t tell my husband…I always turn to my side so he doesn’t see).

Simba from The Lion King – There is one scene in particular that I’m talking about, and if you don’t automatically know which one I’m talking about you can’t possibly have ever seen The Lion King, so GO WATCH THE LION KING RIGHT NOW, YOU FREAK.

Great characters make you scream.

Fear is another thing entirely. Though there are always going to be some people who run in the other direction when faced with fear, quite a lot of us love it. Fear gives a person a unique rush of adrenaline and “fight or flight” hormones that can be obtained in no other way, and how better to experience such a thing than from the comfort of your own home while reading a scary book or watching a horror movie? When a character makes your heart beat faster, the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, and gives you a nervous twtich because of the incredible tension, that is something real and visceral that you won’t soon forget. If the eventual result is actual nightmares, the character has really done their job.

Characters who give me the wiggins:

The creepy ghost girl from Shutter (original Thai version) – There is one thing I will give to the Asians…they know how to do ghosts, and this chick in particular had me literally watching the movie from between my fingers. Bonus points for totally freaking out my husband and father-in-law.

The Joker from The Dark Knight – He may not be scary in the “I’m going to have nightmares forever!” sense, but Heath Ledger’s maniacal version of The Joker creeped me out more than I can tell. He was truly, entirely mad, and that is a frightening concept.

There are, of course, lots of other factors that go into making a good character. The protagonist should be likable but also have real flaws, the antagonist should be hateful but have relatable qualities as well… You’ve heard it all before, I’m sure, or if you haven’t I’m sure you know most of the rules without even realizing it; that’s how you as the consumer recognize the characters you like. But in my opinion, the three things I’ve mentioned above are what take a character from simply enjoyable, to positively incredible. And if you can somehow incorporate all three of these types of characters into one story…wow. Just wow.

Character (groups) that have made me giggle, sniffle, and wig out:

The cast of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV) – Fear doesn’t necessarily apply anymore, but I watched this show when I was young and significantly more innocent, so hear me out. Back in the day the monsters creeped me the hell out, the banter between characters (good and bad) constantly had me laughing, and the misery that several of the characters went through made me (on more than one occasion) bawl like a little girl. To me, that is seriously a winning combination, and that is why this show is one of my all-time favorites to this day.

The characters from Invitation to the Game (Monica Hughes) – The characters in this book were witty and amusing, went through a tense, frightening situation that threatened their lives, and experienced a plethora of negative emotions and miseries. I’ve read this book dozens of times and I still experience an emotional rollercoaster whenever I read it.

As a writer I now find myself in the position of trying to incorporate these factors into my characters, which is a much more difficult endevour than simply pointing them out in the books I read and the movies and shows I watch. Humor isn’t my strong point, although I’ve been told by readers of my fanfiction that I’ve made them chuckle a time or two. I strive to incorporate fear into my horror and fantasy pieces, and I hope it comes across, but I haven’t been in the position yet to have anyone tell me one way or the other. Misery seems to be my “thing” (what does that say about me…?), as I love to torture my characters and I’ve had a number of people inform me that I was successful in drawing out those tears. It’s a very difficult thing striking all three, but as other writers will attest, writing is rarely easy and creating excellent characters can often feel like an exercise in futility. Regardless, now that I’ve beaten down exactly what it is that creates characters I’ve come to love, you can be damn sure that I’ll be keeping these three factors in mind whenever I put pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard.

What about you? What characters have made you laugh until your belly hurt? Sob like a baby? Cower under a blanket? Are there other factors that make a character great for you? Please share!

Dreams: Windows to the (Aging) Soul

Recently I read an article on Cracked.com that was entitled 5 Warning Signs That You’re Finally Getting Older. It gave me a chuckle, particularly because I agreed with most of it. I guess that means I’m getting old. Crap.

Anyway, as happenstance would have it, that night I had an unusually difficult time sleeping because I was being plagued by nightmares. More than once I woke up in a cold sweat. But when I was finally up in the morning it occurred to me that the dreams I’d been having weren’t the kind that one thinks of upon hearing the word “nightmare”, and I thought to myself “here’s another example of something that changes as you get older”. So let’s have a comparison, shall we?

When I was younger I had nightmares about……monsters. Whether it was enormous, rabid dogs, or poltergeists, or zombies, some of my most prominent nightmares involved running from vicious, evil creatures that wanted to eat me.

A few nights ago I had a nightmare about…
…my daughter running into heavy traffic. For some reason we were walking alongside a busy highway and she let go of my hand and took off into the road. I ran after her, but (illogically) my 29-year-old legs only seemed to be able to move half as fast as her 2-year-old ones, and I barely managed to grab the back of her shirt and send us both hurtling into the ditch before a semi truck struck us both.

When I was younger I had nightmares about…
…weird, creepy things happening to the people around me, like when I dreamed that my aunt Judy’s teeth all began falling out of her head as she was talking to me, or when I dreamed that my mother kept randomly chasing me with a butcher knife and screaming like a maniac.

A few nights ago I had a nightmare about…
…my husband suddenly acting as though he’d never met me. We were hanging around our friends and family, but he completely ignored me and treated me like I was a complete stranger.

When I was younger I had nightmares about…
…my friends and classmates and I engaging in war-like battles with tons of gunfire and explosions and people dying all around me. (Now that I’m writing it, this one sounds awfully intense for a kid…is that weird?)

A few nights ago I had a nightmare about…
…missing my plane home from out West. I dreamed that somehow I had forgotten that it was my day to go home and I hadn’t packed. I was in someone’s house rather than camp, and I was running all over it trying to find all my stuff and pack quickly. My coworkers left and I missed the bus, and I spent the rest of the dream desperately trying to track down another bus or a taxi or something that knew the route through the oil sand access roads to the Albian air strip.

The nightmares I had when I was younger filled me with dread, made me sweat right through my pajamas and my blankets, and usually ended in me waking up in a panic, unsure if it had actually happened or not. The nightmares I had a few nights ago elicited the exact same reactions. I woke up from my daughter running into traffic with my heart pounding so fast I thought I might be having a heart attack. The dream in which my husband ignored me found me awake with a pain in my chest, feeling like I might throw up. And the missed-bus dream had me waking up in a cold sweat, wondering how I was going to get home.  The whole thing represents a shift in priorities, it would seem – which is completely logical when you think about it. It’s also pretty funny though. I’ve gone from dreaming about monsters and teeth falling out and vicious battles, to protecting my daughter, losing my husband, and trying to catch a taxi. And the shift has not changed my reactions in the slightest.

I guess I must be getting older after all. Bugger. 🙂