Dr. Frankenstein's Novel - Why I Have No Buried Books

Last week, just as the sun set and a rainstorm passed through, a perfect rainbow formed to the east of our house. I stood barefoot on our front porch and took this with the panorama function on my phone. It makes it clear how the rainbow is the rim of a big lens, focusing light. So unearthly, too. Perfect for our blog of assorted spec fic types.

This week's topic in the Bordello is The Book You Buried: The Terrifying Tale of Your Horribly Written Novel.

You have to give KAK props for her Halloween slant.

So, you all know the old saw this references. How all writers have a book or ten or twenty "under the bed" lurking like the formless monsters of our youths, muttering darkly to themselves and destined never to see the light of day.

Except me.

I don't really have a book that's buried and I've been thinking about why that is. I think some of it has to do with this story.

Way back, Oh Best Beloved, when I was first struck with the awesome, glitteringly huge, transporting and terrifying dream of becoming a writer, I entered a writing contest. As you do. Now, I have never been one to put in my bio that I've "been writing stories since I first picked up a crayon." I wrote stories as a kid, yes. I tend to think all kids do. I also drew pictures and made embroidered silk saddle blankets for my model horses. Which says a lot about childhood hobbies and future occupations right there, I think. I won a poetry contest when I was 12 and contributed angsty anonymous poems to the high school literary magazine. My AP English teacher taught me I didn't know how to write my senior year and I became much better at it but, though I got a 5 on the exam - a high score that let me test out of Freshman Comp in colleg e and put me in a special lit course - it never really occurred to me to be a writer. I was going to be doctor, then a scientist.

Only later, in my mid-twenties and while I was buried in getting my PhD in Neurophysiology, did I have the epiphany that being a writer would be my perfect life. I cut bait on the PhD, took my Masters, got a job as an editor/writer with a petroleum research group and starting playing with what the hell I wanted to write. One morning in my office, NPR told me over the airwaves about a contest sponsored by the Wyoming Arts Council. There were two and I don't recall which this was. They had a Fellowship for Literature that rotated each year between Fiction, Nonfiction and Poetry, and the Frank Nelson Doubleday Memorial Award for an outstanding woman writer in any genre.

You must understand that, not only did I not have a book written at this point, I barely had a concept. However - and this is an enormous caveat - I had fragments and a vague idea along with this shiny newly formed ambition. Though I should have been reasonably mature at that point, especially carrying the battle scars of grad school with a bipolar Hungarian for an adviser, my enthusiasm and hopeful faith in myself so exceeded the strictures of reality that I submitted a page and a half to this contest.

I know.

Do I need mention they asked for 25 pages? Yeah.

You're all wincing for me, I hope. I'm so embarrassed for myself that it took me YEARS to tell anyone this story.

What was I thinking? That's the worst part. I had this idea, this utter hubris, that my page and a half was SO FUCKING BRILLIANT that any judge would see in one glance that my talent was one to be nurtured. And yes, I still have that page and a half from so long ago. Needless to say, brilliant it ain't.

But I learned. I learned to write more and longer. To stick with and refine an idea. I went on in later years to win both the Fellowship and the Doubleday award, along with a Fellowship to the Ucross Foundation and other, really wonderful nods that told me, yes, mine was a talent they believed should be nurtured. Once I'd applied enough discipline to actually exercise it.

Thus, one point of this whole story is that, when newbie writers ask for advice and I say that you have to get disciplined, write every day, write a lot and finish the damn book, I know whereof I speak. I know how damn hard that simple advice is to take and implement. It's also the only way it happens. No one wins awards with a page and a half, brilliant or not.

I feel like I should note at this point, the debt I owe to the Wyoming Arts Council. Those contests did exactly what they were designed to do in encouraging aspiring writers. Not by awarding me accolades in recognition of my incipient, as-yet-unrecognized, as-yet-nonexistent ability, but by denying me and making me understand I had to work for it.

The other point, the one that applies to the topic at hand, is that I have no under-the-bed books because I took those early fragments and constantly cannibalized, reworked, recast and revised until I had a book that deserved to see the light of day. That page and a half? Much transformed and revised - perhaps unrecognizably so - is one of the core elements of my Covenant of Thorns trilogy.

Perhaps this makes me more of a Dr. Frankenstein, stitching together and reanimating what seems to be dead or dying. I have no buried novels because I tore them apart before they were done. I do have a lot of fragments in cold storage, waiting for that bolt of lightning and a bit of attention to be brought back to life.

Halloween Villain Fun

by Allison Pang

So first off, Happy Halloween!

(For some reason, my posts seem to be coming up on a lot of the major holidays this year - but that's fun, so I'm going to run with it.)

Anyway, we've covered a lot of excellent ground this week on villains as protagonists, but I think overall that what makes a well-rounded villain is the ability for the reader to connect with them on some level - or at least understand their motivation. If anything, it can help with the creation of the protagonist as well - how they go about "defeating" the villain can say a lot about who they are.

I particularly like anti-heroes more than villains, or where the seeming-villain ends up being the good guy in the end. (Wreck-it Ralph, anyone? He's *programmed* to be the bad guy in his video game...and yet he manages to discover that he's more than that, to the point of attempting to sacrifice himself for the good of his friends.)
Back story can be *so* important. Take Magneto, for example - he's portrayed as a bad guy in the X-Men comics - and his methods aren't particularly nice when it comes to normal people - but a reader can understand that he's doing what he thinks he has to do in order to protect mutants. When you discover his back story of being imprisoned in a Nazi death camp and having his whole family murdered, well, now we can start to see how his experiences helped shape who he became. (Not that it should become an excuse for his actions, but at least we can see why he is the way he is, and that goes a long way in creating a complex character.)

What I find particularly fascinating is how in popular culture, readers and movie-watchers can often find it easy to "forgive" a villain because of their looks (or some need to tame the 'bad boy,' as was brought up earlier this week.) Sadly, it happens in real life as well - good looking criminals often get marriage proposals in prison, or are defended by those who cannot possibly believe someone who "looks innocent" could perform such terrible actions.

I could probably go on about what that says about society's obsession with perceived beauty and narcissistic tendencies, but that's probably a post for another day.

Seeing as it's Halloween, I want to take a look at some of the more popular types of villains in books and popular media common to this holiday instead.

1) The Slasher/Splatter-Killer. If you were a child in the 80's, you probably saw at least one of these sorts of movies - Friday the 13th, Halloween (ha ha), Nightmare on Elm Street, or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. They were a staple of early video stores and basic cable.  I don't think these sorts of villains work very well in a book setting, though I'm sure it's been done - but as any fan of the horror genre can tell you, we don't watch these movies for anything more cerebral than to see people die in awful and creative ways. Although each of these villains - Freddy, Michael, Jason, Leatherface have some sort of basic back story to explain their presence and their need to kill, most of the time these explanations are pretty thin - but for some reason they're enough to make umpteen sequels, so what do I know?  Maybe that's what is so terrifying - there is NO explanation as to why these guys are killing...and there's no way to stop them. In some ways, these movies are almost like modern morality plays. Have sex? YOU ARE GOING TO DIE.  Virgin? You will probably get away. Maybe. (But check out Cabin in the Woods for a very tongue-in-cheek look at this particular set of horror tropes.)

2) Animals as Evil.  Again,the 70's/80's had whole horror book/VHS movie sections dedicated to animals going batshit crazy and frothing into killing sprees - Jaws, Swarm, Cujo, Piranha, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, Alligator, The Birds, Sharknado, Them! (I've included some more recent and older ones in that list, yes) We don't usually see a whole lot motivation behind why these creatures kill - maybe someone wanders into their territory and wakes them up, or rabies, or whatever - but the main thing that scares us is that these creatures can't be reasoned with. No matter what you do, short of killing them, you're screwed. Bonus points if the animals become super large as they go on their killing spree. Like my personal favorite, Night of the Lepus:
Yes. Killer bunnies.

3) Insane Normals - Of all the potential villains, these probably rank among the scariest. These are the psychopaths that blend into society. They're charming, well-educated, and often living double lives. Think Norman Bates or Hannibal Lecter - they earn the protagonist's trust, only to turn on them later. (And possibly eat them, because hey, why not.) I find these the worst to have to watch/read about simply because people like this do exist - I can't simply shove them under the rug as pure fantasy.

4) The Devil Among Us So what do you do when the villain actually IS the Devil? Exorcism, of course! (And there's a ton of exorcist type movies and books, though I still think The Exorcist is the best, and I'll throw The Omen up there too. (And frankly, I dig Chernabog from Night on Bald Mountain).

5) Man as Monster Vampires, werewolves and other assorted shape-changers and paranormal creatures. Over the years we've seen a big change in how these villains are perceived - as terrible beings, a la Salem's Lot or The Howling, vs sexy vampires from Buffy or Twilight.  Some of what made the old-school villains compelling is that they didn't KNOW they were the monster - it's one thing to go up against a creature of night...what happens when it's you?

And though we do see some horror creeping back in to the vampire trope (Fright Night or 30 Days of Night) - they key to the modern shapechanger is that they usually have a chance at redemption, where as the villains of years ago were pretty much monsters out for human blood. (I think The Lost Boys straddles this line, actually - there's a little of both happening there.)  Also gamer peeps - check out TheWolf Among Us - it's based on the Fables comics, and what happens when Fairy Tale creatures secretly live in the real world. You get to play Bigby Wolf (As in Big B Wolf /Big Bad Wolf - it's really interesting to see how your past (eating pigs and grandmothers) translates into how people perceive you in the world today...especially because now you're the sheriff responsible for keeping order in Fable society.)

5a) Zombies Technically they started out as human and had very little say as to their creation, but rotting corpses tend to lack the sex appeal of the vampire/werewolf dynamic, so they get a subcategory. (And frankly, it's not even that the zombies are always villains so much as what they represent - metaphors for human consumption or corporate greed AKA Soylent Green is people!  I'll throw Frankenstein into this category- although we have to ask ourselves who the bigger villain is - the monster created without consent or knowledge...or the Dr. who made him. (Or in the case of Resident Evil - the zombies? or Umbrella Corporation?) See also, CHUD or The Hills Have Eyes. Not zombies, exactly, but groups of cannibalistic hillbillies still fits the Zombie bill for me. )

6) In Space No One Can Hear You Scream Alien villains are all over the place. Species. Aliens. Critters.The Thing. The Kaiju from Pacific Rim. It. War of the Worlds. We're pitted against creatures we can't understand and have no natural defenses for. Bonus for aliens who live in sewers and look like clowns.
s At My Door. Not quite the Devil, per se - but there's still a supernatural element going on. Hellraiser, Poltergeist, Evil Dead. Child's Play. The Ring. The Grudge. Christine. Opening the forbidden book (or box, or trinket) and releasing the evil inside. (This is usually the sort of book or movie where the protags fall into that Too Stupid to Live trope. Why do they go into the basement alone? Why do they read the book that was clearly made from human skin? WHY do they play with the puzzle box?)

8) Creature Feature Not quiet animals, not quite aliens - this is where the mutant weird things hang out. Gremlins, Ghoulies, Jeepers Creepers (and anything that comes out of hibernation every x number of  years to prey on teenagers before going back to sleep.) Tremors. The Blob.

9) Witches Lots of witchy villains floating about popular media, but I am actually going to simply mention The Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz - simply because I like how she goes from villain to anti-hero, given her backstory explained in the musical Wicked. She's much more sympathetic and her actions explained and it lends her much greater character definition.

I could probably go one with additional categories, but I think I'll end the post here by asking what your favorite horror villain is (I know I barely scratched the surface). And I'll also leave you with this:

How to Keep Zombies Fresh

I like to use a walk-in freezer, myself.

Ha ha. I don't get to make zombie jokes very often because, well, I don't really have the zombie thing.

I confess. I don't get it.

I mean - yes, I watched Night of the Living Dead long ago on a hot summer afternoon that did nothing to dispel the dark creepiness of that movie. It scared me silly. And then it pissed me off that the one guy who manages to survive the night gets mistaken for a zombie in the morning and killed.

Really hope that wasn't a spoiler for anyone. But hey, that movie is nearly as old as I am, so I think you've had time to see it.

Still, with all of you gleefully going on about the zombie apocalypse, double taps and so forth seeming to enjoy it SO much, I feel like the kid in the corner pointing at the shuffling creature and saying "dude, a toddler could outrun that thing."

No, no - I get why this is a bit of horror for the human mind. Part of our fear and dread of death. Revenants are the fulfillment of both our greatest hopes and deepest terrors. Everyone at some point longs to have someone dead come back to them - and yet we know we can't have that and shouldn't want it. The utter wrongness of that reversal feeds the nightmare of the revenant. It also plays on our knowledge that we, too, will someday die. Zombies are the monsters we become.

So, to actually address this week's topic - how do you write about zombies or revenants and keep it feeling new.

I've already scattered those breadcrumbs, I hope.

You do it like you do to avoid any cliché - by digging beneath the surface of it. Instead of taking the easy route, go beneath, to the charge of emotion that fuels the thing. The inevitability of death and the subsequent corruption of the body. The perversion of natural order to bring the dead back to life. The obsessive terror that this, too, could happen to you....

Happy Halloween everyone!

And if you need a palate-cleanser after all that talk of death and would like to taste the opposite side of the coin, I'm participating in a fun little sale of erotic books. Sister Word Whore Carolyn Crane is also playing. You can check it out here.