September 2015 Update
You can feel them: the winter winds, creeping over the mountains hoping that you won’t notice them. Outside my window, it’s snowing. But in these parts of Canada, it always starts snowing in October. There’s no reason to believe this year will be any different.
This is the Year
But for me, this year will be so different than any other year. For this year is the year I become an author! As I eagerly make my way through one of my favourite books – Clive Barker’s The Thief of Always – I find my spirits lifted despite the fact this is a dark tale of childhood. For you see, only Barker’s tales have been able to give me the chills since I can remember. And it’s this beyond-the-pages touch that I hope to convey into my readers. If I can give them the chills or influence them after they’ve set the book down, then my work here is done.
This month, I’ve spent my time in the R&D side of writing – I’ve read more ghost stories and horror than I can shake a stick at. In fact, I crashed my Kindle (twice) with overuse from the books, and read more Wattpad entries than I care to admit. All in an effort to find one thing: lines, passages, statements – anything that sent a shiver down my spine.
My Plan for Thrills and Chills
With Below written, edited and waiting patiently for cover art, Book 2 (title: Whole) is a hair’s breadth away from first draft. My goal for the series is to take the underlying tone from dark paranormal fiction into horror. I told myself to wait until the third book before I let loose with the true horror genre, and I’ve been writing those horror scenes in handfuls lately. Using the books and stories I’ve been researching, along with a love of Asian horror movies, I’ve been piecing together the remaining three to four books of the series using skipping stones of stories that either struck fear into my bones or sent a shiver down my spine.
Passage from Servant of the Bones by Ann Rice (and my vulture talon fingernails)
Needless to say, I haven’t been sleeping too well these days. Whether it’s ghastly children hiding under the tablecloth, or a frightening spectres crawling out of the television set, or a vampiric house trying to eat its occupants alive – they’ve all left their mark, and they all made me sleep with the bathroom light on more than once. It’s such an interesting concept – being able to influence the reader or watcher so deeply that they’re effected even after they turn off the movie or put down the book. And that’s what I want to do: to be able to continue influencing my readers even after they’ve put down my book.
I know it’s vain of me to compare myself to other established and well-published authors, but those are the ones I strive to be like. Stephen King, Clive Barker, Ann Rice – these are all horror-genre writers I’ve loved well before I decided to be a writer myself. Stephen King instilled in us a raw fear of clowns with It, Clive Barker taught us that the whims of childhood can lead to horrors beyond our imagination with The Thief of Always, and Ann Rice was rockin’ the vampires well before they sparkled and in-explicitly kept repeating high school with her Vampire Chronicles series.
These are my role models; these are the authors whom I strive to become.
The NaNoWriMo question
With my goals set firmly in my mind, there’s still another question which plagues me: to NaNo or not to NaNo. October is NaNoPlanMo – National Novel Planning Month, though I’m more of a pantser than a plotter by nature. I’ve NaNo’d for the past 3 years now, finishing two of those years with novels (one of which is Book 2 in my almost-published series, The Rose Cross Academy). This October, I’m still struggling with whether I have enough time to compete in NaNo, or whether I should focus my energy on publishing my first novel. November is, after all, my goal publishing date for Book 1.
An idea popped into my mind while watching the news, of all things. This idea I thought I could take to NaNo in November and give it flesh and bones. It’s a modern take on Stephen King’s Carrie but told in novel form. My main character, Becca, is an outcast at school and gets her revenge on the classmates who torment and torture her by calling upon ghosts and nightmares to do her bidding. I’ve chosen the title as simply Becca, also as an homage to King’s Carrie.
I like the concept and I’ve planned out a few scenes, but I’m still on the fence about whether I will have enough time to write the novel in November. Nothing’s stopping me from giving it a shot, but at the same time I don’t want to get anyone’s hopes up. It’s a tough story to write, and due to some unique reasons.
NaNo 2015: ‘Becca’ (maybe!)
I want the tale of Becca to be a unique one, and I want the horrors to happen during the day. Night time haunts are cliché-ic and predictable; the dark figure in the window, the screams in the nights. But when was the last time you were scared in the daytime? I want the horrors to be everywhere; no where is safe from Becca and her nightmares. You’re not safe shopping at the mall, you’re not safe walking home from school on a busy street. Right in broad daylight is where Becca will strike, which is where I want the thrills and chills to live. You’ll never know if it’s safe to take that selfie or open the mailbox. You’ll never know if one of Becca’s horrors is coming after you.
And then he blah’ed all the way through the plot
But then what happens at night? This is where I’m tripping up, actually. It’s easy enough to instill a sense of uneasiness in a dark house at night, but that’s too predictable. I struggle with how to make the night just as chilling as the day without getting into the corny aspect of the horror genre. I don’t want things hiding under the bed or in the closet – these concepts have been done to death, pardon the pun. And you’ll expect to see reflections in the mirror or the darkened windows of night. But what about a dark figure in the hallway? In the reflection of your soup spoon. Would that be out of the ordinary enough to bypass the horror cheese-and-wine platter? We’ll see.
There’s also the problem with proving to the world I’ve actually written this story. I’ve juggled with the idea of uploading the story chapter-by-chapter to Wattpad. I could do that as well with past NaNo projects, I guess. My only issue is uploading anything which isn’t edited or proof-read. My first pass at the draft is straight-forward: ‘he did this, then he did that’ – with no emotion and very little narration. Then there’s the bullet points left over from those rare moments of planning. Oh! And let’s not forget the “blah” entries which need to be fleshed out. All of these things I can’t in good conscious upload for public consumption.
The Updates
Too late!
And so with that, we come to the end of what has been a long and rambling blog post. I’m still in wait mode for cover art for Book 1 (Below), and Book 2 (Whole) is still growing past my initials estimates. I’m really delving into the horror genre, so I’ve been reading all my old horror faves from my teenage years as a form of research. Half our jobs as writers is to read, and that has been my job this month.
October will be a month of many decisions and many milestones. I want to try to make another YouTube video, as painful as the first one was. Here’s hoping the stars align enough for me to get some work done!
Halloween is coming! (Let’s avoid a corny Game of Thrones reference here)
Halloween is my favourite holiday.
– Rissa
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