Whether this page is being read or not, I’ve managed to set up and keep a regular schedule of updating every Sunday. This means that every Saturday night/Sunday morning, I sit down with my notebook and a ball point pen, and try and think of a topic to write about. Usually, since my life these days has boiled entirely down to “wake up, check email, read comics, apply for jobs, shower, read, apply for jobs, read, eat, go to bed”, with occasional additions of “buy pet food”, I find myself delving back into the regions of high school adventures or bizarre family traditions in order to fill this space. I find a topic, and by around 3 o’clock in the morning, get started writing.
Sometimes it comes quickly. Sometimes I stare at a blank page for hours on end before blathering inanely about something that doesn’t actually make sense.
Every now and then I decide to get meta on myself and write a bit about how I decide what to write.
This is usually a sure sign that I’ve come up with absolutely nothing else to blather on about, am feeling utterly useless, and want to get the damned thing over with so I can have my nightly battle with Alice over whether or not turning off the light is a signal for her to stand at my bedroom door and whine.
She’s perfectly happy to lie quietly by my side and fall asleep when I WANT to pay attention to her, but the instant I decide to go for “me-time”, it’s all pitiful meows and carpet destruction. She’s very cat-like that way.
But I’m not here to talk about my cat.
I’m also not here to talk about not talking about my cat.
I wanted to write this week’s entry about strange and scary stories, and why I love them, and why some people (including me) will go out of his or her way and put his- or herself into potentially dangerous situations just to prove that things like ghosts and monsters DO exist, to validate all the time that he/she spends on the internet, scaring his/herself stupid reading stories about them.
I had a great introduction too. Then I spilled my raspberry Italian soda on it at Borders, after I spent forty minutes sifting through books of love spells and Joseph Campbell trying to find some good folk-lore. I hate trying to rewrite things completely (I also hate having to re-edit things, but have realized that if I’m ever going to be a halfway decent writer, that’s a necessity), so I had to toss out that whole idea.
I considered refocusing the thing on the time I managed to completely creep myself out in my dorm room last spring. But in truth, that story only really works when spoken out-loud, in true traditional storytelling fashion, complete with framing devices and story symbols.
In fact, pretty much all of my good spooky story material worked that way.
I considered writing about WHY I’m willing to spend forty minutes in the tiny Mythology section of Borders, and another twenty in the “magical studies” section, looking for books on folklore and ghost stories. I was going to talk about the fact that my interest in such things was actually purely academic, serving as possible resources for horror stories in the future, or to look at the phenomenon of superstition from the anthropological perspective.
But that’s all bunk, so I threw it out. I go through those sections, scoffing at books telling me what color personality I have, because I’m a junky for the squirrelly, spooky feeling I get when I read creepy stories at three o’clock in the morning.
Maybe I could talk about going to Edinburgh for the Fringe Festival in August 2002, taking a ghost tour through the underground vaults, and then having to take a quick weekend up in the middle of December before leaving the UK, because I heard about the MacKenzie poltergeist and was desperately hoping to get some spooky reading on THAT ghost tour instead.
Of course, I didn’t. Maybe I was too well read on the subject. More likely it has something to do with the fact that my brother and I are described as “psychic walls” in spite of our fanatic love of the supernatural.
And, of course, I KNEW going in that I wouldn’t feel anything, and jinxed myself from the beginning.
So finally I settled on the idea of just sitting down at the keyboard instead of the notebook, and doing the whole thing completely freeform, babbling about whatever came to mind. All I really knew was that I wanted to write something about spooky stuff. It’s all Neil Gaiman’s fault.
If Jackie, the girl from the Ren Faire, hadn’t got me talking about Neverwhere, and then showed me his blog, I wouldn’t have gone to Borders to find his second children’s book, and ended up in the mythology section in the first place. I certainly wouldn’t have come home in a spooky story mood and then found the dybbuk ebay auction online.
See, if Neil Gaiman weren’t such a great author, or as obsessed with the deeply weird, I’d have– ah, hell. I’d have found some other reason to be spending Valentines Day babbling about ghosts and ghoulies.
Happy Valentines Day! I leave you with an entirely un-Valentines-y quote from the ineffable Days with Frog and Toad, and with the fact that one of these days, I’m going to have to figure out what “ineffable” actually means:
“Frog and Toad sat close by the fire. They were scared. The teacups shook in their hands. They were having the shivers. It was a good, warm feeling.”
Thank you, Arnold Lobel.
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