Saturday, January 17, 2009
Good Old Fashioned Nightmare Fuel!
So we're in the thick of an economic recession, an economic nightmare, some might say. People are having a hard time finding pennies to hold on to, jobs are getting sliced left and right. However, I can't say I've been experiencing a recession in ideas. I have quite a few lined up, different things just keep coming up with more things to deposit into the idea bank. Besides my novel which is done and pretty much publisher bait which could use some improvement here and there, I have projects lined up such as: a screenplay, a second novel, a children's book (yes, I know), and a short story. I'm actually in the middle of getting one all tuned up for a contest I mentioned in the last post. At the moment, it's a runny turd, but I have roughly half a month to get it right.
Still, its safe to say, I'm seeing a surplus in good old-fashioned nightmare fuel. Now I'm using the definition in a totally nontraditional sense. By nightmare fuel, I'm just talking about energy for ideas. Since, most of my ideas tend to be of the darkly humourous variety. Not to say I'd never write anything uplifting and saccharine, but nobody should hold their breath. I will also use nightmare fuel incorrectly when I say there are and more than likely will always be things to inspire me. Let me let you in on something, I have very little faith in 90% of people I encounter and wholly trust a much much lower percentage. Coming to such a realization should force me to move from my house on a hill to a house on a mountain and cut off all communications with everybody out there. But no, that's not how it works. I benefit from being around other people, so long as the environment allows it. Seeing and knowing people, no matter how reprehensible, annoying, or artificial they may be can give me oodles of material to work from. There are plenty of characters I could mention, such as the man with the mohawk and the eye that was clawed out by a bear, the long haired guy at [Miskatonik] University who wears stiletto boots, the man who tried to get me to dance with him in the middle of town, library man, et al. Many of them are interesting, and probably could be more efficient nightmare fuel. However, the old man who decided to chat on the phone with me for an hour during my inauguration as Keymaster of [Pages] book store. He wouldn't let me go, so I continued with all of my work as he told me his life story. I liked the guy, constantly used self deprecating humour of how he was an old fart, how he wasn't doing well, and wholly acknowledged that he was wasting my time.
I learned from him that he was a closet socialist (to each his own I guess), that he loves the world but hates the people in it (a view not too far from my own), and that old women are the most repugnant people out of all. He was a street kid who came to Canada from England when he was 15 and has been here for 60 years. He told me to avoid being sent to a retirement home at all costs. And I learned that the Tories are sick.
Listening to him was beneficial because I realized, even though he was a quarter shy of being the right age, this man is the protagonist of the short story I've been doing. I've been keeping his voice and an image of him in my head as I go through this story.
And here's something else, short stories aren't my thing. The short story is about the length of the amount of words I could contribute to my novel in a good day. Yet, it's been a bitch getting the words out. It's a challenge to meet the projected word count, and when I look at it, I want to vomit. One of the problems is that I'm going for a slightly realistic approach, when surrealism is my forte. So that's why I've decided to do a second story to enter into the contest. The second story will be more freewheeling and surreal, hopefully I have more fun with this one.
I'm not counting on winning the contest with either entry. I don't know what kind of material they're looking for, I don't know how many other people are entering, and I don't know if their work is more along the lines of what they want than what I'm doing. But there really is only one way to find out.
Time will tell.
Before I go, I should clear up the true definition of good old-fashioned nightmare fuel. It's imagery, normally seen during childhood, which aren't intentionally scary, but succeed in scaring the daylights out of you, anyway. It could be a psychedelic kid's show, Santa Clause, robots, puppets, whatever. Rubber Johnny, a video someone at [Miskatonik University] told me about a couple years ago and just remembered a couple days ago during a conversation with coworker [Ophelia Leichenbestatter] about weird music videos, is probably good old fashioned nightmare fuel.
I thought for a while, and at first thought nothing's really been scary to me. But then I remembered there were a couple things. There was a cinematic in a game by brother had on his Amiga 500 called Another World. Your character wakes up in a prison cell in some alternate dimension, and the first thing he sees is this weird alien guy with beady eyes. For some reason, I would have to run out of the room whenever that happened. My brother took advantage of that, and would call me up saying "Hey, look at this new cartoon!" or something and then when I got in, he would turn off the lights, run out the room, and leave me alone with that image frozen on the screen. Good old-fashioned nightmare fuel. Ever since those days, I haven't had the pleasure of being scared.
See everyone in hell.
