Just a reminder to all you readers, no stats blog this week because I took last week off from writing to heal my wrist. I've been pain free all week and am excited to get back to writing tomorrow.
So I am taking this day of blogging to kickstart a series of posts in which I will be talking about the horror genre.
But before I can even do that, I have to talk about what brought me to that genre and why I write it, and my journey to accepting the fact that I write horror. This post is just a brief intro into my writing and reading habits as a kid through adulthood. The other posts will be a mix of information and my own experiences with the genre. But here is the start:
I got interested in reading much like most kids: with the Goosebumps novels. Sure, they weren't THAT scary, even to me as a kid, but they were still "darker" than some of the books I was supposed to be reading. I read Babysitters Club, and The Boxcar Children, and the like, and they were fine, but I always went back to Goosebumps. And I'm not sure if it was because I was a girl, or because I continued to read them while my peers were reading "literature", but I got teased a little for it. Not enough to traumatize me for life, but enough that I remember that being the case.
During this same time I was writing stories. I don't know what genre you could say that I was writing at the time, but I was always writing, and while some of my stories featured romance, or action, they always featured ghosts. Sometimes my characters were in love with a ghost, sometimes they were trying to put the restless spirit to rest. Either way, there was a haunting of sorts. I did go through a Jurassic Park fanfiction phase, and while those didn't feature ghosts, a lot of my less important characters died bloody deaths by the jaws of dinosaurs.
As a teen I wrote typical angsty teen fiction. My stories featured brooding characters named "Haze" or "Sky" or "Jade" and were very dark and introspective. Hardly horror, but typical for an angsty teen.
Meanwhile, I was reading a mix of dark YA fiction, and Stephen King.
I gave up writing for a long while after going into community college, I figured college was for career prep and writing would never be a career for me, so I gave it up and studied Psychology for a year. And then switched majors to World Literature....and minored in Creative Writing.
Meanwhile, I was reading authors like Kafka, Goethe, Shakespeare, and Stephen King.
After that, I transferred to Southern Oregon University to finish out my BA and my major was English Education. I had a personal crisis in which I realized that I didn't want to teach English, and that I wanted to be a Librarian. The good thing about wanting to be a Librarian is that the only requirement is an MLIS or MLS, meaning I could get my BA in whatever I wanted. So I changed majors to...Creative Writing.
Meanwhile I was reading TONS of Short Stories. Too many different authors to list here, but one of my favorites being Joyce Carol Oates. I was also falling in love with Southern Gothic Literature (Harper Lee, and Truman Capote for examples)
This was probably one of the best decisions I ever made. And one of the most frustrating.
It was great because this was when I learned that I was really good at writing short stories. After struggling to write novels for who knows how long, I had accepted that I would be a short story writer. This is also where I learned to take writing seriously, as work or as a craft, and to not get discouraged at bad drafts. Like I mentioned earlier, writing was a craft, something that if I was willing to put the work in (the immense amount of work) that I could get better. And I did. I was very proud of the work I produced in college.
However, it was no place for commercial or genre work. That was the hard part. I liked horror. I liked writing thriller/horror type stuff. But that didn't fly with my professors unless I took it in a way that transcended the genre. As long as my work was free of tropes and cliches. Which of course I wanted it to be, but at the same time, coming into the major as a genre writer, and waving that flag, I had to try twice as hard as my peers to impress. There were a few other students, a fantasy writer, and a sci-fi writer who had the same struggles I had, but we prevailed in the end.
I got my BA degree in writing, and shortly published some short stories that could be considered "thriller" but ultimately were still considered "literary fiction" and while I am proud of them, they weren't 100% what I wanted to write. I wanted to make my readers a little uncomfortable. But I still didn't want to write "horror". Horror was for sellouts. For commercial writers.
And then I went to Library School. I read A LOT of different things in library school (go figure). But most of all I realized that just like I strongly believe in not judging people by what they read, I strongly believe in not judging people by what they write.
So I decided to become a horror writer.
Admittedly, I still have one foot in the writers closet and will say "speculative fiction" when someone asks me what I write. I'm slowly getting over that.
The book I am writing write now is a dystopian horror, and my first horror short story will be coming out later this fall in a horror anthology, which I am super excited about.
I'm writing this post because its going to jumpstart a series of posts about the horror genre. I will be going into depth about what the horror genre is, my take on it, as well as brief discussions on some other influential genres to me such as Southern Gothic, and Speculative Fiction (maybe cubist literature too...but we'll see on that one).
I plan on writing a post for this series twice a month (starting in October), and you'll still get weekly stats posts, and in October I will be posting a horror flash fiction piece once a week in celebration of every horror writers favorite holiday: Halloween.
Stay Tuned!
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