Idea Gremilins

I have started to ask myself where in the world I get ideas from. As I understand the story: published, successful author types get sick, real quick of the question. I have had some good ideas, but I cannot even start to catalog where they come from. The story I am working on now came to me on the john going number 2. Now that I recall, the last really good idea before that came on the can... Going number 2 as well. Hm?
It's crude, very crude. The jokes write themselves too: maybe I should have flushed them with the rest of the shit. Ha Fucking Ha.

*

I have often come to a story idea by asking myself "what is scary?" That question is often left unasked yet answered as something comes up and creeps me out or unsettles me.
Being scared eats at my insides as it happens. As soon as it is over I find myself wanting it all again, dreading it at the same time. When it happens, I want to get at the heart of it and show it to someone else.
There it is, the reason I write.
Still, what scares is not an idea for a story. The closer you get to the root of what the "scare" is, the less of a story you have. Deep emotional loss is scary, not a plot. It is a seed that I plant in dark wet soil. Then it grows. How it grows is the question.
I get the scare, then find a vehicle for it to drive. The characters, the locales, the scenery, trappings, events, plots, and the twists. They ride like a convoy, the scare at the head of it. They all need to help give it weight, momentum. They push it home.
I have found the vehicle first a few times, which works, but I have to remember to ask the question in reverse. "What is scary about this?" A convoy without a driver goes nowhere.
I have never come by it mechanically. Never laid out the plans of what kind of story I was going to write.
"Today I am telling the tale of three sisters going through midlife trouble."
More often a notion hits, I plant, it grows, and a tale is told. Sometimes it is broad concepts that get filled in through careful consideration. Other times that notion is a full blown idea with characters (named or unnamed) and plot all laid out.
Those big movies, that blurt out in the theater behind my eyes, are the ones that lead to these questions. Where the hell did all that come from?
I feel as if there is a little gremlin sitting at a writing desk in my head, churning out pages, and bouncing his ideas off me like a pitch man.
"The next great gremlin novel!" He assures me, every time. "Huge seller."

*

Reading what I have written here, I wonder if any of this is getting me any closer to an answer? Don't know.
My ideas just come. Does it really matter how? Being truthful with myself I am saying no. It does not matter.
Well, then fuck it.
Looking at yourself, as a writer, and delving into what makes you work is always good for something. Now, whenever writer's block comes I have got the solution. A good idea is right around the corner, after a trip to Taco Hell and a nice long sit on the crapper. That always gets the gremlin working.

Post #1

I am a horror writer. That means I traffic in tales that scare, creep-out, unsettle, and entertain their readers. My horror is not cute or coy. It is about the macabre. Other themes populate my stories, but their hearts are always that genre of the bizarre, and the dreadful.

Horror is in me, boiling and spilling out all over the page whenever I write. Even when I try to write outside the corral of horror it seeps into my prose.

I am scary, creepy, and unsettling. I am not cute or coy. I love the macabre. Most of my tastes tend toward the bizarre and the dreadful. That is me. I am horror and have decided that I love that about myself.

I am not alone. There are others just like me. In no way am I the central authority in the “horror universe.” I am not even published yet. (I will be, but not yet.)

This blog is here for the purpose of chronicling my journey to get published, to get my horrors out there to the world. It is also my journey, as a writer, toward being the best I can be at what I do.

What I am putting here for everyone to see are my thoughts and personal discoveries on horror and what is happening with my career. This post is an introduction and an opportunity for you to see what this is all about.

To further that, I am making this deceleration:

I am affirming that my horror will always be about scaring, creeping out, unsettling, and entertaining.

I affirm that this blog will always be about my horror.

I affirm that I will never take all of this too seriously. I will remember this all started under the covers, with a flashlight, a paperback book, and a scared kid.

For clarity sake let me point out some things so no one gets the wrong idea.

One. I am not goth. (I don't look good in make-up.) I am not sad, depressed,or sure of the universe's unwavering existentialist cruelty.

Two. My type of horror is not about promiscuous vampire hunters who get it on with the “creatures of the night,” or most other stories of that type.

Three. I have discovered that there are horror novels that are not that much about horror. Their purpose seems to be about gaining the approval of some mythical group of intellectuals. My type of horror's singular purpose is laid out above in the second sentence of the first paragraph.

Fourth and finally, I am not going to qualify anything else I put in this blog with statements such as “in my opinion,” "IMHO," “this is just what I think,” or “I'm sure not all of 'x' (or 'x's') are like this but...” If something I put in this blog ever offends you, pisses you off or otherwise destroys your sense of inner-peace just add the following statement, in your mind's eye, to the end of whatever it was that put you in that state:

“I am sorry that your life, self esteem, and/or well-being was so fragile that the words on your computer screen were enough to blow your shit up. Maybe you should reconsider your continuing participation in this thing called the internet."

I hope that your type of horror shares something with mine. If it does, the plan is to post at least every five days. Thanks for taking the ride with me.

Macabre –adjective

1.	gruesome and horrifying; ghastly; horrible.

2.	of, pertaining to, dealing with, or representing death, esp. its grimmer or uglier aspect.

3.	of or suggestive of the allegorical dance of death.