Category Archives: Shadowing “The Shaded”

Interview With My Doppelganger

Photo by Psychopoesie

So I’m writing this YA novel that’s heavy on the supernatural, and I’ve had doppelgangers on the brain lately because my main character’s double plays a significant role in the story. Well, I must have been putting more than just mental power behind it because a few days ago I was in the grocery store checkout line and suddenly there “I” was at the same time jamming a hand up the Redbox dispenser trying to steal DVDs.

The resemblance between us is pretty uncanny, although the DG doesn’t chew his fingernails and my eyes don’t go dark and dead like a shark’s when I feel threatened.

Anyway, there was the store manager calling the cops and I felt this intense, familial obligation to save “myself” from the police. And so while we hid inside a burned-out car in the alley I had a chance to ask my doppelganger a few questions. Here’s the transcript from our interview:

Me: What movie were you trying to steal?

My Doppelganger: laets ot gniyrt ouy erew eivom tahw?

Me: Wait, that’s my question repeated to me backwards. Is that how doppelgangers really talk?

My Doppelganger: No, I’m just messing with you. Next question.

Me: Do you know how or why doppelgangers exist in the first place?

My Doppelganger: Hmmm…well, I don’t know how to put this delicately, but basically you get a man and a woman and you connect them via their sexual organs and then–

Me: Never mind, I got it.

My Doppelganger: You sure? Want me to draw you a picture? I’m getting pretty good.

Me: So you’re like my evil twin, is that it?

My Doppelganger: Evil? You tell me, bro. I pretty much do all the things that you secretly want to do.

Me: I don’t secretly want to molest Redbox machines.

My Doppelganger: Fine, but what about the Fifty Shades of Grey fan fiction? The PB and whipped-cream sandwiches for breakfast?

Me: Oh, that’s a great idea! Christian and Anastasia would love PB and whipped-cream sand–I mean, that doesn’t…none of that…are you sure you’re my doppelganger?

My Doppelganger: Come on, dude.

Me: Yeah…

My Doppelganger: And you know exactly what movie I was going for in there.

Me: Crazy Enough.

My Doppelganger: Starring Chris Kattan–

Me: –and Chris Kattan.

Me and My Doppelganger: “It’s Twin-sanity!”

My Doppelganger: Hey man that could be us. We could be Twin-sanity every day.

Me: Um…yeah. Every day.

My Doppelganger: Yeah man, bring me home, introduce me to your wife, let me sleep on your couch. We’ll make matchstick sculptures of your favorite escalators and sell them at county fairs. Don’t keep it a secret anymore!

Me: Uh-huh, excuse me a second. Officer! Officer! The man you’re looking for is right here! Here he is!

False Starts, Fresh Starts

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Cathar Fortress, by Duncan Harris

Today I’m starting over.

Again.

For the third time, actually. To try and scale the fortress walls and rescue the prisoner that is my YA supernatural novel The Shaded.

Yes, the first two attempts stalled, and the thousands of words left behind on those 100+ pages often felt like they were being squeezed from a brain that had turned into stone.

And yet after several months of distance and maybe a little amnesia, newfound enthusiasm for the project has inspired me to pull it all apart and put it back together in an exceptional way to make it finally come alive.

I’m scared, sure, but still tenacious, and today I gird myself for battle by looking to Liam Neeson’s character in the movie “The Grey,” (a surprisingly poignant film that I highly recommend) for inspiration:

“Once more into the fray. Into the last good fight I’ll ever know. Live and die on this day. Live and die on this day.”

Okay, it might be a bit overwrought to compare the plight of the last survivor of a plane crash about to fight an Alpha male wolf with a writer in insulated booties tackling the blank page, but hey, when we writers aren’t busy being neurotic we’re playing dress-up in our melodrama. Or something like that.

But hey, self-doubt and fear can be just a vicious to a writer as a pack of hungry wolves, and where old Liam had a knife and his Irish grit, I’ve got my imagination and bullheadedness. Will it carry me through?

I’m an optimist, so yes, I believe it will.

But I could still use some help, fellow creators out there. Tell me about the projects that kicked you to the curb a few times before you ultimately struck back and conquered. Share your hard fought success stories.

Research

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Photo by Squirrelist

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”

-Albert Einstein-

I’ll be honest: I hate doing research before or during the writing of a story. Just the thought of it transports me back to my high school and college days, when I would do almost anything (even clean my room) to avoid actually cracking open a textbook to study for a test or prepare a paper. I wasn’t a bad student, really Mom, I wasn’t, just not always the most motivated.

And perhaps this scholastic allergy flared up again when I sat down to write my first novel, The Chronicles of What Happened, by Cam Hanson. The story deals with regression therapy and analysis, two areas I had little knowledge of, but I didn’t immerse myself in either subject before I started writing. I decided to know as much as my fifteen-year-old protagonist/narrator would know after observing his parents being treated by a mostly unethical therapist who until very recently had been a hypnotist hired out for children’s birthday parties. So I didn’t go in completely blind. I did buy a book called Second Childhood: Hypno-Play Therapy With Age-Regressed Adults, written by Marian Kaplan Shapiro, which did give me a good sense of how a therapist would actually conduct a regression session. But then I filtered that information through my characters and let my imagination fill in the rest.

Alas, as any writer knows, even minimal research is essential in order to spin an honest and authentic tale. And of course I understand its value. Research can aid in enriching the details of every element important to a strong, engaging story, and at the same time improve (hopefully) the intelligence and insight of the author. So even though, in my opinion, it’s robust imagination that is power, knowledge too deserves its own pedestal.

Research is on my mind again as I continue to develop my next project, a YA supernatural-horror novel called The Shaded. The genre itself leaves me plenty of room to imagine and make things up, but central to my story is a sinister occultist organization whose front company is a vanity press that produces nonfiction books on the supernatural, the occult, and various unexplained phenomena. Even though, ala Cam Hanson, my narrator/protagonist is a teenager unfamiliar with most of this, there are several characters who he interacts with who have spent their lives devoted to this area.

So I must know what they know. I must bite the bullet and hunker down and embark on some serious learning. At least its a subject I’m actually interested in and curious about; I no longer have to fear it’ll be like the chemistry class in 11th grade that I only passed because I helped the teacher clean the lab after school. Right?

Anyway, while I regress and repair that trauma, I’d love to hear what you think about research when it comes to writing fiction. And if you happen to be into the supernatural, the paranormal, etc., please feel free to recommend any good books on the subject.

Shadowing The Shaded

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Photo by Ordale

Now that my novel The Chronicles of What Happened, by Cam Hanson is in the submission stage (10 agent queries have been sent as of this writing, 1 request for the full manuscript thus far) I turn my attention back to the project I started last summer. It’s a new novel called The Shaded, the first volume in a supernatural horror trilogy for the young adult crowd. There’s an excerpt from an early draft on my website, located here.

However, after reaquainting myself with the story I’ve decided to take it into a slightly different direction, although the basic premise remains the same: A teenager discovers he is a demon-human hybrid, and the battle within himself and against a sinister occultist organization over how to use his newfound powers is just the beginning of an adventure where a young man’s ability to inspire a demonic force for good may be humankind’s only hope for survival.

In the early draft, the main character is stricken with a compulsion to draw/paint/create a series of particularly detailed grotesque images. He will not stop to eat or sleep, and his desperate parents ultimately decide to have him institutionalized. In that version the story opened with the main character already having undergone months of treatment, to no avail. I decided that it was better if the reader and the main character experience this compulsion together. So the idea of the compulsive creating still exists and the images themselves play a crucial role in the story, but now the main character is kidnapped by the aforementioned occultist organization before any medical doctors have the opportunity to try and treat what turns out to not be a disease or disorder, but a spiritual awakening of sorts.

The story is still being mapped out, and really my first order of business is to get a better handle on who my main character is. He’s my first-person narrator and I need to know how he thinks, how he talks, his behavior, etc. Once I find his “voice” I can move forward with more confidence.

I’m excited about the possibilities here, and this project hearkens back to some of the books I enjoyed as a younger reader, especially the supernatural tales of John Bellairs, the Three Investigators series, and Sport by Louise Fitzhugh. I’ve been reading some current YA titles, such as Feed by M.T. Anderson, Miss Peregrine’s School for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs, and Dan Wells’ I Am Not A Serial Killer (although this last title is often kept in the adult fiction section).

Do you read YA novels? Let me know what’s on your shelf or stored in your e-reader. And I’m always on the lookout for other YA horror titles so if you’re reading one or can suggest one, I’d love to hear about those too.