Let Me Out

Okay, I AM one of those who suffers from Cabin Fever. Doesn't even have to be winter, but it helps. I never noticed this too much while I was working outside the house, especially when I was working two jobs, or hauling my oversized butt up and down hills all day at a nature center. By the time I got home, I was too wiped out to want to put shoes and a coat on and leave again. Now that I work at home, though, I definitely reach the point of climbing the walls.

Part of my make-up is an enormous love of travel, and of experiencing new things. My dh? Not so much. So while I'm getting itchy feet and wanting to go somewhere--anywhere, he's happy to spend his free time flicking channels on the TV. Plus, he does work long hours outside the house, and enjoys vegging out when he finally does get to spend some time at home.

So what to do? Traveling solo is too expensive--just no budget for that on a small-press writer's pay. I can think of a few small things that help, when I get my backside in gear and do them--things I've promised myself to do more often in 2009.

1. Exercise. Cliche, but true. I have a deep-water aerobics class at the local high-school pool. Since I love being in the water, this is good for me mentally as well as physically. Also gives me the chance to talk to other humans, so it's well worth the couple hours away from my computer.

2. Change of scene: I need to remember to pack up the laptop and go somewhere else to write for a while. Local coffee shop or even the public library. At least it's a different set of walls to look at, and you're not constantly distracted by things like dishes or laundry.

3. Other writers: Spending time with any of my writer friends always refreshes me and makes me remember why I wanted to do this in the first place. Lunch out with Dakota or a Monday night critique meeting usually help put the blahs back in their place.

Someday, though? The change of scene is going to mean typing on the lanai looking out over the beach. If I keep telling myself that, it's bound to come true, right?

Cabin Fever?

I was confused at first when this topic hit the board. "What the heck is cabin fever?" I asked the Mr. He explained that NORMAL people require sunlight and activities outside of the house to avoid going crazy. When I gave him my usual "Huh" look he told me to re-watch The Shining.

Oh. Okay. Going nuts because you are stuck inside due to shorter days and cold weather. Yeah, I don't have that. I hate being outside. I don't like the sun. I am an Irish girl so I burn ridiculously easily, never tanning but peeling and ending up as ghost white as I started. So I am not in any way, shape, or form a sun worshipper.

As for activities outside the house...well I also have the good fortune of being incredibly lazy. So sitting on my ass inside with nothing else to do is actually a favorite past time. I hate the cold, but other than temperature issues I freakin' love winter. I can get out of doing all kinds of things due to snow and rain and the like. "Oh, sorry I can't make it to the (insert outside obligation here) the roads are just terrible and the kid has a cold and the dogs can't be left alone...yeah, winter kind of rocks.

Plus, if I am cooped up in my house with nothing else to do, I can write more books. No one complains that I have been on the computer all day because they are too busy finding things to do on their own so that they are not stuck with this "Cabin Fever" thing. Everyone wins!

Now, for those of you who are snickering at how witty Dakota is I should warn you, I am not kidding. I have never, not once, said to anyone that we should go outside and do something. Not once. I like INSIDE. Inside there is internet, and food, and the temperature is the same year round. Outside there are bugs, and that dreaded sun up there in the sky, and it is cold/hot/wet/etc at any given time. And since I live in Michigan it can be all of those things within five hours. Not fun for me.

So sorry, but I can't blog about beating cabin fever cause I don't really understand it.

XoXoXo
Dakota Rebel

Cabin Fever

Sorry, but when I hear this term, I picture the Muppets from Muppet Treasure Island chanting “We’ve got Cabin Fever. We’ve got Cabin Fever. We’ve got Cabin Fever …” Makes me giggle.

I rarely get cabin fever so I’m probably not going to be help to you at all. I am a hermit. If I could, I would go days on end without leaving the house, but I’m forced to and I often look like Mr. Mole blindly poking his head out of his hole and complaining about the bright evil sun—even if it’s not particularly bright. I’m content and happy with my life. I rarely want to get away.

Generally, if I get cooped-up syndrome it’s because I’ve been locked up in close quarters with people for too long without that solitude thing I was complaining about a few weeks ago. It’s very very easy to solve.

1. If I can get away for a few hours by myself, I will.

2. If I can’t get away, I completely rethink my everyday pattern and do something new. I don’t bake everyday, but I love to bake, so I’ll do that. Or I’ll do something artistic. I give myself a mind vacation without even stepping outside.

Cabin Fever

Chestnuts roasting on an open fire...
Jack Frost nipping at your nose...

Ah, winter. In the beginning, there is a certain amount of excitement at the change to winter--especially because it coincides with the holidays. But then in January, the winter doldrums hit. By February, parents are ready to adopt their families out. By March, moms are ready to flee for their lives. Cabin fever truly sets in.

What to do?

The expression cabin fever was coined back when families were scattered on the frontier. Winter meant isolation and darkness and bitter cold. Visitors were rare as travel was difficult. After endless days cooped up in the family cabin, some individuals went so far as to actually commit murder.

In the modern age, that's rare. But there is still a bit of cabin fever when the weather it too bad to carry on our normal activities. Children aren't as likely to go outside to play because it's dark by the time they come home from school. The temperatures drop at night making it much colder to go out to the store or mall. And suddenly, the family is suffering from cabin fever.

In these economic hard times, fewer families are going to go out to eat or shop. So there will have to be adjustments.

Try a family game night. Friday or Saturday night is good. If the kids are old enough, draw lots to see who prepares dinner and who cleans up afterwards.

Try a family movie night. Rotate who decides on the movie. Have popcorn.

Try a family craft night. Remember that perfection isn't the goal, but the joy of creativity is good. Perhaps donate the results to a shut-in or nursing home patient who hasn't any family.

Try a family dance or exercise night. Let the kids lead the routine and pick the music. Most likely, you'll definitely get your heart rate up and wear the kids out at the same time.

What about you? What do you do the combat cabin fever?

anny

Everyone Loves A Scoundrel

Everyone Loves a Scoundrel - But Handle Yours With Caution

By David Niall Wilson

Everyone loves a scoundrel. So I've been told throughout my writing career, so my observations of which men and women are most attractive to hordes of the opposite sex women have led me to surmise, and so the world of publishing has confirmed. From Hannibal Lecter to Billy the Kid, from Mata Hari to the Goddess Kali, you just can't beat a good anti-hero. In fiction, though, as in life, we have to exercise caution when we set out to make gold from lead or draw our heroes from the dark side.

Hannibal, for instance, is an example of a man who should be as execrable as any in the history of humanity, but is instead fascinating. What causes this? What is it about the charismatic bad guy that draws people in ways that white-hatted heroes often fail to match? I believe the difference is only a matter of perspective. What is less clear is whether or not such a shift in perspective is a good idea. It is easier to justify it when the character is wholly supernatural, like Dracula. When we draw our villains from real life we are treading on thinner ice.

If we were presented a Hannibal Lecter drawn from the atrocities he performed, rather than one who listens to classical music, knows fine wine, and shows flashes of psychotic brilliance, the result would be very different. If the gunslingers in westerns were shown as cold blooded killers who didn't bathe regularly, I doubt they'd have attained their mythic status. The reason, then, that we allow ourselves to love bad guys - in my mind - is that we first remove them from reality and invest them with a touch of magic. We make them into the types of characters Superman and Batman used to do battle with. We give them charisma and good looks. We let them outsmart people and escape from situations that, in reality, would be their undoing. We put swash in their buckle and pearly white teeth in their smiles.

You can make a villain sympathetic and heroic just by changing the circumstances of his situation. Hannibal was treated poorly as a young man. Billy the Kid and Jesse James were southern soldiers who were hounded after the war. By carefully crafting the "good guys" to be boring, or setting them up to seem overbearing, dull, or outright mean-spirited, we create an atmosphere that makes readers pull for them to get smacked down. Then we provide the villain with just the right skills and attitude to get that job done. Sometimes we like to believe that we would have done exactly what those villains did in their situation, and we root for them to succeed against authority figures we've been conditioned to distrust or outright dislike.

In my own fiction, I've made great use of the anti-hero. Though most of mine aren't outright villains, the qualities are in place. In my trilogy, "The Grails Covenant," I offered up the Vampire Montrovant. He isn't loved by his own clan, but he is respected. He has a decided cruel streak, but he is brave, determined, handsome, and charming at the same time. He is willing to cut a man into tiny bits of meat to reach his goal, but not to perform that same act just for amusement.

In my novel Deep Blue, Brandt, the hero, is a down-and out blues guitarist who drinks too much, has too high an opinion of himself, and pays little attention to the feelings of others. His better qualities shine through over time, but he is not a cookie-cutter good guy. His is a real life with real problems, set against a backdrop of music and dark fantasy. You can relate to him, and that is another key.

My first novel, "This is My Blood," retells the story of the gospel through the eyes of Mary Magdalene, a fallen angel raised in the desert to tempt Christ with her beauty. Throughout this novel I give examples of how often the mantle of hero can shift from one character to another, and how the manner of looking at a thing affects changes in how your characters are perceived. Lucifer is the villain, and there's little doubt of that, but when it comes to other characters I worked in, such as Judas, Lilith, and Peter, things become decidedly blurry.

I think, as authors, we have a responsibility in writing about evil that I take very seriously. It's one thing to give almost supernatural powers and charisma to a villain, or to present them as misunderstood and build them a following. It's quite another to invest their actions with that same mystique. Hannibal Lecter is an amalgam of several real-life serial killers. The atrocities that they performed are among the vilest deeds recorded. By pulling Hannibal from reality as we know it and turning him into a mistreated child grown into an evil super-genius of comic book proportion, we find something darkly fascinating, or even charming in the character. We can't make the mistake of translating that fascination to serial killers in reality. There is a trend - particularly in modern horror films - to take the brutality and cruelty to bizarre lengths without providing the disconnect from reality such subjects have traditionally commanded. I think it's a dangerous trend without much in the way of socially redeeming factors. I see no villains or heroes to pull for in movies like "Saw," or "Hostel," and I believe they represent a frightening step toward legitimizing evil and branding it as "cool."

Billy the Kid was a crazed young gunman who killed dozens of men in cold blood, often on a whim. The fictionalized version of that same young man rarely shows the brutality or the insanity inherent in his life, or the harm that he caused others. We have our mythic gunfighter, and we love him, but we can't allow that to translate to romanticizing the act of one man brutally killing another.

Hannibal Lecter is a cultured man who, while he kills brutally and actually eats his victims, always seems to have reason and some sort of code of ethics behind his choice of victims. The men he is based on, the Ed Gein and others, had no such compunctions. They ruined people's lives and lived like monsters on the earth. There was nothing charismatic about them, nor would you be likely to romanticize them if you met them in person - though folks like Ted Bundy throw a monkey wrench into that logic.

In closing, I'd say that as in all things creative, the vision you follow will be your own. The villain is one of the most powerful characters in a writer's arsenal, and like anything powerful; he or she should be used with caution. Be careful what you romanticize, but as Jesus says in "This is My Blood," to paraphrase, without a backdrop of darkness, there is no way to judge the light. Here's to those characters that walk the thin lines in shades of gray…

Thanks to James Goodman for inviting me to participate. Those interested in what I have to say can get a belly full of it HERE - or once a month at Storytellers Unplugged. My recent collection, "Ennui & Other States of Madness" is available from Dark Regions and there are still a few copies of "The Not Quite Right Reverend Cletus J. Diggs & The Currently Accepted Habits of Nature" available at The Horror Mall or on Twitter.

Am I Evil?

Good girls like bad boys or so I’ve been told. But what happens when a bad boy turns into the bad guy? Does he lose his appeal? Is he any less charismatic? He shouldn’t be.

A truly effect villain should possess a potent amount of charm to survive or at the very least lull those around them into a false sense of safety. Oh, sure there’s the argument for the absolute unstoppable lunatic who slashes his way through the general populace, but he doesn’t pack near the wallop as a villain who has enough endearing qualities to give the reader a vested emotional interest in them.

One of my all-time favorite villains is Elijah Price from Unbreakable. Here is a character born with a rare genetic disorder that makes his bones as brittle as glass. He dedicates his life to searching for an answer as to why he was born the way he was. Through the course of the story, I actually felt sorry for him, even rooted for him at times, until in the very end it is revealed that he is truly the villain of the story. There were clues along the way, but they were easy to dismiss because of the likeability of the character.

I prefer my bad guys to have at least a few redeeming qualities, just as I prefer my heroes to be a little sullied. The world is not black and white, why should our characters be?

Love those Bad Guys

While I'm a die-hard romantic, I utterly agree that a villain can make or break a book. Whether it's a real character or a set of circumstances, or a flaw deep within ourselves, there have to be obstacles, or the happy ending doesn't mean much. And when I look at books and/or movies I love, often it's the villains that truly stay with me. Who didn't love Alan Rickman as the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves? (Or in Die Hard, or Sweeney Todd, or in Quigley Down Under, for that matter? --I'll admit to a teensy crush here on my favorite bad-guy actor) or another favorite of mine, John Malkovich in Dangerous Liaisons? Arnold Schwartnegger in the first Terminator movie? Darth Vader in the original Star Wars? Weren't we all at least reluctantly impressed by Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lechter? Especially at the end where he tells Clarice that he has no intention of coming after her. That reaffirms the concept that he's three dimensional. Somewhere in his twisted mind, there is room for the concept of "The world is a better place with you in it." (apologies if quote is bit off.)

A really good villain will have readers/viewers identifying, just a little, letting us tap into our own wicked side. He or she can be witty, making us laugh, even while we cringe in terror at the danger presented to our hero and heroine. Perhaps he's handsome and compelling, like Dracula, or hideous like Freddy Kruger, but note that with both of those, the villian is the main character of the piece, the star of the show. Paper-thin bad guys, with no appeal, no charisma, no depth, make for a story that just doesn't stick in our minds. It's true that as writers, we need to put as much effort into our antagonists as into our heroes. The hero/heroine need a worthy opponent, or their success simply isn't as impressive. So whether it's an internal demon or a fanged and cloaked one, a top-rate villian is the hallmark of a good story.