Life, Rice and Ideas

Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons/Anne Rice

I told you that I would publish an article on Ridley Scott's newest films: Prometheus which releases in theatres later this year (I believe summer) and a second Blade Runner movie that's still in the planning stages. I apologise for not publishing the article yet. As is the case with many other writers, I got sidetracked with other projects.

Well, I did do an article on Anne Rice's return to writing horror fiction. You can find it at Examiner.com. It is a little outdated in that the article mentions a live interview with Ms. Rice that was broadcasted over Google's YouTube channel the other day (the article was published a day or two before that). However, the video of the interview may still be posted on YouTube.  To tell you the truth, I didn't even get a chance to tune into it myself. But you'll also find all kinds of neat information on Anne Rice in the article.

I also mentioned last time that I would talk more about my newest short story. I said that it was a ghost story. I'm still working on it. I meant to finish it up this evening but, as with all us writers and artists, "life" gets in the way. But then again life is where we get our ideas from for our art. It's just a matter of what the artist looks at in everyday life that gives him/her the ideas. For example, when my grandfather and I drove to a small grocery store near his house this evening, a store that has seemed to be there forever, it appeared to stand in the middle of no where in the dark since everything else around it, mostly industrial businesses, was closed. Only three employees could be seen and very few customers. The market is a cross between a regular grocery store and a convenience store and so it is very small. When we left I noticed only one car in the parking lot other than our own (if there were any others I didn't see them). Well, right there that can be a call for an absurdist and/or surreal story.

The scene reminded me a little bit of the '70s TV suspense movie, Dying Room Only. In this film a couple stop at a highway cafe with only a small lodge next to it, a couple of parked cars and seemingly no other customers all out in the middle of a desert at night. By the way, the central conflict of the film was that the husband suddenly disappears while the wife is in the restroom. And the owner of the cafe won't do a thing to help the woman figure out where the husband disappeared to because the owner is a total gruff jerk. But don't get me wrong, the employees of the market my grandfather and I went to are very friendly. I'm just talking about the momentary impression that the outside scenery of the market gave me and therefore using that as an example of how you can take just about any everyday situation and turn it into a tale worth telling. Neil Gaiman put it similarly when he said something like you can find all kinds of adventures in your own backyard.

Well, a little more about the ghost story. It's, as they call it, a paranormal story but I just prefer calling it a ghost or horror story. Be careful for the overly specified classifications within genres; a lot of them are used as commercial signs to direct readers in stores (most of which are online as opposed to "brick-and-mortar" now) to the books that sell best regardless of story quality. My story also involves an internet quiz. I'll try to have at least an excerpt for you next week, maybe even the whole thing for you to read (for free!).

That's it for now. Until next time . . .