on Writing the Dark

The Fade Tales

I write dark urban fantasy. I do not write about vampires. I set my stories in the near/far future and write about a California overrun with devils. I do not write about demons.  A demon can be anything–it can sing in a nightclub, or wear jimmy choos. It can be a hot chick with a nasty temper. I can be Alexikakos, a Greek term meaning “evil used in the service of good”. 

 A devil is a whole other  something. A devil has a history, many histories, many stories, none of them ending well, as recorded in religious text and mythologies. A devil is evil–see? It’s written right there in the name.  

I was raised Catholic and had a healthy fear of the word, alone, by the time I was ten. My mother owned an enormous “children’s bible” which, as it’s center piece, had a two page illustration of the temptation of Christ with a big, red, goateed devil flying away across the desert. How I feared that picture. Every time I picked up the bible, I was terrified that the book would open itself to that page and I would be forced to glimpse those cloven hooves and stunted horns. 

I also had a HUGE imagination that tended to do its best work turning my fears into full-blown, horrific nightmares. By the time I was sixteen, I was a nervous, insomnious wreck. By the time I was sixteen, I was afraid of my own shadow. I was afraid of being overrun by something without when it was in fact, within.

It was many years before I learned to live with my shadow. 

So, for me, writing about devils, now, is a way to reclaim all those nights given over to fear–all that wasted time being afraid of nothing, but what I had created in my own head. 

And, the funniest thing happened; when I began writing The Fade Tales, I had a hard time making my devils scary enough. Creepy, yes. Dark, yes. Ridiculous and strange, yes. But, where was that gut knot of fear that I had when my children’s bible fell open to that center illustration? It came as a shock when a recent reader mentioned: “well, yeh, it’s kinda scary, Jas.”  Hmmm? 

Well, as you can see from the tiny excerpt below: so NOT scary.

On Being Creative

The Pool of Sky and Thought

When I was younger, I took my creativity for granted. I would expect it to be there when I turned on my computer at 1am to write harrowing tales of weird futures filled with mysterious card rooms built on top of libraries that only appeared for some people, some of the time, the inherent alchemy in a deck of cards, properly shuffled, a room filled with undercover warlocks, a mysterious man named Hoang and his flock of robotic seagulls, a girl named Maroon, who spent page after page after page searching through half submerged cities for a man named Dwinali.
I admit, I wasted the visions that flowed, nightly, from the top of my head to my fingertips. I squandered the energy and the time I had to write. Like a poor family planner, I said, “I’m not ready, yet” and “I can always do it, later” and the worst of all: “There’s always time.”

There is not always time.

The parts of being creative that I took for granted were the very things that contributed most to my creativity. It has never been a one way street, an endless outpouring of weird and strange from the inside of my head. When I look back at what I was doing during the times I was able to come up with the BEST story ideas or be prolific with chapters springing out of pages and short stories giving birth to novels, I realize that I was involved in so many crazy adventures and wild rides with friends and groups of friends. That things showed up when needed to inspire; the art show, the indie movie, the haunting music. It was as if I had tuned into something that was endlessly, helpfully giving. This is why I know what artists speak of, when they speak of art as flowing through them rather than coming from them.

Now the desire to create is back, but as I search around through “the echoing loss of ‘better days’” I wonder if there’s enough left to fuel the end of this project and the start of the next one and the one after that. I’ve been running on the dredges of the past for too long. I need to find a way down the hole, into the wardrobe, through the garden wall. I need to convince the endless giving thing that I really am serious this time. I’ve learned the lessons of squander and lost opportunities and I am here again asking

On Finding Jasilandia

Snowing Above Ground

It seems strange to start a blog about writing. Strange because I’ve always blogged, but never about the whats and the whys of my writerly life. I never wrote in a journal. When I was a child, I had a diary that I kept for about a week, scaring myself every night with how boring my life looked on paper: woke up–again, watched cartoons, drank coffee [I started drinking coffee when I was eleven. Yes, yes, I know--mom was right--it TOTALLY stunted my growth], went outside, came back inside, ate dinner, went to bed. I was horrified at how the magic of the day, most of it occurring inside my head, looked so flat and dull when scribbled out on those little flowered pages. My sister wrote in her diary every night–it seemed like such a great idea. For me, it was like trying to capture a dream. It never mattered how many words I used; it never came out right. Something was always missing.

Somewhere during week two while staring numbly at the W in the words “woke up“, the little light went on: Woke up, made coffee, was about to turn on cartoons when from outside came the thundering rumble of hooves no! tanks NO! Spaceships LANDING …

So, I’ve never had the firmest grip on the whole separation of reality from fiction. To me, it’s always been pretty much the same thing. For years my friends have called this fusion:  Jasiland.

Errr: If I were a literary and not a genre writer, which to me is only determined by the size of the paperback your novel comes out in; nice big one = literature, little one = genre, I would call Jasiland Magical Realism, incarnate.

This is why, in the past, my writerly blogs have always mixed fiction with journaling. You remember, you were there. My beloved cat’s last days on the planet turned into a post called, Sivi the intangible and Dr. Fate play a few hands of poker. A post about “Dating When You Are Over the Yahoo-Personals Hill” (which, apparently, means any female above the age of 27) turned into an anti-morality play, replete with dark minions and talking “dating accoutrement” and please don’t get me started on The Patch Dreams series, which unfortunately for me, were mostly all true.

The problem with this, I’m figuring out at last, is that I’m always so disappointed when my reality does not mirror my fiction. I’ve always written, but I haven’t always wanted to be a writer. At some point in the past, I do recall wanting to be a wife. That went well. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve come close to being a writer, alarmingly close, only to fail time and again in such spectacular fashion that it frequently takes years to recover.

So, these are the things that I’m thinking I need to address in this blog:

What do you do when you’ve wasted all your chances and you’re on that last one?
When you’ve driven your writing demons underground, only to find out that they were your staunchest allies?
When is it really too late to start over? Is it ever?
What happens when, despite everything you’ve thrown in its path, you have–yet again–a fairly done novel (and I’ll leave you to decide what that bit of poor grammar means) and NO ONE is banging down your door to get at it?

Time to head Underground.

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