When I'm writing weird fiction (or poetry), I feel like I'm in a world of high strangeness where I alone am the God, commanding the humans and creatures, or UFOs or portals and ETs or inter/ultradimensionals to dance or die,or crash, or open and close in the palms of my hands, or at my fingertips, as it were,
I knew from a very early age that I wanted to be a writer. I wrote a short story about my collie dog when I was in the first grade and read it to my class. I also wrote my first poem around the same time. I do not remember what it was about. Later, as I explored the spare bedroom upstairs next to my uncle's room, I discovered in there a bookcase full of my uncle's books...everything from Hemmingway's The Sun Also Rises to Dante's Inferno. From Stranger in a Strange Land by Heinlein to Pet Semetery and It by Stephen King. There were books and magazines there on UFOs and monsters and ghosts and other weird things, fiction and nonfiction. There were old school (I mean REALLY old school) reading, math, and science textbooks, and some more contemporary ones. I read through some of those, too, English has always been my best subject, but I've always wished to be better at maths and sciences. I still do study them from time to time...or try to wrap my head around them. I love to do amateur astronomy and I am now trying to learn more about it. I would like to have a telescope someday, when I'm in a place with a dark enough sky to enjoy using it.
So it was then (I think I was around the age of eleven or twelve) that I started getting into speculative fiction. My grandparents encouraged my love of reading and we also made regular trips to the library. There, I discovered more great writers like Tolkien, Delaney, LeGuin, and discovered worlds that opened my mind up to different worlds and different possibilities for individuality and gender expression and sexuality (I had not yet figured out for myself why I was attracted to both David Cassidy and Farrah Fawcett, but by the time I was in my twenties and living in Florida with my first boyfriend, and watching The X-Files and having threesome fantasies about Mulder and Scully, I'd pretty much nailed myself down as soft butch demisexual--meaning I don't fall for looks or genders, I fall for souls and brains--no I am not a zombie). Sidenote: The X-Files also inspired a story I'm working on, called Dare Mo Shinjinai (Japanese for "trust no one").
My grandmother and my mother were also my first fans, and encouraged me to keep writing. My mother gave me her Stephen King books after she finished them. We talked about them after I finished reading them. My grandmother gave me my first typewriter as a Christmas present. We were poor farm people, so she could only afford to get me a beat up old manual Smith Corona, but it worked, and I gratefully spent hours at it writing. She would often take me yard sales and thrift stores and I would pester her to buy me any good used books I found at them. I began to add a lot more books to the upstairs room bookcase, which became my room, and my bookcase. I eventually started adding poetry collections to the shelf and started writing a lot more poetry.
I was extremely introverted as a child, and highly sensitive (I still am) and I was mortified at the thought of sending any of my stories or poetry to a magazine or publisher to try and get them into print. I did send one poem, when I was about fifteen, and it was soundly rejected. And that ended my desire to try again.
At least for the time being. Years of working in toxic environments toughened me.
In addition to the weird fiction I read as a kid, my overactive imagination was also fueled by the television shows I watched as well. My uncle and I shared the same interests in science fiction (we were HUGE fans of Kolchak: The Night Stalker and In Search Of...). I have to admit, during this time, I did not take real phenomena as presented in shows like In Search Of... very seriously. I questioned the sanity of people who claimed to see UFOs and big, hairy humanoids in the woods. I was a bit of a smart-ass and full to the brim with hubris.
I would later change my mind about this when I began to experience strange things myself. That's always the way of it, isn't it?
A lot of my reading as an adult writer is geared these days toward research and, as usual, I'm reading a lot of weird stuff to fuel my writing. But this stuff is non-fiction, with new favorite writers such as Fort and Keel and Valle. Authors of the weird real happenings of our world, who tried to make sense of it all before I ever started taking it all seriously. Before I found a love for all things Forteana. Because love it or hate it, it's out there. Maybe not for everyone to see, but it is out there...and once in awhile, the superspectrum bleeds through and a person will be treated to a special event, a spectacle no one else will believe, whether they wanted it or not, and then their lives are turned upside down and inside out. I use these instances as fodder for fiction as well. Indeed, they make the best kind of fictional stories, being based on events said to have actually happend. I write fiction based on the phenomena in the hope that witnessers and experiencers will get some kind of vicarious catharsis from reading it, as well as being entertained by it.
I do invent my own original monsters too though from time to time. But I often slip in events that I, myself, have experienced.
Valle and Keel have said that the orchestrators of the phenomena are Tricksters, toying with us. If so, in my stories I hope to be able to to turn those tables around on them a little bit, becoming their god, and their worlds that I build with my words becomes my Disneyland, and I hope it becomes a weird roller coaster ride for my readers as well.
Here's our tickets...
Let's ride!