The Demon

I awoke to the morning light, to see the ceiling fan circling lazily above my bed. I felt incredibly lethargic, almost unable to move, but I was able to turn my head toward my wife where she lay to my left side. I saw that she’d pulled the sheet up completely over her head. She was only a human shape under snow white.

I wondered why she was there. She should have left for work already on this day. Then she turned her head toward me underneath the sheet. I could see the soft cotton flow over her cheek, see it poke up above her nose and then lie down against the sockets of her eyes. And I realized. This shape under the covers wasn’t my wife.

The shape moved toward me, hitched itself toward me under the sheet. I saw that its mouth was open; I could see the hollow darkness beneath the cloth that veiled it. I suddenly wanted to scream but when my own mouth opened nothing would come out.

The shape hitched toward me again. With intense effort, I lifted my left arm to block its approach, and a hand, covered by sheer white, flashed out to grasp my wrist. I did scream then. I think I screamed. The hand held me, fingers like a vice on my wrist. It felt neither warm nor cold. It felt like nothing, but it held me still.

I realized then what it was. A hundred years ago I would surely have called it demon. But I knew it wasn’t. I knew its name and, just as it is supposed to be with demons, knowing its name gave me power over it. “Sleep Paralysis,” I muttered in my own head. “It’s only sleep paralysis. Nothing is there. Nothing. Relax.”

I relaxed, forced myself to. The sheet deflated; the shape was gone. I found my arm wasn’t extended into the air. But the ceiling fan was turning. The room was exactly the same as it had been a moment before, except that I was alone. And now I could move. I took a deep breath. And another.

What I’d experienced was a relatively rare form of sleep paralysis. Common sleep paralysis is when the paralysis that normally accompanies dream sleep doesn’t end when the dream ends. You wake fully up, but you can’t move from the neck down. It’s not uncommon.

However, sleep paralysis sometimes takes a different form. You believe you have completely awakened, but though your eyes may be open and your consciousness seems clear, you are still in the grip of the dream state. Your body is paralyzed from the neck down, and dream-like phenomena continue to occur. They seem real to you in a way normal dreams don’t because the dream incidents get added on top of the real stimuli flowing in from the world around you. For reasons unknown, many of these experiences are frightening, although not all.

Many scientists suspect, and I’m one of them, that such events are the explanation for many cases that are typically described as alien abductions or ghost/demon encounters. The experiences are often terrifyingly real, and unless you know something about dream phenomena you are likely to come up with an explanation for them that flows from your own particular mindset. Even the images are drawn from one’s own life and imagination. Today one might see an alien. Our ancestors would have seen gods and angels and demons. Perhaps primitive humans saw sabertooths and cave bears.

I wonder if tonight I’ll have another “visitor.” I’d call one up if I could. For I feel confident I could put him down again. Mostly confident.

Reading

A few nights ago I watched the movie The Blind Side. There is a scene in the film where Leigh Anne Tuohy is reading to SJ and Michael while daughter Collins is sitting outside the door listening to her mother read to the two boys. That scene curled around my heart and brought back wonderful memories of my mother gathering my sister, brother and I together and reading stories to us at bedtime.
I credit my mother and bedtime stories with starting my interest and enjoyment in reading. As I grew older, I made up stories for my siblings and cousins. Eventually, those stories morphed into manuscripts. Now, I have the pleasure of creating characters and plots for my own novels that I hope others enjoy.
Reading is an experience that can be shared by the whole family. I believe it is so important for parents to read to their children and have kids read to parents. Having a child read aloud helps parents gauge how well a child comprehend what they read.
My husband and I listen to books on CD during dinner and spend part of our dinner hour critiquing those stories. It's a nice way to spend time together and share the experience of a book.
How about you? Do you have a story to share about reading? Email me or click on the link provided.
Remember, don't be a stranger. I'd love to hear from you.

Writing in the 21st century

We live in interesting times: internet, cell phones, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, MySpace, podcasts, You Tube … you name it. Things occur and can be broadcast instantaneously. No longer do we have to wait for the 11 o’clock news or the story in print when we can access it on the internet or get breaking news on our cell phones. And as for the numerous methods of publishing books, it makes me glad to be a twenty-first century writer. I’ve looked back at writer’s lives from centuries past and it makes me appreciate the technologies of this modern era.

So here is a photo review of the writers’ lives through the ages:

1. The Stone Age

Can't imagine what editing and rewriting was like.

2. Dawn of Civilization

3. Medieval times

Writing with inks and quillis on parchment was a huge improvement. Monks spent their lives writing these books. Unfortunately not many people could read the books, so high the global illiteracy rate.

4. Industrial age
Now we've come a long way. There is any number of manual typewriters available and, oh yes, that miracle machine: The printing press. Travel was easier too. There were options of ancient cars, trains, and good old horse and carriage (not to forget bicycles).

5. Twentieth century

It's definitely gotten a lot better: much more efficient manual typewriters, the emergence of the electric typewriter (I dread to think of the amount of papers these used), word processors, photocopiers and finally the personal computer. Agreed large mainframes were around since the mid-twentieth century, but it is the personal computers that really revolutionized the way writers work. But the greatest contribution to the writing revolution: The internet. Amazon became an integral source of book distribution forcing most book retailers to develop an online presence. Self-publishing became an affordable viable alternative to large publishing houses. Ebooks became much more accessible and popular.

But while writing tools were revolutionized, book promotion still primarily involved book tours (that included real travel), book signings, book readings and appearances on radio shows. Good news is, there were plenty of ways to get there.

6. Twenty-first century

Now in the twenty-first century, we've managed to build on the technology of the twentieth century. We still use computers (much faster and smaller, I must say). We have Ipads, thinkpads and netbooks, and all manner of smart phones. We can chat with agents, editors, and publishers by phone, instant message, email and on facebook and twitter etc. The great revolution of the 21st century was not the invention of the internet, but improvment in its use. With the emergence of facebook, twitter, my space and other networking sites, as well as the blogosphere, books can be promoted while sitting at a computer in your pjs. Book tours are quickly being replaced or at least enhanced with blog tours. Podcast, radio promotions without even traveling to the radio stations are utilized a lot. Trailers hit you tube before books hit the market and readers have instant access to writers.

Ebooks are beginning to dominate the market with Amazon Kindle, and Nook and you name it. Self published book can become best sellers because marketing is so much easier. Paper waste reduced (hopefully).

With all the technology that has enhanced writing and marketing over the centuries, aren't you glad to be a 21st century author?

Guest author Carleen Brice: One Writer's Journey Part 2

In Part 1 of One Writer's Journey Carleen Brice explored three aspects of the mythical hero's journey as it pertains to the writer's journey: 'the call to adventure' (the call to write a novel), 'the special place' (the world of publishing), and 'the rough landing' (where the bruised hero/writer discovers the special place can be exhausting, frustrating or disorienting.

Today Carleen concludes with the final parallel: 'the elixir or reward'.



THE ELIXIR

At the end of the journey, hero brings back the reward, the hero’s journey folks call it “the elixir,” to share with others.

That’s what I’m doing today. In the words of Martin Luther King Jr. “I have been to the mountain top.” (Well, maybe the mountain middle.) I have seen some things and learned some things and the purpose of that is to share it with others.

So here goes:

Answer the call. Honor your heart. I sincerely believe the dream to be a writer (or whatever) is there for a reason. Honor it. Respect it. Vogler says persistent refusal of the call leads to disaster. In the Gnostic Gospels, the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says, "If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you."

Learn who your allies and your enemies are. You going for your dream is bound to make someone around you uncomfortable because they are not going for their dreams. They may take it out on you. Try to send them love and don’t let them stop you.

You’ll fight for your dream with everything you are worth, but try to put some distance between you and your work. Try to know that you are not your book. That will help you when you get a bad review or a rejection letter. It will also help you stay sane if you’re lucky enough for someone to like your work. I recommend watching Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED speech.

From Vogler: “Trust the path. It means when you are lost and confused you can trust the journey that you have chosen, or that has chosen you. It means others have been on the journey before you, the writer’s journey, the storyteller’s journey. You’re not the first. You’re not the last. Your experience of it is unique, your viewpoint has value, but you’re also part of something, a long tradition that stretches back to the very beginnings of our race. The journey has its own wisdom, the story knows the way. Trust the journey. Trust the story. Trust the past.

The capriciousness of the gods. Or luck. Being successful has a lot to do with luck. I believe to some degree in attracting things to yourself. But I know too many people praying too hard and writing their affirmations and trying to draw success to them to not believe that luck has something to do with it. I can’t tell you how many writers got honest with me about being frustrated that their books that got optioned years ago haven’t even gone into development yet, so how did my novel go from book to aired movie in two years?! For more on this, read J.A. Konrath’s great blog Newbie’s Guide to Publishing.

Finally, know that the journey doesn’t end until well…until you do. I had been laboring under the “if/then” idea. If I get an agent, then I’ll be all right. If I get a publisher. If I win this award. If I get in that magazine. If my book gets optioned. If the movie actually gets made. Then, then, then, I’ll be okay. And what I now know is that there’s always another if/then situation up ahead. The writer’s journey, the journey of life, is not one great story, but a series. There’s always another adventure, another villain, another abyss. Another reward.

I wish you good luck and great success on your adventure!

—Carleen Brice

Blogging: Dead or alive?

When I got hooked on the blogging phenomenon back in 2005, this new (to me) toy was the smartest, hippest, most exciting thing around. Over the next couple of years the gang - meaning all the bloggers I met online - seemed to spend most of their free time writing blogs, reading blogs, and conversing via the comment trail.

Blogging has been a revelation for the writers among us. For the first time ever, we could join and form communities with other writers across the globe and share our journeys in real time. We could support each other and learn about the publishing business from experts in the field. We could gang up on the people who profit from fleecing writers and expose their nefarious deeds for the whole wide Internet to see. Heady days, these. Heady years.

Over the last two years, however, I've seen many of the regulars in my particular circle - most of them writers, naturally - fall by the wayside. Many have stopped blogging altogether. Others put up an occasional half-hearted article. For those who persevere, readership seems to have fallen off drastically. Group blogs have shrunk or disappeared altogether.

So here's my question: Are we bloggers going the way of the dodo, the Polaroid camera and the Walkman? Or have the mere dabblers moved on to the next fad while we the serious people keep the blog fires burning? Take the poll (it's all in fun) and let's find out!

Is the blogging phenomenon dying?
	Dying? It's so dead.
	Most bloggers I know have absconded to Facebook and Twitter.
	Nah, it's going as strong as ever.
	What's a blog?
pollcode.com free polls

—Liane Spicer

Free poll maker

Second Nature

I wasn’t always a writer.

Calling myself that took me years, a very long time spent writing and rewriting before I could acknowledge that I‘d done enough to deserve the name. I found something late in life that wasn’t just something I wanted to be -- I found something I’d been all along.

I always told stories, in one way or another, long before I started stringing words together on paper. As a child I made my own action figures out of multi-colored pipe cleaners, masking tape and crepe paper, acted out my own episodes of Batman on a piece of slate flooring I’d salvaged along the way to act as a stage set. Complete with special effects, courtesy of stick on caps and a misguided experiment with a pool of rapidly evaporating pool of liquefied butane fuel and a lighter.

My pubescent brushes with pyromania aside, the focus of my play, no matter the props, alone or with friends, was always creative storytelling. When I drew pictures, there was always a back-story, an explanation of the image and its place in a larger event. Games with friends were reduced to role-playing as we acted out Batman episodes or Hardy Boy or Nancy Drew plots.

When I hit my twenties, fresh out of college, I had no real idea what I wanted to do. I’d fallen in love with movies in school, had a film teacher who gave me a referral for my first job on a low budget kids’ Public TV show that changed my life. I started writing scripts then, the perfect blending of my visual and verbal skills.

But fiction writing always lured me back -- the singular pleasure of telling tales not in pictures or words designed to direct pictures, but words as end product. I was a voracious reader -- New York made it easy, with lots of time spent on the subway, on trains or waiting in stations. The more I read, the more I wrote my own early attempts at short stories.

My day job was an education as well, a faster one, as I got notes on everything I’d written for filming -- notes that taught me how to develop deeper characters, establishing them in as little time as possible. I learned to pace a story, and most importantly, to finish one. I worked on children’s shows, but I wanted to make horror movies, like David Cronenberg, John Carpenter, Toby Hooper and Wes Craven.

And the fight was on. I did a lot of photography in there as well, exploring visual imagery and the effects of light and shadow on film. I figured out how to create a matte box for an old Graphlex 4x5 film camera I‘d bought a Kodak instant film back for, and made a series of imaginary twin self-portraits. This one was meant to be a take-off on the poster for Brian DePalma’s Sisters (seen in the background), but I couldn’t get the Siamese twin join clean enough then. I could fix it in Photoshop, but prefer to see it as a portrait of how I felt at the time, torn between two loves.

I made a few short films, expensive then when you shot in 16mm, between processing, mixing, negative matching and print charges. I started a LOT of short stories, some good, some bad, some in the middle. Over the years I did a lot of production work of many kinds, live action and animation, East and West Coast. It took me twenty years to take my fiction writing as seriously as I took my production work, but I feel like it wasn’t time wasted. One fed the other, and lessons I learned on my day job have helped me in my new vocation as a novelist. I hope that one day it will pay my bills as the TV work did for years, and still does.

In a way the photo captures the truth -- I’ll always be split between the two, even if the balance has flipped. Even as I’m writing more than I ever have, I’m also getting back into shooting and editing films on digital video. I still have two loves, writing and production, but they both connect on one level -- storytelling -- my one and only true love.

Setting: Beautiful Ohio

Home is where "normal" is.

I attended the World Fantasy Convention this past weekend in Columbus, Ohio, about 50 miles from Beavercreek, where I grew up. (For my impressions of WFC, please seen my blog posts of the past week at my personal blog, http://ShaunaRoberts.blogspot.com.) Although I left for college thirty-six years ago, the landscape of Ohio remains for me the default of what a landscape should look like and the norm by which all other landscapes judged.

the beautiful tree-lined Olentangy River

If you've ever driven across Ohio on I-70, you may think the concept of Ohio as beautiful exists only in the imagination of the composer of "Beautiful Ohio." But that stretch of flatness does not represent the rest of the state.

I drove from Columbus up north to Ohio Wesleyan University in Delaware, Ohio, twice, first to pick up my niece for World Fantasy Con and again to take her back. It's a 40- or 45-minutes drive each way that starts in an older neighborhood of Columbus and then follows route 315, which for most of its length is a country road.

It was a wonderful, soul-quenching experience to drive through countryside like that I grew up in. Ohio was once covered with forest. Today, wherever the land is left untended, the rich soil sprouts trees again. And not just a few types of trees—like the evergreens that dominate some parts of Mississippi or the live oaks and cypress of southern Louisiana. Ohio's trees are many and varied, of various heights and shapes. Now in the fall, some are barren of leaves, and others are still green; the maples flame red. There are no easy paths through Ohio woods; thick underbrush fills empty spaces.

brick home built by my ancestor Daniel Miller in 1808 near Dayton

To one side of Route 315 the land drops down to the Olentangy River; on the other, forest and sometimes hills rise up. Ohio is a well-watered land, with creeks, streams, and rivers abundant, all eventually making their way south. One of my ancestors was one of the first settlers of Montgomery County, arriving about 1803. Three times he floated home-distilled liquor on barges down the Great Miami River to the Ohio River and then to the Mississippi, bound for Natchez and New Orleans. Not an unusual story for the time—except my ancestor was Pennsylvania Dutch, a religion that disapproved of alcohol.

Ohio is old by the standards of many states. Some of my ancestors were given land in Ohio as partial payment for service in the Revolutionary War. Other people came for the rich farmland. The various Indian tribes were pushed out to make way, and Ohio became a state in 1803. Today, Ohio, though small, is the 7th most populous state. Even so, along route 315, houses are far apart, and many 19th-century farmhouses remain, some helped by their stone construction to withstand a century and a half of snowy winters.

Hills roll through most of Ohio, thanks to the glaciers that gouged and carved the northern two-thirds of the state. Consequently, Route 315 rises up and down and curves pleasantly among the hills.

Although I haven't lived in Ohio for almost four decades, my drives on Route 315 I had a feeling of perfect "rightness." The woods were the "right" density and had the "right" variety of tree species. The underbrush was the "right" thickness, and the houses were spaced the "right" distance apart. The land was neither too flat nor too steep, but "just right." The old farmhouses at the end of long dirt driveways were what my eyes expected to see; the harvested fields were neither too huge nor too small.

Galloway cabin, built late 1700s, home of Rebecca Galloway

Although I didn't see any historical markers on my drives, Ohio is full of them. One near where I grew up sits in an empty clearing in a forest. It marks one of the places the Shawnee forced Simon Kenton to run the gauntlet in 1778 for stealing their horses; he survived that gauntlet and several others. Everyone who went to school in Ohio knows the importance of the Galloway cabin at right: Tecumseh, unwilling to lead a "white" life as his beloved Rebecca Galloway demanded he do if she married him, instead remained single and led a widespread coalition of Indians to fight to retake their stolen lands.

My meanderings about Ohio have a writerly point to make: People form strong connections with their landscapes. No landmark is meaningless; each gas station and dueling oak and rutted road has personal or historical meaning to someone.

I often see these human-landscape connections portrayed in fiction about places with strong personalities such as New Orleans and Los Angeles, but it's usually lacking in stories set in more "ordinary" settings.

My drive through the countryside of Ohio reminded me that every story setting is special, and the writer owes it to her reader to show her characters' connection to or alienation from their landscape, the meaning they derive from it, and the comfort or discomfort it causes them.