Welcome Lisa Blackwood to DIO

A great thing about blogging is the ability to learn from others.  My guest today, Lisa Blackwood, a friend and fellow author from Muse It Up Publishing, provides us with something to ponder.   On with the show...

Write What You Know

As a writer, one thing I’ve heard several times is ‘write what you know’. In other words, write about a topic you are familiar with and incorporate that knowledge into your writing in some fashion. The idea is to make the story more believable, and it also has the added bonus of making the writer’s job a touch easier—less research and all that.(If only it was so easy. LOL.)

Which is all well and good, but when I first read that piece of sage knowledge I wondered how that applied to writing science fiction and fantasy, since both are not-of-this-world so to speak. Still, you can take things from the mundane world and add them to your made up world.

A beta reader once mentioned a great number of horse issues in my writing. I didn’t know a thing about horses at the time, and she suggested I go take some riding lessons to better understand them; as an added benefit, I’d stop annoying horse people with my inaccurate descriptions (you know, things like horses that can gallop all day, never spook, don’t have to spend hours grazing every day to live. You know, important stuff like that.) I took her advice, and started volunteering at a nearby horse rescue. After a year and a half, I now know enough to write realistic horses, I hope. I even went so far as to adopt one. I’m not saying authors have to go so far to get into their characters mindset, but even a few minutes of research is valuable.

Back to the topic of writing what you know. Another thing from my real life that was helpful in a fictional world was my knowledge of birds. Go figure.

Betrayal’s Price (Coming soon from MuseItUp Publishing) is epic fantasy with romantic elements and the hero Sorntar, a phoenix, is half avian. I knew from early on I wanted him to be more than just a human man with wings stuck on his back, I wanted him to be more, to be other. So I looked to nature—if he was half bird, then he needed a few bird traits. I’ve kept birds as pets since I was a child, so giving Sorntar a few bird traits wasn’t all the hard, humorous, but not hard.

The second novel I wrote, Stone’s Kiss, is a paranormal romance/urban fantasy, and has a gargoyle hero. Gregory was a little more complex than Sorntar, but twice as much fun to write. Gregory just knew who and what he was from the get go, and had no problems with deviating from my carefully planned plot. ::mumbles under breath about unruly, headstrong characters::  Whereas Sorntar was clearly birdlike and I could draw on the mythological phoenix for some character traits and magical abilities, Gregory, as a gargoyle, didn’t have a corresponding animal or even much mythology to draw on. So I started to look at other animals until I found the correct mix of traits that ‘felt’ like they’d match my vision of how a gargoyle would think and act. In the end, while still having a fundamental human quality, Gregory also had some canine and big cat tendencies mixed in too. 

My question to you—what can you take from your everyday life and put into a fictional world. Go on. Give it a try. You might be surprised what you’ll come up with.

Lisa Blackwood, author of urban fantasy, paranormal romance and epic fantasy.
 
www.lisablackwood.com
http://blackwoodsforest.wordpress.com/
Stone's Kiss http://www.amazon.com/Stones-Kiss-The-Avatars-ebook/dp/B006EAMITG
Betrayal's Price (Feb. 2012 from Museitup Publishing http://museituppublishing.com/ 

Welcome April Grey

Krampus: The Christmas Demon

In two days, December 5th, it will be Krampus day!

And what is Krampus Day, you might ask?

Well, in the evening of December 5, the eve of St. Nicholas' Feast day, young men in Austria, Southern Germany and Northern Italy celebrate a very old custom. They get dressed up as St. Nicholas' demonic servant, the Krampus, and then go running about the town (called a Krampus run). They warn the children to be good because St. Nicholas is on his way.

You can head to You Tube to see a little of a  Krampus Run .

I chose to feature this folkloric creature in my novel, Chasing the Trickster. When anthropology professor Pascal Guzman puts on a Krampus mask he comes away with a little surprise. He finds himself host to an ancient entity who has been living in the mask.

My interest in the Krampus was first tweaked when I saw a book by Monte Beauchamp, The Devil in Design and learned about Krampus folklore. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there were many Krampus day postcards sent around Europe. These postcards were collected in a book by Mr. Beauchamp. Some of the demonic images are quite humorous as one of Krampus' sidelines was to chase buxom women. As well as having horns, he's--well--rather horny.

This and a few other ideas came together to create the plot and characters of my urban fantasy, Chasing The Trickster.

1. From my college studies in Japanese Noh theatre (I was a theatre geek long before I thought of being a writer) came the idea that a mask can have a soul or being living inside it.

2.  Then there is the idea of where do gods go when no one believes in them anymore. It is thought that Christians took Celtic gods such as Cernunnos, the stag god, and represented them as devils. Then what if the Krampus was originally a fertility god who then was represented as a devil?  And what if when he lost his followers he felt he has no choice but to join with St. Nicholas to have whatever crumbs of worship he could garner?

3. I had seen a Jim Carrey movie many years ago called "The Mask" wherein a person wearing the mask would develop great powers but also lose all inhibitions. What if such a spirit could come out and permanently stay in a host.

Thus we have our hero, Pascal Guzman, possessed and plagued by an ancient entity, who is constantly nagging him to go out and Par-tee! The results are tragic, humorous and risqué.

I hope that you will take the time to find out more the Krampus, and also read my novel, Chasing The Trickster.

Bio: April Grey's urban fantasy novel, Chasing The Trickster, is published by EternalPress. Her short stories have been published in such print anthologies as Demonmind's Halloween 2010, The Best of Everyday Fiction 2, Northern Haunts, Ephemera and Terrible Beauty, Fearful Symmetry. Many of these stories can be found in her collection, The Fairy Cake Bake Shoppe available through Amazon and Smashwords.

http://www.amazon.com/author/April-Grey/

www.aprilgreywrites.com

www.aprilgrey.blogspot.com

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