Results from my poll on what scares you the most

What scares you the most?

I ran a Twitter poll asking which of these things scares horror book fans the most: creepy clowns, evil children, manipulative demons, or shadowy ghosts.

I find it fascinating that people find evil children the scariest, followed by creepy clowns.

If you look at mythology, eerie folk tales, or real-world accounts, it's usually the opposite; demons and ghosts seem to prevail.

I have a couple theories around this. First, mythology and folk tales reflect the more religious nature of older societies. I think, in the modern Western world, we are less apt to fall back on religion, and thus are less likely to dwell on demons and the devil, and maybe also less fearful of an afterlife and ghosts.

Second, real-world stories of ghosts, and even "demonic hauntings", are now relatively common, thanks in part to reality TV ghosthunter and paranormal shows and a long publication history over the decades. Maybe we've become used to them?

A third theory I have is that we may find more fearful those things that we would normally presume are harmless, like small children and babies, or clowns, but which have been perverted by supernatural forces. I'm convinced this is the most important of my theories.

I once turned harmless little rabbits into vengeful spirits, in my novelette "Rabbit Cry" (a story in my my book, Around the Corner from Sanity). I think it's the creepiest story in the anthology.

I wonder... what other seemingly "harmless" beings I could pervert into a good horror story?

What do you think? What other harmless creatures/entities/forces do you think could be a source of fear?

Cheers and happy reading!

How Much Bloodshed Is Tolerated in Science Fiction and Fantasy Novels?

It goes without saying that many fiction genres have little or no tolerance for bloodshed and pain: certainly children's and middle grade books, most romance or erotica (there's nothing sexy about being cut open and bleeding... I'm raising an eyebrow at you BDSM lovers!), humor and absurdist literature, and so forth. You might see a bloody nose or brief mention of wounds in literary fiction, cozy mysteries (like Agatha Cristie), legal thrillers (think John Grisham), and social commentary pieces, but almost never anything detailed.

The level of tolerance increases significantly when you consider thrillers of any sort. You can't have gunfights and martial arts duels without at least some pain and bloodshed, reserved mostly for the bad guys, of course. The range of tolerance here is very wide, so as a writer and a reader you have to have an idea of the subgenre and the author beforehand. And then there's horror, which takes a giant, blood-splattering leap upward on the scale. Even with authors like Stephen King you expect some grisly scenery and description, and that's not even the sort of "body horror" or "grimdark" subgenres that I think is increasingly popular. (As an aside, it's strange to me that this kind of severe bloodshed is more popular in horror movies than in books, but then maybe it's because those who find satisfaction or entertainment in such imagery are more visual than imaginative?). The stories in my horror anthology, Around the Corner from Sanity, run the full range from no blood to gore-fest.

But what about science fiction and fantasy? It seems to me that these genres fall into a sort of gray zone. I read and write in these genres, but even I have a hard time putting a finger on the preferences of the reading public. Again, there's a wide scale and as a reader you sort of have to know the author beforehand. I can't remember any reference to blood at all in Tolkien's books, despite all the battle scenes, for instance. Frank Herbert described brutal acts in Dune but only in a few scenes did he go into details. But other, more modern authors I've read, such as Dan Simmons, don't shy away from it (the creature known as the Shrike in his Hyperion novels still elicits a tantalizing shiver for me).

So I put a poll on Twitter to get some feedback on this. I asked, "#fantasy and #scifi #book fans, What level of bloodshed to you tolerate in your novels?" I expected most answers to fall somewhere in the middle, maybe skewing slightly toward the more violent end. 

As you can see, there is, indeed, the sort of distribution that I thought, with only about 5% voting "none", then increasing to 33% and 43% for "some bloodshed's fine" and "there can be heavy scenes," respectively. I was surprised by the number of people who voted for "full-on gore fest!" (19%). I figured it would be down around 10%.

Maybe I shouldn't have been surprised. I mean, I personally have a very high tolerance and sometimes prefer the more bloody violence, as long as it fits the tone of the overall book and the plot. 

In the fantasy novels I've written, there are only a few scenes that get bloody, in a PG way, and no real "gore", though I allow myself freer space with some of my fantasy short stories. But in my space opera novel, which is written with a sort of pulp-fiction tone, some action scenes are pretty graphic and would be R-rated if made into a movie (not to mention some X-rated sex scenes!).

As a writer, I'll say that the guiding principles related to the violence to include are: what is the interest of your target audience, and is it necessary for the plot and characterization?

How do you feel about bloodshed in sci-fi and fantasy books? Leave a comment!

Cheers and happy reading!

Do you measure space monsters in meters or feet?

A couple days ago I was happily typing away at my space opera scifi novel in my favorite coffee shop, sipping on my chai latte, when my hero, Dirken Nova, saw a massive alien emerge from a tunnel....

Grimmag Ruby-Eye was the largest Eradini that Dirken had ever seen. He was easily twenty five feet long and perhaps ten feet wide. Like others of his species, he was basically a giant maggot with a wide, tubular body that wobbled as if filled with jelly.

But wait....  I stopped typing and read back over that bit. Something bothered me about it. Well, besides comparing an alien to jelly....

And then I realized. I was measuring this beastly alien using the English (Imperial) system. But isn't this a scifi novel set a thousand years from now?? Shouldn't it be a bit more scientific? Shouldn't it be metric?? Shouldn't that be eight meters long by three meters wide? (I'm rounding the value, here).

I'm a scientist by day. I work in the metric system all day long. It just makes sense. Everything is a base-ten and easy to convert between units. Well, except maybe for cooking.

Yet I'm from the United States and, according to my blog stats, the majority of you reading this blog are from the United States as well. The U.S. hasn't yet fully adopted the metric system for some inane reason. It's in lonely company, along with Liberia and Myanmar. If I say that something is three meters long, most of my fellow Americans would scratch their head and puzzle over what that would look like, maybe getting their cell phones out to look it up.

So I got some other opinions. I ran a poll on Twitter (Twitter's great for that!). And the response was overwhelming....

As you see, "metric" won the lion's shares of votes at 64%.

I think the most compelling argument that people made in the comments is that this is the future and science fiction readers are more likely to be fluent with science measurements, which are almost always metric.

One Twitter follower (ScifiFan) pointed out that a meter is not the same on Earth as on Mars, but it turns out he was using the old definition (originally, a meter was defined as "one ten-millionth of the distance between the equator and the north pole," which would certainly be different on different planets. But later it was redefined as "the length of the path traveled by light in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second." (Wikipedia) That's an easy number to remember, right?

So I'll go with metric.

As another Twitter follower (Benjamin W. Bass @TheDarkRabbit) commented:

In space, no one can hear you divide by 12....

Cheers and happy reading!

Finding Inspiration for Writing

Right now, here in western Oregon, there is a light rain falling. It'll rain for days -- a prelude to the coming winter months (which I call "the rainy season", which takes up at least a third of the year here). Though I like summer for its outdoor activities, I like the rain. It stimulates the writer in me. The pitter-pat of drops on the roof somehow activates my creative side (not to mention that I am no longer drawn toward outdoor distractions). I also keep a Pinterest site with images I find inspirational for creating my Strange Worlds (see them HERE, and please follow!).

The other day I ran a Twitter poll, trying to get an idea of where writers find inspiration for their writing.  Here's the poll and its results:

#Writingcommunity, which of these do you find most inspiring for writing?

(please also leave a comment to specify)#amwriting #amediting

— Strange Worlds of Jason Kilgore (@WorldsKilgore) September 9, 2019

Of those options, clearly music was number one. This was surprising to me. Quite often I hear writers saying that they need complete silence to do their writing. I know I can't write when I'm listening to music. But not everyone is the same, of course.

But sometimes I, too, like to listen to music BEFORE writing, to put me in a particular mood. Something adventurous for fantasy, for instance, or techno before writing sci fi. Often I tend to associate one particular song with one book, but the funny thing is that it usually isn't anything you'd associate with the plot or even the genre. For instance, for the fantasy novel I'm currently querying, White Lands Dragon, I often listened to R.E.M.'s "Texarkana" (it makes me think of eons of time). For my first fantasy novel, Chronicles of a Warrior: Death's Foreplay, I would listen to Marilyn Manson's "Disposable Teens" (probably because the main character is a teen boy who is being used as a spy, and angry about it). Neither of these songs is Medieval-sounding in the slightest, so you wouldn't think they'd work for fantasy books, but I'll take inspiration where I can find it.

The web is full of pages of how to get inspired for writing, so I'm not going to go into it all. But there's some good stuff there. For instance, THIS PAGE about how 50 well-known writers find inspiration, or THIS PAGE which has some ... unusual ... advice (99, to be exact). And, of course, there's a WikiHow page (isn't there for every process?).

But because writing is an art, and the artistic mind is unique to each person and each project, there are infinite sources of inspiration. And we "creatives" have a lot of equally creative ways to inspire ourselves.

What inspires you to create? Please leave a comment....

Cheers and happy reading!

Poll Results: What pet do writers like most?

Last weekend I ran a poll on Twitter. I honestly wondered if writers were more likely to like cats or dogs, or other things.

"Rocket" helping author
D.M. Cain with her
manuscript.

I posted it in the evening and didn't think much more about it.

The next day, I was doing my weekly Saturday morning coffee shop writing session and opened up Twitter during a break. Imagine my surprise when there were 850 votes and counting! By the time the poll closed on Sunday evening (I had set it for two days), there were a whopping 1,687 votes!

The result? See below. Cats won, but only by 8% over dogs, 47 to 39%.

It's fun to read through the replies. See it HERE. Lots of writers shared pics of their furry (or feathered, or scaled) friends.

This poll was international, but here in the United States, at least, households have 30.4% cats and 36.5% dogs (source). So it would seem that authors DO prefer cats, particularly compared to the typical ownership her in the U.S.!

What kind of pet(s) do you have? Please leave a comment, below.

Cheers and happy reading!