Don't Wear Us Out, Josh

Last week I talked about the new Umbral Intentions fiction blog starring and written by Josh Rhoads. There was a couple of spoilers, one worse than the other. Just check back, I won't mention the worst one again if you want to know about it. There was a different discussion about the project over at Inchoate Ascendant titled "Don't Jump the Gun, Pants Kicker" about the actual name of the blog. Since I may want to reference it here today you get to be the first to learn that the blog will be titled "On Dark Rhoads" and not Umbral Intentions--to confuse things worse, as also mentioned last week, the blog is for the This Mental Eventide RPG. Now with that out of the way...

The topic of merit today--and this is the lesser spoiler from last time repeated--is pacing the haunting, or how to parcel out the ghostly events. Being a blog places constraints on the story I will be telling that have less to do with the story that they do with how blogging works. This is of course only on some levels. On others it doesn't impact the story itself. Here again I'm giving things away prematurely. The first order of business is setting up Josh. Who is he on the blog? This is something different than who he is in actuality. He could just jump right in with details on the haunting. That doesn't exactly establish him as someone the blog reading public should believe. So, he begins with an introduction followed by a couple normal slice of life style posts. From there he begins to tell his past encounters and then get into posting about them shortly after the fact.

This second stage of story telling is where the issues begin to crop up. First, the blog is scheduled for Saturdays. Obviously all of the haunting incidents will not happen on just Friday or Saturday. This brings about issues of immediacy, and plays into tension. This is a matter intrinsic to blogging versus real-time interactions like Twitter and Facebook streams. It's just like news reporting where you chose an in-depth look versus greater timeliness. The length of each blog post is a further limit--they tend toward the shorter, especially shorter than full scenes in a short story or novel. There is a certain concision and economy. Another issue is that not every post should be about the haunting. This is important to avoid overload or desensitisation to the creepy goings-on. It also plays into the other important factor.

There is also the matter of pacing the haunting itself. It will progress, it will get worse, and more harrowing as time passes. The haunting must escalate. It will have its highs and its lows as far as the amount of activity. It may be cyclical, or it may be dependant on outside factors such as witnesses. Both will be true actually. Then at the same time the lows will be less frequent and less of a reprieve. Likewise the high activity occasions will be more frequent and more extreme.

The idea that witnesses impact the haunting is typical of real cases, especially when said witnesses are intrusive paranormal investigators who come along and disrupt the haunting either with their equipment, their presence, and most often because the entities responsible for the haunting are shy and do not wish to perform for strangers. There are however different new witnesses who can be brought into the situation who have no detrimental effect on the haunting and in fact encourage it as much or more as the original target. That's all I'll say for now.

Mood: teasing.
Music: Catcher In The Rye by Guns N' Roses and Ghost of Perdition by Opeth.

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Conceptions, Intuition, and Truthiness

The other day the following interesting article came to my attention. It was titled "Would You Wear a Serial Killer's Sweater?" It also asked, and I asked again on Twitter, "Would you fear the volunteer who did put on the sweater?" All sorts of factors surrounding social interactions, concepts of what is real and what isn't, intuition about what's real, among others, come into play in this discussion. This is a different tack toward the same kind of idea being explored here lately. All of them come together to build connections between the characters in a story, the plot, and both the expectations and impact upon the audience of the work. Many narratives carry one singular reality, whether or not it is an exact replication of the real world or something very fantastical and different.

How does the sweater play into this? First it does not matter that it is not actually a serial killer's sweater. The insinuation or claim that it is such is enough on its own. Likewise it does not matter that the item is laundered. It still carries the connotations as if it were still stained with the blood of the killer's victims. The idea makes people nervous and uncomfortable. Its proximity causes anger in some even before the outrageous request for someone to don it. It is a tainted item. Worse, that taint may rub off. Conceptually it is an artefact of evil. Fascination with it, shown by taking the offer to wear it, points to the evil nature of that volunteer. It is something that should be reviled and likely feared. Those not espousing such emotions are questionable. Or so the theory goes.

It is a gut instinct, an emotional response that the sweater is bad. This is the same intuitive sense people have upon learning of a person's criminal record. It is of course worse if the intuiting person is familiar with the exact crime, and hard to look past if it was violent. This all begs the question, which is more important, actual fact, or just perception of the truth of something? That word truthiness, trite as its origins are, and frightening as the concept is, seems to sum up the answer to that question as today's society would answer it. Perception is everything in a large segment of the population. This is something that can and should be capitalised on in fiction. It comes up on this blog more than once for a reason. It is depth well used for characterisation, direct plot, and secondary conflict.

Mood: airy.

Music: The Unforgiven III by Metallica and Inconclusion by Dee Snider.

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Bad Blurring of the Lines

On Twitter there is a sprawling community that is rancid, rank, and utterly decadent. This community prides itself on these virtues in mock-physical sense. They are zombie fans. Some of them purposefully obliterate the line between fiction and reality in their communications. They are in essence role-playing on Twitter as zombies. Their antics are as funny sometimes as they must inevitably be disturbing to non-fans of zombie movies and fiction. It is easy to image the horror and indignation of the horror uninitiated in response to the outlandish and gruesome posts. A fan of horror and of zombies can really get into most of what they do. They are awfully witty and comedic for the walking, ravenous dead. They have the most interesting and not for safe work outlook as well.

There is one trend that has developed recently that bears consideration. It also seems to be ill conceived and for once in bad taste regardless of the popularity of it, and the popularity of zombies and horror. Not everyone is jumping on the bandwagon and there is no apparent backlash against it. The trend is to equate the H1N1 virus, otherwise known as human communicable swine flu, with a new and real zombie outbreak and ultimately a start to a zombie apocalypse. Now, it's not the disease factor that is the problem, nor the idea of a zombie apocalypse. There is a great Facebook group called The Hardest Part of a Zombie Apocalypse Will be Pretending I'm Not Excited which expresses the normal sentiment of zombie fans.

It is not even either of these ideas, but at the same time they do lend to the unease of this blurring of the line of reality. The first fear is that some people who are not aware of the fact that this is fictional masquerading as real will get the wrong idea and spread panic like wild-fire. The second is that such a pairing of a real disease, which has resulted in the real deaths of people, with a fictional milieu is insulting to those who have died. A virus that causes the dead to rise is nothing new. Neither is fiction revolving around death by contagion. Something about it just doesn't sit right though and the sooner the trend is over the better. This speaks to what is acceptable, where the line is between the shock and the horror desired, and just being distasteful.

Mood: smooth.

Music: Rock, Rock by Kevin Dubrow and Thrills In The Night by Kiss.

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