A.J. Aalto Supervillain on a Leash

Rapture of the Cold Sweat

March 20

So, I was painting my toenails Three-Day-Old Corpse Blue and thinking about ooky stuff, because that’s what horror writers do on Tuesday afternoons when they’re not digging shallow graves, looking at internet pictures that should never be seen, or inventing fruity cocktails with cute names that reflect one’s personality, like “Last Time I Saw Them, My Panties Were In The Punch Bowl” or “Passed Out Naked On The Neighbour’s Back Porch, Which Isn’t A Porch So Much As It Is A Collection Of Pleasantly Cold Cement Slabs”.

I’m afraid my ookiest fears are pretty pedestrian. Being eaten alive. Being eaten alive by stuff that just won’t die. Being eaten alive by stuff lurking in deep water or tenebrous shadows. Being swarmed by bite-y insects with too many legs. Being eaten alive by a troop (gaggle? flock?) of clowns. Zombies. Zombie clowns. Swarms of underwater zombie clowns with too many legs–crap!! Think I just wet my pants.

Anyway, this inspired a conversation with my husband-slash-manager-slash-motivator (if by “motivator” you mean “guy who bribes me to do shit by buying me chocolate”) during which I’m pretty sure he suspected I had a serious head trauma, if I’m diagnosing the look on his face correctly.

<When faced with an evil clown, remember: kneecaps speak louder than words>

Me: So, I saw Dan last night…

Viking: Manboobs Dan, Hairplugs Dan or “Only Daniel, never Dan or Danny” Dan?

Me: Hot Dan. With the abs.

Viking: Skinny guy down the street? *glares* The man who doesn’t own a shirt?

Me: Don’t even think about buying him one, either.

Viking: *glares harder*

Me: What? I said please.

Viking: No. You didn’t.

Me: Oh. Well, I think he’s a fireman. Everybody knows you don’t buy a fireman a shirt. That’s goddamned kooky.

Viking: When you say you “saw him”, you’re not editing out the words “through my binoculars” are you?

Me: Shyeah, like you’d let me own binoculars.

Viking: After what you did with the night vision goggles? Fuck, no.

Me: “Blah-blah, stalking is illegal, Allison, blah-blah-blah.” Could I get to the important part?

Viking: There’s an important part this time? Jesus, I better put my coffee down.

Me: Dan is afraid of clowns, just like me.

Viking: You know this how?

Me: I was wearing my t-shirt that said “Die, All the Clowns, Die” and he bought me a tea. We toasted. It was a bonding moment.

I use my fingertip to mime a tear of sentiment rolling down my cheek. My husband, accustomed to my dorkiness, waits me out with an expectant lift of his eyebrow.

Me: I’m putting him on my Clownpocalypse Survival Team. I think he’d be handy, what with all the muscles and stuff. Man … the hours preceding my horrible demise promise to be truly epic. *smiles dreamily* I almost can’t wait for the clowns to invade.

Viking: *clears his throat from the distant plane of reality* When the clowns invade, naturally they’ll do so from … Cirque du Soleil?

Me: Gawd, I hope not. Acrobatic French clowns would be sexy and scary.*shudders* My loins won’t know whether to get happy or run screaming with the rest of me.

Viking: So, you think they’ll invade from, what, the Big Top? Ringling Bros? Barnum & Bailey?

Me: No, smart ass, from the abyssopelagic ocean trenches, where they’re breeding their slimey, green-toothed army. Duh.

Viking: Must be hard to keep the greasepaint on, underwater.

Me: Dude, we don’t joke about that.

Viking: First Rule of Clown Club, don’t joke about greasepaint?

Me: *narrows eyes* You’re not as funny as you think you are.

Viking: That’s probably true. So this Dan character was pretending to read words that fall across your tits, then bought you a tea? And from this you misinterpret …?

Me: He was hardly pretending, he repeated the words aloud.

Viking: Allow me to correct your fallacious assumptions. A) he’s had 30 years to practise the skill of reading a woman’s shirt while scoping her breasts. B) Writing on a shirt is practically permission for scoping your breasts. C) He was absolutely scoping your breasts.

Me: *snorts* Scoping. Listerine-ing them. Fresh Mint-ing them. What’s next, he’s gonna gargle them?–whoa!! That sounded a lot less pervy in my head.

Viking: No it didn’t.

Me: Well, allow me to disprove your theory. *lifts shirt* Checkmate.

Viking: Not sure what kind of chess that was, but I enjoyed losing.

Me: Clearly, he wasn’t checking out the Itty Bitty Titty Parade. Hmm … a parade would be a bad place for the Clownpocalypse to start. Oh! I think I just scared myself again. *fans self*

The Viking’s lips almost turn up in a smile, but he’s a very smart man who knows better than to giggle at the chest of the slightly cracked woman who has given him two healthy children, and who cooks him non-toxic food, and who tends to lay awake long after he’s asleep and prone. He surrenders to my logic with a tired laugh.

Viking: Not to discourage your convincing and very scientific display, but does this conversation have a point?

Me: At the moment, it has two.

Viking: And I don’t even have to read anything to scope ’em out. Thanks for that, by the way.

Me: But yeah, I do have a point.

I smile, and it feels like triumph. It feels powerful. If I wanted to, I could terrify the big, strong, clothing-impaired fireman, reduce him to a quivering mass who might sleep by nightlight for a few nights because of me. I’ve had many friends who won’t read my book because “I can’t do scary” … and that is so full of win. I’m not sure I can put it into words, so I don’t try. I shrug, sighing happily. The Viking’s eyes widen with alarm, and that, too, feels like triumph. I am a horror writer … and your fears are my balls to juggle. Even tough guys are scared of something. Everyone’s scared of something.

Hey, what are you scared of?

Maybe you’re afraid of spiders; perfectly natural, since everyone knows they’re tiny skittering bags of creepsauce. I mean, even their webs induce shoulder-hunching heebie-jeebies. Look at that colony! What the–that’s repulsive. I’m not afraid of one spider. I can trap a small one and set it outside, or squish one of those fat ones that appear without invitation or warning in your shower when you’ve got shampoo running down into your eyes, the ones that cause you to shriek and slip and nearly cream yourself on the corner shelf. Oh, I can squish those motherfuckers real good, just give me a bottle of Prell and ignore the war cry and the whackwhack WHACKWHACKWHACK! from the bathroom. Yes, I can handle one spider. But an infestation of them? Hmm, what would be worse: being covered in spiders all stirring about, or facing off against a single underwater zombie clown?

Maybe you’re afraid of snakes. Or sharks. Or the dark. Or a psycho breaking into your house while you sleep. Or the colour of my toenail polish (I admit, it’s looking rather ghoulish). If you’re an aspiring horror writer, get in touch with what scares you the most, and try to write about it. Lead up to the big reveal nice and slow, knowing full well what’s around the next corner. Feel your own belly quiver. If you can scare yourself, you can scare someone else.

What? Oh hell no, I’M not gonna do it. I said YOU should do it. YOU’RE brave. I’m a big chicken. I’m writing this from under my desk, sucking my thumb. I am not writing about clowns, not today. Fuck that noise. I like my sleep.

(Editor’s note: AJ Aalto will now demonstrate her keen ability to speak Kitten, by translating the following feline body language. “Mummy, I don’t think you should sweep the floor, ever-never-ever. Therefore, I am putting myself bodily in your way to prevent such an action from occurring. If you feel the need to sweep, you should observe my case of the rampant cutes, and find something more worthwhile to do, like playing video games, or hey, don’t you have toys that make funny noises?” … kittens: little balls of fluff and wisdom.)

One Part Inspiration, Two Parts Crackpot

April 19

Frequent visitors to my home office (or, as my impertinent family likes to call it, “the dining room”) will be familiar with my wall of horror: a large cork board upon which 2D victims of my amusement are impaled with thumb tacks. Perhaps not the best preprandial artwork to peruse. Also: the reason we don’t eat in the “dining room”. There, I keep pictures and lyrics, sketches and quotations, scribbled notes and to-do lists that look like I stole them from Dahmer (fix “bone snapped wetly” … corpse would be dry by now). Of course, Dahmer only ever gave me nausea, a Clark Bar (“For Quick Energy!”) and some nightmares in the early ’90s. Just kidding, I don’t have nightmares.

I’ve been asked where I get my weird ideas. My knee-jerk reaction was: “Who you callin’ weird, you fuc–oh, that was a compliment? Ah. Right. I was going to say, focaccia … that old Italian verbal lovetap. I know it’s a bread, sillypants, where do you think they got the name? No-no, no need to Google it. Focaccia translates as: delicious friend. Yes it does. Trust me, I’m a writer, I’m paid to *know* these things.”

Today’s blog is in response to the question of Inspiration. (That’s right, I did it. I capitalized. Again, trust me. I am a writer. I can capitalize all day long if I want to. Sometimes, that’s all I do.) I guess people are worried about writers of horror and dark urban fantasy; if we can imagine such dreadful things, surely there must be … urges? Urges that may be dangerous to the general public. Urges that should be medicated. Can’t she write something nice, they wonder? Maybe there’s nothing nice inside her. <insert concerned head-cock, squinty eyes and lips pursed in thought> Maybe her brain is just a big rotted mat of evil. <insert sage nod>

I can’t answer to that; I’ve never seen my brain, not even when I roll my eyes way up ’til it hurts (warning: don’t do that, it hurts!) What I can say is this: I believe in the two wolves thing. You know, that old saying … inside every man are two wolves, dark and light, in constant battle for dominance. Who wins? The one you feed most often.

So I feed my dark wolf (raw organ meat, door-to-door salesmen). When I don’t, I honestly can’t write horror. I lose touch with it, then I feel like I’ve fallen between the cracks. Once I’m lost, it takes a long time to wriggle back into the grimy crypts and cold dank cellars of my imagination. And that’s where I belong, make no mistake about it. That’s where I come alive; my smile hardens, my eyes sparkle, my family hides the knives (no biggie, you can do a surprising amount of damage to door-to-door salesmen when you’re dual-wielding pickle forks); my Word Count tool heaves and shudders as it attempts to calculate, when I’ve been in dark places. Apparently, I have lots to say, some of it absurdly goofy, most of it gory, and not a page of it “nice“.

So how does this writer maintain that dark wolf? Music, sometimes. And the cork board o’ horrors, which is ever-changing. What’s on there today? 

  • the lyrics for “the Derelict”. Sea shanties help me write. “Twas a cutless swipe or an ounce of lead/Or a yawning hole in a battered head … yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!

 

  • Pictures of mountain lakes north of Boulder, Colorado, where my imaginary town and lake (Ten Springs and Shaw’s Fist respectively) are located. Since I’ve only been to Colorado once, I live off  memory and travel guides and the interwebz. Part of me that loved Denver got stuck there; placing my first person character there made sense, felt right. On my outline for Book 3 in the series, she comes to visit my neck of the woods: St. Catharines, Niagara Falls, Thorold, Virgil, Welland. But she’ll always go home to Denver.

 

  • A picture I cut out of the Sears Catalogue of that blond guy who’s been modelling for Sears for-fucking-ever. He’s wearing a suit. When I was 13, he was my pretend boyfriend whenever I catalogue-daydreamed. I have this fantasy where I run into the Sears Catalogue guy in the produce aisle of the grocery store and I drop my Freudian cucumber and sputter: “holy flaming twatwaffles, it’s YOU, it’s really YOU!”, at which point he freaks out, because other than a deranged stalker, who recognizes a fucking catalogue model? At least the fantasy never includes me dropping to baritone to croon into the cucumber-microphone: “Fifteen men of ’em stiff and stark/ Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!”  That would just be weird.

 

  • A side shot of Jude Law (Do I really need to explain that one, ladies? Do I need to explain the half naked cops and firemen? Do I need to explain why I drew chest hair betwixt their man-nips with my kid’s brown crayon? I didn’t think so.)

 

  • sketches of fallen angels, Leviathan, graveyards, ravens, crypts, abandoned autopsy suites, old plantation houses, Mansard mansions like the house from Psycho, the Paris catacombs, London at night, primeval Serbian forests, sigils and symbols and magic alphabets and conjurings, sketches of Cthulu (with brown crayon chest hair. I couldn’t help myself!)

 

  • various artists’ interpretations of Asmodeus, banker at the baccarat tables of hell. I shoved Him in my books, for as He doth command, so shall I–erm, because I was being creative. Yeah, that’s why. I’m a good girl. *tents fingertips and eyeballs the southwest corner of the room over her shoulder* “Ten fathoms deep on the road to Hell/Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!

 

  • Pictures of every classic vampire, and by classic, I mean “tear your throat out and leave you in a twitching heap” vamps, not “I’m too emo-vegan for my fair trade bamboo shirt, but maybe, if it’s all right with you, I might softly kiss the back of your hand? But only if you’re ubercomfortable!” vamps. My favourite shot: Bela Lugosi as Dracula, lurking around a corner in half-shadow. Oh, the pure creeptastic delight!

 

  • Many pictures of the goblin shark Mitsukurina owstoni and the vampire squid Vampyroteuthis infernalis, the coolest real monsters currently residing on planet Earth, to my knowledge. I mean, besides clowns. 

 

     

    • A handwritten lovenote I wrote to myself, to boost my self-esteem: “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I have no faith in you.” It makes me happy.

     

    • Latin words useful in binomial nomenclature, for inventing new plague names for zombie goodness in Book 2. I dig science when it allows me to explain preternatural goodies. I used the bacteria yersinia pestis, responsible for the Black Plague, and altered it to spread an undead plague through bites. Fun! (Ooops, is my nerd showing?)

     

    • a list of possible (mythical? legendary? supposed? partially-logical?) ingredients for raising a zombie via Haitian necromancy. Because I enjoy blending the two types: classic, shambling, risen zombies as undead slaves to a bokor, and infected contagious fast zombies of modern movie thrills. How? Well, that’s where it starts hurting my head, but I’ll figure it out. Book 2 is “first-draft finished”, but definitely needs work. 

     

    • anatomy sketches, names of major arteries, important bones, toe-curling words for innards. Blerg!

     

    • A stick-it note with Christmas ornaments on it that says at the bottom Nice Balls, upon which I have written a warning: Lack of routine is a writer’s doom. I didn’t come up with that myself, I don’t think, but it’s the scariest thing on the board by far.

    I hope this helps answer the question. I can’t be the only writer with a cork board, or a wall of Inspiration. (See? I capitalized again. Incorrigible? Who, me?)

    What morsels do you feed your wolf?

    author’s note: you may notice there are no pictures of clowns on my cork board. *presses two fingers to eye twitch* That’s not because I’m terrified of clowns. *blinks rapidly* I could put pictures of clowns up there if I wanted to. Yes, I could. Shut up. Think you know everything. No, what are you–don’t. Why would you … knock that off. Seriously. I will slap you. Please? God, NO! DON’T, PLEASE! OH GOD, PLEEEEEASE NO, NO, N– *falls off her chair in a dead faint*

    There. The answer to your other question: “What could possible scare a horror writer, AJ?” Clowns. Only clowns. Next question?