{"id":89,"date":"2011-04-19T11:47:20","date_gmt":"2011-04-19T16:47:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ajaalto.com\/?p=89"},"modified":"2011-05-04T15:36:46","modified_gmt":"2011-05-04T20:36:46","slug":"one-part-inspiration-two-parts-crackpot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ajaalto.com\/?p=89","title":{"rendered":"One Part Inspiration, Two Parts Crackpot"},"content":{"rendered":"

Frequent visitors to my home office (or, as my\u00a0impertinent family likes to call it, “the dining room”) <\/em>will be familiar with my wall of horror: a large cork board\u00a0upon which 2D victims of my amusement are impaled with thumb tacks.\u00a0Perhaps 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<\/em>).\u00a0Of course,\u00a0Dahmer only ever gave me nausea, a Clark Bar (“For Quick Energy!”)<\/em>\u00a0and some nightmares in the early ’90s. Just kidding, I don’t have nightmares.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0old\u00a0Italian verbal lovetap. I know\u00a0it’s a bread, sillypants, where do you think they got the name? No-no,\u00a0no need to Google it. Focaccia translates as: delicious friend. <\/em>Yes it does. Trust me, I’m a writer, I’m paid to\u00a0*know* these things.”<\/p>\n

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\u00a0I want to. Sometimes, that’s all <\/em>I do.) I guess people are\u00a0worried\u00a0about 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<\/em>, 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><\/p>\n

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!<\/em>) What\u00a0I 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.<\/p>\n

So I feed my dark wolf (raw organ meat, door-to-door salesmen<\/em>). 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\u00a0no mistake about it. That’s where I come alive; my smile hardens, my eyes sparkle, my family hides the knives (no biggie,\u00a0you can do a\u00a0surprising amount of damage\u00a0to door-to-door salesmen when you’re dual-wielding\u00a0pickle forks<\/em>); my Word Count tool heaves and shudders as it attempts to calculate, when I’ve been in dark places.\u00a0Apparently, I have lots to say, some of it absurdly goofy, most of it gory, and not a\u00a0page of it “nice<\/em>“.<\/p>\n

So how\u00a0does this\u00a0writer\u00a0maintain that dark wolf? Music, sometimes. And the cork board o’ horrors, which is ever-changing. What’s on there today?\u00a0<\/p>\n