Tag Archives: Werewolves

Through the looking glass

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I’ve just about recovered from the shock of seeing our American chums (or the half of them that bothered to vote) elect an evil clown as president. Coming not long after the Brexit fiasco, it feels like all the rules of the universe are now open to question and anything is possible. Tomorrow my bus driver might be a duck, the sky may have turned green and all the fish could be strolling around town in tiny berets, affecting a French accent and taking selfies in front of Copenhagen’s famous Little Mermaid.

Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.”
George Carlin

It’s one of those periods when whole nations seem to go a bit gaga and do something that had just months earlier seemed inconceivable. I took the news quite badly, and I’m not even an American citizen. But my US chums on Facebook and WordPress seemed equally aghast. What new folly had they sunk to? Were they, as one cartoon suggested, competing with Britain for the ‘dumbest nation’ title?
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Vampires! Zombies! Giant killer hamsters!

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hamsterHorror has become big business these days and you can hardly have failed to notice the waves of the undead shuffling, flying or bounding across screens big and small. With a plethora of assorted suckers, rippers and biters, horror fans are spoiled for choice when it comes to grisly supernatural thrills.

There are a ton of psychological theories about why we love to scare ourselves silly with these films. But whatever the truth, many of us just can’t help but subject ourselves to what one might call a safe scare. All the adrenalin and terror without any real danger (despite what some cunning marketing people would have us believe).

We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.” – Stephen King

What would the creators of Nosferatu or Dracula make of all this ghoulish entertainment? Would Mary Shelly find our modern day monsters a little OTT? Could George Romero have ever imagined we’d become so addicted to the brain-munchers?
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A monster hit

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Creature_medI seem to be running low on cash and have begun wondering where exactly I slipped up in my cunning plan to relocate and start afresh in a new country. Who would have thought that employment, contacts or a sensible career strategy would have been so necessary to make it work? Surely just turning up and waiting for opportunities to come knocking is a reasonable alternative? After all, it’s always worked out so well in the past…

Perhaps it’s partly to do with the fact that the term ‘career strategy’ fills me with a sense of nausea, not unlike the words ‘merchant banker,’ or ‘leveraging your personal brand to facilitate an ongoing financial remuneration paradigm.’

Maybe I can drum up a few quid with a bit of genre fiction, and solve my ongoing lack of a financial remuneration paradigm. Maybe.

Looking around at what’s popular recently, I’ve narrowed my options down to writing a story about a girl wizard who grows up and falls for a charming but rather kinky vampire, with whom she must join forces to save the kingdom from a horde of zombie dragons. And have lots of mild S&M sex.

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