Chris Chelser's Blog, page 4

Omnipresent Ghosts: Even Your House Is Haunted

Ghosts and hauntings are like climate change. The facts that indicate its existence are omnipresent, and denying them won’t make it go away.

When it comes to subjects we don’t understand, humans are a cowardly species. We rather deny the existence of elephants entirely than acknowledge the one in the room with us.

So it is with ghosts. Even so, chances are that while you read this, one is reading over your shoulder.

Surprised? You shouldn’t be. Hauntings are more common than you think. Once you learn how to recognise their presence, ghosts are every bit as apparent as elephants.

Ghosts Haunt By Definition

According to the Oxford Dictionary, ‘to haunt’ means nothing more than to frequently visit a place. Since ghosts are often drawn to a particular place and hang around there, sometimes for centuries, it makes sense that ‘haunting’ has become synonymous for the activity of ghosts.

The word ‘ghost’, in turn, refers to an echo, secondary image or lingering trace of something. Echoes of a person, in this case.

So, traces of dead people frequenting a particular place. That is what we’re talking about. But how can the living tell they have a visitor?

Based on my personal experience, I distinguish five stages of haunting.

Stage 1 – Sensing Presences

You’re home alone, but your instinct screams there is someone in the room with you. Ever had that feeling? I’m sure you have, because we all do. In most cases, it’s perfectly normal.

Our brains aren’t always able to tell real sensory input from imagined input, so at times we get a false positive on our perceptions. Alarmed, you look around. Your eyes confirm no one is there, and your brain gives the all clear again. It happens.

The game changes when you can’t shake that feeling of being watched. False positives can’t persist when you don’t focus on them. When you still have that feeling after binging a TV show or doing some chores, take note of your body’s primary responses.

An imagined presence is easily dismissed, but a true presence affects your body as well as your mind. Goose bumps when you aren’t cold before is a good indicator. Your mind picks up subtle changes in the energy of the room, to which your body responds with chills and raising your hackles. The brain might confuse real and imaginary input at times, but your body will respond only when you are not actively imagining something.

Do these sensations occur in a particular place and not in others? Then you may well have sensed a ghost.

Stage 2 – Minor ‘Special Effects’

Thanks to Hollywood, we tend to think that ghosts resort to flashing neon-signs to reveal their presence. But manipulating something corporeal when you have no body of your own is actually quite difficult. Not undoable, as we will see, but too much effort for most ghosts.

Which doesn’t mean that their presence doesn’t influence the intangible energy humans use. Think of light, warmth, and electricity. It’s everywhere, and because it is intangible, it is easier to change. Easier to affect.

Unnatural shadows, flickering lights and cold spots are common activity indicators for ghost hunters. Nature, of course, has a sense of humour, making conclusive detection difficult. A natural trick of the light can cause some absurd shadows. A dodgy set-up on location or a trickster in the team can well explain flickering lights or disturbances in the digital cameras.

But when there is no film crew about in a modern terraced house where the lights go off in empty rooms– infrequently but for months on end, in multiple lamps but not all – blaming the circuitry doesn’t cut it.

Surfing Glitches

Could a flaw in the lamps’ wiring be responsible? Possibly. Material objects are never perfect, but there is an enormous bandwidth between ‘perfect’ and ‘defect’. A slightly faulty wire might respond to minute fluxes in the electricity more readily than an intact wire. But if this is the only explanation, every household would have such issues and we’d all be hollering at lamp producers to make better products.

Still, such slight flaws may be significant. ‘Faulty’ lamps might pick up the effects of a ghost’s energy just like they do fluxes in the electricity system. Ghosts are dead people, and just as lazy as the rest of us. If they can exploit a physical aspect and save themselves some effort, they will.

Stage 3 – Voices & Apparitions

Moans, whispers, sobs, distant screams. A disembodied voice whispering words you may or may not understand. A glimpse of a person disappearing into a wall. Someone standing next to your bed, there one moment and gone the next…

That’s right: we have entered ghost story territory. Chills and lights are too easily dismissed by reasons. In order to convince the audience that a fictional haunting is frightening, the storyteller must resort to more recognisable manifestations.

That is in books and movies, though. What about real life?

Anyone who has ever experienced an encounter like this knows the initial confusion. “Did I just see that?” Uncertain of ourselves and for fear of being ridiculed, we don’t mention what we saw. Even when it happens again.

Personal Encounters

Years ago, I worked in a tiny office building with a workshop at the back. My workspace had a view of the staircase that lead to the first floor, but it was never used. Still, from time to time, I would see a man come down those steps, turn towards the workshop and then vanished. I never mentioned it, until one day my two colleagues told me – unprompted – that they had seen that same man since they started working there. They didn’t know him, either. It was just the three of us working there, and the upstairs offices had been locked and unused for years…

Animals and children are famously more sensitive to ghosts. From my family: “Mummy, who is that lady in the corner?” asked my dad when he was 5 years old. Except there was no lady, and his father’s great-aunt, who fit his description to a tee, died ten years before he was born.

Not all apparitions look friendly. A ghost may look serene and recognisable, or resemble something that crawled straight out of a zombie movie. Such a creepy visual manifestation may be intentional, but more likely it is a by-product of their presence. Like the young soldier in The Devourer, some ghosts hang on to their death too literally.

Stage 4 – Things Go Bump

What it says on the tin: any object that can move, will. Doors, curtains, picture frames tilting, lamps swaying, small items falling or turning up elsewhere than where they were left. It’s all fair game.

Unlike what fictional tales suggest, things going bump is rarely spectacular. The items are not destroyed or permanently lost, and sometimes these anomalies may even be helpful. Unnerving, but otherwise harmless.

Remember, manipulating physical objects requires a lot of effort. The energy to accomplish this must be focussed on the intended effect. So whenever this is happening, the ghost is purposefully seeking to make contact with the living.

The crux, however, is in their reason for doing so.

Deceased loved ones may hang around and leave little reminders of their presence. Their way of saying ‘hello’. Endearing, once you get used to finding your keys or that bracelet in unusual places.

Yet slamming doors and falling objects can also be a warning. While few ghosts are malicious, they aren’t always in the best of moods, either. It’s not just movies where people move into a house, only to be chased out by the old inhabitant. Property can be of great importance to a ghost who doesn’t realise that she is, in fact, dead.

Stage 5 – Angry Poltergeist

Hovering objects, flying cutlery, and physical injury: according to the hardcore horror stories, there is nothing an outraged ghost can’t do. A terrifying thought indeed, but does it actually exist outside fictional stories and elaborated hoaxes? I’m not convinced.

We humans must spend energy to lift or throw an object, and we are physical ourselves. For a person without a body to generate and channel that energy, moving objects – let alone lifting – is excessively difficult.

The stories of poltergeist activity go back too far in human history to write off the whole concept. Yet according to many accounts, the poltergeist don’t pick up objects. They slam doors and make knocking sounds – all Stage 3 and 4 manifestations. No hurdling of any kind involved.

But assuming that Stage 5 does exist, what would that mean?

It means that whoever encounters such a ghost has a serious problem. Any incorporeal entity capable of amassing the amount of energy needed to interact with the corporeal world in that way must have an unwavering will to do so. That kind of willpower tends to come from strong emotions. And few emotions are as strong as anger and hatred. That would explain why accounts of all-out ‘true’ poltergeist invariably mention their extreme violence.

Not exactly a comforting thought…

Reality Check

Fortunately, most ghosts have no interest whatsoever in humanity. Don’t fret if you feel an inexplicable chill in the bathroom. Even if it’s a ghost (and not a draught), it won’t want to watch you taking a shower. Why would they bother? If they can walk through walls, they can see through clothes, too.

In real life, Stage 3 and 4 hauntings are rare. Or perhaps people just don’t recognise them when they do occur. Humans tend to be blind to what they don’t (want to) know. So on a day-to-day basis, we don’t notice ghosts crossing our path anymore than they take note of us.

But if the indicators – the facts – are there. And facts don’t change when you ignore them.

Het bericht Omnipresent Ghosts: Even Your House Is Haunted verscheen eerst op Chris Chelser.

The Monsters You Never Recognise

Picture yourself in a dark alley. There, in the shadows, the glint of bloody jaws. Something moves, its disfigured limbs crawling too fast to be natural. What is that?  You freeze, back up. Then, nothing. Did you imagine it? You listen, you watch, until you see something in the corner of your eye and—!

What makes monster stories so appealing? And why are we so inapt to recognise those very monsters in real life?  

Tricking the Brain

Our instinctive fear of monsters goes back to when our ancestors still lived in trees. That primal response persists in our modern brains to this day, and it’s a veritable treasure trove for storytellers.

Movies and books make use of the face that our brains can’t tell the difference between a real threat and an imagined one. So when you watch a horror movie – at home, on your couch with a mug of hot chocolate – your survival instinct kicks in all the same. Your heart begins to race, you tense up, and cold sweat gathers in your palms.

It’s just a movie, you tell yourself, but your brain won’t buy into that.

So Hollywood and mainstream paperbacks churn out tropes and clichés ad nauseum. The response such concepts elicit is so primal that it never fails to hit the emotional mark. Endanger or kill cute animals and children, and you’ve got the audience by their proverbial balls (m/f).

Other sure-fire bets are intense chases, trapping the main character, and monsters. Is a story lacking spunk? Add a monster of some sort. Success guaranteed.

Breaking Down Monsters

An effective monster goes straight for the amygdala. To do that, it needs to meet 4 key criteria:

It must be a direct threat to the hero’s (way of) life.
It must be highly unpredictable in its behaviour, or the behavioural pattern is unknown.
It is beyond (human) control.
The hero can’t evade or defend herself (and others) against it.

Any large predator will do. Remember the velociraptors from Jurassic Park franchise?

The raptors can and will kill humans.
The heroes can’t be certain when, where or who they will attack next.
The heroes can’t control their behaviour, since the raptors are wild animals and terribly smart to boot.
Try as the heroes might, the monsters’ size, strength and speed render the available weapons useless.

Hiding and running is really the last recourse their prey the heroes have, but even that doesn’t assure their survival. Cue one hell of a story finale!

Large predators capable of hunting humans are the most obvious type of monsters. They appeal directly to our brain, and remind us of the time humanity wasn’t at the top of the food chain.

Thinking Out of the Monster Box

In stories, monsters don’t always look like the stereotypical hunter-killer. Still, their function in the story is functionally the same.

In emotional dramas, the ‘monster’ is often an antagonist that threatens the hero’s way of life. A relative who threatens to cut you off the financial support you rely on for survival is every bit as scary as someone coming at you with a knife. The hero pleads and tries to convince that nasty parent/aunt/sugar daddy, but he has no real control over the decision that may ruin his life. Even the bully in a children’s story checks all the boxes of the monster checklist.

Actually, most antagonist are a ‘monster’ of some sort. Because monsters are essential. Stories don’t function well without them. That is how deeply entrenched our fear of them is.

Tiny Monsters

Not all threats to our survival are posed by big creatures with fangs. Sometimes, the monster is not less dangerous for being microscopic.

A few years ago, the world clenched its collective buttocks as the Ebola virus spread like wildfire. The disease wasn’t unknown, but it had never infected so many people so quickly. So quite naturally, we were terrified.

Ebola has an absurdly high kill rate. Patients die horribly and in great numbers.
The virus is incredibly contagious. Fleeing the area didn’t guarantee you would escape infection.
A preciously obscure virus, we knew relatively little about it and had no way to manage the outbreak, let alone contain it. It spread unchecked from community to community.
There was no weapon against it: no cure, and experimental drugs were still unsure to be effective.

Against all odds, people survived, but rarely due to modern medicine. The Global Village got a taste of what life had been like in 14th century Europe, when the Black Plague decimated entire countries. Of course, this time only West-Africa felt the immense horror of the outbreak, while the rest of us hid behind borders and oceans and prayed the monster wouldn’t find us.

In Real Life

We humans are rather preoccupied with monsters, and with good reason. As invincible as we may feel as a species, a part of us realises we’d be sitting ducks if something truly monstrous reared its head.

It has. Repeatedly. Because monster are everywhere. We just don’t always recognize them in time.

Child molesters look regular persons. To their victim, they may even be family. Gang members may advertise their status, but that doesn’t necessarily make them murderers. Sometimes the line is even less clear: in tyranical regimes, the monsters wear uniforms and carry guns – but so do the soldiers that come to liberate them.

For want of elongated teeth and red eyes to give away the monster, society has more than once turned to ambiguous ‘tell-tale signs’ to identify unwanted persons. Such paranoia yields too many false positives. Still, people prefer to defend themselves against the devil they know, rather than to acknowledge the existence of a monster they want to fight but can’t.

And so every day, the news is full of torches and pitchforks.

Incognito Monsters

Does it help? Does knowing the monster make it less scary? Let me rephrase: are you less frightened watching that new horror movie when you know how its monster was designed?

No. If that monster is credible to you, you will be shivering. Your brain won’t allow you any other option.

Unless the monster is ridiculous and makes you laugh. Or when the shiver you feel is one of awe instead of dread. Then you won’t feel that primal fear, and you won’t recognise the monster for what it is.

That how Adolf Hitler and his henchmen became democratically elected rulers of the German nation. That is how Donald Trump became President of the USA, and how he remains in power. We – that is, society as a whole – didn’t see how they could pose a threat to us.

Nor could we. History teaches us the consequences of leaving such monsters unchallenged, but at the time, no one could have foreseen the dangers. For what danger is there in a laudable bid to restore a struggling country?

Sometimes you just can’t recognise the monsters until it is too late.

Het bericht The Monsters You Never Recognise verscheen eerst op Chris Chelser.

Of Love Stories And Corrupted Fairy Tales

Guest Post by Cael Kalbrandt

Today, all across the globe we herald Valentine’s Day in a splash of crass commercialism. A perfect opportunity to share some little-known details about the origin of romantic love stories.

Prepare to have your pink bubble burst.

The Roots of Love

Our trip into history takes us back to Europe in the 12th and 13th century AD. This is the time in which the stories of King Arthur appeared: the heydays of noble knights, fair ladies, minstrels, and the celebration of platonic devotion to one’s One True Love. The time of courtly love at its purest.

Or so we like to believe. A closer study of aforementioned minstrels crashes that party but good.

Minstrels, also known as troubadours (French) and Minnesänger (German), sang epic songs about heroes and their almost divine ladies. These love stories entertained a wide audience, but they also harboured a profound knowledge, locked away in symbolism.

Certain renowned minstrels, among them famous names like Wolfram von Eschenbach and Walther von der Vogelweide, lathered their tales with so much symbolism that these stories became magical and surreal. The best surviving example is Von Eschenbach’s Parzival, the story of the Grail Knight. But there were many such stories in endless variations.

A good deal of those minstrels’ stories went on to become the fairy tales we know today. Much to our detriment.

A good deal of those stories went on to become the fairy tales we know today. Much to our detriment.

The oral retelling of stories to pass them on from one generation to the next is a noble one, but not without significant risk. In the case of the minstrel’s love stories, ignorant rehashing of half-understood tales cause corruption that has done untold damage to half of the human race.

Blind Devotion?

The minstrels’ love stories were a kind of medieval format fiction: a valiant hero happens on a damsel in distress, comes to her rescue, and is rewarded for his good deeds. This summary doesn’t do justice to their tales, but it is what they boiled down to.

Most notable in any minstrel’s work was his devotion to a particular lady. In their songs, they would sing her praise and liken her to a goddess. She was the damsel in the stories, and the object of the hero’s quest.

It’s often believed that those ladies were actual noble women to whom the minstrels dedicated their work. It might be the wife of their patron, or another lady they admired for some laudable reason. And the hero, of course, was the minstrel himself.

Unless symbolism has blinded us, and the minstrels didn’t sing about love in the first place…

Lost In Translation

Both ‘minstrel’ and ‘Minnesänger’ are derived from the German word ‘Minne’, which means ‘(courtly) love’. With this in mind and taking the stories at face value, it is easy to assume that minstrels celebrated the chaste, romantic love of a gallant knight for his near-divine lady.

Except that the science of etymology isn’t quite on our side here: the German ‘Minne’ finds it origin in the Gothic ‘munni’, which in turn can be traced to the Latin ‘memini’, the still older Greek word ‘mimneskein’ and the Sanskrit ‘man’.

Those four older words have nothing to do with love. They translate as ‘memory’ or ‘remembrance’.

So if the minstrels didn’t simply sing some noble lady a love song, what were they on about?

Heretical Love

Once upon a time, in a faraway land – okay, in Europe of the 12th and 13th century AD – Christianity ruled. Literally. Kings and princes were beholden to the Pope, and were expected to uphold the rules of Catholicism.

At this point in history, however, there were plenty of people who worshipped different ideals than those dictated by the Bible. Not immoral or evil ideals. Just different ones, with a goddess at the centre of its faith. This faith wasn’t new, but the growing influence of the Vatican made life exceedingly difficult for these heretics.

And I do mean heretics in the most literal sense: in several Germanic languages, the word for ‘heretic’ is directly derived from the name ‘Cathar’. The Cathars were just one of many religious orders that deviated from Catholic lore, but due to their thorough and violent eradication by the Vatican, the Cathars went down in history as the best-known example of heretics.

Their crime? That they worshipped a goddess – an ancient personification of wisdom – and valued knowledge and enlightenment higher than servitude to the Pope. Which was, in the eyes of the Vatican, a capital crime indeed. No surprise there.

Memories of Paradise

Facing persecution, those who worshipped wisdom instead of the Bible went underground. They hid their devotion and passed on their knowledge through stories and songs laden with symbolism that only other believers would understand.

Passing on that knowledge was the true purpose of minstrels, and also the reason why the best of them were held in high esteem. But what was this knowledge? What did Wolfram von Eschenbach and his fellow minstrels sing about that we remember their love stories to this day?

Evidently, the lady they sang to was not some random noble lady. Rather the lady was symbol of the hidden wisdom. She is prostate, as symbol that humanity has forgotten the insights and knowledge she represents. The hero is either searching for her or discovers her whereabouts by accident. To reach her – to gain that knowledge – he must best the obstacles in his way. When the hero does reach the lady, he is rewarded with access to a bountiful kingdom is the realm of the goddess of love and wisdom.

In short, the hero is granted entry into Paradise. While not Heaven in the Christian sense, this heretics’ Paradise is spiritually on the same level.

That is what the minstrels’ love stories were: reminders of how one might find enlightenment and enter into paradise. Yet somehow this intention became corrupted beyond recognition.

Corrupted Fairy Tales

Many of these old stories have common elements. The obstacles the hero had to overcome would often be depicted as dragons or immense rose bushes with long thorns. The hero might fight his way past those with the help of dwarves – then still considered magical and knowledgeable instead of cartoons. And when the hero found his way to the secret castle to find the coveted prize – the Holy Grail or the prone lady, usually – the hero would be rewarded with insights, Paradise, and even immortality.

Cue the corrosion of ignorance.

The Cathars were destroyed, the minstrels died. In time, humanity forgot what their stories were supposed to remind them of. The goddess of wisdom became a random princess, waiting helplessly for some faceless prince to save her and claim her hand in marriage and half her father’s kingdom as his reward. How romantic! Because these tales were all love stories, right?

Thus Sleeping Beauty slept for a hundred years behind walls of thorny rose bushes without anyone remembering what those thorns meant. Snow White was poisoned and left for dead, guarded by diminished dwarves until the prince kisses her back to life. Rapunzel was locked in a secret tower with no entrance, and her prince was blinded by more randomized rose thorns in his attempts to reach her.

Minne… Love… It isn’t difficult to see where things got mixed up. But that doesn’t negate the fact that these corrupted versions of the minstrels’ love stories destroyed the rights of women for centuries to come.

Romance Killed Women’s Rights

Minstrels sang about knowledge and bravery, celebrated the figure of a woman as a source of knowledge and love. Something so pure and divine that but few men deserved to reach her. Women were the key to Paradise, if not Paradise itself!

But while society didn’t forget the stories, they did forget their symbols and their true meaning. To this day, girls grow up believing the fairy tales. That ‘True Love’ means waiting for Prince Charming to ‘liberate’ them and tell them who to be. That they should wait, demure and servile, like the ladies in the tales of old.

Don’t believe it. The fairy tale princesses were never real people to begin with. Today’s girls and women are, and should be treated with all due respect.

So there we are: how true love stories have nothing to do with love, and how ignorance and the road map to Paradise reduced women to passive objects. At least now you know why those roses you bought for your Valentine are a symbol of love. Of Minne…

From time to time, the Kalbrandt Institute‘s leading man, Cael, takes the blog stage to share his thoughts with a liberal dose of sarcasm, occasional profanity and gritty realism.

Het bericht Of Love Stories And Corrupted Fairy Tales verscheen eerst op Chris Chelser.

Taming Dragons: Resistance

Our dragons lurk in the darkest parts of our mind, heart and soul. They go by many names, take on many different forms. But while they may be fearsome and dangerous, they needn’t be our enemies. Today’s dragon is called: Resistance.

Photo: Comodo Dragon by Joel Sartore (via National Geographic)
Small But Annoying

Recently I have been working on taming one of my smaller but incredibly annoying dragons. Every time I want to – or need to – do something, it will nag at me not to. With Resistance on my shoulder, getting through the day is like running a marathon with a ball and chain. I might have a chance of reaching my goal, but I will be exhausted well before the halfway marker.

I have no love for athletics – more on that later – but nevertheless, for years this was what every one of my days looked like. Not only did I get nothing done anymore, but every time I did accomplish something, it had cost so much energy that the gain was barely worth the effort.

Eight therapists had failed to help me tame my flock of dragons, and even this one kept slipping through the maze. Until one day, not too long ago, I noticed my son copying his mum’s behaviour…

Clearly, a change was in order. Conventional therapy was out the window, but the ideas posed by coaches James Clear and Benjamin Hardy resonated. Working from their principles, my son and I wrestled our Dragons of Resistance into submission.

We ended up needing only these two simple techniques.

Always Have A Plan Of Attack

Insecurity paralyses. To our poor highly-evolved brain, not knowing what to expect next is utterly terrifying. While flying by the seat of your pants can be exhilarating at times, more mundane tasks like homework or household chores benefit from a plan of attack. Even if that plan is just a list of groceries you need from the shop this afternoon.

Your plan of attack can take on any form, as long as it makes clear what your next step will be. Think of to-do lists, agendas, company procedures, etc.

For my son, a to-do list makes all the difference. He used to slouch around after school, complain constantly, and dragged his feet doing hi homework. And no, he hasn’t hit puberty yet.

These days the two of us compile his to-do list in the morning before school. Now when he comes home, he knows exactly what happens next. He checks all the boxes on the list without complaint and without delay – knowing that the last item on the list is ‘free time’ that he can spend as he likes. So where before he resisted every step of the way, he now has energy to spare after all his chores are done.

In addition to a to-do list of my own, I use outlines: my stories, blog posts and reports start as bullet point lists. Every step (subject or paragraph) is listed in order, so I don’t need to worry about remembering what comes next. And as more steps are added, the outline eventually grows into a full-fledged first draft.

Plans Are Living Creatures

Plans change. Constantly. Whatever you use to help you make sense of where you are in your day, in your work, in your writing, that plan will evolve. Some new branches appear (your boss giving you a pile of extra work) while others die off (something got cancelled).

“Plans are living creatures: they evolve constantly.”

These sudden changes are natural, but they can be harrowing. Our brains object to change almost by definition, but they will have less difficulty to cope – and thus less cause to resist – if you fit those changes into your overall plan. Even if that plan is nothing more exciting than your agenda.

But why stop there? Each individual task comes with its own plan of attack. The same principle, but with smaller steps. Baby steps.

Smaller increments

Simple law of physics: small changes take less energy than big changes. The smaller the increment or step, the less daunting it is, the less insecurity or resentment you will feel about doing it, and the easier and faster that step will have been completed.

Our Dragon of Resistance resists this notion as much as it resists the change itself. It will tell you that baby steps are a waste of energy because they don’t amount to anything. Don’t let the dragon fool you: however small, each step is still a step forward.

“However small, each step is still a step forward.”

That is how I hoodwinked my dragon and overcame my resistance to exercise.

As I said, have no love for exercise. I realise that sitting on my butt all day will not keep me healthy, but even so, I would rather climb razor wire than go to the gym. In light of that hatred, going out of my way to get my daily exercise is not sustainable. My Dragon of Resistance will see to that.

So instead, I started doing planks while the coffee machine pours me my morning coffee. Then I added squats while the kettle boiled for tea. Lunchtime means more tea and maybe some tilted push-ups against the kitchen counter. In the afternoon, weather permitting, I’ll go for a walk to iron out a plot issue in my latest story.

By themselves, such tiny increments seem useless. Yet together they compound to a 15-minute daily workout. Going to the gym twice a week would amount to the same, only now I don’t feel like I’m working out, so there is no resentment. This way it costs me no energy at all to exercise daily, yet I have a visibly better-toned body all the same.

No resistance means less effort to yield the same, if not better, result. But you will have to work with your dragon to manage it.

Taming The Dragon…

Much about this dragon makes sense when you realise that resistance is born from fear. Resistance is the apprehension caused by small, recurring fears like ‘did I forget anything?’ and ‘what will they say?’. In and of themselves these small fears don’t frighten us. They just make us wary. And the human mind despises wariness and will do anything to avoid it.

Behold: the source of procrastination.

The Dragon of Resistance is annoying, but mostly harmless and it can be very friendly once you get on better terms with it. To tame it, start by identifying where in your life your Dragon of Resistance is wreaking havoc. Then plan which of those aspects to tackle in which order, and break these down into still smaller increments. The dragon ignores small steps and won’t see you coming until you are already there.

Had a rumble with your Dragon of Resistance? Let me know in the comments how you tackled it.

Disclaimer: If you do decide to challenge your dragons head-on, please don’t do it alone. Even experienced snake handlers have assistants at hand when dealing with large or unpredictable constrictors.

Het bericht Taming Dragons: Resistance verscheen eerst op Chris Chelser.

Plot Pruning

Last week’s winter storm dealt a lethal blow to our 25-year-old pyracantha. The gale caught and broke off its stems a few inches above the ground. Thus a wall of spikey scrubs landed on the street, narrowly missing several parked cars and ditto insurance claims.

You can’t leave that lying around, so my husband dragged two cubic metre of aggressive plant out of the way. He cursed the air blue, but prevailed. Now this wooden carcass sits in our backyard, entertaining the local birds while awaiting dismantling. And I do mean dismantling: with its two-inch thorns as thick as nails, handling a pyracantha (or ‘firethorn’) feels like a scene straight from Saw II.

The comparison with editing a first draft is so striking, it’s not even funny.

They Will Maim

Every first draft is a train wreck. No argument there, except that a thorn bush is a metaphor. All the main branches, twigs and thorns of your ideas have twisted into each other to form one angry knot. Separating it will be arduous and painful. Before long, you are yanking at random parts, desperate for it to make sense. Except that when you pull too hard, you risk breaking whatever healthy branches in the process.

So if you want to untangle that mess without killing the core, you have no choice but to go in. Not a pleasant prospect, since like pyracanthas, first drafts have a tendency to horrifically maim anyone who comes too close. A gardener will be digging splinters from their flesh for days. Writers will come across offending sentence structures, adverbs and other eye sores that fray their sanity and self-confidence.

Fortunately, dismantling a pyracantha can teach you valuable lessons about keeping safe while editing your first draft.

Advanced Pruning

Editing a first draft is often said to resemble a massacre. Dead-end subplots, boring characters, pointless descriptions, they have to go. Snip, cut and prune that bastard until only the good bits remain, then nurse the surviving buds and branches until it grows into a blooming story.

In theory, anyway.

Dead Wood

First piece of advice my pyracantha gave me: leave it alone for a while. In time, any parts that were dead or dying to begin with will get a chance to wither. Not only are dead branches easier to cut, but their thorns go blunt, too. Not much, but enough to reduce the sting.

So leave a first draft to wither. When you come back to it after a few days or a few weeks, the bad parts will stand out like a sore thumb and it will be less painful to kill what you believed were your darlings.

Hacking & Slashing

However, the hack-slash technique of editing is much like going for the largest branches first. Those are a devil to untangle, because the clever subplots and minor characters you devised on the fly have entwined themselves with the major theme and the main characters. Removing one without seriously damaging the other is all but impossible.

It is a fast method, and a thorough one if you don’t mind taking a long time afterwards to stitch up the cuts and gashes left by your endeavour. Chances are you won’t discover how your slashing spree disembowelled other parts of the story until halfway through the rewrite, you find yourself facing a dead end where there wasn’t supposed to be one.

And if going in with a hacksaw left your too injured, you might even give up on the story altogether.

Snipping & Pruning

Alternatively, you can cut all the twigs and large thorns first. Of course that will take longer, but as you meticulously snip your way, it soon becomes clear how the larger branches are interconnected. By cutting off only the bits that count, you avoid unnecessary scratches to your self-esteem, and the larger branches come apart easily – without damaging the parts of the plant, eh, story you want to keep alive.

Waste Disposal

At long last, you have cut your first draft down to size. Now what to do with the leftovers of your carnage? It is tempting to throw out the babies with the bathwater. For the smaller twigs, like single sentences or the odd paragraph, that might be the right decision. But larger branches, stripped of their painful thorns, can come in use for other purposes.

Whenever you cut an entire scene or character, cut those sections but paste them in a separate file. Who knows what inspiration they may sprout for your next project?

Safe pruning editing!

P.S. Did you know coffee is a writer’s most efficient soother for editing-related aches and pains?

Het bericht Plot Pruning verscheen eerst op Chris Chelser.

Reading: Experience By Proxy

From the instant a toddler recognizes its first letter, we bombard the poor child – and its parents – with the importance of reading. Yet for every child that takes to reading readily and early, there is one that can’t sit still during a bedtime story and rather plays with toys instead of staring at squiggly symbols in a row.

Once these kids grow an appetite to venture into the world of comics, they are told to put down that ‘trash’ and read ‘proper books’. To drive that point home, their school system will force them for years to read classic literature far beyond their interest and comprehension.

Which is a terrible shame. Not on those youngsters, but for them. Because if their repulsion of reading persists, they miss out on far more than a handful of books.

Force-feeding breeds repulsion

Failing to see why reading literature should matter, many adolescents give up on reading all together as soon as they leave school. They hate the books they were forced to read, weren’t permitted to read the ‘trashy’ books they did enjoy, so why bother?

Who can blame them? I certainly have no right, since I was one of them for the longest time.

After I left secondary school with 40+ works of literature under my belt, only a handful of which had been marginally interesting to me, I had lost all appetite for fiction. Small wonder, since the only fiction I had been permitted came from the hand of middle-aged men writing about the problems of their age and generation. None of it had any bearing on me – at least, not at that time in my life.

I still read voraciously, thought, but about history, wars, myths, cultures and religions, psychology… the list goes ever on. To this day, more than half my book collection consists of non-fiction books.

Internet wasn’t so well developed yet, but otherwise I’m sure I would have done what most young people do these days: read online. Articles, ezines, blog posts, stories posted on websites and in social media communities. Most of it is not ‘proper books’ and ‘proper newspapers’, but they read. And watch: the time the TV was just people is long gone. Some of today’s series and movies are genuine art in the literary sense. They are just not printed, but filmed.

Reading with a new eye

In time, we change. For some their repulsion turned to hatred, but fortunately it’s not uncommon for people who broke up with books after school to fall back in love with reading after a few years.  And as an added bonus, their additional life experience breeds a new appreciation of the books they simply couldn’t understand as a teen.

My own reading increased dramatically when I reached my thirties. With every novel I read, I found something to relate to. Characters made choices I couldn’t fathom as a teenager, but which made perfect sense to me now, even if I didn’t agree with them. I recognized plot devices that I had dissected while watching countless movies before, and understood the foreshadowing of events because I was now more familiar with the patterns of nature and history – both of which tend to repeat themselves.

Now these books make sense, and now it is easier to see what makes their stories and themes perennial.

But I also encountered events, emotions and choices that were new to me. Experiences I had never gone through myself – something to be thankful for in many cases – but which became a part of me because I read about them. Everything I had learned about different people and their behaviour from non-fiction books came to life on the pages of the novels I read, helping me to truly understand the world behind the facts.

This effect isn’t personal; it’s universal. Reading breeds an understanding of people and things that extends far beyond ourselves.

Substitute for experience

In the end, that is why reading is important. No one tells us this when we grow up. Other people’s experiences are crammed down our throat before we can appreciate them, but ultimately, reading helps us to better understand the world around us.

Books, fiction and non-fiction, can give us experiences beyond our reach. Not everyone has the opportunity to travel to distant countries, and going back in time isn’t even possible at all. So we read. We read about how the world is, may be, or might have been. We read about ideas we would never have considered ourselves, learning about options we never even knew existed. And through words, we can live terrible events we never have, could, or would want to experience first-hand, but which are very real nonetheless.

Our time and our lives are by necessity limited. Since no one person can make all mistakes and win all successes themselves, we share our experiences. This way others benefit from what we have learned – and we benefit from their lessons in return.

Experience helps us deal with the difficulties in our own lives. By extension, so does reading.

So grab a book – any book – and enjoy!

P.S. All the free content on the ‘net takes time and effort to write. Consider supporting your favourite writers in a small way and click their Ko-Fi button if they have one.

Het bericht Reading: Experience By Proxy verscheen eerst op Chris Chelser.

Stories With Spine

Everyone who loves scary stories has favourite elements they can’t get enough of. Some want to drench themselves in blood and gore, others get their kick out of creepy, enclosed spaces. And if you are like me, it is skulls and bones that send a thrill of delight down your spine.

So when I was researching monsters for the next Kalbrandt Institute Archives book, naturally there would be skeletons involved.

Expanding The Horizon

While dead bodies are the classic stuff of horror, our beloved genre of fear and death tends to limit the role of skeletons to atmospheric purposes. An old battlefield littered with bones for effect, that sort of thing. At best, a few grinning skulls in a corner get to warn the Hero (m/f) that the current locale is a Dangerous Place™, but otherwise a dead body is only interesting when it’s fresh. Or still moving.

But bones have so much more potential than that. A dead bag of flesh must have died recently, whereas bones, under the right circumstances, can be millennia old. That time span alone opens a world of possibilities. But it also changes the questions that the audience wants to know the answer to.

When someone is just dead, the audience immediately wants to know ‘how’ and ‘why’. The murder mystery genre thrives on this. But when the corpse is much older than a few days or even a few months, its role and significance is harder to predict. Suddenly, bones can hold clues to a non-murder-related puzzle, trigger a crucial misunderstanding, or bring the story to a whole different level.

“A dead body keeps the story here and now. Dig up some old bones, and they could propel the reader back through time.”

So Many Bones to Pick

Another trick skeletons can do that fresh bodies can’t: bones scatter. Shifting soil, floods, mud slides, scavengers… The older a skeleton, the more likely it got separated long the way. Which begs its own set of questions, like where is the rest of the skeleton? Is that important? And if so, why?

Isolated bones have a certain horror in and of themselves. Instinctively we know they were once part of a living creature, which makes the discovery of a lonely bone all the more gruesome. The people of Flanders know: the fields where the Great War was fought is now farmland. To this day, farmers find human remains – bits and pieces, but never intact skeletons. All of these lonely, shattered bones once belonged to a young man. A soldier who died, was torn apart by explosions, and buried in the mud. If he was lucky, in that order.

Another question that bones trigger but a dead body will never: what is this even? Skulls are rather easy to recognise, but some animal bones look deceptively human, especially when the rest of the skeleton is missing. When the crew working at my father’s construction site found a man-made hole with some bones, we couldn’t tell for sure they weren’t human remains. (They weren’t. Pfew.)

Advanced Jigsaws

Human, animal, old, new, fossilised: bones come in countless varieties of fragmented shards, haphazard heaps, complete skeletons, mass graves, and neatly organised catacombs that hold the remains of hundreds of thousands of people. And that is just the natural versions. Cross over into the realms of paranormal horror, where the mythical monsters live, and the possibilities becomes endless.

In The Resurrectionist, E.B. Hudspeth did a brilliant job weaving a disturbing tale around anatomically-correct hybrid creatures, including drawings of their skeletons and musculature. It’s one of my favourite books, and I wish there were more like it.

So I took particular delight in piecing together a particular bony jigsaw for Eva. Because bones are more than just decoration to add eeriness to a story. They are versatile plot devices with stories of their own. Stories that they can carry themselves, and I believe they should be used in the capacity more often.

What do you think? Have you come across good stories where bones were pivotal to the plot? Tell us about them in the comments!

P.S. Like this site? Please consider subscribing or helping me through another day:

Het bericht Stories With Spine verscheen eerst op Chris Chelser.

Resolving Unresolved Resolutions

Guest Post by Cael Kalbrandt

 

It’s January 8th, high time to assess the damage done to your New Year’s Resolutions. Come on, be honest: have any of them even made it this far?

Didn’t think so. And don’t bother denying you made any. Even the half-hearted ones count for the purpose of this little treatise.

Changing Digits

It’s human nature to ride the current of a momentous change. When your whole world is upset, for good or for bad, the ensuing chaos makes it easier to introduce other changes. Or you dig in and hold on to what you know. Humanity is fickle…

For some unfathomable reason, changing a digit on a calendar is considered so momentous, it warrants making radical changes. Never mind that the digits on the calendar change all the time. Every. Single. Day. Yet for some people it’s impossible to quit smoking on October 3rd or start going to the gym on April 25th.

Fair enough, I say. If January 1st is genuinely the only opportunity you see to make changes in your life, take it. It would be a waste to sleep off your hangover, wake up on the 2nd and realise you’ll be stuck in this rut for another 364 days! 365, even, if it’s a leap year.

Timing Is Everything

What in the world possesses the vast majority of Western society – and well beyond; it’s contagious – to choose the slowest time of year for drastic changes? Why would you even want to?

Let me explain:

Digging a new rut and pushing your cart from its old track into this new one takes effort. Great effort. Which in turn takes energy. Think of it this way: change is movement, and movement requires energy to come about. If you want to cross the room, you need to move your body’s muscles. Muscles needs energy (meaning, those calories you want to burn) to accomplish that.

Pretty self-evident, right? It gets better. I’m willing to bet that most, if not all, of your Resolutions concern changing your behaviour. Do this, don’t do that, you know the drill. Such things require a change of mind set, and that is a whole other beast entirely.

Now while  switching a mental track is an invisible process, the energetic drain it causes is enormous. Your brain consumes 20% of your daily energy requirements, so go figure. That means changing your behaviour requires huge amounts of energy.

So, when is the best time to set such changes in motion? That has to be the exact same time when nature is in the middle of its annual shutdown, right? Right…

For most of us, New Year’s Day is in the middle of freaking winter! There is little light, nothing grows, and by all rights the lot of us should be in hibernation. But, no. Let’s commit to a goal that requires an inordinate amount of energy to succeed, at a time that this energy simply isn’t available. And of course we should bash ourselves if we fail to bring this already-doomed endeavour to a successful end.

Truly any time of the year is better to make Resolutions with a capital R! If you must insist on initiating your big change on a set date, why not pick March 21st? The start of spring brings light, growth and more energy than you will know what to do with. It is a far more natural moment to make the kind of changes you are aiming at. That alone will do wonders for your success rate.

Truly any time of the year is better to make Resolutions with a capital R than New Year’s Day!

When I said “for most of us”, I meant that the Northern hemisphere is more densely populated than the southern half of the globe, where January is the height of summer. Come to think of it, do people Down Under have less difficulty keeping their New Year’s Resolutions? Interesting. If you know, tell me in the comments.

Upending The Board Doesn’t Win The Game

Humanity is fickle because the human mind is fickle. While upsetting our world is a fertile breeding ground for desired changes, too much upheaval will cause the brain to cling desperately to old habits.

Yes, those exact habits you Resolved to change. Oops.

The greater the change, the stronger the resistance. Since many people stack their radical NY Resolutions ten storeys tall, it’s no wonder that all of them have perished before the third week of January.

Changing habits is a bit like chess: move one piece at a time and don’t rush.

Changing habits is a bit like chess: move one piece at a time and don’t rush. The game is won through a series of consecutive steps, not by galloping at anything that remotely resembles what you think is “The Enemy”.

Those consecutive steps form a habit. How many steps it takes to fully form a habit varies per person and per habit (tip: this guy can help you form yours). Rule of thumb: take a step, and then another. Rinse and repeat indefinitely and stepping becomes second nature.

Sounds familiar? It should. It’s how you learned to walk as a toddler.

Child’s Play

A toddler that has spent all its life sitting down – and they invariably have – can’t simply get up and run when the clock strikes midnight on December 31st. Well, it can try, but no one will be surprised when that ends in a face-plant and parents trying not to laugh.

You – yes, you! – didn’t learn to walk one day to the next. You did it one step at a time, and your tiny brains quickly figured out that attempting to run before you could walk was painful. This logic made sense then, and it still makes sense now. Only you forgot it does.

Consider this a reminder.

So ignore the calendar, get off your arse, and start walking. If a baby can do it, so can you!

P.S. Like me, Chris lives on caffeine. Do the humane thing and click the button below:

From time to time, the Kalbrandt Institute‘s leading man, Cael, takes the blog stage to share his thoughts with a liberal dose of sarcasm, profanity and gritty realism.

Het bericht Resolving Unresolved Resolutions verscheen eerst op Chris Chelser.

Merry Christmas!

Het bericht Merry Christmas! verscheen eerst op Chris Chelser.

Soulless Cry #72

#72

The pain is

almost

bearable…

Until

I remember that you

are the cause of it.

Het bericht Soulless Cry #72 verscheen eerst op Chris Chelser.