K.T. Katzmann's Blog: They're Here...., page 2

The Heartbreak of the Horror Fan Parent

My wife nearly walked out of Aliens Vs. Predator: Requiem.

Now, intellectually, I know there’s a lot of potential reasons for that. When I say I enjoyed AVP:R, I don’t mean it as in “I enjoyed a movie I watched.” More like, “I enjoyed watching a computer simulation of aliens destroying a modern city where some cardboard characters happened to live.” Still, her reaction wasn't due to its cafeteria mystery meat-level quality.

There’s a part in its, dare I say, plot where the Xenomorphs infest a hospital maternity ward. There’s a pregnant woman, and . . . well, my wife nearly walked out.

Now, she’s absolutely a horror fan, not just a reluctant tag-along significant other. If something has either ghosts or an asylum, she'll be chomping at the bit. Our senior prom, we stayed home and watched Frankenstein. Evil Dead 2 and Cabin in the Woods are our feel good films.

But . . . none of those involve such overt violence against kids. Except Frankenstein, of course, but that didn't matter at the time.

At that “at the time" thing is my point.

She also had a bad reaction to The Witch. I loved it for its feeling of all-encompassing dread, but it lost my wife very early on. See, there’s a part with a baby about five minutes in . . .

And there’s the thing. If she had seen those films ten years ago, she probably would've had a very different reaction. Now, she’s a parent. Our babies are wonderful; my fifteen month old daughter points and says “Cthulhu” at every tentacled idol in the house.

We may have helped that a bit . . .

Still parenthood changes you, and millions of years of natural selection’s wiring comes alive in your brain to make you fear for your kid’s safety.

At least, it should. Being a foster parent, I know it doesn't always work out that way.

My friend Matt talks during movies. I forgive him. He laughs and mocks the stupidity of just about every death in splatter cinema. He’s never been scared at a horror flick because he can’t detach himself enough from the stupid bits to reaction emotionally. With all this, he still got disquieted at the scene in AVP:R where a father and his son get facehuggered to death while hunting.

Have you guessed that he has a son yet?

I never thought it would happen to me. I mean, I've never been one of those people for whom fiction sets me off my lunch, for one thing. I read a book on forensic entomology during a Mexican buffet today, and the book’s maggoty goodness just made me smile.

But it’ll get you.

I was listening to the Misfits the other day, and suddenly hit a lyric about dead babies. What had always been a transgressive tasteless joke suddenly stopped me in my tracks. Wait a second, my brain realized. Don’t you have an emotional connection to a baby? Why, have some free horrific mental images, sir! Enjoy!

And today, I finally admitted it. I was continuing to read the wonderful Maggots, Murder, and Me, enjoying the hell out of it. I mean, cool anecdote follows cool anecdote. What can I say? I write forensic crime.

Then I got to the murdered babies.

I wonder how widespread this is. Is it every horror fan, or a subset? Are there parents who can watch the boy get eaten alive ten minutes into Feast without that little twinge of panic clearing its throat in the back of their mind?

I don’t know. And I don’t think for a second that horror creators should avoid writing about horrible things happening to children. After all, the genre is about uncomfortable feelings and transgressing social norms.

I just know the feeling’s there, and I probably won’t be able to show Matt the elementary school zombie-murder epic Cooties anytime school.

Or maybe not. Hell, he teaches elementary school. Maybe Cooties is therapy to him.

So, anybody get more touchy about horror stuff as they over? Leave me a comment!

Spies Stole My Monsters

As a kid, my monster book buying options were limited. Too young to travel to bookstores, I had to rely on garage sales and library quarter bins. I canvassed like an archaeologist, carefully searching for anything in my interests.

And, along the way, I got really pissed at spies.

Now, I loved real-life spies. The only books I checked out of the library for most of elementary school were mostly nonfiction on monsters, myths, spies, and detectives. Man, did I get a kick out of Operation Mincemeat, where Britain dropped a dead body with fake spy identification and war plans off of the Spanish coast during WWII.

Fictional spies, however, spent years trolling me.

Every so often, I would get a temporary thrill as I spotted a book destined to crush my hopes. The titles are lost to me, but I can recall their flavor. Book after book, with names like The Minotaur Operation, The Gargoyle Sanction, The Gorgon Imperative. Often, the covers would even have a cool picture of the monster in question. And guns, too! Were they books about minotaurs hunted with guns? Oh my Ackerman, my young mind would wonder, are they about minotaurs with guns?

The blurbs wouldn’t always be the same. Something like:

Dashing, middle-aged, and strangely attractive Harvey Danger Whitebread is caught in a web of corruption, conspiracies, corrupt conspiracies, and Nazis…

And I’d lower the book, fooled once again.

Now, I freely admit that younger me had laughably narrow taste in reading material. I’ve expanded my interests quite a bit since then. Still, if I see a badass monster on the cover, I away wince if it turns out to be a metaphorical representation of a code name.

So now, I’m reading… this…

 

Somehow, I am still dedicated to clearing out the trashy paperbacks I've accumulated in the name of being a Goodreads-based Mystery Science Theater 3000 for you, the people. So far, this one is not making me hopeful. Still, I will give this book one test.

No matter how many points it loses in weird gender politics, I will hold one to that last, single point if it can just provide me with a real goddamned satyr.

Your move, Linda Crockett Gray.

Ultimate Synopsis of Ultimate Destiny

A reviewer posted his favorite passage from Murder With Monsters...

Fly, You Fools!

So glad that I'm shipping these out in the next 24 hours. My cats have been itching to pee on these lovely, autographed copies all week. Hell, one just urinated in the empty box and glared at me. If this was a film, the Kill Bill theme would've played.

Planning a Murder Part 3: Do-It-Yourself Vampire Construction

Writing monster fiction is like a salad bar; you take servings of whatever legends you like and build the one that fits your story.

Once I started Murder With Monsters, I already had the narrative structure in my head. This was going to be CSI with more monsters and less magic. Seriously, the forensics machines on CSI stray near Clarke’s Law: any sufficient advance piece of technology might as well be magically lazy writing, but I digress. Based on my preferences, I had to build a vampire that could interact with society without just becoming a person with fake fangs on.

There were a few rules that developed in my forebrain.

1) Vampirism May Not Be Fun for My Protagonist

In some books (like Newman’s Anno Dracula, if I remember right), vampirism is just another life choice. I wanted to go someplace different. After all, my detective narrator needed something to complain about, right? I mean, aside from being stuck with a name like Mildred Heavewater. To my mind, her condition shouldn't just be superpowers with a packaged overbite.

That was the mental breakthrough: thinking of vampirism not as a curse, but with the word “condition.”

I decided the lens I’d see the vampirism through was that of a disease victim. As a teacher, I've had to show a lot of videos where STD sufferers tell their side of the story, and that was my depressing inspiration. Vampirism would be something that changes your “life;” you might join a support group or might not, but it never becomes an overall net positive and never goes away.

Life offers plenty of unfortunate examples. One of my friends looked at the manuscript and was shocked at the idea that Mildred spent her high school career banished to a portable on the edge of her school, learning in solitary confinement. That just didn’t seem like modern thinking to my friend. I hated to inform her that I based that entirely off of the life story of a middle school age AIDS victim from the 80’s.

I admit, I write about werewolves and Bigfoot because sometimes I’m sick of the reality I live in.

2) Vampirism Must Be Fun for the Readers

So while Mildred might complain, I want you all to be glad you’re reading about a vampire. I picked out a serving of the entertaining baggage that’s cropped up in pop culture. Her being strong enough to pitch mailboxes and fast enough to outrun taxis give me the freedom to write crazy little action scenes.

3) Vampirism Can’t Interfere with the Mystery

I know Lugosi chose to play Dracula as a mesmerizing hypnotist, but I’m not going to give a detective the ability to mentally control people. Try picturing a Columbo episode that ends twenty-two minutes* in with, “Just one more thing; did you kill your wife?”

4) Vampirism Needs Weaknesses

Now, here’s the tricky one.
I want these to mostly serve as a touchstone for the reader. After all, weaknesses are the most famous part of some monsters. More people know how to kill a werewolves than what a werewolf looks like. Of course, the standard questions come out.

“She’s a vampire; she has a thing for daylight and stakes, right?” 

Yes, I am aware that Ol' Count D could originally walk in daylight and had more reason to fear a bowie knife than a wooden stake. Stoker’s Dracula is surprisingly far from our modern conception of bloodsucker. Still, I want sunlight and stakes. Feels classic.

It’s about standards.

So far, I’ve been building a relatively generic vampire. Deep within me flares an urge to be different, a desire to be weird. When that happens, I know I can always count on my misspent childhood.
 

You may have noticed from my Tumblr feed that I consumed a freakish amount of monster books as a kid. The goofy parts always stuck with me.  I may not recall everything about medieval werewolf lore, but I’ll never forget the story about a lycanthrope getting defeated by being beaten with an apron. Throw in a suitably ridiculous picture, and voilà! Perfect memory maker.

In some long-forgotten vampire library book (that undoubtedly had the creative name of “Vampires” with a generic subtitle) lurked a picture burned into my mind to this day. Picture a classic Dracula knock-off on his nightly search for blood. His terrible fanged grin is contorted into a look of, “Come on, you’re killing me!” as he kneels on the roof of a house, counting a gigantic mess of seeds.

Consulting the text, I was overjoyed when the author assured me that certain European vampires were compelled to count spilled seeds until sunrise. It was a wonderfully ridiculous detail to learn for an eight-year-old who was, at max, about eighty percent sure that vampires weren’t real. Shockingly, fiction rarely makes use of this weakness. The X-Files had a wonderfully comical scene in a vampire who rose from somewhere near The Sandlot runs into this weakness.

 

“You’re killing me again, Smalls!”

That decision flavored everything from then on. Whether the counting compulsion became a major part of any specific Mildred mystery story, its mere existence lets my readers know that this world was weird and people have to deal with it. This is a New York City where people might wear their clothes inside out for a week if there’s been a rash of faerie muggers.

Yeah, I know, so many books and movies use the “You shouldn’t believe every vampire movie” line of thinking, but screw it. Bring on the garlic. Let’s have things get kooky and see how things roll. 

Except that leaves two issues, and two biggies at that. Two weaknesses that imply significantly bad things about vampires in any cosmology.

It’s the mirror, you see. The mirror, and also the damned the holy symbol. Well, probably not damned. I mean, it could be damned, but then it’s not a problem.

You know what I mean.

Now, I had a world-building problem on my hand…

*Twenty-two minutes might seem like a lot, but I started rewatching Columbo recently with my phone’s stopwatch feature in hand. It turns out, like clockwork, Columbo arrives almost exactly twenty minutes in. Only the nastiest and most cunning Columbo murderers complete their killing within fifteen minutes.

Planning a Murder Part 2: Golems, Pilgrims, and Cthulhu’s Job Interview

And no, I’m not referring to Cthulhu’s role in the best part of the last Hitchhiker’s book.

Last blog post, I described how I got an idea for a world of monsters from my book Murder with Monster. Now I needed to figure out who’s running the show. My idea was having creatures that represented different archetypes, just because I liked the significance of having titles like Lord of the Winged. I might need to work on the names, but the idea was there.

I sat down right in the middle of my role-playing game and passed the time between turns by creating the political structure of a nonhuman world.  It beats Candy Crush, y’know? As my friends chattered on around me, I came to the big questions involving monster society: when did this start and why?

For the when, I picked Babylon. Books like Childcraft's The Magic of Words... 

and shows like The Real Ghostbusters...
 

had made Babylon and its myths and monsters cool for me. Why not have the inter-species relations start as soon as humans started to build cities? That’d make the association so old, I’d be ingrained into people; monsters are normalized.

Which leads us to the question, “Why aren’t they eating the humans?”

Firstly, I decided that some still were.

If I’m making the monsters people, than I hold to the principal that some people are dicks. I didn’t nail down exactly how many still preyed on society, though I knew it had to be small. If half of all monsters ate humans, you’d have less of a stable society and more like a tabletop war game of humans vs. beasties. No, it was a tiny percentage, but it had to be there. Like all writers, I needed conflict. 

But back to the friendly ones: why don’t they eat us? I gradually thought of Thanksgiving.

In elementary school, you’re taught a simplistic story of a corn-sharing sit-down dinner between Pilgrims and Native Americans. Later, you learn the more complicated, hidden motives for the pilgrims, ones that involve religious power plays, possible hijackings, and an over-riding urge for beer. 

And yet the elementary school textbooks still have smiling pilgrims and Native Americans.

No human really knows, I finally decided. There’s the high-minded answers that end up in my world’s history classes, but I thought it’d be fun to keep the real reasons complicated and  secret. Most people go about their lives buying into the talk about diplomatic ideals, but a few people wonder, “Why are the monsters being so nice? Why are they keeping us around? Are they waiting for something?”

I do know. You’ll have to wait a few books to find out.

In any case, a sensible world appeared in my head. Now I needed monster to run it. 

You should all know something about me. I ran a role-playing game campaign for my friends once that was an 1890s police procedural in New York. I had just read The Alienist, and walked to do some Teddy Roosevelt imitations. We were planning the game when I suddenly became aware of a betting pool.

“What, you guys are betting on the game? What about?”

“Can’t tell you,” they said while grinning at each other. “You’d influence it. There’s money involved.”

Because I’m a nosy git, I gradually pierced together things. Well, that and they kept the betting slips in a stocking. So, what were my friends so sure of that they were willing to throw their cash down over it?

Golems. The bet was over golems.

My friends, knowing that I’m a monster lover, folklore fanatic, Jewish, and me (they knew me very well), were betting how long it would take me to put the animated clay man of my people into our game. I mean, just because I did it in our Weird Wars game, and the Mutants and Masterminds game after that, and…

So, of course, if I’m making the council of nonhumans, I start with the Golem. Someone has to represent the Creations, the Frankenstein monsters, the talking dolls, and stone statues.

Heck, there were Jews in Babylon. Someone made a golem, and maybe he was one of the Founding Freaks.

Setting the deal in Babylon makes things fall into place. They have a legendary merman who taught humans agriculture; he’s our Aquaman. There’s plenty of choice for the animated dead. Are there any famous ghosts, I wonder?

Well, the most famous dead guy in Babylonian lore is Enkidu, the wildman proto-Wolverine. The Epic of Gilgamesh kicks into high gear when he dies (spoiler alert for the literal oldest story). If I need a famous dead guy, Enkidu could be a ghost.

I needed a lord of aerial beings, so I chose someone Babylonian to promote and immediately kill them off. Hey, I want the Jersey Devil on the council; he had to replace someone.

I grab the Wendigo to be more culturally inclusive and because, in any incarnation, he’s cool. Wendigo is probably the least controlled of these Lords and Ladies, I figure. The Jersey Devil might act like Snooki, but everybody’s happy if the Wendigo just sticks to the wilderness and doesn’t eat people. 

How about Cthulhu?

I solemnly realize I’m betraying Lovecraft’s core principal of cosmic otherness and alien inaccessibility to humanity. What the hell, though. It’ll be fun. Robert E. Howard had Conan occasionally stab the Great Old Ones, so I could throw them into a murder mystery. Maybe the inhabitants of Rl’yeh didn’t so much as float down from the stars as crash here like Optimus Prime’s Ark, possibly running from something worse. I realize I’m doing something like Alien Nation with shoggoths.

Now, one thing jumps to my forebrain. If I’m using the big guy this way, this is not Lovecraftian horror. This is closer to his science fiction, where you get monsters who are alien scientists while still being horrible, genocidal fascists. Seriously, why anyone casts the Old Ones or the Great Race of Yith as good guys is beyond me.

In the end, why not?

Hell, Lovecraft was a rampaging racist anyway. Maybe the shoggoths and Rl’yehians in his stories are about as accurately portrayed as he portrayed African Americans, Asian Americans, women, and everyone else who wasn’t a white male member of the Colonial America fan club.

Scenes start playing out in my head of what happened when Cthulhu met Tiamat, and that wins me over. I’m saving that part for book two.

Finally, how about devils and demons?

Screw those guys, I figured. Making the forces of Hell nice turned the world from a cop show grittiness to Hotel Transylvania. No, there’s a list of creatures that I absolutely don’t believe in even making good guys, and demons are the in the top four.

Maybe the monsters’ good PR comes from them handling the demons for the humans. Kenneth Hite did good work in GURPS Cabal with his monsters against the interdimensional Qlippoth, after all. My scenarios would be much less covert conspiracy and more a cross between Toho Films and Marvel Comics. Visions of the Wendigo grappling with the Great Beast of Revelation played out in my head…

When I finished, it looked like this.

You can see my protagonist’s character sheet in the background. Also of note is Cthulhu’s “original” name that I almost tried. When I changed the focus from a game character to an actual novel, I quickly came to my senses. If the big guy is in the public domain, if he’s met the Ghostbusters and Eric Cartman, he can be in my book.

Also, I changed “abominations” to “starborn;” Cthulhu’s been around long enough to understand how PR works.

So, now I had a world. It was time to make someone to stomp around in it.

Planning a Murder Part 2: Golems, Pilgrims, and Cthulhu’s Job Interview

And no, I’m not referring to Cthulhu’s role in the best part of the last Hitchhiker’s book.

Last blog post, I described how I got an idea for a world of monsters from my book Murder With Monsters. Now I needed to figure out who’s running the show. My idea was having creatures that represented different archetypes, just because I liked the significance of having titles like Lord of the Winged. I might need to work on the names, but the idea was there.

I sat down right in the middle of my role-playing game and passed the time between turns by creating the political structure of a nonhuman world. It beats Candy Crush, y’know? As my friends chattered on around me, I came to the big questions involving monster society: when did this start and why?

For the when, I picked Babylon. Books like Childcraft's The Magic of Words...

and shows like The Real Ghostbusters...

had made Babylon and its myths and monsters cool for me. Why not have the inter-species relations start as soon as humans started to build cities? That’d make the association so old, I’d be ingrained into people; monsters are normalized.

Which leads us to the question, “Why aren’t they eating the humans?”

Firstly, I decided that some still were.
If I’m making the monsters people, than I hold to the principal that some people are dicks. I didn’t nail down exactly how many still preyed on society, though I knew it had to be small. If half of all monsters ate humans, you’d have less of a stable society and more like a tabletop war game of humans vs. beasties. No, it was a tiny percentage, but it had to be there. Like all writers, I needed conflict.

But back to the friendly ones: why don’t they eat us? I gradually thought of Thanksgiving.

In elementary school, you’re taught a simplistic story of a corn-sharing sit-down dinner between Pilgrims and Native Americans. Later, you learn the more complicated, hidden motives for the pilgrims, ones that involve religious power plays, possible hijackings, and an over-riding urge for beer.

And yet the elementary school textbooks still have smiling pilgrims and Native Americans.

No human really knows, I finally decided. There’s the high-minded answers that end up in my world’s history classes, but I thought it’d be fun to keep the real reasons complicated and secret. Most people go about their lives buying into the talk about diplomatic ideals, but a few people wonder, “Why are the monsters being so nice? Why are they keeping us around? Are they waiting for something?”

I do know. You’ll have to wait a few books to find out.

In any case, a sensible world appeared in my head. Now I needed monster to run it.

You should all know something about me. I ran a role-playing game campaign for my friends once that was an 1890s police procedural in New York. I had just read The Alienist, and walked to do some Teddy Roosevelt imitations. We were planning the game when I suddenly became aware of a betting pool.

“What, you guys are betting on the game? What about?”

“Can’t tell you,” they said while grinning at each other. “You’d influence it. There’s money involved.”

Because I’m a nosy git, I gradually pierced together things. Well, that and they kept the betting slips in a stocking. So, what were my friends so sure of that they were willing to throw their cash down over it?

Golems. The bet was over golems.

My friends, knowing that I’m a monster lover, folklore fanatic, Jewish, and me (they knew me very well), were betting how long it would take me to put the animated clay man of my people into our game. I mean, just because I did it in our Weird Wars game, and the Mutants and Masterminds game after that, and…

So, of course, if I’m making the council of nonhumans, I start with the Golem. Someone has to represent the Creations, the Frankenstein monsters, the talking dolls, and stone statues.

Heck, there were Jews in Babylon. Someone made a golem, and maybe he was one of the Founding Freaks.

Setting the deal in Babylon makes things fall into place. They have a legendary merman who taught humans agriculture; he’s our Aquaman. There’s plenty of choice for the animated dead. Are there any famous ghosts, I wonder?

Well, the most famous dead guy in Babylonian lore is Enkidu, the wildman proto-Wolverine. The Epic of Gilgamesh kicks into high gear when he dies (spoiler alert for the literal oldest story). If I need a famous dead guy, Enkidu could be a ghost.

I needed a lord of aerial beings, so I chose someone Babylonian to promote and immediately kill them off. Hey, I want the Jersey Devil on the council; he had to replace someone.

I grab the Wendigo to be more culturally inclusive and because, in any incarnation, he’s cool. Wendigo is probably the least controlled of these Lords and Ladies, I figure. The Jersey Devil might act like Snooki, but everybody’s happy if the Wendigo just sticks to the wilderness and doesn’t eat people.

How about Cthulhu?

I solemnly realize I’m betraying Lovecraft’s core principal of cosmic otherness and alien inaccessibility to humanity. What the hell, though. It’ll be fun. Robert E. Howard had Conan occasionally stab the Great Old Ones, so I could throw them into a murder mystery. Maybe the inhabitants of Rl’yeh didn’t so much as float down from the stars as crash here like Optimus Prime’s Ark, possibly running from something worse. I realize I’m doing something like Alien Nation with shoggoths.

Now, one thing jumps to my forebrain. If I’m using the big guy this way, this is not Lovecraftian horror. This is closer to his science fiction, where you get monsters who are alien scientists while still being horrible, genocidal fascists. Seriously, why anyone casts the Old Ones or the Great Race of Yith as good guys is beyond me.

In the end, why not?

Hell, H P Lovecraftwas a rampaging racist anyway. Maybe the shoggoths and Rl’yehians in his stories are about as accurately portrayed as he portrayed African Americans, Asian Americans, women, and everyone else who wasn’t a white male member of the Colonial America fan club.

Scenes start playing out in my head of what happened when Cthulhu met Tiamat, and that wins me over. I’m saving that part for book two.

Finally, how about devils and demons?

Screw those guys, I figured. Making the forces of Hell nice turned the world from a cop show grittiness to Hotel Transylvania. No, there’s a list of creatures that I absolutely don’t believe in even making good guys, and demons are the in the top four.

Maybe the monsters’ good PR comes from them handling the demons for the humans. Kenneth Hite did good work in GURPS Cabal with his monsters against the interdimensional Qlippoth, after all. My scenarios would be much less covert conspiracy and more a cross between Toho Films and Marvel Comics. Visions of the Wendigo grappling with the Great Beast of Revelation played out in my head…

When I finished, it looked like this.

You can see my protagonist’s character sheet in the background. Also of note is Cthulhu’s “original” name that I almost tried. When I changed the focus from a game character to an actual novel, I quickly came to my senses. If the big guy is in the public domain, if he’s met the Ghostbusters and Eric Cartman, he can be in my book.

Also, I changed “abominations” to “starborn;” Cthulhu’s been around long enough to understand how PR works.

So, now I had a world. It was time to make someone to stomp around in it.

Planning a Murder Part 1: I Blame Sailor Moon

Since Murder With Monsters comes out Saturday, I thought it behooved me to set down the strange and laborious path that leads an otherwise rational individual to self-publish. Let stand as a warning to the curious, or walk my dark path yourself. I'll retweet you, fellow sinner.

In any case, for the first entry, I feel like I have to point fingers. Who do I have to blame for this strange direction in my life? Who's at fault for two years of having vampires, gargoyles, and sasquatch on my brain even more than usual?

Blame Sailor Moon

It really is her fault.

Yes, it's true. About two years ago, my role-playing game group were all pretending to be magical girls. Because of that, I publish a book this month with the Loch Ness Monster on the cover and the Jersey Devil inside taking selfies.

I really should sketch that timeline out with a white board.

Writers get inspiration from weird things. Stephen King wrote The Mist after fantasizing about pterodactyls swooping through supermarkets. Conan exists because Robert E. Howard rewrote a Kull the Conqueror story to please an edition. I wrote grew my police procedural in strange soil.

The game in question was two levels of Kevin Baconesqe separation from Sailor Moon. I refer to what is, for many, the ur-example of the magical girl genre. School girl gets magic powers, monster attack town, romance happens, lots of people die. Really, it's stunning how the body count of the first season Sailor Moon dwarfs the entire televised run of G.I.Joe. That's one reason it hooked a lot of people on anime back in the 90's days. 

One night, my high school girlfriend brought her VHS tapes over for a sleepover. Yes, my Mom was very lenient. It was better than a back alley, to her mind.

My mother's fears were not to be realized that night. We hit play after dinner, and when the Sun came up, my girlfriend was passed out on the bed while I was spellbound by watching a reformed villain get brutally murdered by dozens of spikes while his prospective girlfriend watched. I quickly realized that these Japanese cartoons could turn on the brutality switch on a second’s notice.

This prepped me for Puella Magi Madoka Magica, which is best thought of as Sailor Moon mixed with Breaking Bad. It's about the step-by-step corruption of several teenage magical girls. Imagine Sabrina the Teenaged Witch disemboweling rapists on a subway while she's wearing a cutesy Halloween costume. You start out thinking it'll be sweet and light, than the character who is obviously the protagonist gets her head bitten off three episodes in.

I loved showing that episodes to the kids in the middle school anime club I ran. Their tears have less calories than adult tears.

That brutal yet touching show captivated me, so a friend found me an easy sell when he asked, “Would you want to role-play it?” Apparently someone had written a free indie role-playing game called Magical Burst to simulate the spiraling corruption of super-powered teenage girls, and my friend Kev wanted to run it. Now, this man had already ran a tabletop RPG version of Pokemon that incorporated the Cthulhu Mythos and a literal interpretation of the Book of Revelations; I knew this would be a gonzo game to remember.

It was. My girls kept dying.

Not in the classic Dungeons & Dragons “You enter the room, and the wizard dies” way, mind you. They had romantically tragic deaths, full of drama that kept me from getting too frustrated. Still, after two or three characters, I wanted to try something new.

Since it was a dimension-hopping game, we were allowed to create entire worlds to justify the ridiculous backgrounds of our characters. The game was all about teenage girls making pacts with alien entities for power, and I was tempted to try something more traditionally dark yet paradoxically lighter.

Those alien power-granters were jerks; what if some world somewhere fought them? Maybe they had some traditional inhuman creatures. What would a world run by monsters be like, if they were open and public about it? Most importantly for me, what kind of dark super-powered girl could I make? Was there a type of powerful monster that you could theoretically volunteer to become?

“Hey, Kev,” I asked my game master over the phone. “Can my next girl be a vampire?”

As you do, I threw myself in the game. As these things go, I never got to tell the kind of stories that I wanted. I desperately desired to focus on the world of monster cops, without the distraction of dimension-hopping magical girls or Machiavellian fluffy aliens.

When I sat down at my laptop that November and felt the urge to type, I pruned everything that went beyond even my lax and liberal standard of crazy. I started with a dead policewoman answering an inter-species domestic disturbance call, and the rest gradually took form.

People say that many gamers are frustrated writers. You know what relieves that frustration?

Writing.

So I did, and I created something near and dear to my heart, something with bits of Columbo and Isaac Asimov mixed with a dollop of sarcastic New York Jews and splashed with Lovecraft, mythology, and the Universal Monsters. But somewhere, deep in my murder mystery’s DNA, there’s the slightest evolutionary trace of Sailor Moon.

We all have weird branches in our family trees. I'm just glad there's no genealogical resemblance; Mildred would kill me if I tried to fit her into a schoolgirl outfit.

 Want a free copy? Try the giveaway!

I Blame Sailor Moon

Since Murder With Monsters comes out Saturday, I thought it behooved me to set down the strange and laborious path that leads an otherwise rational individual to self-publish. Let stand as a warning to the curious, or walk my dark path yourself. I'll retweet you, fellow sinner.

In any case, for the first entry, I feel like I have to point fingers. Who do I have to blame for this strange direction in my life? Who's at fault for two years of having vampires, gargoyles, and sasquatch on my brain even more than usual?

Blame Sailor Moon

It really is her fault.

Yes, it's true. About two years ago, my role-playing game group were all pretending to be magical girls. Because of that, I publish a book this month with the Loch Ness Monster on the cover and the Jersey Devil inside taking selfies.

I really should sketch that timeline out with a white board.

Writers get inspiration from weird things. Stephen King wrote The Mist after fantasizing about pterodactyls swooping through supermarkets. Conan exists because Robert E. Howard rewrote a Kull the Conqueror story to please an edition. I wrote grew my police procedural in strange soil.

The game in question was two levels of Kevin Baconesqe separation from Sailor Moon. I refer to what is, for many, the ur-example of the magical girl genre. School girl gets magic powers, monster attack town, romance happens, lots of people die. Really, it's stunning how the body count of the first season Sailor Moon dwarfs the entire televised run of G.I.Joe. That's one reason it hooked a lot of people on anime back in the 90's days. 

One night, my high school girlfriend brought her VHS tapes over for a sleepover. Yes, my Mom was very lenient. It was better than a back alley, to her mind.

My mother's fears were not to be realized that night. We hit play after dinner, and when the Sun came up, my girlfriend was passed out on the bed while I was spellbound by watching a reformed villain get brutally murdered by dozens of spikes while his prospective girlfriend watched. I quickly realized that these Japanese cartoons could turn on the brutality switch on a second’s notice.

This prepped me for Puella Magi Madoka Magica, which is best thought of as Sailor Moon mixed with Breaking Bad. It's about the step-by-step corruption of several teenage magical girls. Imagine Sabrina the Teenaged Witch disemboweling rapists on a subway while she's wearing a cutesy Halloween costume. You start out thinking it'll be sweet and light, than the character who is obviously the protagonist gets her head bitten off three episodes in.

I loved showing that episodes to the kids in the middle school anime club I ran. Their tears have less calories than adult tears.

That brutal yet touching show captivated me, so a friend found me an easy sell when he asked, “Would you want to role-play it?” Apparently someone had written a free indie role-playing game called Magical Burst to simulate the spiraling corruption of super-powered teenage girls, and my friend Kev wanted to run it. Now, this man had already ran a tabletop RPG version of Pokemon that incorporated the Cthulhu Mythos and a literal interpretation of the Book of Revelations; I knew this would be a gonzo game to remember.

It was. My girls kept dying.

Not in the classic Dungeons & Dragons “You enter the room, and the wizard dies” way, mind you. They had romantically tragic deaths, full of drama that kept me from getting too frustrated. Still, after two or three characters, I wanted to try something new.

Since it was a dimension-hopping game, we were allowed to create entire worlds to justify the ridiculous backgrounds of our characters. The game was all about teenage girls making pacts with alien entities for power, and I was tempted to try something more traditionally dark yet paradoxically lighter.

Those alien power-granters were jerks; what if some world somewhere fought them? Maybe they had some traditional inhuman creatures. What would a world run by monsters be like, if they were open and public about it? Most importantly for me, what kind of dark super-powered girl could I make? Was there a type of powerful monster that you could theoretically volunteer to become?

“Hey, Kev,” I asked my game master over the phone. “Can my next girl be a vampire?”

As you do, I threw myself in the game. As these things go, I never got to tell the kind of stories that I wanted. I desperately desired to focus on the world of monster cops, without the distraction of dimension-hopping magical girls or Machiavellian fluffy aliens.

When I sat down at my laptop that November and felt the urge to type, I pruned everything that went beyond even my lax and liberal standard of crazy. I started with a dead policewoman answering an inter-species domestic disturbance call, and the rest gradually took form.

People say that many gamers are frustrated writers. You know what relieves that frustration?

Writing.

So I did, and I created something near and dear to my heart, something with bits of Columbo and Isaac Asimov mixed with a dollop of sarcastic New York Jews and splashed with Lovecraft, mythology, and the Universal Monsters. But somewhere, deep in my murder mystery’s DNA, there’s the slightest evolutionary trace of Sailor Moon.

We all have weird branches in our family trees. I'm just glad there's no genealogical resemblance; Mildred would kill me if I tried to fit her into a schoolgirl outfit.

 Want a free copy? Try the giveaway!

I Blame Sailor Moon

Since Murder With Monsters comes out Saturday, I thought it behooved me to set down the strange and laborious path that leads an otherwise rational individual to self-publish. Let stand as a warning to the curious, or walk my dark path yourself. I'll retweet you, fellow sinner.

In any case, for the first entry, I feel like I have to point fingers. Who do I have to blame for this strange direction in my life? Who's at fault for two years of having vampires, gargoyles, and sasquatch on my brain even more than usual?



Blame Sailor Moon

It really is her fault.

Yes, it's true. About two years ago, my role-playing game group were all pretending to be magical girls. Because of that, I publish a book this month with the Loch Ness Monster on the cover and the Jersey Devil inside taking selfies.

I really should sketch that timeline out with a white board.

Writers get inspiration from weird things. Stephen King wrote The Mist after fantasizing about pterodactyls swooping through supermarkets. Conan exists because Robert E. Howard rewrote a Kull the Conqueror story to please an edition. I wrote grew my police procedural in strange soil.

The game in question was two levels of Kevin Baconesqe separation from Sailor Moon. I refer to what is, for many, the ur-example of the magical girl genre. School girl gets magic powers, monster attack town, romance happens, lots of people die. Really, it's stunning how the body count of the first season Sailor Moon dwarfs the entire televised run of G.I.Joe. That's one reason it hooked a lot of people on anime back in the 90's days.

One night, my high school girlfriend brought her VHS tapes over for a sleepover. Yes, my Mom was very lenient. It was better than a back alley, to her mind.

My mother's fears were not to be realized that night. We hit play after dinner, and when the Sun came up, my girlfriend was passed out on the bed while I was spellbound by watching a reformed villain get brutally murdered by dozens of spikes while his prospective girlfriend watched. I quickly realized that these Japanese cartoons could turn on the brutality switch on a second’s notice.

This prepped me for Puella Magi Madoka Magica, which is best thought of as Sailor Moon mixed with Breaking Bad. It's about the step-by-step corruption of several teenage magical girls. Imagine Sabrina the Teenaged Witch disemboweling rapists on a subway while she's wearing a cutesy Halloween costume. You start out thinking it'll be sweet and light, than the character who is obviously the protagonist gets her head bitten off three episodes in.

I loved showing that episodes to the kids in the middle school anime club I ran. Their tears have less calories than adult tears.

That brutal yet touching show captivated me, so a friend found me an easy sell when he asked, “Would you want to role-play it?” Apparently someone had written a free indie role-playing game called Magical Burst to simulate the spiraling corruption of super-powered teenage girls, and my friend Kev wanted to run it. Now, this man had already ran a tabletop RPG version of Pokemon that incorporated the Cthulhu Mythos and a literal interpretation of the Book of Revelations; I knew this would be a gonzo game to remember.

It was. My girls kept dying.

Not in the classic Dungeons & Dragons “You enter the room, and the wizard dies” way, mind you. They had romantically tragic deaths, full of drama that kept me from getting too frustrated. Still, after two or three characters, I wanted to try something new.

Since it was a dimension-hopping game, we were allowed to create entire worlds to justify the ridiculous backgrounds of our characters. The game was all about teenage girls making pacts with alien entities for power, and I was tempted to try something more traditionally dark yet paradoxically lighter.

Those alien power-granters were jerks; what if some world somewhere fought them? Maybe they had some traditional inhuman creatures. What would a world run by monsters be like, if they were open and public about it? Most importantly for me, what kind of dark super-powered girl could I make? Was there a type of powerful monster that you could theoretically volunteer to become?

“Hey, Kev,” I asked my game master over the phone. “Can my next girl be a vampire?”

As you do, I threw myself in the game. As these things go, I never got to tell the kind of stories that I wanted. I desperately desired to focus on the world of monster cops, without the distraction of dimension-hopping magical girls or Machiavellian fluffy aliens.

When I sat down at my laptop that November and felt the urge to type, I pruned everything that went beyond even my lax and liberal standard of crazy. I started with a dead policewoman answering an inter-species domestic disturbance call, and the rest gradually took form.

People say that many gamers are frustrated writers. You know what relieves that frustration?

Writing.

So I did, and I created something near and dear to my heart, something with bits of Columbo and Isaac Asimov mixed with a dollop of sarcastic New York Jews and splashed with Lovecraft, mythology, and the Universal Monsters. But somewhere, deep in my murder mystery’s DNA, there’s the slightest evolutionary trace of Sailor Moon.

We all have weird branches in our family trees. I'm just glad there's no genealogical resemblance; Mildred would kill me if I tried to fit her into a schoolgirl outfit.



Want a free copy? Try the giveaway!