Some Call It Horror…
Some call it fantasy or dark fantasy or supernatural or paranormal. Some who call it s#%t.
Arriving at the place where I felt confident enough to attempt writing the sort of fiction I grew up loving took far too long, and I’ll call it what it is: speculative fiction.
The King James version of the Bible tells us, “And all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine years: and he died.” Yet the oldest person living today turned 117 on May 13, 2016. Doesn’t that make you wonder why human life expectancy took such a dive? Considering the marvels of modern medicine…
Okay, enough said about medicine. My point is that single word: wonder. The human brain is amazingly good at wondering.
Yes, we have enormous capacity for memory and calculation and rational thought. So do chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans, apparently. But can they wonder?
It is our capacity to wonder that brought us Tarzan and Superman, Xena, Catwoman and Alice in Wonderland. It is also our capacity to wonder that brings about the scientific discoveries which most change our world. Or as Albert Einstein said so eloquently, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”
But back to long life and Emma Morano, who might celebrate her 118th birthday next month. She was born in 1899. What would it be like to experience all the changes that take place from one century to the next – and the next? It was that question, along with a much earlier question, that enticed me to begin writing the Paradise Cursed series, about a 300-year-old pirate.
The earlier question was this: what would it be like to travel the sea on a ship powered entirely by a dozen sails? Happily, that question was answered when I and my son sailed the Caribbean on the Polynesia, a 204-ft schooner. I confess to not being much of a sailor – I don’t swim, can you believe? Yet many years later the week spent on that ship remained one of my most memorable experiences, and it became the pirate ship Sarah Jane which Captain Cord McKinsey converted so many times over three centuries until he now operates it as a cruise ship among the Caribbean Islands.
The strange happenings aboard the Sarah Jane would be called horrific by some or fantastic or paranormal. I still call it speculative fiction, which I love to read and love even more to write.
Thus the series Paradise Cursed and Paradise Cursed Book 2 Tortured Spirit:
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