I Blame Buffy and Joss Whedon

I've been working with an excellent beta reader, Alison Kemper, and we were talking about our efforts to make our books scarier, while at the same time keeping the humor intact.

We both do really well writing pithy, sarcastic dialogue for our main characters. You know, those hilarious off-the-cuff remarks a la Buffy the Vampire Slayer, that break up the tension without somehow diluting it.

The difference is that in an episode of Buffy, we're also seeing the big scary monster (so we're scared too), her reaction (which might not be verbal), and everything moves at such a snappy pace that if they dwelled on something too long it would feel awkward rather than more meaningful.

All those things are so much harder to do on paper! For me, I tried to maintain the pacing over all else, so my main character never really had a chance to process the trauma or experience her own emotional reaction. And that meant the reader wasn't feeling it either.

Because that pithy dialogue is somewhat like having the last word--it's so funny on its own that it doesn't leave any room for you to explore any emotional depth. Like one of those movies that you see where you go away feeling it was only a collection of catchphrases, with no actual plot development. We've all seen those, haven't we, where we should have just saved the $10 because all the funny bits were in the trailer?

So I blame you, Joss Whedon, for giving us expectations that novels for teens can have that same mix of scariness, humor, emotional depth, character growth, and kick-ass pacing that Buffy showed us. Thereby making my job a lot harder.

FIDO: ever faithful

Zombies seem to be everywhere these days, so my husband rolled his eyes when I put in the disc for FIDO, another zombie movie. But we both ended up liking this one. Zombies give me the heebie-jeebies, but I can tolerate them better with a dose of humor.

FIDO delivers on the wry humor (I almost said "tongue-in-cheek" but that takes on a different tone when you're talking zombies)--like Pleasantville meets Shaun of the Dead (another must-see that I've blogged about), which sounds like an odd mix but actually works. I was surprised when I looked back and saw that it got an R rating for "zombie related violence." I've seen gorier movies with a PG-13 rating.

Here's the trailer:

Sometimes I Scare Myself

I am a total wimp about scary movies--I can only take them if they also have a large dose of comedy. I can handle Shaun of the Dead, Zombieland, and movies like that, but I hate the jump-out-and-get-you type especially.

To this day, my husband teases me about when we were watching The Changeling, and I left the room after a moment that I will freely admit was only a "gotcha". A stained glass window burst, and I'd had enough, after all the other spooky stuff that came before that. And as much as I love and admire the LOTR movies, I can't watch them within a few hours of bedtime because they are just too disturbing for me.

As you might expect, my wimpiness carries over into scary books too. I don't even attempt most horror books.

But I've been stepping up the paranormal in this rewrite of my book, and sometimes after I write a scene, I have to set it aside and not look at it for a while. Not because I need to set it aside and come back to it with fresh eyes, but because it scares me! That just might be a new record for wimpitude.

But I do have to say I've had some weird things happen before, so I have plenty of genuinely creepy stuff to draw on. In the end, I don't think this novel will be classified as horror, but I hope I've done my job and at least unsettled a few people.