A Bloody Julius Caesar Stirs Up a Hornet’s Nest

I took my Girls Write Now mentee Laura to go see Julius Caesar last Friday at Shakespeare in the Park in Central Park. We had been planning it for a while and postponed to later in the week so we had nicer weather. I’m glad I charged and packed my computer because we really wanted to tape our exit interview we had planned now that she’s graduating and going on to college in the fall. I had come up with ten questions for Laura, and she ad-libbed questions for me. I was surprised that it lasted longer than an hour, but we had some meaty questions, like “What do you think is going to happen politically in the next five years?” and “What’s going to happen to art in the current political climate?” We were both optimistic about the future and had no idea how portentous our questions and ideas were.

We took turns going to the restroom while the other saved our spot in line, and then right before they started handing out tickets, I went to the snack bar area and got us two hot dogs. The line started moving, and after the first glut of tickets was gone, Laura and I were at the head of the line with just one woman in front of us. A man came by and handed the woman his extra ticket after his friend was a no show, so then Laura and I were at the head of the line. The second round of tickets came by, and the Shakespeare in the Park employee sorted them into singles and pairs and gave us our tickets. We were so surprised to find ourselves in the front row almost center stage—the best tickets in the house. Laura was exuberant, hopping up and down. “I’ve never been in the front row anywhere!”

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The play was tremendous. Whenever I read Julius Caesar while editing our Grade 10 textbooks at Holt, Rinehart and Winston, I enjoyed it, but when I saw it performed at BAM (the first time I’d ever seen it live), I didn’t really like it. Might have been the nosebleed seats we had—the absolute last row in the theater. This Julius Caesar, though, was fabulous. When we sat down, I saw people miling about onstage, looking at scaffolding, like what we have in New York when buildings are undergoing construction. Some had programs in their hands, and they were putting Post-it notes on the scaffolding, similar to what happened in Union Square station after Trump was elected and everybody was so upset. There was a wall that became an entire passageway, where everybody started writing Post-it notes about how upset they were about the election and it became a thing.

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I thought the people were actual audience members, so I told Laura, “Go on up there, hon, and write something. Put your wish down.” Laura said, “No, I don’t think I should,” and usually she’s so bold. Thank God she didn’t. They were frigging actors, and later, they played the part of the disgruntled public.

It was a clever staging. It’s set in modern times, and Caesar is portrayed as a Trumpian character; Calpurnia as Melania, with an Eastern European accent; and Marc Antony was portrayed as a woman with a “Go USA!” attitude, leggings, and an Aw, shucks! Midwestern accent. I’m guessing she’s supposed to correlate to Mike Pence. It worked really well and was riveting for the first three acts, but the play kind of lost momentum in the last two acts. I still loved it. How they handled the crowd scenes was brilliant and unexpected, and Laura and I craned our heads, trying to catch the rabble-rousers who sprang up in the audience. It felt so interactive, like the demonstrations going on now during this presidency. Some people walked out—about four that I could see—and I remember thinking it was because of the controversial staging decisions or maybe because of the chairs. They are pretty uncomfortable. Then I saw the headlines the next day.

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We still don’t have an answer in this play about what is going to happen to us, much like in J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, but it gives us plenty to think about. We just have to be aware and flexible, roll with the punches, and never give up hope. I think of that old saying, “May you live in interesting times.” I do. I most definitely do. And I’m grateful for Shakespeare in the Park.

Oops! Joyce Carol Oates Does It Again with DIS MEM BER

I finished DIS MEM BER by Joyce Carol Oates, and for me, it’s kind of meh compared to some of her other works. I prefer the short-story collection HEAT, where the females are allowed to be mean and fierce. The female protagonists in this collection seem limp and boxed in, which maybe is the point—that the stories show how girls and women are forced into these positions by society. But I want heroes, dammit.

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There are two stories about widows, which speak to Oates’s own experience, I think, after unexpectedly losing her first husband. And I’m glad to have a few short stories on the subject because I haven’t encountered many. In “Great Blue Heron,” a brother-in-law pressures a widow to sell the lakefront home she’s always lived in and “invest” in some technology that he deems worthy. The other widow story was the reason why I wanted to read this collection (“The Crawl Space”), since it won a Stoker Award this year. It’s a creepy, claustrophobic story about a widow missing the house she once lived in with her husband and feeling like she’s neglected his memory—eventually when she visits, she’s trapped with his possessions . It reminded me of “Hansel and Gretel” when the witch is pushed into the oven.

“Heartbreak” really hit me with younger sister, Steff, who’s terribly jealous of her older sister, Caitlin, and the attention she gets from her slightly older stepcousin Hunt. It ended completely different from how I pictured it. There’s gunplay going on in the story, and Chekhov has said if a gun’s introduced, it has to be used. I still wasn’t ready for the massive guilt, which I think is the right reaction to an “accidental” shooting. We need more stories showing the consequences.

“The Drowned Girl” seems to be a take on the real-life Elisa Lam story, where a young woman drowned in a hotel’s rooftop water tank (the Cecil Hotel) and contaminated the water supply. For more than a week, guests complained about the foul water, and then a security guard went to the top and found the bloated, dead body of the girl. Cops say she had a psychotic break (Lam was bipolar) and killed herself by accident, but there are suspicious things in the case: She was naked, the top to the tank was put back in place (too heavy to do one’s self), and the rape kit was never processed. Anyway, Joyce Carol Oates sets the story in a college town, where the woman is named Miri Kim, and she’s already died, but another student becomes obsessed with the case and water and pipes. It kind of reminded me of the protagonist who goes a little crazy in Joan Didion’s PLAY IT AS IT LAYS.

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Joyce Carol Oates at the 2013 LA Times Festival of Books at the University of Southern California campus on Saturday April 21, 2013, in Los Angeles. (Photo by Katy Winn/Invision/AP)

Sister Love Grows Rancid in Raw

I blundered into Raw not even knowing it was a horror film, which was the most delicious surprise. Buried under deadlines early in the week, I depended on my friends to pick the movie and didn’t check reviews, summaries, or anything. We went to see the eight o’clock showing of Raw at the Angelika on Houston Street, and luckily, I didn’t get anything at the snack bar. This is not the type of movie where you want to have nibbles by your side.

In the French horror film Raw, studious, square Justine (played by Garance Marillier) is taken to veterinary school by her parents, and early on, it’s established that they are strict vegetarians. She’s dropped off in the parking lot of what looks like a sad, gray industrial complex, where her older sister is supposed to meet her. Justine’s parents aren’t surprised when the older sister’s a no-show, and Justine trudges off alone, dragging her red suitcase, to find her dorm—quite different, I think, from how American parents would be portrayed, dropping off their progeny at college.

 

Justine finds out that she’s rooming with a male instead of a female, but he tells her he’s gay so the school counts him as a woman. Not sure what to do with herself, Justine goes to bed, only to be woken in the darkest hours of the night by a team of screaming people dressed in graffiti-covered lab coats with masks covering their faces. They toss all the rookies’ beds, clothes, and other belongings out the windows, trashing their rooms, and Justine and fellow first years are made to crawl through some underground complex until they arrive at a raging party, where Justine is finally reunited with her much cooler older sister Alexia (played by Swiss actress Ella Rumpf). This is just the first part of a hazing ritual that all the rookies have to go through.

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Similar events happen after that, including one where Justine has to eat a rabbit kidney. She balks at this after being a vegetarian for so long, but her older sister bullies her into doing it. The kidney makes her ill, giving her the dry heaves, but that’s nothing compared to the bloody rash she wakes up with. Watching Justine’s itching reminded me of what happens when I go camping and forget the super-DEET bug spray. Just the sound of her fingernails on skin made me cringe. I get baseball-sized welts after mosquitos bite me, and sometimes the itching is so bad that I’ll go after the bites with a hairbrush, resulting in hamburger skin. But that just happens in an isolated patch. Poor Justine has hamburger skin all over her body once she’s done itching.

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Shortly after that, she starts having cravings for meat. They start out mild, with her stealing a hamburger patty from the lunch line and then wolfing down shawarmas with her roommate. But they soon progress to cannibalism, where she experiments with human flesh after an unfortunate waxing incident. It was gag-inducing to watch Justine snacking on a dismembered digit like a chicken wing and hard to look at the screen. I panned across the audience and saw people rolling in their seats, covering their eyes or hiding their faces against their partners. After a few seconds of the eating, though, you do get desensitized. I kept telling myself, it’s just a hot dog, it’s just a hot dog, and it turns out the actress playing Justine had to do something similar to psych herself up for the scene. Marillier told W Magazine, “You know, it was sugar. I was eating candy. If there was any difficulty, it was finding the reality in the scene so I wasn’t thinking, I’m just eating sugar.

 

For showings in Los Angeles, staff handed out barf bags to the audience after fainting was reported from Canadian moviegoers. I’m not sure how the two correlate or if that was a marketing scheme, but the gore isn’t gratuitous. Some of the body horror is uncomfortable, but I think that’s because it’s woven in with some gruesome rituals that females engage in for the sake of beauty.

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My favorite part of Raw is the intense sister relationship between Justine and Alex. It’s well portrayed with moments of extreme tenderness and thuggish brutality. At one moment, Justine and Alex are getting drunk together and laughing, and in the next, they’re trading bite for bite in a parking lot fight, with one bite in particular reminding me of a hellish scene in Cape Fear. There’s jealousy and competition—the essence of a sister relationship. I wish Raw was around years ago when I compiled “Top Five Sister Horror Movies” because it’s definitely a contender. I might have to revise my list.

Agatha Christie Battles the Copyeditor

I make my living as a copyeditor, always following different clients’ style sheets, and I find it strange where people decide to draw the line: no commas after hey when used as a greeting, healthcare as one word, and the weirdest, Jay-Z turning to Jay Z. He was done with hyphens.

I’m reading Agatha Christie’s autobiography right now, and even the grande dame of mysteries had to duke it out with a publishing house’s copyeditor when she published her first mystery, The Mysterious Affair at Styles.

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Her first publisher, The Bodley Head, decided that cocoa should be spelled coco. Christie wrote:

For some strange reason, the house spelling of cocoa—meaning by that a cup of cocoa—was coco, which, as Euclid would have said, is absurd. I was sternly opposed by Miss Howse, the dragon presiding over all spelling in The Bodley Head books. Cocoa, she said, in their publications, was always spelt coco—it was the proper spelling and was a rule of the firm. I produced tins of cocoa and even dictionaries—they had no impression on her. Coco was the proper spelling, she said. It was not until many years later, when I was talking to Allen Lane, John Lane’s nephew, and begetter of Penguin Books, that I said, “You know I had terrible fights with Miss Howse over the spelling of cocoa.”

He grinned. “I know, we had great trouble with her as she got older. She got very opinionated about certain things. She argued with authors and would never give way.”

Innumerable people wrote to me and said, “I can’t understand, Agatha, why you spelled cocoa ‘coco’ in your book. Of course you were never a good speller.” Most unfair. I was not a good speller, but at any rate I could spell cocoa the proper way. What I was, though, was a weak character. it was my first book—and I thought they must know better than I did.

Agatha Christie is my new hero.

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Twisted Twins Jen and Sylvia Soska Join the Boys Horror Club

Twin sisters Jen and Sylvia Soska attribute different reasons for the reason why they got into horror. Sylvia Soska says, “Mom eventually caved in and let us watch Poltergeist when we were ten. We were like, ‘We can handle it, Mom.’ Then bedtime came and we were scared…fucking…shitless. And my mother did something that would forever change the way we look at horror movies. She sat Jen and me down and explained what we had actually seen. She explained the director, the actors, the prosthetics, the sets, everything. And she told us how these were very talented artists who collaborated with the intention of scaring the audience. We were like, ‘Wait a minute. It can be your job to scare people for a living?’”

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But Jen Soska says they got into horror because of traumatic childhood experiences at the hands of others. “We were bullied growing up. We were nerdy and dark and liked horror movies and drama club and comic books. I’m grateful we were bullied because it made us want to stick up for other people being bullied. It’s funny to hear from girls who make horror movies that our message is one of support, but that’s at the heart of American Mary. I think if you look normal, you’re hiding something. But if you wear your Cannibal Holocaust T-shirt, you know what you’re expecting from someone. You know they’re a horror fan.”

The twins directed and wrote their first horror movie in 2009, Dead Hooker in a Trunk, and then went on to their larger production American Mary. “It was one of the strangest experiences of our lives, especially because with Dead Hooker in a Trunk, we were just running around with our friends and cameras and just hoping to god that it would work out and on this one we had a full crew and a cast of some really amazing people,” says Sylvia Soska. “It was still really ambitious, though we did have a modest budget.”

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As far as twin directors, Jen and Sylvia Soska believe they’re the only ones out there. “I know of only us. I know of identical twin actresses and models. We started out wanting to be actors. Nobody ever told me I could be the chairman of my own production company and a director and producer. I always tell girls if you want to be storytellers, don’t chase roles you don’t want to do, just to work,” says Jen Soska.

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Sources:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/02/movies/jen-and-sylvia-soskas-american-mary.html?_r=1

http://www.aintitcool.com/node/62620

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/jan/11/soska-twins-american-mary

Cindy Sherman’s Horror Imagery Helps Her Confront Fears

Cindy Sherman grew up in Long Island, New York, the youngest of five children. She always felt that she had to do something to be noticed since her siblings were so much older and established compared to her. Sherman thinks that’s what led to her dressing up. “There are pictures of me dressed up as an old lady,” she says. “I was more interested in being different from other little girls who would dress up as princesses or fairies or a pretty witch. I would be the ugly old witch or the monster.”

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This continued in her adult life, too. Sherman lived in New York working as a secretary at Artists Space and would sometimes arrive to work dressed as a nurse or Jackie Kennedy. “I’d be home, fooling around with makeup and a costume, maybe picked up at a thrift store, and suddenly I’d look at my watch and go: Oh, wow, I have to get to work. Well, okay, I’ll just go like this,” says Sherman.

 

Her first successful photographs, called Untitled Film Stills, involved Sherman using herself as a model dressed up and posing as screen stars in noirish scenes. This work caused artist Andy Warhol to say, “She’s good enough to be a real actress.”

 

In the late 1980s, Sherman started doing more disturbing photographs of vomit, synthetic pimples, and sex dolls. “Initially, I started that work as a reaction to feeling a little nervous that I was getting successful,” says Sherman. “Do people really like my work, or is it that they’re told to like it as the flavor of the month? So I decided to make these pieces. ‘Well, here you go, collectors. If you want to buy this picture of vomit, I dare you to buy it.’ In a way, it was successful. Those are some of my favorite pieces.”

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These darker photos prompted producer Christine Vachon to ask Sherman if she would ever consider directing a horror film. At first Sherman wasn’t interested because her boyfriend had such a horrible time with the sci-fi flop Johnny Mnemonic, but eventually she was swayed. “The money people wanted to do a series of horror films for an art-house crowd, so they were willing to be experimental,” says Sherman.

This led to Sherman developing the story and then directing Office Killer about a copy editor Dorine (played by Carol Kane) who gets murderous when layoffs happen at the magazine  she works for. Now a cult classic, the movie got terrible reviews when it first came out. “The good thing about horror films…is that nobody expects them to be any good,” says Sherman.

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Other work in the late 1990s after she divorced her husband of sixteen years involved a series of mutilated dolls, which Sherman is particularly proud of. “I was so happy when I was making those pieces. Taking knives to Barbie dolls!”

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Sherman finds herself so attracted to horror because it’s a way for her to confront her deepest, darkest fears. “My biggest fear is a horrible, horrible death, and I think this fascination with the grotesque and with horror is a way to prepare yourself physically if, god forbid, you have to experience something like that,” she says.

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But along with horror she always sees humor, as in her horror comedy Office Killer, and she tries to portray this in her work. “I see humor in almost everything, in even the grotesque things, because I don’t want people to believe in them as if they were a documentary that really does show true horror. I want them to be artificial, so you can laugh or giggle at them, as I do when I watch horror movies,” says Sherman.

 

 

The photographer’s studio is littered with odd things. Photographs of amputees, circus performers, wigs, costumes, and a vintage notecard she found in an old junk shop in the late 1990s. She estimates it’s about a century old and has it pinned up in the studio—it reads: “Fair Deceiver: I did not know until last night that you had a glass eye. Woman you have deceived me and our engagement is off! If I had married you, perhaps I would have found out that you had a cork leg, wore a wig and chewed your gum with false teeth — Anyway, I don’t think you could boil water without burning it. I want a girl that can do several things besides rubbing lip rouge on my cheek. Chase around girlie and get another guy.”

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It provides Sherman with a lot of material to think about. “It is just so sad,” she said. “That this person would say what he’s saying, but also that someone kept it all those years. The poor woman.”

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Except for her one foray in directing, Sherman always works alone. “Briefly in the ’80s I tried using friends and family and even hired an assistant to pose, and I felt like I just had to entertain them, be conscious of “Do you need coffee now? Are you tired? Do you want a break?” And they’d be kind of giggly because they were being made up to look funny. I push myself but I don’t push other people, or if I do, I’m apologizing because we’re going too late or whatever. Even having an assistant around, I’d feel self-conscious at times, like I’d better look busy now, rather than just spacing out, looking at images online or in magazines, or whatever I might do.”

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Sources:

http://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/art-books-music/interviews/g1802/cindy-sherman-artist-interview-0212

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/fashion/cindy-shermans-vintage-notecard.html?_r=0

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/arts/design/moma-to-showcase-cindy-shermans-new-and-old-characters.html

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2000/05/15/her-secret-identities

Anne Rice Reinvents Vampires After Tragedy

Anne Rice was born in New Orleans as Howard Allen O’Brien (the Howard came from her father), but she spontaneously renamed herself Anne when a nun asked her name at school. Her father worked all over the United States for the postal service, and Rice did not meet him until she was four years old. Her mother was an alcoholic who died of complications from the disease when Rice was fifteen. “’It was from alcoholism,” says Rice. “As a matter of fact, I think she swallowed her tongue.”

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Rice always felt odd and like she didn’t belong at school and blamed that on the secret life she had to live as a child. “I never felt at home with other kids,” she says. “I felt like at any time I could make mistakes and be exposed as weird. I guess my mother’s drinking marked me out in my own eyes—the fact that it was a huge secret, and I couldn’t tell anyone, and you never knew how she’d be when you got home.”

Rice used writing as a form of therapy after she lost her daughter Michelle to leukemia when she was only five. “It was a nightmare,” says Rice, and she and her husband turned to alcohol to cope with the loss. “I was nothing and nobody. I had no prestige. I wasn’t a mother. I was a bad wife—I never cleaned house. I was no good at anything.”

During that dark time, Rice revisited an old story she had written about a vampire named Louis from the eighteenth century who was now living in New Orleans. Something about the character and setting clicked into place for her. “Suddenly, when I was in the skin of Louis, when I was in this cartoon character—he really was a cartoon vampire with a cape and black clothes and bare white skin—when I slipped into this seemingly unreal thing and looked through his eyes, I could make my whole world real,” says Rice. “He was able to say, ‘Let me tell you about New Orleans, this was our world,’ and I could write about all the beauty. Even the most fictional stuff in there was somehow out of my real world. It fell into place and was coherent.”

This story turned into her best-selling first novel Interview with the Vampire. Rice says about the experience, “I didn’t know it at the time, but it was all about my daughter, the loss of her and the need to go on living when faith is shattered. The lights do come back on, no matter how dark it seems, and I’m sensitive now, more than ever, to the beauty of the world—and more resigned to living with cosmic uncertainty.”

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But in order to do that, first Rice had to kill off her darling. Claudia, a child vampire and stand-in for Michelle, had a different ending in Rice’s first draft. But her editor at Knopf pushed for a stronger ending, and Rice realized while revising “that Claudia had really been meant to die at the end of Interview the way Michelle had died.”

When she cheated on Claudia’s death originally, Rice says she started having a nervous breakdown and her mind knew that wasn’t the correct ending. She says, “I almost died myself and went kind of crazy. I saw germs on everything and washed my hands fifty times and really cracked up. If somebody is meant to die and you don’t do it, you’re really risking your well-being at the end of the book.”

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Two years after Interview with the Vampire was published, Rice gave birth to her son, Christopher, and she and her husband stopped drinking entirely. Instead, she focused on her writing career.

 

Rice has no definite writing process. She prefers now to write in the late morning, but when she penned Interview with the Vampire, she wrote at night—sometimes not starting until 1:00 a.m. “I have never had any one hard and fast method. No storyboard, no. But I do think a lot before ‘plunging,’ and do work out a crude road map of sorts, but I revise constantly, moving back and forth in the growing draft as I work, and sometimes throw out great chunks of material and start over when I feel I should,” says Rice. “But I have written whole books with no real plan—just a concept or a character—at the beginning. There’s just no hard and fast rule at all. Whatever works, whatever causes the prose to flow, the characters to begin talking and walking, whatever makes a world slowly form all around the characters.”

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Rice does like to work in pink-and-blue flannel nightgowns—what she considers her work clothes—and has a closet full of them because “they shrink and get rough after you wash them a few times.”

 

“I think what’s important is that you write what’s really, really intense and what gives you the greatest thrill,” says Rice. “All I know is that the supernatural gives me that intensity whether I’m reading it or writing it. I just find it the most powerful means that I have for writing about real life.”

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Using vampires, Rice feels she was able to explore more what it means to be human. “Here you have a monster with a soul that’s immortal, yet in a biological body. It’s a metaphor for us, as it’s very difficult to realize that we are going to die, and day to day we have to think and move as though we are immortal,” says Rice. “A vampire like Lestat in Interview…is perfect for that because he transcends time—yet he can be destroyed, go mad and suffer; it’s intensely about the human dilemma.”

 

Lestat, the bad boy vampire character who defies the rules of the vampire community, may be Rice’s most beloved character, and she does have a soft spot for her creation. “I loved being Lestat more than anything in the world,” she says.

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Sources:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/anne-rice-the-interview-with-the-vampire-novelist-on-her-daughters-death-living-through-her-own-9829902.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/27/garden/the-coffin-was-too-confining.html

http://www.examiner.com/article/anne-rice-on-the-writing-process

http://www.nytimes.com/1990/10/14/magazine/novels-you-can-sink-your-teeth-into

Alexandra Sokoloff Goes from Hauntings to Serial Killers

Originally Alexandra Sokoloff considered herself a drama kid and threw herself into acting. She started doing theater in sixth grade and majored in it at college, the University of California, Berkeley. But when Sokoloff wrote a one-act play, she loved the feeling of control that writing gave her, and from there, she went into writing screenplays after teaching herself the business by working as a reader for a studio.

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“It didn’t take me that long to get established. My first screenplay won a UCLA Diane Thomas Award and was optioned. My second screenplay, cowritten with David Arata, sold to Twentieth Century Fox in a bidding war, and I’ve been lucky enough never to have a day job since,” says Sokoloff.

 

Sokoloff was able to make a living with her screenwriting for ten years, but she found it frustrating when others were telling her how the story should go. “Hollywood is a seductive place to work. But it’s a sad fact that screenwriters have less and less creative power in an increasingly corporate industry,” says Sokoloff. “When it’s all about box office, and corporate executives are making story decisions, what you get is what we’ve been seeing on the big screen for years now—a mind-numbing parade of sequels and remakes. And that was really what drove me to start writing novels.”

 

Sokoloff’s first horror novel The Harrowing was originally a screenplay, but when deals feel apart, the author ended up buying the rights back and rewriting the story as a novel. “I wanted to take a bunch of misfit, troubled college kids and put them into a situation similar to Shirley Jackson’s great The Haunting of Hill House, and play with the idea that the emotional dynamic between them attracts an equally troubled spirit—or that the whole thing is just psychological or a prank that gets out of hand and builds its own momentum,” says Sokoloff.

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Writing a novel was so satisfying that Sokoloff went that direction with her work. “Although it’s sometimes sheer agony, writing a novel is about seven billion times more satisfying than writing a script, for the simple reason that when you finish a novel, it’s a complete work,” she says. “When you finish a script, it’s just the beginning of a process that may never amount to anything except a paycheck. For me, there’s no comparison.”

 

The writer has always been attracted to the darker elements of life and had some of her own harrowing real-life experiences as well. She says, “I was always attracted to ghost stories—my dad used to tell them around the campfire and he loved horror and suspense—books, movies, plays, anything. I developed a taste for being scared senseless. But also from the time I was a very young child I was very sensitive to the fact that there’s a lot of weirdness out there, and a lot of danger from unstable people.”

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“My family did quite a bit of traveling, so along with all the good stuff—great art, ancient cultures, different mores and political beliefs—I was exposed to disturbing images and situations: poverty, desperation, oppression, madness. Also, I was almost abducted as a child, so I was aware that there are people out there who have something terribly wrong with them, who actively want to hurt and destroy,” says Sokoloff.

 

Lately, Sokoloff has been writing a series about an FBI agent who’s after the rarest creature of all—a female serial killer. Sokoloff says, “I’ve been studying serial killers for years. Years ago, when I was a screenwriter writing crime thrillers, I tracked down the FBI’s textbook on sexual homicide before it was ever available to the public. I attend Citizens Police Academies and other law enforcement and forensics workshops whenever I get the chance. If I know there’s a behavioral profiler at a writing convention, I stalk that person so I can pick his or her brain about serial killers.”

 

In her studies, Sokoloff was puzzled to learn that there has never really been a female serial killer and decided she wanted to tackle the subject. “Here’s what’s really interesting. Arguably, there’s never been any such thing as a female serial killer in real life. The women that the media holds up as serial killers actually operate from a completely different psychology from the men who commit what the FBI calls ‘sexual homicide,’” says Sokoloff.

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“Even Aileen Wuornos, infamous in the media as ‘America’s First Female Serial Killer,’ wasn’t a serial killer in the sense that male killers like Bundy, Gacy, and Kemper were. The profilers I’ve interviewed call Wuornos a spree killer with a vigilante motivation. So what’s that about? Why do men do it and women don’t? Women rarely kill, compared to men—but when it happens, what does make a woman kill?”

 

It’s questions like these that make Sokoloff a writer. She says, “For better or worse, my core theme as a writer is, ‘What can good people do about the evil in the world?’”

 

Sokoloff is sick of seeing women portrayed as prey and rape victims in literature and film. At a recent writers conference, she says, “Prominently displayed in the book tent was a new crime fiction release that featured a crucified woman on the cover. I’m writing these books because I’ve had enough of violence against women in fiction and film.

 

In her own novels, Sokoloff says, “I do not depict rape or torture on the page. I can assure you, no one gets crucified. I think real-life crime is horrific enough without rubbing a reader’s face in it or adding absurd embellishments (my personal literary pet peeve is the serial killer with an artistic streak or poetic bent).”

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Sources:

http://axsokoloff.blogspot.com/

http://www.thebigthrill.org/2015/06/cold-moon-by-alexandra-sokoloff/

http://www.wow-womenonwriting.com/39-FE5-AlexandraSokoloff.html

Amanda Hocking Self-Publishes Vampire Series and Gets a Book Deal

Amanda Hocking became the self-publishing wunderkind after her vampire and troll series took off, prompting a Big Five publisher to snap up her work, something happening more and more often with indie authors. She was born in Austin, Minnesota, which has the distinction of being the birthplace of SPAM, the chopped meat in a can. For as long as she can remember, Hocking has been telling stories. “My mom has a tape from when I was, like, two years old, talking with my grandma, telling her a story that’s really elaborate about werewolves and wolves,” she says.

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Hocking had a stack of novels she had been working on, and in her twenties she started sending them out to agents (more than fifty), but all she got back were form rejection letters. She studied different genres and decided to try her hand at paranormal romance, writing a novel in fifteen days. Then instead of sending the manuscript out to agents, she self-published. At first, sales were slow—a book or two a day—but then things really picked up. She was getting requests to do interviews with bloggers and had positive reviews of her work. Soon “I sold, like, six thousand books that month or something,” says Hocking. “It was a pretty dramatic jump.”

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Hocking decided to go the self-publishing route because she wasn’t getting anywhere submitting to agents. “I once heard the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results. I’d heard that some authors were self-publishing and finding a decent readership, so I thought, Why not? I knew I needed to try something different, so I did,” says Hocking.

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Hocking’s writing process is intense, and she’s published seventeen books since she started making her work public in 2010. She says, “When I get an idea, I think about it for a few weeks, and then I outline. Once I have an outline ready, I sit down at the computer and write. Sometimes, I’ll write for eight to twelve hours a night. When I’m writing, I usually shut myself off from the world for a few weeks and just write. Then I’m done and I come back to real life.”

Her advice to writers who’d like to follow in her footsteps is to keep working on new ideas, like Andy Warhol recommended years ago—always go on to your next work. “Don’t get married to your first book or idea. Write your first book, put it in a drawer, and then write your second. It seems to me that a lot of writers get hung up on their first idea, their first book, but here’s the truth: Almost universally speaking, the first book you write will be terrible,” says Hocking.

“I’m sure there are exceptions to the rule, but I would say that rarely is the first published work by an author the first thing they wrote. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t love your first book or take pride in it or work hard on it—because you really should. It just means you shouldn’t get hooked on that one thing. Write another book and another. Then go back and look at your first book and see how you feel about it. But whether you love it or hate it, just keep writing and reading.”

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Hocking would like to do more horror writing. She says, “I’ve played around with horror, which I think is a sister genre to fantasy. I love writing about monsters and villains and otherworldly creatures.”

After doing so many book series, Hocking is working on a stand-alone novel that will be coming out in 2016, as well as a few projects she calls “duologies.” Hocking describes her upcoming work Freeks as “a YA paranormal romance novel set in the 1980s that follows a traveling sideshow. I pitched it as Pretty in Pink meets The Lost Boys (minus the vampires) meets Carnivale.”

Hocking’s duology will be about teenage Valkyries. She says, “I knew that I wanted to do something with it and the idea just kept nagging me. It’s just such a cool idea, of women deciding who lived during battle.”

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Sources:

http://www.goodreads.com/interviews/show/1004.Amanda_Hocking

http://www.npr.org/2012/01/08/144804084/a-self-published-authors-2-million-cinderella-story

http://happyeverafter.usatoday.com/2015/01/07/amanda-hocking-interview-frostfire/

http://www.sheknows.com/entertainment/articles/951669/author-amanda-hocking-talks-switched

Hocking inks 6-figure deal for 3 new books

V. C. Andrews Made ‘Fairy-Tale Horror’ with ‘Flowers in the Attic’

V. C. Andrews’s books have become cult classics, but when they first came out, her publisher wasn’t sure how to classify them so they were labeled horror and actually outsold Stephen King’s work at the time. Andrews was born Cleo Virginia Andrews in Portsmouth, Virginia, and lived there most of her life—much of it while ill and confined to bed and a wheelchair.

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Andrews fell down a flight of stairs when she was in high school, and after she had surgery, she began to suffer from arthritis that fused her spine. She was only able to complete high school with the help of private tutors and then worked as an artist, drawing portraits of apple-cheeked girls and still lifes of flowers that are quite at odds with the dark portraits later used to illustrate her series. She lived alone with her mother Lillian until she died of cancer at sixty-three.

 

Her editor, Ann Patty, bought the ninety-eight-page manuscript of Flowers in the Attic in 1978, though it needed a lot of editorial guidance. Before she offered to buy the book for a $7,500 advance, one publishing insider said the manuscript had been rejected more than twenty-four times by various editors. Patty told a marketing director who complained about Andrews’s stilted dialogue, “It’s her style—it may be awful, but it is a style, and it will be read as original.”

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Patty had already gone through two revisions with Andrews (the first one causing the manuscript to increase to six hundred pages), and in her second editorial letter, she said, “I’ve frequently noted where you start sentences with adverbs or reverse the natural order of a sentence. It’s good to do this sometimes, but you do it too much, and it often makes for rather awkward reading.”

 

Andrews was influenced by fairy tales when she was young. “I loved the fairy tales. But there is an element of horror in fairy tales, so that when I would go through the woods, I was always looking for something—a witch, an ogre, something scary—and it was never there, and that was a little bit disappointing. I didn’t want a real horror, liked a rapist or a murderer, but I wanted a fairy-tale horror,” she said.

 

Youth is an obsession in Andrews’s books and it appears to have been a topic that was always on her mind. After an unflattering article ran in People magazine, where she said her age was inflated and photographs portrayed her as an ancient recluse, Andrews rarely gave interviews. “The first interview I ever had was with People magazine,” said Andrews. “And they told me, quite frankly, that they come to get dirt. They ask all of your friends and everybody they can find, ‘Tell us the dirt about V. C. Andrews.’ And when they don’t find any, they make up things. For instance, I wouldn’t tell her my age. So she went around and found somebody who told them I was older then I was. I said, ‘You must have found an enemy.’ And the reporter said, ‘What are you trying to hide?’”

 

Andrews was so angry about the interview and pictures printed that she wrote her relative: “How dare you say those photographs in People’s magazine are good? They were awful! I don’t look like that old woman peeking out of the window! I hated the photo of me in the chair! I refuse to allow pictures of me sitting in that thing—but they sneaked in one, and I couldn’t tell when the photographer was shooting the entire time she was here—about six hours. We were taken out to lunch in a nice French restaurant, then back home, and all the time I was interviewed. Taped too. Dolly Landon wrote thirty pages and it was edited down to that short amount you read—thank goodness. From now on I am demanding editorial and pictorial control or NO interview! I showed the magazine to my photographer friend and he said the one in the window had been airbrushed to make my face shadowy and spooky—all to sensationalize the type of books I write. No wonder movie stars hate journalists! I’m with them all the way! They snoop, pry, question, when my life is none of their damn business!”

 

Andrews said a lot of people assumed her work was autobiographical—that she was a victim of incest and had been locked away by relatives who wanted her unseen, as happens in her famous Dollanganger series. “They see me as an abused child who has really suffered. They feel sorry for me, terribly sorry that I have gone though this awful abuse and was then locked away. A lot of them say, ‘Don’t be ashamed that you are in love with your brother.’ All of these kinds of things,” said Andrews.

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Instead, Andrews said her family was very nurturing and supporting. “A lot of people think I was tortured, but my parents didn’t do anything. They didn’t beat me. They didn’t whip me. They didn’t lock me away. I didn’t even go hungry. And I had a lot of pretty clothes,” she said.

 

Her editor says that the Dollanganger and Casteel series, which make up the authentic V. C. Andrews canon, along with stand-alone My Sweet Audrina (numerous other series are written by ghostwriter Andrew Neiderman hired by the Andrews estate), are both based on true stories. Andrews heard them when she was in the hospital for surgery. It was “some doctor there,” says Patty. “So I’d guess that some aspects of it were true—at least the aspect of kids being hidden away. Whether the twins were real, the sex, the time frame, probably not. I think it was just the concept of kids hidden in the attic so the mother could inherit a fortune. The idea for the Heaven series is also based on a true story and how that all came about—I will write about that in the memoir I’m writing about my relationship with Virginia and her books.”

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Sources:

http://www.completevca.com/art_people.shtml

http://the-toast.net/2013/08/12/planting-flowers/

V.C. Andrews: A Critical Companion by E. D. Huntley