What it Be, Chickadee

My bedside table is stacked high with various books...nonfiction books on the writing process by Stephen King, short stories by Stephen king, short stories by Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House (the third best horror novel I've ever read...first best is Rosemary's Baby, second best is The Shining) by Shirley Jackson, The Happy Birthday of Death by Gregory Corso etc. etc. (!!!!!) Yesterday I wrote ten prose poems for a collection I'm calling True Blue Confessions. I'm not happy with the one about the lesbian "hair cutter" in Albuquerque. This is the second or third poem I've written about that particular character. That was the first and last time (I hope) I ever cried while getting my hair cut. I don't have a problem with lesbians...I might be one and just not know it yet...but I had a problem with the lesbian hair cutter in Albuquerque who made me cry. I am very tender headed. She yanked at my hair and told me I had too much hair more than once. She probably didn't hate me but I felt like she did.

The mother of the protagonist in Mordiscado is a lesbian. The protagonist in Mordiscado thinks she might be a lesbian because she has a crush on her husband's mother's ghost. Also...in Vegas she was so turned on by a topless dancer that she offered the topless dancer a thousand dollars to go back to the hotel with her and her husband, Alex. Insanity!

I wrote Mordiscado for NaNoWriMo in 2006. The inspiration behind Mordiscado: I was living in my husband's grandmother's old house in Albuquerque. There was a bad bad vibe to that house. The bathroom off the kitchen reminded me of Carrie. I don't know why. My psychic friend from California (she prophesied that I would have a son and that he would be hell on wheels...true dat) came to visit and she said she sensed a negative presence in the kitchen. I tried to exorcise the kitchen with Pine-Sol. Didn't work. So Mordiscado is about a young married couple, Zoe and Alex, who inherit a house from Alex's grandmother (she died of natural causes while sitting in her recliner watching a soap opera) and against Alex's wishes move in. Weird shit starts to happen but it only happens to Zoe. Alex is immune.

I'm now on page 43, chapter thirteen and I am struggling like a chipmunk in a tube sock (my son's newest favorite movie is that god awful Alvin and the Chipmunks movie starring Jason Lee...his favorite part is when Alvin screams "CHEESE BALLS!"). There is too much dialogue between Zoe and her mother. They haven't seen each other since Zoe was eight (Zoe's mother left Zoe and her father to be with her lesbian lover) but still. This problem crops up in all my novels: too much dialogue. I mean, my gawd, I even made the TOILET talk in Nova's Gone Potty. I'm trying to be all poetic and shit with my prose (HA) and I'm putting in tons of psychotic inner dialogue. But this novel might not make it. In the original Mordiscado I included e-mail messages from Jesus, blocks of text from the King James Bible (so I cheated, I guess...yeah, I definitely cheated...in the end, I only cheated myself) and this slam poet character named Conan and his poem...Pondering My Penis. I don't know what the radically revised Mordiscado will turn into. I feel compelled to include a therapist and a psychic who refuses to give Zoe a reading. That really happened to my mom's best friend in the early '80s...this was right after that monster F5 tornado ripped into Wichita Falls, Texas like a demon from hell...the week after, actually...and my mom and her best friend from Archer City (Texasville, home to one of my favorite writers, Larry McMurtry) went to Wichita Falls to see a psychic. The psychic refused to read Brenda's cards. Brenda died of leukemia a couple of years after that.

In the original Mordiscado the house burns down with Zoe in it. I'd like to keep that ending. Before the house burns down the haunting intensifies and Zoe just completely breaks down. I'm currently living in a huge two-story house that was built in the early 20th century...there is no central air-conditioning and I do my writing in the library, the darkest room in the house. So that adds to the horror.

When I was in college I would read Edgar Allan Poe by candlelight in my dorm.
When I was a little girl I would beg my babysitters to tell me scary stories.
When I was a little girl I enjoyed scaring the hell out of my siblings and cousins.
I have a wealth of horror to draw from...

thus. I was born to write horror novels. Watch out, Stephen King. Prepare to be dethroned.

P.S. I just Googled "Mordiscado" and found THIS REVIEW!!! I'd never read this before. Thanks, man! Hopefully you'll like the revision even more! Now I am bound and determined to revise and sell Mordiscado. Because of this one beautiful review. Thank you!!!