Why Horror?
The first horror movie I remember seeing was Island of Terror. A 1966 British creature feature starring Peter Cushing, where monsters attack a remote island and sucked the bones out of victims. I watched it with a friend and had no problem with the content until my friend said it was based on a true story. I wish I could say this caused me to be a lifelong horror fan, but I was six and instead I had nightmares of monsters sucking my bones out.
Maybe you wonder if it came later when I was 11 and my friend’s parents decided it was a good idea to take a bunch of 11 year old girls to see Poltergeist. Nope. Every night after I made sure my closet door was closed before I went to sleep. Even though now I consider Poltergeist one of my favorite horror movies (Not number 1, that distinction goes to 28 Days Later).
What really got me into horror was Halloween (the holiday, not the movie) and Stephen King. I love Halloween. I grew up without cable or streaming. That meant I could only see Halloween stuff around Halloween. And I watched it all from kid’s stuff and when I was older slasher films. I devoured everything that Stephen King ever wrote. I remember reading the 1100 page novel It over a weekend.
Where does the writing come in?
It wasn’t just horror, I devoured everything considered weird before it was cool. Sci-fi, comics, video games, fantasy and LARP. I was a nerd, an oddball, and just weird. At 14 I fell in love with Dr. Who and from that created a LARP character, The Doctor’s cousin another time lord named Dr. Where. I started writing very bad Dr. Where fan fiction and some even worse poetry (Not about Dr. Where). The poetry got a little better, the writing moved far from fanfiction to (Hopefully) better short stories, novels, and essays.
General Bio.
I’ve been writing seriously since the late nineties. I’ve been a librarian for 20 years. I live in New York with my husband, author Jon Frater, several kitties and other humans.