Monday, September 28, 2015

Finding Inspiration in a Hospital Basement

My son has been going to various appointments at Children's Hospital of Buffalo for all of his 18 years. The hospital is short on space, so a few of the clinics are in the basement, among them, the lab that makes his AFOs (leg braces).

The basement is a series of winding corridors. Pipes and wires clutter every inch of the ceiling. The hospital staff stack bags of garbage up along the walls. You can hear the banging and clanging from the hospital laundry. I imagine there's more than a few critters skulking around the basement.

We happened to take a wrong turn after his appointment one time and got turned around. We wandered for a bit before someone pointed us in the right direction. Both he and I remarked that the basement would make a wonderful setting for a horror story.

I'm using what I saw as the basis for a sequence in The Gray Men, Book Two. One of my characters has been locked in a rather unpleasant basement room (the hospital in my story is abandoned) and she's not alone. I think it would be a horrible fate to be locked in a winding, twisty basement, especially after dark when few people are around. Pretty much anything the writer sees can be fodder for a story. With horror writers, it's always about imagining the worst happening and then dumping that on your characters.

Sunday, September 13, 2015

The Day's Work

Wrote just over 1,000 words yesterday on the Gray Men Trilogy. I'm into the third book. Also editing the second book at the same time. I'm not sure when the second book will be released. Hoping sometime in the fall.

I put my undead serial killer novel Where The Dead Go in KDP/Select/Kindle Unlimited. It's available to borrow with a Kindle Unlimited Subscription.

The Fall Soccer league started and my thirteen-year-old scored two goals in a 4-3 victory by the Italy Gallons. Not sure why they're called the Gallons, but the kids had a great time and seeing the coach give my son an enthusiastic high five after his second goal was cool.

Bad things are happening to my characters in the Gray Men. This should be your mantra as a writer: Make them suffer.

Here's a snippet:

Wincing, she grabbed the rat. It squealed like it had been set on fire. She twisted in opposite directions. Something cracked inside the rat and it went limp. She tossed it aside and got to her feet.

She was soaked. Chills racked her body. She bent over and picked up the pipe, readied herself for the next wave.




Saw A Quiet Place II This Weekend

Jenn and I went for lunch yesterday, then saw A Quiet Place II at the Aurora Theater. The Aurora is a great little theater. One screen, and...