Fear and Fantasy

The other day I heard an interview on NPR about fear and fantasy, which the interviewee was saying were two of the strongest human emotions. Both are embraced in our home during Halloween, which is our favorite holiday. Even the dog is not spared and must wear a costume.

This weekend we shuffled our way to the Thrill the World Thriller dance, a Bollywood Dance party and a karaoke party. We were formally the 99% and 1%, but now roam the land as 100% zombie.

We also went to the zombie walk Sunday but couldn’t get our act together to dress up. We did love these two outfits.

I know the Johnny Depp, Sweeny Todd and Jack Sparrow aren’t zombies, but aren’t they cool?

Andy was kind of a mini celebrity Saturday night with people stopping him on the street asking to take a picture. It was like when we were in China and he was the only white guy in the village we visited.

Dylan took more of a flight of fantasy this year and made her costume out of a 100 feathers and 20 sticks of glue, using her handy dandy glue gun.

I realized that even dressed as a zombie I still look like a panda so I figure I might as well embrace my inner panda this Halloween.

Some of my favorite writers (Stephen King—in his early days, Neil Gaiman, Phillip Pullman) explore fear and fantasy, which is where I’m going to reside for the next month. November is National Novel Writing Month, (Nanowrimo) where thousands of writers try to write a 50,000 word novel (200 pages) in one month. I’ve done this twice before and wrote two novels, The Edge of Mediocrity and A Million Dead Writers. The results were not pretty, but they’re not supposed to be. The purpose of this event is to provide an opportunity for a giant brain dump (zombies would love that) and to get the essence of a story onto the page.

Ever since reading Stephen King’s, The Stand, when I was in 8^th grade, I’ve been fascinated with dystopian stories. So, I’m going to take a stab at writing one during this Nanowrimo. I’ve got a title, main characters, a theme and some subplots, but I’m still trying to figure out the main plot. Suffice it to say, the scary at our house will not end on Halloween.