Italia!

I have exciting news to share! At the end of October I'm embarking on my first international tour. Thank you so much to my Italian publishers, De Agostini, and the Lucca Comics and Games Festival for inviting me to visit their beautiful country. You can find details on the festival here, where I'll be the patroness of Lucca's Halloween party! This looks to be the Halloween party of all Halloween parties, and given that Halloween is my favorite holiday I cannot wait!

If you happen to be in Italy, here is my tour schedule. I'll post more details as I have them!

October 28th, Friday: Milano
October 29th, Saturday: Bologna; Lucca, in the
evening
October 30th, Sunday: Lucca
October 31st, Monday: Lucca
November 1st, Tuesday: Lucca

Halloween in Italy! Davvero!

A Day with Shay

The best things in life are often unexpected. 2010 will go down as my favorite Halloween weekend on record because I was surrounded by family and friends at the Nightshade release party. I'll do full-party blogging soon (I'm waiting on all the pictures to come in), but I wanted to do a Halloween post about joyful surprises.

I was shocked by the number of people who drove long distances to come to party. Dear, dear friends came to surprise me including my high school English teacher, Mrs. Heisler, who always encouraged my writing dreams.

One of the best surprises of this entire experience, however, have been the new and wonderful friendships I've made through Nightshade. My awesome teams at InkWell and Penguin - the amazing YA authors I've met at conferences. And then there's Shay.
Actually he's Will Browning - the actor who brought Shay to life in the Shadow Days webisodes. Getting to know Will has been awesome because not only is he incredibly talented, he's also one of the loveliest people I've ever met.

I was honored that he came all the way from Florida to attend the Nightshade party. And (bonus!) he spent the weekend hanging out with my family and friends.

We took a tour of Minneapolis and St. Paul highlights and he took lots of pictures.

We carved pumpkins
and named them Bateman and Sebastian.
And he stayed up until 3 a.m. with me watching Labyrinth.
As an author, I thought there could be nothing better than having a talented actor portray one of my characters. I was wrong. What's even better is meeting a kindred spirit and making a friend for life.

Thanks for everything, Will!

Wishing all of you a Happy Halloween full of more treats than tricks!

And a huge thanks to DJ for sending me a picture of his pumpkin! Yay!!!

Hallo-Week Wrap Up

It's November 1. Thank you for all the great Hallo-week comments!

Your reward: a very short story!

The Dogs of All Hallow's Eve
(Featuring Gwyn the border collie and Rocco the pug)

Trees stripped bare stretched toward the full moon as Gwyn and Rocco waited.
With patient eyes and wagging tails they donned their costumes, transformed into a creature from below and the world's most dangerous pug.
Flickering candles gleamed within the jack-o-lanterns on the doorstep. And then...doorbell! Devil Gwyn and Karate Rocco run to the door, instantly becoming the highlight of our household - better even than the candy.
And so it went on as dozens of children appeared at the door: the classics - fairies, witches, Death himself, to the current - Batman, Spiderman, Optimus Prime, G.I. Joe. So many costumes.

Gwyn tried to sneak away and go trick or treating with the crowds of little ghouls and goblins tramping down the block. Devil dog indeed.At last the bell fell silent. Costumes were shed.

Exhausted from the busy night of greeting, wagging, showing off their Halloween style - there was only one thing left to do.

Happy Halloween!!!

(No this is not my house, I just wish I'd had the energy to make this lovely setting)

The rituals:

Morning - Watching Halloween episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, South Park, and Simpsons whilst lounging in bathrobe and sipping coffee
Afternoon - prep for harvest feast, carve pumpkins (why can I never manage to get this done before Halloween!)

Evening - friends arrive for harvest feast, dogs forced into costumes (I'll have about 1 minute to snap photos before they are shredded), candy to trick or treaters

Night - Scary movie-a-thon! On the docket: Carrie, The Craft, Rosemary's Baby, Night of the Living Dead, Donnie Darko

What will you be doing this Halloween?

Location, Location, Location

Up to this point in Hallo-week posts we've focused on the whosits and whatsits of scaryville.

But ghosts, goblins, witches, and werewolves would not be half as scary if they didn't have the right backdrop in which to weave their spells and stalk their prey.

Today's post features three of my favorite spooky settings.

1) The windswept moors at night.You're probably alone but if you're not you have just one friend with you. All that means is that one of you is fodder. Why oh why did you wander off the road? I know those villagers were creepy but they were trying keep you alive!

2) Caves
As someone who is claustrophobic, I find caves utterly horrifying. But also fascinating. Caves are nature's labyrinths - mysterious, beautiful and chock full of critters that want to eat you.


3) The gothic manor (of course!)
So many rooms, so much potential for mayhem. Who lives here? Dracula, a witch, a hopeless romantic who just happened to lock his deranged wife in the attic (yes, I think Jane Eyre is horror)?

What locations make the best frights for you?

Of "Wolves" and "Were"

Etymology, or the history of words, is kind of a hobby of mine. I'm no expert, but where words originate and how they change over time fascinates me.

And did you know words can go extinct? No one says, "I lost my azaleas to last night's gelicide (frost)," anymore. Gelicide - cool huh? Really evokes that whole 'killing frost' thing. Perhaps we should bring it back.

But I digress. Today's Hallo-week post is about werewolves. Werewolf has a particularly nifty etymology. What's interesting is that the idea of "were" (man) combining with "wolf" (uh...wolf) has so many origin points. There's the possible Old English 'wer,' but there's also the Gothic 'wair,' German 'ver,' and Norse 'verr.'

The variety of language birthplaces for werewolf is matched by the diversity of lycanthropic legends across cultures. So many, in fact, that I'd have to write a book to recount them all (...and that may happen). But for now you can visit this very cool site to read up.

So where do our furry friends fall in the pecking order of classic Halloween beasties? According to the Wall Street Journal werewolves are about to usurp vampires in the pop culture spot light (*rubs hands* excellent).

So whether you're a fan of the New Moon variety of wolves.



Or the more classic Wolf Man -



Get ready to howl. Oh, and Nightshade has the awesomest werewolves of all time. Just sayin.

Something Witchy This Way Comes

Witches took the poll! So we'll start Hallo-week posts with witches.

Witches are a favorite subject of mine; the period of history I study features the witch hunting craze in Europe and North America as well as the shift from spiritual to scientific with the rise of the Enlightenment.

Witches have a traumatic history. Much maligned and misunderstood, the persecution of witches was a means to suppress female sites of power while consolidated that of patriarchal religious institutions.

Though accused of consorting with the devil and other demonic spirits, witchcraft is actually a means of channeling natural spirits, of working with the earth to produce desired effects. Of course, like any form of power, witchcraft can be abused; thus the Wiccan mantra 'and harm ye none,' as well as the rule of returns - anything sent out into the world will return to the witch three fold.
Since scary witches capture the public eye more easily than benevolent ones, Hollywood has done its part to reinforce the idea that witches are in league with evil forces (okay, okay I have to confess now there are bad witches in my book - but there are good witches too!!) but there are still places in the world where witches are revered and not reviled.

When I visited Bavaria (my father-in-law's home), I was struck by the witches that were everywhere. Effigies of women with brooms, cauldrons, in flight, sat in store windows, hung in kitchens and living rooms. When I inquired about this abundance of witches I was told that in Bavarian lore witches are benevolent women, guardians of the home. To have images of witches in your house brings luck.

As much as historical witches interest me, I'm still a sucker for the Hollywood variety. Particularly the angsty teen ilk. So here are two of my Halloween picks: boarding schools, romance, witchcraft? Yes, please. (And both feature good and bad witches...ahem.)

Hallo-week

Starting tomorrow I'll be featuring a week of thrills and chills on the blog. Halloween is my favorite holiday and I'll be talking about monsters, scary places, and Halloween-esque history.

To start us off, let's hear about your favorite stars of the Monster Mash! Not on the list? Write-in ballots welcome in the comments!!

How I Gained My Edge?

Once upon I time I was a horror wimp. I had a zero-tolerance scary movie policy. If it could make me scream, cringe, or dripped blood I couldn't take it.

I had nightmares after seeing the Poseidon Adventure: no joke. I'm a bit claustrophobic and I partly blame this film (the other part I blame on the time I got stuck in a sleeping bag).

As Halloween approaches I'm seeing perpetual homage to frights and freaks. Blogs posting lists of the all-time best horror films, windows full of spiders and ghosts, and I realize that at some point I shed my fragile disposition for a tougher one. And I'm wondering when that happened.

Was it simply a result of growing up? Maybe it's that my research focuses on violence in human history and at a certain point I just detached from the visceral fear that had accompanied scary stories. Maybe fear of the things that go bump in the night is always accompanied by fascination.

Because everyone loves vampires right now.
Even Buffy couldn't hate all of them.
I used to hide from scary stories, but now I write them. It was a bit startling when my editor and I concluded that we shouldn't have the swing set in my author photo because the content of my book was too dark for playgrounds. And it really is. And that's who I am now. I don't hide from the dark; I embrace it.

It's not that I don't get scared. There are moments when I'm writing that I freak out, shriek, ditch my laptop and run from the room. At which my husband says "what's wrong" and I say "I'm so scared - the story is so scary!" and he says "but you're writing it."

But it doesn't matter. That's living in the world you write, feeling the words and scenes scream through your veins - I write scary worlds.

So how did I go from "the X-Files is too scary" to mistress of the macabre? I don't know, but I think I like it.