I like spooky stuff, and since I write epic and urban fantasy (and some steampunk) with a lot of supernatural and paranormal elements, it’s sort of like Halloween every day.
Halloween has always been one of my favorite holidays, second only to Christmas. I love the decorations, the costumes, the candy—and the sense that the veil between worlds is a little thinner that night than usual.
When we’re home for Halloween, we decorate with orange and purple light strings, an eight-foot tall inflatable dragon (with moving wings), and a life-sized horse-drawn hearse driven by the headless horseman with a vampire rising from his coffin in the wagon! Kids come for the candy—adults take selfies with the decorations!
I love seeing other houses done up in style for the holiday. Some towns and neighborhoods go all-out, and it’s great to see the imagination involved. Other than Christmas, it’s really the only other holiday where outside decorating goes beyond a seasonal flag or a banner. Most of the time, the decorations are funny, but I’ve seen a few places that really took the challenge seriously. At one house, when my kids were little, they were afraid to walk up to the door without me because of the big, mechanical Grim Reaper!
My love for all those things paranormal definitely factors into how much fun it is to write books where magic is real, ghosts and monsters exist, and things are often not what they seem. I enjoy the research involved to get the details right from folklore or to read up on hauntings and the history behind them. I usually find cool details in the research that add a lot of realism. If I give myself the heebie-jeebies from something I’ve written, I know I’m on the right track!
Part of the fun researching spooky stuff is that the old legends are usually always scarier than what has trickled down through pop culture. I enjoy drawing on the older sources because they feel fresh and more authentic. What we think we know about creatures and magic has often been diluted to make movies and TV shows fit ratings standards. The closer I can get to older versions, the stranger and more unsettling the stories usually become.
Whether the stories are medieval or modern day, supernatural thrills and chills makes everything better!
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You can find me online at www.GailZMartin.com, on Twitter @GailZMartin, on Facebook.com/WinterKingdoms, and on Goodreads https://www.goodreads.com/GailZMartin. My Amazon author page is https://www.amazon.com/Gail-Z-Martin/e/B002BM8XSQ and I’m also on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/morganbriceauthor/ My Facebook reader group is the Shadow Alliance https://www.facebook.com/groups/MartinShadowAlliance and the online convention I help run, ConTinual, can be found here: http://www.facebook.com/groups/ConTinual
