(the low-budget, 'accepting mediocrity' version)
I didn't always have the desire to write. When I was younger, I wanted to be
Rick Baker something fierce. I devoured every issue of
Fangoria Magazine I could lay my hands on - not because I wanted to read about the movies themselves (although I did), but because I wanted to know
how they did it. How they made the heads explode. How they made the fangs and the claws and the giant leathery batwings grow. I dug Rob Bottin, Stan Winston, Dick Smith, Jack Pierce - and anyone in the field, really, but no one could make it work like Rick Baker. He was my first 'Movie Hero', more so than any mere
actor. See, you can
act like a Werewolf in a movie all you want, but if there isn't someone behind the scenes to make you
look like one, you're just a goofy naked man howling and rolling around on the floor.
I remember my Dad taking me to the movies to see
An American Werewolf In London. He laughed all the way through it, but I sat there with my jaw open (when I wasn't flinching and nearly jumping under my seat). The hand stretching and forming a lycanthropic paw. The face, you could hear the skull crackling as bones morphed, stretched, pushed, and it was all sweaty and painful and real. The rapidly decaying Griffin Dunne - "Hi, David!" as he waved the hand of the Mickey Mouse toy, that awful flap of torn flesh hanging from his throat and jiggling as he talked.
Rick Baker made hair grow out of David Naughton's back right before your eyes. They created the Makeup Effects Oscar category that year, and I really believe they created it just for him.
I wanted to make the skulls crackle, too. My folks didn't have any money to speak of, so I couldn't buy all the expensive tools and books required for experimentation, but every October for several years after I would save all my money and strategically purchase the better quality Halloween makeup off the store shelves. And practice until it ran out or got too old to use. I was okay at it, but I never really shined. I could do the basic things like wrinkles, bruises, and handmade scars. I could make rips in flesh that appeared as realistic as a $3.00 bottle of liquid latex, fake blood gel, and stack makeup would allow. I could layer hair with Spirit gum and make fairly decent mustaches and sideburns. I never had the proper equipment to make my own molds and try to make my own prosthetic appliances, so I altered smaller storebought ones (like the fake noses, ears, etc) to suit my needs. That bottled liquid latex is very hard to work with, by the way.
Eventually I lost interest, because there's only so much you can do with the cheap, shitty makeup found on the Halloween Aisle at
K-mart. And, from working with clay, I found out I just didn't have a knack for sculpting. I still enjoyed what I could do with my limited abilities, though, even after I'd moved on to other things. I took Drama all through High School, and in addition to acting (which is another story altogether), I also performed makeup duty a few times. These usually turned out badly, like when I had to make my friend Jackie up to look like Miss Havisham in
Great Expectations and ended up making her look like a raccoon rather than a cruel old dirty lady who lived in her ancient wedding dress. Or, when I played the part of a man with a severely burned hand which he kept hidden under a glove all through the play until the very end - I spent hours working up this really nice burn appliance, but didn't glue it to my hand well enough, and by the time the unveiling scene rolled around I had sweated the appliance loose, leaving it behind in the glove when I snatched it off.
"Behold my soft pink unmarked skin!"
And, I still like to make a jackass out of myself almost every Halloween.
This really has nothing to do with writing, though. Forgive the digression from the stated topic.
I'd always had a
voracious appetite for reading, starting from around the age of Ten. I would buy a stack of used paperbacks (Horror novels, mostly) from The Rip-Lin Book exchange, tear through them in about two weeks, and swap them back out for another stack at 25% credit. I read everything from Biographies to Movie Adaptations, sometimes flipping from the last page back to the first to immediately read them again if they were particularly good. Robert Bloch, Ray Bradbury, William Goldman, Peter Straub - some of the subjects they wrote about went over my head, but that only made me want to read them again to try and understand. I would sneak novels into school and read when the teacher wasn't paying attention, which led to frequent confiscation. My teachers always had decent personal libraries at the end of the year.
It's common knowledge that you have to spoon through some truly terrible slop to get at the meat, when it comes to fiction. A fan of Horror Fiction has it worse than most, I think - I'd say the Good/Bad ratio of Horror Novels is somewhere around 20% Good to Excellent, 80% Pure Shit. I don't recall the title of the worst Horror Novel I read back then, or the name of the Author, but I do remember the plot - It was about
Giant, Mutated Crabs coming out of the ocean and eating tourists. Now, that plot might work in a campy 1954 Horror
Movie, but as a novel it was
amazingly awful. The schmuck who wrote it actually used "AAAAIIIEEE!!" as a line of dialogue.
It was the first time I ever threw a book down in disgust and thought to myself
I can write better than that. I was about thirteen.
Skip ahead to age 15, and the Ninth Grade. My best friend Dwight and I had slackered our way through the entire school year, taking the
'fuck learning' approach to our education. Our English Teacher hadn't ever passed out a lot of homework, but there was one thing she'd demanded since day one: We were to keep a Journal for the entire year, one page per week, and we were to turn it in two weeks before school ended. Neither of us had written word one. I started panicking, because this Journal was going to determine whether I passed or failed the class. Summer School is like a Concentration Camp to kids, and I dreaded it more than the cold bony fingers of Death. Dwight and I brainstormed the weekend before it was due, trying to come up with some excuse or workaround, but after an hour ended up with nothing. We'd have to actually do the work. So, both of us sat down at my dinner table with brand-new Spiral Notebooks and pencils, and tried to fill them in with a whole year in one night. We worked out a system - one of us would write a page with an entirely fabricated personal anecdote, then give their notebook to the other, who would then copy and
rewrite that page from his perspective. Nothing in the rules stated that we couldn't do it. In essence, each of us would only have to write
half a Journal that way - the rest was just copying and shifting words around. I thought it was ingenious.
Along the way I discovered that I was beginning to enjoy it. I was spending more time on each page, trying to carefully craft a real story, which evolved into the fictional ongoing saga of two 'best' friends who secretly hated each other (it was funnier that way). We wrote of elaborate cruel practical jokes, joy when the other person failed miserably at something, even murder schemes, all told from two separate viewpoints. We stayed up almost all night.
We passed, by the scuzz on our teeth. The Teacher got such a kick out of the Journals she showed them to all of her teaching buddies. Over the Summer, bolstered by the praise, I tried my hand at a couple of short stories. I no longer have them, but they weren't very good.
My Tenth Grade Teacher Ellen Riescz was one of those 'free spirit' types who gave no written homework, but required three pages of writing (which could be anything - poetry, movie reviews, family histories, whatever) each week. I was familiar with the process, and since I'd found out that the task of writing wasn't so much like being kicked in the nuts, I threw myself into it. I turned in one story a week, most of the time over three pages. Most weeks I waited until the night before it was due to even start. For some reason I enjoyed the deadline pressure - I often blew it, but Mrs. Riescz was very lenient - she knew that if I didn't turn in a story one week, I'd turn in a much longer story the next. She gave great advice (sometimes), and made numerous notations on every page.
Around the middle of the year she invited me to join the Hoggard Literary Society, which she headed. They produced the yearly Literary Magazine. At first I really wasn't interested, but I showed up for a couple of the meetings and found them to be somewhat enjoyable. This was one of those clubs where you'd bring your latest Opus, and read it aloud to the rest of the club, who would then critique it. It would then be submitted to the editors (different every year) for consideration in that year's magazine. I never warmed to the whole 'reading aloud' part of it, and would usually let someone else do it (that was an option). It always seemed a bit pretentious to me - I would have rather photocopied the stories and handed them out to everyone, since what you hear being read aloud sounds differently from the way you intended.
Aside: I generally HATE writer's groups of any sort. Everyone sits around impatiently waiting for you to finish so they can FINALLY read their own earth-shattering prose, and just about every 'critique' you get starts off the same way: "Well, that's very interesting, but I would have tried a different approach..." Writer's Groups are almost always self-congratulatory circle jerks with one common motto: LOOK AT HOW CLEVER I AM.
I started writing the nastiest, goriest, most shocking stories I could come up with, because I knew someone was going to have to read them aloud. I always found it highly humorous to watch them splutter and turn red as they struggled through them, and even though I knew I'd never get a single one in print I loved doing it. Anyway, I got a couple of toned-down stories and poems in that year, smudged all over the cheap newsprint along with everyone else. I still have it. I sucked.
The next year I was bumped up to Assistant editor, and that consisted of typing everyone's stories and poems into the stone-age, squirrel-driven computer we had to work with. I found out the selection process went along these lines: "Do we have room for this one? Okay, how about this one?" And that was it. We never really turned down anyone over anything other than length (and that was usually me), because we barely received enough submissions to fill the mag in the first place. At the end of the year we had the pages printed on nice faux-parchment stock (bigger budget that year), and then headed down to the school board building to bind the pages ourselves on a machine which clipped them with plastic spiral rings.
And people began to walk up to me in the school hallways, telling me they liked my stories. Huh.
In my Senior year of High School I was made Editor in Chief, and I made a lousy one. We had a low turnout for submissions, so I wrote a bunch of crap poetry to fill space, not really thinking about how it would look when completed. When I saw the final magazine I realized I was coming off like the
world's biggest egomaniac, as almost half of it was written by me, and there on the last page was "Kevin Parrott - Editor In Chief". I felt more like "Idiot In Chief". I should've tried harder, I suppose. I never really wanted to be an editor, though, I just wanted to write.
I also started work on two separate novels during that year. I'd write on one until I got bored or stuck, then switch to the other. Both of them were a mess, and I was in way over my head. The less said, the better - but I kept them, in case I could crib anything useful from them for stories in the future. During the summer after graduation, I revised a few older short stories, bought a Writer's Market, and sent them all to different magazines. Fuck college, I was going to sell stories and work in my underwear for the rest of my life. I don't know what I was thinking, because the magazines I chose were some of the more popular magazines of the period:
Amazing Stories, The New Yorker, Playboy, among others. I figured I'd start at the top and work my way down, but I was really just unwittingly setting myself up to fail. I sent all of the short stories off the same day, and waited for months to hear a reply. Over a two-day period I received rejection letters for every single story I'd sent, ten total. Huh. It was the biggest slap in the face I'd gotten since I began writing. It's one thing to know you're rotten, but it's an entirely different thing when ten different magazine editors tell you at once. I threw all of the rejection letters into a desk drawer, gathered up all my stories, placed them in an empty grocery bag, and threw them in the rolling trashcan outside.
I didn't want to be a writer anymore. Who did these High-And-Mighties think they were? Didn't they know how hard I worked on all that stuff? Didn't they know the long hours I sat hunched over my crappy outdated typewriter writing and rewriting while everyone else was going out having the time of their lives getting hammered and fucking everything that moved? Couldn't they have had the decency to write a personal letter instead of a fifth-generation photocopied template? The New Yorker didn't even bother to send me a full letter, just a form rejection letter the size of a Post-It Note. Hoity-Toity Assholes.
Some of them weren't, though. A couple of days after I got over the initial sting of failure, I went through the letters again.
Amazing Stories had written a personalized critique, with some kind words, and some comments on plot structure that I still don't agree with - but it wasn't a form. A guy named Dean who ran a smaller fiction publication wrote me a nice note, saying he couldn't use the particular story I'd sent, but to try him again. I started thinking I'd overreacted, but the rejection had been ov
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