Friday Five: Friday the 13th edition 06.13.2014

In honor of Friday the 13th, 5 movies or books that scared me as a kid:

• 5. Shocker:
  
  I didn't watch or read many scary things for a few reasons: I was an only child with no cable. Also, I would get nightmares. This, along with probably any other scary movie that still haunts me, I watched with my cousins (because that's what cousins are for!).
  
• 4. Cujo.
  
  Is this even considered among King's scariest books? It was to me. After it, The Stand was the only other one I've ever read.
  
• 3. Gremlins
  
  These buggers scared me like whoa. I was probably too young when I saw it.
  
  
• 2. Phyllis Reynolds Naylor's Witch Saga.
  
  I LOVED these books even though they scared me.
  
• 1. Nightmare on Elm Street. The original.
  
  I STILL have nightmares and the song still makes me shiver. 

So, what scared YOU when you were a kid?

Well, sorry, but I'm doing it.

Lately I find myself defending something I'm only moderately vested in. Why? Because I keep hearing "it doesn't exist" and other denials and marginalizations, all of which seem to deny the obvious: We're talking the shit out of it, which says to me that it does, in fact, exist. And because it exists, and represents something NEW and UNTESTED and, here's the kicker, CHANGE-y, it is scary.

TRY NOT TO BE SCARED. Writers, if you're writing it, IT EXISTS. Whatever it is, if you're doing it, it's real. This is true for every single new and scary and different literary path. The currently real-or-not hot space is not a figment of imagination that so many separate people have made up that everyone is talking about it. Neither will the next one be. Where will these new ideas go? Who knows. Will they sell, will they be niche, will they be nothing at all?

No one really knows what will sell until it does.

Write on!

/end rant of ranty rantiness

A push

I got one yesterday. The good kind, the kind that gets you to undertake things you find scary and see what happens. So, by Monday or so, we'll see what happens. I'll report back.

It may be nothing.
It may be something.

If it doesn't work out, nothing will really have changed.
I hope it does work out and that it doesn't kill me.