Category: Pearls of Wisdom

Sharing writing and promo tips with fellow authors.

PEARLS OF WISDOM: Deep Philosophy in Bad Jokes?

Our grandson adores “Dad jokes”.  Here’s one of his favs: How do you weigh a dragon? Depends on its scales.

Recently I was having a one-on-one dinner with my daughter. Fixing me with a gaze steeped in the superiority of youth, she asked: “What do you think of the chicken joke?”

Me: (thinking of grandson) You mean the old chestnut, Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side.

Daughter: “Do you get it? I mean, really get it?”

Me: What’s to get?  It’s Captain Obvious. Chickens are stupid. They follow their beaks across the road to the other side. If you don’t see the joke, you’re as dumb as the chicken.

Daughter: (deep sigh) No, think about it: the other side.  What’s the other meaning of “The Other Side”?

Me: The hereafter?

Daughter: (convinced her mother is beyond help) Right!

Oh, so the real joke is about a suicidal chicken or a bird so brainless it’s about to become roadkill.

I’d honestly never thought about the irony inherent in “the other side”. Neither had my husband when I retold our conversation.  Was there some deep philosophical meaning behind our misunderstanding the true joke? A denial of life’s mortality? Or a deep-seated faith in the superiority of humans to the idiot chickens we regularly eat?

Probably not. The sound you now hear is the whistle of the penny dropping through the decades stretching from the Jurassic Period of my childhood till now.

On the other hand, our daughter didn’t get the joke that made our grandson laugh his butt off:

Why couldn’t the bike stand up by itself? Because it was two tired. 

a red rooster walking across a street
Idiot chicken

 

pink bicycle on brown concrete floor
The tired bike

 

 

PEARLS OF WISDOM: Straying into Cross-genre

 

My Pearl of Wisdom

I DON’T WRITE HORROR…OR DO I?

 The first inkling that I’d strayed from dark mystery into horror happened when the multi-genre conference, When Words Collide, put me on a horror fiction panel.

Horror – moi? I never watch horror movies, they’re far too intense. I hardly ever read horror fiction. Well, I have read Clive Barker’s masterpieces, but that’s about it! Somehow, somewhere my writing crossed over to the dark side.

What I learned from my fellow panelists at WWC is that the core of horror literature is fear.

So that was it! It had to be my novella, Snake Oil, the one about snakes and real estate agents,  nominated for a CWC Award in 2018. Many people have a deep-seated fear of snakes.

I remember reading from Snake Oil at a Noir at the Bar event south of the border. My reading went pretty well, I thought, but the following day, a macho noir writer stopped me.  You know the type: shaved head, muscular, loads of tattoos. He fixed me with a wary eye and said: “You –  you’re the lady who wrote about snakes.”

Even the scariest dude can be undone by slithering reptiles apparently.

Looking through my stories and novellas, many do pivot on fear. In my most recently published story, “The Lost Diner” (Pulp Literature, Issue 47), an older woman driver strays off the main highway and pulls in to a deserted diner. Soon she ends up fighting for her life. The owners of the diner like to disappear customers who won’t be missed.

 

Isn’t this a primordial fear we all share? The fear of an unknown place where we are on our own and defenseless.

Even my comical stories, like “Must Love Dogs – or You’re Gone”, edge into darkness. (Published in GONE, Red Dog Press.) My heroine is forced into working off her murdered ex-husband’s debt at a doggy daycare. It’s either groom dogs or die! There she discovers that her ex used their dog, Flea, to smuggle diamonds into the USA, since Flea will eat anything. The resolution is a pretty dark fight at the edge of Niagara Falls…

Perhaps the difference is this: in noir fiction, the often violent characters remain in control though a bad outcome is often assured. In horror, the characters are not in control: they are frequently isolated and must battle through to an ending that promises to be bleak.

So what to do? Why not embark on a new adventure? And so, like Bilbo, I’m quite ready for a scary dive into the realm of horror writers!