Tag: christopher pike

Heart to Heart

Gah, it’s Wednesday and the week is half over and I’ve not scratched many items off my to-do list. Heavy heaving sigh. Although the weather seems to have turned here and it’s been lovely the last few days. I worked in the storage unit for about an hour yesterday; got a few more book donation boxes together and threw some things away, which was progress of a sort. The primary problem, however, is discovering that almost everything in there appears to be cases of copies of my own books, or my kids’ series–the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, etc.–that I will never get rid of; so I think my next move is to swap out boxes of books in the attic (or decoratively hidden around the apartment), books that I want to keep (copies of books written by friends, etc.) for the cases of my own books; it only makes sense to have easier access to them in order to donate for charity auctions or for book events where they don’t have copies of my books or aren’t able to get copies of my books. Or to sell myself. I do think from time to time I should resell my used books and make some money off them, but it also seems like an incredible pain in the ass and I barely have time to keep up with everything I need to get done, let alone adding another chore.

We’ll see.

I am one step closer to sending out the query letters. With the assistance of some amazing friends, I think I had a damned good query letter put together that just needs a tweak here and there, and has also helped me figure out what tweaking, oddly enough, needs to be done in the manuscript itself. So, the goal is to send out a wave of query emails by the end of the week, work on Scotty, finish the final revision of a short story to get sent out there, and make those manuscript tweaks.

I also put another book in the donation pile this week that didn’t pass the fifty page test, and am about to start reading R. L. Stine’s The Lost Girl. I read a lot of Stein and Christopher Pike novels in the early 1990’s–which helped inspire me to write the drafts that became Sorceress, Sara, and Sleeping Angel–so I am interested to see some of his newer work. I met him, not only at the Edgars one year, but at Stokercon in Vegas, and he is a lovely, very nice man. My original thought with those y/a’s was to link them all together at some point, the way he’d linked the Fear Street novels together, and in a way, all of my young adult novels are sort of linked together–Sara is set in a small town in Kansas; that town is where Laura, the main character in Sorceress is from; the town in California Laura moves to is where Sleeping Angel is set; and Scotty’s parents in Lake Thirteen are from the small town in Alabama where my main character in Dark Tide is from…and the town where Scotty lives now, in the suburbs of Chicago, was where Glenn in Sara moved to Kansas from. All connected. I sometimes forget that my young adult books all are in the same world and are all connected…

And on that note, I’m not going to finish my to-do list by sitting here thinking about getting things done.

Today’s Hump Day Hunk is actor Aaron-Taylor Johnson.

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At Seventeen

The spice mines have not been kind to me lately; I’ve been in one of those awful malaises that I hate so much. I am behind on the book (of course) and I’ve been struggling with some short stories I needed to write. However, yesterday I made some progress on the book (huzzah!) and I think I am snapping out of it. The first thing I saw this morning on social media was this, from Anne Rice:

“To be a writer one thing is required. Write. That’s the big secret. It’s one word. Get the words down on paper, one way or another, and save them. Believe in your own voice, too, and your own way of doing it. Don’t listen to people who say negative things. They’re common. Writers are precious.”

That helped some, and I am hopeful that I am not coming out of the malaise.

Today’s horror topic is Christopher Pike.

christopher-pike-books

I’ve often talked about how discovering the works of Christopher Pike in the early 1990’s was a revelation to me about young adult fiction, which I had dismissed most of my life; I’d gone almost directly from the kids’ mystery series to Ellery Queen and Agatha Christie and Phyllis A. Whitney and Victoria Holt and so forth; adult mystery and suspense. It was finding Pike–and later, R. L. Stine’s Fear Street books–that got me started writing the y/a books in the 1990’s, and even planned on connecting them all together, like the way Stine did.

Christopher Pike’s novels were seriously twisted. The first ones I bought copies of were Whisper of Death, Witch, Die Softly, and Remember Me. I was startled at how ‘adult’ the themes in the books were; when I was a teen the few books about teens I remembered were about “should I or shouldn’t I have sex?” or “drugs are bad for you” or “this is what happens if you DRINK”–that tiresome moralizing shit I couldn’t be bothered with–and in almost every instance it was about white kids in the suburbs, safely middle class. Pike’s characters were all mostly white still, but there wasn’t any overt, hit-you-in-the-head-with-a-baseball-bat type nonsense. Some of the kids were poor, from broken families, having sex, drinking, doing drugs…in other words, these were teenagers dealing with adult problems, and doing the best they could.

whisper-of-death

Whisper of Death was the first one that I read, and I couldn’t believe what I was reading, from page one. The point of view character, Roxanne, and her boyfriend, Pepper, were driving home to their small town from an abortion clinic in a nearby, larger city. Roxanne is the product of a single parent home; her mother ran away when she was a little girl, her father is blue collar and drinks too much, and Pepper, her boyfriend, is higher up on the economic scale and made it clear from the moment she realized she was pregnant that abortion was the only option. Pepper’s cavalier attitude about the situation–the palpable relief he feels now that it’s over–also has her questioning whether he is the right guy for her. So, Roxanne’s nerves and feelings are already on edge and raw as the true terror starts…every town they pass through on the drive home is abandoned. Even in their home town, there’s no one around but find three other teenagers they slightly know, and soon discover the only thing they have in common, really, is a connection through a girl named Mary Sue, who recently committed suicide, and who also apparently wrote short stories about the five of them dying in horrible ways.

As they look for other people, one by one they begin dying the way their deaths were described in Mary Sue’s stories.

I went back and read all of Pike’s books, enjoyed them all–and again, all of them were really dark and twisted. Remember Me, which turned into a trilogy, was about a dead girl whose spirit was trying to figure out who pushed her off a balcony at a party and killed her, for example. He also got me to discover Stine and Jay Bennett–who wrote amazing hard-boiled y/a thrillers. Pike also showed me that you could really push the boundaries in y/a fiction.

And now, the spice mines are calling me again.