February 2022

 Short month Short post.

I finished reading My Heart is a Chainsaw, and it was good. There are tons of references to the classic slasher films I watched as a young teenager. Ahh - Horror movie nostalgia.

We did not always have an easy way to watch movies. It was the 1980s, and we moved around a lot. Our televisions were a mix of color and black and white at different times. It was almost always small screens, but it didn't matter; I would just sit closer, ignoring the warnings that it would hurt my eyes. 

Sometimes we had a VCR to play the movies on, but most of the time, we rented one from a corner store, making a few extra dollars with their video collection. It was usually on a Friday night as my mother prepped to go out with her friends, leaving my sister and me at home with a rented VCR and stack of movies. Dinner was usually pizza from the same corner store. They sold everything in those days.

In the stack of movies, a couple of dumb comedies, a few things my sister wanted to watch, and two to three slashers I would watch by myself when my sister got bored or went to bed. I would stay up late, making sure to watch them all so that I could watch them a couple of more times over the weekend. 

Classic slashers like the many Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th movies. Evil Dead 2 and Ghoulies kept the horror amusing but still scary as hell. Just the cover image from Ghoulies had me timing the flush of the toilet while starting to run for the door and turning off the light. I didn't want the sound of the toilet being flushed waking up the devil before I had time to get out of the bathroom and shut the door. 

There were tons of movies I should not have been watching, but it was fun and kept my brain occupied. I spent just as much time reading horror magazines like Fangoria, learning all about the new movies coming out and the old ones I had missed. 

When I didn't have the rented VCRs and movies, I had the books. Thank you, Mr. King, Mr. Barker, and the many others who made walks home from the library in the dark much more scary and exciting. 

My Heart is a Chainsaw brought me back to some of those movies and time spent getting scared.

Aside from a book and the movie nostalgia, I did manage to edit, or mostly edit, an 8000-word story I have written and titled The Last Automator. I like the story and will try to submit it to a couple of publications before I give up and release it myself. Once I have a few edited shorts, I may even put them together and release them as an anthology. 

I only wrote a little bit this month, slowed down by my ability to focus and attempt at something new with the outlining process I mentioned last month. 

It was a short month, and I'm sure I would have accomplished so much more if there were more than 28 days. 

Here's a photo of the snow-covered pond on Bates College campus. Taken by Jen on one of our walks with Violet (Our pup) (Photo Credit: Jennifer Gammon)