Welcome to JRC Writing

So this is my first shot at having my own blog and I kind of feel bad that I don't fit the mainstream media profile of a blogger. I have a job and I don't live in my parents' basement. Actually, I've never lived in a basement because I'm kind of afraid of them. I mean, my grandmother's basement always terrified me as a kid and still gives me the creeps as an adult. Even during the year when I lived with her after college, I stayed upstairs in my old room rather than have the whole basement to myself. It was sort of retro and cool during the day, but I had no intention of being there when the lights went out. The thought of trying to sleep down there was horrifying. When I was a little kid I had a nightmare where the Frankenstein monster and other nasty looking things came after me out of the boxes in one of the back bedrooms. I have a hard time remembering the names of people I met a week ago, but I still remember that dream.

That's either dark, weird or embarassing depending on your point of view, but it indicates the general vein of my writing which is horror or fantasy. I like traditional horror and things that go bump in the night like vampires, werewolves, ghosts, the living dead, animated corpses sitting next to your bed when you wake up, that sort of thing. Maybe it doesn't make me sophisticated and maybe I'm heretical, but I like plot more than I like characters. You have to have both, but the most interesting characters in the world don't matter if your story is about them sitting in a cafe and eating. Unless you're trying for something artsy that would impress your creative writing professor.

(A brief aside, but I actually really liked the prof who taught my creative writing class in college. We had to write two stories during the semester and for the first one, it seemed like half of the class wrote about some mundane childhood incident like riding in the backseat of their parents' car. Most of them were boring as hell and he pointed out that since it was a creative writing class they might want to be, you know, actually creative. Of course, there was the redneck guy who was working on the novel about the Vietcong taking over south Texas and the local citizens having to resist. He should have called it "Yellow Dawn". I thought that was pretty creative in a John Birch Society kind of way, but the prof didn't agree.)

Anyway, this is my blog and it's here to give me a platform for my writing and stories and to force me to write more. I'll post at least weekly and I will post some of the stories I've gotten published in the past. I'm always interested in feedback, even if it is to tell me how dumb I am so for the one's of fans I have, comment away.

Thanks,

JC