captainredblood, Author at CAMP REDBLOOD

POST 13: VIRAL-NESS, YOUTUBE CRITICISM, and WHAT’S NEXT

17/08/24 at 8.22pm / by captainredblood / 0 Comment

VIRAL-NESS, YOUTUBE CRITICISM, and WHAT’S NEXT

For those just joining the Camp Redblood crew, here’s a quick recap of how we got here…

In late 2013, I was working a middling job at a middling company in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I wasn’t doing what I wanted to be doing occupation-wise (I’m still not to be honest, but I do enjoy the work I’m doing at my current job, a firm that’s anything BUT middling). Anyway, one day the company hosted some sort of tech fair, in which several vendors showed off cool gadgets and products. There were booths and presentations, and there was a guy giving free massages (my chief reason for attending). In other words, it was the boring adult equivalent of having a school holiday party–half the day was working, the other half was pizza and fucking off until it was time to get back on the MBTA.

Anyway, one of the companies that showed up was Microsoft. You might sense where this is going. Fresh from a killer 10 minute massage and encouraged by some excellent friends and coworkers, I moseyed on over to the-booth-that-Gates-built. There I listened to five seconds of a pitch about how awesome the Microsoft Surface 1 was before I held up my hand and said, “I gotta be honest, I’m really not interested in a tablet, but here are some cool drawings I made with one of your… other products.” It wasn’t the smoothest pitch in history, but it impressed a very special woman named Barrie Mirman, who passed it on to someone, who passed it on to someone else, and in January of 2013, Microsoft’s New England Research and Development blog ran a story about me.

https://blogs.microsoft.com/newengland/2014/01/22/pats-old-school-art-with-microsoft-paint/

Now, at this time, Camp Redblood was nothing more than a failed horror screenplay alternately titled Last Stand at Camp Hawkeye and Something’s Out There… However, when I saw how far my weird MS Paint hobby had brought me, my inner hustler was awakened. If I could get Microsoft to do a story about me, I sensed the potential to fulfill Andy Warhol’s “fifteen minutes of fame” prophecy… in other words, the potential go viral. I’d already made the front page of Reddit a year or so before, when my girlfriend posted one of my Harry Potter illustrations there. MS Paint was already inextricably connected to the birth of Camp Redblood (see here), but now it had a shot at getting Redblood to the next level.

After some hand-wringing over whether I should create a Paint comic book or a novel, practicality won the day, and I wrote it as a prose novel with illustrations. This would later lead to some misconceptions in the press, with many outlets referring to the book as a “graphic novel”, which I totally understand. My illustrations look like comics, or even animation cells from a cartoon—not entirely matching the very R-rated tone of Camp Redblood. As it happens, I did make some proof-of-concept comic pages, but to do it as a comic would have required me to quit my job, and brother, I just don’t have that kind of capital.

So two years went by, during which I wrote my first book. I wrote on it the Orange Line, I wrote it on the Red Line. I wrote it in my cubicle. I wrote it on park benches. I wrote it in the Algiers Coffee House in Harvard Square, drinking pot after pot of jasmine tea, waiting for my girl to finish the late shift at her job. I wrote it at three different apartments, on God knows how many notebooks, and typed it on at least five separate computers. I self-published to Amazon Kindle and made like ten bucks from those family members who were kind enough to buy it (even if they didn’t own a Kindle). That first edition, published in April, 2016, did have a few illustrations, but they were little more than black and white line art, nothing that would attract attention. I knew I’d have to wait until they were done in full color before really putting it out there.

Another year went by.

May, 2017. I finally release the “Special Edition” with eight full-color “MS Paint-ings”, the most I’ve ever completed in one year (buy it here!). I posted them to Imgur just before lunch on a bright day in late May, and at just the right moment—using the novelty of MS Paint to go viral had been the plan from the beginning, but it was a plan that always hinged on a certain amount of luck—and then I went to lunch. By the end of that lunch I had several thousand views on Imgur and, for once, more upvotes than downvotes. The next thing I knew, I was fielding interview requests and Microsoft had invited to fly me out to Seattle to join the Creator Council for their new program, Paint 3D. It was my first time on a plane since 2007, and it was pissah.

Fast-forward to late August, and my stuff has gone viral twice over since May. First was July when Microsoft announced it was done with MS Paint, and now again with the release of the awesome video produced by the talented folks at Vox.com. The video has racked up over 700,000 views, and peaked at 19 on YouTube’s top videos. Both of my Facebook pages have received over 600 new followers in less than a week, which is why I’ve written this little abbreviated history.

THE VOX VIDEO

I can’t overstate how honored I am by the video Phil Edwards and the rest of the team at Vox put together. It’s so well-edited and informative that even listening to my own voice (which I hate) didn’t bother me as I watched it. Even before the video was released, many people warned me against reading the comments, as YouTube’s comments section isn’t exactly known as the bastion of sober, respectful discourse. While much of the comments have been positive, ego-boosting bursts of praise, there has been some legitimate criticism of the illustration itself.

To receive this criticism is, in itself, its own kind of honor. It means that, at least for the moment, the discussion has moved beyond “Why don’t you just use Photoshop?” (I’ve provided many answers to this, but it always boils down to 1. I don’t fuckin’ feel like it, and 2. We’re only talking about this BECAUSE it’s MS Paint.) So I’m only too happy to see commentators like “Juliette” rip on the piece a little, because it also means people are taking it seriously. While I appreciate all the nice folks who have sprung to illustration’s defense, I thought Juliette’s assessment was pretty fair. In my own defense, I would just say that this project was somewhat rushed because of a deadline, and I was working on a much smaller canvas than usual, which is why the seams of Paint show a bit more—the larger the canvas, the less you see those somewhat jagged Paint lines.

I’m cool with all of the criticism now for another very specific reason—I’m not a professional. I’m an amateur, a hobbyist. This is a passion project for me, and while I’ve come a long way from my earlier MS Paint pieces, I’m still learning with every single project. My chief weaknesses remain perspective and anatomy (I seriously have like one standard ear that I draw on everyone, and you should never scrutinize my characters’ hands for too long), but I’m comfortable with that for the moment because I do make honest efforts to improve the craft with each new illustration. I remember reading a prominent comic book artist admit one time that he never drew his characters from an elevated perspective, as if you were looking down on them, because he could just never nail that angle. I find little anecdotes like that heartening. I also like to remember how unpolished stuff like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics looked when they first appeared in the early 1980’s. They were rough, but they had serious charm, and I like to think that what people who like my illustrations are responding to is a similar sort of rough charm.

WHAT’S NEXT?

The plan was to just jump right into the next Camp Redblood novel, Camp Redblood and the Summer of Terror, which I began writing well over a year ago (there’s even a chapter 1 excerpt of it in the Camp Redblood and the Essential Revenge Special Edition, available here!). The story is set several years before Essential Revenge, and chronicles Leigh Carter’s first summer at Camp Redblood. All my recent attention, however, has led to commission requests, and since I do still work a full-time job, this has slowed down the production on that novel. Another reason for the delay is that Summer of Terror is much more ambitious than Essential Revenge, spanning, as the title suggests, an entire summer, whereas Revenge took place over the course of 48 hours or so. For this reason, I’ve decided to take my time with the book.

The good news, however, is that another, much shorter Camp Redblood novel is in the works. I don’t have a working title yet, but it is a direct sequel to Camp Redblood and the Essential Revenge, and picks up a few weeks after that story left off. As of this writing I’m about 55 pages into it, and am aiming for a much shorter, leaner, propulsive narrative. A synopsis will be forthcoming, and like Essential Revenge, I’m anticipating a barebones version first, followed by an illustrated Special Edition.

MANY THANKS

I just want to take this moment to thank Vox.com once again for their dynamite video. Also want to thank all the new readers and Facebook followers, and welcome them into the Camp Redblood gang. Have a look around, check out some concept art, some old blog posts, and be sure to check out Camp Redblood and the Essential Revenge. The Special Edition costs about six bucks, and the standard version is even cheaper. It’s a fun little foul-mouthed adventure, but it was written—and drawn—from the heart.

–Pat

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07143FXZ5

POST 12: MS PAINT AND THE EVOLUTION OF CAMP REDBLOOD

16/05/14 at 1.08pm / by captainredblood / 0 Comment

MS PAINT AND THE EVOLUTION OF CAMP REDBLOOD

Microsoft Paint can do anything.

I frequently say this to people who react incredulously when I tell them what my favorite artistic medium is. It’s not entirely true; every once in a while I’ll require the services of a Photoshop knock-off to get a detail right for one of my Paintings. It almost always relates to text within a piece; Paint’s text tool is strictly linear, and sometimes I need it to wrap around something, like on the Camp Redblood logo. I suppose I could just draw the text, but even I don’t have that kind of patience. So while it might not be 100% true that Paint can do anything, it sure feels like that to me sometimes, especially when it relates to Camp Redblood. After all, Camp Redblood was basically conceived in MS Paint.

Something__s_Out_There____by_PatrickHines

These were created way back when I was still futzing around with Paint, unaware that it would become my primary tool in creating artwork. I knew I loved the summer camp milieu, and I knew I wanted to do my own take on it, but I couldn’t put it into words just yet. It would be some years before I did, but these two illustrations captured the tone I was going for. What eventually emerged from these illustrations was a stand-alone horror screenplay that went through a few working titles, beginning as Last Stand at Camp Hawkeye (the camp was called “Hawkeye” until I stumbled upon a real camp with the same name, located rather inconveniently in he exact same region as my fictional camp) and eventually becoming Something’s Out There.

At the time, I had ambitions of raising money to make the movie with friends, and I thought one way garner interest would be to produce a series of concept illustrations the way George Lucas did with Ralph McQuarrie’s indelible proof-of-concept work for the original Star Wars.

My movie never came about, either because of my own laziness or my growing dissatisfaction with the script. Hindsight, however, reveals a third reason: I wanted to know more about this summer camp and its people before I burned it to the ground. Something’s Out There was a straight-up horror story, and many characters (several of whom appear in Camp Redblood and the Essential Revenge) do not survive the tale, but they all felt like they’d known each other for a long time, and presumably spent many summers together. There was a shared history there. Yet I remained resolute in the idea that this would be a one-and-done story; creating backstories is fun, and for me at least, necessary, but in the past it had turned to quicksand with almost every writing project I’d embarked upon.

Enter MS Paint.

When you’re drawing literally pixel to pixel sometimes, details become important. Initially, I tried to make the camp as nondescript as possible without completely robbing it of personality. The rationale being, the more ordinary it was, the scarier it would be once I introduced ghosts or knife-wielding maniacs into the fray.

Little by little, however, small details would creep up in these concept illustrations. Small details in the background that hinted at more. A photo on a wall. The camp flag. The camp motto. Graffiti left on a wall or toilet stall. Like the characters, the camp itself was hinting at a rich history. It got to the point where I was creating Camp Redblood material long after I’d left the screenplay to languish in my “completed works” drawer.

Camp_Hawkeye_Map_MS_PAINT_by_PatrickHines

Slowly the urge to write a complete piece came back, and an idea for a short story pulled me up out of all my creative quicksand. “Bombardment” was really the springboard for the novel that would follow. With it came a bevy of MS Paint designs that would shape the relationship between Camp Redblood and her nemesis, Camp Eagle. Eagle quickly asserted itself as the quintessential summer camp for rich snobs, with Redblood emerging as the slowly-eroding den of the underdog.

Snobs vs slobs has been done in plenty of subgenres, especially the summer camp one, but I thought I could bring something new to the table that I wouldn’t have been able to had I been constrained by a movie budget. Camp Redblood exists in a mostly-realistic 1980s, but it’s still something of an alternate history, one where “supercamps” became a fad. These supercamps, specifically Camp Eagle, allowed me to run wild with my imagination, creating cool structures and ridiculous features like the elaborate obstacle course that encircles the place.

It also gave me leave to make Redblood itself a bit cooler than it would have been in a straight horror tale. Before long I had no problem making it into my own private Hogwarts, improbably situated atop a mountain, filled with secret passageways, and featuring cabins that would never pass a building inspection in a million years. None of this could have been done without Paint. I’ve never been very technically inclined, least of all when it came to drawing. Perspective was always difficult for me, and any time I had to use a ruler I would spend half my time erasing, so drawing buildings was always an uphill battle. With Paint, however, it was simple enough that I could create schematics (or at least schematic-like drawings) that didn’t slow me down, and that I could build on in my head when it came time to write. The entire final chapter of Essential Revenge saw me basically pushing chess pieces around a Camp Eagle layout I created with the program.

I used to assume I’d eventually move on from MS Paint. Then my artwork began to get noticed just because it made in Paint, but that’s not why I’ve stuck with it. Seen in that light, it’s little more than a novelty, something you only see on clickbait websites. The real reason I stuck with it is simple: it’s the one medium where the end result always lived up to what I had in my head.

POST 11: THE FINDING FORRESTER CONUNDRUM

15/02/11 at 6.44pm / by captainredblood / 0 Comment

THE FINDING FORRESTER CONUNDRUM

Ok, so I’m out of ideas to write about for the blog, at least until my manuscript is printed and ready to be edited. My intention was to keep the subject matter of these posts at least tangentially related to Camp Redblood, but what the hell, it’s my blog. In the meantime, I miss writing, I miss posting, and I’m at home sick, so what else am I going to do?

As it happens, today’s subject isn’t entirely removed from my little writing project, seeing as it concerns a film about an aspiring novelist who strikes up a student/mentor relationship with a J.D. Salinger type. The movie, of course, is Finding Forrester, released all the way back in 2000 (cripes, fifteen goddamn years already), starring Rob Brown as the young writer and Sean Connery as the Salinger stand-in. I’m not here to review the movie so much as I am to talk about it, but let me get my general thoughts out of the way. It’s a decent film, but riddled with problems. The screenplay is predictable to anyone who’s ever been to the movies, all of the characters save the young writer and his mentor are thinly sketched at best, stereotypes at worst, and it comes dangerously close to falling into the “white people save black people from being black” subgenre. It’s also clearly a “Sorry everyone!” effort from Good Will Hunting director Gus Van Sant, who at the time was coming off his disastrous Psycho remake. Yet Finding Forrester is a movie I find myself returning to on almost a yearly basis for the things in it that do work.

Even though I’m frequently guilty of it myself, I dislike when people sum up their opinion of a film or a book or any work of art with “it sucks” or “it was good”. Many films have elevating qualities even if the story or characters aren’t completely successful. Just to use a random example, my favorite thing about Die Hard With a Vengeance aren’t the jokes, action scenes, or stunts; it’s the film’s authentic sense of Clinton-era, pre-911 metropolitan New York. Every time I watch it I find myself savoring stuff like the accents of the extras, many of whom weren’t professional actors, just actual cops, firefighters, and other city workers. Vengeance also conveys the feeling of an actual hot summer day; complete with a quick thundershower about two-thirds of the way through.

Forrester might stumble in the script department, but its other treasures can be found in the cinematography, soundtrack, and central performances. The lighting of the indoor scenes in particular has always struck me as deceptively realistic, with just the right amount of atmosphere, dust, and afternoon glare spilling into the rooms of the fictional Mailer School. Watching the film, you’re never quite sure what season it’s set in, but it’s always felt to me like that first real week of spring, right after you’ve opened your windows for the first time in months and feel that warm breeze. I’ll take a movie that gives me that feeling over the last five Best Picture winners any day of the week. The film’s cool, jazzy soundtrack, made up of pieces by the likes of Miles Davis and Bill Frisell, fits the story’s tempo perfectly, and is just plain delightful to listen to. And hell, even if Forrester’s villain is a mustache-twirling academic with an upper-crust William F. Buckley speech pattern, F. Murray Abraham plays the hell out of the guy.

For my money though, the most interesting thing about Finding Forrester is a choice made by the filmmakers during a climactic scene. Jamal, the main character, is accused of plagiarizing part of his submission to an in-school writing competition. Indeed, part of his piece does include material the Forrester character wrote several decades earlier. Jamal is in a pickle; he could tell everyone that he actually does know the esteemed writer and has his permission to include his work, or he can honor his promise to Forrester not to reveal his whereabouts and the details their special friendship. Forrester, a shut-in for decades, bravely traverses the city and shows up at Jamal’s school at just the right moment. He proceeds to read aloud a piece of Jamal’s writing, stunning the students and teachers who assumed they were listening to Forrester’s own words. Here is where the Finding Forrester conundrum arises, and it definitely is a conundrum, one I would have been horrified to arrive at on the page was I the screenwriter. See, the movie is telling us that Jamal’s piece of writing is brilliant, genius, and yes, worthy of a J.D. Salinger. By extension, that means the film’s screenwriter considers his own work in the same league. After all, he’s the one supplying Jamal with his words.

There were three ways the film could have handled this situation. One, it could have presented a piece of writing that, by God, was worthy of Salinger. Two, it could have presented a piece of writing that was sadly, if understandably, not worthy of Salinger. In this scenario the implication of the screenwriter’s astronomic opinion of his own work would be all the more glaring. The third option is the safest one, which is probably why they elected to go with it in the final film. Forrester begins reading Jamal’s work and we hear the first few lines, which are pretty good, but nothing extraordinary (we only get brief, out of context snippets of the boy’s prose throughout the film). However, as Forrester reads the passage, it becomes very clear that the movie itself is getting uncomfortable, realizing the corner it’s painted itself into. The music rises and Connery’s voice fades. We see the faces of his audience, all wearing expressions of deeply-felt admiration for whatever the hell it is he’s saying. It’s kind of like that scene in Forrest Gump where Forrest shares his thoughts on the Vietnam War in front of the Lincoln Memorial and that Army officer sabotages the sound system. You don’t hear what Forrest says, but you hear the voices of the gathered assembly complaining that they can’t hear him and calling for him to speak up. I imagine more than one moviegoer yelled out the same thing to the screen back in 2000.

One could argue that it’s not fair to hold the film to such a high standard. After all, most of the people who love Good Will Hunting probably don’t know fuck-all about advanced mathematics, but that script still won the Oscar. The difference is that the climax of Hunting’s plot didn’t hinge on a genius math equation, it hinged on Matt Damon crying (I kid, I kid). Forrester’s climax, however, is entirely dependent on Jamal’s supposedly staggering piece of writing. I’ve not read Michael Rich’s Nicholl Fellowship-winning screenplay or the film’s novelization, so I can’t say for certain if it was the director or the writer who made the choice to gloss over Jamal’s piece, but I’m interested to read both and find out. I do wish the film presented the piece in full. Even if it didn’t live up to the expectations the film built around it, it still would have been the ballsier move on the filmmakers’ parts. As it is, Finding Forrester has its charms, plus an out-of-left-field, non-crying Matt Damon cameo.

Finding Forrester is currently streaming on Netflix for everyone who wants to be the man now, dawg!

POST 10: CREATING CAMP REDBLOOD PART IV – THE STAFF

15/01/21 at 1.43am / by captainredblood / 0 Comment

CREATING CAMP REDBLOOD PART IV – THE STAFF

Wacky counselors are a staple of summer camp stories, and Camp Redblood’s staff is no exception. When I started writing this thing I knew I had my work cut out for me in this area. Pop culture is littered with memorable staffs, from the professors of Hogwarts to the paper-pushers at Dunder Mifflin. The insane counselors of Wet Hot American Summer’s Camp Firewood cast the biggest shadow in the summer camp subgenre, and to a lesser extent, the crew from Meatballs.

The rule I set for Camp Redblood’s employees was that they had to be equal parts funny, badass, and strange. There’s a few pricks thrown in there too; Redblood’s rival, Camp Eagle, couldn’t get all the jerks. Redblood’s camp structure offered a lot of room for variation. The basic camp counselors who dutifully drag their campers from activity to activity are only the tip of the iceberg. Aside from the normal specialist positions like Nature and Ropes instructors, Redblood keeps a full time loremaster on staff, a demolition/sabotage expert, paranormal affairs consultant, gossip coordinator, and more.

Maintaining a certain tone can be a tightrope act, especially when it comes to creating larger than life characters. On one hand you don’t want the usual bland teenagers that populate summer camp horror, but go too big with the characters and you suddenly find yourself in a cartoon or a Wes Anderson movie. Camp Redblood exists in a reality just slightly removed from our own, so I think it’s important to set tonal boundaries here and there. With that in mind, I tried to draw from real people as much as possible rather than make up the characters entirely.

At any job I’ve ever worked at there’s always been at least one coworker who has an interesting background, is a flat-out badass, or is just exceedingly strange. For example, I once had a security supervisor who claimed he’d done some training for Muhammad Ali in the 1970s. I thought the guy was full of shit until he produced an old Sports Illustrated with an article about him and a photo with him and the champ. A member of the Wompanoag Tribe, this gentleman also regaled me with stories of the haunted Hockomock Swamp in southeastern Massachusetts. One such tale found him camping in those eerie wetlands when all of a sudden he had an overwhelming premonition that he needed to get out of there. As it turned out, the premonition wasn’t warning him of danger within the woods, but of the attempted theft of his car that he discovered upon reaching the parking lot. This lead to one of the single greatest pieces of advice that’s ever been given to me: “Never go into a haunted place like that without some type of spiritual protection. That, or a good side-arm.” These were the type of characters I thought belonged at Camp Redblood.

Anyone who has worked as a camp counselor knows that counselors in training, otherwise known as CITs, are among the most useless lifeforms on the planet, so I thought it would be funny if they all had derogatory nicknames. I find little details like that make the writing process more enjoyable, if a bit time consuming.

Camp Redblood’s staff goes through many iterations between its opening in 1946 and the present day. One of the things I’m most looking forward to in writing future Redblood stories is creating new and unusual counselors for all of the different eras of camp.

POST 9: CREATING CAMP REDBLOOD PART III – FUN WITH LOGOS

15/01/08 at 4.14pm / by captainredblood / 0 Comment

Happy new year campers!

One way or another, 2015 is it, the year this sumbitch gets finished and published. Hopefully I’ll be posting more frequently with updates and news regarding the editing and publication process of Camp Redblood and the Essential Revenge. In the meantime, here’s the latest installment of “Creating Camp Redblood”.

CREATING CAMP REDBLOOD PART III: FUN WITH LOGOS

When I set out to create my fictional summer camp, I knew it had to have a proper badass logo. The more I wrote, however, the more I realized just how many different logos would be required and what an important part of world-building they are. Just look at all the sigils and banners in George R.R. Matin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series. I’m not sure how Martin and other writers go about creating stuff like this—do they design the logos themselves and then describe them in prose or do they work off a simple, less defined, but very basic and easy-to-describe idea? It varies, I’m sure, and I’ll bet some writers turn to others to help them conceive visual aspects of their stories, but I knew from the beginning I wanted to attempt all the logos and graphics myself.

I mentioned in a previous post my fascination with iconography. The interesting thing about iconography is that it comes in so many different forms. It can be a quote (“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”), a photograph (sailor kisses nurse), a costume (when you think of Uma Thurman, is she wearing a yellow warm up suit with black piping?), or an album cover (pretty much any Beatles record). Often iconography is very simple, as with logos. Therein lies the challenge.

In creating Redblood’s logos, I first sought inspiration from the great Saul Bass. Google “Saul Bass logos” to get an idea how much of an influence this guy’s had on what you see every day. His second AT&T logo, created over thirty years ago, is still in use. Bass had a wonderful way of distilling a company or and idea down to its most simple form. I made many attempts to emulate that.

At some point I decided Redblood’s main logo had to contain two things: 1.) it had to be simple, and 2.) it had to have a skull. This was just the right amount of preconceived notion to have, but it still took me several years to arrive at a good working logo because I proceeded to attach several more preconceived notions to the process.

As you can see, I really thought I had it with the above logo. The idea came to me after I created rival Camp Eagle’s logo, featuring a child riding on the wings of the camp’s eponymous bird.

If Eagle’s logo evoked spoiled kids coasting through life, riding on the accomplishments of their elders, surely Redblood’s ought to convey someone who pulled themselves up by the bootstraps, who fought their way, both out of danger and through life. That’s how I arrived at the image of a camper pushing his way out of a death’s head. The reasoning behind the design was sound, but the logo had a fatal flaw: you had to stare at it for a few seconds to understand exactly what it was. Many people tried to explain their confusion to me, but for the longest time I would have none of it. It was too thematically cohesive to throw out, damn it!

Eventually I came back to my senses and returned to the drawing board. This time I set aside my nitwistic notions of symmetry and tried to shoot for Bass’ simplicity. Camping and skull, that’s what the Redblood logo had to be. Camping and skull, camping and skull. It took a few more tries, but before long I was onto something. I almost kicked myself when the idea dawned on me, it was so obvious.

From there it was a simple* matter of creating the final logo in Microsoft Paint (because what was I going to use, Photoshop or something? Please.). I will delve into that process in a later post, but the result is the logo you see at the top of this page. I’m happy with the final design and wear it on my baseball cap every day. It’s been mistaken for a real camp (usually military) and more than one person on the train has expressed their admiration for it, so that’s a good sign.

When I’m trying to solve a narrative problem in my book or designing things for it, I tend to have a conversation with myself on the page in the form of notes. These often seem like the ramblings of a mental patient, but they’ve come in handy. One of my rejected designs for Camp Redblood was later repurposed as the insignia for the Heavy Hittahs, a fictional small-town gang in my book’s world.

I really wanted to name them after West Roxbury’s own absurd gang, the Fruits and Vegetables (hailing from the hard-hitting aisles of Roche Bros.), but I thought readers would find such a pathetic excuse for a gang too lame to believe. Plus, I wasn’t going to break my ass trying to create a gang insignia out of fruits and vegetables.

Another great inspiration for logos and brand names is Pixar Studios. Their movie logos are usually perfect, with Monster’s Inc, Cars, and The Incredibles being the standouts, but the logo designs within the worlds of their stories (Pizza Planet, the Buy N’ Large Corporation) are often just as amazing. Part of my story takes place in the town near camp (It’s always fun to get away from camp, even if it’s just for an hour), which meant I’d have to think up some business names and signs. The first, pictured below, is a work in progress, but I tried to keep the Pixar designs in mind as I created it.

At the end of the day all of this stuff is secondary to the story and characters, but with world-building such a major part of popular fiction these days, it doesn’t hurt to devote some time to it. It’s definitely given me a better sense of the world of Camp Redblood, and it’s just plain fun to do besides.

*Not simple at all.

POST 8: ON GHOST STORIES, PART IV

14/12/11 at 3.47pm / by captainredblood / 0 Comment

ON GHOST STORIES, PART IV: MY STORY

I was not scared the first time I observed the laws of nature momentarily suspended. It was more an understated feeling of exhilaration, and a delayed sensation at that. The strangeness of it all came later.

Let me back up a moment for those who haven’t been following along. I can’t prove that the events I’m about to describe actually happened and have no intention of trying. This is, as always, just between you and me. It’s one of those situations where you’re going to have to choose one of the following:

A.) Pat is describing something that actually happened.

B.) Pat is describing something he believes actually happened, but is simply mistaken.

Of course there is also:

C.) I’ve had enough of Pat’s ghost nonsense and am going to see if there are any new pictures of Kim Kardashian’s ass trending somewhere. (If there are, I’ll join you there shortly. In the meantime, I have to get this off my chest.)

Apologies in advance if you clicked on the link expecting to be scared out of your wits. There are terrifying ghost tales and there are mundane ones; if I could have chosen the Bell Witch to appear before me I would have. No wait, I take that back. Based on what I’ve read, she sounds dreadful.

My friends know that I am someone who wants to believe in stuff. God, ghosts, aliens, Bigfoot, the possibility of a good new Star Wars film– I make no bones about desiring these things to be real. That being said, I never actually observed anything I could honestly classify in my own mind as supernatural until my late twenties. Not that I hadn’t seen some weird stuff. On the contrary– I had one truly unsettling thing happen to me a few years before this story, and I’ll get to it below, but there were too many possible explanations in that case.

So, the year is 2010 or 2011. I am sitting on the couch in my brother and his wife’s apartment in South Boston watching Michael Mann’s great film about the cigarette industry, The Insider. It’s late and they’ve gone to bed. Pizza boxes, Pepsi bottles, plates, glasses, beer cans, and utensils cover the coffee table before me.

Something slams the coffee table. From underneath. I know it’s from underneath because I see the table lift a fraction of an inch off the ground. Utensils rattle, Pepsi bottles topple, an empty beer can rolls off on to the floor. The whole thing’s over in less than one second.

I stare at the table for a solid minute, not moving except to blink. Suddenly I’m on my feet, moving swiftly around the table. Could it have been something heavy that had fallen off? Might something on the ground have simply tumbled over and hit it? No, and in any event I saw the table slammed and lifted upwards, not bumped and moved slightly askew. I circle the table a good three or four times. Eventually I find myself just standing there, staring at it. For how long, I do not recall. Eventually I sit back down. I do not turn off the light.

And that was it. There was some minor strangeness the following day. My brother and I saw some utensil, a dipping spoon or some such thing, pop right off its hook above the sink in his kitchen, then he lost his keys and found them in an unlikely spot behind a row of books on a shelf, but I paid none of it much mind. There’s also a history of my sister-in-law’s family seeing things in the house; figures here and there—again, fun stuff to talk about, but stuff I can’t vouch for. All of it was background noise at the time, anyway. The goddamn jumping table was what chiefly occupied my thoughts that day.

That’s the weird thing about seeing something like that. You’re not frightened as much as you are propelled into a kind of impromptu existential crisis. Sure, I was raised Catholic, believed in ghosts and all the other stuff, but even at my most willing to believe, it was still all in theory. I’d never actually seen the rules broken like that. And in such a mundane, almost nonchalant way! This wasn’t a guy walking on water or parting the Red Sea, nor was it a bunch of demon hands ripping out of the sofa like in Ghostbusters. It was something very small, yet very much not possible. Earlier this year I saw the film Noah, and was really impressed by the scene where the Creator (the movie never refers to the Man Upstairs as anything but the Creator) announces His presence to Noah. A single rain drop falls from the sky, lands on the grass before him, and a tiny flower immediately sprouts. Small, miniscule even, but still very much against the rules. In my case, I didn’t have the benefit (or curse, as it were) of my little moment of impossibility being followed by a booming voice telling me to do this or that. I’m no closer to knowing for certain whether there’s a God or ghosts or any such things out there. All I know is that, for less than one second, I saw the rules break.

This isn’t to say I immediately declared the episode a supernatural experience and was done with it. I made several attempts at rational explanations. None were satisfactory, and all were repeated to me by anyone who later heard the tale. One might wonder why I’d jump from there to the supernatural explanation. I admit I’d have to keep searching for that rational response if I was trying to prove this in a lab or in a court of law. That not being the case, the testimony of my eyes was enough to satisfy the court of my brain.

I imagine there are people who see things like that and just forget about it. It’s the same reason people ignore a strange blotch on their skin or a lump in their breast. Seeing things that aren’t supposed to happen is pretty much the check engine light of the brain, and as someone who’s worked in a mental ward or two, I can vouch for those being the scariest of all afflictions. Although I (and anyone who works with me) can’t completely vouch for my own sanity, my lack of hallucinations in the years since has allowed me some measure of comfort. On the other hand, I can see people putting it out of their mind because of what it might mean if it actually did happen. There’s a reason Alfred Hitchcock once said the scariest image in any horror film is that of a closed door; the rationale being that nothing is more terrifying than what we imagine lurking on the other side of it. That table didn’t just jump on its own. As I said, something slammed into it, something very much like a fist. Barring the possibility of an earthquake localized to the spot directly underneath my brother’s coffee table in Southie occurring, well, it damn well could have been anything.

As for myself, I haven’t put the episode out of my mind (clearly), but jobs, bills, relationships, responsibilities and other demands of everyday life inevitably overshadow that weird thing I saw that time. The enormity of it hits me every so often though, usually in the bathroom. I’ve never been into meditation, and I don’t pray as much as I used to, so I have to admit that’s where my quiet moments of reflection tend to happen these days. When I do think about it, the thought usually starts with, “Holy shit, that happened. That actually happened.”

That other thing I mentioned earlier is something I am less sure happened. In fact, I rather hope it didn’t. Nevertheless, I’ll tell the tale because it shares a thing or two in common with the table story.

So it’s several years earlier, about 2008. I’m still living at home, in the attic, and am working on the horror screenplay that will become my very first Camp Redblood material. This particular script involves a subject this Catholic boy has long been interested in, the demonic. Many reasonable people will tell you that while they don’t believe in such things, they also don’t mess with it. A wise policy to be sure, one I’d be smart to adopt.

In the course of writing this tale, I’ve researched dozens of legends of demons from the Bible and the ancient world. Anyone who’s looked into demonology from a Catholic perspective knows that the identities of these mythological entities are of great significance. The first thing an exorcist demands of an “unclean spirit” according to The Roman Ritual is its name, followed by the date and hour of its departure. As I write my screenplay, I have a sheet of printer paper with half a dozen demon names scribbled on it right beside my computer.

I close down for the night and head to bed. It’s a summer night and the attic is hot. Lacking an air conditioner, I turn on the fan. I lie down and drift to sleep. Some time later I waken. Not all the way, but enough that I open my eyes a little. Somewhere on the dark carpet I spot a small white rectangle, a sheet of paper. Suddenly the paper jerks up, as if someone had flicked the center of it with their finger from beneath. I give the paper a good long look, but the tide of sleep pulls me back in. I wake up the following morning to find the sheet of paper on the floor where I’d seen it. I pick it up and, sure enough, it’s the paper with all those demon names on it. I crumple the paper and hurry downstairs.

Clearly there are plenty of explanations on this one. I was asleep. I was dreaming. It actually happened, but the paper was merely caught in the draft of the fan. The possibilities are endless. A few things still stick in my craw, however. When I went to bed, the paper wasn’t on the floor. It was on a desk that was behind the fan and around a corner. Still, a breeze from another window could have given it a lift. Another thing is the way the paper snapped upwards when it was on the floor. That sound you hear when you flick a sheet of paper with your finger is the sound I heard, not the gentle sound of a paper being lifted by a draft.

The court of my brain ruled that one a dream. Later on, after I saw the table jump, I thought of that sheet of paper again though. The similarities between the two weren’t enough to change the ruling on the paper incident, but I gotta tell ya, it hasn’t done much for my sleeping habits.

P.S. I had hoped to save this tale until it was a little closer to Christmas. Telling ghost stories on Christmas Eve is a very old tradition that has been mostly forgotten or ignored in favor of Halloween.

POST 7: ON GHOST STORIES, PART III

14/12/04 at 4.10pm / by captainredblood / 0 Comment

ON GHOST STORIES, PART III: 5 GREAT GHOST READS

Nothing tops hearing a great ghost story in person, but if any medium comes close to replicating the experience, it’s the printed word. The greatest advantage written ghost stories have over spoken ones is that they can be experienced alone. If a scary story is really cooking for me, there usually comes a moment when I have to get up to turn on an extra light or double-check that the front door is locked. These are fun little private moments you don’t have in a group setting (unless you want to be ridiculed; the cat’s the only one who witnesses me chicken out at home, but he’s not saying anything).

Finding great collections of ghost stories is tough, though. Ghost books roughly break down into two categories: regional ghost stories and the classic chestnuts that everyone’s heard some version of, like “Bloody Mary” or that story of the railroad crossing where the ghosts of dead children push a stalled car out of the way of an oncoming train. The regional books are usually slapped-together affairs with subpar writing and badly Photoshopped covers. Collections of classic ghost stories often fare no better in those categories and face the additional challenge of remaining fresh to readers who have heard multiple versions of them. The Weird U.S. series is a good exception for both types; they’re written well and their design is consistent, if decidedly kitschy. Those big, mass-marketed tomes are like the Applebee’s of ghost books though. It’s hard to be transported by something that’s typically displayed on one of those discount racks you pass as you enter a Barnes and Noble. It’s the old, beat-up books with yellowed pages and maybe a missing cover that truly convey that forbidden, esoteric feeling lovers of ghost stories crave.

With that in mind, I’ve put together a list of five excellent collections that deserve a look. Most can be found on Amazon, which, while not being quite as evocative as a dimly-lit used bookstore, is nevertheless convenient.

Passport to the Supernatural

Bernhardt J. Hurwood

I first learned of this interesting “Occult Compendium from All Ages and Many Lands” while reading an interview with filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, who cited it as a major influence. Del Toro, whose knowledge of folklore is damn near encyclopedic, is famous for the great Spanish films Cronos, The Devil’s Backbone, and Pan’s Labyrinth. His English language films include Pacific Rim and the Hellboy series. When I learned Passport to the Supernatural was also a source of inspiration for Hellboy’s comic book creator Mike Mignola, I knew I had to track it down.

The slim, weathered paperback I obtained features a charmingly literal cover illustration of a passport with monsters and skeletons printed on its pages. The book itself is a concise, well-researched survey of legends and folklore from around the globe, from spirits and demons of biblical antiquity to Russian vampire tales to the modern shenanigans of India’s Thuggee cult (a real gang of vicious highway robbers that existed in India for over six hundred years, but didn’t rip people’s hearts out like in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom). These legends are retold in a frank, earnest fashion, but what sets Passport to the Supernatural apart is the historical context provided before and after many of the stories. Hurwood isn’t interested in veracity of these tales, but does an excellent job illustrating their evolution, often comparing and contrasting multiple versions of the same story and analyzing their variations. It’s a terrific read for those interested in the anthropology of ghost stories as much as the tales themselves.

New England Legends and Folklore

Samuel Adams Drake

Illustrations by F.T. Merrill

I frequently mention the excited, yet fearful feelings I experience listening to a particularly chilling story. Reading New England Legends and Folklore, written by Boston writer Samuel Adams Drake in 1884, one gets the sense that the denizens of early New England lived every moment of their lives in this frame of mind. Everything was an omen, the devil lurked behind every door, and all of your neighbors could be in league with him. Drake writes from an interesting point of history; his disdain for the superstitions of the Puritan era is palpable, yet he accepts the supernatural in a way that few serious writers today would dare.

Many of the tales presented in this collection were old even in 1884, and reading them I’m struck by how much of our own history is an empty timeline for many of us. This is a book that paints a vivid picture of life between the historical milestones of New England. There are feuds and spectacles and entire towns being sent into hysterics at every turn, and much of it is downright hilarious. Recounting the tale of “The Quaker Prophetess”, Drake contextualizes this story of a mad woman of the Friends by citing past incidents where Quaker women, fed up with all the repressive social bullshit of their day, basically streaked through their towns to let off steam.

Even the ghost stories have moments of pure, grim hilarity. When a recently-constructed ship departs New Haven on its maiden voyage in “The Phantom Ship”, one sensitive onlooker knows just what to say:

“Lord, if it be thy pleasure to bury these our friends in the bottom of the sea, take them; they are thine: save them!”

The good Lord graciously takes the speaker up on his suggestion, but is kind enough to send the titular phantom ship back to them the following season as a courtesy. The book is filled with many such moments, and plenty of chills to accompany them.

Spooky Campfire Stories

S. E. Schlosser

Illustrations by Paul F. Hoffman

The tales presented in the Spooky series are as old as the hills, but are brought to life with style and deceptive simplicity by S.E. Schlosser. Comprised of over twenty books featuring classic tales from different states and regions of the U.S., this modern series is unique among local haunting books. Not content to merely report old legends, Schlosser gives each a fresh spin, writing ostensibly fictional versions of classic yarns such as “The Hook” and “The Birth of the Jersey Devil”. The tales are often told in the first person while the rural settings fluctuate between the present and a distant, vague past. The effect is very much like listening to tales around a campfire; it’s not that the line between fact and fiction is blurry– it’s completely irrelevant.

Schlosser’s writing owes much to the brothers Grimm, and like them she’s not afraid of venturing into morbid and gristly territory. Despite this, the Spooky series is perfect for children and easily superior to Alvin Schwartz’s popular Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark. Like that series, the Spooky books feature gorgeous, evocative illustrations. Paul G. Hoffman’s scratchboard artwork is eerie, melancholy, otherworldly, and beautiful, often all at once, and really elevates the already excellent presentation.

Schlosser’s website, Americanfolklore.net, is an excellent resource for studying and comparing myths, legends, and folklore.

Boston Bay Mysteries and Other Tales; Ghosts, Gales and Gold; Supernatural Mysteries and Other Tales; Mysteries and Adventures Along the Atlantic Coast; and many more books

Edward Rowe Snow

Edward Rowe Snow was a major figure in Boston and New England who is all but forgotten by the generations following the Baby Boomers. High school teacher, World War II veteran, journalist, historian, preservationist, adventurer, treasure hunter, and supreme raconteur, this is the type of guy you don’t see very much of anymore. I’ve always thought of him as New England’s own Chester Copperpot. When he wasn’t busy endeavoring to save Fort Warren on Georges Island during the ‘50s, he was hard at work writing histories of Castle Island, shipwrecks, lighthouses, the islands of Boston Harbor, and famous storms. He was also fond of ghost stories, especially ones featuring pirates.

When I was little I was frequently read passages from his Boston Bay Mysteries and Other Tales. This first introduced me to the tale of the famous pirate ship Whydah and its accompanying ghost story of Goodie Hallett, the pirate’s widow who is still said to walk the beaches of Cape Cod waiting for her beloved Sam “Black” Bellamy to return. Snow’s books are filled with great stories of the supernatural, all told with the warmth and skill of a great uncle sitting by the fire sipping whiskey.

William Peter Blatty on The Exorcist: from Novel to Film

There have been plenty of books and articles written about the allegedly true story that inspired William Peter Blatty’s landmark 1971 novel The Exorcist. I first became obsessed with the story behind the story after I saw the film adaptation (not sure what age I was, but it was definitely single digits). My dad had casually mentioned that the film was based on a true story, which I later discovered concerned a boy from Maryland who was supposedly possessed in 1949. This only served to lengthen the already months-long period of sleepless nights I faced following that initial viewing of the film, but I was soon seeking out every available piece of material on the original case.

The most obvious place to start is with the Washington Post articles that originally reported the phenomena. The very first article, with its astonishingly straightforward reporting, can be found here http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/movies/features/dcmovies/exorcism1949.htm

There have been numerous nonfiction books about the case over the years, the most popular being Thomas Allen’s 1993 account, Possessed. Allen, a contributing editor for National Geographic, had the benefit of interviewing the last surviving member of the ’49 exorcist team, Father Walter Halloran. Intriguingly, a copy of the diary kept by the lead exorcist in the case, Father William S. Bowdern, is included in its entirety at the end of the book. This is said to be the same diary that Blatty was entrusted with when researching his novel. Possessed certainly has moments of creepiness, and it’s definitely worth a read for those interested in this stuff, but I found both book and diary to be incredibly dry.

For my money, the most chilling account of the 1949 possession can be found in Blatty’s own 1974 book William Peter Blatty on ‘The Exorcist’: From Novel to Screen. As the title suggests, this is more a chronicle of the novel’s adaptation into a film, but Blatty does spend a fair amount of time discussing the original case. The author had some contact with Father Bowdern, the aforementioned head exorcist, and the first mention of the diary presented in Thomas Allen’s book is made here. Unlike Allen, however, Blatty is not concerned with presenting the facts in such a dry, sober manner. Despite his repeated claims over the years that he never meant his novel to be scary, the guy has a real knack for framing the tale, in all its forms– fictional, non-fictional and otherwise– in such a way as to inspire serious goosebumps.

There’s plenty of intrigue to be mined from Blatty’s inquiries into the case during his time as a student at Georgetown University (the Jesuit institution where part of the ’49 exorcism took place), but I found some of his insights into the novel’s creation to be equally haunting. One such anecdote concerning his secretary and proof-reader during the time of the novel’s composition particularly raised the hair on my neck. She’d been working late into the night typing up the manuscript when a stark realization dawned on her. She immediately picked up the phone and dialed the writer.

“They’re not after the little girl at all!” she said breathlessly. “They’re after him.”

“Him who?” the flabbergasted author responded.

“Karras.”

I’ve never quite decided what is more unsettling here; the woman’s obviously correct assertion that Father Karras was the true target of the story’s antagonist, or the fact that she referred to this antagonist as “they” rather than “he” or “it”. After all, when the entity possessing the man from Gergesa was commanded by Jesus to identify itself in Synoptic Gospels, it responded, “I am Legion.”

POST 6: ON GHOST STORIES, PART II

14/11/21 at 4.26pm / by captainredblood / 0 Comment

ON GHOST STORIES, PART II: THE CREEPIEST SCHOOL ASSEMBLY IN HISTORY

I don’t know when I first became interested in ghost stories, but I distinctly recall the day I became obsessed. It was first grade, I was seven years old, and was sitting cross-legged on the floor of a packed Parish Hall at Holy Name Elementary in West Roxbury. Some nuns were visiting from the region of Medjugorje in what is now Bosina and Herzegovina, and did they have a whopper of a ghost story for us kids.

Before I continue, let me add some brief context. The faculty of Holy Name Elementary in 1990 was roughly half nuns, half laypeople. From what I understand, it’s all laypeople now, which saddens me some. Our nuns were mostly older women belonging to the Sisters of St. Joseph order in Boston, though there were some from other orders I can’t recall. Most of these Sisters were very sweet, and all were excellent teachers, but there were a few who definitely fit the stereotype of the strict, hardass nuns of my parents’ generation. My own teacher at the time was one of these hardasses. The older kids in my neighborhood warned me about her constantly during the summer leading up to my entry into first grade, and when I wound up in her class I was more or less regarded by those kids as a dead man walking. I actually ended up loving her class a great deal, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t in a constant state of pants-crapping fear for the first month or so. That’s not an exaggeration—during that first month I saw this woman staple a kid’s shoelaces to his shoe with his foot still in it, all because the dumb shit kept showing up to class with them defiantly untied.

All of this is to say that when it came to scaring children, even the foot-stapling disciplinarian couldn’t hold a candle to the good Sisters of Medjugorje.

We were called to the auditorium for a special event sometime in the afternoon. With it not being a holiday or a first Friday of the month, when we’d routinely attend mass together as a school, there was much interest and speculation as to what this event was. Mr. Arciero, the principal, took the stage and introduced three or four small, soft-spoken women. They weren’t scary in and of themselves, but there was a calm graveness to them that was unlike anything I’d ever encountered in another human up to that point and have only a few times since. Anyway, with the mystery of the big event revealed not to be a traveling team of yo-yo artists or the Harlem Globetrotters I was a little bummed, but what the hell, it was better than sitting in class worrying about phonics or the state of my shoelaces. I even found some of what they had to say to be interesting. Remember, my world at the time extended about as far as the Dedham town line, so learning about such an exotic place as Medjugorje was enough to hold my attention. I don’t know if the ankle-biters of today would be so attentive, but that’s neither here nor there.

It was about halfway into the nuns’ talk that shit started getting dark. I had assumed they were there to tell us about charity and doing God’s work and feeling guilty about all the stuff we had and took for granted (in other words the usual), but it turned out these women were there with a much darker, dire message. They set the stage by bringing us up to speed on some of Medjugorje’s history, including the Serbian massacre of 1941 and later mass murders of Franciscan monks in the region. Looking back, I can see how deftly they prepared us for the tale to follow; horror stories are always complimented by some well-placed historical context. I might have known jack shit about Serbs, communists, and the Croatian Revolutionary Movement, but I knew what World War II was, and just mentioning it in conjunction with what followed was enough for my young brain to weave their tale into the fabric of history (or at least my concept of history) without much effort.

I was vaguely aware of the Fatima apparitions at that point; it’s hard to grow up in a Catholic community without hearing about the alleged phenomena of the sun that occurred there, or the rosier Lourdes apparitions with their resultant healing waters and pilgrims. However, the tale these nuns told over the next hour or so introduced me to some of the darker tropes of the standard Marian apparition. Those tropes included dark prophecies, dire warnings about the future, secrets about the fate of humanity, and visions of hell. You can read in depth about the Medjugorje apparitions on Wikipedia and the Medjugorje website, but the gist is that the Blessed Virgin appeared to six children there and continued appearing daily for several years, divulging all sorts of scary info and calling believers to pray for those in Purgatory. But I’m not here to spread the Medjugorje message, just to explain my reaction to it.

What was my reaction? I rarely indulge in this Bostonian expression, but between you and me, I thought the whole thing was pisser! Scared me out of my wits, sure, but I loved every minute of it. These weren’t just adults, they were nuns, authority figures, all but saying magic was real. Not only was it real, it could bite, man! I observed something then that that really ratcheted up the stakes. Our principal was clearly uncomfortable. I don’t think anybody told him that hell itself would be a topic of conversation. For all the flak Catholicism gets, it’s not as fire and brimstone as some of the other denominations. In fact, that stuff is seldom discussed. So hearing these Sisters describe what one’s reaction to seeing hell would be (you’d be scared to death, quite literally) was a rare pleasure. The principal, however, probably would have stopped the discussion if he could. Just seeing him nervously shaking his head and glancing from us kids to the nuns told me that maybe this was stuff we weren’t supposed to be hearing—which of course only made it all the more riveting.

The nuns finished their talk and handed out devotional scapulars, which are long necklaces made of string with a small piece of cloth attached at opposite ends. Written on this cloth is the Scapular Promise, which reads, “Whosoever dies wearing this Scapular shall not suffer eternal fire.”

Unfortunately, it does not grant the power of Thor.

Sadly, does not grant the power of Thor.

Us kids practically fought one another to get our hands on them after the nuns’ talk. My seven year-old brain naturally saw the scapular as the ultimate get out of jail free card, and I may or may not have worn it on several occasions in the following days when I was up to no good. I still have it actually, set aside in a little box with other artifacts of my youth.

The Medjugorje talk was my first major lesson in the power ghost stories can wield on a receptive mind. It occurs to me now that those nuns could have scared us into believing anything, perhaps doing anything, and that’s the really scary part. It was a small taste of the fervor which plenty of other kids around the world are not only exposed to, but actually raised in. I don’t believe that assembly was evil or anything, but looking back I do have a healthy respect for the kind of power that was conjured in the auditorium that day, and think of it often.

POST 5: ON GHOST STORIES, PART I

14/11/20 at 7.03pm / by captainredblood / 0 Comment

ON GHOST STORIES, PART I: BETWEEN YOU AND ME…

Ghost stories are big at Camp Redblood, just as they are at any summer camp worth its salt. Camp Redblood and the Essential Revenge is, among other things, a ghost story itself, so I’ll be discussing them frequently as this shaggy dog of a weblog progresses. I should here make a distinction between ghost stories and ghost fiction. For the purposes of this blog, let’s say that ghost stories represent any alleged real world account of supernatural goings on, while ghost fiction covers entirely made-up works like A Christmas Carol, The Shining, and, somewhat lower on that list, my own little writing project. In that case, I should revise my earlier classification of Essential Revenge from ghost story to ghost fiction.

With that neatly out of the way, let’s talk about ghost stories because they’re what led me to the fiction. Anyone I’ve shared a whiskey or two with can attest to my fondness for the topic. Not just spooky tales themselves, but also their place in the modern world, in the old world, in literature, and in popular culture. I suppose at this point it’s necessary to share my actual beliefs on the subject of ghosts. Given the fact that the demarcation line between certain beliefs and non-beliefs has never been clearer than it is here in 2014, it’s likely I’ll lose readers just by virtue of what side of that line I come down on, and that’s the last thing I want.

With that in mind, let me say that while I’m a believer, I think ghost stories are here for one reason only, and that reason is fun. They’re here to be told over campfires for the purpose of scaring the socks off of kids and adults. What they’re not here for is to be proven, that’s for sure. I’m always amused when I turn on the TV and see some dipshit reality show ghost hunter skulking around a creaky basement, armed with infrared scopes, sound recorders, Geiger counters—fucking Geiger counters; people actually go out and purchase Geiger counters for this stuff —in some misguided attempt to push their paranormal malarkey into the scientific realm.

The truth of the matter is that believing or not believing a ghost story is beside the point, at least to everyone who isn’t telling the tale. The point is to have fun, and you leave fun behind the moment you start hanging out in dark places with a bag of electronics in the hopes of proving something. This extends to those on the other side of the fence as well. Those of us who enjoy a good yarn have all had a vocal skeptic cut the thread and spoil the fun at one time or another. These individuals sort of remind me of people who watch a movie and do nothing but point out the continuity errors and visual fakery. The crucial difference is that no movie fan ever tried to go out and prove that that King Kong really did run amuck on the streets of Manhattan in 1933, or that John Rambo went back and single-handedly won Vietnam for the United States in 1985. And nobody ever bought a fucking Geiger counter to detect the Gamma rays emanating from Lou Ferrigno, so my sympathy is with the skeptics here.

I used to believe the effectiveness of a ghost story depended as much on one’s surroundings as it did the verbal prowess of the speaker. A snowbound house, a hotel lobby late at night, even a sparsely populated bar– all evocative places I’ve taken in a tall tale or two. Then one day I eavesdropped on a really bitching ghost story in the lobby of The Boston Business Journal (not exactly the most spine-tingling spot in the Commonwealth) and had to rethink that belief. I concluded that it wasn’t surroundings or even the storyteller that made a great ghost tale come alive; it was the give and take between the storyteller and their audience.

That being said, Camp Redblood’s storytelling spot is pretty boss.

One phrase I tend to hear a lot with effective ghost stories is “between you and me”, and I think that phrase is key to this idea. “Between you and me” is someone leveling with you, someone without an agenda, someone who isn’t trying to sell you something, who knows how crazy this all sounds, who’s just telling you what they saw or heard or felt. Somewhere between you and me is the truth of the matter, and if we’re going to have fun with ghost stories, we have to leave it at that and keep the goddamn Geiger counters out of it.

Tomorrow: Part II — The Creepiest School Assembly in History

POST 4: CREATING CAMP REDBLOOD PART II

14/11/12 at 1.49pm / by captainredblood / 0 Comment

CREATING CAMP REDBLOOD PART II: THE CAMPERS

If you were one of those kids who still had to go to Phys-Ed during your later high school years because you didn’t play a sport, you might have an idea of what kind of campers populate Camp Redblood during the summer of 1985, when Camp Redblood and the Essential Revenge takes place.

There was always an eye-patch kid, wasn’t there?

I do not like sports. I played hockey growing up, and though I made the most of it, I remain as uninterested in it now as I was then. Consequently, I was one of those elder statesmen of the gym class, typically home by 3 pm relaxing with a peanut butter sandwich in front of Animaniacs instead of busting my ass at some type of practice. One of the more amusing relationships I observed in all of high school was that of the alpha-male coaches and the beta, zeta, and flat-out omega-males those coaches had to interact with during these late-stage gym classes.

The guy who got stuck with my junior year gym class was a football coach I liked a lot. He made the best of our very silly situation by treating us like we were his own players for fifty minutes a week to varying (and often hilarious) degrees of success. My greatest athletic achievement in all of high school* was being called “Tiger” by this guy, a term of endearment normally reserved for his players. This moment occurred during one of those aborted gym class football games that I was taking way too seriously (being one of the more athletic kids in a class full of human marshmallows did wonders for my anti-sports attitude). I had made a decent tackle and the coach gave me a slap on the back and said, “There ya go, Tiger!” with legitimate enthusiasm. The coach was from the Midwest I think, so imagine someone from Fargo saying that.

It was a small gesture to him I’m sure, but here I am thirteen years later writing about it. A few other guys in the class received the honor of being called Tiger as well, and I’m sure they appreciated it as much as I did. Hell, we could have wound up with the shithead who spent those periods reading the sports pages while the nerds, potheads, and other athletically-challenged SOBs who made up his class fumbled around with basketballs and floor hockey equipment like Neanderthals discovering tools.

I guess this is my long, incoherent way of saying that Camp Redblood’s campers, like The Goonies and Stephen King’s Loser’s Club before them, are good, old-fashioned outcasts. In creating these characters though, I didn’t want to just make them types (the fat kid, the smart kid, the mouth, etc.), I wanted to make them all as weird and original as possible, just like the guys in those ragtag gym classes. Even as a kid I was never convinced that The Goonies were the rejects Sean Astin’s character described them as. Sure, they’re all a little weird, but they’re not exactly sitting by themselves at the lunch table. Aside from Chunk and maybe Data, I’m sure the rest of them would have avoided upper-classmen Phys-Ed. Brand is a jock for Christ sake.

As I mentioned in a previous post, Camp Redblood in 1985 is in a steady state of decline, with their “best” campers (i.e. the most athletic, confident, popular, and prettiest) having defected to arch-rival Camp Eagle. Redblood’s director, Dr. Cheevers, comes from a much different world, one where the geeks had not yet inherited the Earth, where feminism was a nascent, mildly irritating concept, and where you stood up for yourself with your fists if necessary. Being from that world, Cheevers doesn’t quite know what to make of the goofballs he’s left with, so he makes the most of them, just like my junior year gym teacher did.

*I go back and forth regarding my greatest athletic achievement in high school. Some days it’s the memory listed above, other days it’s the single game of JV Vollyball I played in (lost 15-0), which I did for the sole purpose of being invited to their end-of-year cookout. I still have the jersey and you better believe I listed JV Vollyball as an activity on my college applications.