Today, the first tiny paycheck (tinier than what will usual because I only wrote one piece at the end of this last pay period) from Gamerant dropped into my paypal account . On a day when, despite what I hope is just an allergy sinus headache that had me dragging, I spent some time this morning working on a piece about a new horror docuseries happy as a clam. The source for my info was an article in Fangoria and it reminded me how much I loved reading it as a kid (I would buy issues here and there, though my allowance money was limited, so often I waited til I was at my cousin who had a subscription.) With no internet, it was an easily devoured publication by both of us and the source of most of our info on horror. Subsequently, I sometimes knew what I may be looking for on our Friday night jaunts to the video store with my dad, though sometimes, the best discoveries were made blind (we found Nightmare on Elm Street this way, having no clue what it was about.)
It was a movie that was one of the few that scared me a little more than the usual slasher, who at 11, I was already reasonably familiar with. (Sleepaway Camp having been my reigning favorite--probably a poor choice to show several classmates at my 11th B-Day slumber party, but I did it.) But then again, it was probably no less traumatizing than making us play Bloody Mary in the bathroom with the lights out (not me, no fucking way..lol..) and a tag game, Bloody Murder, that involved running around in the pitch dark of our front/yard/field and grabbing each other.
It then reminded me of the friends I managed to fall in with later. how we would devote long sessions to ghost stories and building weirdly elaborate haunted houses in basements to scare each other (If I recall correctly it was highly organized and split into teams and usually erupted in some sort of drama or fight as did most slumber parties of adolescent girls.) Later, when I was older, I had friends who loved to hit up the local haunts, which we continued to do through the end of high school. the sort complete with strobe lights and jump-out scares we'd trail through in giggles. I've often thought about how, having no brothers or male friends as a child (and really into adulthood) how we were way into a genre that was unfairly written off more as a boy's pursuit, at least then anyway and maybe still. What's hilarious is I've found much more fervent horror lovers that were women as adults than men (some of whom I've dated that actually didn't like horror at all--a bad sign..)
So it feels a little full circle to be writing about horror movies, even though it's just a handful of news pieces per week for just a little money I'm hoping will cover my streaming fees and maybe some movie outings, it's really a lot of fun. I'm also learning how fast the entertainment news world moves ( compared to poetry and design writing that is usually not rolling quite so swiftly to publication. )
