Tuesday, June 9, 2015

Writing is not believing.

One of the stranger things I've encountered, and which I'm still having a hard time wrapping my brain around, is the idea that because I write about werewolves and vampires and Bigfoot, that I must somehow then believe they exist.

This idea never occurred to me.

I just got my first one star review.  It was for The Dead Spend No Gold.  Basically the comment was "pure speculation."

Well, you know, it is a book about werewolves and Bigfoot.  Speculation isn't even the half of it.

I looked up the other reviews by this person, and sure enough there were several non-fiction books about Bigfoot, expressing their belief that Bigfoot is real.

So...well, nothing I can do about it.

When Led the Slaughter, the Donner Party Werewolves first came out, I got the strangest question over and over again.

"Is it true?"

At first I laughed, thinking they were making a joke.  "Only the werewolves," I'd respond.

It finally dawned on me that they were asking a serious question.  So that was the first surprise.

Did they believe in werewolves?  Are there actually people who believe in werewolves?

As more time passed, I realized I had this wrong.  The person asking didn't necessarily believe in werewolves, but they assumed that I did!

I still have a hard time with this.  I live half my life in a fictional world, maybe more if you count my dreams at night.  Movies, TV., books, comics, games.

All made up, folks.

I pretty much don't believe in anything supernatural, nor have I seen any evidence of it.  To me, these are symbolic representations of bigger truths.

And, well...sometimes they're just entertainment.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Evidence of the collapse of civilization.

Reminds me of those man-on-the-street interviews where people are asked what century the Civil War was fought in and they don't know. Or where Iraq is. I don't know, Duncan, some of those people probably do think there were werewolves "in those days."


Jim Cornelius
www.frontierpartisans.com