{"id":4830,"date":"2019-10-28T12:10:33","date_gmt":"2019-10-28T11:10:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/?p=4830"},"modified":"2020-03-09T07:21:59","modified_gmt":"2020-03-09T06:21:59","slug":"stories-for-a-walk-in-the-woods","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/?p=4830","title":{"rendered":"Stories for a Walk in the Woods"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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No better inspiration for spooky stories than a walk in the woods in the fall <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I went for a walk yesterday morning in a park nearby my house. It\u2019s a pleasant little park, long lanes up to a small castle (there are zillions in the CR) and crooked paths through the woods. The ground was padded with golden, yellow, and red leaves. What was left on the trees was still colorful as well, so the place was eerily inviting.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Given the choice of walking on a patted-down lane or a\nforest path, I chose the forest path. Again, really just a meandering lane that\ndoesn\u2019t get too far from the main road. I walked for a while and just took in\nthe crisp air, the blue sky. I am thinking about stories today. More specifically,\nthe stories I want to read at Halloween.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am a very moody reader. Around Christmas time I want funny\nstories about dysfunctional families. It\u2019s the time of year I deal with the joys\nand stresses of family, so that\u2019s what I feel I can relate to then. In the spring\nand summer I want a good adventure novel. It\u2019s because this time of year is\nwhen I want to go on an adventure myself. So the idea of Huck pushing off on a raft\nor Frodo and Sam stepping off towards Mordor have real appeal to me. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In autumn, it\u2019s mystery and spookiness. It\u2019s getting darker\ndaily, the air is crisper and the warm comforting time of year is at an end. I want\nstories that poke at my anxieties and which force me to leave my comfort zone. I\nwant to read about places called Sleepy Hollow and Godric\u2019s Hollow and Haddonfield.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not only does it dictate what I want to read, but also what I\nwant to write. As I wander these leafy back paths with swaying trees I see visions\nof quaint cottages with a secret and potential stories of adventurers, ghosts,\nand rogues. It\u2019s these stories that first attracted me to writing when I was\nyoung and I constructed fairylands in closets and had some boys\u2019 forest tree\nfort under attack by legless forest ghouls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s no doubt that part of the joy of autumn and Halloween comes\nfrom the freedom. It\u2019s the time and one day a year when we are encouraged to\ngive in to our natural wonder and fantasy, to be what we want, to allow ourselves\nto be taken on adventures. We wear masks and talk to strangers, we take candy\nfrom them. Perhaps most astonishingly, we open our doors to strangers wearing\nmasks and give them candy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Everyone who writes learned at some point that it involved more\nthan writing out a story. That\u2019s at the base of it, for sure, but there comes a\ntime when they realize there\u2019s more happening that simply a nice little story. While\nthis is true, I at times feel as though I have had that wonder of storytelling\nbeaten out of me by the professional realities of writing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So with this wonder, spookiness and mystery in mind I sat\ndown and wrote a story. I wrote what I wanted. I allowed the story to take me\nfor a ride and I didn\u2019t worry about or consider publication at all (none of my\nshort fiction gets published anyway).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The result is a novelette called The Second Ghost<\/a>. It\u2019s a take on Dickens\u2019 Christmas Carol but at Halloween, which I always thought would be a fun tweak on the original story. The story is told from the perspective of the Ghost of Halloween Past (the Second Ghost). I always wondered what happened to those ghosts when they finished with Scrooge. I also felt awful for Jacob Marley. So I guess The Second Ghost<\/a> comes from wanting to help all lost souls at this fantastical time of year. You can buy it at the hyperlink on the title, it\u2019s a buck. I hope you have as much fun reading it as I did writing it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And even if you don\u2019t read it, do take a walk on some leafy path\nin the forest and think about all the stories you want to read and write and\nthe adventures that you want to take. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

No better inspiration for spooky stories than a walk in the woods in the fall I went for a walk yesterday morning in a park nearby my house. It\u2019s a pleasant little park, long lanes up to a small castle (there are zillions in the CR) and crooked paths through the woods. The ground was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4831,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4830","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/damiengaleone.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/72674688_409636613283583_1909922938069450752_n.jpg?fit=2704%2C3612&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1EvEu-1fU","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4830","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4830"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4830\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4932,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4830\/revisions\/4932"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4831"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4830"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4830"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4830"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}