I am laughing about this now, but half an hour ago it was scary. I was just settling in to my research on nasty ghosts (as you do) and I got distracted by clips from "Ghostbusters" on YouTube. Particularly I found myself hooked on the scene where the Terror Dog, Zuul, pins Dana into the chair in her apartment, drags her into the kitchen and possesses her.
Unfortunately, right at the moment when I have a wide-mouthed, red-eyed, snarling Terror Dog filling my widescreen monitor, the fuse box decided to blow, plunging the whole house into darkness and leaving that image seared on my head. The fuse box is in the cellar.
I have never been more scared to go and change it. Even with a torch and a quick step in my feet, the hairs on the back of my neck were standing up all the way. That blooming Zuul didn't leave my head until I logged back on with all lights restored.
Have any of you managed to scare yourself like this when researching? Just curious really.
No, but I found researching the aspects of the novel, very interesting and enlightening. I read books and essays by famous authors and eminent literary critics of English literature.
I learned much from, Professors Walter Allen (The English Novel), F R and Q D Leavis(The Function of Characters), Clayton Meeker Hamilton (Materials and Methods of Fiction).
I, also researched and read many books by award winning authors. The essay by George Orwell, Politics and the English Language is excellent, but the best book ever written on the aspects of the novel, has to be, 'Aspects of the Novel' by E M Forster.
'Aspects of the Novel' should be compulsory reading for want-to-be authors.
Jonathan...
Just think of all the "Ready Meals" they could have made with that lot...
;-)
David
Not quite, but I've had a 'fact and fiction' moment.
To cut a long story short-ish, in my latest book a huge number of cavalry horses are slaughtered before an army is evacuated from a Spanish town, to stop them falling into enemy hands. This was a factual event, but it didn't sit well with me so I outlined a scene where one of my MCs secretly saves a large number of them.
Then just before I wrote the chapters which included that event, I found a French officer's diary which stated that when they captured the town they found 500 live cavalry horses which had been left behind.
That's about as spooky as my research gets ;)