Sylvia McDaniel: Witches, Goblins & Spooks--Oh my!!

Witches, Goblins & Spooks--Oh my!

Yeah!! October is here and everyone south of the Red River is doing the happy dance. After 70 days of over 100 degrees, we're finally starting to see the temperatures cool down and know that Fall is on the way.  And with the arrival of Fall comes the holidays. I love Halloween just for this reason. To me it's the kick-off to the holiday season.

While I'm a little old for dressing up and I haven't been to an adult costume party in a few years, I enjoy seeing my neighborhood kids all decked out in their costumes trick or treating. Even the older kids I enjoy seeing the costumes they created right up until about nine pm when I turn out the light and some of you just don't get the message. 

 We're done. Go home!         

As a writer, I feel like I get to dress up every day. I get to step into a different costume, make my characters experience the oddities of life and create their world. When I wrote historical romance, I enjoyed doing the research to see what a woman would wear crossing the Oregon Trail and what a Victorian woman wore during the late 1800's.  All I can say is there is no way I would wear all that clothing in Texas Heat.  I'd probably be arrested for indecent exposure as those petticoats would be tossed in the garbage and that dress would be ventilated or shorter.

Part of the fun of creating characters is placing yourself in their skin, describing their clothes, their actions and making that person come alive. For writers Halloween is every day as we dress up and act out. I've written a character that dressed like Elvira, jumped out of a coffin and sang happy birthday. I've written about a wife who confronts her husband at his dominatrix apartment and he's wearing a dog collar and chains. I've written a series about three women who all find out they're married to the same man and he's dead--poison. I have a runaway bride who torches her fiancés car when she finds out he slept with her best friend.  

Yes, it can be fun to torture your characters. Would I do many of the things I put my characters through?  Absolutely not!  Torching a 69 Corvette? Please! Dressing like Elvira? Ha! I don't think they make that costume in a size 12 with a girdle tough enough to withstand my love handles. Confronting my husband at his dominatrix...there would be no need. Instead, papers would be served.

For writers, creating characters that can act out our wildest fantasies and do things we would never do, is the fun part of the job. I can play act all I want and let my characters do actions my imagination dreams up. This week I was pulled over by the Lewisville Police and well...  That little incident will somehow find its way into a book, very soon.  (Thank you, Officer, for being so kind and not giving me a ticket.)

So Halloween is a day that I enjoy watching the kids dress up, handing out candy and thinking how can I use this in a book? But then again, every day is like that for a writer.  

So tell me, what was your favorite costume as a child? As an adult? If you're a writer, what is the worst thing you've ever done to a character?

Sylvia McDaniel walked down the aisle with the wrong man instead of going to college and has been fighting to correct that mistake most of her life. Now married to the right man for almost 17 years, she’s sold nine historical romances and written five contemporaries. After a publishing dry spell of eight years she struggles for a second chance in publishing.  If marriage the second time around has been happily ever after, surely publishing the second time around will give her the success she dreams of.