Samhain Publishing

I’m not here.
With any luck, by the time you read this I’ll be in Richmond, VA, warping young minds—er, participating in pre-RavenCon programming at a local Richmond high school. Or maybe you’ll read this a little later, after my roommates and I head out to the local cold spots—the kinds of places where the ghost of Edgar Allen Poe never sleeps.
I love finding the weird in a new locale. No two places have the same feel.
It’s more than a matter of kind. You expect the emotional landscape of Manhattan’s subways, skyscrapers and bitter winters to differ from the one created by Savannah’s elegant mansions and sultry southern clime. History also plays its part. The blood-soaked killing fields of Gettysburg affect the mind and heart very differently than the Revolutionary War battlefields of Yorktown.
Even the most mundane details can make a big difference. How does a town trim the trees infringing on its power lines? Does it hack them to within an inch of their lives or prune away only as much as needed for safety’s sake?
This is the stuff urban fantasy is made of. It’s one of the things I adore about the genre. For me, a story takes flight when the character of the setting becomes a character in the plot. I love it when a writer mines the mythic in the everyday. It lets me believe, if only for a little while, that I could turn a corner in Philadelphia or Plano, TX, and find magic.
That’s why it’s so ironic that I’ve had so much trouble capturing the essence of my hometown, Washington, DC. You’d think it be easy. I’ve lived in or around DC most of my life, and nobody can say DC isn’t extreme.
But it’s extreme in so many ways. Where else could you bounce from a basement exhibit of 21st century Japanese woodblock prints celebrating yokai (goblins) on the Tokaido Road to White House follies and Congressional scandals to an Afro-pop performance at a college auditorium to the world’s biggest aggregation of non-profit associations and conflicting agendas, all in the space of a single afternoon? How do you capture that in the pages of a single book?
I’m not sure yet, but at least I’ve defined the challenge. Now I just need to define the plot.
Maybe I’ll be able to scare a few ideas out of my new friend Edgar. That’s the plan, anyway. All I have to do is nail him down.
Does anyone know if silver nails work on ghosts?