Guest blog: Dancing with the Darkness

Today we’re taking a walk on the dark side with Johnny Worthen, author of the delightfully shivery head-trip “BEATRYSEL.” Here, Johnny talks about how easy it can be to slip into the shadows.

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“No light without darkness,” says Phenex. “Love and jealousy; loyalty and betrayal; affection and anger.” — BEATRYSEL

This is the heart of BEATRYSEL. Remembering always the flip side of emotion, I strove to imagine what perfect pain a perfect love could bring, what perfect betrayal from a perfect mate. As I imagined love given form, I only had to turn the euphoria a few degrees to see the depths of despair waiting in balance. The rest wrote itself.

BEATRYSEL began as a love story, and still is, but it in I explore the dark sides of love, its axioms and inversions. Though I prefer “occult thriller,” some have called it “horror” and that might be as good a description as any because what can be more horrible than love, that omnipotent euphoric nucleus of being turned around?

What I expose is how vulnerable one can be when they give themselves over completely to another. It’s a good thing, to love that much, but there is a danger. In the natural flow of things, given time, this emotional exposure is often mitigated by wisdom and maturity. But not always and never completely. Because if you cannot be hurt by your lover, how can you say you love them?

Every love we have has the potential to hurt us. The deeper we are in love, be it for a child, a sister or a spouse, the greater is the potential for dissatisfaction and heartache. But luckily, blessedly, usually that doesn’t happen and unless we have first hand experience, we’re always blind to the danger going in.

It’s cold comfort to know that when it does go bad, we can measure our worth and emotional giving by the duration of our sobs and the volume of our tears. And the tension in our fists.

It doesn’t always end this way. But it could and sometimes does.

Johnny Worthen

For those who have this experience, I present to you, your sister, BEATRYSEL. To those of you with the imagination to conceive of it, I present to you your friend BEATRYSEL. To those of you who are immune to this kind of pain, I present to you your nemesis, BEATRYSEL.

For, BEATRYSEL is a creature of love.

BEATRYSEL was freed September 12th from Omnium Gatherum

My links:

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Beatrysel-Johnny-Worthen/dp/0615874630/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1378227216&sr=8-1&keywords=beatrysel

Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18360200-beatrysel

WEB: http://www.johnnyworthen.com/

Blog: http://www.johnnyworthen.blogspot.com/

Twitter: @JohnnyWorthen

FaceBook: https://www.facebook.com/JohnnyWorthenBooks

Publisher: http://omniumgatherumbooks.com/beatrysel

Supervillain Don'ts: Sharing the Evil Plot

Supervillain Don’ts: Sharing the Evil Plot

We’ve all been there. You have the hero at your mercy, either tied up in some complicated wheel of death or simply bleeding on the ground in front of you. The plan you’ve been slaving over has worked flawlessly, as you knew it would, and you’re only seconds away from crushing the last vestiges of life out of your victim. You NEED the fool to know just how badly you’ve crushed him, to torture him in his final moments by draining him of his last vestiges of hope. Surely it will just make him suffer more if you tell him your wonderful plan, right?

In short, no.  Because the hero is still alive, even if it’s just barely, and you’ve now told him exactly what he needs to do to keep your marvelously evil plan from coming to fruition.

The moment you give the hero this information, something that will inevitably happen that will force you to leave the room for a moment. The universe, and the writers, will demand this, no matter how many times you swear you’d never be one of those idiots who walk away just as the hero is dying. Perhaps your secret fortress will be invaded, or collapse into a flaming heap around you. Perhaps one of your minions will choose this unfortunate moment to be ambitious. Either way, you will leave the room. And the hero will escape, now fully aware of everything you’re about to do.

If you don’t tell the hero, you still might not be able to keep them from escaping. But they’ll have no way to stop your plan (another supervillain don’t: leaving the door to your plotting room unlocked) and you can proceed with your villainy unchecked. It might be fun to boast to the hero when they’re at your mercy, but it’s even more fun when they’re staring at your glorious success. Once the plan is fully completed, you’ll have plenty of leisure time to share your villainous monologue with anyone you’d like.

If you do indeed manage to kill them, your chance to torment them with your plan will have admittedly passed. Your fellow supervillains will still be around, however, and watching them turn green with envy at your evil victory can be remarkably entertaining.

Every little ending of the world

There’s something terribly wrenching about sudden endings, a small but permanent shift where you step out of one world and into another one. Even if the difference between the two is relatively small – a new apartment building instead of the old one, a breakup you hadn’t seen coming – there’s something disorienting about being cut off from the life you’ve been experiencing until just recently. Even though most of the important parts are still firmly in place, it can never quite be the same as it once was. Something that was enough of a part of it to be almost instinctive has ended, and as such is now forever out of your reach.

You wish you’d been warned somehow, because surely a chance to say goodbye would have made the loss easier. You could have made a plan for what you were going to do without whatever it is you lost, or simply taken some time to become accustomed to the thought of letting go. To try and figure out who you are now. But the truth is, there’s never really enough warning. That last step will always feel too final, and you will always wish you had just one more day in the life you’d gotten so used to. It’s in human nature to always want one more goodbye.