What Writing means to me

By Lia Scott Price, Vampire Comic Book Author and Creator of Vampire Guardian Angels^TM

When I first started writing, I was told that as a woman, I should only be writing romance novels or how-to cookbooks. And for a time I believed that was why I should do, to conform to what society wanted me to write. In college, I was also told that my writing was too “silly” when I tried to deviate into more ideas that were adventurous or “out there” (thus barely passing their “creative writing” class).  But when I attempted to write my first romance piece, I ended up killing off the heroine, the hero, and pretty much everybody else. Happily ever-afters, I found out quickly, were not to my taste. I preferred to write about monsters, horror, and creepy stuff, and generally freak people out.

So, after a three-week binge on Bacardi and Orange Juice and Bacardi and whatever else went with the stuff, I ended up with a serial killer novel story — the first story in my Vampire Guardian Angels trilogy series. And as I wrote and pushed my imagination more and thought “outside the box”, I found that writing did not have to mean conforming to expectations and what mainstream society thought I should write about.  Writing meant pushing my imagination further, using my dreams as inspiration, and questioning things people considered “normal”, and turning “ordinary things” into the extraordinary. Horror was what I loved writing about. Because it was a distraction. I could turn my fears into fiction and when I came back to reality, I found that life wasn’t so bad compared to the nightmares I put on paper.

Writing also turned out to be therapy for the challenges in my life. (Although I did find that I could not write when I was happy. I was at my writing best only at the low points in my life). So instead of wallowing, I use a bad day, a depressed day, an “off from being normal” day, to write the bizarre, the strange, the weird, the fantastic. Fiction is therapy. Fiction is freedom for the mind. --Lia Scott Price, Comic Book Author and Creator of Vampire Guardian Angels^TM