Write the Scary Thing

Your characters need not reflect you

...when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you." - Friedrich Nietzsche

Sometimes my online friends I met through Catholic Twitter will ask about my books, expressing interest in reading them, and I am placed in an awkward position.

You see, one of my series isn’t very Catholic. And even well-read people can sometimes make the mistake of imagining an author approves of and practices everything they write about.

That isn’t true by the way. Many authors write from the perspective of characters who are deeply flawed and wrong about a lot of things.

Sometimes we write about things that scare us too, especially those of us in the paranormal genres.

There is a story arc in season 3 of HBO's True Blood involving witches, both traditional female-led European witchery as well as a specific Central American brand of Brujeria, a distinctively male craft. I hadn't even known at that time there were such a thing as male witches, particularly in Mexico, which has a very strong machism…