Taormina and Mount Etna Sicily

As I love to travel I thought I'd begin a series of travel blogs for my adventures abroad and what has inspired me to include in my The Beyond Series Of Books.

I love Italy and I think Italians are amazing friendly people so I was thrilled to get the opportunity to visit Sicily. Taormina is a quaint city in the mountains close to mount Etna. Lost of windy roads to the top of the town. It reminds me of Venice, but without the canals and water ways. Oldie worldy and very quaint.

There is a beautiful Roman Amphitheatre that is still used today for shows. 

A town square where locals gather for coffee and ice cream and leisurely sit around gossiping in the sun and listening to the street musicians. I went to the café that Liz Taylor and …… Famously met regularly for illicit liaisons, so I’ve heard. It was very expensive, but I felt a film star for a couple of hours.
A live band was playing one evening as we sat out enjoying the atmosphere of the square. I could have sworn the lead singer was chatting us up over the Microphone, I couldn't tell what he was saying as it was in Italian, but he did sing Lady in Red whilst winking at me... (I was in a red dress).

I had my portrait drawn whilst there and although my neck was stiff as a board after fifty minutes stuck in one position the results were very impressive. It is something I’ve always wanted and now it hangs pride of place on my living room wall.

One excursion I will never forget though was a trip up Mount Etna… WOW! As a Health and Safety freak you can only imagine my fear of the damn thing erupting whilst I’m taking pictures of an unfortunate hostelry that didn’t survive the last eruption. I can’t believe people are mad enough to go on skiing trips there. Yes, there is a ski village there a few hundred feet from the top where the ground still steams!!! Crazy!! The bus ride was cool, like moon buggies and the tires are so huge to cut through the ash to the top. Barron, but beautiful.

 This was the view from our Apartment Balcony. Stunningly lovely, but there's always that worry in the back of your mind that one may have to escape the island at a moments notice. I barely unpacked anything from my case and lived out of my suitcase for the entire holiday!

As I was heading back to the Cable car ride back to the ski village I looked back to see huge plumes of sulphur smoke billow over the horizon. I Said to someone sitting next to me, “you don’t think that’s and eruption do you?” To which all other passengers turned to look a tad alarmed. And yes when I returned home I confirmed that Etna had indeed erupted again. It was cool to say I have been on a live volcano, but I seriously doubt I will dabble with fate and try that again!



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SciFi Weekender Discussion Panel - Promoting The Beyond Series - Supernatural Books

Last weekend I attended the SciFi Weekender in Pwllheli in Wales to try and promote and sell some of my Beyond Series books. So I was thrilled to be asked by Author Sam Stone to sit on a couple of discussion panels. As this is quite a long blog (for me), I decided to break it into two parts.

Graham Guy, Me, Sam Stone and Austin Chambers on first panel.

Horror Writing

Visceral Versus Psychological

Horror to me is defined as stepping into a fantasy world that you normally wouldn’t entertain in everyday life. For instance you wouldn’t court a mad psychopath who is so unpredictable that you could potentially become their next victim, whether rape, murder or cannibalised! Nor would you really meet a person or a mythological creature that frightens the life out of you and disturbs or disgusts you. To me, this is horror.

When I was asked to sit on two writer’s discussion panels for the Sci Fi Weekender, it actually made me think properly for the first time about the genre I regularly write in. I never normally analyse or label my work until I have to publish the book. So I lay awake most of the night before thinking about what horror writing meant to me and which did I prefer. Needless to say I was tired the next day, but with the adrenalin pumping and microphone in hand, an eager audience waiting for something profound to be blurted from my lips, this is what I wanted to say – even if I didn’t articulate it very well at the time.

Visceral Horror is the blood, guts and gore of the genre, the things that we watch or read that makes us go eeewwwuurgggh!!! Psychological Horror is suggestive, giving the audience the opportunity to use their own intelligence and imagination to make the spine shiver and the heeby jeebies get jiggy in your tummy.

Zombie Cop!

As I am predominantly known as a novelist, I wanted my audience to be clear that ‘writing horror’ isn’t just restricted to writing books and short stories for anthologies or magazines. Graphic Novels, TV Scripts, Film Screen Plays and Theatre all come under the writing banner too. At the end of the day a person thought it, wrote the script and then let others produce the creative media the story is being told in.

So we discussed novel writers such as Dean Koontz, Stephen King. Horror Films which crossed over into the Sci-fi genre too, such as Cloverfield and Skyline (I found terrifyingly disturbing films). Supernatural Horror like Nightmare on Elm Street, Carrie and Paranormal Activity – Serial Killer Horror like Halloween and Friday the 13^th. Granted there is some blood and gore in them, but only right at the end when the psychological tension has been built to a crecendo. I pointed out horror in the theatre, psychological plays like A Woman in Black, The Haunting and Ghost Stories (my personal favourite). I did see a visceral play in the form of a Jacobean Play called The Changeling (I have reviewed this play in my Blog before). Quiet shocked when there was a lot of stabbing and blood at the end.

The Weeping Angels on Doctor Who. The thought of something horrible happening to you when you close your eyes for just a second is terrifying!

I concluded that psychological horror worked much better for me because I like to think about what’s going on in the story, being kept on the edge of my seat or compelled to turn the next page of the book, but a certain amount of visceral horror is needed to push the story along. For instance, my Beyond Books do have a certain amount of violence or blood based wounds and deaths because the supernatural creature themselves are visceral and NEED to drink blood or kill with their bare hands or decapitate the odd immortal Lycan, because it is necessary for their survival.

One cannot help but feel sympathy for a vampire who is made against their will and then must feed on human blood to continue to survive – or a were-wolf pack ripping the heads of the feral wolves that attack them in their homes when all they wish to do is live peaceful lives and hunt in the forests.

It seemed unanimous amongst the group that it was easier to accept this fictitious world because we all know it’s not real, but an escapism of the drudgery of real life. However, psychological horrors involving humans inflicting the visceral blood lust and gore on fellow humans is deeply disturbing for me. For instance, serial killer TV programmes that I have watched like Dexter, The Following, or Patrick Jane tirelessly hunting for Red John in The Mentalist is far more frightening because we are all too aware that these sort of people really do exist. In fact, as you read this and look around, (if in a public place, of course) notice the people and ask yourself – Who are they? Why are they there? Are they inherently good people or could they be the next Yorkshire Ripper or Myra Hindley?

How many times have friends and neighbours said in the news about killers. “Well, I’ve watched them grow up on our street. I’ve known them all their lives – He was such a lovely person – I can’t believe he could do such a thing!” And the shock quotes could go on and on. I’ve never heard anyone being interviewed after a revelation of a captured serial killer saying – “I knew all along the guy was a complete wacka-doodle… or - I thought about telling the cops when I saw him cooking his pet guinea pig on a campfire when he was a kid… He gave me the creeps!!” To me this kind of horror is truly disturbing and which is why I am exploring the mind of a serial killer in my crime thriller series Mancunian Tales. I have two books written so far, but I want the one I’ve been currently researching to write to be released first as part of a trilogy. 

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Ghost Hunt Of Healey Hall

Healey Hall is a beautiful old house in Rochdale. I was invited to a real Ghost Hunt, which was brilliant, I have to say. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do especially seeing as I write for a living about a paranormal investigative team in my Beyond Series of books. I thought it would be fun to go on a hunt and do a little research for my books characters at the same time - plus I wanted to have a nosy inside a big private manor house!

First we had a tour of the house and immediately I was creeped out by the maze of cellars and the attic rooms, especially when the owners had one of those creepy life size child dolls that face the wall as if playing hide and seek, but when you turn the things around they have no face, yahhhh! How can anyone find those things cute?

There was also a little chapel on the first that was currently being used as a dressing room for a guest bedroom and this also sent shivers down my spine. I’m telling you now, if I was a guest sleeping in that house, I would be sleeping in the lounge.

I heard a few moans and groans through the white noise, but the séances were a joke. There was a lady there who claimed to be psychic, and who blatantly directed the séances using a glass. There wasn’t even an attempt to use the power of suggestion through advanced language patterns. As an NLP Master Practitioner not much passes my attention, so I sat out of them both, especially when I felt other people in the seance circle actually pushing the glass around to spell out a word! Geeze!

Anyway, I enjoyed sitting in the darkened living room alone, until other people came wandering in and talking, which irritated me a little as it ruined the ambience for me. I left at 3 am because the “psychic lady” was banging on about a Victorian nanny that walked into the current nursery. Now I knew that that room hadn’t always been a nursery and it’s pretty safe to assume that a house that size would most certainly have had servants and a nanny!!! Oh yeah and I was tired. I didn’t experience anything conclusive that ghosts exist or blew my socks off scary like that librarian in the beginning of Ghostbusters movie!

We did have this machine that gave out white noise and if you went into this room you had to keep very quiet, unless something was heard through the equipment. So I spent quite a bit of time in here. I did hear something - I'm not sure what, a cry or a moan or a sigh! The organisers came running in the room very excited and asked me if I'd just heard 'that'? I said I'd heard something from the white noise box. Apparantly the two men had been in the attic and they claimed to have heard screaming and moaning! Creepy!! But sadly that was the only exciting thing that happened that night.   

In conclusion, I think it's fair to say that these ghost hunt TV programmes do exaggerate and sensationalise each and every hunt they go on just to make themselves more credible. I would really like to go on a ghost hunt with just two or three people and who are trustworthy enough not to fake stuff. Any Offers?

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