Guest Blogger, Jessica McHugh
Jessica McHugh is going to be our guest tonight on Edin Road Radio, reading from her book Danny Marble & the Application for Non-Scary Things. We invited her to be our guest on the blog and, happily, she agreed. Enjoy!
Danny Marble & the Application for Non-Scary Things is dedicated to two people. The first is my husband, Dave McHugh, who did the wonderful illustrations. Not only was this my first collaboration with my husband, it was our first collaborations with anyone, and I’ll admit it was a little trying for both of us.
I wrote Danny Marble before Dave drew a single picture. It was also accepted for publication by Reliquary Press before he had little more than sketches. I may still have a full-time job, but I’m also a full-time writer. My projects are always in mind and I don’t feel comfortable without progress. So, depending on someone else to complete their portion while I was twiddling my thumbs was a slight frustration. But while Dave is a fantastic illustrator, he isn’t a full-time or even part-time one. This was something completely new to him: adhering to deadlines while delivering his best quality work and dealing with his writer wife constantly bugging him for updates. However, I was completely unsurprised when Dave expertly set stress aside and delivered the perfect illustrations. He really captured the creepy cuteness I was looking for. I was so in love with them, in fact, I had one tattooed on my forearm.
The second person in the Danny Marble dedication is Guillermo, as in Guillermo del Toro. Whether he will ever know my book is dedicated to him, I couldn’t guess, but it was something that needed to be done. The night Danny Marble sprung into existence was the same night I watched Guillermo del Toro’s The Orphanage. It’s a creepy movie, to be sure, but it isn’t exactly terrifying. However, the dreams I had that night were. In The Orphanage, there is a small child named Tomas who wears a burlap sack over his head. I kept seeing him standing next to my bed, seconds away from tearing away the sack to reveal the twisted horror of a face hidden beneath. I couldn’t sleep. I imagined his deformities as he reached out to me, perhaps to snatch a new face for himself. That’s when I said the words, Danny Marble and the Application for Non-Scary Things. I repeated them over and over in my head as I imagined something new: a young boy plagued by deformed demons. They came to him every night, induing a years-long insomnia. I repeated the title as I wrote it on the second page of my dream journal. (The first page held the plot of my novel, Rabbits in the Garden, published this year by Post Mortem Press.) The next day, I began brainstorming the plot for Danny Marble & the Application for Non-Scary Things, including the following poem which isn’t actually in the book but inspired the development of Danny’s Scary Things.
There are many secrets humans keep
Of how they fall into a slumber deep,
But for Danny, finding restful sleep
Took so much more than counting sheep.
Always falling from the tall bookcase
Is the ragged rabbit with the ravaged face,
Whose eyes and mouth are just empty space
Mumbling and stumbling through the place.
With a squealing wheel and a jingling bell
Is the legless clown from the depths of hell,
Who swears up and down he means you well,
But his true intent, none alive can tell.
From the far-most corner where the sun can’t reach
Sits the thin, gray cat with the broken teeth.
He smiles and watches as the blood moon peaks
Before hissing and spitting his lispy speech.
There is another one that comes at night
And doesn’t inspire fits of fright
She sends Danny’s monsters into flight
The lady with eyes of lantern light.
Obviously, there isn’t much of a story within the poem, but it help design the characters of the Scary Things, as well as Danny’s sometimes-savior Lantern Eyes. Rather than picturing real-life characters as I wrote the story, I pictured it as stop-motion animation. I had recently seen the movie Coraline based on the Neil Gaimen novella and really loved the feel of it. When I discovered Danny Marble, I thought it would work really well in that kind of fantasy world. Dave perfectly brought every aspect of that world to life in the illustrations. We created something very beautiful and very cool, and I personally can’t wait to read it story to our children someday…although we might have to skip over some of the bloodier parts.
Thank you so much to Edin Road for having me on their blog. It was a blast getting to revisit the experience of creating this book. Danny Marble & the Application for Non-Scary Things will be available in hardcover and ebook in September through Reliquary Press, Amazon, etc. Please visit www.JessicaMcHughBooks.com for more information.
http://www.JessicaMcHughBooks.com
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Jessica McHugh is an author of speculative fiction that spans the genre from horror and alternate history to epic fantasy. A prolific writer, she has devoted herself to novels, short stories, novellas, and even playwriting. She has had nine books published in three years, including Song of Eidolons, The Sky: The World, and the first three installments in her Tales of Dominhydor series.
Tags: Danny Marble, Edin Road, edin road radio, Guillermo del Toro, horror, Jessican McHugh, Neil Gaiman, Scary Things
