Cold

Today in the Cold, we are talking about possibly the most fascinating, alluring, and confounding character in all of literature...Count Dracula. What is it about Bram Stoker's "Dracula" that inspired a global phenomenon that turned so many of us into undead junkies? Was it masterfully written - yes. Stoker wove a complex, culturally sophisticated, and truly terrifying horror story. Ultimately, though, I think the secret lies with the Count himself...

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://victoriadougherty.wordpress.com/2013/10/29/dracula-the-gothic-pimp/

As promised, this week in the Cold, I'm telling you all about what it's like to live in the wonderful, old, story-machine that is my home. Did I mention that it's haunted? Yes, haunted! But life in a house with a bit of history, and a smidge of woo-woo spirituality is not what you think. Don't even consider skipping this episode!

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://victoriadougherty.wordpress.com/2014/10/21/life-in-a-haunted-house/

This week in the Cold, we're talking about the woo-woo, the spiritual, the paranormal, and why even the most rational of us just love, love, love it. The paranormal is such a tasty spice in the stories we read and write. It can be a smaller element of a greater work of literature or genre fiction, like the witches in Shakespeare's "Macbeth," or commandeer an entire story, as it did in Bram Stoker's "Dracula" or Stephanie Meyer's "Twilight" and Maggie Steifvater's "Shiver." Big or small, it draws us in, opening up a world full of mystery, showing us both our darkest and best selves. Reminding us that anything is possible.

I'm also including a link to a blog radio program I was on some years ago, hosted by two lovely women writer friends. I came across it again recently and had a listen. It's a great conversation about Historical Fiction and the paranormal elements in the stories we love, and I think you're going to enjoy it.

Cover to Cover with Michele Gwynn and Jami Brumfield right here: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/cover2cover1/2015/07/16/historical-fiction-in-novels

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://victoriadougherty.wordpress.com/2015/07/27/the-ghost-stories-we-tell/

It's October, which means Cold is going all-in on ghosts, monsters, aliens, and all creatures of the night or things that go bump in the dark. This week, we're diving head-first into the bloody, brain-splattered world of the horror story! Horror, second only to Romance, is the most maligned genre in fiction. Rarely taken seriously, and treated more like a carnival sideshow. But I charge that horror is as integral a theme for our psyches as the love story, and it doesn’t really matter whether it’s presented in the form of schlocky genre fiction or serious literary endeavor. In the end, all horror stories serve the same master: An instinct to solve mysteries, seek out danger for the sake of mastering our fears and our environment, tame the monster within or without.

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://victoriadougherty.wordpress.com/2020/01/10/truth-and-dare-the-dangerous-allure-of-the-horror-story/

Today in the Cold, we have some harrowing real-life stories that sound like they're straight out of science fiction. We uncover chilling tales of the lost cosmonauts of 1950s and 60s Soviet Russia, including what may be actual audio from one of these failed missions. It includes a female cosmonaut no less! We also ponder the very different ethics which distinguished the American and Soviet space programs of the Cold War.

This episode comes right on the heels of Elon Musk's newest SpaceX endeavor - the Inspiration 4 - which is the first all-civilian mission to go into orbit. Our new space race - taking place mostly amongst our eccentric billionaire class, has a very different feel to it, and has certainly re-energized my passion for the stars. It's also gotten me thinking about the way we, as a culture, approach risk and danger as we venture back into manned space flight. Do check out the Inspiration4 homepage, as it details their mission including the pillars of leadership, hope, generosity, and prosperity that define it, and how the four crew members were chosen to exemplify these qualities. It's truly a science fiction writer's dream.https://inspiration4.com/

 This episode is also available as a blog post: https://victoriadougherty.wordpress.com/2017/08/31/the-lost-cosmonauts-of-the-soviet-union/

This week in the Cold, we talk about humor as a crucial element to any story that endeavors to rise above cliché. We zero-in on Diana Gabaldon's "Outlander" novels as a gold standard for tackling very serious topics like war, history, and love with a confident and unapologetic sense of humor. We look back on Shakespeare, Twain, Hemingway, Chandler, even ancient literature in order to illustrate how humor isn’t just something meant to make us feel good. It is defiant, subversive and smarter than we are. Through humor we can say things we’re too afraid to say, and speak truths that polite society won’t tolerate. Because ultimately, humor reminds us that no word or circumstance can hold power over us. You don't want to miss this one. This episode is also available as a blog post: https://victoriadougherty.wordpress.com/2018/03/16/getting-damned-serious-about-humor/

Join us in the Cold today as we excavate the past through photographs, and talk about how to make new worlds out of old ones. Photography is invaluable for me when I'm creating a work of historical fiction. Photos help me conjure stories I could have never constructed without the help of someone else's eye. The eye of a person who is perhaps long dead, but whose perspective lives on through the pictures they took for a newspaper article, or maybe just to commemorate a personal occasion or family vacation. These snapshots can have so many lives, and continue to reinvent themselves through the eyes of any imaginer who happens upon them.

And if you'd like to see some of the photos that I use as inspiration every day, follow me on social media. I post a lot, and I mean A LOT of old pictures.

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/victoriadougherty.author/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/victoria_dougherty/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/vicdougherty

 This episode is also available as a blog post: https://victoriadougherty.wordpress.com/2021/07/30/a-picture-becomes-a-thousand-words/

I contend that raising kids and writing novels isn't a whole lot different. Both are hugely creative, ambitious, and gobsmackingly intimidating labors of love. So much so that a lot of people contemplating the creative life (and we use this terms loosely - there are a lot of ways to live a creative life) may wonder if taking on two such enormously challenging endeavors is even possible. That's why, in this longer episode of Cold - twice as long as our usual - we explore balancing the personal and professional. What are the trade-offs, the joys, the burdens, the mind-blowing emotional rollercoasters we might find ourselves riding? We ask...is it worth it? And yes, I do answer the question. Honestly. 

Warning: Your time in the Cold this week might make your heart swell, or make you cringe - it might make you angry or hopefully or even more confused than when you started. But that's what we're here for. 

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://victoriadougherty.wordpress.com/2019/02/15/why-would-anyone-have-children/

There's isn't a truly compelling fictional story, let alone a real-life one, that doesn't in some way involve a bad habit. Whether it's a propensity that's relatively straightforward, like an excessive love of drink, or more opaque, like a secret lust for bad women. Bad habits have black magic - there's just no getting around that. As much as we might hate them, or hate ourselves for succumbing to our more base instincts, or look down our noses at others for their particular weaknesses, we're fascinated by them. More often than not, when it comes to the bad habit, we keep coming back for more. That's why this week in the Cold, we're going to do a bit of a deep dive into some of our worst proclivities, looking into our own personal motivations, as well as the impulses and inclinations of some of our favorite characters in literature. Buckle up - it's going to be a fun ride...unless we crash. This episode is also available as a blog post: https://victoriadougherty.wordpress.com/2019/06/26/the-sublime-whisper-of-the-bad-habit/

Last week in the Cold, we talked a bit about how huge adventures and calamities, like wars, for instance, are a breeding ground for coincidences and other extraordinary sequences of events. It's a big topic with so much to unpack, and it's well-worth expanding on. Only this week, I want us to approach it a little bit differently. I want to delve into how chance encounters, those little occurrences that happen in our day to day lives and can appear insignificant, can also utterly change our destinies. And the way fiction, when it's done right, not only mimics these uncanny developments, but wraps them in mystery and fantasy. It can make us believe in miracles and even shoot for the stars. This episode is also available as a blog post: https://victoriadougherty.wordpress.com/2019/06/14/chance-encounters/