"How can you tell there's anything out there? The door's closed." -- Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

When requested to write a monthly column for Fear Zone, my brain immediately went into warp speed trying to come up with ideas that would be both informative and entertaining. I haven't penned a column since the days of yore [circa 1980s] when I still knew everything and cockily ran the media at my high school. That I had that much power is terrifying in itself. Interestingly enough, in my senior year, my classmates predicted that in the future I'd eventually become editor-in-chief of Guidepost magazine. I've apparently veered from my expected path.

Later, I went onto college where I discovered I didn't really know everything, but four years later, all of that was remedied, when, with diploma in hand, I graduated. Some day, the novel written during my college years will be discovered and published posthumously, and my heirs will surely be rolling in the dough. Afterall, everyone loves a novel written by an 18-21-year-old quoting Nietzsche and Marcus Aurelius about time traveling Texans fighting the Mexican army. Stop laughing! You know you have one equally as horrible in your own drawer! AND, it beats the novel I wrote while in high school, where the women swoon and wake up to discover they gave birth. Oy!

I promise this column won't be boring. There's enough true horror in my life to keep me writing for a long while -- and I find that true horror is best approached with a sense of humor. If you can't laugh at life's crap, the crap will just pull you under. I, for one, refuse to yield to the undertow of the perpetual mire of life.

So, you might be asking: Who the hell are you, Angeline Hawkes? And, Didn't you use to have like four other names or something? Well, a Mormon Pisces artist [my father] married a Catholic Gemini artist [my mother]. The four of them got together resulting in me. Said parent then became a Methodist minister...stop me when the horror becomes too heavy. But, seriously, I'm a fantasy and horror writer with publication credits since 1981 [I was really young]. I'm a former high school teacher who did my tour of duty and retired before my sanity was ripped away. I taught British Literature, Journalism, Reading, and Speech Communication. Readers will find that there is a strong emphasis on history in most of my writing. My education was classically based with a solid concentration on the mythologies of various cultures. All of this has helped to make me the writer I am today. I don't write chick lit. I don't write about Cinderella castles where teapots sing and pumpkins turn into coaches. My castles stink like real castles, people piss in the straw, and plenty of guts and blood get splattered around by various sharp implements or rampaging beasts of various sorts.

If you've still got questions, pop over to my website and look around. I'll see you next month.

http://www.angelinehawkes.com
www.fulbrightandhawkes.com