A little paranormal feast

This whole blogging thing really sneaks up on me. As usual, I have no idea what to say since my mind is full of camping plans and researching guinea pig pregnancy. (One of my piggies is expecting...I've felt he babies kick.) This morning, on the way to the mailbox, I wondered why nobody has done a guinea pig shape shifter. Now you can laugh, but anyone who knows me knows that I'm all about unusual animals being made into paranormal creatures.

Last summer, I thought it would be funny to write a story about a moose-shifter. When Samhain bought the story (Last Prophecy), I think I asked the editor if she was serious or if she was joking with me. This summer I have a beaver-shifter story coming out under my other personality (Courting Damnation at Forbidden Publications). I've seen rabbit shifters, fox, bear, cats, wolves etc and just for fun, I thought I'd ask what everyone thinks about the animal part of a shifter personality. What's the most unusal animal you've seen used in a story? How much of the animals personality should bleed through to the character's human persona?

It's a big, big, paranormal world

k, I'm operating on about 1 hour of sleep here, so if I babble, I'll appologize now.

My paranormal leanings are fairly recent. Until, oh, about 2 years ago, I was strictly a fantasy/sci-fi girl with the odd historical romance tossed in for variety. I can't believe I'm saying this, but I was never a fan of vampires, weres or any usual suspects. In thinking about this, I wondered how I could love fantasy and magic and not care for the same types of story set in our own world.

I blame it on TV.

Ok, I can't completely blame it on TV. The truth is, I don't remember much paranormal TV or books geared towards teens. The 80's and early 90's were full of sitcoms and if there were any movies with para elements, my parents must not have let me near them. By the time Buffy, Angel and Charmed (among others) aired, I was too busy with college to watch much TV.

As for books, the problem might be that paranormal is generally shelved with romance, cause of course there's usually lots of hot nookie in them. Being a teenager, you don't want to be buying YA books (at least I didn't) and I felt...squicky...being infront of the romance shelves (I could borrow them from mum, but buying them was another story.)

Hopefully it'll be different for my kids. Buying books for them I see tons of stories with magic, faeries, etc, and paranormal has made itself known in a big way on the television and big screen. Hopefully it's not a fad, like a lot of people are saying.

So did I just miss out on all the good para TV as a kid? What were your first paranormal books/favorite movies?

Oh the power!

One of my favorite paranormal characters to write are witches. Maybe it's because it lets me experience magic powers vicariously. My problem is limiting myself (and my characters) to a believable number of gifts. Yes, usually the plot dictates what the main gift should be, but oh man! It is so easy to just add a power here and there, thereby creating the "super witch." Unfortunately, that's not good. Too much power makes the character completely unbelievable unless there is some major drawbacks to having so many gifts, not to mention the fact that it becomes too easy to have a "magic" answer for everything. With a super witch character, you're going to have a hard time maintaining suspense if she can just wave her hand and solve every problem.

The question becomes where to draw the line. How much is too much? At what point does your character become the equivilent of Q from Star Trek or an ascended ancient in Stargate? There is no magic number (no more than 4 powers to each customer) and every story is going to have different requirements. One option is to let the character have a couple strong gifts, and a very limited ability with some others. Mercedes Lackey did this with her character Vanyel in The Last Herald Mage trilogy. he was strong, yes, and had almost every gift out there, but some were only useful in small things. (Example: he had the firestarter gift, but it was only strong enough to start a campfire, and would't have been useful as an offensive weapon)

In a project I'm working on now, I divided the popular "powers" into elemental groups. Any one witch can have as many gifts as I care to give her/him in one group. Having powers from more than one group, ultimately destroys the witch and drives them insane. Some pairings are slower to disable the user, but others, like fire and air can mess them up pretty quickly. And what happens when some pour soul starts developing powers in all four elements? I don't know yet. I'll let you know when I get the story done *grin*