Boo! Did I scare you?

It’s hard to believe that this Saturday is already Halloween. I hope you’ll have a wonderful day, whether you’re getting into costume and going to a party or just hanging out at home, passing out candy. For me, this Halloween will be a quiet one, but that’s how I like it. I’m hanging out at home, watching Practical Magic 1 and 2, Hocus Pocus 1 and 2, The Munsters, and, of course, who can let Halloween go by without at least one viewing of It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown? I’ll likely get in some Spirited Away as well.

I love cute Halloween, and I’m definitely not a fan of scary Halloween. I know that sounds funny since I write about vampires, but I’ve never been into the horror genre. When I think about my inspiration to write fiction, my initial intention was to write about ordinary people with ordinary lives. The paranormal inspiration for the Loving Husband Trilogy occurred in stages, which you can read about here. Once the idea for Her Dear & Loving Husband and my personal favorite vampire, James Wentworth, occurred to me, I realized that there was a lot to unpack when it comes to what it means to live forever.  

I wonder if part of the reason immortality has been a frequent topic of entertainment is because it faces the parts of being human that frighten us the most, such as changing, aging, and dying. In a way, stories about immortality offer fictional escapes from things we’d rather not think about in our society.

Our lives are valuable because we know that one day we will no longer have them. As a result, we have to make choices, and then make peace with those choices, because we simply can’t do everything we want to do. These days, time feels different than it did when I was younger. When I was a kid, a year seemed to take forever; now years pass in the blink of an eye. I read somewhere that the faster passage of time as we grow older isn’t in our imagination. When you’re 10 years old, a year is 1/10 of your life, so it seems longer. When you’re 60 years old, a year is 1/60 of your life, so it seems to pass much more quickly even though it’s the same 365 days. 

It’s unbelievable to me that 10 years ago I was halfway through my PhD program. It feels like just yesterday I was writing my blog posts for this website around due dates and comprehensive exams. When I look at the world now, so much has happened, and so much has changed in the past decade. In my mind, I don’t feel any older. Then I try standing up out of a chair. My younger self hasn’t disappeared, but she’s older, and I hope, at least a little wiser.

I think the reason we’re fascinated by immortality is in that idea somewhere. Someone immortal, like James, would have to live with so many memories. And even though he looks the same on the outside, he’s quite a different person on the inside. As I wrote The Professor of Eventide, I wondered how many versions of yourself you can carry before you become someone else entirely. James has gone through so many iterations of himself I’m not even sure he knows himself how many names he’s had.

When I thought about James’s long life, I wasn’t just interested in the supernatural aspects of immortality, although I love writing speculative fiction, and I find those paranormal elements a lot of fun to imagine and write. With The Professor of Eventide, I was most interested in the memories of someone immortal. What does it mean to remember a person who has been dead for more than 300 years? We imagine eternity as endless life, but I imagined it as endless memories. James feels the weight of his past while everyone he knows eventually disappears. For someone immortal, a moment from decades ago might feel more real than something that happened yesterday. 

Writing itself can be a sort of immortality. Every time we put something on paper, we’re sending a message to future readers. Is that what I’m really doing when I write stories, hoping to touch readers in the future? That’s a fascinating question that I’m not sure I have an answer for. Of course, I love knowing that there are readers today who like what I write. If people in the future like it too, that would be a grand thing, but there’s not much I can do about that. I prefer to think about things in my control. 

Places that seem familiar now may look completely different years from now. Yes, there’s sadness in that, but there’s also beauty. Autumn, my favorite time of year, sees the beautiful burst of color that it does because the leaves are dying. Mary Oliver wrote about the living beauty of nature, but she didn’t shy away from writing about the violence and death that are also part of nature. Everything changes. This too shall pass. Marcus Aurelius mentioned death frequently in his notes to himself that have come down to us as his Meditations. He wasn’t being morbid, but he was reminding himself that things that seem important in the moment really don’t matter in the long run. Memento mori. Remember you will die. To that motto, we should add: Remember to treasure this moment.

I began writing Her Dear & Loving Husband in 2009, so for 17 years I’ve examined what it would be like to live as an immortal. Immortals are by necessity always evolving into someone new. But we mortals are always evolving as well. Thoreau said, “We are constantly invited to be who we are.” Our one life cannot last forever, and it’s worth paying attention to, and it’s worth being authentic to who we are in the process.

Happy Halloween, everyone.