Folklore Of Our Time

Happy Blog Day Everyone!

Today’s post is part of something I muse about a lot, and certainly something I’ll be putting together with other thoughts in the near future. What am I talking about? My thoughts on how I approach Urban Legends and Creepy Pastas as Folklore of the future. Well let’s move on to the Weekly Briefs!

Weekly Briefs

#IndieAugust

It’s Indie August! Another month dedicated to the independent and small published authors of the world. If you follow the tag on Twitter, you may just find your next favourite read! Give it a go! Remember, all writers have to start somewhere.

Harvey Duckman Presents…Volume 3

You didn’t think that just because Volume 2 was out and getting stellar reviews that this would be the end of it did you? Volume 3 is set for an October release, in what is proving to be a very packed month for my publisher. It will of course include a exclusive Brennan and Riz story, one that I’ll talk about that in detail after the book releases, in the coming weeks I may even share the title with you, and possibly moan about writing for a special Harvey Duckman release, but that’s all I’ll say for now.
Don’t forget, if you write Steampunk, Fantasy, Sci Fi or Horror (or a mix of the genres), then feel free to submit your work to this growing anthology! Click here for submission guidelines.

Creator Chaos

This week the All About Me starring unlucky...I mean, lucky participant, Kelvin Rodriguez should be hitting the air waves, letting you know the answers to questions you didn’t know you’d asked. Haskins and the Commander fans should not miss this! If you don’t know who they are then you’ve lived a very sheltered life...Seriously check out Kelvin’s #vss365 tweets, you won’t regret it...Unless word based puns aren’t your cup of tea of course.
Guest Writers have already been contacted to star in forthcoming normal podcasts, so you’ve got some great content to look forward to, we just need to sit down and record them!
A reminder of who the rest of Creator Chaos are:
Me – I don’t think I need to explain myself…
Kelvin Rodriguez – Fans and followers of the #vss365 tag will recognize this fellow and his creations, a master of the pun. He also has a mighty fine singing voice.
Zack Brooks – Author of the ‘Charlie the Cupid’ shorts and ‘The Trials of Amaford” novellas, the audio book version of ‘How Not To Be A Rogue’ is out now! This is a perfect chance to get in on this series, with a great narrator. A great guy and the defacto leader of our rabble.
Pete Hartog – Author of the novel Bloodlines, and currently working on its sequel. A great guy with a great taste in music and a fantastic name. He also has a blog you can find here, give it a read! He’s currently working on a sequel to Bloodlines.
Click here to listen to all the podcasts so far and look out for us on Spotify and Apples Music Service!

Vector Unit Regen Orphan’s War

Still on hiatus, but all being well I should be able to resume it September going forward. It’ll probably be a fortnightly release schedule but I do want to see this story finished.
To catch up on the series so far, click here!
 

Brief Mentions

Liking what you’re hearing about Brennan and Riz? Click here to look at the short story collection of their adventures so far!
Looking for newer stuff?
Click here to order ‘The Yeti in the Snow’, the standalone Brennan and Riz Christmas story. Only available on Kindle. It may be collected in a paperback version in the future.

Click here to order Harvey Duckman Presents Volume 1 which includes ‘A Walk Through The Pleasure Gardens’

Click here to order Harvey Duckman Presents Volume 2 which includes ‘The Black Cat on the Prowl’
Click here to find me on Goodreads
And now…time for our main feature presentation…

Folklore Of Our Times

Let’s start off with a statement that many have made: comics, especially superhero comics are the Greek myths of today. You can see why, given how the medium is used to bring the characters to life and refine their stories over time, adding to their epics while pruning parts that people feel no longer work. The ancient Greeks (and later the Romans) would retell their myths time and time again in a similar manner, just not on printed paper of course. So following this, I’ve come to the conclusion that Folklore has a modern form as well. Actually I think it’s got two forms, one developing off the back of the other.
To start with, let’s talk Urban Legends...Not the movie, the type of stories that people tell to scare each other. These normally involve either an action that you do (like making a face while the wind changes, or reciting Bloody Mary three times in front of a mirror) to places (Area 51, Rosewell in New Mexico). Sound familiar? Folklore covered the same kinds of stories, and were used to either explain natural events or tell stories with morals that were relevant at the time.

One interesting thing to note is that some people have noted the links between folklore of the past, and some urban legends of the now era (well the link was made back in the nineties when UFOs were in vogue again after their initial big flutter in the 1950s.) The Link was the similarity of tales involving alien abduction stories to that of encounters with the Fae in the distant past. Lights in the sky, strange unearthly beings, missing time or strange relationship with time (i.e. Time moving faster in one place then another.) Some old descriptions of Fairies even sound like what some witnesses have described as aliens. Of course, Fairies aren’t the old denizens of Folklore that have been mixed up with this, demons have been linked as well.

This is more the similarities between night time visitations of aliens, where abductees have reported being unable to move and the feelings of apprehension and dread, to encounters with Inncubi and Succubi, demons that came to good folk while they slept to have their wicked way with them. Just as some abductions took on a sexual aspect before turning and focusing on hybrid efforts, so did the stories of the demons, with it being said that the Inncubi would make a woman pregnant with a child destined to become a warlock or witch, and the same for the Succubi.
What these show is that words may change but the story itself, and it’s structure doesn’t.

I believe there’s more cases out there like this, and that we really just love telling a good story, hence why we create these Urban Legends, like the friend of a friend story about the vanishing hitchhiker (which I touched up on in my Brennan and Riz story, The Wild Hunt on the Road) or the tale of the serial killer that hides in the backseat of a car, which a good Samaritan spots and scares the heck out of the woman driver, making her think he wants to catch her! Another infamous one of course is the story of the lone babysitter, terrorised by phone calls which get traced back to the house... As is often the case, more times then not, a real being is the antagonist in A Friend of a Friend told me type tales, a sub-class of Urban Legends.

These are passed on with even greater frequency thanks to the internet, which is where they have evolved into another form which I think is a look at Folklore for the digital age. This one is called Creepy Pasta...While at this time I don’t know the origins of the name, I think I can name one story that everyone will have heard something of, either through internet memes or, sadly, stories from real life news sources. Slenderman. This was the creature thought up for a contest in 2009 that became so popular that he spread like wildfire. Everyone added to him, with some people starting to believe that he had always existed, forgetting that his origins were rather mundane.

 In a few more years or more, I have no problem believing that he will grow and operate in the spaces of what used to Folklore. It’s a testament that his design struck such a cord with people. Of course there is other examples, like the Rake, another creature that’s taken a life, with many people now claiming to have seen the monster in the real world, and won’t believe when the truth is revealed that he’d never existed before. Another one, which was the first story of this type I’d ever read was surrounding a haunted N64 Legend of Zelada Majora’s Mask game.

In fact, most Creepy Pastas share story structures from the stories that came before it, most notably where the source of the stories, always being a friend of a narrator, or a mutual friend. These stories reflect the youth of today who write them.
That’s all the time we have for this week, but I’ve hoped you enjoyed a sneak look at what goes on in my head sometimes. As I said in the intro, I hope to work all this and my other musings into a well researched essay on Folklore, it’s past and it’s future. When I’ll get around to this though, is another matter entirely!