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Today we welcome Kirsten to Ginger Nuts of Horror as part of our #HorrorBloggerTribe initiative, where we shine the spotlight on some of the other horror bloggers out there. The endgame of this initiative is to create a tribe of fellow bloggers who like, share, and support each other. Don't be shy, come along and join us, if you would like to take part in this series of articles drop us an email, the horror blogging tribe is in the main part a really supportive bunch of people, together let's promote horror “What do you want to be when you grow up?” This wasn’t a hugely challenging question for 8-year old me. I’d known that I wanted to be a writer since I was old enough to talk and tell stories, to sit in my grandparents’ living room and write silly little haikus on the back of their newspapers. What I wasn’t prepared for was how my writing style would change over the next 10 years of my life. I’m Kirsten from K. Smith Blogs, writer/editor/procrastinator/graduate/general mess of a human being. Today, I’ve written a piece for Ginger Nuts of Horror to talk about how I got into horror blogging, plus the rewards (and consequences) of writing about it. If you’ve ever taken a gander at my blog (I do encourage you to do so if you favour the weird and gory genres of film), then you’ll know that I write primarily about the horror genre, though I do tend to dabble in general hot topics on the film industry. What you may not know is that I never started out wanting to write horror: in fact, this is a relatively new line of work for me. When I was an 8-year old, ready to take the world by storm with my clearly perfected writing style (I am already cringing at the countless grammatical mistakes I used to make), I knew I wanted to be a poet. I didn’t have the best childhood, so I lost myself in Plath, Baudelaire and Poe: if it was deeply disturbing, I was reading it. But when I wasn’t reading, I was watching horror films with my dad, films that I was definitely too young to be watching but revelling in the guts and gore of nonetheless. I believe my first horror film was Jaws (1975) around the age of 6-years old. Horror was my escape. When I had a bad day at school, when I was sick, when I needed to get away from everything, I stuck a horror film on. If it was a bad day at school, it was usually a slasher. If I was sick, a body-horror. When it was escapism that I needed, my favourite horror films came out of the cupboard, namely A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and Hellraiser (1987): those two films are the epitome of my childhood introduction to the genre and I’ve watched both equally too many times to count. I grew up, went to high school, college (back when that wasn’t mandatory, sorry, Gen-Z) and then packed up my bags and moved to Essex to study Creative Writing at university. I remember walking onto campus and thinking “this is it, this is where I become a real writer”, as if anything I had written up to that point didn’t count. Uni was my first experience of networking, of coming together as a group of people and celebrating what we do: up until then, I didn’t have any writer friends, nor did I know anybody that cared very much for reading (with the exception of my best friend). When I received my BA, I was ready to be a poet. I’d been training four years for it, after all. And that is, of course, where I did a complete 180: as soon as I started my MA, I found a YouTuber named Ryan Hollinger, a man who produces critical video essays about horror films. It was at this point that something clicked in my brain that for some reason never had before: I could combine my love of film and my skillset as a writer. I remember distinctly slamming my cup of tea down on the coffee table and yelling with frustration that I’d never even considered it. All that time and experience at university and not once had it crossed my mind to write about horror, let alone create a blog for it. I repurposed an old blog from my college days and branded it K. Smith Blogs. I decided to private my old posts and delete a few because my writing has change drastically since I was 16-years old: my viewpoints had changed, my writing style differed, and I wanted to change things up. So, with that, I produced my first post and never looked back. You might be wondering whether any of it is worth it, whether anyone would read your blog if you made one. My answer is always to say yes because, regardless of whether you get many hits on your content, you should always be writing for yourself. I am a small-time blogger, but I do aspire to be more: I hope to see myself in a few years writing content for a horror site fulltime, however, I know that it’s going to take a while to get there and I want to be producing content I care about. I will say there are some highs and lows. Blogging, from my own experience and from talking to fellow horror writers, isn’t just an occupation: it’s an outlet. You can put important things out into the world, things that will be innately yours and relatable to others. One of my best pieces of work this year was an article called The ‘T’ That Cinema is Missing, drawing attention to the lack of transgender representation in the film industry: it caused an absolute uproar in Facebook forums, igniting debates from different corners of the world. Admittedly, this was a difficult thing to witness, because while I was happy that my post was getting a lot of attention, it also meant that I had to deal with transphobes and people invalidating my viewpoint due to my lack of experience in writing for this industry. I don’t regret posting it, though, because it’s important: it’s always good to bear in mind that someone, somewhere, will always disagree with what you have to say, and that’s alright. FOLLOW KIRSTEN IN TWITTER BY CLICKING HEREComments are closed.
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