vicdougherty

[vicdougherty]

Comings and Goings

On Sunday, I’ll board a plane for Doha. That’s two days left of this thick Appalachian summer–the floral air, the bats tracing dusk with their wings, the laughter of friends drifting through the heat. Two days left with my children, scattered on their early-adult adventures, and my Boston Terrier, Barney, who will stay behind with my middle daughter. Two days left with the skeleton of my house,…

[vicdougherty]

Packing Away Twenty Years - And One Curse

When I flew from Doha to Virginia for three months, I carried only one suitcase—the rest of my belongings still anchored in our house here, though not for long. I’ve spent the past weeks packing up twenty years of living, readying the rooms for another family to move in. Soon, they’ll eat at our table, sleep in our beds, make their own small history under our roof. I want them to love the place,…

[vicdougherty]

Night of the Moon Witch is Coming!

When we first moved into our house in Charlottesville, the nights were… noisy. Not in a modern, beeping and chinking way—more in a Civil War morgue that remembers too much kind of way. Things went bump. Floors creaked under no feet. Nothing ever felt threatening—just present, insistent. Watching. One night, I got up for a drink of water. I came back, crawled into bed, and as I settled into the…

[vicdougherty]

The Line Between Order and Chaos: Literature's Lost Archetypes

My daughter is a huge true crime fan. It’s become our thing, listening to true crime podcasts together. This week, we were listening to a bunch of them as we were driving the interminable journey from Tampa, Florida, where we were visiting my aunt and cousins, back to Virginia. As we were taking in the psycho bitches, murdering husbands, perverted pastors, and doomed goth-maidens (one was skinned…

[vicdougherty]

Whirlwinds and Other Unscripted Moments

Our neighborhood in Doha Recently, rockets lit up the sky over Doha, Qatar—right above our neighborhood no less. The same one you see in the above photo that I snapped with my iPhone just a few weeks ago. According to our Doha friends, the sound alone was enough to stop time–that peculiar whistle and boom that makes your heart forget its rhythm for a beat or two. For those of you who may not…

[vicdougherty]

Love Language

Language means a great deal to me–not only as a writer but as a human. Our choice of words matters, and the way we frame things to ourselves and others has a tangible impact on our lives. Words have the power to sway, seduce, transcend, and destroy. The meanings we ascribe to words, and the way we arrange them, don’t just have immediate effects–they build on each other, accumulating until they…

[vicdougherty]

Writing Spooky

I’ve been on a mission to write a spooky story. Spooky with a capital S. To create a hair-raising universe that dwells in shadow, embraces the unholy, and resides fully in that twilight realm where reality frays at its edges. It’s a place where the essence of Halloween – the disguises, the suspension of disbelief, the veneration, yet heart-fear of the dead – is a way of life.  While all of my…

[vicdougherty]

The Red Velvet Curtain

Doha baristas have unmatched flair I got a story in my coffee the other day. I snapped the above picture right after our barista set down our cups. My husband got the usual heart in his milk froth, but for some reason, perhaps because he sensed I needed it, our barista gave me a froth fit for fantasy. A charging horse, winged on top of it all, that set me up for my first full week of writing in…

[vicdougherty]

When Things Fall Into Your Hands

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com Years and years ago, when I was in my twenties, I came upon a book that affected me so profoundly that it literally changed the course of my life. It wasn’t a particularly big book, clocking in at about one-hundred-ninety-two pages. Yet it seemed to cover all of the human condition and inspired me not only to start writing my first novel, The Bone Church, but to…

[vicdougherty]

The Cold Annual List of Infinite Gratitude

Disclaimer: not a Halloween image In recent years, I’ve watched Halloween explode across the world. My non-American friends now dress up like vampires, Barbies, superheroes and zombies, going to parties, street festivals, and haunted houses like it’s the natural state of things and they’ve been at this for generations. They assemble clever, whimsical costumes for their children and drag them…

[vicdougherty]

I Have a Big Announcement

It’s been a while since I’ve been here in the Cold, but I’ve got a good reason. If you’re subscribed to my newsletter, you’ll know I’ve been teasing that something big is coming up, and honestly, it’s been hard for me to keep it a secret. It all started a few years ago when I met Janet Margot. I know a few of you Cold readers are also writers, so you may recognize Janet’s name. She’s an Amazon…

[vicdougherty]

The Many Faces of Beauty in Fiction

Isabella’s beauty was just a short of otherworldly. While her gaze was tentative and shy, the electric blue of her eyes was as piercing as a sudden, joyful laugh, the splash of an ice-cold wave. Her body, poured like heavy cream over the lounge where she was reading her tawdry, little romance novel, hardly stirred when I entered her father’s library. But her hair…that was something else. It fell…

[vicdougherty]

Epic Battle Scenes of the Mind and Heart

Relate. They say war is hell and I say writing about it is a hell of an undertaking. I’m going to try in these next few paragraphs to capture some of the critical triumphs, challenges, and pitfalls of the endeavor. This is something of a thinking-out-loud exercise; a stream of consciousness if you will. And I hope it’s helpful. See, I have great affinity for the war story. War, whether hot or…

[vicdougherty]

Demanding Greatness of Our Characters

As those of you who follow Cold know, I’m cold war historical thriller and noir writer, but I also pen an epic historical fantasy series, and I guess that genre would be called Romantasy now (and I kind of love that new moniker, I have to say). My Romantasy books are in the vein of The Time Traveler’s Wife, The Secret Life of Addie Larue, Life After Life – stories like that. These are all very…

[vicdougherty]

A Ramble About Writing Love and Violence

[vicdougherty]

An Absolutely Positively Wild and Wide-Ranging Conversation About Creating Stories, Developing Characters, and the Limits of Art

Art is a revolution in your soul. Are there limits to art? You might think that’s a strange question for someone like me to even be pondering. Right here in the Cold, we tend to be pretty open-minded and overall ready for anything. In past essays, I’ve written about humor, for instance, and its role in allowing us to explore the taboo, say the things we’d never say in polite company. Any form of…

[vicdougherty]

How Much Romance Can a Man Take?

Not too long ago, I asked readers for feedback. Specifically, I asked them what words or descriptions come to mind when they think of my work. I also asked them to describe themselves – male or female, age range, favorite genres, etc. Answers like these are extremely helpful for fiction authors. Not only do they help us identify the proper demographics for our marketing efforts, but they also…