As I have mentioned before, the lightning bolt that created Tattered Tents… came to me at a county fair. I was working a second job briefly as a recruiter for a local community college and had set a tent up at the fair for the weekend. It was hot and windy but it was a fun atmosphere to be in. I set things up and took some pictures of the fair before it came to life. There was a thick ground fog and there were a few tents set up where folks working the fair had slept and it was all together eerie. I wondered what the life of the fair was like when the lights were off and the rides were silent. I wondered what it was like when the carnies had grown quiet and the patrons had all gone home.
What was that world like?
I quickly wrote down a poem about it all, and how dangerous that world was, just behind the tent and loved the ideas it held.
I ended up so in love with the poem and the ideas it teased that I pursued it as a book and soon wrote Tattered Tents & Whispered Wishes, using a photo I had taken in a craft store as the cover.
I loved it.
I hoped the world would too.
The notion of a dangerous circus and a scary fair are not new. Look no further than Ray Bradbury’s seminal Something Wicked This Way Comes to find such a creature, so I wasn’t going into this with the idea that I was going to write something never seen before. What I was going to do was write something that was true to myself and go from there. Yeah, there’s a point where you can say that EVERYTHING has been done before, sure, but if you fall prey to such cynicism you’ll never do anything. Yeah, it’s all been done but it’s not been done by YOU. By ME and so it will inherently be different than what someone else wrote.
What I wanted to focus on, also, was not the fair itself but on a person pursuing it. Chasing the tail of a thing across the land as they sought to find someone that was entangled within its web.
It was a story of love, of longing, and of terrible revelations.
It was a dangerous world and the fair was at its center.
There is a power in love, both dark and wonderful, which will draw us into danger and peril if we can but hold that love in our hearts for a while. We are fools for it, are slaves too it, and will pursue it beyond sense’s last breath.
That was this book.
I had never written anything like it before and loved the challenge and fell in love with the book wholly. It is less about the horror, though it’s there, and more about yearning and a quest, and I love it for that.
It’s one of the books I am sorry more people haven’t gotten a chance to experience but hope they will some day.
It’s short, and surprising and I think you’ll like it if you give it a chance.
Tattered Tents & Whispered Wishes is available on Kindle and as a paperback through Amazon.
The Spooky World of Chris Ringler 