Fan Fiction is a mashup of cartoons, horror movies, and fairy tales. Fairy tales are told in a flat tone, but they have layers of meaning. The word origin of monster: "Monster derives from the Latin monstrum, itself derived ultimately from the verb moneo ("to remind, warn, instruct, or foretell") ...A monster is often a type of grotesque creature, whose appearance frightens and whose powers of destruction threaten the human world's social or moral order." via: wikipedia's monster etymology sectionOther fun Fan Fiction buzzwords besides monster: death, time, madness, torture, repetition, symbolism, chainsaw, knife, candy, werebears, witches, cave, waves, mansion, wizard, gang, Halloween, Gargamel, Map, Backpack, hockey mask, Death, scythe, machete, big black boots, birds, bones.Imagine being a monster. Ugly. Violent. Lonely. Monsters are pathetic. The root of the word pathetic is pathos, the same root word for passion. Monsters want things. Monsters have desires. Monsters, they're just like us!Our lives are stories. Beginnings, middles, ends. Time kills us all.Dora is on a quest to kill Death. Death is the ultimate monster. Dora is brave.Dora carries a backpack, AKA a bookbag. Books are cool. They're just a series of words. Black words on white pages. Simple as that. Beyond the literary content, books exist as things. Objects that can be held in the hand, objects with weight and heft. A book can be made of bound paper or a digital scrollable screen. You turn the pages, or flip them with a thumb. Books are things you interact with. They are touched, held, consumed. The relationship between book and reader is symbiotic, codependent. Books can't exist without us. The book is objectified. The book is submissive, but not without power. Books are powerful. Books take up space. Good books do stuff to us. They touch us, hold us, consume our attention, our imagination, our thoughts.Language itself. A tool. A virus. Like a fire, it lives and breathes and consumes. It mutates, fragments, evolves. Language adapts, like all living things."Jack" is a story about repetition, about madness, about the shape of words on a page, about the words repeated on a page, about how much can be said with a single sentence, repeated like a mantra or a curse, chanted like a prayer. Broken down, the sentence twisted like a snake, repeated like a mantra, the words lose all meaning, and gain new meaning. The sentence fragments into sentence fragments. The words dull. The words play. All work. No play. Jack."Where's Waldo in the Mirror Maze" is a story about repetition. Waldo is lost in the crowd. Waldo exists in books beyond words. Picture books. Illiterate books. He hides within context clues. Red and white stripes are his prison bars. He lives in mazes. He is never alone, yet always alone. Waldo is trapped in books, trapped in crowded, claustrophobic scenes. To open a Waldo book and look for Waldo, to find Waldo, is to validate Waldo's identity. Waldo breaks the fourth wall. Waldo exists to be searched for, and is found only with effort. When you find him he smiles. But the rest of the time, he's screaming."The Final Smurf" is a story about repetition. Smurfs are all the same. They are defined by what they do. Painter Smurf. Doctor Smurf. Baker Smurf. They speak smurf, their verbs and nouns are smurf. Smurf this, smurf that. The word becomes a redaction. Something that obscures a word. You have to smurf it to smurf what it means. But do you even want to smurf it? What if it's a smurf getting his neck smurfed with a smurf? Language smurfs us all."Halloween" is a story about repetition. Words mutate. Sexy teens get killed by a monster. Instead of smurf the verbs become candy.Imagine a house made of candy. Imagine who lives in that house.