This Is Halloween, Everybody Make A SCREAM!

There’s a fine line between creepy fun, and creepy bad. I prefer to err on the side of creepy fun and not straddle the lines. My friend prefers to walk dead center and see where it takes him. And majority of current scary movies filmed like to be creepy bad. How do you explain these differences, well it’s pretty easy.

When I do scary or creepy things, I try and make them always fun. For example, my club on campus is throwing a Family-Friendly Halloween event on campus, and our planning committee got together last night to start the planning process. We had ideas such as witch-hat-ring-toss, a “Hay Bale Maze,” and a “Do you know the body part?” Game. Those games are very creepy fun, especially for little kids who don’t want to get scared too bad they just want to experience something new.

When my friend Tara does things scary or creepy, she can either go fun similar to me, or a little bad. When she goes creepy fun, she’ll crack a mildly weird joke or story, but while doing it or thinking it her face will be light and full of smiles. But when she goes creepy bad, her face and what she’s saying changes completely. She can go from being full of energy and smiles, to stone-cold and serious in the face. When she does this, it’s creepy, but definitely in a bad way. I know lots of people like scary movies, but I’m just not one of them. I find it weird when she does this and proceed to tell her so. It’s just not how I like my creepy and scary to be.

Lastly, when scary movies do things scary or creepy, they take it above and beyond the scope of reason. Instead of simply terrifying you, they proceed to gross you out. They one second will have a busty blonde running across the hallway and locking herself in a room only to find a killer there, if that weren’t creepy enough, they then proceed to execute her in a myriad of ways that are shall we say less than kosher. Current day scary movies aren’t just about the scare and creepy factor anymore, they take pride in making you want to vomit as well.

This is why I feel that Creepy bad is just not the type of creep you want to have in your lifestyle or movie watching preferences. You should always err on the side of creepy fun because you never know who’s going to take you seriously if you decide to go creepy bad.

NaNoWriMo for Youth, Not Just for Adults!

      Have you ever heard of National Novel Writing Month? I just learned about it this summer and started a program called 4-H NaNoWriMo boot camp. The program was for kids of all ages in the 4-H program interested in creative writing and my group had kids from 6-19 years old. My supervisors for this program did not think it was an appropriate idea for kids that young, but I completely disagreed.
      So, incase you do not know what NaNoWriMo is, it’s a month long writing event that tries to get adults to write a 50,000 word novel in a month, some famous books that came out of that are Water For Elephants by Sara Gruen, and The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern.
I thought this was a great idea, but maybe way too difficult for the age range that I was trying to get interested in Creative Writing, so I changed up the rules a little bit. I made it so that each participant could make up their own word –count goal, and if they weren’t sure we had different word counts based on the ages of the kids. After the idea formed I really needed help convincing people that it was a good idea to start up this program. After much coaxing, I convinced my supervisor that it was a great teaching aid for people to learn about goal setting. I convinced her that each youth member would have to set their own goal that they thought they could do in a month and try their best to reach it. Some kids set low goals because they had crazy lives and ended up surpassing it, others set really high goals and ended up coming a little short. This taught them that they needed to work on time management and realize how much is actually feasible for each of them.
       I held this program in July and had 20 participants, it was a huge success we had 1 adult leader and 2 youth leaders who helped me run all the meetings and kept the energy level high so that people would want to come back. Even though I had to convince people that NaNoWriMo was not just for adults, in the end it was a worth argument that I proved throughout my whole program.