Women Who Rock Wednesday: The Halloween Edition!

Welcome to Women Who Rock Wednesday! Last week Kathi Baron offered up a copy of her book Shattered and the lucky winner is.... Pam from Blogger! Congrats Pam!

This week's Women Who Rock Wednesday is late because I just got back from my first visit to my old high school. It went well, but it still feels like a scary place to me and speaking of scary... It's almost Halloween!!!! Obviously I love Halloween. Big time. So I decided this week's Women Who Rock Wednesday would be devoted to some the spooky ladies I loved growing up.

Around the age of 17, I became jaded with punk and went more goth. There weren't nearly as many female fronted goth bands that I loved as female fronted punk bands. Basically the most memorable was Switchblade Symphony and then the goth/punk goddess herself, Siouxsie Sioux!

I first discovered Siouxsie when I was getting into the Cure in late junior high. I loved her voice and how she was just herself. I still have a poster of her and Robert Smith on my bedroom door and I still want to dance whenever I hear one of her songs. So for your enjoyment....

Then there was the book I read over and over at that time Lost Souls by Poppy Z. Brite. Nothing, the son of a vampire and a mortal girl, is being raised by adoptive parents in the suburbs, but one day he gets into a van with a bunch of vampires (one of whom happens to be his dad) and is off to New Orleans where lots of debauchery occurs. So outcast suburban kid who is really vampire offspring and he gets to run off to New Orleans, a city which I totally feel in love with due to her writing. (It even partially inspired a drug-fueled trip there my freshman year of college.) There's sex, drugs, and rock n roll in Lost Souls. Definitely a fucked-up, gory-at-times book. About as far from Twilight as you can get with a vampire story. It was totally my kind of book at 17. And I would write the line "3 am knows all my secrets everywhere." I also adored her novel Drawing Blood, about a boy who tries to figure out why his comic book artist dad spared his life when he murdered the rest of the family, and her short story collection Wormwood. My favorite character was Ghost, the sweet musician boy with psychic abilities. After a really grotesque serial killer book called Exquisite Corpse, she stopped writing horror. But man I loved Poppy as a teen and she really taught me to push boundaries as a writer, so I remain forever grateful.

Lastly, I must honor the Lydia Deetz from Beetlejuice. She was played by Winona Ryder and this was the role that made me fall in love Winona. She became my favorite actress growing up and oddly enough, I get people telling me that I both look and sound like her, which is a huge compliment. In fact once a middle-aged man ran up to me in the Whole Foods parking lot just to tell me how much I looked like Winona. Little did he know that back when I was 10, I used to take hair gel to make my bangs look like Lydia's in Beetlejuice and she was probably one of the reasons I started wearing all black. And her quote here, who doesn't feel like this in high school? I felt like this from about 6th grade on, but I guess I was a melodramatic one...



Oh and here is a good one:


Yes, Lydia and Winona both, totally my idols. And Beetlejuice remains on of my favorite movies of all time.

What about you? What spooky female writers, musicians and characters do you admire?

Next week we'll be back to our regularly scheduled interviews and prize giveaways with Pam Bachorz author of Candor, which is a very scary book in it's own way, so please come back and meet Pam!