Friday, 08/08/2008 - 12:05 am
by Angela Wilson
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Who is Terri Garey?
I’m a Southern girl with an overactive imagination, who grew up in Florida, always wondering why tropical prints and socks with sandals were considered a fashion statement. I survived the heat by reading in the shade, and watching cool shows like the The Twilight Zone and the classic gothic soap opera, Dark Shadows. Born too late to be a hippy and too early to be a Goth, I did the logical thing and became a computer geek. Balancing a career with marriage and motherhood convinced me that life was too short to rely entirely on the left side of my brain, and quirky ideas about life among the undead began to replace the dry logic of computers. Deciding imagination was my best weapon in the war against reality, I dove even deeper into the world of the unexplained, and started writing my own demented tales from the dark side.
DEAD GIRLS ARE EASY (October 2007), was my first published novel, followed by A MATCH MADE IN HELL (July 2008), a novella called GHOULS NIGHT OUT (June 2008, as part of the Avon anthology “Weddings From Hell”), and I’ll have two more novels released next year, YOU’RE THE ONE THAT I HAUNT (March 2009) and another, as yet untitled, in November. Each one features Nicki Styx, a former Goth girl who survives a near-death experience to become an unwilling “ghoulfriend” to the dead.
How did you develop your protagonist, Nicki Styx?
Weird as it may sound (particularly to those who’ve met me!) I must admit that I consider Nicki, in some ways, to be my alter ego. She’s who I’d like to be (minus the seeing dead people part!) I got married very young, had children, worked full-time in the computer industry, and never really got the chance to be young and carefree, much less Goth—I was always too busy being responsible! Her wicked sense of humor is mine, but Nicki’s much more comfortable saying things out loud than I am. I felt like adding a gothic aspect to her personality would make her life more interesting—it’s one thing to be “into the dark side”, but it’s a whole other ballgame when the dark side becomes interested in you, don’t you think?
My husband and I have done a lot of volunteering in the arts community, so I’m very comfortable with people who are willing to be a little “out there”, so to speak. I’ve never seen a ghost, but I know some very credible people who claim they have. So basically, the idea of Nicki Styx came from playing the “what if” game: What if a free-spirited young woman, who thought the darker side of life was cool, actually died, then came back to life and started seeing spirits herself? How would she deal with it? How would it change her as a person? Would it still be cool? Her character really fell into place in my mind after that.
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