Blogging from A to Z Challenge: Dark vs Light

Hello and welcome to the Focused on Story Blog. If you are a Word Nerd, then you'll like my theme for April because I'm going to share words that have caught my attention, words that fascinate me, words that roll off my tongue, words that make a sound (crackle), and words that have been in my vocabulary for one reason or another. Yes, I'll explain why they made the list. Many of the words are new-to-me. Hopefully, by including them in this survey of words, my vocabulary will expand and perhaps you’ll also learn more words.

~gorgon~

a fierce, frightening, or repulsive woman, Dictionary.com

Just to give you an idea how fierce and repulsive this woman is, the second definition of gorgon is “in classical mythology, each of three sisters, Stheno, Euryale, and Medusa, with snakes for hair, who had the power to turn anyone who looked at them to stone.”  Now you'd think author Helena Fairfax is describing a scary scene with a mad woman chasing someone, but that isn’t the case. She uses this horrible dark description of a woman in a lighthearted way. She actually was describing the male head chef in the hotel’s kitchen in Felicia at the Cross Hotel, guarding his kitchen from employees who try to sneak in for snacks during the day. I love the contrast of the description of such a horrid person being a chef instead of a warrior or scary dragon.

Terror on Sunshine Boulevard
Available at major online booksellers

One of my favorite tricks as a writer is to juxtapose the dark side with the light side of a story. In the title of my latest mystery, Terror on Sunshine Boulevard, terror certainly contrasts with the idea of sunshine. The story takes place in sunny Florida in an active retirement community full of fun winter activities. But death, murder, mystery are played out against the background of the fun-loving retired seniors. 

Can you think of more stories or movies with such contrasts?

Click here for the MASTER LIST
of all participants who signed up
for the #AtoZchallenge 2018!