Floridia at Dusk: An Introduction of Sorts

I suppose that introductions are in order:

My name is Jude Wright and I am amongst other things a graduate student, a voratious reader, a lover of cats, and a horror writer living in Florida.

I've been visiting the state since I was a child: family friends in the Panhandle; the obligatory trips to Walt Disneyworld; a visit to St. Augustine our nation's oldest city in my adolescence. I've spent some time in New England, and Maine calls itself "Vacationland." For me, and much of the nation, that name is more aptly given to Florida.

I moved to Florida at the age of eighteen to attend Flagler College in St. Augustine. While there I fell in a strange kind of love that had probably always been sitting in my sun-avoiding soul waiting patiently for to emerge. I'll not wax too poetical about all of this, its neither terribly interesting or terribly original. Suffice to say that a boy from Colorado came to appreciate the hot humidity that had seeped into his skin from his early days visiting relatives in Lousiana. While living in St. Augustine and attending school I worked as ghost tour guide (of which there are many) something that put me in touch with the realms of folklore, lived experience, and abject chicanery that this blog will more than likely be about.

"Aye, there's the rub" as the Dane would say: what exactly is this blog going to be about? Well, sometime ago, back in the erstwhile years of my undergraduate (mis)education, I began calling the state of my current residence "Floridia", adding to the word the i and the a that would distinguish it from the rest of the natural world. Years later I'm back in the state and my little silly linguistic game now stands for the nebulous place where geography meets story, where sea meets sky, and where sardonic horror writer meets bloody-fucking-sunshine-state.

Love and Hexes,
-Jude