Desire Paths

Recently, I spent about a week writing a short story set in the imagined West. It integrated Lovecraft mythos (or, so as not to invoke the name of a hilariously antisemitic and inadequate prose stylist, cosmic horror). This mix of genres is known as "weird West." 

I've been wanting to write a Western for some years now. I'm (increasingly) in love with the genre, particularly with how its environment is quite precise but its manifestations are nigh infinite. That is, the imagined West is a desert place, usually but not always in America in the late 19th century, with saloons and fast guns and horses and leather. Within that, you have certain character types: villain, antihero, innocent, Othered enemy. You have big, vague forces: the Law, modernity, temptation, Mother Nature, money, grief, the shadowy past. But you can mix and match any number of other elements. Gender and race can be whatever. Technology can be anachronistic, if you want. (Neo-Westerns have an even more flexible set of characteristics!) Because no one really believes the imagined West is factual, it can be molded to the story you want to tell. That's why the weird West is such a fertile blend: Cthulhu slides into the setting with ease. 

While trying to overcome anxiety about the Casablanca novel (I have added a decent number of words to it over the past month, but I might have bitten off more than I'd like to chew with the historicity), I wrote this story, based on an idea of Matt's about two opposing characters who both accept supernatural favors on one particular night in a silver mining town. I had so much fun writing it, and I broke a bunch of my own rules of revision, including reading today's words today (you gotta let 'em sit!) and submitting the day after I finished a draft (YOU GOTTA LET IT SIT!). 

The submission was rejected almost immediately. This was part of the feedback, edited to keep from spoiling the story: 

"...the opening scenes lacked a bit of tension. I think if I had more insight earlier on into the narrative stakes (such as what [x] in first scene could mean, or what [y] could signal), there would have been a bit more of the urgency I needed." 

Let's be clear. I'm quoting and unpacking this NOT because I'm wounded about a rejection. It was such fun to write this story that I felt rewarded as soon as I finished the draft, and I submitted it with a higher proportion than usual of I-want-someone-else-to-love-reading-this and less than usual of I-want-to-be-published. And, by now, I virtually never care about story rejections, because that's a numbers/persistence game, not personal or meaningful. 

I'm unpacking this feedback because I find it remarkably self-contradictory. In writing this story, I surrounded x and y with enigma so as to keep the reader reading, which, as Donald Maass taught me, is what tension is. How can a scene lack tension when it has enigma? If I'd explained what x and y meant on the first two pages, why on earth would you keep reading? 

It's possible that the first few pages didn't move quickly enough. It's possible that the rejecter misspoke, and meant "lacked a bit of clarity," not tension. But, based on my experience of rejections over the past five years, I think it's more likely that the rejecter didn't know what they meant. I think it's likely that the rejecter didn't like or even notice the sentences (which is part of what I enjoyed most about the first two pages: polishing the sentences until they rambled and rolled like a bowlegged sheriff), and wanted the story to move faster, to jam plot in immediately. 

Sentences matter more than plot to me, but that's exactly why I haven't done very well with my genre fiction. It might not be the root of this rejection - I am not stupid enough to think this story is perfect, nor single-minded enough to think it's perfect for this market - but I suspect it is. 

This rejection is the latest in a whole catalog of occurrences that are making me rethink, altogether, what I want out of a writing career. It bookends the first item in the catalog: an agent rejection for my bad-film book, which I got sometime in 2021. The agent didn't think the book had major-press possibilities. The way she explained this to me, I got the message: she is an agent who makes big deals, not little deals, and she didn't think she could sell the book as a big enough package to make it worth her time. I respected this, but it also surprised me, because I know how many copies make a bestseller and I know the size of the bad film/cult film audience. But I'm not a major critic, I'm not cruel, and the book doesn't have little bite-sized essays, so you'd have to market it pretty carefully. 

Hmm. Okay. So, I used this feedback to rejigger my expectations and I queried smaller or specialty presses for the book. A year & many rejections later, I've finally contracted the book to a terrific indie press, Castle Bridge Media, and I'm thrilled to be working with them. But I really did think this book was going to go to a big press. The result isn't a disappointment, but it's a different path, an alteration in the trajectory I thought I was creating with my first two books. 

I thought the idea was to step up and step up until I had an agent and a comfortable contract/series of contracts. I thought I'd edit and write reviews until I had a book or film column. I never thought I'd make a living wage by writing alone, but I did think I'd be able to stop hustling, stop hanging my own slate and instead have people or objects (publicists, agents, my own recognizable name) to do that work for me. 

These are the ideas I'm rethinking altogether: the ladder, the progression, the comfort, the reliance on others. None of them have come to pass, even though I've jumped through many of the necessary hoops. 

My friend Dave Housley has been running Barrelhouse for many years, and he has published seven books. I don't think he has an agent at the moment, and he's never brought a book out with a major press (although he has with big indies). Writers of many types and sizes know and respect him as a community-builder and a good dude. He's held a day job unrelated to writing all this time, and I doubt anything about his life or work is going to change. I don't even know if he wants it to. He keeps writing and making what he wants, and plunging himself up to his elbows into writerly community and working, and he doesn't have to be a hotshot to do those things. 

I'm wondering if this is a preferable model for my writing. Should I stop thinking about remuneration more completely than I already have? Should I make things and trust that readers will show up somewhere along the line? Should I stop trying to build this thing like a city planner, and instead let my interests make desire paths wherever they want to go? 

I'm considering making my weird West story into a Kindle single type thing for 99 cents. That's where I'm at. I tried self-publishing in my 20s, with a (deliberate) ripoff of VC Andrews that I couldn't figure out how else to sell, and I failed at it and swore never to do it again. Now that I've got 15 years of experience on that writer, I'm thinking about breaking her oath. I don't want to submit this story for two years only to hear feedback that doesn't make sense, I don't want to trunk it until I finally have enough genre stories for a collection (...it'll be a while), I don't want to rely on others who don't understand my work to promote a story I can damn well promote myself. 

I want to put stuff into the world that I love, and help people discover it who will love it too. Doing that has been the goal all along, but it's always been complicated and ritualized and tediously reliant on gatekeepers. Now, it seems possible that I'm at a stage where for some parts of my work, I don't need or want to trade gatekeeping for greater prominence. I've watched a handful of acquaintances go through this and never thought it would be me. And, let's be clear, I could not have published Ceremonials or Plan 9 on my own, nor can I publish Junk Film or most of the manuscripts I'm shopping on my own. But this little weird West story? I think I can. And I think I might. 

I just need to let it sit a little longer. 

The Three Rs and Other Stories

I'm really proud of the two posts I wrote after my blog break in February - the one about an old friend, and the one about how I misinterpreted Lynda Barry. The first one especially got a lot of personal reactions from readers, which tells me that I wrote something well. I hoped I would have equally sharp and thoughtful things to say after this long break between May and now, but I'm not sure it's going that way. Instead, a lot of small stuff is in tow. Nothing big and thematic and relatable like before. Forgive me.

1) Reading. The past month has brought a slew of reading that I didn't really want to do and a good deal that I did. I slogged through a 1794 novel written by Mary Shelley's dad, which was just deadly boring, and worse, I kept sensing that it wasn't doing me any good. Even when I can't write, reading always feels a little bit like creative effort, because my mind is chugging away at the underside of the book: why did the author do this, is that really working, does the other seem bad to me because it's lazy or because of my taste, etc. Caleb Williams was just dull, just obsolete, and the only thing it taught me in hundreds of pages is that a very good plot can do little to jazz up mediocre writing. I did not need to learn that again.

I'm taking the second volume of Remembrance of Things Past with me on vacation next week. For reasons already explored, I decided earlier this summer to give up on my three-years-of-Proust plan (one volume each summer), which made me very sad. But I've improved such that I think I'll be able to do it after all. Now I just have to remember everything from last summer's volume.

Lovely notion, though I felt very, very alone during Caleb Williams 

2) Writing. I've been working with fair diligence on the secret project in the last couple of weeks. Not every day, but most days; not a lot of words per day, but more than none. I feel good about it, or at least about prospects for revising it. I'm not ready to share what it's about yet, because I'm still not sure if it's actually a good idea. That's an odd place to be, to have some certainty about the quality of the work I'm doing and significant uncertainty about the foundational idea of that work. Usually it's the other way around, and I'm sure the idea is good but dubious about whether I'm writing it well. Right now, I know that I'm writing well and/or I can see what I need to fix. I do not know where this critical capacity came from. (Maybe from all that reading.)

I also dreamed a really fun, interesting idea last week that, if I can write it, will wind up being a sort of low-pressure rehearsal for the wikibook. Since it was that project which triggered a giant creative crisis this year (more about that another time, perhaps), I'm goddamn ecstatic about the idea of having a legitimate practice run in the works. The wikibook is the book I need to write, but I'm still scared enough of it that I need all the help I can get. The dream idea will probably end up being another unpublishable, too-long, genre-ish-but-not-really piece of work like so many before it, but if it helps get the wikibook out, I'll accept virtually any terms.

3) 'Rithmatic. I haven't done any math lately.

There are other things, but I want to save them for other posts. Surely they'll be organized better elsewhere. Or will they? Maybe it's all just a jumble right now and I should tell you about the ah-may-zing opportunity I'm getting over Labor Day, and the podcast that made me actually literally shake my fist at the sky, and the From Me to You post I thought up this morning that's about how to revise everything from a sentence to a novel, and this book I read that was so good I ordered ten copies from the publisher to send to friends, and...no, this is just me blabbing. Never mind. I'll winnow it out and give you something logical in August.

Links to Real Good Stuff!

Some good luck scattered across 2014 is coming to fruition in quick-time harch this month. Today, my short story "To-Do" goes live on The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review, which is frankly a personal triumph for me and a pretty nice thing professionally as well. You can read it here for free. I hope you like it.

Also this week (!), Kzine, a Kindle-only genre magazine, publishes its 11th issue, which includes "On Conti Street with the Kintner Dame," by yours truly. This story has about as much in common with "To-Do" as two-toed sloths have with Picabo Street. It's a lot of fun, though, and it sits in good company in the magazine. The issue is available at Amazon here. I think it's a free read for Prime members who have a Kindle.

In case you're not convinced enough to click through, here's a little bit about each story. "To-Do," which I've called the grandma story once or twice on this blog, is, in brief, about a fairly awful woman biting off more than she can chew.

You go, little turtle! (You're not endangering children, like Lily is.)

Writing about her was challenging and satisfying, as was writing about the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts many years after I lived in it. I tried to make the story slightly different than the norm visually, and to (maybe) trash some reader expectations for the rhythm of a 3,400-word piece. Other than that slight push toward experimentation, I haven't got a lot to say about this one. I worked hard on it, but writing it wasn't a mystical creative experience.

"Conti Street" came out of a dream I had about a band composed of zombies. When I wrote the dream down in my notebook, I thought of just doing a throwaway line in some story about how if zombies formed a shoegazing band, no one would even notice they were zombies. But then I had another dream about a strange silver coat with magic powers (which I as dreamer never quite sussed out). My determination to write a goddamn noir story already formed a chemical reaction with those ideas, and Jean-Jacques McHugh was born. I want to write another one with him, but I haven't written a lot of genre stuff lately and I'm kind of discouraged from the get-go. I loved writing "Conti Street," and nearly everyone to whom I gave it loved reading it, but I had a hard time placing it. Most noir magazines today, I discovered, want gritty-ass modern noir instead of old-fashioned Philip Marlowe stuff. Me, I love Chandler, but it's possible that I love parodies of Chandler just as much

, and I hope "Conti Street" walks the line between the two as lovingly as I intended.

If either of those stories has brought you here, welcome! Make yourself at home. Leave a comment. Have a drink. The bar's open and I can be pretty talkative.

A Year of Procrastination, Two Days of Work

On Friday and Saturday of last week, I sat down at last, at long-ass last, to revise Highbinder. I have had this endeavor on my to-do list since June of 2013, since I got some catalytic comments from a reader-friend. I can't believe it took me a fucking year. And I'm done with the first pass, because, as predicted in my New Year's resolution, it was really not that much work. It was burdensome psychological work to get myself to sit down, was all.

I did line edits (cut about 200 words that way, from just under 96,000), but more importantly I changed around the climax, some stuff throughout that informs the climax, and some of the (fictional) engineering of the world. I also removed most of the F-words in it (I resisted him, but my reader was right about that), which made me sad. I like F-words. I'm pretty sure I didn't fuck it up, but I'm going to let it sit for two weeks and then go through the whole thing again.

This revising entailed a full read of the book for the first time in many months. (For those of you following along at home, I finished the draft in January of 2013.) I shouldn't be surprised about this, but it felt...well, it's very much a book I wrote over a year ago, before I took the Esalen workshop, the UCLA class, or any of the CSUN classes. The prose often seemed clumsy, even though in reading I could remember firsthand the effort I'd put into the placement of every word. It's also very much a genre novel; everything was way overexplained, the dialogue sometimes told the story, and the narration is so far inside the protagonist's head that I should've been able to hear her heartbeat.

Ultimately, all of this is okay with me. I think the book works well enough as it is, for what it is, that I don't feel the need to start over from the top and rewrite it. (If it gets roundly rejected, maybe I will, but so far the only rejection has been because "I just didn't fall in love with the characters".) I worry a little bit about writing the sequel, because either the style will be quite different or I'll have to rewire my brain in order to put it together. The latter sounds exhausting.

It was an uneasy couple of days, but it was also such fun to dive back into that world. I enjoyed building it, and I can't wait to share it.

I don't know if it was the revising or something else, but a couple story ideas have dropped onto the pile, my first in several months. I think that means I need to get to my notebook this week. One of them came from work and the other from one of the weirdest damn dreams I've ever had, which linked sex with trains. Don't ask me. I mean...trains?

And not all delightful and sanitary like this 

Near-Fetched vs. Not

One of several books I read over the holiday was Bel Canto, a 2001 novel by Ann Patchett which won several prizes upon its release. I had read her latest book, State of Wonder, this past spring, and I really didn't know what to make of it. At the time I said this:

It's the first of her books I've read. ...I found myself looking forward to finishing, but also reading with enjoyment (Patchett creates narrative tension extraordinarily well)...much of its plot struck me as outlandish. Yet when I was in the last chapter, I felt like I'd been through a remarkable experience. I looked back at the journey of the novel with amazement and pleasure at what I and the characters had been through. Ultimately I am confused about it. 

State of Wonder gave me a great deal of food for thought; I've been thinking about it on and off since I read it in May. "Outlandish" is still the best word I know to describe the plot of the book, and yet I never scoffed and gave up because Patchett had written something that wasn't believable on the human scale.

The question I found myself asking after I read State of Wonder was whether it matters that the world of a book is far-fetched, as long as the author has confidence and skill. I thought State of Wonder worked, and I enjoyed it in the process of reading it, but when I was finished, the down-to-earth side of my brain protested that such a wacky premise should never have gotten on the page at all, much less published.

What's the point of novels, anyway? To build a world that's so realistic, on its own terms, that no one will question that they're reading something that could actually happen? Or to build a world, any world, into which the reader can tumble, entire, like Alice into the rabbit-hole? State of Wonder made me ask these questions. A book that casts a complete spell the way it did really reorients my view on fiction, and reminds me of how books felt when I was a little girl - how much I viewed them as utter escape from the present. A magic carpet, bound and glued, that took me wherever the author wanted me to go, no matter whether the destination was a real place or not. Wonder was maybe not realistic, but it was spellbinding, and it reminded me that there are more things between paper covers, Hemingway, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

I've read weirder stuff, sure. Sci-fi and fantasy books go way outside the realm of near-fetched. But Patchett is a contemporary literary author, and I don't think Wonder is meant to be magical realism. Even if it is, it doesn't read that way; it reads like...crazy realism? Exotic realism? I don't know that there's a term for it. It reads like it's outside the rules of any one genre.

But I fell head-over-heels into it, and I did the same for Bel Canto, which is not equally far-fetched, but close. It's based (loosely) on a real incident, but truth is stranger than fiction and this is pretty strange fiction. I loved the characters, I raced through every page, and I was slightly bereft when I was finished. I bought into every detail even as that other side of my brain tapped a foot and sniffed highly improbable. Once I was used to the outlandishness, I was sorry to let it go to return to more firmly realistic fiction.

I think the old truth about the rules of writing fiction - the importance of not breaking them is inversely proportional to how good your work is - applies here, but I still couldn't nail down for you exactly what rules it seemed to me like Patchett was breaking. There's no rule that says your scenario has to be believable in the real world. State of Wonder made me see that potentially, the most important rule is that the reader has to want to turn the page and read what comes next.

I guess the takeaway is that every writer needs to build a rabbit-hole - a consistent, intriguing world in which it's safe to suspend disbelief. Maybe that world is 90s-era Portland, where young grungers fall in love and have unsafe sex (Girl); or it's an otherworldly backcountry that's populated by fairies as well as credulous, romantic young men (Little, Big); or it's Viking-era Greenland, so thoroughly historically accurate that the novel can be used as a secondary source (The Thrall's Tale). Make me a sound rabbit-hole, and I'll tumble in without a thought.

Maybe another takeaway is that I need to suspend that foot-tapping self a little more often. She's kind of awful.

Depressurized Art

Despite the last post, the crazy robot story was accepted yesterday by a UK market called Theaker's Quarterly Fiction. I'm...pleased. Yes, let's leave it at that. TQF is a print and Kindle mag, and the issue with my story will be out in September or October.

By the end of the day, I had a fourth rejection for the opera story in my inbox, so y'know, she comes and she goes.

Last Saturday, I read half of The Sound and the Fury, and on Sunday I read the other half. If you haven't read this book and decide to read it, I strongly suggest doing it this way. The small details wove into each other much more satisfyingly when gulped all at once. Just as with As I Lay Dying, I'm not going to pretend I understood it from top to bottom, but there wasn't anything plot-wise in the Wikipedia synopsis that made me go "when did that happen?". And I really liked it. In truth, I loved it a little. The end of the second section had this brilliant idea in it, a nut that was worth building an entire novel around, but Faulkner just slipped it in as part of two characterizations, not as a central philosophical tentpole. (I think.) More of his books are in my future. Just...in a while. When I recover.

BTW, The Sound and the Fury was published in 1929. Faulkner was born in 1897. I bet a lot of writers over the last century have hated him for that.

I also read another book by Lynda Barry, What It Is, which is equally about the creative process and a poke in the back to get creative yourself. It was good, and I'd like to give it as a gift to a number of people I know, but the density of questions in it overwhelmed me. I consumed about half of a book of poetry by Carl Phillips, which gave me a new poem to add to my favorites list ("Cortège"), but which was almost too potent. "Blue" and its subtle repetitions and rhythms won't leave my mind.

And I finished a book of short stories by Elmore Leonard, When the Women Come Out to Dance. I was sorry when it was over and there were no more stories to read. I wrote on Facebook that this was the good stuff, straight to the vein, and I'm sticking with that assessment. The book also gifted me with the insight that Westerns and noirs have a lot more in common than you'd think. The only real difference is the props. Think about it.

As for writing, I did nothing last week. I'm ashamed of it, but there it is. I'm back into feeling blocked by gutlessness, a condition which is usually relieved with a combination of cranberry juice and vodka consumed while sitting in my writing chair with my notebook and putting words on the fucking page. But oh, there's all this work to do! And when the work is done, I'm tired and deserve to rest! And then there's grocery shopping and laundry and cleaning and music and movies! I'll just have to write tomorrow. And tomorrow. And tomorrow.

It's not just procrastination, not just busyness (Lord knows I'm really not that busy). It's revision. The idea that whatever I put on the page in love and heat is going to be sacrificed to the great god Revision. It makes me cower and despair.

So, instead, I've started collaging. Once I got the notion that you can make collages with detritus rather than with genuine, preservable art objects, oh, off I flew. Concert tickets and rejection slips and HAVE YOU SEEN ME pictures and completed crossword puzzles, and even a broken cell phone case - all the stuff that testifies to an experience I had but which is really just trash - it all gets glued on a medium-sized piece of posterboard and set away under the TV. I always feel so much better afterward, to a degree that's kind of miraculous. Like when you get that little piece of whatever it is out from between your teeth.

Depressurized art. It's pretty much exactly what I need. I just wish I could bring that breeziness to writing.

Genre Urgency (?)

Last time on The Fictator:

11. One of our exercises was to write down the question at the core of our work. I had a very hard time with this at first, although eventually I came up with an answer. But more on that in the next post.

This was in the context of the workshop I attended at Esalen. Along with the question at the core of our work, we had to set down the universal question in the work (the first question is what does the work mean to you; the second question is what does the work mean to the rest of the world), other experiences that collide with the story, something in culture/history/mythology that resonates with the story, how many layers there are in the story, and, finally, "who are you really?". Right. Simple stuff.

I haven't felt the same kind of urgency to write the novels I've written as Cheryl spoke about over and over. The name of the workshop was "Writing from the Urgent Place/The Story You Have to Tell" and part of the reason I was eager to sign up for it was the nagging feeling that I don't write from a particularly urgent place. Going through them one by one, I remember my motivations for everything I've written, back at least to my terrible superdramatic stories in high school about the cool best friend I never had, but I would scarcely call most of those motivations urgent.

I could point to stories I've written and tell you that this or that one felt urgent. The boy-on-garbage-scow story is the most recent example. That story felt necessary, felt like a part of me that had to be excised and put on the page. But the boy-and-mom-in-crisis story, and a fun noir story about zombies (the two that I've finished most recently - one literary, one genre), they didn't feel urgent. They felt good, like I was practicing my craft and pressing up the hill toward my goal, but they didn't feel like I was tearing something out of me with my fingernails and grinding it into the page. I do feel compelled to get the ideas out into the world that I put in my books and stories. But as I listened to my co-workshoppers' passion, cranked up to 11, about the work they want to complete, my feelings about the novels I've written seemed tepid.

Am I doing it wrong? Should I keep seeking that urgent place? If I didn't write, I would shrivel up on the inside and my sanity would be threatened. But I wouldn't die if I didn't complete a particular project - I'd just move on to another one - and that was the kind of urgency everyone else was talking about.

I would like very much to hear from other genre writers about this issue. Writing Highbinder felt necessary because I wanted so much to bring Berra to life, wanted everyone who read the book to love her as much as I love her. But I didn't feel like my life depended on being able to set her down. Pam said in the very first session that those were the stories she loved most: when it felt to her, while reading, as if the writer's life depended on writing it. No project I've tackled has felt so urgent as that. Am I not meant to be doing this? Or am I just doing a different thing than finding a story under my own skin?

As I looked back, I didn't see a single thread connecting all my work that could be called a core question that mattered to me, the person, rather than me the storyteller. I see themes that are similar: disappointing, manipulative, or absent parents is the most consistent one, but betrayal and sexual deviancy seem to be interesting to me too, and women or girls in severe peril appear over and over. (I have explanations for some of these themes but not others.) I thought long and hard about this core question thing, and finally I wrote down the issue at the heart of the wikibook, which also sits at the center of the other big literary project I've conceived, one I know I'm not ready to write yet.

Truth. The nature of it, the fallacy of it, the value of it, whether or not it matters in a life story.

Unsurprisingly, this is an issue at the heart of my life in the world, too, but I don't see it as having appeared in my other novels so much. The novels I've written have been about their stories and their characters, not about a literary question. Yet I just can't see this as being the wrong way to have written them. I wanted to write about Berra, about Elaine, about Rose and Eliza and Jackson, about poor prickly Fiona, even about Jessamyn. When putting their stories together, I didn't want to write about truth, or about what it meant to be alone, or about how to go on when it seems impossible to go on (a sampling of other core questions). I just wanted to write about what happened to them.

Am I doing it wrong?

The Point Where You Stop Talking About It

Earlier in the week I edited the opera story and sent it to a reader. Matt liked it. I liked it too, although I had the same feeling in rereading it that I had when I finished drafting it. Not my favorite story of mine, but solid and worthwhile. I guess it's not necessary to spray my guts on the page with every single story in order to do good work. (Contrary to popular wisdom.)

I'm chugging along on KUFC. I think it's going okay. I'm continuing the practices that have worked so far: 1) not writing every day, 2) taking notes about the next couple of chapters when I'm finished with the current one, 3) writing longhand for the first draft instead of typing.

I don't have that much to say about the process of writing this one. Part of the reason is simply that I'm playing it close to the vest. Matt doesn't even know that much about the story, when usually, idea-wise, he could easily claim credit as my co-writer. This means that when I get stuck I have to get out of it on my own, which is hard, kind of exhilarating, and leads me (ironically) to greater certainty about the ideas I'm integrating. Perhaps it's blind arrogance, not certainty, but I guess we'll see when I'm finished.

Another part of the reason I think I don't have much to say was voiced eloquently by your hero and mine, Caitlin Moran, in an interview with The Hairpin:

You know when you've met the right person because there's nothing really to say. I've noticed that time and time again, every time one of my girlfriends goes "I've met this guy," and it just goes on forever in the G+ circles I'm in, and there will be pages and pages filled with like five or six of us debating what he said and what he did, and you're going "Well he did this, and he did that, what does it mean?" And then suddenly that person will disappear, and they've met someone else and they'll just resurface five weeks later and you go "What's going on?" and they're like "I just found a man." And they just stop talking about it. That is generally the key, the point where you stop talking about it, because there is nothing to say when you're happy. So yes, that's basically one of the big rules that I've found out in life. If you're talking about him, it's probably not your future husband.

It's not that I think KUFC is The Book of Destiny, but I do think that better relationships and better writing result when you can get your insecurities to shut the fuck up and let you conduct your business. If I have lots and lots to say and parse and think and dig into and moooooooan about, then I'm not sure the writing's really going that well. I optimistically interpreted this behavior as caring about my art, as talk-therapy to make it better, but it walks and quacks like insecurity and obsession, not meticulousness.

So. Word by word, it's going on the page. Don't know what else to tell you without giving it away.

Over the last couple of weeks Matt and I have been having a sort of ongoing conversation about Jim Butcher's wisdom on storycraft and other assorted writing skills. Matt's part of the conversation is actually a lot more interesting than mine, but he brought it to my attention that Butcher is not a fan of literary writing and has taken the trouble to point out why it sucks compared to genre fiction.

It depresses me that a writer I like as much as Butcher has a closed-minded view on literary writing, which he set forth in brief in the comments on his website. Those posts are years old so I don't know if he's come around to literary fiction since then, but sheesh, that is so not the way forward for genre writers, to get bitchy about the differences between the forms. Since reading as a hobby has been trending downward basically since the end of the Victorian era, I equate this genre/literary argument to passengers arguing about seating arrangements on the Titanic lifeboats. We're all after the same thing, let's just get along, mmkay?

If you want to see a really lengthy example of the literary argument against Jim Butcher, a screed which, when you clear away all the fancy words and the ability to construct a debate-team-style argument out of popsicle sticks and Superglue, is the work of a troll with a dictionary, go here. If you want to see a reasonably good set of arguments against Butcher's opinion, go here, but the comments get a little bit snippy.

Christmas, she's a-comin'. I woke up with a sore throat, so it's possible my already-potent holiday cheer will be intensified by a virus. Whee. I'm not sure whether I'll be posting much over the next seven days; I'll be out of town, and I'll have my laptop but it's really a whirlwind tour that's been planned. So, in case I don't see ya, good afternoon, good evening, and good night.

One Day, Bloom Shall Know My Wrath

I'm not feeling so happy today - more stressed and insecure. This does not lend itself to insights about my writing life. Which is a shame, because my friend DeAnna wrote this really interesting post about literature that I'd love to respond to. But I can't be arsed. So instead of writing something new, I'm going to cannibalize an e-mail to my mother that's partially about literature, partially about why I write, and on the side explains exactly why I have such a big beef with Harold Bloom. Then I'm going to make myself a hot pastrami sandwich and listen to all the most depressing songs on the Twilight soundtracks. Happy Tuesday.

A seminal moment for me was when Stephen King was awarded a fancy commendation for his contributions to American letters. Harold Bloom came out in protest, calling King a writer of penny dreadfuls without a cell of literary merit in his entire body. This infuriated me even as it perplexed me; I realized after thinking it over that it wasn't my instinct to defend King only because I personally enjoyed his work. Because, frankly, he does write penny dreadfuls, for the most part.

The thing that bothered me was that Bloom wasn't seeing the American canon (which I realize he helped define) in the whole spectrum in which it exists, or in a bigger cultural context. He was decrying and dismissing work that was important to a very, very large population of Americans with minds and hearts, and trying instead to perpetuate novels that are Important but that only a small slice of people will ever read, enjoy, and learn from.

By the same token of this rejection of King: to say that pulp and genre novels, science fiction and fantasy, have no place in the Important pile of books is quite closed-minded, to me, and worse, it does a disservice to the melting-pot attitude that has been America's philosophy nearly from the word go (much as we kick and scream against it today). To eliminate whole categories, whole bodies of work, because they're not one person's idea of good literature is to miss the point of what makes America the society it is. Some people only read romance novels. Are romance novels to be kicked aside as unimportant because they're not "good literature", even though they comprise something like 30% of the money in the book market? I'm not saying they have to be read in college courses, but to insist that they are not a part of American letters is just foolish. They may not be a part of the canon, and they may not individually be Important (or even good, or worth reading), but I consider them a part of the spectrum that should not, not, not be tossed aside.

Plus, there's the problem that yesterday's penny dreadfuls are tomorrow's great literature. Dickens. Poe. Raymond Chandler. Even Shakespeare, if I'm not too mistaken. Wake up, Bloom.

So, aside from making me a permanent archenemy of Harold Bloom's, this moment showed me that I want to write (mostly) on the border between genre fiction and lit-fic. Because genre fiction always needs better writers (especially lady ones), and because lit critics badly need their minds opened as to what "American letters" means. I want to contribute to that open-mindedness by writing damn good fiction that's literary and genreiffic, just like Atwood and Vonnegut and Brockmeier and a ton of others.

Maybe that means it'll take me until I'm nearly 70 to be acknowledged as a good writer. But if I end up making as much money as Stephen King has, I think I can live with it.

Results of Rewriting and Also Reading

Yesterday I finished with work earlier than I have in...well, I don't remember how long it's been since I finished work before 6:00. Days? Weeks? I don't know. But I decided to seize the opportunity to approach a couple of stories afresh: the crazyass robot story and an older literary one.

I got interesting feedback from three different sources on the robot story: one person who indicated that it was largely worthless, a second person who said that she loved it but that I hadn't been clear enough about various things, and a third person who raved beautifully over it. This last person fully understood the intricate things I was trying to do stylistically and still gave me useful feedback about how I could make it better, becoming the first person ever to do this for my work. Seriously: I felt like I'd been minding my own business walking down a dusty road and managed to knock my walking-stick right into a boulder-sized diamond. He's thousands of miles away and happily married, but I still wanted to fling my arms around him and give him a big sloppy kiss.

Using feedback from all three sources, I rewrote a few key sections of the robot story and generally tightened it elsewhere. Final word count on it is 8,200 words, which means I added a couple hundred in these last edits, but I think it was for the better. Looking at that figure, 8,200, makes me groan. That's an awful lot more words than I really like a short story to be. 35 pages in double-spaced Courier. But when I first got going on this story, I decided that its length was going to be as many words as it took to tell the story, and that was that. This particular story just demanded that, to me, and I've hung tough on it, despite the screamy little voices in my head that say I'll never sell a story this long and any good story should be told in as few words as possible and bleh bl-bleh bl-bleh. Sorry, no. It's 8,200 words, which was as many as I needed to tell the story. So there. I sent it to a market that I hope will want it. Their other material makes me think it might be up their alley.

The older literary story, about a hesitantly gay college guy who suffers a bad trauma, was structured with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and a reader told me that I should ditch everything except the middle. She said she knew she was arguing about just three pages, or so, and that it really wasn't so demanding on the reader to read that stuff, and that it fleshed out the characters a bit better. But, she said, the Double Stuf was so compelling that I needed to just edit out the cookies. I reread the story for the first time in a couple of months last night, and even though it seems illogical to the way stories are generally structured to cut out the beginning and the end, she was right. She was flat-out right. So I reworked the beginning radically, I think for the better, and did a medium-bad patch job on the end before I ran out of creative gas and quit for the night.

I've recently finished a couple of books that I didn't really enjoy, but which were very useful. I read a superhero novel that had good things in it, but was often frustrating, because it felt a lot like a YA novel in style and was often un-YA in substance. It also had troublesome gender issues, which has really been a problem for me in reading material lately. That one was good to read for this-is-acceptable-quality-in-publishing standards. I also read a zombie novel that was a weird downhill slope in holding my attention - the first 50 pages were nearly annoying in how generic and unrealistic they were (my brain is still calling bullshit on something that happened on about page 25), but it got real good real fast about 2/3 of the way through, to the point where I stayed up late to finish. I met the person who edited this book at PPWC, and he tried to explain that his publishing house was really into pop culture genre books, and I didn't really get what this meant until I read this book. Now that I've spent several hours of my life on a book I didn't much like, of course, I totally get it. It's an awesome focus to have. And I seriously doubt I will ever have a home at that particular house. Oh well; about half of the book was lots of fun to read, and the writer got one giant LOL out of me courtesy of a perfectly timed Starship Troopers reference.

Right now I'm reading How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, which isn't wishy-washy eh kind of I guess I'll be glad I read it. I don't like this book. I'm 40 pages in and nothing is happening. I see that he's trying to bring sci-fi elements to literary fiction, but he's got the worst excesses of lit-fic along for the ride, and instead of seeing it as a delightful hat-tip, it's just pissing me off that he's appropriating Doctor Who for his own ends. My policy for whether I'll finish a book depends on the book, but for this one I've decided I'll read a hundred pages or so before I give up. Every few sentences the writer has a beautiful turn of phrase, which is nice, and a much better ratio than I've been batting with what I've been reading lately, but it's not enough.

All that is soon to change, however. On the basis of a breathtaking story I read in the steampunk anthology, I paid thirty dollars for a goddamned Wizards of the Coast book that's out of print. The writer is Samantha Henderson, and her story "Cinderella Suicide" utterly captivated me, even if I barely understood it for the first couple of pages. THIS, folks, is what I want to do, the thing that Samantha Henderson has done. Spectacular sentences, dancing around in genre without being of genre, breaking numerous rules and being better for it. She restored my faith in what I write with that story, and I don't think I could have gone on and started the KUFC book without her.

Anyway, I ordered her book Heaven's Bones, and after a couple of library books, it's next on the list. I hope it's just as beautiful as her other stuff I've read. Here's one of her stories, published earlier this year in Strange Horizons.

Aaaand I think that's about enough rambling.

KUFC (New, with Parkour Action!)

On Wednesday, I wrote this:

I guess I pictured that those ubiquitous kickass book-cover chicks would be parkouring all over a sooty Gotham with explosively powerful crossbows. In fact, yes, that's exactly what I pictured when I thought of "urban fantasy". 

After reading my post, Matt messaged me and said "You should just write this book." I joked back that I totally should. And then I thought about it for another day and the joke part sort of faded.

This is concept art from Diablo III (and has some of the problems of fantasy figures of women) (PUT HER DAMN HAIR BACK), but this is sort of what I picture. Only...steampunk. Oh yes: steampunk crossbow parkour chick. I'm giddy with the awesomeness, and 95% committed to writing this book.

I toyed with several central ideas, but over the course of the weekend I finally settled on one that I like, not involving demons or vampires or werewolves as the main enemy, and giving my chick a backstory that makes the skin crawl. I also went to Barnes & Noble and picked up a dozen books with kickass urban fantasy chicks (KUFCs) on the covers, reading the backs, putting them down again. I very much doubt that they were all the same on the inside, I give published writers more credit than that, but they all seemed the same from the back covers. I bought the first Anita Blake book, because I think you could make the case that that's where all this came from, and a book called Under Wraps about a demon hunter in San Francisco, and Plague Town, which really doesn't have much to do with all this but which Steve Saffel talked up a lot at the PPWC. A day later, when I settled on steampunk, I went back and bought Ganymede.

See, because I haven't actually read that much of this stuff. Particularly steampunk - I've read one steampunk short story to date, and it stank so much that I figured it was just an art that I'd enjoy visually from here on out. (It was that bad.) And although I've read all the Sookie books, I haven't read any KUFC books, or any real urban fantasy in the new wave - I've read Neverwhere and nearly all of the anthology I mentioned the other day and short stories in Weird Tales and the like, but no novels in the zeitgeist, and not much that resembles what I want to write.

Recent events, though, have made me debate internally whether this is a bad thing. Most of my grounding as a writer comes from non-commercial fiction. I haven't read many of the books that establish the rules of engagement for writing stories about fairies and elves and robots, so I tend to break them without realizing it. I have always believed (through significant insecurity, of course) that this makes for better work, because when you don't feel compelled to play by a certain set of rules, you wind up with more original ideas. Ask any entrepreneur. If you can't find what you want to use or own or read, do it yourself, and someone will probably like it the way it is.

I thought that this potential originality made up a little bit for the confusion faced by readers who are expecting some particular thing and instead get something else with different rules. But recently I've gone back and forth about that. I still don't want my work to be formulaic, but I do want it to get sold. And there's no way around the basic problem of not knowing my market.

My conclusion for right now is to sketch out the fundaments of my KUFC idea before reading all the books I bought the other day, and then read them to see how the details are done. This was the same thing I did with my Greenland book - I wrote a lot of it, and complained to Matt about how hard it is to build a world underground, and he told me to read Homeland, and I did, and it helped with the detail and with addressing the illogical aspects of living underground. I was really glad I didn't read it first, though, because it would have skewed and influenced stuff that it shouldn't've, and made the work less my own.

Anyway. Matt points out that the Marilyn book will take a lot longer than this KUFC one, so I should write this one first. I'm happy to take that advice. Anything that delays the Marilyn book. I also have a couple of short stories on the brain: one literary based on a nightmare I had, one slipstream that will help me clear some emotional chaff out of my life. Or so I hope. And we have to pack all of our stuff THIS WEEK and get ready to live in a completely empty house for another week. Yippee. At least that'll be a week to get a lot of reading done whilst sitting on the cold hard floor.

Isn't It Just Contemporary Fantasy?

In my local library, the SF and fantasy are in a section far away from the regular fiction section, and in fact are in the same area as teen fiction. I am not in love with what this connotes but, you know, oh well. I was browsing along the shelves a few weeks ago and came upon The Urban Fantasy Anthology, edited by Beagle and Lansdale and with a few top-notch authors in it, and picked it up. I've heard an awful lot about urban fantasy in the last five years, and seen increasing numbers of these terrible covers at Barnes & Noble, but if you asked me to define it I could only guess lamely. (Related to that link and well worth reading: this. Also this, funnier still.) I thought it would help to read a whole anthology of the actual genre.

There are no fewer than four introductions in this book, and three of them mention Buffy the Vampire Slayer. When I saw that, I went [oh.] So that's what urban fantasy is. It would be nice if they'd just said that.

As I work my way through the stories, a lot of what I read reminds me of Charlaine Harris's Sookie books, which I read voraciously whenever they're released (every year on the dot - actually, it's May, isn't it? Yessss!) and which I love for their transparency and speed and sex scenes. I would never call them great literature, and some of them I wouldn't even call good writing. They are, however, extremely fun. But there's a sort of studied casualness to the fantasy aspects of both those books and these stories that I find hampering. I remember, when reading Neverwhere, how effortlessly Gaiman introduced London Below, and how he didn't linger or waste words on supernatural stuff when it wasn't necessary. This is hard to do while building a genuine world, really really hard, and some of the authors in this anthology don't seem to have mastered it.

The thing that bothers me, though, is how ho-hum the stuff that comprises "urban fantasy" seems to me. In the anthology, I've read a pretty good but more or less standard ghost story; a lovely Gaiman story, wistful and imaginative and really very unfantastic (and not at all encouraging to someone moving to Los Angeles in a few weeks); a story by Lansdale that I truly hated, a dudeish post-apocalyptic zombie/sex bloodbath without a single pleasant sentence; and a few others in the realm of fantasy that I enjoyed, but that I wouldn't call urban. I guess I pictured that those ubiquitous kickass book-cover chicks would be parkouring all over a sooty Gotham with explosively powerful crossbows. In fact, yes, that's exactly what I pictured when I thought of "urban fantasy". Is there a book like that, one that's actually decent? Because I'd read that.

In other news, I have another story idea. This one might keep me from having to write the old old idea that I fear fucking up, or from having to iron out the Marilyn book until I get my nerve up.

In the last week, I've completely gorged on Twilight Rifftrax, watching all four released movies with their accompanying riffs. It's really helped. While I'm not exactly embarrassed about the thoughtfulness with which I've (perhaps needlessly) approached the series in the past and the complete sucker that the romance bits made of me, I did want to have a more objective view of the whole thing. Rifftrax has helped with that a lot, although I still find myself being a sucker for certain aspects of the movies.

That suckerism, along with some gender reading I've done in the past couple of weeks, made me ache desperately to write...something. Some kind of thing that would explore idealism and yearning in relationships, that would get down to real words all the vaguenesses I feel when I read romance novels and watch Edward and Bella getting it on. An essay wouldn't do it, wouldn't give me the freedom I needed. So I was really grateful when I came up with this idea. It's sci-fucking-fi, AGAIN. Digging myself in deeper. I suppose I could mutate it to more present-moment fantasy, make it fae instead of techy, but that's not how I picture it right now.

Of course, writing will have to wait until I get some actual frickin' sleep. Or have my house packed and ready to move. Or find a renter. Or...daaaaaaah.

In this post I've copped to devouring Sookie Stackhouse books and getting roped in by Twilight. If you're just joining me for the first time, I promise I'm not always such an airhead. It's just, y'know, you have to read everything. High, low, creamy middle. Stick only to uppercrust stuff and you become Harold Bloom: soulless, snobby, relentlessly confused about why the world doesn't agree with you. I'LL GET YOU ONE DAY, BLOOM! BLOOOOOOOM!!

As If I Know What Positronic Means

Some years ago, I wrote a novella called The Apocalypse Experiment. The premise was that in the not-too-distant future, aliens nicknamed Portents have ended the fertility of the human race, killing all already-pregnant women and then all women who become pregnant. Humans are scared into a zero birth rate. A pair of scientists and a group of the Last Babies (the last generation to be born, now middle-aged) decide to try and restart the human race by controlling the hormones created and exuded by pregnant women, keeping them secret. Ultimately, they fail, in a tragic way that I didn't foresee until it was on the page.

Even before I'd finished writing, Children of Men came out. Oh, well.

I was horribly insecure during the whole time I was writing this novella. The lion's share of my genre reading has been edge-of-genre fantasy and science fiction - Bradbury, Susanna Clarke, Gaiman, Gregory Maguire, Douglas Adams, etc. There's not a lot of straight Arthur C. Clarke science fiction and even less R.A. Salvatore fantasy in my head. I don't know what you call this in the fantasy realm (low fantasy?), but what I like to read is known as soft sci-fi. Bradbury's later short stories are the best example of this I know, because they're mostly about people, and sometimes those people happen to be, y'know, on Mars.

Before The Apocalypse Experiment, I had only tried to write science fiction in short stories. My memory is telling me that in fact I only attempted YA sci-fi short stories before I wrote this novella, but that doesn't seem right to me. In any case, none of them were any good. The science was exceptionally shaky, because I am so thoroughly right-brained that I can barely calculate tips properly, much less comprehend physics; and I felt like I failed to get at the thing I love best about soft sci-fi. Which is: the way in which fantastic stories unknot what's essential about us, the way the best writers use the framework of science fiction and otherworldliness to show something humbling and brilliant and miraculous about the human animal. Ourselves mirrored in the future. This is also why I like soft sci-fi as opposed to hard; hard sci-fi is far more interested in the Petri dish than in the organism.

You have to write the fantastic stories properly, though, before you can capture the psychology of humans within their cage. You have to build the world before populating it with ideas, and that was what I failed to do in my stories. With the novella I wrote, I think I did a better job at this; my characters were pretty darn well-realized, and I was really proud of my plot. I was really proud of the whole thing, in truth. I still think the science is perhaps a bit embarrassing, but a reader like me wouldn't know the difference.

That's the thing that keeps driving me back to wanting to write science fiction at all. A reader like me. Someone who finds Arthur C. Clarke appallingly boring but who's devoured every damn minute of Star Trek: TNG. (Multiple times.) Someone who couldn't tell if a method of space travel was implausible, couldn't care less if the medicine is unrealistic or inconsistent.

I have a lot of smart friends, though. A lot of people who are thoroughly left-brained. One of them, for example, is a Ph.D. from MIT who's researching artificial intelligence and string theory. Their faces loom in my mind whenever I get a sci-fi idea that would cause me to invent and fumble through all sorts of crap I know nothing about, and I hear them scoffing and laughing at my ridiculous ideas about future transportation and future housing and future diets. So I get insecure. And I put those ideas aside, think about writing them later, maybe after I've been to a few cons and suffered through a little more Clarke.

The idea I'm working on now? It refuses to be put aside. It won't leave me be. I'm crazy about my conflicted, semi-Magneto-esque, completely wackadoo android, and I've just got to get his story down. I was depressed this morning to learn that Asimov (who straddles the line between hard and soft, I find) has already written part of my central idea. Children of Men all over again.

But I'm going to write it regardless. This story is developing to be a lot more like Poe than like Asimov, anyway, and I think I'm going to write in that direction, throwing to the wind all my frets about my poor sci-fi skills. It's coming out slowly and painfully, but I keep trying to remember that I wrote 25,000 words through insecurity about my ability as a sci-fi writer, and surely I can write a few thousand more now.

If You Liked It Then You Shoulda Put a Vampire In It

I took an online writing workshop through the magazine Barrelhouse this past fall, and one of the things I was hoping to get into with my instructors and fellow students was what genre amounts to in the writing market of today. My opinion was previously that since Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy, then building with Harry Potter and, later, Twilight and all the accompanying vampire television, fantasy fiction has become much more of a mainstream proposition, no longer restricted to social misfits and obese owners of comic book stores with stained shirts, but something you can read on the subway without people thinking badly of you. Then I stumbled on this page on Wikipedia, and learned that apparently everybody is reading fantasy on the subway, and has been for many years, and has maybe just been putting false book jackets for Philip Roth over that Ken Follett novel. Which made me wonder ever more why the literary community disdained genre fiction. I think it has something to do with the taint of money against the porcelain posterior of art, the idea that popularity means you haven't written something lasting and worthwhile. I tend to believe exactly the opposite, because I think it matters if people like it. Especially if gigantic numbers of people like it.

In any case, I had thought that genre writers were rather maligned among the literary community, and while I think this is still probably true for writers who are deep inside the boundaries of the genre (i.e. high fantasy, hard science fiction), genre bleeds over into literary fiction in ways I hadn't really guessed. I was told by one of the workshop leaders that agents had taken to suggesting, "Put a vampire in it!" for lit-fic that they didn't think was yet worth selling. Shudder. And once I started looking for genre fiction in the lit community, I found that Kurt Vonnegut and Margaret Atwood are sometimes considered more genre authors than straight literary authors, which enormously surprised me. 

I'm much more familiar with Atwood, and yeah, she writes a good amount of speculative fiction. Probably her most famous work is The Handmaid's Tale, which stands immediately next to 1984, is Venus to Orwell's Mars. But she's also written a number of novels that aren't speculative at all, that are about women and friendships and woe in the present day, and there's no doubt to me that her work falls firmly into the category of literary fiction. 

I have all sorts of questions about this sticky subject - whether genre fiction can only be acceptable to book snobs if it's in a literary-fiction shell, where the dividing line is between something that's Fantasy and something that's Literary With Fantastic Elements, why something that so plainly has worth is deemed worthless by so many in the literary community. Whether the derision has changed since LotR, or whether the shooing-in of genre elements is about dollar signs on the part of the agent rather than a concession about available quality. Why the community bothers to hold up Cormac McCarthy as an example of its broad-mindedness when it could just as well be reading Ursula LeGuin and calling it even. I could spend all day brooding over this. 

But that was a really, really long way of saying that I'm struggling with the genre problem in my work. Right now, you see, I'm working on a horror novel. Or at least, I conceptualized it as a horror novel. In fact, I put in a bunch of silly horror tropes at the outset. My "monster" has residence under the stairs. I collected a group of young characters and put them in a lodge way out in the woods. The call is coming from inside the house. At some point I hope to have someone say she'll be right back. Etc. This tickled me pink when I started erecting the structure of it, because I LOVE horror fiction, especially when it's extremely well-done and is nevertheless idiotically gory. (Drag Me to Hell is a perfect example of this kind of thing, a wonderfully made movie that tosses buckets of gunk at the screen and wants you to laugh about it.) I wanted to write a really excellent horror book that had silly cliches snuck into it so that intelligent consumers of genre fiction would read my book and wink and say "I see what you did there." I hoped it would tickle them as much as it did me. 

The problem is, my writing is getting better.  

I'm stepping away from the self that worries about sounding arrogant to tell you this. My writing is getting better. Last night I wrote a few thousand words that, when I was finished, I read over and shivered; it was exactly what I wanted to say, beautiful sentences that didn't need editing. 

The room inside was dustless, with fresh pink and white gerberas on the little table under the window. A faint clean-linen aroma emanated from the canopy bed, on which was arranged a panoply of stuffed animals, their friendly blank eyes and funny colors only grim in the context of this room. An enormous, elaborate dollhouse stood open on the right-side wall. A downsized dresser stood against another wall, a blue satin jewelry box the sole object on its surface. Elaine knew that a plastic ballerina crouched inside, en pointe on a spring. A nightlight glowed under the drapery of the bed.

I'm writing much more carefully now than in times past, working on a sentence-by-sentence basis rather than just writing a lot, sloppily, and coming back later to fix it during the editing process. I never wind up with more than a few really splendid sentences that way, and by writing with total intention now, I end up with whole paragraphs of fiction that makes me proud to read it instead of just baseline getting-my-point-across stuff. It is much, much harder, slower and more exasperating, but oh, is it ever better. 

So I'm writing a really beautiful horror book. A book with emotional impact and difficult truths. But it's still a horror book, and of all genre fiction, I think horror is the least likely ever to be respectable, the way certain swaths of fantasy fiction have become respectable. 

So. What am I writing here? I am not denying that horror fiction can be beautifully written, by any means. But I find myself asking what literary fiction actually means, and why I'm so convinced that I can't write it, because that level of quality is what I'm striving to write day after day. It just also has a monster under the stairs. If I was writing a literary novel about this subject, I would emphasize that the book is about time, and the fucked-up-ed-ness of time and those who can manipulate it. But then I'd be writing a whole different book, a philosophical sort of thing that was more primarily about how humans perceive time than about how this group of characters copes with an evil little girl who can alter it. I'll think about the big philosophical stuff, and I'll maybe encourage my readers to do so while reading, but topically I'm much more interested in writing about the evil little girl than about the big stuff. 

Perhaps that's what makes this a genre book rather than a literary book. Writing about the evil girl rather than writing about the concept. I do have an idea for a conceptual book, but it's in the future, after I've become a much better writer than I am now. At the moment I just want to know what Clara's going to do next.