“I think what weird fiction tries to do, it’s unsettle you to some degree. But it also wants to make the world bigger than you ever thought it was, or could be.”
From a great interview with Stephen Graham Jones over at Weird Fiction Review.
“In solitude I used to wander about the garden, alternately collecting birds’ eggs and meditating on the flight of time. If I may judge by my own recollections, the important and formative impressions of childhood rise to consciousness only in fugitive moments in the midst of childish occupations, and are never mentioned to adults. I think periods of browsing during which no occupation is imposed from without are important in youth because they give time for the formation of these apparently fugitive but really vital impressions.”
– Bertrand Russell
“When the Lord finished the world, he pronounced it good. That is what I said about my first work, too. But Time, I tell you, Time takes the confidence out of these incautious opinions. It is more than likely that He thinks about the world, now, pretty much as I think about the Innocents Abroad. The fact is, there is a trifle too much water in both.”
– Mark Twain
“We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.”
– Anais Nin
Been back home for a week or so — well, going on two weeks now — and I’ve been following up with the handful of contacts, leads, and introductions I made while at the BookExpo America.
Apart from some good connections, the only other notable thing to come out of the trip was that I started writing the next project, my third novel. If you’ve been following me on Twitter, you might have noticed more references to gods than usual. You might as well settle in and get used to it, because that’s what the new project is about.
It’s a bit of a shift, really. I’d had another project planned and plotted, ready to start writing . . . but it just wasn’t there yet. Anything I did felt forced somehow. After a few weeks of working but not feeling it, I decided to set it aside and let my subconscious work on it a bit more.
It wasn’t the project’s fault. There was something off in me and I just couldn’t get in the right position to flip the switch.
If the other project felt forced and difficult, digging out our old notes and sketches was like coming home . . . and I’ve already slid into the work with a sigh of relief.
Who knows, maybe in a few years I’ll come back to the other project and find it’s right there, ready to go.
The second project — the new project, the god project — was one from five years ago that was originally meant to be a collaboration with the excellent Keeley Geary (now my most excellent wife). Although she’s graciously relinquished the story and characters into my hands, I expect she’ll still be involved in the plotting and development process — if for no other reason than I’ll keep asking her annoying questions and trying out ideas on her.
LaDawn Driscoll (a new Twitter friend) recently twittered the quote from Anais Nin above, which serves as a perfect compliment to this one from Homer’s The Odyssey: “For the gods are never strangers when they meet…”
Taken together, Homer and Nin do a pretty good job of summing up where Keeley and I started with this new story, way back when.
I’m not in a position to say much more about the new project just yet, but suffice it to say that I’ve got a lot of writing ahead of me.
And I’m looking forward to it.
It’s Shirley Jackson’s birthday today, author of The Haunting of Hill House. I’d wax poetic about her, but Garrison Keillor already beat me to it on today’s Writer’s Almanac:
She was a very eccentric woman. For most of her life, she heard voices and music that no one else could hear, and she believed that she was psychic. She kept half a dozen cats in her house and she said they often leapt up on her shoulder and whispered poems in her ear. She read dozens of books about witchcraft, and claimed that she had once used a voodoo doll to break a man’s leg.
And…
The people in her town talked about her behind her back, calling her a communist and atheist and a witch. Neighbors said the house was full of monstrous dust balls, and the children always had dirty tangled hair. She felt as though everyone in town was watching her and judging her, and she began to dread running into people at the local grocery store.
And…
Shirley Jackson said, “I tell myself stories all day long. I have managed to weave a fairy-tale of infinite complexity around the inanimate objects in my house… No one in my family is surprised to find me putting the waffle iron away on a different shelf because…it has quarreled with the toaster… It looks kind of crazy, of course. But it does take the edge off cold reality.”
Find the demon.
Do you know what I’m talking about? It’s the little voice in the back of your head that’s always whispering, “You can’t.” You know the demon. You may think you hate the demon, but you don’t. You love it. You let it own you. You do everything it says. Everytime there’s something you want, you consult the demon first, to see if it will say, “You can’t have that.”
What you don’t realize is that your demon doesn’t know anything. It’s an idiot. It’s nothing but a parrot, repeating back to you anything negative that it’s ever heard, anything that makes you hurt, makes you squirm. If a teacher once told you “You’ll never accomplish anything,” it was listening; it hoards words like that and repeats them back to you to watch you jump. It doesn’t know what it’s saying. It doesn’t care.
Exorcise yourself.
From the essay Hack Yourself.
I haven’t had time to dig in yet, but I think I might like this Bloodletters site.
The future doesn’t exist. If you keep saying we have to do something because of the future, if you boil it down, it means we have to do this now because I’d like you to. The future is a mythical construct in which there’s no strife. So what the politicians say is that if you do X, Y and Z now, you can have that beautiful future in which there is no strife. It’s the same thing as saying if you get rid of the Jews, or the blacks, or the gays, all the strife will be gone. As somebody said, all great crimes are committed in the name of public tranquillity. To ensure peace, I have to annex the Sudetenland. To ensure peace with honor, I have to stay in Vietnam. To ensure the tranquillity of this town, we have to get rid of all the black Americans. It’s a confidence trick for taking power.
– From the 1997 Salon Interview
I miss David Mamet. I’ve always liked his plays, although his movies leave me a bit cold (particularly the ones he directs himself). It seems like he’s been doing more movies lately, writing fewer plays. So I miss him.
But I miss reading his essays most of all. I was happy to see that Amazon has a new collection of them, along with a new adaptation of one of my favorite stories, Faust. Christmas is coming.
Today’s his birthday, by the way.