Why write? You have to be a real fool. Your friends won't care. They won't want to read what you write (but they'll be glad to tell you about the "great book" they just read---sigh). Publishers won't care---unless you're a celebrity, or know a celebrity or have some dirt on a celebrity, or if you want to write a diet book, or a self-help book (that pretty much tells folks they are all right already). Their interest is in making money. If you love someone, your writing may even drive them away. Sometimes strangers on the bus or subway will care---as long as you listen to their crackpot ideas afterward.Usually it's because you can't help it. It's a compulsion that takes root early and never leaves. Stories pop into your head and won't leave you alone until you cave in, get out the pen or keyboard, and start writing. Can't help it, the girl can't help it. And a great deal of effort goes into tales the end up in a drawer or on a hard drive.
Writers live for that connection, that response that can come from readers who read. They don't have to agree with your ideas, or like the style, or even find you talented--they just have to connect, take the work seriously, and...care. Rare.
Some of my compulsions follow. Real masochists can read my dissertation proposal. Comments of any kind are welcome. Just email me.
REVIEWS"'Most Foul, Strange, and Unnatural': Shakespeare's Hamlet as Gothic Touchstone." Under submission, Gothic Studies. "’For the grure þaet grap hire’: Horrific Imagery in the Katherine Group Texts." Magistra (forthcoming!). "A Most Unusual Totem Animal." Circle Magazine. Fall 2001. "Music is Praise." The Seeker Journal. July 2001. "Anglo-Saxon Charm Against a Wen." The Seeker Journal. May 2001. "Teaching Medea." The Beltane Papers. May 2001. "Goddess, Waiting." The Seeker Journal. December 2000. "Against a Swarm of Bees: An Anglo-Saxon Charm." The Seeker Journal.March 2001. "Edward Gorey 1925-2000." Obituary. The Comic Store .com. April 2000. "Erce: Earth Goddess--An Anglo-Saxon Charm." Dual-text Translation. Avalon Rising: v1n3 Ostara/Beltane 1999. Reprinted in The Seeker Journal February 2001. "'A High Steppin' Filly': Effluent Juissance in Dame Darcy's Meatcake." Essay. Indy: Spring 1998. Reprinted in Quadrado, August 2001. "A Halloween Wedding." Essay. Horror-Wood: December 1997. FICTION"Japanese Magic: The Girl-Friendly Films of Hayao Miyazaki." With Wendy Goldberg. Femspec (forthcoming). The Sandman Companion. Review. The Comics Scholarship Annotated Bibliographies. "The Book of Zines." Review. Other Voices: v1n2 Sept 1998. "Dark City." Review. Millennium: March 1998. "Alien Four: Foot Fetish." Review. Millennium: December 1997. "Two Movies Clive Barker Hopes You'll Never See." Review. Weird Times: v1 n4. My zine Wombat's World."Touched By An Angel." Short Story. Delirium: January 2002. The Willimantic Frogs. Chapbook. May 2001. "Sinnikka Journeys North." Short Story. The Beltane Papers: May 2001. "Walpurgisnacht." Short Story. The Seeker Journal: April 2001. "A Gift House." Short Story. Masters of Terror's House of Horror: April 1998. "The Eleventh Commandment." Short Story. Rictus: #9, April 1997. "Revelation": my short story that won the "Clive Barker's 'Lord of Illusions' Internet Short Story Contest" though MGM/UA never bothered to credit it to me (Lost Souls, the official Clive Barker fan club has though). Clive wrote that it was "full of fluent style and poetic dialogue." :-) November 1995. The 1998 Chapbook: Three Penny Dreadfuls
The Pile of Unpublished Tripe:
Some useful writing links:Download a PDF file of my three day novel (yes, written in three days for a contest) Cruel. It has been described as Dangerous Liaisons in leather jackets; set in New Jersey in 1982.
"Call Me Jack": not your usual horror story.
The Medieval Studies Annual Holiday Party has given me the opportunity to write a few satirical plays, which you can read here.
Wade into a scene from my novel Not Waving. The title comes from a Stevie Smith poem "Not Waving, But Drowning." It was rejected by one Hollywood agent for being "too relentlessly dark." Duh! Let's just say that, while it had its moments, it suffered heavily from over-wrought "first-novelitis"--odd, in that it was not my first novel (that potentially embarrassing artifact rests, I believe, in the hands of a childhood friend [along with issues of my first zine from Junior High, Celebrity Gossip]...but whatever happened to The Fat Pony, a picture book written when I was ten?)
