"The fisting of life to the music outside."

[greygirlbeast]

This isn't going to be much of a blog entry. I'm on hour 41+ of a headache, and my coherency level is not very high. Also, it's 84F in the house, and poor Dr. Muñoz, parked in my office, can hardly make a dint in the heat. Oh, a favor please. No headache advice. Or AC advice, either. When I finish this, I'll take a cool bath, and try to clear my head. My dreams culminated in fire.

There was no writing yesterday, no work. A lost day. "L" in the day planner.

I have a doctor's appointment in two days, and I dread it more than I can say. It's one of those socially acceptable bodily violations, the casual, careless, expensive ministrations of a physician.

"Is small life so manic?
Are these really the days?
Poor dunce..."

I'm mostly very pleased with how The Red Tree is doing, and with the reviews I've seen thus far. Sure, it could be selling better, but that's almost always the case. I have mixed feelings over its being received as a horror novel. People tell me how much it frightened them, and clearly they mean this as a compliment, and it would be rude of me, I know, to take it any other way. I am grateful for the compliments. But they also leave me confused. I didn't set out to write a horror novel. I'm still not sure that I see the book as a horror novel. Which is not to say that it does not contain elements of the horrific, for it surely does. It may be that "horror" has taken on too many negative connotations for me. It may also be that this is what I have inside me, horror and awe, terror and the uncanny, and that I have little else in me to send out into the world. And it's just a matter of my learning to accept this.

Okay. The headache is intent that I will say no more for now.

Comments

[chris-walsh.livejournal.com]

I'm looking forward to writing a full review of The Red Tree. I've been reading chunks of it out loud, too, trying to figure out what I think the characters would sound like.

I'm appreciating the book: I can sense Sarah's sadness, humor, exasperation and day-to-day need to do the tasks at hand. There's reality to it, something that H.P., as good as he was, never really achieved. Or was interested in achieving, likely.

It's good that you used first-person in The Red Tree as a well-considered approach. I know how it often gets used by first-time writers as a crutch, and a lot of them don't really think through how it should be used. You've clearly done that thinking. I don't remember you even telling many early short stories in first-person, so it likely hasn't been a crutch for you. (I haven't read The Dry Salvages yet, but I found it telling that you waited that long to write even a short novel in first-person.)

And I appreciate how you handle the sex in this book. I once said that your characters "seem like Lovecraft characters you can actually imagine having sex," and that's reductionist to a ridiculous degree but I think there's some truth to that. Your Sirenia Digest writing has definitely helped you in being able to portray sex. You also avoid the pitfall of a lot of badly-written sex scenes where the particular moment of sex is The Most Important Sex For This Person Ever. (That's the sort of thing that makes so much of Penthouse Forum absolutely ridiculous. That, and just the bad writing in general.) It's handled in The Red Tree as a fact of life, an often complicated fact but one that keeps happening, that's a part of the continuity of these characters' lives. So: *salutes*

I'm sure I'll have more to say later.

[greygirlbeast.livejournal.com]

It's good that you used first-person in The Red Tree as a well-considered approach. I know how it often gets used by first-time writers as a crutch, and a lot of them don't really think through how it should be used. You've clearly done that thinking. I don't remember you even telling many early short stories in first-person, so it likely hasn't been a crutch for you. (I haven't read The Dry Salvages yet, but I found it telling that you waited that long to write even a short novel in first-person.)

Aside from some poorly executed sections of The Five of Cups, I don't think I did first person until...well, I guess it was "The Dry Salvages." So, for the first ten years of my writing career I avoided fp, and now it's the voice I use most frequently.

Your Sirenia Digest writing has definitely helped you in being able to portray sex.

I agree.

You also avoid the pitfall of a lot of badly-written sex scenes where the particular moment of sex is The Most Important Sex For This Person Ever. (That's the sort of thing that makes so much of Penthouse Forum absolutely ridiculous. That, and just the bad writing in general.) It's handled in The Red Tree as a fact of life, an often complicated fact but one that keeps happening, that's a part of the continuity of these characters' lives.

Personally, I suspect a lot of authors who write sex that way either don't get much of it, or they attach an inordinate importance to it. It assumes this sort of status as a penultimate, rather than as a pleasurable, important, and sometimes (but only rarely) exquisite experience. It's very like eating, in that respect. One should learn to write well about food before even trying to write about sex.