Wednesday, March 13, 2002
It's easy to lose track of time. Being a writer, I mean. Lacking that schedule that most people take for granted and dread, but which at least keeps you cued into the days of the week. Days pass and I don't realize that it's been so long since I bothered to make a journal entry here.
I spent most of today proofreading "Onion" before I send the ms. off to Ellen Datlow for Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, Volume 15, tweaking little things here and there. I firmly believe that no story is ever actually finished. There is no real conclusion to the process of writing any given work of fiction, only a somewhat necessary and arbitrary place where you stop and type THE END. So it's not uncommon for me to rework something before it's reprinted, because there's always a word or two I wish I'd done differently.
Spring is coming, which is good.
An e-mail tonight, though I might not be much for the full answer right away. That might take some time. Anyway, Mr. Zach(ary) (Z. E.) Bennett writes:
"I read in your online Journal (30 Jan.) that you no longer espouse the
Left Bank/Right Bank taxonomoy of horror. My question is, why not? In
the DarkEcho interview of 23 Apr. '98 you explained it brilliantly, and
convinced me of its usefulness."
Right. I did say that. Which all gets back to the unfinished buisness with Ann Radcliffe and the distinction between terror and horror, the effects of the one and the other. Short answer, which will have to do for now as it's too late to think quite as clearly as a complete answer would require: I may have found something that works better. I'm not trained in literary theory or criticism (see, I'm not all bad), and I'm not sure how people who are do things. My understanding of taxonomy and theory comes, instead, from geology and biology. A model is good, as long as it works, or until a better model comes along. In this case, I may have been ignorant of a similar, pre-existing, and superior model, and unnecessarily created my own. The Right Bank/Left Bank model of "horror" fiction (see the interview section if you're wondering what the hell I'm talking about) seemed like a good idea at the time. It seemed to work. I even lectured on it at Trinity College in Dublin back in April '96, and they seemed to like it, too. But now, I think it fails by missing some very fine, but important points. Points which I will elaborate on some other night. Thanks for the e-mail Zach, and perhaps I'll be brilliant again and convince you I wasn't quite right the last time I was brilliant.
More than six months now since September 11th. Isn't that somehow amazing?
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