Thursday, August 07, 2003
Despite a raging headache which should have put me in bed, yesterday I wrote 1,267 words on Chapter Seven and finally escaped the scene I've been mired in since Saturday. By the way, it occurs to me that Saturday was also the last time I actually left the apartment. I've become reclusive again. Spooky will have to force me out into the world tomorrow night, whether I like it or not. But at least I seem to be caffeine-free, said freedom being the probable source of my headache (which hasn't yet ended), and I'm afraid this paragraph is making some sort of loop-de-loop about itself.
Last night I watched Robert Mitchum in Thunder Road, read John Ciardi's The King Who Saved Himself From Being Saved to Spooky, and then read Lovecraft's The Hound to myself. Though I derive particular joy from "The Hound," it's one of those stories wherein The Gentleman from Providence was at his worst with adjectives, simply, tiresomely stating mood and atmosphere and dreadfulness instead of revealing it through more subtle prosinations. I just made that word up: prosination. As opposed to poetifications. One must keep these things straight. "The Hound" is one of those Lovecraft stories I keep wanting to edit.
The ms. for Murder of Angels now stands at 312 pp., and I'm still determined to end it with Chapter Ten (and an epilogue). It's an issue of restraint. But I don't want people, especially reviewers for Publisher's Weekly, remarking that it feels rushed. So, it's a fine line I'm walking here. As it is, they will complain endlessly about its being a sequel to a book they couldn't be bothered to read and complain louder still about the unconventional narrative structure. Jack Morgan (The Biology of Horror) has described my narratives as "cubist." If that's so, then I think Murder of Angels may be a tesseract. It's a narrative that seems determined never to go where anyone, including me, might expect it to go. Sort of like the first paragraph of this entry. It obeys its own internal compass. In the end, of course, this is what stories do. They lead us where they need us to go, not where we might expect or prefer for them to go. The more they do this, the less artificial they are, though they will always be entirely artificial. No, that's not a contradiction. It's a bit like how the set of whole numbers and the set of natural numbers are both infinite sets, but one of the sets is a larger infinity than the other. One may never write fiction which is free of artifice, as fiction is, by definition, artifical, as is all of art, but one may write fiction which is somewhat less artifical, without ever getting any closer to "reality." But reality is the last thing I'm worried about. Reality is for theologians, philosophers, and physicists. It is for all those arrogant and/or ignorant enough to think they may have grasped it. Now, now, Caitlin dear. You know perfectly well that you have nothing against theologians, philosophers, or physicists, not in general, at least, so don't let's get carried away.
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