Friday, October 10, 2003
Since June 1992, I have written six novels, sixty or so short stories, a handful of chapbooks, and forty-five comic scripts. All of these have been sold (at least once) and published. In the space of only eleven years. Oh, and you have to squeeze Death's Little Sister in there somewhere, as well. It's no wonder that I'm beginning to wonder if I've anything left to say. I didn't even count the hundreds of thousands of words that have gone into this blog since Nov. '01. The circuitous road between The Five of Cups and Murder of Angels. My trail (and trials) of broken sentences. In that eleven-year period, I can discern at least three people I have been, two discarded and the third speaking now to you. I'm not the unspeakably angry person who wrote The Five of Cups, nor am I quite the NeoVictorian, quasi-Romantic who wrote the stories of Tales of Pain and Wonder. I am the confused woman who wrote Murder of Angels, and Waycross, and Low Red Moon, and "Riding the White Bull," and "La Peau Verte." Searching for the next incarnation, and I may have found her already, sure, but one can never be too careful about these things. I do not know how common it is that writers reinvent themselves this way. Wait. I don't think it's an issue of me reinventing myself as a writer, per se, but, rather, as a person. And then there's the inevitable reflection of that reinvention in my work.
I'm not even sure if it's something that I do on purpose.
This me, the "present" me, writing these words for you on this cloudy October afternoon, would appall the me who wrote Threshold, who would have annoyed the hell out of the me who wrote Silk.
At least for me, this me, there is no distinction between Me and The Work (convenient, that phrase — "The Work" — it appears in most contracts I've signed). I am what I write. I was The Five of Cups and Silk. Then I was all those songs I wrote for DLS and I was the stories about Jimmy DeSade and Salmagundi and the Children of the Yard. A little later, I was Threshold and the last few issues of The Dreaming, and there was an air of transition in there. Shift again, and this is me, and near as I can tell, clutching at straws in the dark, slipping on wet shingles, I'm all these unbound pages of Murder of Angels and the science-fiction stories I'll write this winter and the unfinished screenplay for Threshold.
I expect I'm making too much of this. I have a talent for exaggeration. Maybe it comes with the territory.
But I do feel peculiarly out of focus these days, this past couple of years, and I expect it to begin to manifest itself in what I write. There was once clean definition. Now there is a kaliedoscopic turmoil. Surely it will show.
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