People on the outside think there’s something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn’t like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that’s all there is to it. – …
Monthly Archives: September 2009
My Macabre Muse
It’s hard to get into the mood for gloomy, macabre writing when the sun is shining and it’s 80 degrees outside. I have to play tricks on myself and mentally travel to abandoned castles being lashed by violent thunderstorms, fog-bound moors, cemeteries with dead trees standing in silhouette under a full moon. Today I went …
A Dark and Crooked Road
Moving into the “horror” genre (or what Harlan Ellison prefers to call “fiction of the macabre”) was an unexpected turn in the road for me. I never read much horror, at least not much that I can recall. Supernatural fiction (Dennis Wheatley), stories about poltergeists, but no Stephen King, or Anne Rice, Clive Barker, not …