Theodora Goss's Blog, page 73

Yesterday night, I worked on my Folkroots column, which is due on January 5th. I thought you might be interested in how I went about it. It's a bit of a random process, working on a column. Not like working on a story.

For me, writing a story is a linear process. I have an idea of what the story is about, of its arc, in my head. And I start at the beginning, and go from there.

That's not how a column happens. I've known what this column is going to be about for some time: vampires. I've also known the first line: "I don't like sparkly vampires." That first line gives you, in a sense, the thesis of the column. It's going to be about bloodthirsty vampires, the kind that actually suck blood, that try to invade England and form a vampire army. The kind you decapitate. And I've known the basic organization of the column: first I want to talk about vampire folklore, and then I want to talk about literary vampires.

I have about 3000-4000 words to do it in. That includes notes and suggested readings.

The first thing I did was assemble my sources. I have on my desk beside me The Penguin Book of Vampire Stories, the Penguin edition of Dracula, and Walter Pater's The Renaissance, which contains a description of the Mona Lisa as a vampire. I'm going to quote from those. I also have the Bedford edition of Dracula, because I was the research assistant for that book and it contains contextual material that I want to look at. I also took another look at a website called Dracula's Homepage, which looks appropriately lurid but is actually a reliable scholarly site created by Dr. Elizabeth Miller, who is an expert on Dracula. In addition to assembling my sources, I went to the Boston University library website and identified several reliable texts on vampire legends that I should be checking out later this week.

See, this is Folkroots. It's not some random website. When I say something, no matter how casual my tone, it needs to be backed up by research. If you research vampires on the internet, you will find plenty of websites that tell you there have been vampires, or creatures resembling vampires, in all cultures. (And they will provide little or no documentation. Sometimes I think they're all repeating each other.) That may be true, if you have a fairly broad definition of what a vampire is. But the vampire as we have inherited it comes from the 18th century, and it is primarily a literary creation. The vampire of folklore, which is an Eastern European phenomenon, is quite different from the literary vampire, closer in some ways to the zombie. It is most emphatically not a seductive aristocrat.

Where was I? Oh yes, describing my process. While I was doing all this, I was also identifying images that could be used for the column. I'm responsible for identifying 3-5 images for the column, which need to be out of copyright. Once I find my images, I have a better sense of what I'm going to write about.

Then I started writing. I wrote the introductory section, which should both draw you into the column and provide a basic sense of what the column is about. The drawing you in part is especially important to me. I think it's important for the column to be scholarly and accurate, but also to appeal to the reader, to say, "Hey, here's something you may not have thought about, but that I think you'll fine interesting. And by the way, I have a perspective on this, which you may or may not agree with." That perspective – it's something columns often lack, but aren't columns more interesting with it? I'm not just giving you information. I'm also giving you my thoughts about that information, how I relate to the material I'm presenting. You may agree or disagree with me, but at least you won't have the illusion that you've simply being given a list of facts. Because that is always an illusion: behind the blandest facts is a columnist, selecting them. And that columnist has a perspective. I want to make sure that perspective comes through in my columns.

I wrote about as much of my column as I've written of this post, about the same number of words. I did not write it in a linear way: there are bits and pieces I will eventually connect to one another. It's easier to write that way when you're taking material from sources. You get down the material first, and then you work on creating a linear narrative.

I'll be working on it again tonight, and every night until it's all put together and sent to the editor. I hope he'll like it – and I hope you'll eventually like it when it comes out in Realms of Fantasy, the April dark fantasy issue.

When we left Stone Gap, the mist was still curling around the houses. There was the general store, the gas station, the Methodist Church, the Baptist Church, the library. The high school where I was not going to go, because I was going to Miss Lavender's. I remember that morning very clearly. I was almost thirteen.

Martha Harrington, who had been my guardian and my family's lawyer for many years, was driving me in her old Volkswagen. She was a former hippie who had moved to Randolph, the closest large town, to practice law in the 1960s, when Randolph had never seen a female lawyer. She was retired now, but she still did our legal work, although that consisted mostly in administering my parents' will and making sure that the house where we had both lived since my parents had died was kept up. So she was sort of the housekeeper and groundskeeper as well.

"Are you sure you have everything you need?" she asked.

"I guess so. I have no idea what I need," I told her.

"For Boston? Warm coat, boots, scarf, gloves. It's not going to get cold for a couple of months, but then! Just wait." Martha had gone to law school up there. She told me she still dreamed, sometimes, of the cold.

I would get my books and school supplies up there. I had an allowance of sorts, from the estate. (Such a grand term! It really just meant that there was a Graves family trust, and four times a year I got some money from it. Not a lot, but enough for Stone Gap. Hopefully enough for Miss Lavender's.)

"Do I really have to room with a Gaunt? She's going to be a snob."

"Sweetie, freshman room assignments are made by Mrs. Moth. But you are going to have a fellow Southerner. One of your roommates is from North Carolina. Her name is Matilda Tillinghast."

"A Gaunt and a Tillinghast! It's going be to completely ghastly," I said.

"Very funny. Can you check and make sure you have your ticket?"

I caught my train in Richmond. And then it was twelve hours – twelve hours! – through Washington and New York and finally into the train station in Boston. By then I had won fifty dollars in a poker game in the dining car, and I had the telephone numbers of a cute sophomore from Groton and a boy who said if I ever needed anything in Boston, a motorcycle or computer equipment or cell phones, to just call him.

I got out at the station and splurged on a cab. It was almost dark, and I was too tired to figure out the subway system.

I got out at the common, paid the driver with part of my poker winnings, saw an ice cream shop and bought myself some ice cream (heath bar crunch with extra heath bar topping) because I didn't know what school food would be like, and made a note to self: ice cream shop, right by the common. I assumed I would be able to sneak out to get ice cream. I had been very good at sneaking out of school in Stone Gap.

And then, I went to the address on the admission letter and said to the cat that was lounging on a doorstep, "Hecate Lane, please."

"Follow me," she said. "There hasn't been a Graves at Miss Lavender's for a long time."

"My Mom went here," I said.

She stopped in the middle of the lane, turned back, and said, "You must be Thea. My condolences," then walked on.

I followed her, tears prickling my eyes. I hadn't expected that. In Stone Gap, we had been the eccentric Graveses. I had been Thea Weirdo Graves. Here, we – I – would be something else.

That was clear to me as soon as the door opened. I knew who it was immediately – everyone knows about Hyacinth. "Hi, Thea. Can you go right into Mrs. Moth's office? It's late and I want to get you some dinner, and then have you meet your roomates. Everyone's here except Matilda Tillinghast, who's arriving tomorrow."

And as soon as the office door opened. "Thea Graves. I'm so glad you decided to enroll. Your mother was one of my favorite pupils." So this was Mrs. Moth. She didn't look particularly scary. For who she is, you know. And then she said, "I like Rancatore's too, but no sneaking out for ice cream, please. Freshmen need permission to leave campus. Besides, if you try to leave, you may not end up where you intended. Wait until after you've had Transportation to try the front gate."

So much for that. Whatever the middle school teachers had told me, I disbelieved on principle. But you can't exactly disbelieve Mrs. Moth.

Dinner was better than I expected, some sort of soup with meatballs in it. And then Hyacinth took me upstairs. Let's just say Emma Gaunt was not exactly what I expected. I mean, my cat at home is snobbier than she is. And Mouse was awesome. Can you imagine? I was definitely not going to be the room weirdo. (I mean that in the best way, of course. But Mouse is weird. I mean, how can you not be, when your Dad is an evil warlock and your mother is a sort of tree?)

Today, I spent about five hours going through the second chapter of my dissertation. This is what that looks like (spectacles, hair everywhere, surrounded by papers):

After a break for dinner (organic hot dog and steamed broccoli, while writing this blog post), I'm planning to work on a column that is due in early January.

This is the glamorous life of a writer. I wonder if Margaret Atwood's or Joyce Carol Oates' looks any different. I rather suspect they don't. We are the story tellers, and we are the dreamers of dreams, but our own lives tend to be rather pedestrian.

Of course, I could tell you the story of my life in a way that doesn't sound pedestrian at all. The flight from a communist country. The moving around Europe, catching frogs in Italian marshes, seeing parrots and parrot tulips in the marketplace in Belgium. Memories of taking trains through tunnels under the Alps. Coming to America, seeing the lights of New York through the airplane window. Growing up near Washington, going every weekend to the café in the National Gallery. First loves: the guy from reform school, the guy who thought he was Jim Morrison. Going to the University of Virginia, wearing pearls (even to the gym). The Washington Literary Society and Debating Union (being president, and I still remember the motto: quam fluctus diversi, quam mare conjuncti). Where preppy was not a fashion trend but simply what one wore. Riding through the streets of Charlottesville on a motorcyle behind a guy in a leather jacket (wearing an evening dress and, of course, pearls). Harvard Law School, cutting classes to read in Schlesinger Library. Working as a corporate lawyer on the 42nd floor of the MetLife building, wearing a suit and heels. Cocktail party with Katie Couric, and the strange day when a billionaire threw a pen at me. Leaving it all to go back to graduate school, the graduate student life (second hand bookshops and azuki creams at the Café Japonaise). Free tickets to the Museum of Fine Arts, where I spent afternoons writing beneath the John Singer Sargents.  And then becoming a writer, the workshops, the conventions, the readings and signings, the dancing boys.

All right, I made up the dancing boys.

There are no dancing boys. Unless you hire your own. (Which may not be such a bad idea.)

The glamorous life of a writer consists of sitting in front of a computer and writing. Unless it consists of sitting in front of a notebook and writing. My life consists of both. There has been a great deal of that in my life. And I have to admit, many of my happiest moments have tended to be just that: sitting and writing. When the writing is going well, when I'm completely engaged in the story I'm telling, there's nothing better.

It's as though I have a life inside me that is so rich and strange, it makes what is on the outside seem pedestrian. I bring all sorts of things from the outside world into it: the streets of Charlottesville, the halls of Harvard, girls riding motorcycles behind guys in leather jackets. And then I mix them all up, so those girls marry bears and the guys on the motorcycles are aliens although they don't know it. (I haven't written that story yet.)

When I started this post, I was going to write about the supposedly glamorous life of a writer, how it is always a life of work, often a life of solitude.  And it involves a lot of sitting. But now that I've gotten to this point, I realize that I do, after all, live a glamorous life. It just happens to be the one inside my head.

Think about it. Miss Emily Gray, the sorrow that blankets Budapest like snowfall, the rediscovery of Cimmeria in modern Ukraine (I haven't written that one yet either), all have to exist inside my head before they can exist outside it, on a computer screen or sheet of paper. I get to live in the stories I create, as they are being created.  I get to meet all my characters before I send them into the world.  I get to walk down the streets of Cimmeria, hearing the calls of the pecan roasters, the sellers of candied dates and carpets woven by hill tribes.  I get to see the red valleys of Mars, hear the poems of Elah Gal, make my curtsy to the Child-Empress.  I get to hear what Mrs. Moth and Hyacinth are saying to one another, quietly over the files spread on a mahogany desk, determining fates.  I get to answer directly to Mother Night.

That is, if you think about it, a glamorous life indeed.  A lot more glamorous that Katie Couric's.

Sometimes I wonder how it will affect Ophelia, growing up with a mother who is a writer, and specifically a fantasy writer.

It already means a couple of things. It means that her room is filled with books. They're mostly the books I grew up with, which means they're too old for her. She'll read them someday. Right now she's fascinated by the Magic Treehouse series, although she's more than halfway through the first Harry Potter. (Should I mention at this point that she's six?) But since she was quite young, she's been surrounded by fantasy movies as well. She has all the best Miyazaki DVDs, and has been watching My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki's Delivery Service, Spirited Away, Nausicaa and the Valley of the Wind, and Castle in the Sky for years. (She thinks Howl's Moving Castle is too scary.) She's watched both sets of Narnia movies, and of course the Harry Potter movies.

Perhaps it's appropriate, thinking of the female characters she's been exposed to, that she's completely against anything "girlish" (her word). To play with, she always chooses horses, knights, swords and suits of armor, robots, dinosaurs (and yes, she has all those things, including a plastic sword and suit of armor). She has emphatically rejected anything pink or with ruffles. I know because I buy her clothes, and thank goodness for preppy catalogs like Land's End, where I can buy girls' clothes in navy blue, red, yellow, and green. Because if she won't wear something, she really emphatically won't wear it.

She's spend her childhood in museums: the Museum of Fine Arts, the Harvard Natural History Museum, the MIT Museum of Science. She's idolized female astronauts and robot makers. Because her father is a scientist, she's made DNA out of split peas. She's made robots herself. She's been to Boston, New York (where she went to MoMA and the Met), Denver, Charlottesville, and various cities in Hungary. She's slept and played giant chess in a real, actual European castle. She's ridden horses. She has a favorite horse (whose name is Little Man).

What she has not done is gone to Disney World, or any other amusement park. I don't think we've ever gone to McDonald's. We went to the Children's Museum once, and never again. I tried for a while, when she was young, to be the mother I thought mothers were supposed to be. After I while I decided that if something bored me to tears, I would not do it. I could not help it, I simply could not endure baby gym classes. Mommy and me yoga classes. The Children's Museum on an average weekday. These are all, I'm sure, my failings as a mother. The PTA is very important. I will never bake cookies for it. Sorry.

When we were deciding what to have for Christmas dinner, we asked Ophelia whether she would prefer pizza or Thai food. She looked at us as though the answer were obvious: Thai food of course, with plenty of shumai.

Not all of this has to do with being a writer's child. But quite a lot of it does. She has a mother who, given a choice, will always choose romance, in the sense of narrative. There is a romance, an incongruity, to Thai food at Christmas. In comparison, pizza seems ordinary. There is a romance to being in New York and going to MoMA. It engages the imagination. One can tell stories about it. And I realize that I choose to do things one can tell stories about. And I choose to surround myself with stories, whether on bookshelves or DVDs or in the things I do every day. My clothes have stories. I write stories about my cats.  And so she too tells stories and has that instinct for romance, for narrative.

She gets all sorts of things from me: my compulsiveness and desire to master disciplines, and her imagination is just out of bounds. (Here she is beside me, telling me that she has made a machine from a lego kit she was given for Christmas. It's an annoy-o-matic. And it is, indeed, annoying. She is correcting me as I write, telling me how to write annoy-o-matic, with the hyphens.) Some of those traits are genetic, some of them no doubt the result of having grown up in a household where, if you ask how robots are made, you are shown how. If you ask for art supplies, you are given them.

My daughter has had a book dedicated to her, by one of her godparents. (Who are both writers.)

On the other hand, if you look for her on the internet, you will find almost nothing. The other side to being a writer's child is that to the extent I have a public life, and she is a part of it, she will have a public life as well. And I don't want that. Whatever life she has, I want her to create for herself. She can have a web presence as soon as she designs her own website.

Once, she asked me if I was famous. She had seen my books on the shelf, and had seen that if she put my name into the google search box, pictures came up. I told her, a teeny-tiny bit. She told a friend at school that her mother was famous, and her friend told her that meant she was famous as well. I wasn't quite sure what to say about that, except to emphasize the teeny-tiny part.

Since she is standing here beside me, having come up to show me her annoy-o-matic, I ask her: do you mind that I'm writing about you? She laughs and says no. But this is most likely the only time I will.

Today I saw The Voyage of the Dawn Treader movie.

Below, I will be discussing various parts of the movie, including the conclusion.  So there will be what you might call spoilers.  But then, if you're reading this blog, I'm guessing that you know how the novel ends. Right?

The movie was all right, I suppose. There were parts of it where I felt the Narnian magic, particularly at the beginning where Edmund, Lucy, and Eustace are all taken into the painting and find themselves in Narnia, on board the Dawn Treader. And then Caspian introduces Edmund and Lucy as their Narnian selves, and all the Narnians bow. That's a magical moment, a moment of transformation: you are not the ordinary selves you were, you have become extraordinary. That's the transformation Narnia allows.

(I should say here that the Narnia books were absolutely central to me, both personally when I was around ten to twelve and in terms of my development as a writer. When I was in law school, I started to write my first fantasy novel. It was, I later realized, a sort of response to the Narnia novels, about a girl named Flora who has the power to bring summer again to a land trapped in winter. So it matters to me, whether the movies are good adaptations or not.)

The parts of the movie that worked least for me were the parts where C.S. Lewis' original plot was replaced by Standard Epic Fantasy Plot. For example, instead of the elaborate plot involving Caspian's abolition of the slave trade on the Lone Islands, we get a series of sword fights. But that plot shows us what Caspian is actually like as a king, using cleverness and subterfuge when he doesn't have might on his side. It shows, right at the beginning of the novel, that he is worthy to be king, and what it means to have proper, legitimate rule of law. The Narnia books are really Lewis' treatise on how the world should function. He goes into all sorts of details: what sorts of clothes people should wear, what education should be like, how the natural world should be treated. The movie leaves all of those ideas out, except to the extent that Reepicheep articulates them. If you took that out, Reepicheep would have no dialog, because he really is, in the novel as well as the movie, a walking exemplar of the sort of courtesy and bravery that Lewis believes makes the perfect gentleman.

The green mist plot, that was rather dull. The man whose wife is stolen by the green mist and then he has to go save her by joining the journey plot, that was also rather dull. The daughter who stows away on the ship to join her father, that was excruciating. It was a plot out of late night television fantasy, not out of Lewis, who never, ever did anything cute. He abhorred the cute, and when he had something cute, like a mouse, he gave it courage so that it was no longer cute but something lovely and profound.

My least favorite part was the conclusion, or rather the part right before the conclusion where everyone is fighting the sea serpent. For one thing, that sea serpent looked an awful lot like Cthulhu, and suddenly I wondered whether I was in a Lewis-Lovecraft mashup. But I think this particular scene in the novel highlights what it is that makes Lewis so effective and what the movie lacks. Lewis is not Tolkien. The Narnia novels do not have epic sweep, which makes them more difficult to film. They are about a series of small, domestic moments. Think about the meal with the Beavers in the first novel. If you're trying to save the world, Lewis tells us, you still have to eat. The actual scene with the sea serpent in the novel goes something like this: a sea serpent wraps its coils around the Dawn Treader, and everyone has to push together to get the ship out of those coils. In the end, when the ship is saved and sailing on, the sea serpent looks confusedly over itself, trying to figure out what happened to the ship he thought he was crushing. That's not an epic battle. It's everyone working together to save the ship, each in her or her own role, and then we get the sea serpent's perspective. It's small and individual and charming.

Another example. In the movie, Eustace is transformed back from a dragon to a boy when his skin comes off, in a highly dramatic, CGI sort of way. We can tell that Aslan's magical power is at work. But in the novel, Aslan claws his skin off. It's painful, much more powerful, and much more meaningful. Eustace is losing the skin he has built up over the years, all the traits that allowed him to become a dragon in the first place, and what is uncovered is his genuine human self.

Do I hope there will be another movie? I would love to see The Silver Chair filmed. It's one of my favorite Narnia novels, and Puddleglum is one of my favorite Narnian characters. But what would they do to it? I don't want to see it transformed in the way The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is transformed in the movie. I don't want to see my Puddleglum become some sort of action hero.

I will say that the movie was visually beautiful: the Dawn Treader was the ship I imagined as a child, the costumes were exactly what I would want to wear in Narnia, the characters looked just right, even the computer-generated ones.  And I was still, despite the passage of many years, completely in love with Reepicheep.  One final quibble. Those flowers in the ocean at the end. They looked like Casablanca lilies. Since when do Casablanca lilies grow in the ocean? Couldn't they have made the lilies look more – aquatic?

I was going to write a post on the night of the Winter Solstice with this title, but that night I was still grading papers, and I did not have the – focus, I think. I'm still not sure I have it now.

What I want to write about is two thoughts I've had lately, one about darkness, one about writing.

Here is the first thought.

I think that when the caterpillar is spinning its cocoon, it thinks it's dying. It's going into the darkness, into a claustrophobic darkness in which it will transform, but how do we know that it, the caterpillar itself, knows that? I think it doesn't, that it goes into the darkness not knowing. And it's scared. Because it's always scary to go into the darkness, particularly the way the caterpillar goes into it: alone.

So it thinks, I'm dying. This is what dying feels like. Nevertheless, it spins its cocoon because every cell of that caterpillar is programmed to spin that cocoon, and it knows in the depths of its being, in whatever constitutes the depths of being for a caterpillar, that to spin that cocoon is its destiny, and it can't be avoided. So it spins.

Yes, this is a metaphor. Of course it's a metaphor. Aren't caterpillars and butterflies always metaphors, except when we pick the caterpillar off our roses or try to attract the butterfly with bottles of nectar? Which, if you think about it, doesn't make much sense. We want the butterfly without the caterpillar.

But the caterpillar is the longest life stage for most butterflies. They spend most of their lives as caterpillars. (If you want butterflies, you have to accept caterpillars on the roses. That's a fairly simple metaphor.) The caterpillar lives an ordinary life, the life most of us live most of the time. It eats, it grows, sometimes it becomes food for birds. (If you don't think we're all going to become food for birds, you're kidding yourself. That's another metaphor, still fairly simple.) The butterfly lives an extraordinary life. It flies, sometimes for thousands of miles, it reproduces. That really is the purpose of a butterfly: it is the reproductive form of the caterpillar.

This is another metaphor, the third and last, and I think the most complicated. There's a reason the butterfly has often been used as a symbol for the soul. It is that in us which reproduces, but I don't mean physically. I mean mentally, spiritually. The butterfly is a metaphor for that in us which produces art. It is the artist. (I know, you could see that one coming.) I identify production with reproduction because what the artist produces is always drawn out of the self. It is an image of the self that is nevertheless different from the self, as the egg is different from the butterfly.

So the caterpillar going into the darkness, drawing filaments out of itself, wrapping them around itself, does not know what it's doing. It does what its instincts tell it to do. And when it goes into the darkness, it thinks, this is what dying feels like. And it does die, because transformation is a kind of death. The caterpillar that was is no longer going to exist. What comes out is the butterfly, which we think is so beautiful, which we watch through our binoculars as it flies thousands of miles to Mexico or Brazil, telling each other how lovely, look at them!

And we do not think about the darkness that butterfly came out of. How it, on its journey, thinks: I died. I am born again. And with the sun on its wings, it almost, but not quite, forgets the pain and terror of death.

Here is the second thought.

There are two types of writers. (This statement is as simplistic as any statement that attempts to systematize the world. Bear with me.)

The first type, I will call the School of Eliot. These are writers who write about what happens in the world, about the human beings in it, what they do, how they think. Middlemarch is the epitomic (yes, I made up that word) School of Eliot novel. I walked though a bookstore today, and most of the books I saw were of that school. They were about human beings living their lives, loving, failing to love, becoming sick or well. Struggling to understand parents or children. Traveling to India for enlightenment. That sort of thing.

The second type, I will call the School of Kafka. These are writers who write about something different, not what happens in the world but that world itself as it is constituted, its structure. Not about a human being attempting to become a better mother, daughter, proprietor of a cupcake shop. About what it means to be a human being in the first place, how we define the human, how we define being. It's as though, rather than writing about the physical world, they are writing metaphysics.

I think you can see this distinction even in genre fiction. For example, Edgar Rice Burroughs belongs to the School of Eliot. He is concerned entirely with the physical world. Tertius Lydgate struggling to establish a medical practice that allows him to do research, John Carter struggling to defeat the Tharks so he can rescue Dejah Thoris. It's all about how to live in the world as it is, as a given. On the other hand, H.P. Lovecraft belongs to the School of Kafka. Gregor Samsa lives in a Lovecraftian universe that operates by rules he does not understand. The novel asks us to consider, what are the rules of the world anyway?

As I said, this is of course an oversimplification, but it is what I was thinking today, walking through the bookstore. And I was thinking that there were many more writers of the School of Eliot than of the School of Kafka. One would think the School of Eliot would be more comforting. After all, it tells us that the world we live in is real, a given, something that should not be questioned. We don't need to worry about turning into an insect or being destroyed by an Elder God. (Unless, that is, the novel explicitly tells us those things are possible, but then there are usually ways to avoid or counteract such fates.)

But when I've done into the darkness, and I've thought, maybe this is what death feels like, I've always chosen the School of Kafka to comfort me. Today I came home with Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, Difficult Loves, and Mr. Palomar. That is not a metaphor, and therefore I have no idea what it means.

First, I want you to go look at this video: Fishmen.

Did you get it? You did if you've read H.P. Lovecraft's "The Shadow over Innsmouth." It's all about the fishmen who inhabit that city, and the narrator does, at the end of the story, discover that his ancestry is Innsmouthian, and fishmenian as well. He feels himself start to transform.

If you go to YouTube, you will find many videos based on Lovecraftian themes, some of them set to Christmas music. I've seen a number of them around. People start posting them to Facebook, and the like.

So my question of the day is, why Lovecraft? There's something about him, about the whole Cthulhu mythos or non-mythos, that seems to have captured our imagination. People crochet Cthulhu dolls. People cut Chulhu-shaped paper snowflakes. People make Cthulhu gingerbread cookies. (At least, they did tonight at my house.) And the time for Lovecraft seems now. There are Lovecraft-themed anthologies. It's even been said that Guillermo Del Toro is bringing At the Mountains of Madness to the movie screen.

I don't think anyone paid much attention to Dracula when it first came out. But something about it started to capture the popular imagination. It was the Count himself, the Eastern European aristocrat who was also a blood-sucking vampire. The potential romantic partner who also wanted to suck your blood. (Although the Count wasn't exactly Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt in the novel.)

But there was something about Count Dracula that resonated, as there is something about Lovecraft's universe that resonates with us. I think it's that as we've gone through the twentieth century, Lovecraft's universe has, more and more, turned out to be the place we actually inhabit. It's common for critics to say that Lovecraft belongs in the nineteenth century, that he is in a sense a late nineteenth-century writer. That may be true stylistically. But in terms of his ideas about how the world we live in operates, he belongs right where he was born, around the same time as Franz Kafka. He tells us that our world operates by laws we do not understand. That the universe is larger than we know, and older, and that it does not care about us. He tells us that we can lose our humanity more easily than we imagine. Here I think he really is like Franz Kafka.

But there is also something in Lovecraft that belongs to a later time, and this is why I think he resonates with us. There is something fundamentally postmodern about what he's doing, because whereas most of the late nineteenth-century writers were deeply disturbed by the transformation of something human into something not human, by the abhuman, Lovecraft glories in it. Oh, his narrators tell us how terrible it is, how frightening. But I think Lovecraft is having fun.

And every once in while he tells us that the abhuman, the monster that was once human but is no longer, is having fun as well. At the end of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," the narrator glories in his connection with the fishmen, wants to break out of his mental asylum and go down into the waters off Innsmouth, down to the city of his ancestors. At the end of "The Outsider," the narrator who discovers that he has been dead, probably for centuries, when he looks into a mirror realizes that he is a monster and goes to live with the other monsters. He tells us,

Now I ride with the mocking and friendly ghouls on the night-wind, and play by day amongst the catacombs of Nephren-Ka in the sealed and unknown valley of Hadoth by the Nile. I know that light is not for me, save that of the moon over the rock tombs of Neb, nor any gayety save the unnamed feasts of Nitokris beneath the Great Pyramid; yet in my new wildness and freedom I almost welcome the bitterness of alienage.

What the narrator implies is that it's painful to be a monster, it involves loss. But it's also way cooler. It involves riding with ghouls and playing among the catacombs, attending those unnamed feasts of Nitokris, all things to which we as ordinary people have no access.  Monsters are cooler than we are.

I think that's why I love Lovecraft, despite all his faults (and he has many). Almost despite himself, he's on the side of the monsters.

So, I wrote a story called "Fair Ladies." It was published in Apex Magazine, and then Jonathan Strahan asked to reprint it in The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume Five.

I received the copyedits, and I could immediately see that they were terrific. When you're a writer, there's nothing you care about more than having a good cover and a good copyeditor. The copyeditor, in particular, saves your life. There was one suggested change that amused me: I had used the "kroner" as the currency of Sylvania, where the story is set, and the copyeditor informed me that kroner was plural, and the singular would be krone. He was right of course. What was amusing, to me, was that I hadn't even thought about the fact that a krone, or krona, depending on which country you're in, is an actual unit of currency. In my mind, I had just seen the Sylvanian kroner, with the head of King Radomir IV on it. Of course, it had come into my head because there was a krone, a krona: because there were currencies out there named after the Latin for crown, corona. If that hadn't been floating out there, I would never have thought of "kroner." I wanted my currency to sound vaguely but not exactly like any other European currency.  But in Sylvania, the kroner is singular.  Nowadays, you can buy coffee with about ten kroners.  (Or about five Euros.)

I mentioned all this on facebook, and Marty Halpern, who turned out to be the copyeditor, wrote me a comment about it. And then we exchanged some comments, me and Marty and Paul Witcover, who joined in, about the writer brain and the copyeditor brain, how they were alike and different. Marty asked if he could reproduce and comment on that conversation on his blog, and the two of us said that of course he could, so here it is, on writers and copyeditors: Writing with Style (Sheets, That Is).

It's a fascinating account of how copyeditors think and why writers should produce style sheets. One comment of Marty's particularly intrigues me:

"Dora states that the comments provide insight into the mind of a copyeditor, but I feel that Dora's explanation of how she came to use 'kroner' provides some wonderful insight into the mind of a writer, which is far more complicated than that of a copyeditor, trust me on this – we follow the rules; writers break the rules and create their own!"

Is this true? And I guess at some level I'm asking not just whether writers think differently from copyeditors, but whether they think differently from other people. And I suppose I'm thinking not just of writers, but of artists of all sorts. They break the rules and create their own. That's what they're supposed to do.

What that reminds me of is a quotation from Albert Camus that I saw somewhere: "Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal." Is that really from Camus, or one of those things people say Camus said? I hope it is from him. Because I think it's deeply and absolutely true. "Some people," in that quotation, could refer to writers, because they do break the rules and create their own, and if you have a brain that's constantly creating its own worlds, sometimes it's difficult to see, and you have to force yourself to see, that the physical world outside your own brain still exists. It's almost as though – wait, you see, a story is coming to me. About a writer who keeps on losing the world, the actual physical world outside his head, and so he needs to keep writing things down, because that's the only way he can capture it. He keeps writing down the rules.

Fire burns.

Don't cross against the light.

You must pay for things. You may not simply take them.

Say hello, remember to shake hands, when you leave say goodbye.

If in doubt, nod.

No smoking.

You see? He has to write down the rules because otherwise he won't remember them, otherwise he will believe that the world inside his head, which is a different world altogether, is the real world.

Oh copyeditors! How do you do it? Do you really think differently than I do? (And does it have anything to do with something I just realized, that the tone and format of Marty's post is completely different from mine? I started with style sheets and ended up with an existential yawp.)

Thank goodness for copyeditors, and editors of all sorts in general, because what would this world be like with only writers in it?

No one does existential yawps better than Camus, so let him have the last word, on this day after the shortest night:

"O light! This is the cry of all the characters of ancient drama brought face to face with their fate. This last resort was ours, too, and I knew it now. In the middle of winter I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer."

So today I went to see the friendly copy shop people, and they told me that it would be easy for them to make a booklet for me. I wouldn't even have to do the layout or printing myself, I could just bring in a file and they would print that file for me, arranging all the booklet features. (Like, you know, how all the pagination works, and all that.) And we went through all the costs, for paper, printing, binding, folding, cropping if necessary, etc.

And so I came home and started to make another booklet, formatted differently this time. I took a poem I had written a long, long time ago, a poem called "Maid Maureen." It's a sort of parody of an old ballad, and it's about how the West Wind falls in love with Maid Maureen, trapped in her tower. I used a John William Waterhouse painting that I believe is called Boreas for the cover image.  Here's what the cover looks like, but you can't quite tell the size because it doesn't have a border. That's because I learned how to save the document as a PDF, then open it in Photoshop and save it as a JPG. Rather than copying and pasting, which is what I did last time. I think I'm getting pretty good at this.

And here are two pages:

I'm really rather proud of myself. You see, my brother is Myk Melez of Mozilla (google him, he gets more hits than I do). He's, like, a computer whisperer. And I really don't have an intuitive sense for technology, at all. But I like to know how to do things like create websites and publish small books myself, because those are the sorts of skills that come in handy when you're a writer.

I don't know, maybe I'll actually make "Maid Maureen" into a booklet and then do – what with it? Let me know if you have any ideas.

And here, in case you're interested, is Boreas, which I think is a gorgeous painting:

I'm talking about literary guilty pleasures of course, although I have discussed my addiction (seldom indulged except on airplane flights) to chocolate-covered pretzels on various occasions.

One of my guilty pleasures is Agatha Christie murder mysteries. In a strange way, it's like my pleasure in poetry. It's the pleasure of pure form. I want to see the form of the murder mystery play out, I want to see her variations on it (because she would rewrite the exact same mystery as a novel and a short story, altering the motive and victim). I don't care whether I've read that particular mystery ten times and know who the murderer is. I don't care that her protagonists are all going to behave as they should, the countess being a true countess, the butler a true butler. I just like reading them.

Another guilty pleasure, and the one I really wanted to talk about, is the occasional Oprah Magazine. There's something fascinating about its combination of uplifting articles, fairly aggressive financial and relationship advice, and expensive advertising. I'm supposed to accept myself as I am, save a financial cushion equal to six months of my salary, and buy $200 dresses. It's enough to make me dizzy with the contradictions of late capitalism.

But what I sometimes get out of the magazine are valuable bits and pieces of – what shall I call them? Magical thinking? Like the following, in the "What I Know for Sure" section of the January 2011 issue:

"Fear comes from uncertainty. Once you clarify your purpose for doing something, the way to do it becomes clear."

That is magical thinking, isn't it? Once you know why you want to do something, you can still flounder in the morass of figuring out how. But for the most part I think it's actually true, and magical thinking is like that. It usually has an underlying veracity and effectiveness to it. (I didn't say I don't believe in magic.)

I do think that fear comes from uncertainty. If you're not sure what you want to do, or why, you're going to be fearful, you're going to hesitate. You're going to make the wrong decisions, and then try to figure out why you made them. And once you clarify your purpose for doing something, it's not necessarily that the way to do it becomes clear to you, consciously. But things start getting out of the way. It's as though you suddenly think, but that's not going to help me get where I want to go. It's a great opportunity, but it's not my opportunity. It doesn't contribute to the ultimate goal I've set for myself. And that does help. That does make the process easier.

These particular sentences struck me because they made me ask myself, do I know why I want a writing career? I don't just want to write. Anyone with a pen and paper can write. Nowadays, anyone with a computer can publish. I want a writing career, which means that I want to write, and be asked to write, and teach writing. I want to be part of the dialog about writing in my time, and perhaps if I'm very lucky after my time. I want to be part of the world of literature.

Why?

I think the answer is that I look at the world around me, and it's not the world I want to see. It's filled with things I don't think it should be filled with: ignorance, cruelty, sordidness. And I believe, on a deep and fundamental level, that we can only change material conditions by changing ideas. That's why we need to tell stories, that's why art exists in the first place. It allows us to see things that we can't see in any other way. So I want to – not make people see things differently, because you can't make readers do anything, but offer them another way of looking.

That sounds awfully ambitious, doesn't it? But another thing I've learned from Oprah Magazine is that you need to admit to your ambitions. If you don't, if you pretend that all you want to do is – it doesn't really matter what I'm going to write, the operative word is "all" – "all" you want to do is whatever, then it's as though you're starting by tying one hand (probably your writing hand) behind your back. If you start off admitting that what you really want to do is change the world, because it doesn't seem to you at all satisfactory in its current state – that does at least give you a sort of freedom. (And a sort of permission to fail, because you're going to fail, of course. You're never going to change the world. But you might change a perspective or two or three.)

I'm trying to work all this out as I write, why those particular sentences spoke to me, what I'm getting out of them. I think they gave me a sense of freedom. Once I clarify my purpose, and I think I'm starting to get a clearer sense of my purpose already, then the way to do what I want will become clearer as well. It will still be an enormous amount of work. But I will at least know the way to go, which is something I haven't been certain about for a long time.

(Shall I tell you the bit of wisdom I've always remembered from Agatha Christie murder mysteries? At one point, Hercule Poirot guesses that a suspect is concealing her identity based on her shoes. He tells Hastings something like this: A lady is always careful about her shoes. However cheaply she may be dressed, she will choose her shoes for their quality. I've always remembered that, and tried to choose shoes that are of good quality, that will last and can be repaired. Seriously, that's where I got it, from Agatha Christie. I have no words of wisdom to pass on from chocolate-covered pretzels.)