A little known fact (at least, it was little known to me up until recently): Joyce Carol Oates done lost her mind in the 80′s.

I stumbled across this fact whilst gaily tromping around Amazon looking at stuff one day. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that my dear Jay-CO had written a romance. A Bloodsmoor Romance, to be precise.

I had to own it. Because what could be cooler than combining my favorite high-fallootin’ lit author with my seedy love for cheap beach fiction?

Alas, I discovered soon upon the delivery of said tome that, of course, Jay-CO would not write a pile of cheap beach fiction. Instead, she has pulled together some seven hundred pages of a Gothic romance novel. For those of you not acquainted with the vagaries of this term, Gothic romances and modern romances are vastly different. Gothic romances oft feature a lovely heroine swooning about a drafty old mansion, bemoaning stuff left and right, with a narrative style that’s like Dickens humped a thesaurus, full of run-ons, bizarre exercises in vocabulary and odd comma splices. (The affect of said narrative style can be seen here, on this blog post, for it is highly impossible for me to write in any brief, grammatically correct or serious fashion whilst reading such a winding, ornate sequence of words. And there’s lost of whilsts, too.) Whilst there’s still bemoaning in modern romances, the narrative style is, shall we say, far less overwrought. It’s like comparing a long, chaste  courtship to a quick blow job.

Jay-CO’s captured the Gothic romance style of writing perfectly, of course; if someone weren’t paying attention to the copyright date, they might think the book was written at the turn of the century. Plus, she uses the opportunity to make scathing societal commentary on the rights of women, the nature of intelligence, and other lofty stuff about the human condition. It’s all very academic, and finely executed, but that also means that the book is freakin’ unreadable. Only the most hardcore English geeks can get all the way through this book and enjoy it.

Sadly, I am only a slightly hardcore English geek.

Doubly sadly because, in my haste, I decided I must have not only A Bloodsmoor Romance, but the prequel and sequel, Bellefleur and Mysteries of Winterthurn. Alas, my hapless husband bought them all for me as an early birthday gift. Now I have to read them, all eighteen hundred some-odd pages, and I fear that, by the time I finish, I shall be mad.

Yes, quite mad, in fact. Quite.

This is the thing I have done: Petty Monstrosities, Twelve Tales of Tactless Terror. I took a handful of the stories I’d published in small press or semi-pro markets over the years and combined them into a short collection, complete with one story never before seen elsewhere. Available on Smashwords, the price is free, and so far no one is breaking down my door to tell me that I’m suddenly famous and my writing will be heralded in the annals of history forever.

I’m so happy.

There’s this lovely little feature at Smashwords that allows me to see how many times the file’s been downloaded. I put it up on Thursday of last week, and so far I’ve had about thirty downloads. Thirty! No comments or reviews, nobody’s even mentioned that they liked it, but the book has been downloaded thirty times. I feel absolutely wonderful about that. I’m not stressing out over submissions or rejection letters or marketing or beating my head ceaselessly against the wall of publishing–I just wrote some stuff. I like the stuff I wrote. And some people have looked at it. Such a thing is so enormously satisfying.

For the first time, I’ve put down the struggle to be something and given myself the luxury to make something.

I’ve enjoyed this so much, I’m think going to make a habit of this: making something I like, then putting it up. Probably still for free–for some reason, I can’t bring myself to put that 99 cents price tag on something I’ve uploaded to the internet. It feels like charging a quarter for someone to read my blog posts. When, really, blogging is about thinking in words in an environment where one has the chance to share.

It’s kind of like graffiti. We can write words all day but, when we graffiti them on a wall in red spray paint, we realize someone might look at it. And that prospect of getting looked at makes us think that we’re not doing it alone.

Maybe that not doing it alone feeling is the thing I was looking for in my writing career.

Funny; I thought I was looking for obscene piles of wealth and the adoration of millions. Well. We learn something new every day, don’t we?

I can’t remember exactly when I started using the em dash. Probably after reading Stephen King’s The Tommyknockers at too early an age–really, parents should keep their King away from eleven year olds. Too much cussing.

What? I did it again? Sorry.

Anyway, it wasn’t long before I started using em dashes for more than just demarcating a thought. Pretty soon, I was demarcating left and right, just for the chance to use it again–asides, tangential fragments, completely unrelated deviations, lists. My em dashes took up my entire life. They became my semicolons and commas, pretty soon I was using them to do everything in a sentence except end it. I was lost. I hit rock bottom. An essay I wrote on Nathaniel Hawthorne came back with a note from the instructor. “Use any more em dashes, and I’ll em dash you.” God, I was so embarrassed.

Since then, I’ve been trying not to use it anymore, but it’s so hard. I mean, the em dash is so pretty in a block of words–it’s like a slide that swooshes you from one thought to the next. It’s so smooth, so elegant. Not at all like parenthesis, which are more like freakish pillows. Semicolons are still awesome, like little earrings for words, but that support group is next week.

What am I supposed to do, use ellipses? Ellipses look so stupid…and you can forget just breaking everything down into separate sentences. Once you do that, you might as well start writing Dean Koontz novels.

*sniffle* I hate Dean Koontz novels.*bursts into tears*

My All-Time Favorite Books list, the short version (because the Long version is, well, long.) In progress and in no particular order:

Beasts, Joyce Carol Oates (Literature)
I adore Joyce Carol Oates. Every word she puts to page is sheer gold (except for We Were the Mulvaneys. That book’s more like bent pewter.) If I see a book written by Oates, I can pick it up and be confident I will like it, if not right-out worship it. Some of my other Oatey favorites are Zombie, Because it is Bitter, and Because it is My Heart, and Starr Bright Will Be With You Soon

Oates usually writes stories that I should hate. Like Beasts; it’s about upper class, white privileged academics romping around and taking gross advantage of their undergrads. Blech, right? But Oates writes with such palpable imagery and darkness that, by the time I’m done, I’m convinced that I am an upper class white priviledged academic. All of her books are Awful-Beautiful and gorgeously horrific. She is virtual reality.

Mortal Fear, Greg Iles (Thriller)
Greg Iles is a smart mofo. I really enjoy brilliant people–especially when they’re so brilliant that they’re nuts–and Iles’ brilliance is very evident in the books he writes. He takes what would be subpar thriller nonsense and makes it elaborate, exciting and sexy. Such as in the case of Mortal Fear. The book is about an IT guy who discovers a murderer preying on women through what is essentially an online sex chat. But there’s also fascinating vintage tech (cutting edge at the time); creepy-spooky villains; wonderfully fleshed-out characters, male and female (which is rarer than one might think); and sexiness throughout. In fact, this book is so good that at one point I wanted to be a writer just to increase my chances of sleeping with Greg Iles. He makes sexy words.

Also among my Iles favorites are Dead Sleep and Blood Memory. Ah, Greg. Love ya, but your titles suck.

Black Light, Elizabeth Hand (Urban Fantasy)
Drugs, cults, punks, giant prehistoric elk, this book has it all. It’s like if someone melted down sex, drugs and rock n’ roll into a liquid form, added a vial of sparkly fairy dust, and then mainlined the whole batch. Pure awesome.

Kiss Me While I Sleep, Linda Howard (Romance)
I like a lot of romance, usually when it’s done with a good crime-thriller undercurrent and not written like a histrionic fourteen-year-old’s sex dream. (Hello, Sandra Brown?). Linda Howard managed to produce a lot of cool, hard-edged romances back in the day (until she lost her mind and started writing about an army of mafiosos bombing a small-town Idaho community. Like, what? When did The Executioner novels come back into style?)

Kiss Me While I Sleep is about two CIA assasins (or “hitpersons”) jaunting through Europe and having tense, creative sex, all the while foiling some evil world-dominating side plot. Not that I can remember what that side-plot was–c’mon, its romance. Nobody pays attention to the side plots. Another Howard favorite of mine is Cry No More, where the romancees are mercenary troubleshooters jaunting through Mexico having tense sex while foiling a plot. My romance needs are pretty simple.

Prince of Thieves, Chuck Hogan (Thriller)
I was convinced this was the best Boston-bank-robber-falls-in-love-with-hostage stories ever written until Ben Affleck went and made a lame movie based on it. The book is beautifully violent and tragic; the movie is just sad. Don’t watch it.

Bunnicula, Deborah and James Howe (Young Adult)
The first of a hilarious trilogy including Howliday Inn and The Celery Stalks at Midnight, Bunnicula first inspired my love for horror parody, paranormal comedy, and fuzzy things. It is about a vampire bunny. Also Chester the cat and Harold the dog should be lauded in the annals of history as one of the best comic teams ever.

White Oleander, Janet Fitch (Mainstream Lit)
Before I read this book, I hadn’t realized that prose could be poetical. Upon reading this book, I started using the term poetical, which I’m still not sure is a real word.

White Oleander is about a girl thrust into foster care after her aesthetic mother goes to prison for murder, and it follows her through the households of other equally beautifully-screwed up women. This is also another one of those don’t-watch-the-movie books, which I think is indicative of a great narrative. Great narratives can make a meh story seem transcendent in the way they take the mundane elements of plot and use them to question the very things that make us human. Great movies take a meh story and make it just meh. Or worse, ew.

Maximum Bob, Elmore Leonard (Crime)
Another one of those authors who I can just pick up whatever they’ve written and be sure I’m going to like it;  the characters are like crime cartoons, and Elmore paints plots like its Saturday Morning for warped adults.

The Damnation Game, Clive Barker (Horror)
After I got out of a wretched Anne Rice phase when I was fourteen, I thought I’d never read horror again. I thought horror fiction was too overwrought and superficial–and then Clive Barker ripped out my lungs and showed them to me. It was then that I realized that good horror fiction could terrify me much in the way that my beloved horror movies did. My nightmares have been much more entertaining ever since.

Also among my Barkerian favorites are the Books of Blood and The Great and Secret Show; plus, I can watch the Hellraiser movies until the well runs dry. It’s been a long, hard road on the way to finding another horror author like Barker who makes me wish I didn’t have eyes, but I’m up for the challenge. Poe and HP Lovecraft would do it for me if they weren’t such wordy bastards. The classic horror masters are great–if only they’d shut up and get to the point. Which, I guess can be said of most classic literature. It makes me realize I’ve got lots of classic writers who I love, but I can’t stand to read their crap. Does that make me a bad reader? Possibly. But I think it just means I have a sadly modern attention span.

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So, that’s it for the time being. I’ll possibly be adding books to this list as time goes on. I have a few books who are sitting on my Loved It shelf, and if I continue to love them a while longer, they’ll make the cut to the Loved it for All Time shelf. And then there’ll be room for more books on Loved It! I can’t wait.

It’s six-o-clock in the morning and I’ve been up for a good hour.

Back in the day, there was no way I’d have hauled myself out of bed at six-o-clock in the morning, not to write or do anything else. When I say “Back in the day” I mean more than two and a half months ago–before the birth of my first child, Remington.

He’s a darling little creature, truly, but I’ll be damned if he hasn’t completely trashed my writing career.

There used to be a time when I could just sit around and write for hours. From eight am to noon, I did nothing but plug words into the page, electronically speaking, before going to the Day Job that happened to be at Night. Even when the Day Job changed, I could still use the weekends and evenings to leisurely traipse across a naked Word file, flinging all sorts of wonderful nonsense that nobody ever wanted to read. It didn’t matter–the words were mine, and I was perfectly content blowing most of my day on the act of making them. These days, I’m perfectly content if I manage to get a shower.

I have a writer friend who has four kids. Four kids. He’s managed to write more, in sheer word count and quality, than I ever did when I was able to lounge around all weekend on the computer. How he’s pulled it off, I have no idea. (Well, I’m sure it has a little to do with his wife–I hear mothers tend to dominate child care. It’s not always about society’s skewed division of labor along gender lines; sometimes it’s about greed. Even when I’m dead tired and at the end of my proverbial wits, my husband offers to the take the child and I’m all like nu-uh, my baby. Mine.) But still; when I think about all the time I used to have, and what little I did with it, I am distraught.

I knew–I just knew–that someday I would regret all that time I wasted hanging out on I Can Has Cheezburger.

So now, I’m up at six-o-clock in the morning, sitting in the dark, because it’s one of those rare times when I have both hands available to me for use. It’s also one of those times when the exhaustion mutates into a strange wakefulness. Who would have thought that the lack of sleep makes you want to sleep less? I suppose insomnia is a lucky break for me, because now I get to sit around and plug words onto the page from five am to whenever my precious spawn wants to wake up. And the scarcity of such time certainly increases its value.

Most of the entries here at Typeworm will be written at this unGodly hour of morning; in the quiet, contemplative cold away from my bed. It will be dark, and I will suffer eye strain from staring at a glowing laptop screen, but it will be worth it. Here, I’ll spend some time traipsing across a naked Word file or smuggling in a few chapters of an ebook; peeling apart the layers of some lofty piece of literature or gabbing about what’s going on in the world of publishing. I will eat words, nom nom, and it will has a flavor. I just have to manage not to spill coffee all over myself.

Good morning,

Lorna ^_^