In my heart every day is Halloween. My husband will never understand my obsession with all things macabre, but I'm drawn to it. For a long time, I felt the need to hide my love for horror films and books, ashamed that amongst my more literary minded colleagues, my interests were amateurish. I feared they would flog me with Keats, snicker at me from behind their copies of Ulysses, and preach about the greater joys of reading Chaucer in one's spare time.
Don't get me wrong. It isn't as if I've sequestered myself into one small area of all literary-dom with no intent of ever venturing outside, but this girl can't deny that she loves to be scared. Thank God for Henry James, and Bram Stoker, for Edgar Allen Poe and Shirley Jackson, for H.P. Lovecraft and Stephen King.
And so for years, I've been rather quiet about loving all things that go bump in the night. Most certainly I never shared my penchant for the Gothic with my writer colleagues, and I most certainly did not write any speculative fiction for submission to any of my critique groups or writing workshops.
Then I started to get bored. Started even to dislike what I was writing. I stumbled across Shimmer Magazine by complete chance and began reading. When I was finished, my flesh crawled. It was exactly the feeling that I had been missing.
Slowly, I began to seek out a network of writers and magazines--writers and magazines who are producing NOW--and started researching. Check out Aaron Polson if you have some time and are a fan of the genre. After many hours devoted to wrapping up my Capstone, I'm letting myself say it loud and say it proud. I'm writing horror, dammit.
Don't get me wrong. It isn't as if I've sequestered myself into one small area of all literary-dom with no intent of ever venturing outside, but this girl can't deny that she loves to be scared. Thank God for Henry James, and Bram Stoker, for Edgar Allen Poe and Shirley Jackson, for H.P. Lovecraft and Stephen King.
And so for years, I've been rather quiet about loving all things that go bump in the night. Most certainly I never shared my penchant for the Gothic with my writer colleagues, and I most certainly did not write any speculative fiction for submission to any of my critique groups or writing workshops.
Then I started to get bored. Started even to dislike what I was writing. I stumbled across Shimmer Magazine by complete chance and began reading. When I was finished, my flesh crawled. It was exactly the feeling that I had been missing.
Slowly, I began to seek out a network of writers and magazines--writers and magazines who are producing NOW--and started researching. Check out Aaron Polson if you have some time and are a fan of the genre. After many hours devoted to wrapping up my Capstone, I'm letting myself say it loud and say it proud. I'm writing horror, dammit.
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