Repetition repetition

A good day yesterday, finally — surprisingly. I managed to spend a good chunk of it working out the kinks in the latest tale, and I'm now a day ahead of where I thought I'd be. It's off in the hands of a reader, making sure some of the facts I invented are legitimate, but I hope the entire piece will be done in the next few days. In the interim, I hope to start writing a batch of new drafts for myself — perhaps as many as four or five. That will give me work into the summer, at which point I hope to take a break for a bit and read.

Have I mentioned all this before? I feel like I have.

The blog is a constant battle against repetition, and sometimes when I'm bored and find myself looking through the archives I see places where I've unintentionally repeated posts. I also, sometimes, see the origins of thoughts and I surprised by them. For instance, I thought for a while that the idea of writing and reading sharing the same mental landscape was my own, but according to an old blog entry, I stole it from Stephen King. It's amazing how one can take ownership of ideas when they strike the right nerve.

Rambling aside, there isn't any real news to report at this juncture. So, instead, the first part of an essay I was writing for the blog but never finished...

I'm a bit in the dumps about the small press at the moment for obvious reasons and it makes me wonder what the hell I'm doing.

There's an argument that says that all horror writers are doing (almost the entire lot) is retelling the same stories for a dwindling audience. Do you like romantic comedies? Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back? Do you love them so much that it's all you'll watch, just endless variations on that same idea? That's sort of what horror's like. Writers who grew up reading stories about giant tentacles and vampires (and vampires with giant tentacles) who go on to write stories about giant tentacles and vampires (and vampires with giant tentacles). It just goes on and on and on, but the fanbase is like any analog copy — it degrades over time. Each generation loses fans, which is one of the reasons horror is relegated to the small press almost exclusively. It's a tiny sub-genre of fiction, one that perpetuates itself incestually — writers buying writers' work. From inside the pond, it looks like there's a lot of action, but in the grand scheme of things it's barely a bump on the log of literature, and hardly memorable. The bulk of the writers we remember from the past were working on far larger canvases than we are now, and even they are now relegated to the bins of the small press. And even those writers who aspire to something beyond the small presses find that there are so few spots in the world of "success" that it renders the attempt fruitless. No one reads fiction marketed as horror, not in any great numbers, so what's the point in trying? If one wants to write horror stories, one has to accept that it will always be "hobby" writing — fiction written by enthusiasts for other enthusiasts. In a way, it's not much different that the slash fiction movement, which pits character from famous television shows and films in romantic situations — often with other members of the same sex (the famous "Kirk and Spock get it on" comes to mind). Written by enthusiasts for enthusiasts. Never to grace the best-seller shelves.

Of course, there's the counter-argument, that all fiction is a rehash of what came before. I'll leave it to your, dear reader, to convince me of the counter.