Does an author ever know whether he's breaking new ground?

Does an author ever really know whether he's breaking new ground? For example, with regard to the previous post entitled 'Bird Flu' about Selbi Cuderri's The Tenacity Of Feathers trilogy of novels (first blogged September 2005 - March 2006), how indeed *new* are its concepts or treatments of dream sickness, dream spam, strobe history, hawling, core mythos, blogging-real-time-action-day-by-day and characters trying to create their own Big Brother-type characters beyond the control of the author etc. etc. - plus Bird Flew (as recounted in part twelve of Klaxon City)??

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I enjoy narrative undependability and collusive omniscience where not even the author, let alone the author's created narrator, is *truly* omniscient or 'in control'.

Anyone read this book?
'The Rhetoric Of Fiction' by Wayne Booth.
I read it in the sixties.

Also in recent years, I have been studying a book called 'Style In Fiction' by Leech & Short (Longman 1981) which explores paragraphs of fiction, examining graphological, phonological, syntactic and semantic nuances and patterns, discussing how they affect the meaning etc.

Do we miss all this? Or do we instinctively absorb it, however fast we read? Does it apply to all genres of literature? And does the writer intend these effects (in a slow laborious fashioning?) or instinctively produce them (at speed?)?

I myself feel both reader and writer 'do' this thing together - instinctively and at speed.

Indeed, generally, I prefer a free-wheeling instinctive approach to fiction-writing. For example, a lot of my own fiction is about characters creating their own characters in a sort of extrapolated 'Big Brother' experience as intrinsic to the plot, with only a light touch on the tiller from myself as author or narrator. Or that's the theory!

I have a lot of strange theories, perhaps, but a book stands or falls in the audience arena (and that includes the arena that it first meets vis a vis the agent or publisher). Or in the blogged Tenacity of Feathers novels, the audience arena is anyone who simply clicks on a website and reads them there or prints them out as a book!

Bird Flu

I have just discovered that American TV viewers are about to be presented with a frightening fictional film about Bird Flu entitled Fatal Contact. Also, that migratory birds are about to land in USA as they always do about this time of the year.

As some may know, my trilogy of separate self-contained novels The Tenacity of Feathers (written and blogged between September 2005 and March 2006) is woven into a tapestry (or carpet!) of Bird Flu symbols and fantasifications. The trilogy starts HERE with The Hawler.

Please try this specimen chapter HERE (part twelve of the second novel Klaxon City).

Difficulty

Interesting discussion thread: HERE tangential to earlier posts on this we-blink (Irreducibles), ie. my posts entitled 'Fictpathy', 'Fiction' (Fiction as Magic), 'Wordy Weird', 'Obscurantism/ Norrell' and perhaps some others.
des

PS: a professional literary agent for fiction said today on this thread HERE:

It's an obvious thing for me to say, but no one in publishing in 2006 gives a damn what Virginia Woolf did in the 30s.

Fictipathy

Fiction is the only form of writing where you don't know what you're writing. How truthful is it? How duplicitous? How good/bad or (a)(im)moral? How will it strike the reader, especially (or even?) fiction with didactic propensities? Where does it come from? Its aesthetics that burn through your own disintentionality?

Characters you supposedly create sometimes take over and make the piece even more unknowable as to direction and purpose etc. This is what defines fiction. Not knowing what it is.

Or fiction is knowing about everything that is not known.

"Both wanted to sit down in the shade at the edge of the woods: neither would suggest it."
from A Game Of Hide and Seek (1951) by Elizabeth Taylor

i.e. hiding and seeking truths amid the unsynchronised omnisciences of more than one fictional mind.

Chasing a noumenon.

Fiction is like two unknown but gradually known characters or threads that eventually may blend (almost beyond the writer's control) across some vast waste (in one case between the unknown and the known, the other between two beautiful minds whose two bodies happen to be in a Freak Show Circus trailer - as metaphors for the divide between writer and reader) by means of imputed incarnation-by-fictipathy or simply by imagination...

'Fictipathy' (a word I invented) has indeed become mainly concerned with the pathology of fiction, but also, more recently by common usage, it has become to indicate a form of active telepathy by fiction - distinct, however, from the more passive Jungian 'Collective Unconscious' or, even, from what I would call 'nemoguity'.

On the other hand, fiction is probably more akin to a transcending of genre, reality and self - not through what I described as 'fictipathy' above, but as a designer of words into non-pragmatic patterns. Stories are indeed unpragmatic (ie of no possible use) but they do allow one to evolve abstract musical journeys with extrapolated (pseudo and real) memory- or dream-recall resonated by the ricochet -- a ricochet of meaning, look, sound and syntax -- which the words inexplicably form plotically (as well as poetically) within the reading mind.

This may be relevant to other discussions about what is wrong with certain fiction genres. It is the genre that is wrong, not the stories that make up the fabricated genre. It is the self that is wrong (both writer and reader), not the 'ricochet' described above.

There is much fiction *about* religion but very little fiction that aspires to *be* religion.

And for 'religion', please read 'empowered spirituality' rather than any single sect of religion. Or it is, as I have said before here, magic. Magic in itself rather than about magic.

I think the Horror and/or Fantasy genres (not sects!) are the most likely to achieve this goal. And those who have approached it (even if it was not their conscious goal): Lord Dunsany, William Hope Hodgson, Robert W Chambers (King in Yellow), HP Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, Elizabeth Bowen, Thomas Ligotti, Rhys Hughes, Jeff VanderMeer, Susanna Clarke...
Any more?

Or is this a cul de sac, because you feel that 'religion' cannot be attained by fiction. Nor should it try?

Silly Automatic

TO BE PUBLISHED IN 2012 - 'THE LAST BALCONY' COLLECTION (The InkerMen Press)

Obscurantism/ Norrell

I have had a large book of stories out since 2003 (one of which stories contains the phrase fustian to the nth degree). I notice very few readers seem able to get through it all ... even if they enjoy it -- or even with the carrot of being given the code to their own immortality should they manage to get to the end.

Is there an inspirational art to Obscurantism or is it something you need to work at or is it a curse one is born with? Can there be any justification for it? If you understand the question, please comment!


A review HERE says it is a book "to live with for several months, maybe even years." Replace 'years' with 'several lifetimes', I'd say!

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A poetic fable (written by DFL in the last few days) and apparently enjoyed according to much feedback received:
HERE.

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Regarding my earlier post here ('Fiction') and its references to 'fiction as magic' in respect of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, I'd call it, on reflection, genuinely 'weird'. If Weird Fiction has any meaning at all, this is it. I don't think I've read true weird fiction before encountering this 'novel'. 'Weird' as well as its usual connotations carries a colloquial 'controlling of fate' sense. A Weird is also a spell or charm or geas. If you have dreams from reading books, with this book, you'll probably have a 'real life' instead.

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Re yesterday's blog on Internet promotion, with me (and I don't know how typical this is of others), I'm all or nothing. If I'm on the internet, then I'm on it in a big way, as I have been*. I cannot reduce it. The only other option is to leave completely, and abandon my 'derelict buildings'.


* My blog entry of 27 April 2006: Chasing The Noumenon. Arguably - using a degree of pretentious objectivity with which I do not deserve to be indulged - my lifetime's 'opus' should not be seen as directly constituted of the various DFL fictions themselves. It is, rather, I feel, those very fictions' repercussions, i.e. their tentacular body of brainstorming accoutrements - from url to url to url to url - that I have tangentially built up (with the unselfconscious collaborative help of others) since 1999 on the Net.

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Publishing/ Internet Promotion

An intriguing exchange between A and B elsewhere yesterday:

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A: On a note of contention, and for the record, I still have a great deal of time for the view expressed below:

FELIPE ALFAU: I am not a professional writer. Only by necessity have I ever received payment for my work. Dalkey Archive Press offered money for my two novels but I refused to accept it. For my poems I received $500 because I needed to pay the monthly payment here, in the retirement home. The truth is, I was never interested in writing, nor did I ever dream of making a living at my craft. I hate full-time authors. I hate intellectuals that make a living from abstractions and evasions. The art of writing has turned into an excess. Today, literature is a waste. It should be abolished, at least in the form we know: as a money-making endeavor.

IS: How do you think writers should support themselves?

FA: I am not sure, but certainly not by selling their books as jewelry.

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B: No one is going to force a writer to act commercially. Don't blame publishers for making money. Any author who doesn't want to submit their book to feelthy capitalists and thus sully their endeavours will be entirely left alone by said capitalists. Different strokes...

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A: The problem is that the system, by which I mean the profit-driven mass-market publishers, will force a writer to act commercially. If, that is, said writer wants any wider recognition beyond the small press. Even those writers who profess strong left-wing views end up having to accept the system's market values (self-promotion, self-promotion, self-promotion) as opposed to allowing the quality of their work to speak for itself. This is one reason why the "mid-list" has been destroyed. The final say in mass-market publishing houses is now made by marketing departments and not, as previously, by commissioning editors. I suspect it also has a great deal to do with the smaller mainstream publishing houses being swallowed up by conglomerates as has happened over the past twenty or so years.
PS: Sorry, when I said "profit-driven", I should have said "substantial profits-driven". I realise that all businesses need to make a profit, but it's whether they're satisfied with a moderate, rather than a walloping profit that I had in mind.


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B: As far as I'm concerned, one should want to make as much money as possible - it's a business. And as I said, if you don't want to be involved, that's fine. All businesses change over the years, and who knows when they will change again? Ten years ago, you couldn't give historical fiction away, but now it works every well. I'm well known for believing that sales and marketing departments have too much power in present-day publishing. However, new authors are still published successfully. It's pointless to wish it was the fifties again, because it isn't.

One thing I will say. I find Mr Alfau's attitude smug, self-satisfied and pretentious. He seems to feel that he is somehow better than those who write for money. He ain't. It's as smug, self-satisfied and pretentious as it would be for me to say that authors who ARE paid for their endeavour are obviously more important than those who choose not to be.

Dr Johnson said that only a blockhead wrote for any reason other than money. I'd say that was a touch extreme! However, I'm not having anyone tell me that they command moral high ground because they DON'T write for money.

I come back to my main point: it's a business. I've published a number of left-wing writers who work within that. What they then do with the money they make is up to them. But to have this...distasteful...attitude to commercial publishing is, I think, less than pragmatic or realistic.

And the mid-list was dying in the 80s, long before the rise of marketing power. I saw it happen.

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Now from me yesterday (as I thought it may be considered rightly off-topic on the original thread):

I have sympathy with both the views of A and B. I will say at this stage that commercial demands can affect an author unduly: and if he concentrates his life on writing pot-boilers or even great commercial fiction, he may have written different and longer-lasting fiction without those commercial demands diverting him. That would be a shame. Equally, it can work the other way. Someone could beaver away for years at pretentious poetic prose which is not likely ever to be successful in any field of literature when, all the time, he could have been writing successful commercial fiction, but hadn't done so becuase he had a 'thing' against being commercial!!

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From me today:

Well, A and B have happily come to agreement on the original thread.

I'd just add:
There is no complete distinction between Commercial, Literary and Small Press. They can fail or succeed at the time they are published in terms of monetary and/or critical considerations. Some Small Press becomes commercial many years in the future or becomes accepted 'standards' of literature much later (even in a later century!); some contemporary Commercial fiction immediately falters at the wayside or succeeds greatly in the short term or succeeds as an accepted 'standard' of literature eventually.

An overlapping spectrum:
(1) Pot-boilers
(2) Quality Commercial fiction.
(3) Acquired Taste literature.
(4) Off-the-wall/experimental!

And the discussion could continue if anyone wants to define the word 'quality' in the above spectrum!

And I'd repeat my point yesterday: many writers are diverted from their more natural course to get into what they consider to be their 'felt' aim ... whether it be (1), (2), (3) or (4). And most writers, I guess, aim mainly for (2) because of the pressures of peer rivalry, domestic constraints, agential editing etc.

Within each of (1), (2), (3) and (4) above, I feel there are two other spectrums, i.e. (a) Commercial, Literary, Small Press and, separately, (b) all the specific fiction genres.

An overlapping complexity, true, but one I feel that needs to be appreciated in the round, before being able to discuss the points made by A and B above and before any agreement can be reached.

I intended 'Nemonymous' (all 5 issues so far) to comprise all these spectra in working shape.

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I think most internet communication comes out 'wrong'. With regard to self-promotion, I tried (but more for enjoyment than promotion) and am still trying blogs, experimental discussions, websites, spraying my previously published fiction in various places on the Net etc.
I am often misunderstood. Or mostly ignored.
Re the last bit - I don't know that what I say on the Net is ignored. It just feels ignored, despite some very kind people who have given me feedback. I suspect everyone feels ignored (or more ignored than they think they deserve). I am no exception. I agree that nobody owes me feedback.

I don't know if I feel more sensitive than I should. Experience doesn't always help, not even the experience of nearly sixty years!

Further thoughts: I believe that youths these days spend all their spare time socialising electronically; their whole conversation being about who said what to whom about what or about whom; they don't talk about films, books, music, TV programmes etc.; they just talk about their own inspiralling of electronic communion with each other?

Are we the same, we on these blogs, boards and elsewhere? Have I - at the age of nearly 60 - been trapped by these new modes of communication to live for each day so as only to carry on these electronic conversations, instead of concentrating on more tangible things?

Or am I an old fogey in thinking this?

Even further thoughts: My contention is that the Internet is so overcrowded, so fraught with misunderstanding, so susceptible to spontaneous mood (anger, joy, depression, intoxication, temporary stupidity, nepotism etc etc) that nobody reads anybody else's work or promotion on the internet. That's an exagerration! Temporary stupidity? But this morning, I believe it. For 'nobody' above , please read an extremely small number compared to the hordes posting work or promotion on the internet. It's just self-deception to believe otherwise. Of course, like pop stars or footballers, some 'famous' writers do get a lot of attention on the internet and elsewhere. But there are millions and millions of active creative writers compared to a handful of what I would call 'famous writers'.

Coupled with above, if your own promotion on the Net is noticed, it's often counter-productive, inasmuch as the Internet does not give good promotive techniques. It's good for information and discussion and sometimes creating new friendships (which, ironically, can so easily then be lost because of the nature of the Internet!), but for work promotion (however professionally done) I feel it is endemically counter-productive - and many people are becoming more and more averse to buying things on the Net with credit cards or whatever means of money electronic exchange because of fraud.
And all this ignores what I said earlier about how it's affecting badly the behaviour of future generations, grooming people from temporary stupidity to permanent!

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Sales of Nemonymous seem to have livened up in recent weeks - as well as constructively giving away some of them. Fingers crossed that I'll be able to do Issue Six sooner rather than later, as there seems to be a gap in the quality-produced UK dark fantasy market at the moment.

LADIES

Do you wish to read an undiscovered DFL novella? If so, please write to nemonymous@hotmail.com for the link.

It is entitled LADIES and written in the early-nineties. It was spectacularly printed by an independent publisher in 1999, but only one copy was published and this is in my possession. Not even the publisher kept a copy.

Rhys Hughes

Just remembered the following review I wrote about Worming The Harpy and Other Bitter Pills by Rhys Hughes (published by Tartarus Press), a review that appeared in the then prestigious American magazine Deathrealm in 1996:

"These stories are essentially literature in its purest form - wonderfully rumbustious, humorous, word-magical fantasies, liberally peppered with honest-to-goodness horror. They remind me of Lord Dunsany, John Barth, Jorge Luis Borges, Jack Vance, involving the fabulous traditions of surrealism, fairy stories and piquant wit. They strike me of the feeling one would have upon entering a treasure trove of a bookshop and discovering for the first time works that had been written in some ancient future, a future impossible to believe ever possessing the antecedence of a present let alone of a past. Rhys Hughes' book is one that I had dreamed of reading but never thought I'd be so lucky ever to do so in real life."

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Ironically, one of my genuinely favourite examples of Rhys Hughes' prose is an essay from 2000 about a 1993 chapbook of mine:
http://tinyurl.com/etnog
Long lost Hughes prose that is brilliant.

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Rhys Hughes has three stories in the Nemonymous canon: All For Nothing, Climbing The Tallest Tree In The World, The Small Miracle.

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Gut Road HERE: A Rhys Hughes story pastiche of DF Lewis

"DF Lewis" seems to have written a story in A New Universal History of Infamy by Rhys Hughes (Ministry of Whimsy Press 2004)!

Four ancient DFL/RH story collaborations listed HERE for free internet reading.

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Rhys Hughes obituary: HERE
DF Lewis obituary: HERE

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Free Fiction

I love money, but when you don't write commercial stuff it's usually negligible. So money is not (and was not) part of the equation. And congratulations to those few (and in the scheme of things - it is few!) commercial writers who make a living from fiction writing. I admire you tremendously.

Millions write. Millions want to be read. Literally.

Millions try to be read by almost impossibly trying to sell their writing. So if your stuff is not commercial or is an acquired taste, logically & simply, if you want your stuff to have more chance in being read during your lifetime, then you need to do what I'm doing HERE. Otherwise (if you are not among those 'few' I mentioned before) you risk failing in this logical & simple task of having your stuff deservedly read during your lifetime. Why write it if it's not going to be read? Art for Art's Sake?


Astrology and Classical Music are the same thing.
by Selbi Cudderri

I feel that 'classical' music is like fiction injected straight into the vein. My own definition of classical music is shown below (music being something about which I am more passionate than writing editing reading...), though I am musically illiterate as far as its technicalities are concerned:-

A formless area (defaulting towards an aspirationally cultural & predominantly exact art form) within the universal, uncompartmentalised, wholly accessible language of sound commonly known as music: encouraging spirituality and/or various permutations of all human emotions -- centring on and radiating from the serious deployment of an ostensibly organised pattern of acoustic sounds as produced by orchestral instruments and voices (performed normally by established or qualified interpreters/musicians, from one to very many). The question of taste and the unknowable relativities of disharmony and harmony are no part of this description, because such affective considerations differ from individual to individual. I shall tailgate any preconceptions!

Including any preconceptions about the harmonics of Astrology. The strange forces of serendipity and coincidence ever seem to be at work, especially when amid stories in the horror mode. Either that or there is some wondrous mantra (or muse?) steering our minds towards those priceless moments of creativity and gestalt. Astrology, one such mandala, is not concerned with cause and effect; it is an empirical study of human behaviour and of life-force trends as paralleled by the positions of all the planets in the Zodiac at the precise moment and place of birth. The concept of Synchronicity (i.e As Above, So Below) could not be more logical. If our Universe and all its ingredients failed to move in cogwheel patterns with perfectly overlapping ripples, that would surely be more ridiculous than if they did move in that way. So why is belief in Astrology deemed ridiculous when a disbelief in it would be more ridiculous? Those people who ridicule Astrology - who decry this interpretative study of synchronicity empirically derived from (a) scientifically calculated patterns of the universe and (b) simultaneous human actions - will never know whether it works, because the Astrological influences in their own horoscopes may well demonstrate that very ignorance which they were born to suffer: a vicious circle of disbelief.

The movement of all bodies, Heavenly or otherwise, is surely a refined, interactive process, having taken merely a single eternity of preparation to produce our infinitely complex mortal life. Only those who believe will in turn be believed, because Faith is a two-way conduit. As Above, so Below.

If we are vampires, the stars are our stake-outs. As Below, so Above.

Vampires don't exist, unless we start to believe in them. Until similes become full-blooded metaphors, we shall always live in the negative darkness of a world in proper pain. The world this side of death, where we happen to reside, for our sins, is a living nightmare, but one that is not positively horrific; it's simply a reality without imagination, an everlasting wake without dream, a narrow house of flesh. Recession hereabouts means the receding of spirit, as well as of material things: a place where nightmares are their opposite.

We need to jump-lead the rich seams of gothic synergy in the spirit and to dark-light the way. Already, there are pinpricks of positive nightmare, in our neck of the woods - and we cannot help thinking that less directness and more obliquity will allow us to see better round corners. Eye to eye doesn't show us the soul, but simply its well-head. And in Hell there wait those who were wrongly thrown out of Heaven that sorry day universes ago. Indeed, the road to Heaven is paved with bad intentions.

And what of the vampires? They no longer believe in us.

Horror should be Nightmare disguised as Dream, Blood as Ruby Sea, Hell as Shadow. Not the other ways about. We are the best such disguise. That tells more about us than a thousand close textual surveys of our works. Search out, I say.

I have recently been reading the best sensitive horror going. Undercurrents of spectres and sensuality. Read such writers if you can. But if you want horror really oblique to the point of non-existence (but nonetheless powerful), try claustrophobic novels of timeless family life written earlier this century.

So, with due decorum, I shall hasten on to a quieter London Adventure of Three Impostors. A few weeks ago, we wandered through the ancient London by-ways and visited a Museum: a place beguiled with duplicitous perspectives, bulging with bizarre statues and skeletons, topped with a lop-sided roofscape of skylights, sown with darksome knick-knacks, peopled with peering paintings &c. &c. - and we felt as if we had walked straight into a story, a story limned by dream out of hybrid hells.

We also sat chatting around fountains in peaceful sunlit squares, viewed the dome of St Paul's Cathedral from new shimmering non-Euclidean angles, saw the outside of an inscrutable apartment where a writer we admired did hone his masterpieces of myth and monsters ... and, oh yes, as one of us wrote in a subsequent letter: "the first pub we visited where our conversation was so scintillating I could see it as an episode in a book."

We mustn't forget: even if blood were dream, vampires would sniff at it.

Well, we are not dogs too old to learn new tricks. Exploring, as we do, from time to time, some of the older books in our personal collections, we recently stumbled across some really special ones. Yet, the trove is deeper, the treasure richer, as one delves into even lesser known works which touch on preoccupations of ours regarding ambivalent existences and dimmer-switch identities. The style, too, is a deliciously woven tapestry of clause and sub-clause ... and the aftertaste is sweeter than honey yet black-peppered with other concerns that will stay with us within daylight as well as night - and during those dimnesses between.

Another wonderful reading experience, during moments of the sweetest synchronous serendipity, echoed another browsing of books. By chance, one of them expands upon the tantalising themes of crossed personality and involuted individuality, together with a disturbing treatment of bodily mutilation, plus the vibrant historical immediacy of eastern European venues.

It warmed the heart. (We hadn't eaten hearts for a long time - and even if the hearts present were insufficiently warmed through by the fellow feeling (or by the heated discussion) they were probably more palatable than conger eel with or without onions!)

Vampires would eat their hearts out to have innards.

Well, we have been guilty of brandishing bare words without elaboration, assuming that everybody must know, love and cherish books; but perhaps we are wrong: we are often wrong.

We all live out ghost stories - of sorts. Many are surrealistic, without resort to over-intellectualism. They infect dreams. There are often undercurrents of eroticism and perversion. They are ungraspable, without being opaque. Macabre. Poetic. Yet full of character and dialogue. Frequently a happy mixture of traditional and experimental; a rare dream which is successful in being both accessible and inaccessible at the same time! Frightening. REALLY SCARY. All this is our opinion. And we are often wrong.

About to draw in my feelers. Armed with a stake, I penetrated a vampire the other day on my kitchen floor, without first suspending my belief. Much messier than fiction. Even messier than dreams.

I am half Welsh, my father having spent his boyhood in his birthplace of Llanelli, South Wales, before being dragooned to fight in the War of the Worlds in 1941 - eventually ending up stationed on the English east coast in Walton-on-Naze, Essex, where he met my mother...

On a visit to Llanelli recently, whilst taking my father on a nostalgic trip back to his roots, I could easily imagine the surly inhabitants possessing brothership with Deep Ones - and the deserted part of Llanelli docks being their Lurkhole. And I think immanent synchronicity and dark serendipity affect lovers of the dark side more than most. Just as an example, whilst on that short visit to Llanelli, Dad scoured the local telephone directory in what he thought was a hopeless task to track down one of his old friends with whom he had gone diving at Llanelli docks as a boy: someone he had not seen or heard of for over forty years - and, lo, that very friend was living directly opposite the guest house where Dad and I were staying, miles from the friend's previously known abode! This chap turned out to be Chief Mason in Llanelli with more resemblance to one of the Deep Ones than it was polite to notice.

Indeed, there once existed a wonderful writer for Horror/Ghost story lovers as well as for people who love huge panoramic, picaresque, idiosyncratic tours-de-force of social history ... his books being full of Victorian fogs, street-sweepers, costermongers, plug-ugly villains, fresh-faced maidens, well-meaning heroes, weird characters with even weirder names, laughter, pain, farce, surrealism (yes, a genuine surrealism that predates the twentieth century by a good number of years!) and, above all, scenes that can horrify and gently haunt you. The style of language takes us along winding paths within an overgrown maze of meaning and resonance, whereby digressions become main narrative threads - and vice versa - until we reach an understanding of something important to life, something which is not at all obvious unless we apply a retrospective ear to a whole novel's wondrous dream-like or nightmarish or side-splitting backwash of sound.

In many ways, these novels remind me of probably the most mysterious phenomenon within the universe known to man, yes, my own greatest passion: music.

With due respect - and I may be wrong here since I'm often wrong - I imagine many of you enjoy popular rock music in its various forms ... which is fine, carrying, as such music often does, mind-stretching horror images, eeriness, nightmare, alternative religiosity (even quiet contemplation): especially when you're in the right frame of mind to bring ordinary music-listening towards your spiritual antennae.

Well, so far so good. But if you want more, if you want something different, why don't you try modern orchestral 'serious' music? I know a number of people denigrate what they call avant garde music - saying it's a load of pretentious noise. Well, yes, some of it is. You're right. But there are some composers whose music I cannot live without. The secret, for me, is to listen to such pieces time and time again until they settle down, where the unpredictable sounds and apparently tuneless passages begin to match the rhythms of your self-induced waking dreams.

There was one piece of music that originally stirred me into the outlands of taste, turning me from the more 'normal' ways of my beloved parents who only ever listened to melodic music and watched television. As ever, I will not name names.

Vampires play the flute.

I must admit that an ambition of mine is to blur the distinction between so-called literature as praised by artsy-fartsies and our own beloved horror genre. There is someone who, to my mind, embodies this ideal better than anyone. His running themes are murders, historic London, inhumanity, mysteries, literary tricks ... with such dark undercurrents one can actually sense the incubi of his demons close by, penetrating even the stones of modern London as one wanders, at random, its streets.

The first novel of his I read was one where he entwines past and present, flaying bare the seed-beds of arcane evil that marinate the very stones and statues and walls. A detective story that will haunt and horrify you forever. Another discernible theme is the ambivalence of gender. Like the phenomenon of Spontaneous Combustion, androgynous ambiguity and sexual sleight of hand are, I feel, untapped sources of material for fiction of horror and of psychological terror - although some of us subtly and perhaps unknowingly demonstrated them in some stories.

In many ways, when children didn't spend all their time glued to computer screens and had a good grounding in stylistic English, they would certainly have enjoyed these explorations into occult and mystic realms of fear, since some stories, indeed, feature children as their protagonists. Child-like grown-ups, I guess, are the only possible candidates for wonderment these days, because most of our real children have been 'spoilt'. And those grown-ups among us who read and write in the horror genre I've often thought are child-like, in this positive sense. They have not been jaded by the act of growing-too-old-too-quickly, they do not zombie round with cowed bleary eyes and a spiritless soul. Even madness is better than mindlessness.

I have a great faith that Mankind's creativity (particularly the creativity of literature and music) can be our only soul-mate in this otherwise material universe. Other people are merely passing strangers who you befriend or, even, love, but, through their very mortality, they will depart your territory, inevitably leaving you quite alone one day. And I feel that literature and music, wherein you can drift, or even fly, supplies what you are missing when the world's crazy religions are shown up for what they are: just things that make people cruel to each other.

Mankind can create its own bespoke world - and horror fiction is a very efficient tool for expanding the mind beyond the matter that constricts it. I have always condemned mind drugs that are administered to the body from outside it. I have never taken such drugs (except, I admit, for my occasional weakness for drinking alcohol!) and I never shall. Drugs come from within.

There can be no goodness without its balance of bad. Perhaps Mankind is fundamentally ill-created, perhaps people have evil inbuilt at birth, and, by recognising those facts, by simply writing about the bad-the-ugly-and-the-frightening, this act of honesty alchemically refines the "soul". Perhaps a vampire is only evil because of the human vehicle it drives.

Sometimes I wonder - does horror need to be horrific?

To be truly horrific, the images and conceits that are embedded in a plot do have to stick in the mind - and only a craftsmanship with words is able to carve out the haunting quality that is necessary whether the horror be physical, psychological, fanciful or supernatural.

Some stories are essentially literature in its purest form - wonderfully rumbustious, humorous, word-magical fantasies, liberally peppered with honest-to-goodness horror - involving the fabulous traditions of surrealism, fairy stories and piquant wit. They strike me of the feeling one would have upon entering a treasure trove of a bookshop and discovering for the first time works that had been written in some ancient future, a future impossible to believe ever possessing the antecedence of a present let alone of a past. There is one book that I had dreamed of reading but never thought I'd be so lucky ever to do so in real life.

Even if you have a complete blood change, your mind will never forget...

As I sit here - within my chalet bungalow close to the North Sea where recently, due to a storm, many pleasure beach-huts were smashed to smithereens or even entirely snatched away - I wonder what defines an island. The world is an island, I suppose. I am one, too. The horror art (i.e. the words and pictures we manufacture to depict the dark side of humanity) is perhaps a personal sea against which our mental and physical coast-defences will eventually crumble. But before this happens, we should seek out the sandbags.

The only activity we are are possibly good at is this art of horror. And we want to be famous, remembered after we are dead, rumours of our existence to be blessed with at least the life-span of this island planet. But to be remembered as being sick! No, never! But that's what will happen, if we don't beware. Our families and friends will remember us as people who got carried away by our art, subsumed by our own insular minds. And if we couldn't control ourselves, what sort of people were we?

Unless, of course, we can justify the art of horror itself.

Many ordinary people love horror. Simply that. Everybody is cruel at heart. Why not give them what they want? Lay the horror on as thickly as possible. But people like a lot of things that are not good for them. This argument of personal responsibility is an unending one. If we could resolve it here, we would deserve to be famous. Or is Horror actually good for people? A purge. A catharsis. People have evil built into the fabric of their souls at birth. And what the horror art does is dilute that real horror with its imaginary equivalent. And imaginary horror, surely, is preferable to any other kind. On the other hand, perhaps we are intrinsically evil, inexcusably warping people's imaginations. Our corrupt soul needs an artistic outlet for its own self-satisfaction. But why also submit such art for others to publish? We want to provoke. We have always provoked people since being kids, haven't we? Mainly in minor ways. Ways that we thought would not harm them. But perhaps we are more harmful than we ever expected. We must never admit that, though. Even if it's true.

Sticks and stones may hurt our bones, but names will never hurt us. What harm can there be in simple words or drawings on a page? But we want our art to get under the skin. Be more than just art. Perhaps, if we are truly honest, we want to bite home. Only nasty medicine can cure, they say. But there's something we are missing. An imponderable that we cannot even set down on the page properly, let alone successfully address. Monsters can live in our nightmares and by describing them, hopefully we circumscribe them. By writing, I circumscribe myself. I fetter myself from creating the only horror that will harm you as well as me: me.

Yet, there is much humour in our art. Sick humour, perhaps. But it's meant to make people laugh. Laughter and horror are often bed-fellows. Audiences often burst out into chortling at the most frightening bits of films. Mischief and the poking of fun are part and parcel of our attitude. Seriousness could only lead to unwelcome admissions. Perhaps, we are the appointed providers of horror. Without bad, there couldn't be an equal measure of good. Good is only good when compared with bad. We are thus do-goooders. But this absurdity means we have run out of further thoughts. Leaving us with Nothing. Bliss. Nirvana. We hope that we are forgiven by our loved ones - especially when our final artist's block comes ... or after the abandon-edit button is pushed before anything is saved. Meanwhile, the sea is in an ugly mood again, tonight. Even the fish have fangs and flop ashore, bleating for breath. And horror surrounds me with wave upon wave of self-doubt. But, as some philosopher once said, doubt is strength.

By the way, there is a misprint later. For blood, please read beer.

Each time I try to enter the non-fiction mode, ideas for stories seem to take over and I feel myself slipping away into my usual sort of convoluted dream or cruel conceit. And this set me to thinking. It strikes me that fiction represents a fusion of real life and imagination, one feeding off the other. How otherwise can one appreciate the frisson of fear or the gulp of revulsion without believing it is really happening? Suspension of belief is, I think, an expression often employed. But it is more than this. Yet would I be pretentious enough to maintain that reality is fiction and vice versa? Well, maybe.

It is much more complex than simple suspension of belief (or even disbelief). Horror fiction, at its best, enters our individual territories and becomes part and parcel of a revolving realm with Death at its core: and, in this realm, all the flotsam and jetsam of life (the richest life being generated by the imagination as well as by the day-to-day interaction of our minds and bodies) spin round, some colliding only to ricochet off, others sticking together, some being swallowed whole or bit by bit. Eventually, the various items are sucked into the core where they are minced up or refined into streams of sense (or apparent sense or, even, nonsense) which are then released from that realm into other revolving realms which create new collisions, fusions and spin-offs. This is using Death as a positive tool, as it surely is. Without Death, we'd be nothing.

Furthermore, Horror fiction shares a bed with surrealism and humour as well as with the more usual ingredients of grim acts, monstrous creatures and ghostly visitations. Literature, indeed, uses all kinds of devices, tropes, figures of speech, call them what you will, to make the welding of reality and unreality as seamless as possible. But why make something seamless, when there are no seams in the first place? It only takes a few lateral thoughts or, as I have proposed here, spinning ones. Horror fiction can accomplish this feat with some degree of logic, because the realms actually created by it are indeed real - and perhaps that is because there is nothing more horrific than being real in reality as we know it. I am only in it for the blood.

I don’t know whether any of you have ever been to Docklands, a reclaimed area in the East End of London, where my Grandfather travailed on the cranes before the Second World War - but, when I arrived on the amazing Docklands Light Railway, amid the tall behemoth constructions that still pay obeisance to Thatcherite Britain, I really felt myself to be in an Alternate World. From my hotel bedroom, I could see the same railway-on-stilts arriving through the corridors of a Wellsian Metropolis on the other side of an in-city waterscape ... and, yes, despite myself, I was awestruck... exhilirated, even.

Life is a dark dockless ocean of meaning and sound, something that will haunt our dreams forever (even beyond death) as well as make us believe that our beloved horror genre will eventually encompass all art and literature. But, surely, there is more to life than mere monsters and vampires.

Style In Fiction

On and off over the years, I have been studying a book called 'Style In Fiction' by Leech & Short (Longman 1981) which explores paragraphs by Conrad, Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Henry James etc, examining graphological, phonological, syntactic and semantic nuances and patterns, discussing how they affect the meaning etc.

Do we miss all this? Or do we instinctively absorb it, however fast we read? Does it apply to all genres of literature? And does the writer intend these effects (in a slow laborious fashioning?) or instinctively produce them (at speed?)?

I myself feel both reader and writer 'do' this thing together - instinctively and at speed.

Selbicuderri

If you read - in the normal course of events - this message (without being solicited to do so) AND you have a UK address, you will be eligible for a free copy of EITHER Nemonymous Five anthology OR Only Connect paperback book.
Please write to nemonymous@hotmail.com mentioning this message.
Please do not tell anyone else about this message. There will be other messages with other free gifts dotted about the DFL threads or websites, should you be lucky enough to find them.

Separately, if anyone anywhere would like to review The Hawler (Word Doc or PDF doc available from nemonymous@hotmail.com), they will receive (when the review appears) both a full set of Nemonymous and a copy of the aesthetic Prime trade paperback entitled Weirdmonger, until stocks last. All will be signed by DFL, if required. These are to compensate for the reviewer not receiving a hard copy of The Hawler and the review can, of course, be praising, critical or indifferent.

des
http://www.weirdmonger.com

Chasing The Noumenon

Arguably - using a degree of pretentious objectivity with which I do not deserve to be indulged - my lifetime's 'opus' should not be seen as directly constituted of the various DFL fictions themselves.
It is, rather, I feel, those very fictions' repercussions, i.e. their tentacular body of brainstorming accoutrements - from url to url to url to url - that I have tangentially built up (with the unselfconscious collaborative help of others) since 1999 on the Net.

Publication-On-Reading

O.G. Donde-Vega wrote that, with the technology available, there was no excuse not to be professional when publishing fiction. The fiction market was incredibly crowded because of this technology and the potentiality given by simply being protagonists on the Internet. Every one who wanted to be a writer became a writer. All three million in UK alone, probably! It became simply a question of getting your stuff read. No necessary advantage in having your stuff published traditionally. It would sink without trace eventually in those crowded seas however good it was. In the main.

Self-publishing - to Donde-Vega - was anathema, always had been. But, of course, that only applied to printed works. For example, he would never have dreamt of including one of his own stories in NEMONYMOUS (a fiction magazine he earlier edited and published).

There seems now to be five ways to publish a novel:
(1) Traditional publisher with all their services of distribution, marketing, review copies sent out etc etc, (either by Print-On-Demand (POD) or traditional printing).
(2) Publisher who simply prints book and facilitates distribution (usually by POD)
(3) Publisher who asks for money from author to publish it (vanity publishing, either by POD or traditional printing).
(4) Author self-publishes in print with whatever he wants to give to it as publicity impetus etc etc.
(5) Author makes raw text of novel available on-line allowing the reader to decide to 'publish' it by simply reading it there or producing as book for personal use only and for author to sign (or not).

In hindsight (and perhaps sub-consciously), Donde-Vega chose (5) for his first tentative novel (WE ALL LIVE ON A YELLOW CARPET) at the age of 58 (after 20 odd years' activity as a story writer and editor/publisher), because that was the way he did it and it probably read like that (with references to current affairs of the day when he wrote it etc.) and it would never have been written without this method of doing it and he was deeply unsure of the novel as comments on his earlier work did not encourage him to think he should ever write a novel that was publishable traditionally, because of commercial considerations etc. although he did seem to have some facility as an acquired taste for a small coterie of readers. All speculation.

He named his method (5) above as Print-on-Reading (POR) as a method of publishing a novel (not self-publishing although it involves the author making raw text available on-line) - with the knowledge that it had become easier to print and bind things to one's own specification. This could have led to many unique editions of one work - and signed by the author if the logistics of getting the author to sign the hard copy are easy enough.

I shall quote from the introduction to 'We All Live On A Yellow Carpet' by O.G. Donde-Vega (aka Rachel Mildeyes): “In 'Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell', it was said that there had been some prejudice against using magic in the wars of those historical times. However, today's magic has become fiction: equally powerful, equally prejudged, equally within the hands of only a few skilled practitioners. And the biggest war is about to be fought using fiction's powers as one of the available weapons.”

Stub Of pencil: Horror literature horrifies, but does it ‘truly’ horrify? A work of fiction, if you touch its words one by one, should literally (as well as literarily) fill you with horror -- an electric shock from one word? A synaptic outburst from another? Just reading the words doesn't seem enough. Incidentally, do the viruses in avian influenza have conscious ‘intent’ to infect the human beings to further their own survival or are they hidebound by the tenets of ‘The Intentional Fallacy’? This and other catalysts are treated in Donde-Vega’s novel.

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Chasing The Noumenon

Wordy Weird

I see myself as an exponent of 'wordy weird' fiction (even though I said earlier on this blog that I did not like the word 'Weird'!). By means of a vexed texture of text or a woven firewall of words, I feel that one can wring a greater degree of (often unexpected) meaning or plot-direction or characterisation-construction than in straightforward or transparent or linear prose. If anyone else wants to employ this 'wordy weird' form of story-telling, I shall probably end up following them, because I generally see myself as a first mover in literary matters, but not as a skilled practitioner.

Here is a picture of Wordy Weird:
HERE.

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Regarding my claim above to be a first mover, this actually comprises seven pointless claims:

(1) DFL wrote the world's most separate short fictions published in the most separate independent print publications (none of which fictions, incidentally, should be read out of context with the others but rather as an entire highly moral accretion of fiction or novel-in-continuous-progress),

(2) he produced, in 2001, 'Nemonymous': the world's very first self-contained multi-authored volume of anonymous fiction stories collected as such (the authors' by-lines being revealed in the subsequent published volume),

(3) he was the very first editor to start considering (and later only to consider) anonymous story submissions for publication until and beyond final acceptance or rejection,

(4) he is the only writer who has ever attempted to post the whole of his back catalogue of fiction to a megazanthine network of freely available websites - a sixties-type 'happening' showing the writing he has done over the years,

(5) he published, in 2002, the world's first blank short story in print (as far as it is known), and

(6) he coined these words and expressions: 'zeroism, egnisomicon, egnisism' in conjunction with PF Jeffery (1967), 'whofage' in conjunction with PF Jeffery (1973), 'agra aska' (1984), 'weirdmonger' (1988), use of 'brainwright' in modern times (1990), 'wordhunger' (1999), 'nemonymous, 'nemonymity', late-labelling, veils-&-piques' (2001), 'denemonise' (2002), 'megazanthus', 'weirdonymous' , 'chasing the noumenon' (2003), 'wordonymous', 'wordominous', 'the-ominous-imagination' (2004), 'a woven fire-wall of words', 'nemoguity', 'vexed texture of text', 'fictipathy', 'nemotion', 'the hawler', 'the angel megazanthus', 'klaxon city', 'horrorism' when used as a word for the philosophy of horror fiction (2005), 'publication-on-reading', 'antipodal angst', 'the tenacity of feathers', 'a writer's mandala', 'fiction as magic', 'wordy weird' (2006).

(7) he is the first DF Lewis to serialise his first novel (THE HAWLER) as freely available on the internet as its first and only publication without having first submitted it for publication elsewhere.

Brand new DFL fiction to read

These are stories and fables I've written very recently and can be read for free: HERE instead of links below (EDIT).

Grass Candlemass Candlemass (2)
Left Foot Left Foot (2) Snail Trail Snail Trail (2)

Only Connect (free gift)

For anyone reading this post with a UK address, you may receive an absolutely free copy of the beautiful paperback book entitled ONLY CONNECT (1998) containing mostly ghostly tales by me and my dad. Until stocks last. Details of book: HERE.

Just write to me at nemonymous@hotmail.com to arrange your delivery of this book.

Please do not advertise this offer elsewhere, as it is only intended for those who read this particular message in the normal unsolicited course of events.

des

Tamar Yellin

Tamar Yellin's collection of stories Kafka in Brontëland has had a wonderful review in the national newspaper 'The Guardian' and the review can be read HERE.
If you enjoy this book (and you will!), please try her stunning novel The Genizah At The House Of Shepher from the same publisher ... together with three original stories that appeared in the NEMONYMOUS journal, i.e. The Unmiraculous Life of Jackie Mendoza, Genie, In The Steam Room.

Tamar Yellin is among this blog-owner's top ten favourite living fiction writers. And no greater praise can he give than that.

A Whelk To The Paradise Garden

OBITUARY (21 April 2006)

For DF Lewis, the ability to know his limitations was a happiness greater than continuously striving with blind ambition.

He was ever expressive of thanks to the Small Press for many writerly joys over the years, allowing him a tiny glimpse at least of being a 'proper writer' in publication outlets well beyond his wildest youthful perception of any possible literary achievements that he could manage in later life.

Just before his death, sad to report, he resorted to self-publishing on the internet. This included his trilogy of novels (written in the last months of his life) and the re-showing of all 1500 of his previously printed stories at a weblink address that will now, perforce, remain hidden to most of his few readers. This act of his seemed to be another ratchet beyond (or, rather, behind) his youthful ambitions. Yet, as a result, these first (and, now, of course, last) novels of his - at the age of 58 - are being read by some and, in a few cases, printed as a book by these readers.

He annoyed more than he pleased. And his views on fiction and Nemonymity were no exception to this.

Meanwhile, his death now makes me wonder how real a fictional situation needs to feel before it ceases to be (i) a fictional experience (as one would expect a fictional experience to be) and becomes (ii) a really real experience with all the drawbacks that real experiences often entail!

It's at that very cusp between (i) and (ii) where DF Lewis was trying to establish a magic base for Fiction, I feel. This related to his latterly expressed point regarding the state of antipodal angst kicking-in the older he became. Perhaps he felt the touch of death's own cusp.

In the last months, he still tried to make his fiction as real and nasty as possible, but that sometimes entailed him making it less real or nasty to prevent it blowing the readers' minds before they enjoyed the experience. Like the dynamite in LOST.

Feemy Fitzworth


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Small Press

Rhys Hughes gave a very interesting slant on a lifetime of being 'published' in the Small Press today here:
http://tinyurl.com/zzyja

I wish him luck now that he is spreading his wings, with the help of an agent. He is a wonderful writer.

For me, the ability to know one's limitations can be a happiness greater than continuously striving with blind ambition. But if those limitations are not yet clear, one must indeed persevere until either success comes (in one's own terms) or any personal limitations do eventually become established.

I am thankful to the Small Press for many writerly joys over the years, allowing me a glimpse at least of being that 'proper writer' in outlets beyond my childhood's wildest perception of any possible achievements that I could manage!

I now self-publish on the internet. This includes my trilogy of novels (just written) and re-printing all 1500 of my previously printed stories (please enquire for weblink to access these). This act of mine seems to be another ratchet beyond (or, rather, behind) the Rhys template in his post. My first novel (at the age of 58) is at least being read and, in some cases, printed as a book by its readers.
des