“I
need a world filled with wonder, with awe, with awful things. I
couldn’t exist in a world devoid of marvels, even if the marvels
are terrible marvels. Even if they frighten me to consider them.”
—Caitlin
R. Kiernan.
This is
a pretty good quote to frame most things, IMNSHO, but definitely to
frame my most recent piece of news: I finally have an official
deadline for the first draft of my new book, Experimental Film: A
Novel. Said deadline is September, 2013, which is...crazy, frankly.
Still, I needed a good ass-kick to get me over the threshold with
this project, and that certainly qualifies.
Without
giving much away, Experimental Film is a story that's about as
far removed from the Hexslinger-'verse as is humanly possible. It
exists as an outgrowth of my “Toronto Dark” world, the one many
of my short stories are set in, contemporary and urban and
stand-alone. On the one hand, there's an M.R. Jamesian ghost
story/mystery whose roots date back to the end of the 19th
century and the beginning of cinema; on the other, there's a
character who's not quite me, other characters who aren't quite
various figures from the Toronto experimental film scene, and a lot
of the stuff about Canadian film history I used to inflict on my
students. It's stuff I've touched on before, most recently in the
2010 Shirley Jackson Award-nominated novelette Steve and I wrote
together (“each thing I show you is a piece of my death”), but
since I've never had to spin it out for 80,000 to 100,000 words before, it's quite fairly terrifying to contemplate. But
energizing.
In other
news I should have been linking to this blog, I've been writing a
bi-weekly column on...gee, let's call it “horror culture”, for
ChiZine.com. The current one is “Softly Brutal: The Gialli of Pupi
Avati”, but you should be able to link the the rest though this
(http://www.chizine.com/pupi_avati.htm#.UFNQoY7FUfE).
For those who are interested, I also now have a Tumblr, here
(http://handful-ofdust.tumblr.com/), which I mainly use to file
odd-ass visual stuff I find inspiring. You'll see some mood-building
stuff for Experimental Film up there already, and can expect to see
more.
Okay,
back to it.;)
