Skip to main content

Gothic Moments

I’ve started to feel it in the air.  Just a tiny bit.  Mostly when I’m outside in the early morning.  While we’re still getting days in the 90’s around here, I sense the slow approach of fall.  A moodiness comes over me that is melancholy and beautiful all at the same time.

Ever since I was a child I’ve felt this.  My breath catches in my throat and a strange, sad rapture fills my chest.  Things look a little darker, more foreboding.  This is not violence, but perhaps the distant threat of it.  It’s subtle, poignant, and absolutely exquisite.

I’ve stood outside and breathed deeply in the autumn and fleetingly thought that should I die at that moment there would be not the least regret.  It’s a little scary, yes, like Halloween, but not like a slasher movie.  This is the atmosphere I try to capture in many of my stories.

Each person is different, I know.  There are those who enjoy the warmth and brightness of summer.  Or the erupting promise of spring.  The cold bleakness of winter is so compelling that I some times have to sit down and remember to breathe.  But autumn.  Autumn.

Even though each person is different, we have only four seasons from which to choose.  There must be others out there who feel about the fall the way I do.  If, perchance, they’re literary types they might enjoy the moody tales I write about a season that never lasts as long as it should, but which would be fatal if it did.

The Gothic movement, so literary critics say, grew out of Romanticism.  Romanticism was a reaction to the cold, mechanical  insistence of the Enlightenment that science could and would explain everything.

People, as cogs in the industrial machine, could be slotted into factories and when worn out, be replaced by the new.  There was no soul to go to Hell, so the hell with it.  We were just robots made of meat.  Automatons.


Romanticism rightly gave the lie to such misguided, but still very powerful thoughts.  We still live in a world where people are interchangeable and science is god.  But when I step outside on a morning when fall is in the air, I know that there’s some kind of heaven out there, even if it is only in the Gothic imagination.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Patterns

  There’s a pattern I’m noticing.   For fiction publishers.   Even if you aim low you’ll find it a struggle.   Part of the reason is the pattern. Lots of websites list publishers.   The smaller, hungrier presses either eventually close or get to a place where they require an agent to get in.   That’s the kiss of death. Although my stories have won prizes, and been nominated for prizes, I can’t get an agent interested.   I’ve queried well over a hundred, so the agent route is one of diminishing returns.   This too is a pattern. Back to the smaller presses.   I check many lists.   What I write, you see, is highly idiosyncratic.   It’s literary but it’s weird.   Publishers don’t know what to do with it.   If a smaller press published stuff like this, I’d find it. The pattern includes writers who never get discovered.   Ironically, a number of editors of fiction literary magazines (mostly online) tell me they enjoy my wor...

Creative Righting

  Rejection of my writing is a rejection of my imaginative world.   That’s why I was cheered by the acceptance of one of my stories this week.   That makes number 31. I’ve been working on a lot of fiction lately, even as nonfiction book number 6 is going to press.   The ideas are still there, and bizarre as ever, but publishing venues just aren’t welcoming. The other day I had lunch with a professor whose wife is also a professor.   She just had her first novel published, and so he pointed me to her indie publisher.   I went to their website to learn that they’re closed to submissions.   I have to admit that my latest accepted story, “Creative Writing Club,” was probably given the green light because I know the editor.   That seems like a pretty dicey way to get any notice, doesn’t it?   You have to know the right people even in the low circulation world. My fiction is difficult to classify.   It’s got speculative elements to it.   ...

Maybe Okay

  A couple pieces of encouraging news, perhaps, dear struggling writers.   I had a couple short stories accepted for publication in recent weeks.   As a fellow writer recently said, “You've got to keep trying.  Somebody will like what you wrote.” That’s a bit of sunshine.   And it’s likely true.   But the stories:   “The Crossing,” about two men in a boat trying to cross the Atlantic, was accepted by JayHenge Publishing.   JayHenge is a small, but paying publisher.   I was flattered when they wanted it for their Masque & Maelström: The Reluctant Exhumation of Edgar Allan Poe anthology.   Being associated with Poe in any way feels good. The second story, “St. Spiders’ Day,” had been brewing in my mind for years—yes, this is a long game!   A friend pointed me to The Creepy podcast.   Since the story hadn’t been written, I followed their guidelines of what they wanted.   It worked. I recently heard a successful wri...