Every November National Novel Writing Month blows into town like a cold winter wind. I’ve never taken part, but I wish all the best to those who do. The idea is simple: each participant has 30 days to write a short novel of at least 50,000 words. There are no prizes, except for a feeling of personal accomplishment. If you fail to reach that word count, however, you are forced to turn in your thesaurus and are banned from writing forever. That’s what happened to Hemingway, look it up.
The Guardian had an interesting piece yesterday about the horror genre and whether it’s doomed to literary hell. Do you agree with the author, Stuart Kelly? I don’t. Every genre goes through high points and low, and each has interest from the general reading public hit the same notes. Sometimes the two intersect — horror in the 1980s or sci-fi in the 1950s — and then the entire genre explodes in public consciousness. Right now I don’t believe horror itself is going through the creative doldrums, but I think it is being ignored by the industry. The readers still care, the writers still care . . . it’s the publishers who’ve left them behind in favor of the “paranormal” genre.
(There’s a longer blog post in that thought, one I hope to return to in the near future. Right now I have to leave it at that.)
