So I’ve been having these crazy ideas. Well, I always have crazy ideas, that isn’t really new. I recently came up with a story about a sociopathic U.S. senator who goes on secretive forest retreats to kill deer naked with a bowie knife and sleep inside their carcasses, and becomes trapped in his own psychotic carnival sideshow with Keith Olbermann as the ringmaster. I ended up giving the idea up to my brother (better known to some as Reverend Civilian), because that kind of crazy really is more his speed.
For me, I have crazy ideas, but so many of them are outside of my particular realm of crazy. I keep tabs on them, like a scientist huddled by a radio and a computer screen, waiting for signs of life from the animals I’ve tagged and released into the wild. I jot down notes and outlines and even first drafts, but I never feel quite right about it, quite natural. Like I’m tugging on the threads of someone else’s sweater, or pressing my palms to the window outside of some tea party, breath fogging the glass, because I don’t belong in that world. That’s what it’s been like lately, with stories like Deborah’s Baby (which I’ve started and can’t finish, can never seem to finish) and Whipstitch Fred, that I’ve been working on and working on and can’t get anywhere with.
I think I’ve taken my interest in surreal horror in a strange direction. Obviously I’m still working on my book, which is outlined and catalogued in its own special notebook, and in pieces on my computer, but I still love writing short stories. I have one I’ve finished, about what happens when the world runs out of places to bury the dead, that needs to be typed up. And as much as I like it, I still feel weird about it. I think I’ve spent too much time on dry land.
For me, everything comes from the sea or from space. These are the things that inspire me, because when I think of honest-to-god, balls-to-bones horror, I think of men strapped in tin-cans lost in the empty black vacuum and ancient terrible things hiding in the twilight depths. I think of low volume dread and anxiety that bubbles up under your skin and coils in your stomach, because something is wrong, it’s wrong and you know it and you’re not going to get out of it because man has no place in water or space. And since space has always occupied my thoughts in terms of starships and phasers and kicky mini-skirts (thank you, Gene Roddenberry) the sea is where my thoughts pool and collect, and hatch stupid ideas.
I have recently returned to some of these stupid ideas, because it just feels right. As much as I like zombies and werewolves and giant spiders, it isn’t my speed. I’m always pondering women loving octopuses and spider crabs and men whose lovers have eaten their tongues to live inside their mouths (see the above picture), and the occasional squid in a business suit, because, I don’t know, it seemed like a good idea at the time. I just think it’s time to return to what I know, for better or worse.
