I can’t quite put my finger on it, but there’s a common flavor between Beth Orton, K. J. Bishop, and Shimmer Magazine. They all have a very urban but have a slightly disconnected, dreamlike taste to them. The otherside that all three seem to tap sounds a deep echo, both a little disturbing and a little enticing, a place that works close enough to our own world to lull us into complacency but just differently enough to make us uneasy and wonder if perhaps our own world doesn’t secretly work that way and we’ve never noticed.
I guess this is related to my ongoing attempts to define the ‘flavor’ of my own speculative fiction. I spent about half an hour yesterday trying to explain it to Billy, how my horror story “Preta” and my naturalistic SF “Sweat and White Cotton” taste similar, even with very different tone and genre. It’s hard to develop a niche if you can’t explain what it is that links it all together, and doubly so for a writer, since it means there’s something you can’t put into words.
Today was very accomplished on many fronts: I got work done on the SF artist horror, picked up books for school, went dancing and discovered new and sore muscles in my legs, cleaned out my room (at last), and, oh yes, City Year Chicago seems interested in setting up an appointment with me for the ’10-’11 year. We’ll see how that goes with the phone interview tomorrow.
Recent Comments