Apparently it is my lot in life to blog my ass off today. I was going to wait until tomorrow to post this and see if cooler heads (say, mine) prevailed, but what the hell; I've got a lot to do tomorrow and may not even get to the computer until late, and I know I'm still gonna want to say it.

Of all the correspondence I get, I think my least favorite is from the strangers who think they "know" me. I don't mean the readers who just say "I feel like I know you from your books," which is kind of nice, but the ones who actually believe they do know me, frequently better than I know myself. And my least favorite subset of these is the people who want to tell me about how I'm Denying My Inner Darkness by no longer writing horror. They're like some kind of reverse Jesus freaks: "But ... but ... if you keep writing this stuff, you might go to Heaven!"

I've gotten several such e-mails from fans (ex-fans, I guess), but yesterday was the first time I've gotten one from a professional. I suppose it's mean of me to write about this, because he apologized afterward and I told him there were no hard feelings, but tough shit: these things get in my head and go round and round and bother me, and I've got enough crap going round and round in my head already these days, and if you're going to put more crap in there, you just might hear about it here. Big deal; as the Australian girl's badge said, "I don't care about your blog," and that goes for mine too, so don't worry about it overmuch.

Anyway. A few weeks ago this editor sent me an invitation to contribute to a horror anthology, and I said sorry, no thanks. A few days after that he sent another e-mail saying look, you don't get it, we REALLY NEED YOU in this book. I almost didn't bother writing back -- I tend to feel one polite "no" is sufficient -- but more fool me, I sent a reply saying no, again, my schedule's full and I'm not writing much horror these days anyway.

So yesterday I get this MULTIPAGE E-MAIL about what a TRAGEDY it would be if I, the young genius who wrote Exquisite Corpse (I mean, thanks, but also oh, please) were to Deny Her Dark Side Forever More by no longer writing horror, and -- this is the part I really like -- especially in light of the tragedy that has befallen New Orleans. He's worried that I might deliberately and willfully neglect a project of serious exploration that is ultimately guided by my inner darkness.

Serious exploration. As if Liquor and Prime and Soul Kitchen and the related stories were, you know, just goofy larks. As if I somehow didn't mean them the way I meant Exquisite Corpse.

It is absolutely no one's business whether or how I plan to deal with the recent events that have befallen New Orleans in my future fiction. For the record, though -- and as I've already stated here -- I do plan to deal with them. For a short time after the storm, I was comforted by the idea of writing about a version of New Orleans where the tragedy had never happened, but that soon came to seem callous and irresponsible. I can't ignore an event that will shape the city for the remainder of my lifetime and probably beyond. I do plan to deal with it in the Liquor books, and the way I do so won't be funny or cute or light-hearted, though there will probably be elements of humor in it, since that's one of the ways my current characters deal with things. It also won't focus with a voyeur's loving eye on the Gorgeously Iridescent Ichor seeping out of the corpses floating through the Lower Ninth Ward, even though this guy might think I was being more "true to my inner darkness" if it did.

I wrote back, briefly. Probably I'll regret it. Among other things, I mentioned that there is this guy Stephen King, perhaps you've heard of him, who's spoken repeatedly about how he never sets out to "write horror" per se: he tells the stories he needs to tell; maybe, just conceivably, that's what I'm doing too? And always have been?

I really wish someone could explain to me why some readers think moving away from fiction that can be labeled "Horror" means you are NEGLECTING YOUR INNER DARKNESS. And, furthermore, what makes them think my "inner darkness" and whether I choose to explore it is ANY OF THEIR FUCKING BUSINESS.

I mean, how does "I'm not writing much horror these days" equal "I will only ever write again about sweetness and light and happy bunnies"? How is their reading experience, hell, their entire outlook, so narrow that they think "darkness" only appears on the horror shelf? Excuse me, but what the blue fuck?

Liquor, I'll admit, was an almost purely fun book to write. Prime had some rough moments, some things that were hard for me to face, and Soul Kitchen contains some parts that were as difficult to write as anything in Exquisite Corpse, though they're not nearly as, you know, gooshy. Dead Shrimp Blues will deal in part with how the Cajun shrimpers of the Louisiana bayou are being driven to poverty, despair, and even suicide by the destruction of their livelihood -- now there's a barrel of laughs for you.

But even if I was writing Pat the Bunny, whose business would it be if I just wanted to have fun? Whence this attitude that because I gave readers one book that made them feel a certain way, I somehow owe them another one? No, you know what, I can understand that attitude even if I resent it. What I can't understand is how they dare to turn it around and say I owe it to myself to do what they want, not what I want.

Every once in a while, a reader's "enthusiastic" response to a book is enough to make me wish I'd never written the damn book. I hate feeling that way, and it doesn't last. But mostly I hate that some stranger's words can make me feel that way, even for a little while, about something I cared for and labored over and was proud of.

I'm a hypocrite now, because I told the editor "No hard feelings" and now I'm writing this. But I lied; there are hard feelings, not toward this guy personally, but toward the whole attitude that "mainstream" fiction can't explore anything dark or mysterious or dangerous. It's nothing more than an equally obtuse reversal of the mainstream idea that horror can't possibly be serious or of high quality. At the end of the day, it's the same small-mindedness dressed up in different costumes, and I call bullshit on it all.