I need to go to the shooting range again RIGHT NOW. Either that or mainline several milligrams of Xanax.

First of all, Frankie has developed an obsession with silverware. He gets it out of the sink and carries it all over the house. Now, this in itself is pretty funny, and I can even see the humor in being awakened at 7:30 AM by having a dirty fork dropped on your head, but overall I could have used another three or four hours' sleep.

Next: over the past couple of years, due to being married to a fat man and having many fat friends, I've become interested in fat acceptance, fat-positiveness, or whatever you prefer to call it. This afternoon, while browsing such a community, I learned about Mississippi House Bill 282 by Rep. W.T. Mayhall of Southaven, MS:

AN ACT TO PROHIBIT CERTAIN FOOD ESTABLISHMENTS FROM SERVING FOOD TO ANY PERSON WHO IS OBESE, BASED ON CRITERIA PRESCRIBED BY THE STATE DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH; TO DIRECT THE DEPARTMENT TO PREPARE WRITTEN MATERIALS THAT DESCRIBE AND EXPLAIN THE CRITERIA FOR DETERMINING WHETHER A PERSON IS OBESE AND TO PROVIDE THOSE MATERIALS TO THE FOOD ESTABLISHMENTS; TO DIRECT THE DEPARTMENT TO MONITOR THE FOOD ESTABLISHMENTS FOR COMPLIANCE WITH THE PROVISIONS OF THIS ACT; AND FOR RELATED PURPOSES.

Of course any stupid shitsplat who manages to get elected can propose a bill about any moron thing s/he likes, and of course this idiocy died in committee, but it twists my gut and boggles my mind that ANYONE ANYWHERE EVER TOOK THIS DISCRIMINATORY GARBAGE SERIOUSLY. Even in Mississippi. (Apologies to the smart Mississippians out there. C'mon, I'm from Louisiana; we've got to have somebody to make fun of.)

Next, while innocently reading fuckyoulist, I came upon this prize. (DO NOT click if drooling ignorance about transsexuality/transgendered people makes your head explode.)

So I decided I needed to get away from the computer, and I went out in the yard to see if the fence guys had come and put up the rest of my razor wire as promised. Of course they hadn't, and while examining my plants, I found several boards that hadn't even been screwed down at the bottom. It would have been the easiest thing in the world for a fairly skinny person (e.g. most of the crackheads in my neighborhood) to kick in one of these boards and slip through the resulting gap. If they haven't come and finished the job by tomorrow morning as promised, I swear to God I will do it myself and bill them for my labor.

At that point, Chris came home from running errands and told me I needed to calm down. He had to go back out again for some groceries, so I amused myself by continuing to read Amazon reader "reviews" of my older books, and I found a doozy. I may have to make this a regular feature. This one's about Exquisite Corpse, but you probably could have figured that out on your own.

T. Jackson (Portland, OR United States)
Though I am a big fan of many dark films and movies, I usually like for them to have some sort of moral, lesson or hope to impart. Most of them do. This book is darkness for darkness sake, extremely gross and sadistic, and beyond disturbing. Though well written, I thought it was a waste of time and offered nothing but horrific visions and bleakness. I was so upset by this book, I wanted to write the author, but naturally, she has no public email or way of contacting. I really think she should be hanging her head in shame for contributing garbage like this to the world. I am no prude, extremely liberal and my favorite movie is The Crow, which is quite dark itself. But while that film is about love and redemption, this book is about terrible things. The world doesn't need this kind of darkness.

Somehow, I have no trouble believing that T. Jackson is "extremely liberal." I share many political opinions with liberals, but I find that those who just have to brag about how liberal they are seem to enjoy being offended almost as much as white people (of course, there's a lot of overlap there). Ah, how I wish she had found my P.O. box address (which has been on my website since 2000; this "review" was posted in 2006, so I guess T. Jackson didn't look terribly hard for that contact information she accuses me of hiding) and written me that letter telling me how I should hang my head in shame. I've never sent anyone a dead animal before, but there's always a first time.

In case anyone cares, here is our traditional Thanksgiving dinner:

- Turkey, either brined or deep-fried (sometimes a capon and once a goose, but I thought it was dry -- this year we're having the deep-fried turkey, which is a semi-Cajun tradition most people, including us, order already cooked)

- Cornbread dressing with Campbell's Chicken & Rice Soup that only my mother and I are allowed to touch as we make it, arguing about the size of the crumbled cornbread pieces, torn-up bread pieces, and amount of seasoning

- "Cranberry Cumberland Sauce" from Anna Thomas' The Vegetarian Epicure -- I make this very, very tart with lemon juice, orange zest, and a dash of powdered mustard

- Yams baked with butter and pecans

- Green beans with slivered almonds

- Parker House rolls that I don't eat

- Dessert that nobody but Chris can ever eat (this year my mom is making a lemon meringue pie, but I love her lemon meringue pies and hardly ever get them anymore, so I bought a pitiful little WHO DAT? Saints cake that I felt sorry for and that I'm hoping I can palm off on anybody who wants dessert so I can have the whole pie to myself the next day)

Our friend Harry T. is celebrating with us. This year I put myself in charge of the wine, God only knows why. I got two bottles of Torres Sangre de Toro red, a wine Chris and I used to drink when we were first going out (we actually preferred the Coronas, but it's hard to find now, and Sangre de Toro comes with a cute little plastic bull attached to the neck) and two bottles of J Champagne, which I have always liked both because it's good and because, before I wrote Exquisite Corpse, my ambition was to write a short story called "Love, J." that would be in the form of a letter from Jeffrey Dahmer to a lover -- dead or alive, I don't know -- stuck on the refrigerator with a magnet.

How often do you get a sensible answer to a ridiculous question that's been bugging you for more than half your life? Well, more often since the Internet was invented. Ritchie Champagne writes:

I saw your post about the song "Jet" and coincidentally was listening to that very song so I had to answer. The line you are referring to references David Bowie. Bowie had just made it as a star and McCartney thought he looked like a woman. Hence the line " I thought the Major, was a little lady. "Major Tom". Right after that he says Suffragette, referring to "Suffragette City". Bowie has mentioned that he thought of offering the song "Let's Dance" to McCartney in 1983. The line "Put on your red shoes and dance the blues" was supposedly telling Paul to return to his roots instead of the commercial crap he was putting out then ("Ebony And Ivory" anyone?).

And suddenly it all falls into place ... well, as much as Paul's lyrics ever do, anyway. I'd argue with David Bowie that most of the Let's Dance album was commercial crap too -- if I ever hear "China Girl" again, I will certainly barf -- though worse things were to come (Tin Machine, anyone?).

I'm always happy to see worms in the news. If they are helping to demonstrate the obvious fact that sexual orientation is a matter of biology, then so much the better. Chris suggested the other day that perhaps I should use this "down time" to write my worm book, the sequel to Exquisite Corpse that was going to be told exclusively from the point of view of the various worms and larvae in the original story. I shot him, but it was only a scratch.

William's situation is iffy. Our vet feels it's time for him to go, and this is a doctor I trust. However, William woke up seeming a little livelier this morning, ate some more ham, and isn't in pain, so Chris -- who's been working for the past five days and hasn't gotten to spend much time with William -- asked if we could try one more steroid shot/infusion of subcutaneous fluids and, if things aren't looking better by Thursday, do it then. I can't deny him those last two days with William, and of course I'm happy to have them myself. William has perked up before when the vet thought he was at death's door, so there's a chance it won't happen Thursday, but we've already had more time with him than we expected to when this began -- for which we are grateful.

Thanks for all the well-wishes. We appreciate them.

I was amused to read the following in officialgaiman:

A couple of odd FAQ mails came in accusing me of either lying or "jumping on the bandwagon"when I mentioned the other gay Neverwhere character. So I thought I'd point them to http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/2003/06/questions-answered-neverwhere.asp. (Odd, because they didn't actually seem to be from readers of my stuff, but seemed to be from people who'd been led here from some sites where people were arguing about other things.) (Shrugs.)

I want to "jump on the bandwagon" too, so I'm announcing that Trevor and Zach in Drawing Blood, Andrew, Jay, Tran, Luke, Soren, and several more characters whose names I can't remember right now in Exquisite Corpse, Jared, Benny, and Frank in The Lazarus Heart, and Rickey and G-man in The Value of X and the Liquor books are gay. (I didn't include any characters from Lost Souls since most of the characters in that one seem to be of the Frank Booth orientation: "I'll fuck anything that MOOOOOOOOOOOOOVES!!!") I'll be happy to organize a press conference if anyone wishes to discuss these shocking revelations.

Bad high school English classes have given too many readers the idea that "theme" in literature is a ponderous concept, the sole province of Great Literature, something writers decide on before they write the first word of a novel. In truth, I think most stories, highbrow or otherwise, have a theme of some sort, and it's seldom a preconceived thing. It grows out of the story and the characters, and I believe few writers know what the themes of their novels are until the novels are finished, or at least well underway. Sometimes it doesn't become evident until years after you've written the damn thing.

In On Writing, Stephen King writes:

I don't believe any novelist, even one who's written forty-plus books, has too many thematic concerns; I have many interests, but only a few that are deep enough to power novels.

Of course I got to thinking about what my own "thematic concerns" might be, and I came up with a few I believe have run through my work over the years, regardless of how radically some readers may feel it has changed:

- The search for and creation of alternate families by characters whose biological families have rejected them (Lost Souls, Drawing Blood, The Value of X)

- The way the gay community sometimes victimizes itself almost as effectively as it is victimized by the religious right and its other obvious enemies (Exquisite Corpse, The Lazarus Heart, [to a lesser degree] Prime)

- How doing the work you truly want to do can power your life and fulfill your dreams (Liquor, D*U*C*K)

- How the everyday people of New Orleans, even more than the celebrities, the architecture, the food, the music, the spooky glamour, or any of the other things we're best known for, make it the unique place it is (Liquor, Prime, Soul Kitchen)

I don't know if this is of great interest to anybody, but I don't have much to say about my work these days (what work, ha-ha?), so I thought I'd share.

"T. Jefferson Parker has created a monstrous villain who makes Thomas Harris's Dolarhyde, Buffalo Bill, and Hannibal Lecter look like three of the Vienna choirboys."

-- Elizabeth George, blurbing Parker's Where Serpents Lie

I hate it when authors feel they have to engage in this silly, kick-the-other-guy-in-the-teeth hyperbole in order to praise their peers. How many horror blurbs have you seen saying "Makes Stephen King look like a scared little bitch" or something to that effect? -- and yet I expect Stephen King would readily admit that of course he's scared, and couldn't write what he does if he weren't. I think it's graceless, unprofessional, and unimaginative, I'm deeply sorry if I have ever engaged in it (I don't think so, but I never know what the hell I did during those first few years of "fame"), and while I guess it must be meant as tongue-in-cheek at least some of the time, it strikes me as a petty, bitter sort of tongue-in-cheekery. Besides, while I think T. Jefferson Parker is one of the best suspense/noir writers working today, his Where Serpents Lie villain is masterfully repulsive and squirmy but doesn't begin to produce the utterly convincing heart-chill of Francis Dolarhyde and Jame Gumb. (Dr. Lecter has gotten a bit cuddly over the years, and even in Red Dragon I found him more of a fascinating character than a terrifying one.)

By the way, I've neither met nor read Elizabeth George, and this isn't intended as an attack on her in particular; I just happened to come across her blurb and found it a prime example of something that's bothered me ever since the U.K. mass-market paperback of Exquisite Corpse featured the blurb, "A better writer than either [Anne] Rice or [Clive] Barker." Besides, I seem to recall that the Daily Telegraph was actually saying something like, "A better writer than either [Anne] Rice or [Clive] Barker, Brite nonetheless focuses on juvenile, repellent homosexual-fantasy themes best left to the smut dealers of Soho" or somesuch. I may be wrong, but even when the British press liked me they could be brutal.

I knew that if I made the mistake of talking to somebody who knew what they were talking about, I wouldn't be able to get away with just slapping down an extra layer of plywood and polyurethane in the litterbox room. I did talk to such a person, and now it has blossomed into a project of thinset mortar, something called Hardiback, and pre-flooring primer, all this before we can put down those nice, easy self-stick vinyl tiles (which I'm betting won't be as easy as promised). In addition to the materials for this vast and intimidating project, I bought our new refrigerator, washer, and dryer today. The new Lowe's on Jefferson Highway rules. I'd have preferred to spend all that money in Orleans Parish, but so be it.

Tomorrow night is my last public appearance for some time -- U.S. or otherwise, as I finally made the difficult decision to tell my agent that there is no way I can travel to Paris this spring, as my French publisher wanted me to do for their release of Liquor. I regret having had to make this decision, but feel tremendously relieved to have made it. Anyway, here's the announcement from yesterday's Times-Picayune book page:

Poppy Z. Brite reads as part of the reading series 1718 (named for the city's founding date), featuring guest writers and Tulane and Loyola University students, Tuesday at 6:30 PM (not 7:00 PM as previously announced) at the Columns Hotel. Free, and attendees get discounted tickets to Dave Eggers' appearance at NOCCA Tuesday at 8:30 PM.

I don't know what kind of turnout I'll get having to compete with Dave Eggers (although the times have been staggered to allow people to make both, I'm guessing not too many people will want to attend two readings in one evening), but them's the breaks. I'll be reading my most recent short story, "The Gulf," which won't be published for a minimum of several months yet and does not appear in Antediluvian Tales. I'll also be signing books, which will be for sale on-site (the Liquor books will, anyway; I'm not sure about the older or small-press stuff). The Columns is at 3811 St. Charles, a couple of blocks uptown past Louisiana Avenue.

I received word today that Exquisite Corpse has sold to the Swedish publisher H. Strom. Unless I've missed something, this will be my first translation into Swedish.

Bless kava kava. When you're low on your -pams, it can be a godsend. Don't worry about the liver-damage rumors you've heard, just splurge on the good shit that's made entirely from the roots. The liver-damaging toxins are in the bark, which is only used in the cheaper versions. At least that's what I choose to believe, and ain't nobody better tell Daddy different. Right now I'm more concerned about my sanity than my liver. (Make that last sentence a little less unwieldy and you could sell about a million T-shirts bearing the slogan in New Orleans.)

I wasn't in the mood to read the newspaper this morning, so I came in here, removed some of the toxic junk that's been flying around my journal and prime_liquor for the past couple of days, looked at some e-mail, and scanned my Amazon page. I look for new reviews and check the sales ranks (which aren't usually all that great, but occasionally they shoot wildly up, which is mysterious and exciting even though my agent says, and I quote, "Those damn numbers don't mean a damn thing and I wish to hell you writers would quit looking at them"). This is a daily ritual for a lot of writers. I've never known a single one who didn't take at least an occasional look at their Amazon "reviews" (though, admittedly, I've not quizzed every single writer of my acquaintance on this). The thing is, I really only pay attention to the "new" books. I might glance at the older books' sales ranks to see how they're selling, but I never check to see if they have any new reviews the way I do with Liquor et al. It's not that I don't care about the books themselves, but I guess I've gotten far enough away from them that I don't much care what people think of them anymore. The other day someone said to me -- not in a mean way, though I don't suppose there's any really kind way to tell someone you hated their book -- that he hadn't cared for Exquisite Corpse at all. Had he said the same about one of the newer books, it would have hurt my feelings and I might have said something snotty. (I hope not; I try not to, but you know me.) As it was, I just replied, "That's cool -- I don't think EC is my best book either, though I think it's probably the best of the earlier ones. If you feel like it, check out Liquor or one of the more recent ones. Here's a page I made to help people figure out which ones they might be interested in reading." He seemed surprised and grateful at my measured response, and said (possibly even truthfully) that he would pick up Liquor.

That wasn't really leading up to anything, I'm afraid. It was just another sad little peek into how writers spend their time online.

Late-breaking, heartbreaking bulletin: Chris, who's in the other room reading the paper, has just called out to me that Mr. Ernest Hansen has died. You can read his obituary here; it's a particularly well-written one and may bring a tear to your eye. Briefly, Mr. Ernest was the co-proprietor of what I consider New Orleans' best snowball stand, Hansen's Sno-Bliz. It's mentioned in Liquor. He invented the machine that shaved the ice to a soft, snowy consistency utterly unlike the hard crystals you'll find in many local snowballs. Whenever I would go into Hansen's wearing a sleeveless top or dress, Mr. Ernest would always get excited about my tattoo of the Amsterdam city crest and start reminiscing about his youthful travels (which may or may not have actually happened; I could never really tell). You may recall that his wife, Ms. Mary (who concocted the delicious syrups that completed the snowballs) died shortly after evacuating to Thibodeaux in the storm. I imagined he would follow her soon. After a 72-year marriage, they were only able to bear seven months apart.

(Since Ms. Mary died during the immediate aftermath of the storm and I never saw her obituary, I didn't know until today that she was a Gemelli before marriage, but it just further proves my contention that in New Orleans, everybody's grammaw was Italian.)

... and they don't seem nearly as refusenik-y as they used to be. Could it be that "old-school" and "new-school" PZB are finally coming to be seen as the cohesive (if not always coherent) body of work I view them as? Holy shit, they're even doing Liquor fan art now! I don't ever, ever, ever want to see any of it, but it kinda makes me happy.

Fanfic, on the other hand, would not. Do not write Liquor/Stubbs family fanfic, please. I say please because I try to be nice whenever possible, but this is not negotiable.

And to answer the perfectly reasonable question in this post ("When you went through to make sure everything Andrew [in Exquisite Corpse] said sounded and was spelled the British way, why did you still spell it 'gray' instead of 'grey'?"): Because I am a dumbass.

[Addendum: After writing I don't ever, ever, ever want to see any of it, it took me about ten minutes to go to the guy's journal and look at his piece of Liquor fan art. And ... holy shit again! He did a damn good job. He's right that Rickey is too skinny, but he still looks good, the other characters look great (especially G-man), it's a witty piece, I love that it's done in a Western cartoony style rather than some unbearably cutesy Manga or Yaoi or whatever the kids call it, and I'd hang it in my office if I owned it. He doesn't have me on his friends list, so I wonder if I should comment and tell him so. I would, but you people can be so weird about that kind of thing sometimes.]

Today I received a small but very important royalty check: $168.12 from Simon & Schuster. Yes, ten years, no promotion whatsoever, and two ugly legal battles later, Exquisite Corpse and Untitled Novel #2 (which, obviously, I never delivered) have finally earned out (meaning, basically, that sales of Exquisite Corpse have now exceeded the advance money Simon & Schuster paid me for both books, and now I can start sharing in the income produced by further sales of the novel). No matter how tiny the advance or how long the period between publication and first royalty payment, this is always a banner day for any writer. Most novels never earn out; they go out of print long before they've had the chance to do so. If I had to name the one thing I'm proudest of about the "business" side of my career, it would be that all my major books are still in print.

Several writer friends of mine have recently been advised by their agents to take down their Amazon Connect pages due to the following clause in Amazon's TOS:

For all Author Materials that you post or submit in connection with the Program (including any trademark or similar rights in them), you hereby grant Amazon a non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual and irrevocable right and license throughout the world in any media to: (1) use, reproduce, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, and display all of your Works.

I discussed this with my agent this afternoon and we came to the conclusion that the copyright problem isn't particularly onerous unless you're putting up content that you wouldn't want to see reproduced elsewhere, e.g. short stories or novel excerpts. For writers like me, who maintain separate blogs for our "real" online journaling and whose Amazon blogs consist primarily of new-book announcements, anthology-appearance announcements, and such, as my agent put it, "If they decide to license it to Amazon Poland without your consent, who gives a shit?" I like the feature, I've seen a small but definite increase in sales since I started using it, and, pending any further developments, I'm going to leave my page up.

In other news, a thank-you note I sent to "P. Tibbs" in gratitude for a kind gift has been returned as undeliverable. Thank you, P.Tibbs, whoever and wherever you are.

I think this may be the single stupidest thing I've ever read about my work that wasn't on the Internet: "[Exquisite Corpse]'s insistent linkage of homoerotic lust with extremes of violence and insanity might seem to interested readers to be a curiously repugnant, if not outrightly [sic] malign, expression of the author's admitted obsession with male homosexuality." Well, it's a good thing we have The St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers to expose my nefarious anti-gay agenda (and to shun the serial comma). This is an old comment, but I encountered it while proofing my Contemporary Authors entry and thought it would probably amuse some of you. Between this and foppish nutter Kim Newman's characterization of the novel as "reactionary," you'd think I'd have joined forces with Fred Phelps and started picketing funerals by now.

eulipion has compiled an excellent list of post-hurricane New Orleans blogs. Some lean toward the political, some toward the personal. My own post-K revelation for the day was how incredibly luxurious a traffic light can seem when you haven't had one for a while. The four-way lights at the major intersection near our apartment were fine when we came home in October, but they went out a couple of weeks ago, and the intersection has lately been a horror of inching traffic, blaring horns, and near-misses. The lights were repaired while we were in Grand Isle, and today I sailed painlessly through the intersection, contemplating how little we appreciate the everyday conveniences of life until we don't have them.

A mysterious little Mardi Gras parade came down our street and gathered in the parking lot next to our house today: kings, queens, a brass band, and one fine mama with a sleek little black dress and a giant eyeball for a head. This is the sort of thing I mean when I say Carnival cannot be stopped. Even when the official celebrations are canceled (which has happened twice, once during WWII and once during a police strike), these private revelries crop up and spread throughout the city. I've said it before and I'm sure I will say it again: the spirit of New Orleans is a greater force of nature than any hurricane.

A maybe-interesting tidbit about Outsiders, which I forgot to mention earlier: Bentley Little's "Pop Star in the Ugly Bar" is a story I bought for Love In Vein 2 years ago, but was forced to remove from the anthology on the grounds that it was "too extreme." In reality, I think they feared a lawsuit from Madonna (upon whom Little's pop star is obviously based), as if she spends a lot of her time sitting around reading erotic vampire anthologies. Hell, I don't know; maybe she does. At any rate, Roc apparently has more balls than HarperCollins, who also forced me to remove two other stories: one by John Edward Ames because its vampires fed on shit, piss, snot, etc. and, though brilliant, it was admittedly pretty gross; and one by Outsiders co-editor Nancy Kilpatrick because it featured a (gasp) masochistic female character. Kilpatrick's story was later published on Gothic.net. I'm not aware of the Ames story ever having appeared anywhere, which is a shame.

Lo these many years later, I think HarperPrism was probably two-thirds right; the Little and Ames stories weren't quite what Love In Vein readers are looking for. I'm not even sure how I thought "Pop Star in the Ugly Bar" was a vampire story, though of course the anthologies' "erotic vampire" theme wasn't my idea and I could never bring myself to care much about it when editing the volumes -- I just wanted to buy good stories. I believe the Kilpatrick story would have fit in well, but apparently it was not, and may still not be, PC to admit that some women are submissive. Market-savvy or not, though, the memory still rankles. The only thing I can think of right off that gets me even worse was when Dell dumped Exquisite Corpse (also for being "too extreme"; the mid-nineties seem to have been an extreme time for me), then sent my agent a registered letter saying, basically, "By the way, Poppy still owes us a novel; she'd better hurry up and crank out something that more closely resembles her first two." As you know, I declined to do this. That right there is how much most major publishers respect you, the reader. I'm not talking about editors; most editors care about publishing books that are not crap, and part of the situation with Dell was caused by the fact that my editor had left. The bottom-line guys and gals, though, don't much care what they shove down your throat as long as your money's in their pocket. (And the fact that A Million Little Pieces has been one of Amazon's top ten sellers ever since The Scandal makes me think maybe some readers deserve this treatment -- but not you, of course. My readers are scholars and gentlemen, even the ladies. Especially the ladies.)

The person who made the final decision to dump Exquisite Corpse, by the way, is no longer a publishing poobah; instead she's writing books, such as this one.

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.

In other news, the EXQUISITE CORPSE movie project may be dead. The producer and writers haven't been able to secure any financing and don't have the money to extend their option, which actually expired about two months ago. Apparently no one in Hollywood is panting for a movie about HIV-positive, cannibalistic serial killers. I got a bad feeling about the project back in March, when one of the writers told me they'd met with some executive who wanted them to rewrite the script to make Andrew more like Hannibal Lecter.

I can't say I am entirely sorry. The script they showed me was quite good and very faithful to the book (something I think readers have worried about rather more than I have - several people have declared the novel "unfilmable," as if every drop of gore and assfucking must appear onscreen to preserve the story's integrity), and I believe their hearts were in the project. Still, there is something I find distasteful about the idea of having my work filmed. I've often quoted Stephen King, who was quoting someone else, I don't recall who: when a journalist said Hollywood had "ruined" his books, the writer pointed at the bookshelf and said, "No it didn't. They're all still right there." This is true. Even so, there are a lot of people who associate Stephen King with the movie versions of his books, most of which aren't very good. I don't want to be associated with bad movies. Even if the movie was good, though, I suspect it wouldn't feel right to me. Those wouldn't be my characters up there. I would feel as if I'd sold them - with good reason, because I would have. Though I'm no longer close to my old characters, I don't particularly like the idea of selling them, just as I wouldn't betray an old friend I'd lost touch with or grown apart from.

Having said all that, if more film offers should come along I will probably accept them, because I'm not in a financial position to be as sentimental about my characters as I am about my friends. But I suspect I'll always take a small comfort in knowing the film will probably never be made.

There is an unintelligible notation for today in my day planner. It looks like it says "Mail Choad." If anybody gets a choad from me, I apologize in advance.

Never thought I'd have one of these things. I always faintly disapproved of them, not for any particular reason, but with the vague, supercilious old-farty disdain I have for many Phenomena of the Modern World, such as cell phones, flavored martinis, and Commander's Palace dining rooms other than the main one.

Certainly I can understand the voyeuristic pleasure of reading someone else's diary, and online journals are a good way of keeping up with friends I don't see often enough. But I can't say I'd ever seen one as anything more than an entertaining vanity site until an old friend died unexpectedly last month.

On July 4, I received word by e-mail that my friend Tim Maroney had died of a pulmonary embolism in his longtime home of Berkeley, California. He was 41, the same age as my husband. I was in fourth grade with his sister Terry, my oldest friend, and all three of the Maroney children were the closest thing I ever had to sisters and brothers. I last saw Tim at Spookycon in January, where he introduced me to his girlfriend Kat. I'd met several of Tim's other girlfriends, but I can't say he ever seemed particularly happy or well-matched with any of them. Tim and Kat, though, were as obviously in love as any couple I've seen in a long, long time. They seemed drunk on each other.

Sitting at the computer in shock, I typed Tim's name into Google just looking for some last trace of him, and came up with his Livejournal. It was disturbing but comforting to read his last few entries. On May 27 he wrote, "This world is physical. I am made of thinking meat. It could be turned to hamburger in an instant, or some sudden neurological glitch could turn the thinking part psychotic, or aphasic, or violent, or, again, simply dead. Everything we construct ourselves to be in our identities and in our society is transcended in the train wreck. How could we not be transfixed?" On June 30 -- his last entry -- he was haunted by thoughts of an acquaintance who'd recently died. There were already 46 comments from friends all over the world mourning him. I left my own, and returned to his journal again and again throughout the next few days, and visited his brother's and his sister-out-of-law's and those of other people who had known him. We couldn't all be together in person, but through Livejournal we were able to deal with this loss together. For me, anyway, it was a greater comfort than I ever thought anything on the Internet could be.

This didn't directly make me want to start my own journal, but it did increase my interest in them. I'd originally joined Livejournal so I could correct a rumor on the PZB community about there being "censored" and "uncensored" versions of Exquisite Corpse (there aren't), and I posted on there once in awhile, but some of the other members seemed disappointed that I wasn't ethereal, tragic, interested in vampires, etc. etc. I left the community so as not to make them uncomfortable with my normal, slobby, sports-watching real self, but I still had the membership, so I decided to mess around with it. And here you see the results.