In case anyone thought otherwise, yesterday's entry was just a bit of silliness; I do not actually judge my characters by the Mary Sue Litmus Test. As greygirlbeast pointed out in a couple of recent entries, the Mary Sue concept is stupid and essentially meaningless outside the context of fanfic. A reader commented on prime_liquor, "I love Lost Souls, but each and every character leans heavily on the Mary Sue level!" Well, maybe not each and every one -- the fun of being, say, Wallace or Ann escapes me -- but every writer puts varying amounts of himself into every character, especially the characters he likes best, and in youthful works like Lost Souls I think it just shows more.

I will say that my feelings about fanfic have changed drastically over the past couple of years. This may have something to do with not writing and publishing, or possibly just with gaining some kind of perspective on life in general. I still don't want to read fanfic or slash, and I still think anyone who would try to make unauthorized money from another writer's creations is a morally and creatively bankrupt scumsucker (hello, Potato Falls or whatever that stupid "controversial" fanfic novel is called), but it is now hard for me to recall why I once saw it as this huge invasion if someone liked my characters well enough to want to make up more stories about them and publish said stories on a free website where maybe 15 people would read them. The older I get, the more I realize that I have not always chosen my crusades carefully enough.

I took the Mary Sue Litmus Test for my earliest and most recent "autobiographical" characters. (I use "autobiographical" not to suggest that the characters' lives have resembled mine in any way, but because they were the characters I most identified with/felt I resembled while writing the stories in question.)

Nothing from Lost Souls:

Your Mary Sue Score: 100 (71 points or more: Irredeemable-Sue. You're going to have to start over, my friend. I know you want to keep writing, but no. Just no.)

Rickey from the Liquor novels:

Your Mary Sue Score: 39 (36-55 points: Mary-Sue. Your character needs some work in order to be believable. But despair not; you should still be able to salvage her with a little effort. Don't give up.)

So apparently I've been guilty of Suedom my entire career, but I have improved some.

No, not the evil waiter in D*U*C*K, but the guy who won the auction to have that character named after him. Despite the millions of eBay items you have so kindly bought from me, I cannot presently find your e-mail address, so this is just to let you know that, after an inexcusable delay, the signed ARC of Lost Souls from the person in New York is now on its way to you. Everyone else, please excuse the interruption.

I have now tagged all my 2008 entries. Yay for me. This tagging business is compulsive, and I'd eventually like to have the whole journal tagged, but I wonder if someone on my friends list would be willing to do the entries from September/October '05. I find those almost impossible to look back at.

Speaking of looking back, when I visit my Amazon page, I usually only check out the new reviews of my more recent books, but today -- perhaps because of Kody Boye's nice comment about Drawing Blood on my most recent Amazon blog entry -- I wondered what people had been saying about my older stuff lately, so I checked out the most recent of the 228 Lost Souls reviews. Most of them were good, but I found this gem (excerpted) from "Otto" of San Antonio, Texas:

I support gay rights, gay marriage, etc, but I can do without details that paint a picture in my mind, or actually seeing it happen. If someone told me Poppy Z Brite wrote a book and the gay stuff isn't in it, I'd be interested in reading it. Otherwise, I doubt I'll pick up another book of hers.

In other words, "I'll say what I have to say to be PC, but I don't want to know what those icky fags actually do with each other." I can only hope someone told him Exquisite Corpse wasn't a bit gay.

I'm astounded by the fact that some people actually seem to think "Elizabeth R" is a good poem. I didn't think I was capable of more than solemn doggerel. Because Chris didn't understand why my salvation lay at the tomb of Edward the Confessor, I've added another quatrain (is that the right word? Poet I am not) just before the final one:

I'm not a killer nor a thief
Nor yet a brutal rapist;
My single sin is in my faith
For which she calls me Papist.

I'm currently being traumatized by the fact that Ernest Hemingway is a good writer after all. I've spent most of my life disliking him without having read very much of him. Recently I noticed an anthology of short stories from the 1940s on my shelf and was unwillingly impressed by "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber." About three years ago I found a collection of Hemingway's short shories in a restroom at LAX (the airport) and begrudgingly brought it home thinking I might want to have a look into it sometime. Well, now I am, and they're damn good stories, dammit.

Apparently I woke Chris up early this morning to tell him that I was crow-footed. I don't remember why.

I leave you with this very weird dream about my characters from Jenn M:

Hey Poppy,

You're not the only one having bad/weird ass dreams, I guess. Now, I wasn't drunk, but I do seem to have the flu or some other bug, and have been getting massive amounts of sleep lately, so maybe it was too much, but here's the dream.

The weirdest thing of all may be that it appeared in my dream as a sort of lost chapter to Lost Souls. Like I was reading Lost Souls and all of a sudden I was like, "I don't remember THIS from the other 5 million times I've read this book..." Which is also weird because I'm not reading Lost Souls right now...I've been wandering through Antediluvian Tales, rereading it since I got it last week.

At any rate, the dream involved a scene with G-man's folks, who were apparently partaking in some sort of domestic discipline relationship for fun. I don't remember what had happened to make Mary Rose at fault, but she was made to strip by her husband and whipped somewhat moderately with a rattan carcass beater as seen here.

So, I don't know what any of it means, but I felt compelled to share that with you...

DEVIL PZB: I don't wanna edit manuscripts tonight. I wanna smoke pot and read It for the ten- thousand-and-thirtieth time.

ANGEL PZB: Put it on your TS list and send it to the chaplain, ringmeat. Your days of unemployment are over and you've been working slower than snot on a cold doorknob.

Speaking (as I did yesterday) about the only team in the world that is qualified to call itself "Carolina," I was reading an article in this morning's paper about the nooses that have been appearing everywhere since the Jena Six debacle. My eyes fell upon the line, "A toilet-paper noose was discovered hanging ... " Oh, fuck me, I thought. Who in the world would be stupid enough to make a noose out of toilet paper? I kept reading: " ... from a campus bathroom stall Nov. 8 at North Carolina State University." BWAAAAAA-HAAAA-HAAAA-HAAAAAA- HAAAAAAAH, YOU DUMBASS COWFUCKERS!!! I bet you thought you could really hang a guy with it, too, and he kicked your cracker ass.

No, nooses are not funny. But I'm sorry; N.C. State is. "Duke is puke, Wake is fake, but the team I hate is N.C. State. GO HEELS!" Yes, we really used to holler that. I still do, sometimes, during a particularly stressful college basketball game.

Today I received a fan letter of the sort that truly does my heart good from a young man in England, and since he included no return address or e-mail, I feel justified in reproducing it here so that perhaps he'll know how much it warmed my old cockles (of the HEART, o ye of dirty minds, of the HEART):

Hello Poppy,

I recently acquired a 10th anniversary numbered/lettered edition of Lost Souls and saw that you felt a little bit awkward about revisiting it in the foreword, either because you see it as reflecting your juvenile side, or because returning to it acts as a regressive step in a fast-paced life (or Option 'C'). I just wanted to tell you what it means to me (I'll be brief, it's not my autobiography). I guess around '93 a black-clad young lady in a pub booth in Nottingham said to me 'Have you read Lost Souls, I hadn't, but bought a copy some time later. I don't read much, but it was an enthralling, contemporary novel, where the characters don't quite fit into normality, I liked that immensely (like most readers would). It caught my imagination, and soon after a fiend [sic] of mine called Carole announced a meeting in Beckenham, you were there, seated between Brian Stableford and the large blood-orange figure of Ramsey Campbell, receiving a most humorous Lambda Award [note: it was actually a British Fantasy Award; the so-called "Lammies" have never seen fit to grace me with one of their precious benedictions -- but as anyone who has seen a British Fantasy Award knows, it is indeed quite amusingly phallic. And while I can't say I've ever noticed Ramsey looking particularly orange, I'm sure the description will amuse him greatly]. I visited the Big Easily-Wasted in '97, and tried the local scene, the Twinkies, the booze and the nightlife, apparently the girl in the local pizzeria kept asking my associates 'Hey, where is your sick friend' -- I believe that is alcohol related. [It happens to the best of us.] I asked about you in the Garden District Bookshop, to be told you were in Venice [ah! my cosmopolitan days], later discovering you'd returned and were at a party some of our group went to [ah! my leaving-the-house days], such is life.

Anyway, I'm not a stalker, this is a purple pen, not blood mixed with ink, and Tom Waits (still) to be played on my hi-fi. Lost Souls will always remind me of my youth, happy drunken, sexy times, skinny clothes, and fun.

And you know, regardless of what flaws I may see in it now, it will always remind me of those things too. Thank you, young sir*, for reminding me of that.

*The writer is probably my chronological age or close to it, but I recently declared myself 92 and thus reserve the right to call almost anyone "young man" or "young lady."

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.

The event at the Columns last night couldn't have gone better: it was standing room only, "The Gulf" seemed to read well and people seemed to like it, many books were sold, organizers and attendees alike gave me lovely gifts, and I must admit that, as much as I always dread these things beforehand, I'm going to miss doing them. To the cute little gothy couple (as reported by one of the student organizers) who showed up early, asking plaintively, "Is Poppy going to read any of her old work?": no, never again in this lifetime, but you can buy a CD of me reading a couple of chapters from Lost Souls here. Damned if I can remember which chapters, though.

I seem to have amassed another backlog of e-mail. Blame my excitement about the new house, the work I've been doing over there, and the extent to which said work has exhausted me. I'll try to get to it very soon, I promise.

"So have you read Fat White Vampire Blues?" my friend Louis asked me last night as we waited for Krewe du Vieux to roll.

"No, but I'm going to." I hesitated. "I still don't like vampires, but I'm trying not to be such a racist about it."

"Is that what you've been?"

I shrugged. "Well, when I wrote about vampires, I had them be a separate race. So I figure by hating them so much, I'm being a racist."

Someone from Chapel Hill, whom I think I might even know from high school, recently posted the following on my Amazon Connect page:

I haven't read some of your newer novels, but I did enjoy Lost Souls a lot. I do wish you would write more on the subject(s), but understand why you don't. Good to see new stuff coming out!

I replied:

I'm sure you wouldn't want to read a book by an author who cared nothing for the subject or characters and was only cranking the thing out to make a buck. I respect myself and my readers too much to do anything like that. Even when I've taken on projects primarily because I needed the money (as with the C. Love bio), they didn't go well unless I was able to develop a deep interest in the subject. A LOST SOULS followup by a nearly-40-year-old PZB who has zero interest in vampires, goth culture, or Kids These Days would not only be a sad and unreadable thing; it would be a slap in the face to the people who loved the original novel. I think that's something folks fail to take into account when they express a wish for me to write more books like that -- they want me to be the same person I was in 1987, and I obviously can't do that. If you want to read something that comes from my heart every bit as much as LOST SOULS did back in the day, then please read the Liquor books -- these have given me more pleasure to write than anything since LOST SOULS.

After I posted this, it occurred to me that maybe fans of Lost Souls don't actually want me to revert to my 20-year-old self; rather, they wish the characters could have grown up with me. The thing is, I could never imagine any of those characters growing up at all. Obviously Nothing and krewe were going to remain their hedonistic teenage selves, which would have rendered any further fiction about them extremely tiresome. However, I tried to write a bunch of stuff about Steve and Ghost after Lost Souls, and it just didn't work out. You probably know about the post-Lost Souls short stories, but I had hoped to write another novel about them too -- not precisely a Lost Souls sequel since it wouldn't have had any vampires in it, but something about their extended travels through the American desert the summer after Lost Souls. This novel never got off the ground, because the characters didn't want to grow. It seemed to me that, when they were thirty or forty-five or eighty-seven, Steve would still be drinking too much, feeling sorry for himself, and expressing his self-pity in anger; Ghost would still be spacy, ethereal, and self-sacrificing to a fault. Though I loved the characters and continue to feel affection for them, this lack of growth just didn't interest me. To put the blame on myself rather than them, I liked the idea of making them recurring characters, but -- beyond the space of a short story or two -- I couldn't sustain the reality of it.

I used to say the thing I liked most about Rickey and G-man was that they had given me a new way of seeing and writing about New Orleans. That's still true, but four novels, several short stories, and a quarter-novella in, what I like even more is that they have grown and changed. When I tried to keep writing about Steve and Ghost, I felt I had to hew to a template I'd already created for them, because as fine a pair of characters as they were in Lost Souls, there really wasn't much more to them. When I write about Rickey and G-man, I don't even feel the shadow of a template, nor can I usually predict what they'll do; however, I know I can depend on them to carry the story in a way I never could with my other recurring characters.

If people like what I'm writing, they will read it; if they don't, they won't. I don't feel I owe anyone an explanation of what I do or don't write, but I would like to be able to discuss it without feeling as defensive as I did the first couple of years after moving away from horror fiction. This doesn't mean I want to start answering the same old questions about Lost Souls et al., but that I'd like to be able to say, "You know, I'm not doing that stuff anymore, and here are a couple of reasons why" without making people feel stupid for liking the old stuff or scared to acknowledge to me that they like it.

OK, the last 30 pages of Soul Kitchen await, and oddly enough, it's not getting any earlier.

The J.T. LeRoy/Frey thing won't go away, so I suppose I may as well get some more mileage out of it. (Frey's first name simply will not stick in my head, and judging by the excerpts of A Million Little Pieces I've had the misfortune to read in the past few days, he is such a horrible writer that I cannot be arsed to learn it.) Last night on prime_liquor, someone asked:

I haven't read either author but it makes me wonder if this is the kind of scam one has to pull to get published?

And I replied:

If (as in Frey's case) you're not a very good writer, then maybe so. I suspect "LeRoy" would have been good enough to get published without the great marketing angle, but who knows? Publishers love angles enough that I always advise young/black/professional dominatrix/etc. aspiring authors to mention these things in their query letters; it does help.

I dunno ... I was young and reasonably photogenic when I sold Lost Souls, but I never felt any urge to pose as a teenage runaway who hung out with vampires. Some people have said I should have sold the Liquor books under a pseudonym, but I say they can blow me.

Obviously I was feeling a little rude last night, but never mind. However, I shouldn't have mentioned angles without warning the reader that once you work one successfully, the publisher(s) will never want to let you turn it loose, and the public, if you have one, will never forget it. See faustfatale's entry today: because she worked the professional dominatrix angle in the '90s, publishers still think she writes "erotica" even though she's done several successful media tie-ins and a cracking good hard-boiled mystery (Hoodtown), none of which is especially erotic. I'm sure there are still people out there who think I write goth fiction, if not actual vampire fiction.

The public-never-forgetting part wouldn't be so bad if more of them could also accept that you've moved on. Christa doesn't want to deny her pervy-fetish history. I don't want to deny that I wrote a bunch of horror stories that a lot of people liked and of which I'm damn proud. (Though no one would have liked them and I wouldn't be so proud if they had resembled that last clunker of a sentence.) I certainly don't want people to forget about my early books; even if I disliked them, which I don't, I'd be grateful for the royalty income they bring in. The memory, though, of how hard I had to fight to get publishers to see me as anything but the twentysomething queen of darkness (even when I wasn't twentysomething anymore), and the knowledge that the author of a terrific novel like Hoodtown is still being pigeonholed as something almost wholly unrelated to what she's doing now ... when I think of these things, I feel irresponsible for mentioning "angles" without warning writers of their dangers. You may decide to work the angle anyway, but you should do so with the knowledge that if you succeed, you'll have to go through the wars to ever be known as anything besides "that black fantasy writer" or "that former sex-industry writer" or "that writer with an inside view of the New Orleans restaurant scene" (my current angle, and one that has worked well for me so far, but having once said that I thought horror would encompass anything I ever wanted to write, I certainly can't say that I'll always want to do this).

The Soul Kitchen revisions are done. Tonight I just have to finish putting together the doodads (dedication, acknowledgments, notes to the copyeditor not to change "sous chef" to "sous-chef," "neutral ground" to "median," etc.), then e-mail it to my editor and agent.

Although it's only been a little more than a year from when I wrote the first sentence (in a motel room in Grand Isle) to when I gave it the final tweak (here in this apartment), this novel has spanned more changes in my life than anything else I've written with the possible exception of Lost Souls. I'm very proud of it, but I will be very happy to finish with it.

Quote of the day, heard while driving up Royal (not Bourbon) Street with the window down:

GUY WITH MIDWESTERN ACCENT ON CELL PHONE: It's the Big Easy! ... I'm on Bourbon Street! Do you know what Bourbon Street is? ... It's where you go to get drunk!

You know, it's even kinda good to see the idiot tourists coming back.

Our final night in Bibleland. Dr. Jesus rules: I had the drugstore call to see if he'd give me a refill on the Klonopin, not really thinking he would but figuring what the hell. Last time he gave me 30. This time he gave me 60 and a refill. Jesus really is my friend.

I'm such a dumb reader, especially with my comfort reading. While we were in New Orleans I reread The Shining. Since somebody had sent me a brand-new copy, I kept hoping that things would turn out better: maybe this would be the happy edition where Jack wrote a quickie bestseller while they were still living in Boulder, and they could all go live in Florida and go crabbing with Dick Hallorann. Or at least maybe this time Danny wouldn't go in Room 217. But no, it all happened again, just as inexorable and heartbreaking as ever. I reread Cujo too, and it also turned out just as bad as ever for the Trentons (though, all in all, pretty well for the Cambers). However, I don't love the Trentons as much as I do the Torrances.

Now I'm rereading Ramsey Campbell's Alone With the Horrors, and I give you this thought-provoking bit from his introduction:

[T]here is nothing wrong with learning your craft by imitation while you discover what you want to write about. In other fields imitation isn't, so far as I know, even an issue. It's common for painters to learn by creating studies of their predecessors' work. Beethoven's first symphony sounds like Haydn, Wagner's symphony sounds like Beethoven, Richard Strauss's first opera sounds remarkably Wagnerian, and there's an early symphonic poem by Bartok that sounds very much like Richard Strauss, but who could mistake the mature work of these composers for the music of anyone else? In my smaller way, once I'd filled a book with my attempts to be Lovecraft I was determined to sound like myself, and Alone With the Horrors may stand as a record of the first thirty years of that process.

Which is all absolutely true and useful -- I spent much of my teens writing Bradbury pastiches, some of which I think also comes through in Lost Souls, and I consider my early story "Missing" very much a Campbell study (with some New Orleans and vague homoeroticism thrown in because I was at least starting to know what I wanted to write about). And there are sentences in almost every early- to mid-period Stephen King novel that I read and think, My God, did I use that somewhere nearly word for word? I wasn't particularly trying to imitate King's style, but his voice was just so firmly engraved on my writer-mind by age 20 or so that I think I occasionally just kind of dropped him in without meaning to.

Anyway, what I started out to say wasn't about young writers learning by imitation; it was an idea that it might be fun for an older, more experienced writer to do something similar on a conscious level. Not frequently, of course, but ... well, I want to get back to writing about New Orleans, and soon. But before I do, I wonder if it mightn't be fun to just up and write something set utterly elsewhere, a potboiler Graham Greene fairytale with giant spies and hollow poison teeth and off-season Blackpool hotels and ... well, I don't know. It's a thought, anyway. First I need to get moved back into the city, and by that time, the edited Soul Kitchen manuscript will probably have arrived and will need my immediate attention. Ooo, won't that be fun.

Tomorrow we take the last load of cats to N.O., Saturday we come back here to clean up and get the last of our stuff, Sunday we go to the Saints game, Monday we rest and maybe do a little something for Halloween, and Tuesday I go to Greenwood Cemetery and scrub the everloving hell out of the Ducoing/Toole family tomb, because I bet it really needs it. The grave-cleaning is really supposed to be done before All Saints Day, but this year strange times demand special circumstances.