Obviously, I'm too eager to sink back into my manuscript because, essentially, I've been playing with rewriting a tentative author's note. Tentative in the sense that I've yet to mention a note to my editor at all, and she may hate the idea.
It's satisfying, though, at this stage to look at my early influences and think about how they may be reflected in the manuscript.
In the introduction to Gothic! Ten Original Dark Tales (which I'm reading now and so far like best Vivian Vande Velde's "Morgan Roehmar's Boys" and M.T. Anderson's "Watch and Wake"), anthologist Deborah Noyes writes, "The differences may be academic, but it's probably more accurate to think of gothic as a room within the larger house of horror. It's decor is distinctive. It insists on the burden of the past. It also gleefully turns our ideas of good and evil on end."
In an earlier post on "horror" versus "gothic fantasy," I found myself leaning toward the latter mostly based on the poetry and connotations of the specific words. But Noyes' analysis drives more to the heart of the matter.
I have no interest in too clearly crafted good and evil stories. If fantasy is a metaphor for reality, for humanity, most everything intriguing falls somewhere in between. Certain conventions, traditions, provide a framework, a lulling familiarity, but what keeps us turning pages is the storyteller's surprise. What haunts us, changes us, is how we recognize ourselves in the otherworld.
I suppose, through the dark veil, "burden" of the past feels more true. But as a writer, I see it more as a gift, an inheritance. Even a responsibility. I hope that reading my novel will lead the audience back to the earlier gothic masters, the pre-existing folklore, the other influences juxtaposed to offer the novel it's twist. Perhaps an author's note then is a good idea, a tool to point the way through the shadows. Or maybe I'm just being self-indulgent.
Hm. If nothing else, it would give the librarians and reviewers something to chew on. They're all geeky academic sorts like me.
