Bemildred*

My poem, "Night Train: Heading West," is going to be in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror XIX.

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My bemildredment is small and personal and has to do with the fact that I'm not a poet and I know I'm not a poet. This is the only poem I've written in ages and ages (practically since the Second Punic War), and I doubt--but of course cannot discount the possibility completely--I'll ever write another one.

It is not a complaining bemildredment, mind you. Nor is it a wtf are they thinking? bemildredment. Just ... not what I expected somehow. Life is odd.


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*iirc the name of the third bat in Pogo--either that or my post-con-crud is giving me delusions.

International embarass yourself as an artist day

I accept matociquala's dare.

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( Beware the Man Who Waits )

I got a very nice rejection letter from Algis Budrys on this story in 1993. And, like Bear says about hers, I was proud of this story in 1993. I believed in this story. It was certainly the closest I'd come to writing something that behaved like a story instead of a macrocosmic run-on sentence.

I look at it now, and I see what I couldn't see thirteen years ago: the floridity of the language, the overabundance of descriptors and the underabundance of plot. (You can see why my fondness for Lovecraft borders on the irrational.) Also, dear sweet barking Jesus, the imagery. The strained, lame, bludgeoned to death with a hammer imagery. Clearly, I learned how to do imagery from reading The Scarlet Letter in high school English.

But when I wrote it, it was the best I could do; I labored over every one of those excessive adjectives. I wrote my damn heart out. Which is what I'm still doing, like the song says: Get behind the mule and plow.

And it is heartening, to look back and see what the state of the art was in 1993. It's like being able to watch evolution under glass. Our hominid ancestors would be embarrassing company at, say, the Inaugural Ball, but hot damn they're a clever bunch of primates.

I salute my former self for swinging for the bleachers.