For the past so many years, my love for the zombie has withered in a shadowy place in my heart & enveloped in jadedness, it grew cold, or at least, I felt like it had grown cold. A year or two ago I came to the conclusion & a subsequent declaration (of questionable authority) that the zombie genre should be off limits — forbidden territory for all art forms — for, at least, the better part of a decade, & while perhaps this ban should be in place for those who would abuse the zombie simply as something to fill in for X (the Russians turned Middle-Eastern terrorists of the horror genre), I can no longer pretend to turn my back on my beloved, rotting chums. Really, I suppose, it’s only a ceremonial reversal of the stance, as the walking dead have still occasionally found their way into my writing regardless of the “ban”. My love never died for them, I just wouldn’t admit that. The reasoning?

Like with a failed crush, I was hurt.

There’s a place in our hearts where the “inconsequential” things we love as children & teenagers are kept forever, becoming quite consequential in shaping who we become, &, although this may be biased thinking, this place is all the more sacred & vulnerable to those who as kids had to rely all the more on these inconsequential things to compensate for falling short of society’s expectations — weird fucking nerds like me. This place, inside of me, is overrun with zombies. Zombies, that rather selfishly, I’ve felt have come to be shared with those who don’t deserve them.

That stance is obviously childish & silly to the point where I’m not going to dwell much on the details, but I think, in a strange way, it’s a testament to the importance of the place of the inconsequential. We always seem to fuck up the most with things & people we love the most.

Thankfully I’ve realized this stance is buggery & I’m abandoning it. I can separate the good from the bad & not treat the genre as some synecdochical organism (is there really an adjective form of synecdoche?).

What this is all leading to is that I have a large zombie-genre writing project in the very early stages. I probably won’t have details anytime soon as I literally haven’t even narrowed down the century for the piece (a few different ideas have been battling it out in my mind for the last month), and I’ve come to realize that the more one shares about a writing project the more a false sense of accomplishment stifles any actual writing.

It’s a good time to start calisthenics & stockpiling 7.62x54r.

D.

Happy All Hallows’ Eve!

At some intersecting point between research & simply having weird interests, I was recently reading a book on epitaphs. It’s one of those books you purchase & then lose in a crowded shelf, wonderfully resurfacing at its most useful time — be it when you’re in the mood for such a topic for pleasure reading or, in my case, when you’re looking for a decent source of old grave inscriptions to base a fictitious one upon.

I understand it may come as a surprise, but despite being a “writer” of horror & weird fiction, I’m quite taken with cemeteries. This fact only makes it all the more disappointing at how grave ornamentation has become less of an art in modern times.

I’m not going to belabor (much) the hows or whys, & with all deserved respect, I’m not attempting to detract from the recently dead. This isn’t meant as an exhaustive musing on the subject either, I’d just like to share some of the older epitaphs I’ve come across — commenting, haphazardly without planning, here & there.

Boston, Mass

The Victorian era restrained the epitaph greatly, but the text was still beautiful, & the stone itself became more art than medium. Cemetery crowding was a major factor in this, & the reason the family plot became much more widespread in the western world.

In a morbid chicken or the egg scenario, I’m curious to the relationship of the epitaph & the obituary. The obituary had already been around since the rise of the printing press, but it was not common until the Victorian era. My guess would be that cemetery crowding & a lack of space for inscription lead to the demand of publishing obituaries, but I’m sure it’s quite possible the obituary removed the need for such comprehensive epitaphs.

Thus simple inscriptions of “We Shall Meet Again” or “Gone To Rest” became common, but that isn’t to say the long epitaph was, by any means, out of use.

Chittenden, Vt.

Julia Eddy was the mother of the Eddy brothers — the rather known, and incredibly interesting, Spiritualism mediums. I’ve a feeling I’ll get around to writing about them here sometime in the future.

Newfane, Vt.

I’ll end — for now — with two of my favorites.

Hartford, Conn.

I was somebody.
Who, is no business
of yours.

D.

MMX, X-VII.
Magniloquence I: Slight Introductions & Musing on Titles

This is another attempt at keeping an online journal. Its existence is mostly to encourage me into writing more often, I suppose, but it’s also a convenient avenue of sharing some of what I’m working on at the time — should you be inclined to care for some odd reason.

I’m a would-be writer of weird fiction. I’m currently working on a novella (that may someday grow up to be a novel) dealing mostly with the later years of the American Spiritualism movement. This is the novella’s working title:

I have an odd relationship with titles. For quite awhile, it was a terrible, abusive relationship, and I preferred “Untitled” to any alternative — which I admit, is a lazy approach. I don’t believe I was ever satisfied with using “Untitled”, but I still think it’s better than the majority of titles. Eventually I started picking out small things such as the protagonist’s name or any one-word, simple concept from the story. Still rather boring, but better than “Untitled” and these titles never took away from the story.

Titles I hate, and that I feel take away from the story, are the titles that lead to moments where I’m looking for significance within the text in places that I wouldn’t normally were it not for the fact that the “cryptic monocle” triggers an instinct to investigate after reading the title: “I Assure You, The Cryptic Monocle is Very Significant in this Short-Story”. (Side note: I would probably still like any story that involves a cryptic monocle).

I stuck with the simple and pointless titles for awhile until I wrote a short-story by the name of:

It was a strange story sparked from adding a footnote to a few rough lines of prose that developed into a faux-scholarly persona (and thirty-eight more footnotes in the small span of five pages). Whether it deserved a grand title (that can be argued) or I was just caught up in the pretentious nonsense of it all, the story ended up with a title thirty-three words long. And to me, it was a satisfying title.

Some of the feel to “Roderick…” has creeped into the novella project, as well as my continuing fondness for characters and personas removed from the story proper, and perhaps that’s why I have another paragraph title (that dwarfs “Roderick…”s title by twenty-three or twenty-four words depending on if you count the asterism), but, I suppose, I won’t really know until I see what titles I attach to stories in the future.

I didn’t intend to write this initial entry on titles, but I think it’s actually rather fitting as the first thing to be seen on here. This little internet-diary’s title is “X-VII”, which would fall into my title schemes after the “Untitled” phase and before the paragraph phase. The number comes from today’s date, the day Edgar Allen Poe died. I could claim I’m using it for a greater meaning, but I’m not — so I won’t. It was going to be the day of his death (X-VII) or his birth (I-XIX) and I’m more inclined towards October. 

X-VII doesn’t interfere, gives a small nod to an idol, and looks pretty. It’s not a paragraph of pretense, but it fits much more easily into your browser’s address bar.

D.