Reading:
- "L. DeBard and Aliette: A Love Story," by Lauren Groff
- The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton
- "Ferian Fetlock Hitches a Ride" - 1,520 words (Estimated completion 17%)
- "Ferian Fetlock Catches a Cold" - Outline 100%
- "The Revenant"
- "Cora and the Sea" - Third draft 50%
Welcome... to the Shelf of Horror!All right, not exactly horror. I've got a couple of horror-type stories, here, sure, although most tend toward mystery and suspense rather than outright horror. (Which raises a good point... why would anyone want to read something in order to be horrified? Just don't get it.)
No, I tend toward the classic mysteries (witness the Complete Sherlock Holmes in its proud red dust jacket) and the three volume collection of Alfred Hitchcock stories... purchased fifteen years ago, now, from Bookstar, which was later absorbed into Barnes and Noble. I also owe B&N for many of the other collections there, including Murder Most Irish, a refugee from the Irish Collection on the shelf above.
Do you see that stack of brightly colored paperbacks there in the middle? That's a few of the better mysteries of Carl Hiaasen. I ran into him for the first time back in 1995, thanks to the Jimmy Buffett album Barometer Soup. (Stay with me, I'm going somewhere with this.) One of the songs on that album was "The Ballad of Skip Wiley," one of the main characters from Tourist Season, a great Hiaasen novel and the only of his I own in hardcover.
Now cast your eye to the back left corner. That stack of green paperbacks starts at the bottom of the shelf and goes all the way up. That's an almost-complete set of Jonathan Gash's Lovejoy series. This one I got into thanks to the British TV series of the same name, based on the same books. The show is wildly different from the book series, but I love them both independently. I've also learned more about East Anglian slang and antique forgery than I ever expected to. If you like a good mystery and don't mind wading through slang to get it, you've got to try out Lovejoy. He's awesome.
Now, by this point you might have noticed The Illustrated Treasury of Children's Literature and Peter Rabbit, and even The Happy Hocky Family. You see, this is also where I keep my children's books. (Not that I have children... I mean that this is where I keep my books that are in the genre of children's literature.) So I guess this should really be called The Shelf of Horror or Actually Mystery and Also Children's Books Because That's Not Creepy at All.
Why are they side by side? Because, silly, I didn't have a full shelf of either. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Publication Status:
- Submitted: 5
- Accepted: 1.4?
- Rejected: 2
- Pending: 1.6?
No comments:
Post a Comment