I watch SUITS.
I see how it is manipulative, simplistic, and shallow, using every cheap soap opera trick to jerk the feelings of sappy open-mouth viewers. Every move is obvious, predictable, and as familiar as your own discomfort.
I realize people eat this shit up. It’s the ice cream and chips of writing. Sugar and salt. It’s really bad for you but so basic it works on a basic level every time.
I get that I’m under-published because I won’t write such stuff. In trying to offer more I’m losing readers with each word I use to offer something better.
In a world demanding whoppers, I’m a vegetarian hoping for haute cuisine. Were I an Ivy League lit journal alumnus I might have the right pedigree and connections to prevail among the snobs as a fashionable flavor. Being other, I’m left to genre for the most reasonable set of outlets.
Genre is not what I write. My work is Ficta Mystica. It’s eerie realism. Comes out that way naturally as my voice, due to my interests over a life many would call misspent, others just wiccanthropic. I own that voice neither resentfully nor swaggeringly. It overlaps many genres while being of none, yet unlike a style is not always a comfortable fit.
In trying to parse all this I write essays like this one. In trying to sort the puzzle pieces of putting my work in front of people who might resonate with it I reveal ambition, frustration, and self sabotage swirling in all I write. It strikes me this is probably true of all of us afflicted by a vocation to any of the arts.
Building on a solid foundation of basics is a good approach. Using basics to bash heads is simple assault.
Still, I watch SUITS.
/ Gene Stewart writing as Samael Gyre
