Why I’m So Old

Years ago, having published short fiction for more than a decade, in scads of magazines (remember them?) and anthologies, I’d begun writing novellas and novels. 

Some of my novellas began appearing, notably in the War World Series of military sf tales, but my novels eluded publication for diverse reasons ranging from having offended a publisher to having my work peddled as part of a package deal to a failing publishing house. 

All writers have horror stories. Where do you think Hollywood book-keeping came from? That’s right, straight outta NYC publishing houses. “Schmucks with Underwoods,” is the quotation to remember. An Underwood is a typewriter, by the way. Back in manual days I used a cast-off cast-iron military surplus Royal. Manual typewriters = manual labor. 

Still, I kept writing, pounding those keys, working hard to hone my work.

Health challenges pounced as unexpectedly as they always do and for the next fifteen or more years not only did the markets for fiction change but my submission rate fell off dramatically. Connections drifted apart. From knowing dozens of people in the industry, I fell to knowing no one. 

It was as if I’d died, from their viewpoint.

For many years I wished there’d be a coterie of writers of dark stories. It would focus on producing solid work and protecting intellectual property rights and rightful profits. It would promote worthwhile material and backstop contract shenanigans.

Another Bloomsbury Group or Algonquin Round Table is what I imagined,  but not snobbery, not based on social status, and not about drinking or sneering. A group to promote and discuss quality dark fiction in all forms, cultivating always a better standard. 

As examples of local support groups made good, The Inklings comes to mind, or the Moscow Mafia, amateur groups of friends that produced successful writers. Perhaps being amateur was the only way it’d work, although a local monthly dinner group I’d joined, the Omaha Beach Picnic, first decayed into a fanboy club, then dissolved in the idol’s absence, without producing any work or discussion thereof.

Yes, but what about professional writers’ organizations, right? HWA sure didn’t cut it, unless “it” is defined as each others’ throats. SFWA wasn’t much better, interlopers breaking award protocols. I’ve since left both after more than a decade of membership.

Egos and in-fighting rot professional writers’ groups from the core outward, so maybe it’s best each of us go it alone. Not even Salman Rushdie could count on unwavering support from PEN or other support groups in his Joseph Anton days of forced hiding. Censorship of his presence among other writers diminished his life too much. He realized finally he had to come out from under the stifling concerns and live his life on his own terms. 

It never pays to try to live by others’ standards, although it can exact appalling costs to live on one’s own terms in this world of fear, greed, hate, and random violence, be it state-sponsored or stochastic terrorism.

Writers don’t tend to be joiners. Being part of something that subsumes you is particularly unappealing to those of a darker cast of mind. We who write dark fiction, eerie works that challenge consensual reality models, are picky. We’re certainly not conformists. We’re quirky. We’ll find our own fates and fight our own monsters, thank you.

Yet others have apparently craved some kind of family to fit into, or at least to be considered part of. If one felt attached to a group, maybe there’d be safety in numbers and some attention paid to even fringe members’ work. And if there is no family unit waiting, why not create one? 

This urge prompted a few stabs in the dark at forming artificial clumps by making up names for what were hoped to be novelty “genres”. Wampeters, Foma, and Granfalloons, eh Kurt? Lonesome no more.

Attempts to create artificial genre via critical buzzwords and skewed terms failed every time. Those fake islands sink. 

The New Wave? Just improved writing for Golden Age science fiction approaches. The New Weird? Please. Same old tentacles and cosmic mind-warps from WEIRD TALES pulp pages, with a glossy new coat of word ichor. Neo Noir? Same crimes in the same old night shadows hooked to current events, contemporary concerns, or controversies. 

Genuine genres are identified only after they have developed without plan or intention. They can’t be cultivated, only spotted once they’ve sprouted. 

Genre arises when a cluster of works speaks in a given harmonic tone and display similar themes, tropes, and topoi. It’s about resonance. One looks back and realizes, oh, that set of elements has jelled to become a genre.

Writers of dark fiction are usually lumped into the horror market category, one which many bookstores have eliminated these days. Fervent intolerance extends to soft censorship of this type all too often.

Horror, a style rather than a genre — because it’s defined not by required, identifying elements but by effect or tone — can be bright or dark, Gothic or modern. As a style, it can be applied to any genre, from comedy and romance to crime, suspense, and mystery. Science fiction carries off the horror style well, as does both epic and urban fantasy.

Dark fiction can play amidst those frolics, but sleeps somewhere else.

So what do we write? Dark fantasy, it’s often called, when more specific labels peel off too fast. 

“Dark” indicates shadows, negatives, and harsh underlying realities. Crime, corruption, conjuring, and curses are found in the dark. Being in darkness makes us nervous. We can’t see what makes that noise, we can’t decide how close it is, or whether we’re one step away from a long, deadly fall. Edges hide in the dark to cut us, to trap us, and to hurl us off unknown heights. 

“Fantasy” because dark fiction almost always includes challenges to physics or perception. Things get weird. It can manifest as subtle hints or world-shattering cosmic strangeness, but it’s definitely fantasy, not merely descriptive, no matter how grounded in realism.

Having somehow survived a string of health challenges, one of them costing me an eye, I wanted to start publishing again, not in a new genre but simply to have my work available to anyone who might resonate with it. I’m content for my work to be labeled any way readers want to see it. First and foremost my stories should entertain. Anything more can crop up later, if at all. 

Write serious fiction in popular idiom, Norman Spinrad once told me. If it’s not read, it’s having no affect. 

Finding a description, a concise way to convey what I write, kept me searching. I needed to set my work apart somehow from the torrent of new publishing verities. 

Without gatekeepers or editors, with no vetting, with little or no professional poise, digital publishing now lets anyone put out books, and finding a way to curate and cull writing worthy of attention baffles everyone. 

All those and many other changes in publishing had come about since my prior swim in the pond. Incremental stepping stones toward releasing books crumbled, swept away in the currents of so-called progress, so climbing out of the muck without drowning got harder, or at least less defined a process. 

How could I carve out a niche so people could find my work, once they’d heard and liked my voice? That became my concern, a way to release a variety of books under the aegis of a unifying identity.

So, wanting at least a term for what I write, I looked my fiction in the eye and spotted some common threads. From them I condensed this description:

An eerie tone grounded in the real world with relatable people who encounter worlds or beings they’d never noticed before and being changed by such experiences, along with changing things through their actions. Themes rooted in the nature of reality, the nature of humanity, and lives made worthwhile. Mystery and Mysticism swirled in that mix. 

Mystical Realism, I thought. Writing realistically about mysterious things. 

One lunge into iffy Latin later it had become fictamystica. 

That’s why I’m so old, even if the books are new, and it’s where fictamystica came from. Okay?

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