I'm Not A Natural Criticizer

On A More Technical Level, A Story Takes A Lot Of Words. And To Generate Words And Phrases And Images And So On, That Will Compel The Reader To Continue Reading - That Stand A Chance Of Really Grabbing A Reader - The Writer Has To Work Out Of A Place Of, Let's Say, Familiarity And Affection. The Matrix Of The Story Has To Be Made Out Of Stuff The Writer Really Knows About And Likes. The Writer Can't Be Stretching And (purely) Inventing All The Time. Well, I Can't, Anyway.

I'm Not Thinking Much About Overall Themes Or Preoccupations Or Anything Like That. Instead I'm Just Trusting That, If I'm Working Hard, Various Notions And Riffs And Motifs And So On Are Very Naturally Suffusing The Stories And The Resulting Book.

Fiction Is A Kind Of Compassion-generating Machine That Saves Us From Sloth. Is Life Kind Or Cruel? Yes, Literature Answers. Are People Good Or Bad? You Bet, Says Literature. But Unlike Other Systems Of Knowing, Literature Declines To Eradicate One Truth In Favor Of Another.

I've Had That My Whole Career. People Were Always Hedging Around The Question Of: Why Are You So Dark? What Happened To You?

So I May Not Have Had A Gothic Childhood, But Childhood Makes Its Own Gothicity.