I wish I had actual photos I’d taken of Lookout Arts Quarry, or the exhibition advertised on the poster above from this past December. It’s a very distinctive, memorable place with one foot in the wild, which is unavoidable given its location within the temperate rainforests of the Pacific Northwest. Unfortunately my phone got smashed before I had a chance to back them up, and so the best I’ve got is the poster, which was on my laptop to begin with.
I was at Lookout Arts for the whole month of December, working on the first draft of a collection of three linked novellas. At the beginning of my stay, the van was parked near the front of the property, but between the winter temperatures and record rainfall, this caused issues due to my electric hookup being on the same circuit as the print shop. I moved to another spot, much farther back on the property, within an abandoned “wild west” village. Not an actual village, to be clear, but a cluster of facades and semi-functional buildings, like you might find at an amusement park, only made by a bunch of punks with access to a metal shop.
Waking up to this every morning was surreal. Every morning, the first thing I’d see was Mutiny the Adventure Cat staring as if entranced through the side window, without fail. It took me about a week to realize she had figured out the daily routine of the Varied Thrushes in the area (lovely birds, worth looking up if you don’t know) and was situating herself to watch them comb through the field, flipping over dead leaves in search of bugs to eat.
At night, I would head back to the van after dinner cleanup. There were no lights on the part of the property where I was parked, and I would walk back in the foggy gloom (I generally see better by moonlight than I do by flashlight, and so didn’t bring one). Often I would hear strange sounds and animal calls, some of them very close by, but always just out of sight. Sometimes there was an eerie scraping sound. I was fairly sure this was a beaver working on a tree, but when you hear a sound like that in the dark of night, it’s gonna do what it’s gonna do, emotionally speaking.
The quarry’s full-time residents were delightful to work with, and I left feeling like I’d learned a great deal, in addition to having a new (perhaps overly ambitious) manuscript to start working on edits for.
Out of all this came the first draft of Red Leaf Days, the novella fugue that I’m still in the process of working into something really solid and cohesive. As of this writing, one of the three novellas is ready, one is nearly so, and one still needs significant work. The fact that I accidentally wrote two more books this summer isn’t exactly speeding things up, but unless my body fails catastrophically in the next few months, I’m confident I will get there.
Red Leaf Days isn’t all that much like my previous books. There’s some familiar themes, to be sure, grief and loss chief among them, which follows pretty logically from it being a book about accepting your own mortality and the choices you’ve made on the way to it. But I wouldn’t call it horror, nor, I think, would anyone at most of the publishers I could potentially find myself working with. I’m always saying that genre is a marketing thing, and marketing is someone else’s job, but I do feel like I know the major hallmarks of the genres fairly well, and I know it’s pretty difficult to find yourself under the horror umbrella without involving some kind of antagonist.
To be fair, I still might work in an antagonist, or something that appears to be one, depending on whether I ultimately decide to include a prologue. But even if that happens, I still don’t think it really fits the bill. The characters in the three novellas don’t spend their time facing down the monstrous and uncanny and trying to get out alive (at least, not in the parts of their lives we’re reading about). It’s more that they’re trying to grasp grand, hidden truths about our lives and the worlds we spend them in. The “conflict” element, insofar as there is one, is that the things they’re trying to understand can only truly be known from beyond the boundaries of death, and they’re trying to do it while they’re still alive. At least, they’re pretty sure they’re still alive. At least some of them are definitely still alive, probably.
The point is that between this and Help Me (one of the summer’s two accidental books, which is very definitely not horror despite the title), I’m going to have to brace myself to take on a branching-out. May have to finally find myself an agent, which I haven’t sought out so far largely because I haven’t needed to. I’m finding myself grateful for the fact that my most successful book is essentially a cult classic, not a breakout NYT bestseller that ties my public image to it for all eternity. Don’t get me wrong, I love writing about disabled revenants having psychotic breakdowns in motels and then later in the woods, but it’s not what I want to do all the time forever.
After the current round of edits on Help Me, I’m coming back to Red Leaf Days for another pass. Maybe the final one, who knows. The words keep coming. Sometimes they’re the only thing that does, but that’s writing, for me. It’s what never gets lost. Or rather, what’s never gotten lost yet. Everything gets lost, sooner or later. Or maybe nothing does. That’s the project in a nut shell, really.