GRAVES, AT MY COMMAND: The Cigarette Smoking Blogger replies to my post on Paglia; and "Blackadder" replies to my horror-anthology post with the awesomely-titled, "If Reanimating the Dead Is Wrong, I Don't Wanna Be Right."

I don't know that we necessarily disagree, although I need to ponder. My post was more about, "If you do a 'came back wrong' story, this is what I will need in order to feel satisfied by it."

Now, though, I really want to read stories about the returned dead in which they don't come back wrong--there are a lot of possibilities there, from an eerie coziness to harsh rejection of the "returned" by their terrified or resentful relatives to the kinds of issues I touched on in "Now and at the Hour" (PDF--something similar to the point Adam Greenwood makes at the Vox-Nova link). How did people treat Lazarus? What was it like for him, and those around him, when he came again to death?

LIE BECOMES THE TRUTH: I recently amused myself by listing things that are true of me when I'm writing fiction, and at no other time. (Or, let's say, at few other times!) Here are a few, posted in hopes that they will amuse you all as well.

I'm a reactionary. You know, I'm really much more of a liberal than my fiction expresses. "How They Made the Manticore" is both a parable that really resonates with me, and a temptation I need to recognize and sometimes work against in my fiction. I don't want to write "All change is bad! Progress is perverse!", not only because I don't believe that but also because Jesus wouldn't agree.

I'm 50/50 bisexual. In "real life" (que significa eso?) I'm... you can either say, "I'm 85/15 lesbian," or, "I'm maybe 60/40 attracted to women vs. men on a physical level, but in terms of emotional orientation and romance, I'm much more likely to be romantically and even iconically drawn to a woman than to a man."

[eta: This isn't quite right, you know. I'm dykier than this suggests. Not sure what would adequately convey the issue, other than a) iconicity is far more important to me than the Kinsey scale could ever recognize, and b) less excitingly (and by "exciting" I always mean "metaphysical"), I'm always gayer than you think I am, though usually less gay than you expect. Think of it that way--isn't that illuminating? ;) ]

But I can always tell when I find a character's image in my head physically attractive; and, intriguingly, I split really close to 50/50 lady/guy there.

I obsess more about death than about suffering. In my extrafictional life, the reverse of this is usually true. (Have I mentioned that I'm more liberal than you think I am?)

And the next novel will really focus on suffering--as the recent novel did, in many ways--whereas death, in both novels, is merely one cause or form of suffering among others. But in my short fiction, "the candles blew and then he appeared"... partly, I'm sure, because it's death that makes repentance necessary. "When there's no future, how can there be sin?"--because sin as a concept is always embedded in a narrative of possible repentance and also missed opportunities for that repentance. Sin is an irrevocable act, and that act can only exist, be reckoned with, and be reconciled in a world where sinners die.

That isn't the entire reason--it only explains let's say three or four of the skeleton-haunted stories I've written--but it's interesting in its own right, so I'll say it, and let time and change sort out the rest.