Repetition in Genre Fiction, and Why No Horror Blogosphere?
Thanks once again to the estimable Sean Collins for a tip....
Formula, Convention, and Cliche: Repetition in Genre Fiction is the title of a post at Groovy Age of Horror, a weblog whose writer centers on '70s horror and ranges in all kinds of interesting directions from there. Game writers, you want to read this one; so will others. I wouldn't make all his slams against literary fiction, but when it comes to looking at how genre fiction works, yeah, right on. This is good stuff.
And as long as I'm taking tips from Sean, he's got good comments on the network of comics bloggers and the absence of same for horror. This is my occasion to say something I've noticed about my own sustained reading.
The bloggers I stick with are the ones who seem to me to be interesting people who happen to share some interests with me and a knack for good expression. I find that it's the more focused-topic blogs that are most likely to drop off my list because either I got bored, or I got angry in unproductive ways. (Like my experiences with more and more political blogs, for example.) It's people who bring me back, and precisely because there'll be surprises, wanderings, and other stuff that I couldn't predict or categorize.
There are of course a handful of exceptions, like Dirk Deppey and the astoundingly good Journalista, which is a must read if you're much into any kind of comics or serial storytelling. But then Dirk does drop in asides like this one on his daily routine: "I finally haul my lazy ass out of bed somewhere between 1-3PM Arizona Mountain Standard Time - where we all understand that Daylight Savings Time is a plot by the Carlyle Group’s Zionist Masonic Bankers to floridate our water supply and turn us all into socialist homos! - and set a pot of coffee to percolating, presumably with unfloridated water. Goodness knows, I’m no socialist." His life and tastes and a strong sense of personality do emerge gradually...partly through gentle repetition, in fact, to tie this back to the earlier topic.
Anyway, I'm less interested in a bunch of blogs about horror than I am in blogs by folks who talk about horror along with other things, and from whom I learn something and/or get good entertainment.
This is one of the reasons I beat myself down whenever I start thinking about spinning off topic blogs, and instead make more use of LJ tags.
Formula, Convention, and Cliche: Repetition in Genre Fiction is the title of a post at Groovy Age of Horror, a weblog whose writer centers on '70s horror and ranges in all kinds of interesting directions from there. Game writers, you want to read this one; so will others. I wouldn't make all his slams against literary fiction, but when it comes to looking at how genre fiction works, yeah, right on. This is good stuff.
And as long as I'm taking tips from Sean, he's got good comments on the network of comics bloggers and the absence of same for horror. This is my occasion to say something I've noticed about my own sustained reading.
The bloggers I stick with are the ones who seem to me to be interesting people who happen to share some interests with me and a knack for good expression. I find that it's the more focused-topic blogs that are most likely to drop off my list because either I got bored, or I got angry in unproductive ways. (Like my experiences with more and more political blogs, for example.) It's people who bring me back, and precisely because there'll be surprises, wanderings, and other stuff that I couldn't predict or categorize.
There are of course a handful of exceptions, like Dirk Deppey and the astoundingly good Journalista, which is a must read if you're much into any kind of comics or serial storytelling. But then Dirk does drop in asides like this one on his daily routine: "I finally haul my lazy ass out of bed somewhere between 1-3PM Arizona Mountain Standard Time - where we all understand that Daylight Savings Time is a plot by the Carlyle Group’s Zionist Masonic Bankers to floridate our water supply and turn us all into socialist homos! - and set a pot of coffee to percolating, presumably with unfloridated water. Goodness knows, I’m no socialist." His life and tastes and a strong sense of personality do emerge gradually...partly through gentle repetition, in fact, to tie this back to the earlier topic.
Anyway, I'm less interested in a bunch of blogs about horror than I am in blogs by folks who talk about horror along with other things, and from whom I learn something and/or get good entertainment.
This is one of the reasons I beat myself down whenever I start thinking about spinning off topic blogs, and instead make more use of LJ tags.