It is February the Fourteenth, at that hour of the morning when all the children have been taken to school and all the husbands have driven themselves to work or been dropped, steambreathing and greatcoated at the rail station at the edge of the town for the Great Commute, when I pin my heart on Missy’s front door. The heart is a deep dark red that is almost a brown, the colour of liver. Then I knock on the door, sharply, rat-a-tat-tat!, and I grasp my wand, and I grabbed my wand, my stick, my oh-so-thrustable and beribboned lance, and I vanish like cooling steam into the chilly air.. (Harlequin Valentine, Neil Gaiman in Fragile Things)
Here I am, having gone through Neil Gaiman’s Smoke and Mirrors for the second time and re-reading some stories from his Fragile Things. There’s no other author who inspires me to write quite like he does. There’s one particular story in Fragile Things that never fails to make writing seem like such a fun enterprise.
That story’s “Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Secret House of the Night of Dread Desire”. The story’s as quirky as the title, and Gothic with a capital ‘G’. A clever tale where the worlds of fantasy and reality (ours, that is) are inverted; the protagonist is a wannabe writer (even in Gothland, they exist, apparently) who lives in a world of ghouls and shrieking women, but who yearns to write fantasy with fantasy being our boring world of toasters, work, strained relationships and hurried breakfasts. It’s humorous, whimsical and – for me, curiously inspiring. There’s also a lesson-nugget embedded, delivered by that fixture of gothic tales – the drawn, humourless, seemingly bloodless but always faithful butler.
In the introduction, Gaiman (one of the few authors who seems to have a rollicking time conjuring up stories for the rest of us) remembers how the story – which he wrote twenty years ago – was rejected by publishers. It was only two decades later that it was rewritten and published, first in a gothic anthology, and subsequently included in “Best of” Anthology Collections. It was the Best Short Story in the 2005 Locus Award.
Fiction is subjective….and writing it is never as much fun as it seems. Anyway, here’s a state of bliss towards which all writers strive, even without ghouls and monsters and a mad, shrieking Aunt Agatha in the attic.
The quill went scritch scritch across the paper, and the young man was engrossed in what he was doing. His face was strangely content, and a smile flickered between his eyes and his lips.
He was rapt.
(Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Secret House of the Night of Dread Desire, Neil Gaiman in Fragile Things)
Filed under: Books, Personal Note, Writing , authors, Books, fantasy, neil gaiman, reading, Writing
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