Episode 107: Weird Fiction

Michael Hulse couldn't see us today, so I frittered my time away watching Little Nonya. (I've actually just finished the last episode, and I must say that I agree with Bernard. Disappointing! It felt like the writers were trying to tie up too many loose ends in too little time.) Met Samantha in the Arts Centre to catch up over lunch, which was immense fun. There was markedly less smoked salmon and cream cheese on my jacket potato than the last time though! China Miéville's lecture-cum-workshop this evening was pretty awesome. Then again, it's hard not to be impressed by someone who can talk intelligently and lucidly about something like weird fiction. Now I really feel like reading his novels. On top of the writing exercises from Maureen Freely's seminar in the morning, I've probably got more creative writing to do over the weekend than I've had in a long while. Not that I mind though. I quite prefer that to the 'Howl' essay that's been gnawing at me for the past couple of weeks in some way or other. I've decided that attempting to read all the secondary material I've gathered is quite a futile exercise, especially since I seem to work best when I already know what I want to say and I'm just cherry-picking quotes that do the job better than I could. So I'm going to mull over the introduction while falling asleep, and hopefully, an outline will come to me. If I can just nail the introduction, the rest of the essay will just be expanding and breathing life into it, so it has to be absolutely killer. Once again, I'm stuck trying to come up with a snazzy opening line. Well, snazzy to me anyway, I'm not entirely sure how impressed Adam Putz was by my previous one: 'Hell and literature are not unfamiliar bedfellows.' It sounds a bit too pretentious, now that I think about it!