Tick...Tick...Tick...(Or Whatever Sound a Calendar Makes)

Today is August 1st, which puts me just two months away from the beginning of everybody's favorite month, October. And October is the month where, around these parts, I do shit like this. I've done this for three years now, and every November 1st I think "Well I'm never doing that again. Fuck that. That's dumb." And I maintain that rough attitude right up until about mid-September, when I decide that I'd better do it again or else I'll have nothing to write about in October, and I'm supposed to be at least in part a Person Who Knows and Likes Horror, so...

But now, already, at the very beginning of August, I'm already excited to get back to The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! I'm not entirely sure why this is, but I'm approaching the whole idea with a renewed vigor. Part of it could be that at least three times now I've already said to myself "Oh, I can read that!" -- it's nice to have ideas early, especially if they're early enough that I can get a legitimate jump on not just the reading, but possibly the writing. But a greater factor in my excitement, verging on impatience, to do this project for a fourth year must be the genre itself, and genre fiction in general. You're probably tired of hearing me talking about it, but it took me many, many months to read Infinite Jest, and I knew, when I was at about the halfway mark, that when I was done I was going to dive headlong into the genre fiction I was intentionally denying myself. This was not just horror fiction, of course -- I also got a powerful hankering for crime fiction and science fiction, and, in fact, I've sometimes wondered if I could someday pull a stunt similar to The Kind of Face You SLASH!!!, but with crime and science fiction. Unfortunately, there is not yet a holiday celebrating the time Bonnie and Clyde killed all those cops, or the day that the one science-based event occurred, but not really, it was more just an imaginative extrapolation of current technological and sociological ideas, so the timing of either one would have to be entirely arbitrary, and therefore easier to blow off if I ever even settled on a date. Then, too, I must remember that my interest in science fiction doesn't translate into any kind of expertise, even of the very low, amateur/enthusiast level I manage with horror, and crime fiction, unlike horror fiction, thrives in novel form, much less so in the short story, for whatever reason, don't look at me, I don't decide these things. But speaking on a purely practical level, that leaves crime fiction right out.

So horror it is, and ever shall be. Upon finishing Infinite Jest, I've already managed to read three horror or horror-adjacent books, and while I won't be writing up any of those three in October, the fire has well and truly been lit. And while this post may read to you as nothing more than an announcement that I'll be doing that thing this year that I do every year, I wanted to get it off my chest anyway, because I'm sort of psyched, and I didn't expect to be. So there.