Working with Angels, Fighting Real Demons

After reading Mr. Vachss e-mail to me I worked on my own book for a while. I’ve manged to cut out a few more characters and make some of the characters who were just hanging around posing start to do some serious work. It was two hours of nothing but fun.

Then I tried to get a spark of life out of my web site and absolutely nothing, I’m back to square one, only this time without the launching fees. But I’m going to try some more to get my alternate website up off the floor and into the virtual world. If I can do that, perhaps all will turn out well in the beginning.

It being late and me being married to a wonderful, but early rising spouse, I was tired. So I lay me down to sleep but before dreaming I did some reading. It was a short story from Charles De Lint’s “Tapping the Dream Tree,” And I realized that the difference between our writing styles, other than him having sixty odd books published I nary a one - is my characters come from weird but supportive families. They are not the straight growth of the twisted stalk, but the flowers of the straight stem.

I think that perhaps that is what makes my writing more fantstic, the bad guys are bad and the good guys are good and the main characters are conflicted, but know there moral roots. They may get killed but they don’t wind up twisted. That simply isn’t the way of the world.

Charles De Lint’s Jilly Peppercorn and Andrew Vachss’s Burke are more realistic, because they are good [in Burke's case loose definition, but he gets the job done is such a satisfying way] people who have come from rotten pasts, pasts that the news shows us are all to common.

I am grateful everyday that I come from where I did, and I feel an obligation to help spring those flowers still waiting to escape the quicksand and predators of child abuse. Andrew Vachss and Charles De Lint hold the torch high so we can follow. Let’s not let them get out of sight.

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