What Goes Around...

Very well.

So it seems I have discovered that my Southern-Gothic-but-in-New-England is transforming itself from a screenplay into a novel. As the story does not exist fully formed in either iteration is mostly irrelevant at this point; I feel the tightening grip of seriousness that I imagine swaddles a "novelist." It's like a very dramatic scarf - you love it, but there is no way you can avoid it being self-reflexively ostentatious at best, and merely showy at worst. I must confess that I do not find it disturbing as much as I find it familiar. Of course, I would like it to be a potboiler in a classic sense of the word - fun, entertaining, generating oodles of cash, etc. but I am concerned that because of the subject matter that people will make the mistake of calling it literary. If it must be categorized, let us put it into a new genre I propose here - the Homicidal Kitchen Sink Drama. I'm not quite sure of that category name yet, it's just not pithy enough to catch on as a cultural zeitgeist. I always have thought the key to establishing oneself as a dictator of The Zeitgeist is merely sitting back and uttering a zinger of a phrase, encompassing the work of others in a statement that only points to your own cleverness. Even disappeared from the quotation that becomes standard vocabulary, the inventiveness of the utterer is implicated. And in some unfortunate turns of phrase, the unseen utterer should be indicted. Recent examples would be words such as "steampunk" and "internet."

I suppose I should attend to my actual work, by which I mean what I am paid to do. But in all honesty, I feel like listless commentary really is my calling.