(no subject)
Aug. 7th, 2006 02:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
readingthedarkFor about seven reasons, a little over seven years ago I think, a turning point in my life happened to happen at Dangerous Visions. I was wandering the streets, on a bad day with vomiting, and saw the sign and thought of Harlan Ellison and walked in.
I was being interviewed by a high-paying (by my simple standards) job in "corporate entertainment sales" and I went through every book in the store before "discovering" Poppy Z. Brite's "Exquisite Corpse" spine out.
I didn't follow the field obsessively (or work in books) like I do now, so I hadn't heard of him; the trade paperback merely looked like the right book for the plane ride home.
Reading really good horror for the first time in years was enough to get me to leave my personal careerism behind and shift the focus back to writing my own fiction, rekindling the Barker, Lovecraft and Gaiman pilot lights that had gone out while I'd been studying literary theory at college.
A week later, when they offered the job (and the company car and the tickets to cool things that I'd never get to go to otherwise), it was easy to say no.
Sink or swim, thanks to Dangerous Visions, my path was clear. And, of course, it still is.
Hating myself for what I've become,
G.
(posted on Shocklines two years ago but it seemed relevant to my state of systematic decline)
I was being interviewed by a high-paying (by my simple standards) job in "corporate entertainment sales" and I went through every book in the store before "discovering" Poppy Z. Brite's "Exquisite Corpse" spine out.
I didn't follow the field obsessively (or work in books) like I do now, so I hadn't heard of him; the trade paperback merely looked like the right book for the plane ride home.
Reading really good horror for the first time in years was enough to get me to leave my personal careerism behind and shift the focus back to writing my own fiction, rekindling the Barker, Lovecraft and Gaiman pilot lights that had gone out while I'd been studying literary theory at college.
A week later, when they offered the job (and the company car and the tickets to cool things that I'd never get to go to otherwise), it was easy to say no.
Sink or swim, thanks to Dangerous Visions, my path was clear. And, of course, it still is.
Hating myself for what I've become,
G.
(posted on Shocklines two years ago but it seemed relevant to my state of systematic decline)
