Ellie

I respect the hell out of this woman but she's not for me. Glad to have gotten exposure to a more avant-garde style than I would normally read, though—it's good for my brain to consume things that challenge my own sense of taste.

Emily Tesh never misses 💚

Lovecraft, for me, is like Philip K Dick: amazing at ideas, middling at execution. Five stars for the unhinged hysteria and deeply committed mythos of his world-building. Minus one star for deeply purple prose and At the Mountains of Madness being about 50 pages longer than it should have been while he waxed on and on about geometry. Minus one star for (what was even for the time period extreme) egregious racism.

Highlights for me were “The Rats in the Walls”, “The Colour out of Space”, “The Dunwich Horror”. I really enjoyed his essay on writing weird fiction at the end as well.

This is a really really interesting book. It subverts the content of most craft books by asserting that when it comes to writing basically no critique/advice is valuable or useful, and all learning/growth stems from:

1) following a specific process of creation where you toggle back and forth between voluminous output with no editing and a close reading of your output to extract meaning, and
2) participation in what Elbow calls “the teacherless writing class” in which all feedback is communicated as the reader's phenomenological experience and all feedback is accepted and used as valuable data even when contradictory

I need to experiment more with the techniques. And possibly leave my current writing group 😅

FIVE STARS FOR PURE CHUTZPAH I am in awe of this author's gonzo glorious grimdark gay genius 🙇‍♀️ Henceforth I shall be reading everything they ever write and hating them for their prodigious talent (/affectionate)