One of my fellow Drollerie authors, Meredith Holmes, unfortunately was in the hospital this week with a pulmonary embolism. So she was unable to participate in the Blog Tour this time around, and since she was scheduled to host Elisa Diehl, I’m going to take care of hosting Elisa’s post instead. Check it out, folks!
And also, stop by Meredith’s place and wish her well. ‘Cause hospitals are never fun, especially this close to Christmas.
Take it away, Elisa!
Danger Will Robinson! I’ve always sort of vaguely wondered who/what Will Robinson is, and I am starting to wonder how one goes about defining “danger” for the purposes of this blog post. Anyhoo, for those of you who don’t know me, I’m E. G. Diehl, and I’ve been writing for most of my life. I’ve worked as a journalist, I won several writing competitions with short stories and the like as a child/student, and Drollerie Press is publishing two of my some-twenty novel length manuscripts. I’ve been filing through my enormous list of works (ranging from essays for scholarship and grant applications, to radio plays, to articles about crime in Tulsa, to haiku I wrote about chewing gum) and I have come up with so many things that could be called “dangerous” for one reason or another that it makes my head spin. What is life but a series of risks, after all?
I once wrote a letter to the director of a play that could have gotten me ejected from the cast, but instead it resulted in my developing a much better rapport with the director in question. I wrote 2 songs for JET Coaster (my rock band in Japan) that got me in trouble with other band members, but we wound up performing them anyway, and the audiences liked them even if our oboist would flee the room in seething annoyance when I threatened to sing one of them. I wrote a play about a woman answering the door naked only to find that the person who knocked was her little brother with groceries, and that could have gone wrong in a hundred different ways, but that went over amazingly well with the theatre-going public in Honolulu last summer. Early in my novel-writing escapades, I wrote a horror story in first-person-omniscient voice, which broke every writing rule I’d ever been taught in school, but that made for the best sort of creepy atmosphere because the first-person character knew what was going on in the heads of everyone else in her story’s world, and I creeped myself out with it to the point where I had to put it aside or risk nightmares. I handled delicate topics occasionally when working as a news writer, but I managed to never seriously anger any of the parties/organizations involved. Writing-danger never really ends dangerously for me.
On a totally different danger note: I’ll admit that Kinlea Keeper (published by Drollerie) is FAR from the most socially dangerous fiction I’ve written, but the man himself is one of the top two most dangerous people I’ve written (in an “ultimate showdown” of every character in every world I’ve written, I think Kinlea would win if the battle were held in his world and Kalia would win if the battle were in hers, but only very few readers will know what I’m talking about when I say that). Does that make him a dangerous thing, or is it just plain rude to call a person a thing, even if it’s a fictional person? I wrote a weapon that could change reality in its entirety once (in a novel called An Exercise in Bad to Worse), and that’s a pretty dangerous thing, though only within the context of the world for which it was written. These dangers are safely fictional dangers and can’t hurt me or you or anyone else we know, so I don’t think they really count.
I guess the writing experiences that felt the most dangerous to me were for job/university/grant applications of various sorts. Those always feel a hundred times more important than they are when I am writing them because the results directly affect my immediate future. But isn’t that silly, really? The very worst thing that could happen in that sort of situation is that I do not get the position I’m after, but seeing as I’m a successful graduate student, actor, writer, and musician, not getting the positions I didn’t get didn’t seriously impede my progress in life.
Well, I guess I’m finished picking my brain in search of danger (real and imagined). I like to push boundaries hard and fast, but they so rarely push back, and now I feel like a very safe, boring, and lucky writer indeed. Crazy that, considering the topic! Ah well. Happy Holidays to all, and if you happen upon Will Robinson in your travels, give him my regards and tell him I know where they keep the first aid kit. –E.G.D.
