What’s Your Reading Mood?

Sometimes readers like serious work and sometimes they’re in the mood for something lighthearted. Unlike a lot of authors, I have two modes of writing, snarky and dead serious, and I’ve often felt that this is because my life is either absurd or heartbreaking, with very little in between.

If a bird is going to poop on someone in the city, it’s going to be me. If someone is going to step on their own foot going down the stairs, resulting in a pratfall and a broken ankle, it’s going to be me. If someone is going to say something rude about the teacher just as he walks into the room, yes, you guessed it, that was me in high school.

And then on the other hand my daughter was born with a massively deformed brain and impossible-to-control seizures that required horrific surgery and there is absolutely nothing amusing about that, not even twenty-eight years later when it turns out that she survives.

I always think she could have happed to someone even slightly prepared for the situation, but she didn’t, and what happened isn’t that I became a more serious person, but that I grew a more serious aspect of my personality, and sometimes that aspect picks up a pen.

Otherwise I don’t see how a novel like The Destroyer could sit alongside a novel like The Mage of Motor Avenue.

I’ve stopped fighting the bifurcation and have finally accepted it. Some of my work is serious and some is absolutely not. And I hope that readers are willing to try the different styles to suit their different moods.