wynonna

Heh, glad the comment made sense. Because my favourite kind of fiction is the "New Weird" style that blends the fantasy and SF sensibilities, I've been spending some time recently thinking about what, if any, the differences in the F, SF and horror mindsets are and how they work in fiction. It's feeding back into my own reading and writing now, but it also means I tend to go off and bend people's ears about it sometimes.

(When I was in Europe a couple of years ago I was trying to plan a trip to Prague, and the hotel brochure fell open at a place where apparently Kafka lived for a while and did a lot of his writing. I was so heading there until there was a cock-up and the money didn't arrive )

I wondered that about the bat too, but the thing was that when we put him in the log we propped a bit of wood over the opening to give him some shelter and privacy. There was a gap big enough for him to get out, but if a fox or something had taken him out I'd have expected the wood to be knocked over. A snake might have managed it, but we're still in winter here, it's below freezing most nights and the snakes are all still hibernating. It's weird.

Maybe the log itself digested him? I've now got this picture of a big grey dried-out Yellowbox log writhing through the hills looking for small animals to devour...

Regardless of any one individual's personal feelings or criticisms, I find it a good starting point to remember that, no matter how "importantly" we regard certain iconic/historical figures (such as a Kafka, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, etc), their work should NOT be valued simply because it's old. I don't think that often enough we consider and remember that they were just as full-of-shit as we are......