all will love me... and despair

Had a great writer's meeting this weekend--good food and snarky humor are always a favorite combination--but as usual my peers' remarks gnaw into my writer's soul where they churn and ferment and cause acne. 

In particular I'm musing over someone's assessment of my book as "dark."  On the one hand, Yay! I don't want it to be lightweight. I didn't really set out to write horror, but it is definitely dark fantasy, and I sure don't want to create a "paper tiger" conflict. On the other hand, people said Revenge of the Sith was "dark," and it still sucked. 

On the third hand--I guess we're up to feet now--I don't consider my story that dark. Maybe because I can see the big picture and I'm still optimistic. Or maybe because I'm comparing it to some of the utterly repugnant trash that passes for horror these days, and priding myself on still having a plot.

On the fourth appendage, I remember thinking that my Quinn Taylor books weren't that dark either... until I tried to reread "Mobius" earlier this year, and dear Ghod, that book is depressing. 

And on some fifth tentacle of supposition, my buddy Rob mentioned after this latest installment that he was pleased to say, he had no idea what was going to happen, nor even whether there would be a happy ending. And of course my husband remarked a few weeks ago that he was almost afraid to read any further, because he'd become emotionally attached to these characters and he was afraid I was going to do something bad to them!

Mine is an evil laugh.

Am I really doing a George R.R. Martin? That would be supremely ironic, since I quit reading after A Game of Thrones precisely because I couldn't take the grinding grimness. And further irony because I created Trace specifically to be an unambiguous good guy. It's just that I have to make Mereck equally bad in order to balance.

Don't worry, I don't have any "red wedding" scenes planned. There will be suffering, to be sure, but I really want these two to have a happy ending. After what I did to Quinn and Seth, I owe myself some writerly karma points.