By: Mark L.

Mark L. — Mon, 19 May 2008 17:31:50 +0000

Thanks for putting my novel “Marienbad My Love’ in your “F—ing Weird” category. You really get me! I knew I was onto something last year when I received these comments during the “First Chapters” novel contest on gather.com: “The incoherent ramblings of an insane mind … I am not sure there is even a classification for this one … long stretches of surrealism, where we are in this character’s head and not grounded in any recognizable reality…What was that?! Was this person using drugs or what? … I decided to be generous and give you a one, rather than a zero… I am so completely confused. I have no idea what’s going on, what’s real and what the narrator is imagining … It’s terrible.” But you know who thinks “Marienbad My Love” is the weidest? Mark Sheldon, my alter ego and protagonist of “Marienbad My Love.” He says that if I “really wanted to create a noteworthy science fiction novel, then why no swords or elves? Why no Roman centurions? No, you thought you were too good. Only a hack would write genre, right? Instead of straight science fiction, you decided to employ the ‘conventions’ of SF. ‘It’s all for EFFECT,’ you explain. And why did you have to make me so perverse? After all, I am an autobiographical character. What do my perversions say about you, the novelist? ‘You are only an exaggerated version of me,’ you say, ‘exaggerated for comic effect.’ Fine. Here is what I say: I hate this, being a fictional creation trapped in this abomination of a novel. Experimental? Stream of consciousness? Metafiction? How about ‘crap’? Now that ‘Marienbad My Love’ has been unleashed on the world, surely the Apocalypse is not far behind.”

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By: Mark L.